Authors: Helene Hegemann
‘But I gave you a fifty-euro note!’
‘I won’t listen if you shout like that!’
‘Fifty euro, Mifti!’
‘Yeah, but then I bought cigarettes as well, because you smoked all mine the other day.’
‘But we’re still not back to the original fifty euro.’
‘There’s a minimal deficit.’
‘And where is that?’
‘In my jacket pocket.’
And there it is: the sound, your access to absolutely any state of consciousness you desire. Anything you want can be produced at short notice, the blackness before your eyes occasionally rent by brief flickers. It’s all about your gimpish grin and those moments of unstoppable loss of yourself, confirming nothing other than that you’re no longer an individual human being in this mass of polytoxicomaniacs wading spasmodically through the shit, but a dissolving piece of commonality. You’re dissolving, you let yourself bounce off one wall to the next and then into the arms of the bass that allows you everything you want. It infiltrates your muscles and you beam at it, driven to the extremest of extremes by the violation of the basic rules you once set yourself.
Edmond: ‘It’s so fucking secondary that you’re so fucking symbiotic.’
‘WE’RE NOT FUCKING SYMBIOTIC!’
I open my eyes, take a sidestep to the left because of my loss of balance and slam backwards against our front door. I take three steps forwards and slam backwards against some kind of ice cream advertising medium set up in the public sphere. I turn around and slam backwards against an acne-ridden guy in a green uniform. The police officer’s progress in terms of non-verbal communication goes like this: he drags me roughly down a stone staircase – how on earth did I get here? – he shoves me in a taxi, the taxi driver drives off and is inspired to turn the radio up out of identification with his aggressor (which is me). I feel transported back to a four-thousand-capacity establishment and start to cry as George Michael wails hysterically ‘Guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm’ at me from the speakers – in a track that makes me suddenly want to give anything for a 2 × 2 metre laminate dance floor. I wail along, still crying, the driver asking me for the third time, ‘Where am I supposed to take you then?’
* * *
I take three steps back and slam backwards against the taxi. I lie down in the entrance to the former factory building where Ophelia lives, finally falling victim to an unspecific emotional articulation generally categorized as facial expression and accompanied by floods of tears. Crying is not attached to any particular emotion, occurring frequently, however, in cases of fear, melancholy and aggression, for example. Those who rampage tend to wreak blind destruction. Those who are traumatized (in the broadest sense) tend to find themselves constantly in situations of heightened nervousness.
I’m standing misplaced in the washroom, eyeing a systematically heterogeneous group of filamentous fungal growths stretching in snaking lines across an organic substance as a greenish coating. My kindergarten’s going mouldy. I’m four years old and very recently puked into the open palms of a trainee nursery nurse.
I’m standing crying in my mother’s bedroom as two china dishes containing my milk teeth and unfounded accusations are slung in my face. She says she’s going to die. She severs the back of my knee with a spare cutter blade. She severs my tendons with a lightness of hand, she cuts up everything that belongs to me in the slightest, she sets fire to my open wounds with an extra-long refillable electronic lighter printed with an advertisement for cling film and fitted with a child lock. She says I’m the best thing that ever happened to her. SHE SAYS I’M THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO HER.
* * *
I say to Alice, ‘Maybe I’ve got borderline personality disorder.’
Alice answers, ‘Oh, that whole borderline personality syndrome crap is the equivalent of unspecified upper stomach pain. They always say that when they can’t think of anything else.’
I’m sitting in the church hall of the Düsseldorf-Düsseltal Lutheran Community at the age of six, compelled to celebrate Christmas at an event organized by my teacher. Yellow laminate floor, brown curtains, woodchip wallpaper and homemade posters. My mother gives me two Santas made of Kinder Surprise eggs and cotton wool. I pretend to be moved to tears.
‘Can you see all the crap lying around here? That paper and foil over there?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘The other parents all gave their children these Santas, and they just went and broke them because they were so greedy for the bloody chocolate. Their parents went to so much trouble, and the little bastards just go and smash the Santas and chuck them in the corner.’
