Axolotl Roadkill (15 page)

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?’

‘Do you seriously want to have a conversation about my drug problem?’

‘D’you even know what we’re talking about here?’

‘What then?’

‘Jesus Christ, you’re sixteen years old and you’re sitting here in the kitchen of a barely functioning twenty-eight-year-old woman and you look like you’ve been trying to come down from a seven-week trip for the past three days. It’s absolute self-destruction, in five years’ time you’ll either be dead or, in the best case, you’ll be working cash-in-hand in a suburban travel agency.’

Dark-haired fungal-infested skank (mortally offended): ‘Hey, hey, hey, hey!’

Foxy: ‘Hey, come on, it’s true!’

The dark-haired fungal-infested skank blows her nose – it’s all too much for her.

Foxy: ‘Look at Alessa, Mifti, look her right in the eye. She works on the side in a travel agency because her benefits aren’t nearly enough to cover all her excessive needs. Heroin’s like a child, your whole life revolves around it and suddenly you wake up stinking in a shit-filled bathtub – that’s your official bed and you’re not even capable of questioning your state, let alone doing anything to change it. Picking up a heroin habit is comparable to having children, I’m not kidding.’

I’m like, ‘I’m not going to pick up a heroin habit, it’s just that I keep thinking, shit, my legs are ten feet long and so elastic!’

‘And what exactly else is going on? In your head, I mean?’

‘Oh, no idea, really. What d’you want to hear? Everything’s kind of fluffy, mystical, my skin’s fucked, everything inside me’s going soft, I stink to high heaven, I haven’t had a shower for three days and, oh shit, the floor’s three-dimensional! D’you want to know what I’m thinking about while I chuck all this in your face like the slimy corpse of a squirrel? A few months ago I was standing in the kitchen next to my father, whose mind was occupied with some crap or other, and I had an orange and a knife, and I asked him, like, “Hey, Dad, I don’t know how to peel an orange without it getting really annoying.” He didn’t react so I carried on annoying him really badly, I mean I really had this serious problem and I had to get it solved. “Please, Dad!” And he yelled, “Mifti, all you have to do is simply cut it into segments like a pumpkin, there’s really no reason to explain to a fifteen-year-old semi-adult how to peel a bloody orange!” And there was nothing I could do but carve a smiley face into the orange. If it hadn’t gone mouldy it’d still be there now.’

‘Top story.’

‘D’you want to hear another joke?’

‘You’re really wasted, Mifti.’

‘Three days after the whole orange shit my father wanted to take me out cruising down Friedrichstrasse in his BMW to show me the house I was born in. By the way, I didn’t even know I was born in Berlin until that moment, I got the shock of my life. Anyway, so we got out of the car and trotted through to the backyard, and then there was this stupid little climbing frame, it was like an improvised playground installation, and we’re like smack bang in front of this climbing frame made of old ropes and stuff. And my dad asks if I remember it. I say no, as you might expect. And he’s suddenly like: “You really don’t? When you were two you climbed up to the top like greased lightning and then you just fell down on purpose through the hole in the middle. Crazy, huh? You weren’t messing about or anything, you were just firmly convinced you could fly. You were pretty confused when you landed on the sand, kid. That’s when I first thought, this kid’s crazy. Oh boy, this girl’s really something special.’

‘At that moment all I felt like doing was weeping bitterly, but I couldn’t. I wanted to freeze that impulse to cry so I could thaw it out later and remember it and then scream and shout hysterically when nobody would notice. It was an incredibly liberating idea, but I really can’t reproduce the whole crap any more. So anyway we got back in the car and listened to Verdi. Verdi’s actually just pop, mood music with no credibility, the perfect accompaniment for thinking up mass murder strategies. And I realized two things at that moment. Firstly that Verdi, Wagner and I only despise each other because all our razzle-dazzle sensationalism is so similar. And secondly that all this is tantamount to nothing but deepest sadness. I could have been thinking about so many things, had so many really serious ideas. Like the question of what you see when you have an orgasm, a Gothic cathedral or baby animals. I dunno, all I ever see is cheddar cheese melted under neon lights and beer garden tables just about to collapse under my weight. I mean, that whole unbearable horniness that’s somehow even based on mutual consent is the main reason for my excessive identification with Patti Smith – because on the evening of my twelfth birthday, when a completely naive impulse made me strut around the changing room in a state of greater undress and provocation than absolutely necessary, when the two of us were alone for the first time, when my admiration for him evolved into a desire for him mingled with deep, deep disgust, I felt like I was surrounded by horses. Horses, horses, horses, horses. Coming at me from all directions. Shiny white horses, their heads going up in flames. Punk. I could’ve been thinking about punk or the fact that I’d be pretty fucked if I didn’t pass my exams. Or about Frau Simmrohs limping down the corridor still wondering why I held a talk about the common mallard instead of the assignment she set on photosynthesis. About how to gain basic knowledge of trigonometry of my own accord. Why my tights are laddered, why my skin’s so scarily rough, why my father has had absolutely nothing against me chain-smoking in his car for some time now. About how everything goes on. Everything keeps going on. About my neighbour texting me the other day that he had an animal story for me about Paul the baby squirrel that fell asleep in the palm of his hand in White Trash with his tail in a vodka and tonic, and a couple of days later the two of them went to Lake Garda. I could at least have wondered why there’s no guarantee that the sky won’t suddenly fall in. But all that seemed so freaking petty in comparison to the realization that the apatosaurus igitur definitely didn’t waste a thought on whether it might look ridiculous sixty-five million years ago. It didn’t give a shit what kind of impression it made and that whole superficiality didn’t even exist, back then, you know what I’m saying?’

