Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

‘Woah, OK. But she’s still, like, “Hey, let’s go out raving!”’

  ‘Yeah, totally.’

  22:35. Text from Ophelia in a state of total instability: ‘I feel so harried right now, no time to relax. It distracts me so much from myself that I don’t even feel time passing and everything just rushes past me in a totally overpowering way. As if I was standing at the side of a motorway and can’t cross over. And I can’t go back either, because of course I’m standing on the central reservation. A little accident to throw the world out of kilter wouldn’t be bad right now.’

  23:23. ‘I’ve just realized that “totally overpowering” is one of your phrases. I almost never use it. You do, though. I’ll just come round to see you.’

  When Ophelia enters our flat with a spaghetti-topped pizza, Annika eyes her like someone who’s superior to me, with her pearly-smooth skin, her elegance, her perfect hair.

  Despite last night it’s no longer all about me, but mainly about the hopeless situation I’ve got myself into. Something pretty grave has got bottled up inside my body, a mixture of proteolytic watery solutions and allocations of guilt. Quite a lot has gone off the rails. I see streets that want to eat me alive, stuffed penguins talk to me, saying things like, ‘But animal testing’s terrible too!’ My surroundings are literally beginning to crack.

  I’m lying next to Ophelia on a mattress squashed on to the balcony, a MacBook Pro resting on my raised legs just for a change.

  The way you always tag ‘so to speak’ on to the end of your sentences, in fact the whole trick of making intellectual sentences confusing and breathless with those little filler words – impressive, Mifti!

  We watch television clips about Belgian penguin freaks and a trailer for a film in which an eight-year-old boy gets fucked up the arse so incredibly overpoweringly that he has to go to hospital.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, it sounds really bad, right, but that really turns me on.’

  Whereupon of course I nod, totally head-fucked, and of course I ask, ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s just like that disgusting sex scene with the fat-arse trucker in that awful film Butterfly Kiss. That’s one of my top twenty masturbation turn-ons, I swear.’

  Then we snog out of pure boredom.

  ‘We’re both so gender-confused, honey.’

  * * *

  ‘She just plays around so badly, you have absolutely no idea how much she hurts me. I don’t know if it’d be any different if she knew about my mother.’

  ‘It’s still sick though.’

  ‘That I love her? Yeah, sure.’

  ‘Or not really sick, more like a displacement activity.’

  ‘It’s such torture.’

  ‘In any case, you can’t be anything but friends if you tell her the thing about your mother – if Alice still has a healthy cell in her body, sorry. And I don’t know if she’s capable of dealing with it.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you were just friends? No, it wouldn’t be better. Wouldn’t it be better if you never saw each other again?’

  ‘Ophelia!’

  ‘There’s this phantasm, it was a real place in the Middle Ages, where fulfilled love was allowed to take place. A place for the experience that people are entitled to. I used to be in love with the boy in The Never-Ending Story, shit, what was his name again?’

  ‘Atreyu.’

  ‘Yeah, and I’d still say that boy was my greatest ever boyfriend. Of course I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me.’

  ‘Are you trying to reduce the whole thing to some teenage experience?’

  ‘No, I’m just giving it as an example to make the whole thing a bit less abstract. Anyway, there was a place in my imagination where I could meet up with the boy. The things he does and his sense of humour mean he plays a pretty major role in my life. The idea I had of him kind of socialized me, I think. At least more than all the other people I really hung out with at that time. It’s a love story, but the way the rest of the world sees it, I have to have slept with him for it to be really acknowledged as love. Maybe that’s the problem. You know her so well. And your whole bond only came out of the way you came together, you only function together – now I think we’re getting to one of those overvalued spiritual kinship points.’

  ‘We only function together, hallelujah.’

  ‘Yeah, man.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Let’s talk about sex.’

