Michelle von Horrowitz.

Berlin is a strange place to live, especially as a young person. When the years haven't yet conquered the soul, one expects a city to roll out before them like an extension of the playgrounds of their youth. A city should be infinite, even within the finite boundaries of its suburbs, to allow a young person to live and grow and enjoy themselves a little before they are transformed into the old, stifled, and frightfully dull person they were born to be. Berlin, or at least most of it, was smothered and choked by a long-lingering smog of guilt. The old were bent double by the memory of their collective grief. Their respect and nostalgia for the more acutely felt self-loathing of their parents turned them inwards. They expected the same of their children, but such an atmosphere can only sustain itself for so long. A down-trodden creature, even the lowly human, still possesses the remnants of a spirit.

For Michelle, at the age of twenty one, Berlin was the perfect place. The Netherlands, her homeland in only the most literal sense of the word, was not an option. The emotional baggage that she'd left behind there was too much for her to carry. Her mother was still breathing but clinging onto life as she clung to the bottle. She had grown bored and then wary of the pseudo-liberalism of France during her schooling there, tiring of Marseille's airs and Paris’s pretensions long before she failed to graduate. America - where her sister had studied and now plied her trade whilst hunched over a cello - offered Michelle her first taste of freedom, but she drank too long from that particular cup. Too much, too soon. The shadow of her sister’s wings always lay over her, and so she returned to Europe in an attempt to spread her own.

Wrestling was already something to her but it wasn't nearly enough of a something to pay her bills. The Aunt Maude money had dwindled and now, more than a decade after her untimely death in Marienbad, the nest egg was bare. And so, Michelle found herself working a string of bar jobs to subsist in this supremely stifling city. This employment was mostly temporary, so as to accommodate her infrequent tours of Europe to wrestle. She'd even been on one in Japan, although the opportunities that she thought would present themselves following this initial foray had thus far turned out to be only promises. In the Summer of 2001, she found such employment at der Spieler, a small and uninspiring bar in-between a library and a bakery in the Lichtenberg district. And, on this particular night in the Summer of 2001, she stood behind the bar running a rag around the rim of a glass stein, an affection she'd picked up from watching other bartenders in similar settings across three continents.

The bar was quiet most nights and tonight was like most nights. One regular, an accountant named Lars who said nothing except to order his drinks, sat alone in a corner reading a battered old book beneath an open window. A cigarette, still burning, sat wedged between the grooves of his ashtray. She liked Lars. A pair of oil riggers from the Balkans occupied the corner table, as they had on every night of the previous thirty since their arrival from their last dispatch at sea. They had overpowered a young tourist and taken him into their circle this evening, forcing him to listen to tales from the rig, off-colour life advice, and a league table of European countries according to the quality of their women. This sprawling lecture was given loudly and obnoxiously, and was accompanied by many hearty slaps on the tourist's back and triumphant pulls from the riggers’ steins.

And then a fifth and final patron, sitting at the bar with a rum and coke. He'd first asked for a series of cocktails, most of which she'd never heard of before, let alone known how to make. This was the most sophisticated drink she was able to mix. She worked in places with simple menus as a rule. If he was disappointed by her inability to pour a Martini he didn't show it. In fact, a curious smile was upon his face, his eyes were directed at the young woman behind the bar. She was unsure how long he'd been staring at her, but something about the man made his gaze light and easy. She was unharmed by his focus. She couldn't pinpoint why, at the time or at any moment afterwards. Perhaps it was his uniquity, or the comfort with which he occupied his stool, or the attention to detail belied by his carefully cultivated look. He was captivating, and he knew it, and was all the more captivating for this knowledge.

First impressions are important.

“You don’t seem to like them very much,” he said. His accent was compromised by a youth in the countryside (near the mountains if she was pushed to guess), but his keen, piercing, intelligent eyes marked him as anything but a bumpkin. Michelle became aware that she had been mentally enumerating the evening’s customers with a demeanour suggesting discontent. In truth, der Spieler’s patrons had little to do with it. Discontent was her general state of being.