I gasp for air, deeply upset that such a load of utter crap just came out of my mouth. Alessa asks me, ‘Are you the mysterious gifted child then who got raped as well? Is that why you two are friends?’

I look at Ophelia, and Ophelia says, ‘It was all completely different – I was six and I got fucked up the arse on holiday and I was such a poor little neglected rich kid that nobody believed me. I suspect the major problem is that you think you’re a sexualized child and you can deal with it.’

‘Did you just say you were a poor little neglected rich kid?’

‘Yeah, Mifti. Just look at Foxy.’

Heroin, well, you know, it’s kinda sorta uncool in the year 2009. As I look over at him, Foxy puts on a kind face to suggest that even I might as well go ahead and take it, at least to throttle my excessive party pulse-rate down from three hundred and twenty to a healthy ninety. I’m completely freaking out, and at the same I really don’t give a shit what I take next, even though my diaphragm starts to distort unpleasantly in the wrong direction even at the thought of the words, ‘I did my first line of heroin when I was sixteen and now I’m nineteen and I look like I’m thirty-eight.’ I go over to Ophelia, who’s starting to cry yet again, and bite her on the neck, and as I do so I realize I’m definitely too weak to stand up to the peer pressure building up here.

‘Go away, honey!’ sobs Ophelia.

‘No.’

‘Hey, sweetheart, let go of me and go and sit down again over there.’

I sit down in one corner, as far away from the heroin as possible. A remnant of intelligence prompts me to make that decision – not a bad thing. I was told my mother was dead in a mustard-yellow room, sitting all alone and abandoned on a hard chair, and suddenly this doctor, whose face I’ve sadly blanked out of my memory, gives me an absolutely unfamiliar approach to life. As he uttered the words that I’d be on my own from now on, my head moved to the left, forcing my eyes to stare out of the window into absolute blackness. The fact that her death added this level of blackness to my perception is too high a price for the words, ‘My mother died when I was thirteen.’

But still, those words are actually all I have left now. I haven’t got a dedicated parent or guardian and I haven’t got a favourite leisure activity, I didn’t even have a mother, all I’ve really got left is these words, no kidding.

‘Do you want to take it or not?’

‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’

The line cut specially for me is held out generously. I grab the saucepan lid out of Alessa’s hand.

‘OK, so you do want to,’ she says, majorly annoyed. Me, the heroin, its addictive potential and a skin full of goosebumps run out of the kitchen and down the hall to Ophelia’s bedroom, and my answer to the question posed in a droning singsong by three different mouths – ‘Hey, what’s up with you? Where are you going?’ – is, ‘I get the feeling I have to make some kind of ceremony out of this, guys, that means on my own and on a comfortable visco-elastic mattress, and I may also provide a soundtrack of appropriate music for the event!’

‘Speaking of music, the other night I dreamed me and Emre made a whole load of little Turkish baby boys, and one of them scratched my “Blue Monday” record.’

‘“Blue Monday”? You keep celebrating some rebirth of New Order that never even took place, it’s disgusting. They’re out. They’re just plain old out.’

