Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  Ophelia makes a kitsch waving-it-off gesture, signalling that she’s emotionally unstable and too drunk to maintain the conversation. She takes a pea-sized plastic sphere out of the breast pocket of her nightshirt and chucks it over at me. I chuck it back again.

  ‘By the way, I met your old crazy dealer the other day,’ I say.

  Instead of answering me, she peels off the plastic film. In the end there’s a pinch of brownish powder on the mahogany table, looking like instant tea and smelling like a mixture of cigarette butts, trash and vinegar. She rolls a tube out of a piece of silver foil, tipping half the powder on to another piece. When she holds a lighter under the foil, the heroin melts, producing a miniature trail of smoke. Ophelia inhales this vapour with the aid of the aforementioned aluminium tube, until all that remains is something very dirty, small and evil, and she asks me, ‘So what do my pupils look like now?’

  ‘Jesus, shit, I’m underage.’

  ‘No, Mifti. You’re not sixteen, you’re an indirect extension of my life now.’

  Her head drifts slowly towards the tabletop. I stroke her back and wait until she regains control over her body, put out of service by a sudden alteration in perception. It takes an eternity.

  ‘Or more like a direct extension. Mifti?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ll get you an invitation and you can come to Samantha and Albrecht’s party in Charlottenburg next Friday. It’s their wedding reception, completely fucked up, what d’you expect in Charlottenburg? Emre’s DJing. He eats black pudding sandwiches. I hate eating meat, but sometimes, every so often, I get these wild cravings for dirty great black pudding sandwiches.’

  ‘Can you get hold of some coke?’

  ‘I don’t spend money any more on drugs that don’t make music sound good.’

  ‘But I really need to do coke again, Ophelia. When you’re bored, and I am right now, or at least I would be if we weren’t sitting here together, but anyway – when you’re bored you always think of drugs right away, don’t you?’

  ‘I love you, Mifti.’

  ‘Who’s Emre anyway?’

  ‘The man of my life.’

  ‘And what’s he like?’

  ‘On benefits, permanently wasted, Chanel suit.’

  * * *

  At 3:55 a.m. I wake up on Ophelia’s bedroom floor and decide to leave her apartment without passing Go. Ophelia’s heavy-breathing on top of her double bed, which is covered in puke. I scrabble around the room, collecting up enough coins for cigarettes and a short-hop train ticket out of strategically placed porcelain dishes filled with five-cent pieces. Once I’ve closed the bedroom door as quietly as possible, I sprint along the mile-long corridor towards the exit, both hands full of small change. From one second to the next I start suffering from a psychological disorder accompanied by a temporary loss of connection to reality: I hear voices. I get hysterical. Hallucinations are clear symptoms of psychosis. I regard not myself but my surroundings as altered and can’t recognize my abnormal condition; that’s what occurs to me spontaneously right now. The voices are coming from the kitchen, only a few hours ago still smoked up with heroin trails, and they’re talking about an art form that finds its expression in the production of moving images: ‘Well, perhaps you can walk over there, OK. Then I’d like you to act out recognizing your own desperation in Marie’s anger.’

  When I enter the kitchen, there are fifteen people standing around, either talking about the contradictions in their roles or correcting backlit lighting effects.

  I ask, ‘Excuse me, but what’s going down here?’

  They look at me as if I were the world’s thinnest-skinned person.

  ‘I know there’s nobody who’s NOT staring at me as if I was the world’s thinnest-skinned person, but what’s happening here right now? Have you talked to Ophelia about it?’

  A stick-thin unit manager in a cheap brand of jeans looks over at me with such an ominous expression that I fall suddenly silent and creep inconspicuously out of the kitchen and back to Ophelia’s bedroom. I wrench the door open and scream, ‘Ophelia, there are fifteen people in your kitchen!’

  She wakes up with a jerk and throws the same freaking shoe at me that she threw over the door of a toilet cubicle last week. Then she sinks back on to her feather pillows.

  ‘What’s going down, Ophelia? There’s fifteen people in your kitchen.’

