20. Berlin #2
Jack waited for Rosie’s brutal take on this situation; she had a chip on her shoulder about the snotty, popular kids at Rockwell, and Rosie never held back her opinion on anything.
“Isn’t Cynthia basically a total bitch?” she said. “She’s never given any of us the time of day.”
Cynthia wasn’t a bitch, and Jack decided right then that he would use his time with her not only to raise her scores but also to get her to know what a good person Rosie was, to get Cynthia to like all his friends. He would talk them up to her.
“We’ve been neighbors forever,” he said, “before middle school made everyone cliquey. She’s nice, actually. You’ll see.”
“Has she ever invited you to a single party?” Rosie said. “No. Or showed up at your house to hang out? Or stopped to talk to you in the hall at school?” Rosie was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said, “it feels to me like she’s using you.”
That stung. But despite Rosie’s warnings, he went to Cynthia’s anyway, sneaking through the back gate.
She was nice to him, and she would bring snacks to the pool house, where they would sit on the couch together with SAT books and scratch paper, working their way through math problems. He would calm her down when she got upset over a wrong answer.
One day she cried and called herself stupid; he couldn’t bear for her to think that.
Cynthia’s scores had skyrocketed from 1150 to 1340, but she never talked to Jack in the hallway at school, and she never befriended Rosie, and she did not, in fact, invite Jack and his friends to her house for the huge party she threw the weekend before graduation.
Jack had seen the cars parked up and down her street.
He’d gone straight to Rosie’s house and told her she’d been right about everything.
“Like I said, the girl’s an irredeemable bitch,” Rosie said that night, just minutes before he made the decision to scrape the web for data and write the code that got him expelled. He’d been filled with bitterness.
Rosie squinted at him. “You didn’t, like, have a thing for her, did you?” Rosie said.
“God, no,” he said, and then, to get her off the fucking topic, he threw in the name of another classmate, “but Nell is kind of perfect.”
“ Nell? Duh. Nell’s a goddess. I like Nell. God, that’s a relief,” she said. “I feel better about your taste in girls.”
Jack had made it to the end of the lush, tree-lined park and now stood smack in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
He walked around the crowded, cobblestone plaza with all the other tourists who were milling around and taking selfies.
He had read the Wikipedia page to know a bit about what it was and where the wall had once been, separating East Berlin from West, and then he took a picture as well—a good one in which the Goddess of Victory and the four horses stood out against a dramatic, cloud-filled sky. He had no one to send it to.
He turned and walked down a broad boulevard called Unter den Linden and down a few side streets until he reached a landmark he’d seen online called the Gendarmenmarkt.
It pretty much blew Jack’s mind, this wide-open square, flanked by two huge cathedrals with a concert hall in the middle.
The sun came through the clouds for a moment, and he took a seat on the steps, watching people walk across the plaza.
There were big groups of kids, carefree and relaxed, joking around with one another, unburdened by the knot of agony that Jack carried around with him everywhere he went.
They were on their phones, taking countless pictures of themselves and each other, and Jack imagined what they would post on Instagram.
Group selfies in front of the Schiller statue in front of him: Some old dead dude #summer #collegebound #travel #friendsforlife .
Jack watched the happy students—juniors in high school, he guessed—and hated them.
The knot tightened.
He hadn’t thought he was hurting anyone because he hadn’t meant for anyone other than his friends to see the list. He’d only wanted to prove mathematically—in jest and in fact—that while he might be worthless, Cynthia and her friends were heartless, terrible people.
But he had not included any guys in the data, so while he had sworn and even believed that there was no misogynist intent behind his math, Principal Neal hadn’t believed him, because on some level maybe there was.
Introspection sucked. Jack shook his head, trying to push his shame away and appreciate the sights around him.
He stood up and to his great surprise, he got a notification on Instagram.
This was almost impossible, as he’d made his account private and removed all followers who hadn’t already blocked him, making an exception only for family members.
All that was left on his page, after he’d deleted almost all of his posts, was one picture of Tank and Bunny, one of the Boston skyline taken from the MIT campus, and an image of his family that his grandmother had taken for her annual Christmas card.
He opened Instagram and saw he’d gotten a follow request from a girl he didn’t know.
Her name was Monika, and her profile said she was from Berlin.
Her posts featured groups of friends, outdoor parties, and dance clubs.
