Axolotl Roadkill (10 page)

Mifti (shocked): Pardon?

Lars: No, so I like justified it that a shell, from inside . . . I don’t know exactly, there’s something totally intimate about the structure of the interior of a shell.

Mifti: And you handed that in? That’s really majorly shit!

Lars: The guy thought I was taking the piss as well, odd huh?

Mifti: You’re a German vegan with over-sized ears – you can’t hand in shells when you’re studying graphic design in London.

Lars: What would you have handed in then?

Mifti: No idea, I’d probably have taken photos of movie stills from
Intimacy
.

Lars: No, be honest.

Mifti: I’d have photographed skin. I’d have handed in a whole 35-mm film of skin blemishes. Or intimate body piercings.

Lars: No, tell me honestly what you’d have handed in!

Mifti: Who got the most gushing praise for their project?

Lars: This Taiwanese girl who took photos of bleeding feet and a telephone and crap like that and some old posters hanging on walls. And she said she re-created peripheral settings, because the peripheral settings are like the thing that makes us remember intimate situations most incisively, so that’s what she recreated.

Mifti: I’d have photographed pages from my grandma’s photo album, where my mother stole photos of herself as a child. You can see the pages and the fact that something used to be there and that photos have been stolen, by my mother, pictures of my dead mother. Nobody knows where the photos are now. I don’t think there’s anything more intimate in the world.

When I lie, I lie neurotically and compulsively. My lies result from a dependence on metaphysical occurrences. When Annika lies, her lies are supposed to make the person on the receiving end feel better or enhance the harmony of the group, or at least its motivation to achieve great things. She’s firmly convinced of all that.

Lars: Yeah, I’m really sorry to bother you right now, but it’s really crap with no PlayStation on a crappy day like today.

Mifti
(tossing her hair back with a cool gesture):
No worries, Lars! But I didn’t manage to get through the game. I don’t know, first I shot down six hundred zombies a minute, but the bad thing was that later this sea monster came along with this thing in its back, and I didn’t hit it with the anchor.

Lars: It’s not an anchor, it’s a harpoon!

Mifti: I think it is an anchor, because the guy was just being spontaneous and he didn’t have a harpoon handy on his rowing boat and then he tried to ram the anchor into the big fish’s frontal extremities remodelled into fins, but then I just didn’t quite manage it.

Lars: Probably because you have to set the dog free from the bear trap at the beginning and you didn’t do it. When I got to that bit the dog helped me with the big fish because I saved him in the first level.

Mifti: That bastard dog? Shit!

Lars: Yeah, shit.

Mifti: What a crock of shit. What kind of shit is that anyway? You shoot down human beings with the B key held down, and then at the end of the day it’s all a matter of some white Saint Bernard Greenland dog crossbreed.

Annika: What kind of alien dialogue are you two conducting here, kiddies?

Lars: Jesus, Mifti, turn around again a minute.

Mifti
(who has just accidentally turned the blood-soaked back of her head in Lars’s direction for a brief moment to run into the kitchen and fetch him an empty mustard jar full of squash for him and the brat):
Annika beat me up.

Annika gives a bold, confident laugh, wiping the alarming sadistic tendencies escaped from her subconscious off the face of the earth. Nobody will ever accuse her of any such thing
.

Lars: Hey, Mifti, that just sounded totally bad, you really shouldn’t say that kind of thing in public, I bet someone might even believe it.

Mifti: Annika beat me up, Lars, I’m not kidding.

Lars: I mean it, Mifti, you mustn’t say that sort of thing in public, you make it sound so plausible that everyone would believe it if they didn’t know Annika.

Annika: It looks pretty heavy, huh? That’s why we didn’t pick up the phone before – Mifti didn’t get out of bed as usual with her total lack of fucking discipline and then she did, and then she went out the door and came back again! Imagine that!

Lars: Are you crazy, Mifti?

Annika: Mifti?

Lars: Mifti?

Brat: Mifti?

Annika: And then after that Mifti kind of suddenly banged her head on the junior soldering iron Edmond keeps in his room.

Lars: What junior soldering iron?

