August 14th, 2012

Berlin, Germany

 It’s funny how the smallest detail can make a surreal situation seem very, very real.

It was almost as if he hadn’t fully processed what was going on until, as he sat there in his uncomfortable leather seat, shifting restlessly from side to side in an attempt to regain some small semblance of comfort, the intercom pinged once, and the small display in the back of the seat in front of him sprang to life. A woman’s voice filled the cabin with its artificial joviality; a New Jerseyan who had clearly been paid just enough to make make seatbelt fastening sound exciting - almost. The voice went on for a few more minutes until finally, exclaiming merrily, “Have a nice flight!,” the voice died away, the screen fading to black along with it. A few seconds passed before the display fired up again, playing the same video as before. This time, however, a different voiced echoed through the cabin, repeating the same message, but in a different language.

“Bitte verstauen Sie schweres Handgepäck sicher unter dem Vordersitz.”

That was when it really sank in for Matt. Of course, he had realized it before. But there’s a difference between knowing something will happen and realizing that it is happening. Funny, how something so truly insignificant could dig a knife right into the mind of one person on the flight while the passengers around him yawn or flip lazily through their magazines, eager to get their long journey over and done with.

The flight passed by rather uneventfully, as most flights do. The drive by taxi from airport to hotel was equally dull, the sun only just beginning to breach the skyline, with only the occasional pedestrian walking or biking their way through the cold morning air. For Matt, it all went by in a foggy blur, jetlag and lack of sleep mixing all the events together like different shades of paint on a palette combining to make a dreary gray - the memory of disembarking jumping suddenly to that of being stared down by middle-aged men in uniform, to that of wheeling baggage out to the pale yellow taxi, and finally to the soft mattress of the hotel room and the unexpected warmth and comfort of sleep.

Matt slept for ten hours, waking up drowsily and rubbing his blurry eyes before sitting up and looking out the window. His room is on the fourth floor, and the window overlooks a narrow side street that goes on a little longer before opening up into a wider road, cars and trucks flashing by, the odd driver honking his horn at a slower one in front of him. Matt couldn’t see any of that, though. He was looking up, the fifth floor of the building opposite the only obstruction to his view of the light blue evening sky, the faintest wisps of long-gone clouds still floating by slowly.

He gets out of bed slowly, stumbling a bit in his first few steps as he shakes off the last dregs of sleep. Still fully dressed, he slides the keycard lying on the dresser next to him into his pocket, slips on his shoes, and leaves the room. In the lobby, a young couple bumps into him on their way to the elevator, the woman briefly brushing her fingers on his arm and offering a rushed, “Sorry!” before joining her partner in the elevator, the doors sliding shut after her.

Walking down the sidewalk towards the sound of traffic, Matt looks around him, and then up. The street itself, while small, feels open, with the green of the occasional tree and the old, jumbled cobblestone of the street itself giving it a more rustic than urban air. The buildings, Matt notices, are nowhere near as tall or tightly clustered together as the ones in New York. That’s probably part of it too. Other than that, though, it really isn’t all that different - there are still buildings, still people walking up and down the street, either in silence or deep in conversation with someone at the other end of a phone. A city is still a city, he remarks to himself, and the thought, though obvious, offers him a strange comfort.

He reaches the main street, the cobblestone road giving way to smoother asphalt. A street vendor in a flamboyant red booth is selling chopped-up sausage to his customers, smiling as he hands them their food. A mother and her child pass him, holding hands, and in an attempt to make room for them Matt, stepping sideways, nearly gets run over by a cyclist. The man on the bike shouts back at him as he speeds by, already halfway down the street when the words leave his mouth. Matt opens his own to shout back, to tell him to watch where he was going, but realizes - with a rather unexpected shock - how pointless it would be. The man wouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying.

After that, the comfort is gone, replaced by a disconcerting feeling of singularity. With every step, Matt notices something new. The street signs with their gothic lettering and foreign names. The cafe menus, presented on small chalkboards and completely unreadable to him. The vendor, now directly to his right, hands his latest customer a small paper plate loaded with currywurst, smiling again and lifting one hand in partial farewell.

“Schön Tag noch.”

“Gleichfalls,” replies the woman, starting her meal as she walks past Matt, who is still standing there, listening. He know that they had just said goodbye to one another, that much was clear; but the words themselves are lost on him, their specific meanings drowned out by the context. He stands there for a while, thinking, running the words through his head over and over as passersby stare at him openly, allowing themselves a moment of curiosity before losing interest and looking away.

“Matt?”

He turns with a start, both surprised by the English and recognizing the voice. His mother.

“You could at least have waited until we got back before you went out,” says Patricia, shifting her plastic grocery bag further up her arm.

“Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to take a look around. Where’s Dad?”

“He went to the apartment to get the keys and take another quick look around.” She motions slightly with her arm for Matt to follow and starts walking back down the sidewalk, turning the corner toward the hotel. “He should be back in an hour or so.” They walk in silence after that, passing from the humid outdoor air into the cool air conditioning of the hotel lobby. As the elevator makes its way up the building, Patricia turns to her son.

“So, now that you’ve gotten to look around a bit, what do you think? I know you haven’t seen much of the city yet, but the atmosphere is exactly like how I remember it. I know it’s different from Newport, but I’m sure in a few weeks you’ll be just as used to it as you are to New York.”

Matt hesitates for half a second before smiling, looking back at her. “Yeah, I think so too. It isn’t all that different, from what I can tell.”

Patricia beams at him, turning back to the door as it opens, his smile fading as quickly as it had appeared.

“Good!”

Hours later, lying in bed as his watch ticks softly across the room, Matt will look out the same window as before, this time at the denim sky, its vast emptiness only by the occasional blinking, multicolored lights of a plane soaring off to another foreign place, another city where so much is the same, but everything is different. He’ll stare up at it for hours until finally, as the faint light of the sun once again starts to seep slowly into the deep blue, the ticks of his clock lull him to a restless sleep, in which he dreams of the same sky full of bright, brilliant stars.