Meltdown XXII & Fallout 022 (Nov '22).

MICHELLE von HORROWITZ
in
[VOLUME NINETY FIVE]
”Meanwhile, in the past…”
(reprise)

****

The morning reared up at her like an untamed and affronted stallion, and she cowered from it meekly. Sun was entering her cabin through the slits between the wooden boards that made up its walls, projecting thin slithers of light for the dust to dance in. She squinted, groaned, stretched out. Outside the cabin, she could hear the gentle breath of the water on which they sat. She knew it to be the Rhine, upon which they’d snaked through the night, having now - if all had gone to plan, judging by the time of day the sunlight implied - arrived in Köln. She squinted again, groaned again, stretched out again.

Her arrival in Köln was early, she knew, but this was by design. The idea of spending too much longer in Rotterdam itself made her feel dizzy. The fanfare that accompanied her appearances in European wrestling rings was tolerable. In fact, it made a welcome change from the troglodytes who watched her matches back in the States. But Rotterdam? It was the city she grew up in, and one she had left behind for a reason.

Her senses were returning to her, one by one, and now her vision was strong enough to see through the planes of sunlight coming in through the slats to the roof of her cabin. The crack was still there. It waited for her when she woke up, sometimes resembling a smile, at others a frown, her days alternating between comedy and tragedy and this crack deciding which way the needle pointed. Today it seemed larger than it did yesterday. Yesterday it seemed larger than it did the day before yesterday. Upon inspection, she found she could now fit her fingers up to the first knuckle inside of it. The thought of these hungry jaws opening above her as she slept made her uneasy, and so she dressed quickly before leaving her cabin.

The captain was alone on deck, sitting with his feet up on the railing with a cigarette and a cup of coffee. As far as Michelle could tell, there were three other members of the crew besides the captain, but when they were docked they were invariably making the most of the city. She only ever saw them when they were moving, and the majority of that time she spent below deck in her cabin. They mostly moved at night, but every now and then she'd catch a glimpse of them whilst going to the bathroom, or restocking her drinks cabinet. They paid her no mind, as they would any other quarry.

"You're still up?" Michelle asked, whilst removing a cigarette of her own and taking a seat next to the captain. He was friendly enough, and amenable to early morning idle dialogue

"We arrived, I slept, and then I rose," the sailor said, in-between sips of his coffee. "It is quite late in the morning, Frau von Horrowitz. I mean to make the most of our time here in Germany, but first I needed to speak with you."

"I was meaning to speak to you, too," she mumbled. "There's… there's this crack, in my cabin."

"I imagine there are plenty of cracks in your cabin," the captain said. "This ship is old."

"This one… it seems to be getting bigger," she said, and as soon as she had she felt stupid for doing so. "Maybe I'm mistaken."

"Maybe," the captain replied. "Maybe not. The ship lives and breathes itself. Some cracks get larger. Others retract. But she still floats."

Michelle thought about this for a moment and sucked on the end of her cigarette. They were docked about as close to the city as they could manage, but it would still be a decent walk for her today before she made it to the bars there. She thought about remaining in her cabin instead. This idea wasn't without merit, but the crack dissuaded her. The ship might be living and breathing, but she couldn't shake the picture of one sharp inhalation swallowing her entirely.

"You said you wanted to speak to me, as well?" Michelle asked, whilst finishing her smoke and stubbing the end of it on the railing. The captain was using an old coffee can for his ends, and she dropped hers into it.

"You had a visitor this morning," he said. "An hour or so ago. Even early for me. He asked if you were onboard."

"How did he know I was here?" Michelle replied. Instinctively, she thought about the three crewmates below deck, and wondered which one had betrayed her confidence.

"Maybe he knows someone at the docks," he answered, with a shrug. "Or maybe he read about my boat on the internet."

Michelle had sensed the captain's understanding of who she was growing over the voyage so far. Subtle remarks about their route, such as referring to it as a stadium cruise, and vague allusions to her being a fighter during their morning conversations suggested he wasn't as clueless as he once was. It shouldn't have been a surprise that the dirtsheets had worked out her travel plans. They probably had the ship's inventory on hand, also. It shouldn't surprise her. But every time it did.

