I didn’t see much more of Berlin.
Rudy hadn’t practised at all but he’d already scored some Purple. Of course I did a few lines with him, even though I was exhausted and more than a little drunk. I thought it was laced with something else, because when we disrobed I saw his penis had turned into a pretty blue candle. It looked like a regular candle, just blue, not one of those penis-shaped candles they have in sex shops, thank heavens.
Of course I lit it and turned off the lights. Instead of having sex, we watched for hours, his penis’s flame the only blue light in the dark room. Just before it burned to its end we blew it out together: one two three, blow.
I meant to go to sleep then, but Rudy asked, “Kim, are you ever afraid of going insane?”
“Yes,” I answered truthfully, “but not here, not now.”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t my time to go crazy yet,” I answered. “This is yours.” I didn’t know where the words came from. Blame it on the Purple.
And I was right too. The next day Rudy had to check out the club and run through a few songs with his band. I stayed in our room and slept. When he came home I wanted to go out for Schnitzel but he wanted to order from room service and do more of the new Purple. Somewhat reluctantly I agreed. I was here on his dime.
A brand new candle appeared almost immediately.
“Where are we, Kim?” Rudy asked. “Have we gone too far in this time?”
I have no idea where he got the Purple. I know he’d tried in Canada and hadn’t been able to get any; we mostly had Green there, not the same animal at all. Maybe Katie got it for him—I wouldn’t put it past her—or maybe he bumped into Lou on the street.
Who wouldn’t take beautiful, exclusive, scary new drugs given to them by Lou Reed? I would have, then. I took them from Rudy after all, not nearly so glamorous. I guess he was to me what Lou was to him; Rudy was my Lou. I have no one to blame but myself, that and my age; I was only twenty-two, if clever and sophisticated as Katie and Hans liked to point out.
Most of the time, I was pretty happy about my life, knowing, as Hans said, it would likely only come once. Only now and then did I fret I was a mere groupie as I had that night in Die Ruine, or that I’d wake at forty, lonely and alone, in need of a long stay in rehab.
Like what happened to Rudy.
To answer my question to Leni: Rudy’s little West German tour was the height of his fame. With the exception of “Fires Halfway,” his next album was awful, and the one after that bombed. His contract wasn’t renewed, but he still had habits, and they are harder to kick even than memories of failure. I only know this from hearsay, because after I flew home alone I never saw him again.
I went to fashion school and now design upscale maternity clothes and am successful enough at it for my standards, admittedly not high, but I have my health and work I love, and that is a life blessed. And if you remember the late seventies or early eighties, you weren’t there, but I didn’t forget Rudy, and there he was last week at a gallery opening, Rudy whom I hadn’t seen in years.
Rudy who? Everyone asked later as I tried to explain his career—he sells real estate now, or software or something—I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten. Fires Halfway was never more than a minor hit, but it’s the one that got people to know who I meant. It’s still in rotation. Its reputation has grown, if anything.
Isn’t that enough to get him a new contract, you ask?
Well, no. Because he didn’t actually write it.
Sometimes, I have to admit, I’m still pulled in by the past, by the hopeful love I felt for him that I wonder at now. Neither Rudy nor Lou died, neither there in 1982 in Berlin nor in the twenty years since, although not for lack of trying. And neither did I, or I wouldn’t be telling you my story. But enough people have paid the final price, including Serge, one of Rudy’s favourite drummers, who OD’d on heroin in a Paris hotel room. You’d think we’d all have seen enough by now, but it seems each new generation falls for the same dangerous lies, for the girl at the opening on Rudy’s arm couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and her pupils were big as saucers.
“What’s with her?” I remember whispering.
“Orange,” he whispered back. “It’s so good. Want some? Remember Fan?”
Maybe he should have died.
“Halfway there,” I muttered gloomily, watching his nightly candle. By the third night I felt seasoned, knew what to expect, almost tired of the inevitability.
The dead pull of Berlin. Out of time, out of space. I could stay here forever, I thought.
Rudy and I wrote a song that week. It ended up making him enough to pay cash for his Toronto house. We were already split up when he next recorded and it didn’t occur to me to ask for a credit and he didn’t offer me one. It was Hans who tracked me down and told me I should threaten to sue. Which I did, and Rudy sent me a large cheque worth, indeed, half the royalties. I didn’t care about my name. He told me to buy rubber spike heels, thinking he was being cute, but at the time I was back in school and put it towards my loan.
We indulged heavily in room service. We didn’t go out, unless he had a gig. His playing was less than memorable, but he looked beautiful. Giggling, we’d take a cab back to the hotel afterwards, refusing all invitations.
“We’ll hate each other before it’s over,” I said, thinking I already did, a little. But I couldn’t stop any more than him. Once the candles were over, we experimented with sex on the new Purple and discovered it was not just possible but fantastic, inexhaustibly compelling and inexhaustible every other way, until, at dawn, we’d both want to stop but seemingly couldn’t. Sleep, when it came, was always a welcome respite. I felt like we had hormones in an IV drip. It was almost embarrassing.
One night when I was alone I turned on the radio and heard the fire song we’d written together a few nights earlier and had been singing together every day, as we cried or laughed at our plight, or more likely, just made strange love again.
Of course that was impossible; Rudy hadn’t recorded it yet. The music was very beautiful. I wished I knew more of music so I could sing him the melody when he returned from seeing Lou (my euphemistic name for his Purple supplier, which I shared with him—he didn’t get the joke) and he could write it down, because it was far better than the one he’d written.
But the words were the same, word for word.
What is time? What is creativity?
I felt like we’d been sent out on a space probe, the two of us, to bring back the unearthly answers to those portentous questions, but who could survive that?
Still, waiting for him to come back, I tried to tap it out on the room’s piano, but I have little ear for music and I never got it right. When he eventually got back he said, “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard you play; it captures so perfectly our eerie trajectory.”
“It’s a quarter of the original, if that, and many notes misheard. It’s the melody to ‘Fires Halfway.’”
“‘Fires Halfway’ already has a different melody. What do you mean, the original?”
“This one’s better. I heard it on the radio.”
“You’re a technology-based Coleridge,” Rudy said. “I know you said you’d wanted to be Kim, and I said I’d be happy if you could, but now you’re pushing it.” Still he madly scribbled notes, and the lost portions he replaced with accessible poppy riffs, not nearly so frightening. It was a good collaboration, the one and only between ourselves and the Sirian extraterrestrials singing to me and only me from the radio. Or so I joked. Rudy winced. I could say things like that and still remember to pick up the dry cleaning; it was before Fan came. Rudy was concerned; he had a lighter grip that week than me. Kim, whom he’d conjured, strange wise beauty, was turning out to be a little more than he could handle.