Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  I’m sitting on a toilet seat, overstressed. The axolotl is hanging from the non-functioning lock mechanism of the toilet cubicle. I’m trying to hold the door closed with one hand, and with the other I key a text to Edmond. I sense I’m REALLY losing my mind, the day has finally come. Come what may.

  0:12 a.m. ‘Dear Edmond, I just wanted to tell you I love you. You’ll probably wonder why now of all times. To be honest I don’t really know exactly. I saw that loaf of potato bread in the kitchen today and I thought it had such a cute name and I loved the idea that you went shopping and stood in the bread section and thought, hey, awesome, there’s a loaf of bread called Knolli, maybe I should just take that one. It was really yummy too. See you tomorrow. PS: Are they all allowed to be sick? Or presumed dead? Other people’s pain already causes me so much pain. Please model your sickness, please do Neuro-Linguistic Programming and please tell everyone to just leave me alone, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Dear Mifti, my friend Sarah thought you were from the East because you buy ready-sliced cheese.’

  When I look around, I’m devastated by the fact there’s no toilet paper left. Outside there’s a queue of hysterical men; I’m sitting on the men’s toilet. ‘Hey, babes, go and do your coke somewhere else, we really need to take a dump.’

  I haul myself across to the next cubicle and have to explain at great length and in great detail to a bare-chested Swabian of about nineteen that he should go back to Stuttgart right this minute. I’m handed a moisture-soaked toilet roll in return.

  By the time I struggle past the queue back into the crowds of people, I’m dizzy, and all of a sudden panic blazes up inside me, a fire licking at the edges of my entire mental life, raging along my throat. OK, that too, I see. Cramped between sweaty faces stuck with red-brown strands of dyed hair, I can certainly imagine something better than falling victim to a panic attack in this atmosphere, of all places.

  Every glance shot in my direction transforms into a piercing arrow, and I’m so paranoid that instead of pulling it out I bore it so deeply into my body that no one can see it any more. I line up the steps to be taken next – getting up out of the vodka puddle, tying my soaked shoelaces, heading home or at least getting a breath of night air at a wide-open window. Too blocked; my arms won’t move, my knees buckle, my eyes can’t focus, and all this with ten-centimetre-long arrows in the region of my ribs, all entangled. I feel like crying but it doesn’t work, I feel like remembering what Ophelia said before I took my first ecstasy pill – ‘It’ll pass’ – but that doesn’t work either because by now it’s not the routine question on the length of the horror, there are just two possibilities lit up dimly ahead of me. Either I survive all this and I can decide tomorrow never to take drugs ever again. I’ll write it down on a piece of paper: THAT SHIT’S NO GOOD FOR YOU! And then I can stage an idyllic sex movie sabbatical for three weeks, alternating between pornos and spaghetti alla Sorrentina and parenting books. Or I die right now. Foxy reaches his hand out to me. It costs me a great effort to let him pull me up, lean against the wall for a moment and then stumble three steps to the next opportunity to prop myself up. Which is Alessa. A big red pimple has now emerged under her thick make-up – head-on confrontations with someone else’s spots are always rather difficult, of course – and she says, ‘Mifti, I’m so sorry about the heroin, shall I stick my finger down your throat?’ Someone yells, ‘Ha ha, heroin, how out is that?’ I know what I want to answer, I open my mouth and my voice fails me, all I can manage is half a nod, which is absolutely exhausting. I manage another four tortuous steps via content-free dancing in a direction not of my choice, and all I can feel is some kind of secreted fluids running down my back. Seven steps until I reach the low banisters around a spiral staircase, where I drag myself up a crazy amount of irregular steps. Someone screams, ‘Hey, that girl over there’s going up on the roof! Honey, you’re not allowed on the roof, they don’t let anyone up on the roof after midnight – the likelihood of plunging off drunk is about ninety-nine per cent.’