"Who was he?" Michelle continued.

"Just some boy," the captain began again. He'd long since finished his coffee but was only now getting around to setting down his empty cup. "Well, a young gentleman, I suppose. All young gentlemen look like boys, really. But he said he knew you. Or used to. He knew you back in Berlin, he says. The boy's name was Tomas."

The memory of Tomas was not a particularly difficult one to dredge up. Even now, half a lifetime on, she could conjure up the finer points of his facial features, and as she did he smiled back at her, vivid as ever.

"A blonde boy?" she asked, for confirmation.

"Maybe once," the captain said. Although he'd finished both his coffee and his cigarette, he didn't seem ready to abandon his reclined position on the deck of his ship any time soon. "Bald now. But you can see for yourself if you'd like. I told him you weren't onboard, as instructed. He said he'd be at some place called Vorbild for dinner and drinks at eight. I said I'd pass on the message."

There was a long pause.

"So that's the message," he said. Then: “I’ll get one of the boys to take a look at that crack.”

And then he said no more.

****

Michelle had said many goodbyes, and left many cities. The only place that she remembered leaving twice was Germany. That was Berlin, which was the entire breadth of the moderately large (by European standards) country away from where she was now. But hearing the same language, albeit spoken in a vastly different and quite peculiar accent, with all the dialectal differences that went with that, brought the memories back none-the-less. With most places, she was left with a singular opinion on her time there, usually punctuated by a fitting finale. Japan was a time she associated with her work, and as a result her final interactions there were within the ring. Marseille, and France in general, with her schooling, and the relative revelry that she partook in there, with her exit from the city coated in gin and confetti. Moscow was an insular and self-indulgent time, but one that was cut short, and thus her final days there resembled question marks.

Berlin, though, and by extension the whole of Germany, was unique in that she’d lived there twice and she’d left there twice, and she was never really sure which of these two disparate memories of the place was real. Perhaps both of them were, perhaps neither. As she walked down the streets of Köln and lit a Camel, both of these images of the country that she had in her mind were distant and remote. Perhaps this place was absolutely different to the capital. It seemed it: smaller, less obnoxiously modern, less unique in many ways. Or maybe it was she that was different. She was thirty two, now. She didn’t know it yet, but she was already half-way through her life. She was nineteen when she first lived here, and twenty seven when she came back. The years took their toll. Those lost girls, the Michelles she’d left behind in Berlin back in ‘09 and ‘18, didn’t know how good they had it.

Tomas had been there, the first time she'd said goodbye to this country. He'd been there for much of her early years in the wrestling business: he took her to watch her first show in Marseille, to her first lesson in Paris. He drove her to countless matches in Berlin and in Munich and in Stuttgart and every city in-between. He was on the same cards, often in the same matches. He'd been there for so much during those formative years, as far as wrestling went. It was only fitting that he was there when she left.

The last image she had of Tomas was him standing in front of the Bundestag back in 2009, his trousers around his ankles, his manhood painted gold, red, and black. Margot, an old school-friend from Marseille who was working as a freelance photographer, took a picture of him which Michelle still had somewhere in her parents' attic in Rotterdam. He was arrested and released two days later, but by then Michelle had already left for Japan.

The early morning hours in front of the Bundestag were just the climactic scenes of a week of revelry leading to her exit from the continent. Japan awaited, and all the promise that came with those islands. But she was leaving with safe knowledge that all of them - Tomas and Margot and Karina and the rest - would be there in Berlin, waiting for her should she eventually come back. Her goodbyes were only pauses in what would most likely be life-long dialogues.

Fate brought her back to Berlin a few years later. In the intermittent period, she had - of course - fallen out of contact with Tomas and Margot and Karina and the rest. She'd made and lost more friends in Japan and in America. Very few of them remained to her in 2017. Only Jean-Luc, really. When she came to say goodbye to Berlin for the second time, again to go East, she was confronted by the fact that there was nobody left to say goodbye to. She'd always looked back on Berlin as a great city, where she'd spent one of the happiest times in her life. But, as she prepared to leave it for the second time, it was difficult to believe those things had even happened there. It was just a random array of buildings, with dour people and miserable weather. When she tried to remember the elation of her first departure from the city, it only served to compound the misery of this new, more insular farewell.

