Greg Baxter - Munich Airport

Miriam came to London once, while I was there. She didn’t tell me she was coming, but I got a message from her saying she was in the city but probably wouldn’t be able to meet. I didn’t write back, because I thought her message was pretty cruel — who would write to say they were in town, then add they had no time to see you? But two days later I got another message saying she was feeling very ill, and could I come to her hotel. This was when I was still trying to make my business a success, and doing the MBA at night.

I went across town to see her. It was raining. If she’d let me know in advance that she was coming, I could have set aside a little bit of time and taken her to some museums, lunch, dinner, anything. I spent a lot of time in London wondering about Miriam, and wishing to see her, and I was quite deflated by the idea that she could make a trip to London but not spare the time to see me. But now, because she hadn’t given me any warning, I was annoyed that I had to drop what I was doing and come take care of her. I was swamped. I was working to exhaustion, then studying, and I thought I could very easily have a nervous breakdown, if I bothered to stop and observe the pace I was at. But when I got there, I saw that she was really ill, she needed somebody to take care of her. I had to knock several times. She opened the door, but she did not say hello, she merely turned and crawled back into bed. The hotel was musty, cold, cheap, and it didn’t have a view. There was a window, but it opened right onto the wall of another building. The distance between the two buildings was the width of a rat. She crawled under her sheets and closed her eyes. I felt her forehead. She was really burning up. Is it bad? she asked. You need to see a doctor, I said. Don’t make me move just now, she said. I gave her some soluble acetaminophen. I sat beside her. Within about twenty minutes she was a little more alert. There was some color in her face again. Her eyes were a little brighter. You look good, I said, for somebody so sick. And it was true. She wore a healthy weight, she was probably twenty pounds heavier than she had been when she moved to Berlin, and I thought it suited her. Her hair was long. I checked my watch, it was ten in the morning.

Thanks for coming, she said.

We’re going to the doctor, I said.

Let me just rest a little longer.

What are you doing in London?

Oh, something really stupid, possibly a job, but it was all a fake, spent all my money getting here, I’m so stupid.

She glanced at my coat, a double-breasted gray mackintosh with large peaked lapel, and underneath it a gray suit, a sweater, and a tie, and she said, This is exactly how I imagine you dressed, you look so sophisticated.

She fell asleep for a while, and I was beside her in the bed, doing some work. Suddenly she started moaning and jerking around. She was trying to get the covers over her head, but she couldn’t, because I was sitting on them. She woke, but all she could say was, I’m cold, cold, cold. So I got under the covers and held her very tight. I started to sweat immediately, because she was so hot to touch. But she was shivering. Her teeth were chattering. I’m freezing, she said. I packed all her stuff into her suitcases. You’re getting out of this place, I said. I had to help her get dressed. I helped her put on some jeans, and a shirt over her undershirt. Her bag was heavy. She seemed to have packed a lot of stuff. She was also pretty heavy. I checked her out and paid for the hotel, got a taxi, went straight to my GP, got a prescription for some antibiotics — my GP checked the back of Miriam’s throat and she said, Oh yeah, that’s a bad one — and then we went to my place. She remained very sick the first night, and I let her sleep in my bed while I slept on the rug in my sitting room — my couch wasn’t quite long enough to stretch out on. Her temperature kept spiking at 106 degrees, and every time it spiked she would call for me, and I would give her some acetaminophen and lie beside her, hold her very close, try to keep her warm. Then as the acetaminophen took effect and her fever started to break, she would throw all the sheets off and toss around the bed, sweating, trying to find dry spots to sleep on. The next morning she was a lot better. She was fatigued, could hardly move, and was spaced-out, but her temperature was more stable. She stayed for just over a week. She did not eat, which, at the time, seemed like a normal reaction to such a bad infection. I got lots of takeout and rented lots of movies, which we watched on my computer. I took some time off work. It was probably the best week I’d ever had in London. And one of the reasons I have remained so fond of that apartment, and probably why I like spending so much time there, is because that apartment contains the memory of her visit. I had hoped to show her around, especially Columbia Road on Sunday, when the flower markets were out, but she didn’t have the energy for a walk. Then she decided to go home. I bought her a ticket. I took her to Gatwick and put her on a flight back to Berlin.

Four or five years after that, I sent her an e-mail asking if she’d meet me in Cologne. I was heading there for a marketing conference. She said she didn’t have time. So I telephoned. I’m going to be there for three days, why don’t you come. You can stay in my hotel room. We can go out, I’ll skip some talks, I can get tickets to the Philharmonic, I said. I can’t get away, I don’t have the time, she said. I said, I’ll skip all my talks, I won’t go to the conference, I’ll buy your train tickets. She said, I can’t, I’m sorry. I said, Just a day, come in the afternoon, have dinner with me, then get the red-eye home, I’ll get you first-class tickets so you can sleep. She said, No, I can’t. I was almost going to forget it, I was going to say, Okay, okay, you win, but then I became emotional, and I said something totally unexpected. I said, I’m lonely, Miriam, I am really lonely. When I made this call, I was somewhere in the city, I was traveling across the city to a client’s office, and what I was thinking was that four or five years had passed since I’d seen her last, and very little had changed — or rather, much had changed, but nothing had improved.

She came to Cologne for a day and a night. She arrived just before lunchtime. It was snowing. I got a taxi to the station. The conference had been going on for two days and it was a waste of time. The idea was to network, but I could only handle so much of it. The first night there’d been a late dinner, then drinks until it started to get light. The next day I was very tired, muscled through some early talks, had a big lunch, made it halfway through the afternoon, then went home to sleep. I was asleep at four-thirty, before dusk, so naturally I was up very early, still the middle of the night, and anxious to see Miriam. I went down to the lobby at four a.m., got my laptop out and did some work. Some people from the conference came in drunk. I had been among them the previous night, but the lobby was dark, and they didn’t recognize me. Then it was quiet again. At around seven I started to get tired, so I went up to my room and drank some instant coffee, watched BBC World News, and when I felt like I was definitely going to fall back asleep, I decided to leave the hotel. I arrived at the train station almost three hours before Miriam’s train was due to arrive. So I walked around in the snow for a while, along the Rhine. I watched the snow fall into the Rhine. Then I returned to the station. I met Miriam on the platform. I had a croissant and a coffee waiting for her — something I got at a nice bakery, not at the train station. She stepped off. I waved. She was in a black coat and wore black snow boots, and she had a little rolling suitcase. As she got closer, I saw that she was quite thin in the face. Closer still, I saw that she seemed to have aged a lot since the last time we met, not five years, more like twenty. Then I realized she was emaciated. The train was full — it was just around Carnival, which I hadn’t known when I booked the conference — so the platform was trampled by partygoers, many of them dressed in shiny, sequined outfits, or with feathers in their hats. And they had painted faces. They sang songs, and they smelled like beer. Miriam stopped right in front of me. The crowds went all around us, unperturbed. She put her hands on my face and said, My poor big brother. I embraced her for a long time. I thought I wasn’t going to be sad, but I found that I was sad. There, there, she said. And after I let go of her, we spoke no more of my loneliness. I offered her the croissant and the coffee. She took the coffee — which was black — but said I could have the croissant. We stepped into a taxi outside the station. We departed. I was really happy to see her, but I didn’t have a whole lot, suddenly, to say.