Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  Pörksen, a 43-year-old newcomer, screams into the prairies of the music industry he occupies, ‘YEAH!’

  ‘D’you fancy a unique mix of village disco and cowboy saloon, Mifti? Imagine Ronald Reagan holding a party in his den!’

  Tina’s just like, ‘And Gorbachev’s on the decks!’

  And then Pörksen’s, like, stuttering like crazy, ‘And that’s where we’re gonna be tonight, little baby. It may be hollow, but it’s techno.’

  Although I’m absolutely fascinated by decadence coupled with putrefaction and I’m usually pretty steadfast, I can already envisage myself going under in a huge crowd of libertines who don’t want to miss their last chance for uninhibited sex on a Sunday night.

  ‘Hey, shit, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Will you look at this crap here.’

  ‘What, it’s awesome! Did you watch that video I sent you, by the way, where the woman says to her husband, “Harald, I’m off to train the dog!” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, put your coat on, it’s chilly out?!”’

  ‘Erm . . .’

  ‘Anyway, there’s this weird guy who runs these parties, his name’s Ismail and he’s a real oddball. Like one time he had this experience, he says there were no drugs involved whatsoever, where his brain just suddenly twisted round. Like, his whole brain matter sort of drifted off to the left, and then there was a hollow space in his head above and below it, and it kind of turned around, so to speak, his brain, and now he sees everything the wrong way round.’

  ‘And do you get used to it?’

  ‘Looks like it, yeah.’

  Pörksen knows stuff about a lot of things. Once I was sitting in a car that drove over his heel, and afterwards he was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s harmless. I saw a documentary about it.’

  In my direct vicinity, a bottom with receptive orifices is seeking a hot stallion for regular orifice training. The people here like giving head and they also fuck untiringly to reggae before my very eyes, all part and parcel of a displacement activity lasting several years in total. In this black-painted basement grotto, the logical assumption is that you’ve landed up in some nether anti-world. So that’s the point I’m at right now; some of the guests are wearing Venetian masks and the theme is unexplored territories, and this kind of thing so doesn’t fascinate me. There’s not enough space for uncoordinated monging on the simulated dance floor, seeing as there are far too many contorted people present who’ve come to tonight’s party without any particular fetish. I drink vodka and cranberry juice on a steel seat, not moving a muscle and breathing in as rarely as possible so as not to inhale anything unexpected. A girl is hanging from the ceiling on a chain, her shoulders dislocated, stretchmarks across her back. Of course, we don’t feel justified not to categorize her screams as part of the whole show.

  It’s a parallel world. We’re sitting next to a woman who calls herself Smiley Susie and her guy. The two of them are around fifty with tattoos across their shaved heads. ‘Mifti, listen for a minute. I’ve known Smiley Susie since primary school days! She used to sit on a bench at gymnastics all on her own in a pale blue towelling leotard.’

  There’s this hole in the guy’s lower arm.

  ‘I was hungry.’ ‘What?’ ‘I was hungry so I cut a chunk out of my arm. Anyway, d’you know Tuffi?’ ‘What?’ ‘The elephant that jumped out of the monorail over Wuppertal in the sixties?’

  ‘WHAT?’

  ‘You don’t know him then, never mind. There was this circus elephant, right, and they walked him through the monorail as an advertising gag and then he only went and jumped out. It’s suspended, you know.’ ‘ZEN, darling, Zen.’ ‘What’s Zen?’ ‘Let me spell it for you: Z-E-N. You know, as in Zen Buddhism, and Zen’s this state of mind, totally meditative, and you don’t care about anything. But while you’re at it you do sometimes think about stuff you’re supposed to do and—’ ‘What?’ ‘You think of stuff you’re supposed to do, right, like buy toilet paper, and this guy who organizes meditation trips with fifty people, right, he told me one time that you just have to say to yourself, goodbye, I have to buy toilet paper.’ ‘WHAT?’ ‘Goodbye, I have to buy toilet paper.’

