Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  8:40 p.m. Once Ophelia has slammed the front door behind her and realized her key’s not in her handbag but on the kitchen floor, we treat ourselves to a spot of socializing terror before the world comes to an end. The two-hundred-year-old neighbour’s doorbell is rung, and instead of greeting us with the words, ‘Hello, I’m two hundred years old and you wouldn’t believe all I’ve seen,’ she’s in her in underwear, a big fat plaster over her right eye. There follows a great deal of reciprocal cursing, some kind of coat hanger is handed over, which is to be bent into shape at 7 a.m. tomorrow so that it fits into the lock, reciprocal backs are patted for normality achieved in an emergency, and now at last the illegible words are written on the huge dance floor as it slams the shit at a hundred and forty dB: On thy house too may I bring the curse. Instead of finding an alternative taxi number, we decide in mutually overflowing inspiration to hire a car, because that’s kinda cool anyway. Foxy knows someone in Lichtenberg, so we stroll on out to Lichtenberg, totally mentally disturbed, taking ages to reach a mouldering car-hire place in the dark grey of the rising night. A milky veil has settled over the path we’ve trodden. A guy with fat teeth and irregular facial hair heads for Foxy with his arms akimbo and says, ‘Oh man, last time I saw you, you had fake dreads and now you’ve suddenly got a black crop cut, would you look at you!’

  The two of them take turns grouching at each other, five yards away from us next to a BMW 1 Series convertible. Four minutes later the guy comes over to us with the keys to the BMW. Seeing as I’m only capable of doing as I’m told right now, I watch myself entering my PIN number on the card reader held out to me. For some inexplicable reason a hundred and sixty euro is debited from my account. Before I end up cowering on the back seat next to Ophelia, trying to watch Foxy starting the engine and whatsit-ing the roof back at the same time, we all take a seat together on a kerb behind various small VWs and get through what feels like three kilos of coke. I notice it’s now no longer about the effect, it’s just a kind of nasal gratification, and at the same time I remember the idea Ophelia had a couple of weeks ago, of always combating suicide attempts with a cocaine overdose. She was of the opinion that before you’ve consumed enough to seriously kill yourself, your personal world view ought to have changed so much for the positive that you really don’t fancy being digested and shat out again by dumb maggots under the earth three days later. I said, ‘Can I join your club?’

  And she’s like, ‘Yeah.’

  So that’s that.

  The wedding is in a 4,000-square-foot apartment in West Berlin. We’ve struggled up six flights of stairs and are heavy-breathing outside a slightly open door, through which an acceptable bassline boxes its way out – out of this unbearably laid-back semi-private party shit.

  Looking down at myself, I realize I’ve been wearing a jumper decorated with an appliqué squirrel for about four days. And for more than six hours, I summon up briefly while I’m at it, my right hand has been gripping this plastic bag filled with fresh water and the axolotl.

  ‘Great wedding present,’ someone says.

  And I answer, ‘I’m not a criminal, I’m just not looking all that good right now.’

  The axolotl’s stopped smiling. The flat is spilling over with people sipping their drinks, swathed in asymmetry, hysteria and satin – in other words, everything that makes a good party dress – and some of the guests have smeared some kind of glitter stuff on their faces. The surroundings are slightly too wood-panelled for my taste. I stand in the doorway of a bathroom remodelled into a highly frequented chill-out area and watch Hersilie, who played ‘Killing Me Softly’ on a grand piano we came across in the lobby of the Maritim Grand Hotel the other week, after two Bacardis at twelve euros a pop. Right now she’s sitting on the edge of a bathtub and disqualifying herself in the eyes of several bored-looking men by narrating a sex disaster related to her preference for knitwear, gesticulating wildly. I’m listening with equal measures of horror and amusement, when suddenly her fatally distraught boyfriend Georg drags me away from the doorway. Why’s this arsehole wearing a fur coat and two pairs of sunglasses?

  He says, ‘Shit, can you please do something about this?’

  ‘I don’t feel responsible for anything whatsoever today, Georg. I’ve just come as a discursive extra, me and my axolotl.’

  ‘Mifti, those two guys are supposed to be financing my next project about the everyday objects sealed in plastic document pockets, and apart from that they’re a totally humour-free zone. If they’re reminded at the office tomorrow morning that Hersilie’s here with me, they’ll think I’m absolutely out of the question.’

  ‘Hersilie’s your girlfriend, sweetheart!’

  ‘And what do you think I should do now, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Just be glad she always brings along her own party tent, unlike the humour-free zone over there.’

  ‘But can’t she ever take the party tent off, at least today?’

  ‘To be honest I don’t think it comes off any more.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘What would you prefer, Georg? Collective anal retentiveness or . . .’

  A strained-looking man in polyester shorts pushes between us and wants to join in the discussion. As far as I’m aware I’ve never seen the guy before in my life. ‘Collective anal retentiveness? How does that come about then?’

  Georg looks the guy up and down and says, ‘Er, Mifti, have you two met? This is, er . . .’

