The Appointment

by Katharina Volckmer

  You don’t need to be scared of me, though, Dr. Seligman, really. Your assistant told me that you are very thorough and that this would take a while, especially the photos, so I don’t want you to worry, because I still think that the reasons for my discharge from work were misconstrued and it’s unfair to say that I have anger issues. I was angry that day, of course—it was before I had started taking my hormones—but to get suspended like that when they have no idea what it’s like for people like me. And I don’t think that threatening to staple a coworker’s ear to their desk whilst waving a stapler around can really count as violence. Not with those staplers, anyway. I doubt they have ever tried to staple through human flesh and into a solid desk with one of those stiff little plastic things. I was probably more at risk of losing my eyesight from an errant staple, but of course that didn’t matter to them. And you don’t need to think that they ever provided us with safety glasses; heaven knows how many casualties will be caused by all that cheap stationery. But now I don’t feel sorry anymore; let them all be poisoned from chewing on those horrible pens that turn all handwriting into a lament. Because the worst thing was not losing my job—in this city you starve either way—but that they made me see a therapist called Jason, for otherwise they would have pressed charges. Can you imagine being serious with a therapist called Jason, Dr. Seligman? A therapist who looked like he might also be called Dave or Pete, who had the kind of face that would adapt to anything, like one of those yoga teachers who smile their way through any atrocity, knowing that the universe is backing their cause. And if the sun could break out of herself and revolve around them, she would. That’s why people like Jason think they can forgive all those petty human errors, and that’s also why I decided to lie to him.

  I had no idea what Jason’s background was, but I thought that it would wind him up if I told him about my sexual fixation with our dear Führer and that my inability to ever fulfil my desires had brought about my anger and made me want to staple my colleague’s earlobe to the desk. I could not tell him about the true nature of my dreams and all the things that were wrong with my body, and after a while I really began to enjoy my story. I wanted to be a writer once, Dr. Seligman, and coming up with a narrative like that was a beautiful experience. Toward the end Jason could not wait for our sessions to be over, I could feel it. I guess there’s nothing more off-putting than a perversion you don’t share; plus, being stuck in a room with a German talking themselves into a semi-orgiastic state over imagining being spanked with the Führer’s very own riding crop also poses a moral issue. Even though Jason didn’t really look like he was willing to invest any unnecessary emotions, I could tell that he was suffering. But it wasn’t just filth—there were moments of true intimacy, of that paternal chivalry we all secretly crave, of doubts and broken promises and the inevitable end of being left for Eva Braun, his frumpy secretary named after the ugliest colour. I described in great detail how I petted the dogs for the last time before returning all those sweet tokens of affection and how I managed to smuggle out a strand of his famous hair hidden in a dirty pair of nylon stockings and a note, in his own handwriting, requesting me to wear nothing but one of those Jewish skullcaps. I think Jason actually winced when I told him how I had been daydreaming about my little A, that’s how I called Hitler by myself, making me say “My name is Sarah” before punishing me with his mighty crop. In my dreams I had very dark hair and a pair of those lovely dark eyes, and everything felt so wonderfully controversial. Jason promised to sign anything attesting to my calm and placid nature if he never had to listen again to me telling him how I had gotten into the habit of coming on little portraits of the Führer, imaging his moustache tickling my soft parts. How I found it hard to orgasm without doing the salute. I even offered to draw some of my dreams for him and suggested that role play might be a good way to overcome my tensions, but all he could mumble was that I should never forget that I am not my thoughts. Overall, I was quite disappointed with Jason and his lack of imagination, Dr. Seligman, yet there was one thing I was grateful for. Prior to those sessions I used to think of Hitler as nothing but a severe case of short-man syndrome gone horribly wrong. A desperate little moon trying to woo the sun when she couldn’t care less. You might be wondering why I am referring to the sun as she, but remember that in my mother tongue the sun is a woman and the moon is a man, like some sort of Valkyrie trying to save her charms from an unpleasant little man. Maybe that is why we are so twisted and maybe that is why the so-called short-man syndrome has had such catastrophic consequences for us. I don’t want to make amends again, but maybe Hitler really felt like he would not be able to satisfy the sun. Only a little man would come to think of his own potency in such terms; only he would feel threatened by someone that would never contemplate threatening him, who could not even produce his own light. I am sure that the sun does not care about the moon and his hopeless advances. Why would she even consider a man who could quite possibly walk into her vagina without any sentimental impact?

