Europe, 2020. Some claim that the Berlin Wall, once a living entity, is coming back together, its scattered pieces seeking reunion on the far side of history. The European continent trembles on the edge of total war, either in reality or deep in its own feverish imagination. Part present-tense apocalyptic satire and part neo-medieval phantasmagoria, David Leo Rice’s new novel presents an alternate history of the present where the Internet has become a territory unto itself and unstable factions obsessed with nationalism, liberalism, and romanticism drive one another toward a clash that could turn the very notions of refuge and culture into the ravings of a lunatic.
Prologue: Eternal Weimar
January 2020
Reports of immense, icy mountains growing of their own accord along the coastlines of Europe, undercut by craters, tunnels, and passageways that connect in undisclosed locations, or don’t connect at all, have so far proven impossible to verify. Surveyors sent out to map, or re-map, the fjords of Northern Norway and the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, the southern beaches of Sicily and the Algarve in Western Portugal, return with contradictory reports, or don’t return at all. Some embed in fishing villages and take vows of silence, while others send back field notes in garbled code, terrified bleatings and blurred selfies that serve no purpose other than to exacerbate the already heightened state of alarm in which their home offices await them.
Cell phone videos of jagged peaks rising like elevators from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and of long, humanoid processions vanishing beneath rocky escarpments, appear on computer screens in Paris, Rome, and Berlin, and then, after a second of static, disappear, only to reappear again late at night when no one’s watching, or a day later, when no one can be certain if key details have changed. News reports are redacted or deleted moments after they air, by forces the anchors swear are entirely outside their stations’ purview. These anchors then also vanish. Entire websites and journals shut down over false reporting, only to be resurrected by debunking the same stories they previously died defending.
Simultaneous screenshots of these claims from different computers display different information, while printed maps in university archives and public libraries also fragment, some displaying the newly monstrous coastal ranges—claiming, in medieval gothic script, that these are the oldest, most sanctified facets of Europa, God’s bulwark against the rising seas—while others remain unaltered, or show large gaps in what used to be the solid edges of the landmass. Even maps of the old geography begin to look suspect, as if perhaps no change has occurred other than a weirding of what was there all along, a sudden perceptual inability, among the EU’s 500 million, to see the normal contours of the Croatian or the Latvian or the Irish coastlines as normal any longer.
Geography professors squabble and fracture, half of them insisting that an epochal change is afoot, while the other half insists that the sailing, so to speak, has never been smoother. Any perceived tempest, this unruffled half insists, is playing out within a sturdy Ikea teacup, so that, surely, now is the time to stay the course. “The biggest mistake we can make going forward,” insists Peter Lenz, Chair of Humboldt University’s European History Department on Deutsche Welle’s New Year’s Day Broadcast, “is to let ourselves get spooked going into the next decade.”
Nevertheless, spooky, ant-like smudges of stranded human families (although, German Chancellor Lena Havermeyer thinks, much as she hates herself for thinking it, let’s not assume they’re human just yet) climbing and falling, scuttling and plummeting, dot these mountains on the computer screens cluttering her office in the Reichstag, their eventual crash into the waves barely audible, even with the volume turned all the way up. Havermeyer pictures them first as crabs and then as spiders, watching the words ‘crabs’ and ‘spiders’ scuttle from one side of her head to the other, perfectly representing that which they… represent.
She laughs at the redundancy of the thought, marveling at how, just a moment ago, she’d expected something profound to emerge from the folds of what she still considers her supple, first-rate brain.
Seriously though, she thinks, something, in reality or an unnervingly good simulation thereof, is afoot. Beyond this, no layperson, and not even those who ought to know, can offer anything more than the same contradictory speculation that has defined the discourse of the past several decades, if not the past century, if not all of Europe’s history, if such an entity can still be said to have any knowable history at all.
If Europe can still be called an entity.
“Now the entity is folding in on itself,” she reads, unable to resist opening window after window after window on her thirty-inch desktop work screen. “Its edges are rising vertical and even warping over the top to form something like an origami box, sealing 500 million souls inside, or threatening to, while granting access, through channels no one can map, to millions of others.” Air travel remains unrestricted for the time being, but even so it seems more and more fraught. Prominent personages leave in a hurry, while those who arrive at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle and Milan Malpensa seem hollow-eyed and remote, like decoy people.
