Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy

Picking Up the Pieces BY PAT CADIGAN

Pat Cadigan has twice won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novels Synners and Fools and has been nominated many times for just about every other award. Although primarily known as a science fiction writer (and as one of the original cyberpunks), she also writes fantasy and horror, which can be found in her collections Patterns, Dirty Work, and Home by the Sea. Her work has been translated into many languages, including Polish, Russian, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Czech, and Japanese (also Pirate and Swedish Chef via Google, which doesn’t count as official publication, but she gets a kick out of it anyway). The author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction titles and one young adult novel, she currently has two new novels in progress.

She lives in gritty, urban North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, and her son, Rob, and their minder, Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite forgiven 1989. It was one of those years when everything started looking up.

OK, not everything. But even after Tiananmen Square, the developments in Eastern Europe were enough to make a person think the world was actually becoming a better place.

All right, then, just me. I wondered. I was thirty-six—theoretically old enough to know better but young enough to drop everything and fly halfway around the world for my crazy sister Quinn.

Dammit, everything goes to hell around that girl, my father used to grumble. Actually, it was more like chaos, which, now that I think of it, was hell for my father, a man who envisioned his daughters as swans and instead got—well, us. And Quinn, in that order. The first four (of which I was the last) made his head spin. Then when I was sixteen, Quinn arrived, unintended, unpredicted, unexpected, and made everything spin. My sister, the thrill ride. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, she’ll probably come back as a Tilt-a-Whirl. Or a Wild Octopus.

Maybe a rocket, seeing as how she was born the day after the first moon landing. But it would have to be a rocket that never came down: She wasn’t manic-depressive; there was no depression, just manic and more manic. Although to be honest, it wasn’t mania in the clinical sense, just high energy and no brakes. Two separate therapists diagnosed her as a borderline personality. I had to look that one up. Some things seemed to fit, some didn’t, and the rest I wasn’t sure about, but it all sounded pretty bad.

In the end, I decided the diagnosis creeped me out, not my sister. Quinn could be frivolous and silly, the grasshopper to everyone else’s ant; she could be self-centered and even insensitive, with the attention span of a gnat and poor impulse control, but she had never been mean or spiteful. Most of the time she was good-natured, slow to anger, and quick to kiss and make up. And more than anything else, generous.

My mother never missed a chance to point out Quinn’s good qualities. There’s no malice in her. She’s got a good heart. She never goes out of her way to hurt anyone. She’d give you the shirt off her back. What my mother didn’t mention, however, was that when Quinn ran out of shirts, she’d expect you to volunteer yours. Her tendency to presume wasn’t as attractive as her thick, curly black hair or her silvery gray eyes or her smile, features that could usually persuade the susceptible to overlook her flaws.

It didn’t always work to her advantage, of course. Because she was a child, she had a hard time telling the difference between excitement and trouble. I’m not sure she even knew there was a difference. Because there’s no malice in her, my mother said. Because she’s got a good heart.

In November of 1989, Quinn went to Berlin with her good heart, which had been captured by a tall, rangy blond man with blue eyes, cheekbones like the white cliffs of Dover, and snake hips. It was a package that would have held my attention even without the German accent. With it, everything he said sounded exotic and even a bit mysterious, at least to my tin American ear. Especially after a few glasses of red wine.

And very good red wine it was, too, a French Bordeaux that actually tasted as good as the label looked. He brought two bottles when he and Quinn turned up at our parents’ house for the annual your-father-won’t-celebrate-his-birthday dinner in early September. Only Kath, Lisa, and I were not-celebrating with our parents. Our oldest sister, Marie, and her wife were stuck in Toronto seeing their twins through chicken pox, and as far as any of us knew, Quinn was traveling—the family euphemism for that period beginning with the last time anyone had heard from her and ending when she finally called one or more of us to say she was OK and hint she needed a small loan. Unpredicted and unexpected again. Surprise, everybody, and oh, hey, meet Martin.

The not-a-birthday dinner immediately turned into the Quinn Show, with special guest. Quinn was bubbly, vivacious, and entertaining, Martin was personable, witty, and utterly covet-worthy, and everyone enjoyed themselves. Though Kath, Lisa, and I sneaked commiserating looks at each other even as we did; sometimes it was hard not to feel drab around our baby sister.

But if we felt drab next to Quinn, we were positively lackluster compared to Martin. Originally from East Berlin, he was barely more than a toddler when his parents had given him over to some trusted friends who had smuggled him through the Berlin Wall and taken him to live with them in London. Since then, he had heard precious little of his family: All he had was a blurry photo of his parents with the two younger sisters and a brother he had never met. My mother teared up. This embarrassed Martin, who apologized. Quinn, however, sat back with a faint smile, and I knew she was pleased to have brought us someone to prick our social conscience—very much a Quinn thing to do.

