The Appointment

by Katharina Volckmer

  And so, you don’t have to feel like a murderer, Dr. Seligman, because you are not really killing me or my vagina; you’re really just making space for Emil to move in as well. That way we will share that inheritance that my mother didn’t allow my father to keep after my grandfather’s death last year, freeing him from the burden of being the favourite son. The inheritance that my father then gifted to me in a heap of illegible paperwork without telling her, my great-grandfather’s hitherto untouched property, making me his daughter until the end of time. A dead man’s favourite descendant. Because secrets are thicker than blood, I need a brother to get me through this. And so, we will take his name, because I have always hated mine and because I think that Emil deserves it after all those years of prayers and Nazis and underfucked old ladies. I really hope he didn’t have to witness too many obscenities when the monks were on their own. But I wonder whether you sometimes feel like Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Seligman; do you feel like you are creating monsters? I know that’s how a lot of people feel about people like me, and I guess they are right in that we are staring in from the outside, that we see through their actions and know all about their little lies. And I think that’s what makes us so ugly in their eyes; knowledge makes people ugly, which is probably why we think that stupid people are easier to fuck, or more fuckable—that they are not tainted by the obvious and, not unlike animals, much more in touch with their bodies. Officially that’s of course considered to be a bad thing, at least that’s what I gathered from my mother’s complaints whenever I sat with my legs apart, my inability to sit properly because I never understood why there were two different ways of sitting for people with and without cocks. And I constantly got them wrong, because I was forever confused by the fact that as a girl you actually have less to hide than a man, but that was before I understood that a cock is some sort of sword, an object of pride and comparison, whilst a vagina is something weak, something the owner can hardly be trusted with. Something that will always be a fuckee, that can be raped and get pregnant and bring shame upon a house and family. Something that needs protection without anyone ever questioning that need for protection, why it is that streets aren’t safe at night and that girls with short hair look like boys and not the other way around. I always found all of that terribly confusing and often thought that maybe the cocks should be hidden instead, that we should ban the weapon and not the wound. But anyway, I think that our bodies know things long before our minds, Dr. Seligman; they will have all the words written on them long before our tongues can find them and our teeth can pull them apart in the empty space between our gums. And in some cases, words can take years to follow our bodies, to say what has already been said. K knew all about that; he had painted enough bodies to be able to read them, to understand my movements, how I could never really walk in tight shoes or be friendly in that way girls are supposed to be, and even though my body was sometimes a secret and took a little longer to show itself, he would eventually have had to see that this unicorn had more than a tail. He must have known what it meant when I stopped shaving down there, when I let my vagina be buried under that dark hair that women are not supposed to have and kept only the area around my other hole neat. He must have understood what my body was trying to say when there was suddenly hair showing around my nipples and my hands started to grab him with that new firmness, when I suddenly slapped him during our final moments of oblivion; he must have understood, don’t you think, Dr. Seligman? That it wasn’t my heart that let us down.

  He always said that the colours came after the drowning, Dr. Seligman. The colours that K painted were the colours he saw when he closed his eyes at night, circles and lines glowing and buzzing in the dark, there and not there, always out of reach and too perfect to be the product of his imagination. The colours appeared after he almost drowned in his aunt’s swimming pool as a small child, after he thought that blue, the kind of blue we all associate with a better life, the colour of the holidays we never had, of the freshness we dream about in stuffy moments, would be the last thing he ever saw. Afterwards he thought that this was the moment when he became a painter, the moment when his cousin tried to drown him by showing him life beneath the water, when K learned that violence binds us together like nothing else, and that nothing is more violent than the body of a five-year-old. It’s like when you first learn the difference between being hit with a flat hand and with a fist; you will never forget it. And we all know the colour of a swimming pool, its smells and the taste of the water, so once again there was something quite public about K’s trauma, about the ways in which life had chosen to shape him and the use he made of it. In those moments he often reminded me of those strange plants that people dump in the forest so they don’t have to pay for their garden waste, those plants that clearly don’t belong there and that insist on blossoming in spite of their hostile surroundings. That don’t just go away because they don’t belong there. K was exactly like that: he didn’t care that most people didn’t like him, that they found him arrogant and knew he was most likely cheating on his wife, a ridiculous artist with too much hubris and not enough talent, a spoilt kid, a bad father, and a hypocrite. He didn’t care, Dr. Seligman; he simply blossomed and refused to be put down by those ordinary beasts and their ordinary colours. K always chose how to see himself, and I loved him for that. A bumblebee that didn’t know that according to the laws of mechanics, he wasn’t able to fly.