Planes disappear in midflight, or crash into barriers that, upon inspection, prove impossible to locate. Pipelines burst, gushing oil into wheat fields and water reserves, while hobbyist geographers pour from the woodwork with their homemade instruments, eager to prove, once and for all, that the earth is nothing like what the powers that be have always insisted it is. That it is, rather, a Rubik’s cube being constantly shuffled by unseen hands, all borders suspect, all compasses faulty, no formations permanent. Much as she wishes she could avoid the thought she knows is coming, Lena Havermeyer slumps back in her office chair in the touchy nerve center of Germany and admits that they might just be right.
That evening, she wallows in heartburn in her tasteful, modern residence in the Grünewald in Southwest Berlin. She stands alone in front of her frosted-over windows, massaging her temples and looking out at the distant lights of the city under which, she can’t help but fear, something real is stirring. Whether this thing is physical or metaphysical she can’t be sure, nor can she quite be sure what the difference, at the dawn of the new decade, might still be said to be. As she pictures them, the mountains and tunnels stand as an example of something that can only be indicated by example.
But an example of what?
She has the suspicion that some completely different event could just as easily have occurred and made the same point. But, again, what point? Burping acid, she feels like she’s just received a message she can’t open. Yes, it arrived, she imagines telling the disgruntled sender, and sure, I’ll sign for it, but no, I haven’t yet completed the unboxing.
And I’m not sure I ever will.
So stop asking.
She sends more delegations into the field, demanding better intel, which she knows they won’t deliver and which, in due time, they don’t. YouTube overflows with experts and reenactments, old footage doctored to look new and new footage doctored to look old. Ancient races rise from the thawing permafrost, their chests carved with glowing runes, while craters swallow Slovenian villages, replacing them with dens of harpies and werewolves.
In the next set of videos, the Chancellor watches a movement coalesce around a candidate named Ulli Harz, an avatar who seems to have arisen from a rift in the Internet itself. She muses on this concept, uncertain whether she heard it discussed on a commentary track—one that is perhaps still playing—or arrived at it in what might still be said to constitute her own thoughts. The Internet as authentic topography, as a space unto itself rather than a representation, true or false, of any other. A realm, a district, an autonomous regime of being. The mountains, she considers, are rising in the Internet, not only on it. The images are not images of things—they are those things.
Whatever she’d been watching while thinking or hearing all this reverts to a campaign video for Harz’s One Valhalla Party, which advocates, as far as she can tell in the state she’s glazed into, the union of Austria and Germany with Scandinavia and The Netherlands and the secession of that new nation from the rest of Europe, his campaign abetted by the sold-out lecture tour of Ragnar of Atlantis, whose videos clot any screen his name appears on. All grim signs for next year’s election, symptoms of the same chaos spreading everywhere, seeping outward like the oil spills that have become a meme whose parallel seep she can’t help but follow. Soon, Europe will be nothing but a black pool of oil, contained by the thousand-foot walls of its new border ranges.
And yet it’s still possible, as a parallel stream of videos never ceases to insist, that nothing is happening. Nothing but boredom. Too much peace. Too much prosperity. Too many teens on screens.
All I want, she thinks—though, even more so than before, her thinking feels pat, like she’s consenting, or not quite consenting, for something in need of a head to think this through her—is a simmering down of whatever this is. Whatever underlying condition we now either are or are not seeing the worsening symptoms of. The mountains and tunnels, if they’re real, are likewise symptoms. Everything displaced onto something else, all events signs of other things, never quite things in their own right. Hyperlink events, leading ever deeper into the news.
She leans back in her chair and tries to enter a dream of Baiersbronn, deep in the Black Forest. Silent, dappled in summer sunlight or fresh Christmas snow. She tries to place herself back in the Mayor’s Residence, where she lived from 1981 to 1996, walking the shaded country lane from there to the Town Hall and back twice a day, even on weekends, when she never missed a leisurely brunch and stroll around the park, greeting her constituents with a handshake and a smile.
She holds onto the dream, forcing her head into the plush leather headrest of her office chair while YouTube plays against her closed eyelids. She burrows down inside herself, through one of the rifts in the newly fractured ground, down to the Second Europe beneath. The reserve continent. Still-pristine, its future still to come.