  ‘It was so perfect.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Everything fitted perfectly, right from the beginning. That week in her apartment and then after that all that stuff in France with the sea and that, I mean normally you’re embarrassed or you say, oh, hold on a moment, I think my leg’s kind of trapped, or you get cramp or whatever, because it never goes completely smoothly, but in this case it just did. Go smoothly.’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘I still want it to stay the way it is right now. And I’m not jealous of her boyfriend or her forty lovers or anything, I really like them all. I’d be jealous if she was wading through the whole shit with some kind of pet. With something that’s cuter than me. If she was pregnant I’d probably shoot myself outside her front door or something.’

  ‘She’s forty-six, you’re sixteen – you had sex when you were fifteen. Or fourteen? And then you tell her you recognize your dead mother in her. Something must have got going inside her.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know, scruples or whatever.’

  ‘Can you please just give me a specific tip?’

  ‘But Mifti, you know everything already, and there’s no point anyway because you’re in love and irrational.’

  I treat myself to twenty minutes’ contemplation before I expose myself to Annika’s aggression.

  We’re sitting in the heavily frequented outdoor area of some former kindergarten converted into a hip location and have just decided to have a serious discussion about the problems arising from our new family structure. The European Cup is being projected live onto a 3 × 4 metre screen, and the atmosphere is one of totally tortured lack of inhibition. All the after-hours walking wounded are sitting at beer tent tables, slightly depressed, nodding their heads in reassurance now and then and eating pork chops to assuage the burnt-out wastelands wreaked by alcohol on twenty thousand stomachs. Twenty thousand stomachs full of burnt-out wasteland. I go inside to ask why nobody’s coming to take our order. The waitress says, ‘You see, the problem is, that’s a summer awning out the front, and it wouldn’t stand up to an unexpected rainstorm so we’ll be putting it down within the next ten minutes, so the outside service will be restricted and, well, maybe you could just sit down inside, yeah?’

  My life, my lack of discipline, my pet sheep, my tendency for auto-aggression, my self-doubts, my fear of not facing a tough test in time or a tough decision, and of course the fear of never having to get out of bed again, except to get hold of cigarettes every now and then and then dump a dole application in the post box in a couple of years’ time. My auto-aggression goes beyond a cluster of scars on my non-dominant lower arm; I’ve been intravenously injecting harmful substances and am now at risk of an unintentional fatal injury.

  Everything goes on. It’s not worth waiting for a life-changing event.

  I’m an abused teenager. My sister, an empathetic interpreter, readily recognizes in me a deeply traumatized, hyper-intelligent person who has strayed from the right path and is sending out the famed silent cries for love/help from the brink of the abyss. I, on the other hand, am pretty pleased at my perfectly displayed attitude of arrogant, abused arsehole of a kid that flirts with its snobbish fucked-up status, unmasking the whole fucked-up status of its entire surroundings in one fell swoop. And as Annika is perfectly aware that she’s part of the surroundings I’ve categorized as degenerated, this evening will presumably push her off a cliff into the depths of desperation. Basically, I’m spewing my guts
on her designer shoes, but that’s certainly way more interesting and exciting than many an artfully imagined intellectual outpouring. They’ve imbued me with a language that is not my own. That language is very lively, although certain words are put to extreme overuse. To carry off the smooth aloofness convincingly through all the insanity going on, it’s important for the text to be flawless and perfectly structured. All in all, what remains to be said about me is this:

  This young woman plays smoothly on elemental spinets like a gazelle with a bazooka.

  * * *

  I take a proper look at Annika for the first time in my life, registering the fact that her hair is black and she has large-scale white tattoos across her thin, pale upper arms, which you initially think must be a pigmentation disorder and then find original. She scratches, she squints to break your heart, and she acts as if the reason she’s disappointed in me is a murder I’d committed of a family member. With the skeleton buried in the woods and a blood-soaked carpet ripped out of the flat and all that. Edmond has been in bed for fourteen hours now.

  Last night he ran down Kastanienallee stark naked under the influence of the dissociative drug phencyclidine, and when he got home he started talking about a guy who cut off his dick on PCP, swallowed it and then regurgitated it later, laughing all the time. I love my brother and sister.