  ‘Are they really here already?’

  ‘Yes, they’re really here already!’

  ‘Have they got cameras and lights and stuff with them?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then my friend Frauke’s filming a scene for her final exam project, where this guy puts cyanide in his girlfriend’s tampon so that she dies. Wicked, huh? As long as people make a film in my apartment it’s guaranteed to stand out from all that young German social realism crap.’

  Back in the kitchen, I help myself bold as brass from the buffet spread across a trestle table. Nobody takes any notice as I eat a roll spread with nutella and watch a heavily made-up woman in fishnet tights screaming, ‘Just give up your fucking drugs, Jürgen! I don’t want any fucking drugs in my place!’

  Jürgen is played by a man completely undisturbed by the hand-held camera close to his face, sniffing blueish powder.

  I say, ‘That doesn’t look very realistic, does it, if you want to make a drugs film and he’s snorting blueish powder. What’s that supposed to be then?’

  ‘Fuck, who are you anyway?’

  ‘D’you mind if I use the bathroom for a minute?’

  ‘No, you can’t go in there, someone’s getting high-collagen tissue painted on their back in there right now.’

  I stomp angrily across the middle of the kitchen, say, ‘Go bury your fucking film in the desert then!’ and slam the front door behind me.

  Mental blackout.

  I shout, ‘Hey, fuck, who shat in your brain?’

  Annika flinches. At 7:20 a.m. she conscientiously emptied a bucket of water over me as I lay weeping in my bed.

  ‘Oh God, sorry, Mifti, I didn’t notice you were awake. Why are you crying?’

  ‘Yeah, fuck, would you look at my hair now!’

  ‘Come on, Mifti, we have to get this over with, come on now! You look so great, don’t cry, please!’

  Of course Annika can totally understand that I’m crying now and I don’t understand the world any more and don’t recognize myself.

  ‘You look really great.’

  ‘No, I’ve got all these complexes and my hair just gave me this special strength.’

  ‘Honey, look at yourself. You’re really confident . . .’

  ‘I’m not confident at all.’

  ‘We both have no confidence and together we’re strong, me with my nasty fat tummy and now you with your funny hair which looks completely gorgeous.’

  ‘That’s what I’d say now if I was you.’

  ‘You look good, I’m not kidding, you look like Carmen Electra in a lagoon!’

  ‘Really?’

  Annika sits down on the side of the bed, smiling and taking my hand.

  ‘But you really have to get up now, it’s twenty past seven.’

  ‘Hey, come on, just let me sleep another five minutes.’

  ‘What’s up with you? Are you sick? D’you want to stay in bed all day again or what?’

  ‘I told you I’m getting up.’

  ‘You promised me you’d go to school today. This is really the end of the line.’

  ‘No, it’s not the end at all, just let me stay in bed another thirty seconds, look, I’m counting to thirty.’

  I really do count out loud up to twenty-two.

  ‘Your thirty seconds are up.’

  ‘THREE MINUTES, ANNIKA!’

  ‘NO! NO!’

  ‘You’re yelling at me the whole time and bombarding me with freaking orders and you seriously expect me to get up?’

  ‘What d’you expect me to do then, baby sister? Should I beat you out of bed or wh
at? D’you want me to beat you up? I can’t beat you up, though, sorry, that’s out of the question I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  She gives me a shocked look. ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you can, Annika, just go ahead and beat me up.’

  Within a matter of seconds, her shock transfigures into limitless understanding for every single violent parent and guardian on the planet. She’s struggling, she hates me, she’s capable of forcing me back with traditional unconcern into a position in which I spent years of my life longing for repression and humiliation. As soon as she touches me I’m all hers. We watch each other dying in silence for three long minutes.

  ‘No, I can’t,’ she says and turns away. I pull the cover over my head and start to cry again.

  ‘You’re trying to turn me into your sick, dead, sadistic fucking mother. I’m totally paranoid. You killed your mother and you’ll end up killing me, that’s what my freaking paranoia keeps telling me.’

