Axolotl Roadkill (3 page)

Ophelia says, ‘He’s got ecstasy.’

I walk towards him, ignoring the fact that she’s waiting for a witty response.

‘Could you possibly sort us out with two units?’

‘Ummm . . .’

‘Since when have we been good friends?’

‘Ummm?’

‘Take a quick look at the heels on my friend’s weave-look shoes. Pretty reflective, huh?’

‘So you’re interested in fashion as well, are you?’

‘Do I look like I am?’

‘That coat alone, it’s really – and the belt with it. Do they go together?’

‘No.’

‘So you mix ’n’ matched.’

‘Yeah, well, no. I like it when men do it, when they wear suits and that. Like those disgraced English ministers, that’s kind of sexy.’

The guy looks at my torn polyester skirt and expects two fivers from me. I take money out of my shoe, coming across as a mix of mentally disturbed and nervously excited. He gives me the pills more inconspicuously than absolutely necessary, looking me up and down like the world’s thinnest-skinned person.

I ask, ‘Are you up for oral sex?’

He answers, ‘How old are you? Sixty-three?’

And with that he releases me into a never-ending well of sadness.

Ophelia is extremely attractive – a phlegmatic action heroine. Whenever I go looking for Ophelia, I always find her sitting in front of a full-length mirror with a razor blade, a complete wreck. Whenever she hasn’t consumed any drugs for more than six hours she ends up with an attack of hysteria that wants to kill her, and tries to rid herself of her facial muscles. We met because she occasionally temps in school canteens, out of some half-hearted need to get close to reality despite being in the top tax bracket.

‘I’d like the creamed polenta with spinach and can I have pasta out of the other pan instead of potatoes, please?’

Her: ‘What other pan?’

Me: ‘The second or third from the left over there.’

‘Just pointing would’ve done the trick.’

‘And pudding?’

‘You’ve already had your dessert.’

‘I’ve definitely not had my dessert, I’ve only just come in here because I had social science on the third floor.’

‘Never mind your motherfucking social sciences, you still just took a pudding, baby!’

‘No I didn’t!’

‘I can’t just run around here chucking forty portions of custard into teenage faces that nobody’s paid for. What am I supposed to call you now? Impotent wanker?’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Shut your fucking mouth, you smart arse.’

‘Get up, you cunt, and bow.’

‘Pardon?’

‘GET UP YOU CUNT AND BOW!’

Ophelia threw a large ladleful of buckwheat bake at me. I chucked my classmate Olivia Stüter’s custard at her, she emptied a portion of spinach intended for two hundred thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds over my head. While the two of us maintained strict eye contact all along. We conjured up a channel between us, through which we managed to stare at each other as if we were head over heels in love.

She informed me that she was the perfect mirror for my true yearnings. And I just swallowed it, dialled her phone number, listened to her saying I urgently had to throw away a number of items of clothing she didn’t like, and answered that she was a dead woman.

‘If there’s one thing you can count on in this world, it’s being mentally and physically violated.’

It may all sound pretty implausible, but that’s just the way it was back then.

I have to tell you my dream. You’ll like it. We wanted to get together and I was supposed to visit you at your place. A huge old apartment building. Mirrored stairwell. Twenty doors per floor. I’ve even done a drawing of it, shame I can’t scan it in. I went up the stairs. There were dogs fighting over the remains of a donkey. It was quite dark because there was only one window in the entire hallway. In a corner was a table and chairs. I looked around and realized that this vestibule covered in vulture-shit was part of your flatshare.

I was curious because there was an unlocked door. The gap between the door and the frame was really wide and I could see it wasn’t locked. I opened it and looked into a little room with a metal bed inside, and on it was an old man covered in zillions of pus-filled wounds. He heard me and moved. I left the room. A girl came out of a double door. I didn’t quite know if it was you but she looked like you, and she went to the washbasin and washed her hands. I didn’t dare ask who she was because I’d forgotten your name. I couldn’t remember if it was Ute or Uta. At some point I asked if she was Mifti. She said in an unfriendly way, no, she’s inside.

It was your flatmate. Her name was Claudia.

We went into the bathroom, and there was a crowd of people in flipflops made of old car tyres, all in just as bad a state as the guy on the bed. You’d invited all these people round and I thought, she really is disturbed! They were all vying for your attention. Two women even got in the bathtub naked to impress you. All the others, there were at least seven of them, stood around the bath. I just carried on walking without saying a word to you. And you looked totally out of your depth. In the next room, which was incredibly large, there was an orgy going on. A man got down on all fours in front of me and pushed his arse out so I could fuck him. And I suddenly had a cardboard dick but it was only two-dimensional, just like the condom I wanted to put on it. And of course that didn’t work. The End.

And how do you interpret all that?

In my last dream I flew to the Amazon in an inflatable plastic helicopter. After a while we had to make an emergency landing in the rainforest in the dusk and my brother said, ‘You can decide now whether to get dressed or not.’

Then someone shouted: ‘Oh, a melody in the night!’ and we saw a huge, vacant hotel with a pool and a squash court. All the passengers spent their time lying around blind drunk on car roofs discussing tropane alkaloids. Alice was there too. She wasn’t human. She adjusted her face, stroked the back of my hand tenderly and reminded me what she and I really are – real-life individuals or whatever you call it, in a real-life society, with real-life desires that can’t just be sliced out of our real-life heads. You were lying under this big palm tree and waving at me the whole time. I went up to you, so utterly upset I couldn’t even speak any more, and you whispered, ‘Mifti, you’re in a strange land, you’re acting like you’ve just got off the ark and of course you’re much too thin-skinned.’