“I like them just fine,” she announced, meeting his gaze happily and with ease. “They don’t try to talk to me. Except to order drinks.”

“The only way to talk to you is to order a drink?” he asked, his inquisitive smile still in position and perhaps even more pronounced. The barkeep shrugged and looked away, as if to confirm the stranger’s suspicions. For his part, his curious and cunning smile slowly faded. It was quickly replaced by a pensive, almost absent expression that she found difficult to not glance back at.

This went on for almost a full minute, until he rather suddenly finished his drink in one long pull and stood from his barstool. Michelle allowed herself that second glance. The sudden, bold, decisive movement demanded her attention.

“I was debating a choice, if you’re wondering,” he declared, whilst adjusting the lapels of his coat. “Between ordering another drink, which would make me late for work, or embarking upon a vow of silence from the moment I leave this bar. If I can’t talk to you, barkeep, I don’t see much point in talking to anyone else.”

He didn’t give her the opportunity to respond, instead turning on his heel and striding with verve and confidence towards the exit. Michelle continued the task of running an old rag around the rim of a glass stein.

The stranger returned during each of her next eight shifts. She imagined he must’ve shown up at der Spieler on the nights that she wasn’t there, too. It was a coarse approach to learning her schedule but it got the job done. On those subsequent visits he would approach the bar and order his rum and coke by nodding at a bottle of Captain Morgan. He invariably sat at the bar and drank in silence, occasionally accompanying the liquor with a vanilla cigarillo. Then, he would leave, ostensibly because he didn’t want to be late for work.

At this stage in Michelle’s brief entanglement with the stranger, she took her leave from the bar for a week to complete a brief tour of Munich and the surrounding area. Unlike most of her previous employers, der Spieler’s owner told her that the job would be waiting for her when she got back, mostly owing to his approval of her generally dour attitude. She disappeared, wrestled a few matches, and returned to Berlin sporting a new array of minor injuries and niggles. But that’s not really what this is all about.

On the tenth evening since her last shift at the bar she embarked on another. At precisely the same time that he had on their mostly silent previous meetings, the stranger entered from a cool night. He removed his coat and scanned the room, the bored, passive look on his face breaking into his familiar, cunning smile as he laid eyes on the barkeep. His favoured stool was empty and waiting.

“A rum and coke, please,” he declared, eliciting a cocked eyebrow and continued inactivity from Michelle. “No ice tonight. Cold outside. Summer’s over, I’m afraid.”

The barkeep begrudgingly unfolded her arms and set herself to work. She poured a short measure of the amber from an optic and, as she filled the glass from the soda fountain, carefully regarded the interloper. She’d wondered if he’d come, wondered if he’d still be silent. She was pleased by the answer to both of these questions. The young man was in the process of removing a battered old copy of a wafer thin book from his bag. L'histoire de l'œil, Georges Bataille. She didn’t know it.

“You gave up on your vow?” she asked, as she placed the drink on the bar in front of him. “Already? It hasn’t even been a month…”

“In your absence, I decided to give being verbal a second chance,” he announced. He sipped his drink, his book abandoned for the time-being in favour of a conversational inroad. “I see you’ve abandoned yours, too.”

“A life in service,” Michelle mused, as if in explanation. She returned to her perch against the back counter with her arms folded in front of her.

“I know it well,” he acknowledged. He lit one of his vanilla cigarillos, a soft scent emanating from the dark brown paper as it burned. He stopped short of declaring himself in the industry, as other less tactful strangers had posited in attempts to conjure kinship. He didn’t seem the industrious type. His lithe frame, unblemished skin, and fine clothing suggested a life of leisure over labour. There was a subtle extravagance about the man that, despite her instinctive reticence to engage with strangers, she found magnetic.

“Where do you work?” she found herself asking, in spite of her apprehensions.