  Last night I discussed the Ebo Hill film Way Down over tuna carpaccio and lemongrass vodka. Jürgen is pretty soulless and has insane guest-list capacities. We met at one of Ophelia’s theme parties, and unlike many of the other guests he didn’t want to take his pants off, and I thought that was great. At some point I’m, like, ‘So, what do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a student. But I’m a friend of Julianne Moore’s. That makes it pretty difficult to take all the media studies lecturers seriously, with their receding hairlines.’

  After that night I wrote on all my T-shirts in permanent marker: I SEE THE WORLD IN TWO DIMENSIONS.

  Reality level two: I’m sitting at a table with this guy Jürgen. I’m an abused teenager. He and his whole fucked-up status as an aristocratic porn actor make me look pretty damn scheduled and scheming. One hundred and twenty-five established personalities are eating monkfish in pork nets and chatting about emotional low points that Asian actresses in art-house thrillers with international casts fail to capture. Wealthy construction moguls certainly don’t frequent this establishment, because you don’t get value for money. I jump out of a huge birthday cake wearing nothing but a feather headdress. Jürgen apologizes profusely and then gets up from his chair, heading for an exposed concrete artwork on the opposite wall. His feet are no longer in contact with the floor; he seems to be floating. At first I can’t believe it, but the guy really does appear to be flying around the place.

  The object is lit from above. He holds his wine glass below the lamp to reassure himself that there aren’t any insects floating in his drink. A breath of relief. He battles his way back through a squall of nouveau-riche gallery owners, the squall of nouveau-riche gallery owners in turn battling its way through another squall, this time consisting of the bodyguards surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy’s father, who’s making his way to the smokers’ lounge. I think all over again, every day: the proprietors presumably couldn’t make their minds up between a smokers’ lounge and a darkroom, although they did make their minds up on a naturalistic vista shot, an Ulrich Seidl shot, so to speak, I don’t know. Pamela Anderson enters the freaking place.

  I personally would be pleased if you, the audience, found something of use in the evening described above that goes beyond the writer’s individual psychology level.

  * * *

  We place our order. I point with slight embarrassment at the poussin-stuffed mushrooms on the menu.

  ‘How do you get a whole poussin into a tiny mushroom?’

  ‘I’ll have two of everything and five bottles of mineral water.’

  ‘Oh, I see now, the poussin’s stuffed with mushrooms, not the other way round, sorry.’

  ‘And then I’ll have the frozen pistachio stuff for dessert. What is that actually, a new Balkan state?’

  ‘So, Mifti, my experience on the subject you broached: even if you have a behavioural disorder nowadays and even if you’re capable of maintaining some semblance of emergency normality, success doesn’t come automatically – although your deviant personality makes you a special case.’

  Annika’s just like, ‘Mifti, you’ve destroyed all language.’

  I totally agree but I still ask, ‘Why?’

  ‘Everything you promise is a lie, so everything you say is somehow a lie. I really don’t care if you ruin your school career and have to go on the game or kill yourself later on. The worst thing is that you’re permanently lying to me. You disrespect all the prerequisites of human coexistence. I really don’t care if you kill yourself later on or not.’

  ‘Technoplasticity, Annika.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At some point, once your blood starts circulating on a real technoplastic level, everything’s fine again.’

  Sure, every girl wants to look like . . .

  No actually, I don’t want to look like Heidi Klum, but do her job? Sure. If I was four inches taller?!