My mother starts crying. I hug her. There are no perpetrators, only victims. The younger a child is, the more guilty. The more responsible a child is for his or her sociopath parent, the better he or she can deal with his or her own criminal liability.
0:08. Perhaps you’re only innocent when you have no idea of morals any more, I think at some point, finding myself completely unlikeable. I really need to get out of this habit of precociousness before it takes on a life of its own. By the time Ophelia says hello through the intercom I appear as if the pain were either non-existent or already processed. Four storeys and a woman who only values our spiritual kinship for her own sake. She’s standing in the doorway smoking, wearing a pink and blue striped satin nightshirt.
‘You smoke too much, Mifti!’
‘Why? Because I’m so out of breath?’
‘Yeah. And you know what? I think it’s so great, the whole idea of the two of us as a culture annihilation crew.’
Ophelia’s converted warehouse and industrial space is 290 square metres in total. The floor is concrete, the walls are four-centimetre-thick plasterboard. Her art collection is dominated by genre and landscape painting, with almost no trace of religious motifs or the intensified post-1970s modernism-postmodernism discussion. She bundles me on to one of her seats, offers me a probiotic yoghurt and asks, ‘Why exactly are you here right now?’
I shrug. Were I capable of crying in the presence of people made of flesh and blood and not only in my own company, a number of things would be easier, both for myself and for the people made of flesh and blood.
‘Mifti, you’re too good, too young, too promising, too talented. I’ll scare you right out of here if you put on some great big performance. I scare off everyone I love, and then I feel something too. I went to Salem boarding school. Salem’s totally pathetic, at the end of the day. I did everything right but nothing works. That’s where I perfected my asocial streak, camouflaged under the façade of my empathy. I’m the same age as everyone when they die. That’s why you’re the superior one.’
I don’t say anything.
‘Is all this crap here something to do with your mother again? Don’t you want to tell me what your mother was like?’
‘On benefits, permanently wasted, Chanel suits despite it all.’
‘And what’s happened now?’
‘I went to that unexplored territories party with Pörksen and Tina yesterday.’
‘Why didn’t you text me? A good day to rattle, wrestle and fight or punch guts.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, Mifti, someone asked me there one time if he could ram this big fuck-off medieval fork into my sternum. And of course I put up inconspicuous resistance and pretended I had an urgent appointment at the bar – you always do that, don’t you, pretend you really really need to go to the bar – but the whole situation proved all over again that anything goes. Not only can you shove aubergines up arseholes, you can try to ram four metal spikes into the flesh under a complete stranger’s jaws.’
‘Anyway I went there.’
‘Yeah, that’s where we were just now.’
‘And it was completely OK, even though I was utterly fazed by all the shaven-headed fetish freaks. What I’m getting at, this afternoon I completely flipped out, even though I got up this morning and felt amazingly fine under the circumstances. I was putting up these shelves with Edmond, and everything was totally chilled and great and wicked, and I thought, hey, yeah, family and that. And then some bit of wood broke off, and it totally freaked me out. Some stupid bastard little piece of wood broke off the freaking shelves, and I just stood there and started screaming at Edmond, and I thought it was the end of the world. And then I even called my father and said, “Dad, oh shit, it’s all too late.”
‘And he’s like, “Can you please start the conversation properly?”
‘“Dad, can I talk to you a minute?”
‘And he’s just like, “How much money do you want?”
‘“I’m in real shit here, something’s just broken off.” And no one knew what was going on. Not even I knew. And I can’t remember the rest. And then at some point Annika threw me out. She didn’t use violence, she didn’t present a horrific challenge for the law enforcement authorities by beating me out of the front door, she just threw me out. That’s how fucked I was. And now I’m here.’
‘How did you get here?’
‘Some railway policeman put me in a taxi. I stumbled into his arms completely fucked-up.’
‘And how did you pay for the taxi? Is there some hysterical professional chauffeur leaping around my backyard who I have to pay off?’
‘No. I had some money in my shoe, no idea why, but I still had money in my shoe.’
Ophelia gives a nod of respect and gets up. She drinks a large glass of tap water before she ventures any reaction: ‘Why are you here?’
‘Because yours was the only address I could think of.’