  There’s a little skylight at the end of the spiral staircase. I push it open, pulling myself together along with the tiny amount of reserves left in me. Cold wind – it feels as if I am breathing properly for the first time in my life. A three-minute vacation in the Teutoburg Forest. Without consciously experiencing how my body managed it, I find myself finally standing on two firm legs, right in the middle of the roof, taking in a deeply moving view across Berlin. I instantly discover three burning rubbish bins in the west of the city. When I turn around I see a small group of people shaking each other’s hands at a distance of about a hundred yards. One figure breaks off and moves in my direction in a starkly familiar rhythm. The shape of her handbag is starkly familiar too. The sound of her heels is starkly familiar. She’s still too fit to walk on the balls of her feet.

  Suddenly she’s standing before me at a competently maintained distance, raising one slow hand and running it through her hair on the left and right, and I can’t help laughing; it’s so typical of her. And different from how she used to be. It’s as if I were meeting her for the first time all over again, even though she’s her. In two thousand different countries, in two thousand apartments, in hell, in heaven – she’ll always be her.

  I look at her, she looks at me. We stand there like two squirrels in a cartoon, suddenly realizing in the middle of a bush that the entire outside world can be ignored with a clear conscience. No idea how long. My sense of time is overshadowed by something else. It might be two minutes’ silence or two hours’. In any case, it’s all incredible; the sweat on my skin turns into a layer of ice sheathing my entire body. My face turns to stone and my mouth hangs open. Alice. OK. I’ve already started to find it stylish to hype you as a long-lost legend, and now suddenly you’re standing right here staring at me, just when my regeneration phase has finally kicked in, and my heart rate is forced to return to normal territory.

  ‘Have you hurt yourself?’ she says.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Someone or other trips over the last step about thirty times a night. I heard moaning and I thought, shit, not again.’

  DEAR GOD, I’M NOT ASKING HER TO FORSAKE HER INTRANSPARENCY, ALL I’M ASKING FOR IS A TEENY WEENY BIT OF FREEDOM!!!!!!

  ‘Was I moaning?’

  ‘You were making some kind of noise.’

  ‘It’s all just a bit much for me.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that a lot too.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Err . . .’

  ‘Why are you like that?’

  ‘I think you’re running a fever, is everything all right?’

  ‘What on earth is supposed to be all right?’

  ‘Honey?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘That’s just what I wanted to hear.’

  ‘I’d better ask you what you’re doing here then.’

  ‘DJing. In ten minutes. So if you want a drink you’ll have to tell me NOW.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mifti?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She takes a breath and that’s just what I’ve been waiting for, for that tiny spark of honesty in her face, for her every movement to take place in slow motion, for time to stand still in some way and for us to look at each other again and know that what’s happened so far and every drink and every job are all suddenly utterly meaningless.

  ‘Do you despise me?’

  And then something suddenly overcomes me.

  ‘Remember how you showed me the ocean? When I was sick in that holiday home in France with waves of fever, between all those over-dimensional animal posters and photos of sunsets in frameless glass frames, you know what I’m getting at, when I got in that panic and had a forty-degree temperature. I know now why that was. I was scared of my own body or the fact that my consciousness has nothing to do with the world, let alone with my flesh or my skin and all the material you can see on the surface, just allocated to me like it always had been. I wanted to give up thinking because wor
ds were meaningless, because meaninglessness was meaningless, because my life wasn’t worth anything, because my entire physiognomy is part of the inherently consistent organism of a populated celestial body from which I keep distancing myself. And then you walked to the ocean with me in the morning. Every morning we stared at the ocean and we loved being there because it was like us, Alice. It was the answer to everything. That ocean was obvious. And oceans are only oceans when they move. Everything you asked me and everything we saw and did, it was all obvious, it was a work of art, and that artwork was us.

  ‘Oceans are just their waves and every wave breaks at some point, simply because it moves forwards. I keep seeing your face and how it moves into some expression. The waves that break lose their shape in a gesture that expresses that shape in the first place. And now, now you’re suddenly standing right here. And I can see your face, but in some different way. And I can’t even imagine you really exist any more.’