Annika: The junior soldering iron that the cocker spaniel Chantal dodged a couple of months ago, and that meant Chantal caused a car accident. Edmond bought the junior soldering iron in an internet auction because he thought the story to go with the junior soldering iron was so awesome.

Lars
(concerned, to Mifti):
Why aren’t you at school today again? Why don’t you just get down to it?

And then Mifti sets fire to Berlin-Mitte. She strangles Lars to death with a telephone wire, throws the two-year-old brat unpretentiously out of a third-floor window and gives Annika a seeing-to with an iron prop the size of her hand, equipped with sharp tines for the purpose of first tearing to shreds the flesh of its victim hanging by their arms and then scraping the flesh down to their bones. And then Mifti goes to visit Alice, who’s lying on her roof terrace with a distinct lack of interest and a joint in her hand. Mifti ties Alice to a table and places a cage on her chest, containing a rat. As there are glowing coals on top of the cage, the rat attempts to gnaw its way out through the victim.

By now we’re sitting at the breakfast table. Annika washes down half a Ritalin with low-fat chocolate milk and divides the contents of the second pack of North Sea prawns into three equal portions. Lars, Annika and I are getting on like a house on fire.

Annika asks, ‘What would you have had at school today then?’

‘Huh?’

‘You know, what subjects? What classes are you missing? Maths? If you miss technical drawing again you’ll fail!’

‘They’re all going to some concentration camp today.’

‘Fantastic!’

(Leisha Hailey)

I’m currently on a suburban railway platform, and I’m not under the influence of drugs on this occasion. Instead, I’m standing at the ticket machines in the company of two sixteen-year-old female classmates from Berlin’s most affluent area. The two of them are wearing neon headbands with fleece linings, and I’m not an outcast, pseudo-arrogant compulsive truant. Instead, I’m a quiet, integrated member of a class of twenty-seven adolescents constantly attempting to impress one another. The difference between them and me is that I don’t feel the need to make anything of myself, that there are photos of me as a child which prompt no other reaction than, great, far too much wisdom in such a small face. My teachers don’t know the meaning of the term ‘ambiguity tolerance’. They just know intuitively that it’s a pretty big deal to be nice to me right now, so in other words, they do know it.

Margit Kratzmüller says, ‘Hey, cool, you’re back. Where’ve you been?’

‘I had secondary pneumonia and had to have antiviral therapy every morning.’

‘Woah, we really missed you.’

‘Yeah, wicked.’

‘I’ve got a boyfriend now.’

‘Great, how old is he?’

‘Uh, eighteen?’

‘Anyone I know?’

‘He’s a friend of the flatmate of that model I had a thing with.’

‘That bastard of a model off Facebook with the Billabong top?’

‘That’s the one, only he’s not on Facebook any more, and I always thought, if he’s not on Facebook any more he must be dead.’

‘Probably is.’

‘Yeah, I bet. Anyway, we were right up the top of this club on Alexanderplatz, and I kind of scraped all the skin off my back.’

‘So you had sex with this guy on the staircase at Weekend and you scraped all the skin off your back?’

‘Yeah, and you?’

I bury my face in my arms. ‘I’m not the talking-about-it type.’

‘Oh yeah, you and your issues with genitals.’

‘What?’

‘You told me about it one time, remember? About your issues with genitals.’

‘I have issues with sex, because sex counteracts unconditional love, and that’s what I want. Sex is nothing but a selfish, bestial urge that unmasks the people I love as remote-controlled conglomerations of reflexes. Actually you’re right, I do have issues with genitals.
Imagine la scène suivante
. . .’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Picture the following scene: you’re sitting on the red armchair in your room, and your new, eighteen-year-old boyfriend places a book with the most complicated, philosophical problem complexes in your hands, which he wants you to structure systematically for him. Let’s say Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo Sacer
.’

‘OK.’

‘You think nothing of it and you start reading out some text about the juridical schism of your identity into a socialized entity, containing words like “abrogated”, I mean really heavy stuff, and suddenly he starts fingering you. You want to toss the book aside and enjoy but he forces you to read the text to the end.’

‘Yeah . . .’

