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with the ribbon?”
    “Showing my support for the troops.”
    “The American troops?”
    “Saved our asses once upon a time, didn’t they? My mother never stopped talking about the airlift.”
    When the Soviets cut off road access for nine months in 1948, the American Army delivered packages of food to the starving citizens of West Berlin in planes. Although in fact the planes had landed at Tempelhof airport, Walter had always imagined the food literally falling from the sky: candy into the mouths of children, people standing all over the city with their arms outstretched. He pictured himself waiting in the rubble along Ku’damm, looking up at the heavens. When his beer came, he drank half of it down in one gulp.
    “Heike left me.”
    Bodo nodded.
    “She came in last night and gave me these to give to you.” He reached over the bar and pulled out a ring of house keys. “Are you okay?”
    The keys were cold against the palm of Walter’s hand. Many questions presented themselves simultaneously. What did she say? Who was she with? How did she look? Where is she now? He asked none of them. Instead he pushed his empty beer glass toward the bartender, who refilled it and handed it to Bodo, who carried it over to a table out of earshot by the window. They both sat down.
    “I’m going to California,” he said with finality, as if he had already bought the tickets and packed his bags.
    “Going to California?”
    In heavily accented English, Bodo sang the title of the Led Zeppelin song, badly. Walter moved around the silver-ware set at his place. They were exactly the same age, old enough to remember playing air guitar to that song when it first came out.
    “When?”
    “Soon.”
    Walter sipped his second beer. A waiter came and he ordered a hamburger.
    “Because of Heike?”
    “Because a good opportunity just came up and anyway it’s time for a change.”
    He was hesitant to get into details because the rhythm of his friendship with Bodo had long been established: Bodo was the one with the big ideas and Walter was the listener. Bodo took action while Walter plodded predictably forward like a pilgrim toward what felt like an increasingly ephemeral destination. In the fifteen years they’d known each other, Bodo had achieved impressive notoriety as the voice of River Phoenix, gotten married, retired from dubbing on the heels of Phoenix’s dramatic death from a drug overdose, had two children and refused to come out of retirement when Anthony Edwards’s career took off in Germany with the TV show ER, graciously offering the part to a younger, less experienced actor who had since made a great deal of money doing voice-overs for a derivative, safety-oriented pharmaceutical campaign ( “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV” ). Throughout, he had maintained a successful restaurant in West Berlin despite the fact that everyone else had moved to Mitte. Walter, meanwhile, had been living in the same rental apartment he took over from a friend in the summer of 1985 when he returned from his first, failed stint in California. He had been doing Tom Cruise since early 1986, had had a series of unsuccessful relationships, gained fifteen kilos, lost his hair, kept his considerable earnings in a simple savings account that accrued a paltry floating interest rate of 1.5 to 3 percent a year and had eaten almost the same meal, at the same restaurant, almost every night since it opened. Over the years, Bodo had suggested endless possibilities to Walter: summerhouses on the Baltic Sea, new-economy investments, Pan-Asian restaurants and other explorations into the world of ethnic cuisine. Walter had never, on his own, offered up a plan like moving to another country, in particular the very country where they both knew he’d lost his way once.
    The confidence he had felt when he was alone with Tom Cruise at home on Replay was fading now like a daydream.
    “What kind of opportunity would take you, of all places, back to