My grandad, secretly going to a playground in his cord hat to play on the swing with his eyes closed. The money I saved up to buy my teddy a little school satchel made of red leather.
The taxi driver climbs awkwardly over the seats back to the steering wheel and starts the car. I start my third pack of cigarettes. I try to work out what order I should go through all the addresses that might come into question as destinations to tell him. Actually, the question isn’t the number or the order of various addresses to choose from. The only question is whether Ophelia is still alive.
‘I have to go to my father’s place. You can just let me out anywhere you like, it’s up to you. I have to run through town until I fall unconscious in a puddle of petrol with a torn diaphragm, incapable of anything more than hoping someone accidentally throws a match into the puddle. And while I’m lying there I’ll listen to this really clever playlist I put together with totally obscure unknown songs by these sixties garage bands from American small towns, there’s this site on the net where you can download them, and at the same time you download a real feeling of exclusivity because you think nobody except you has ever listened to them. Like there’s this one song called “Loving You Sometimes”. I listened to it and thought, shit, shit, there must be some way to express what I feel for this damn song that’s just reeled out of some genius musician’s heart straight into my arms. And then I realized, I can’t express it, because I haven’t got any weapons of expression any more, all I have is an input capacity glowering over my existence that can’t be switched off and has transformed my entire mental life into tangled strings of sausages. I’m a tangled string of sausages. I’m probably not going to survive the whole thing. Just chuck me out anywhere, all right?’
‘OK, but can I just ask you if you’re kind of disturbed in any way?’
‘What?’
‘You’re talking nine to the dozen here about strings and sausages, you’re really kinda weird – did you take a single breath just now?’
‘Have you got some kind of a problem?’
‘No, have you?’
‘I haven’t got a problem, you’ve got a problem.’
‘Now you pipe down. It’s about time you realized it’s definitely not me who’s got a problem here.’
‘I haven’t got a problem, you mong!’
‘Well, nice to have talked about it.’
‘I’m underage.’
‘I hate that, all you underage girls who imagine I’m going to shack up with you in some holiday home or something.’
‘Twenty-six-year-olds are worse. They want to go the whole hog.’
‘Whole hogs are no problem at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘All that means is that someone keeps the fridge stocked up, you share an Ikea bed and pretend you’re not in when the gas man comes round. All the rest is just unrealistic fantasy crap that holds you back and blocks you and disappoints you and gets on your nerves. I’ve only got this one life and I’m never gonna see the inside of a holiday home, and that’s actually completely acceptable in view of the fact that we’re all going to die anyway and then we won’t even remember that study trip to Uzbekistan or that holiday home on the Baltic coast. All everyone ever wants is to experience something or other. Everyone wants to spend six months of their lives in Tanzania or eat cockroaches up a tree in Burkina Faso.’
‘Or build a children’s home in Afghanistan.’
‘Right. Any day now I’m going to wantonly shoot fifty holes in some random person’s lungs, just so I can spend the rest of my life in jail and finally don’t have to be part of this society any more, where you’re not obliged to do anything except take constant responsibility for your own reputation.’
‘Would you really kill someone to go to prison?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I might steal a car or rob a perfumery or chuck a stone through a window and then let myself get caught.’
‘I could go to the police and say you raped me if you like.’
‘I might get back to you on that one.’
‘It’s a fantastic plan. I can spend the rest of my life legitimizing everything I do wrong with some rape, and you get banged up for four years.’
‘Four years of TV, plenty to eat and basketball on the weekend.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘If you like that kind of thing.’
I say my goodbyes and get out of the car. I look round one single time; the taxi’s still there and the guy gives a slightly embarrassed wave from the distance.
Hot tar rains down from the star-spangled sky, reminding me I’ve arrived on the lowest level of disillusionment and have no chance of a salutary turn to excess opening up before my feet. I’m too disillusioned to look for positive side effects in the depths of my self-pity. Not even self-pity is an option any more. I can neither run nor put on my headphones. The worst thing is, I can’t cry. We human beings actually only cry when we’re happy, because there’s nothing more dangerous for our hearts than dust.
Dust is the only dirt that can do us any harm.
My fear’s so huge that I can’t even breathe any more. I’m walking through a part of town full of individuals in neat and tidy outfits, all sufficiently trusting and socially competent to distract one another from their sobering knowledge of the pointlessness of human existence. Me and my amphetamine-ridden repulsion wait more than twenty minutes outside the bastard of an eggshell-white building I want to enter, until some fashionista faggot opens the door to me from inside. He wraps a scarf around his neck as he steps outside and I squeeze past him into the entrance. He presumably thinks I must be homeless and says to himself, hmmm. Once I’ve dashed down a corridor still filthy with unfinished concrete repair work, I discover an extremely misplaced-looking rubber plant in a pot on the third floor. With hectic paws, I shovel most of the earth out of it and come across the spare key, which I plan to use to break into my father’s flat. Logically enough, he didn’t tell me to my face that he’d buried a spare key under the rubber plant on the third floor; he yelled it at the current love of his life during some phone call, presumably while she was putting something through a juicer or flicking through a biography of Luis Buñuel. The phone call went something like this:
‘Hello, Mifti!’