‘Anyway, after three syllables at most, the whole thing develops into an incredible struggle between your body and your mind. Between biology and intellect. You try really hard to carry on making some kind of rational sense out of what you’re reading, but at some point you just can’t because your muscles and your hormones are resisting like crazy. And at some point you come, and you drop the book. Your body, which doesn’t actually have anything to do with you, has won out over you. Some people say that’s absolute gratification. But for me it’s just frightening.’

‘Then you’re scared of losing control.’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Well, all the stuff you say always sounds very clever, anyway.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Jürgen?’

‘Good thing you’re ringing, Mifti. I was just about to go and puke.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t do it now, can I?’

‘Why were you going to puke?’

‘Anorexic attack. But anyway, as I said, I just won’t puke now.’

‘Are you on your own? Did you get my masochism text?’

‘Yes. Where are you right now?’

‘At a concentration camp. It’s just not imparting any kind of vision. Our twenty-seven-strong class is evenly spread across a semi-circular parade ground that used to be closed in by four barracks ordered in a fan shape.’

‘Are you in Sachsenhausen? I puked outside the sickbay there once.’

‘Instead of puking outside the sickbay, I’ve just been chatting about a loose contact in my audio guide, so to speak. How was your day?’

‘Peeing scenes in a multi-storey car park where we didn’t have permission to film.’

‘Can you get me out of here?’

‘Mifti?’

‘When are we going to see each other?’

‘Day after tomorrow? At Albrecht and Samatha’s wedding – you are invited, aren’t you? Oh, I meant to say, don’t worry too much about why you made Annika beat you up. All that masochist crap gets less and less of a deal as it goes on. In ten years you’ll be having perfectly normal legal sex, with equal rights based on mutual love. With people who aren’t members of your family.’

‘You said that in a really lovely way, Jürgen, but I suspect it’s a huge pile of crap.’

‘At some point you’ll be a really hard-boiled sadist. At some point you’ll even realize that genitals can be beautiful. Don’t you ever feel like clamping clothes pegs on the nipples of your entire drainpipe-jeans-clad class and then twisting them?’

‘No. They’re all too cute.’

‘Cute is silver, but sadism is golden.’

‘I trod on a snail outside Berghain the other day.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Yeah, I got the shock of my life. It was awful, even just the crushing sound and then that weird girl Hersilie, do you know her? Anyway, she goes—’

‘D’you mean Hersilie with that badass “I’m playing a prostitute in a movie” look?’

‘That’s the one. Anyway, she’s like, “Now you know what you’re going to be in your next life, a snail outside Berghain.”’

‘OK. You can use that later in life, in your Buddhist phase on some beach in Thailand when everyone’s talking about reincarnation and saying, “Hey, I’d like to come back as a tree” or “I want to be reincarnated as a leaf”, and you just give this mega-disillusioned shout, “I know what I’m going to be – a snail outside Berghain.”’

‘Shit.’

‘So where does it go, your soul?’

‘Either to heaven or to hell. Or it turns into a butterfly.’

There are so many years of my life I spent in a kind of rigor mortis or whatever you call it, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights, so like not moving because, you know, this can’t really be life, can it, and you have to just get through it, that terrible time, you have to go through what other people dictate are necessary experiences, but they make you think: I’m not actually the slightest bit interested. What am I writing here?

* * *

The first day at my new school was approximately eight months ago.

I enter a building that I’ve finally tracked down in the middle of a patch of woodland, following a fifty-six-minute train journey. From now on I will answer every inquiry on my family background with, ‘I don’t have a family.’ I swear that to myself after my first two steps on the speckled blue laminate floor covering, which requests in an unacceptable tone that I bid farewell to my existence as a combat bitch from hell discussing intellectual trends on auspicious late-summer evenings. I think, ‘Apartment, wrestling, rock ’n’ roll.’ Every metre robs me of part of my vocabulary. I won’t be capable of anything in this place in the near future, apart from permanently forgetting to fold my worksheets in the middle before I punch holes to file them. If you don’t punch holes in worksheets at the right place, they end up sticking out of the ring binder in an ugly untidy manner and earning you a less than gratifying grade for ‘reliability and conscientiousness’ in your end-of-year report.