T
Chapter 1
he last time Lazlo Enyedi and I made this much physical contact with
each other, the Berlin Wall was falling.
Literally.
As the crowd energetically chiseled chunks of graffitied concrete off
the sections surrounding the wall’s checkpoints, Lazlo’s body pressed so
close to mine that his heat nearly melded us together.
That was, of course, over thirty years ago. But for someone who’s
been around as long as I have, three decades is little more than a shooting
star flitting across the night sky, and I remember that moment well. It was
history in the making. A watershed hour for the revolution. A shift in the
paradigm that led to portentous sea changes in the tides of civilization, and
drew people—people like me—from all over the world.
Although, to be truthful, I only went to Germany because I was
hungry.
Careful research had indicated that a very bad man was prowling
around Berlin, doing very bad things to innocent people. Since someone
needed to stop him, and since I hadn’t fed properly in a few weeks, I
decided to pay him a visit and kill two birds with one stone.
Except, it wasn’t fowl that I killed.
Afterward, I licked my chops, adjusted the shoulder pads of my blazer,
and took a stroll through the bustling droves of humans celebrating the
epoch-making night.
The thing about creatures of my ilk is, we’ve seen it all happen
already, over and over again. We understand that time is a flat circle. We
have witnessed civilizations rise, plateau, fall, then plateau again on their
way back up. Rationally, we know better than to get too invested in the
affairs of mortals. Still, there is something deliciously sustaining about the
energy that surges through a crowd during a landmark event. All that
transformative, life-changing power is like a current coursing through our
veins, and a luscious juxtaposition to the fixed immutability of our own
existence.