She'd come back to Germany between those periods in which she'd lived here, but this was the first time she'd spent a significant portion of time here since she and Jean-Luc had left Frankfurt for Moscow in 2018. It felt mostly the same.

****

It was in the late afternoon that she caught her first glimpse of the markets. They were still being erected, and seemed to sprawl in an inconceivable maze across many of the city's larger squares. She'd been led to believe that this episode of Fallout was something of a grand opening for the 2022 Köln Christmas Markets. She struggled to see the link between the second week of competition in the F1 tournament, and the birth of a boy in a desert in Palestine a couple thousand years ago. It was best not to look for meaning when there was none.

Other than the Netherlands, she'd probably spent more Christmasses in Germany than in any other country. She remembered an evening deep in December that she and Tomas spent in Dusseldorf, which was a very different city from Berlin and even Köln aside from the overarching similarities between all German cities. Dusseldorf was less pretty than most of the others, which was a damning statement in itself. They'd driven seven hundred kilometres over the past two weeks, west from Berlin and across much of the country. This old guy, Jan, who ran their gym had some contacts in the industry out here, and this was the last of five or six bookings in what she could reasonably call her first tour.

She'd been wrestling for two years already, but had no name or reputation as of yet. Barely any skill either, really. Most of her matches had taken place in Marseille and Berlin up to that point, where she could walk from her apartment to the ring. Relying on Tomas for a ride across an unfamiliar country was uncharacteristically trusting of her, and probably spoke a little to the sincerity of feeling she had for him at that tender, young age. Margot came too, to take photographs and offer moral support. She lost more than she won, so maybe the moral support wasn't worth much.

Every show up until Dusseldorf had seen between five and twenty people come to watch them in almost-empty sports gyms or night clubs. They'd been paid little, barely enough to cover Tomas' fuel. But they'd come out in the industrial city at the very end of the journey. Maybe two hundred and fifty people were crammed into an old, disused warehouse. She'd won, too. Perhaps the whole thing wasn't such a waste of time, after all.

She remembered peering through the curtain from Gorilla position as Tomas' match drew to a close. He was facing some old Czech bruiser with a scar across his chest, and had spent much of the match on the coarse end of the brawler's fists. But his conditioning was showing through. He'd turned the tide with a German suplex, and popped the crowd by wrenching his much larger opponent up for a brainbuster. Tomas liked to use the shooting star press, and the audience were on their feet as he executed it in Dusseldorf, an audible gasp emanating as he came dangerously close to the warehouse's low ceiling. It was a thing of beauty. Michelle bit her bottom lip as he crashed down onto the veteran, and only exhaled again once the three was counted.

As vivid as the picture of Tomas' victory was her recollection of the scene within the promoter's office an hour or so later. She couldn't remember his name, but the image of the short, old man with the pockmarked face and clusters of hair around his ears and neck was still clear to her. He sat behind his desk, reading through a pile of documents, as if they were more important than the two wrestlers in front of him.

"Your base pay's all there though, right?" he was saying, evasively.

"It's not the base pay I'm talking about," Tomas answered. He held his light envelope out towards the promoter, half in illustration and half in accusation. "The winner's purse. We were promised an extra hundred if we won. And we both won tonight."

"Congratulations," the promoter said. He seemed bored, both with this conversation and in general. "Look, the gate wasn't what I'd hoped tonight. Wouldn't be able to afford the win bonus. And even if I could, some of my guys have been throwing matches and splitting the purse. Until I get to the bottom of that, I'm withholding all win bonuses for the time being. You understand?"

Tomas didn't say anything for a moment. The promoter turned a page in his document, as if in triumph.

"You should understand that, unless you pay us what you promised, we won't come back here," she said, taking up the argument on their behalf. "We won't wrestle for you again."

The promoter looked up at her, and then he began to laugh.

"I'm sorry, what were your names again?" he asked, in between cackles. "I'll try to make do without you. Have a safe drive back to… Munich, was it?"

"Berlin," Tomas corrected, pointlessly. The promoter didn't say anything else, and the pair left.

