Love often reminds me of blood, Dr. Seligman. Don’t you think they are quite similar? Blood is only beautiful and full of symbols as long as it stays in its place, but once we see it smeared across someone’s face or dried on a towel, we are put off, because our mind immediately fills in the gaps with violence and a lack of control. Love, like blood, needs to be a story we can tell. If it breaks free from the picture frames and veins we have forced it into, it causes hysteria, and brutal attempts are made to put it back where it belongs, to contain what is contagious; for, like love, blood gives life, but it is also home to all the things that can kill us, all that we are afraid of, all the diseases that Dracula instilled in his rats. There is a hygiene of love, don’t you agree? Just like I cannot go smearing my blood around, like they have invented endless products to make sure women don’t lose their dirty blood in public, I also cannot go around and just love where I see fit. The blood we see on the pavement could be anyone’s; it’s not immediately clear whether we are dealing with a person or an animal, and we don’t even know how it got there, whether there is a culprit or whether they turned against themselves because they just couldn’t handle it anymore. Whether they used a weapon or simply their teeth. Blood on the pavement signals unrest, just like love outside the frame, a reminder of all the pain that is inevitably coming our way. And don’t get me wrong—I am not saying that I should be allowed to let loose in a playground, but we have such a clear idea of what a love story is that if you go and try to find a different way to use your heart, they will say that you too have sick rats in your basement and that you drank their blood when they least expected it. But it’s their own fault, Dr. Seligman; if they had not tried to fit my body into one of their picture frames, to make me smile whilst nothing around me was true, I would never have tried to be like them, and K and I would not have needed all those other colours to paint another universe onto each other’s bodies.
K could cry like a child. He would sob and rub his eyes, and his bottom lip would protrude in defiance against the overall injustice of his fate. I don’t know if he had taught his children to do the same, or if he had learned it from them, but afterwards he once told me that in those moments he actually felt like a child, like his body was little again, unable to escape the violence of others, the inevitable weakness of his own limbs, the force that forever outweighed his own efforts. The nausea you feel when your nose gets hit and you think you can smell your own blood. And so, he had found a way out of his body, and even if it was painful, he knew that our flesh holds many lies, that we should never trust the stories we find written on our skin. I think that’s why we had to find each other. The first time he cried, Dr. Seligman, I just watched him as you would a wild animal that has suddenly chosen to show itself and not run away, and as with an animal, initially I didn’t move, offered nothing as cheap as comfort, but simply watched as he returned to his former self. Shedding those big tears that rarely spring from an adult’s eyes, those tears that still believe in adventures and shelter. Those tears that think that fairy tales are true, that sleep tight in the knowledge that the darkness outside their windows isn’t real, that it’s just a part of their parents’ imagination. And afterwards his eyes were so clean. I have no better way of putting this, Dr. Seligman, but they were never red; instead they looked fresh. As if creation had only just happened, as if he had just unseen the world and the colours were suddenly all new to him. As if we could fall asleep every night knowing that our dreams would make us fly.
But I don’t want to bore you with my broken heart and the whole story about K, Dr. Seligman. It seems like such a cliché to fall for an artist, and you must hear so many strange stories in your profession, all those bodies that need change, and who knows, you might not even approve of the fact that I have been with a married man. And also, Jason told me that I should try to be less focused on myself and that being interested in others might help me overcome some of my issues. But I find that really hard; most people are so dull, don’t you think? I wish I could see the other frames on your desk from here—seven, I think? I am sure they contain pictures of your children and maybe even your grandchildren. I imagine that you got married when you were quite young and that your children followed your good example and always iron their clothes, and that you have regular family gatherings where you are all very loving and happy. Where even the occasional tragedy is part of the narrative. Would you forgive me if I was your child, Dr. Seligman? Your ugly German daughter, fallen out of your wife’s precious womb like a rotten apple. I often think of my father when I do something wrong, and it always makes me so sad, because I know that he would never forgive any of it. And it’s not that I have never contemplated pregnancy—it’s the obvious thing to contemplate for someone my age, and I cannot turn on my computer without being bombarded with ads for pregnancy tests and nappies, images of all the happiness I am missing out on. And so I bought a “Baby on Board” badge to travel on the underground with; they were selling them in the market near work, and I thought, why not? We lie about so many things, why not about what goes on in our uterus? And already as I bought my little badge there was that smile, you know? The kind of smile you only get when someone thinks your life is complete and meaningful, when everyone can see that you had sex for a reason and your body is finally no longer yours. I loved that smile, and for a while I became quite obsessed with wearing my badge and the power it suddenly seemed to grant me. I could ask people to bring me things for no other reason than because I was, as we would say in German, carrying another life under my heart. Unterm herzen. I don’t pretend that I understood this sudden generosity, Dr. Seligman, when we all well knew that there was no reason to believe that this new life under my heart would turn out to be any less banal than that of everyone else. Yet still it’s a holy moment, a moment as blue and beautiful as the Virgin Mary’s gown, a moment when you finally become what you are. And I revelled in my holiness. I even made myself untouchable with dignity when I started to turn one of my rings around to make it look plain enough to be a wedding ring, plain enough to have a husband in a suit waiting for me at home. It was almost like finding a religion, like I was finally in a position to despise others.