Down here, in this ur-Baiersbronn, the splintering ground of Berlin forms the sky, raining ash and dust upon her as she walks the road to town, working hard to imagine that it’s still 1985, or even 1995, the cherry strudel and Milchkaffee at Kleindorf’s fresh and waiting for her. But, even in the dream, history won’t revert. The sky continues to shake and spark, and she sees a figure blocking her way, just up ahead, and she knows she’ll have to stop to meet it.
She slows, the air darkening as Karlheinz Bauer extends a hand and smiles, his eyes invisible in the gloom. She nods and forges ahead, determined to muscle past him. But now, as then, he pivots to block her way, staring, his face pulsing in the darkness, his suit wet and steamy.
“We’re not going anywhere,” he says softly, as she stops short, inhaling his rose-scented musk. “We know you’ve seen us here, coming and going from the office complex on the Heideggerstraße, beyond the Aldi. We’ve been watching you since ‘89. We like what we’ve seen. We can help, if you let us.”
He steps aside and she hurries on, but now the road leads only to the train station, and the only train is the Express to Berlin. She boards with no luggage, barely dressed, falls into a feverish sleep, and awakens in her campaign office in Mitte, her long, victorious ascent to the Chancellorship already underway. The hard work of campaigning purely a formality.
The Chancellor opens her eyes and waits to remember that she’s still in Berlin. As if the dream sent me here, she thinks. As if, had I only kept my eyes open, I never would’ve walked that road, never met Bauer and his colleagues, never entangled myself with the Soft Illuminati, considered by so many to be the glue that held the Berlin Wall together. The literal mortar, loosed across the continent and then the world one November day in ’89. If only I’d resisted the dream—now it both is and isn’t possible for her to have been in this chair, in this room, to have had or not had that dream in the first place—I would’ve remained Mayor of Baiersbronn, living out my life over Milchkaffee and cherry strudel on a succession of temperate Sunday mornings, rereading my Antiquariat Kleist and Hoffman editions in my dim study at night, a glass of chilled prosecco by my side.
Unless that too is heresy. A convenient fiction, masking… what? Our careening through formless space? A trackless Siberian frontier, groping through a blizzard, dreaming of homes that never were? She shudders, summons a force of will sufficient to close her browser just as the next Ragnar video comes alive, and gets up to mix a gin and tonic with what she affectionally calls my imperial swizzle stick, not hesitating to add a splash of rosewater.
April/May
She emerges from a tunnel of nightmares that’s left her gray-haired and yellow-eyed, her gums black and weeping, when news reaches her desk that Martin Himmelreiter has died. Surrounded by his four children, twelve grandchildren, and thirty-two great-grandchildren, at home in Bamberg, the ancient skeeze has finally shuffled off at the age of 107. While she knows that the phrase ‘last living Nazi’ can never be absolutely proven, and is thus, in essence, a farcical notion to indulge, she decides that he’ll do, and convenes a committee to plan a lavish celebration. Thank you, God, she thinks, glancing up at the eggshell-white gypsum of her office ceiling. If I could perceive you as real, this is what I would think in your general direction, now more than ever before. Thank you for this opportunity.
The celebration, set for May Day, will also serve, she decides over breakfast with her Culture Minister and some finance people from Luxembourg, as a symbolic Funeral for the 20th Century. An end to the madness, and mad madness-denial, of the past five months, and, by extension, the past hundred and twenty years.
As soon as breakfast is over, she resolves to write her speech at her work desk in front of the same window she spent the winter and early spring staring out of, brooding on images of self-generating mountains and intermittently accessible wormholes, of gushing pipelines and vanishing planes, of work crews unfolding paper maps only to vanish into them, turning up as fly-sized blots over the names of major cities. Of Europe making itself a fortress with the tacit approval of all its leaders, no matter what they might say, myself included. She often thought all this in February, March, and April, mired in an insomnia so profound that sleep had come to seem like a rare and shameful delicacy, one she took care not to be seen trying to enjoy.
This whole year has felt like one long night, but not the kind you sleep through. First the mountains and tunnels, she thinks, losing the gist of her speech, then the man in Tübingen who claimed to have undergone a kind of divine intercourse whose nature he couldn’t or wouldn’t describe, the result being that he gave birth to what he called, on national TV, “a micro-race of sixty-six Supermen, currently being raised in my basement and those of allies around town and the nearby villages.”
