Assimilation

“Member of species 5618, you will be assimilated!” Locutus says to me as soon as I open my eyes, strapped onto an operating table. A red light on his right temple is blinking while he speaks. I also know him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Star Trek – The Next Generation, the bane of my formative childhood years, for I never understood what was going on, yet I was rather fascinated by it for that very reason. It was also the first time I encountered the word assimilation. For some reason, it didn’t leave a positive impression on me. Locutus indulges in a lengthy explanation on how I will undergo an assimilation, while someone else connects my spinal cord with a computer, through which I have access to countless snippets of other peoples’ memories. I access one randomly, which is a quite bumpy endeavour.

“Pregnant women first?” I hear myself shouting through a megaphone in Arabic and some sub-Saharan languages, when I shift back into lucidity. I’m perfectly able to keep my balance standing on our quickly moving rubber dinghy, while circling a cargo vessel, on its way from Libya to the white beaches of Italy. The heavily overcrowded coffin ship is at least twice the size of our old hospital ship from the sixties, which we use to scan the Mediterranean for refugees to save from drowning. Some able-bodied individuals jump from the ship into the rough sea, swimming up to our dinghy. Among the countless bodies in the water there are many dead. Their most pressing worries weren’t about how well or if ever they will assimilate in Europe, but mere survival. Then there is the Italian coast guard ship. I hear them before I see them. And I feel them, too. One of their rubber bullets knocks me out cold.

Next, I am on my way to work. I pass by a typical Chinese neighbourhood, when I see a little boy, his underpants down to his knees, relieving himself into a flowerbed in front of an old and rundown block of apartments. In all this suffocating humidity these days, I feel a refreshingly cool breeze; and then a sudden and warm sprinkle, carried over by the refreshing gust, finds my naked calves. Just the day before yesterday, on my way to the metro station, I stopped at the traffic light of a large intersection. It can be life-threatening if you do not. The light switched to green when suddenly a ruthless pack of silent-death e-scooters skipped the waiting cars and busses. In my peripheral vision I made out one specimen that was headed for my position, if I had kept walking. I wanted to lift my leg up high to kick him off the scooter, but instead I let the anger travel up my arm into my hand. And then I only threw my cup of hot soymilk after him, yelling. He just turned around, laughing. I want to be part of this society, I really do. I learn the language, can eat with chopsticks and all. But they don’t let me. They make it exceptionally hard for me to integrate. As a foreigner you are a drop of water in a sea of oil. Given my expatriate features, I know that I will never be able to blend in with them. I will always be the exotic pet. The foreign friend. The white monkey. Assimilation impossible. Upon this sobering realisation, I shift over into another shred of someone else’s memory.

On the table in front of me are photocopies of several documents. A couple of weeks back, my child’s father had been officially recognised in my child’s birth certificate at the registry office in Berlin Charlottenburg. This step has helped provide him with the legal status he was aiming for all along. There are photocopies of an Italian medical card, a provisional Nigerian passport, and a German residence permit. None of them match. The Nigerian passport had been issued, based on the Italian medical card, and the German residence permit took the Nigerian passport for granted. Bureaucratic whispers down the lane. Three different documents. Three different passport photographs, of which none resembles the man I conceived my child with. Three different signatures. Three different names, let alone the dates of birth. How is this even possible? Does my child have three fathers now? How can I make sure that none of these men can come and claim custody for my child? The woman at the registry office said that once a father is recognised there is no way back. And I should know best who I had intercourse with! Deutsche Willkommenskultur on the loose! If we can’t even integrate them properly, how will they ever assimilate? Tired of the world’s most absurd turnings, I slide back into familiarity.

“Welcome to the Borg’s collective consciousness, Eight of Sixteen, Tactical Drone of Trimatrix 5337!” I open my eyes once more, when Locutus pads me on the back. In a mirror, I see myself in a black bionic suit. There are tubes and cables coming out of my neck and my back fusing into a panel on my right temple. My red light blinks when I state my status, “Confirmed: Assimilation of a member from species 5618 completed successfully!” Is force really the only way this works?! is my last thought before I lose my self in the depth of our hive mind.

A Murder Of Crows

 

“Mum, mum, can you come here, quick! I think Tigger did something to a crow in the backyard.” Christopher, my little baby brother cries out, “Tigger was playing with it and now he fled into the house.”

“You and your stupid cat!” I say, “Every normal boy would have wanted a dog and you wished for … a cat!” I chuckle.

“Shut up, Robyn, you … you mean … sister!” he shouts at me.

“Christopher! Robyn! What’s the fuss with Tigger all about?” mum says, coming in from the kitchen.

“Well, look at the trees in the backyard. They are filling up with crows. Dum-dum’s cat has probably killed a crow outside.”

“No, Tigger didn’t kill it. He just played with the bird. It can’t fly, but it isn’t dead! And I’m not a dum-dum, you … skinny … scarecrow!” my baby brother tries to defend himself.

“Mum, that little shit just called me a skinny scarecrow!” I plead for mum’s support.

“Well, Robyn, you may want to contemplate on your recent eating habits, is all I’m saying. If you deny your body any form of fat you probably won’t have to deal with as large hips as your mother’s, but you won’t grow any nice boobs either. Think about that.” mum says. Christopher is rolling around on the couch, holding his belly while laughing out without loud.

“Shut up, you little son of a bitch!” I hiss at him, through my gritted teeth.

“Look at that!” mum says, pointing out of the window, “That’s definitely a big murder of crows. But not as big as the ones I saw when I was a kid like you, Christopher.”

“But mum, Tigger didn’t murder the crow. He only played with it! It’s still alive and hopping around in the grass, see?!”

“That’s just a figure of speech. A group of crows is called a murder. Like a school of fish. But not like in Finding Nemo, understand?” mum says, and Christopher nods vigorously.

“So, now be quiet, children, because the bitch,” mum winks at me, “is going to tell you a story from the crows of her childhood.”

“You remember Walter, grandpa George’s neighbour; the one with the nice garden behind his beautiful house?!” We just nod in silence and mum goes on,

“When I was a kid, Walter threw a rock at a crow. He unfortunately killed the bird. As soon as the other crows got over the initial shock, the outrage began.

“You couldn’t see his grass, roof or trees for all the crows.

“They kept up a week-long vigil on his house and back garden, complete with their unholy cacophony and defecation on any remotely horizontal surface until Walter respectfully buried their fallen comrade.”

“Then a year later at the same day they came back, en force, and spent another week harassing him.

“This went on for years.

“Eventually I met your dad and we moved away.

“But once when we were visiting grandpa, I was drinking coffee with him on the porch behind the house.

“Man, that’s a lot of crows.” I said

“Yeah, every year they come back like a clockwork.” Grandpa said.

“Still?!” I asked.

“Grandpa just nodded, drank his coffee and watched the chaos unfold.

“It’s been more than twenty years. The original crows are long gone since, this is intergenerational hatred that will last until the neighbour moves or dies. Crows are intense!” mum concludes.

“I tell you, Christopher, we have to hand Tigger over to the crows, or they’ll do the same to our house and backyard!” I say, trying to scare him.

“Mum! No, please no! I don’t want to give Tigger to the crows!” my little brother says with tears welling up in his eyes.

In this very moment Tigger walks nonchalantly into the living room, as nothing had just happened, and decides to jump into mum’s lap. Mum starts patting him. And while she is on it, a smirk is flashing over her face.

“Mum, can we keep him, please? We don’t have to give Tigger to the crows?!” my brother is fishing for reassurance.

“No, my darling, that would be pearls before swine!” mum says. And with this she grabs Tigger by his neck, jerks him up while she, herself, gets up on her feet!

“Noooooo-eeeeeehhhhhh!” a terribly screechy and long stretched sound, is being performed by my little baby brother’s yet unbroken vocal cords.

This, miraculously, leaves the glass in the doors and windows unharmed, but motivates Tigger’s black feathered playmate from before to give spreading wings and fly another try. The crow succeeds, takes off, joins the others in the trees and together they fly back to where they came from.

Mum goes over to Christopher who’s sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. She puts Tigger into his little shaky arms and hugs both of them tightly. I join the three of them. And into my brother’s little ear I whisper,

“Who is the scarecrow now?!”

He sniffs back his snot and with big tears still rolling down his rosy cheeks, he gives me a toothy smile.

Inspiration From Within

You’re almost finished with the play you’re working on. However, your female lead character just refuses to kill herself with a dagger she is scripted to find in her family’s tomb, on the dead Romeo who had killed himself with poison.

“I don’t want to die yet, Friar Laurence!” she says.

“That’s good, my girl!” he says, “Come with me then. I’ll bring you somewhere safe!”

“Yes, I’m coming!” she says, “But I need to talk to him first! Wait for me, please!”

“To whom do you wish to talk?” Friar Laurence says.

“To the guy who’s responsible for this ludicrous play here.” she says.

*

“Rosaline, please speak your mind, then!” you say, your voice is coming from the off, and you go on, “What deters you from killing yourself with the dagger I specifically placed in the sheath on Romeo’s belt for that very purpose? If there is a dagger mentioned in a story, the dagger must be used. Future generations will refer to this as ‘Shakespeare’s Dagger’, believe me!”

“You see, William …” she interrupts herself, “… you are William Shakespeare, are you not?! Because there is quite a handful of people who believe that you’re a talentless drunk and that someone else writes for you?!”

“Please, call me William, my dear, that will do.” you say, then you take a sip from a glass of wine, ignoring her question.

“Okay, then … you see, after I followed your script and took the sleeping potion, Friar Laurence was instructed to give me, I’ve had a minute or two to think about things, while I was asleep for forty-two hours.”

“You mean, I shouldn’t have mentioned the dagger, right?!”

“For one thing, yes. But not only limited to the bloody dagger! Don’t you see, your whole story is ridiculous!”

“What do you mean?”, you say, and another gulp of wine goes down your throat.

“Well, for starters; in a course of roughly four days you kill off six characters in your story, including myself. And just for you to understand, I’m not going to go along with this.”

“I’ve been busy with my sonnets and other plays, and hence I borrowed from Matteo Bandello’s novellas.”

“‘Been busy’, my arse! Stop the glorification of busy, will you?! While borrowing, didn’t you think for one moment that changing the plot, or the timeline would make things more plausible?”

“Rosaline, in case you might have forgotten about the very important fact that I’m the famous playwright here. And you just happen to be a tragic figure in one of my many very successful plays. You’re just a figment of my imagination. I can do to you whatever pleases me.”

She’s perplexed, and you go on, anyway.

“I could write you into a rape scene with a paedophile.” you smirk in smug complacency in the dark, and she can feel it.

“See, that’s the other thing that bothers me very much.” she says, “You made me ‘not even fourteen’ in your play. And Romeo? How old is he anyway? I mean, he comes to our family’s masked ball to see his love interest, my cousin Juliet, who is much older than me and then falls madly in love with me? And at the same time, I lose myself over him, as well. How is this even possible?”

“Ingenuity in its purest form, my dearest Rosaline, don’t you think?!” is the most self-flattering thing you can say.

“Well, to be frank with you, I find it utterly pathetic! But I must admit that I feel quite pleased when this lovesick puppy appears under my balcony.” she says.

“And then the two of you exchange vows of love and agree to get married the next day. That’s so powerful!”

“It’s anything but powerful! I only go along with it, because he is so cute down there under the balcony, and I’m required by the circumstances to be a woman whose is woven out of very emotional fabric.” she just mocks you, and goes on in the same ironic voice, “And you’ve got to have balls if you do something like this?! This will inspire generations of young men to propose!”

“Exactly my thought, Rosaline! You have to leave something behind, in order not to be forgotten!”

“I like the secret marriage part, only because it’s some revolt against the patriarch, Capulet, my father. That’s the only reason why I’m in. He wants to marry me to Paris. Paris, can you imagine, William? … Of course, you can! You made the whole thing up.” she says.

“See, I like the way you think. It’s almost like I was saying it. … Which, in fact, is true because you’re just a formidable product of my boundless creativity!” you say.

“But I’m not going to kill myself over someone I just met three days ago. I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but seriously?! No!”

“Rosaline, you see, this is supposed to be a tragedy. And the death of a main character is always perceived as very tragic. I … the story needs you dead, Rosaline.”

“I don’t know about your audience out there in the Globe every night, but I’m having a hard time suspending my disbelief here. “

“Rosaline, I assure you, the audience will love it. Trust me!”

“Okay, William, just think about this here: A thirteen-year-old girl wakes up in the family tomb, finds her older husband poisoned on the floor. Next to him there is another dead guy, the man her father wants her to marry. And then you believe that she is going to stab herself to death? If you ask me, I’d just walk away from this messed up shit.”

“Rosaline, you can’t just walk away from my story! Not so close to the end, anyway! What am I supposed to do without you?”

“I don’t know, you’re the gifted genius playwright oozing buckets of creativity, are you not?! But if you ask me, I’d consider Juliet. The last time I spoke to her, she was dying to get a female lead in one of your plays. I think it’s about time for her.” she says.

“This sounds like a way out. But the billboards all over town read ‘Romeo & Rosaline’ already.” you’re having a whinge here.

“No, William, no! ‘Romeo & Juliet’ has much better ring to it, believe me.” she says, because she means it.

“Uh-huh, you don’t say…” is all you say. Then your steps clear away in the dark.

*

Someone gives a little cough in the corner. Rosaline turns around and look.

“Ah, Friar Laurence, I think I’m done here. We can go now, when you’re ready.” she says.

“As you wish.” the Friar says, and the two of them leave the scene.

La Petite Mort

 

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward, as the saying goes. But is this really it, is this all there is?

 

The life-support machine next to your bed in the hospital is humming back to life. There is a guy in his fifties and his family next to your bed. All of them are in tears, sobbing, whilst you are trying to jog your memory: Who are these people? Exhausted, you close your eyes.

When you open them again, you are somewhere else. A cute nurse pushes your wheelchair through the garden of the retirement home. When you are back in your room, the nurse helps you into bed and props up your head. You feel the impulse to thank her with a little smack on her juicy bottom, but you are still too weak. You can barely move. She puts some fruit tea and oatmeal in front of you and feeds you the same.

Quite some time later, the guy from the hospital and his family is there again. “Hey dad, how are you today?” he asks. You don’t say anything. You just listen. “Do you remember who we are?”, your son asks you again. You lie to him, nodding your head.

Probably a couple of years later, your grandchildren visit you in the nursing home. You remember them and their names well, but now they are a bit younger than the last time you saw them. They take you outside to a nearby park and open the bottle of wine and you eat the chocolate cake they have brought for your birthday.

Another few years forward, you feel so energised that they make you leave the nursing home. The place your son calls your home is crammed with old relicts and memories of a life you have yet to live. There is a photograph on top of the fireplace with you and a woman at a beach somewhere. She looks beautiful and happy. You look sort of happy, too – with watery eyes, though. The woman must become your wife one day. And there is another one from a much younger woman, radiating the same beauty and grace like your future wife. Is this your daughter?

 

*

 

You do not really like your home. It is far too big for just one single person. The pension that is coming in from different sources is quite substantial. You travel around the world and play golf with your friends and business partners from your future. There are a couple of women along your way, but not the one from the picture.

You will be the managing director of your company, judging by the party they throw for you when you leave. That night your young secretary ends up in your big and empty house and, of course, in your bed, too.

After some years of loneliness there is a funeral. It is for the woman in the photograph. You cannot cry, since you have yet to meet her alive.

“No tears, not even for your own wife?! That is so typical of you! You selfish arsehole!” a woman cusses at you. You are dumbfounded. You don’t know her. But isn’t that the young woman from the other photograph, the daughter that never visits?!

“This is all your fault, dad!” your daughter shouts at you, a week or two earlier. Overdosed on barbiturates, the doctor confirms. Your wife eventually smiles at you in person, when you wake up that morning. A smile full of pain, because she is dead. Still no tears from you for her there either.

Fast forward a couple of years, where you are younger and your hair fuller. You’ve just been promoted to branch manager. At the party, your wife has had a bit too much to drink.

“I know it all, you cheating bastard and I also know of the intern! The one you forced into an abortion.” she screams. Your two children are also there, witnesses to the absurd scene. Of course, you don’t know, what she is talking about. And you feel that there is an insurmountable heap of emotional debris between you and your wife. You also sense that your infidelity – you feel guilty about nevertheless – is only a symptom of the yet unknown cause of your marital alienation.

“Talk to me!” she says, years earlier, “Talk to me, will you?! Do you think it’s my fault?” she shouts now. You do not know what to say, so you stay quiet and say nothing at all, as always.

“Tell me straight to my face! Am I a bad mother?” she screams, “Don’t you think that I deserve at least a little bit of honesty?!” Still, you do not know what is going on, and you do not know anything else to say either.

“It is not your fault, at all!” is all you can come up with. You do not have it, yet, to get through to her. And so, the two of you drift even further apart, you in your world of work and carnal distraction, and she tries to dissolve her pain in hard liquor and anti-depressants.

You turn around in your bed and you see your wife still asleep. She looks much younger, almost like in the photograph, only her hair is shorter now. Suddenly, your children storm into the room. Your son and your daughter at around ten and six. And there is another child. Do you have three children? The photographs in the home from your past didn’t prepare you. But the two-year-old girl comes over to your side of the bed. “Lift me up daddy, please!” she says. And of course, you do!

Later that day, which is a Sunday, you decide to go to the cinema. The Land Before Time. It was your daughter’s wish, the youngest, because it is her birthday. When you leave the house, your eldest stay with you, while you lock the door. Your little one follows her mother across the street to where the car is parked. First you hear tyres screeching. Then you hear your wife’s scream, a howl like a mortally wounded animal. Slowly it is sinking in and now you understand.

There is a camera in your hand and you take random photos. The three children are nine, five and one now. Your only beach holiday as a family of five. You take photos of your three kids. Photographs, which will have vanished from your past without a trace. And then you see your wife, like in the photograph on top of the fireplace of the home from your past, you remember it clearly; you wait for the right moment when she is by your side, then you release the shutter and smile into the camera with tears welling up in your eyes. A glimpse of happiness, yet tainted, captured for eternity, engrained in a photograph.

“You may now kiss the bride!”, and that is what you do! Your hair is long, and your sideburns are the latest fashion. You got your first job and a woman that adores you. You feel invincible. If there only weren’t these memories of her future.

 

*

 

There is this one day in your final year of university; you are in the library, doing some research for your thesis. And there she is. That is the one, you still think. When she turns around and smiles at you, it is hard for you not to connect her beautiful smile with the first time you saw it, the painful one that morning in the bed, thirty something years into her future. But still, even though you know that this will be the last time you will ever see her, you cannot but go over and talk to her. You cannot change both your past and her future in the present, can you?!

It tastes like a little hairy creature has died a horrible death in your mouth, months ago. You push the naked punk girl with the green hair off you and leave the bed. Staggering through a minefield of beer and booze bottles, you see other party victims sprawled out on the floor of your apartment. On your desk next to a plastic bag filled with weed, a pile of books with a post-it note reminds you that a paper is due … you check the calendar … tomorrow! It seems like you just started university. At least it feels like it. That is why you switch on your record player, which had its needle parked right at the beginning of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’.

You are eighteen when you wake up in the back of a Volkswagen Bulli. The guy who is driving has tied his wild hair back with a batik bandana.

“Peaze brozer!” he says with a thick German accent when you look at him through the rear-view mirror. “Those bang lassies, they really kick ass, don’t they?!” You just nod your head. The girl in the passenger seat is asleep. She is wearing pink coloured and heart shaped glasses. She looks cute, you find. Even in her patchwork corduroy bell-bottoms.

“She told me that you are also on the way to Goa.” he says, looking at you, looking at her.

“Yes,” you say, “if that is on your way and not too much of a bother.” Because you think that this would be one of those places you would like to visit.

“Of course, it is not! Be our guest. We are going to meet up with our friends. They organise huge parties at the beach down there.” You just nod into the mirror so that he can see you.

“What do you think of Agra? The Taj is amazing, isn’t it?! When we get to Goa, I am going to build a Taj Mahal for her in the sand on the beach.”, he says with a flower-childish glow in his eyes, looking at his sleeping beauty.

Lost in the memories of your past, and with a lack of appropriate sensitivity you say, “You do know that the Taj Mahal is a tomb a king built for his favourite wife, don’t you?!”

Then there is a graduation ceremony. Everybody is excited and talks about their future plans. Travelling. University. Family. House. Kids and all. It pains you to join these conversations, so you just tell them about your upcoming trip to India.

You are bored at school; everything is getting easier for you as your time moves on.

Then comes a period when kissing girls becomes something like a sport to you. You meet up with them behind the football pitch after school. You like them, and they like you. They show you theirs and you show them yours. Sweet as these lovely creatures are, none of them even matches the one you married in your past.

A little later you realise that now you have reached an age where you are no longer in control of yourself. The girls around you drive you crazy. Their blossoming chests and hips have something that you have noticed before, yet you have always been able to cope with these situations. Now these coping mechanisms are completely out of your reach. Blushing or stammering in a pretty girl’s presence has become an everyday occurrence. And it is not only the girls that worry you. Your own body has become a reliable source of embarrassment. You remember that one time in the school canteen when everybody wanted to go and hang out in the playground, but you did not dare to get up from your chair because you visibly liked that one cute girl with her lovely bosom a bit too much at that moment.

Luckily, you have progressed to a stage where football has become more interesting than girls. Who likes these annoying giggle machines anyway?! However, football will quickly be substituted by an addiction to sweets and cartoon series on the telly.

You are growing smaller and smaller and you learn that with your size it is perfectly normal to be carried around all day. Having discovered this convenience, you also resort back to gibberish and childish babbling. Yet still, you get what you want.

 

*

 

You have almost gone full circle. You are on fruit tea and oatmeal again, now in your mom’s arms at home. One day you disappear into her womb. Slowly but surely you let go. Painless mental dulling, knowing that you are shrinking, evermore.

And just to make sure that nothing is wasted, your life ends in an orgasm!

The Get Out Triplicity

 

I

 

My earliest memory. In the beginning, there was silence. I had just been flushed out of my intrauterine panic room, and my still gummy eyes were trying to adjust to the rather intense light. Where I had been until only a couple of minutes ago, there was no light. And I had no intention to get out, at all. But now that strange person was holding me by my shrivelled-up feet. Upside down. I could tell, even with all the light and the state my eyes were in, that the woman wanted to raise me higher, but there was the cord. So, she cut the cord and lifted me up a little bit more. The loss of connection to my previous supply system and, of course, the slap on my behind made me scream at the top of my lungs. But I suppose that was the purpose of the whole thing all along, to see if my lungs were working properly.

II

 

“Please come out of there, my darling.” I say to my three-year-old daughter, still calm. She’s in there again. But she doesn’t want to listen.

“I’m as sweet as they are, daddy! You said so yourself!” she says, pouting now.

“Of course, you are! And you are even sweeter than they will ever be! That’s why you don’t need to go in there with them, my sweet little munchkin!” I try to reason with my little stubborn girl.

“See, you even call me by the same name!” she now screams in her high-pitched voice.

“No, I didn’t.” I defend myself, still trying very hard to remain a sensible and responsible parent, “And now, be a nice girl and come out of there!” She, however, pretends not to have heard any of this.

“Please, let’s finish this here real quick before mommy comes home. Because if you are in there, I can’t put them inside to bake them.” I say. But she instead goes into a huff, turns around and crawls deeper inside.

I’m on my last leg with my parenting skills, and I shout, “Get out!” As a last resort, I grab her by her little legs and try to pull. But she gets hold of something inside and her body is hanging in mid-air; inside her little hands cling to the rails for the baking tins while I hold onto her legs, outside. I, somehow, manage to peel her sticky little hands off the rails and pull her out.

Now the violently shaking bundle is sitting in an armchair, sobbing hysterically, just because I didn’t allow my sweet little munchkin to be in the oven with the sweet little muffins she helped to make.

III

 

To tell you the truth, you’re stuck. It’s nothing personal. It just happens to the best of people, sometimes. I mean, there can’t always be progress. Sometimes there is also regress. However, thinking of regress here is like only thinking in categories of black and white. Thinking only in a rather limiting duality. Good and evil. High and low. Up and down. And of course, progress and regress.

            You’re stuck. That means that there is neither progress nor regress. Or there rather shouldn’t be. Because otherwise you will force a tragedy to unfold around you, involving you. Just imagine watching a Shakespeare play in the theatre, you get an idea what tragedy means: Every possible solution is wrong. The dramatic hero doesn’t get to choose between good and evil, but whether to make this mistake or another one. In a catastrophe of this magnitude, every choice is wrong.

            What does that mean for you? It means that you must lie low for a bit, until the tide has turned. When your actions are unsatisfactory, gather information; when information is insufficient, sleep. That’s how you’ll get out.

Saved by the Bells

There’s a knock at the door. I open. He puts his foot between frame and leaf. I push against it. He pushes me into the wall, effortlessly. Then he walks in. Goes straight to the fridge in the kitchen.

I don’t know his real name. They call him crazy Ivan, because he apparently looks like those stereotypical Russians from the movies. Ham-fisted and heavily built; that kind of guy, you know. But he isn’t Russian. To me, he sounds like he is from the mountains and lakes of Connemara, west of the city. A big and burly ginger. He works for the landlord. And I’m a couple of months short on the rent.

“No beer, eh?!” he says and takes out a can of peach halves instead. He pulls it open by the tag, just a little, walks over into the living room and lets himself fall into the sofa, making the frame graunch. There’s also a loud noise in the bedroom. He stares at me.