Yet the badge also brought its limitations, and I stopped wearing it when I realised that it gave every last prick permission to stick a moral finger up my ass and drown me in a concern for the unborn, which they very rarely exhibited for anyone outside a womb. Even I know that nobody likes mothers. And even the concern for the unborn is a lie, Dr. Seligman. I mean, did you know that in all these years they never thought of inventing a seat belt for pregnant women, and that countless unborn children have been strangled by those unrelenting black things? I still remember them cutting into my neck when I was not sitting properly as a child and my mother telling me to straighten my back. It’s the kind of unassuming material that will kill you in an instant, and it terrifies me, just like fishing rods and tights. There is no way they would break before you are strangled, and whilst there is maybe something sexy about playing with tights, it seems unacceptable to die from one of these other objects, to be strangled by one of life’s many banalities. I cannot afford a car anyway, so I would be fine, but it still upsets me even now how everything, even time, is designed around the so-called male body, the body with a cock, putting half the population at risk of dying from objects of everyday use. And I am sure it applies to everything from toothbrushes to elevators, hot water bottles, pianos, and toilet seats. It could of course be that men are in need of all this extra assistance—you can’t even have sex with them without their having an erection—but still I wonder, even though it doesn’t really concern me anymore, don’t you find it upsetting? Or is it not something you ever think about? I have often tried to understand the void at the other end of the outcry, why it is that men like you were happy to keep your better halves in a cage for so long? A cage measured to fit your own proportions, of course; it was always a tiger in a lion’s cage with people saying there was hardly
any difference between the two. And yet they all agreed that it would be unacceptable for the lion and his understanding of himself to be put in a tiger’s cage. There’s something inherently ridiculous about the tiger’s cage, just like you might say that I would look quite dashing in your suit, Dr. Seligman, and people would think you had lost your marbles if you showed up in one of my old dresses or skirts. It would be the end of your masculinity—your life as a man—you would be a lion without a mane, weak and humiliated, and I never quite know whether this inspires my anger or my pity.
Have I told you that I like your small hands, Dr. Seligman? I know that a lot of women would not agree, but I think they are wonderfully soft and perfectly suited for your job. They almost feel like little kittens, warm right from the start; your wife must be so happy. And I don’t see why everything about men always needs to be so oversized, why so many women feel the need to feel small. I think that’s one of the reasons why, once my peachy years were over and the creepy uncles had moved on, men never took much interest in me; some parts of my body never seemed to belong to a woman, just look at my hands, I am sure they are bigger than yours, not to mention my feet, which have been a men’s size ever since I hit puberty. Don’t you think it’s stupid to think about everything in that way when clearly it isn’t true? For years, my feet alone made me feel like an ogre, not to speak of whole other industries of products designed for either men or women, of colours and smells associated with people with and without cocks. I could never understand why this had to be our primary way of looking at people, why we needed a system, down to public toilets, that separated the two. Personally, I have long started to use men’s toilets, not just since I started dressing like one, partly because there are no queues, and partly to see what it feels like. In many ways it could be said that public toilets have taught me more about myself than most other places. Thinking of them as important spaces in our everyday lives, Dr. Seligman, it was there that I first felt excluded. It was there that I never shared secrets with my best friend, never reapplied my makeup, and never wrote the name of my sweetheart on a greasy wall. It was there that I felt for the first time that I didn’t belong to a space made up exclusively of women and that I would never be able to share those moments of ecstasy, intimacy, and grief that seemed to bind them together in front of those tarnished mirrors. And it’s not that I had no friends but the fact that I had to use these spaces because of the shape my body had turned out to be, just felt wrong, and so, once I had learned to think for myself, I started going to the men’s toilets instead. And most importantly, Dr. Seligman, that’s how I met K.
