Axolotl Roadkill (6 page)

Tina’s lying totally incapacitated in front of the TV, watching
Germany’s Next Top Model
and shouting now and again with her fingernails buried in her scalp, ‘Shit, fuck, wank . . . and all these arsewipes get all the money. That’s such a pile of wank, Jesus!’

‘What’s up?’ I ask, not daring to take another look at the greasy-haired entity on the seat behind me. I stare at Pörksen’s face to gauge from his reaction to Tina what’s going on with her. He shakes his head.

‘I can’t not eat for four days again, Pörksen!’

‘I’m in the top tax bracket this year,’ I say.

‘Respect!’

I pocket a lump of hash I find lying around and disappear past Tina into the office. Massive sub-woofers – well, at least that’s better than some love-sopped gaze – the ‘Clitoris Bite Boogie’ and a whole load of extremely cheesy Polish disco stuff. Incredible.

I’m like, ‘Why does the book put you in a permanent state of sexual arousal?’

‘I don’t know really, but there’s this part in one chapter, for example, where they suddenly start injecting these tiny fish into their veins, so to speak, and that makes them into huge dragons that can fly over the city. I mean, I can really imagine something like that might really exist in thirty years. But it’s so awesome that this guy can think up something like that already. Anyway, they shoot up these tiny fishes and turn into these dragons and then they fly around like crazy the whole time, and when they land again they kind of talk about what they could do better next time around. So like one of them says to another one that he shouldn’t fly around a certain tower, for example, because they kept getting in each other’s way. I can’t really tell the story that well, but it’s so funny. It kind of symbolizes, like, everything the writer thinks, you know, that Russia’s going to reintroduce the monarchy in thirty years’ time, so to speak, I don’t know.’

‘Oh, right!’

‘Yeah, well. Tina’s read it too.’

Tina is the kind of person who wears a coat made out of the last two surviving Indonesian cave gnus. She does it solely to appear amoral at first glance; a lot of people suddenly feel pure morality is something they vehemently have to combat. I don’t want to exercise some moral authority that strikes everyone down with awe. Psychology and morality are not appropriate instruments for dealing with life. There’s a popular myth that everything that appears deficient to us can be put down to psychological problems. And morality is unintelligent, it doesn’t go far enough. You simply reach a consensus too quickly, people. (That’s what occurs to me spontaneously on the subject.)

‘Yeah, well, I’m on page seventy-seven or so, but even in chapter two there’s this sudden totally cheerful description of a mass rape. I was lying in bed and my vaginal muscles totally cramped up. Completely dumb. I mean, he’s writing about the big team they have – the thing about the book is that there’s this big team that rules the land, you know what I mean? They’re the same ones as with the fish and all that. And then one of them describes this mass rape and he really gets his rocks off.’

‘We need a remedial teacher right this instant, if not several!’

I suddenly find myself on a tall bar stool in the middle of an empty living room, an electric guitar pressed into my hands, feeling under pressure, discussing Heidi Klum and the fact that that bitch is imparting medieval standards to my entire generation, and I think: is this the life I wanted to lead when I was thirteen?

Pörksen, a 43-year-old newcomer, screams into the prairies of the music industry he occupies, ‘YEAH!’

‘D’you fancy a unique mix of village disco and cowboy saloon, Mifti? Imagine Ronald Reagan holding a party in his den!’

Tina’s just like, ‘And Gorbachev’s on the decks!’

And then Pörksen’s, like, stuttering like crazy, ‘And that’s where we’re gonna be tonight, little baby. It may be hollow, but it’s techno.’

Although I’m absolutely fascinated by decadence coupled with putrefaction and I’m usually pretty steadfast, I can already envisage myself going under in a huge crowd of libertines who don’t want to miss their last chance for uninhibited sex on a Sunday night.

‘Hey, shit, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘Will you look at this crap here.’

‘What, it’s awesome! Did you watch that video I sent you, by the way, where the woman says to her husband, “Harald, I’m off to train the dog!” And he’s like, “Yeah, yeah, put your coat on, it’s chilly out?!”’

‘Erm . . .’

‘Anyway, there’s this weird guy who runs these parties, his name’s Ismail and he’s a real oddball. Like one time he had this experience, he says there were no drugs involved whatsoever, where his brain just suddenly twisted round. Like, his whole brain matter sort of drifted off to the left, and then there was a hollow space in his head above and below it, and it kind of turned around, so to speak, his brain, and now he sees everything the wrong way round.’