“I don’t really work anywhere, barkeep,” he confided. “Haven’t a day in my life, as people are fond of telling me. But I still serve, in the best way I can. I own a place up in Falkenberg.”

“What’s it called?” she enquired, with genuine curiosity. When she wasn’t sleeping, working, or wrestling, she was generally walking the streets of the city, although admittedly the far north-east remained relatively unexplored. She’d drunk in a good percentage of the city’s bars, including those that lay outside the parameters of her taste.

“You wouldn’t know it,” he said, with confidence. “It’s underground in more ways than one.”

“You’ll show me?” she said. She lamented that her side of the dialogue now consisted of a series of simple questions.

“Maybe,” he afforded. Another pull and his drink was finished. He was elusive and implacable. “One day soon.”

It was three more meetings before they arranged to meet somewhere other than the bar and three more before they fucked. It happened after a walk through Spreebogenpark and a long, silent train ride across the city. She was close to being overwhelmed by the tension on the U-Bahn, but eventually the doors slid open in Lichtenberg and they made for her apartment. She was unembarrassed by the modest scale and shabby state of her dwellings. She imagined his were better but was happy to preserve the mystique.

He was not like the other men she had known, either in America or here in Europe. They were boys really, and that was never so obvious as it was now. Most of them were inexperienced and thus unskilled, and those that had a few more hours between the sheets had seemingly used those hours to learn only how to satisfy themselves. This selfishness was commonplace amongst the male of the species and partially the reason that she frequently sought the company of women instead. The majority of the boys were finished before she could think about getting started. Some were timid and some were overly confident. Some aloof and some intense. But all of them had been disappointments in their own unique way. Until the stranger.

Their meetings over the next two weeks were generally consigned to her small, Lichtenberg apartment, aside from one or two evenings when he’d arrived at der Spieler at his usual time to drink a rum and coke at the bar. The interactions directly following their first carnal encounter were characterised by lengthy periods of silence, at first not awkward but instead comfortable and serene. After one such interlude Michelle smoked a pair of consecutive cigarettes whilst sitting next to an open window with her bare feet upon the ledge. Emboldened by the quiet, she broached a subject which had piqued her curiosity during the stranger’s first visits to the bar.

“Where do you go?” she asked, whilst watching a taxi pull up to the intersection at the end of the street. A young man emerged from the back of it on his hands and knees, crawling across the sidewalk and towards what was presumably his apartment. It was almost sunrise. He gave up at the base of the short flight of steps that led to the front door. There were worse places to greet the new day, she supposed.

“I go lots of places,” the stranger replied, somewhat elusively. Evasion was part of his charm. At least for now. He was supine on the bed with a thin sheet pulled up to his waist, his old Bataille book above his face, held open as he scanned the last few sentences of the text. The whole story couldn’t have been longer than sixty pages. She was surprised it had taken him this long to get through it, but - in his defence - she had conspired to distract him from the task. “You’ll have to be a little more specific, barkeep.”

“Where do you go each evening, after you’ve enjoyed the best rum and coke in Berlin,” she answered. The faux-confidence of her words was belied by her passive expression and general abstraction from the scene. She lit a third cigarette and watched the young man sleeping on the bottom step, next to the deserted intersection.

“I go to my club,” the stranger replied. It was the first time since their second (verbal) conversation that he’d mentioned the business he purportedly owned. He was generally unforthcoming with details and she wasn’t one to press. Not at this time in her life. He was equally uninterested in her ‘professional life’, so much as one existed. He was quite willing to accept bar work as her only vocation. In return, she was happy to encourage this errant assumption, although not a lot of encouragement was required.

“In Falkenberg?” she continued with her inquiries. Concurrently, her counterpart closed his book and placed it down on an already cluttered bedside table. He would forget it when leaving in an hour’s time, leaving Michelle to doze away the morning and waste the afternoon before her evening shift.

“In Falkenberg,” he confirmed.

