Axolotl Roadkill (7 page)

‘What?’

‘You spent precisely two seconds outside yesterday. On the walk to and from the taxi.’

‘I think something’s going into meltdown here, Pörksen.’

‘Anyway, at about five a.m. we heard this crazy noise like someone snoring their head off, and then suddenly something flew away, it was a—’

‘Pörksen, if we really did go back to your place, that means something’s up with my perception of time and space. And don’t you try and neutralize it with the word psychosis. All last night’s gone into meltdown, I swear. I could swear we were outside. You were kneeling over me, and the ground opened up, that’s what happened.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean? That you’ve understood the world as a whole? Believe me, I’ve been there already. The only mistake mankind ever made was inventing time – I found that totally plausible back then.’

‘I—’

‘You were totally strange yesterday, Mifti. And you hadn’t even taken anything, that’s the weird thing. What a comedown. You’re lucky we took you back with us. Someone could have totally cut your guts out of your body, and then you’d have woken up later with an arsehole the size of Canada. Or not. You never know what might happen in a situation like that, it’s in God’s hands.’

‘Where’s Annika?’

‘At work.’ Edmond is kind of bouncing aimlessly around the flat.

‘OK, so did she say anything? Like when’s she coming home? Hel-looo?’

‘All she said was that you were lying in bed with totally dilated pupils and that she doesn’t know quite how you’re supposed to get out of your tricky situation. You’re really infuriating her, Mifti. What are you trying to prove? That you can ruthlessly cut all the ties to your relatives without even showing the slightest sign of emotion? And she told me to tell you that you don’t have to sell your own grandmother. You don’t have to sell your grandmother and you do have to go to school. You have to just get down to it. That’s an imploring request. I want to know who you really are.’

‘What are you talking about? And why can’t she tell me all that to my face? I’m sitting here and you’re telling me that she told you that I don’t have to sell my own grandmother.’

‘And you didn’t empty the dishwasher either. She asked if it’s pure evil or fear that makes you do it.’

‘Like I so give a fuck if I emptied the dishwasher or not! Of course you have to take her side, you can’t help it. Unfortunately you live out of her pocket, you have no other option but to underscore her conspiracy theories against me with loud-mouthed endorsements, but just look at me will you! I’m a girl of small means and I’m completely fucked up, and she comes along and expects me to function perfectly, but I can’t. I don’t just function properly like a happy little bunny, I don’t function at all. Material greed, rituals and habits, jealousy, a lack of privacy, it’s all coveting, coveting, coveting.’

‘Maybe it’s time you went to see a therapist.’

‘I know if they want you to draw trees you mustn’t make the roots too thick, because that’s a sign of aggression. Too many fruits mean you’re over-striving, too many flowers mean you’re overly romantic. You can totally rule out finding anything out about me that way – forget it.’

Is that what you all class as insanity? Are you scared of going insane? Do people who go crazy send nice warm shivers down your spine?

By the way, the fact that Edmond appears so concentrated with regard to my recent misbehaviour shocks me to death. I’m plagued by self-doubt. He’s not the disinterested arsehole I’ve known all my life any more.

We set the table on the balcony with a flourish – plastic-wrapped ham and cheese slices past their sell-by date – talking about how his fringe theatre crap might develop into something that . . . well, something anyway, maybe something that enables him to get a second home in Costa Rica.

‘So, Mifti, right, in the beginning you have all these endless possibilities, and suddenly your options get more and more restricted, so it meant I had to set boundaries for myself, and suddenly you realize, oh shit, no, you have to block it and it’s completely dumb, the guy could have staged an excellent performance without all that post-structuralist crap about the concept of happiness and the one-size-fits-all moral crap. I was like totally blown away by the whole thing, so I’m just standing there and thinking, wow, it’s so totally touching and great, and then I started talking about that abstruse mass rape in scene four and I was still totally euphoric and then I looked at the actors and they’re just like, yeah, umm. D’you get what I mean?’