She and Martin didn’t stay long after that. “And there they go,” Kath sighed as we stood on the front steps watching Martin’s sports car pull out of the driveway. “Back to life among those more beautiful and exciting than us.” Her gaze swiveled to Lisa, the grammar Nazi of the family.

For once, Lisa wasn’t taking the bait. “What color do you suppose the sky is on that planet?” she asked wistfully.

“Dunno,” I said. “Our eyes are probably too ordinary to see it.”

“Don’t be silly, Jean.” Kath elbowed me. “It’ll be gold lamé. With real gold.”

“Girls.” Mom was right on cue. “There’s no malice in her. She’s got a good heart.”

Dad gave a small hmph. “I hope this Martin doesn’t break it.”

My sisters and I looked at each other, knowing immediately he would.

Quinn’s call came on one of those rare nights when I had a few friends from work over for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The conversation was mostly about East European politics. Was this really the beginning of the end for Communism, and, if so, did that mean changes for China after all, despite Tiananmen Square? Current events along with Martin’s brief visit had me thinking more about politics than I ever had before, although he and my sister were the furthest things from my mind when the phone rang.

She was talking so fast that I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. I couldn’t even tell whether she was happy, angry, or scared. I tried calming her down so I could call her back after everyone left; instead, I ended up mouthing apologies at my guests while they showed themselves out. Eventually Quinn wound down enough so that I could get in a few questions.

Martin had gone back to London in mid-October, promising to return in a week, ten days at the most. There’d been two brief phone calls from him—one the day he’d arrived in London to let her know he’d arrived safely, the other two weeks later to say he had the flu and was too sick to fly. And after that, nothing—no calls and only the answering machine when she called him. She went on phoning at all hours of the day and night until she’d finally gotten an answer—not Martin but the neighbor who said she was watering his plants while he was in West Berlin. No, she didn’t know when Martin was coming back, big things were happening. He hadn’t told her much before he left, just something about people coming through the Berlin Wall, which would be very exciting if it were true, wouldn’t it. Quinn managed to wheedle the name and number of the hotel where Martin was staying out of her, then decided to take more direct action.

So here she was in Berlin, at the hotel where Martin had supposedly been staying. Only he wasn’t there now, and she had been running all over West Berlin for days trying to find him. And now she’d heard about people who had gotten out of East Berlin going back through the wall and getting stuck, unable to get out again even if they had passports from the UK or West Germany or even America.

That didn’t sound right to me. Could any country, even East Germany, prevent a foreign national from leaving? I thought of what I’d seen on the news about Hungary’s relaxed border with Austria allowing East Germans to escape to the west. Maybe East Germany was tightening its own borders with everyone else to counter this, making travel problems for everyone, regardless of nationality? It didn’t seem likely, but I just didn’t know. Stranger things had happened.

“Maybe the best thing to do is get on the first flight out of there,” I said the next time she stopped for breath. “Come home, wait for Martin to call you.”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Martin needs my help, I just know it. He’s one of those people who went back through the wall and can’t get out again. I can feel it in my bones.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“I just told you, I can feel it in my bones,” Quinn said, as if I had questioned the existence of gravity. “Haven’t you ever felt that way, like you just know something?”

It was on the tip of my tongue to say, Yeah, but I’ve always been wrong unless it was something bad that I was in denial about, but she was talking again.

“A lot of the people here think something’s about to happen, but they don’t know if it’s going to be something good, like more travel restrictions being eased, or something bad, like Czechoslovakia in 1968—”

“Do you even know what happened in Czechoslovakia in 1968?” I asked, amazed.

“Tanks,” she said vaguely. “But whatever happens, I can’t leave Martin to face it alone.”

I sighed. “Quinn, honey, I think you’ve got it backward. I think Martin left you.”

“He wouldn’t. I know it in my heart. We have a bond.”

There’s no arguing with what someone knows in their heart or feels in their bones, but that’s never stopped me from trying. It was especially counterproductive in this case, because the more I argued against it, the surer she was about Martin and the more determined she became to help him.

“I’ll go get him myself,” she said finally. “I’ll go through the wall and find him and bring him out again.”

“You just said you heard people from other countries were having trouble getting out. What if you can’t get out again yourself?”

“Then we’ll be stuck there together,” she said nobly, making me wince.

“And what if he’s not there? What if he’s in West Berlin? Or what if he’s already gone back to London—or even the U.S.? What if he’s been calling your apartment to tell you when to pick him up at the airport?”

“He isn’t. I told you, I can feel it in my bones. He’s in trouble. He needs me.”

