Why We Took the Car Read online

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, but doctors are a skeptical bunch. I mean, they wanted something from you. And as your attending doctor . . .”

  Yeah, yeah. For God’s sake. Confidentiality. I get it. What does he want to know? How someone falls off a chair? Sideways, down, and plop. He shakes his head for a long time; then he makes a small gesture with his hand — and suddenly I understand what he’s trying to figure out. My God, I’m so slow sometimes. So damn embarrassing. Why didn’t he just ask?

  “No, no!” I shout, waving my hands wildly in the air like I’m swatting a swarm of flies. “It was all legit! I was sitting in the chair and I lifted up my pant leg to look at it, and when I did I got all dizzy and fell over. There were no external factors.” Good phrase. Learned it from a police show.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure, yes. The police were actually really nice. They gave me a glass of water and tissues. I just got dizzy and fell over.” I straighten myself up in front of the desk and then demonstrate like a talented actor, twice letting myself slump to the right until I nearly fall over.

  “Very well,” says the doctor slowly.

  He scribbles something on a piece of paper.

  “I just wanted to know. It was still irresponsible. The blood loss . . . they really should have . . . and it did look suspicious.”

  He closes the green folder and looks at me for a long time. “I don’t know, maybe it’s none of my business, but I’d really be interested to know — though you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. But what did you want — or where were you trying to go?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Like I said, you don’t have to answer. I’m only asking out of curiosity.”

  “I would tell you, but if I did, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. I’m pretty sure.”

  “I’d believe you,” he says with a friendly smile. My buddy.

  “It’s stupid.”

  “What’s stupid?”

  “It’s just . . . well, we were trying to go to Wallachia. See, I told you you’d think it was stupid.”

  “I don’t think it’s stupid, I just don’t understand. Where were you trying to go?”

  “Wallachia.”

  “And where is that supposed to be?”

  He looks at me curiously, and I can tell I’m turning red. We’re not going to delve any deeper into this. We shake each other’s hands like grown men, signaling an end to the conversation, and I’m somehow happy that I didn’t have to push the bounds of his confidentiality.

  CHAPTER 5

  I’ve never had any nicknames. In school, I mean. Or anywhere else, for that matter. My name is Mike Klingenberg. Mike. Not Mikey or Klinge or anything like that. Always just Mike. Except in the sixth grade, when I was briefly known as Psycho. Not like that’s the greatest thing either, being called Psycho. But it didn’t last long and then I was back to being Mike again.

  When someone doesn’t have any nicknames, it’s for one of two reasons. Either you’re incredibly boring and don’t get any because of that, or you don’t have any friends. If I had to decide between one or the other, I’d have to say I’d rather have no friends than be incredibly boring. I mean, if you’re boring you won’t have any friends anyway, or you’ll only have friends who are even more boring than you are.

  But there is one other possibility: You could be boring and have no friends. And I’m afraid that’s my problem. At least since Paul moved away. Paul had been my friend since kindergarten, and we used to hang out almost every day — until his dumbass mother decided she wanted to live out in the country.

  That was about the time I started junior high, and it didn’t make things any easier. I hardly saw Paul at all after that. His new place was half a world away, at the last stop of one of the subway lines and then six more kilometers by bike from there. And Paul changed out there. His parents split up and he went nuts. I mean really crazy. Paul basically lives in the forest with his mother and just lies around brooding. He always had a tendency to do that anyway. You really had to push him to do anything. But out there in the middle of nowhere, there’s nobody to push him, so he just stews. If I remember right, I visited him three times out there. He was so depressed every time that I never wanted to go again. Paul showed me the house, the yard, the woods, and a hunting blind in the woods where he’d sit and watch animals. Except, of course, that there were no animals. Every few hours a sparrow flew by. And he jotted down notes about that. It was early in the year, right when Grand Theft Auto IV came out, though Paul wasn’t interested in that kind of thing anymore. Nothing interested him except wild critters. I had to spend an entire day up in a tree, and then the whole thing just became too idiotic for me. Once I also secretly flipped through his notebook to see what else was in it — because there was a lot in it. Things about his mother, things written in some kind of secret code, drawings of naked women — terrible drawings. Nothing against naked women. Naked women are awesome. But these drawings were not awesome. They were just messed up. And between the sketches, in calligraphy, observations about animals and the weather. At some point he’d written that he’d seen wild boars and lynxes and wolves. There was a question mark next to the word wolves, and I said to him, “This is the outskirts of Berlin — lynxes and wolves, are you sure?” And he grabbed the book out of my hand and looked at me as if I was the crazy one. After that we didn’t see each other very often. That was three years ago. And he’d once been my best friend.

  I didn’t get to know anybody in junior high at first. I’m not exactly great at getting to know people. And I never saw it as a major problem. Until Tatiana Cosic showed up. Or at least until I noticed her. She’d been in my class the whole time. I just never noticed her until the seventh grade. No idea why. But in seventh grade she suddenly popped up on my radar — and that’s when all my misery began. I guess at this point I should probably describe Tatiana. Because otherwise the rest of the story won’t make sense.