“The mystery club,” she said, finally turning away from the drunk at the intersection. She flicked her cigarette out of the window and closed it behind her. “That I don’t even know the name of.”

“You think you’re ready?” he asked. He wasn’t looking directly at her but his curious smile had returned to his face.

“Ready for what?”

“That’s exactly the point,” he said. He closed his eyes to block out the first rays of morning light that peered in through the window. “I think you’re ready. But think isn’t enough. Soon, Michelle.”

“You’ve said that before,” she sighed. “What if I get bored of waiting?”

This elicited a chuckle from the stranger. He placed his hands behind his head and made himself comfortable.

“Patience can be an aphrodisiac,” he advised. “Are you coming back to bed?”

She nodded her head. Went back to bed.

That afternoon, she visited a city park alone and read the book that the stranger had left behind. It told the tale of young love in its most sordid guise. The central characters, Simone and an unnamed boy, meet as children and find they share the same set of unusual sexual quirks. One particularly memorable scene sees Simone develop a fetish for inserting hard-boiled eggs into her orifices: memorable for the obvious peculiarity of the fetish itself, as well as the sense of dread that grips the reader when they remember the title of what they are reading and consider the concept of foreshadowing. The protagonists enjoy exhibitionism, with both living and dead audiences, until complicity in a friend’s suicide sees them flee from France to Spain.

The foreshadowing of Simone’s eggs and the novella’s title plays out at the book’s climax, when she seduces a priest in a basilica after masturbating in his confessional. It was not the prolonged depictions of unusual and violent sexual urges but these sequences - of the desecration of Catholic symbols like the booth and the eucharist - that Michelle found most thrilling. The carnal, even in this unique and extreme context, mostly bored her, but in this blasphemy - along with the couple’s eventual escape to Africa and evasion of consequences - she found encouragement and a strange brand of hope.

She didn’t doubt that the stranger had left the book in her room deliberately. Not specifically because he had an interest in omorashi or finding a new, novel use for hard-boiled eggs, but as a vague promise of things still to come. As an assertion, indirect yet clear, that they were only just beginning. Michelle smoked a cigarette and pondered this. She struggled to find any feeling, let alone an answer.

She next saw him the following day, and for once they were somewhere other than Michelle’s apartment or place of work. They walked the banks of the Spree until they became tired, and then they sat on a bench to watch the boats pass by. She said little but thought lots. He seemed to be of a similar disposition, chain smoking his vanilla cigarillos whilst staring with an unknown purpose at the opposite riverbank. She followed his gaze to a young woman sitting alone on an identical bench to theirs, reading a book that she couldn’t make out the title of. She was short and wore glasses and was sort of frumpish in her dress sense. She looked older than she probably was, Michelle thought.

As she made this conclusion, the man sitting next to her shook his head and let out something that resembled a sneer. He dragged his eyes away from the woman on the opposite side of the river and directed them at Michelle instead. His facial expression, which had been pained and dour as he stared across the water, settled into his familiar, curious smile. With each passing day she found it more unbearably smug.

“Loneliness and silence,” he started, obliquely. “The antithesis of life.”

“You can be alone and not be lonely,” she replied. He didn’t specifically say, but she surmised he was talking about the woman across the river. At that moment, she dreamed of switching places with her. Loneliness and silence didn't sound so bad.

“Her eyes are closed,” the stranger asserted, confident in himself and his quick judgement.

“And mine?” she asked, as his flashed with lust and ambition.

“They’re just opening,” he said.

Over the next week, the stranger’s sex became as much of a chore as his conversation. His familiarity with her made him lazy, and although his self-serving nature was less obvious than the boys of her youth it was still there. Her pleasure was not given for its own sake and for her enjoyment, but rather so that he could be the one giving it. It could just as easily be withdrawn. He operated the faucet, doing so deliberately and with a will to dominate. His touch was coarse when it was once tender. His eyes grew angry and wild. He was a beastly thing, submitting in serfdom to lust, the very thing he’d thought his saviour.

