Axolotl Roadkill (18 page)

‘It’s not only real, it’s a nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol and next to it is a loaded spare cartridge.’

‘It’s loaded?’

I’m like, ‘Put it away please.’

‘Has Albrecht seen it yet? Why did you give him something like this?’

Well, no one told me about her

The way she lied

No one told me about her

How many people cried

‘What kind of question is that?’

‘What kind of signals are you trying to give off, huh? That married men have to shoot themselves? Or someone else? Mifti, get your axolotl right now, we’ve got to get out of here.’

‘All right, I will, although actually . . .?’

(Leonard Cohen)

I wake up in a child’s pale blue bedroom, which has a door that leads into a back garden through glass panes. On the ornate plastic bedside table next to me is a small white piece of paper. I can’t yet summon up enough energy to decipher what it says. I get up and walk through a maisonette apartment ripped off from some alternative parenting magazine, instantly identifiable as requiring 5,000 euro a month net income. In the bathroom I hang my weak head under the tap, gulp down three litres of water and then lie down in the empty bathtub to wait for it to fill up. After, wrapped up in a towel, I position myself in front of the mirror for the first time in three days; I’ve almost forgotten what I look like. Then I lie down under the covers again with wet hair and read the note:
Stay in bed as long as you like, everything’s fine
.

The motto sweatshirt guy appears in the doorway dressed only in boxer shorts and says, ‘Stay in bed as long as you like, everything’s fine.’

He really does look kinda good, like a guy in a nouvelle vague film set on a sailing boat. They have this special kind of biceps that I just can’t help admiring; it has nothing to do with rowing machines, it’s purely genetic.

‘What time is it?’

‘Five a.m.’

‘Have I only slept that long?’

‘You went to sleep at three the night before last and you’ve slept through till now. You’ve missed a whole day of your life. Hold on, I’ll show you something.’ He bangs around the flat and comes back with a photo album open on his mobile phone. My pupils jump out at me from the screen, the size of plates on that ketamine night two weeks ago. It’s scary and I tell him so. Then we introduce each other. His name is Viktor and he won’t tell me what he does for a living. On the basis of my burnt-out behaviour the night before last, he’s decided I’m intelligent enough to work it out for myself. ‘I don’t want to get into your pants, by the way. I’m not really interested in you. I think you’re objectively hot, if you get what I mean, but I’m absolutely not interested in you.’

‘You’re a psychotherapist!’

‘Spot on.’

‘And you hang out, extremely well-dressed, in some practice on Kollwitzplatz with red velvet curtains.’

‘Spot on.’

‘I went to one of those once. In the end the therapist said I was therapy-resistant and I had to drag myself out with a numb leg that had gone to sleep. It was so incredibly embarrassing. A numb leg and smudged eyeliner. He’s like, “Are you all right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure, my leg’s just gone to sleep, oh God.”’

‘OK?’

‘And with the second therapist it was like, OK, he was supposed to be the absolute über-dude of a therapist, so anyway, I go in there and I see a Heidegger book and I crank up the precociousness and say, “Oh, Heidegger!” And he answers, “Hey, if you think I’m gonna chat philosophy with you, you’ve got another thing coming.” The third one chucked me out at some point and three days later there was this all-blue postcard in the mail saying she was sorry, something came over her. And the fourth one wanted me to draw a person, a tree and a road before she even introduced herself. My father had one too. I was supposed to go along with him one time. She was really, really abysmal. Classic case of counter-transference. She talked to me about my truancy issues for a couple of minutes, and my dad fell asleep on the chair opposite me.’

A child of four at the most with a Playboy bunny shaved into the back of her head is standing in the room. ‘We could play with my pyramid,’ she says.

Viktor says in a really cool, laid-back tone of voice, ‘Hey, come on, either you go back to sleep or you keep yourself occupied for a while.’ And I realize there is a world that exists without expensive viscose fabric samples or the constantly repeated statement, ‘Three days after my first arsefuck I discovered a fingertip of lube cream on the end of my log.’

