Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  She screamed, ‘Mifti!’

  Before I could leave the flat, she came stumbling out of her room and stopped motionless in front of me. She was wearing a royal blue polyester sweater and dirty knickers that had slipped down so far that every person in the flat was involuntarily confronted with her pubic hair. She was days away from starving herself to death. Her hair was stuck to her head and the corners of her mouth were bleeding. To my great dismay, all the strangers involved in the situation looked even worse than my mother, even though they were sober and clean, in contrast to her.

  ‘Mifti,’ she said again.

  ‘Are you Mifti, madam? She’s been calling for you the whole time.’

  ‘Why are you calling me madam? I’m only ten.’

  With these words, I ran down the stairs. Ms Kaplitz-Pittkowski croaked, ‘Are you crying? Hey, Mifti, don’t cry!’

  She put her arms round me. I didn’t resist because any rebellion would have given her too much insight into my mental state. I hated her. I hated my father for ringing her up.

  ‘Does this happen often?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  The lasting reminders were a torn muscle in my left thigh and a ruptured ligament that ought to have been operated on. Two days later, my mother gave me my own key with a metal goldfish as a keyring. No comment was made. Nothing else happened.

  3:20 a.m. Cold spreads across my skin; it can’t be natural, it must be the result of some kind of cosmic rays caused by the Big Bang or something. My body falls asleep, trembling. I’m standing in a maisonette apartment straight out of an English blockbuster movie, grabbing a bald-headed man between the legs. By dint of writing the words ‘sperm cunt’ on the wall in lipstick, he proves he has an organic brain syndrome. Every pair of shoes I’ve ever owned is lined up according to size in the middle of the room. Spray-can cream and cake mixture spills out of them. A paranoia attack prompts me to leave the flat. Outside is nothing whatsoever. The entire world consists of construction rubble. When I go back inside, the flat has mutated into a hotel of above-average standard. The man and I walk up a stone spiral staircase, side by side. I know I’ve slept with him, but I can’t get my head around when it must have been.

  ‘Have you got any diseases or anything?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to know if I have to start worrying now.’

  Through a swing door, we enter a wide corridor in which barred cages take the place of chandeliers. A selection of the most famous people in the world scream at us from the cages, in a language I’ve never heard before. Madonna is there and Marlon Brando and unfortunately that other weird guy, I can’t remember his name right now, the one who always runs around like he’s in the mafia. Now it’s Ophelia walking by my side, wearing red overalls and not answering.

  ‘What’s up? Why aren’t you answering? Are we going to carry on fucking at some point?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t fuck any more.’

  ‘Jesus, man, I’m feeling so horny, though!’

  ‘I’m not going to fuck you any more.’

  ‘But why not?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Are you positive?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you positive?’

  ‘Yes. But you know I am.’

  Everything’s black and white because I can’t see any colours any more.

  I go and dance. Bryan Ferry tells me, ‘We all spent Christmas in the totally classic way, really, as classic as you can get, it was UNBELIEVABLY classic. Until the fashionista faggot’s little sister had the radical idea of holding some ritual on her deceased grandmother’s property. We wrote down our wishes on slips of paper and ripped them to tiny pieces and scattered them on the wind and we wrote everything we wanted to leave behind on slips of paper too and then we threw them on the fire, though, well, you know. And last of all we all let out a huge primal scream.’

  ‘Ah, the fashionista faggot, I see.’

  He ceremoniously presents me with two tickets to Los Angeles, wrapped in paper printed with cartoon mice. ‘You’re in the wrong town, you should be in Hollywood!’

  ‘Why are you giving me these?’

  ‘Because it’s your birthday.’

  I look out of the window. It can’t be true; today’s not the 16th of August. There’s snow on the ground. Within a matter of moments, I’m utterly convinced that I’m dreaming. If this is a dream, I think, the whole of humankind is doomed. I turn around, I bite my lips, I feel the wind, I realize it’s all real, it’s all three-dimensional.