  But even today, Dr. Seligman, for a German a living Jew is quite an excitement, something that no one prepared us for when we were growing up. We were only used to dead or miserable Jews, staring at us from endless grey photographs or from somewhere far away in exile, never smiling, and us forever in their debt. And our one way of making it up to you was by turning you into magical creatures with fairy dust coming out of every hole, with superior intellects, curious names, and infinitely more interesting biographies. In our imagination, no Jew would ever be a cabdriver, and there was even a page in my theology book dedicated to famous Jews. And in our music classes we had to sing “Hava Nagila” in Hebrew, Dr. Seligman—thirty German children and not a single Jew in sight, and we sang in Hebrew to make sure that we remained de-Nazified and full of respect. But we never mourned; if anything, we performed a new version of ourselves, hysterically nonracist in any direction and negating difference wherever possible. Suddenly there were just Germans. No Jews, no guest workers, no Others. And yet we never granted them the status of human beings again or let them interfere with our take of the story down to that ugly heap of stones they put up in Berlin to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. Have you seen that, Dr. Seligman? I mean, seriously, who wants to be remembered like that? Who wants to be remembered as the receiving end of violence? We are so used to being in control of our victims, and that’s why even after all these years I cannot quite suppress my amazement that you are alive outside our history books and memorial sites, that you have broken free from our version of you and that we’re now in this room together doing what we are doing, that I can almost touch your lovely hair from up here. It’s like a miracle. Although I should probably tell you that your hair is thinning a little at the crown; it’s very slight, nothing that would deter an admirer. But still, I thought you should know.

  Do you think it was silly of me not to make better use of Jason, Dr. Seligman? The one time they pay me to go and see a therapist, and I have nothing else to do but tell him such a mad story. I should probably be glad he did not have me committed and sent to some looney bin for coming up with nicknames for the Führer’s cock. But that was the time before my body became the problem it is now, when I still thought I could just watch gay porn and somehow laugh my way out of this situation. That was before I met K, Dr. Seligman. Until then I had known about my dilemma, but there are different ways of knowing, of reacting to our knowledge. And contrary to what they say, you do need a body to love. All that rubbish about souls is simply not true, that you can love a soul independent of the shape it comes in. Our brains are made so that we can only love a cat as a cat and not as a bird or an elephant. If we want to love a cat, we want to see a cat, touch its fur, hear it purr, and get scratched if we get our petting wrong. We don’t want to hear it bark, and if the cat started growing feathers, we would kill, study, and, finally, exhibit it as a monster. I don’t know why our brains are like that, but K has taught me that if we try to grow feathers without people expecting u
s to fly, they will shoot us from the sky and their dogs will shake us to make sure our necks are broken before we are chucked into a bag and disposed of. Our brains can just about tolerate a cat with a missing tail or three legs, but any additions, anything the cat was not supposed to have been born with, will never be accepted. And a cat that barks is a sick cat that spent too much time in the company of dogs; it’s not the kind of cat you want in your house for your children to play with, for who knows—its disease might spread, and the next day your Cockapoo will wake up with a horn in the wrong place. Until I met K, Dr. Seligman, I didn’t realise that these are absolute borders that we are talking about, and that no barking cat has ever conquered the sky.

