The next morning Vic and I went for breakfast in a little German bakery that sold giant rectangular cakes the size of bricks. We walked to Moritzplatz and up the road past the infamous club Kitkat; I pondered aloud to Vic how, if one could invent some sort of gadget that detected historic orgasms per square metre, the machine would hit the roof when you passed the area. Further down the road we arrived at the giant industrial building that houses Tresor, Ohm (where I watched Annie play a set back in the day) and Kraftwerk – a gargantuan events space inside the gutted husk of a power station.

I first went to the space years ago with Dave; some photography exhibit where they gave us fancy cameras at the door and turned us loose inside; they let us keep the SD cards at the end. I tried to take my dad the next week when he visited me in the city – booked us tickets – but my grandad came with him as a surprise which, while absolutely bonkers and wonderful, meant we were shy a ticket and couldn’t get in, and were turned away at the door.

“‘Ere lads, a wouldnae bother queuing,” my 80-year-old Geordie grandfather said, as we walked back past the snaking line of hipsters outside. “We’ve just been in. Shite!”

Vic and I met Bruna outside. We stood under white blossom trees in the sunshine and commented on how nice the day was, and how good it felt to have spring underway. Then we pulled open the heavy iron door to Kraftwerk and disappeared inside the blackness.

The exhibition, named something like ‘Inside a Dying Star’, began eerily, as they all do in Berlin. In the cavernous dank space of concrete slabs and pillars shooting up to vanish in the gloomy canopy, a slow digital drip cut through the dark, static crackles interspersed with words, breathy and low and diced up beyond comprehension, emphasising the wretched visceral pops and flicks of spittle in mouth. A whisper from a hidden speaker ruffled past me in the dark, making my ear twitch: ‘We are the dust of stars’.

It made me smile. How long since I’d been in such a dungeon? How long since I’d felt my pulse quicken at the sight of a macabre bundle of matter dangled from a string in a spotlight, set to a backing track of ambient hell-sounds? I watched a strange organic bio-satellite rotating gently in the dark, feathers and reeds twitching from an unseen breeze as the structure was hauled skyward by a motor hidden in the black. The theme of the exhibition was the quantum world – states that are at once there and not there, things and unthings, existing in the spaces between (relatable).

We made our way up a solid concrete stair lit by two parallel strips of blue light, pausing to raise eyebrows at each other halfway as we registered the unnerving bass of slow, gigantic breathing sounds coming from the vast gloomy chamber before us. At the top the chamber swept open around us, rushing off in all directions to the distant haze of blackness, warm wet air filled with the fizzing vibrations of breath, and floating in the heart of it, expanding slowly with booming inhalations, was a colossal glowing octopus-like creature. Suspended from the ceiling with purple-black tentacles unfurling across the chamber, fondling blindly for recesses to explore, it moved rhythmically, disappearing between pillars – with the largest tentacle reaching directly towards us, held aloft above the stairwell, billowing with a slow and terrible grace as though held in underwater stasis.

“Fuck!” I said, taking a photograph.

We explored the great cavern, taking photos and looking at the monster from different angles, listening to its breathing and the strange digitised whispers that echoed in dark corners like schizophrenic voices. I found a basin with a beam of burning hot light, standing alone in a corner, and watched as two feathers danced in the physics of it. Beneath the octopus’s body in the middle of the chamber we found many people: lying on their backs on cushions, unmoving. We stepped inside a thin ring of curtains dangling like entrails and joined them. The whole underbelly of the octopus was a giant circular screen, and the three of us lay back and watched strange shapes and birds and twisting imagery interspersed with humming and giggles and motherly laughter.

We lay there a long time, waiting politely for the movie to loop before moving on. Growing restless after several minutes, as always, I glanced up and watched a white-haired old man approach the circle. He stood watching the strange people lying down, staring up at the wall of light, unreactive and transfixed. I felt sorry for him a moment; I thought of my own grandparents, and of how much the world has changed from when they were young children straddling the arms of sofas pretending to be cowboys atop stallions, and how fucking mental it must look that only a few decades later to be entertained we have to go and sit in the dark beneath a massive glowing octopus purring to us about insubstantial particles. I felt embarrassed; how strange and foolish we must look to him – how lost, warped beyond all familiarity. Then the old man nodded to himself, took his shoes off, and stepped over the recumbent bodies to lie down beside us. I had been wrong: he wasn’t freaked out at all; he wasn’t standing there bewildered and appalled and thinking of all that’d been lost in his lifetime. He just wanted to find a good place to lie down and join in.

*****

After the exhibit we stepped back outside and all yelped as one as the sunlight blinded us and the sounds of the street swept back in like a wave. We walked to Cafe Luzia, a favourite spot back in the day (lo-fi paint-peeling brasserie meets cowboy saloon), and drank a beer, then it was time for me to run away again: off to meet Karelle, a student of mine from La Reunion now living in Berlin, ex-fashion designer and one–time female chess champion of the whole of France. I passed my old barber on the way and saw that the prices had gone up, and a building had been erected to cover the courtyard I used to gather with my work friends for our Friday parties.

I checked my phone to see I had text from Ben; we were supposed to be meeting in a few hours with Vic to see a circus show (he lives with acrobats). The text said:

See you later mate! I’m spangled 🙂

This was not ideal: it implied he had not slept since he went out the night before. I put my phone away and hoped he managed to get a couple of hours sleep before the show.

