Small Fury
It was one of those impossibly hot summer days, the kind that burn themselves into your skin and keep the night perpetually at arm’s length. Eva was watching the waiter move away—a southern type, unhurried, effortlessly warm—while I tried to crush the ice cubes in my cocktail with the straw. A crowd of tourists pushed along the street, laughing at something. I watched them go and felt a small, stupid envy.
How’s Adam?
I said, not because I particularly wanted to know, but because the silence had become architectural. We hadn’t seen each other in so long, and yet her life and her partner’s felt curiously remote, like dispatches from a country I’d visited once. Good,
she said, and let that sit for a beat before turning it around. And Sina?
Something struck me hard from inside. My hand slipped and the cocktail went off the table—glass, fruit, liquid across hot concrete. I watched it shatter. I liked how it looked. I smiled a little stupidly.
Two years had passed since Sina left my apartment and my life in a single tearful exit, and we hadn’t exchanged a word since. By all accounts she had arranged herself beautifully in this city—the right contacts, the right parties, the right rooms. She was hosting a few shows on a music channel, modeling for local labels when it suited her, and there were rumors attaching her name to a rotating cast of musicians, managers, and minor television faces.
I ran into her occasionally at events, sometimes photographed her—Sina with an overly groomed celebrity, Sina with a bored model on her arm, Sina smiling for the camera with the precision of someone who had studied the gesture carefully. Then the flash would die and she’d turn and walk, usually straight to the bar. As if she didn’t know who I was. Those nights were generally ruined after that.
Some sadistic god seemed to have laid our two lives on the same scale, tilted deliberately against me. While Sina’s had fast-forwarded into prosperity and recognition, mine was sinking into a thick dark sludge of self-doubt, dissatisfaction, and a free-floating hatred I couldn’t aim properly at anything. The search for her—or for whatever she had unlocked in me—had become the organizing principle of my existence, and what it had produced was an endless procession of setbacks and crushed expectations. I had become a shadow of something.
I searched all of Berlin for a convincing copy of her. Her playful freckles, the red-gold hair, the specific luminosity of her blue eyes—I went looking for these things in every Catholic schoolgirl, every wired designer, every hollow-eyed woman the city produced, and each time confirmed with less shock and more finality that they were all just empty containers, supporting characters who couldn’t approach whatever Sina had ignited in me and who could never meet the expectations I loaded onto them before they’d had a chance to breathe.
At night, on illegal stimulants and Red Bull, I lay awake working through her Facebook photos methodically, furious at every sycophantic message left on her wall, jealous of every new follower who threaded themselves into her life via comment. I had become a stalker—a solitary nobody without real friends, slowly drowning in a world of glitter and drugs and performed sanity. Exactly as Sina had predicted.
It must have been a few days after the laconic encounter with Eva when someone asked me to shoot the aftershow party for Matthias Schweighöfer’s new film at a hotel somewhere in the city. I arrived very drunk and very late. The room had seventeen kinds of martini, a serious commitment to candles, and a perpetually wrecked boss who spoke German with a New York accent and pushed it too hard. Her New York accent repulsed me in a way I couldn’t fully rationalize. Of the photos I shot that night, only a fraction were usable, but I didn’t care about that or much else. I was an artist. There was no good reason not to admire me.
People like me had never had it easy. I’d always pushed further—further, further, one more step—until everything around me developed cracks and collapsed like a glass cube into a thousand pieces. My life was an experiment and everyone in it was a test subject I could prod until I crushed them with expectation or they found their senses and left. It was time for me to leave too.
The fixed smiles and sad eyes of the other guests were pushing me physically toward the exit. I slipped out onto the balcony with a cigarette and stood there trying to blow smoke rings at the Berlin TV Tower—imagining them reaching it, tightening, bringing it down. After a while I realized someone was standing beside me, watching my efforts with what seemed like genuine interest. When I turned to look at her I started coughing. Sina smiled at me.