BERLIN

We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife, both in love with our friend M.,
a professional flautist, long-fingered and heron-legged. They’ve gone to Zagreb to witness a mother’s death.
For the duration, my husband and I walk their mutt, Streetboy, in Tempelhof Field.
My husband hates Streetboy. Streetboy retaliates. Streetboy pees on our pillows. I forgive Streetboy
without hesitation. I pity Streetboy like I pity anyone entrusted to my care. If I were virtuous,
Streetboy’s bladder would have lasted the five flights and three blocks to Tempelhof.
My husband reminisces about when he lived here a decade ago. One winter dark
so insistently that on the first day of real spring sun, he wept.
Yet he maintains he was happy. He keeps describing happiness as Streetboy lunges for a bicycle
and almost dies, which wouldn’t have been my fault, truly, however much it felt like it.
All my husband’s happiness lives in the past. And this, the afterlife?
Paradise is a club in Mitte where I’ve never danced.
The couple returns. They pay us in drugs for our trouble. It turns out it was the husband’s mother.
It turns out Streetboy’s name is Stribor.
How apt! I think. When a shared hallucination of a name is a good description of marriage.
But it means surprisingly little to set word to action. If you even manage it.
Like: Once, in Manhattan, we slid dollar-store rings onto each ­other’s fingers
as the officiant barked, Look at each other! Don’t you know what you’re doing? Okay, now say it.