  It’s only now that I realize nobody here has a face. It’s a really clever lighting solution, albeit an unfathomable one: nobody has a face, there’s an atmosphere of unlimited anonymity. So it’s all about God here.

  You’re only anonymous at this party, and you’re only anonymous if you’re God.

  An inferno. Hell on earth. Sex is always an act of violence anyway. Eusebius of Caesarea says: ‘Woe betide him who considers hell risible now and must experience Hell himself before he believes in it.’

  And even though, being an enlightened human being, I’ve long interpreted hell as an instrument of political power, I now believe in it. From one second to the next, I’m somewhere else. In a television documentary on Siberia, where scientists doing a test drilling to research the origin of earthquakes reach a cavity nine kilometres under the earth. They let down a microphone into the chamber. The sound of human screams comes over the microphone. Countless voices. And later a cloud of poisonous gas escapes from the hole they drilled. Even the tiniest sound penetrates to my inner ear through the labyrinth of bone and I make out the voices, and they’re telling me something that definitely wasn’t premeditated by whoever created this track. The music and me and a terrifying creature with a hideous face and claws, which appears as they retrieve the drill head and hisses at me, making me leave my place in panic.

  I’ve never looked at Pörksen the way I am now, his tongue just about in my pharynx, his eyes screwed shut an inch away from mine. Actually none of it would interest me in the slightest if it weren’t for this pure horniness taking me over right now. We’re sitting on a seat full of holes with yellow foam emerging from them. I get a face full of artificial fog, tears run down my cheeks, and by the time I can see again and want to pull his face back to mine he’s disappeared.

  ‘Oi, you, I think someone’s waiting for you outside,’ says Smiley Susie.

  ‘Ho ho ho! Amazing day: sun, sea, beach, wind, happy dog, happy Susie.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Did you know they have VIP nights here?’

  ‘You pay twenty thousand euros and you get to shag a sheikh up the arse.’

  Everyone’s a foot taller than me and I get a constant series of armpits in my face as I rush outside. And then he’s standing there smoking, and I wonder if this is all about drugs or sex or a nice cool night breeze. He comes towards me, I take the cigarette out of his hand, and as I take a drag he bites my neck. At some point I’m lying on the wet concrete ground with my legs akimbo, gravel aggregate digging into my back. Pörksen on top of me, my sequinned tights round my ankles. In this position, I let him fuck me in the mouth for an incredible length of time, for various reasons. As the sun rises, warm cum runs down my throat. It disgorges all over my face; funnily enough there’s something pretty operatic about it. I turn my head slightly to the left, very slowly. For some reason I can’t fathom, the movement causes an extremely loud, threatening sound as if I were in an open quarry, just about to be crushed by a landslide. This is it. The ground kind of turns soft, hot, I don’t know if it’s my back that rips open or the ground beneath me, and when Pörksen says, ‘Look, Mifti, d’you think that was a bat that made an echo off the TV tower by flapping its wings?’ the volume of his voice rises exponentially like you wouldn’t believe and it turns into a giant snarling that I’ve been expecting all along anyway. It’s just far too loud. Pins and needles pierce my eardrums. Thick, dark red tube-like structures protrude from my arms. Veins with tiny insects squishing through them. They get bigger and bigger until my blood vessels burst and dark maggots come creeping out of my body, crawling over me, mutating into flat beetles with feelers three times as long as their abdomens.

  The taxi driver says, ‘I’ve driven you before, haven’t I?’

  ‘Pa
rdon?’

  ‘It’s your teeth and your eyes, I’ve seen them before.’

  ‘Yeah, a crossbite, pretty tragic.’

  I limp into the flat, blood seeping from my lip in all seriousness, which gets me totally worried again. A hyped-up Edmond is wolfing down liquorice wheels in the kitchen. Annika’s asleep, lying innocently and heart-wrenchingly ready for sacrifice under one of our covers printed with comic characters. Her life of regularity moves me to a spontaneous attack of sentimentality. I decide I will never again get into a situation that transforms her face into a concerned battlefield of contradictions.

