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A glass-fronted building. Probably. There's a woman on the desk inside. Beautiful; that is, sexy in that edgy way I notice everywhere as soon as I cross a border - any border - from Czechia, a name I'll now choose on account of its being different from The Czech Republic, which was itself different from Czechoslovakia; a name I'll now choose because it sounds, to me at least, small and somewhat ridiculous. Beautiful and unfathomably congenial. Beautiful and probably tattooed. Beautiful, though it may be an unexceptional beauty - a prettiest girl in the class kind of a beauty - and sympatická, sympatisch. Beautiful and as likely as not not Caucasian like the blonde Czech girls with their passive aggressive yoga matts I make fun of in my Czech classes. The Czech classes where I am teaching, not learning. Those in which I make fun of Václav Havel as the Czech Jesus. I say likely as not because she is a notion rather than a vision. She is a vibration. A series of dialogues. A series of reading partners for a work-in-progress theatre script. Unseen like Columbo's wife. I say likely as not because it's a notion of distance from the women I meet that matters here rather than some fetish relating to another race. She may be white with one of those austere, radically unattractive Forest Gump-like haircuts German women seem sometimes to prefer; the kind some women can pull off. She may merely have an undercut; rare and edgy in Prague, commonplace elsewhere. I announce myself in my bad and not improving Duolingo German. A glass-fronted, "modern" building of the kind I have never worked in. Revolving doors. Sometimes. Invariably when it's throwing it down. Probably something got reused there. Like something might get reused on a film set or in a video game.
We are in Berlin. Berlin being the place you might think of escaping to when you're done with Prague. Prague being the place you escaped to, twice, when you were done with Britain. Parochial Britain. London was too far. The provinces the world over abutt one another as the major capitals coalesce, their airports more efficient at moving people than their trains and coaches. The third and fourth and fifth-rate towns jostle with one another like third and fourth division football teams. But then the first league in one country might be shifted down when placed next to another, the third and fourth teams out of the running entirely. And so a capital city of one country - perhaps a young, reasonably overlooked country - can be paired with the one-size-fits-none punchline towns of a more established country with an ostensibly enviable history even where it might be found to be in decline.
A job interview. A new chance in life. A chance to get out of this place as much, I suppose, as I ever needed to get out of Stourbridge. Or Llanrwst. Or any of the third and fourth and fifth-rate towns I have lived in.
These, more or less, are the vibrations. They assemble, as night dreams are assembled, throughout my days and from the moment I wake. I'll greet the woman at the desk when I first wake needing to go to the toilet. I'll announce myself as having a job interview. Or, sat on the toilet waiting minutes for my muscles to relax to take a piss - not a new thing; it has always taken minutes - or sat on the tram, or walking back down from Apolinářská through Ztracenka, I'll be right there in the interview going over one of a handful of topics.
I turn up on a bike. Black. Simple. Austere. A hipster aesthetic. (A debatable term I find myself endlessly debating in these infernal dialogues.) A single speed. A flip flop rear hub (freewheel on the one side, fixed on the other) and brakes reduces the purity of the hipster appeal. So what am I? An ambivalent hipster leaning on plausible deniability? I make kombucha for fuck's sake. Debateable. Endlessly debated.
The bike is real. As some props are real. Ordered a week or two ago around the time this all began. This "dwelling". One that will be everything for a week or two. Three, four decades now of one and two and three and four week dwellings of insidious, ubiquitous, intrusive imaginings of every iteration of a future I could imagine myself having a place in.
Berlin anyway. Sometimes I see the bike hanging on the train from Prague. I certainly imagine locking it up. Before that, riding around on the broad pavements, sometimes with fancy arm-pumping gymnastics where I balance on the pedals (usually here with a fixed hub) and hop the wheels around, looking for the bike racks.
The eras come at me at a clip. By the time I sit down at a computer or write in a notebook, I am somebody else.