We argued for another half hour before I could finally make her promise she wouldn’t go near the wall before I got to West Berlin. I couldn’t always count on Quinn’s word, but, all told, she had kept more promises than she had broken and there was a very good chance she’d keep this one. She’d made a passing mention of maxed-out credit cards before I hung up.

When the plane touched down at Berlin Tegel, jet lag hit as if someone had dropped a heavy blanket on me. I managed to drag myself through customs and the baggage claim and finally through the entrance gate and straight into bedlam.

I was caught in a sea of utterly joyful people, hugging, kissing, laughing, calling to each other in German but also several other languages, occasionally even English. At least three people kissed me on both cheeks, and more tried. The hugs were harder to avoid—arms came out of the crowd to embrace me while I tried to find the city bus, which my travel agent had told me to take to Am Zoo, the hotel where Quinn was staying. If she was still there.

I didn’t have to wait long at the stop, but more people had jammed themselves onto the bus than I’d have thought possible. Nonetheless, several near the door pulled me and my one small bag up into their midst, ignoring my protests that there was no room.

“You’re North American? U.S. or Canadian?” a woman asked in a heavy German accent.

“Uh, U.S.” I felt awkward. We were pressed up against each other so tightly I could feel her breath against my face. She had been drinking beer. So had everyone else around me.

“I’ll go there one day. I never thought I would, but now I know I will!” Her wide blue eyes, already red from crying, welled up and spilled over. With great difficulty, she maneuvered one hand into the shopping bag she was holding and came up with a piece of toilet paper. I looked down; the bag was bulging. Besides toilet paper, I could see bananas, marmalade, peanut butter, face cream, shampoo, and, on top, CDs by Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper.

“Soft enough to wipe your eyes,” the woman said as she did so. “Nothing will ever be the same. My mother dreamed of this. She saw the wall go up. I only wish she had lived to see it come down again.”

“It’s not down yet,” a man said. “Not all the way.”

“It will be!” said someone else, and everyone around me cheered.

As the bus lumbered along, I found out from the people around me what had happened while I was still in transit. The party secretary in East Germany had announced there would be no more restrictions on travel to the west, effective immediately. Thousands of East Berliners, on foot or in cars, promptly made a beeline for the wall, papers in hand, demanding to cross into West Berlin. They were met by bewildered guards who, unsure of their orders, refused to let them through. In a few hours, thousands became tens of thousands, until the guards finally gave in and opened the border. But some brave souls had decided to break through the wall literally, using sledgehammers and power saws. West Berliners who gathered on the other side greeted them with champagne, embraces, even money. There was music and people were dancing on top of the Berlin Wall. The whole city was caught up in the spirit; it was the biggest street party ever.

By the time the bus reached Ku’damm, I was feeling quite a lot of that spirit myself. I was no longer tired, my face hurt from smiling, and in spite of myself, my own eyes were welling up.

But as I struggled through the heaving masses on the street looking for the hotel, I wanted to kill my sister.

Quinn had added my name to the hotel room. The people at the Am Zoo front desk were delighted to see me, or rather, my credit card, which Quinn had assured them would take care of the bill, incidentals included. I made a hopeful joke about discounts for historical events but suddenly no one understood English well enough to get it.

The room was nice enough, though I wasn’t sure it was really worth the small fortune I would be paying for it. I was relieved to see my sister’s things very much in evidence—it meant she hadn’t gone—although she was out. Of course. Probably dancing in the streets with everyone else in West Berlin. Crisis or no crisis, she never could resist a party.

I looked out the window at the teeming streets, and jet lag hit again. Even if I’d known my way around the city, I had no energy to elbow my way through all those people. I lay down on the bed and passed out.

The next thing I knew, Quinn was shaking me like a rag doll.

“Come on, Jean, you’ve got to wake up!”

Squinting against the bright overhead light, I tried to pull away from her. “Stop—you’re gonna give me brain damage!”

Apparently she thought I was talking in my sleep; I had to use a self-defense move to get away from her. It worked but I almost dislocated an elbow. Then instead of standing back so I could get up, she actually went for me again. I rolled away, got tangled in the duvet, and landed on the floor.

“Don’t touch me; I’m awake already!” I yelled as she loomed over me.

“I was just going to help you up,” she said, looking offended. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Somebody shook me out of a sound sleep. What’s your excuse?” I used the bed to pull myself up to a sitting position.

“The Berlin Wall is coming down,” she said. “It’s history, happening right here, right now, before our very eyes.”

My very eyes still hurt from the bright light in the room: I glared up at her murderously. “And that’s why you couldn’t wake me up in a more civilized fashion?”

“I tried. You were dead to the world.”

“I’m jet-lagged. I spent the night not sleeping in a transatlantic sardine can.”