“The cat.” I say, wiping my wet palms off on my outdoor trousers. He’s satisfied with the answer, though.

“Know why I’m here?” he says, then puts the can to his lips and slurps the cool syrupy juice out of the can through the small hole. “Ahhh!”

“I’m so sorry, I got laid off three months ago. And I …” He puts his index finger slowly across his lips and I fall silent.

“That’s another issue that needs to be addressed, but for now …” he smirks, and focuses on the can again, pries it completely open, takes out half a peach and puts it in his mouth. The juice is running down his chin, dripping on his shirt. “Ahhh!” He takes a cushion and buries his face into it.

“Heard about the old man’s daughter?” he says, after he’s wiped his face clean with the cushion.

“Not since we broke up a few months ago, no. I’m sorry! Why do you ask?” I say convincingly enough, having a look at my backpack leaning against the armchair next to the sofa, and then quickly back at him.

“The old man didn’t want to let her go to Australia.” he says. I say nothing, because I didn’t want to let her go alone either, as I didn’t have the money to go with her. And see, where am I now?!

“A bloody nurse in fecking Australia, can you believe it?! We need nurses here in Ireland more than they do in rotten down under, the boss told her. But she wouldn’t hear it.”

“Yes, I know, she wouldn’t. But she had saved quite a bit of money for it.”

“She with her pale Irish skin would burn to a crisp in no time, he said to the lassie, taking the piss, the old man.” Then he takes another peach out of the can and puts the whole thing into his mouth. “Ahhh!” he goes, and wipes his mouth dry on the cushion again.

“Anyway, she went down to Kerry with that new fella of hers, that eejit. I mean the girl is such a ride and this moron has a face I wouldn’t want to ride into battle with. I don’t know what she saw in that gobshite, honestly?!” he shakes his head, “Probably the money, though. He comes from money, you know, he’s a McNamara!”

“So, they go down there to hike up Carrantuohill. Two climb up the mountain, but only one comes back down again.” he says, and I’m shocked instantly. I just look at him; my eyes are a blank stare. “Hey, you, do you understand what I am saying?”

“What happened to her? What did he do to her?”

“What? … He didn’t do nothing. That dipshit got himself knocked out on top of the mountain.” he reaches for the can and fumbles another peach out of it and shoves the juicy piece into his mouth, followed by another “Ahhh!”

“So, she knocked him out, then?!”

“No, at least not the way he sees it.” This time he doesn’t use the cushion; this time he sucks his syrupy fingers clean.

“How does he see it?”

“How does he see what?” he says, focussing on his sticky fingers.

“How did he get knocked out?”

“Ah, the fella! Yeah, he says that they were alone on the way up to the peak. She was way ahead of him when he heard something behind him. He said, he turned around, but before he could see what it was, he got kicked right in the face.” He looks around in the living room, then asks, “You wouldn’t have any wet wipes for my fingers, would you?!”

“Give me a second, I get some for you!” I say. On the way into the hallway, I kick my dirty boots out of his sight, get the wipes from the kitchen and return to the living room.

“Anyway, nose broken, some teeth poked out. Pretty bad. I mean, he wasn’t exactly a beau, you know; but now, a face like a sack full of spuds, that ugly son of a bitch!” He just drops the used wipes on the floor in front of him, and goes on, “When he woke up, he’s alone and it’s dark. He climbed down to the lodge. The landlady told him that she hadn’t seen her coming down to the lodge. He checked his stuff and found the money missing.” He chuckles to himself and shakes his head in disbelief.

“Just imagine this, that ugly bastard took twenty kays out of his bank account to run away with the lassie to Australia, fecking Australia again! She is missing, the money is missing. And you say that you haven’t talked to her in what … months, is that right?!” Then suddenly the bells of Big Ben chime out of his pocket, and he answers the phone.

“I got to go now.” he says after the call has ended, “Have to be down in Shannon real quick. Fecking Shannon Airport, my arse! But a good friend of the boss knows somebody who works down there who said that she’s on the passenger list, and she’s flying out to Melbourne in two hours.” He jumps up, grabs the half empty can of peaches and the wet wipes and leaves as quick as he came.

I go over to the cupboard and from behind the dusty pint glasses I get the two tickets for Dublin to Auckland. Then I step into the bedroom, knock at the closet and say, “Honey, get ready, we only have three hours to get over to the Dublin Airport!”

Moosehair Underwear

 

Now the tears have dried up. We’re in our comfortable room in a lodge, somewhere between Talkeetna and Chickaloon. The open fire gives off way too much heat, but that’s okay. It helps my facial muscles relax.

I’d been crying for the last fifteen miles. No, not really crying, but the freezing cold wind was eating into my face and drilling into my eyes, which made my lacrimal glands go crazy.

I’m not an overly sensitive person, but the head in the truck bed of my pick-up makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, even though it’s covered with a huge tarp. It’s also because of the climatic circumstances of the cold season and, of course, the windshield that’s missing.

I didn’t like this. But Jesse insisted on taking the head with us. At least the head, he said. He wanted the whole body, but I said, only over my dead body. And that was something he wasn’t willing to challenge at this hour of the day. And after all, it was my pick-up we’d taken up to Alaska. Fucking Alaska!

 

A moose, a Giant Alaskan moose, for fuck’s sake! How did this even happen? That gigantic beast jumped out through the undergrowth, staggered across the frozen road and stopped, hypnotised by our headlights. We couldn’t help but skidding into the paralysed roadblock, wrecking the whole front of the truck. And then these gargantuan antlers. They’re called antlers, aren’t they? To me they looked more like huge excavator shovels, even more so when they came poking through the windshield.

Once the windshield was smashed, and the moose’s shovels got stuck in the windshield’s frame, Jesse wasn’t the same anymore. Not my sister’s little boy any longer. I haven’t seen him like this before. He whipped around, retrieved his dad’s hunting rifle, which he’d been hiding under the backseat, and – without batting an eye – put at least nine bullets into the mooster’s forehead. The moose took some time to realise what had hit him, then collapsed onto the hood, lifting the pick-up’s rear end up high.

Of course, Jesse was the first one out there. Jumping around in excitement. Can we take it home, he wanted to know. I said what I had to say, but he insisted on keeping the head.

I should’ve known better, but I was stupid enough to challenge him by saying, but you do it. This, he didn’t need to be told twice. In no time he was up on the truck again, digging the chainsaw out of the aluminium box on the loading space. The moose’s head then, was severed from its body in the most brutish manner.

I was still in a mixed state of disgust and amazement, when I found myself helping him put the bloody thing into the truck bed and cover it with the tarp.

 

The lodge was barely visible from the road. It was hidden within an enormous drift of snow, a thick layer weighing down on the roof. Only a meagrely flashing neon arrow behind a thick wall of icicles hinted at civilization. The slow and sleepy guy at the reception wasn’t really functioning yet in these small hours of the day.

“There’s a … wooden board with … registration forms … over there … Just put down your … details and leave it … on the counter … I’ll take … care of it first thing … in the morning.” the receptionist said, already on the way back to his cosy cot. We were standing with our backs towards him, but he wasn’t even paying attention to us.

“Just take the … big key to the … right.” he gestured with his hand, “The one with … the plastic moose for a key tag … That’s room … one-o-one … On the … upper landing to the … left.” The door snapped shut and we were alone in the foyer.

“Phew, that was close.” I said, “We look like two clumsy butchers on the run.” Jesse just shrugged it off impassively and went up the stairs.

We took turns taking long hot showers to wash the treacherous blood off our bodies. Then we burned the clothes in the open fire. Jesse said that this is something they would’ve done in the movies, so I let him have it that way.

Early in the morning, I woke up because something was about to break, overhead. Jesse was already up and about. Before the main beam came down on my bed, Jesse managed to yank me out of it. But we were still being showered with tons of snow sliding in from the caved in roof. From somewhere the open fire was still supplied with enough oxygen to keep going. The furnace melted all the incoming snow within minutes, leaving behind a pool of ice cold water.

 

Now, we are in the gift shop, the only place in the lodge that is still intact. Around the shop there are shelves and glass cabinets filled with souvenirs. Dreamcatchers, wooden bears, you name it. There is also a space for sweets. The Chocolate moose, with a passion for intricate details, catch my eye. However, we are completely soaked, and in dire need of something dry to wear, or we’ll catch pneumonia, soon.

“I am terribly sorry … for what happened … this morning … We should’ve … gotten the roof fixed … long before winter.” the receptionist comes shuffling in with his head lowered, “And I was just talking … to the management … on the phone.” He puts a heavy leather briefcase on the counter. “To avoid an unpleasant …ahem … lawsuit, we offer you … a lifetime membership card for our lodge, which means you can stay and use our facilities for free, … with breakfast included. The cards” he goes on, “will be issued … in your names only. This basically means … that they are not … transferable.”

We stare at him, completely lost.

“Yes, I know, … this is not much but, … please hear me out, … I am also authorised … to offer you each … an annual pass for the … Denali national park … How does that sound?”

“Excuse me, but we don’t want any of these.” I say, “If you’d just something dry for us to jump in. That would be absolutely fabulous. We’re completely soaked.”

“Oh, sorry, of course! … If the gentlemen … would like to come … over here.” The slow receptionist walks even slower over to the section with the merchandise stuff. On the way we pass by a counter that seems to interest Jesse.

“What the hell is this, dude?” Jesse asks. Under the glass of the counter lies something that looks like a mangy rabbit turned into knickers. The receptionist looks over and swallows hard.

“Oh that, I am so sorry! … But someone … took down …” the receptionist struggles, “Mighty Zeus last night …”

“Mighty Zeus, seriously?!” I interrupt the painstakingly slow receptionist. “Who the hell is he?”

“He has fathered … most of the young … calves in this area.”

“Oh, I see, just some breeding bull from Greece, huh?!” I joke.

“No, no, no, … you don’t understand! … He is … ahem … was our mascot around here.” the receptionist tries to clarify.

“A mascot! What mascot?”

“Don’t you know? … Mighty Zeus … the moose!”

“Oh really?!” Jesse chimes in excitement, “THE Mighty Zeus?! I once watched a documentary about him when I was a kid! I can’t believe it was him!”

“Yes, … that’s the one … And they even … These barbaric bastards! … They took his head!” he forces reluctantly out of his vocal cords, suppressing tears.

“No shit?!” I blurt out, “Are trying to tell us that you knitted these rags out of Mighty Zeus’ hair?!”

“Ohhh nooo, of course not!” he succumbs into rampant waves of heavy sobbing.

My eyes go from Slo-mo, the receptionist, quickly to Jesse and over to the tarp on the pick-up outside in the parking lot on the other side of the road. Luckily, I’ve parked the truck with the front away from the road. With my eyes back on Jesse, I mouth “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Jesse nods.

 

Now the tears have dried up, and Slo-mo looks at us again.

“I’m sorry, … but the news has … thrown me off … the track here.” he struggles, “And of course, this here … gentlemen … is our moose hair underwear collection.” he continues, regaining composure.

Even though I’m beginning to feel even more uncomfortable, my face is all question marks.

“These are quite popular with the Chinese and Korean tourists.”

“Why is that?” I say, biting my tongue quickly after the words have left my mouth.

“Someone claims to have found out that pulverised hair from the Giant Alaskan moose is a natural potency-enhancing drug. We just make an additional dime with upselling our underwear, as well.”

“And what are these good for?” Jesse frowns.

“You know, we just tell them that if men wear them close to their private parts, it’ll have an enlarging effect, too.”

“Do they have …” Jesse hesitates, “… the desired effect?” Definitely not my sister’s little boy any longer.

“You can try … if you want.” Slo-mo is honing his upselling skills.

“What do they sell by?” Jesse asks with gleeful interest.

“Fifty bucks a piece … do you want one?”

With the inconvenience of having a national mascot’s severed head hidden under a tarp on the back of my pick-up truck, I feel quite keen on leaving this place. I look at Jesse and he reads my expression well.

Jesse smiles at Slo-mo and says, “Well, we take two then! And two of the knitted sweaters and some pants, as well.” He smirks at me, and I hand him the cash, teeth-gnarshingly.

In the absence of a fitting room, we change into our dry clothes silently behind a stand-up display, showing our bull moose and his offspring in an awkward genealogical tree.

“Have a nice day and safe travels!” says Slo-mo, “And, of course, thank you for shopping with us today.”

“Anytime.” I say, closing the door behind us.

 

With fringed cowboy pants, sweaters with Zeus, the moose knitted in on the front and, of course, our latest acquisition in itchy underwear, we are trying to make our way over to the truck as inconspicuously as possible.

An Utterly Odd Perfectionist

“I hate it when this happens! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!” I hiss through my gritted teeth. My whole body is convulsing, with my hands clinging to the table top, rattling the big piece of canteen furniture.

“Calm down, please, will you?!” the nurse says, “You should’ve checked today’s dietary menu on the board over there, then you would’ve been prepared.”

“I did!” I bark back, “But it was changed after breakfast this morning!”

I am really pissed off right now. I push the tines of the fork under the plate. I also put the knife under the fork to get a better leverage. Then I lift my fist. I am ready to lower the fist quickly onto the fork’s handle, when the nurse sweeps in and whisks the plate off my fork-knife contraption, just a blink of an eye before my fist makes heavy contact with the handle and sends the fork flying off the table, somersaulting, describing an almost perfect arch, before piercing into my favourite cactus on the nearby windowsill. I also hate it when this happens, although it does not happen that often. But still …

“Oh no. Oh no. Oh no …” I start mumbling the nerve soothing mantra, when I slowly slide into rocking back and forth, while chewing my lower lip. I am sitting on both of my hand, to avert further damage, when the right one wiggles free – involuntarily – and starts excessively scratching the rash on my right temple. Fortunately, my fingernails had been clipped yesterday, so it does not bleed right away.

Less than a minute later, the nurse comes back and puts a new plate in front of me.

“Look what I’ve prepared for you.” she says with a big fake smile on her otherwise stern face.

The new plate looks nice. Every piece of food has its own place now. The three scoops of yellow mashed potatoes are on the left hand side of the plate. A small brownish sausage was put horizontally between the orange baby carrots and the green peas, which share the plates right hand side. Everything is perfectly separated from each other, nothing touches. I allow myself to relax a little.

I really like the arrangement of colours on the plate, but still, something strikes me as utterly odd. And then I see it.

There is one sausage, three scoops of mash and … I quickly pull two napkins out of the despenser and count the green peas and the baby carrots out onto them. Separately, of course.

When I count seventeen baby carrots, I tense up a bit. But the thirty-three green peas really push me over the edge.

“Odd numbers, I hate odd numbers!” I roar, “The food items on my plate are all odd numbered!”

Suddenly, my two fists come down onto the plate and the napkins, many times. A somewhat desired displacement activity. Although I want this, I do not concur with the dimension. I am in charge of not being in charge. It just happens and I let it happen without interfering, until I am satisfied with with the result, as well as repulsed. It is more the disgust for myself than the satisfactory quality of the outcome that makes me stop.

A little later, after I have calmed down a bit, the nurse stares daggers at me while she is cleaning up my mess. My dirty hands lie flat on the table in front of me, when I start humming and rocking back and forth again. The nurse is still staring at me. Her piercing eyes look at my manky hands and then her head and her cold icy eyes point into the direction of the bathroom. I lower my gaze and a huge wave of guilt and shame spreads throughout my whole body.

Still trembling like a leaf, I get up and go to the restroom. I turn on the steaming hot water, take the hard brush from the little shelf and scrub my hands and arms until they are perfectly clean – while the little mirror in front of me fogs up and the water turns crimson in the process.

The End

 

I could not tell if it was a man or a woman. The face was that of a woman, a pretty one, as I clearly recall. The lips were deep red, like blood, yet the colour seemed somewhat clumsily applied, for my taste anyway. The body, rather slender, was that of a delicately featured young man. The word androgynous came to mind.

Advanced in years, I felt that I had just landed on the shores of inevitable times. The weather, even though still sunny with only a light breeze, was yet urging me to move on. It didn’t seem to me that the town, an even uglier appendix to the filthy port itself, had anything special to offer. So, I decided to head off.

The way the person moved had something otherworldly about it. Every step, every motion with its legs and arms and hands seemed perfectly in harmony with its surroundings. No move was unnecessary or conducted in haste.

I was walking the dusty road, which was leading me out of town, when after no more than three miles, the person suddenly stepped out of the bushes onto the dirt road; some ten yards ahead of me. So, I stopped. The person came up to me and put its elegant left hand gently on my right, which itself was resting on my old and worn out walking stick.

 

“My name is Val. Would you like some refreshments?” the person asked in a dark yet female voice. If I hadn’t felt thirsty before, after Val asked me, I certainly did.

“Yes, please.” I said.

“Then follow me, my dear.” Val said. And with its delicate left hand, it parted a thick elderberry bush like it was nothing.

“The staff.” Val simply said, using such an archaic word, before stepping effortlessly through the row of hedges.

“What about it?” I said. But Val didn’t even turn around, it only pointed with its roundish right hand to a spot near the bushes to its right and said, “You will have to leave it there. You won’t need the staff where we are going.” Where are we going, then? I thought, bewildered. And to my own surprise, I left the walking stick that had helped me to carry my weight for so many years at that spot and followed Val through the bushes.

 

I could not tell – at first – if Val’s right hand was injured, or not. Because I didn’t remember the elderberry bushes having had any kind of thorns for protection. However, Val’s right fist was clenched, and blood seemed to be dripping in tiny little drops out from inside its fist.

After the bushes, we walked up a steep hill. Even though I was in decent shape, due to my journey for all my life all the way to here, I ran out of breath after only a few minutes of steady hill climbing. Val, however, seemed to manage effortlessly.

After a while, though, I decided to have a break. At the foot of the hill it had been just a breeze, but the higher we climbed the stronger and colder the winds got. When I turned around to have a look at what we already had accomplished, I was astonished not to see the waters I had crossed before landing on this shore. I had run into Val only a couple of miles outside of town, so I clearly should be able to see the ocean from up this hill, should I not?!

But what I saw could not be farther away from what I expected to see. The only bodies of water I could recognise as such were two rivers. They were coming from different directions, bent around the flanks of the hill, and eventually converged roughly at the spot where we must have come through the elderberry hedges. But to my own puzzlement, there were no elderberry bushes at the foot of the hill.

On top of it all, we were not even climbing a hill any longer, but a full-grown mountain, which seemed to be sitting in the middle of what appeared to be a vast valley surrounded entirely by even higher, snow-capped mountains. The valley and the mountain, we climbed, didn’t have any kind of notable vegetation, neither trees nor bushes, at all. Only grass and moss which mostly clung to the rocks, that were scattered all over the place. A dreary and inhospitable scene.

Further up in a distance, I saw Val joyously hiking up the mountain. And every so often, I happened to see how Val raised its right hand up in front of its face. To inspect the injury on its hand? That was at least what I was thinking.

I didn’t catch up with Val on our way up the mountain. Yet, I held its pace, at a distance, though.

And then I saw a bird. A little redbreast was lying on the ground. It looked like it had been crushed by something heavy. Feathers were missing here and there. Underneath, tooth-marks were visible, which looked like they had been caused by a predator’s bite. Vivid red bloodstains were spreading. Otherwise, the bird seemed strangely deflated and empty. However, this was only the first bird among quite a few others on the path up to the top of the mountain.

The sun was already setting when we reached the mountain top. We had been climbing for many hours and the refreshment that was offered to me earlier that day was now more needed than ever. But the crest of the mountain didn’t have much to offer; only mysterious piles of random rocks of different heights. And then there were the skulls and bones. On a second look, the area around the obscure rock pillars was littered with animal carcases. Mice, rabbits, rats, and – among others – birds.

It wasn’t before Val turned around to look at me that I saw its crimson lips, redder and seemingly bigger than before. And in the corners of its mouth stuck little feathers. When Val noticed me staring at its lips, its tongue flicked out, caught the feathers and sucked them in. Almost instantly thereafter, Val spat out a bloody knot of fur and feathers onto the ground close to the rock formations.

“Welcome to Val.” Val said smiling, “Time for some refreshments, right?!” I didn’t say anything, whereupon Val took a wineskin out of its leather knapsack and drank from it. It wasn’t wine, though. Although the colour was deep red, the liquid was rather thick.

 

I could not tell what I had for a drink. The way Val handed me the wineskin felt like part of an ancient ritual. Val went down on its knees, lifted the wineskin above its head and handed it over to me. Already with the first sip, I noticed the unusualness of taste and texture as soon as the liquid reached my tongue. An odourless, thin puree with a taste that comes closest to a smooth combination of beetroot, spinach and pumpkin. The drink didn’t keep its promise, though. It was refreshing at first, but it made me feel surprisingly exhausted later, like a leaden blanket of fatigue descending upon my tired shoulders. The sun seemed to be setting quicker after that, darkness was creeping up on the mountain’s body.

“Val?” I said after a while. And Val knew immediately what I was going to ask. Val spread its arms ceremoniously and moved slowly in a circle as if presenting the outlandish scenery to me.

“Welcome to the valley of Val.” Val said.

“The valley of Val?” I said.

“This is where you have to be strong. Because this is exactly where you are supposed to pass over.” Val said without any stir of emotion. I, however, was shocked. And then it dawned on me. I hadn’t failed to notice that with every inch of the sun’s setting the surrounding two half circles of snow-capped mountains bent upwards and closed in on each other – like a pair of giant jaws.

Val looked at me and it knew that I was slowly beginning to understand. For some reason, this put a smile on its pretty face. It didn’t take long for the sun to set and the mountain jaws to close entirely. The last beam of sunlight felt warm on my skin. Then the darkness swallowed me. Once it was completely dark, I stopped feeling anything. I suppose that is what you are going to experience at the threshold to the yet unknown.

 

I could not tell why Val had brought me up here, why it had to be me, and the birds of course, and why it had to happen the way it just did. Maybe just because my time simply had come. However, I have always refused to accept the inevitable.

 

---

 

“Am I dead now? Is this what it feels like after one has died?” I say, but no answer comes.

“Val, are you there? Somewhere? Anyone?” I say. Again, there is no reply. Only darkness that seems to swallow every sound.

“What is going on here? Is there anybody out there? Where am I?” I try, getting the same result. Isn’t trying the same thing all over again, yet expecting different results, kind of insane?!

At some stage the darkness moves on and gives way to some light again. The mountainous jaws, as they were closed, have started gradually to open again. The sun is rising at a familiar pace. That bit at least is somehow reassuring.

With my eyes slowly adjusting to the light, I can make out Val’s slender figure, sitting comfortably on top of one of the pillars of piled up stones. But it isn’t until I can see Val just across from me when I realise that I am residing on top of one of those pillars myself, as well.

Its knapsack is stirring again and out of it Val produces a roundish fluffy creature. The little bugger is twisting and turning in its slender hands. Then Val just lifts the rodent up to its mouth and sinks its teeth into the guinea pig’s flank and sucks until the motivation for resistance has completely vanished from the animal’s now deflated body.

“What is this? … What is it all about?” I say.

“This what? What is what all about?” Val says, with a boyish smirk on his face.

“Killing these animals, I mean. First the birds and now this poor thing just here. Why do you keep doing this?” Val looks straight at me, holding my gaze, yet smiling. In the corner of my eye I see how it drops the lifeless animal body nonchalantly to the ground.

“You have to understand that I live off the lives of the dying.” Val simply says, “I am merely making sure nothing goes to waste.”

“Just like this?”

“Just like this!”

“So, you are Death? You kill animals for a living?! Is that it?”

“No, not exactly. Me as a concept is probably a bit too complex for you to comprehend, given your human limitations. Technically speaking, I am Life. You may even want to call me by my other name, Love. Only Life can give, but also take life. There is no such thing as death. That is one of your kind’s quite popular misconceptions, because you people fail to see the bigger picture.”

“You call yourself Life, and yet you kill these animals! But wait, … humans, as well? Am I here because you are going to slaughter me, too?”

“Your remarks seem to be getting rather offensive now, I find. I wouldn’t want our conversation to continue if you kept going on like this. Ungratefulness seems to be strong in you. I don’t kill beings. They are already on their way out, dying. That’s what living beings do, they die. Because at some stage, if you like to put it that way, their bodies are old and worn out. I only take what life is left in them. And redistribute it.”

A blank stare from my side gives Val all it needs to know about me and the current state of our conversation.

“Let’s just take you as an example, shall we?!” and Val goes on, “You were dying on that road, when I picked you up. On the way up to the top of your mountain, you died a little more, step by step.”

“But you didn’t suck the life out of my body, did you?”

“It looks different from the inside, right?! To be frank with you, I did, and I am still doing it, as we speak.”

“How do you mean – as we speak?”

“Some creatures don’t put up fights, like birds and guinea pigs, for instance. But for others, like your kind, it takes longer to understand the fundamentals.”

“What fundamentals? What are they? And what has this to do with you drawing off the remainder of my energy?”

“Well then, I am taking the energy from your dying body and directing it back into the circulation. Or better, I am re-channelling it to be creative again.”

“I am sorry, but you lost me there again.” I say.

“What I would like you to understand regarding your energy is that it is known in other circles as spirit or even soul, if this makes more sense to you?!”

 

After a while I look down to see where Val dumps all the empty corpses whose energy it is continuously re-channelling. When my eyes are on the way up again, I see that for some reason my feet and legs have become slightly transparent. A look at my hands tells me that even they are fading away.

Val notices my confusion, realises that the time has come, leans over and hands me the wineskin again. It is rather difficult to drink from the skin with gradually fading hands and fingers.