  ‘What can you do to wake up from one of these tricky in-between worlds, Bryan?’

  As he doesn’t answer and I want to try to make the best out of my inescapable situation, I throw myself out of the third-floor window. I fly for days over a landscape of glaciers.

  Frustrated Women (I mean, they’re frustrated)

  (The Standells)

  The ideal state of mind is just sailing through all the crap, high on adrenalin, thinking, what I’d really like to do now is play the lead role in a video for Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, and anyway, woah, everything’s gone pear-shaped, look, the sun’s coming up. Our flat is flooded with rays of light squeezing in between the slats of the blinds. An unacceptable stench assails me. Edmond just happens to be one of those people whose favourite hobbies include nibbling at a honeydew melon someone else has already digested. Standing in his doorway, I watch in horror as my completely unclothed brother lies on his back snoring while someone else takes his photo. A man under the age of twenty-five who I’ve definitely never seen before is kneeling on the mint-green sheets with a digital SLR camera, zooming in on Edmond’s dick. He’s blond, wearing four-way stretch high-waist side zipper pants over black polyester shorts, and he gets the shock of his life when I give a rather over-ambitious cough just out of curiosity to see his face.

  On his bare chest is an ornately lettered, Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

  Apart from that, there’s absolutely nothing about him that might prompt spontaneous nausea right here and now, as über-attractive as he is, squatting there with his grey eyes and his guilty look, and his life’s motto tattooed on his forehead: My drugs phase will definitely be over tomorrow.

  ‘Holy shit, man! Which one of his sisters are you?’

  ‘Mifti.’

  Meanwhile, Edmond has plumped over on to his stomach and I can’t stop staring at his poorly shaved sphincter.

  ‘Haven’t we been introduced at one of those concept-free parties with the “I wanna fuck” badges, Mifti?’

  ‘Erm . . .’

  ‘Never mind, I can’t remember your face either. I really hate it anyway when all those idiots claim non-stop that they always remember faces but not names – I mean, how uncool is that? I personally much prefer remembering names than faces. And I’m perfectly open about it. So, Little Miss Butter Wouldn’t Melt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t even know Edmond was gay, by the way.’

  ‘He isn’t, if you ask me.’

  ‘Why are you saying a thing like that? You’re obviously not all that into anal sex?’

  And then a sudden spontaneous wit emerges within me, taking me completely by surprise: ‘No. Because I don’t understand what’s going on there. If they’re good-looking I like just watching all those anally fixated women and men and thinking, great the way these beasts are moving and have a view of each other that catapults everything else into the background. Fantastic! I can certainly get a kick out of something I neither command nor enjoy. But I’m just not capable of getting any deeper into the material or making a more complicated judgement of what you do and how good it is. Still, it’s impressive, that whole act of violence.’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘What’s your name anyway?’

  ‘Just call me Smoothio.’


  Edmond croaks: ‘Water, water!’ and waves his arms impassively to draw attention to himself. Smoothio and I try to trickle flat Diet Coke into his mouth, breaking out in several fits of hysterical laughter. Meanwhile, the shaved sphincter turns out to be the most difficult aspect to digest, what with my sibling’s only warning to repeatedly permeate the whole anti-authoritarian upbringing in a big-brotherly tone consisting of the advice, ‘Mifti, if you shave your sphincter you’re shaving your whole life away!’

  My life, his bedroom, his Ferrari T-shirt, his shaved sphincter and our top-banana genes.

  Right now it’s all about the deconstruction of daylight anyway, or a new definition of moral values, and apart from that it’s about a decaff cinnamon cappuccino with amaretto and about the fact that we’ve run out of cigarettes and about the ineluctable continuation of alcohol consumption. It’s quarter past eight and the sun’s screaming at me in anything but a subtle manner, telling me I should have closed the curtains long ago. It’s one of those moments right now when not even more vodka or any of these parallel-world add-ons to my consciousness are capable of digging out a channel within me that’s willing to survive. Everything that happens takes three seconds.

