The Appointment

by Katharina Volckmer

  Of course I am okay with your taking pictures. Your assistant told me that this would be part of the examination today, but thank you for checking—and don’t worry, I will hold still. I can’t help but think that Jason was ungrateful, though; he didn’t even appreciate that I tried to acknowledge my situation, whatever that might mean, but I thought he would be pleased that I was aware that I even had a situation. I also didn’t want him to grow suspicious, because I couldn’t afford to be sued by my ex-colleague; my inheritance won’t stretch to that, and it’s only a matter of time before my aunts start making demands. And I guess a small part of me also wanted to feel sorry for Jason. With people like him, it’s a little bit like in one of those Western films: you have to shoot first, because if you don’t feel sorry for them, they will feel sorry for you, and it’s only downhill from there. And I like to make people feel incompetent, because I never felt like I was good at anything, so why should anyone else? I am sure you have never been in a situation like this, Dr. Seligman; you would never allow a character like Jason to make you question your beliefs. You are too sure of yourself and your ways, you know how to live your life, and you don’t need any help with it. Unlike most men, you know the difference between a woman and a bicycle. That’s a very attractive quality, Dr. Seligman, and useless people like myself get very attached to the kind of guidance you offer, we are like the seagulls that follow ships across the ocean, intoxicated by this sudden sense of direction and purpose. But people like Jason only live off making others feel bad about themselves, by pretending that they know the way when in the end they will drown just like everyone else, and for no apparent reason. Like the boy in that stupid Titanic film. We all know that there would have been enough space for him on that plank, but we also know that this was the only way to turn this into a love story. To pretend that she would have married him, to relish a broken heart rather than reality. Nobody wants to marry their holiday fling, and women cannot save men from poverty, unless they are old pervs; only Jasmine was allowed to save Aladdin, but then she also had a tiger for a pet. You can’t really mess with that.

  Please don’t think that I am a sociopath, Dr. Seligman. I know that we need illusions, but sometimes I think that we shouldn’t be so scared of the truth. And I don’t mean the truth about how most olive oil is fake or one in three beards contains traces of faeces—those facts aren’t fun, and it’s probably best to keep lying to ourselves about them and the damage we do to ourselves and others. But what about beauty? Don’t you think we would all be happier if we could finally get over that illusion? When I was younger, my best friend had been to see a fortune-teller and kept scaring me with stories about an impending war, World War III. Do you know what my first stupid thought was? That I could finally eat as much chocolate as I wanted, that suddenly it didn’t matter anymore if I was fat or not, that some higher power had finally taken control of my body. And remembering the skinny pictures of my grandmother from after the war, Dr. Seligman, I was so excited that I would soon be free from all those petty concerns for my protruding belly and my mother’s fear that my bum might get too big and that it would start wobbling. It was thanks to her that I always knew that a body could be ugly and that whatever you do in life, you don’t want any of your body parts to wobble. And until this day I have not been able to free myself from her perspective. I can forever see the light of changing rooms shining on my ugly curves, revealing everything I wish she hadn’t seen. But back then I decided that I would go and buy white chocolate, as many bars as my measly pocket money would allow, and that I would hide them from my mother and eat them when I was alone, safe in the knowledge that my body had more or less ceased to exist in the face of this catastrophe. It was only much later and after I had eaten all the chocolate and no bombs had fallen outside my window that I realised that no catastrophe, apart from maybe a final nuclear strike, would ever be big enough to free us from this curse. That even though we’re in charge of this planet, we are its ugliest inhabitants, and that our longing for our own beauty will never cease, that we will never be content with the beauty in front of us. And yet I will never forget the feeling with which I ate that chocolate, Dr. Seligman; nowadays it gives me a headache if I eat more than just a little bit, but in that moment it was a sin without consequences. And I never gave up on the dream that one day my body wouldn’t matter anymore. It’s a little bit like imagining that your glasses are sunglasses, Dr. Seligman; the light gets easier to bear.