“Is this preventing me from disappearing altogether? I say.

“No, it is not. It turns off pain. And it smooths the transition.” Val says, which doesn’t help at all. “In the end, not only your body will have faded away but also your consciousness and memories of all this and the things passed, and you and your energy will eventually re-join the circulation and pass over to the yet unknown.”

“For some reason, I am failing to comprehend the painful part in this.” I say.

“Oh, it will be painful for you, believe me, I have seen it many times. The way you cling to the past makes parting so painful for the likes of you.” Val says, and adds, “But we don’t talk about physical pain here.”

My face is a blank stare again yet riddled with question marks. And so, Val goes on, “I usually tend to have less or close to none of this kind of conversations with animals. Because they seem to have a natural understanding of the circle of life. They don’t fail to see that the finale is actually not an end but a beginning and that the goal is simply to be open to whatever change lies ahead.”

 

A look around makes me realise that the sun has disappeared, and the valley is now covered by a misty yellow dome. A closer look reveals that the foggy dome only reflects the flickering yellow light coming from numerous fires. The valley itself is now a bottomless pitch-black pit. Out of the pit’s endless darkness, countless huge rock pillars stand out. On top of each of the broad pillars fires are burning. I am now on top of one of those big pillars, as well. Between Val and myself a fire is happily eating its way through the heap of bone dry wood.

Occasionally, you can see how some of the fires die out. Val looks at me and points in the direction of one of the fireless pillars.

“Do you see? This was one of your kind. The fire died because she was fading away until she understood. I don’t understand why you people always have trouble with letting go. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. One of your famous writers once wrote this in one of her early books. And she is absolutely right about that.”

“How do you know that it was a she over there?”

“The fact may challenge your mind, but I am sitting at every single fire you can see here, having almost the same conversation everywhere. This is you on your so-called deathbeds, regretting things you did, or things you’ve never risked to do, or asking questions you never dared to ask before. I am your life; I am everybody’s life and I am also everybody’s realisation of that very fact. That’s how I know.”

I nod, since I am beginning to understand. Another sip from the wineskin makes me even more drowsy than I already am.

Val, of course, notices that, and with a smile on its face it gets up and motions me to do the same. Then it comes over to me. We stand face to face. One last look at Val’s beautiful and yet cruel appearance.

“Time to let go!” Val says, comes even closer now and puts its elegant hand in the nape of my neck, then draws me gently towards it, and kisses me on my barely visible lips.

 

A pause. After which everything has vanished. There is nothing, only silence and darkness. There is neither valley nor pit, neither Val nor fire, and there is no human being, either. Then a long-stretched, booming sound – although inaudible, yet very palpable – is swelling up, causing ripples while expanding throughout the universe. Vital energy in space, re-joining the circulation.

 

A Beginning

A Meretriciously Deceptive Box of Voices

 

Once upon a time there was a queen. That queen had a daughter. And that daughter was a princess. Of course, she was. And yet, the princess was forced out of the castle, by the queen herself, and hence decided to share a cabin in the woods with seven hardworking men.

Technically speaking, the queen wasn’t the princess’ real mother, but her stepmother. After the princess’ real mother had died, her father, the king, didn’t grief for too long. He took a new wife shortly thereafter. Word had it that he wasn’t quite fond of the term widower; even though another rumour claimed to have heard that the king himself gave the orders to turn him into one, in the first place.

Anyway, the new queen was a real badass type of a stepmother, one would only encounter in fairy tales of old. The fact that the princess was removed from the castle and lived alone with seven men, shows that there had been some serious animosities going on between the two of them.

The queen herself was a very competitive person. Nobody really understood why someone in their right mind would want to compete with the princess’ beauty, but the queen did. Not understand, but compete. And since the queen couldn’t bear the princess’ presence in the castle any longer, she – one fateful day – ordered one of her most loyal guards to bring her stepdaughter out into the woods and take care of the increasingly nasty nuisance the princess had become to her.

 

The sun had almost set when the guard brought the princess out into the clearing in the deep and dark forest. In the treacherous twilight, shadows were moving around behind the trees and bushes. But she couldn’t tell whether they were from beastly or manly origin. The wind was pushing a chilly breeze through the leafy twigs and branches. The princess slid off her high horse and stepped onto the mossy ground; her feet sank in, almost an inch deep.

As to be expected, the guard shouted “Run!” And run, she did; over hedges and through ditches. Will I get out of this alive? or Will he fulfil his task? were the princess’ predominant thoughts, when suddenly a bolt from the guard’s crossbow struck one of the old oak tree’s lower branches, right above her head. This partially answered the princess’ pressing questions.

Then the princess heard a second arrow being released from the guard’s crossbow. A split second before the bolt’s tip would have split her pretty skull in half, something swept the princess off her feet.

To the guard this looked close enough to what he considered a successfully accomplished mission. So, he turned the two horses around, left the clearing and returned to the castle.

 

“What the …”

“Shhhh!” An old and wrinkly face, close to the princess’, with an old and wrinkly finger in front of its lips, hushed. The little man pointed silently to a rope tied to a sycamore tree close to her feet and to another equally old and wrinkly man over by a big beech tree, who was holding the other end of the rope. When she looked over, the other little man smiled and waved at her.

“… fuck! You are all midgets!” the princess burst out after all seven of the hardworking little men had gathered around her.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no, she has used the M-word!” the little men were whinging in a chorus of deeply resonating sad voices while stroking their long beards. “You see, around here it is rather uncommon to make use of the unpleasant M-word!”

“How else am I supposed to refer to you guys, then?”

“What about our names?”

“For that I would need to know them!”

And this was how the princess was introduced to her new companions.

 

Upon return to the castle, the guard reported back to the queen, omitting crucial details he, however, deemed unnecessary mentioning. The queen, sceptical by nature, went to her chambers and consulted her old friend, the magic mirror.

“Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?”

The mirror, warping itself inside out, forming a face that was trying to resemble the queen’s, but hardly succeeded, said “My queen, you are the fairest here, so true. But the young queen beyond the mountains at the seven dwarfs is a thousand times more beautiful than you.”

It goes without saying that the queen was glowing white with rage. What followed were numerous attempts to assassinate the princess, including one to do away with her with the help of the famous poisoned apple, executed by the queen in disguise herself.

 

The king wasn’t very pleased with the decline of reputation this discord had brought upon his once so honourable and reputable family. When after yet another consultation with the talking mirror, the queen had – in a fit of anger – torn it off the wall and smashed it into pieces, the king decided to let one of his most progressive craftsmen take care of the issue. While the queen took her daily bath in a tub full of ass’s milk, the craftsman went into the queen’s chambers and fixed the mirror as best as he could.

“My queen,” the king intercepted his current wife on the way back to her quarters, “we must try and find a way to put an end to this most unpleasant of all quarrels.”

“You are a fool to believe that my enjoyment of life can exist side by side with your daughter being present in this world!”

The wise king made a sufficiently sad face. “My queen,” he sighed, “I have already taken measures to bring joy back into your life.” The king looked down on the floor mimicking an even sadder self than his voice could even convey, and ended with, “My daughter won’t be a source of bother to you any longer, my beautiful wife.”

Like all people with a disposition towards vanity, the queen found her husband’s recent words exceedingly flattering. And as soon as she returned to her quarters, she found her talking mirror back in one piece hanging on the wall where it always used to be. She was so excited that she shut the door quickly and went straight up to the mirror – her thoughts revolving only around one single question.

“Mirror mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?” she asked. The mirror again, warped itself inside out and answered the question as truthfully as always. The queen, an unversed laywoman when it comes to lip reading, just listened to the voice.

“My queen, you are the fairest here, so true. Because everywhere in your kingdom, and even beyond the seven mountains, there is nobody left that is more beautiful than you.” This was exactly what the queen had been dying to hear all this time, and thus suspended all her disbelief voluntarily.

 

The voice, however, didn’t come from the mirror itself. The king’s skilled craftsman had found a way to rid the talking mirror of its overly honest vocal cords and voice box and replaced them with his own invention, a small and round and black box that glows blue at the edges when it’s turned on. The craftsman named it Alexa. And since Alexa didn’t only answer question, but was also quite keen on listening, the king was always one step ahead of his scheming and plotting queen.

And thus, the skilled craftsman became the kingdom’s first minister for security and intelligence. The king could ensure the safety of his realm and reign. The princess took care of the dwarves’ house, while they were working hard. For Alexa’s voice was unerringly mirroring the queen’s deepest wishes, hopes and desires, the queen grew quite fond of Alexa’s mendacities. And everybody lived happily ever after.

The Island of J. S. Budgett

The ocean was furious. Huge waves were breaking down on me. The storm, that sank our ship, had been going on for hours, it felt. I was exhausted; ready to give up, end the struggle, surrender to the powers of nature. But then, suddenly, when I was on top of an immensely towering wave again, instead of the other way around, I got a glimpse of a wooden dinghy not far away from me. Strangely enough, none of my mates were anywhere to be seen.

The dinghy was moving fast – summiting a wave, then going down into a valley again. Hope was like a thin straw handed to me through the dinghy, and I was willing to grab it. I reached the meagre vessel, this I know. But how I got to the island, I don’t.

I was woken by a crab trying to clip one of my toes. I got up, which proved to be quite difficult, after fighting for my life – for how long, I don’t know. Staggering along the lengthy and curved body of white sand, I believed to have heard sounds of human origin. When I reached a pile of boulders that separated one part of the beach from the other, the voice seemed to become clearer. It took me quite some time to climb the big rocks. The voice, however, wasn’t human at all; it was a skinny young sea lion trapped between the slippery boulders calling out for one of its kind to rescue it.

With no intention to intervene in the way of the world, I left the poor fellow to his own devices and climbed further up the bare rocks to the top of a gigantic boulder, which turned out to be the body of the small island itself.

I roamed the island for days or even weeks, I really don’t know. There was a part of the island, close to the beach, which was densely forested with bamboo. In between this green forest there was a little grove where I found other trees and bushes with edible fruits and berries. There was also a little freshwater pond nearby.

One day I fell asleep on the beach. When I opened my eyes again, it was a star-bright night. In the distance, close to the forest, I saw something glowing white. When I came closer, it turned out to be a long bridge made of bamboo, lit by the bright white light of the stars. The bridge led out onto the sea. I started running, onto the bridge. I was brimming with joy. I jumped and shouted: “Woohoo!” Running along the bridge, I took off, and then I flew. “Woohoo!”

I was woken out of my daze when my face and belly hit the hard sand on the same beach where I had fallen asleep the day before. The bridge’s apparition was gone, of course. This realisation was painful, but it came with a brilliant idea in tow.

After some weeks, my shirt and trousers were torn to pieces due to the fabric-eroding effects of the ever-present and mercilessly blazing sun. I just had to follow the foul smell to find the by then immensely bloated sea lion between the boulders. A thick cloud of flies was buzzing around its dead body. I covered my mouth and nose; and equipped with a sharp-edged stone, I went down into the pit. With the help of salty seawater, oil from the sea lion’s brain and a contraption to smoke the hide, I called two days later a new pair of sea lion shorts my own.

I had spent quite some time building the bamboo raft. The raft was big enough for me and a shelter from the relentless sun, made from the leafy parts on the top of the bamboo poles. I also used the same leaves for a sail-like construction to catch the wind and bring movement into being.

One morning, I set off with the bamboo raft and some small baskets of fruits and berries. It was again a star-lit night when I reached another island. This one was different, in any way. It had a strange feel about it. I pulled my raft onto the beach and went up to where the trees began. From there I saw a huge bonfire. I could also hear voices. A language that even I was able to understand.

It wasn’t humans that I encountered speaking my language. Was I hallucinating, again? There, around the fire, were thousands of lizards, snakes, toads, frogs and other amphibians. And all of them spoke my language. I was just about to eavesdrop and find out what this hubbub was all about, when a stick cracked under my feet. Within seconds thousands of pairs of eyes were upon me.

“A human.” said a wide-eyed lizard.

“Who are you, human?” asked a tadpole in a squeaky voice. The tadpole was splashing about in a bowl of water. The bowl itself sported a handle and four wheels. Mother toad, who was rocking the bowl by the handle, looked surprised down at her rather inquisitive offspring. But I was still more stupefied than any of them. I was so stunned, I couldn’t even utter a single word.

Then a long and smooth snake slithered up to me. “You mussst be Friday!” it said, “We are ssso sssorry! But you mussst know thisss, Robinssson died quite a while ago.”

“No, no, no!” A massive Budgett’s frog was suddenly breaking through the undergrowth and hopped into the clearing where the bonfire was burning. The pale fat frog with small but gibbous eyes and a big mouth, going from ear to ear, was waving its arms in front of its roundish body in negation. All the others went silent in an instant. Then the frog took out two flares and lit them on the fire. When they started shooting off colourful fireballs, the frog shouted in excitement: “It’s Wednesday, my dudes!”

Intra Muros

Walls are diverse; they can be inside, as well as outside.

The outside walls are made of aluminium. They are riveted onto elegant but robust frames forged from sturdy steel. Walls in general are meant to protect the inside from the dangers of the outside.

The temperature inside the cabin feels like the equivalent of twenty-one degrees Celsius. The outside temperature, as displayed on the little screens in the dividing walls or on the overhead TVs, is minus sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

The safety instructions turn out to be surprisingly useful for the passengers when suddenly – with an enormous roar – sheets of aluminium are being ripped out of the wall in the back of the cabin. The hole in the hull is getting bigger with every precious second that passes.

The people – still tied to their seats by their seat belts – are screaming. The screams, however, drown in the savage cacophony of aluminium getting peeled off steel frames and bolts being wrenched out of floors and walls. The interior panelling is getting shredded into chunks of freely and slowly moving debris, due to reduced cabin pressure and expanding vacuum, as the tortured body of sturdy steel frames, holey lightweight metal walls and remaining rows of seats is nose-diving with rapid velocity.

Entire seating rows are being sucked out into the icy open, like pieces of Lego through a tube into a vacuum cleaner. The scared screams of those passengers simply fade away when being eventually consumed by the outside.

A flight attendant – unable to cope with an event with this unusual a magnitude – is wide-eyedly watching the spectacle unfold, while trying to stiffly tie herself tighter onto the narrow spare seat in the flight attendant area, quite close to the hole in the hull in the back of the cabin.

Decompression in the cabin has progressed significantly. The air is getting thinner and thinner, the people can barely extract enough oxygen from the thin and gaseous mixture. Hence, they grab the yellow masks dangling in front of their faces and press them hard onto their mouths and noses.

They follow the rules.

An exceedingly apprehensive passenger is making many signs of the cross in rapid successions, then slumps down and continues with thoughts and prayers, oblivious of the rather hideous fact that he, inside the cabin, is already – to some extent – in heaven.

The hole in the hull in the back of the cabin is expanding at an extraordinary rate. The seating rows twenty-nine to twenty-five have already disappeared through the vortex in the wall.

Walled up inside myself, I have – all this time – been sitting on seat twenty-four C.

IC408

 

“Your attention, please! Your attention, please! Your attention, please! Indian Airlines announces the departure of the flight IC408 to Hong Kong. The passengers are requested to proceed to the aircraft.” a male voice was blaring out of the creaking speakers at the gate, while outside a plane was noisily taking off from a concrete runway, nearby.

“Good evening! Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of Indian Airlines and captain Dasgupta, I welcome you on board of flight IC408. We are about to take off from Calcutta. Will you kindly fasten your seatbelts, keep your seats upright and refrain from smoking while the no-smoking sign is switched on. We hope you enjoy your flight. Thank you!” a more pleasant female voice announced over the PA system inside the aircraft.

My aviophobia already threw a tantrum when I only thought about buying the ticket. Imagine me inside a real plane! But the glass of red wine in front of me and the nice aperitif of a good handful of barbs would carry me into dreamland in a few moments, I hoped.

Han, my friend from university, had invited me over to Hong Kong to celebrate Chinese New Year with him and his family. He had been doing so for many years and I was preparing for this trip for quite some time. I even went to see a counsellor.

“You look scared, mister. Are you alright?!” the young Chinese woman, sitting next to me, started a conversation. I took a medium sip of wine to relax. Because she was cute and had a winning smile.

“I’m just afraid of flying, that’s all.” I said curtly. I was staring straight-on at the back of the seat in front of me. I only regarded her out of the corner of my left eye. Then I took another but larger gulp of wine from the glass and let it run down my throat.

“The name’s Wong, Tracy Wong! You are Mr Banerjee? Abhijeet Banerjee, right?!” the woman said.

“Have we met, Ms …?”

“Wong! No, we have not. Not in person, I am afraid. But I know you quite well, Abhijeet. I may call you by your first name, may I?!”

“No, you may not!”

“Please, have another sip of wine for me, Abhijeet. You must relax! For me, please!”

“What do you want from me, Ms Wong?”

“Tracy, please! I just want you to relax and enjoy the flight, Abhijeet!”

She then ordered another glass of wine for me. When the flight attendant came over with the delivery, she took the glass right out of the surprised woman’s hand and brought it straight to my lips. I was so startled by the absurd scene that I swallowed the whole content of the glass in one go.

But I soon felt comfortable in the strong arms of mighty Morpheus.

 

I wake up. Not on the plane, but in a tiny room. How did I get here? What am I doing here? I am wearing a hospital gown. Why am I wearing a bloody hospital gown? What is going on?

The floor and the walls are flagged in cheap white tiles with awful Chinese ink paintings on them. By the door, a tiny shower is set in the corner. There is also a narrow makeshift bed in the room on which I have slept for quite some time, I suppose. Over the top of the bed and opposite the door there is a small window, which doesn’t let much light into the room, though.

My hangover is horrible. I feel like I had been drinking for days. Also, my whole body is aching, like I had been beaten up, recently. But I don’t see any bruises. My back hurts, though.

There is a package of painkillers on, and a big bottle of water under what looks like a nightstand next to the bed. I have some pills and half of the bottle. Balm for my parched lips.

I try the door. It is locked. What the hell is going on here? I try harder to push the door open. Now, that was too much! There is a mighty sting in my lower back. The pain is spreading like a wildfire through my weak and maltreated body.

I try to locate the epicentre of pain and my fingers feel out a bandage covering my lower back. Under the bandage, I feel out something angular. When I push it just a tiny bit, the pain almost makes me pass out. What the hell is going on here?

I try the window. The window leads to something that seems to be a large ventilation shaft. Although, there are many other small windows out there and pipes of various sizes, as well. It looks like a dump; all sorts of garbage are sticking to the glass of the windows or hanging down from the pipes.

So, I try the door again. When I am just about to push harder than before, I hear two different voices outside.

“Ms Wong! I believe he is awake now.” an unknown woman’s voice says.

“Oh fine, let’s just pay him a visit, then.” Ms Wong’s voice says happily, “Ms Chen, ahem, Abigail, can you go and fetch the device from Mr Hung, please? Thank you!”

Ms Wong unlocks the door. To my surprise the door swings into the tiny room, so that I have to step back a bit. The door leaf has the letters IC408 written on it. She sees me staring at it.

“Good evening, Abhijeet! How are you today?” Ms Wong says with a cute smile on her pretty face. “IC stands for ‘interchange’ and 408 is a serial number, your personal number. In case you were wondering, Abhijeet.”

“What is going on here? Why was the door locked? How come I’m wearing a hospital gown? This place looks hardly like a hospital. And why am I in pain? What did you do to me?”

“First of all, you are absolutely right! This here is not a hospital, at all. This is an apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of the famous Chungking Mansions on Nathan Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui, just a stone’s throw away from Hong Kong Island.” Ms Wong says, “You have undergone what here in these premises is called an ‘interchange’. We took something from you and we gave you something back. In return, so to speak. By the way, thank you for your much-appreciated donation!”

“Donation? What donation? I don’t remember donating anything!”

“We usually do not concern ourselves with asking our donors for permission. That is a rather rigid part of our business policy. But I would like to emphasise that we are, nevertheless, extremely grateful for every donor’s donation. In particular yours, because Mr Liu, the tremendously influential mayor of the exceedingly famous city of Hangzhou, sends his regards. He is very pleased with his new kidney. You two were the perfect match.”

“My kidney?!” I touch the bandage again. And feel the angular object under my skin. And again, a sharp spike of pain travels through my weak body.

“Oh Abigail, thank you for the device. Be careful with this! He is just an armlength away from us!” hisses Ms Wong towards the clumsy and scared Chinese girl.

“Yes, of course, Ms Wong! I am sorry!” the girl named Abigail says.

“Here, Abhijeet, this is for you! Your life depends on this little thing here! So, stay focused!” Ms Wong hands me a device that looks like a handle of a revolver, only without drum and barrel. “Put your finger here right on the trigger, before I let go of it, okay?!”

“What is this? What is going on?”

“Abhijeet, you may already have noticed the little box, we’ve put in place of your kidney?!”

I stare at her, not able to say anything. My mouth just went bone dry instantly.

“This is a box full of awfully effective explosives.” and then she adds, “And here in your hand you hold the detonator.”

“But what? … And why?” I come forth.

“You have to understand that it was extremely difficult for us to find a suitable donor for Mr Liu. His body has rejected all previous donor kidneys within the first hours after the transplantation. But then we came across you, and your file. Strong male, regular exercises, healthy diet. And, of course, your spotless medical record. It was a perfect match!”

“You stole my kidney? You stole my kidney!”

“Abhijeet, you have to be very focused now. Focus on the trigger. If you let go of it, there won’t be much left of you, or your remaining kidney.”

“Why? Why? Why?”

“You have a real chance here! If you go and find somebody to defuse the bomb and get it out of your body, you will live. If not, you will die. Perhaps it helps you to understand that the bomb was activated the moment your heart rate went higher than forty-eight beats per minute. This is also the way to deactivated it. Temporarily of course.”

“Do you want me to go back to sleep, again? After all this shit?!”

“Abhijeet, you are upset and I understand your situation, but this is your very own decision. To live or to die. This is entirely up to you. Your future lies within your very own hands.”

“You understand my situation? You fucking cunt! Why did you do this to me? Wasn’t the kidney enough?! Why also the bomb?”

“You know what they say, Abhijeet? When you’re good at something, don’t do it for free. We sell our many services to our many clients. That is how we conduct our overly successful business.”

 

In the end, Abhijeet Banerjee makes a decision. He holds on to the trigger, runs out of the apartment and over to the lift on the twenty-fourth floor. No one is holding him back, neither Tracy Wong nor Abigail Chen. He flees and manages to leave the enormous maze of the building’s intestines.

Outside it is dark and a massive crowd of people is celebrating on Nathan Rd. Chinese New Year, the Monkey is passing the baton on to the Rooster. It is close to midnight and people are everywhere. So, it happens that Abhijeet Banerjee bumps into quite a few of them. He then eventually loses grip of the handle and the trigger when the clock strikes exactly midnight – the amazing fireworks start off and everybody is blown away.

The huge detonation can also be felt quite intensively on the twenty-fourth floor of the Chungking Mansions. Abigail Chen, who didn’t see this coming, spills her hot Jasmine tea all over her fine silk dress.

“Hmm, I thought, he would make it. This one seemed rather strong and particularly determined. I feel quite sorry for him!” Abigail Chen says.

“Oh, my dear, please don’t! Would you rather have wanted to be in his place, then?”

“No, of course not! Not for all the tea in China!”

“So, you see, that’s what is called the impermanence of life. In my experience, none of them ever makes it. It’s the adrenaline. They get high on it and think anything is possible. But the opposite is true. If you’re on your own, nothing ever is! … Anyway, he didn’t get as far as I expected, but it was still quite effective, I hope.” says Tracy Wong and puts her tea cup carefully back down onto the saucer.

 

ICFZE News live from Hong Kong:

“As Chinese New Year celebrations are in full swing, an explosive charge detonated exactly at midnight on Nathan Rd., one of Hong Kong’s densely populated business areas. In the blast, at least eighty-four people have been killed. Hundreds were seriously injured.

The HKPD believes this to have been an act of terrorism. A spokesman of the HK anti-terror taskforce said that the suicide bomber has been identified as a certain Abhijeet B. According to intelligence reports, the young Bengali man, a radicalised Muslim from Chittagong, has recently been targeted by the anti-terrorism investigators, because of his close ties to the major terrorist organisations, such as the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda.

However, these groups have yet to comment on this rather unverified information.”

Nocturnal Visitation

Sleep comes heavy,

Descends upon me,

As a long day’s exhaustive pleasance.

Also as something else’s presence.

 

A gentle breeze at the nape of my neck,

It is warm, but also a bit moist.

I feel a kiss on my forehead’s speck,

Like a whisper, only unvoiced.

 

Five fingers comb through my dishevelled hair,

And a scream dies in my throat.

I’m entirely confused and in utter despair,

And suffocated by a leaden coat.

 

Is this what I believe to be the peak?

Something wet slides slowly across my sensitive cheek!

 

I want to, but can’t move an inch,

My only response has to be just a flinch.

 

Then the dream suddenly ends, as quick as it came,

It still is dark, no light, all the same.

 

It chills me right down to the bone,

What I see on this gadget of mine,

As I reach out to my phone,

To check for the actual time.

 

A picture of me, sound asleep,

Much to my chagrin,

And a strange old crone, down on me,

Licks my very exposed skin.

Bear With Me

 

Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most. No, I haven’t. I have yet to lose it. Which I wouldn’t mind. It would make things much easier.

I lost something different. Something I wouldn’t be able to find with the help of anybody. I must find it myself. What I’ve lost, can be named, but hardly described. I can only describe its absence. So please, bear with me.

