GARNET 2012 59
“How is your dad, by the way? Is he still living here in Berlin?” She looked back at me incredulously. “My dad’s dead.” It had been too long. I was beginning to forget her. The silence that ensued marked a distance between us that we tried to ignore. It was all right to forget little things, like her mother’s maiden name or something like that, but to forget a death as serious as her father’s was unacceptable. I remember when I first asked about her father, it was worse, being only three months after he had been lowered into the ground. I remember seeing her eyes swell and redden, and I remember her shaking fingers as she lit a cigarette. Her loss was strengthened by our loss of communication, the distance between us, the distance between the subject, the distance between life and death—it all came to a head in the form of icy tension. What do you say to that? Sorry? Does sorry really mean anything when someone has forgotten something like that? Does sorry mean anything when it comes from a stranger to the deceased? “I’m sorry . . . I haven’t slept in . . . um, where should we go after this?” I tried to sound natural, acting as if my topic change did not completely disregard the weight of the topic beforehand. “It’s fine,” she laughed it off, “I don’t know. Lets just walk in that general direction. There’s a hostel down the road. It’s far but there are bars up ahead, and it’s not like we need to hurry, is it? I mean, we can just take the underground if we need to.” She laughed. “What’s the name of the hostel?” “Circus-Freak. The last time I went there it was full of Australians screaming at each other over some shitty Aussie Indie band. Their music was god-awful, but they were nice, very loud, but nice.” I loved that about her. For one, it was her taste in music, none of that whining stuff that fills the ears of so many homes nowadays. She listened to Zappa, Waits, and Reed. But for a girl who listened to music with such thrust, she didn’t care about anything. And I liked that about her too: she just walked through the world to walk, and would stop wherever she felt it was a good place to stop. I tried to pay for her food but she wouldn’t let me. In fact, she insisted that she pay for me, but that certainly wasn’t going to happen. I figured it was fine since I would be buying the drinks in a moment, and I really just wanted to get back out to see Berlin. I was only going to be there for a day, and I wanted to make sure that I did as much as I could. Not that I really wanted to do much, except to see her again, but I did want to see the general culture of the city, which I had heard was pretty wild, and I only had one night to do it. We continued to walk down the streets; Sophie still stepping in the water puddles that had gathered from the drainage pipes. I remember realizing that my feet had gone numb, the only feeling being an eerie sort of pressure. We had only been outside for about five minutes, but my shoes were soaked and did little to block the chill of January. It seemed like she was just walking, walking with no particular goal other than to step in every puddle she saw, so I asked her if she wanted to go into a bar that was about twenty feet ahead of us. She nodded and we walked inside. It was a pretty cool atmosphere. Several layers of black curtains blocked the entrance