  ‘I didn’t kill my mother.’

  ‘You were born; you killed her. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘She said I was the best thing that ever happened to her.’

  ‘She ripped open your oesophagus with the screw of a choke pear. Would you just stop letting these pseudo-naive, pseudo-childish, pseudo-innocent statements out of the wall of your teeth. You’re gonna make me puke, I swear. You’re not the abused three-year-old you constantly pretend to be in your constant pseudo-trauma. There aren’t any vivid memories left inside you that have developed an ominous life of their own and are now turning on you. You’re the one who’s turning on us. You’re grown up, Mifti.’

  ‘Jesus, get you. Quite the amateur psychologist.’

  ‘You’re just demanding your right to be tortured, am I right?’

  ‘Yeah, great.’

  You’re dragged out of bed and across the parquet flooring by your three-year-old pseudo-traumatized hair and after a few minutes of total lack of orientation you find yourself under your half-sister’s shin, she having discovered her sadistic side and attempting to smash the back of your head in with her elbow. She’s kneeling on my back because, unlike me myself, my body is a bundle of reflexes reacting to physical pain that can’t hold still. I scream. Even the screaming has nothing to do with me, it’s to do with my system’s direct reaction to a particular stimulus. I am not my screams, I am not my physical reaction to pain, I am not an animal. Funnily enough, I’m hungry. You always think of the most banal things in this kind of situation. Something really odd happened to me two weeks ago. I was walking down Choriner Strasse one night and this mega-aggressive gang of chavs turns up on the other side of the road. Wearing baseball caps, their socks tucked into their cheap jeans and with this severely underage minger in 10-euro pointy stilettos in tow. Prompted by a joint surplus of ideas they decide to throw an empty beer bottle in my direction. I put my headphones on. The second bottle landed right in front of my feet, and the guys crossed over the road.

  ‘Stop where you are, you haven’t got a chance,’ said the most hideous one of them, as I was still clinging to the belief that I could beat the lot of them to a pulp with a couple of skilful kicks. And then someone kicked his foot into my sight line from behind, and I just managed to dodge it. The only thing I thought of was all the numbers on my mobile phone. Not my mobile. Please not my mobile.

  And then the hideous one’s like, ‘Oi, you just did a Nazi salute or what?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I saw you, you just did a Nazi salute!’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘I saw you, don’t gimme that!’

  ‘Are you crazy? I put my headphones on – I’m not even German!’

  The chavs’ faces froze, and then they relaxed again and all looked pretty confused.

  ‘Shit, sorry, we thought you’s a Nazi.’

  ‘No way! Hey, you can’t just go rocking down Choriner Strasse and beating people up.’

  ‘Nah, we always do that. Erhan gives them a high kick, and then when they’re down on the ground, all the rest of us pile in.’

  Erhan’s like, ‘Yeah, sorry about that kick, but at least I missed.’

  ‘Can we get a couple of cigarettes off you?’

  My head’s bleeding. I’m calmer than ever before. I’m lying on my stomach, clearly identifiable as a victim, savouring the state of total freedom from responsibility. Utter innocence because the whole fucking thing is a particularly severe violation of the child’s well-being. I’m evidently a child and thus entitled to well-being, and evidently my well-being as a child is being proved to me by being violated. I’m evidently sufficiently independent of Annika to recognize only the advantages arising for me as a result of her criminally prosecutable actions. I’m sufficiently independent of my sister to hyperventilate in her face that there’s a special police department for victims of violence like me so that I don’t have to make tortuous multiple statements.

  Annika suddenly realizes she’s just got herself into a situation that has changed her face. She’s leaning on the radiator, trembling on the overstrained floor and looking pitiable in a disgustingly sentimental way, which makes me feel aggressive and superior in equal measure.

  Hyperventilating, I scream, ‘You’re so cruel, you only hit me on the head because my hair’s so long and no one will see the bruises!’