  Not turning around to me again, she climbs back through the skylight, the personification of business casual wear. Or more like the personification of flirtation. I have never in my life trembled as uncontrollably as now. My star-spangled sky, my Berlin, my total collapse reminiscent of an epileptic attack.

  Despite it all, I somehow manage to fulfil the most rudimentary demand made of party guests: if you can’t be cool, at least be inconspicuous. If this was a film there’d be a camera fastened above my head using some special construction, plummeting vertically towards me every time I breathed in. A tear would roll down my cheek and torrential rain would set in. In the most extreme case, they might tell me to do something completely insane, maybe empty a champagne glass over myself and screech, ‘OK, here we go, now I’m gonna fuck you!’ But sadly, the world doesn’t work like that, I realize at the very last moment.

  0:24 a.m. Emre is just mixing his last two tracks, and Alice puts down her record case all covered in stickers, takes off her coat, gives him a brief hug and puts on her headphones. Ophelia comes over to me in tears. I tell her, ‘Your father would be really glad if he knew you were partying tonight, I bet.’

  She slaps me round the face. How I’ve missed that numb feeling that comes after a slap. I hit her back.

  ‘WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT ANYWAY, MIFTI? HUH? ALICE IS HERE, WHY DON’T YOU JUST GET CHATTING ABOUT GREAT RAPE FILMS AGAIN AT LAST?’

  ‘The thing with ALICE is a thing about music and nothing else. About everything in the world. And nothing. It’s nothing to do with homosexuality.’

  She slaps me again and says with an expression solidifying into ultimate disgust, ‘Jesus, you are disgusting.’ I’m not even registering properly any more, so all I can do is give an idiotic laugh and let someone drag me away. It’s the guy in the motto sweatshirt.

  ‘FUCK YOU, MIFTI! FUCK YOU! FUCK OFF AND DIE, I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!’

  ‘What’s up with you two?’ asks the motto sweatshirt guy, and seeing as I don’t respond he adds, ‘Is everything OK?’

  ‘No, absolutely nothing is OK.’

  ‘Well, that’s a starting point at least.’

  ‘Where’s my axolotl? My axolotl’s gone, can you help me find my axolotl? It was here a minute . . .’ and then I break off mid-sentence, because I identify the first guitar chords initiated by Alice as a song just for me. None of the wedding guests are into The Zombies. Into creatures trapped between life and death and performing ‘She’s Not There’ in a serious state of underfucked love. The situation on the simulated dance floor alters drastically, but she does her thing as hard as nails.

  I say, ‘It’s all so obvious.’

  The guy, now stuck to my back, has dumped me down in front of a trestle table laden with flowers and wedding presents. The axolotl is floating sadly in a glass bowl full of water. He says, ‘Oh shit, look, is this real?’

  I look at the gun in his hand. He’s just picked it up from the table. A fat bald guy comes towards us from behind, just as Colin Blunstone is singing, But it’s too late to say you’re sorry, how would I know, why should I care?

  ‘It’s not only real, it’s a nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistol and next to it is a loaded spare cartridge.’

  ‘It’s loaded?’

  I’m like, ‘Put it away please.’

  ‘Has Albrecht seen it yet? Why did you give him something like this?’

  Well, no one told me about her

  The way she lied

  No one told me about her

  How many people cried

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘What kind of signals are you trying to give off, huh? That married men have to shoot themselves? Or someone else? Mifti, get your axolotl right now, we’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘All right, I will, although actually . . .?’

