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The Emcee drifted through the Kit Kat Club, with the same lax elegance he would afford to any other evening, as if the world had never quite interested him enough to offer it anything of his own.
Quite likely, it hadn't. It seemed that both nothing was ever of interest to him and he was constantly interested regardless in some strange yet calculated display of spite.
The exhaust fumes of cigarette smoke and cheap wine wafted over him, the perfume of the club that would never escape his skin even after a thousand baths- if, indeed, he did bathe, for there was always something almost unclean about him even when his hair was finally free of gel and grease.
Perhaps it was the bruises.
More likely it was the cigarette burns. Or the track marks.
They did all bleed together, didn't they? He was never too terribly sure of which.
Did it particularly matter?
His hand ran across his face, covered by makeup, and he wondered if he'd recognize himself without it; or, indeed, that his sallow skin had grown so taught across the hollows of his cheeks that he was more a tortured artist's maquette than man. There was an air of performance about him even when free from the bounds of the cabaret, something dance-like in his movements, something wicked in his eyes that made mothers herd their precious children away from him.
Of course, it was not as though this was any bother to him. He had never been one with even a dim association with normalcy and certainly never one to pretend he had such.
Normalcy was so terribly boring, as his dear friend Sally Bowles would say.
Or something along those lines. Her german was near-incomprehensible. He deferred to English at all costs.
But such things are put aside when you live in the slums and the sewer-holes of a city. Such things are entirely discarded when you begin to dream of being the Emcee at a cabaret. As if that position were equivalent to a chancellor, a doctor, a lawyer.
No, the dreams of most here were at a far smaller scale. He had known many who would have sold most of the working parts of their body just for a taste of a rich woman's perfume, as if the memory of the scent would keep them upright.
It seems when constantly confronted with choices only based on bodily survival, minds turn to the insignificant, the tawdry, the wanton.
But one must never deride one's companions so. After all, he was very much the same. It never does much for one to be pretentious beyond reason.
He lit up a cigarette as if in an effort to add to the already permanent cloud of smoke in the air; focused on the flame of the lighter as if it were the most important thing in the world. The back hallway was dripping in the familiar noise of preparation- the screaming of the orchestra, the scent of a thousand different powders and lipsticks, the everlasting conversation from dressing room to dressing room about the same topics as the night before and the night before that. His fingers ran through his hair and came back greasy with gel, the slime of the club sticking to him even now.
Once he had had a smoking jacket and had only smoked in that as not to ruin his clothes. But that was before and this was now, and now he smoked bare-chested so that the scent might finally sink into his skin and mark him for its own.
He wondered, occasionally, what his past self would think of him, the one before the darkness of the world took over, before he knew even of the concept of going to bed with a new person every night, before his eyes had grown dark and dingy from smoke and his arms brown-green with bruises.
He also wondered, when he had had enough to drink, if he would recognize his past self at all.
After all, there had never been that much of him in the world to begin with.
Perhaps it had all dripped away already. Absorbed into the ground like a leak from the ceiling. Dusted off and thrown into the alley like a thousand other pieces of garbage. Entanglements severed. Telegraph wires to a station snapped and the scissors lying on the ground, rusty and rotten and brown-green, green-brown.
No, he thought... he would not recognize himself.
The boy, the fool, the one who had not known what he was getting into. There was none of him.
In his place were splatters of worthless makeup and new lean muscles and a propensity for dance and a thousand other new skills that he regretfully knew the names of. The feather-light tap-tap of fingers on piano had long since been replaced by the clicking of heels on hardwood.
What he had once been was long-dead and he reveled in it, the soft little creature who could not conceptualize his future self, whose face grew to be more bone than skin and distorted by brush after brush after brush of eyeliner- the black marks that rubbed themselves off onto his pillowcase every night and yet reappeared like magic in the morning, sharp and harsh like the flick of a penknife.
There was black on his pillowcase and black in his hair and black forced onto every day, long periods of blankness between performance and performance, the abyss between his delve back into a reality, his reality, the fabrication he pretended resembled anything of the world outside. In here, life is beautiful!- those words flung themselves from his mouth every night like dead birds, landing in the audience's open, gaping jaws. Lose himself, lose himself, in the high of performance and the blissful period after where he truly thought of nothing, cigarette burning bright as a comet, makeup running down combined with sweat, saltwater and ocean blue, bright eyes and hands on his body and the smell of kerosene and lead pipes, an old building, every building- all of the town in one and him in all of the town, the entire city of Berlin his body, his mind. He was one with it, one with it all, one with the rich men who could pay for a thousand drinks and never feel a sting in their wallet, one with the poor girls who sold themselves for rent, one with the brick and the pavers and one with the water and the fountains and the fruit-shops and boarding houses, the city and the museums and the cabaret all in one, classical painting and graffiti on the street.
His face was white and his eyelids were blue and his mouth was red and his arms dripped with brightness, green-brown, brown-green, the color of holiness and good, the color of his world and his god and himself, the world he governed and yet was subject to at every turn, the world that forced him down into its bowels and threw him back up again until he hit the wall of glorious, glorious blackness, of unthinking and unfeeling and the burning of a cigarette and nothingness until he was thrust back into the world that he hated and the world that was killing him bit by bit.
It was beautiful and it was wonderful and it was him and it was everything he hated about himself and loved about himself at the same time.
His hand ran across his face and came back stained with makeup.
He was the city and the city was him and the city was art and he was the painter, made of canvas and wood and smoke and oil-
There was nothing left of the man he had been because there was no man, not anymore- there was stone and machinery and art, art that made his stomach turn in excitement and disgust at the same time, a painting examined by a thousand eyes every night, beauty and cruelty, something that hurt to look at and yet captured the thought of hundreds, thousands, millions-
He took a long drag of his cigarette and he was brought, dizzyingly, back to the damned hallway, ash landing on his black boot like dust from a mortar.
His hand ran across his face and cut through makeup.
He felt skin on skin and flesh on flesh and was once again a creature of bone.
He longed for the blackness. But the lights of the club flashed and the music played and like a puppet he was dragged forth.
"In here, life is beautiful!"
His voice rang out like a pipe organ.
All he heard was the hum of a telegraph wire, cut short.