Wrecked (13 page)

After that it’s as if I’m on autopilot. My body does everything automatically. I repeat everything my father said word for word to my boyfriend and his family. They are all speechless and stare at me. Nobody says a thing. We are blocking the other passengers trying to get through the customs area, but we don’t care. We stay on the floor and think. I have no idea what to do next. We sit there for an eternity.

The news my father delivered that day has left me a bewildered person to this day. It plays out in every decision. My husband bears the brunt of that, the poor man. But he benefits from it as well, because as a way of sort of making up for my psychological
shortcomings, I put incredible effort into it when I suck his cock. As gratitude for the fact that he has put up so long with a wounded animal—me.

So, he doesn’t take me up on my spectacular offer to show him my worms. I’ll have to deal with that alone. Got it. Thanks a lot. That’s the last time I make such a nice offer.

“But if my guts were hanging out, would you help me? Are you sure? You’d have a look then, yeah?”

“Of course I would. You know that. If it were really something bad, I would rescue you.”

Thank you. I lean against him. Hopefully something really bad will happen to me again soon. It can’t go on like this—that I keep picturing the most horrible things happening without anything ever actually coming to pass. I have a crazy sense of imagination. That just dreams up new horrific scenarios. I think the scenarios out to the smallest level of detail. I really work myself up doing that. I learned in therapy that the only time I’m free of fear is when I displace it with hypersexuality. Then I am able to enjoy life for a little while and feel as if I know what I’m living for. My therapist calls it fear arousal. It feels similar to sexual arousal. For me it’s either one or the other. The one extreme or the other. Frau Drescher says I’m trying to escape my fear through sex—that it’s the only feeling that can sometimes temporarily displace the fear. It is not, however, the answer to my problems. Too bad. She says I need to address the problems within myself and not transfer them outward.

I could easily have sex ten times a day. I could alleviate a lot of tension that way. But usually I opt instead to agonize over things myself. It goes like this: every night I lie down in bed and look up at the ceiling. There’s a crack in the plaster.
I look at it every day and am sure that it is getting bigger. So I convince myself that it’s not just a crack in the plaster but a more serious structural problem.

We live in a building with four apartments in it. Stacked one on top of the other. All of the rest above ours. We’re on the ground floor. If it all comes crumbling down because it was poorly built, I’m prepared. I’ve played out that scenario in my head a million times. To the right of my side of the bed is a load-bearing wall. If I hear the building crumbling, I just roll out of bed and lie against that wall. Once everything has collapsed, I’ll crawl along the intact support wall to the kid’s room and find my crushed daughter. Then I’ll crawl back to see my crushed, smashed husband. I always have my phone and a knife with a long sharp blade next to my bed in case burglars break into the apartment. I swear I’ll stab them. If the building implodes, I’ll call 911—and I’ll be the only survivor. But as my life will have no meaning anymore without my husband and child, I’ll kill myself a few days later in the psychiatric clinic where I’m placed for trauma therapy. I play out this scene every night in my head, with different endings. The fact that the house will soon collapse, however, is certain. My therapist says that people who fear their building will collapse around them actually have structural damage in their psychological “building.” They project their inner fears outward on the exterior building. What’s collapsing is inside, not outside.

It doesn’t seem to make things any better even when I acknowledge that buildings never collapse in Germany—that everything is too meticulously built, with solid foundations. Death always seems to be lying in bed between me and my husband. I’ve asked my husband hundreds of times in the years
we’ve been together whether he, too, has noticed that the crack in the ceiling is expanding. He rolls his eyes every time, then looks at it the way I look at the witch under my daughter’s dresser, and says, “No, it hasn’t gotten any bigger.” In these moments he talks to me as if he were talking to a crazy person, in a deep, calm tone. It makes me sick when I hear my own craziness in his voice.

