‘No – he’s just a kid,’ I answer.
We eat fish fingers. Aeneas is sitting on a shelf in his knight’s outfit, waiting for something or other.
‘What are you doing up there?’ I ask.
No answer.
‘Aeneas, where are you?’
‘On a train.’
‘And where are you going?’
‘To Barcelona. To fight.’
‘Oh Annika, you’re the only person I know who can wear everything!’
‘Thanks, that’s really—’
‘Seriously, you can wear absolutely anything.’
‘Oh no, I’m just really careful about what I buy. That’s probably why it looks like I can wear anything.’
‘Yeah, you can wear just anything.’
‘Annika is what you’d call a cross between Germany’s sex-shop pioneer and former stunt pilot Beate Uhse, Germaine Greer and Mother Teresa. She’s worked her way up to a position where people now look up to her, she looks a million dollars and she adores Argentinian beef. The thing is, searching for some ancient traumatic odysseys through the Berlin underground scene clad in neon T-shirts is pretty much out, in her book. Aeneas’s father has come round as well. He’s sitting slap bang across from me, out of his depth without the slightest idea of how to maintain a semblance of family life for the sake of this socially disturbed child. It’s a family life that was shipwrecked on the rocks of his lack of intelligence and his ex-wife’s effusive emancipation ambitions. She’s just talking about how her new lover bought a set of glass carafes for four hundred euros on eBay.
They used to take baths at our place in the dim and distant past, when they had the builders in. We could always hear them through the crack of the door, arguing in a pseudo overwrought way about feminism and the feminist alliance with patriarchal society and female sexuality restructured by men through the whole pornography thing until it’s not sexuality at all. And how the womb is only a product of discourse and all that. And it was great because neither of them could get out of the bath to get a bit of distance on the subject – they didn’t want to walk around naked in our flat.
Terrible lives are the best stroke of luck.
When he notices me noticing him he gives a sudden croak: ‘Hey, Mifti, were you also at Luther’s store on Schönhauser today? They had some dumb sit-down rave.’
‘Oh, yeah. No, what makes you think that? Edmond was there on his own. I don’t even know what you mean by a sit-down rave.’
‘What?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Must be the time zones. You look like you’ve got mini jet lag, and all the writing on the cigarettes is in English.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The cigarettes, where did you get them?’
‘Edmond just brought them home.’
‘Oh right, cool. I didn’t smoke when I was your age. I was still learning to tie knots in balloons.’
‘When I was your age . . . ha ha ha.’
‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’
It makes me want to puke, all that adult blustering and filibustering, all that talk about how little Aeneas pointed at someone at the next table in a restaurant and now his dumb mother had to go and say that stupid German saying beloved of all grown-ups, ‘Aeneas, we don’t point naked fingers at people with clothes on!’ And Aeneas went and poked his finger in a potato and carried on pointing it and the potato at the woman regardless. Zero punchline, but still, ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’
Annika’s mobile rings. Frau Pegler has informed my father that I haven’t been to school for the past six weeks. I don’t give a fuck, really I don’t.
‘You’re not the victim, you’re the sole perpetrator.’
‘Excuse me, but your thing’s burning!’
‘School qualifications? What do I need them for? I’ve got a bike and I can keep myself entertained just as well with French films where all the protagonists stuff some kind of crap into themselves out of handmade clay pots while cheating on their wives.’
20:13. Text message from Father in Tel Aviv: ‘What R U going to do now?’
20:29. Promising text message to Father in Tel Aviv: ‘Return to petty criminality no longer an option.’
20:33. ‘Y don’t you call?’
20:34. Text to Ophelia in her androgynous phase: ‘Know what, I want to shower you with love right now. Everything. Anytime.’
