She says, meekly, “They said they wanted to use their report to prevent more accidents like this from happening in the future.”
“Of course they said that—so you would spread your legs for them to fuck you, goddamn it.”
I saw the report. Of course there wasn’t a single word about measures to prevent accidents on the autobahn. Obviously. Not a fucking word. It was pure emotional porn. Our mother taught us decency. Resist the impulse to gawk, never gloat over the misfortunes of others. Everyone has the choice: be a decent person and don’t do these things, or be vile and give in to your lust for lurid things—at the expense of others.
I push away thoughts of the accident. I really need to be careful not to brood over it. It messes me up. And I get demonically aggressive. That’s what Frau Drescher says. These days I concentrate on my family. I am done with my mother—outwardly, anyway. I’ve closed that door. Internally I’ll never get rid of her—that’s what Frau Drescher says.
Because I hate the way my mother lived her life—particularly before the accident, when I was a child—I
obsessively try to be boring and bourgeois. Or stay boring and bourgeois. But without any role model, I have to teach myself how to be that way. Every day I enter new territory, since my mother sent me off without knowing how to stay in one place, how to put down roots, how to stay with one man. How to work at something. To invest yourself in something. I want to provide this knowledge to my child. People say that without roots you can’t blossom later on in life. I can’t blossom. I’m living proof of that saying. I’m fearful because I have no roots. I’m fearful because I have no past.
What I want for my daughter is for her to have such boring, bourgeois parents that she puts down roots in a home where she thinks,
Man, they’re so boring
. And then she can fly the nest. And be happy. And once in a while come home to see her boring, bourgeois parents. For that purpose I forbid myself to do lots of things I’d like to do: taking drugs, drinking myself stupid, fucking around, partying, and, first and foremost, dying. Maybe once she is able to get by without me. I should never have been allowed to have her. It was a huge mistake. It was clear to me even back then that I would go out by my own hand. But I wanted a child as a replacement for my ailing mother. I wanted that so badly. And now I am totally devoted to her; I love her above all else. Even though she has ruined my life and sucked all the vitality out of me like an egotistical baby bird. And makes it incredibly difficult for me to check out. To fulfill my plan. When is the right time? When does a child no longer need her mother? Or no longer need her too much? When can I kill myself and perhaps take a few others with me?
After I’ve dropped off my daughter at her father’s place and distributed the antiworm medication—with explicit instructions about how to use it—I have to drive quickly to therapy. But not too quickly. Never faster than the speed limit. Whenever I’m behind the wheel I think about the way my life would be affected if I hit someone while I was speeding—how all the relatives would get the news from the police that their family member was dead because of a woman who was on her way to therapy, which she attends to get over a car accident in her own family. How, because she was trying to make her appointment, she stepped too hard on the gas. And how, like it or not, I’d then have to go to the funeral if I had managed to kill the person or to the hospital if he or she were not quite dead. And how I wouldn’t know what to say then, and how the pressure would be easy to see on my face, how I’d have to struggle not to laugh because the pressure to put on a sad face would be so extreme that I’d nearly crack.
So I drive slowly and keep an eye on the speed limit signs. Now the signs are my friends, instead of enemies conspiring to keep me from getting places on time. Speed limit signs help me avoid ever having to look into the eyes of that grieving family. I think a lot about the things we discuss in therapy. Therapy defines my life, and I need the support it gives me. I see myself as a little hydrangea bush that needs to be regularly pruned by my therapist. Otherwise I’ll grow and crowd out everyone else—with all my barely controllable fears and psychological dysfunctions—and choke out all the life around me, including those who are dear to me. Basically I’m hostile to life and always try to prove to myself that everything is horrible, that nobody loves me, that I have to do everything on my own, and that I’m
all alone in this horrible world. That it would be better if I made an early exit. At least then I’d piss off fewer people.
On the way to therapy I try to figure out what I want to talk about with Frau Drescher. I try to arrange the time and topics so I’m not suddenly surprised when the hour is up.
I sought out Agnetha immediately after the accident. I enjoy thinking back on how I came to meet her. I was allowed by my health insurance to choose a therapist. In my mind it was clear that it had to be a woman. You’re allowed to try out five different therapists before you have to decide on one.