Retweeted half a billion times by Ulli Harz and his legions, humans and automata alike.
Thinking back on that segment now, she pictures this man distended on a bathmat on the basement floor like a collie birthing a litter of puppies, and it’s all she can do to keep from guffawing. Despite the relief a true belly laugh would bring, she forces her face into a tactful smirk, aware, as always, of being watched by her staff, all with Twitter accounts of their own.
She coughs into her fist and buries the aborted first page of her speech beneath the morning’s news. The topmost sheet details further instances of what has come to be known as flaccid invasion. Reports of this nature have been coming from all corners of the continent, hysterical (she hates the word, but there is no other) testimonials in which men and women claim to have been “imperceptibly violated in the night, so that, when I woke up, I felt like I was both me and not me at the same time. It’s like something has gotten into me and I don’t know what it is!” This exact phrase, uttered verbatim if one accounts for the imprecisions of translation, has now cropped up, according to the running tally at the top of the sheet she’s looking at, eight hundred and eighty-six times, in every country in the EU, as well as in Turkey and the UK, sulking in its self-imposed banishment. The day before yesterday, she was forced to watch a video of a man in Katowice, outside Krakow, jigging naked in a kiddie pool in his backyard, his chest covered in coarse white hair and his biceps boasting dual rose-wrapped crosses, shrieking (according to the subtitles), “But there’s no entrance hole! There’s no entrance hole anywhere on me! How could this have happened?”
How indeed? She shrugs, as if performing her uncertainty could free her from the need to posit an answer. Then she returns to the ordeal of writing her speech. “The twentieth century,” she writes, struggling to string the words together, “was a time of unprecedented chaos and brutality. Let us never mince words about this. Indeed, let us never forget that the twentieth century was… was… was…”
She sits back in her desk chair and feels herself suddenly on the verge of weeping. What was the twentieth century, exactly? Did it even occur? She gets up, fearful of flaccid invasion despite being unable to imagine, in any concrete sense, what the term refers to. She expels her staff and locks the door, then sits back down and lets the tears come, and with them the fullness of the feeling that, in all honesty, she cannot remember what the twentieth century was. The best she can do is squint through her tears at what looks like a thick hank of skin hanging from the ceiling, descending toward her like a blanket. This, she thinks, is perhaps what the twentieth century has amounted to. The skin of millions sheared off, then stitched into an odious blanket smothering the continent, softening edges that ought to be hard.
She tugs it down to face level and uses it to dry her eyes and blow her nose. Then she snuggles against it, well aware that it’s the only human contact she’s had in months.
May Day arrives and Alexanderplatz fills with revelers, or mourners, while the Chancellor folds and refolds the three handwritten pages she’s managed to produce, picturing the origami-like folds of the continent as she rehearses the words in her head, trying to imagine how it’ll feel to say them while telegraphing the impression that she means what they mean. She thinks of Wittgenstein, her constant companion during the seven years of her philosophy doctorate in Heidelberg, and the only bitter old man with whom she’s ever felt a shred of kinship. What does it mean to say one thing and mean another? She asks herself, as Wittgenstein once asked her, groaning alive from the pages of some clothbound library book full of nail clippings and dead hair. In what actual sense does the meaning exist apart from what is said and, if it doesn’t exist, what does it mean to speak of it? She shrugs and shudders and watches from behind a curtain as the crowd continues to file in and the embalmed body of Martin Himmelreiter in its sleek black casket is removed from its government hearse and propped in a stand beside the podium, which it is now time for her to approach.
She looks at the sky, clear and blue, and wonders what became of the rumors that it sealed up or clotted over. Then she looks back at the sky, still clear and blue, but now she wonders what it’s supposed to look like, and whether, perhaps, this is a long way from that. She closes her eyes, forcing herself to remember—“Sky! Sky!” she shouts inwardly, like an asylum doctor offering a patient one last chance to demonstrate her sanity—but wrenches her lids open in a hurry when she ends up back on that road in Baiersbronn, Karlheinz Bauer waiting beneath a chestnut tree in his steaming felt suit.