In the car, neither of them said anything for quite a long time. Eventually, Margot stopped asking them what was wrong from the back seat and fell asleep. Tomas' eyes had been fixed on the road in front of him for the best part of an hour.

"If you say it, you've got to follow through," he said, finally. He seemed to be speaking mostly to himself. "We can't wrestle for him again."

Tomas was prone to giving people advice, but Michelle couldn't really determine whether this utterance qualified as such. It was, in a cynical twist of fate, certainly the most long-lasting and prevalent lesson she'd draw from anything he'd ever say to her. This was true even though it wasn't meant as a lesson when so much of what he spewed was. The idea of retreading familiar steps was one that she had avoided by rule, with the lonely exception being her return to Berlin. Even then, she was somewhat dragged there, although she put up little struggle, a willing victim to that period of anonymity.

The opportunity never presented itself for her to reject an offer of work from that nameless little promoter in Dusseldorf. Perhaps it still would, if he was alive somewhere. But this idea of always looking forward had applied to everywhere she'd worked since. She had, after all, only come back to North America when the CWA was dead and she'd outlived it. Looking back, she wasn't sure if this was cowardice.

Only now was she beginning to apply this inadvertent lesson to opponents as well as employers. For so long her inability to do so had cost her so much. More than just matches and titles. It was a marvel, really, that Gerald had stuck with her despite everything. She could see he still struggled with it, but she was committed to the team. Committed to their run with the championships. She'd meant everything she'd said in London: this was to be a historic reign, that will be spoken of in the same breath as the recent giants of the division. She owed that much to Gerald, and would drag him to that legacy kicking and screaming if she had to.

She found a clearing within the market stalls where a wrestling ring was being erected, and lit a cigarette whilst sitting in the top row of the surrounding bleachers. She determined not to allow any memory from her past - recent or near-forgotten, in any of the phantom-forms her demons and allies liked to take - get in the way of what she was building with Gerald.

****

She'd spent only a small part at the start of her day considering whether or not she would meet Tomas. The memories they'd built had subsided far, but still they were strong. She was usually wary of figures from her past emerging now that she was, for want of a better term, a household name. But Tomas had been there during the earliest and most humble days, when the first bricks of the foundations of Michelle von Horrowitz were being laid. When they were seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, they had been cut from similar cloth. Destined for similar heights.

At least, that is how the two of them saw it when they'd sat in his loft, freezing cold with the windows open, the room full of smoke and stinking of cheap booze. She had a habit of seeing twinned souls, and an interest in mapping their trajectories. Observing parallels. Bell Connelly was the most obvious example, but not the only one. Snowmantashi and Parr, too. And it was the case with Tomas back then, at the beginning of it all. She found it peculiar that she reexamined Tomas again as a twinned soul now, a decade and a half later, on a cold afternoon and evening in Köln. But that was how fate worked. The luck of the draw.

Now that Tomas sat opposite her at Vorbild, she realised that any parallels between the two were ill-founded or - at their every least - visible only in infancy. Time had separated them as much as any ocean.

"I didn't think I'd see you again," he was saying, as he shovelled more of his main course - a dry looking steak that came with both fries and a salad - into his mouth. "I don't really watch much wrestling nowadays, but I knew you were still going. I saw your name on the posters for the markets. My company is doing some work there."

Michelle didn't say anything. She hadn't ordered anything to eat, either. She only drank, and stared at the bald man Infront of her with passive eyes. It was difficult to believe that this was the same man she'd seen arrested in front of the Bundestag in 2009. She remembered that every molecule of his being had been replaced between then and now, so maybe he wasn't the same person anyway. The thought both reassured and scared her.

"I run a food truck company that's working the markets," he said, answering a question that she didn't ask. He'd already told her about his dull wife and his dull children, and now he was moving onto his dull job. "So maybe I'll get to see you wrestle again. See if you've learned anything since our time together."

He smiled to himself, and Michelle sensed unearned wistfulness. He reached for his wine and took a satisfied sip. Michelle wondered what she was doing there.

