Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  So I’m climbing some steel staircase side by side with Ophelia. Meanwhile she’s discreetly getting off on the fact of her patented existence as a photographer with her own vision and ideas and all that black and white crap. She always says she doesn’t see colours any more now that she’s so sick. She’s just gone colour blind. I read this interview with David LaChapelle once and sussed out that the colour blindness story is lifted from him. When you ask her where she gets her inspiration, things usually get abstract. The African steppe, cold snakes of the air and Jil Sander suits reflected in the parquet with cheeseburger telephones, with a stuffed toy jackal emerging from them covered in pig’s blood or whatever. So she’s an artist, right? And she hates dull people who stop her on the street and bother her. What’s worse than wealth are these hypocritical proto-artists who claim to be absolute scum and make fun of all the heirlooms I possess. Silk napkins, necklaces, not even silver cutlery, just two silver spoons. Not one critic understands what it means to shove your own deservingness in people’s yellowed faces day after day, for money, because you need a bit of money for a change, plain and simple. ‘Their problem, these critics’ problem,’ she always says, ‘isn’t even their arrogance, being arrogant is aristocratic and all that. The worst thing is their stupidity, or not even their stupidity, the worst thing is their laziness. You make a statement and it’s neutralized and watered down by, like, I don’t know, pathologizing it or psychologizing it or marking it down as unintentional, out of pure laziness. But the whole anarchy thing isn’t a mistake, it’s meant to be exactly that way, d’you know what I mean?’

  On principle, we only ever walk side by side when we’re not obliged to talk to each other.

  We share cocktails and it’s a fantastic moment, I don’t even know why. I suddenly feel showered with the love I mentioned a few hours ago in my text to her. Two hysterical shadows wave at us from a concrete couch, and I take their presence as a threat. Ophelia introduces an over-fifty-year-old hardcore restaurateur with above-average income as her most down-to-earth friend. I repeat: concrete couch. He says hello. He has a banana stain on his black shirt and brightly coloured trainers and a twenty-year-old girl on his arm called Samantha, who’s either mentally retarded or out for a fur coat.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Miss Sixth-Former over there that the guy she’s here with looks like he’ll lose his entire restaurant empire in a round of poker. OK, Mifti?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘They’re getting married in four weeks, Jesus, and Albrecht’s gambling everything she loves him for every night without even looking at his cards first. At one of those gambling clubs run by a trannie in a claw necklace on Schiffbauerdamm. Blind All In, that’s what they call it. That skull over there’s the engagement ring, by the way.’

  Inevitably, I get left out and end up following the two and a half über-established freaking icons obligingly into the private smokers’ room, overly sensitive and unbalanced.

  Samantha dumps her genuine pale-blue calfskin Hermès bag on me, adjusts her Margiela cardigan and changes her Acne jeans for a flannel miniskirt from Marc Jacobs – and Ophelia whispers in my ear, ‘How can anyone be such an uninspired dresser?’

  Then we all start exchanging pleasantries about the falafel wrap that Ophelia puked up on the kitchen floor a couple of hours ago, and pop our pills casually but in unison. Albrecht offers us two lines of ketamine, which is used by vets as an anaesthetic and has a hallucinogenic effect in small doses. He says, ‘You know what you can tell your friends at school, Mifti? That ketamine entails the complete dissolution of your own existence, four years in a coma and the worst brain spiralling, but apart from that it gets you DANCING like a maniac, non-stop, no matter who or where you are.’

  Samantha says, ‘I just can’t fucking believe how incredibly dumb you all are! We’re talking about an anaesthetic drug, and as you might imagine it can anaesthetize you! And when you’re anaesthetized you stop breathing. And when you stop breathing you run out of oxygen at some point. And that’s not good.’

  The stuff stings like fuck in your nose.

  And this is my life.

  It displays a fine crystalline structure, is transparent in colour and its consistency varies greatly with temperature. It’s blurred, it’s an underwater tank from which you have to escape as quickly as possible and suddenly you’re swimming through a swarm of oversized dangerous fish at five hundred metres below sea level. I decide to erase every moment of clarity with ketamine or the words ‘Fifty whisky and sodas please!’ from now on. Interim worlds are my only relation to reality. I almost want to say the truth, oh God, and after years frozen like a rabbit in the headlights, now I’m reaching out and grabbing life by the balls. I can’t see anything but dark blue waves, seaweed and ochre sperm whales with their jaws wide open. Whenever I’m just about to end up between the gums of one of these sperm whales and therefore suddenly absolutely convinced I’ll be dead in a matter of seconds, the world blacks out for a moment. I don’t know whether I’m lying down or standing up or still sitting on the lap of some long-haired fucked-up bum who’s fallen asleep with a bare torso in one of the sofa niches designed for casual sex. The first thing I see is a threatening number of black silhouettes. After that an overweight woman in a full-body latex suit comes towards me, taking three more or less sexless individuals for walkies around the premises on leashes, and tries to hand me a napkin.