Foreword
I grew up wild and I want to stay wild. It’s 3 a.m. and my partied-out body is sitting in a taxi, submerged to death in its role as a victim. The driver’s telling me about his son, who’s left his wife after ten years, and about his own wife, who’s cheating on him, and about God, with whom he claims to have a pretty good connection. That’s why he’s willing to forgive homos, because it’s like not their fault they’re that way. I’m running a fever, coordination problems, a BAC of 0.1 per cent and I’ve gone and agreed to go to a place of absolute opportunistic inhibition all over again. It’s all about my respect-worthiness, about steel and concrete, about a huge glazed façade that can be closed up using mobile shutters, about my fear of death, it’s about the explosion of perception and perhaps also a little bit about an organized form of aural events.
My wildness is a characteristic idiosyncrasy. I can either do what I want and satisfy my characteristics or just not.
Doing what I want is dangerous because it really makes me vulnerable. Not doing it is not an option.
That’s why I lie to you. I say, it’s primarily a matter of principle right now.
* * *
I’m sixteen years old and presently capable of nothing but wanting to establish myself – despite colossal exhaustion – in contexts that have nothing to do with the society in which I go to school and suffer from depression. I’m in Berlin.
It’s all about my delusions.
I can’t believe I’m exposing myself to all this crap all over again, on cognac-coloured four-inch heels. An industrial wasteland, of course; from far off you can see a former power plant in which the plan is to forget myself in half an hour at the most. I negotiate a path fenced in with neon tubes, generally regarded as the most awesome path in the world, which has never interested me, for some unfathomable reason. I find my dissociative identity disorder more interesting than anything this city constantly spews in my face. Facing a ten-foot security chief called Syd, I pretend to be on the guest list of a barman who spends his daylight hours attempting to represent the confusing prospects of our urban world by means of contemporary charcoal sketches. I circumnavigate a mile-long queue of overstyled 23-year-olds from stable family backgrounds, in whose eyes I’m not a human being but merely underdressed and fickle. Oral incontinence. They’re chucking shit in my face. I’m a motherfucking immoral cunt and I need to get a handle on my life.
The big question of the night: ‘Hey, what’s goin’ down here?’
The big answer of the night: ‘Hey, nuttin’s goin’ down.’
The big outcome of the night: ‘Wicked, no queue, taxi’s waiting back there, World Health Organization definitions everywhere you look, Jesus.’
From where I stand in front of the DJ console, on the left behind a big glass wall is a long bar, and there’s various seating options; on the right behind the dance floor is one of the unmissable darkrooms. As far as the eye can see, these pseudo-ravished individuals in their mid-twenties are trying to dance their souls out of their bodies. I’m sitting on leather upholstery, unimpressed by some absurd music style, being asked the most important question of the night after only ten minutes of unspectacular exuberance crap. Sixty-foot ceilings, two thousand five hundred people and HIV-positive Ophelia, who I’ve arranged to meet at the entrance. She looks gorgeous and anorexic in equal parts, wearing a half-open bomber jacket with nothing underneath, teamed with black leggings and satin Lanvin sandals with mirrored heels, and I talk undiluted crap the minute I see her.
‘Everything’s fine as long as some simple silhouette is transformed into an absolut
e must-have this season, huh, honey? Classic elegance.’
‘I’d step into any breach for you anytime, Mifti.’
‘And the ruffled fall of a silk curtain conceals most of your body.’
‘I really want to have a good time.’
‘But it’s just too hot in here.’
So then at some point she asks with a gesture towards the ladies, ‘See that guy over there?’
It’s the guy whose presence has prevented me from running past him nonchalantly to the cigarette machine. Just for a change, he doesn’t awaken any sexual yearning – only a bit of an emotional affection attack because he’s so cute, because he’s toned and he looks so totally washed, in contrast to all the chubbed-out chauvinist hippies around here. I’m only talking uninspired crap anyway.
Ophelia says, ‘He’s got ecstasy.’
I walk towards him, ignoring the fact that she’s waiting for a witty response.
‘Could you possibly sort us out with two units?’
‘Ummm . . .’
‘Since when have we been good friends?’
‘Ummm?’
‘Take a quick look at the heels on my friend’s weave-look shoes. Pretty reflective, huh?’