 

“Daddy, read it in the hollow and affectless voice of a man who has nothing left to lose.” my daughter said to me the other night, when I was reading her favourite bed time story to her.

“Why would I do that, darling?” I asked her.

“Mummy says that this is what you can do best.” was her innocent reply.

And then two or three weeks ago, my millennial girlfriend snatched her phone from the bedside table in the hotel room and took a picture of me right after we had sex. I asked her why she had taken the photo. Her reply was simply that I had been caught speeding. I came too quick, she added. Then she threw herself into the pillows and pretended to sleep, facing the wall away from me, sulking.

Then there is this disturbing news that the world’s two ugliest men – judging by their extraordinary hairdos – Kim Jong Un and Donald J. Trump are probably going to meet to do some problem solving, initiated by the latter. But I won’t to be around to see this happen. I can’t bear all this nonsense any longer.

Whenever things do not run well for me, then I like to contemplate the fascinating phenomenon that there are girls out there who won’t have any eyebrows left, once the rain sets in.

But that wasn’t enough this time, because a little less than two weeks ago, I had a serious meltdown. I filed for divorce and left the sole custody for our daughter to my future ex-wife.

I also met with my lover for the last time. Her hair dyed pinkish-grey, and the so-called mom-jeans and granny shoes she was wearing, made it all the easier for me to dump her. It seemed that she completely exhausted her emotional capacity by putting an 😥 emoji in her Facebook status and left the room without a word.

Earlier that day, I had also taken out a loan. It wasn’t much I needed for myself. But some money for the child support, until my daughter turns eighteen. And just a little bit for my last trip. Not that I’m going to die any time soon. No. But I went on a cruise.

Shortly after Skagway, on the way back to Juneau, I left my cabin in the middle of the night, went up to the top deck and released one of the big life boats out of the mounting. It – with me in it – jumped overboard, but landed safely in the icy waters. With me on board, I had taken a smaller inflatable life raft. You never know when this could come in handy.

Back in the civilisation, I had also stocked up on any kind of seeds they had in the DIY markets. Here in the wilderness, I have put the seeds into the ground, hoping that they will sprout soon. Currently, my diet consists mainly of berries and mushrooms and the odd inattentive squirrel, every now and then. I’m not saying that those aren’t good for you, but I have noticed that there are some unmissable side effects to this rather restricted nourishment.

Now I’m here on what I believe to be an uninhabited island somewhere along the coast of Seward’s Folly. I have moored the life boat from the cruise ship in a small bay on the far side of this islet. My side of the island I share with a family of nasty racoons. They occasionally interfere with me gathering mushrooms and berries. On the other side of the islet lives a sounder of wild boars. They sometimes come over and raid the patches I’ve put out with all the seeds to sprout.

I’ve also put up something that would have qualified for a barn if only I had been a child. It hardly provides any shelter from the sometimes rather torrential rain. But apart from that I’ve finally found what I was looking for – my peace.

 

Today I set out to fetch the raft from the life boat on the far side of the island – to patch up my shed. I’m on the way back, now. Under my left arm, I’m carrying the inflatable life raft. However, the yellow package unfortunately unfolds as it hits a couple of tree trunks while I’m zigzagging hastily through the thick woods. With the formerly wrapped-up package unfolding, I almost lose grip of the expanding bundle. In the very last moment, I get hold of a red tag. This very tag is attached to the release cord which is unfortunately the trigger to eventually set the life raft’s self-inflation process in motion. The yellow raft explodes into the limited space between the close trees.

As I don’t let go of the red tag, my arm is being pulled back when the big and round life raft gets stuck between the trees. In no time the boat expands right behind me, preventing me from bumping into … let’s just call it unexpected wildlife.

If my cell phone still had juice and coverage, my last message would probably have been something along the lines of “Help! Bear with me!”

Curriculum Vitae

 

One, two, three, four, five and so on. The earliest memory, you say? Let me think. Ah yeah, that’ll do just fine.

In the beginning, there was only silence. I had just been flushed out of my intrauterine panic room, and my still gummy eyes were trying to adjust to the rather intense light. Where I had been until only a couple of minutes ago, there was no light at all. And now that strange person was holding me by my shrivelled-up feet. Upside down. I could tell, even with all the light and the state my eyes were in, that the woman wanted to raise me higher, but there was the cord. So, she cut the cord and lifted me up a little bit more. The loss of connection to my previous supply system and, of course, the slap on my behind made me scream at the top of my lungs. But I suppose that was the purpose of the whole thing all along, to see if my lungs were working properly.

The second pivotal memory. I can’t really put my finger on the point in time when this happened, you see. But there was this one day when my parents set me down and never picked me up again. I’m still trying to picture when that was.

Fast forward to the age of eleven. In the hospital again. I think the second time after the earliest memory. But I could as well be dead wrong. I was in pain, you see. A grumbling appendix, the doctors said, and had the nurses put a thick layer of ice around the appendix side. The pain didn’t stop, though. The appendix’s torture only made way for some more agony due to frostbite. In the end, however, it had turned out that they better should have applied some heat to the area. Supposedly, this is how you deal with a urinary tract infection. It was also found out that one of my kidneys – the one on the right-hand side – was way smaller than the one to the left, and severely crippled. A future kidney donation for monetary benefits has never been an option for me.

As a good German at the tender age of twenty-four, I pocketed my first masters in business administration and mechanical engineering. I was also offered a fully paid PhD research position to further the studies of my thesis. But for some reason, I decided to do something completely different.

At the age of thirty-one, I found myself working as a kindergarten teacher in a pre-school in Wuhan, China. My cheeky monkeys were all between the age of four and five. They had become quite fond of the exotic and hairy creature from the West. Sometimes they would even gang up on me, tackle me down and climb around on me. On one of those occasions, numerous tiny hands were all over my face, getting hold of my beard. I had been studying Chinese for quite some time and even passed for a native speaker (on the phone where I could hide my Caucasian features), but dialects and children’s voices made me walk right into the trap of homophony. With their little fingers combing through my beard, their high-pitched giggles and mumbled words sounded like they were calling me their big ape. That was when I started to call them monkeys, as kind of a revenge and also because most of them were born in the year of the monkey. It was only later that day, sitting in the bus on my long way home, when I realised that they weren’t calling me 大猴子 (dahouzi), big monkey but 大胡子 (dahuzi), bearded.

After mastering in Chinese and Mongolian literature, a friend of mine planted the idea in my head to work for his company, which also had a couple of offices in Ireland. Mainly to improve my English, which back then was not anywhere near a position to compete with my Chinese in terms of proficiency.

Now I’m here in a city situated on the picturesque Wild Atlantic Way, doing creative writing classes and again an idea of doing something completely different came out on top. And again, the countdown has started: five, four, three, two, one …

The Great Escape

I shouldn’t be doing this. Not at all. I’m not allowed to remove myself from the premises. The head nurse had pointed out, only yesterday. What am I doing here, then?!

Ah, there you go. I’m on my way into town. That’s what I’m doing here. You see, my memory isn’t always serving me well these days. Not with all this daily cocktail of pills, anyway. To be honest with you, I’m still looking for a way to get off the premises. And then I might be going into town, because I haven’t been there in a while. Pubs and all, you know?! But first things first.

I’ve sprained my ankle when I jumped out of the window in my room. On the ground floor. For a moment, I was a bit disoriented, but now I’m okay again. Also, the sludge from the bed of flowers under the window has made my indoor slippers a bit clunky.

“Linus, where are you! Are you okay!”

That’s one of the nurses. And Linus, that’s me, of course. The voice I just heard is from the one with the big and hairy hands. Pete is his name, I guess. He helped me dress tonight. He called it my pyjamas, but I wouldn’t call it that.

Out in the gardens it is pitch black. The lights have already been turned off. But I know that close to the gates and along the fences to the outside there are motion detectors connected to floodlights. Here is no light at all, though. I can’t be anywhere near the free world, then.

Shhh … it! I trip and roll, head over heels, down a little slope behind the main building. Given my temporary limitations, there is almost nothing to stop me. … Oh, there is. A thorny hedgerow. It hurts awfully. Some scratches, but I somehow manage to get back on my own two feet again.

No rest for the wicked. I’m up and running once more. My eyes still have problems adjusting to the light conditions out here. Behind the big oak tree, though, a crescent moon provides just enough light for me to see some autumn leaves being whirled around by a gentle gust of wind. Their nice pale colour attracts me and I follow them. I’m filled with the wish to touch them. But the pills are still restraining me. I’m after the leaves, admiring their beautiful autumn dance, when out of nowhere one of the mighty oak tree’s strong arms knocks me out with a precise upper cut. Darkness descends quickly upon me, and a huge wave of pain, also.

When I come back to myself, the moon is hidden behind a thick cloud. I’m fed up with this whole escape thing. I had something entirely different in mind. But behind what seems like a corner of a house, I see a gleam of light.

Yes, there’s a light. And there’s a minivan right in front of me. But also, next to the entrance of the main building. Even with no one around, it’s risky. But I’ve suffered enough. And this is tempting; the driver’s door is open and the seat is empty. I start running. My eyes are scanning the ground for potential trip hazards. With a big leap, I jump inside and onto the driver’s seat. Clumsily enough to make the door close behind me, once my weight’s momentum impacts the seat.

In the van, I see that the seats are taken up by other inmates. Sorry, patients. All of them are sleeping. Except for one.

“Hey Linus!” it is him, one of the old guys in the asylum. I don’t know how old. But he keeps talking about the war a lot. Claims to be the only eye witness left. Of a war in Russia. Against Napoleon.

“Hey Mikhail, what are you guys up to here tonight?” but the moment it is out, I realise that this was a stupid question.

“I’m not supposed to tell you, so please keep this confidential. Okay?!” and without hesitation he continues, “The high command sends me and my small unit on a secret mission.” he comes closer to me from behind, cups both of his hands around his mouth and my left ear, and adds, “To assassinate that Corsican fiend. This is big, believe me. This is huge!”

While I’m listening to Mikhail, I see the key in the ignition and my heart beat quickens. But my hands won’t listen to my mind’s orders. The pills? I can’t reach the keys. And then I see him.

Pete is coming out of the main building, straight over to the van’s offside. I can’t get my hands to obey me and open the door to escape. But for some reason, I think that diving into the passenger seat’s foot well is an adequate solution to Pete’s imminent arrival at the car. So, I throw myself over the centre console and manage to relocate myself head first into the leg room underneath the glove department. My mud caked feet, however, still stick out when Pete opens the driver’s door.

“Hi Pete.” Mikhail says. I keep quiet, though, hoping not to be discovered in my unlikely hideout.

“Hi Linus.” Pete says, ignoring Mikhail completely, walks around the van and abruptly opens the passenger door. I roll out and drop onto the gravelled driveway. I know instantly that this is where it all ends.

Pete lifts me up, puts me back on my feet, and pads the driveway’s dust off my shoulders.

“Linus, Linus, we’ve been worried sick because of you. Where have you been all night?” Pete says, puts a shot into my left arm and squeezes its content into my bloodstream. And while my whole body gets wobblier with every second, I collapse onto Pete’s shoulder. Then he simply says, “Don’t do this to us, again! And, of course, to yourself! You’ll only get hurt in that straightjacket of yours.”

The Unbearable Odourlessness of Volatile and Colourless Liquids

 

Mama used to say that sometimes a bad smell is better than a good one. Or none, at all, she might have added recently. And then Baba would have argued in favour of good smells, and said that he very much likes Mama’s new perfume. And I would have said that I like her new cologne, also. And then Mama would have smiled, come over to Baba and me and hugged the two of us very tightly.

With the three of us so close together, Baba would also have whispered into the warm and closed space between us, that Mama’s perfume is one of the very good good smells.

I remember one day out on my grandparents’ farm, when Bassam, one of my annoying cousins, came in from the barn and smelled like the goats he had been tending the whole day. Everybody in the kitchen was complaining about the stink he had brought into the house. I also remember that my fragile aunt Lilia had almost fainted. But uncle Amin had laughed so hard, that tears were running down his rosy cheeks.

Back then, Mama just winked at me, squeezed my little nose and said, “Remember, this is a bad bad smell.”, then she laughed.

And then there was that one night, not so long ago, when Akilah, the eldest of my cousins, had smoked one last cigarette by her window after she had come home from a night out. The ember must apparently have fallen onto the old rug and set it on fire while she was fast asleep. Only our old dog Zahid had smelled the smoke and woke the whole house with his barking. He had even tried to pull Akilah out of her bed by her hand that was dangling out from under the heavy duvet.

After everybody was safe and sound and the fire was put out, Mama had said to me that this probably was one of the very rare occasions of a good bad smell.

 

However, this morning around six o’clock, I was woken by a few big thuds somewhere close to our house. Everyone was still asleep when I got up and walked around in the house with sleepy eyes. Since there wasn’t anything unusual going on, I went back to bed.

But then, suddenly, I woke up again. My head was aching. And my eyes wouldn’t want to see any colours no more. Also, I was feeling drowsy, had a runny nose and difficulties breathing. Something very strange was going on.

And then everything happened super quick.

Out in the hallway, I saw that all the windows were broken. And Bassam was dragging his older sister Akilah out of her room. Froth was coming out of her mouth, and her body was shivering. Bassam suddenly passed out and fell, with his sister on this shoulder, down the stairs. From the upper landing, I also saw aunt Lilia’s small frame buried under uncle Amin’s big body.

I ran downstairs to look for Mama and Baba. They were both still in their bedroom. Baba was sitting upright with puke all over his shaking body. Mama was leaning to one side, drooling out of her twisted mouth, and her body was twitching and jerking. My eyes were burning even more down there, so I wrapped my sweaty pyjama top around my head and jumped up onto the bed and tried to push and pull Mama and Baba off the bed.

But then, out of nowhere, Zahid came flying, kicked me off the bed, and wouldn’t let me anywhere near it again. He was growling and baring his pointy yellow teeth. Zahid pushed me further back and out into the hallway, towards the big door of the entrance.

Suddenly, something smashed through the door. The two wings flew wide open. A fire hose was spewing water all over the place. And then someone put one of those plastic things with fresh air coming out over my mouth and nose, grabbed me by my thin arms and dragged me out into the open where they emptied buckets of water over me. To rinse the poison off, as they said.

Later in the evening, the men who rescued me, were talking about an attack with bombs, and that there was something called nerve gas in them.

I feel happy sad. They say that this is because I am still in shock. Can you believe this?! Not even old Zahid got out!

But tomorrow grandpa is coming to pick me up from here. I am going to live with grandma and him in the countryside. I think this is going to be fun, because I don’t really mind the smelly goats, at all.

I keep thinking of Mama a lot. Somehow, I have the feeling that if she was still here with me, she would probably have agreed with me that the wicked gas from the morning has had a super bad good smell.

Mar Adentro

BAM! Once again, the Kindle or something else just slid off his bed and dropped heavily onto the floor. In the middle of the night, I am wide awake, once again.

“Oh no, get off me! Leave me alone!” He whimpers in his sleep, then heavy panting. A nightmare. Again. Since Donald Trump was elected president, my housemate’s paranoid bipolarity has blown out of proportion. Now he drags himself over to the ensuite bathroom just above me, in the attic, and empties his bladder in the usual old man’s way.

Through the ventilation shaft in the wall I can clearly hear the night rain’s soft and soothing sound which lulls me in and fortunately helps me to go back to sleep again.

Then the alarm on my phone goes off. First a gurgling waterfall in the front, fading away to hand the stage over to various species of birds – somewhere in the Amazonian rainforest, I suppose – chirping to their hearts’ content. In the background, condensed water is slowly trickling down, from one leaf to the next, and eventually to the ground.

I open the window in my room and see a flock of seagulls floating in the coastal morning breeze right in front of my window. It takes quite some time for my consciousness, which is still a bit foggy with sleepiness, to realise that their calls are anything but pleasant to the awakening ear.

The crescendo of the old kettle’s annoying noise heralds the imminent availability of tea water. The steaming hot liquid being poured into a big cup relaxes me. I was brought up in the mountains, but since I came to live close to the sea, I grew quite fond of the sound of liquids doing all sorts of things.

My cap and on top the helmet muffle the sounds of the street while I am on the bike, cycling to work. The rain is pelting down on the helmet and the new waterproof high-visibility jacket. I can hear and as well feel it, like little pinheads coming down on a wafer-thin sheet of glass. I forgot my gloves today and the ice-cold rain turns the colour of my hands into the skin colour of these Japanese snow monkeys.

The day’s actual overture in shower water is babbling down on my body, wrapping me in a warm, cosy and somewhat transparent blanket. This gets me ready to tackle whatever human obstacle may lie ahead of me today.

The cacophony of an ordinary open space office, I blank out with headphones and a Ravel concerto for string quartet. It carries me off into a land far far away from where I actually am. There, in the concerto world, are no imbeciles talking in moronic corporate platitudes just for the sake of sounding sophisticated.

The canteen around lunchtime is the acoustic version of the Pacific Ocean littered with tons of audible plastic waste. The silence of my after-lunch stroll recharges my battery again. Outside the office, I can even take pleasure in listening to the calls of the seagulls again.

After work, back in town. There is a storm but no rain. So there is no excuse not to go for a walk. Just along the shore, close to the roaring sea. The sound of the waves’ coming and going is like a perfectly arranged symphony to my ears. It whispers, I am the water, I do whatever I want, come and go whenever the moon allows and, of course, it pleases me. I am the sea, I will always get my way, so I don’t really care.

Dinner time at home, in the kitchen. The simple question ‘What’s new?’ triggers a rant, going from Mike Pence over Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon to Donald Trump. In my temporarily desensitised nature, I ask him if he’s had a bad dream last night, and in a swift and unanticipated counter-attack he accuses me of heavy snoring. For no particular reason whatsoever, he continues on with calling me names and starts to verbally abuse me. But that’s okay, we’ve been there before. To me this has become merely some random white noise in the background. Because after a while, as usual, he snaps out of it, apologises and tries to explain himself. I suppose being American these days isn’t as easy as it used to be. He, for my taste however, takes this running-the-country-into-the-ground-thing way too seriously. It’s not that he’s not also in the possession of an Irish passport. But I think, this is what you’d call patriotism – an concept which couldn’t be more foreign to me.

I feel like taking a bath to wash off the muck of the day. Listening to the bathtub filling with water is balsam for my spirits. Once in the tub, I put my head underwater. My ears filling with hot liquid, relaxes me. I lift my head and the water runs out of my ears again. Then I go underwater again. In and out again. I like the feeling and the sound. It sounds a bit like sea waves coming and going. The sea inside. And then, there is this quite liberating thought again: I am out at sea, and I don’t really care – about anything, at all.

It Turns Off Pain

(Please note that this is a continuation of Rite of Passage.)

 

“Am I dead now? Is this what it feels like after one has died?” I say, but no answer comes.

“Val, are you there? Somewhere? Anyone?” I say. Again, there is no reply. Only darkness that seems to swallow every sound.

“What is going on here? Is there anybody out there? Where am I?” I try, getting the same result. Isn’t trying the same thing all over again, yet expecting different results kind of insane?!

At some stage the darkness moves on and gives way to the light again. The mountainous jaws, as they were closed, have start gradually to open up again. The sun is rising at a familiar pace. That bit at least is reassuring.

With my eyes gradually adjusting to the light, I am able to make out Val’s slender figure, sitting comfortably on top of one of the pillars of piled up stones. But it isn’t until I can see Val just across from me when I realise that I am residing on top of one of those pillars myself, too.

Its knapsack is stirring again and out of it Val produces a roundish fluffy creature. The little bugger is twisting and turning in its slender hands. Then Val just lifts the rodent up to its mouth and sinks its teeth into the guinea pig’s flank and sucks until the motivation for resistance has completely vanished from the animal’s deflated body.

“Why are you doing this?” I say.

“Why am I doing what?” Val says.

“Killing these animals. First the birds and now this poor thing here. Why do you keep doing this?” Val looks straight at me, holding my gaze, yet smiling. In the corner of my eye I see how it drops the lifeless animal body nonchalantly to the ground.

“You have to understand that I live off the lives of the dying.” Val simply says, “I am merely making sure nothing goes to waste.”

“Just like this?”

“Just like this!”

“So, you are Death? You kill animals for a living?! Is that it?”

“No, not exactly. Me as a concept is probably a bit too complex for you to comprehend, given your human limitations. Technically speaking, I am Life. You may even want to call me by my other name, Love. Only Life can give, but also take life. There is no such thing as death. That is one of your kind’s quite popular misconceptions, because you people fail to see the big picture.”

“You call yourself Life, and yet you kill these animals! But wait, humans, as well? Am I here because you slaughtered me, too?“

“Your remarks are getting rather offensive now, I find. I wouldn’t want our conversation to continue if you kept going on like this. Ungratefulness seems to be strong in you. I don’t kill beings. They are already on their way out, dying. That’s what living beings do, they die. Because at some stage, if you like to put it that way, their host bodies are old and worn out. I only take what life is left in them. And redistribute it.”

A blank stare from my side gives Val all it needs to know about me and the current state of our conversation.

“Let’s just take you as an example, shall we?!” and Val goes on, “You were dying on that road, when I picked you up. On the way up to the top of your mountain, you died a little more.”

“But you didn’t suck the life out of my body, did you?”

“It looks different from the inside, right?! To be quite frank with you, I did and I am still doing it, as we speak.”

“How do you mean – as we speak?”

“Some creatures don’t put up fights, like birds and guinea pigs for instance. But for others, like your kind, it takes longer to understand the fundamentals.”

“What are those fundamentals? And what has this to do with you drawing off the remainder of my energy?”

“Well then, I am taking the energy from your dying body and directing it back into the circulation. Or better, I am re-channelling it to be creative again.”

“I am sorry, but you lost me here again.” I say.

“What I would like you to understand regarding your energy is that it is known in other circles as spirit or even soul, if this makes more sense to you?!”

 

After a while I look down to see where Val dumps all the empty corpses whose energy it is continuously re-channelling. When my eyes are on the way up again, I see that for some reason my feet and legs have become slightly transparent. A look at my hands tells me that even they are fading away.

Val notices my confusion, realises that the time has come, leans over and hands me the wineskin again. It is rather difficult to drink from the skin with gradually fading hands and fingers.

“Is this preventing me from disappearing altogether? I say.

“No, it is not. It turns off pain. And it smooths the transition.” Val says, which doesn’t help at all. “In the end, not only your body will have faded away but also your consciousness and memories of all this and the things passed, and you and your energy will eventually re-join the circulation and pass over to the yet unknown.”

“For some reason, I am failing to comprehend the painful part in this.” I say.

“Oh, it will be painful for you, believe me, I have seen it many times. The way you cling to the past makes parting so painful for the likes of you.” Val says, and adds, “But we don’t talk about physical pain here.”

My face is a blank stare again, yet riddled with question marks. And so, Val goes on, “I usually tend to have less or close to none of this kind of conversations with animals. Because they seem to have a natural understanding of the circle of life. They don’t fail to see that the finale is actually not an end but a beginning and that the goal is simply to be open to whatever change lies ahead.”

 

A look around makes me realise that the sun has disappeared and the valley is now covered by a misty yellow dome. A closer look reveals that the foggy dome only reflects the flickering yellow light coming from numerous fires. The valley itself is now a bottomless pitch-black pit. Out of the pit’s endless darkness, countless huge rock pillars stand out. On top of each of the broad pillars fires are burning. I am now on top of one of those big pillars, as well. Between Val and myself a fire is happily eating its way through the heap of bone dry wood.

Once in a while you can see how some of the fires die out. Val looks at me and points in the direction of one of the fireless pillars.

“Do you see? This was one of your kind. The fire died because she was fading away until she understood. I don’t understand why you people always have trouble with letting go. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. One of your famous writers once wrote this in one of her early books. And she is right.”

“How do you know that it was a she over there?”

“The fact may challenge your mind, but I am sitting at every fire you can see here, having almost the same conversation everywhere. This is you on your so-called deathbeds regretting things you did or things you’ve never risked to do or asking questions you never dared to ask before. I am your life; I am everybody’s life and I am also everybody’s realisation of that very fact. That’s how I know.”

I nod, since I am beginning to understand. Another sip from the wineskin makes me even more drowsy than I already am.

Val, of course, notices that, and with a smile on its face it gets up and motions me to do the same. Then it comes over to me. We stand face to face now. One last look at Val’s cruel and yet beautiful appearance.

“Time to let go!” Val says, comes even closer now and puts its elegant hand in the nape of my neck, then draws me gently towards it, and kisses me on my barely visible lips.

 

A pause. After which everything has vanished. There is nothing, only silence and darkness. There is neither valley nor pit, neither Val nor fire, and there is no human being, either. Then a long-stretched, booming sound – although inaudible, yet very palpable – is swelling up, causing ripples while expanding throughout the universe. Vital energy in space, re-joining the circulation.

 

The End

Rite of Passage

 

I could not tell if it was a man or a woman. The face was that of a woman, a pretty one, as I clearly recall. The lips were deep red, like blood, yet the colour seemed somewhat clumsily applied. The body, rather slender, was that of a delicately featured young man. The word androgynous comes to mind.

I had just landed with a boat on the coast of the continent of inevitable times. The weather, even though still sunny with only a light breeze, was yet urging me to move on. It didn’t seem to me that the town, an even uglier appendix to the filthy port itself, had anything special to offer. I decided to head off.

The way the person moved had something otherworldly about it. Every step, every motion with its legs and arms and hands seemed perfectly in harmony with its surroundings. No move was unnecessary or conducted in haste.