  Hyperventilating, Annika screams, ‘Yeah, Jesus, fuck, what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Are you gonna ask me now how you ought to punish me for the whole thing? D’you want me to say, Hey, next time just ram a freaking Ikea lamp smack bang in my face!?’

  ‘Oh God, just shut your bloody mouth, will you?’

  ‘Aren’t you scared I’ll get a brain haemorrhage?’

  ‘Mifti, you’re not a bloody baby any more, only bloody babies have bloody brain haemorrhages!’

  Hyperventilating, she gets up and staggers down the hall, hyperventilating. Just before she manages to escape to her room, our landline rings for the first time in six months. We look at each other, suddenly allied and utterly fazed. Completely knocked off our stride, we wait until the answer machine kicks in and the acoustic outcome of the vibration generated in our neighbour Lars’s larynx casts a new light on our situation, making it look utterly ridiculous and inappropriate. Lars says, ‘Yeah, hi, are any of you awake yet? I’m really bored, so I wanted to ask if I can come down for a minute and pick up my PlayStation. I lent Mifti my PlayStation three weeks ago. Bye bye then.’

  Annika’s just like, ‘Is he crazy? It’s eight in the morning!’

  I apply mascara in front of the bathroom mirror, put on a turquoise silk kaftan dress that allegedly has something subtly impressive about it (whatever subtle may mean in this context), and say, ‘Bye, Annika!’

  An impassive Annika says, ‘Are you going to school in a Halston dress that cost one and a half thousand dollars?’

  * * *

  I slam the front door behind me. Exhausted, I sit down on our doormat and summon up exactly where the problems lie.

  1. I have absolutely no inclination to go to school right now.

  2. I have a mother of a headache.

  3. Our doormat is printed with the words Yoga Mat – and that’s so out of order.

  4. I urgently need to find a way to get back into the bastard flat.

  You have a tendency to think up unnecessary to-do lists as an aid to spending the next twenty minutes outside the closed front door in a vaguely useful manner:

  1. Music exists solely to preserve emotions. Karen Carpenter and Richard Carpenter.

  2. Why does the sun go on shining? Why do the birds go on singing? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

  3. Van Morrison, Gloria, continuing hyperventilation and the memory of the phrase, let out of the wall of Edmond’s teeth, a few weeks ago: ‘All I can do is run, run fast and run away and over and over again. Patti Smith’s an old junkie – what is it with you and all these old women? Age doesn’t make anyon
e any better. Ageing just means getting stale and jaded.’

  4. Instead of wasting away in a state of anguish beyond all repair outside the front door, I simply open the door again.

  Annika is sitting at the kitchen table along with her high-definition mascara and looking at me as if my thin-skinned nature has evolved into a now inconceivable unscrupulousness within a matter of moments.

  ‘I don’t have to go to school any more, Annika.’

  ‘This is the end of the line.’

  ‘Yeah, it really is the end. Everyone’s unconscious outside.’ ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Everyone outside’s unconscious.’

  She takes a paranoid look around.

  ‘Nuclear war?’

  ‘Chemical assault?’

  ‘Close the window, Mifti.’

  ‘Too late.’

  Annika loses consciousness; I fall over. Both of us think we’re the only one putting on a show. It’s incredibly sexy.

  Yes, we were all close to tears, and I have to admit it quite honestly, even though you don’t get that very often with me, but if there are moments when you’re close to tears, then this was certainly one of them, so we were all very close to tears.

  At 8:10 a.m. Lars, his two-year-old brat and a superlative heap of expectation are standing in our hallway. The two-year-old brat is wearing a white crocheted Chilean poncho and has never had his freedom of choice restricted in the slightest and therefore grabbed a full pack of North Sea prawns out of our fridge within twenty seconds of his arrival and then gobbled down the content of said pack on the spot.

  Lars spent three years studying graphic design in London. He’s a vegan.

  Intimacy

  When our neighbour Lars was studying graphic design in London, he photographed shells from inside for a project with the set title of Intimacy, justifying this admittedly utterly crap idea by claiming that the interior of a shell had a great deal in common with the human anatomy and muscular structure. And all that.