‘So you’re interested in fashion as well, are you?’
‘Do I look like I am?’
‘That coat alone, it’s really – and the belt with it. Do they go together?’
‘No.’
‘So you mix ’n’ matched.’
‘Yeah, well, no. I like it when men do it, when they wear suits and that. Like those disgraced English ministers, that’s kind of sexy.’
The guy looks at my torn polyester skirt and expects two fivers from me. I take money out of my shoe, coming across as a mix of mentally disturbed and nervously excited. He gives me the pills more inconspicuously than absolutely necessary, looking me up and down like the world’s thinnest-skinned person.
I ask, ‘Are you up for oral sex?’
He answers, ‘How old are you? Sixty-three?’
And with that he releases me into a never-ending well of sadness.
Ophelia is extremely attractive – a phlegmatic action heroine. Whenever I go looking for Ophelia, I always find her sitting in front of a full-length mirror with a razor blade, a complete wreck. Whenever she hasn’t consumed any drugs for more than six hours she ends up with an attack of hysteria that wants to kill her, and tries to rid herself of her facial muscles. We met because she occasionally temps in school canteens, out of some half-hearted need to get close to reality despite being in the top tax bracket.
‘I’d like the creamed polenta with spinach and can I have pasta out of the other pan instead of potatoes, please?’
Her: ‘What other pan?’
Me: ‘The second or third from the left over there.’
‘Just pointing would’ve done the trick.’
‘And pudding?’
‘You’ve already had your dessert.’
‘I’ve definitely not had my dessert, I’ve only just come in here because I had social science on the third floor.’
‘Never mind your motherfucking social sciences, you still just took a pudding, baby!’
‘No I didn’t!’
‘I can’t just run around here chucking forty portions of custard into teenage faces that nobody’s paid for. What am I supposed to call you now? Impotent wanker?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Shut your fucking mouth, you smart arse.’
‘Get up, you cunt, and bow.’
‘Pardon?’
‘GET UP YOU CUNT AND BOW!’
Ophelia threw a large ladleful of buckwheat bake at me. I chucked my classmate Olivia Stüter’s custard at her, she emptied a portion of spinach intended for two hundred thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds over my head. While the two of us maintained strict eye contact all along. We conjured up a channel between us, through which we managed to stare at each other as if we were head over heels in love.
She informed me that she was the perfect mirror for my true yearnings. And I just swallowed it, dialled her phone number, listened to her saying I urgently had to throw away a number of items of clothing she didn’t like, and answered that she was a dead woman.
‘If there’s one thing you can count on in this world, it’s being mentally and physically violated.’
It may all sound pretty implausible, but that’s just the way it was back then.
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Sun, 4 November 2007, 22:12
I have to tell you my dream. You’ll like it. We wanted to get together and I was supposed to visit you at your place. A huge old apartment building. Mirrored stairwell. Twenty doors per floor. I’ve even done a drawing of it, shame I can’t scan it in. I went up the stairs. There were dogs fighting over the remains of a donkey. It was quite dark because there was only one window in the entire hallway. In a corner was a table and chairs. I looked around and realized that this vestibule covered in vulture-shit was part of your flatshare.
I was curious because there was an unlocked door. The gap between the door and the frame was really wide and I could see it wasn’t locked. I opened it and looked into a little room with a metal bed inside, and on it was an old man covered in zillions of pus-filled wounds. He heard me and moved. I left the room. A girl came out of a double door. I didn’t quite know if it was you but she looked like you, and she went to the washbasin and washed her hands. I didn’t dare ask who she was because I’d forgotten your name. I couldn’t remember if it was Ute or Uta. At some point I asked if she was Mifti. She said in an unfriendly way, no, she’s inside.
It was your flatmate. Her name was Claudia.