  Do you care for hotel rooms, Dr. Seligman? I have always admired those shiny surfaces, and I think that if I had ever written a book, it would have been about hotel rooms. I just love the idea of a space where your actual life doesn’t matter anymore and time has ceased to exist. They are like airports, except that you can be naked and don’t need to pretend that you are a frequent flyer or that your job allows you to travel the world. Hotel rooms are much more anonymous in that way, and their bedsheets are usually crisp enough to carry a mild euphoria, and even though I missed the colours in his studio, I did enjoy meeting K in those empty spaces. It was much more like being with a stranger, and I think everyone should make use of them sometimes. Do you ever take your wife or your seven Nazis to a hotel room, Dr. Seligman? Or maybe you take both? I think you should; there is something about that confinement in the unknown that excites us in a good way, and it always gave me a hint of the kind of sex people must have had in bunkers during the war. And maybe that’s what K and I were, two people trying to fuck their way out of the apocalypses they both carried within themselves, out of the fear our bodies couldn’t handle alone. I sometimes think that’s why people secretly long for wars—not just so they can torture their descendants with stories of mutilated bodies and having to eat potato peels but mostly so they can have actual sex again and not that tame stuff that freedom and peace have to offer. And even though we were careful to always use a different hotel, Dr. Seligman, we didn’t manage to remain strangers. Thinking about it, I am sure that K actually told me where he was from but I forgot, or wanted to forget, to protect him from the inevitable. But the inevitable came, and because K could only sleep with the lights on, I cannot pretend that I didn’t hear or see it happening, that he didn’t say those words you shouldn’t say to someone like me, to a barking cat. It’s like asking someone not to die, like speaking in one of those impossible grammatical constructions. But he said it anyway, Dr. Seligman; after he opened his beautiful green eyes in the middle of the night, he said, BE WITH ME ALWAYS. And before I could say anything in reply, he had fallen asleep again, that heavy sleep that nothing can disturb. A child’s sleep. And it’s not that K wasn’t a good man—he wasn’t the kind of man you would imagine fingering a dead chicken or who would aggressively watch credits at the end of a film. The kind of man who takes pride in the smell of his own shit. He was the kind of man my mother would have welcomed in the shower, and what more could you ask for? We all just want to fuck where our parents have been, and I didn’t care that he was married with children and all of that. Those things don’t mean anything
to me, and I hope that he knew that I hadn’t suddenly become a square and that Emil would have stayed with him until the end of time, but the person he wanted had long ceased to exist. That he had been with a ghost, and like a ghost I vanished from that room whilst he was still asleep, which really feels like killing someone with their eyes shut. And when I think about it now, I always feel like I had his blood on my hands as I closed that door—not his colours, not the purple he had chosen for me, but that my fingers were wet and sticky from his blood. Like someone who had just poisoned their dog and had to leave the room because they couldn’t bear to look at those eyes again. I felt like someone else’s nightmare, Dr. Seligman, and I never know how long you have to stare at a wound before it stops bleeding. And yet, as I walked down that corridor in the early morning, something was different, and by the time I reached the reception area I couldn’t help but smile at the first face I saw. It was then that I knew for sure that she had stayed in there with K and Emil had left with me. That we were finally safe.