You want to know how I met someone in a public toilet? I wouldn’t usually volunteer this information, but since you are asking, Dr. Seligman. Most men feel threatened when you come to check out their cocks in such a blunt manner, when you invade one of their last sanctuaries with open eyes, but not K. I could tell right from the start that he was up for a challenge, and that all that happened afterwards was already defined in this moment. Please don’t think that I used to go to the men’s toilets looking for random sex, Dr. Seligman—that’s not what it was with K, it’s just the way we met, nothing more. And nothing less. I stood behind him, when our eyes met in the mirror and I immediately forgot that there was anyone else with us in that dismal restroom at the back of a pub. Just like I forgot that I had come there to pee; it was suddenly gone, my whole body and all the obligations that came with it were suddenly gone, and all that I could see was K’s cock. And he understood, and then—this gesture still moves me, Dr. Seligman—he waited until all the other men had left and washed himself in one of those tiny sinks with separate taps for hot and cold. That’s when I knew that I could trust him, that it was safe to disappear into one of those little cubicles with him. Maybe that is what I had been looking for in those toilets after all; maybe K was simply the first to understand that all I wanted was to suck off a complete stranger and leave it all behind. The first who could read my silent gaze. I guess it doesn’t matter now, but it was the first time in my life that I was ready to offer devotion, and I wanted nothing else from him; I didn’t want him to try and satisfy me. I just wanted to be there, squatting with my back against the wall and him holding my head firmly whilst he was fucking me in my mouth. I was content with his hands in my hair and my tongue licking the underside of his cock as he was gliding in and out. And when he offered to finger me afterwards, I declined, almost embarrassed that this was even a possibility. And yet I had never felt so satisfied before. You probably know more about this than I do, Dr. Seligman, but don’t you think we are misled by our desire for orgasms?
I thought of my father whilst we did it. It’s almost the reverse of watching your parents have sex, imagining how they could see you giving rough oral sex to a stranger in a dirty public toilet. I didn’t do it because it turned me on, Dr. Seligman; I like the idea of others watching, but not like that, and I have not reached the point yet where I find satisfaction in letting my father down. I reached that point years ago with my mother, but with a mother it makes hardly any difference. It’s not like you will ever be free from her love, from that animal-like affection that would follow its children to the darkest of dens, the kind of love that finds excuses for Marc Dutroux and Harold Shipman. It’s like the slime my mother covered me in before forcing me into this world, and the idea that I was once part of her flesh still fills me with dread. Her love was always too much, too embarrassing, too indiscreet. A father’s love can’t be compared to that; there is an element of choice in it—it’s something you can win and, of course, something that you can lose. Gaining our father’s love is, in many ways, our first achievement, have you ever observed how flirtatious babies are? They must know that nobody will respect them for their mother’s love alone, and that everybody finds it so much more moving when we manage to conquer a reluctant heart. And just look at all the bad press single mothers get here in Britain and elsewhere; without your father’s love, your chances of becoming a success are rather slim. We depend on it. I have no idea what it’s like from the parental perspective and probably never will, but are you actually interested in your children beyond those seven frames, Dr. Seligman? Do you feel special for not walking out on them when they were little? Because we all know that you could have, and it would have been fine. Only women can’t seem to get over the umbilical cord, have you noticed how when women leave their children to fulfil their dreams of money, younger men, and a happy vagina, they become monsters? How in our imagination they have all been seduced by the devil and have turned into immoral vessels of sodomy and lust? I sometimes think some women, once they realise what it means to be seen as a mother, they find a way to strangle their unborn children in the womb using the same umbilical cord that would otherwise have chained them to a life of self-annihilation and their mother-in-law’s disgusting selection of homemade chutneys. And yet I never felt compassion. I never pitied my mother; if anything, I was angry that she had chosen to bring me into this world instead of doing away with me before anyone could notice. For not choosing to be free.
Did you talk very openly to your father, Dr. Seligman? I never told mine anything, because I always thought that silence was better than an open disappointment, than telling him a story he would never be able to understand. It’s not like we spoke much anyway; my father was epileptic and mostly sedated from his medication and I don’t think he had spoken much to his own father either. It wasn’t something my father would have learned at home, where they all inherited my great-grandfather’s silence. And so, I always feared that telling him what was really going on would bring about one of those terrible seizures. That he would die from choking on his own vomit just because I didn’t understand how to be a girl. And yet it all started with him lying in bed on Sunday mornings, trying to recover from his life as a sales rep for washing machines. It’s not a joke—that job really existed back then, and once a year he even got to go to the annual conference on the development of washing machines that took pl
ace in Nuremberg. The sinister irony of that only became apparent to me much later, Dr. Seligman, but really, which other city would be desperate enough to host such an event? Where else would they have wet dreams about clean laundry, endless washing lines with freshly laundered shirts floating in the summer air—we even had a TV advert propagating that stupid image. Anything to make people forget about the other annual event that used to take place there and the famous laws named after the city separating people into human and subhuman categories, deciding by means of the most dilettantish little pie charts who deserved to live and who didn’t, who had fucked the wrong way and who hadn’t. And the best thing they could think of, apart from the annual conference on the development of washing machines, was to put on that ghastly Christmas market, which is nothing but a facade to cover up their lack of grief. It’s their way of pretending that this is all that ever happened there, that since medieval times they have always just been selling overpriced wooden crap and that all they ever used their ovens for was to make lebkuchen—you know, that famous German gingerbread. It’s so typical, this inability to acknowledge that they have lost far more than their architecture makes me so angry, Dr. Seligman, and to think that now they are also hosting these Christmas markets here in London makes me feel sick to the core. Why won’t they just leave people alone?
The Appointment Page 3