‘You want to do theatre, yeah, of course, and there are all these rules for the theatre, even if they’re completely dumb rules like the one where one actor’s not supposed to stand in front of another one. That’s what the director used to be there for, so he could tell them: you can’t see the others from the front if you stand like that. I mean I’m not the kind of person who thinks everything’s just a game, but if you look at a play as this funny kind of game, then logic dictates you have to look at it conventionally as a stupid childhood game, even though you can’t project yourself back into your whole idyllic childhood – and you want something else, you don’t just want to play “Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses”. So you can’t ever really go back there, but you can take the attitude that anything goes. So you don’t waste time thinking about whether you ought to subjugate yourself to certain standards or techniques. Anything goes on stage, you’re allowed to disregard all the classic forms within the problem of content, all the moral laws and any kind of technique. The whole social network that’s involved is the equivalent of a fifteen-month-old baby in its early childhood omnipotence phase.’

‘I don’t quite get what you mean.’

‘There’s just this one world of natural laws, one world of social laws and constraints, one world of moral laws and conventions and there’s this one world of games and pretences. And because theatre’s a social art, you never know whether it’s really all that free, because in some sense it’s also a societal confrontation between people in their roles in society. So it has to remain communicable. Although – actually, it doesn’t. If you have the possibility to make a completely off-the-wall work of art you don’t even need an audience.’

‘So what happens if you exchange the world of social laws for the world of games and pretences in your private life? That’s what we do all the time, isn’t it?’

‘No idea. But I definitely think we’re far more than an insider phenomenon now.’

‘That’s just what I keep asking myself. You do theatre because you want to have fun, kind of thing, but when I put on that piece in Brussels and it was so expensive, I don’t know, and anyway there was this guy there and he goes, “So, did you have fun?” And I was like totally glad he asked me that, because I looked so unhappy. And that’s something where I think, do I stay true to the whole thing or do I stay true to myself, and if I stay true to myself will I ever find a room in a flatshare? And then you meet people who think just as many thoughts about the whole thing or about some other subject, but that doesn’t matter really, as long as somebody somewhere is thinking thoughts at all, whether it’s about raccoon livers or Medea.’

‘As long as you’re having fun, kind of thing.’

‘Yeah, and you know, I just, when we were in Brussels, and that was the only moment while I was staying in Belgium that I thought, yeah, the thing with the mass rape scene went really well.’

‘I have no lack of ideas, and you have no lack of radicalism and no lack of courage. The one and only thing you lack is influential people who you can convince of what you do, Edmond.’

He smiles triumphantly, I eat half-fat margarine by the ton with candied spiders, and then we clear the table the way happy little bunnies do these things. At some point Edmond asks me if I fancy biscuits shaped like animals, and I reach into the bag he presents and pull out an elephant.

‘Oh no, you can’t eat that one.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s a protected species. The Malayan
elephas maximus
.’

Dear Medea,

Whatever happened to you? A character in a drama who has a problem with her lover, essentially nothing more than a stomping ethnic minority womb who kills her children during a spontaneous emotional outburst at the Deutsches Theater, and in a fitted kitchen, and in the nineteenth century. I’m firmly convinced that you didn’t sink back into your uterus plagued to death by female jealousy – you were a politician. Murdering your children was a coldly calculated political act.

You demanded your human rights by means of a claim for justice that developed by necessity into the murder of your children, in this society. You had a right to fame and dignity, and you weren’t just mere female biology, dependent on a lover. You were related to a sun god.

All my love,

Mifti

Alice, I’m just thinking about you right now and I’m not going to stop either seeing your face or writing these things down, because otherwise it’ll all be gone, this directness will be gone and this happiness too. But I’m still never going to have anything to do with you again, because you obviously don’t want to love me any more, regardless of whether the circumstances are to blame or not. There are complications, because I tend to act like a little child. All this is probably way off the mark, of course there are shades of grey, but you’re still there somewhere – why don’t you come out, you hackneyed old whore?

Annika’s pubes are in a shocking state. She apologizes for them as she gets in the bathtub with me, and we’re sisters again. We’re sisters who’d have nothing to hide from one other if only we were both passionate student teachers specializing in sport.

