“Dr. Seuroq,” said Luc, “can we go home now?”
“Yes,” Seuroq answered, “I’m finished here,” and when Luc reached out to touch the old man there was an abruptness about it that gave way to hesitance, which triggered in Seuroq the last memory he would have of Helen tonight. “You’re making that up,” he had answered her in the hotel room when she said the Queen of Wands was the card of passion, and he had reached to take the card from her and look at it; but between their fingers, his and hers, the card crumbled, disintegrating with age, as though it were as old as the hotel. That night she woke him and said she wanted to go home, so they checked out of the hotel at one in the morning, to the extreme displeasure of the concierge. In the back of the taxi Helen explained to Seuroq that she had been dreaming over and over in her sleep of the card crumbling in their fingers, and it somehow seemed important that they go back home before everything else crumbled. “Everything else?” he had asked. “Like the hotel,” she answered, and laughed as she did when she chained herself to the shackles of the courtyard wall. But it wasn’t really the hotel she meant.
In the fall of 1998 an American writer living in the same hotel room first read the news on page seventeen of the International Herald Tribune, below the reviews of the latest shows in Paris and London. It would have been more appropriate with the obits, the writer thought to himself later, but at the time he didn’t understand the ramifications anymore than anyone else. It wasn’t until three months later when a magazine ran DAY X across its cover — or JOUR D’X on the European editions, out of deference to the French scientist who discovered it — that the panic set in and Erickson took the Bullet to Berlin, where they called it X-Tag.
39
IT SEEMED TO THE writer that every crucial moment of the Twentieth Century had sooner or later expressed itself in Berlin and therefore it was natural he should go there. But past Hannover the train just got emptier, and by the time it reached Zoo Station at dawn the writer rose from his sleeper to find himself disembarking alone. He took a room on the third floor of an empty hotel in Savignyplatz. The neighbors led lives even more transitory than his: streetwalkers and barflies and whatever tourists were weird enough to stray into Berlin, the kind of adventurous eccentrics who used to pass up Paris or Maui for Amazon villages or Alaskan outposts. A block from the hotel, passing beneath the tracks of the S-Bahn, he looked up one night to the scream of a runaway train hurtling west. The sound and speed were terrifying, the white boxes of the train’s windows empty of life, and in the cold blue shine of the moon the tracks of the S-Bahn glistened across the sky like time’s vapor trail. The writer braced himself for the crash in the distance, the cry of the train flying off the track into space, plunging into a building or park or the waters of Lake Wannsee. That was the night of the first phone call.
As time passed, his memory of this became less exact. As the present slipped into the final year of the millennium, memory became more and more disengaged from the past, like a door that floated from room to room in a house, taking up residence one day in the kitchen and the next day in the basement. The phone in his room had never rung before. The American couldn’t have said for sure the phone even worked. Since there was hardly anyone left in Berlin and he didn’t know anyone anyway, he assumed it was the hotel manager; maybe there was a problem with the bill. Erickson answered and there was silence for a moment and then a young woman’s voice spoke to him in German. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German,” the writer said, and there was another pause and the woman said, in English, “I want to take you in my mouth.”
For a split, ludicrous second, he thought it was his ex-wife. He hadn’t talked to her in several years — only once since the Cataclysm, and then just long enough to assure himself she was all right, blessed as she always was by dumb luck. His ex-wife lived her life in fear of one disaster or another, ranging from the apocalyptic to the mundane, when more than anyone he knew she was always unscathed by events; in a meteor shower she’d be the one who just happened to be off the planet at the time. Now, for a split ludicrous second, he thought she’d tracked him down, though in the next moment he knew that was impossible. With the phone in his hand he instinctively turned to the window, as though someone were watching. He tried to remember what was across the street — another hotel, where someone might be staring at him from a darkened room. “What?” he finally answered foolishly, and she said it again.
“Are you alone?” she asked, after a pause. Hesitantly he answered that he was. “Take off your clothes,” she said; and at that moment he was either going to hang up or do what she said. He told her he had to close the blinds on the window. “Did you take off your clothes?” she said when he came back. They talked some more; she described herself. She had blond hair and nice breasts. She didn’t say how old she was, but when he thought about it, which was for only a second, he imagined she was much younger than he. She didn’t say she was beautiful. It became implicitly understood, particularly within the boundaries of the fantasy they were sharing, that outright lying wasn’t permitted. The thing he would remember later with dead certainty was that, immediately after it was over and he lay spent on the hotel bed, she asked if he was all right. Not whether the sex had been all right but whether he was all right, his intensity having betrayed itself to her. Yes, he answered, and there was a click.
After that he was shaken. He wanted a real woman, not a fantastic one. He even thought of going to the Reichstag, which he’d never done before, but that scene was too strange for him. He pulled on his clothes and opened the window, expecting somehow to see her revealed; below, a camel loped silently down the empty dark street toward the square. It was more than a month before she called back. She left a message with the hotel manager: Are you really never there, it said, where do you go when there’s nothing to do at home? In his mind he imagined her with only a dollop of romanticism — more attractive than plain but not especially pretty, perhaps a bit plump. He wouldn’t allow himself to sit in the hotel room waiting for her calls; and yet in Berlin all there was left to do was wait. From his window he watched the dark street for another camel, as though it had been a sign. But when her third call came, the block was empty of beasts, not even the growl of the lion he believed slept in one of the nearby cellars, though he’d never seen it. She fucked him on the phone again and told him when she’d call back, and so already their rendezvous transgressed the spontaneous.
Animals prowled the city. The previous summer, under the cover of darkness, members of the Pale Flame opened the cages in the garden across from Zoo Station; now people were mauled by tigers. In the mouth of the Charlottenburg U-Bahn station the American found what was left of a kangaroo ripped apart by a panther. For months after the cages were opened, the city was the most alive it had been since the fall of the Wall nine years earlier, the orange and yellow and green noise of exotic birds flashing across a sky still smoky from the Night of the Immolation, when the Pale Flame had captured and set on fire seventeen Asian women in the pattern of a swastika. Sometimes the American could still see or hear the few birds left in the gables of the buildings. Beneath the Brandenburg Gate he was once so startled by a clap of thunder above him he might have thought it was another runaway S-Bahn, if there was an S-Bahn that ran anywhere nearby; but the sound wasn’t a train, it was the pandemonium of escaped birds amid the stone rafters, crashing wildly from one archway to the other. The color and music of birds survived neither Berlin nor winter. Slowly but surely one species of escaped animals wiped out the next, with no cops around to pick up the gutted carcasses.