  ‘Yes, I think we know each other, you’re . . . shit, hang on, I know for sure we’ve met before, um . . .’

  ‘I’m Smoothio, we were introduced at that party where you only got in with a badge saying, “I wanna fuck.” I slept with your brother yesterday.’

  ‘Mmmh.’

  And Georg says, just before he realizes he’s messed up the situation and has to disappear a.s.a.p.: ‘Oh, kiddo, don’t worry about it, I can’t remember him either.’

  I look at Smoothio. He’s looking really shit by now.

  ‘I was actually there when you were sleeping with my brother.’

  ‘Oh yeah, true, sorry.’ He hugs me and gurgles some disconnected crap. I’m just about to turn my back on him with no further comment when he adds to his stammering, suddenly perfectly clear, ‘There’s definitely something fishy going on when someone sweats right through two jumpers like you.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your body seems to be secreting some pretty nasty stuff right now. Pretty hardcore – just now you sweated right through your jumper and mine too!’

  ‘Oh man.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘See you later.’

  I’m not interested in the over-dimensioned neutrality of the situation, I’m not interested in the wolf’s-headed glitter ball stuck half-heartedly to the ceiling, and I’m not interested in the beat driving up my pulse from all directions, even though my blood pressure is about to explode some blood vessel responsible for supplying my lung tissue. I spot Jürgen in the distance, his cry of joy thirty per cent down to my presence and seventy per cent down to some in-law of a big-time entrepreneur being drafted in to wander around putting up to three grams of coke in selected guests’ back pockets. There’s ecstasy punch as well. All I want is water. A plastic cup of water to wash this bastard shortness of breath away and let me be something other than this embodiment of mega-claustrophobic FEAR getting bashed by one elbow protruding from a T-shirt sleeve after the next. Cheering, transparent plastic chairs, candlelight, a man with close-set eyes, whose shoulder I’ve just accidentally rested my chin on. I’m starting to feel how incredibly good he looks in his motto sweatshirt, presumably printed with fluffy lettering by some up-and-coming designer. He stands perfectly still, holding my right hand, until I relax and he comes closer and says, ‘You’re allowed to breathe, by the way.’

  ‘I kind of can’t breathe any more.’

  My hand on the back of his neck, alternating between lying flat on his shoulder and clenching like a fist. His sto
mach and thighs against my stomach, my thighs. My lips, terribly, close to his ear. The slightest change in the pressure of his hand on my back alters our motion. In an attempt to maintain my tenderness by any conceivable means, I unfortunately say the terrible words, ‘Touch me.’

  He puts his hand on my head with slightly too much emphasis, and I tremble, because of the things rising up inside of me, because of this awful situation and my lust for life – what can I do, all he has to do is reach out his hand for me again. I look on at the whole scene without the slightest reaction, his fingers try to de-torque my greasy hair, all the horror vanishing down the plughole, and as soon as a tiny trace of desire’s involved, I freeze like a little bastard of a know-it-all struck by lightning. When he kisses me it means war. I look at a thread of saliva I’ve left behind between jet-black stubble on his cheek, and turn around.

  He throws me a nagging, ‘What’s that stupid creature you’re lugging round with you the whole time?’

  In the meantime, Samantha’s taxi-driving father has got himself tattooed as well as the happy couple. How delightful. He can now parade around Neukölln with the face of David Hasselhoff engraved into his lower arm. I cum in my sister’s body lotion.

  In the furthest corner of my eye, Ophelia is just adopting a position enabling her to see what record Emre’s putting on next. I love it when the little slut rubs my sperm all over her skin.

  It’s not just conflicting feelings he’s landed her with, it’s the biggest and baddest crap in her whole life. Because she used to love him. He was the first person she really seriously loved, that arsehole. And normally he spends all day yelling, ‘GOOD LIFE’, in a sun-soaked London apartment. They both had this sick passion for Brian Wilson, because he’s so sick and all that, Pet Sounds is just so dark dark dark. Last autumn I listened to Ophelia laying down the whole complicated relationship issue under a Japanese flowering cherry tree outside her front door. ‘I love the world, I love baby foals, I love adjectives just like you, I love Görlitzer Park, I love women. And men are just kind of dumb,’ she said. ‘I wrote a whole novel when I was twelve, patched together entirely out of Nick Cave lyrics. “Next to me lies the print of your body plan like the map of a forbidden land.”’

  Bryan Ferry: ‘Where would you go if you were me?’

  Unsuccessful faces distorted by hate wherever you look.

  ‘What, running, huh?’ ‘D’you still go jogging on the track next to the Mauerpark?’ ‘No, I only do yoga now.’ ‘I’m not quite sure whether I ought to find the girl over there interesting or sad.’ ‘But when you do yoga they like fix you with your back to the wall and then you have to do the, shit, what’s it called, doggy position? Joey, is it called doggy position, do you know about yoga and stuff?’ ‘That’s the mega-underage sister of that marketing bitch and the cool words jungle brother.’ ‘Poor little precocious girl.’ ‘Dog, that’s it.’

