Axolotl Roadkill (17 page)

I HAVE NO PROBLEM PROVIDING YOU WITH THE SUBTLE PLEASURES I’VE BEEN DENIED MY WHOLE LIFE LONG, PEOPLE!!

Hail drums against the windows. It’s not a light rainfall, it’s something that goes right through your bones with dire consequences, the sky dyed dark red, you’re sitting in your leather-look multi-media chair, you can’t move, and if you get up you’ll die.

If the film tears, the world will fall apart.

A thousand monsters cover the surface of the earth, amidst humans rolling in the dirt; they come creeping out of the damp ground and your central nervous system, and while you’re still trying to defend yourself you’re already bearing their mark on your forehead, enraptured. I’m lying on the ground, letting them stomp me to death. Even now I’m telling lies.

I lie because I actually know very well what I long for. Do you seriously believe, ladies and gentlemen, that I buy into the urgency I’ve claimed and all the semi-bourgeois bullshit I’ve written in the past eight months?

I swear I can’t believe one word, not one single word of anything I’ve said in this diary. That is, I believe in the words, I know they correspond to the generally accepted definition of truth, but at the same time it makes me extremely physically uncomfortable to claim it’s all justified in some form or other. All the fuss about the fact that the concept of a dog doesn’t bark appears to suit me down to the ground. The indignation, the grief about it, even. Hand-made paper has its purposes. Heroin has its purposes too, that goes without saying. Help me, Dostoyevsky!

You’re fascinated by your face in the mirror and the way it’s toughening up, but it’s better you turn to face the wall and don’t look at it
.

All you motherfucking individuals everywhere out there, all you’re interested in is some stupid internship that’ll take you to Peking for two semesters, or trying to categorize my dress sense! I’m interested in world wars, severed heads with perfect hairstyles, and not the words, ‘Wow, sometimes you wear flares with holes in on Easter Sunday and two days later you turn up in a dress that catapults you and everyone around you straight back to the nineteenth century.’

I’m sitting on a toilet seat, overstressed. The axolotl is hanging from the non-functioning lock mechanism of the toilet cubicle. I’m trying to hold the door closed with one hand, and with the other I key a text to Edmond. I sense I’m REALLY losing my mind, the day has finally come. Come what may.

0:12 a.m. ‘Dear Edmond, I just wanted to tell you I love you. You’ll probably wonder why now of all times. To be honest I don’t really know exactly. I saw that loaf of potato bread in the kitchen today and I thought it had such a cute name and I loved the idea that you went shopping and stood in the bread section and thought, hey, awesome, there’s a loaf of bread called Knolli, maybe I should just take that one. It was really yummy too. See you tomorrow. PS: Are they all allowed to be sick? Or presumed dead? Other people’s pain already causes me so much pain. Please model your sickness, please do Neuro-Linguistic Programming and please tell everyone to just leave me alone, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Dear Mifti, my friend Sarah thought you were from the East because you buy ready-sliced cheese.’

When I look around, I’m devastated by the fact there’s no toilet paper left. Outside there’s a queue of hysterical men; I’m sitting on the men’s toilet. ‘Hey, babes, go and do your coke somewhere else, we really need to take a dump.’

I haul myself across to the next cubicle and have to explain at great length and in great detail to a bare-chested Swabian of about nineteen that he should go back to Stuttgart right this minute. I’m handed a moisture-soaked toilet roll in return.

By the time I struggle past the queue back into the crowds of people, I’m dizzy, and all of a sudden panic blazes up inside me, a fire licking at the edges of my entire mental life, raging along my throat. OK, that too, I see. Cramped between sweaty faces stuck with red-brown strands of dyed hair, I can certainly imagine something better than falling victim to a panic attack in this atmosphere, of all places.