For eight years now, I’ve gone to see her three times a week. Without her I wouldn’t be alive anymore. I’ve wanted to kill myself twenty times during those eight years. Of course, just once would do the trick if you did it right. Without her, my husband would have left me a hundred times—he must have thought I hated his son, given the way I used to treat him. She has improved so many things in my life. Ever since I’ve been with her I have this horrible fear that something might happen to her. Obviously my concern is for selfish reasons. I don’t want to have to spend years and years explaining everything to someone else just to get back to the point where Frau Drescher already is. Her brain is a giant psychological-story-processing machine. Like a giant painting that I’ve been working on for three hours per week for the last eight years. Plus I like her. That’s another reason nothing can happen to her. I like her even though I don’t know a thing about her.
I know nothing. A while back she canceled a few sessions, something that in the eyes of a patient is intolerable as it is.
Her justification: she has to have an
operation
soon. I nearly passed out. An operation? Of course, she has cancer. Otherwise they wouldn’t call it an operation. Got it. Probably uterine cancer. Why else would they call it an
operation
rather than, say, a procedure, or surgery? She doesn’t have to say another word. She has uterine cancer, I’m sure, 100 percent sure. She’s going to die a wretched death, and I won’t even be able to visit her in the hospital to continue my sessions. So that she can at least leave me halfway cured before she herself bites the dust. That sounds selfish, but that’s the nature of therapy. There’s nothing I can give her. I’m not allowed. I can’t even bring her a piece of homemade cake. A therapist can’t accept something like that—it could be poisoned. No gifts, no invitations to my birthday parties. I’ve tried it all.
It’s no secret that I go to her. All my friends know about her. And still she never comes to any of my parties. Too bad. And I’ve never seen her on the street, the way Tony Soprano accidentally ran into Dr. Melfi at that Mafia restaurant and the doctor had to lie to her husband about how she knew him. What an idiotic move on her husband’s part even to ask. He makes it difficult for her to keep her vow of silence, or whatever you call it. He must know that every single person she says hello to and he doesn’t know could potentially be some nut from her practice.
I don’t know whether Frau Drescher lives in our town. She never says anything about herself and yet she even knows exactly how I get myself off, when things are going well sexually between me and my husband and when they’re not. It’s very unfair.
“What do you mean by operation?”
“Nothing bad, don’t worry, Frau Kiehl, it’s really nothing bad.”
I’m sure she’d say that even if it were something awful. Anyway, you often don’t know if it’s something bad until after they cut it out and test it. The results often come much later. But in the meantime she still has to appear steady, unperturbed, and calm. She’d never break down and say, “Yes, I’m so afraid, I’m really worried that my four overweight children will be left with only their other mother, and she’s such a terrible mother. It was a mistake to use her brother as the sperm donor for my artificial insemination. We only did it because we thought that way the DNA would be as close as possible to hers.” She would never talk to me like that, unfortunately. But I secretly know that her life is just as I imagine it. I can sense it. The poor woman.
I’d love to be her best patient. I would subvert my own identity if doing so would fulfill the desires of others—people like my husband, my therapist, my child, the neighbors, my friends. The waitress at the café. I’d subvert my own identity until there was nothing left of me.
I drive on. It won’t be long until we get rid of our car. When I drive the car on winter mornings, I gawk at the fumes spewing out of the tailpipes of the other cars and wonder to myself how this is still permitted in this day and age. All the people are alone, driving their own car to work, all causing smog and traffic. Always just one person in each giant car. Sometimes I can’t control myself. If the children aren’t in the car, sometimes, against the protests of my husband, I hop out at a red light if there’s a gas-guzzling Jeep in front of me and walk up and smile at the driver’s window. They think,
Oh, a nice woman who probably wants to chat me up because I drive such a cool
and luxurious car that shows what big balls I have
. Then, when the person rolls down his window, I tell him how outrageous it is, an affront to man and nature, that he drives such a wasteful car that uses so much gas.
The people inside those cars must be fucked in the head. And I don’t think you can change the world if you let every asshole do what he wants without punishing him somehow. After I die my husband will get rid of our car—I put it in my will. We want to be a good environmentally conscious family, even when I’m dead.
As soon as I can see the high -rise as I’m driving up, I work myself into a state. Agnetha has a reserved parking space for her patients with a big sign that reads
DOCTOR.
