Kreuzberg apartment, evening of Day 13.
Your bag is packed. The book of Ukrainian poems is in the bag. The postcard from Frau J is back on the mantel where it was when you arrived, because it was not yours to take.
Your plate from dinner is washed and put away. The cup is washed. The kettle is on the stove.
You sit at the table for an hour without opening the book.
The apartment is already starting to be the apartment-after-you. You are not the last person who will sit in this chair. Tomorrow night someone you do not know will put a bag in the corner where your bag was. The water-ring on the table from a glass set down without a coaster is still on the table. The apartment is not yours. The apartment has not been yours. The apartment has been a room you lived in, and the building has kept every month that a body slept in it and then left.
Dawn. Day 14.
The landlady comes at 6:30.
You give her the three keys on the ring. She takes them without looking. The two keys and the small brass key whose purpose you never learned.
Gute Reise, she says.
Danke, you say.
She does not close the door after she leaves. You close it. You pick up your bag. You walk down the four flights you walked up fourteen days ago for the first time and have walked up and down, you do not know, thirty or forty times since.
S-Bahn, southbound.
The ticket to BER is three euros eighty. You buy it at the machine. The machine takes your coins and gives you back a receipt you do not keep.
The train car is half empty. A man is sleeping on a duffel bag. Two women in their thirties are speaking Portuguese and drinking coffee from paper cups. A child is asleep in the lap of an older woman who is not looking at the child and not looking away.
You do not sleep. You look at the window. Berlin morning is the kind of light that is not yet day.
BER, Terminal 1. 7:45.
Check-in takes the time check-in takes. The woman at the desk looks at your passport and at your face and then at the passport again. She holds the page one beat longer than she held the pages of the three people ahead of you. You register the beat. Your body registers it before your mind does — a pressure at the base of your skull you do not name. She looks up. Zweck Ihrer Reise? Purpose of your trip, she says, in German then English. Tourism, one month, you say. She turns the passport back to the first page. She types something. She hands the passport back. She hands you a boarding pass. Seat 23B. You put the boarding pass in the book of Ukrainian poems. It is the thing in your bag closest to your hand.
Security.
You take off your boots. You take the laptop you did not bring out of the bag you do not have. You put the bag on the belt. You stand in the thing.
At the other side of the thing you do not close your fingers on the belt of your jeans when you go to put it back on. Your fingers are not closing. You are wearing the jeans still but the belt is off and your fingers are standing with the belt in them like a thing they have not been told is a belt.
The woman officer at security looks at you without stopping what she is doing. She is going through a different person's bag.
You close your fingers. You put the belt back on.
You pick up the bag. You put the boots on. You walk fast because the gate-signage reads six minutes of walking and your body wants the walk.
Gate 12.
Forty minutes until boarding. A man is announcing something in German, then in English. The Portuguese women from the train are at the same gate. One of them is eating a bread with cheese. The other is not eating.
Above the gate counter a TV plays without sound. HALLORAN UNDER REVIEW — ETHICS INQUIRY OPENED reads the chyron in English. You do not know the name.
You think of Charlotte for a moment. Charlotte at seven. Charlotte not in an airport. Charlotte in Denver drawing a dog with three ears.
Your hand has closed on the bag strap without your telling it to. Your breath has not changed.
The thought stays for a second and then goes.
You drink water from a bottle you bought at the kiosk for two euros fifty.
The gate agent opens the gate. People stand up. People sit down. People stand up again.
Seat 23B.
The plane is a Ryanair. The seat is blue and orange. The magazine in the pocket is not a magazine; it is a thing that looks like a magazine.
You are in the seat. The seat next to you, 23A, is a man in his sixties reading a paperback in German.
The flight is three hours twenty minutes.
Takeoff.
The plane moves. The plane moves faster. The wheels leave the ground.
You look out the window. Berlin is below you. Kreuzberg is somewhere in the grey-brown of it. Friedrichshain is somewhere else. BER is behind you under the plane. You cannot see the building you lived in, and you cannot see the building he lives in, and you cannot see the building with the basement.
Your hand touches your wrist under the cuff of the shirt and comes back. You do not look at the wrist.
The seat belt sign goes off.
You close the book of Ukrainian poems.
You look at the cloud that is the next thing below the window.