He became more adventurous in this period, succumbing to whims and inhibitions that he'd thus far suppressed through unfamiliarity with his partner. Now that he was comfortable there was no need for such suppression, and their sex became characterised by gentle subversions of Freud's pain-pleasure principle. At first this served to heighten the euphoria for Michelle in a fashion that she mistrusted. She abhorred submissiveness in every aspect of her life, but found herself spasming with ecstasy as his teeth or nails sunk into her flesh, or as his fingers tightened around her throat. Doors opened that she immediately wished to close again.

August turned into September, and the stranger continued to push the boundaries: her boundaries and the boundaries of their intimacy. The first time he struck her with any intent was the first night of September. Once across the face when her eyes were closed. It wasn't particularly forceful, especially for someone who made a living receiving physical abuse from strangers, but the sudden and unexpected nature of it brought forth an instinctive reaction. His one open-handed strike across the cheek was met with a closed left to the jaw, and then a right knocked him off balance, the force threatening to throw him off her and off the bed. He clung on by sinking his fingernails into her shoulders and, his mind and all of his restraint overwhelmed by animalistic frenzy, immediately finished inside of her for the first time.

He collapsed under the weight of his exertion and his pleasure, his lithe frame heaving with sharp, laboured breaths on top of her. She could feel the expansions of his ribcage and, underneath it, the beating of his heart. The sensation repulsed her. She placed her hands on his shoulders, pushing him down as she writhed upwards, wriggling out from underneath him. She felt him and then his seed fall out of her, both landing on her already rank bedsheets and sullying them irreparably forever. With one more exertion she forced him onto his back and away from her. He was asleep already.

She left the bed to smoke a cigarette in a high-backed rocking chair next to the window. He was gone before she woke, but had left behind a long, rambling note - one born out of and imbued with lust rather than love - that she read only the very start of.

-----
M (the barkeep),

I had to leave to prepare for a new day, and a new evening afterwards. Tonight I must go to the club. I have been away for too long, held back and held down by your tendrils. It has only been two nights, but that is a lifetime for a place like die Erfahrung. I don't know if you're working tonight, but if not, you are welcome to come along to Falkenberg. The address is 107B Ahrensfelder Chaussee. We open at midnight. You have asked about die Erfahrung before, but not for a few weeks. I hope it is still of interest to you. As I'm sure that you can surmise from the fact that it is owned by me (and as you will find out first hand tonight, if you accept my invitation), it is not a place that just anyone should be able to find. We have no doors that open onto the street. When you arrive, ask for x. You can leave any time you like, but I imagine you'll throw yourself in, as you have this past month.

I can meet you at the real reception, if you wish. Just ask for x again a second time. Or, if you want to explore alone, go ahead. I will doubtlessly be encumbered by the task of hosting the…’
—--

She folded up the letter without reading the rest and placed it inside the stranger's copy of L'histoire de l'œil. She called in sick for work and felt bad about letting her boss down, given how accommodating he'd been of her wrestling commitments. But he could cover it himself and she soon got over it when she began to contemplate the closure of this particular chapter in her life. No more than an interlude, really. Die Erfahrung’s doors were finally open to her, and with them several others began to close.

That evening, she wore the black dress that she'd been given for her sister's graduation along with a scaramouche mask that she'd adorned for a party in her final years of schooling in Marseille. The mask was meant to hide her: from her boss in Lichtenberg, should he decide an evening in Falkenberg was on the cards, but more directly from the stranger. She wished to experience the place alone, even if it was his, and the idea of his eyes upon her as she walked through the doors made her tense. The more she thought about it, the more ridiculous this plan was. He had seen her, all of her, and a small piece of black fabric over her eyes and nose wasn't going to change that. Still, she felt comfortable beneath the guise, and found - for the first time - that hiding from herself was easier than hiding from everyone else.