That’s just great. It’s so embarrassing. Everyone knows you’re nuts when you pull into that spot. Even after all these years I still feel ashamed when I park there. But I’ve never said anything to her. Even though you are supposed to tell your therapist everything. She always says it’s important for our relationship. Yep, we have a relationship. Which is something unusual for me. The only reason I’ve never said anything is that by the time I get to her couch this particular embarrassment has been displaced by a thousand other things. Right, exactly, you lie on the couch in her office, as if she were Sigmund Freud. Except that she’s better-looking and friendlier to women than Freud. I spend most of my time with my husband lying on the couch, and I spend all of my time with my therapist lying on the couch. I never anticipated that the couch would be the central piece of furniture in my life.
I step into the elevator, go through all the fears that used to put me into a cold sweat. I used to often reek of the sweat of fear because I had so many phobias. But I’ve found a deodorant
that totally stops my underarms from sweating. Normal deodorants have a little aluminum chloride in them to stop perspiration. The one I found is all aluminum chloride. When I apply the roll-on directly to my skin, it itches and stings badly. But if I put it on my fingertips and then rub it under my arms, then there’s no skin reaction.
I ring the bell and her automatic buzzer lets me in. Hello,
Guten Tag
, greetings, the awful handshake, looking each other in the eyes, and finally I lie down and gape at her picture of the devil. And fidget with my fingernails. I’m nervous. Always. But I would never bite my nails, because then everyone would be able to see I have psychological problems. Chewing on my cuticles is also something I’d never allow myself to do. That would offer too much insight into my psyche.
“We wanted to go to the brothel today, Georg and I. But I realized last night that both Liza and I had worms. Liza didn’t go to school. And I figured I’d better also cancel the trip to the brothel. And Georg was so disappointed again. You know how often I’ve backed out—out of either cowardice or anxiety. We don’t need to talk about the worms. They’re dead. We went to the doctor this morning and all got medication. Problem solved. When I go home after this I’m going to tell Georg we can reschedule our little sexual outing.
“What I’d really like to talk to you about is my paranoia about being followed by newspaper reporters. Because they hounded us so much back then, I still feel as if they’re following me. I’m going to surprise Georg with the news that we can go ahead with our trip to the brothel. But every time we go I’m always so afraid that someone will manage to snap a picture of us—ugly and naked, with fat tummies, fucking away
in a threesome. Even though they wouldn’t be able to publish something like that, I can’t stop imagining it happening. Luckily I’d at least be doing it with my husband, not behind his back; otherwise I’d have the additional worry of the photo destroying my marriage. Those assholes from the tabloids swarmed us from all sides after the accident. The TV crew that snuck into my mother’s hospital room—I’ve told you about it a thousand times. I dream about a producer from one of those shows—someone with blood on his hands—having a stroke or something and feeling with his own body what’s it’s like to be thrown to the wolves of his business. See what it’s like to have someone sneak into the hospital and publish photos that show you in a really unflattering light.”
“Frau Kiehl, it’s almost as if you are evil. You need reparations in the form of at least one of these people undergoing the exact treatment they inflict on others.”
“Yes, exactly. I’ve been turned evil. Very evil. You know what I dreamed about recently? I was practicing something in a rental car so Georg wouldn’t know about it. I took the car out into a field in the middle of the woods and practiced wedging a brick against the gas pedal to get the car to go on its own. The idea was to figure out how to be able to jump out of the car and have it keep going. I dreamed that I spied on the publisher of the paper that published that photo. Eventually I knew where he lived, where he went out to eat, when he came and went from his office. Everything. And I knew about an annual meeting he had—he and his closest colleagues went out drinking at a certain bar after a yearly audit of the profits. That’s where I decide to do it. I sit in the car a few meters away. The entire car is full of gasoline. I’ve painted three little faces on one of the
gas cans on the backseat—one has freckles, one has slightly jug ears, and one has glasses. Just as the people from the paper are getting out of their car in front of the bar, I step on the pedal and race toward them. Sometimes I dream that I stay at the wheel, just to be sure my revenge scheme comes out perfectly. Other times I dream that I manage to jam the gas pedal down with a brick and jump out—because I’ve practiced it so many times.”