The Invisible Circus (21 page)

“What’s that?”

“Literally, Red Army Faction. But ‘faction’ is more like ‘gang’ in German.”

“I’ve heard of them, the Red Army Faction,” Phoebe said, mildly electrified. “So did you—meet them or something?”

Wolf shook his head. “They were underground,” he said, “you wouldn’t meet them. In fact, you couldn’t get near them. They’d spent most of that summer in Jordan, learning guerrilla tactics from the PLO. I remember hearing that and thinking, Shit, here we just pissed away our summer getting stoned and throwing feathers around.”

Phoebe remembered the charge of excitement she’d felt in Harrods during the bomb scare. People her own age changing the world by force. What guts it took.

“So we got to Berlin,” Wolf said. “And there was this incredible charge to the place, almost this simmering. We crashed with a carpenter friend of the guy we drove with, he had a big place in Kreuzberg, this tenement district near the Wall full of immigrant Turks, where the freaks had sort of collected.”

“And were the anarchists all around, like you thought?”

“Totally,” Wolf said. “The Hash Rebels, Black Help, this one group called the Socialist Patients’ Collective, literally a bunch of mental patients—and their doctor—who’d decided society made them sick and the way to get well was to fight it. Tupamaros West Berlin, named after some Uruguayan group … they were a whole world, these people. Tons of underground papers,
883, Extrablatt, D.P.A.;
they’d print letters from this jailed Hash Rebel named Michael Baumann to his girlfriend, Hella, and I’d translate them for Faith …”

Phoebe heard the lift in Wolf’s voice, as if the very memory excited him. “We got swept along by the scene,” he said. “Clubs, taverns like the Zodiak, the Inexplicable Shelter for Travelers, the Fat Host and the Top Ten. We kept crazy hours, crashing at dawn, sleeping whole days. And whenever we woke up, the good feeling was still there—that was the thing—like finally we were moving, like if somehow we could just keep to this pace, we’d do more than survive, we’d catch hold of whatever it was the Weathermen, the students in Paris, the Hell’s Angels—what all these cats had missed. Faith was in heaven. Parties in old blasted-out warehouses—I’d look out through a pane of broken glass and see the moon, smokestacks, ashy glittering stars and think, Christ, here I am, like I was about to be lifted away.”

Phoebe listened intently, overcome by a familiar sense that she herself was slipping from the scene as if literally fading, becoming physically less solid. She felt an urge to grab hold of something, anchor herself, but there was only Wolf, and he’d vanished into the story. “What about the Red Army?” she said.

“Oh, you felt them,” Wolf said. “They’d come back from Jordan that August, literally just a week or so before Faith and I got to Berlin, and everyone was just—aware of them, you know? Especially in Kreuzberg. Walking around, I kept thinking I saw them. Later it came out that their trip to Jordan was a disaster … Baader, I guess, was scared of guns; also there’d been some flap about the German girls sunbathing nude on the compound roof. But no one pictured it like that, I can promise you.”

“Did you ever really see them?” Phoebe asked.

“No,” Wolf said. “We never did, that was the thing. After a while it got to us.”

It was August, each day shorter than the last. “You could taste fall on the air at night,” Wolf remembered, “this tang under the heat. I’d catch myself thinking of school, the draft, what would happen when I didn’t show up for classes—would I be an outlaw? Could I ever go home without getting thrown in jail? And this panic would open in me, like what the fuck had I done with my life? I’d wake up some days and find Faith staring up at the ceiling, brooding, have no idea what she was thinking about. Sometimes not even ask.”

They’d drifted among the sights, Nefertiti’s bust, the spangled halls of Charlottenburg Palace, Hitler’s Olympic Stadium, where, crossing the moth-eaten grass, Faith had turned suddenly to Wolf and said, “We’re doing something wrong.”

Wolf didn’t want to talk, he felt too many things of his own. “Something can’t be happening every minute,” he said.

“Something is,” Faith said. “You’re either with it or you’re not.”

“Hey. Look where we are.”

Faith glanced around them at the vast field encircled by walls, long white flagpoles vanishing into the mist.

