“Have you two been in touch?”

“Not since he turned war hero. It’s difficult to get an appointment.”

“The new novel’s been picked up in a dozen languages—care to give me a quote?”

“He’s the novelist of our generation. Correction—he’s the novelist our generation deserves.”

She frowned, folded, capped, “You talk about all your friends this way?”

“You’d rather talk about the importation of Arab crime fiction to the American market? Or the enduring popularity of comix?”

She smiled, “Graphic novels.”

“Graphic just used to mean you’d get a titty scene, after which a thug would get his legs blown off.”

“Have you read any of the enhanced ebooks released for multisense ereaders? You hold the tablet and it shakes and you can manually feel the explosions?”

“Have I read them? Is that what you’re supposed to do with them?”

“Tell me another story, then.”

“Like a bedtime story?”

“You don’t have it in you,” and she smirked and then tugged my lanyard, me, close. “Who are you?—I mean, besides Aaron Szlay?”

The DJ spun up again and all around us glitter swirled like metal snowflakes. Laser tracerfire. Flashpot brisance. Strobes.

Our mouths were a tongue apart. But my teeth were too sharp and her lips were still moving.

“You have to help me out,” she said. “My deadline was a drink ago. Lene Termin at Viking hasn’t returned any of my msgs, I’m currently out of the office, no shit. The booths are all just assistants and so trained nowadays I get nothing but review copies, smiles. No one’s in NY, but it’s like no one’s even in Frankfurt. Finally I called out to Iowa, but the students kept transferring me to extensions that might’ve been Caleb’s but the voicemails weren’t set up.”

I put a fist at her back, “Why can’t we just sleep next to each other, no touching?”

She flinched and dropped the credentials, “Why can’t you do me one fucking favor?”

“Because you’re dead.”

“You’re an asshole.”

Then I was conjugating: “You’re dead, I’m dead, they’re dead, we’re all dead.”

“But you’re still an asshole.”

My reply was slurred toward the exit because—across the room past the median bar and splotched in ambers and clears amid appetizer molder—was Finn. Floridcheeked in grief carousal. He didn’t notice me, he hadn’t. This must’ve been his local lodging.

Finn’s silk shirt was busted open to the butterflycrunches navel, and the suitjacket he held and danced with whipped and spun like a ghost. It was an unbuttoned black with white pinstripes ghost he dipped and twirled around, Sufi matador dancing on the ceiling of hell.

The vestibule was riled with revelers who weren’t waiting for the elevators, or were, but swayingly, gropingly, humping one another up against the bookwall and the ballroom’s sliding partitions, and suddenly it struck me as impossible that they were readers too, or claimed to be, impossible that they’d ever even once just sat still in a chair or lain in bed, alone, silently, one light, and read. Indirect light. Quiet, please. I went hushing the couples stairward. The partition walls were sliding apart, or the lidcovers had been pried off the bookcoffins along the stairs, and even as I had to tipsy around them to avoid tripping, craven Danish creatures were crawling out of the darkness and seizing me, tugging at my totestrap. “We take you to what room you stay,” they said. “We are help you cannot stand.” I can’t say how or why, I just smelled it on them, through the herb liquor sulfur—they were Danish.

“I’m not a guest,” I said, or intended to say. “Just get me a cab,” like have it drive into the lobby and up to the landing at least.

Wheeliebags kept clunkaclunking past me downstairs, and all of them were mine, and I said to each, “You’re mine,” not because they were, because it entertained me. The railings were not to be trusted. I reached for them and they swatted me back, so I leaned against the coldsweat porphyry, and sat. And assed myself between the steps.

By the time I got to the lobby it must’ve been midnight, because everyone was straight above me, shooting me: my attempts to rise, my sotted swipes at their devices, my pale hairy bellyflopping, staying on my belly so they wouldn’t snap my face and tag it posthumous. #DrunkAmi. #LitSlob.

The carpet tasted bland. Because it was immaculate, unpatterned.

“Lass ihn,” was said in a foreigner’s German, but in a foreignness I recognized. “Er ist mein Arbeitskollege—mein Freund.”

Such brute fancy watches on the hands that rolled me, on the hands that grasped the strap to drag my flab upright, even as I tried stuffing the tote under my shirt and pants at once, popping buttons. My waist tumbled out into handles. I was being lifted, taken by my handles and lifted and whatever I was yelling had to do with whether anybody was fucking aware of what this fucking suit cost? Anybody?

Maleksen—bulked albinic Maleksen—he was speaking with the stubblepated guards who had my arms pinned back and were twisting my wrists: “Er kotzt.”

Sure enough if I kept protesting I’d puke.

Maleksen wagged a finger at me, before switching to the only sprache guards respect besides violence: “Bloke went bottle up on an empty stomach. But a good bloke. Good Arbeitskollege and Freund. We bunk at the Frankfurter Hof. I take him myself, no worries. Danke, mate.”

I was basically shoved into him—“Macht Platz.”

Maleksen staggered me into the doors like they were revolvingdoors, which they weren’t, headfirst.

Outside. And shivering. But Maleksen still wouldn’t let go, and no curbstumble I took or rut I forced myself into had him loosening his totehold. Whatever I was babbling went into the wind, beyond the kliegs of the hofzone and into the dimming. Au revoir, you logos. Adieu, you chains. It was too late in the day for late capitalism. Everything was closed. Maleksen jerked me back. “Wait.” Then a boot to the calf. “Move, mate.”

Because there were businessmen blundering inebriate. Because there was a crowd at the tramstop, though by the schedule of the night route a solitary kerchiefed pensioner huddling sackladen at the shelter was a crowd. Even just a cig would’ve been. Just a goddamned cig. We came to this intersection of shuttered bar, shuttered schnitzeleria/bar, vacant plaster atelier still affiched as a cybercafé, and as I hobbled along with the tracks Maleksen heaved me sharp by the strap into a turn, and now I was behind him, led, towed, like I was leashed. River gusts blew in through the gape in my fly. We crossed again, against the signal. Maleksen was scared of being followed, but also scared of not being—rather he was afraid of not having the correct followers.

He stopped again at the meridian, checked traffic—“What is the pass, mate?”

“The password?”

“It will be cracked,” he said, “but it will be more gentle if you tell me—it is not fingerprint, no?”

“To my computer? None of my passwords have computers.”

This was parkland now, grass swards scrawled over by the umbrage of bare branches. And my only witnesses, writers and the like more famous and for now more dead than I was, enpedestaled statues.

“Give it up, mate,” Maleksen said.

“So we’re going to visit Balk? He lives in a park?”

He was dragging me toward the willows. Behind that a road. Above us the stars. Plane weather.

“Give it to me.”

“Stop talking porn to me.”

He whirled around and as he spoke the scarred bars bent at his throat: “The computer. The laptop.”

“Let’s get clear on this—you’re mugging me? For fucking recordings you’d be getting anyway? All because why? I violated terms? Because I left Berlin or went online like once at a welfare state library? Or is b-Leaks getting impatient with me and reneging?”

“Shut up. You will type and access for me.”

“It’s just suckmypenis, alloneword. The name of that twat teacher from Sydney who taught your accent, all CAPS. I should be mugging you, for all that cash you owe me. I should be tapping Balk’s defense fund.”