From time to time, my friends have asked me to publish some of my short stories. Since they are somewhat long, I’ll be publishing them in parts.
I wrote this first story, “Geisterbahn Incident”, here in Berlin in 2003. It’s a work of speculative fiction, a dark, ghostly tale based on a horrifying era of the city’s history.
I’d like to rework this narrative into a screenplay and film it :-) If I’m successful, you dear reader will be able to follow significant parts of my creative process right here.
I feel that this is important because so few writers allow audiences to follow their entire creative process. Although, I won’t be able to document all of my process (for example, you can’t actually follow me through a train station when I’m doing research, like I did for this story), I can do this much.
So without further ado, I hope you enjoy this first excerpt of “Geisterbahn Incident”. Please feel free to give me your feedback. As always, thanks for reading.
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GEISTERBAHN INCIDENT (Part One)
By Kevin.M. Booker
To be brutally honest, I think most of you are just plain stupid.
I’ve never been able to deal with ignorant people; Lord knows, I have truly tried. But since most of you don’t see me anyway - or care what I think - it doesn’t matter. I’m just a janitor, a clean up man, nobody. Niemand.
Nonetheless, would you believe most of you are too dumb to flush a toilet behind you when you finish?? Or that some of you would look at a toilet bowl in a restroom, see it stuffed with mountains of wet toilet paper and feces and use it anyway. Unglaublich!
Ich meine, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know when you flush it, the paper and muddy water flows from the toilet to the floor and everyone who comes in marches through the pee-pee-water, wading in water and stomping on half-used rolls of toilet paper, spreading cesspool stink around for all to enjoy.
I’m that guy who cleans up the Scheisse you leave behind, the one you never see.
I clean up after you and in all the places you tear up: your schools and churches, your stores and shopping centers, construction sites, bars and restaurants, hospitals and offices, airports and bus stations.
I used to specialize in public toilets, male and female, so I can tell you a little trade secret: the women really are worse than the men. Sad but truly true: even though most men are filthy, stupid, raunchy cretins, women can still amaze me with the sheer variety of mess they leave behind in public. I’ve seen whole toilet walls smeared with lipstick and freshly used menstrual napkins, as if somebody was trying to write Latin graffiti for me to translate. I honestly don’t know why anyone would do something like this.
However, I do have a theory.
I believe women are so fed up, frustrated and pissed off with men they’ve got to get the anger out, take it out on something, anything, once in awhile. Why not a wall in a public toilet? Since it always means overtime pay for me, I never complain.
In my 25 years on the job I’ve seen just about everything humans can leave behind in public, even after they’re dead. And oh yeah, I realize that most of you don’t believe when you die you leave anything behind.
But most of you are just plain stupid and you do leave things after you all the time. I know because I’ve cleaned up your mess too many times to count.
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Berlin is a big old grimy city and in spite of all the new construction, not much has really changed here since the 20’s. People here are mostly mean, ugly and stressed out most of the time. Also, it’s no secret that in a city of cramped apartment buildings, you can live right next door to someone for years and years but if they passed you on the street, you wouldn’t even recognize them.
Even after two world wars, many of these old buildings are hundreds of years old and stuffed with memories of generations of cranky, anonymous voyeurs: if anything, Berliners love to watch.
Some of the old factories and U-Bahn stations I’ve cleaned up have seen a lot. There are times when I truly believe the walls of the buildings and train stations remember all the things that people have forgotten, like the things that happened during the last war.
I guess if I were a train station built in 1902, like the one on Wittenbergplatz, sixty-something years ago might seem like yesterday to me too.
Frankly, I think the stations get frustrated and confused sometimes, just like the people who use the trains everyday, losing their sense of time and space. Imagine all those years of being used up by grumpy, stupid people, all that stress from decades of panic, anger and hurt. After years of non-stop chaos, I can imagine how some of these old places, by now, would be plain worn out.
My Oma once told me when the Russians invaded in the last days of the last war, thousands of women were tortured, abused and murdered. She said the Russians were merciless, that countless rapes took place in the underground train stations and the bunkers beneath where women and children tried to hide. She said it didn’t matter if the women were fifty, sixty, seventy or eighty years old, the Russian troops went crazy and you know, sometimes I think these underground places still remember.
She said after that a lot of folk lost their minds, wandering around in the shadows of the parks every night, women hungry for comfort, men buying sex for the price of a pack of cigarettes, venereal diseases taking over their bodies, unrelenting loneliness and blood-lust driving people mad.
Even if most folk don’t remember this stuff anymore, I figure some of the places keep the memories somewhere, perhaps in the wetness of the underground walls and tunnels, or the canals below.
The vast water table underneath Berlin has remained because the city was built on top of a swamp and I’m sure the sewers and gutters saved the smell of this misery. Anyone who knows about The National Socialists - the slave labour they used to dig the tunnels, the suffering, the pain, the agony, the castrations, the torture, the suicides - can smell those leftovers sometimes. This smell endures in each damp, dank cranny of every bunker and crawl space. All the stains of bloodshed serenaded by suffering moans, the putrid stench of hatred and the stammering of bombs layer those tunnel walls like moldy old cigarette smoke. This collective terror, I am sure, still wades in those waters.
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Thanks for reading Verna! This is fun for me as well...kinda like telling ghost stories at grandma's house back in the day...
love, Kev
Posted by: Kevin Booker | March 08, 2010 at 05:04 PM
Cuz - I truly enjoyed part one and look forward to following this story as it unfolds. Verna
Posted by: Verna | March 08, 2010 at 04:03 PM