I was walking the dusty road, which was leading me outside of town, when after no more than three miles, a person suddenly stepped out of the bushes onto the dirt road; some ten yards ahead of me. I stopped. The person came up to me and put its elegant left hand gently on my right, which itself was resting on my old walking stick.

“My name is Val. Would you like some refreshments?” the person asked in a dark yet female voice. If I hadn’t felt thirsty before, after Val had asked me, I certainly did.

“Yes, please.” I said.

“Then follow me, my dear.” Val said. And with its delicate left hand, it parted a thick elderberry bush like it was nothing.

“The staff.” Val simply said, before stepping effortlessly through the row of hedges.

“What about it?” I said. But Val didn’t even turn around, it only pointed with its roundish right hand to a spot near the bushes to its right and said, “You will have to leave it there. You won’t need the staff where we go.” Where do we go? I thought bewildered. And to my very own surprise, I left the walking stick at that spot and followed Val through the bushes.

 

I could not tell – at first – if Val’s right hand was injured. Because I didn’t remember the elderberry bushes having had any kind of thorns for protection. However, Val’s right hand was clenched and blood seemed to be running in a thin red line out from inside its fist.

After the bushes, we walked up a steep hill. Even though I was in good shape, due to my journey for all my life all the way to here, I ran out of breath after only fifteen minutes of steady hill climbing. Val, however, seemed to manage effortlessly.

After a while, though, I decided to have a break. At the foot of the hill it had been just a breeze, but the higher we were climbing the stronger and colder the wind got. When I turned around to have a look at what we already had accomplished, I was astonished not to see the waters I had crossed before landing on this shore. I had run into Val only a couple of miles outside of town, so I clearly had to be able to see the ocean from up this hill, had I not?!

But what I saw could not be further away from what I expected to see. The only bodies of water I did recognise were two rivers. They were coming from different directions, bent around the flanks of the hill, and eventually converged roughly at the spot where we must have come through the elderberry hedges. But to my very own puzzlement, there were no elderberry bushes at the bottom of the hill.

On top of it all, we were not even climbing a hill any longer, but a full-grown mountain, which seemed to be located in the middle of what appeared to be a vast valley surrounded by even higher, snow-capped mountains. The valley and the mountain, we climbed, didn’t have any kind of notable vegetation, neither trees nor bushes, at all. Only grass and moss which mostly clung to the rocks, that were scattered all over the place. A dreary and inhospitable scene, I must admit.

Further up in a distance, I saw Val joyously hiking up the mountain. And every so often, I happened to see how Val raised its right hand up in front of its face. To inspect the injury on its hand. That was at least what I used to think. I didn’t catch up with Val on our way up the mountain. I held its pace, at a distance, though.

And then I saw a bird. A little redbreast was lying on the ground. It looked like it had been crushed by something heavy. Feathers were missing here and there. Underneath, tooth-marks were visible, which looked like they had been caused by a predator’s bite. Vivid red bloodstains were spreading. Otherwise, the bird seemed strangely deflated. However, this was only the first bird among quite a few others on the path up to the top of the mountain.

The sun was already setting when we reached the mountain top. We had been climbing for many hours and the refreshment that was offered to me earlier that day was now more needed than ever. But the crest of the mountain didn’t have much to offer; only mysterious piles of random rocks of different heights. And then there were the skulls and bones. On a second look, the area around the obscure rock pillars was littered with animal carcases. Mice, rabbits, rats, and among others birds.

It wasn’t before Val turned around to look at me that I saw its crimson lips, redder and seemingly bigger than before. And in the corners of its mouth there stuck little feathers. When Val noticed me staring at its mouth, its tongue flicked out, caught the feathers and sucked them in. Almost instantly thereafter, Val spat out a bloody knot of feathers onto the ground close to the rock formations.

“Welcome to Val.” Val said smiling, “Time for some refreshments, right?!” I didn’t say anything, whereupon Val took a wineskin out of its leather knapsack and drank from it. It wasn’t wine, though. Although the colour was deep red, the liquid was too thick.

 

I could not tell what I had for a drink. The way Val handed me the wineskin felt like part of an ancient ritual. Val went down on its knees, lifted the wineskin above its head and handed it over to me. Already with the first sip, I noticed the unusualness of taste and texture as soon as the liquid reached my tongue. An odourless, thin puree with a taste that comes closest to a smooth combination of beetroot, spinach and Hokkaido pumpkin. The drink didn’t keep its promise, though. It was refreshing at first, but it made me feel surprisingly exhausted later. Like a leaden blanket of fatigue descending onto my shoulders. The sun seemed to be setting quicker after that, darkness was creeping up on the mountain’s body.

“Val?” I said after a while. And Val knew immediately what I was going to ask. Val spread its arms ceremoniously and moved slowly in a circle as if presenting the outlandish scenery to me.

“Welcome to the valley of Val.” Val said.

“The valley of Val?” I said.

“This is where you have to be strong. Because this is exactly where you are supposed to pass over.” Val said without any stir of emotion. I, however, was shocked. And then it dawned on me. I hadn’t failed to notice that with every inch of the sun’s setting the surrounding two half circles of snow-capped mountains bent upwards and closed in on each other – like a pair of giant jaws.

Val looked at me and it knew that I was slowly beginning to understand. For some reason, this put a smile on its face. It didn’t take long for the sun to set and the mountain jaws to close entirely. The last beam of sunlight felt warm on my skin. Then the darkness swallowed me. Once it was completely dark, I stopped feeling anything. I suppose that is what you are going to experience at the threshold to the unknown.

 

I could not tell why Val had to bring me up here, why it had to be me, and the birds of course, and why it had to happen the way it just did. Maybe just because my time simply had come. But this remains yet to be seen.

 

(The story will be continued with It Turns Off Pain.)

Oil on Canvas

 

I am restless. I don’t know why. It’s the night from Monday to Tuesday and I haven’t put anything useful on paper in regards to the assignment for today. Write either six haikus or a pro or anti Valentine’s day story. Sounds pretty straight forward, I’d say.

But what I’ve come up with so far is utterly pathetic and unentertainingly boring. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at it again. Is this writer’s block? It definitely feels like something I haven’t felt in a very long time. And even back then, when I did, I didn’t know what it was. A word like constipation then came to mind. Creatively constipated, I thought, I was.

Even if I left the whole assignment thing aside and try to write about anything that comes to mind, I don’t succeed. It’s almost like my creative channels have been glued shut.

It usually works like this: I just pick some random first lines to start with. Something that is catchy and draws the reader in. I like to think of myself as being particularly good at this.

Once I have the first sentences, which I rarely change as the story develops, the ideas spread like a wildfire. Everywhere in my brain the synapses go crazy.

Just imagine a calm surface of a random body of water. And then use an ordinary pipette and set one single drop of oil carefully somewhere on top. You can see how quickly the oily rainbow colours spread all over the water. That’s also the speed my ideas for the stories tend to grow.

Sometimes, if my thoughts run wild, it’s like you haven’t set the drop of oil gently onto the surface but let it fall down from a distance, the oily rainbow spreads in ripples, stirring the creativity up even more.

But at the moment, nothing like this is happening. Far from that. It is more like having a huge bathtub full of oil and a single drop of water tries very hard to merge with the oil. It’s simply not going to happen. Physics, pure and simple. Or chemistry for that matter. The drop of water will be sliding across the surface of the oil without any effect at all. Nothing, niente, nada, nix.

 

While I was trying to put my current dilemma into words here, some thoughts got caught in my frontal lobes’ selective attention department. One of the thoughts was about how unfortunate an institution this Valentine’s day actually is.

Come the first of February, a big cloud is approaching. It gets heavier and darker with every day it comes closer to the fourteenth. Romantic relationship’s judgement day. The performance of this particular day is a measure of how successful your relationship skills are. At least it feels like this.

Did you manage to get a reservation for the best restaurant in town, or are you taking her out for pizza at Napoli’s? What’s her favourite food, anyway? Maybe take her on a short city trip over the long weekend? But where to on this short a notice? Admit it, you weren’t paying much attention when she had her hint dropping day in late January, am I right?! How about roses then? How many did you get for her last year? Does she even like them? Or was it lilies? A fucking booby trap of a day!

And it is even worse for singles. So, what do you do? Probably call up your last mistake and see if she is available and desperate enough to do this. Then you have another awkward date. It doesn’t matter where you take her, but make sure the booze is cheap. So, you get drunk and have bad sex. Then you sneak out of her apartment as soon as she’s fallen asleep, delete her number and go home. At least you haven’t spent Valentine’s alone watching a film on your laptop; that would have been depressing, wouldn’t it?!

And if you nevertheless feel a little bit weary on the morning of the fifteenth, you still have the option of calling in sick or hope that Pancake day on the twenty-eighth will be more successful.

De-escalation is everything

Eoin went to Sheridans Cheesemongers last weekend. On Saturday, he had decided that it was time for a treat – delicious cheese and good wine. And so it happened that he ran into Saoirse. Eoin was just talking to the woman behind the counter – a decision regarding the compatibility between wine and cheese had to be made – when Saoirse tapped him on the shoulder. They had been working together for quite some time, but then Saoirse had left for a better position somewhere else. They hadn’t been that close back then, but close enough to share a funny anecdote. Saoirse started to talk about the Christmas party two years ago, and Eoin asked her if she remembered the girl from HR, the little one that was dancing like crazy. He told Saoirse that he had hocked up with her that night, and how they ended up in the girl’s apartment.

While Eoin talked away, bragging in rich detail about that night, Saoirse had a good view at the door and froze when suddenly Donald Trump entered the shop. With one of his little hands he was dragging the aforementioned Christmas party HR girl along. It wasn’t so much the presence of the POTUS himself in Sheridans Galway that struck her, but the fact that she recognised her and that the HR girl herself seemed to recognise Eoin.

“That’s him, Donald! I told you about him! That’s the offender!” the HR girl screamed, pointing at Eoin. When Eoin saw the fuming girl, it took him almost a full round of sixty seconds to put the pieces together. The one piece that really wouldn’t want to fit was: What the fuck was the Don doing here? When the penny eventually dropped and Eoin was able to connect the girl with the just shared and bragged about event from the past, the blood in his veins started congealing.

“What did that freak do to you, my darling?” the POTUS asked the HR girl. The girl took Donald Trump’s red tie and pulled him down to her level. Her narrowed eyes fixed on Eoin, she whispered something into Trump’s ear. The President’s face lit up and a mischievous smile flashed briefly over his face. When the girl was finished, Trump went over to Eoin and patted him on his back.

“That was terrific! Good boy! Well done! That’s how you handle those situations! Want some more advice on these matters, my boy?” Trump asked him beaming. But Eoin just shook his head and looked down at his feet. “Well,” the Don said “suit yourself then, you loser.”

This scene had made the HR girl so furious that she jumped at the POTUS and slapped him a couple of times right across his smirking face. Although her hand was hurting quite a lot, it didn’t seem to have done any harm to Trump’s face, which remained orange and bloated. When she kicked him right in the Trumpian crown jewels, though, his face turned crimson and for a couple of seconds his hair piece seemed to hover quite a few inches above his head.

“Security! Take this fucking bitch off me! Immediately!” the President barked. The men from the Secret Service removed the fuming and clawing bundle of rage and carried her outside. “If something like this happens again, I’ll have the troops send to this godforsaken place! I’ll have it wiped off the face of the earth! Mark my words! Mark! My! Words!”

“Mr. President, I strongly advise against this rather premature approach of yours.” From behind a huge pile of cheese rolls, Kellyanne Conway stepped forward.

“You are right, Mrs. Conway.” said a man who had just entered the shop, coming in from the weekend market. And turned to Trump, he went on, “I can’t but agree with your formidable advisor’s words, my dear Mr. President. There is no need to take this drastic an action.”

“Who are you?” the POTUS asked, but without waiting for the man’s answer, he turned to his counsellor. “Conway, who is this fool?”

“Mr President, my name is Enda …”

“Shut up! I didn’t ask to you, did I?” and to his advisor, “Who is this clown here, Conway?”

“This, Mr. President, is Enda Kenny, their Taoiseach.”

“Their what? And who are they?”

“Their chieftain or Prime Minister, if you will. We are in Ireland here, Mr. President. Two hours to the south from here, there is your Golf Course.”

“Ah yeah, I remember, Doonbeg. But Ireland, wasn’t their leader this horrible … wait … Theresa May woman? The one that came over for a visit just a few weeks ago?”

“No, Mr. President. She is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.”

“Ireland, there you go again.” Trump said.

“Same, same but different.” Enda Kenny commented.

“Shut the fuck up, will you!” Donald Trump said to Enda Kenny “Or do you need an executive order to get the gist? Conway, if he does this again, we should get the troops ready and bomb the shit out of them!”

“Mr. President, I strongly advise …”

“… against this approach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But why not? I am the President of the U.S. of A., I can do things like that, can I not?”

“Yes, you can, but you shouldn’t, Mr. President. First of all, this might jeopardise your Golf Course business down in County Clare. And secondly, they don’t have any barrel of oil to their name here anymore. The oil they had, they have already bartered away for little money to the highest bidder years ago.”

“Yes, she is right. The oil was sold off in the eighties and nineties.”

“What did I tell you, Kennedy?! You stupid fuck! Conway, call Tillerson! I am pretty sure Rex can do something about this. We! Need! This! Oil!”

“Mr. President, it’s not Kennedy, his name is Kenny.” said Kellyanne Conway.

“Kenny or Kennedy, all the same to me! But this one over there,” Donald Trump points with his little fingers at Enda Kenny, “really pisses me off! We should get the troops ready!”

“If you are really planning to teach the Ayatollahs a lesson soon, Mr. President, we should conserve our energies here. No troops necessary, anyway. This Enda Kenny person is only the same calibre as that Theresa May woman. Just another kissass. Although, they both might come in handy some day in the future. Just keep that in mind. Because you are not exactly making friends at the moment.”

“That’s fake news! I say, fake news! Fake news everywhere!”

“Mr. President, mind your blood pressure and calm down, please. Let’s just call it an alternative fact, shall we?”

 

Meanwhile, Eoin had made a choice regarding the combination of cheese and wine, paid for it and took Saoirse home for a nice cup of hot tea.

 

The next day, Eoin and Saoirse were still in bed and watching the news on RTÉ, when they saw how the Don announced that he was going to bring hundreds of American jobs to Doonbeg in Ireland by building a huge wall around his Trump International Golf Links and Hotel Ireland estate. Right after the announcement, but still on the podium, he went on Twitter, promising his followers that he would make the Irish pay for that wall. Bigly, he said.

To Open a Door

 

I am in the hallway when I hear them coming. I just came in from the back garden to get something warm against the evening chill. The sun is setting quicker these days, closer to autumn; but it is still nice outside. I quite enjoy those days of being disconnected from a frantic world. I am out here on the farm in the middle of nowhere. Only me, the dog and nobody else to bother us.

And then there are at least three big cars pulling up in front of the house. A woman gets out first. Her gait looks somewhat familiar, she is dragging her left leg a bit. But I can’t really place her right now. Some indistinct flashback from a distant past only. Her entourage, some big guys in black suits and sunglasses, gets out of the cars as well, but keeps outside the little fence in front of the house. The woman approaches the front door alone.

They don’t look like they are here for the child support, which I still owe to my ex-wife in full amount for the last fifteen years, or was it even longer?! I don’t really remember. Anyhow, single mothers have never had this kind of a lobby that drives around in big black cars. Then there is the anticipated knock at the front door.

The orange-red sunset behind her makes it difficult for me to look at her. There is a halo around her, and the woman’s face is left in a shadow cast by herself. Her dark brown hair has been ruffled up by the breeze on the way from the car to the porch. The fiery setting of the sun adds a reddish glow to it now. She looks hard at me through her dark shades. I can almost feel her stare physically.

She shifts her weight to her right leg, giving the left one some rest. Her right hand rests relaxed on the door frame, but she withdraws it eventually after a little while. Now she smiles at me while she brushes some flakes of dry white paint off her hand. Her smile stirs up some more memories that were buried in time by many other events from the past.

The air is fresh and clean out here. The scent of late summer evenings is lingering in the air, and mingles beautifully with the perfume the woman is wearing. Apart from the crickets chirping, there is no sound other than the rustling wind, coming from the little grove further down the road by the little pond. The meditative spell of silence is suddenly broken by a phone ringing over by the cars. One of the men in black answers the call and walks down the road, away from the others. The dog starts barking on the veranda behind the house. He is probably wondering what takes me so long to get the cardigan.

Other than her escort, the woman doesn’t look formal at all. Quite casual even. Her bare feet seem to enjoy the soft carpet of grass underneath. Her toes curl around it, grabbing and playing with the stalks. Then I see it, and all seems to be coming back rather quickly. There is this long scar on her left foot stretching out up to the lower shin. Now I remember clearly her little mangled foot and the pain this had caused for all three of us back then. I have a closer look at her and eventually give her a smile.

She simply says “Are you going to invite me in, Dad?”

Imperial Bedroom

 

There is a first time for everything, they say. But there will always be one first time that you will remember for the rest of your life. I’m not talking about kissing a girl, or even grabbing her by the … Did I just say that out loud? I’m sorry, but I think that’s because of the nature of the job I was asked to do.

Really, my name doesn’t matter. And since I had to go into hiding, I’m not going to reveal my true identify to you. But since you insist, call me Kolya, if you like.

I used to live in St. Petersburg, Russia; not pensioner’s paradise in Florida, mind you. We have cold winters here and need to keep ourselves warm during those times. So, we do jobs, we’re not proud of. But you know, no one can really afford to be an idealist anymore, these days. So, I did this job. In that hotel. In St. Petersburg.

“You’re that cable guy, the television technician?!” the guy said, when he approached me at the entrance to my condo. He had something quite convincing about him. You know, this mixture of ham-fisted physique and that for-your-own-sake-don’t-contradict-me-expression on his face. When he put his coarse paw on my shoulder and said hello, I couldn’t do anything but go down on my knees, which made me realise instantly that this guy wouldn’t take no for an answer.

The pay was good, though, you see. I could even live of it for more than three months. It was one of those luxurious hotels that you usually wouldn’t even go near, fearing they would charge you for just looking at it. The largest suite, called Emperor’s Residence, had three times as many rooms as the tiny flat I used to share with my sister’s family of six. The beds and the rest of the furniture were made from this inconceivably costly tropical timber, the bathroom fittings made of pure gold. You know, this kind of palace-like place you only get to see in those ludicrous Hollywood films.

Those guys had all the equipment ready for me. The newest of the new, extravagant stuff, I tell you. I was only supposed to install all that stuff in the room, and make it invisible, and then leave. But since I’m good at what I am doing, I happened to have plenty of time left to talk to the girls afterwards. Those poor creatures looked so expensive. They said they were waiting for a extremely wealthy customer, even though they used the word client. They didn’t yet know who he was, but there were already two other girls with him out for dinner since after the business meeting.

Talking to the three girls here in the suite who were getting ready for their job, I inspected my work. I was proud of myself, as I wasn’t able to detect any of the cameras and microphones with the naked eye. And then everything had to happen very quickly.

Up until today, I can still remember that night. The scars on my knees and elbows are my witnesses and reminders. Nobody had thought of informing us that the client was already coming up to the room. So, I was the first one to hear the only door to the suite being opened. The girls were fluttering around like sacred up chickens, eventually draping themselves lavishly on the gigantic bed.

My heart was pounding up in my throat. My mind was racing. I had to get out! But the only way out was blocked by them coming in. The window curtains were ridiculous. I mean, hiding behind them. In the bathroom behind the shower curtain, even more so. Their steps came closer with every second. With the wardrobe, a funny thought entered my mind. But I dismissed it immediately, due to capacity problems. The instant they opened the door to the Imperial Bedroom with the girls and myself, I duck down, rolled to my left and skidded under the bed, causing painful friction between knees, elbows and carpet.

The guy’s security personnel did a lousy job when checking the rooms. I was clinging to the slatted frame when one of his bulldog-faced gorillas checked half-heartedly under the bed, without noticing the blood dripping down from my elbows and knees. Later on, squeezed into a corner under the bed, I was licking my wounds and biting my tongue – fighting fire with fire.

“Ladies, you can call me Donnie!” the guy said nonchalantly to the girls and threw his bulky frame onto the bed. “Hello Donnie!” the chorus of girls chimed back. Then the situation on the bed grew quite vivid. When I had to listen to some liquid being spilled onto the guys naked skin, I put my index fingers into my ears and hummed children’s song to myself, silently. I still want to believe, it was one of the girls pouring champagne on their customer.

After some time, the horizontal activities had gone quiet. He had fallen asleep, eventually. The girls gave me a signal that the coast was clear now. When I came out from under the bed, I saw that on the bed a slightly deflated orange balloon of a man had passed out. The big guy was lying there spread-eagled with a satisfied smile on his wrinkled-up face. That was when I saw him naked for the first time. I must say that I was deeply disgusted by his sight. I didn’t make much of it, though. But then girls told me who they had been pleasuring that night. And immediately I knew that I was in some big trouble.

Since the entrance was still guarded by two of his thuggish bouncers, I went out on the balcony and climbed down the ivy tendrils. I also knew that I had been caught on tape, as well. So, I decided not to go home straight away, and I was seriously trying to hide.

But not for very long, to be honest, I am not hiding anymore. Going into hiding is a feat of activeness whereas being kept hidden clearly defines a state of inactivity on my part. If you’re not good at hiding, you get caught, you see. And if you know something no one else is supposed to know, you are locked away.

I don’t know where I’m at the moment, but this place has one enormous flat screen TV. I am sitting in the middle of the room on an uncomfortable chair in front of that very screen. My arms are tied to the back of the chair. I’m also not able close my eyes, because my eye lids have been taped to both my forehead and my cheeks. And as some weird kind of punishment, they make me watch the orange ape’s inauguration, over and over again. But I’d rather be dead, because Donnie has been made the forty-fifth President of the United States of America, which is unfortunately not an alternative fact.

Domestic Violence – A Christmas Carol (of Sorts)

Snow is coming down heavily – a big blizzard is raging in the area. The news on the radio is accompanied by statics: “Due to global warming CRSHHHHHH arctic circle CRRRRSSHH Finnish-Russian border region SSSHHHH Korvatunturi mountain broke open CSHRCK” The hissing and crackling made our dog leave the kitchen and join our children in the living room.

“Korvatunturi, isn’t that where the kids send their Christmas letters for Santa?” I say to my wife.

“Shh,” she says, putting her hand over my mouth, “Shut up, there is more. Listen!”

“CRSHH Finnish scientists believe CRCK something ancient was in that mountain SSHHHCRRR has disappeared CRSHHHCKRK town of Korvatunturi SHCRSHCK destroyed by an unknown force.”

So what?! I ran out of dead rats’ arses a long time ago, I don’t give them anymore.

Later that night, I am lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, trying not to fall asleep. I am waiting for the children to drop off, though. Next day is Christmas day and this year I am responsible for the presents. And the presents are all waiting in the wardrobe, the drawers and under the bed to be put around the tree in the living room. My wife still insists on this tradition. I suppose the Santa-puts-presents-under-the-Christmas-tree-tradition is more important to her and myself than to the kids. Because I suspect even the little ones to have already figured out our little seasonal charade. But anyway, it is nice and I really like this little custom of ours, it puts you in the mood, you know?! If it only wasn’t for my eyelids being so heavy tonight.

Okay, where are we? Ah yes, thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening. Me, in the middle of the night, waiting for our offspring to doze off, so I can put the presents under the tree, pretending to be Santa Claus. Outside the storm is still raging and howling. Inside, I am just on the upper landing, on my way down to the living room when I hear something on the roof. A song comes to my mind. Hark! What is that sound I hear? There are big thuds, little tiptoeings and long skiddings.

And then I see them. Little boots are dangling down in front of the window. In those little boots, there are little hairy legs. The little hairy legs stick out of little manky pants. The little manky pants have the same dirty colour as the filthy overcoats. Out of the scruffy sleeves of the filthy overcoats stick tattooed arms and hands, which cling to the wonky gutters. Between those pairs of tattooed arms, there are fierce faces. Those fierce faces have edged knives between their jagged yellow rotten teeth.

And then I see that they see me. One of them lowers his hand, reaches for the knife and throws it at me. The blade pierces the wooden window frame. And that is when I run down the stairs into the living room.

There, under the Christmas tree, next to the open fire, are already all the presents for the family. I am a bit confused, someone must have put them there earlier. I walk over to the tree, but I am thrown back by a huge deflagration and a dust cloud coming out of the fireplace. Something just came down the chimney and smashed into the still glowing embers.

It wasn’t something, it was someone. Someone rather short. This hideous little creature builds himself up in front of me. His pointy ears stick out from under his grimy hat.

What the hell is this? Is this a fucked-up version of a Christmas elf? There are more like him coming down the chimney and out of the fireplace. With them, they bring a thick cloud of something deeply unpleasant. They all reek of booze, cheap Scandinavian vodka, I can tell. The first one in front of me comes up with his knife in hand.

“Joulupukki has been woken, and he is very angry!” he says with a voice made for cutting glass. First, I believe the language to be something Eastern-Scandinavian, but I seem to understand it, which absolutely amazes me. Must be globalisation then, or something else. My brain is racing because I am trying to place the word Joulupukki. I have heard the name before. It must be …

I stop thinking because the evil elf has thrown a knife at me. It has pierced my slipper between my toes and is stuck in the wooden floorboard.

