"Utopian Pockets" by Taylor Miles

Utopian Pockets

You walk toward the Nordufer to get some fresh air after work where you spent the day slicing subtitles into videos with your mask on. Your mask is black with a yellow smiley face on the left side – your auto reply when your boss asks you how you’re doing. You reach the river at the end of Torfstraße and tear off your mask, exhaling onto the human-free water. You look at the view: the foreigner’s office and a red brick industrial building you’re pretty sure is a coal-powered energy plant. The view is far from spectacular when you think about what you’re actually looking at, but normally, you’re lucky to snatch up a patch of grass at this central Wedding meeting point.
Two people sit on a blanket down on the other side of the bank. You catch a whiff of their rolled cigarettes. It’s a smell you so rarely encounter these days that its association with the bars and clubs, where you inhaled smoke rather than air, is overpowering. Just when you had convinced yourself this was a nice after-work activity, the smell sends fluorescent flashes of pre-pandemic Berlin. You try to ignore the images, thinking about what you’ll do for the rest of your Friday evening. You and your friends are no longer meeting indoors, if at all, and your partner has video call plans for his.
It’s there now, the pit at the bottom of your stomach. The longing for the energy that pulsed below the city. The undercurrent of a potential good time, fueled by the cheap beer of 24-7 Spätis. Though you were often heading home on the U8 from Kotbusser just as the long, black-jacketed, red lipstick masses poured out to start their nights, you loved knowing that when you needed to escape your overcommitted days of underpayment, you could slip out among them. You could find the portal into one of the city’s utopian pockets and lose yourself to the infinite night. You don’t want things to open yet. You just want — like everyone else — a world in which the pandemic never happened. And among so much else, you want the city you love back.
Another whiff of that rolled-cigarette smell and you’re back at a Kotti bar, sipping the unspecified beer on tap as you wait for your friend to return from making a phone call. You look around and see how absorbed people are in their conversations and decide they must all be living an anarchist revolution daily. The bar is dark other than a candle burning on each of the tables and a neon pink glow from the Döner shops and hookah bar outside. You watch the two girls talking near the window. As the short-haired girl on the right speaks, she pauses to inhale her cigarette. She then looks up at the ceiling to exhale before continuing her story with furrowed brows. The long-haired girl across the table nods in wide-eyed agreement, her mouth full of beer. She swallows, then sets the beer mug back on the tiny wooden table with a forceful thud: “Exactly!” she replies in Spanish, loud enough for you to hear. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about!”

You have wrapped your scarf tightly around your neck, but still feel the cold, moist air seeping through. You are not yet ready to go home where you’ll end up indulging in your new pandemic hobby: watching reality TV with a bottle of red wine. You walk through Sprengelkiez, as the sun sets in oranges and blues above the pale palette of apartment buildings. You need groceries and contemplate which store will still have a cart available, so you don’t have to wait outside until enough people have left the store. There’s a park at the end of Sprengelstraße, where a group of four people in their late 20s are gathered at a distance. They hold cold beer in their gloves and their words and laughter come out in puffs of hot air. One of the guys starts telling a story, holding the others attentively in silence. He reaches the punch line as you turn toward Triftstraße and they all burst into laughter. You feel your stomach sink with each laughing echo of fun.
The laughter ricochets across the bar to where you’re standing in line for the bathroom. You have a solid buzz from the combination of beer and secondhand smoke. A girl comes to wait behind you in line — a mere ten inches from you. After five minutes pass, you say to her in German that they are taking forever in there. She walks around you, knocks, then yells, “Hallo, wir warten!” The two of you laugh. She puts her hand on your shoulder and asks where you’re from. You inhale the peppermint schnapps on her breath as she speaks, recalling the waiter carrying a tray full of Pfeffi shots just a few minutes ago. As soon as you say you’re from the U.S., she switches to English. She’s from France. You’ve both been living here for a while and tell each other why you prefer living here, though neither one of you asked the question. At various points in the conversation, one of you says, “I mean, it’s Berlin!” Depending on who is saying this cliché, you either love it or hate it. Tonight, you are all about it: You have wrapped yourself up in it like one of those long, black jackets.

You walk down Müllerstraße past the empty kumpir restaurant, where guests normally spill out onto the sidewalk like the overstuffed baked potatoes they’re eating, but these days, all the chairs are wrapped in caution tape. Those you pass by on the street move away from you as a courtesy. You know Lidl is a risky grocery store choice in terms of cart availability, with the number of carts correlating to the number of people who can enter, but it’s worth the risk. You know exactly what you want (cauliflower, pumpkin seed bread, Brazil nuts, and cheap red wine) and where it is. You find there are two carts left and insert a euro coin into the lock on the handle, releasing it from the other cart. You see some complimentary disinfectant and spray some onto the handle before realizing there are no paper towels left. You look at the wet handle for a few seconds before you wipe it off with your gloves. Lately, you contemplate bathing in hand sanitizer, so it’s whatever. You push the cart toward the entrance and hear someone on the other side of the parking lot playing deep bass techno from their car. It’s a sound that has transformed so many warehouses, living rooms, basements, indoor swimming pools, parks, airport tarmacs, and rooftops across the city. And whether people like it or not: This unrelenting bass is the sound of Berlin. You shiver when it drops as the grocery store security guard muffles behind his mask that you may enter.
After the bouncer at Humboldthain told you it’d be at least an hour wait to get into the club, you and Lisa stumble back near the Wedding S-Bahn station in search of a Späti. You pop open her beer in front of the shop by using the top of yours. You should use a lighter like a good Berliner, but you never have one, so you use the top of your Club-Mate to open yours. The two of you “Prost” before sipping your beers. You then share the Club-Mate, ignoring each other’s spit on the glass rim. An apartment across from the Späti on the second floor is alight with technicolor disco balls. The music is loud enough to be a club and the two of you are drunk enough to treat it as such.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this. What should we say?” she asks, glitter plastered across her eyelids, as you stand in front of the apartment door.
“Just say we’re friends with, um, Martin,” you reply.
“Oh, god, I can’t do this.” But she knocks anyway.
The apartment door opens.
“Hi?” A guy stands in the doorway looking sober in contrast to the noise level emanating from the apartment.
“Hi. We’re friends with Martin. I’m Lisa and this is Veronica,” she says in German.
He stares at you for a few seconds. “Okay, come in.”
Soon, you’re standing in front of the DJ who is playing electro cumbia on enormous speakers to a crowd of five in the living room. Two people bob to the beat and the others stand in the corner attempting to yell a conversation over the music.
“Cheers,” the guy who let you into the apartment says, as he raises his Budweiser to your second round of Tyskies.
“Cheers!” you say in unison.
“I know you don’t know anyone here,” he smiles. “Have fun.” He raises his beer once more before walking away. You laugh to the point of gasping for air.

Taylor Miles

Taylor Miles is a writer and English teacher living in Denver, Colorado, where she works at a nonprofit supporting immigrant and refugee communities. She recently moved to Denver from Berlin, Germany, where she lived for seven years. In Berlin, she worked as a translator, studied North American literature and culture at Freie Universität, and was the managing editor of SAND. She received her M.A. in creative writing from Kingston University (London).

Headshot: Max Behrens

Photo Credit: Staff