‘And do you get used to it?’

‘Looks like it, yeah.’

Pörksen knows stuff about a lot of things. Once I was sitting in a car that drove over his heel, and afterwards he was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s harmless. I saw a documentary about it.’

In my direct vicinity, a bottom with receptive orifices is seeking a hot stallion for regular orifice training. The people here like giving head and they also fuck untiringly to reggae before my very eyes, all part and parcel of a displacement activity lasting several years in total. In this black-painted basement grotto, the logical assumption is that you’ve landed up in some nether anti-world. So that’s the point I’m at right now; some of the guests are wearing Venetian masks and the theme is unexplored territories, and this kind of thing so doesn’t fascinate me. There’s not enough space for uncoordinated monging on the simulated dance floor, seeing as there are far too many contorted people present who’ve come to tonight’s party without any particular fetish. I drink vodka and cranberry juice on a steel seat, not moving a muscle and breathing in as rarely as possible so as not to inhale anything unexpected. A girl is hanging from the ceiling on a chain, her shoulders dislocated, stretchmarks across her back. Of course, we don’t feel justified not to categorize her screams as part of the whole show.

It’s a parallel world. We’re sitting next to a woman who calls herself Smiley Susie and her guy. The two of them are around fifty with tattoos across their shaved heads. ‘Mifti, listen for a minute. I’ve known Smiley Susie since primary school days! She used to sit on a bench at gymnastics all on her own in a pale blue towelling leotard.’

There’s this hole in the guy’s lower arm.

‘I was hungry.’ ‘What?’ ‘I was hungry so I cut a chunk out of my arm. Anyway, d’you know Tuffi?’ ‘What?’ ‘The elephant that jumped out of the monorail over Wuppertal in the sixties?’

‘WHAT?’

‘You don’t know him then, never mind. There was this circus elephant, right, and they walked him through the monorail as an advertising gag and then he only went and jumped out. It’s suspended, you know.’ ‘ZEN, darling, Zen.’ ‘What’s Zen?’ ‘Let me spell it for you: Z-E-N. You know, as in Zen Buddhism, and Zen’s this state of mind, totally meditative, and you don’t care about anything. But while you’re at it you do sometimes think about stuff you’re supposed to do and—’ ‘What?’ ‘You think of stuff you’re supposed to do, right, like buy toilet paper, and this guy who organizes meditation trips with fifty people, right, he told me one time that you just have to say to yourself, goodbye, I have to buy toilet paper.’ ‘WHAT?’ ‘Goodbye, I have to buy toilet paper.’

It’s only now that I realize nobody here has a face. It’s a really clever lighting solution, albeit an unfathomable one: nobody has a face, there’s an atmosphere of unlimited anonymity. So it’s all about God here.

You’re only anonymous at this party, and you’re only anonymous if you’re God.

An inferno. Hell on earth. Sex is always an act of violence anyway. Eusebius of Caesarea says: ‘Woe betide him who considers hell risible now and must experience Hell himself before he believes in it.’

And even though, being an enlightened human being, I’ve long interpreted hell as an instrument of political power, I now believe in it. From one second to the next, I’m somewhere else. In a television documentary on Siberia, where scientists doing a test drilling to research the origin of earthquakes reach a cavity nine kilometres under the earth. They let down a microphone into the chamber. The sound of human screams comes over the microphone. Countless voices. And later a cloud of poisonous gas escapes from the hole they drilled. Even the tiniest sound penetrates to my inner ear through the labyrinth of bone and I make out the voices, and they’re telling me something that definitely wasn’t premeditated by whoever created this track. The music and me and a terrifying creature with a hideous face and claws, which appears as they retrieve the drill head and hisses at me, making me leave my place in panic.

I’ve never looked at Pörksen the way I am now, his tongue just about in my pharynx, his eyes screwed shut an inch away from mine. Actually none of it would interest me in the slightest if it weren’t for this pure horniness taking me over right now. We’re sitting on a seat full of holes with yellow foam emerging from them. I get a face full of artificial fog, tears run down my cheeks, and by the time I can see again and want to pull his face back to mine he’s disappeared.