She had a nose ring, pink hair in one picture and purple in another, and she seemed in every way too cool for the likes of him.
She was either a bot or the request was a mistake. He ignored it.
But his phone pinged a second time with another girl from Germany asking to follow him.
He clicked on her profile. Emmi was a college student in Freiburg with a great smile, and she had recently posted several stories: sunlight reflecting off pool water, a plastic bottle of Dr Pepper, and—as Jack leaned into his phone in surprise—a picture of Tank and Bunny sitting in her lap.
It felt like an episode of Black Mirror .
Her most recent post was a picture that showed the photograph his grandfather took that was hanging over Jack’s bed.
He quickly texted his mom: Who’s the girl staying at our house?
She answered right away: Emmi. Your grandmother says she’s nice. Having a good day?
He sent a thumbs-up.
And before he let himself overthink it, he accepted both Emmi’s and Monika’s requests and then followed them back.
Seconds later he got a message from the girl with pink or purple hair:
Hallo! I hear from Emmi you are visiting Berlin for the summer. Meet for coffee? Wednesday afternoon?
This, he thought, was why his mother had whisked them away from Dallas, removing him from the scandal, away from people who thought terrible things about him. That’s so nice!!!!! he wrote back. Where and what time?
There was a pause during which he realized he’d looked psychotically eager using that many exclamation points. But Monika replied:
1900 Café (Charlottenburg) Wednesday 5:30
Okay, he wrote, see you there. Thanks, Monika! Looking forward to it.
He would have to bring his little sisters along, but that didn’t seem like an entirely bad idea. He would be less nervous with them there. He was glad his skin had cleared up a little.
The knot in his stomach eased ever so slightly as he got up and walked the periphery of the Gendarmenmarkt.
He imagined sitting in a café with someone his age.
It would be cool to hang out with someone who knew nothing about his stupid list, who knew nothing about him at all.
It was what he needed. New people, new experiences. A fresh start.
Jack took a few more pictures of the cathedrals to his left and right, and then he checked his map to see how far he was from the gym.
Once he got his bearings, he adjusted his backpack straps and started walking, marveling—as he often did, and as his father always encouraged him to do—at the power of human ingenuity.
A social app had helped his mother find them refuge in a foreign country and had just connected him to two people he’d never met before.
Another app was guiding him to a gym in a neighborhood where he’d never been as another counted his steps along the way.
Spotify allowed him to listen to whatever music didn’t totally fuck his mood.
Jack could not say what made him stop in his tracks to read the sign on the building he was passing, but the words caught his eye, the name S?ren Kierkegaard practically jumping off the wall.
Kierkegaard, the plaque said, had once lived in this very place.
Jack looked up at the building and then back at the sign.
There was a quotation: “Subjectivity is truth—subjectivity is untruth.” That statement made no sense—how could subjectivity be both truth and untruth?
—and yet he was interested. He turned the words over in his mind as he headed south toward Checkpoint Charlie.
There was his subjective truth about what had happened, and then there was Cynthia’s truth.
Hers wasn’t true, but then maybe neither was his.
Jack typed the phrase into his notes app to google later.
Although, he thought, if there was anyone who could explain the quotation to him, it was Bj?rn.
His parents had told him that his biological father was out there somewhere, ready to hear from him if the time ever came.
All he had to do was tell his mom, and she would arrange a meeting or a phone call.
But they’d stopped bringing Bj?rn up years ago because Jack had never shown any interest in him.
Jack had a family, he had a father. He never had a gap in his life that needed to be filled.
But now he was facing a void. He did not have a plan, or a solution, or any understanding of his failings or of his strengths—if he even had any.
He had no clarity, nowhere to go once this trip to Berlin was over, no clue what to do with his life.
He was in the midst of a kind of existential crisis that philosophy was built for.
And his biological father, according to everything he’d read about him, was someone who could help him think it through.
As for his own father, he might as well be on Mars.
In the little office where Jack slept, there was a desk with an old-school fountain pen, a jar of ink, a box of thick, cream-colored stationery, and an envelope filled with stamps.
Jack liked the idea of writing a formal introduction to his philosopher father, handwritten in a loopy script.
Jack’s handwriting was abysmal, so he would have to practice if he had any hope of his words being legible.
And what words would he choose to make a first impression ?