It was as Tomas explained to her the intricate workings behind a food truck business - the ordering, the contract negotiations, of course the actual preparation of the food, etc - that Michelle realised she was possibly (probably) the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him. That wasn't meant to be in any way self-aggrandizing. More a denouncement of the banality that surrounded this shell. This passive shell of a man she used to know, who used to be so vibrant and prone to hostility. She wondered if it was the same for the rest of them: for Margot and Karina and the others, whose names escaped her now. She wanted to know, but she didn't want to have to find out.

"I saw you'll be facing Mike Parr," the bald shell was saying, as he placed his cutlery down on his plate and leant back in his chair. His stomach involuntarily protruded over his belt, obnoxious and glaring. Michelle recoiled from it. "I read about you two. Can't imagine it's a match you're looking forward to."

She didn't enjoy speaking about these things with Gerald, let alone a man who was now a perfect stranger. She thought about standing up and leaving, though she didn't. Instead, Michelle just sat in front of the shell, occasionally sipping her drink, but saying next to nothing at all.

The notion that she'd be facing her old rival Mike Parr had of course been playing on her mind as of late. But it didn't light the same fire beneath her as it perhaps once would have. Back in 2020, the hunt for Parr became her everything, building a monopoly on her mind and clouding her judgement. It had cost her and Gerald the tag team championships, perhaps. It had distracted her from the match against Bell Connelly that she'd requested for half a year. It had delayed the real hunt, of Saint Sulley and of the FWA World Championship, whilst Parr's trivial jealousies were addressed. It was, ultimately, a waste of time, but one in which she poured every ounce of her heart, to the detriment of everything she'd built up until that point.

But now? Mike Parr did not seem to her to be the same opponent that he was when she had gone to war with him. A pointless war, yes, but a war none-the-less. Much like the bald man in front of her was a shell of the daring, bold boy she'd entered into adulthood with, the Mike Parr she would face in Köln was the same Prodigy of Desert Storm and NOLA in name only. A shadow of his own past, whose last attempts to grasp at power seem like a whimper in a hurricane. His fourth reign with his favourite trinket was his being in microcosm: a suggestion of a glorious past now long gone, a faded memory.

But just like the memories of those first goodbyes to Berlin amplified and compounded the silent loneliness of the second set, her recollection of those battles with the Prodigy did the same now. She lamented the limp affair that awaited her, knowing what they had put each other through before. But it wasn't the same. They had both changed. The years take their toll.

She should have resisted her own heart when Jean-Luc suggested Berlin in 2017. Memory is a difficult thing. She expected to find the happiness here that she'd once known, waiting for her with little or no effort required in return. She should've realised how naive she was. The memories of Berlin should have remained memories, fading over time, and yet more colourful as a result. She wouldn't make the same mistake with Parr.

Eventually, when her glass was empty, she did leave without much of a goodbye. On the way home she saw an old dog, chasing its own tail.

****

The walk back to the boat from the city seemed longer than the same journey made in reverse that morning. By the time she reached the river she was already plodding, and it was another kilometre or so before she reached the familiar deck of the S.S. Sisyphus. The captain was in situ, sitting on his chair with a bottle of German beer in his hand. He wore his hat low over his eyes, and it was difficult to tell if he was awake. It was late, the moon already high, the sun having given up on the world and deserted it. Michelle shuffled from foot to foot, the boards creaking beneath her shifting weight.

The sound was enough to prompt the slow-moving captain to lift his free hand and raise his cap. His eyes were open and knowing, and he smiled when he saw Michelle.

“Have you moved from here at all today?” Michelle asked. The question seemed to amuse him, but he elected not to answer it.

“Did you meet Tomas?” he said, in his manner of responding to a question with another. She didn’t think for a second that he was interested in the answer. His deflection was obvious.

“Yes,” she answered, plainly. She retrieved her packet of cigarettes and offered one to the captain, who took it gladly.

“Did you learn anything?” he asked.

She thought about the only notable resolution that she’d made whilst drinking with Tomas, and that did not revolve around the blonde boy that Tomas used to be, or the bald, uninspiring man that he was now. It related to Mike Parr, and her unwillingness to once more allow the Prodigy to occupy space within her life. It didn’t seem much, and she trusted that she would’ve come to this conclusion herself without the help of Tomas and his disappointing company at some point over the next week.

She rarely ever learned anything, these days.

“Not really,” she said.