“Well, perk up, ’cause you have to see this; it’s amazing! The East Berlin guards are trading hats with the West Berlin ones; they’ve got their arms around each other and they’re singing.”

I struggled to my feet, batting away the hand she offered to help. “Then Martin isn’t trapped anymore, and he and his family can see each other whenever they want. Our work here is done.”

Quinn blinked at me, baffled. “What work?”

“Democracy. Liberté, egalité, fraternité. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, they’re free at last. Martin and his family included. Right now, he’s probably bonding with the sisters and brother he’s never met in between hugging his parents. That’s your cue to slip away quietly with your sister and go home and hug your parents. I’ll help you pack.”

“There aren’t any flights out now,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Who’d want to leave? Jean, you slept the day away; there wouldn’t be any flights now even if it weren’t the most incredible day in recent German history.”

I almost laughed; being all of twenty, my sister’s idea of recent history was last Christmas. “Fine. Let’s pack your stuff. I’ve got one little bag I haven’t even opened. Then we’ll be all ready to fly out tomorrow morning.”

Quinn shook her head so vigorously her curls flew. “No, we’re here now. It’s happening right now. Every second is history. Twenty years from now, do you want to have to tell everyone that you were in Berlin when the wall came down and you watched it on TV in your hotel room?”

I gave in and put on my shoes.

As soon as we waded into the crowds on the street, I realized I wasn’t just hungry but famished. I hadn’t eaten since before the plane had landed and that hadn’t been much—a small cup of yogurt and a roll so stale it had mutated into Styrofoam. Quinn didn’t mind putting off our eyewitnessing history in favor of food, but then with her credit cards maxed out, she’d probably missed a few meals herself.

The problem was the crowds, not just in the streets but anywhere and everywhere food was served. “See, they don’t get any of that stuff in East Berlin,” Quinn told me, pointing at a smiling man loaded down with two cases of Coke. Next to him, his family were eating out of large bags from a fast-food joint. “They take their kids into stores and the kids think they’re in fairyland. What we take for granted is incredible luxury to them.” She sounded practically authoritative, as if she knew all about the privations suffered by people in East Germany.

That would be Martin, of course. She was parroting Martin, probably right down his tone of voice. And then it hit me: She was trying to find him. I was along to cover expenses.

I wanted to be wrong, but there she was, up on tiptoe, stretching her neck like a meerkat, scanning the crowd. Irritated, I dragged her around a couple grinning at each other as they hefted boxes of stereo equipment, through a group of young guys with enough junk food and beer for six weekend toga parties, and down a side street, where I found what was probably the only restaurant in West Berlin without a line of people a block long waiting to get in. When I saw the prices, I understood why, but I was past caring.

“You’re looking for him, aren’t you?” I said as we sat at a table waiting to order. “Don’t deny it; I’m not a moron. But you are. If he’s back on this side of the wall, he’s probably with his family. Can’t you just leave him alone with them for a while? Give him some space?” The last sentence replayed itself in my head. Had I actually said that? I wanted to bite my tongue off.

“You’re being silly, Jean. It’s like a tidal wave of people pouring through from East Berlin. It’s impossible to find anyone.” But she wouldn’t look at me; instead, she studied the menu as if the secret of life were printed on it. Or Martin’s current location. I started to say something else but she talked over me. “Let’s just eat, okay? I don’t know about you, but I’m almost light-headed with hunger.”

That’s what happens when you max out your credit cards, I managed not to say out loud. At this point I was too hungry to deal with anything, much less Quinn’s foolishness. A relentlessly happy waitress took our orders and then brought us two pint glasses of beer we hadn’t asked for, dancing away before we could tell her we wanted soft drinks instead. While the restaurant celebrated around us, Quinn and I ate our overpriced steaks in silence. Every so often, I stole a glance at her to find her doing the same; it wasn’t until I’d finished a little over half the meal that I could find a little humor in the situation—the immediate situation, that was. There wasn’t going to be a whole lot of hilarity in getting my sister home.

“You’re twenty years old.” The words were out before I realized I’d spoken.

Quinn gave a faint, puzzled laugh. “And you’re thirty-six. And?”

“Ever think about going back to college?”

“Not this again.” She sawed a piece off her steak. “As I told Mom and Dad and Marie and Kath and Lisa and you and everybody and their mother, I’m not the academic type. Studying isn’t my thing.”

“So what is your thing—chasing some guy halfway around the world?”

Now she looked offended. “Martin isn’t just some guy. He’s more—so much more.”

“Okay, he’s got quite a history, I’ll give you that. Being a refugee from behind the Iron Curtain, growing up without his parents—definitely not your average man on the street. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t dumped you.”