“I meant Berlin,” Wolf said, uneasy.

“Everything is the same,” Faith said. “Same people running the world, stomping on the same other people. Nothing is different, Wolf, after all this, nothing!” She sounded panicky. “I’ve still got fifteen hundred dollars.”

“You’ll run out.”

“I know,” Faith said, pensive. “I need to think of something big. It has to be big.”

“Let’s start a fire,” Wolf said, tossing her his lighter. Faith flicked it, the tiny flame pulsing in the fizzy air. She pulled a joint from her antique cigarette case and fired it up, Wolf peering around nervously, half expecting SS guards to come goose-stepping out and arrest them. But no one came. The place was a museum.

Faith took a long hit and passed the joint to Wolf. “If IBM built a stadium, it would look like this,” she croaked, holding in smoke. “They’re fascists, you know. All of them.”

“I’m the converted,” Wolf said.

As they finished the joint, the place softened before his eyes, rippling like there was music pulsing through it. Wolf flicked away the roach. “Adolf Hitler built this place,” he said, “and we just got stoned in it.”

Faith took his hand. Wolf kissed her hair. “When you feel like nothing changes, think of that,” he said.

They had gone to a party that night on the outskirts of Berlin, in a massive building where someone said bombs used to be stored during the war. It was a wild scene, acid bands, freaks from all over the world. Faith and Wolf met a guy there, Eric, who wore a pink leather coat and looked a little like Manson: dark, lunatic eyes, handsome with a kind of fanatical edge. Wolf had seen him before at the Gedächtniskirche, this bombed-out church on the Ku’damm where all the hippies hung out. Eric’s mother was English, so Faith could talk to him without Wolf having to translate. Somehow the RAF came up, and Eric mentioned the fact that he’d gone to university with Baader’s girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, another Red Army member.

“Do people ever join the group?” Faith asked. “Or is it just the original members?”

“They’re accepting CVs as we speak,” Eric said.

Faith looked doubtful. “What’s a CV?”

“He’s goofing,” Wolf said. “It’s a résumé.”

Faith’s eyes narrowed. She hated being mocked. “I shot a rabbit one time,” she said, deadpan.

Eric stared at her, and Faith burst out laughing. Wolf laughed, too.

Eric smiled sardonically. “And when did you perform this … action?” he said.

“I was ten,” Faith said, still grinning.

“A prodigy. But haven’t you any more recent experience?” He poised phantom pen to paper, a mock interviewer.

“Coke bottles,” Faith said.

Eric looked blank.

“Targets,” she explained. “Clay pigeons, too.”

“The gun?” Somehow the discussion had turned serious.

“A .38. Revolver.”

Eric’s brows rose. But he said only, “Americans. Always the revolver.”

Wolf tried to lure Faith away from Eric, but there was no budging her. So he ate a tab of acid and hung around, kind of drifting in and out of the conversation. It wasn’t long before Faith brought up Gene, how IBM had ground her father down, drained his spirit away until he was empty, until his very blood revolted. She said things Wolf had never heard before: how it felt to watch her father die, how there was nothing she could do, she’d tried everything she could think of, but he died anyway. All her life she’d been trying to fight back, she said, all her life, but she was getting so tired—you couldn’t do it alone, what you did alone was always too small. Wolf listened, half disbelieving as she opened her soul to this stranger, handed it over like someone else’s wallet she’d found. Sure enough, Eric was staring at Faith as if mesmerized, Wolf flashing on how she must look to him: a passionate American kid, light-years from home, who’d risk anything, everything, who’d give it all away. And suddenly he was terrified.

He lifted Faith’s hair, whispered into her ear, “Let’s split.”

“Not me,” Faith said.

Frustrated, wasted, Wolf wandered off to flirt with an Italian girl in yellow hip-huggers, yellow fabric under his fingers, watching the pants move between his hands as he danced with her. Faith’s glare trailed him around the room, but she was too proud to come near him—that was his mistake. Although he hardly had the heart for it, Wolf followed Yellow up a flight of creaking metal stairs to this giant roof you could’ve launched a plane from. They lay down under stars that in Wolf’s present state were indistinguishable from the shards of glass around the mattress they lay on. All he could think of was Faith, how he wanted to teach her a lesson but was too stoned and wiped out to recall what exactly it was she needed to learn.