  ‘Have we got any halloumi left?’ I ask Edmond, and he turns to face me with his eyes wide.

  ‘Yeah, probably.’

  ‘Can you fry it up for me?’

  ‘Can’t you fry it yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So you’ll do it?’

  ‘Only if you watch to see how to do it.’

  I tiptoe into my room, still in an absolute panic that the floor will open up and swallow me any minute now.

  ‘COME BACK HERE AND WATCH THIS, WILL YOU, MIFTI!’

  ‘NO!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m so dizzy.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There is hope for us all

  (Nick Lowe)

  Pörksen’s parents are apparently complete esoteric hippies, which is why he’s pretty agnostic about my current astral travel phase. This is now my twelfth attempt to leave my body, except I keep getting slung back into the darkness of my completely blacked-out bedroom by this crazy shortness of breath. It’s 12:45 and I’ve done nothing for the past five hours but lie in bed smoking. The only light source consists of the glow of my cigarette every time I take a drag. I look down my body and suddenly think I’m only occupying this thing here temporarily, the thing with the lungs and all the blood vessels and that, like a parasite from another star system come for research reasons to . . . well, anyway. At any rate, a few hours ago I was suddenly not inside it any more for a tiny moment. I severed myself from it as this weird cloud-like shell or as air, and I felt the exact moment when I was dragged back into the mouldering old thing by a power beyond my possession. I can’t take this any more. That power is God. I hate God.

  Pörksen calls. He says, ‘Jesus, at some point you just started mumbling, fuck . . . err . . . fuck, baby, what’s going on? Wow. Anyway first you did this completely hardcore thingying around, then you sucked me off when we got home, and at some point you ripped Tina’s Pavel Pepperstein picture off the wall. It’s OK, though, thank God. And after that we heard this weird noise, and you—’

  ‘What d’you mean, when we got home?’

  ‘Back to my place, you know.’

  ‘We were outside.’

  ‘You’re just a bit confused, hon.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You spent precisely two seconds outside yesterday. On the walk to and from the taxi.’

  ‘I think something’s going into meltdown here, Pörksen.’

  ‘Anyway, at about five a.m. we heard this crazy noise like someone snoring their head off, and then suddenly something flew away, it was a—’

  ‘Pörksen, if we really did go back to your place, that means something’s up with my perception of time and space. And don’t you try and neutralize it with the word psychosis. All last night’s gone into meltdown, I swear. I could swear we were outside. You were kneeling over me, and the ground opened up, that’s what happened.’

  ‘And what’s that supposed to mean? That you’ve understood the world as a whole? Believe me, I’ve been there already. The only mistake mankind ever made was inventing time – I found that totally plausible back then.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You were totally strange yesterday, Mifti. And you hadn’t even taken anything, that’s the weird thing. What a comedown. You’re lucky we took you back with us. Someone could have totally cut your guts out of your body, and then you’d have woken up later with an arsehole the size of Canada. Or not. You never know what might happen in a situation like that, it’s in God’s hands.’

  ‘Where’s Annika?’

  ‘At work.’ Edmond is kind of bouncing aimlessly around the flat.

  ‘OK, so did she say anything? Like when’s she coming home? Hel-looo?’

  ‘All she said was that you were lying in bed with totally dilated pupils and that she doesn’t know quite how you’re supposed to get out of your tricky situation. You’re really infuriating her, Mifti. What are you trying to prove? That you can ruthlessly cut all the ties to your relatives without even showing the slightest sign of emotion? And she told me to tell you that you don’t have to sell your own grandmother. You don’t have to sell your grandmother and you do have to go to school. You have to just get down to it. That’s an imploring request. I want to know who you really are.’

  ‘What are you talking about? And why can’t she tell me all that to my face? I’m sitting here and you’re telling me that she told you that I don’t have to sell my own grandmother.’

  ‘And you didn’t empty the dishwasher either. She asked if it’s pure evil or fear that makes you do it.’