Every glance shot in my direction transforms into a piercing arrow, and I’m so paranoid that instead of pulling it out I bore it so deeply into my body that no one can see it any more. I line up the steps to be taken next – getting up out of the vodka puddle, tying my soaked shoelaces, heading home or at least getting a breath of night air at a wide-open window. Too blocked; my arms won’t move, my knees buckle, my eyes can’t focus, and all this with ten-centimetre-long arrows in the region of my ribs, all entangled. I feel like crying but it doesn’t work, I feel like remembering what Ophelia said before I took my first ecstasy pill – ‘It’ll pass’ – but that doesn’t work either because by now it’s not the routine question on the length of the horror, there are just two possibilities lit up dimly ahead of me. Either I survive all this and I can decide tomorrow never to take drugs ever again. I’ll write it down on a piece of paper: THAT SHIT’S NO GOOD FOR YOU! And then I can stage an idyllic sex movie sabbatical for three weeks, alternating between pornos and spaghetti alla Sorrentina and parenting books. Or I die right now. Foxy reaches his hand out to me. It costs me a great effort to let him pull me up, lean against the wall for a moment and then stumble three steps to the next opportunity to prop myself up. Which is Alessa. A big red pimple has now emerged under her thick make-up – head-on confrontations with someone else’s spots are always rather difficult, of course – and she says, ‘Mifti, I’m so sorry about the heroin, shall I stick my finger down your throat?’ Someone yells, ‘Ha ha, heroin, how out is that?’ I know what I want to answer, I open my mouth and my voice fails me, all I can manage is half a nod, which is absolutely exhausting. I manage another four tortuous steps via content-free dancing in a direction not of my choice, and all I can feel is some kind of secreted fluids running down my back. Seven steps until I reach the low banisters around a spiral staircase, where I drag myself up a crazy amount of irregular steps. Someone screams, ‘Hey, that girl over there’s going up on the roof! Honey, you’re not allowed on the roof, they don’t let anyone up on the roof after midnight – the likelihood of plunging off drunk is about ninety-nine per cent.’

There’s a little skylight at the end of the spiral staircase. I push it open, pulling myself together along with the tiny amount of reserves left in me. Cold wind – it feels as if I am breathing properly for the first time in my life. A three-minute vacation in the Teutoburg Forest. Without consciously experiencing how my body managed it, I find myself finally standing on two firm legs, right in the middle of the roof, taking in a deeply moving view across Berlin. I instantly discover three burning rubbish bins in the west of the city. When I turn around I see a small group of people shaking each other’s hands at a distance of about a hundred yards. One figure breaks off and moves in my direction in a starkly familiar rhythm. The shape of her handbag is starkly familiar too. The sound of her heels is starkly familiar. She’s still too fit to walk on the balls of her feet.

Suddenly she’s standing before me at a competently maintained distance, raising one slow hand and running it through her hair on the left and right, and I can’t help laughing; it’s so typical of her. And different from how she used to be. It’s as if I were meeting her for the first time all over again, even though she’s her. In two thousand different countries, in two thousand apartments, in hell, in heaven – she’ll always be her.

I look at her, she looks at me. We stand there like two squirrels in a cartoon, suddenly realizing in the middle of a bush that the entire outside world can be ignored with a clear conscience. No idea how long. My sense of time is overshadowed by something else. It might be two minutes’ silence or two hours’. In any case, it’s all incredible; the sweat on my skin turns into a layer of ice sheathing my entire body. My face turns to stone and my mouth hangs open. Alice. OK. I’ve already started to find it stylish to hype you as a long-lost legend, and now suddenly you’re standing right here staring at me, just when my regeneration phase has finally kicked in, and my heart rate is forced to return to normal territory.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’ she says.

‘Pardon?’

‘Someone or other trips over the last step about thirty times a night. I heard moaning and I thought, shit, not again.’

DEAR GOD, I’M NOT ASKING HER TO FORSAKE HER INTRANSPARENCY, ALL I’M ASKING FOR IS A TEENY WEENY BIT OF FREEDOM!!!!!!

‘Was I moaning?’

‘You were making some kind of noise.’

‘It’s all just a bit much for me.’

‘Yeah, I get that a lot too.’

‘I know.’

‘Err . . .’

‘Why are you like that?’

‘I think you’re running a fever, is everything all right?’

‘What on earth is supposed to be all right?’

‘Honey?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘That’s just what I wanted to hear.’

‘I’d better ask you what you’re doing here then.’

‘DJing. In ten minutes. So if you want a drink you’ll have to tell me NOW.’

‘No.’

‘Mifti?’

‘Yes?’

She takes a breath and that’s just what I’ve been waiting for, for that tiny spark of honesty in her face, for her every movement to take place in slow motion, for time to stand still in some way and for us to look at each other again and know that what’s happened so far and every drink and every job are all suddenly utterly meaningless.