  Tatiana’s first name is Tatiana and her last name is Cosic. She’s fourteen years old and her parents’ last name is also Cosic. I don’t know what their first names are. They’re from Serbia or Croatia, you can tell from their last name, and they live in a white apartment building with lots of windows. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

  I could blather on about her for ages, but the surprising thing is that I actually have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t know Tatiana at all. I know the things that anyone in her class would know about her. I know what she looks like, what her name is, and that she’s good at sports and English. And so on. I know how tall she is because of the physical exams they gave us on health day. I found out where she lives from the phone book. And other than that, I know basically nothing. Obviously I could describe exactly what she looks like and how her voice sounds and what color her hair is and everything. But that seems to me unnecessary. I mean, everyone can imagine what she looks like: She looks great. Her voice sounds great too. She’s just great all around.

  CHAPTER 6

  I guess I never explained why they called me Psycho. Because, as I mentioned, I was known as Psycho for a while. No idea what the point was. I mean, obviously I know it was supposed to suggest that I had a screw loose. But as far as I’m concerned, there were several other people who deserved the name more than I did. Frank could have been called Psycho, or Stobke, with his lighter. They’re both way crazier than I am. Or the Nazi. But then again, the Nazi was already called Nazi, so he didn’t need another name. And of course there was a reason that I got the name instead of anyone else. It was the result of an assignment in Mr. Schuermann’s German class, sixth grade, a word prompt story. In case you don’t know what a word prompt story is, it goes like this: You get four words, like “zoo,” “ape,” “zookeeper,” and “hat,” and you have to write a story that includes all of the words. Real original. Totally moronic. The
words Mr. Schuermann thought up were “vacation,” “water,” “rescue,” and “God.” Which was definitely more difficult than zoo and ape. The main difficulty was God, obviously. We only had ethics classes, not religion, and there were sixteen kids registered as atheists in the class, including me. Even the Protestants in the class didn’t really believe in God. I don’t think. At least, not the way people who really believe in God believe. People who don’t want to harm even an ant, or who are happy when someone dies because that person is going to heaven. Or people who crash a plane into the World Trade Center. Those people really believe in God. That’s why the writing assignment was tough. Most of the students grabbed on to the word “vacation.” A little family is paddling around off the Côte d’Azur and are taken totally by surprise by a terrible storm and yell “oh, God” and are then rescued or whatever. And I could have written something like that too. But as I sat down to write the story, the first thing that occurred to me was the fact that we hadn’t been on vacation for three years because my father had been preparing for bankruptcy. Which didn’t bother me — I never particularly liked going on vacation with my parents anyway.

  Instead, I spent last summer squatting in our basement carving boomerangs. One of my elementary school teachers taught me how to do it. He was an expert in the boomerang department. Bretfeld was his name, Wilhelm Bretfeld. He’d even written a book about boomerangs. Two books actually. But I didn’t realize that until after I’d finished elementary school. I ran into old Bretfeld in a field. He was basically standing right behind our house in the cow pasture throwing his boomerangs, homemade boomerangs he’d carved himself. It was yet another thing I had never realized really worked. I thought the things only came back to you in the movies. But Bretfeld was a pro, and he showed me how to do it. I was blown away. Also because he’d made them himself. “Anything that’s round in front and sharp at the back will fly,” said Bretfeld. Then he looked at me over the frames of his glasses and asked, “What’s your name again? I can’t remember you.” The thing that most blew my mind was the long-distance boomerang. He’d developed it himself. It could fly for ages — and he had invented it. All over the world today, when someone throws a boomerang and it stays in the air for five minutes, setting some record, and a picture is taken of it, it’s always there: based on a design by Wilhelm Bretfeld. He’s world renowned, Bretfeld. And he was standing in the field behind our house last summer and showed me how to do it. A really good teacher. Though I never noticed it in elementary school.

  In any event, I spent the entire summer break sitting in the basement whittling. And it was a great summer break, much better than going somewhere on vacation. My parents were almost never home. My father drove around from creditor to creditor and my mother was at the beauty farm. And that’s what I wrote the assignment about: Mother and the Beauty Farm, a word prompt story by Mike Klingenberg.

  The next class, I got to read it aloud. Or I had to. I didn’t want to. Svenja was first up, and she had written one of those nonsense stories about the Côte d’Azur, which Schuermann thought was great. Then Kevin read basically the same story except that instead of the Côte d’Azur it was the Baltic coast. Then it was my turn. Mother at the beauty farm. It’s not really a beauty farm. Though my mother does always look better when she comes back from it. It’s actually a clinic. She’s an alcoholic. She’s drunk booze for as long as I can remember, but the difference is that it used to be funnier. Everyone is normally funny when they drink, but when a certain line is crossed people get tired or aggressive. And when my mother started walking around our place with a kitchen knife again, I was standing upstairs with my father as he called down, “How about another trip to the beauty farm?” That’s how the summer started at the end of sixth grade.

  I like my mother. I have to add that, because what I’m about to say might not cast her in the best light. But I always liked her, and still do. She’s not like other moms. That’s what I’ve always liked best about her. She can be really funny, for instance, and you can’t say that about most mothers. Calling the clinic the beauty farm was one of her jokes.