  If I get up off this nut-wood-look stackable chair right now, I’ll manage two stumbling steps towards the bathroom and then collapse.

  ALICE KNOWS IT, I KNOW IT, GOD KNOWS IT.

  ‘So you suspect your brother isn’t even gay?’

  ‘He’s as bi as they come. So there’s no need for you to feel offended in any way if he suddenly stumbles out of here, says his goodbyes and swings off on his bike to the Thai brothel on Kopenhagener Strasse. And then he’ll tell some petite black-haired beauty with fantastic olive-skinned legs how much it turns him on that her skin looks the same all over, even her armpits, and two seconds later she’ll find herself underneath him getting a seriously substandard shag through her fishnets. That’s just what he’s like, huh? Why – d’you like him then?’

  ‘He looks like David Hasselhoff, for fuck’s sake! I’ll put on a motorbike helmet and break his face if he wants to fuck around with dumb Thai cunts. Are you as bi as they come as well?’

  ‘I hardly jumped for joy when I found out about it, but yeah, I’m as bi as they come as well.’

  ‘Hot shit.’

  Then minutes of meaty silence. I just can’t deal with this right now, I just can’t manage to take a toke on the joint held in my direction for some time. My hand keeps missing it.

  At some point Smoothio’s suddenly like, ‘Fuck, what was that noise?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘There was just this really weird noise thingy just now.’

  ‘That was the joint in my big toe cracking.’

  ‘No, it was – Jesus, I dunno, what was it? What direction did it even come from?’

  ‘Oh shit!’

  Someone is interfering with our front door, certain of victory over it.

  ‘I urgently have to barricade myself into some kind of bullet-proof larder!’ I say, pretty determined, and Smoothio responds simply.

  ‘Holy shit, Mifti, you just got up and fell right over! I just closed my eyes for a moment for various reasons and then I open them up again and you’re not upright any more, you’re like lying around, and now you’re still lying there. Crazy, I’ve never seen anything like it, I swear! You just fell right over!’

  Everything’s spinning, the shards of crockery next to me are spinning, a couple of months ago a coffee machine exploded here and the resulting stains on the ceiling are not only spinning, they’re suddenly evolving into combatant baby animals on bikes with five-cylinder rotating engines. Annika starts spinning too when she comes shuffling into the kitchen with her back bent over. It takes her ten minutes to take her jacket off, and as she does so she explains to us three times over in various different tones of voice that she ought to have been at the agency five minutes ago, in theory.

  ‘We’re just talking about bisexuality!’ I segue elegantly over to her.

  ‘Um, I’m hetero!’ she says with her eyes closed, and Smoothio regurgitates a semi-digested portion of blueberry yogurt into our polka-dot teapot. Monday morning – perfect, in an hour at most our housekeeper will be standing outside the front door announcing with great fervour that she’d have baked us a cake if her husband hadn’t died of a stroke last night.

  I don’t dare to think about tomorrow, in fact I don’t even dare to think at all.

  I turn my music up too loud, I dance too much, I go over the top in everything I do just so I don’t attract my own attention any more. I wait. Wait to fall asleep, to go crazy, to get up again and go in the kitchen, to turn myself into a Colombian black-spined toad on the kitchen windowsill. OK, and my answer to every question anyone asks me is, ‘Everything’s great, I’m just trying to decide on the basis of all my thoughts and fantasies and impulses and actions revolving around my own death how long it’ll take until I bleed to death at last.’

  Then at some point I head round to Simon’s place in Neukölln, because he’s just always stoned and has a two-thousand-euro Siamese cat and about forty aquariums full of these little amphibian-type creatures for sale. I gaze at a nocturnal Mexican salamander, shocking pink or at least very, very pink indeed. It has funny little tentacles, beady blue eyes and the friendliest smile I’ve ever seen. Crazy shit.