  I ask her, ‘Could you perhaps pass me the boa constrictor for a moment?’ My view is obscured by an open sore in the fish’s throat as I swim into its mouth. I close my eyes, open them again and find myself in a rectangular toilet cubicle with Ophelia and two men. As soon as I become conscious of my body and the fact that I’m capable of independent thought, my short-term and long-term memory are suddenly out of sync. The past and present merge into one, the predatory fish gullet and my hysterical surroundings fade into each other, my perception of time is transformed into a huge field of piled-up memories. It’s a near-death experience, I start to panic, then I persuade myself that this state has nothing to do with my imminent death but with neurochemical processes in the temporal lobes of my brain. Ophelia’s standing on the toilet lid so that she can cut three lines of speed on the dividing wall between the toilets. Laughing, she throws first her belt and then one of her shoes over the cubicle door. I can no longer distinguish the basslines coming out of Europe’s best sound system from the people banging on the door from the outside; I just can’t help monging out in my usual abstruse dancing style in the tiny space, finding out all over again under tortuous circumstances what the best beat is for dislocating your left shoulder. I have my own hands, my own legs and my own sense of balance. I fight my way through walls of steel and the over-dimensioned neutrality of a situation one could objectively categorize as ‘inappropriate’. As I said, steel. Puddles of vodka, body parts, mouths, hair, sweat, moles in armpits, a German hunt terrier tattooed on the upper arm of a girly PR trainee, raw flesh and strobes.

  ‘Jesus, look at the size of your pupils!’

  ‘Yeah, thanks for the conversation.’

  The ecstasy guy from before is now wearing a blue sweatshirt, chewing gum and pressing me against the wall like in a soft-rock video.

  I shout, ‘Hey, maa-an, get off me please!’

  ‘Can I take a photo of them?’

  ‘Kindly fuck right off!’

  ‘Just let me take a picture of your pupils, OK?’

  ‘No, go away, go away!’

  ‘Don’t you know that film, Romance? You only love me when there’s a table between us.’

  ‘I know Last Tango in Paris, where the girl shoots Marlon Brando out of nowhere, and then he like sticks his chewing gum under the balcony railing, just before he dies with a huge hole in his stomach. Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘How do you like the music?’

  ‘I love this club but I don’t love Berlin!’

  ‘Right answer!’

  ‘Do you always talk in platitudes when
you’re embarrassed?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He has stubby eyelashes and he stares me triumphantly in the face. His eyes shine as if they were looking into a pond reflecting every available light source in Berlin at the same time. Something’s swelling up there that only he can see, a different world. Keen to wipe the circumstances off the face of the earth, I try to stop my body from ending up between the gums of the person standing opposite me. Two thousand five hundred people have taken whizz to stay awake tonight and narcotics to fly away.

  At 8:26 a.m., Ophelia is simultaneously bored to death and glad to have found me asleep but unharmed at the back end of one of the bars. She asks me in all seriousness if I want to have a sitdown for a minute. Get down on your knees, sweetheart, and kiss the ground. There’s no talking on the leather upholstery of her choice; instead we look past each other seriously and stylishly and act as if communication might work magnificently via an unbounded tolerance of each other’s silence.

  ‘Shall we go? It’s so dull here.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What were you wearing, actually, the first time you kissed Alice?’

  I only manage the twenty-four-day march home by imagining getting shot at every step.

  Mother

  (Pink Floyd)

  Of course it was a huge catastrophe when you looked across the road out of the front window in your pissed pants and died three hours later. Your system collapsed from internal bleeding and took on a life of its own, and your unmade-up eyes practically screamed at me in the overcrowded emergency room, telling me you knew I was going through hell because you refused to speak to me. You knew I’d slit all my veins the moment you stopped talking to me, I tried it regularly with a razor blade as a kid to make it somehow clear to you how terrible you were. And suddenly you were suspicious of life. The final falling of all chains, the death criteria. You possess me, you dominate me, I have nothing to do with you. The entire world despises me. It’s possible that I murdered you under more civilized circumstances. Men want to rape me, of course, certain parts of my body are constantly swollen, this world is paradise, pain doesn’t exist. You just have to believe it for long enough. You were brain dead in one of those hospital nightgowns out of an early-evening TV show, and I was obliged to switch off a machine which would have prevented your heart from stopping. Hate, cream-coloured polyester shirts with holes for the thumbs, traditionally relaxed conversations about volleyball teams and sea-salt face masks, I mean . . .

  Listen, Mother, your spewed-up shit will have my entire approval my whole life long . . .

  I was driven to extremes by a masochist machine within. Since you died, no unsuspected violence has lurked behind the doors of the places I live any more – just unbounded disappointment. I saw dead robin embryos on the metal staircase to our flat, fallen out of their nest and crushed beneath your feet. I learned to light matches, I weaned myself off my inborn trust and found myself forced to start idolizing you and all the fibres of meat drawn out between your teeth. If you hadn’t died I’d still be lying shocked to death in a pool of parental blood, puke and vaginal secretions. I entirely failed to savour all the advantages associated with your death, burning the money in the condolence letters and not speaking because I thought it would come across as more authentic somehow if I sat around with my pale skin emphasizing the impression of pensiveness. BIG MISTAKE. I suffered exclusively. So now this letter is my weapon of expression against the fear of not surviving it all. I lay down in front of some wallpapered radiator and just waited for everything to stop.