When finally Wolf rejoined the party, Faith and Eric had gone. He wasn’t surprised; hell, he’d brought it on himself. But his druggy panic had eased. She’d be back, he thought. They’d been through worse and come out of it.

Wolf turned, meeting Phoebe’s eyes for the first time in a while. She jumped at the contact. “You okay?” he said.

Phoebe nodded. She felt empty, as if her mind had no more proper contents than a road awaiting traffic. The feeling brought its own strange peace.

“Phoebe?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice was disembodied, as if she’d ceased to be anyone at all. Wolf watched her with a remoteness befitting her own faint presence, Phoebe thought. Her understanding no longer mattered, the story had reclaimed him. They sat in darkness.

Faith didn’t come back that night, or what was left of it. No surprise. The next day, either. Wolf hung out, killing time at the Gedächtniskirche, the Park Tavern, trolling the Zoo station looking for her. He drifted into a thing with a Russian art student, a redhead, that was all he remembered about her. Paintings full of DNA patterns.

By the time he saw Faith again, two weeks later, Wolf was half living in the art student’s studio. He’d drop by the carpenter’s pad a couple of times each day, checking to see if Faith had been around. Her backpack was still hidden in a closet, under a Mexican blanket. One day she met him at the door.

“Welcome back,” Wolf said. “What happened to Prince Charming?” Faith looked blank. “You know, what’s-his-name,” Wolf said, “with the flippy eyes. Eric.”

“Oh. I don’t know,” she said.

“So where the fuck have you been?”

“Don’t ask like that! Where have you been?”

She wore different clothes, straight clothes, a blouse with little red diamonds on it. Her hair was trimmed and neat, flat, as if someone had sat her down with a wet comb and worked all the tangles out. Wolf was struck by how unmarked she was; he felt the miracle of this, how the years of wildness had left no visible print. It was all just practice; in the end she would still be a teenager. Wolf felt a thousand years old beside her. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“I’m kind of back.”

They were alone in the apartment. As Faith came toward him, Wolf noticed she was walking oddly. He couldn’t explain it—as if her center of gravity had shifted. He took her hands. “You look like you’re here to me,” he said.

They lay on the carpenter’s bed. Wolf wanted her so much; it never went away, that part. He wanted other girls, too, but never with this urgency, and the truth was, he’d gladly have given them up if he thought he could do it without conceding something. Faith’s thin warm arms looped around him, pulling him back to a deep, still place within himself. He’d never loved anyone this much.

Reaching under Faith’s blouse, he felt something hard against her skin, wedged in the back of her pants, pulled it out and found himself holding a little automatic pistol. “Holy shit,” he said. The gun was warm from her skin. A .22, it looked like.

Faith seemed ready to burst, watching him hold the gun. Wolf grinned, shaking his head. He looked at the gun, then at Faith, and they made love with it right there in the bed, cold and smooth on their bare legs.

Later, Faith rummaged for the gun and held it up, turning it in the light so it made a dark shape on her face. “I’m a good shot,” she said. “My dad taught me.”

Wolf leaned on one elbow, watching her. “You won’t let me smash a bug,” he remarked. “It’s kind of hard to see you shooting people.”

Faith laughed. “It’s for self-defense.”

“People get shot in self-defense.”

“I’d never shoot it,” she said, serious now. “I’d only ever use it to scare them.”

Wolf flopped back down, his arms crossed. “I don’t know, Faith.”

She moved close to his ear. He felt her breath, the warmth of her limbs, and pulled her against him. “Wolf, I
found
them,” she whispered.

After dark Faith got up, pulled on her jeans and the diamond-patterned blouse so gingerly, as if the clothing were on loan. She slid the gun back down her pants, the front this time. Wolf sat up, resting his feet on the cold floor, trying to clear his head. “Wait,” he said. “You’re just—like, taking off?”