We went into the bathroom, and there was a crowd of people in flipflops made of old car tyres, all in just as bad a state as the guy on the bed. You’d invited all these people round and I thought, she really is disturbed! They were all vying for your attention. Two women even got in the bathtub naked to impress you. All the others, there were at least seven of them, stood around the bath. I just carried on walking without saying a word to you. And you looked totally out of your depth. In the next room, which was incredibly large, there was an orgy going on. A man got down on all fours in front of me and pushed his arse out so I could fuck him. And I suddenly had a cardboard dick but it was only two-dimensional, just like the condom I wanted to put on it. And of course that didn’t work. The End.
From:
Mifti
To:
Ophelia
Subject:
RE: Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Mon, 5 November 2007, 00:12
And how do you interpret all that?
In my last dream I flew to the Amazon in an inflatable plastic helicopter. After a while we had to make an emergency landing in the rainforest in the dusk and my brother said, ‘You can decide now whether to get dressed or not.’
Then someone shouted: ‘Oh, a melody in the night!’ and we saw a huge, vacant hotel with a pool and a squash court. All the passengers spent their time lying around blind drunk on car roofs discussing tropane alkaloids. Alice was there too. She wasn’t human. She adjusted her face, stroked the back of my hand tenderly and reminded me what she and I really are – real-life individuals or whatever you call it, in a real-life society, with real-life desires that can’t just be sliced out of our real-life heads. You were lying under this big palm tree and waving at me the whole time. I went up to you, so utterly upset I couldn’t even speak any more, and you whispered, ‘Mifti, you’re in a strange land, you’re acting like you’ve just got off the ark and of course you’re much too thin-skinned.’
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Mon, 5 November 2007, 06:28
>
The fact that I couldn’t remember your real name in my dream shows up my superficiality. I don’t listen properly. The fact that you’d invited so many people or women at the same time is down to my subjective perception of what kind of person you are. I seem to think you’re someone who wants to arouse attention by going to extremes, who’s egocentric and hurls their problems or innermost thoughts in people’s faces for the sake of short-term liberation, and enjoys and needs their reactions. An absolute perpetrator but a victim too, who I end up fucking. Funny, isn’t it? And I don’t even know you well enough. Last night I met you at an awards ceremony. You had your black velour jacket on and you went over to the lift when you saw me. I screamed, ‘Mifti, I hate you!’ You screamed, ‘But why?’ I screamed, ‘For you with your 24 × zoom lens on Alice, any kind of love based on mutual affection is too much to ask! Why can’t other people ever enter your fucking field of vision?’
I started doing nothing else in maths lessons but developing the next dream to be described in spectacular detail. I failed to develop an understanding of binomial equations or the fact that you can give names to angles in trigonometric functions. All I developed was an all-encompassing love of adjectives.
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
RE: No subject
Date:
Sat, 19 January 2008, 10:28
Is it possible that everything’s just chemistry or biology? Then wouldn’t the point of falling in love be only reproduction? So why do I only ever fall in love with women? But still want brutal sex with men? I keep reading this book about serial killers and I think it’s altered my sexuality. It describes everything, and there are things I’d never even imagined in all my life. Ninety per cent of murders are about sex. I think all wars are about sex. It’s a pretty selfish act somehow, the whole shagging thing. You want to be desired; you want to give the other person pleasure because what you can do for them gives you pleasure. You want to be sexy or for the other person to like you. You want an orgasm. Sometimes when I sleep with someone the sounds we make aren’t real, maybe. But maybe they are. Do we exaggerate? I think the whole animal urge thing at the beginning (when I don’t generally reflect on things) is only there to tie you to each other. Nature probably did that on purpose. Then I can do stuff legally that I’d usually only do on my own. Once I loved someone, with my every pore and dripping with kitsch, and I just switched off my brain. What a relief. Because it wasn’t just a reflex, it was suddenly imploding and going soft. So soft that all I could do was smile, because I couldn’t feel anything apart from myself melting away. And from then on it wasn’t an animal urge any more, it was divine and sexy. You ought to stop surrendering yourself to truck drivers and only let someone you love bite your neck, because with everyone else you’re probably really some kind of animal. You are anyway. And none of it matters.
Axolotl Roadkill Page 2
