By spontaneous signal across a medium thinner than air, two warring cities turned out on either half of their barricade. The happy violence gave off the feel of a sporting event — mass disaster tinged with religious awe. By instinct, they poured into the severed Platz, that forty-year-old scar on a continent's heart. A whole generation, raised to believe in this cement fiction, met at the Wall and passed right through it.
Those who couldn't squeeze in to ground zero spilled out along the split. As one, on a silent word, they smashed at the graffitied stone. Chunks flew off, each fossil splinter turning to instant history, shoveled into plastic bags for the overnight souvenir market. The imaginary barricade breached, half the success-stunned sappers foraged east, snapping photographs of a world about to vanish, while the other half streamed west into commercial fairylands, shocked to a standstill by how far shopping's fantasia had advanced in their absence.
The old, mass hallucination came apart at the seams. Cameras sallied out along the salients, soaking up this collective sabotage. A hundred happy souls labored in one residential neighborhood near the Versohnungskirche, undoing the surgical cut that politics had sliced through its narrow-laned heart. Celebration held its breath, terrified with joy. Then it swung into communal destruction, a raucous town barn raising run on rewind.
Along one stretch, the razing snagged on a stuck slab. Worked from both sides, one fifteen-foot-tall block of concrete wobbled on its steel reinforcing rods, flipping lazily in the air like a sheet of damp cardboard. At the far end of a long chord through the Earth's crust, an Armenian mathematician raged against this amateur demolition squad's ham-handedness. He shouted at the video transcription, already hours obsolete. Achl Wunderbar. Brilliant. These are the planet's legendary engineers? The sons of Krupp and Porsche? Would anyone who grasps the basic concept of leverage please step to the front of the mob?
A man half the mathematician's age, nominally Italian, but belonging to no particular nationality except the International Benevolent Order of Programmers, stood by, gawking, as the membrane went permeable. Boyle's law, it seemed to him: the thermocouple yanked to allow free equilibration across that barrier. The aging boy nursed a childhood dream of urban renewal. Blocked-up subway spurs would now be cleared. Traffic could flow rationally, as designed, with all inefficient border checks swept away. Both sides would enjoy a windfall peace dividend, not to mention the beauty of simplification.
In a sorry excuse for a neighborhood local, a Belfast emigrant raised half a glass to the television above the bar, where an ecstatic battalion of barbed-wire cutters danced an allemande on top of their taken objective. Best of luck to you, poor buggers. Reached the promised land, have you?
He mimed a virtual glass-clink and sipped, a good-sport attempt to join in history's graduation party. He toasted the end of the lifelong war, the end of status quo brinksmanship, the end of the market's last alternative, the end of mutually assured destruction, of gunpoint-guaranteed safety. He toasted the end of willed divisions. He toasted the New World Order, the beginning of nuclear proliferation, the steady slide into universal factionalism, the fragmentation past any ability of power politics to control… As he tipped his glass, the onscreen revelers waved their spilling magnums to toast the Irishman back.
An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?
This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.
And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.
30
All inefficient border checks swept away. Both sides would enjoy a windfall peace dividend, not to mention the beauty of simplification.
In a sorry excuse for a neighborhood local, a Belfast emigrant raised half a glass to the television above the bar, where an ecstatic battalion of barbed-wire cutters danced an allemande on top of their taken objective. Best of luck to you, poor buggers. Reached the promised land, have you?
He mimed a virtual glass-clink and sipped, a good-sport attempt to join in history's graduation party. He toasted the end of the lifelong war, the end of status quo brinksmanship, the end of the market's last alternative, the end of mutually assured destruction, of gunpoint-guaranteed safety. He toasted the end of willed divisions. He toasted the New World Order, the beginning of nuclear proliferation, the steady slide into universal factionalism, the fragmentation past any ability of power politics to control… As he tipped his glass, the onscreen revelers waved their spilling magnums to toast the Irishman back.
An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?
This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.
And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.
The warm room is shelter against the surrounding cold.
Inside, you find a bed and a ready stock of blankets. Someone has seen to all needed provisions: sheets, candles, oil, towels. Cans in the pantry, wood in the cellar. Hooks and hangers, empty dresser drawers waiting to be filled by the stray refugee.
Outside, the wind hacks away with chill efficiency. Terminal winter settles in. Again, the world expels its baffled tenants. But the warm room takes all the roomless in.
The place seems almost to have known you were coming. Doors, stairs, windows all run exactly to your scale. The shelves carry all your best-loved books, and all those you have ever hoped to read. Your favorite nautical watercolors and cloud-teased landscapes line the front hall. All afternoon, each window's view outbids your eye's imagination. You've stumbled upon this hotel, this makeshift hospital, by more than chance. Linen waits stacked up in the cabinets, dishes in the chest. Behind the bathroom mirror, soaps, brushes, and blades stand at sacrificial attention. Dry provender renews itself with each use. All these things have long existed, but never before like this. They seem to gather in this holding pen strictly for you to delight in them.