107 Ahrensfelder Chaussee was a small Vietnamese takeout restaurant. There was no 107B as far as she could tell. The Vietnamese restaurant looked just barely open judging by the solitary lampshade visible through the window, which was turned on and illuminated an elderly (presumably) Vietnamese woman behind the counter. It was already past one in the morning, and initially Michelle surmised that the time was the reason that nobody seemed to be buying any food, but it became clearer as she chain-smoked a pair of cigarettes across the street that all was not as it seemed.

Halfway down the first cigarette, a young and extravagantly dressed couple arrived in the back of a limousine. The car pulled away without them as the man held the woman's hand to help her get up the short flight of steps in front of the restaurant. She walked inelegantly in obscenely high stiletto heels, struggling with balance to the point where Michelle found herself wondering why she bothered with them. They disappeared inside the restaurant and Michelle waited patiently for them to reappear with a bowl of pho or noodles or whatever Vietnamese delicacies took their fancy in the middle of the night. She waited and waited, but the young couple didn't reappear.

This disappearing act repeated itself twice more, first with a middle aged man and then with a girl who looked younger than Michelle. She had a clear enough picture of what was going on to enter the restaurant herself. The elderly (presumably) Vietnamese woman smiled at her knowingly from the other side of the counter.

“I'm here to see x,” Michelle said, as instructed. The woman nodded at her.

“Everyone's always here to see x,” she lamented, in a thick accent and with a hint of mockery. “Popular boy. Through the curtain, down the stairs.”

Michelle followed the directions into a basement, which she assumed was what the ‘B’ stood for. Here was the real reception: a long, black counter, a single piece of stained metal, with a young, sort of wiry man in a tuxedo sitting behind it. He smiled, too, but his grin seemed subtler and less accusatory than the elderly woman’s.

“You must be the barkeep,” he said. It didn't feel good to hear that somewhat derisory and condescending pet name uttered by new, unfamiliar lips. “Would you like me to send for x?”

She shook her head.

“Very well,” he continued. “What are you here to do? Would you like a room, or would you like to watch?”

“I think I'll watch,” she answered. “At least at first.”

“Very well,” the host repeated, whilst seemingly agreeing that this was a good decision with a nod of his head. “If you'll follow me.”

He led the way to a long corridor with white walls before closing the door behind himself and leaving her there alone. Well, not quite alone. Around thirty metres ahead of her were two young men, both crouching down so as to stare through different holes in the wall. The entire hallway was pockmarked by these portals, all the way up to where she was currently standing. She nervously lowered her eye to the nearest one. On the other side was a small, unspectacular room: dimly lit, nicely furnished, and entirely devoid of activity.

She slowly moved along the corridor, the pace of her breathing slightly heightening each time she lowered her eye to one of the peepholes, the next three of which also revealed empty rooms. The two men away up the corridor barely seemed to notice her, instead preoccupied with their own portals and the process of groping one another. She left them to it, determined to find more than empty rooms within this palace, within the stranger's secret.

The fifth hole gave her what she was looking for and she immediately regretted her desires. Inside, a tall and handsome man with blond hair stood at attention in the centre of the room, a quartet of young women - all blonde, too, as if by design - arrayed around him in a horseshoe. He looked like a military man, which wouldn't have been a problem necessarily, but for the eagle on his kepi and the swastika on the breast of his jacket. The women around him groped at his legs and his belt, attempting to pull him down onto their level, but the blond man resisted and continued in his salute. She didn't find out how long he could hold out. She withdrew from the hole and forced herself on to the next one.

After two more empty rooms, she found another that was occupied by a young couple, high and strung out and on a mattress that had been positioned up against the door. A pipe lay discarded by their side. The woman - her skin scorched bronze, suggesting a heritage across the ocean and a kinship with the indigenous peoples she'd left behind - gently stroked the long strands of hair that fell to his shoulders, where a hideous tattoo scarred his pale, white neck. Metres away from the couple, broken shackles were tied around the legs of the deconstructed bed. Master, take the chains off me.