‘But Papa, I don’t know what to play.’

‘I can’t help it if there’s no diamond castle on offer for a change and only your enormous collection of educational toys, but please stop being so annoying! Boredom can be a great thing once in a while. I’ve got three different options for you, but we can’t do any of them for at least two hours. You can either tidy your room—’

‘But there’s someone in my bed.’

‘Never mind that. Would you be willing to tidy your room?’

‘No way. Hey, what is there to tidy up?’

‘Your train tracks, for example, and then you can sort out all your different frogs.’

‘What’s the second option?’

‘Mifti makes waffles with you. Sorry, Mifti.’

‘And the third one?’

‘You go back to sleep now, and afterwards I’ll read you the story about the pig that wouldn’t wash. There’s this pig that refuses to take a bath, and then one day it does have a bath and it never wants to get out again because it’s so great. And after that I’ll read you that other book, the one that explains what all the different kinds of tractors do.’

‘Why such crap books?’

‘Because you chose them yesterday, Bibi.’

Then we all sit there with gelatinous milk chocolate mush in our mouths and alternate between discussing German splatter films, Madonna’s biceps and therapy programmes.

‘When I was a twenty-six-year-old student I was so broke that I put a small ad in the paper, with a female friend of mine. We called ourselves “Amor and Psyche”, that was kind of hip back then, and we advised men with no sex lives on the broad subject of women for fifty euro an hour.’

‘Like consultant physicians?’

‘Yup. Oh, er, hmmm, maybe you should try this one: not wearing clothes.’

‘And then?’

‘It was a complete nightmare, we’d be sitting there with these unattractive consultant physicians and persuading them, hey, if you can get a woman to talk about her childhood, that means she’s in love with you.’

‘Well, I was raped as a child.’

‘Oh really?’

‘No. The whole rape thing’s just supposed to relativize the fact that I still expect anything from that disgusting bastard. I love the guy. He’s not the only person I love, but he might be the only one I can still believe in, surrounded by all this stupid out-of-touch shit here. So. And then I had a mother too until not that long ago. Very simple issue: she was schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, neurotic, sadistic, highly intelligent and unemployable because of the drugs. We lived in a one-bedroom flat and shared a bed every night until she died. Whenever I woke up in the morning and she wasn’t lying next to me, I knew she’d be stretched out over the kitchen table, totally melancholy and drunk as a skunk with her head buried in her arms. I get home, she’s lying around somewhere – that’s how our peaceful coexistence worked for the main part. Putting up with her corporal punishment was a relatively bearable state of affairs, because then our roles were clearly defined and my position was clear-cut: just being the weak one for a change. I read this book a while back about codependency but I couldn’t find an explanation model that fitted me. They analysed all these different family combinations, but drug-addict single parents with only children between three and thirteen simply don’t come up. In view of all that, I can say, yes, I went through some stuff back then, and now I’m starting to ask myself how I managed it. But unfortunately it didn’t make me into a great artist. It’s really kind of difficult for me. All that getting tortured. It switches off your dissociation, your ability to adapt; a person like that can’t get used to physical pain.’

‘It’s amazing that you can talk about it.’

‘See? That’s what I was going for, that one bastard sentence that I never wanted to hear again. It doesn’t make any difference whether I talk about it or not. I’ve been repeating myself for three years, in this glitter, dirt and sequin system, a real bad nightmare bass for grown-ups. I can’t stand it. I have no problem talking about anything that’s ever happened to me that entails post-traumatic disorders, but you know, it’s a total myth that it’s possible to get your head around all your personal issues with all that psychology crap. It doesn’t get you anywhere. Regardless of that, what you can say is, I’ll be disabled for the rest of my life and no one can change that. I’ll be able to understand the behaviour of suicide bombers for the rest of my life, and no one can change that.’

‘Yes, maybe.’