“Doesn’t mean he has.” Quinn chewed stolidly and took a sip of beer. “You have no sense of anything that isn’t ordinary. To you, it’s all just people shifting around like, I don’t know, little blocks. Legos. Martin and I aren’t Legos. We have something more profound than you could ever know.”

“How long were you with him?” I asked. “Two months? Three?”

“Almost four.” Quinn looked smug. So there.

“Almost four profound months, eh? What’s his middle name?”

My sister looked startled for a fraction of a second, then covered with a laugh. “Nosy, aren’t you?”

“Can’t say you know anyone if you don’t know their middle name,” I said.

“I don’t like to pry. Unlike some people.”

“I didn’t know Eddie’s middle name was Erasmus til after we got engaged. Turned out that wasn’t the only thing I didn’t know about him, and we’d been together for over a year. Good thing I found out before I did something stupid like marry him.”

“You didn’t break up with Eddie because his middle name was Erasmus,” Quinn said. “I was only ten but I knew that.”

“Correct. I broke up with him because he’d been hiding things from me.”

“Martin never hid anything from me.”

“You don’t know that. Four months isn’t long enough to know—”

“Fine,” Quinn said flatly, her eyes hard. “Then I’ll give him a little longer.” She dragged her napkin back and forth across her mouth before dropping it on the table. “You really don’t know, Jean. There’s a lot more to life than you think. There really is an unseen world. I know—Martin showed it to me.”

My heart sank. “Oh, no, Quinn, not like the guru.”

“He wasn’t a guru, he was a swami.”

“He was a con man and he saw you coming.”

“It’s not like that!” she said hotly. “This isn’t America where everything happened ten minutes ago. This is the Old World. Time is measured in millennia here, and everything isn’t always nice and neat and easily explained. Martin opened my eyes to so much. I’m not going to just abandon him.”

“You’re going to have to learn the hard way again, aren’t you?” I said before I could tell myself to shut up.

Quinn didn’t take offense. Laughing, she toasted me with her beer. “We’ll just see who learns what the hard way—me or my older and supposedly wiser sister.”

In the course of my misspent youth, I joined the 1971 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, D.C.; some years later, I went to pre-Katrina New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Both times I thought I’d been in big crowds; this beat them by several magnitudes.

There was no place not filled with people—happy people, dancing, singing, shouting—while music played and fireworks went off. I held on to Quinn’s arm, determined not to lose her—or let her lose me—but invariably someone would come between us to hug her or me or both and I’d lose my grip on her. Fortunately, I always found her again, although a few times I would grab for what I thought was her arm only to discover I was manhandling a stranger. Quinn’s face would pop up several feet away, looking amused as I swam through the crowd to get to her.

“We should have tied ourselves together with rope,” I said as we squeezed through the masses. Disoriented, I had no idea where we were. There seemed to be only two directions—toward the wall or away from it—and only two locations—one side of the wall or the other. Correction: There was a third location—on top of the wall. People dancing on it were reaching down to hoist others up to dance with them. Was Quinn’s errant boyfriend up there? I wondered. As we got closer, I could hear, below the singing and music and general uproar, tapping noises, metal on stone in various rhythms. Hammers chipping away at the wall? It would take a hell of a lot of hammers to punch through. They needed sledgehammers or better yet, wrecking balls.

Abruptly, I heard a loud buzzing whine; on top of the wall, a cascade of sparks erupted as someone attacked it with a power saw. People cheered, and I found myself spontaneously cheering with them, which earned me another amused look from Quinn. But only very briefly—she was scanning the mass of people in front of her with more urgency.

The buzz-saw whine cut off, and I heard a new sound, the chatter of a small engine working too hard. I looked to my left, and through a break in the crowd, I saw a small car exuding a cloud of exhaust. As it inched forward, people lunged out of the crowd to pound their fists on it, startling the driver and his passengers. For a moment, I was afraid I was about to see a mob drag them out of the car and attack them. But no, the crowd was laughing. A woman shoved a bottle of champagne through the driver’s side window and kissed the wide-eyed driver, while a couple of teenagers stuck flowers in the front bumper.

“What’s that about?” I asked my sister.

“Trabi thumping,” she said. “They’ve been doing it all day. Trabants are really awful cars, but that’s all they have over there.”

Another rattletrap car crept along behind it and was given the same treatment. I turned to ask Quinn how our being out in an enormous crowd watching people dent cars would accomplish anything, but she was gone. The arm I was holding on to belonged to a middle-aged man with a mustache; he was grinning at me with delight.

He went on grinning as I apologized and disengaged, feeling like an idiot, and a drunken idiot at that. I hadn’t had much beer, but it didn’t take much combined with jet lag and mass celebratory hysteria. People kept hugging me as I struggled through the crush; I stopped trying to fight them off. It was faster just to go along with it and keep moving. After a while I realized I was automatically hugging everyone I passed. When in Rome … or West Berlin.