  You know when you look back at your life and suddenly you can’t pretend anymore that you didn’t know something? In some ways, I have always known that I was a barking cat, and sitting here with you trying to understand my private parts, I have so many memories coming back. Did you have to go swimming with your mother as a child, Dr. Seligman? Did you have to share one of those small changing cubicles with one of your parents and wonder how long it would take for your own body to look exactly the same? When your pubic hair would start thinning and little warts would start growing under your armpits? I don’t know why I couldn’t just have waited outside, like all the other children. Maybe it was my mother’s idea of intimacy, but I remember how her body used to terrify me, how I used to think it was the ugliest thing in the world, and every time her soft skin brushed against mine I felt like I was drowning in that little box of warmth and the smell of our old towels. Back then the word we used for public swimming pool was badeanstalt, swimming institution, but anstalt also is a short term for mental institution, and something about that terminology made those little cubicles feel even more uncomfortable, as though they were the first step toward a life spent in solitary confinement. To add to this, my mother had a scar from the caesarean that had helped me enter this world; it had not healed properly and looked like a shiny red worm, yet instead of being grateful I always despised her body even more for that stain, that overt mark of weakness. And I always wished she would hide all her tired skin in a bathing suit instead of holding on to her bikinis. Outside they would all be able to see that my body would look like hers one day, that my breasts would turn into those horrible saggy things, that purple stripes would show where my flesh had given in. They would see the whole tragedy of the female body paraded around in front of them at different stages of its development, like those stupid songs we had to sing in rounds at school. On and on and on. As soon as I was released from the four walls of shame, Dr. Seligman, I would search for the first male body I could find, to rest my eyes on a flat chest, feeding the secret hope that I might be spared, that my body would not change and that I would be allowed to carry on wearing my little swimming shorts. That one day my mother would stop threatening me with the horrors of her bodily existence.

  You’re right, it might be that my mother wasn’t actually that ugly, but even later I could never get over the disappointment of the body, over the discrepancies my illusions and all those useless magazines for teenagers had produced. You see more naked people than I do, Dr. Seligman, and I’m sure you agree that all the excitement we have created around the body isn’t justified. It’s just the illusion that keeps us going, the fact that we have seen those ancient statues and think that one day mortals like that will be born again, that those are depictions of actual human beings like you and me. I don’t mean to say that you are unattractive, Dr. Seligman—you are of course a fine-looking man, even with your hair loss and all—but, you know, nobody would want one of us in marble. There is nothing about us that would inspire music or poetry, that would keep anyone awake at night, tortured with longing. That’s where we differ from animals: with very few exceptions they always look the part, like perfect representations of their species, dignified and in just the right shape. That’s why there are no idealised versions of tigers and panda bears, and only a perverted mind would think of an ideal horse—you know, those weird people that like to masturbate next to a horse because everything else is illegal in most countries. But looking out of your window and seeing so many people that look like they are about to go for a casting call for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, maybe they are right. What if they have seen the light and understood that you have to tell yourself so many lies before humans actually become attractive that you might just as well go and fuck a horse? And of course, horses don’t talk, Dr. Seligman, it must be so much easier to love them.