  I want vision. If I do everything I can to steer my desires and dreams and characteristics in a completely different direction so I don’t have to leave you, am I turning away from all that’s dearest and deepest: vision? Or are things like vision necessity working itself out? Oh God, I don’t want to write all this stuff any more. The other day I watched all Gena Rowlands’s movies. I have to say you were a mixture of Gena Rowlands and all the roles she played in John Cassavetes’s films.

  Gena Rowlands as A Woman Under the Influence, plunging into a deep crisis in the intensely acted family drama.

  Gena Rowlands in Opening Night as a Broadway actress who plunges into a deep crisis.

  Gena Rowlands in Gloria as a courageous woman who takes on gangsters to protect a little boy, and that kind of plunges her into a deep crisis at some point.

  You even had two 9-mm semi-automatic pistols and thought you were a mafia boss wanted in twenty-eight countries. Jesus, I just remembered that this minute. And that the whole thing between us was a love between two adults with equal rights, living in a hideout for female terrorists under difficult circumstances and realizing every morning that they’ve never seen each other before in their lives. A pretty sexual love based on reciprocity and mutual consent. Of course I’ve since been driven to extremes by a sadistic machine within. I ran away to be fully reflected and balanced in this terrible city until the end of my days. Now I want to blow every establishment I enter into smithereens in a spontaneous suicide bombing. Didn’t I tell you once that I’d help you to destroy me? I’m old enough now to want to know everything about your past and to see that I have more to do with your life before I was born than any of the people who were part of it.

  You know you’re the only one I love.

  Mifti

  PS: And I know you only did what was best for me.

  Right now I’m lying on red cord mats next to something not quite substantial, puked into a pale yellow toilet bowl, and I’ve been skinned. Above me hangs my now blood-soaked T-shirt. Someone’s torn it off me and then applied a specially manufactured knife to my coccyx to make the first cut along my backbone. Then the skin was separated from the flesh. The scalp at the back is the easiest to remove. The face is left, a few scraps of skin on the knuckles too. Hands and feet dangle because they’ve been severed at the joints.

  I’m nothing but one huge wound and I’m dissolving into my surroundings. So this glorified freaking youth is written on my skin, on the upper-class skin of which I consist, of which I primarily consisted before Alice, who is revealed ever more clearly in the contours of the interior fittings wavering in all directions, and now stands suddenly before me.

  She’s been through excessive plastic surgery. With my authentic martyr’s gaze, I estimate the ratio of her hips to her arse and the tension of her muscles under the whole excessive Chinese silk dress thing she’s got going on. My circulation is set to collapse forever within the next ten minutes due to the high blood loss; she knows it, I know it, and in the best case God knows it too.

  ‘Your eyes, Mifti, I’ve never seen such a state of mind. So relaxed. I don’t think you’re picking up on what’s going on around you any more. But you’re still . . . yes, you really are still alive.’

  I scream, ‘Do you even know what you’ve done?’

  ‘You’re blind, do you understand? If you’d got old you’d have looked back at some point and realized that the entire memory of your whole happy youth consists only of me. Of the hope that I’d play you I need you again in a mega-disco flooded with something transcendental. And then you’d have told yourself I never even existed. I was only some inappropriate fucked-up individual through whom you had to learn that devotion can lead to loss of self, and this loss of self has nothing to do with love any more, only with auto-aggression. Can you tell how you’re transcending right now?’

  ‘I hate you.’

  ‘You’re a victim, just like all the others. It’s so easy to create a victim out of someone. All they did was lock you in a dark room, and your suffering began, your agonies were intensified methodically and, cold as ice, you went through various stages of consciousness, and after a while it’s perfectly natural for an all-encompassing trauma to develop in such an awful situation. The tiniest touch makes you perceive things that only exist in your imagination. What do you see? Insects, cockroaches, beetles crawling all over your body?’

  ‘Erm.’

  ‘Y
ou’d rather chop off your own arm than put up with it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Do you know who you look like right now, Alice?’

  ‘This planet is made in such a way that there’s only room left for victims. People have forgotten how to suffer.’

  ‘Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when she says, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.”’

  * * *

  You know, I just want to apologize to myself for the fact that all the promises I made to my later self have just been ripped to shreds by some numb wind. That’s why I started this whole diary crap in the first place. To be honest I think I’m trying to prove something to myself.

  Success is like a timid deer, everything has to be just right: the stars, the . . . Oh, I don’t know.

  (Franz Beckenbauer)

  Annika asks, ‘How old is Ophelia anyway?’

  ‘Twenty-eight.’