‘I have a whole load of raised scars to show off as soon as anyone accuses me of social incompetence or anything else, and then they leap up like enchanted ambulance-chasers – the whole deadly dull mass of psychologists, constantly maintaining something curdled into general understanding – and then they say, oh, what did they do to you, how great that you can talk about it, then maybe you’ll finally be normal soon. And that cements me right back into the victim maze, while all the others stumble out triumphantly somewhere or other. Every single second, you have to remember to conform to some norm or other and slave away at some stupid convention crap or other. She abandoned me once, when I was about sixteen months old. And everyone says you can’t remember that far back, but I remember that feeling, of being abandoned, and in a way being killed to some extent as well. Can you imagine how mega-aggressive I am to all the pseudo-experienced bastards all around me, who’ve never been confronted with any serious difficulty except maybe rheumatism or a broken heart? And then they want to tell me what to do in life and what’s acceptable and what’s not and what’s OK from an artistic point of view and that you must never talk about that kind of subject in a socially critical singsong, because that’s repulsive and out and everything has to take place on a totally sober and best of all entertaining level or best of all not at all, because it’s not even a social taboo, all it is is kitsch. I’m always thinking no – you have no idea of anything except orderly conditions, and as soon as your conditions aren’t orderly, if they’re not neat and tidy like they ought to be then you just take a brief jaunt through some kind of drug hell or you go to wild parties or puke all down your nineteen-forties Gucci dress, and that’s that, you go straight back to your tagliatelle. I hate people. Apart from Bibi, she’s great, I’ve just noticed. She’s sitting over there, throwing specially designed pharaohs off Playmobil cliffs, and she doesn’t ask too much. Modest and unassuming. Top of the pops.’

‘Did they even have Gucci in the Forties?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you in love with anyone right now?’

‘Yes, you can tell, can’t you? I’m in love with someone who said things to me that I’ve started dreaming about now. Every night. Shit. Now I’ve really gone and turned into one of those melodramatic weeping Wendys just because the woman happens to be perverted. And then I had a row with my best friend the day before yesterday. If the worst comes to the worst, she’ll write and tell me she’ll always love me and she can tell by my eyes where I’ve been and she’s my witness. And then we’ll never see each other again. We’ve always argued, once just because I made her a mix-tape and that offended her honour as a music expert, but this time it’s different somehow. None of it matters anyway.’

‘Shall we have another lie-down?’

‘Yes.’

Then we lie on his bed side by side, while outside lots of friendly little people go to work or eat cream cheese bagels. Just before I fall asleep he says, ‘Turn around a bit, I want to show you something.’ And when I turn around he just puts his arm around me, in that decisive banker’s manner you see in films occasionally, and then I fall asleep, and when I wake up for a moment in between, I put my arm around him for a change, and then I fall asleep again. The whole thing ends up with his head between my legs and me screaming in ecstasy and tossing and turning from left to right and digging my hands into his elbows as he props himself up on the bed.

At some point I force myself to get up. As I’m tiptoeing to the front door I spot an aquarium lined with large pebbles on top of a cabinet in the hall. Estimated gross water capacity, 160 litres. It has to be lighter in the aquarium during the day than at night, and that just about sums up the axolotl’s needs in terms of lighting concepts. If there was ever a more idyllic moment in the history of my personal heteromatrix or at least in the history of humankind, then I’ve never heard about it.

‘That’s my childhood, the childhood of an orphan, a foundling, a homeless little girl with no father or mother, who never had love bestowed upon her. It was awful, but I have no regrets.’ And then she said, ‘Prettiness fades, beauty remains.’ What terrible thing did you send me, it made me want to puke – animal masks are totally in right now, non-stop animal masks, expressionless potato fields everywhere you look and expressionless people in animal masks. The two of us can be so unbeatable together and stir up the whole crappy little pessimistic leftist cultural scene so bad it makes them all break out in a sweat. I know all the tricks, I just haven’t used any of them yet.

You have to tell me what your songs are called so I can use them on my life.