These days I ask him only when it’s an absolute emergency, when I’m more worried than usual, because I pretty much know he’s just going to lie to me and say no. It’s important to note that my therapist has found that I’m not afraid of dying. I don’t have a problem with death and dying as such. I’m happy to have Death nearby; he makes a good friend. No, my problem is with losing control. I just don’t want to die from something I could have prevented. If I get sick and there’s nothing that can be done, I would embrace death. But to die because of something stupid, something you just didn’t pay attention to, is something I don’t want to happen to me or those close to me. I’m always on alert to save the life of the members of my immediate family.

I sit on the couch and tell my husband that the visit to the brothel tomorrow isn’t going to happen. He can see the hint of a smile on my face. He says, “You’re happy about that, aren’t you? Relieved?”

“Yes, you know I hate to be anxious about something. And if something that’s making me anxious gets canceled, then I’m relieved at first. We’ll set it up again as soon as I’m no longer infested with these vermin.”

He knows just how overwhelming our brothel visits are for me ahead of time, how I get so anxious and afraid, and how afterward I congratulate myself because I’ve succeeded, I’ve
survived: despite having sex with someone else, my husband is still with me! What a miracle! Woo-hoo!

The disappointment on his face is clear to see. He always looks forward to these outings. The anticipation alone makes him so happy. He’s much more transparent than I am. Just like on any other night, we turn on the TV. We sit silently for a little while—he’s silent because he’s disappointed that the trip to the brothel is off, I’m silent because the itchiness from the worms is driving me crazy. I hate to disappoint him. He’s really down now. Fuck.

We both stare mutely at the huge TV screen. My husband thinks I’m watching the show, but I’m actually ruminating secretly on the accident again. I let the scene play through my head over and over again, as if I had been there. And I have to keep repeating to myself,
Yes, Elizabeth, you have to reconcile yourself with it, because it really happened, it’s true
.

I’m kneeling on the floor in the airport and searching around in my head to try to figure out if what I told my father was right. Who all was in the car. I feel blocked when I try to think of the names. It’s so many! But in order to help my father, I need to know I haven’t made any mistakes. I fight to find all the names. I repeat them several times: Mama, Harry, Lukas, Paul, and Rhea. Yes, I think that’s right.

The mother of my boyfriend, the woman who will be my mother-in-law, goes out to explain everything to the bus driver, who does in fact have a sign with our name on it. I feel that if I say it to a stranger, it will actually become real. Or more real. I can see from afar the way the driver’s face changes. At first his ugly English mug looks relaxed and happy. But as she talks with him, darkness creeps across it, and he keeps looking over at us.

The way he looks now is probably how I look, too. A contorted look of horror. No more keeping up appearances. Not a single muscle is moving. I no longer have to act anymore, there’s no more need to smile anymore. No need at all. Every move now is made as if in a trance. Calm, automatic. I’m able to perform just basic functions now, nothing else.

At some point we have to get up. We load our baggage into the cargo bay of the bus. I sit in the last row, just like when I was in school, back where the cool kids always sat. The man who suddenly would no longer be my future husband sits down next to me. We proceed as planned. What else can we do? The plan was to drive everyone from the airport to the various hotels, after which we—the bridal couple—would be delivered to the hotel where the wedding would take place. But after we have taken all his family members to their destinations, I no longer want to go to the wedding hotel. I just can’t take it. I have a ton of cash with me, as a good bride should, so I offer to pay the bus driver to change the plan—I want him to take us instead to see my relatives in London. Fortunately he doesn’t have another job to go to, so he agrees to drive us there. It takes an hour and a half.

My boyfriend and I sit alone in the huge bus as the driver keeps a worried eye on us in the rearview mirror. I hand my phone to my boyfriend—it has all the numbers of my English relatives on it. He calls my uncle and aunt, and I listen as he relays the unbelievable news. I keep thinking he’s lying. It can’t be true. He should shut his lying mouth. What a load of crap. He must be nuts. He’s saying there won’t be a wedding. Okay. That’s probably true. It’s hard to rethink it after months of planning. Every fiber of my being wants to see the plan through to
the end. But I can’t now. We sit silently beside each other. He holds my hand. What else is he supposed to do? Nobody is taught how to act in situations like these, how to be helpful or useful. It’s like men during childbirth. What are they supposed to do? They don’t teach that in school. The important things. You only ever see situations like this in war movies. Five people dying simultaneously. It’s like an act of war against my family. As if a bomb has been dropped on us. And still almost all I can think about is what happened to my dress. Woe is me, it’s ruined.

