I didn’t want to call anyone, neither family nor friends, not right away, maybe not ever. I stayed in a hotel.
When you go back to New York City (which is where I’d begun) it is as though no time has passed, as though the person you left there decades ago has been waiting for you all along. She is the person you would have become if you had stayed there. You wonder if you made a mistake, if you can still find her.
Who is she? She is the person who never knew you.
It’s as if you are a tattoo I can never remove. But growing up in New York I hadn’t met you yet.
In New York I went to the Met and looked at Toledo. It wasn’t after all in the room the docents told me it was in and so I had to run from room to room quickly before closing; it had taken me all day to get uptown, what with this and that.
You had cousins not only in Germany but also in Greece and had always wanted to see the El Greco but had never been to New York, never in fact, to North America at all. It is a much different thing, seeing a painting in “real life.” There is a certain frisson that happens, looking at a painting in the flesh as it were and not in reproduction. It’s a form of time travel, sharing space with brush strokes done hundreds of years ago. I looked at that haunted green square for both of us. I wished you could also see it, could look out through my eyes. I pretended there was a little part of you that didn’t leave this planet and stayed inside me. Kept our pact, to go to my hometown together one day, and look at Toledo in the Met. Maybe it was even true.
That night I dreamed it was I who had died and that you and Karina were at my funeral.
You were both drunk, and danced around my coffin waving empty liquor bottles full of flowers you had picked in public gardens. I lay in my open casket, trying very hard not to wink.
I woke up sad. It was fall again and I began to think that I could never forget you. I had crossed the Atlantic to forget the beating of your heart but in the end what is the difference—Berlin, Paris, New York? Some would say a great deal and they are right of course but I began to see my delusion. I was bleeding my life away in cold northern cities telling myself you would find me one day. More than a little part of me believed you’d faked your death, covered your trail.
Practised invisibility, even from me. Or especially from me. I’d written Invisibility after all, so that if you could hide from me you could hide from anyone. Even, presumably, them.
It is hard to breathe in the northern hemisphere, the summers so brief one is never without fear of the cold, of freezing somehow, alone in the night. I would go somewhere warm, I told myself, somewhere nearer the equator, where people did not think so much, where they dream more, where it is easier to forget time, the hand of time.
Or maybe it was hard to breathe anywhere you had breathed.
And then, on the subway, someone called my name. Who could be calling my name? It was Karina, our Berlin cabdriver. She was so happy to see me, it too made me sad.
We went to an old bar close to my hotel. The Ear Inn is ungentrified, old school and full of neighbourhood types. Why, I asked, was she in New York? Was she going to NYU for graduate work?
She asked me about you, and once again a cold wave of fear (what size animal?) came over me. It was not fear that they would find you, it was the other fear: that they would find me. It was partly because of this fear that I left Berlin for Paris in the first place, even though I did not leave the work. I would make myself invisible, and work on Invisibility. I did not want to be found before I finished. And in this plan, at least, I succeeded.
I think.
One grows too weary for fear.
Karina had known all along, she confessed, she had always worked with us. She just hadn’t been able to tell us, so that we could all be safer. She had kept her involvement invisible, even from us. She beat us at our own game.
Maybe.
Involvement in what?
In stopping it.
In helping us stay invisible.
At least that is what she said.
She also spoke my thoughts aloud: I came to New York because it is hard to breathe anywhere he breathed.
Was she reading my mind or had I spoken it, written it somewhere? And is there already a technology for mind reading that I don’t know about yet? Or did we just feel the same way?
Yes, she slept with you too. I didn’t mind. You were like that. Many women could sleep with you and not only did we not hate each other we also didn’t hate you.
Maybe she didn’t come to New York for the reason she said but to keep tabs on me. Taxi driver, yeah right.
She was wearing the jacket like yours. Did I ever tell about the jacket? It was like this:
Leaving Paradise and trying to hail a cab, we often got Karina, you and I. At first it was coincidence. But the coincidence, after repeating itself so many times, like links in a chain, transmuted into pattern, and she would come looking for us.
Paradise would close, and we would pour out the gates, waves in the deluge of aftermath. We would ignore the line of taxis waiting like vultures, looking for Karina, and if she wasn’t there we would wait, knowing she would be soon. Seeing us she would honk her horn like a trumpet and we would limp over to her, a collective Jonah to his whale, a killer to the hangman of his choice. You, me and your hangers on. Movement people, artists, lawyers.
And she would take us home.
Why did we let her?
I met her once outside of her work. It was in January, during the Winter Schluss Verkauf at KaDeWe, the year-end sales. It was in the men’s department. There was a jacket of the softest black leather. There were others of course but it was the only one of such an exquisite cut, so masterfully sewn together. Reaching for it at the same time we found unexpectedly one another’s hands. Our fingers brushed and strangely I took her hand instead of withdrawing from the awkwardness, the transgression, touching a stranger in public. Maybe some part of me knew that I knew her. Maybe my fingers knew.
And we looked up, away from the jackets, and into each other’s eyes, mine blue, hers green. Strangely we did not let go, not immediately, even though we did not know one another yet. I couldn’t place her, this red-haired girl with a clear strong face wearing, I now saw, a look of such confused recognition it could only have mirrored my own. I felt (or maybe my fingers felt) the connection to be more than the superficial circumstances it generally turns out to be in such situations. I didn’t think of the obvious which, by its plainness had assumed a cloak of—I must say it—invisibility.
“Ich kenne dich,” I said, as people do.
“Ja näturlich, aber von wo?”
As people do, we listed all the places we might possibly have met. It gave us no clue, for of course she and I could never both be in the same place on any given night—if she was at the same play or art opening or party or just drinking at Paradise then she wouldn’t be available to drive us home and listen to every word we said. Finally, as I should have at first, I asked her what she did. She told me she was a taxi driver and only then did I exclaim, “Du! Du! Du fährst uns nachhause vom Paradise!”
It all seems so obvious now—she always drove us; she was in KaDeWe that day. She saw me on the L train in lower Manhattan, going back to the west side. It seems strange, erstaunlich, that I didn’t see it sooner, not just who she was in the department store in West Berlin that winter day now years ago, but all of it. And as to her? Who knows?
When she drove taxi she wore makeup and her hair pulled away from her face but in the department store it spilled down the shoulders of her scruffy sweater in waves; some women dress up to shop but she was not one of them. And of course, the context was unusual. My second excuse, or maybe she knew an invisibility spell I didn’t know. If we’re not recognized, it’s as good as being invisible, isn’t it? At least to those who do in fact know us.