  ‘But it’s interesting to see what happens when you give a stage to some deadly boring teenage drama.’

  ‘Anyway, in the dog when you do yoga you have to bend over these funny piled-up blocks, and after that my back always hurts like hell.’

  ‘I always find it so crazy the way people take her so seriously. Why does a sixteen-year-old young thing who’s constantly slipping into hardcore arrogance and using empty phrases get invited to a party like this? Is she still at school?’

  ‘What blocks?’ ‘She’s a drug addict, how’s she supposed to go to school?’ ‘I bet she puts her hand up in German class and asks if she can pop over to the chemistry lab to get her heroin fixed up over a Bunsen burner.’ ‘Blocks?’ ‘She really gets on my tits. Acts like she’s skipped puberty and now she’s fighting against having to catch up on it. She can’t listen properly either, all those empty phrases and the constant “Yeah, yeahs” to every question you ask her – how hard is that to deal with, huh?’ ‘What blocks is he talking about?’ ‘I know this girl about the same age and she talks the same, completely strenuous, people tend to overvalue that kind of person, in my humble opinion.’ ‘You know, blocks. There’s not that many different kinds of blocks, are there?’ ‘You’re right, by the way, I think. Precociousness plays a big, big role in the whole thing.’

  I’m a bad person. I’m a sick person. But mainly I’m the only person for miles around who can claim in all seriousness to be absolutely unscrupulous, despite the anti-megalomania stance put on hold for years and the constant shouts of, ‘At the end of the day everything takes place according to the fundamental laws of increased consciousness and the inactivity resulting from those laws, with the consequence that everything is relative “and nothing can be changed and if we do have to live then at least do it in a nice French chateau” life principles rubbish.’ What’s behind this unscrupulousness? Is it my extensive experience of life? The iron-shaped scar on my back? Is it because I was taught to respond to the comment, ‘I bet you’d rather be hugged than hug someone else,’ with the words, ‘Yeah, from the day I was born’? Is it my shattered knee joints? My sensitivity to temperature, the cigarettes extinguished on my skin, some genetic defect, burnt-out synapses and all this anger at having to wake up every morning in a general state of fear?

  I have no trouble watching a fully conscious six-year-old getting her retinas burnt out with boiling sulphur while some dick gets rammed up her arse simultaneously, and after that she bleeds to death wide-eyed in a car park. I’ve given up trying to reintegrate into these peaceful and politically correct societal norms by thinking of serene green meadows the minute one of those violent fantasies emerges from the depths of my subconscious. ‘Let me out of here,’ were the first words I learned. People expect me to provide oracular pronouncements, perform the devil, the vacuum, string together grown-up words without understanding them. It’s mega-tough being an individual. Meeting a child’s natural needs. I’ve never got the slightest kick out of that stuff. I only ever made sandcastles if there was a vague possibility of at least catching the attention of an adult fully equipped with picnic basket and iced tea on the opposite bench in the playground. This impulse is actually the only thing left over from my ‘difficult childhood’.

  I HAVE NO PROBLEM PROVIDING YOU WITH THE SUBTLE PLEASURES I’VE BEEN DENIED MY WHOLE LIFE LONG, PEOPLE!!

  Hail drums against the windows. It’s not a light rainfall, it’s something that goes right through your bones with dire consequences, the sky dyed dark red, you’re sitting in your leather-look multi-media chair, you can’t move, and if you get up you’ll die.

  If the film tears, the world will fall apart.

  A thousand monsters cover the surface of the earth, amidst humans rolling in the dirt; they come creeping out of the damp ground and your central nervous system, and while you’re still trying to defend yourself you’re already bearing their mark on your forehead, enraptured. I’m lying on the ground, letting them stomp me to death. Even now I’m telling lies.

  I lie because I actually know very well what I long for. Do you seriously believe, ladies and gentlemen, that I buy into the urgency I’ve claimed and all the semi-bourgeois bullshit I’ve written in the past eight months?

  I swear I can’t believe one word, not one single word of anything I’ve said in this diary. That is, I believe in the words, I know they correspond to the generally accepted definition of truth, but at the same time it makes me extremely physically uncomfortable to claim it’s all justified in some form or other. All the fuss about the fact that the concept of a dog doesn’t bark appears to suit me down to the ground. The indignation, the grief about it, even. Hand-made paper has its purposes. Heroin has its purposes too, that goes without saying. Help me, Dostoyevsky!

  You’re fascinated by your face in the mirror and the way it’s toughening up, but it’s better you turn to face the wall and don’t look at it.

  All you motherfucking individuals everywhere out there, all you’re interested in is some stupid internship that’ll take you to Peking for two semesters, or trying to categorize my dres
s sense! I’m interested in world wars, severed heads with perfect hairstyles, and not the words, ‘Wow, sometimes you wear flares with holes in on Easter Sunday and two days later you turn up in a dress that catapults you and everyone around you straight back to the nineteenth century.’