The two men, her only company in the hallway, had disappeared through the door at the other end of it. She was alone again. That gave her comfort and courage. She found another occupied room at the spot in which they'd been standing. An angry and wild creature, more beast than man, pinned a young woman to the floor. He repeatedly called her K., in-between vile groans and shrieks that sounded like a dying animal, despite her constant protestations that this wasn't her name. It made no difference to the beast. He was there only in body.

She backed away from the peephole, scared and thrilled in equal measures, a self-perpetuating cycle. The thrill scared her, and the fear excited her. She became acutely aware of her heavy breathing, her ribcage expanding and shaking with involuntary convulsions. She stepped back once more and hit the door at the other end of the corridor, her hands groping behind her for the handle.

A waitress gave her a glass of champagne on the other side of it. She took a seat on a low, cushioned bench next to an empty stage. Others drank and spoke and laughed around her but she couldn't focus on anyone in particular. She smoked a cigarette to calm her nerves, which only half-worked. She despised champagne but drank three flutes of it in quick succession before she'd regained enough of her wits to ask for a beer instead.

Three men came to speak to her as she reclined and recuperated, approaching one at a time with the intention of sweeping her off her feet. She declined all three, warding them off with only a shake of her head and a thick column of cigarette smoke. Eventually, after an amount of hours in die Erfahrung that Michelle could only guess at, a more appealing proposition came her way. A tall, red-headed German woman held out a hand, silently insisting that Michelle take it. They retreated into a private room and remained there for several hours. But, like bodyslams in Munich, that isn't really what this is about.

She spoke to the stranger twice more. He had called der Spieler when she hadn't been there a number of times, and after a week she finally returned them from a payphone outside her apartment building. Three more days later, they sat on a bench on the banks of the Spree. He was early and she was late. He smoked a vanilla cigarillo and watched the boats pass by. She wasn't interested in them today. She only stared at the stranger, as if doing so for long enough would shed some light on what she'd seen in him in the first place.

“Lucas tells me you're leaving your job,” he said, eventually. “At der Spieler.”

“Who is Lucas?” she asked, sincerely. She wondered how this Lucas was privy to her business and why he felt free to share it with strangers.

“Lucas is your boss,” he replied. ”Or was, I guess.”

“Oh,” she said, as guilt crept in. For all his kindness, she'd never bothered to learn the man's name, at least to the point where she was able to recall it later. “Yes. I'm touring Japan again. Longer this time.”

“Touring?” he asked, with an inquisitive tone. She felt confident enough to reveal more of herself now that she'd decided to never see him again. The question was vague enough to allow for elaboration, but she elected to simply nod her head in response. “So, you'll be back?”

“I'll be back,” she confirmed. There was only a slight pause. She knew she had to be blunt. “Though I don't want to see you again. After today, I mean.”

The stranger's face contorted, his pain worn plainly. There was no suggestion of his smug, condescending smile anymore. The one she'd grown to hate. Now he resembled a wounded animal, sad and pitiful and ready to lash out.

“After all I've given you?” he asked. She couldn't help but flash him a grin of her own, as smug as anything he'd ever mustered.

“What exactly do you think it is that you've given me?” she replied.

“I've shown you a new world,” he said, with equal parts confidence and desperation. ”A world that lives within you. They say that sex is about power, but they are wrong. Sex is a liberation. This is what I've done for you. What I've given you. I've broken down the walls that you've built around yourself.”

Michelle allowed herself time to think. Lit another cigarette. Stared at their disparate reflections in the ripples of the Spree.

“You’re less free than I am,” she asserted, passive in tone. “You're a slave to your own body. Your own impulses. Sex isn't the great liberator. Sex is just something you do. Like reading a book or writing a poem or making a sandwich. But you've made it into what you are. It is your everything. It has a power over you that fills me with pity.”

She sucked on the end of her cigarette and shook her head.

“I had such high hopes for you.”

The stranger didn't reply. He finished his cigarillo, threw the end into the river, and left. She never saw him again.