  Ah but don’t go home with your hard-on . . . You can’t melt it down in the rain You can’t melt it down in the rain You can’t melt it down in the rain You can’t melt it down in the rain

  (Leonard Cohen)

  I wake up in a child’s pale blue bedroom, which has a door that leads into a back garden through glass panes. On the ornate plastic bedside table next to me is a small white piece of paper. I can’t yet summon up enough energy to decipher what it says. I get up and walk through a maisonette apartment ripped off from some alternative parenting magazine, instantly identifiable as requiring 5,000 euro a month net income. In the bathroom I hang my weak head under the tap, gulp down three litres of water and then lie down in the empty bathtub to wait for it to fill up. After, wrapped up in a towel, I position myself in front of the mirror for the first time in three days; I’ve almost forgotten what I look like. Then I lie down under the covers again with wet hair and read the note: Stay in bed as long as you like, everything’s fine.

  The motto sweatshirt guy appears in the doorway dressed only in boxer shorts and says, ‘Stay in bed as long as you like, everything’s fine.’

  He really does look kinda good, like a guy in a nouvelle vague film set on a sailing boat. They have this special kind of biceps that I just can’t help admiring; it has nothing to do with rowing machines, it’s purely genetic.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Five a.m.’

  ‘Have I only slept that long?’

  ‘You went to sleep at three the night before last and you’ve slept through till now. You’ve missed a whole day of your life. Hold on, I’ll show you something.’ He bangs around the flat and comes back with a photo album open on his mobile phone. My pupils jump out at me from the screen, the size of plates on that ketamine night two weeks ago. It’s scary and I tell him so. Then we introduce each other. His name is Viktor and he won’t tell me what he does for a living. On the basis of my burnt-out behaviour the night before last, he’s decided I’m intelligent enough to work it out for myself. ‘I don’t want to get into your pants, by the way. I’m not really interested in you. I think you’re objectively hot, if you get what I mean, but I’m absolutely not interested in you.’

  ‘You’re a psychotherapist!’

  ‘Spot on.’

  ‘And you hang out, extremely well-dressed, in some practice on Kollwitzplatz with red velvet curtains.’

  ‘Spot on.’

  ‘I went to one of those once. In the end the therapist said I was therapy-resistant and I had to drag myself out with a numb leg that had gone to sleep. It was so incredibly embarrassing. A numb leg and smudged eyeliner. He’s like, “Are you all right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure, my leg’s just gone to sleep, oh God.”’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘And with the second therapist it was like, OK, he was supposed to be the absolute über-dude of a therapist, so anyway, I go in there and I see a Heidegger book and I crank up the precociousness and say, “Oh, Heidegger!” And he answers, “Hey, if you think I’m gonna chat philosophy with you, you’ve got another thing coming.” The third one chucked me out at some point and three days later there was this all-blue postcard in the mail saying she was sorr
y, something came over her. And the fourth one wanted me to draw a person, a tree and a road before she even introduced herself. My father had one too. I was supposed to go along with him one time. She was really, really abysmal. Classic case of counter-transference. She talked to me about my truancy issues for a couple of minutes, and my dad fell asleep on the chair opposite me.’

  A child of four at the most with a Playboy bunny shaved into the back of her head is standing in the room. ‘We could play with my pyramid,’ she says.

  Viktor says in a really cool, laid-back tone of voice, ‘Hey, come on, either you go back to sleep or you keep yourself occupied for a while.’ And I realize there is a world that exists without expensive viscose fabric samples or the constantly repeated statement, ‘Three days after my first arsefuck I discovered a fingertip of lube cream on the end of my log.’

  ‘But Papa, I don’t know what to play.’

  ‘I can’t help it if there’s no diamond castle on offer for a change and only your enormous collection of educational toys, but please stop being so annoying! Boredom can be a great thing once in a while. I’ve got three different options for you, but we can’t do any of them for at least two hours. You can either tidy your room—’

  ‘But there’s someone in my bed.’

  ‘Never mind that. Would you be willing to tidy your room?’

  ‘No way. Hey, what is there to tidy up?’

  ‘Your train tracks, for example, and then you can sort out all your different frogs.’

  ‘What’s the second option?’

  ‘Mifti makes waffles with you. Sorry, Mifti.’