My mind just isn’t capable of much more. Once in a while I think to myself,
I hope my mother isn’t dead
. I wouldn’t want to live if she were dead. We’re very close. Too close. I often still sit in her lap when I see her. When I was a child we were close; during puberty as far apart as two people can be; and then when the storm clouds of puberty cleared, we were once again as close as when I was a child. Fatally close. I was never able to create space from her as an adult—my options were limited to being close to her or having no relationship with her at all.

On the bus, driving to my uncle and aunt’s place, I keep thinking to myself,
Fuck the rest of the people in the car. Please, just don’t let my mother be dead
. I was willing to make a deal with destiny, with the devil, with God, with whomever. I didn’t care: I would trade my siblings and my brother’s girlfriend for my mother’s life. Because I just can’t live without her. Don’t want to live without her. It just shows you how fucked up faith is. At the moment when the most horrible things happen, when you are weaker than ever, you start to go nuts. It’s the best proof of the fact that God and faith are inventions of man. But just because people want it to be, does not make it so. It all comes from despair, from the feeling that everything is pointless and
that we’re all alone and lost in the world. When fate strikes, it’s just a coincidence. Or human error. Every single accident. Fate if you are not found legally responsible; your own fault if you cause the accident. There are no other possibilities.

That’s why I get just as pissed off at Christians as I do at women who pump silicone into their breasts. Because both are taking the easy way out. Christians just can’t handle the idea of spiritual homelessness that I’ve dealt with, been fully conscious of, for my entire life: life is pointless, the world is pointless, mankind’s existence is a fluke, and there is
definitely
no life after death. To console themselves, Christians dream up a life after death. Because they would like—so badly—for us to be more important or more unique than animals. They convince themselves that there’s a heaven up there for them in the afterlife. You wish! Oddly enough it’s always the self-professed Christians who flip out the most when they lose someone close to them—despite the fact that they will ostensibly see each other again soon in heaven. When you see their reaction to death you can tell they don’t believe their own bullshit. And when it comes to breasts, you should just accept the ones you have and deal with it—like the pointlessness of life.

My husband is still clearly disappointed that our visit to the brothel tomorrow is off. He’s sulking. This time there’s really nothing I can do about it. I didn’t get worms on purpose. Though he probably wouldn’t put it past me.

I want to get away from the oppressive atmosphere on the couch, so I say, “I’m going to bed.”

But as an adult woman, I can’t simply flop down and sleep, as I’d like to. I have to wash all the coloring I put on that morning off my face, using a special cleaning substance called makeup
remover. You have to brush your teeth for a good long time to set a good example for your children—even though they’re not watching. Comb your long hair so it won’t be all tangled in the morning. Undress, throw your dirty underwear and socks into the rattan laundry basket, and put on your slightly musty old pajamas that are hanging on the hook on the back of the bathroom door.

We try to do as little laundry as possible, for the environment—our ersatz religion. And that means wearing the same stinky pajamas over and over. We also change the bed linens as rarely as possible. As a result our bedroom smells a bit like a cave. I often think,
This is the same way the Neanderthals smelled, this greasy bodily odor
. We make sure not to stink only when we interact with others, outside our home. At home everything is subordinated to the environment. It’s always a competition between me and my husband to see who will do all the things we have to do before bed in the big bathroom and who will be forced to use the little guest bathroom.

We try to do everything better than we did in our previous relationships, because we want—need—to stay together forever. So we eliminate all the mistakes that killed earlier relationships. Anything to do with bodily hygiene we hide from each other. We don’t brush our teeth in front of each other, or wash, clip our nails, piss, or poop. We did those things in front of previous partners and realized it had been a problem.