  Together with the same friend, I also used to watch a lot of music videos. I never cared much for the music, and I never felt like they were singing for people like me. But there was something about that condensed extravagance that fascinated me—those perfect bodies and how they could deal with anything in the course of three minutes. How you could remain attractive in the midst of any calamity. Nothing seemed to matter as long as you could dance, and someone did your makeup, you could fit any story into those few lines, and I started to watch the charts every Saturday morning in my friend’s bedroom. My parents would never have paid for those other channels, for the fun programmes and all that American stuff, for the commercials. And they wouldn’t have understood why I drew comfort from this parallel universe, from these people who had just left their ordinary existences behind and now lived off glitter and fame, who liked the idea of complete strangers having posters of them in their bedrooms. I admired their confidence, and because of those videos I even thought that there was a certain elegance to them and that their movements were real. You are probably laughing again down there, but I wasn’t fooled by their lyrics, and back then nobody sang about what it’s like when a boy is stuck in a girl’s body and wants to fuck boys. I am not even sure anyone does today, as pop culture is not actually that subversive and needs to be sellable in places where people aren’t free. But I was misled by their bodies, and you have to become pretty old before you see that if you ever tried to walk down the street in one of those outfits, even if you had one of those perfect bodies, you would be a rather tragic sight and that we were all raised on so many sweet images that I am surprised we can all bear to look at each other. Yet after a while, as I was sitting there with my best friend, I could always detect a little red glow on her face—these images turned her on. But no matter how hard I tried, they did nothing for me; my vagina remained dumb and numb as if it had been made with Play-Doh from the toy shop, disfigured and useless. And it’s not that I hated them because I was one of those people who hate things because little girls like them, it just took me so long to understand my own desires, Dr. Seligman, to understand that I was forever one step removed from fulfilling them and that choosing my favourite boy band member, which I then struggled to remember, would always be a lie because my body was the wrong recipient. Because my body didn’t exist. Because I couldn’t see these boys with a girl’s eyes. I think that’s why I developed an early liking for the opera and the theatre; that was also weird, but a kind of weirdness that people had heard about and were more willing to accept. And I felt more at ease in a world of costumes and allegories where at least occasionally you would see a woman dressed as a man or men dancing in tights, moving in ways I had never seen before. Bodies that were not designed to speak to boys and girls but that spoke to a different set of senses, that went deeper than anything I had experienced before, and I fell madly in love with this world where, for a few hours, anything was possible and you could be highly emotional for no reason. Back then I longed to live on a stage, Dr. Seligman, to be allowed to go around in a costume of my own choosing.

  This love of the stage was one of the things I shared with K. He too seemed mesmerised every time the curtain went up, and I could feel a childlike excitement electrifying him. He told me that to him it had always been a safe space, a space where you knew in advance what horrors to expect. It was also one of the few spaces where we could sit in the dark amongst other people and pretend to be like them, one of hundreds of other Thursday-night couples holding hands to show their affection. The
y had no idea what was going on beneath my skirt, and I could tell that he was becoming more and more reckless; he knew full well that we might run into one of his many acquaintances—as a married man, K knew many friends of friends—but he didn’t care. He just told me that his wife didn’t like the theatre and that it was very important for him to come here with me, that it helped him to cope with things. And it took me a long time, Dr. Seligman, to work out what his demons were. It wasn’t his body, because unlike me, he had a pop star’s confidence in his appearance and his movements, and so I spent many hours next to him in the dark, wondering what it was that made him run away from his perfect life to come and be with me and my increasingly dysfunctional vagina. But then it’s one of my many flaws, Dr. Seligman, that I cannot imagine other people’s unhappiness. I felt so violated by society all my life that I refused those people who lived by its rules the right to be unhappy. I always wanted them to smile themselves to death for supporting those institutions and limitations that had made everything so difficult for me, for thinking that as long as you tick all the boxes and follow all the rules, flowers will be growing out of your ass until the end of time. I didn’t want them to be allowed to talk about their pain; I wanted them to suffer from their own stupidity, to starve like that Greek king in the midst of all their fucking happiness. And even with K. I saw a picture of his wife once, she was pretty—you know, a bit like Helen, one of those women who don’t mind being a woman, and it took me the longest time to accept that he was lonely in the midst of all his happiness and that he too felt the pressure of having to smile in family pictures, or to smile in general. You know how nowadays we are constantly expected to have a good time? How people put on their broadest smiles for health insurance ads and verruca treatments? If it was up to them, we would all continue to smile in our sleep, and the worst thing is that these people perceive it as a criticism when you don’t smile back at them or refuse to have fun. If you were a regular plastic surgeon, Dr. Seligman, I would ask you to silence those muscles in my face, to put an end to this industry of happiness.