  Back when I was younger and still living in Germany, Dr. Seligman, I once saw a documentary about a young woman who was allergic to everything. She spent her life living in a house with very bright rooms but no windows, because she was even allergic to the sun. Her skin would go red and blister at the slightest touch of a sun ray, and so she lived like a snow queen, covered in eternal darkness, invisible to the human eye. But since she wasn’t really a fairy-tale creature, and even Dr. Zhivago had to eat something in his icehouse and possibly even go to the toilet, her life was an ordeal. For even though they found white clothes to cover her skin, there was nothing she could eat without discomfort, nothing that would not make her retch and choke and swell. And like a pet whose demands on life had become intolerable, her parents sometimes thought of putting her out of her misery—or their own, depending on your point of view—until one day one of their neighbours arrived at their doorstep with a dead squirrel. A red squirrel, one of the good ones, not one of the grey squirrels we have come to think of as only slightly better than rats because they steal birdfeed and dig out flower bulbs. The neighbour wasn’t young, not a possible suitor for the lonely bride, and so they accepted that he acted out of kindness. They skinned the tiny creature and threw away its bushy tail and proceeded to boil the little meat it had to give. They told her what it was, and she didn’t mind; she ate, and nothing happened. Her body kept as calm as when you or I eat one of those grapes that fortune has handed to us. It was like a miracle, and unlike some of the first American settlers who died from eating nothing but rabbits, long before we were saved by our five fruit and veg a day, she happily lived on squirrel alone. The neighbour went hunting for her every day, but because her immune system was so fragile and strangers and their germs posed all sorts of risks, he never got to see her, never got beyond her doorstep where her parents received the precious spoils. And yet he carried on, and whenever the squirrel was young and tender, her tongue rejoiced, and her heart blossomed with gratitude.

  I like to imagine that after a while she asked for the tails to be kept, that she decorated her room with red squirrel fluff and that, since they were the only things that she and her mysterious hunter had both touched and nothing is as sexy as a stranger, she started playing with them. Every tail was like a new encounter, the wall a map of her orgasms, shy and gentle at first until they became loud and hungry, and she started to play with several tails at the same time and felt itchy enough to fuck the wall. But this is of course just my mind wandering off, Dr. Seligman, I am sure that none of this happened and that all the tails were disposed of in the most respectable manner, and that in the end his love, by keeping her alive, did nothing but increase her suffering, whilst the other love—that of her parents—would likely have killed her before she could feel a first wrinkle on her forehead. That’s probably why I like to think about this story—not so much because of the squirrel-tail masturbation but because of what it says about love and about how it really is an egoistic pursuit, how it’s irresponsible to let someone fall in love with you and yet impossible to avoid. For even if you bury yourself alive in a room without windows and declare yourself allergic to the entire world, someone will find a way to put their heart under your foot. It took me so long to understand that, and anyway, how was I supposed to know that men die from broken hearts too? I always thought that was only for girls.

  Do you think it snows above the sea, Dr. Seligman? It’s almost dark outside now, and often when I lie awake at night and cannot sleep, I think about this image. Don’t you agree that it’s the perfect illustration of innocence? Those beautiful white snowflakes falling from the night sky, quietly, from heaven with its holy blue and all its celestialness, dancing in the breeze above the waves, rustling against each other with that divine lightness that only an angel’s wings could imitate, just before they are swallowed by that dark sea of filth and toxic waste, a flood of dying creatures. Never to be seen again, with nothing but a split second before they are subsumed into this big mass of different layers of darkness that makes no difference between its components, its inhabitants. Where everyone and everything has to swallow the same amount of dirt and disease, day in and day out. And yet they say that they’re all different, don’t they, Dr. Seligman—that each snowflake has its own unique crystals, and so in many ways they are like us. Some of them fortunate enough to be born on those pretty mountaintops, in groups large enough to bury entire groups of ugly German tourists with their ugly mountaineering gear beneath them. Others land in people’s front gardens, where they are put together to resemble men made from snow with a little orange carrot cock and others, like me, land in that sea of darkness with no real purpose other than to prolong and worsen our miserable existence and only a very select few get to land in those regions that reward them with eternity. Those special snowflakes that will still be here long after we both have died, Dr. Seligman. I am sure that the Snow Queen herself has filed them to perfection, that there is an intrinsic reason for their immortal glitter, that it can’t just have been chance.