The little shit looks at me in surprise and shrugs his shoulders, then turns around and gestures something to the crowd gathering behind him, whereupon they storm off and throw themselves into the pile of gift boxes. When one of the little bastards finds my presents for my other half, I get in on the act, as well. He plays around with the hairspray can and sprays it against a Zippo lighter with my initial on it. The DIY-flamethrower sets the tree and the nearby drapes on fire. The whole place descends into absolute chaos.

A blood curdling and glass breaking scream from their leader makes them all turn to him. All at once, they shout: “Joulupukki! Joulupukki! Joulupukki!” A war cry and a summoning of sorts. Because outside the stamping has taken on enormous proportions. I can’t see anything but the snow is shaken off the branches with every thud.

“For Joulupukki!” They shriek once more and throw themselves at me. I duck down to the right and roll over to the torn-up boxes and get my hands on another spray can. As a matter of fact, I am looking for something completely different but for now, I can render a few of them harmless with an ordinary pepper spray.

I call out for my wife. And even though her name consists to three-quarters of vowels, which are supposed to make a word resonate vibrantly, she doesn’t seem to hear me. All quiet on the upper floor.

I don’t know much about the challenges pubescent girls have to go through in their early innocent lives, but this year my eldest daughter had a rather unusual request. I see it in the corner close to the stairs. I throw myself sideways, get hold of the handy tool and manage to take them out one by one. Click, click, click, TSSSSSSS. Click, click, click, TSSSSSSS. The new Taser X3 allows you to have three shots in a row before you need to reload. One last shot and another one bites the dust. TSSSSSSS.

Their battle cries have shattered all the windows, at least on the ground floor. Through the big living room window, I now can see a pair of gigantic hairy feet coming closer, stomping the yard.

And then there is this gargantuan beast of a man in front of the house. At least twice as tall as the three-storey house itself. A shadow descends from above and a huge hand knocks gently on the front door. The elves and their quite convincing knives make me step out on the snow-covered lawn. Although they are less than half of my size, the elves lift me up and carry me over to Joulupukki, and present me to him. He bows down again, grabs me by the feet and lifts me up.

On my way up, I see – upside-down – that he is a rather skinny and wiry fellow. An old haggard man with a sunken face and a thin white beard, which makes him look like a goat with human features. Thin legs in torn-up pants, skinny arms in a stained Bordeaux coloured overcoat with white fur lining. He is also wearing a huge flapping t-shirt with “Korvatunturi – Home of Father Christmas” written on it. And then I connect the dots loosely. According to Finnish legend Korvatunturi is the home of Joulupukki, the Laplandic version of Santa Claus. Only, he is not always a nice guy, he comes to punish the children for their misbehaviour during the year.

Joulupukki, it seems, is also not a man of many words. Without much ado, he just lifts me above his head and lowers me into his mouth. Before the sight of his rotten teeth and his obnoxiously strong breath knock me out, I manage to press the actuator on the pepper spray can one more time. His screams will haunt me until the day I die.

Then, surprisingly, I wake up. My feet are on the couch, but the rest of my body lies on the floor. I turn my head to the left. Everything is quiet and peaceful. The living room is all fine, nothing burnt or broken. However, our dog is lying in front of the fireplace with six probes in his body and wires that lead from the probes back to the Taser within reach of my left hand.

Flabbergasted, I turn my face up. My wife is towering over me with a sad but also angry look on her face. Her bloodshot eyes make her look like she has been crying exhaustively. A numb feeling in the wrist of my right arm, makes me turn in this direction, just to see that my spouse’s left foot is keeping down my right hand in which I am still holding a pepper spray can.

The City

She is not just a city but an entity of some kind. And yes, she is like a magical carbuncle growing on the back of an ancient reptile. In a gentle pace, though. She is not one of those fast-growing megacities with their repulsive stretch marks. On the contrary, she is a beauty even when I refer to her as a boil. She is a benign growth. The lump of lanes, streets and alleyways has something organic about it. Nothing is forced, everything is where it belongs. And all this casts a spell over you. As Kafka once said about her, “She never lets you go … this old crone has sharp claws.”

It was July back then and it is the same month this time. We have picked the date in accordance with our first trip here almost a decade ago. It was around Tereza’s birthday, which is also our anniversary; and so it is this time.

She is sitting next to me here in the big square in the centre of the old town. We are just across from the old town hall with the astronomical clock everyone flocks to and takes pictures of every full hour. This time we are well able to afford lunch at the restaurant, back then we weren’t. Time has passed, and so many things have changed but not the city – thank heavens. She is still as captivating as she ever was.

If European cities were necklaces, she would be a diamond among pearls. I am trying to get away from the precarious situation we are in. Earlier this morning, Tereza found the expensive beads on a string that I put around her neck awfully pretentious and called them a misplaced attempt to fix a thing that needed shattering, not mending.

In my thoughts, I cross the river by way of the old iconic bridge and walk the narrow lanes up to the castle and the palace. Up here, my eyesight suddenly has improved significantly. From here I can clearly see her staring at me, while I am still having my eyes pinned on the medieval clock on the town hall wall – trying to figure out what time really is about.

There is nothing I possibly could say to her, nothing I actually want to. Just going back to a place from a happy past won’t rewind the clock, turn back time. It was a stupid idea. But it was our idea.

The night we arrived here, we briefly returned to our passion from our first visit in the same hotel and even lived up to it – for a short while. Only to fall into a deep hole the next morning. There was no foundation left. Not anymore.

Before we left the hotel, the pearl necklace discarded on the bedside table, Tereza was lying on the bed, naked, staring at me. “Tomáš,” she said, “would you please come over here.” But I kept staring out of the window, brushing my teeth. I knew what she wanted, and even though I wanted it too, I could not do it. Strange, isn’t it?! But she kept talking.

In the distance, now I am a scary gargoyle on the castle church’s roof, I see a three-legged television tower on which black plastic babies climb up and down on the outside. This futuristic mark of shame is defiling the city’s charming suburbs.

I wonder if she can smell the chimney cake just around the corner from here. The first time we came here, she loved it. The roll covered in sugar and cinnamon and filled with chocolate cream. For her, it was the icing on the cake, as the expression goes. I am more into savoury stuff, the local version of goulash and dumplings made it for me. I can still remember the taste and I even passed the restaurant, where we had them back then, on my way up to the castle.

She has now started to talk to me, even though I am not listening, I just can’t. But when I eventually turn to her and ask her in an irritated voice to stop, since this is distracting me from enjoying the city, which I actually do not dare to verbalise, Tereza says “For you it might be a disturbance, but I am trying very hard to make conversation.”

That probably is the fundamental difference between women and men, I suppose. “Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious. Both are disappointed.” says Lord Illingworth in the third act of A Woman of No Importance.

The Man Who Came in from the Cold

 

A heavy blizzard is raging outside the lodge, which is clinging to the steep mountain face close to the snow-covered and famous Thorong La pass. Inside, the open fire is lively crackling away, giving off some precious heat. Only a few guests have found their way up to the rustic chalet that night. Outside, a single man is running towards a faint glow of light in the white hell of driving snow. His legs sink knee-deep into the snow with every step he takes. He is running away from something. Something that is hard on his heels.

When he finally hammers on the heavy wooden door, he still has to wait for quite some time until he is let in. Now everyone is staring at the sturdy door frame. Underneath, the dark silhouette of a man – who came in from the cold – surrounded by a flurry of snow. Therefore no one is paying attention to a single shadow that is passing by the window.

“Look what the cat dragged in, man! Tris, is that you?” Pim says, squinting his eyes and lifting his head from the cushion he had put on the table to support his heavy head while spacing in and out of his consciousness.

“Joder!” Álvaro says, “What the hell are you doing here, Tristan? We thought you’d come up here tomorrow.”

“I am being followed! A monster is after me! We are not safe here!” Tristan says, panting heavily.

“Who’s following you? And where are the others, are they with you?” Álvaro says.

“No, they are not. I was alone until I followed some weird footprints into a cave full of human and animal cadavers.”

“A cave full of gnawed off bones? Hahaha!”

“Yes, believe me, white bones everywhere. And then there was this giant beast right in front of me. A hideous white creature!”

“No, not this again! Seriously?!” Álvaro says, “The abominable snowman, Tristan, of course?! And he is after you? Sure thing!”

“What are you talking about?” Pim chimes in, “The Jedi? – Out of your fucking mind, you are! Yes, hmmm.”

“Shut up, Pim. No, I am not talking about the Jedi! But yes, I saw the monster! I am dead sure about it!”

“Oh, Bun Manchi, eh?” the hostess, who was eavesdropping, says, “You talk about yeti, eh na?!” She gestures to her husband and says something in their common tongue. Then she ushers him away and disappears into the nearby kitchen. The husband hobbles towards the main door and vanishes into a hole in the floor.

A couple of minutes later, the host reappears from the basement with a dust covered wooden box wrapped in a white Tibetan prayer flag. The hostess rushes over from the kitchen and snatches the box out of her husband’s arms and puts it on the nearby table. Then she opens the box ceremoniously, unwrapping the prayer flag and lifts the lit.

“Mi-goi head,” she says, “hair from the wild man.” The hostess beams at the spectators. Inside the chest, there is something that looks like an ancient, lice-ridden hairpiece. The scuffed thing sports an old fashioned middle parting. And after a few seconds of silence – to let the impression sink in –, she leans over to her guests and says mysteriously, “Local legend has it that he who sees one, dies or is killed.” Then she puts the ugly piece back in the box again and indicates her man to put it back where he got it from.

“This is ridiculous, there is no such thing as that wild snowman. It’s just a myth. A fairy tale. Nothing else.” Álvaro says.

“A myth! A fairy tale! Of course, you know it all, you’ve seen it all!” Tristan says, “But it was all like in that book I’ve read.”

“Tintin in Tibet, I gather?!” Álvaro enquires. “He and Captain Haddock are after the obnoxious snowman. Yeah, what an enormous piece of evidence for the snowman’s existence that is! Like that shaggy wig in the box. I am overwhelmed!”

“Really funny, Álvaro! The book I mean is by that mountaineer guy from Italy. The title of the book … I have it at the tip of my tongue … it is ‘My Quest for …”

A bearded guy in the corner close to the fireplace, who himself bears some cunning resemblance to the hairy beast in question, gets up from his stool, knocks it over and turns around, away from his Sherpa. He says with a booming voice, “No it is not a myth. It is not that easy, either. But yes, I have seen one, too. It was long ago. You probably weren’t even born, back then. We were just on the way back from the Everest, me and my friend Tensing here,” he points to the old and extremely weathered man by the fire “when we ran into the beast. My first impulse was to get the camera out and take pictures, but then it was heading straight at us. So, instead I pulled the rifle from the holster Tensing had on his back.” the guy goes on, “I shot it right between the eyes. And when we came closer, we saw that it was not the monster, but an enormous bear. Probably a Tibetan blue bear or even an endangered Himalayan brown bear.”

At that, Pim, suddenly, begins to recite: “When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride.”

“Pim?”

“He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.”

“Shut up, Pim!”

“But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.”

“For fuck sake, Pim!”

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” Pim finishes the first stanza of the poem and goes back resting his head, heavy with thoughts, on the soft cushion again.

“Anyway, it’s all in my book. It’s called ‘My Quest for the Yeti’.” Reinhold Messner says, turning back to Tensing, his Sherpa, resuming the conversation from where they had left it.

Outside the blizzard had eventually died down. Now the crunching of the snow is clearly audible. The one shadow from before is now accompanied by many more. And then all of a sudden there is an impatient rattling at the door and the glass in the tiny windows shatters.

Labour Day

The van sped down the motorway like there was no tomorrow. But the reason why they were speeding down the road was all about the future. The future that was supposed to start that very same day.

Her sweaty hands held fast onto the handle in the door at her side and the other one embedded in the ceiling above her head, when she realised that this – above all – might possibly be her first near death experience. And even though she was a mother of eight, and like her ambitious husband liked to emphasise – still counting –, she wasn’t willing to let go of anything that she already had and what she was going to accomplish soon.

He, on the other hand, was drumming the rhythm of the song that was playing on the radio with his fingers on the steering wheel, whistling the tune. New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle. He smiled into the rear-view mirror at the Caucasian mountain dog in the back of the van, giving it the thumbs up. The massive beast itself was wagging its enormous tail, pounding it against the backrest of the back seat.

And that’s when they hit the traffic jam. He slammed on the brakes. She almost wrenched the handles out of the door panel and the ceiling. But the dog only bumped mildly into the backseat, while his unforgiving claws dug themselves relentlessly into the carpety boot floor. The car came to a halt.

“Bloody hell, we are in such a tearing hurry, for fuck sake!” He slammed his fist down on the steering wheel.

“Language, please.” She let go of the handles reluctantly.

“Oh c’mon, please, he is not even here, yet!”

“A ‘he’, you say? No, it’s going to be a girl. I can feel it, now even more than ever before.”

“Then tell me, why do we always have to do this blind flight thing? I mean, it’s not like it’s our first time where multiplying still has something magical about it.”

“Hmm, it’s going to be number nine, to be precise. But say, isn’t that what you always wanted?”

“I want a boy! After eight girls, the only thing I want is a boy!” Only a split second before his other hand was about to vent his annoyance – on the dashboard this time –, he stopped himself. Because she was twisting and turning in her seat – clutching the handle in the door again, but now for different reasons.

“Oh no, not now! Not here!” His edgy voice made known.

“Shut up, I don’t need this now!” She barked at him. The handle crunching in her vice-like fist.

“But look at you, I can’t help you. Not here. Not now. You need a doctor.” He whined, patting her hand that was clinging to the hand brake.

She turned around and looked at him “A midwife is all I need! Shut up now and don’t be such a wimp!” She hissed through her clenched teeth. “You are a bigger sissy than your eight daughters combined!” she spat at him.

It is not known whether she intended the following to happen or not, but he straightened himself up, released the brakes and floored the accelerator. The car – for the want of space – pushed itself up the crash barrier. With the two wheels on the barrier guiding the other two along the road, the car picked up speed quickly, bypassing the traffic jam that way. After quite some distance the van jumped off the end of the barrier and gained, even more, speed.

As soon as the van was back on the road, he pushed the car even further, trying to make the needle perform a three sixty. The engine was roaring. However, the vehicle’s speed was inversely proportional to the dog’s level of comfort. The poor creature started howling in the back like it was going out of fashion. He, with both hands on the steering wheel, tried to calm the dog, talking to it, which aroused in the animal the wish to be with its master in the front. In the rear-view mirror, he could see how the terrified dog tried to climb over the back seat. While staring daggers at the dog, he was shouting at the confused creature. Its master’s loud and booming voice eventually compelled the poor thing to obey him and stay where it was, even though it was shitting bricks.

Both of them were completely oblivious of the ghastly ordeal she was going through, twisting and turning in the passenger seat. Even though she was a pro for that matter, it seemed that this time she wasn’t able to deal with the situation, obviously due to the slightly different circumstances. Her pain, his shouting, the dog’s howling and their speeding was perhaps a bit too much for her to handle at a time. The repeatedly breaking of painful waves made her clutch the door handle and the hand brake again. A big one caused her to take action by ripping the handle out of the door panel and by pulling the hand brake. The latter action caused the car to violently veer off course, resulting in a collision with the aforementioned crash barrier.

The understanding of motion teaches us about inertia as the measure of a body’s resistance to changes in velocity. The second when the colossal Caucasian mountain dog smashed through the backrest of the back seat and hit her seat was exactly the moment when her water broke.

Hunger

If it is in your nature you cannot win. And she had the craving in her veins.

As soon as she let go of the piece of rope that she had noosed around his neck, tied tight and choked him, he flung his huge hand uncontrollably from out of the dark into her face. Not a dislocated jaw again, she hoped. No, this time it felt different, something broke.

She knew what she was in for. So, no complaints there. Not from her. Since she went to the group meetings several nights during the week, she had met others with more extravagant needs. There was that fellow who only could come when his balls were banded tightly. The first time they were shagging, his shiny purple ball bag almost dropped off, because the rubber band was tied too tightly. Before he eventually came – in apparently quite painful spasms – he handed her a rusty razor blade and begged her to cut his balls and his cock off. The ecstatic combination of pleasure and pain had numbed his wits and senses and so he believed by making the cut things would last forever.

The one she was riding like a horse right underneath her, lying on his back – virtually dead – was not any different. Either the rope or a plastic bag were his accessories of choice. Asphyxiophilia. The lack of oxygen kicked him through the stages up to the redeeming climax. It is actually pretty easy, deprive your brain of oxygen and it induces a lucid, semi-hallucinogenic state called hypoxia. Combine this with an orgasm and you will get a rush that is no less powerful than cocaine, and highly addictive on top of it.

The force bottled-up by the rope – then suddenly released – let him kick and beat around in inadvertently violent eruptions, not paying any kind of attention to his surroundings in his struggle back into oxygenic life.

One of her front teeth and the bridge of her nose had given in to the force coming from the dark side. The blood running down the back of her mouth and then down her throat tasted like the sweetest honey. What if love is a bear that feeds you honey with its claws?

It was long ago when she fell in love for the first (and maybe the last) time, which of course involved sex. At least this part has proven to be highly rewarding to her. And naturally reinforcing, as well. What followed next were somewhat excessive activations of the so called reward-reinforcement mechanisms, which led inevitably to the development of compulsive sexual behaviour. That is a rather clinical observation, coming from some guy in the SAA group, to be honest.

Naturally speaking, sleeping around is a comparatively effective relationship killer. Because she also called a significant bit of narcissism her own that energetically demanded its share of affection and affirmation. This can be bought through sexual interaction quite efficiently, though. She could not help but get involved with her male friends and the friends of friends and so on. So it was just a matter of time until she was ousted by her friends and the people around her.

Every one of us has an appetite for something. Until we get what we want, we are starving. What followed in her case were lots of co-dependent relationships. Rather dysfunctional in nature. She more or less got what she wanted and in return had to give what the others asked for.

The compulsive need for affirmation and sex has brought in its wake an expansion of her hunting grounds. And since society rather cheers for openly virile men, women who live their life actively are frowned upon, to put it mildly. Losing job after job and being on the dole for what felt like an eternity, made her reality a very dark place to live in.

First it was just alcohol. Then later, this kind of escape behaviour did not suffice any longer, she slumped into drugs of every kind to fade out reality.

Without the opportunity of sufficient funding of her basic human needs, she got a couple of times involved in drug-related crimes of more or less serious nature. Although, there was rarely money left for food, after a hit and run or a break and enter, though, there was always money for a celebration of some sorts.

Carelessness or the state of permanent midnight she had manoeuvred herself into, got her caught at some stage. Part of her sentence stipulated the attendance of so called self-help groups. But the groups she was forced to be present at had the opposite effect on her. In AA she found people for occasional drinking binges. NA helped her to a steady supply of narcotics. And SAA with their twelve step plan to your next score … of course, you only went there if you were in for a lay.

That is what he did and that is how she met him, the man with the huge bear claws.

“Go and get yourself a towel from the bathroom, but do not bleed on the tiles.” he said, still lying on the bed, holding his hurting punch hand.

“Okay.” was her very thin and rather powerless response. Scuffling her feet, she went into the dark bathroom and turned on the lights and then the water. In the mirror, she had a look at her bony self – even paler than before, she looked, like a laboratory rat doped up on Valium with her red rimmed and bloodshot eyes.

“What the hell are you doing? Turn the fucking water off and get out of there!” he shouted over the noise of the running water. When she came obediently out of the bathroom, he had turned on the lights in the bedroom, still lying on the bed.

“Get your stuff and leave, will you? I call you later, okay?!” he said and added quickly, “Here are twenty bucks. You are getting skinnier every time we meet. Get yourself something to eat. You look hungry.”

A Furry Tale

I just can’t seem to figure it out! Why does she always sound like a big sponge in her mouth is sucking up all her saliva when she talks to me on the phone? This time, she called me in the middle of the night with a muffled voice, like there was hair growing all over her teeth, to ask me if there was still a chance for us. “Tomorrow, three in the afternoon, my place.” I had said, quite reserved of course, whereupon she simply replied “Okay, fee you fen.” There was also a droning but less stifled bass in the background, and before I could ask her where she was, and what she was doing, she had hung up on me already.

“Phoebe, what’s this supposed to mean?” Like agreed last night, she arrives at my apartment at three o’clock sharp with a suitcase in tow that is bursting at the seams.

“What?”

“The bloody suitcase!”

“Oh yeah, I need that for later, perhaps. Then you’ll see.”

“Uh huh, then I’ll see?!”

“Yes, then you’ll see!”

“What will I see then?”

“Don’t be ridiculous Coeus, if I tell you now, it won’t be a surprise later, right?!”

“A surprise? You must be fucking kidding me, Phoebe, you are not moving in here again!” I say, “Not now!”

“You are really funny, babe. But I wasn’t planning on moving in with you, again. Where do you always get these absurd ideas from?! I just want us to have a talk. That’s all.” says Phoebe. Then she jumps with feline elegance onto the leather couch and drapes herself on the worn-out piece of seating furniture. Her arms are stretched out on a pile of cushions, while her legs are curled up under her belly. She looks like a shrunken but very much alive version of the Sphinx. Her behind, though, sticks out enticingly and makes me feel woozy with its hypnotising movements before it eventually finds the most comfortable resting position. I’ve taken a seat right in front of the sofa on an ordinary kitchen chair and look at her.

“So, what do you want?” I say after I have toughened myself against her eccentric attempts of seduction.

“We’ve had good times, haven’t we?” Phoebe starts.

“Of course, we had. But we also had bad times.”

“Yes, but that’s normal, I suppose. You can’t have sunshine all year long, can you?!”

“Well, then let me put it that way, you brought the rain upon us.” I spurt out, crossing my arms in front of me.

“That’s great, it always happens when I want to talk to you! Can you please – just for once – stop talking in riddles!” Phoebe says with an edgy timbre in her words.

“What I mean is, you started to fuck around!”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean? I didn’t fuck up our relationship by myself, it takes more than one person to do that. You had your own part in this too!” Phoebe says, pointing at me – her hand trembling slightly.

“You started acting strange. You became very distant and there was no way of talking to you back then!”

“Well, I got the same impression from you. When I wanted to talk, you always had excuses. Perhaps you didn’t want to hear what I had to say?!” Her voice is getting thinner now.

“Oh, and that’s why you decided to go out by yourself?!”

“I went out with my friends, and I told you!” Now it’s shaking.

“Friends I never was introduced to, for some reason!” I say, “Because you started sleeping around! That’s it, right?!” I look straight at her but go on anyway, picking up speed. “You are like those little rodents, the ones where the female dies when she doesn’t mate. When she is in heat, and doesn’t get it, the female will secrete high levels of oestrogen and if this hormone stays in the blood for too long, it will cause a progressive depression of bone marrow that results in a severe, life threatening aplastic anaemia which is fatal. Yeah, you are a female ferret! That’s what you are!”

“Excusez moi!” she says with her neck straightened, looking me straight in the eye. And then she – very slowly – turns her head towards the window to her right. She actually doesn’t have any French, but she sometimes uses it to emphasise her indignation. I, however, say nothing.

“You! Little! Piece! Of! Shit! And your wanton imagination! That’s so sad, you are so sad!” And then she turns slowly back to me, “And by the way, ferrets are not rodents, they are like martens, some kind of mini predators,” and then she finishes me off with, “you dimwit!”

“Ahem … whatever, I found hair on your clothes and even on you. And then when you came home, all that sweat and the smell of sex and whatnot?!”

“Hair, smell of sex? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Hair that was not your hair, short blond hair or even red. And then sometimes you brought home some fur, as well, hair of animals. And you perhaps remember my difficult pet hair allergy?! But you just don’t seem to care!”

“Are you done now?” Phoebe says, her voice gaining back strength, “Seriously, you are out of your fucking mind! And by the way, you have stopped making any sense to me at all!”

“That’s just perfect, that’s so you, Phoebe! I have stopped making sense, and so have you! But already a long time ago. All the get-togethers with your new friends and the hair and fur and shit, all that secrecy. If you want to keep it that way, that’s up to you. But then I simply ask you to leave now, because I’ve had it for a long time, and I’m tired of this shit.”

Phoebe doesn’t say a single word, she purses her lips instead and lifts her head, looking up at the ceiling – not at a particular spot, though – just to avoid looking at me, while she turns her head to the left and lowers her gaze down at the pitch-black TV screen in my back.

“No! Please! Wait!” I say, my thoughts have gone head over heels just now. “I need to know! What did you do with your friends, these men? I want details! The not-knowing is driving me mad. I need to know; this is essential for my sanity!”

Either I am or Phoebe is losing it right now; because after all this messed up scene she is smiling, a very happy smile. It almost looks like she is going to relieve herself of a burden she has been carrying around for quite a long time.

In some catlike fashion, she gets up from the sofa, jumps light-footed over to her suitcase and drags it back to the couch again.

And then she put on the contents of the suitcase she had brought along. I see her taking off her bra. Her small but firm breasts are covered in goose bumps, and I realise that it is quite chilly in here. This reminds me of the first time we got naked. Back then she had said that she liked my rather smallish hands, because they made her boobs feel bigger. She changes right in front of me, and now puts on some plush bra and furry knickers.

“Jesus Christ, stop staring at me like this, Coeus, you creep!” Phoebe says and chuckles tensely, “You have seen me naked before, remember?!”

No, I have not, not like this. And I must admit that this is a rather bizarre development, which I did not anticipate in any form, because – to my knowledge – she hates body hair. She once even said to me that from under her nose down to her toes, I would not be able to find a single piece of hair on her body. And honestly, I never did. I tried really hard.