Working my way through the crowd, I began hearing snatches of English. When I looked around, though, I couldn’t see who was speaking. I listened in vain for Quinn’s voice. Then all the voices were drowned out by the sound of fireworks. Multicolored lights blossomed overhead, briefly turning the night as bright as day. None of the joy-filled, upturned faces around me belonged to Quinn. I kept pushing toward the wall, calling out her name.

More fireworks streaked skyward and exploded. Suddenly a new light hit my eyes, blinding me for a couple of seconds before it slid away and rippled over the crowd: Someone on top of the wall was wielding a spotlight like a searchlight. The bright circle moved back and forth, pausing here and there; the people caught in it waved their arms and cheered.

Trying to blink away the dark patches of afterimage, I kept pushing toward the wall, calling out my sister’s name. More lights appeared high up now, large banks of them, sending faint multiple shadows from the people on top of the wall over the crowd below. I put one hand up to try to shield my eyes, watering madly now from the cold. Or maybe I was so caught up in the moment I was crying with happiness like everyone else in Berlin; I honestly didn’t know anymore and I was starting to feel a little scared. Not just by that but by the fact that the crowd was getting so thick that sometimes my feet didn’t touch the ground.

Abruptly, I fetched up against something hard and rough and cold. I’d reached the infamous Berlin Wall, where people had died making a break for freedom, machine-gunned by East Berlin guards—and where it seemed I was going to be crushed to death, squashed by the entire happy population of West Berlin celebrating its symbolic fall.

With great effort, I pushed myself back so I could turn around, just as something hit the stone inches from my right eye. I had a glimpse of a grinning male face and then flinched as a large hammer came at me. Chips and dust flew against the side of my face.

“Watch it, you moron!” I yelled, startled and angry. “I got that in my eye!” I had one hand pressed to my eye and I didn’t actually know if that were true, but it would have been just my luck to be blinded by fragments from the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Where the hell was Quinn? Blind or not, I was going to kill her.

“Here—a special souvenir!” Someone shoved something into my other hand and closed my fingers around it.

After a bit of careful blinking, I determined that my eye was all right even if I was still in danger of being mashed to pulp against the wall, then I turned to see the grinning face again. He was using a hammer and chisel on the wall but at a safer, lower level.

“What are you doing?” I asked, forgetting I was mad at him.

“Getting pieces of the wall,” he said happily. “Special souvenirs! I gave you one!” He jerked his chin at my closed hand. I opened my fingers to see a jagged chunk of stone sitting on my palm. “See? Piece of the real Berlin Wall, the night it came down! Have to get it while we can, before it’s gone!”

In spite of everything, I had to laugh. Yeah, the Berlin Wall was most definitely down. In a year’s time, there’d be chunks of broken stone and brick for sale in every hotel and airport gift shop, attached to key chains, set in snow globes and paperweights and framed boxes, with or without an accompanying historic photo—Pieces of the True Wall, for sale along with toilet paper, shampoo, and CDs by Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper. The people behind the Iron Curtain had no idea what was about to hit them.

“You want some more?” the guy asked me, pausing with the chisel against the wall. There were lots of craters where bits had just been chipped away.

I dropped the fragment in my coat pocket and shook my head. “Nah. Save some for the East Berliners. They’ll need the income.”

He frowned. “I am from East Berlin,” he said.

I nodded and started to push my way past him when he grabbed my arm.

“Wait!” He fumbled in his coat pocket and came up with a compact camera. It looked brand new. “Please, could you take my picture?”

I looked at the people crowded around us. “I can try.”

He posed, smiling, holding up his hammer and chisel in one hand and a large chunk of stone in the other.

“Say ‘cheese.’”

“No, say ‘freeeeeeedom!’” someone shouted, to the delight of everyone in earshot. The guy did so but then had to wait an extra second while I found the right button for the shutter, which probably made his smile look just a bit strained. Not that it mattered: He now had photographic evidence to prove his rubble was really from the wall and not just something he picked up off the ground somewhere.

“There you go,” I said, passing the camera back to him. “That’ll take care of the provenance.”

He thanked me, looking puzzled, and went on chipping away. As I kept moving along the wall, I saw that he wasn’t the only souvenir hunter. Lots of people were doing the same thing, some of them filling plastic bags with chunks of history. There was one woman, however, who was actually fussy about the pieces she chipped out of the wall. She would work on a small area very carefully, doing her best to get a chunk at least as large as the palm of her hand. Once she did that, she would hold it for a few seconds, head bowed and eyes closed. Then she would either discard it and look for another section of wall or kiss it and drop it into the large cloth bag slung diagonally across her front.