  I guess there is one moment when humans actually are beautiful. This is probably a sign that I have started to turn into a dirty old woman, but there is a moment of youth when their bodies are still firm and fresh, a bit like horses, when they have started to be adults without all the ugliness that comes with it. Before they are thinking about building houses and brushing their hair, before they are old enough to be mentioned in a will—that’s the moment when you can still write poetry about them. Now I am past thirty and old; nothing was yesterday anymore, everything happened a few years ago. And my body’s response to everything is haemorrhoids and horrible-smelling substances coming out of my orifices. I will never understand why my belly button sometimes goes soggy, Dr. Seligman, but I still remember that other age. Those years when all the creepy uncles come together and try to molest you at family gatherings, when you are still confident that one day something interesting will happen in your life, before you realise that everyone in your family is a boring cunt and, on the whole, quite ill-disposed toward you. Before you realise that your cousins are your worst competition and that most lives are just endless repetitions of the same mistakes, the same desperation, and the same bad taste. I cut ties with most of my family years ago, and even if that means that I will die alone in a piss-ridden care home where carers will gag me with their dirty underwear, it also means that I managed to break free from the worst kind of conversation there is on this planet, that between family members, and in particular between aunts. It’s like sticking a hoover into your brain and pressing reverse, except that there is no mercy: your head won’t simply explode, which would be a blessing. Instead you will have to listen to that empty noise for the rest of your life. Because blood is thicker than water and you all climbed out of each other’s wombs one day. It’s one of my few consolations, Dr. Seligman—that I managed to leave that behind and anyway, they would not understand what’s happening with me now. Most aunts don’t even understand if in life you don’t just want to have children and die, so why would they understand this? And even if I tried to talk to them, all they would ask me is what happened to my great-grandfather’s property after my grandfather’s death. And I don’t have an answer to that question, I mean, who knows what goes on in old people’s heads? They are like children with money and even less of a moral compass; they are driven by the last desires they can afford, and in that quest, nothing will count as an inhibition. They scare me, Dr. Seligman, and sometimes I have nightmares about my grandfather’s hands and the way they insisted on holding things they didn’t have the strength for.

  Are you sure you don’t want to answer the phone, Dr. Seligman? I really don’t mind. I quite like listening to your voice; unlike me, you have such a wonderfully British accent, too intelligent to be posh. And it might be an emergency, or maybe your wife. Is that her in the picture over there on your desk, or is that your mother, Dr. Seligman? With some men it’s hard to tell who their heart belongs to, but I imagine that you are one of those happily married men with ironed pyjamas who could never imagine not being happy. And plus, you are a member of a heavily persecuted minority, so I am sure you have lots of children; they are your form of rebellion. I get that, it must have been such a triumph for you to get your wife pregnant and think of all the people who tried to not make this possible. So, in a way, you are like me and think of Hitler when you orgasm. I’m joking; I’m sure you thought of flowers or how beautiful your wife was, and I’m also sure that it was all v
ery dignified. But don’t you think having someone’s portrait on your desk like that is a little possessive? Isn’t adoring someone, especially a woman, like burying them alive in your own version of things? I always felt like men were not capable of loving women for what they actually are, and so they turned them into little cakes, or rather gâteaux—you know, those scary-looking things we call torte in German. Something that’s nicely decorated and capable of keeping you alive for many days if necessary, something that could feed a family but not something you would ever buy in a shop if it wasn’t perfect. And at some point they started calling this oppression love; I mean, I get it, nobody likes ugly people, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to label this a positive emotion as opposed to something that we should all be working on, like mindfulness and plastic straws. Just look at women in their wedding photos and then think of the horrible German torte with its layers and layers of buttercream, originally designed to help pensioners die more quickly, and all those men in suits smiling at yet another woman who fell for all this crap and let herself be turned into a pretty little thing, scared of moving in case some of her decoration will fall off, or that someone notices she wasn’t born like this. That there is a face underneath this face and a heart beating underneath all those layers of white fabric, there to remind everyone of some seemingly long-forgotten tyranny of innocence and the generations of women that came before, who signed over their freedom for getting one day in their lives when they could honestly believe that they were the most fuckable thing in the room and that this was about them and not about conquering their spirits. Isn’t loving someone like this a little like being with one of Mr. Shimada’s sex machines, Dr. Seligman, or a dead person, someone who is defenceless and can no longer refute what is being said about them? I also wish it was more acceptable to speak ill of the dead; I feel like that way we could be closer to ourselves and our own history, and we wouldn’t have to perpetuate the myth of how beautiful our grandmothers were and that they only grew their moustaches with old age instead of admitting that the fur on their faces could always rival a cat’s whiskers. I wish we didn’t feel this need to be proud of something that has no potential. But I’m sure you never tried to suffocate your wife in layers of buttercream, Dr. Seligman. You might even be a man with a romantic story who doesn’t watch pornography, a man who would never contemplate the vices his money could afford.