Right now, and I am not making this up, she takes a jumpsuit out of her suitcase. This thing is made of brown fluffy fur. The front is white and the arms and legs are almost black. Then I see something that makes me cringe. There is a very dark brown tail sewed on to the back of the jumpsuit.

With the same elegant gracefulness, she seated herself onto the couch with, she now slips into the exceptional jumpsuit. The suit also sports a dark brown hood with two white and wire framed plush ears attached to it. The hood can be partially closed with a mask that covers nose and mouth, although it allows you to open the mouth. Of course, it is plushy white and has a pink nose and enormous whiskers. And then she puts on a dark brown, almost black sleep mask made of plush, with two holes for her big brown eyes. And next, as if it was the most natural thing for her, which it probably is, she puts some plastic vampire fangs into her mouth, the ones you always can buy around Halloween. To complete the whole transformation, she puts on a pair of fluffy fur boots and plushy gloves, as well.

“Et voilà!” Phoebe says in a muffled voice but with a broad, but somewhat nervous smile, through her plastic vampire teeth.

During the entire conversion, I have been up on my feet, staring at her, while she turned into something else. Now I need to sit down again, because here right in front of me I have a human-size mini predator that winks at me through the holes in her plush sleep mask and gives me a big female ferret smile.

And with all this fur right here within arm’s reach, even though artificial, I am scared shitless of having an episode of an allergic reaction towards the plush – with seizures and all that jazz. But it is not happening. Instead I get my shit together and even realise that this is not a moment for my stupid jokes. I just sit down and try to look as normal as possible and listen to what she has to say.

The words are coming, although reluctantly, but they come – later in waves, huge waves. She talks about prejudices, bullies, openness and trust. She talks about furry fandom and their conventions. She talks about her new friends, her community, which I – in the past – would have referred to as a bunch of freaky people who fantasise about getting busy with anthropomorphised cartoon style animals. But from what she says, I can start to see past that. These people seem to be sensitive souls who love animals, probably trust animals even more than people due to bad experiences. But who am I to judge others for wanting to feel more connected with something which makes them feel safer and more loved?

Through her muffling plastic vampire fangs Phoebe concludes, “You have to learn to liffen, not to reply, but to underftand.”

Confessions of a Feline Mind

I do not seem to care about anything apart from myself. I like to ignore people, they say. But you know, it is not just that I blank them, I really ignore them. So I put a lot of effort into the action.

The thing is, you always have to be aware of what is going on around you, or otherwise you will miss ignoring people. By that I mean, I withdraw attention from a person deliberately. I always do that to get their attention. You see, that is how it works. Reciprocity is out of balance and needs to be restored. At least that is what people think. Cat people they call themselves, and live under the impression that they understand us. But under the cold prism of truth they do not – nobody understands cats, not even we ourselves.

I only ignore certain people. All would be too easy and that is boring. I like challenges. It challenges me to just ignore a particular group of people. That is usually the group that gives me the most attention already. And that is why I can afford to ignore them.

I do this because I am proud. Too full of pride, some might say. Some might even venture to say, my pride eats me up from the inside. But I could not care less. Well, I do care, but only briefly. Once I am sure, I have got their attention, I carry on ignoring them.

You may also have noticed that I tend to ignore people when they have crossed or criticised me. That is right. But I do not do it just for fun. I do it only when I do not agree with them. Which I never do. That is why I ignore them. I never agree with any of them because they are beneath me.

And then there are the people I do not ignore, because I cannot afford it. I pay close attention to them, because they do not take any notice of me. I suppose, deliberately. I have heard them referring to themselves as dog people.

Those kind of people usually have very little use for the likes of us cats. For me that means reciprocity is imbalanced. Then I generally take action. I jump on their lap when least they expect it. Or just prowl around their legs. Or I climb up the back of their armchairs, position myself close to their head and then I start purring into their ears, unexpectedly.

But if this does not help to get their attention I, in some very hard cases, have to resort to even more drastic measures. I remember one occasion where I had to climb up the drapes and jump onto the ignoramus’ back to compel that dog person’s attention.

But once I have got what I want – their attention –, I start ignoring them immediately. Of course, only after I have outrun them.

Kate & Leopold

Kate and Leopold used to be inseparable. Which is quite an achievement when you take into account that their relationship is that of daughter and foster dad. But that was long ago. It was before Ailbhe died, and she is dead twenty years now.

“Hey there, can I borrow a lighter?” The boy said, sneaking up on Kate on the dimly lit platform of a rundown suburban train station.

“What? …Hey, a lighter, you say. … Of course, here you go!” And Kate lit the cigarette sticking out of the boy’s face.

“Thanks.” The boy with the greasy hair said. It was raining and the water was dripping off his highly hydrophobic head. “It’s quite something, isn’t?!” But Kate, who was the only other person on the platform with him, didn’t respond. “The weather, I mean.”

“Yeah, the rain is quite something.” Kate said, not really in the mood for small talk. It was early in the morning – a Monday morning at that. And it was Ailbhe’s birthday. The home-made cake was in her bag on the bench next to her. He will be so excited about the cake, Kate thought, it is his favourite, which is actually rather strange, since it is her birthday. But she would have been happy with that.

“You aren’t really the talkative type, are you?” The boy again. “My name is Andrew, by the way.”

“Kate’s the name, and it’s a pleasure.”

“Okay, I’m just in a binged up mood for a chat while we’re waiting for the train. But if you don’t want to, just say the word, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“No, you won’t.” Kate said, smirking. “And since we’re waiting for the same train, we might as well kill some time chatting.”

“Well, you’re taking the six thirty train, too? Where are you going?”

“The last stop.”

“What a coincidence, me too. What are you doing there? Are you going to the correctional facilities?”

“Yes, I am on my way to the prison, visiting someone. And you, are you visiting somebody, as well?”

“No, today is my first day. I am starting my new job there. I am the new kitchen hand.” Andrew said, beaming.

“Oh, the new kitchen help. How old are you anyway? You look like fifteen, tops.”

“No, I am actually twenty years old. Well, technically speaking I am still nineteen. But I am in my twentieth year, which I will have completed on Friday. So I am more or less twenty.” Andrew chuckled. And Kate, she didn’t respond, because she wasn’t even listening.

Ailbhe had left them the same year this boy was born. Twenty years ago. The same year he went to prison. Kate blinked away some tears. But today is her birthday not the day she died, and it is something that keeps us together, Kate thought, and I’ll be able to spend some time with him. Now Kate could even smile in anticipation.

“Who are you visiting in the prison?”

“Leopold, my dad. But he doesn’t belong there.”

“Most of them don’t, I suppose. What’s he in prison for?”

“God damn it! The fucking train is late, as always!” Kate cursed to divert from the unpleasant subject. More herself than the boy.

“Yeah, I suppose, I am going to be late on my first day in the new job. But I don’t really care, you know, because we’ll drown anyway, anytime soon. It’s been chucking it down for almost forty days, and if we don’t make it to the big ship, we’ll get washed away by the great flood.” Andrew laughed.

There was nothing that could have prevented their story from resurfacing, not even the boy’s terrible jokes. Twenty years ago Leopold had been accused of child abuse and manslaughter. The trail had torn the small family into shreds. Ailbhe knew that Leopold was innocent and this was so hard on her that it killed her even before the unjust end of this horrible trail.

“What’s Leopold, I mean your dad, in prison for?” The boy didn’t let go. And after a little while of silence he added “If you don’t want to talk about it – it’s fine with me.”

Leopold had been a preschool teacher for many years, until one day a girl was found dead in a shed on the school premises. There were also signs that the girl had been raped before she was smothered to death with her own parka. As the only male teacher in the small school, the spotlight was, of course, on Leopold. Even though Leopold was very popular with the children in the school, most of the girls said that he had been touching them and had asked them to do things they didn’t want to do. And that they were afraid, so they obeyed. They accused him, because they thought it was expected from them. For the grown-ups usually know what they are doing, right?! However, when the girls wanted to withdraw their statements, because they saw that it wasn’t right and what the baseless accusations were doing to Kate, Leopold and Ailbhe, the school counsellor said that they were traumatised by the terrible events, but still must speak the truth, which was to identify Leopold as the offender.

“Well then, it was nice talking to you but you look really spaced out right now, so I leave you to yourself.” Andrew said, putting out the cigarette on the bench’s armrest, and leaning back.

Kate had come to Ailbhe and Leopold at the age of two as their foster child. By the time of the accusations she was five. Kate had never had any situations where Leopold had touched her inappropriately. Of course, Leopold liked physical contact, but he was never the awkward touchy-feely type. Anyway, this shouldn’t be the basis of a witch hunt like this. But it was, and in the end they even found particles of his skin under the dead girl’s fingernails. How it got there, Leopold did not know, since he did not do it. But this did not prevent the jury and the judge from convicting him of child abuse and manslaughter.

“Jesus F. Christ! It’s a quarter past seven, and now the train is coming, finally. If we get there without any further delay, I’ll still be late as fuck!” Andrew fumed, now a little bit less relaxed than before.

For Kate it was slightly different, she wouldn’t be late in the sense Andrew was running late. But if the train took its usual one and a half hours to get there, she would only have ten minutes left of her assigned time slot to celebrate Ailbhe’s birthday and eat the cake with Leopold. But this was, of course, exclusive the time needed for the security procedure when entering the facilities.

Clavicula

You probably know these kind of video clips from YouTube; there are thousands of them, and they are more or less funny – as long as you are not involved. It is so obvious; how can someone not see this coming? As long as you are not involved!

Well, I was and I did not.

I was on the way to Black Rock – wetsuit in my rear pannier bag. En route to an evening swim, which had become an almost daily routine lately. The sun was shining like most of the evenings recently. And cars parked along the Prom in Salthill.

And that is where you usually start laughing when you see this particular setting on YouTube. “That dumbass is going to jump the handlebar, just keep on watching!” you would probably say to your friend next to you. And then he jumps – not your friend, but the poor guy on the bike in the video clip – what else can he do?!

I saw the driver’s door opening. I saw it and pulled instinctively to the right. But the right in this case wasn’t right enough. Because the left tip of my handlebar still got caught by the door that was still in the process of being opened. Then I jumped and flew.

“I am so sorry! That was my fault, I should have checked in the mirror. I am so sorry!” Domhnall said, as he tried to lift me up from the ground.

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again, okay?!” I said though my clenched teeth. I should not have said that out loud. But it was too late. I should have thought it only inside my head, but there were already so many other things begging to be thought right after I had come off the bike so violently. That must have been the adrenaline, I believe. My body was flooded with this precious hormone so that I felt like one of those invincible superheroes – only without the ridiculous cape.

“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” that was Domhnall’s wife. Like most of the smarter part of this planet’s population with at least a bit of common sense left to her name, she had left the car on the safe side. “You are bleeding. Wait, I get you something.” There was a dark red hole in my left thumb and then there was something that looked like a piece of bone piercing through the flesh. But I did not care. Just put a plaster on it and be done with it.

Domhnall and his wife were swarming around me like pesky pigeons lusting for breadcrumbs. They were taking care of me and the bike and all. But still, I did not want them to be there, I wanted them to leave me alone. I was pretty much convinced that after I had put on my wetsuit and had swam a few strokes in the bay, the pain would go away by itself and all would be fine and go back to normal in no time. Wishful superhero thinking, you know?!

I was dragged back into reality, though, when Domhnall asked me if the bike was okay. From the looks of it, the bike seemed fine. I had hit the road first and the bike had basically landed safely on top of me. “Only the chain has come off.” I said. Even though I had gotten up from the ground propped upon my right arm – feeling nothing, now the chain seemed to be so much heavier than myself before, because lifting the bloody thing – with my right hand – back onto the frontal chain set proved to be impossible. I did not even feel the greasy connection of metal links in my fingers.

With the adrenaline rush gradually wearing off, I became aware of the painful fact that I was not a superhero at all, but an ordinary and at that mortal human being. So I surrendered to ephemerality and accepted Domhnall’s offer to drive me and the bike home. And around this time it also leaked into my consciousness that something funny must have happened to my right arm and shoulder. Because when I got into the passenger seat, Domhnall had to fasten my seatbelt for me.

With the adrenaline almost entirely flushed out of my system, I felt overcome by a leaden tiredness. Wrapped in this heavy blanket I just wanted to stay at home after Domhnall had brought me and the bike into the house. But my flatmate insisted on going to the emergency service just to be sure how to deal with the injury.

I have had heard stories about this institution. Time in there, they said, is like gooey molasses, passing in slowest slow motion only. That is why I brought a book. Just to kill time if necessary. But I think – among other things – I broke the record that day. I had dropped the paper work into the letter box of a certain blue door down the corridor, as I was instructed by the receptionist, and had just found myself a comfortable enough chair to sit down and enjoy the book, when a nurse called my name.

In a room full of beds and curtains, I was seated on a greenish bed with a paper sheet on top.

“Marcus, how do you feel and what happened to you?” nurse Siobhán asked me, while she took the blood soaked paper tissue off my left thumb. Just a bruise and a flesh wound, no actual bone sticking out, I could even wiggle the swollen thing.

“I’ve dislocated my shoulder, I guess.” I said. “Just give me some painkillers and pop the nasty thing back in.” Siobhán rolled her icy blue eyes and spun around on her swivel chair. When she came back after her three-sixty, facing me, I was given one of those small and transparent plastic cups filled with pills of different colours and shapes. They would help me to cope with the pain, she said.

“You look like you fell off your bike, judging from your condition and outfit, of course.” That was nurse Deidre, getting ready to leave.

“Yes, I suppose so. That’s what happened. Can you just pop it back in, and then we can all go home, please?” I said.

“We will need to examine you first. Can you stand up, please?” Siobhán asked. With my left arm I was holding on to my book, phone and wallet. My right arm was dangling listlessly alongside my body.

“We will just put this back here.” Siobhán said, taking my belongings off me and dropping them back on the bed. “It will hurt a bit, but we need to get you out of your cycling gear, okay?!” And at that nurse Siobhán started to pull all three layers of sports gear over my head – in one go.

Unfortunately, the cocktail of drugs had not kicked in yet. And when the skin-tight material of my cycling gear pulled my right shoulder up and closer to my head, an up-swell of pain, high like a tsunami wave, flooded my body. Pain, in general, is to be understood as a warning signal, intentionally. It usually indicates that there is an injury. But I knew all this already. Why did this daft cow need to make me suffer again? This wasn’t a nurse, but a butcher in disguise; and for an instant I saw a shiny meat cleaver lying within reach of nurse Siobhán on the table next to me. But it just turned out to be only a transparent folder with my medical record in it, reflecting the bright light from the ceiling.

I suppose it is nonsensical bullshit, but in the internet they say that a human body can only bear up to forty-five del units of pain. But at the time of giving birth, a woman feels up to fifty-seven del of pain. This is similar to twenty bones getting fractured at the same time. And then they also say something about getting kicked in the balls – something I can relate to more than going into labour –, which is supposedly even more agonising. The pain I felt in the emergency room, however, was so overwhelming that for a short moment I was close to passing out. But I did not. Instead I felt nauseous and almost threw up.

“Look at this, Siobhán!” Deidre was back in the room pointing at my bare right shoulder. “You can clearly see it. There is a gap. See?! And the other one feels so smooth.” Now standing right in front of me, Deirdre was touching both of my collarbones at the same time, smiling at me.

“Marcus, it looks like a clavicular fracture. But to be sure we’ll need to do an x-ray of your shoulder.” Siobhán said, looking over Deidre’s shoulder from behind.

In the end the x-ray confirmed a double fractured collarbone. And sitting there on the green bed again, looking at the x-ray on the computer screen, kind of a déjà vu was coming up and I had the unmistakable feeling like I knew it all along, since I had come off the bike so unexpectedly. Before my mind’s eye, I could even see myself going over the handlebar – just like if I was on YouTube –, and with the painkillers gradually taking effect this put a maliciously gleeful smile on my face.

Changes

It is around four o’clock in the morning on a cold and windy summer day at the Irish west coast – no rain, though. You were just woken by the remnants of a birthday party next door. The last guests were still outside talking loudly, making noise. And then, all of a sudden, a vacuum full of silence. They were gone, from one second to the other. Now, someone is cleaning in front of the house. Sweeping the floor noisily. Since going back to sleep is not an available option at the moment, you decide to have a cigarette at the window.

It is one of those few moments, when you get the feeling that you are alone in the world. But there is no loneliness. There is only a certainty that you are a single human being – detached. The connections you usually have to other people, don’t feel as strong now as during the rest of the day. But now it doesn’t bother you. You feel like floating, free to go wherever you want to go and to do whatever you want to do, be whoever you want to be – probably your-self.

You feel like leaving. Leaving the place and people behind – only taking the memories with you. Just some change. You read somewhere that this hour of the day is called “the hour of the wolf”. It is the hour of change, the hour between night and dawn, when the new day is about to begin. A new day full of change – new opportunities, new people and new ventures.

You still feel a bit tired, but you are not ready to go back to sleep, yet. It somehow feels like travelling. When you have arrived in a new place, early in the morning. Everything is completely new and everything is still possible. Everything is exciting.

Watching the clouds go by. Listening to just a few seagulls – the early birds – while most of their kind have still their heads dug under their wings. You’re making plans. No, not really making plans, just letting the mind wander. Like brainstorming, only without the storm. Everything comes by itself, nothing is forced. Thoughts come and go, some stay, others just fly by.

Slowly, with time, people and places come back to you. (Or are you coming back to them?) No, not really places, but definitely people. People who are important to you. People you don’t want to miss in your life. People you deeply care about. People you love. And this love turns detachment into attachment. Not instantly, but slowly and surely.

And this very comforting feeling of attachment wraps you up in a warm and cosy blanket and you are eventually ready to go back to sleep.

A Storm’s Gathering

Many people get sick on a boat, I just fall asleep. The rocking and rolling of the ship always hushes me quickly into a deep and most of the time relaxing sleep. And so I didn’t even notice that the weather was changing on the way to the island.

Spray was foaming around the bow, as the ship made its way back to the mainland. By the time the vessel had disappeared behind the earth’s curvature, we had eventually reached the top of the hill with the weather-beaten cottage on it. A massive wall of clouds was closing in rapidly from the west and seemed to float only a few inches above the fuming waters of the roaring sea.
“Isn’t this something?!” I said, looking around while dropping my backpack in one of the armchair in the main room of the cottage.
“At least the roof seems to be intact, so we won’t get wet in here.” he said, inspecting the thatched roof thoroughly with a flickering torch from inside the house.
“You’re hopeless,” I laughed, “you don’t have any sense of romance.”
“Well, I like the setting, though.”
“Fine, it was your plan, after all. Although, you seem a bit tense, as if you weren’t in the mood for a weekend on a remote island.”
“But I am.”
“Oh, that’s very convincing.” I said, “Just relax!”, and then I kissed him softly on his cheek. Since it was very dark inside the house already, he lit the oil lamp on the table in the middle of the room, while I took the food out of the plastic bags and put it onto the kitchen counter.
“I’m going outside for a quick smoke before the storm picks up. You might want to get the stove ready for the cooking?!” I said.
“Will do that. But, ahem, I took the tobacco out of your bag … because you said you would have a smoke-free weekend, do you remember?!”
“I do. But you did not, did you?!” I said, narrowing my eyes.
“Oh yes, I did take it out!”
“Take care of the stove then, I would like to be alone now!” I said detached. Then I opened the door, full of zest. The wind had picked up and pushed through the door inside the cottage, throwing the paraffin lamp off the edge of the table. The petroleum quickly spilled over the floor and caught fire instantly. But he, in the presence of his mind, took the huge and thick blanket from the big leather couch and threw it over the little sea of flames before the fire could spread to the furniture. Entirely unaffected by this, I went outside and slammed the door shut behind me.

Inside the small house, under the heavy blanket, a lonely book of soaking wet matches was lying in a shallow but colourful lake of oil. I, however, sat in a spanking breeze on a dry wooden bench under a group of wind-beaten pine trees, gazing out at the rocky beach and the pier. I was lost in thoughts. The wind had picked up even more and it had started to drizzle, as well. I was just flicking pine cones indifferently into a rusty bucket full of holes, when it started pouring down.

“Are you waiting for me to do what women are supposed to do in the kitchen or why didn’t you get the fire going in the stove?” I said sarcastically when I came back inside.
“I couldn’t find any dry matches.”
“Oh, that’s brilliant! Were those the only ones you brought? Who would bring matches anyway?!”
“Yes, only wet ones.” he grinned, misjudging the situation, “But I was wondering if you had a …”
“… lighter on me, yeah? No! I’m so sorry, but Mr Smarty Pants here thought it best to patronise me in health matters, and left my smoking utensils at home. So no lighter here on that island.”
“But there has to be a lighter somewhere! Can you check your stuff?!”
“No, not here. Remember what the landlord said: What you don’t bring to the island, you won’t find here on the island. Well, I wanted to bring a lighter, but you …”
“Cut it, will you?!” he hissed, “I was only thinking of the baby!”
“What baby?”
“Our baby!”
“Sweet fucking Jesus, I’m not even pregnant!”
“But we said, we want to have a baby?!” He said uncertain.
“At some point, yes. But right now, I’m not so sure anymore.”
“What is this supposed to mean?”
“What I’m saying is that I do not like the situation we both are in here, at the moment.”
“Well, I don’t like it either, but we have to make the best of this here; the weather, the cottage, the stove, the island and all that.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean then?”
“We’ve been through this before.” With a big bang the wind pushed the window open. “It has to be our decision. We both have to agree. Not only you. Do you understand?!”
“Yes, I do. But I thought we agreed on this. And this weekend …” he stopped and closed the window again.
“… you wanted to get me pregnant and make your mother proud of her son. That’s very considerate of you. But where am I in all of this? Am I just your baby machine?”
“No, of course, you’re not! But I come from a very traditional family and there are certain expectations one has to answer. And you know my mother.”
“Of course I do! I remember her very well!”
“So you know what I mean. She can be very demanding, sometimes.”
“Very nice, nicely put! If I remember her correctly, though, then she was the one who treated me like a retarded person with impaired judgement. She was also the one who told me that spotting and continuous bleeding during pregnancy is normal. She has also refused to call the doctor to have me checked, when my body rejected the life that was supposed to be growing inside of me.”
“I’m sure, she only had the best intentions, and as you may also remember, she is not a doctor!”
“So why didn’t she call for one when I lay there dying? She wanted the baby at all cost! When push had come to shove, even over my dead body! She sat there by the bed, praying for the baby’s life. Not for mine! The baby was already dead and rotting, poisoning me from inside! But she kept praying!”
“She is a very …”
“Don’t say religious woman, because that is biblical bullshit! And you are missing the point here.”
“And the point is?”
“That you make decisions over my head and infantilise me. That’s the fucking point! Do you want to put me through all of this again? Without even asking me?! Am I just a tool for you to please your mother?” I shouted at him, when all of a sudden a branch from the pine trees broke off and came flying through the window, scattering the shards of broken glass all over the place.

“Hey, wake up, we are there, on the island.” He said, while he gently shook me awake. I felt the warm sun on my skin, again. And I could even see the orange colour that the sunbeams had painted my closed eyelids with.
Even though moored to the pier, the boat was still rolling slightly. So I opened my eyes, jumped up, grabbed my backpack and ran off the boat. I didn’t want to fall asleep again.