As she now informs me, today I puked up next to Edmond’s anodized aluminium keyboard and knocked the living room table over. Just for a change, she’s not standing in the background troubled by moral concerns, but rubbing in eucalyptus shower lotion and essential oils, lying in a calming bath completely off her head.

‘You know I’m going away tomorrow, don’t you Mifti?’

‘No, you weird fascinating monster dictator.’

Annika explains that our world is in constant flux and trends are the trailblazers of this process of change. So as to ride the crest of the wave and not have to react to tides, she and her agency maintain an international network – the majority of whom will spend tomorrow making a deliberately ironic music video for the agency’s Facebook page at a fancy-dress party with the theme ‘Strange in Brandenburg’. As part of the event, thirty to forty poorly paid ‘PR trainees with their fingers on the fashion pulse’ will be singing Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, ‘showcasing the high-quality summer collections of the labels they represent on a continuous basis’. The whole thing was initiated by Annika herself. She’s simply the one who knows best how to come up with experiential worlds and couple her market-friendly intellect with her experience of innovative marketing tools.

‘You know, don’t you, we’re on a constant hunt for trends and changes.’

‘Oh, right. And when are you coming back? D’you think my teeth look kind of funny?’

‘Huh? No?!’

‘Phew.’

‘Next week.’

‘Why next week? What are you doing out there for so long? You’ll come back home and sleep for three weeks solid. You can’t do that to us, Annika.’

‘I don’t even want to do that to you. We have to have conferences and that. I just think it’s pretty wicked shit.’

‘Yeah, it’s wicked shit.’

Suddenly Edmond tears the bathroom door open and yells with joyful aplomb, ‘FUCKING DRUGHEADS!’

Annika yells back, ‘FUCKING DRUGHEAD!’ and throws the dumb shower lotion stuff at him, which misses Edmond but hits the doorframe and will leave traces of its contents on our hall carpet for the next four years.

I say, ‘Edmond, can you please leave the bathroom, I’d like to concentrate on our unacceptable state as such right now.’

He leaps into the bathtub fully clothed. I flip out completely. Annika laughs over-ambitious and uninhibitedly despairing tears. Edmond is wearing turquoise Doc Martens, in which he very recently stomped through a nearby piece of woodland. Mud and particles of dog shit float in the bathwater. He tries to adopt a position that might prove acceptable for all parties. Now he’s sitting calmly between us, first of all taking a deep breath of course.

‘Mifti?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Can you give me my money back now? Are you feeling better now?’

‘Huh?’

At this point we’re informed that I not only puked up next to Edmond’s anodized aluminium keyboard but also refused (just as unscrupulously) to repay my debts to him from the previous day, with the argument, ‘Fuck capitalism!’

‘But what debts anyway?’

‘Well, not exactly debts, but I gave you the money to buy that thing, you know.’

‘What thing exactly?’

‘An international culture magazine.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I want my change, kind of thing.’

‘Oh right, sorry, I’ll just go and get it.’

I run to my purse, only to find that I kind of haven’t got enough for some reason. I run back, by which point Edmond has calmly shoved an oversized chocolate-coated soft marshmallow traditionally known in Germany as a ‘nigger’s kiss’ into Annika’s face and is now bent over her ribs inspecting her tonsils for white spots.

‘That looks pretty cool from here – if Annika wasn’t naked I’d take a photo.’

‘I’ve got this sore throat out of nowhere, Mifti. I don’t know how come. Edmond’s just checking if I’ve got white spots on my tonsils.’

‘So how much do I get back now? You know – interest. One dumpling for every week.’

I press a small amount of change into his hand.

‘Are you kidding me, Mifti?’

Annika: ‘Edmond, what d’you think, men in underpants and socks are the worst, aren’t they?’

Edmond: ‘I just can’t stand my own sexiness, I always have to take the sting out of it so I don’t get a boner every time I look in the mirror.’

Mifti: ‘Well, I bought that book about the Baader-Meinhof gang, the one you told me to get, where the woman describes it all from her perspective, and then your international wank thing, and they both cost seventeen euro. So I spent thirty-four euro altogether, and now you get nine euro back.’