  Are you scared of dogs, Dr. Seligman? Or, rather, of those men who mostly live what remains of their sexuality through their pets’ oversized genitalia? Apparently, men first look at a dog’s private parts before they see anything else—like victims of their own dreams. Just think of all the dog ladies they have been perving on and all the male ones they tortured because they felt inferior. And yet these men often refuse to have their dogs neutered; they are worried that it will reflect badly on their own unused cocks. But then I never worried about these dogs, never felt like they would turn their doting little faces against me. Until K told me about his fear of dogs, it simply never occurred to me that some of them were like unlicensed weapons on a leash, that those teeth could rip my flesh apart, that those jaws were strong enough to chew my bones. At first it was so strange for me, Dr. Seligman, because if you saw K, you would think that he was a big man, gifted with the kind of physique that is meant to remain unharmed. But the body others see is never the body we see, and whenever he saw a dog, he would cross the street; just walking next to him, I could feel his body freeze with fear. I found it very upsetting that his pride was so vulnerable, that everyone could see that there was a wound his skin had never been able to cover. It was like watching someone being hit with their own hand. We never discussed this fear, just like we didn’t discuss his fear of the dark, because I always think that there is nothing more private than fear, and K was a real collector of fears. It would have taken more than a lifetime to archive them all. What do you think of when you hear the word fear, Dr. Seligman? I think of a part of my body that I don’t know, but I am sure exists, pink flesh from before I was born. Something that doesn’t want to be touched because it has no skin yet to protect itself, like a version of me that never got the chance to live and is breathing somewhere in the dark, scared of being discovered by the wrong hands. Moist and unshaped. But you, Dr. Seligman—do you think of angst? Of my ancestors in their uniforms and their dogs? K made me think a lot about that image, about how much it adds to violence if you outsource it to an animal that was born without intentions, that would have protected you under different circumstances. An animal that had its dignity taken away in order for you to be relegated to its rank. And yet they wouldn’t even have given you the chance to be a gladiator; they went straight for the humiliation, for the power of those who think they have corrupted nature to their advantage—which brings me to another concern of mine, Dr. Seligman. Violence is such a male toy, and I feel that by going through this process I am opening myself up to those possibilities. I am taking the risk of becoming one of those sausage-faced German men in need of a large canine penis, and it worries me, Dr. Seligman, it really does.

  I guess it is one of the reasons why I came to see you; to be honest, it’s probably the main reason, and I know this might sound a little strange, Dr. Seligman, but when I was younger I always thought that the only way to truly overcome the Holocaust would be to love a Jew. And not just any old Jew, but a proper one, with curls and a skullcap. Someone who’s devout and can read from the Torah and doesn’t leave the house without a black hat. I know that this was in poor taste, and I am only telling you this to make you understand where I am coming from, and maybe also to confess that I’ve always had a thing for those curls. I myself went through a phase of pretending that I still had that wavy hair I used to hate so much by rolling up my curlers every night, and I loved the idea of a man doing the same; it suddenly made everything more fluid, and I felt less like a girl for doing so. I kept thinking what it would be like to unroll each other’s curls in the morning, how gentle it would be. But of course it’s nonsense to think that you can overcome a crime on someone else’s behalf and that my otherwise useless vagina could suddenly become a symbol of peace by welcoming one of those beautiful circumcised cocks. And where we lived there were no Jews anyway, not even a reminder that they had once lived there—nothing but that strange German silence that I have come to dread more than anything else. That way of pretending that everything has been swallowed by the ruins. I would have had to leave for one of the bigger cities to find my Jew, and whilst I liked the idea of telling my father and maybe even my grandfather about my plans, I didn’t have the courage to go in search of my Shlomo. That’s how I referred to my new romance, Dr. Seligman. I had always liked that name. I am not even sure my father would have shown much of a reaction—his medication would have hidden much of his despair—and yet I would have liked to explore those soft parts of my family, that tissue which has grown around our past. To try and reach across that gap that stands between ourselves and what we could have been if we hadn’t decided to change things forever in a moment of genocidal rage. I was never really able to fully grasp what we have done, Dr. Seligman, what it means to wipe out an entire civilisation, but I always felt that I had grown up in a ghostly country in which there were more dead than living, where we lived in cities that had been built around the remnants of where our cities used to be, and every day felt like walking on something that wasn’t supposed to be there. I always felt like we had wiped out ourselves too. And I always thought that by finding Shlomo I could find a way back to how things used to be, to retrieve a fragment of what has been so irretrievably lost. But of course there is no way back, and I very much doubt that I could have tempted poor Shlomo with my private parts and I really admire your courage, Dr. Seligman, for laying your hands on a German vagina. And I want to promise you that it will all be worth your while, for not only are you making sure that I will never give birth, but you are giving a German woman a Jewish cock. That’s much more radical than my affair with Shlomo could ever have been, don’t you think? It’s like the übermensch is finally becoming real. I can almost feel the sun rising above my head and the trumpets getting ready in the background as we walk down hand in hand, confident that this is the true victory. That this time it will be a peace project. We should probably have considered applying for EU fundin
g; our project could have been called something like “Exchanging Shapes and Minds: How Having a Jewish Penis Changed My Life.” Don’t you think, Dr. Seligman? We could have been famous.