  (Sexy Julia)

  I fight my way through a solid mass of social hardship on the U8 train, eventually giving up in the face of this concentrated underclass made of flesh and blood. I come across Ophelia’s former heroin dealer on Oranienstrasse, head over heels in a container for interim refuse storage. I remember him as a well-groomed nineteen-year-old of Russian origin who was utterly clean. Hanging over the rim of the organic waste bin, he straightens up, looks more fucked than ever before and raises his hand in greeting, as if he recognized in me a potential customer destined for failure in life. Logically enough, that makes me panic. A moment later he’s back on two legs in a doorway, makes an inconspicuous gesture, and several junkies not instantly recognizable as such rush towards him. He smiles over at me. I can’t manage to turn my head away until I’ve taken a couple of steps in the other direction. I ring Pörksen’s doorbell. His face has been crowned recently by something he refers to as a strongly gelled business cut. He’s moved in with his permanently doped-up girlfriend in Kreuzberg. Their new flat is a failed attempt to lend a serious note to the concept of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle in the West End of the back of beyond. Rather than emptying the removal boxes, he listens to bad punk at a higher volume than necessary. An extremely large rabbit jumps up to welcome me. It’s called Panzer and they brought it back from Denmark when they went surfing there. There was this group of cool guys there, all pretty hardcore, and they had these rabbits with them and they used to let them out now and then, and then these well-dressed guys chased after the rabbits all around the campsite shouting, Panzer, come back, Panzer!

  Tina’s lying totally incapacitated in front of the TV, watching Germany’s Next Top Model and shouting now and again with her fingernails buried in her scalp, ‘Shit, fuck, wank . . . and all these arsewipes get all the money. That’s such a pile of wank, Jesus!’

  ‘What’s up?’ I ask, not daring to take another look at the greasy-haired entity on the seat behind me. I stare at Pörksen’s face to gauge from his reaction to Tina what’s going on with her. He shakes his head.

  ‘I can’t not eat for four days again, Pörksen!’

  ‘I’m in the top tax bracket this year,’ I say.

  ‘Respect!’

  I pocket a lump of hash I find lying around and disappear past Tina into the office. Massive sub-woofers – well, at least that’s better than some love-sopped gaze – the ‘Clitoris Bite Boogie’ and a whole load of extremely cheesy Polish disco stuff. Incredible.

  I’m like, ‘Why does the book put you in a permanent state of sexual arousal?’

  ‘I don’t know really, but there’s this part in one chapter, for example, where they suddenly start injecting these tiny fish into their veins, so to speak, and that makes them into hug
e dragons that can fly over the city. I mean, I can really imagine something like that might really exist in thirty years. But it’s so awesome that this guy can think up something like that already. Anyway, they shoot up these tiny fishes and turn into these dragons and then they fly around like crazy the whole time, and when they land again they kind of talk about what they could do better next time around. So like one of them says to another one that he shouldn’t fly around a certain tower, for example, because they kept getting in each other’s way. I can’t really tell the story that well, but it’s so funny. It kind of symbolizes, like, everything the writer thinks, you know, that Russia’s going to reintroduce the monarchy in thirty years’ time, so to speak, I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, right!’

  ‘Yeah, well. Tina’s read it too.’

  Tina is the kind of person who wears a coat made out of the last two surviving Indonesian cave gnus. She does it solely to appear amoral at first glance; a lot of people suddenly feel pure morality is something they vehemently have to combat. I don’t want to exercise some moral authority that strikes everyone down with awe. Psychology and morality are not appropriate instruments for dealing with life. There’s a popular myth that everything that appears deficient to us can be put down to psychological problems. And morality is unintelligent, it doesn’t go far enough. You simply reach a consensus too quickly, people. (That’s what occurs to me spontaneously on the subject.)

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m on page seventy-seven or so, but even in chapter two there’s this sudden totally cheerful description of a mass rape. I was lying in bed and my vaginal muscles totally cramped up. Completely dumb. I mean, he’s writing about the big team they have – the thing about the book is that there’s this big team that rules the land, you know what I mean? They’re the same ones as with the fish and all that. And then one of them describes this mass rape and he really gets his rocks off.’

  ‘We need a remedial teacher right this instant, if not several!’

  I suddenly find myself on a tall bar stool in the middle of an empty living room, an electric guitar pressed into my hands, feeling under pressure, discussing Heidi Klum and the fact that that bitch is imparting medieval standards to my entire generation, and I think: is this the life I wanted to lead when I was thirteen?