The fact that I couldn’t remember your real name in my dream shows up my superficiality. I don’t listen properly. The fact that you’d invited so many people or women at the same time is down to my subjective perception of what kind of person you are. I seem to think you’re someone who wants to arouse attention by going to extremes, who’s egocentric and hurls their problems or innermost thoughts in people’s faces for the sake of short-term liberation, and enjoys and needs their reactions. An absolute perpetrator but a victim too, who I end up fucking. Funny, isn’t it? And I don’t even know you well enough. Last night I met you at an awards ceremony. You had your black velour jacket on and you went over to the lift when you saw me. I screamed, ‘Mifti, I hate you!’ You screamed, ‘But why?’ I screamed, ‘For you with your 24 × zoom lens on Alice, any kind of love based on mutual affection is too much to ask! Why can’t other people ever enter your fucking field of vision?’

I started doing nothing else in maths lessons but developing the next dream to be described in spectacular detail. I failed to develop an understanding of binomial equations or the fact that you can give names to angles in trigonometric functions. All I developed was an all-encompassing love of adjectives.

Is it possible that everything’s just chemistry or biology? Then wouldn’t the point of falling in love be only reproduction? So why do I only ever fall in love with women? But still want brutal sex with men? I keep reading this book about serial killers and I think it’s altered my sexuality. It describes everything, and there are things I’d never even imagined in all my life. Ninety per cent of murders are about sex. I think all wars are about sex. It’s a pretty selfish act somehow, the whole shagging thing. You want to be desired; you want to give the other person pleasure because what you can do for them gives you pleasure. You want to be sexy or for the other person to like you. You want an orgasm. Sometimes when I sleep with someone the sounds we make aren’t real, maybe. But maybe they are. Do we exaggerate? I think the whole animal urge thing at the beginning (when I don’t generally reflect on things) is only there to tie you to each other. Nature probably did that on purpose. Then I can do stuff legally that I’d usually only do on my own. Once I loved someone, with my every pore and dripping with kitsch, and I just switched off my brain. What a relief. Because it wasn’t just a reflex, it was suddenly imploding and going soft. So soft that all I could do was smile, because I couldn’t feel anything apart from myself melting away. And from then on it wasn’t an animal urge any more, it was divine and sexy. You ought to stop surrendering yourself to truck drivers and only let someone you love bite your neck, because with everyone else you’re probably really some kind of animal. You are anyway. And none of it matters.

So I’m climbing some steel staircase side by side with Ophelia. Meanwhile she’s discreetly getting off on the fact of her patented existence as a photographer with her own vision and ideas and all that black and white crap. She always says she doesn’t see colours any more now that she’s so sick. She’s just gone colour blind. I read this interview with David LaChapelle once and sussed out that the colour blindness story is lifted from him. When you ask her where she gets her inspiration, things usually get abstract. The African steppe, cold snakes of the air and Jil Sander suits reflected in the parquet with cheeseburger telephones, with a stuffed toy jackal emerging from them covered in pig’s blood or whatever. So she’s an artist, right? And she hates dull people who stop her on the street and bother her. What’s worse than wealth are these hypocritical proto-artists who claim to be absolute scum and make fun of all the heirlooms I possess. Silk napkins, necklaces, not even silver cutlery, just two silver spoons. Not one critic understands what it means to shove your own deservingness in people’s yellowed faces day after day, for money, because you need a bit of money for a change, plain and simple. ‘Their problem, these critics’ problem,’ she always says, ‘isn’t even their arrogance, being arrogant is aristocratic and all that. The worst thing is their stupidity, or not even their stupidity, the worst thing is their laziness. You make a statement and it’s neutralized and watered down by, like, I don’t know, pathologizing it or psychologizing it or marking it down as unintentional, out of pure laziness. But the whole anarchy thing isn’t a mistake, it’s meant to be exactly that way, d’you know what I mean?’

On principle, we only ever walk side by side when we’re not obliged to talk to each other.

We share cocktails and it’s a fantastic moment, I don’t even know why. I suddenly feel showered with the love I mentioned a few hours ago in my text to her. Two hysterical shadows wave at us from a concrete couch, and I take their presence as a threat. Ophelia introduces an over-fifty-year-old hardcore restaurateur with above-average income as her most down-to-earth friend. I repeat: concrete couch. He says hello. He has a banana stain on his black shirt and brightly coloured trainers and a twenty-year-old girl on his arm called Samantha, who’s either mentally retarded or out for a fur coat.

‘Whatever you do, don’t tell Miss Sixth-Former over there that the guy she’s here with looks like he’ll lose his entire restaurant empire in a round of poker. OK, Mifti?’

‘Huh?’

‘They’re getting married in four weeks, Jesus, and Albrecht’s gambling everything she loves him for every night without even looking at his cards first. At one of those gambling clubs run by a trannie in a claw necklace on Schiffbauerdamm. Blind All In, that’s what they call it. That skull over there’s the engagement ring, by the way.’

Inevitably, I get left out and end up following the two and a half über-established freaking icons obligingly into the private smokers’ room, overly sensitive and unbalanced.

Samantha dumps her genuine pale-blue calfskin Hermès bag on me, adjusts her Margiela cardigan and changes her Acne jeans for a flannel miniskirt from Marc Jacobs – and Ophelia whispers in my ear, ‘How can anyone be such an uninspired dresser?’

Then we all start exchanging pleasantries about the falafel wrap that Ophelia puked up on the kitchen floor a couple of hours ago, and pop our pills casually but in unison. Albrecht offers us two lines of ketamine, which is used by vets as an anaesthetic and has a hallucinogenic effect in small doses. He says, ‘You know what you can tell your friends at school, Mifti? That ketamine entails the complete dissolution of your own existence, four years in a coma and the worst brain spiralling, but apart from that it gets you DANCING like a maniac, non-stop, no matter who or where you are.’