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘I just wanted to ask what you think about me giving Annika one of those funny cacti for her birthday, you know, the ones you attach to your mobile phone and then they get really huge.’
‘What?’
‘Haven’t you ever seen a cell-phone cactus?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, right. My girlfriend Franziska says it’s a great idea.’
‘How is she, by the way?’
‘She’s fine, the only thing is I had this really long tortured conversation with this assistant woman last night about emotional depths that some up-and-coming actresses failed to capture in these Tibetan art-house films. And then I was so bored I made us all figs in Parma ham, and Franziska ate them too but then she went off, I mean to bed, I mean without me, I didn’t go to bed until much later. And then this morning she came drooping out of the bathroom all sad and said she’d really wished she could be alone with me.’
‘Jesus, Dad, you always have girlfriends who really wish for stuff, and then you keep on saying, “Yeah, my girlfriend Franziska really wished she could be alone with me” or “My girlfriend Jane really wished for a bit of humidity”.’
‘And how’s things your end? I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask you!’
‘Great.’
‘I’m flying to Tokyo tomorrow, have I told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that awesome?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t you like to go to Tokyo some time?’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘I’m just such a bad tourist. Being a tourist would get me completely depressed, Dad, I’d just want to commit suicide. I can’t do Asi
a. I don’t want to revel in other people’s misery. Italy, two thousand years of tourism, I could probably deal with that, but real travelling and looking at stuff and the mysteries of Laos and Cambodia – no thanks.’
‘Have you ever even been on a plane?’
‘No.’
‘Seriously? You’ve never been abroad?’
‘Nope. Actually yes, to France, to the coast or whatever it’s called.’
‘Shall I bring you a souvenir?’
‘A Japanese baby.’
‘Don’t you want to start with a little puppy dog?’
‘I wouldn’t say no to a little puppy dog for my birthday.’
‘Love you.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry, hold on a mo – FRANZISKA, I’M JUST BURYING ANOTHER SPARE KEY IN THE RUBBER PLANT POT, OK?’
The moment I enter the flat, everything my father bought for himself while my mother was spending her available funds on cheap plonk is splayed before my eyes. An original Leni Riefenstahl photo, a plasma screen, Indian wall hangings that look like someone brought them back from a wildlife safari, and a seventy-three-euro salt cellar. Tiny state-of-the-art remote controlled planes with a total value in the five figure range. All his favourite leisure devices, all his art, all his music. I steal a three-foot-high pile of Kinks records. On the topmost cover, he’s stuck women’s mouths cut out of porn mags, sperm running out of some of them.
I steal 2,000 euros. An unanticipated crashing rings out in my head. My systems are built on logic, analogies principally, contained within a concept. Yet as soon as I have no idea of the concept, the analogies become a jaded collection of out-of-context photographs that don’t tell a story any more. When my hair blocks my view I notice that my hair colour is dark brown. That makes sense. Had gravity been abolished within the past twenty minutes it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least. In fact I tip the entire contents of a bottle of vodka on to the worktop integrated into the dome-shaped kitchen system, for the sole purpose of getting worked up about the liquid not flowing upwards. If one and one is no longer two, shouldn’t the world be coming to an end?
By the time I walk into the bedroom, see my father lying on his visco-elastic mattress and think at every breath that it might be my or his last, it’s all too late. Every observation I’ve made over the past few hours contradicts the immediately plausible principle on which the certainty of my existence is based. It wouldn’t have a single qualm about waking him.
Adaptation, I think, adaptation’s what’s needed here.
Why haven’t I actually done anything at all over the past ten days? Oh yeah, I was unconscious.
2:15 a.m. Seeing as I could theoretically be asleep right now at home or at Ophelia’s place or in the traditionally individualistically decorated apartment of some acquaintance collapsing under the burden of his or her personal misery, I abandon the idea of ringing Alice’s doorbell. I squat down on my jacket in the backyard of her house, wedged into the gap between the regular and the recycling bin, strip down to my underwear and attempt a spot of unimpassioned freezing to death, or at least to get myself a series of impressive chilblains, or at the very least to pretend I have some kind of auto-aggressive complex on a worrying scale.
The last time I was homeless was when I was ten. I called my mother from a phone box and she didn’t answer. It was the middle of summer. Individuals outlined as black silhouettes in short H&M sports clothing against a deep blue evening sky as they left the outdoor pool. My entire day consisted of the attempt to distract myself from the thought that she’d accidentally bled to death after biting off her own tongue.
We lived on the upper floor of a two-storey concrete prefab building, next door to a sixty-four-year-old deaconess who was convinced that war was God’s explicit will to cleanse the world. There’d been a nursery on the ground floor but it had been closed down because of a fungus infestation. I climbed over the broken garden gate, which three years later was to prompt two acne-infested ambulance workers to break into a snide conversation about benefits scroungers instead of getting my half-dead mother out of our freaking flat as quickly as possible. It took six paces to the front door, which sent my fear right off the scale. I rang the doorbell; she didn’t open up. Just like the day before. I rang at least twenty-two times at regular intervals before becoming firmly convinced she was dead. Then I ran off to some other phone box, and when I stopped and dialled my father’s number, I noticed every breath of exhaustion coupled with panic felt as if it would tear my entire torso in two.