She trembles, her chest cavity sagging, until an aide presses her shoulder. Then she watches her legs convey her head and torso out from behind the curtain and up to the microphone, before a crowd of thousands that roars in such a way that it’s impossible to tell if they’re welcoming or warning her.
And who are they, anyway? She wonders, just below the level of her official consciousness. Though she knows that the first five rows are made up of supporters hired by her staff, she can’t help but wonder: in what possible world can it be true that I was elected to govern them?
Though she’d like to ask this very question aloud, instead she looks at her papers and cedes control to the worldly part of her, the part that resolved to leave Baiersbronn and embark upon the campaign that would put her at the helm of the EU’s sole economic and cultural superpower, no matter what those sweaty perverts in France might say, she thinks, allowing herself a miniscule smirk. Then she clears her throat and hears a voice that reminds her of her own.
“Today, good people of Berlin,” it says, in clean, clear German, all traces of Bavarian brogue ruthlessly purged, “and those who’ve come from far and wide, we convene for a special purpose. Today, it is both our solemn and our joyous duty to lay the twentieth century to rest. That century of murder and madness, of fuming, infernal machines, that century in which chaos nearly swallowed us whole, is, thankfully, long gone. We have learned much from it, and we know that the road ahead will pose challenges of its own, but today we close that chapter forever. Twenty years after its calendar end, today we mark the biological end of the twentieth century. Its last wheezing, groaning avatar has left us in peace. Today, Martin Himmelreiter, um,” she gestures at the coffin and swallows a sudden, panicky surge of doubt as to who, exactly, Martin Himmelreiter is, or was. She’s afraid she called him Martin Heidegger. As soon as the name registers, a body materializes to match it: an old man in the front of the crowd, wearing a damp tweed suit with a pink necktie and a rose corsage, leering at her, enjoying her momentary lapse. Here I am, his eyes seem to say. I took the train all the way from my cottage in the Black Forest. That coffin is empty. She closes her eyes and sees herself leaping down from the podium and wrapping her fingers around his neck, choking him to the ground and smashing his skull against the concrete until part of it opens, revealing his brain. Heidegger’s brain. She pokes a thumb through the hole in the skull and presses into the soft, spongy flesh, but stops when it says, “C’mon baby, crush me like the slug we both know I am! Give me what I deserve. Put me in the coffin. Do it now, or forever hold your…”
“Today,” she repeats, wiping her fingers on the edge of her skirt, “we lay to rest the last remaining Nazi. Martin, um, Himmelreiter,” here again she scans the crowd, half-expecting to find Heidegger mouthing the words, I can never die. Nothing can ever kill me. I am Being itself. Instead, the old man with the rose corsage simply stands and listens, refusing to let on whether he’s thinking what she is.
Or vice versa, he seems to whisper. She feels a spasm run the length of her back and a thick rivulet of sweat follows it down, under the waistband of her skirt, as the words, Hitler’s soft fleshy back… I never found anything half so erotic as the merest thought of Hitler’s soft fleshy back, float through her head, and she tries to remember who said this first. Dalí? Must’ve been. She clears her throat, determined to go on speaking before Dalí —if it was Dalí —says anything else inside her.
“Martin Himmelreiter,” she continues, her fleshy back entirely slick now, roiling with what she tries hard not to imagine as rank Spanish semen, “was a minor official at Theresienstadt, not one of the epochal mass murderers who were sentenced at Nuremburg and Jerusalem. Yet, still, he both ordered and carried out the deaths of countless innocent German citizens. Indeed, his very banality makes him all the more emblematic of the forces whose purgation we are today here to celebrate. Today, at long last, he is gone from our midst. At the age of 107, this monster has departed from us, and we are all the better for it. The evil contained within him, responsible for the mass death of the Holocaust just as surely as it bears responsibility for the pernicious rumors of the past several months, has dissipated back into the universe where, for lack of a human host, it will become fodder for black holes.”
She pauses, her head again full of Wittgenstein, as she wonders what it is she means, if not what she just said. And yet what she just said seems… it seems… again a cloud fills her, starting in her stomach and moving upward, like one of those mountains supposedly rising from the Norwegian coast and rendering the continent impregnable except through passageways no one can guard. Or did I imagine that as well? She wonders, unable, at the moment, to fathom how so far-fetched a story could possibly be true. And yet, she thinks, if that isn’t the case, what is?
Mustn’t something be?