  ‘That’s a baby axolotl,’ says Simon.

  ‘An axolotl?’

  ‘A baby axolotl. It has the friendliest smile on the whole planet – take it with you. It looks like a comic character, it’s really low-maintenance and it reaches sexual maturity without ever undergoing metamorphosis out of the amphibian stage – it just never grows up. Crazy, huh?’

  ‘Can it turn in a circle?’

  ‘What?’

  I really do go right ahead and buy the dumb axolotl off him, carrying it around with me for ages in a see-through plastic bag filled with water.

  My lung says its farewells and I keep on running, my heart skips a beat and I keep on running, the mucous membranes start coming out of my nostrils, having painfully separated from the mechanically delineated organ surfaces, and I run past a long-haired passer-by in a Hawaiian shirt, who stutters wildly into a microphone pointed in his direction: ‘I think flirting’s generally very good, and, er, it depends on the, er, how you flirt, what you – I mean not like dodgy chat-up lines, I mean more laid-back, not all that macho stuff, more like you have a nice conversation and then you end up picking someone up. I’m lucky, you know, I go to the kind of establishments where you find classy women, let’s say, and then you get talking and it always works, I always end up in bed with someone, let’s say. And if you ask me, it’s great, you just mustn’t start in with the funny jargon in that whole naff way. You have to reach women via their feelings, so I tell them, hey, nice outfit, and that works every time. You take that feelings route and you get everything you want. That’s how I’d interpret it.’

  As the sun goes down, it starts to rain like that whole meat-coloured early summer shit, and I stomp across town with my eyes down. Circular arcs of light reflect from scattered puddles. Outside the door to Ophelia’s apartment, I try to suppress the nausea rising inside me at the thought of her irregular features. I knock. A guy of over-average height with greasy hair opens up. He looks at me like an aggressive bulldog and yells, not taking his eyes off me, ‘Have you got a new girlfriend, Ophelia?’

  From what feels like two miles away, Ophelia shrieks back, ‘Shut up, man, I love her and I’m gonna look after her, she’s the first goddamn person in my whole life I’m gonna look after voluntarily!’

  She comes running to the door in two-inch high mules, staring at me out of breath, with her mouth open and mascara dried hard on her red-stained face. As she drags me into the flat, she leads me to understand, with all the egocentric nervousness that makes up her existence, how crap everyone else is and that I’m the only person whose face she doesn’t want to puke in.

 
The bulldog says, ‘So the result is that I’ll have to look after both of you from now on.’

  ‘So what if you do?’

  ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘Foxy.’

  ‘Foxy comes across as if the main purpose of his life is phlegming up on carpets. Is he living here right now?’

  ‘Foxy’s a literature lecturer.’

  A mega-bony girl with black-lined eyes is sitting in the kitchen.

  ‘Are you living here right now?’

  ‘Yeah, because – I dunno.’

  I take a bottle of whisky out of the kitchen cupboard and sit down on Ophelia’s lap, seeing as the fourth kitchen chair appears to be missing. There’s a smell of hash, baked trout and sweat. Last night Ophelia was informed over the telephone that her father had died of bowel cancer. She shows me a couple of photos she’s taken of herself on her digital SLR camera. A woman absolutely shattered and broken leaps out at me from the tiny screen, blessed with the omnipotence to plunge anyone confronted by these photos into a state of impotence. Although we’re veering between diarrhoea, dizziness and mortal fear, the four of us are kicking it with an attitude of absolute elegance. Foxy the bulldog asks if I’m OK; apparently I look really upset, as if I felt both dehydrated and superfluous at the same time.

  ‘You’ve been taking drugs, haven’t you?!’ he says.

  I don’t answer, of course.

  ‘And how old are you?’

  Ophelia: ‘Stop it, will you? Mifti can look after herself much better than all of us put together.’

  And I go, ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Sixteen? She’s sixteen? And you’re trying to tell me she can look after herself in some way?’