I was curious but more concerned about finding Quinn. I tried calling out her name again, and this time, the sound of my American accent generated a new and unexpected response.

“American!” “Yay, American!” “USA … USA … USA!”

Suddenly, everyone in my immediate vicinity loved me. And I mean, loved. They rushed me all at once, pressing me into the cold stone, grabbing me, kissing my arms, my hands, whatever they could get at. This was it, I thought as I gasped for air; I was going to die of love at the Berlin Wall.

Then I felt my feet leave the ground. Oh, good, I thought giddily, I was going to crowd surf. That was so much better than getting crushed to death, I wouldn’t even mind if someone groped my butt. A small price to pay …

But I kept rising higher and higher, and before I knew what was really happening, I was already on top of the wall amid a group of laughing, dancing people who also seemed to love me a lot, while the crowd below cheered.

The only coherent thought I had was Omigod, as my sense of balance disappeared and left me teetering among strangers who might not notice I was about to fall to my death. Then my balance returned as abruptly as it had vanished and I was fine. Better than fine—it was the perfect vantage point for looking for Quinn.

I hollered as loud as I could between my cupped hands. People heard me: I saw them turn to look up at me curiously and then go on with their hugging and kissing and dancing and drinking champagne. Getting a bit more used to where I was, I started slowly sidling along the wall, stopping only for the occasional hug and kiss. Flashlights played over the sea of people. A flashlight was exactly what I needed, I thought; maybe everyone loved everyone so much up here that I could persuade somebody to loan me one.

A tall woman with spiky red hair was only too happy to let me use hers on the crowd, first demonstrating zigzags and figure eights and other patterns. I obliged briefly and then began searching methodically among the people closest to the wall. The light was already dimming in my hands, probably after hours of zigzags and figure eights. Just my luck, I thought—

Then I saw a head of shiny black curls directly below me; I might not have been sure except for the shiny blond head with her.

“Quinn!” I screamed.

She and Martin looked up at me along with at least thirty other people. Quinn was surprised, as if she had forgotten I was even here. Martin’s expression was a mix of dismay and vague puzzlement. He didn’t recognize me, I realized.

“Quinn, we have to go home now!” I hollered.

She made an annoyed face before turning away to argue with Martin. He wasn’t having any: He kept interrupting her and gesturing at me, all the while shaking his head emphatically. No, no, a thousand times no.

“Quinn, he said no; now let’s go home!” My throat was getting raw. I had to get down. But how? I tried to talk to the people around me to ask them to help me down, lower me down or something, but no one was listening now. They’d just hug me or kiss me and go on dancing or cheering. I crouched down, trying to estimate by sight how long the drop would be if I were to hang by my hands and let my feet dangle. Too far not to get hurt, I decided. Assuming I actually could have dangled my own body weight by my hands for longer than an eighth of a second.

Martin gestured at me again—no, not me, the wall—and pushed Quinn back a couple of feet. She tried to move toward him, but the people directly behind her grabbed her and held her back. Not roughly, but firmly, so that she could barely move. Were all those people with Martin? Who were they? I couldn’t see their faces very well at this angle but some of them had the same shade of blond hair.

Martin’s family? Then they’d gotten through from East Berlin. Or some of them had gotten through and they were here at the wall waiting for the rest? But why here? Why not at one of the actual gates, where people were coming through on foot or in their cars so the West Berliners could pound dents into them?

All at once there was an incredibly loud buzzing whine that startled me so much I nearly fell. Several feet to my right, I saw a fountain of sparks—another power saw. The hell with rubble; grab some power tools and cut yourself a whole panel. People on top of the wall and below were cheering. Except for Martin and the people with him, I saw; they actually looked scared.

Quinn was still struggling to get free. Martin seemed to be telling the people who had her to hold her tighter. Then he turned to face the wall and put both hands on the stone.

I could actually hear my sister screaming above the power saw as Martin moved closer to the wall in tiny, shuffling steps. The angle made it impossible to see what he was doing; for that matter, I couldn’t even see him anymore. There was no way to lean forward without taking a header off the top. I lay down on my stomach so I could see what was directly below me.

The people holding Quinn hadn’t moved, and Quinn still twisted in their grip, but I couldn’t see Martin. I inched forward, scanning the people on either side of the spot where he had been standing, but he wasn’t among them. And the spot where he had been remained clear: No one crowded in, almost as if an unseen barrier were keeping them back.

Quinn lifted her tearful face to look at me. I was trying to think of something to say to her, when Martin came through the wall.

The actual movement itself seemed so normal that I almost ignored it. Then I did what I can only describe as a mental double take. By that time, Martin was standing in front of the wall embracing an older woman shaking as she sobbed in his arms.

