Axolotl Roadkill (12 page)

Edmond, ‘It was no fun for the mouse, Annika.’

‘No, I don’t think it was.’

‘Me neither, Mifti.’

‘And what else happened back then?’

‘Edmond always slept on the top bunk, and this one afternoon he was sitting up there in the middle of some hyperactive phase, our mother wasn’t in, and suddenly he goes, “Hey, Annika, I’m gonna pretend I’m a figurehead.” And I’m like, “You’re so disturbed, kid!” And then he went right ahead and leaned right over and then he fell out of the top bunk on his head, and guess what I did next, Mifti.’

‘No idea.’

‘I wrapped all this toilet paper round his head because it was bleeding like crazy.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Dunno, six and nine or something?’

Naturally enough, none of the three of us want to come into contact with any kind of unsettling everyday life ever again.

Text from Ophelia to Mifti, who is standing in front of a mirror looking at herself as if she had to make out not herself but a huge crowd of people: ‘Mifti, I maltreated my lower arms dispassionately with a bread knife and now I wish I could run away. I wish I could run away. I can’t take it any more.’

While I look at myself in this disappointing way for minutes on end, I think I can feel the beginning of a smile. My hair is stuck to my forehead, my skin is more semi-gloss than ever for some inexplicable reason, and I count my eyelashes. The effect of my reflected self hits me directly with the suddenness of an arrow, beginning to bore through me in my most distant memories: a pain that’s none other than my own.

The only thing still visible is the unbounded weakness and the resulting innocence. Not taking my eyes off myself, I try to remind myself that the skin above the backs of my knees, the scar tissue between my shoulders and the field of freckles on one thigh are all part of me.

I squeeze through a small window into the dark backyard, from which the Rammstein album echoing out of the kebab shop is driving out a leap of leopards. My brother and sister won’t think to investigate my whereabouts, they’re too busy distinguishing effects and side effects from one another. All I know is that I love myself and that I love every one of my steps, I’m trembling so much, no idea why, that I can only walk about five yards, and then I sit down on the kerb to flag down a taxi at some point.

I say, ‘OK, I have absolutely no idea where I want to go.’

‘Are you excited?’

‘Why are you asking me that?’

‘You look like you’re just about to meet someone you’re in love with.’

‘But I just said I have no idea where I want to go.’

The taxi driver drives off, watching me in the mirror as I take off my parka. I write my name on the steamed-up window with one finger, and the words, ‘Yesterday I had the most terrible dream. I dreamed I was a plastic bag.’

‘So what does that mean – you’ve got no idea where you want to go?’

‘OK, let’s go home.’

‘You’ve just been smoking, haven’t you?’

‘Is that some kind of problem?’

‘No, I’m not one of those militant anti-smokers. But I gave up before you were even born, I should think. I’ve been a non-smoking taxi ever since.’

‘So you’ve been a non-smoking taxi ever since.’

‘I even threw someone out the other day.’

‘For smoking?’

‘No, he got in and he’d especially ordered a nonsmoking taxi, and then he wanted to look in the ashtray to make absolutely sure there was no smoking in here. And I said, “No, get out. That’s beyond the pale, really.”’

‘Funny.’

‘Yeah. I’ve only ever let one passenger smoke in here. He was standing there and he’d just lit up a Havana. I pulled up and he says, “Oh, I forgot to order a smoking taxi.” And I said, “Herr Müller, no problem, go ahead and get in.” Then we wound down all the windows and we drove down Oranienburger Strasse at five miles an hour at the most, and whenever someone gave us a look, we waved at them like that sheikh, what’s his name again?’

‘That was very nice of you.’

‘Yes, I mean, Heiner Müller, you’ve probably never heard of him, but in a situation like that you just have to—’

‘The Heiner Müller? The playwright?’

‘Heiner Müller.’

We drive through Mitte by night. When he stops the car I realize I haven’t got any money left and I ask if he wants me to leave my ID card but he answers, ‘No, I trust you,’ and I run upstairs to the darkened flat, where all I can find is a 500 euro note that he can’t change, so we drive to a cashpoint, I give him his stupid thirteen euro fare, and he says, ‘Get back in again, at the front, I’ll drive you back.’

He doesn’t give me a second glance until he stops the car in the empty car park of an exhibition space for designer furniture reached via a spiral ramp, and gets out. I wind down the window to give him my half-smoked cigarette, cold hitting me with an above average unpleasant bite. Disgust, pure lechery, egoism, a farewell to all intellectual fads and to the romantic idea of a life-affirming night out.

He tugs my head up, I can’t remember how I got rid of my underwear, I have a dark red, wrinkly penis in my face and I’m watching its owner as the beastly bastard fucks his way rhythmically through the situation, lunging with his extenuated hairy balls all over all the body parts I made out as my own less than an hour ago. He sticks his index finger in my mouth and attempts to look like Enrique Iglesias in the video for
Hero
. His dribbling tongue licks my rib cage in such an uncivilized manner that his saliva gland secretions seem to drip off my skin by the litre on to the beige leather seats. I prop myself up to arch my back, thereby pressing my torso into his face, which by now is twitching uncontrollably out of lechery. Somehow, the two of us entirely independently existing individuals continue along this road as if we were a single entity, until we stop, and at this point of pause for thought he says, completely out of breath after trying to stick something or other down my throat again, I don’t know whether it was membrane-enclosed muscle or his shin or his dick, ‘Are you an actress?’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m a radio presenter. You have such clean diction, you have that characteristic actor’s style, I knew all along you were an actress.’

‘Why are you driving a taxi then?’

‘They took my show off the air.’

So then I decide out of the blue not to make any appearance any more. I know he’s fucking my brains out – I don’t want this indecent knowledge, it means losing my language; I have no language in this world of pure sex. Nothing about it is disgusting or interspersed with explosions of ecstasy or revolting. The most unsavoury thing is that my body comes several times over, shaken by multiple orgasms during the course of these three rounds of strenuous procedure. No sexual tension released via involuntary muscle contractions, no high and no liberation. Just a seemingly never-ending spiral of overpowerment through piles and piles of feelings, dominated by pity and the contours finally traceable again after my traumatic odyssey through the world of psychedelic mind expansion. The sobriety returning. The thought of my grandmother calling to tell me that dandelions were her daughter’s favourite flowers – her dead daughter, even though children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. Anyway, children dying, that’s crazy.

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.’