Leaning against the mic, she watches a municipal work crew load the casket into a hearse with BAIERSBRONN displayed in gaudy lettering across an illuminated destination marquee. Once this has been accomplished, and televised, she continues, “Not only is the body of this despicable creature going to be carried down to the Black Forest and interred there, but so is the Holocaust Memorial,” she gestures here to a series of eight flatbed trucks, all loaded with stones and signage. “The Holocaust, at long last, is behind us forever. As extinct as the dinosaurs; the Reich as fallen as Rome, no matter what Ulli Harz might induce his bedroom-dwelling minions to believe. Let them stay in their bedrooms. Those of us here, in real time, can see that the space the Holocaust Memorial once occupied is now to stand empty as a Future Museum, to be filled, when the day comes, by the glorious, as-yet unwritten history of the New Germany and, by extension, the New EU which, now that the tumult of its youth and, let us say, adolescence has been concluded, is entering its Golden Age. Germany faced its worst self and, alone among nations, triumphed.” She scans the crowd, wondering how many Harz supporters are among them, far from their bedrooms, wishing her dead. Do such people exist, outside the troughs and trenches of the Internet-as-autonomous-topography?
She forces herself to continue. “Germany rose from the ashes of its own making to become the greatest modern society the world has ever seen. Indeed, it rose from those ashes in order to define what a conscientious, equitable, and enlightened modern society looks like. The Future Museum will, in time, be the jewel of Berlin, the envy of capitals the world over, a site dedicated to peace, prosperity, and the constant, patient search for greater knowledge, greater reason, and greater tolerance. As we move into the 2020s, let us all together celebrate the centenary of the cultural apex that was the Weimar Republic, but this time, thankfully, with no dark specter on the horizon. This time, good and decent people of Berlin, the liberal consensus is here to stay! We have reached the ideal present, and from this present, we move gracefully, without fear and without regret, into our collective future.”
She steps back from the mic and waits, unsure whether to expect applause or attack. A smattering of ambiguous chatter ensues, and then something resounds in her ears and she feels faint and grabs the podium, terrified of appearing incapacitated in front of her people. An aide sidles up to her but she shrugs him off, gripping the lacquered wood and staring at the mustache above Heidegger’s permanent avuncular smirk.
A wave ripples through the crowd. At first she thinks a bomb has been detonated, and part of her hopes this is the case, because at least that would be a tragedy of knowable proportions, one with a well-established protocol, a transaction of sorts, but she senses that no such thing has occurred. The crowd seems to warp and crack up; then it comes back together, unscathed but altered, its integrity called into question in a way that Lena Havermeyer, despite her doctorate and three guided mushroom trips in Marrakech and the ten or so books she’s read about the consciousness of octopi and Aspen groves, finds herself ill-equipped to comprehend.
She closes her eyes as the Soft Illuminati slip through the rift that’s opened in the day’s mellow spring weather, straining not to see them even though there’s nothing to see. They rise from the scarred ground where the Wall stood and massage rose jelly into the torn membrane they’ve come through, kissing its edges, whispering, Dear sweet nurturing mother, we are here through your grace alone, and through your grace are we strong. Where once we held concrete and barbed wire, now we hold reality itself. Allow us to mediate between the Hard Illuminati, never to be seen, and the many, many people of this world, as they gaze upon its fraying seams and pray to be delivered into the future they all know is coming.
Then they stow their jelly in the breast pockets of their damp suits and commence in earnest the work of flaccid invasion, worming their way into the bodies of the thousands gathered there on Alexanderplatz, filling the spaces between their organs that had, until a moment ago, processed the diseased flesh of the century that has now been well and properly buried, peeled from the bones of the known world so that newer, healthier flesh might grow in its place. When they’ve finished and returned to their safe house in Wannsee, the rift heals in such a way that everyone in Berlin can tell something is different, but no one can say what it is.
Now available from Whiskey Tit
David Leo Rice is a writer and animator from Northampton, MA. His interests cluster around metaphysical horror, dark comedy, dreams, myth, hauntings, the uncanniness of small towns, and the grotesque. His first three novels, A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2, and ANGEL HOUSE , are out now, as is his first story collection, Drifter. David’s fourth novel, The New House, was released in Spring 2022. He’s online at: raviddice.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 