‘Oi, you, I think someone’s waiting for you outside,’ says Smiley Susie.

‘Ho ho ho! Amazing day: sun, sea, beach, wind, happy dog, happy Susie.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Did you know they have VIP nights here?’

‘You pay twenty thousand euros and you get to shag a sheikh up the arse.’

Everyone’s a foot taller than me and I get a constant series of armpits in my face as I rush outside. And then he’s standing there smoking, and I wonder if this is all about drugs or sex or a nice cool night breeze. He comes towards me, I take the cigarette out of his hand, and as I take a drag he bites my neck. At some point I’m lying on the wet concrete ground with my legs akimbo, gravel aggregate digging into my back. Pörksen on top of me, my sequinned tights round my ankles. In this position, I let him fuck me in the mouth for an incredible length of time, for various reasons. As the sun rises, warm cum runs down my throat. It disgorges all over my face; funnily enough there’s something pretty operatic about it. I turn my head slightly to the left, very slowly. For some reason I can’t fathom, the movement causes an extremely loud, threatening sound as if I were in an open quarry, just about to be crushed by a landslide. This is it. The ground kind of turns soft, hot, I don’t know if it’s my back that rips open or the ground beneath me, and when Pörksen says, ‘Look, Mifti, d’you think that was a bat that made an echo off the TV tower by flapping its wings?’ the volume of his voice rises exponentially like you wouldn’t believe and it turns into a giant snarling that I’ve been expecting all along anyway. It’s just far too loud. Pins and needles pierce my eardrums. Thick, dark red tube-like structures protrude from my arms. Veins with tiny insects squishing through them. They get bigger and bigger until my blood vessels burst and dark maggots come creeping out of my body, crawling over me, mutating into flat beetles with feelers three times as long as their abdomens.

The taxi driver says, ‘I’ve driven you before, haven’t I?’

‘Pardon?’

‘It’s your teeth and your eyes, I’ve seen them before.’

‘Yeah, a crossbite, pretty tragic.’

I limp into the flat, blood seeping from my lip in all seriousness, which gets me totally worried again. A hyped-up Edmond is wolfing down liquorice wheels in the kitchen. Annika’s asleep, lying innocently and heart-wrenchingly ready for sacrifice under one of our covers printed with comic characters. Her life of regularity moves me to a spontaneous attack of sentimentality. I decide I will never again get into a situation that transforms her face into a concerned battlefield of contradictions.

‘Have we got any halloumi left?’ I ask Edmond, and he turns to face me with his eyes wide.

‘Yeah, probably.’

‘Can you fry it up for me?’

‘Can’t you fry it yourself?’

‘No.’

‘OK.’

‘So you’ll do it?’

‘Only if you watch to see how to do it.’

I tiptoe into my room, still in an absolute panic that the floor will open up and swallow me any minute now.

‘COME BACK HERE AND WATCH THIS, WILL YOU, MIFTI!’

‘NO!’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m so dizzy.’

‘Oh.’

(Nick Lowe)

Pörksen’s parents are apparently complete esoteric hippies, which is why he’s pretty agnostic about my current astral travel phase. This is now my twelfth attempt to leave my body, except I keep getting slung back into the darkness of my completely blacked-out bedroom by this crazy shortness of breath. It’s 12:45 and I’ve done nothing for the past five hours but lie in bed smoking. The only light source consists of the glow of my cigarette every time I take a drag. I look down my body and suddenly think I’m only occupying this thing here temporarily, the thing with the lungs and all the blood vessels and that, like a parasite from another star system come for research reasons to . . . well, anyway. At any rate, a few hours ago I was suddenly not inside it any more for a tiny moment. I severed myself from it as this weird cloud-like shell or as air, and I felt the exact moment when I was dragged back into the mouldering old thing by a power beyond my possession. I can’t take this any more. That power is God. I hate God.

Pörksen calls. He says, ‘Jesus, at some point you just started mumbling, fuck . . . err . . . fuck, baby, what’s going on? Wow. Anyway first you did this completely hardcore thingying around, then you sucked me off when we got home, and at some point you ripped Tina’s Pavel Pepperstein picture off the wall. It’s OK, though, thank God. And after that we heard this weird noise, and you—’

‘What d’you mean, when we got home?’

‘Back to my place, you know.’

‘We were outside.’

‘You’re just a bit confused, hon.’