‘Do you despise me?’

And then something suddenly overcomes me.

‘Remember how you showed me the ocean? When I was sick in that holiday home in France with waves of fever, between all those over-dimensional animal posters and photos of sunsets in frameless glass frames, you know what I’m getting at, when I got in that panic and had a forty-degree temperature. I know now why that was. I was scared of my own body or the fact that my consciousness has nothing to do with the world, let alone with my flesh or my skin and all the material you can see on the surface, just allocated to me like it always had been. I wanted to give up thinking because words were meaningless, because meaninglessness was meaningless, because my life wasn’t worth anything, because my entire physiognomy is part of the inherently consistent organism of a populated celestial body from which I keep distancing myself. And then you walked to the ocean with me in the morning. Every morning we stared at the ocean and we loved being there because it was like us, Alice. It was the answer to everything. That ocean was obvious. And oceans are only oceans when they move. Everything you asked me and everything we saw and did, it was all obvious, it was a work of art, and that artwork was us.

‘Oceans are just their waves and every wave breaks at some point, simply because it moves forwards. I keep seeing your face and how it moves into some expression. The waves that break lose their shape in a gesture that expresses that shape in the first place. And now, now you’re suddenly standing right here. And I can see your face, but in some different way. And I can’t even imagine you really exist any more.’

Not turning around to me again, she climbs back through the skylight, the personification of business casual wear. Or more like the personification of flirtation. I have never in my life trembled as uncontrollably as now. My star-spangled sky, my Berlin, my total collapse reminiscent of an epileptic attack.

Despite it all, I somehow manage to fulfil the most rudimentary demand made of party guests: if you can’t be cool, at least be inconspicuous. If this was a film there’d be a camera fastened above my head using some special construction, plummeting vertically towards me every time I breathed in. A tear would roll down my cheek and torrential rain would set in. In the most extreme case, they might tell me to do something completely insane, maybe empty a champagne glass over myself and screech, ‘OK, here we go, now I’m gonna fuck you!’ But sadly, the world doesn’t work like that, I realize at the very last moment.

0:24 a.m. Emre is just mixing his last two tracks, and Alice puts down her record case all covered in stickers, takes off her coat, gives him a brief hug and puts on her headphones. Ophelia comes over to me in tears. I tell her, ‘Your father would be really glad if he knew you were partying tonight, I bet.’

She slaps me round the face. How I’ve missed that numb feeling that comes after a slap. I hit her back.

‘WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT ANYWAY, MIFTI? HUH? ALICE IS HERE, WHY DON’T YOU JUST GET CHATTING ABOUT GREAT RAPE FILMS AGAIN AT LAST?’

‘The thing with ALICE is a thing about music and nothing else. About everything in the world. And nothing. It’s nothing to do with homosexuality.’

She slaps me again and says with an expression solidifying into ultimate disgust, ‘Jesus, you are disgusting.’ I’m not even registering properly any more, so all I can do is give an idiotic laugh and let someone drag me away. It’s the guy in the motto sweatshirt.

‘FUCK YOU, MIFTI! FUCK YOU! FUCK OFF AND DIE, I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!’

‘What’s up with you two?’ asks the motto sweatshirt guy, and seeing as I don’t respond he adds, ‘Is everything OK?’

‘No, absolutely nothing is OK.’

‘Well, that’s a starting point at least.’

‘Where’s my axolotl? My axolotl’s gone, can you help me find my axolotl? It was here a minute . . .’ and then I break off mid-sentence, because I identify the first guitar chords initiated by Alice as a song just for me. None of the wedding guests are into The Zombies. Into creatures trapped between life and death and performing ‘She’s Not There’ in a serious state of underfucked love. The situation on the simulated dance floor alters drastically, but she does her thing as hard as nails.

I say, ‘It’s all so obvious.’

The guy, now stuck to my back, has dumped me down in front of a trestle table laden with flowers and wedding presents. The axolotl is floating sadly in a glass bowl full of water. He says, ‘Oh shit, look, is this real?’

I look at the gun in his hand. He’s just picked it up from the table. A fat bald guy comes towards us from behind, just as Colin Blunstone is singing,
But it’s too late to say you’re sorry, how would I know, why should I care?