Ophelia gives another nod of respect and sits down again.
‘I kind of can’t find any way to react. I hope you don’t expect any reaction. I can tell you, go to school, don’t take heroin, integrate into your family structure as well as possible and be a surgeon when you grow up. Just get down to it.’
‘D’you know how often I hear that, Ophelia? That I should just get down to it?’
‘I don’t even want to tell you all that stuff. I’ve always thought I’m the one who’s the child. You don’t have to defend your mother even though she’s dead and she was a great woman, you don’t have to feel responsible for your father or his well-being or the fact that he can exist without having to think about whether you exist, and if he does then of course he thinks you only exist in a state of total lack of needs. I know that feeling. Sitting staring at some box of pills just because some bastard couldn’t keep his prick to himself, because Mummy . . . well, what? Shouldn’t have had children? Should have stayed her mother’s little baby rather than becoming the mother of her own little baby? Should they not have left you and me with our mothers? They were with us, Holy Saint Mifti, we weren’t with them. It tastes like shit, like metal, it tastes bitter, and it definitely doesn’t taste of comfort, but maybe it tastes of meaning in a general mouldering way.’
Ophelia makes a kitsch waving-it-off gesture, signalling that she’s emotionally unstable and too drunk to maintain the conversation. She takes a pea-sized plastic sphere out of the breast pocket of her nightshirt and chucks it over at me. I chuck it back again.
‘By the way, I met your old crazy dealer the other day,’ I say.
Instead of answering me, she peels off the plastic film. In the end there’s a pinch of brownish powder on the mahogany table, looking like instant tea and smelling like a mixture of cigarette butts, trash and vinegar. She rolls a tube out of a piece of silver foil, tipping half the powder on to another piece. When she holds a lighter under the foil, the heroin melts, producing a miniature trail of smoke. Ophelia inhales this vapour with the aid of the aforementioned aluminium tube, until all that remains is something very dirty, small and evil, and she asks me, ‘So what do my pupils look like now?’
‘Jesus, shit, I’m underage.’
‘No, Mifti. You’re not sixteen, you’re an indirect extension of my life now.’
Her head drifts slowly towards the tabletop. I stroke her back and wait until she regains control over her body, put out of service by a sudden alteration in perception. It takes an eternity.
‘Or more like a direct extension. Mifti?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll get you an invitation and you can come to Samantha and Albrecht’s party in Charlottenburg next Friday. It’s their wedding reception, completely fucked up, what d’you expect in Charlottenburg? Emre’s DJing. He eats black pudding sandwiches. I hate eating meat, but sometimes, every so often, I get these wild cravings for dirty great black pudding sandwiches.’
‘Can you get hold of some coke?’
‘I don’t spend money any more on drugs that don’t make music sound good.’
‘But I really need to do coke again, Ophelia. When you’re bored, and I am right now, or at least I would be if we weren’t sitting here together, but anyway – when you’re bored you always think of drugs right away, don’t you?’
‘I love you, Mifti.’
‘Who’s Emre anyway?’
‘The man of my life.’
‘And what’s he like?’
‘On benefits, permanently wasted, Chanel suit.’
* * *
At 3:55 a.m. I wake up on Ophelia’s bedroom floor and decide to leave her apartment without passing Go. Ophelia’s heavy-breathing on top of her double bed, which is covered in puke. I scrabble around the room, collecting up enough coins for cigarettes and a short-hop train ticket out of strategically placed porcelain dishes filled with five-cent pieces. Once I’ve closed the bedroom door as quietly as possible, I sprint along the mile-long corridor towards the exit, both hands full of small change. From one second to the next I start suffering from a psychological disorder accompanied by a temporary loss of connection to reality: I hear voices. I get hysterical. Hallucinations are clear symptoms of psychosis. I regard not myself but my surroundings as altered and can’t recognize my abnormal condition; that’s what occurs to me spontaneously right now. The voices are coming from the kitchen, only a few hours ago still smoked up with heroin trails, and they’re talking about an art form that finds its expression in the production of moving images: ‘Well, perhaps you can walk over there, OK. Then I’d like you to act out recognizing your own desperation in Marie’s anger.’