And suddenly they fall silent, the drugs putting everything out of action once and for all. I don’t use the light switch, nor do I think of simply tipping the line out of the window. There’s a pleasant twilight atmosphere going on outside. I sit cross-legged on the bed and reach for a post-it note to roll up, with two Austrian phone numbers and the name ‘Will o’ the Wisp’ written on it. OK. Now we have it. I vacuum up the craving for absolute intensity in life. I close my eyes as a reflex. In slow motion, I see tiny crystals rushing up my mucous membranes, battling their way into my bloodstream and then exploding there within a fraction of a second, to an extent that whips me against the headboard. I tear my eyes open and try to grab hold of the last tiny spark of realistic ugliness, but some primal force out-trumps me, not putting my perception or my muscle contraction impulse out of action, but only that centuries-old consensus among all the do-gooders in this world, according to which every living individual tries to battle their way to some surface or other from the cradle to the grave. The bed tips to the left. I slide slowly towards the floorboards, dragging the sheet off the mattress. Heroin is not one of those approaches to human life that offers diffuse promises, it’s the only way to decode the word ‘life’ as what it is: nothing whatsoever. The zone of sacred law violation. Heroin is the surface. I’m gonna tell you exactly what I’m feeling, because you never say anything: I’m feeling absolutely nothing. Nothing whatsoever. If there’s anything, anything other than your love, which can and will lead me back to the arrogance with which I embarked on this journey through all this messed-up shit, then it’s probably the apathy I now know.

Dear Alice,

I feel the need to communicate with you but find it absolutely impossible, because I’m scared. Scared as if to death of saying these words, of saying any words. You don’t need to doubt this fearing, my fear has many reasons.

If fear wasn’t necessary, we by now would have found ourselves travelling down a road. How can I be telling you that I need you and simultaneously believe equally, that is, totally, another reality that lacerates? I’d love to look like you, so that every time you stare at me and yet still don’t say anything, you see every pulsing pus of eczema, every tiny piece of rotting flesh, every skin crater, every boil, every malignant cancerous carcinoma. May you only have fallen in love with me for the sole purpose of being confronted every moment with every characteristic you despise: with yourself. M.

All I think any more is: that’s why. That’s why I’m not regarded as socially acceptable by generally accepted standards, and that’s why I don’t have my sights on the target of being utterly suitable for some kind of normal labour market – because it’s just not about whether you experience something or miss out on it, all it’s about is the degree of intensity, isn’t it, Madonna? A moment like that can’t be planned. Are you hanging out in the next-door flat right now, with a waxwork of the Pope and forty puppy dogs flown in specially?

‘Sorry, but fuck! The Liars are the fucking most awesomely fucking wicked band on the whole bastard planet! Aaaah! I’m completely flipping out, I have to shag a huge freaking cliff!’

‘I’m just that “He only told his own girlfriend about the three hundred male sexual partners on holiday in Tanzania when his AIDS test was positive and he had to secretly escape to South America” kinda guy. I just have a couple of bad habits.’ ‘I don’t know who you guys are and why you shot at him, but if you want to stay here you’re gonna have to stop shooting at each other.’ ‘You can sell someone a baby polar bear as a dog, you know.’ ‘Right now I’m Bianca Jagger, Snoopy’s biggest titty groupie.’

I REMEMBER EVERYTHING, what the hell’s going on here, what is this? Jesus.