‘Hello, Dad, this is Mifti I hope you listen to this message please get straight on a train and come here wherever you are Mum’s dead she’s not opening the door and I don’t know what to do I just really don’t know what to do now. And thanks for the armbands by the way.’
I ran back again. There was a narrow, overgrown garden behind our house. From there, I tried to smash one of our windowpanes with a stone. It didn’t work. Despite its malnourished state of weakness, my four-foot-five body tried out all the options open to it, in a completely uncontrolled manner. I wept bitterly, threw flower boxes around the garden and spent at least half an hour running from one side of the garden to the other and then back to the first side and then to the other again. My last attempt consisted of leaning a seven-rung household ladder against the wall and leaping from the top rung to the guttering, in the hope of pulling myself up on to the flat roof. I dangled from the guttering for ten seconds.
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Then I slipped off and landed in a semi-split on the rusted remains of a broken barbecue. A sound emanated from my left thigh, rather like someone biting into an apple through a megaphone. The sound was so loud that it was that that shocked me and not the pain that shot through my pelvic area half a second later. When I tried to get up I fell over. I scrabbled across the ground for a couple of yards and then decided to stay lying there for the rest of my life. I imagined how liberating it might be never to have to love anyone ever again. I imagined living in a little patch of woods next to the railway tracks after my mother’s funeral, existing on blackberries and abandoned drink cans. Then I made the greatest mistake in my life to that date.
Someone called out: ‘Mifti?’
I thought it was my mother, so I shouted, ‘I’m here.’
Suddenly a bespectacled woman spilling out of her overly tight clothes and sporting a short black haircut was standing in front of me, at that moment seemingly the ugliest person I had ever seen. When I recognized her as the single parent of my classmate Charlene Kaplitz-Pittkowski, I leapt up, despite the pain, tidying my hair as a reflex.
‘Your father called me.’
‘What?’
She was a chemistry teacher and she’d been furious at me for months after I’d given Charlene’s seven-year-old brother a Lara Croft beach towel, which she regarded as glorifying violence.
‘Your father called me.’
‘Why did my father call you?’
‘He said you couldn’t get in your flat. And that you think your mother’s dead.’
I was feeling weak, so I nodded.
‘I’ll take care of it, OK, Mifti? Look at me.’
‘Erm . . .’
‘You go over to Charlene, she’s waiting for you, she’s made pasta with butter and sugar for the two of you.’
Instead of puking my guts out in her face, I caved in and set out on the five-minute trek to the sturdy block in which Charlene Kaplitz-Pittkowski and her family occupied a three-bedroom paradise with conservatory. I had to limp across a playground and then through a patch of allotments. My leg hurt so much that I wished I could have chopped it off. When Charlene opened the door to me shyly in her blue and white striped tights, it seemed almost as if she was embarrassed at being four levels above me on the social scale from that day onward. She was one year ol
der and sadly twenty years more retarded than me. In her room, we alternated between painting window pictures (ponies, Santa Claus, Shetland ponies) with special window picture paint and reading letters from fifteen-year-old girls to Bravo magazine about how a condom had got stuck somewhere in their cervix during sex.
Charlene: ‘My mother just went so totally crazy when she found out you’d given me that Marilyn Manson CD, and then she confiscated it.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘She said it was crap and anyway it was a cover version and the cover version isn’t as good as the version by the guy who sang it before.’
‘That’s true, actually.’
‘Hey, hello? The guy who sang it before sang it like three hundred years ago, and that’s so totally not cool.’
‘No, Charlene, it’s much cooler.’
‘It’s totally not cool, man.’
We were just listening to a cassette about two girls at a gymkhana when Charlene’s mother knocked at the door. Obviously trying to prove something to me, she pointedly complimented Charlene on her pyjamas which she said looked really cool with turn-ups and all that. Then she said to me, ‘Mifti, could you come outside for a minute?’
She didn’t look at me again until I noticed there was an ambulance and two police cars outside our house. The downstairs door was open and I stomped up the stairs in a state of pseudo-calm, and our front door was open too, and just before I walked into the flat I was assailed by the stench of forty tons of puke and shit. Everything was covered in puke; wherever I looked some pool of puke triumphed at its victory over us.
The first thing I noticed was that my childhood drawings had been ripped off the walls, my elephant in the grass. Then I saw that our entire furnishings now consisted only of chunks of cherrywood scattered bleakly around the flat. You could no longer tell if they’d once been part of my shelves or my desk. The place I was standing in was made up solely of interblending shades of grey. In my mother’s bedroom, six people in different coloured uniforms were attempting to put an end to her violent outbreak. She was biting and scratching and hitting out and screaming louder than I’d ever heard anyone scream. It was absolutely inhuman and repulsive. Blood was flowing from a hand – I wasn’t sure whose it was. I stood in the doorway. She saw me before anyone else did, and fell silent. I ducked out of her sights.
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