  ‘Like I so give a fuck if I emptied the dishwasher or not! Of course you have to take her side, you can’t help it. Unfortunately you live out of her pocket, you have no other option but to underscore her conspiracy theories against me with loud-mouthed endorsements, but just look at me will you! I’m a girl of small means and I’m completely fucked up, and she comes along and expects me to function perfectly, but I can’t. I don’t just function properly like a happy little bunny, I don’t function at all. Material greed, rituals and habits, jealousy, a lack of privacy, it’s all coveting, coveting, coveting.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time you went to see a therapist.’

  ‘I know if they want you to draw trees you mustn’t make the roots too thick, because that’s a sign of aggression. Too many fruits mean you’re over-striving, too many flowers mean you’re overly romantic. You can totally rule out finding anything out about me that way – forget it.’

  Is that what you all class as insanity? Are you scared of going insane? Do people who go crazy send nice warm shivers down your spine?

  By the way, the fact that Edmond appears so concentrated with regard to my recent misbehaviour shocks me to death. I’m plagued by self-doubt. He’s not the disinterested arsehole I’ve known all my life any more.

  We set the table on the balcony with a flourish – plastic-wrapped ham and cheese slices past their sell-by date – talking about how his fringe theatre crap might develop into something that . . . well, something anyway, maybe something that enables him to get a second home in Costa Rica.

  ‘So, Mifti, right, in the beginning you have all these endless possibilities, and suddenly your options get more and more restricted, so it meant I had to set boundaries for myself, and suddenly you realize, oh shit, no, you have to block it and it’s completely dumb, the guy could have staged an excellent performance without all that post-structuralist crap about the concept of happiness and the one-size-fits-all moral crap. I was like totally blown away by the whole thing, so I’m just standing there and thinking, wow, it’s so totally touching and great, and then I started talking about that abstruse mass rape in scene four and I was still totally euphoric and then I looked at the actors and they’re just like, yeah, umm. D’you get what I mean?’

  ‘You want to do theatre, yeah, of course, and there are all these rules for the theatre, even if they’re completely dumb rules like the one where one actor’s not supposed to stand in front of another one. That’s what the director used to be there for, so he could tell them: you can’t see the others from the front if you stand like that. I mean I’m not the kind of person who thinks everything’s just a game, but if you look at a play as this funny kind of game, then logic dictates you have to look at it conventionally as a stupid childhood game, even though you can’t project yourself back int
o your whole idyllic childhood – and you want something else, you don’t just want to play “Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses”. So you can’t ever really go back there, but you can take the attitude that anything goes. So you don’t waste time thinking about whether you ought to subjugate yourself to certain standards or techniques. Anything goes on stage, you’re allowed to disregard all the classic forms within the problem of content, all the moral laws and any kind of technique. The whole social network that’s involved is the equivalent of a fifteen-month-old baby in its early childhood omnipotence phase.’

  ‘I don’t quite get what you mean.’

  ‘There’s just this one world of natural laws, one world of social laws and constraints, one world of moral laws and conventions and there’s this one world of games and pretences. And because theatre’s a social art, you never know whether it’s really all that free, because in some sense it’s also a societal confrontation between people in their roles in society. So it has to remain communicable. Although – actually, it doesn’t. If you have the possibility to make a completely off-the-wall work of art you don’t even need an audience.’

  ‘So what happens if you exchange the world of social laws for the world of games and pretences in your private life? That’s what we do all the time, isn’t it?’

  ‘No idea. But I definitely think we’re far more than an insider phenomenon now.’

  ‘That’s just what I keep asking myself. You do theatre because you want to have fun, kind of thing, but when I put on that piece in Brussels and it was so expensive, I don’t know, and anyway there was this guy there and he goes, “So, did you have fun?” And I was like totally glad he asked me that, because I looked so unhappy. And that’s something where I think, do I stay true to the whole thing or do I stay true to myself, and if I stay true to myself will I ever find a room in a flatshare? And then you meet people who think just as many thoughts about the whole thing or about some other subject, but that doesn’t matter really, as long as somebody somewhere is thinking thoughts at all, whether it’s about raccoon livers or Medea.’