‘Hey, Mifti, Alessa used to study medicine and she did a spell on the psychiatry ward as well, as you do, and I don’t know if I should tell you this but do you know what kind of prognosis you had?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘Do you want to tell her, Alessa?’ ‘What d’you mean, prognosis?’ ‘Well, you know, in your situation and state of mind, whatever.’ ‘So?’ ‘Purely palliative, you get me? You were something like an incurable case for the psychiatry ward.’ ‘What, you mean – oh. That’s why they were all so “I don’t care”? You mean they’d just given up on me? They didn’t think I was dumb or anything, they just thought . . . FUCK!’ ‘Statistically, your chances were close to zero. In all probability they still are. Mine too. Let me take you by the hand, and I know why Alessa told me and why I’m telling you now, for fuck’s sake, WE GOT THE GODDAMN POTENTIAL TO RULE EVERYTHING! I’ve got a little admission to make, sweetheart: I’m not twenty-eight, I’m thirty-six. As you can imagine, I can’t cope with life the way I ought to at my age. I’ve never told you that because I was so scared it would relativize everything or change things in some way. Scared you’d look at me differently. Or that my photos aren’t what they ought to be, as soon as I’m in my oddball inexorably ageing freaking position and it’s no longer OK to have no idea how everything works, you know, love and life and stuff. I keep asking myself: how could this happen? Why am I still incapable of anything but permanent coquettishness with my state of unconsciousness, this constant anti-capitalism that always operates on a moral basis and considers itself morally integer; anti-capitalism as a self-preservation instinct, so to speak? I exploit resentments, like against bankers for example, to defend myself against the superfluity of my own existence. Why do I wake up one morning with a ten year stretch in my life when nothing worth mentioning has changed, except for my bank balance? That’s the question my drug-abused physical constitution has started asking me three times a day – it’s now totally detached from my mind. It didn’t used to be that way; we used to be a team, my body, my mind, my promising future and me. I feel like I’ve had amnesia for years. My brain just stood still from nineteen ninety-nine to two thousand and eight, and now everything’s out of sync. I’m four million levels below you guys in the food chain and I hate myself and everyone else. I just had to get that out.’ ‘My father thinks I’ve messed him up and my own life too. Maybe he’s right. I lied too much, I caused too much mistrust, and now at the end of the day I’m totally paranoid because of course I feel like I can’t change anything any more, apart from using long words in the wrong context and everyone leaving me and rocking on through all the crap like a complete bitch from hell. Nobody ever taught me to deal with conflicts. Someone recommended I try building an anger den to get it out of my system. Has he gone to sleep over there?’ ‘Who is Alice anyway?’ ‘Whoa, how nice and simple for your father! And if it wasn’t you, who would have messed up his life? Your mother? Your sister? His hundred and ninety-three lovers? The housekeeper? The postman?’ ‘There’s really nothing going on here right now.’ ‘At first I wanted to laugh, but then – pah!’ ‘The moment is sooo gone.’ ‘I’ve just been your intern for the past twenty seconds.’ ‘Then go and get me the waffle maker and minced pork right now.’ ‘And the fifty-stone corpse for dipping.’ ‘I’ll bring you the bicycle pump as well.’ ‘OK.’ ‘My father’s wife, on the other hand, has recently been widowed, as you know. We talked on the phone today.’ ‘Yeah, we know that.’ ‘And she told me in this tear-choked voice how they resuscitated him three times in a row. The first time round, like once he’d been clinically dead for the first time and then alive for five minutes in between, she said he demanded more reanimation. No way did he want to die for good, no way.’ ‘Crash course in depressing music, part one.’ ‘Explain the general truth in one sentence: Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with. Kim Gordon is the woman of the millennium. My Bloody Valentine, a hundred and forty dB, oops, I’ve just gone deaf. The MDMA man, is no horse.’ ‘Crash course in depressing music, part two. Robert Wyatt, “At Last I Am Free”.’ ‘To be perfectly honest, all I can do right now is laugh like an idiot.’ ‘Tell the rest of that animal story about the crazy squirrel in the vodka and tonic.’ ‘It even started off mega-absurd. You have to imagine Lars as a slightly degenerate guy with a long red fringe and white dandruff on his black sweatshirt jacket, standing under the ultra-violet lighting in that bunker club. And along comes this really nice girl. She says, “Hey, I’ll give you twenty euros if you look after my baby squirrel while I go to the toilet.” And Lars really adores animals more than anything else, especially squirrels, so he says, “Jesus, I’ll give you twenty euros if you LET ME look after your squirrel.”’ ‘Does anyone fancy crazy non-stop-talking comedy characters? I just got a text from someone called Stefan asking me if I’m going to THE WEDDING today. A pond scum of digested anti-capitalist material forming on top of a group of crazy comedy characters. What motherfucking wedding does he mean? I hate texts like this. And what scum is he talking about?’ ‘Oh shit.’ ‘What?’ ‘The wedding.’ ‘Wait, tell me which Stefan might be in possession of my mobile number?’ ‘Isn’t he that nonsense farce guy whose villa we went to and the sprinkler system turned on for some inexplicable reason, and later he leaned out of the car on the way to Schlachtensee and said, “Excuse the testosterone, we’ve gone all evening without testosterone and now it’s just breaking out of me, sorry”?!’ ‘Yeah, it could be him.’ ‘Albrecht and Samantha, wedding, Richard-Wagner-Strasse. I completely forgot about it, guys.’ ‘Isn’t Emre DJing there?’ ‘I think I’m gonna puke.’ ‘Shall I call us a cab?’ ‘Yeah. Oh fuck, you know, the fur-coated sixth-former and the restaurateur and Emre and – the thing with Emre is a thing about music and nothing else. So about everything in the world. And nothing. It’s nothing to do with heterosexuality.’ ‘Why is laughing like an idiot all you can do, Mifti?’ ‘It’s a thing about AIDS too, don’t forget.’ ‘I just can’t contribute anything to this situation except idiotic laughter. I know there’ll never be anything more awesome in my life than heroin. From now on I’ll compare everything that happens with this morbid upper middle-class heroin trip that’s just taking off. I don’t even get that you’re all here, I so don’t give a shit about you. Not one single moment in my entire life will ever match up to the perfection going down right now. How long’s it going to last?’ ‘I’d guess seventy minutes, tops.’ ‘So the best time in my life will be over in seventy minutes?’ ‘Tops.’ ‘We can trust the MDMA man. He’s his own best customer. He’s no horse.’ ‘Has anyone got an alternative taxi number? This one’s permanently engaged!’ ‘Woah, crazy, I thought you said before that MDMA’s no horse!’ ‘The MDMA man’s no horse.’ ‘Oh well, OK. Seventy minutes.’