They came through the wall. They came through the Berlin Wall. Except, I remembered, some people had trouble getting through the wall. Some people got stuck.…

My rational mind was telling me I was tripping on the atmosphere, jet lag, beer, and possibly something my beer had been spiked with. But my rational mind was very small and very, very far away. What I was seeing told me that I had to get Quinn out of the way before she screwed things up.

“Quinn!” I bellowed. “We have to leave! We’re in the way!”

Martin, the woman who I figured was his mother, and everyone else looked up at me. I got up and moved down several feet, trying to show them in sign language what I wanted to do. Even finally getting some help from the people up on the wall with me, however, I couldn’t get close enough to the ground to jump without hurting myself. Then a few of the people holding Quinn gave her over briefly to Martin, who tolerated her clinging to him for the time it took for them to catch me. Still, it wasn’t fun: the fall knocked the breath out of me.

Martin’s people probably were family; close up, the resemblance was very strong. They didn’t have much English but enough to make it clear that I had to catch my breath quickly and take my sister away. I wasn’t sure I’d actually be able to do that, considering it had taken four of them to hang on to her, all of whom looked a lot stronger than I was. But I guess all the struggling had tired her out. I didn’t need much help to peel her off Martin, and once I got her back into the thick of the crowd, she wouldn’t be able to push her way through them to get back to Martin.

“Thank you,” he said to me in a voice that was somehow both formal and warm. “It takes all of us to will it. I can’t take her, too. We’d never get out, we’d die in there. I’m sorry, Quinn, I am.” He bent to kiss her. “Go. This isn’t for you.”

“No, I can help,” Quinn wailed. I turned her around, grabbed her waist, and pushed her into the crowd ahead of me. “Jean, don’t, I love him—”

“Just stay out of it,” I growled, wincing at the growing soreness in my throat. I’d been shouting so much I was going to lose my voice. “This isn’t your fight. Not this part.”

“You saw it, though, right?” She twisted out of my grip and turned to face me. “You saw; now you know!”

“Yeah, I saw, I know, and tomorrow I’ll fall out of bed and it’ll all be a dream. Cliché ending, but if it works, it works. Let’s go.”

“No, I want to be there for him, I want to help! I want to be part of it!” Quinn tried to push past me, but I’d been right: She had no strength left now.

“You can’t,” I rasped. “You’re not part of it, you can’t be, you never could have been. They’re them and we’re us.”

“But he showed me—”

“His mistake. People make mistakes when they think they’re all alone.”

“That’s not it—”

“Quinn! That is it. Now we have to let him get the rest of his family out.” The image of the woman I’d seen chipping pieces out of the wall popped into my mind, tossing some pieces away, keeping others, kissing them before she put them in her bag. Because she couldn’t get her own people out? Why not?

Because they had died in there. The answer came unbidden and with a certainty I couldn’t justify. I shoved the thought aside, telling myself that when I woke up tomorrow, I’d have forgotten all about it

“I can help!” she insisted, trying to lunge past me again.

“You can’t!” I pushed her back hard. “You don’t belong with them; you’re not special, you have no place in any unseen world; you’re like me and the rest of our family. Get used to it!”

She looked at me like I’d slapped her.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling equally stung by her reaction. “It’s hell being ordinary, but that’s the human condition.”

All the fight went out of her then, and she let me take her back to the Am Zoo.

The next morning I paid the horrendous bill and we flew back to the United States. Quinn wouldn’t talk to me for most of the trip home, which didn’t bother me much. I was too busy sleeping. The more time I could spend unconscious after that, the less real it seemed and the saner I felt.

Quinn eventually started speaking to me again but never about that night in Berlin. From time to time, I’ve been tempted to bring it up but I know that would just be asking for trouble.

I’m much more curious about what happened with Martin and his family—if he got them all out, where they are now. I’m pretty sure Quinn never heard anything from him. I don’t know for certain but I’d bet money that she tried to find him again after we got home. And it wouldn’t surprise me if she Googles his name now and then or looks at footage from that night on YouTube. I’ve looked myself and never seen anything unusual.

I’ve never gotten back to Berlin, but one of my friends from work went to Germany for the first time a few years ago on her honeymoon. She came back and gave us all these little bottles about three inches tall, filled with fragments of brick and stone.

“Pieces of the old Berlin Wall,” she said. “You can buy them everywhere. It doesn’t look like much but it’s history, I guess. A little bit of history in a three-inch bottle.”

I took mine home and emptied it out on a saucer. It really didn’t look like anything at all. It certainly didn’t feel like anything special. But instead of putting it back in the bottle, I dumped it outside in the backyard. Maybe it was just debris from some demolished building, or maybe it was a collection of pieces of the true wall. On the off chance it was the latter, I left it to blow away freely in the wind. It just seemed right.