Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

I gave in and put on my shoes.

* * *

As soon as we waded into the crowds on the street, I realized I wasn’t just hungry but famished. I hadn’t eaten since before the plane had landed and that hadn’t been much—a small cup of yogurt and a roll so stale it had mutated into Styrofoam. Quinn didn’t mind putting off our eyewitnessing history in favor of food, but then with her credit cards maxed out, she’d probably missed a few meals herself.

The problem was the crowds, not just in the streets but anywhere and everywhere food was served. “See, they don’t get any of that stuff in East Berlin,” Quinn told me, pointing at a smiling man loaded down with two cases of Coke. Next to him, his family were eating out of large bags from a fast-food joint. “They take their kids into stores and the kids think they’re in fairyland. What we take for granted is incredible luxury to them.” She sounded practically authoritative, as if she knew all about the privations suffered by people in East Germany.

That would be Martin, of course. She was parroting Martin, probably right down his tone of voice. And then it hit me: She was trying to find him. I was along to cover expenses.

I wanted to be wrong, but there she was, up on tiptoe, stretching her neck like a meerkat, scanning the crowd. Irritated, I dragged her around a couple grinning at each other as they hefted boxes of stereo equipment, through a group of young guys with enough junk food and beer for six weekend toga parties, and down a side street, where I found what was probably the only restaurant in West Berlin without a line of people a block long waiting to get in. When I saw the prices, I understood why, but I was past caring.

“You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” I said as we sat at a table waiting to order. “Don’t deny it; I’m not a moron. But you are. If he’s back on this side of the wall, he’s probably with his family. Can’t you just leave him alone with them for a while? Give him some space?” The last sentence replayed itself in my head. Had I actually said that? I wanted to bite my tongue off.

“You’re being silly, Jean. It’s like a tidal wave of people pouring through from East Berlin. It’s impossible to find anyone.” But she wouldn’t look at me; instead, she studied the menu as if the secret of life were printed on it. Or Martin’s current location. I started to say something else but she talked over me. “Let’s just eat, okay? I don’t know about you, but I’m almost light-headed with hunger.”

That’s what happens when you max out your credit cards, I managed not to say out loud. At this point I was too hungry to deal with anything, much less Quinn’s foolishness. A relentlessly happy waitress took our orders and then brought us two pint glasses of beer we hadn’t asked for, dancing away before we could tell her we wanted soft drinks instead. While the restaurant celebrated around us, Quinn and I ate our overpriced steaks in silence. Every so often, I stole a glance at her to find her doing the same; it wasn’t until I’d finished a little over half the meal that I could find a little humor in the situation—the immediate situation, that was. There wasn’t going to be a whole lot of hilarity in getting my sister home.

“You’re twenty years old.” The words were out before I realized I’d spoken.

Quinn gave a faint, puzzled laugh. “And you’re thirty-six. And?”

“Ever think about going back to college?”

“Not this again.” She sawed a piece off her steak. “As I told Mom and Dad and Marie and Kath and Lisa and you and everybody and their mother, I’m not the academic type. Studying isn’t my thing.”

“So what is your thing—chasing some guy halfway around the world?”

Now she looked offended. “Martin isn’t just some guy. He’s more—so much more.”

“Okay, he’s got quite a history, I’ll give you that. Being a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain, growing up without his parents—definitely not your average man on the street. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t dumped you.”

“Doesn’t mean he has.” Quinn chewed stolidly and took a sip of beer. “You have no sense of anything that isn’t ordinary. To you, it’s all just people shifting around like, I don’t know, little blocks. Legos. Martin and I aren’t Legos. We have something more profound than you could ever know.”

“How long were you with him?” I asked. “Two months? Three?”

“Almost four.” Quinn looked smug. So there.

“Almost four profound months, eh? What’s his middle name?”

My sister looked startled for a fraction of a second, then covered with a laugh. “Nosy, aren’t you?”

“Can’t say you know anyone if you don’t know their middle name,” I said.

“I don’t like to pry. Unlike some people.”

“I didn’t know Eddie’s middle name was Erasmus til after we got engaged. Turned out that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know about him, and we’d been together for over a year. Good thing I found out before I did something stupid like marry him.”

“You didn’t break up with Eddie because his middle name was Erasmus,” Quinn said. “I was only ten but I knew that.”

“Correct. I broke up with him because he’d been hiding things from me.”

“Martin never hid anything from me.”

“You don’t know that. Four months isn’t long enough to know—”

“Fine,” Quinn said flatly, her eyes hard. “Then I’ll give him a little longer.” She dragged her napkin back and forth across her mouth before dropping it on the table. “You really don’t know, Jean. There’s a lot more to life than you think. There really is an unseen world. I know—Martin showed it to me.”

My heart sank. “Oh, no, Quinn, not like the guru.”

“He wasn’t a guru, he was a swami.”

“He was a con man and he saw you coming.”

“It’s not like that!” she said hotly. “This isn’t America where everything happened ten minutes ago. This is the Old World. Time is measured in millennia here, and everything isn’t always nice and neat and easily explained. Martin opened my eyes to so much. I’m not going to just abandon him.”

“You’re going to have to learn the hard way again, aren’t you?” I said before I could tell myself to shut up.

Quinn didn’t take offense. Laughing, she toasted me with her beer. “We’ll just see who learns what the hard way—me or my older and supposedly wiser sister.”

* * *

In the course of my misspent youth, I joined the 1971 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C.; some years later, I went to pre-Katrina New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Both times I thought I’d been in big crowds; this beat them by several magnitudes.

There was no place not filled with people—happy people, dancing, singing, shouting—while music played and fireworks went off. I held on to Quinn’s arm, determined not to lose her—or let her lose me—but invariably someone would come between us to hug her or me or both and I’d lose my grip on her. Fortunately, I always found her again, although a few times I would grab for what I thought was her arm only to discover I was manhandling a stranger. Quinn’s face would pop up several feet away, looking amused as I swam through the crowd to get to her.

“We should have tied ourselves together with rope,” I said as we squeezed through the masses. Disoriented, I had no idea where we were. There seemed to be only two directions—toward the wall or away from it—and only two locations—one side of the wall or the other. Correction: There was a third location—on top of the wall. People dancing on it were reaching down to hoist others up to dance with them. Was Quinn’s errant boyfriend up there? I wondered. As we got closer, I could hear, below the singing and music and general uproar, tapping noises, metal on stone in various rhythms. Hammers chipping away at the wall? It would take a hell of a lot of hammers to punch through. They needed sledgehammers or better yet, wrecking balls.

Abruptly, I heard a loud buzzing whine; on top of the wall, a cascade of sparks erupted as someone attacked it with a power saw. People cheered, and I found myself spontaneously cheering with them, which earned me another amused look from Quinn. But only very briefly—she was scanning the mass of people in front of her with more urgency.

The buzz-saw whine cut off, and I heard a new sound, the chatter of a small engine working too hard. I looked to my left, and through a break in the crowd, I saw a small car exuding a cloud of exhaust. As it inched forward, people lunged out of the crowd to pound their fists on it, startling the driver and his passengers. For a moment, I was afraid I was about to see a mob drag them out of the car and attack them. But no, the crowd was