Liberation

I’m in a room, with a woman. Olga, our master of ceremonies, professor emeritus of co-ordinated contact, brings the evening’s itinerary to a close. “No rules now — do whatever.” Five feet in front of me, four wildly attractive people immediately start going at it. Somewhere inside, a trapdoor springs.

At the bar, I chat to a black American sex worker about her experience in the trade. She sighs over Berlin’s stream of tourists, white men with money who treat her like an exotic commodity. Here, at least, the perverts are nice to her. She’s angling, but sadness forks off her like cartoon B.O.

Breaking news, goes the ticker across the screen: “Loneliness is a problem unsolvable via addition.” I wonder about those Ferrante novels at home, still in the Dussmann bag.

Dating in Berlin means navigating a web of definitions and arrangements, especially on the apps, where everyone’s reduced to core attributes. The city is a botanist’s notebook of sprawling subspecies.

Online, most male complaints about dating are ones of supply and access. Berlin — populous, frisky, direct — solves these problems (at least for those of us in relative privilege), but presents new ones in their place. How can one mammal metabolise all this sherbert?

I’m in a room, with a woman. She’s paid by my insurance. Once a week, for fifty minutes, we strap on our scuba suits, dive into my subconscious, and search for clues. Here, fish sprout eyes out their arse. It’s easy; then for a long time it’s really not; then it kind of…