  My mother used to play a lot of tennis. My father too, but not very well. The ace in our family was my mother. When she was still in shape, she won the tennis club championship every year. She even won it with a bottle of vodka in her system, but that’s another story. Anyway, as a kid I was always at the courts with her. My mother sat on the terrace at the tennis club and drank cocktails with Frau Weber and Frau Osterthun and Herr Schuback and the rest of them. And I sat under the table and played with Matchbox cars as the sun shone down. In my mind the sun was always shining at the tennis club. I looked at the red clay dust on five sets of white tennis shoes and collected bottle caps — you could draw on the insides of the caps with a ballpoint pen. I was allowed to have five ice creams a day and ten cans of Coke and could just tell the waiter to add it to our tab. And then Frau Weber said, “Next week at seven again, Frau Klingenberg?”

  And my mother: “Sure.”

  And Frau Weber: “I’ll bring the balls next time.”

  My mother: “Sure.”

  And so on and so forth. Always the same conversation. Though the joke was that Frau Weber never brought balls — she was too cheap.

  Once in a while there was another version. It went like this:

  “Again next Saturday, Frau Klingenberg?”

  “Can’t do it. I’ll be away.”

  “But doesn’t your husband’s team have a league match?”

  “Yes, but he’s not going to be away. I am.”

  “Aha. Where are you going?”

  “To the beauty farm.”

  And then somebody at the table who didn’t know the phrase yet always, always, always, threw out the unbelievably clever quip, “You certainly don’t need any help in that department, Frau Klingenberg.”

  Then my mother would knock back the rest of her Brandy Alexander and say, “That was only a joke, Herr Schuback. It’s actually a rehab facility.”

  Then we would walk home hand in hand because my mother was no longer capable of driving. I carried her heavy racquet bag and she said to me, “You can’t learn much from your mother. But two things you can learn: First, you can talk about anything. Second, what people think doesn’t mean shit.” That was enlightening. Talk openly. Screw what other people think.

  My doubts crept in only later. Not doubts about the ideas in principle. But doubts about whether my mother really didn’t care what other people thought.

  Anyway, the beauty farm. I don’t know exactly what went on there. Because I was never allowed to visit my mother. She didn’t want me to. But whenever she came home from the place she told the craziest stories. The therapy apparently consisted of talking a lot and not drinking. And sometimes exercise as well. But most of them couldn’t really do much exercise. For the most part they talked while tossing a ball of yarn around in a circle. The person allowed to speak was the person with the ball of yarn. I had to ask about the ball of yarn five times because I wasn’t sure whether I’d heard it right or whether maybe it was a joke. But it was no joke. My mother didn’t think this detail was so funny or fascinating, but to be honest I found it incredibly fascinating. Just try to imagine it: ten adults sitting in a circle and throwing a ball of yarn around. Afterward, the entire room was full of yarn, but that wasn’t the point of the whole thing, even if it’s fair to think so at first. The point was to create a web of communication. Which tells you that my mother wasn’t the craziest person in the place. There must have been considerably crazier ones too.

  But anyone who thinks the ball of yarn must be the strangest thing at the clinic hasn’t heard about the cardboard boxes. Every patient had a cardboard box. It hung from the ceiling in each room, with the open side facing up. You had to throw notes into the box, basketball style. Notes where you wrote your aspirations, wishes, resolutions, prayers, or whatever. Whenever my m
other wished for something, made a resolution, or scolded herself, she wrote it down on a piece of paper, folded it up, and then basically did a Dirk Nowitzki and slam-dunked it in the cardboard box. And the insane thing about it was that nobody ever read them. That wasn’t the point. The point was just writing it down so it was there and you could see it — my desires and wishes and all that crap are hanging right there in that box. And because the cardboard boxes were so important, you had to give them names. The name was written on the box with a felt-tip marker, so basically every drunkard had a box named “God” hanging from the ceiling with all his or her aspirations inside it. Because most people just called their box God. That’s what the therapists suggested — just call it God. But you were allowed to call it whatever you wanted. Some old lady called hers “Osiris” and somebody else “Great Spirit.”

  My mother named her box “Karl-Heinz,” and as a result a therapist came and peppered her with questions. The first thing he wanted to know was whether it was her father. “Who?” she asked, and the therapist pointed at the box hanging from the ceiling. My mother shook her head. Then the therapist asked just who he was, this Karl-Heinz. And my mother said, “That cardboard box.” So then the therapist asked what the name of her father was. “Gottlieb,” she said, to which the therapist said, “Aha!” It was supposed to sound clever, as if the therapist had just figured something out. Gottlieb, aha! My mother had no idea what the therapist had figured out, and he never said. And that’s the way it went the entire time. They all tried like crazy to act as if they had things figured out, but they never gave away what they knew. When my father heard about it — the thing with the cardboard box — he nearly fell out of his chair laughing. He kept saying, “My God that’s sad,” though he was laughing. So I had to laugh too, and my mother decided it was funny as well, at least in retrospect.