I met Karelle at a cinema cafe called Wolf. It’s always funny meeting people in real life when you’ve taught them for a long time through a screen. You can’t help but be a little bashful. She had the two forefingers of her left taped together; she’d slammed a door on them two days previously and broken them, and was yet to have them set by a doctor.

We bought cake and drinks and sat on wooden chairs surrounded by film posters and talked about our lives. Karelle had recently got back from a French town where she’d been invited as a ‘master of chess’. She’d met the mayor, been interviewed by the press, and had played against a variety of opponents in a tournament as a celebrity guest.

“I leave Berlin and I’m a rock star,” she said, laughing. “I come back here and nobody knows who I am. I work in a hotel.”

It was a notion I was familiar with: on the road with a dusty backpack, I always felt like somebody, a bold piratical figure clinging to the side of an overcrowded train jangling through desert or jungle, able to make a friend of anyone, to help people follow their passions, to keep a level head when all hell broke loose and offer levity and comfort to the nigh-inconsolable. But when I get home after a year of this and walk into my mum’s house, I’m just Dan who writes stories on the internet and cooks pasta badly and doesn’t know how credit ratings work.

“Would you ever move back to France?” I asked.

“No. I like it more here.”

“I’ve been thinking of moving back here, actually.”

“Really? Why?”

“London is just… it’s a lonely city.”

“Berlin is a lonely city too, no?”

I paused eating my cake and looked at her.

“It is?”

“Of course. It’s hard to meet people here. But London is very nice, no? My friend moved there and he told me it’s easy to meet people, and everyone is so friendly and kind and open. Sometimes I dream about moving there.”

I didn’t want to contradict her – to muddy this vision with my own hangups and biases and jadedness. There was something too hopeful in her voice.

“Yeah…. yeah. People in the UK certainly can be very friendly. And for international people in London there’s a big community. If you have enough money to live it can be a lot of fun.”

We talked for two hours about everything in our lives and our careers, and as the sun was setting Karelle walked me to the S Bahn and we hugged goodbye. Flitting away above the city my thoughts kept returning to the tragicomic scene: two people from two cities, frustrated in the mediocre tangle of their lives, convinced the answer to everything lies within the very place the other is trying to escape. It was oddly comforting. I never belonged to any clique before, but maybe this is mine: the perpetually dissatisfied idealists. Probably not as fun as being a rave kid or a MILF or a leather harness goth or whatever – but something.

*****

I met Vic somewhere in Prenzlauer Berg at 7pm, the sun now set and the temperature dropping rapidly. My phone rang; it was Ben.

“Alright mate,” I heard him yell over whipping winds. “I woke up literally three minutes ago and I’m cycling to you now, I should be there in ten minutes man!”

Vic and I sat in the theatre and Ben arrived several seconds before the performance began; he’d been on a date the previous evening that had escalated into a club night and somehow culminated in an intense afterparty with a group of Russian men. Ben sat down heavily, smelling of clubs and outside, and took his cap off to reveal a shaved head. Last time I saw him he had shoulder length hair.

“Where’d your hair go?” I asked.

“I noticed it thinning at the back so I just thought fuck it, time to get rid. It’s gotta be done.”

He said it as simply as that: as though shaving off one’s major defining physical characteristic was no more of a decision than switching from full-fat to light mayo. The stoicism and non-vanity of it stunned me; I’ve been wrestling desperately with my own slow but steady follicular exodus for the last 12 years.

The show for the evening was a one-man show by a friend of Ben’s – we’ll call him Jay – a professional acrobat with a sparkling academic background in science. It was an endearingly ramshackle show, void necessarily of the slick production I’d grown used to in London’s West End. Props toppled over, acrobatic maneuvres veered dangerously close to awry, lighting and sound were not quite in sync – but it was entertaining and interesting. Between all the twirling and flipping and contorting, the recurring theme of the show, unmentioned on the flyers and posters I’d been seeing all over the city since arriving, was the environment – the science behind our destruction of it, and what we can do to help it. It made some of the older audience members – who had presumably booked tickets believing they would be watching a leotarded man soar through the air in silence – bristled towards the end, as things took a more serious turn and the always-hard-to-swallow message of ‘we are not doing nearly enough’ echoed through the hall. But there was a standing ovation in the end; only a few of the older, surlier German couples remained seated.

*****

After the show we met Jay, the star, outside, and went with him and Ben to a bar for drinks (Ben doesn’t drink alcohol these days – good for him – he had a 0%). Vic got tired and left soon after, and I tried to talk to Jay a bit but I couldn’t find any way to relate to him – me, an oft-exhausted single childless writer who isn’t sure about anything ever, and he, a totally-wired eccentric acrobatic and father who spoke with certainty about everything. He was certainly mad – and hoooo, do I ever harp on about finding the mad ones – but he wasn’t the very specific right kind of mad that makes me tumble into instant friend-love with people; he wasn’t Annie mad, or Seth mad. Not silly – not goofy. But then I suppose he had just finished 60 minutes of intense, fuck-it-up-and-you-will-die-awfully aerial acrobatics to an audience of a thousand sceptics while reeling through a heart-learned script about the man-induced destruction of the planet, so — he probably wasn’t in the tomfooleryest of moods.

I got back to the hotel in the early hours of the morning, having consumed a kebab the size of my entire torso on the way home – just for old time’s sake.