Roadkill

Eliot was sitting in the back of the car while Lindsay, his mom, was steering the vehicle over the bumpy road. Her mother in law, Kathy, was in the car as well, in the passenger seat next to Eliot’s mom, taking care of his little baby sister Gwendoline.
Eliot had been picked up from the day care center by the three of them, because that day was his older brother’s birthday. Napoleon had turned ten – and the four of them were on the way to Bullets & Burgers to have a birthday party with him and his friends. Richard, Eliot’s dad, was already with them, taking care of them, giving instructions.
Usually a good and safe driver, Lindsay was shifting around on her seat, though; occasionally giving the odd glance over to Kathy, making sure the old lady was still comfortable. Lindsay’s hands were already clammy and had started trembling as soon as they had set off from home.
Eliot sat in his booster seat. His legs dangling around, he played with the seat belt in front of him, noisily clicking the fastener open and shut – over and over again. His baby sister Gwendoline was quiet, though. She had dozed off as soon as they had left from the day care center when the rocking car had started to lull her into sleep. Eliot, however, went on: click, clack, click, clack and click.
“Please, Eliot, stop that clicking.” his grandma said.
“Are we there yet?”
“We’ll be there soon.”
“How much longer?” Eliot clicked, clacked and clicked.
“Five minutes, maybe quicker, if your mother permits.” Kathy said, giving her daughter in law a look that spoke volumes. “And stop that clicking, El, will you?!” Kathy added, gritting her teeth.
“I have to pee!” said Eliot after a while. The clicking had stopped, since Eliot had peeled himself out of his booster seat.
“Get back into that seat and buckle up!” grandma Kathy shouted, turning around but also trying to put baby Gwendoline onto the dashboard, to have a hand free to put Eliot back into his seat. But the sleeping baby beauty Gwendoline in her baby carry cot always slid back onto her grandma’s lap. Eliot, however, wasn’t listening, at all. Instead, he climbed up, onto the back shelf where all his toys were lying around.
“Lindsay, you are his parent, talk to that brattish son of yours, will you?! He’s apparently not listening to his grandmother! And as you might have noticed, I have to take care of your daughter here.”
“Don’t you call my son a brat ever again.” Lindsay’s shaking voice was scarcely audible. “Or …” it faded out.
“Or what?”
“Or I will throw you out of the car! Then you can walk the rest of the way.” This time the voice wasn’t exactly booming but more stable than before.
“Dare you, bimbo!”
“You … you … I am going to stop now!” the shaking was back again.
“Pull over, go on. But you are too scared, aren’t you?!”
“I am going to be sick.” Eliot from the back shelf piped up again.
“I am not scared, Kathy!” Lindsay replied, distracted, not paying much attention to her son.
“Pull over, then!” Kathy said in smug complacency, but Lindsay didn’t do anything, just drove on.
“You are too scared about what Dick would do to you if I told him. Huh?!”
“Will you leave Richard out of this!” Lindsay said, clutching the steering wheel, with her slippery and now visibly shaking hands.
“Oh, I can see, you still remember the last time when he was in a rage, and his hands slipped, because of you. Go on then, pull over, if you feel fit to face the consequences, again.” At that Lindsay suddenly slammed on the brakes.
Unprepared for this unanticipated stop, Eliot, accompanied by most of his toys, slipped off the back shelf, flew over the back seat and sailed somersaulting down into the foot well.
“What are you trying to prove here, Lindsay? Don’t be a fool!” Kathy started, as soon as the car had stopped. And with a mischievous smile on her face and an uncanny calmness in her voice, she went on, “Get going, we’re running late, anyways. And besides, you don’t have the guts to leave me here in the middle of the desert?!”
Lindsay, not being a fool this time, channelled all her anger into her right hand and hit the car into the first gear, then put the pedal to the metal, somewhat oblivious of her son’s presence in the legroom behind her seat.
At that, Eliot quite alright with his new playground, had his eyes fixed on a shiny object that was quickly sliding towards him from under the driver’s seat. He picked it up and examined the cold and heavy item.
“That was a very smart move of yours, Lindsay.” Kathy complimented her daughter in law, smiling impishly.
To Eliot the new thing looked like a silvery boomerang with a wooden handle, a drum and a lever. Eliot sat himself up and played with it. Turning it around pulling here, pressing there, spinning the drum. Then he figured that the lever must have a certain function and focused on it.
“Lindsay, my dear, shouldn’t you have used the stop for getting your son back into his seat? What do you think?!” Kathy ridiculed her.
In his urge to explore, and with all the physical strength he could find in his three-year-old body, Eliot pulled the lever, which set an irreversible sequence in motion. The lever released a spring which itself had cocked the hammer and now released it. The hammer hit the primer of the shell in the drum. The hit primer ignited the propellant inside. The ignited propellant caused the gas pressure inside the shell to rise. The risen pressure expanded and fired off the bullet through the barrel. The fired off bullet eventually hit grandma Kathy’s butt.
At that, Kathy’s head whipped around. “Ouch! What the hell, you son of a fucking bi …” she tried to release her pain in the arse.
But Eliot, being a three-year-old, wasn’t fit to take all the gun shot’s blowback. While thrown back, he tried disastrously to hold fast onto something; the only thing he could hold on to was the gleaming boomerang; so he involuntarily pulled the trigger again. The bullet, this time discharged from a different angle, ripped grandma Kathy’s throat wide open.
What kind of thoughts go through your head when most of your blood doesn’t? At that stage we simply don’t know, because Kathy was already dead when the car eventually came to a standstill, after parking itself abruptly through the guardrail into the roadside ditch.
Lindsay in her motherly instinct had left the steering wheel and the pedals to themselves and had thrown herself over her still sleeping baby girl to protect her from all the blood that was gushing out of the horrible bullet hole in her mother in law’s throat.
Eliot, with his now red freckled face, was sitting up again, unharmed and almost relaxed, in the foot well. He was crying, though. Because when he was trying to touch one of the still smoking shells, he had burned his little fingers.

A couple of miles down the road, Napoleon wasn’t really waiting for his family to arrive at the Bullets & Burgers. For that he was too distracted, not to say confused. Pacing up and down the sidewalk, he was trying to make sense to the most recent events. He was too shell-shocked because his father just got his head partially blown off. A bullet had entered through his throat and had left Dick’s head through the roof, leaving a crater that to Napoleon, strangely enough, looked not unlike a bowl of stirred up chocolate ice cream with hot strawberry sauce on top.
Later on, the newscasters would say that Richard Vacca was accidentally shot in the head as he instructed a nine-year-old girl how to fire an Uzi, an Israeli-made 9mm submachine gun. As she pulled the trigger, the gun jumped out of her left hand towards Vacca, who was standing beside her.
“To put an Uzi in the hands of a nine-year-old is extremely reckless – to say the least.” law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes would also comment later on TV.

An Embarrassment of Riches

“If you are like me and you feel uncomfortable going out with only one watch, I have the perfect solution for you.” Simon says.
To be honest, Simon did not really say this, someone put it in big and elegant letters on the glossy advertisement with Simon’s hands on it. Simon’s left hand shows an awfully expensive watch, the right one is holding an equally expensive watch holder made of baby sealskin. It can carry up to six watches, the small print at the bottom of the page tells us. Simon is a hand model, spending most of his time with photo shootings and putting lotion on his precious assets. Simon’s hands and nails are always splendidly done. You could call him handsome, pretty even. There is also something androgynous about him. As a kid he could have easily passed for both, a boy or a girl, depending on the way he was dressed, which was of much distress for his sister.
Simon had a yacht. A big one. He bought it from one of those filthy rich Russian oligarchs. The guy was fed up with owning a ship for more than six months. He had already a new one waiting for him in the shipyard of Lürssen Yachts. That one was more than six hundred feet long and came with a mini-submarine and a helipad; and of course, the yacht builder had thrown in a brand new helicopter, as well.
“Oh, Simon you will have lots of fun with this one, but for me it has just become too tinny.” Vladimir, a bear of a man, said with a thick Russian accent.
“Tinny, how come?” Simon asked, raising his eyebrows, “Vladimir, is there something I need to know?”.
“You can call me Vova, Simon! We are friends now, are we not?! Let’s drink to your beautiful new ship!”
“Okay Vova! But what do you specifically mean by ‘had become tinny’? Is there something wrong with the ship?”
“You see, Simon, your new yacht is just a bit too small for me. It is only two hundred fifty feet long. I needed something bigger. Bigger than the Azzam even.” Vova smiled.
“Oh, I see, but we actually like that tininess of the yacht, don’t we, Simon?” That was Elisabeth, Simon’s sister. Then the three of them clicked glasses.
Since Elisabeth didn’t have the looks in the family but the brains, she took care of her baby brother’s finances. She got him the best contracts with the agencies and the most paramount advertising deals. She was the real architect behind Simon’s hand modelling success. Sometimes, when realising this, in his few moments of profundity, Simon would say, “There is no life without Beth.”

One day Simon came into his mansion and announced. “I don’t really do it for the money, obviously.” He said, “But I’ve got a new hand job.”
“A hand job?!” Elisabeth said, “For fucks sake, Simon! Seriously? I hope the agency sends the paperwork to me?!”
“Yes, they will … I suppose … I said, I would even do it for free, when I heard who was going to do the shooting.” Simon said, “Daido Matsumoto! Do you know who that is?”
“I guess so. A photographer?! Japanese?” Beth said, unmoved by Simon’s enthusiasm.
Daido Matsumoto was a photographer, known for his eccentricity. But he was also a recluse and a cult leader whose teachings revolve around the theory that getting pictures taken, will steal the soul of the person who’s photographed. His followers had permanently set up camp in the limestone karst archipelago of the Halong Bay nature reserve. Matsumoto resides in a small pavilion on top of the tallest freestanding limestone pillar in the middle of the bay. Once a day, between nine and ten, Matsumoto receives a preselected group of disciples. The ascent to the top takes around four to five hours for the chosen ones. The only approved (because environmentally friendly) way to get up the vertical walls of the sharp-edged karst pillar is to give each other leg-ups until one reaches the top. Then, upon reception, Matsumoto has his followers take photos of each other. Because one of his other theories says that what is not there anymore cannot be taken away from you.
“Simon, they will be paying you for this shooting, won’t they?!”
“Well, I think so. They always did, didn’t they?!”
“Simon, seriously! We need the money. You need the money!”
“Yes, I know. The yacht was expensive. And Vova was not nice to us.”
“Simon, you and your bloody proclivity for extenuation. Your friend Vladimir fucking framed you! Grow up and face it!” said Elisabeth, making Simon flinch.
After the yacht was transferred from Yalta, in Crimea to Southampton, in the UK, Vladimir’s favourite concubine was found locked up in one of the private cabins. The room, deep in the hull of the ship, apparently no ensuite, stank of urine and faeces. Valentina was covered in a white powder and had taken the room apart. For the lack of any alternative, she had already started eating the foam from the upholstery. During the twelve day transfer the inexpensive but superstitious Filipino crew had heard noises and screams coming from that room but suspected it to be the restless ghost of a rivalling oligarch, who had been beaten to death by Vladimir in that very same room. They left it at that, and did not go near the cabin. Upon hearing of Valya’s discovery, Vladimir accused Simon of human trafficking and filed a lawsuit against him.

Since Elisabeth had taken care over the negotiations for the Matsumoto shooting, Simon would get a quite significant amount of money for it, but had to take care of transportation and accommodation himself.
“I bought the ship, so we will take the ship!” Simon insisted.
“You know what the Vietnamese said about us staying in the bay overnight, don’t you?!”
“Yes I know, but I bought the ship, didn’t I?!”
“Look, just taking a flight into Hanoi and go down there by car and boat will save you a lot of time and money. Money you need for the court case.”
“Could you not mention the lawsuit, please?!” Simon said, “I want to bring all my friends. And besides, Valya doesn’t want to leave her cabin and I want her to come with me.”
After the cabin had been restored into the original state, Valentina insisted on staying on the yacht, threatening Simon to put rape on the list of indictments he already had to face in court. Vladimir was furious about the turn of events, blaming this development on the Stockholm syndrome.
“Oh shit! Is it her cabin already?! It was just a matter of time until you would fall for that bitch. Okay, she’s got a pretty arse and a nice set of boobs, a combination that would make every man spineless, but that goes way too far now! She’s draining you of all your money.”
“Don’t talk about her like that and don’t talk about money, Beth. I love her and she loves me!”
“Oh dear me! You have shit for brains, little baby brother, you’re hopeless!”

It took them a couple of weeks to arrive in Haiphong. That was as far as the Vietnamese authorities would let them with the yacht. From there they were supposed to charter a local boat with a licence to go into the limestone karst archipelago. But these days, there is nothing money can’t buy. So they went in there, into the bay. And the night before they had a big party on the yacht.
“Don’t tell me, Sébastien going overboard last night was bad! I do not need this, Beth!” Simon said with glazed and bloodshot eyes, slurring his speech. “Bad things make my hands wrinkle. And surely nobody wants to take pictures of wrinkly hands! At least not Matsumoto!”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?! One of your sycophantic friends has disappeared, probably died, and you don’t care?!” Elisabeth hissed through her teeth.
“Well, of course, I do care! By the way, did you find someone to carry me up to the top of Matsumoto’s pillar? It is going to ruin my hands if I have to climb up there myself.”
“Ever thought about using gloves?”
“Gloves make my hands sweat, which results in wrinkles. Different cause, but the same unacceptable outcome.”
“I take it that neither your beloved Valentina nor any of your pea-brained hand modelling friends will do the job. What did you bring them here for anyway?” Beth said resigned.

Same rules for everyone. So they set off right after dawn to climb Daido Matsumoto’s limestone pillar. Bayani and Datu, two members of the Filipino crew, volunteered to get Simon up there. A chair was tied to Bayani’s back to which Simon was strapped. Datu supported them from underneath.
While Bayani and Datu’s hands and feet were torn open by the edgy limestone, Simon’s hands were kept in sealed up plastic gloves which were filled with cotton wool soaked with skin smoothing lotion. The two helpers were sweating like pigs while Simon complained about the chilly breeze the higher they got.
On top of the pillar they had a beautiful view over the entire archipelago. As Bayani and Datu bandaged their bleeding hands and feet, Simon saw another – much bigger – ship closing in on high speed. But this was of no importance to him.
“Matsumoto-san, I have arrived!” Simon shouted. But Daido Matsumoto was nowhere to be seen, even though the top of the pillar was no bigger than six hundred square feet. One of the luxurious chronometers that Simon had brought for the shooting, told them that they were ten minutes ahead of schedule. When they eventually found Matsumoto behind the pavilion, still asleep on a tatami mat, an explosion was clearly audible, the rumble crawling up from sea level, and the pillar started to sway. The bigger ship turned out to be an enormous mega yacht, which just had rammed Simon’s comparatively meagre vessel, whereupon the smaller yacht had crashed into the karst pillar.
“Simon,” a megaphone voice blared up from below, “it’s me, your friend Vova! I’ve come for Valya. To rescue her from your despicable hands!” Simon stood there at the edge of the pillar, speechless, looking down at his sinking ship. Many black, blond and even ginger dots were trying to get away from the spot as quick as possible.
“I am so sorry for your tinny ship, Simon.” Vladimir over the megaphone again, “But I couldn’t let you get away with this. You understand that?!”
The pillar’s swaying had intensified significantly. Everyone was trying to hold on to the few trees and bushes on the top. Matsumoto only woke when the pavilion shifted away from him and finally jumped over the pillar’s edge. Simon with his sealed up plastic gloves clinging to a pine tree, saw how the pavilion smashed into the helicopter and hence also destroyed the helipad of Vladimir’s yacht.
From the bottom to the top, the pillar started moaning and cracking. Bits and pieces broke out of the limestone and splashed into the water. Then the karst pillar tipped over completely. After a big and loud squelch peacefulness returned to the Halong Bay nature reserve once more, again.

Matsumoto, once awake, was not inactive any longer, he took loads of pictures before diving into the waters of Halong Bay. Many of the pictures show Simon’s hands, which made Simon very happy, still holding on to a pine tree branch while screaming in mid-air, which didn’t. Others show how Matsumoto’s former safe haven, the limestone pillar, sinks Vladimir’s mega vessel and buries it at the bottom of the bay. But Matsumoto did not stop taking pictures when he was under water. There is one single, but blurry, shot that shows Vova and Valya through the side scuttle inside the yacht’s mini-submarine, quickly clearing away from the scene.

The Land of Virtue

I’m from a spot in between two states which are actually the same,

From one country where pride became synonymous with shame.

 

I’m from the makeshift den in the branches of oak trees,

From yellow rape fields humming with swaying bumble bees.

I’m from amidst the old fruit trees in our family’s garden,

From the question what has become of them; I beg your pardon?

 

I’m from the cobble stone streets covered in dirt,

From the air which is grey and where breathing will hurt.

I’m from a nearby coal fired power plant.

But complaining about the conditions we shan’t.

 

I’m from summers spent on the shores of the Baltic sea,

From family gatherings when I still was me.

I’m from the peacefulness of my cousins’ company,

From a derelict barn with tunnels dug into the hay.

 

I’m from a land with real existing socialism, how adorable!

From a country slid into post capitalism, how deplorable!

I’m from an ineptitude that borders on the imbecilic,

From a need to learn which made me become bibliophilic.

 

I’m from the pictures in our family’s photo treasure trove,

From a dusty shelf near the ancient living room stove.

 

I’m from the back seat of a little funny plastic car,

From dad who drove mum to their first date in a local bar.

 

I’m from the past that shaped me,

From the present that I am today,

And from the future that lies ahead of me.

Sanctuary of the Golden Tusk

The bus spits me out at a sharp corner in the road.

“Just follow that path. You cannot miss it!” the driver yells at me while making the stolid vehicle dash off, like he is late for mass. And indeed, only after a few minutes I get to a heavy wrought-iron gate. Two pillars, made of red brick stones, support an ornate metal arch with the word Sanctuary on it. The squeaking wings open reluctantly to a huge front garden. I make my way on a narrow gravelled path, which is winding through a lush and emerald green lawn, towards the main building.

Miranda, my new flame, had asked me to pick her up from here, tonight. She sometimes volunteers in the community. Today she and the nurses have organised a masquerade ball for the elderly.

It is an old manor house converted into a retirement home for the wealthy. In the hallway I am stunned by the intricate decorations and the amount of money that must have been put into the refurbishment. Around me there is silence, but in a distance I can hear chattering and other disturbing noises.

I am still marvelling at the skilfully renovated staircases and the paintings – depicting detailed hunting scenes – on the ceiling, when all of a sudden something approaches me rapidly. Down an incline, coming from the main hall into the entrance hall, an armoured vehicle with a cannon is closing in. No wait, it actually looks more like a creature – out of a science fiction horror film – on a wheelchair with an arm stretched out, holding a crutch like a lance. The crutch hits my crotch and I am paralysed, folding in half like a jack knife.

“Ding dong, anybody home?!” an extremely dark woman’s voice – probably shaped by gallons of whiskey and heavy smoking – is coming out of a deceptively real Alien costume, and asks me, “Are you one of the new nurses?”

I am grasping for air. “No, I am not!” I manage to say in pain through my clenched teeth, “I am looking for Miranda.”

“Uh huh, but there are no Mirandas here, only Agnieszkas or Kasias. Because they are cheaper.” I am lectured.

“So you do not know where I can find her?”

“No, I do not! And by the way, I hate to repeat myself!” she says, pulling off her Alien mask. Underneath, her face looks like that of an extremely shrivelled up Sigourney Weaver. She stares at me for quite some time. Her tongue pushes her false teeth out of her mouth and then she sucks them back in – over and over again.

“If you are not one of the new nurses, what did you come here for?”

“I came to pick up Miranda.”

“Oh no, not again! I told you boy, do not overdo it!” I am warned again.

 

I leave grumpy Sigourney alone with her lethal weapons of crotch destruction and drag my hurting body towards the big hall where all the noise comes from. The view that offers itself to me there is both shocking and amusing at the same time.

The place is overwhelmingly decorated with garlands of all colours of the rainbow. The hall is littered with broken plates and cups. Food is everywhere. A nurse’s hat and some other pieces of clothing hang down from the garlands and the glittering chandeliers. And while navigating through a vast sea of tipped over chairs, I step into a Tayto crisp sandwich.

In one corner a retired Spider-Man is staring apathetically at a big slice of black forest cherry cake, drooling out of his skin-tight mask. A bald Little Mermaid in a wheelchair chases after a limping Pocahontas on crutches through the hall. The proud native American princess apparently stole Ariel’s deep red wig.

One of the real nurses sees me, waves at me, but then decides to come over herself. “Can I help you? Are you looking for someone?” asks the nurse. ‘Head Nurse Ratched’ it says on her name tag.

“Yes, I am looking for Miranda. Have you seen her?”

“We do not have a Miranda here, I am sorry. But since you are here, would you mind helping us out, quickly? We are head over heels in chaos, as you can see. And we are a bit short of hands at the moment. Could you collect the champagne bottles from the tables, please? I do not know who did such a ludicrous thing, but the alcohol obviously does not go well with the patients’ medications, as you can imagine. And the situation is clearly going out of hand.”

Just across the hall Snow White has fallen asleep; her head is hanging over the back of her chair. One of the Seven Dwarfs quickly seizes the opportunity and is trying to get his gout-ridden hands under her dress.

“Okay, I will help you. But you really do not have a Miranda here, do you?”

“I am afraid not, but wait, there is that girl here today, she helps out sometimes. I honestly do not remember her name; it may even have an ‘m’ in it. I have not seen her in a while, though.”

Getting my hands on the bottles proves to be quite challenging. The moment I try to take away a bottle of champagne from an elderly Goldilocks, three arthritic bears throw their walkers at me, simultaneously. On the other end of the hall a couple of nurses busy themselves with tying an ancient but nevertheless rather hyperactive Egyptian mummy to a stretcher. I slip off and leave the main hall quickly to find Miranda.

On the top of the stairs a wrinkled version of Pippi Longstocking is sitting on a big baking tin, just about to slide down. I just let her be. She is old enough. She knows what she is doing.

I have to find Miranda and leave this madhouse; the sooner the better.

On the gallery, a visibly exhausted Poseidon is having a rest on a chaise longue. The god of storms has a colourful rolling whistle in the corner of his mouth, which inflates and deflates in accordance with his quite audible respiration.

 

The second floor is rather quiet, compared to the pandemonium downstairs. Most of the doors to the senior’s rooms are closed. But there is one door that is left ajar. The light from that room illuminates the otherwise dark hallway.

Inside I see a nurse hovering over a walrus, which is lying in the bed. The tail fin and the flippers cease to flap the longer the nurse hangs over the old creature’s head. Then she takes something out of the walrus’ mouth. I am witness to this scene by just watching it through the crack in the door.

The nurse is actually not a real nurse; it is my Miranda. I open the door and go inside. But Miranda is somewhat surprised to see me.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to pick you up, Miranda.” I say, trying to give her a hug.

“Uh-huh, is it time to go already?” she takes a step away from me, though, holding in her hands a big ball of something that looks like playdough.

Next to the walrus’ head lies a moist cloth. I lift it up and put it to my nose. Its distinctive sweet smell makes me feel woozy instantly. I do not remember the name of this volatile substance, but I have it at the tip of my tongue. I put the cloth back down again. Embedded in the walrus’ mouth there is an old man’s head with a toothless hole for a mouth.

“What is going on here, Miranda?”

“Nothing, just let me finish this here, will you?! Then we can go home, okay?!”

Having said this, she peels an unusually big set of golden choppers out of the playdough and lets them slide nonchalantly into one of the pockets of her white nurse tunic. The dough with the dental impression in it, she puts in a small plastic container. Then she makes a tube appear from another pocket. The semi-liquid substance from the tube, she squeezes into the now solid dough form. The substance takes on a near golden colour while it sets very quickly. After less than a minute, Miranda breaks the fake set of artificial teeth out of their form. Then she puts the golden plastic teeth into the old man’s mouth. I see that the sweet smelling cloth has suddenly disappeared from the side of the walrus’ head.

“So, are you ready? Let us go and get one or two bottles of the champagne from downstairs, for a nice evening at home. What do you think?” she asks.

“Miranda, are you for fucking real?” My face is just blank, for once I am struck by awe and disgust at the same time.

“Oh, you think the blue-haired bunch downstairs has not left us any? No worries, there is loads of it left. I ordered it myself.”

“You are fucking nuts!”

“What is wrong with you? Get your act together and be a man for a change, will you?!” Miranda surprises me more and more.

“You are crazy, stealing that old geezer’s precious teeth?!”

Miranda just smiles at me for an inaudible answer.

“I am going to scream; you know?! And I am going to tell nurse Ratched!” I threaten her. But Miranda does not seem to be very impressed by this. She steps closer to me, and puts the sweetest smile on her face; tiptoeing she is just about to kiss me.

“My silly boy, will you shut up now?!” she says winking at me with her left eye. And before our lips touch, she suddenly pulls the cloth out of her tunic pocket, slides it smoothly up between the two of us and puts it swiftly into my face, covering my mouth and nose. I am taken by surprise and the sweet smell of chloroform, but do not offer any resistance. I just let it happen.

I am fainting; slowly sinking down on Poseidon’s cosy chaise longue, right next to him. Shortly before I eventually pass out, I grab her by her tunic’s collar, and pull her closer to me. Only a split second before I have to let go of her again, I get a first and a last glance at her name tag, which plain and simple reads “Mindy”.

The Tooth Fairy

“Good morning! How was your weekend, sweetie?” the old lady asked, after manoeuvring her wheelchair out of her apartment onto the narrow veranda, overlooking the car park below.

“Oh, hi Ronda. Didn’t hear you coming. But I’m fine, thanks.” Mindy said, smoking the cigarette she had just lit. “How are you?”

“Thanks for asking, I am good. But tell me, sweetheart, how did your date go the other day? With the guy you ran into, I mean?!” Ronda said, also lighting a cigarette.

“Yes, it was nice.” Mindy said, taking a long drag from her cigarette, inhaling deeply.

“The young lady says ‘it was nice’?! You can’t be a bit more specific there, can you?! What does he look like? Is he handsome? Did you get to see him closer? I mean the full package.”

Mindy blushed. “Well, I didn’t get to see him any closer. Not on the first date. You know, Ronda, I’m not that kind of girl.”

“I see, that’s why it’s so quiet on the other side of the wall.” Ronda winked at her. “Back in those days, when I was your age, I was the opposite of you. I was working as a nurse in a military hospital. Over in Europe during the big war, the second one. The young lads in their slick army uniforms couldn’t resist me. And, you know, those kind of things usually work both ways. Back then, it was all wieners and sauerkrauts.” she chuckled at herself. “But I’m getting carried away. You said ‘first date’. Was there a second date, you didn’t tell me about?”

“Well, Ronda, we are in Europe here! And no, it wasn’t really a second date.” Mindy said, wrinkling her brows and rolling her eyes.

“But you got to see his wiener, didn’t you?” Ronda interrupted her.

“No, Ronda, I did not get to see his penis. Because it wasn’t an actual date.” Mindy said, turning away from Ronda’s inquisitiveness, shaking her head. But then decided otherwise. “Oh, but of course, I actually did get to see his willy. It was hanging out of his hospital gown.”

“You don’t say! A hospital gown? He’s in that role play stuff, isn’t he?” Ronda asked, and went on. “I don’t really like it, but my third husband was crazy about it. He liked a lot to look like a hypertrophic toddler and always wanted to be breastfed. If I refused, he would cry like a baby.”

“No, he is not into role play. At least not that I know of. He got beaten up on our first date …” said Mindy but couldn’t finish.

“Oh darling, isn’t it wonderful when men get into a fight over a woman?” Ronda said. “When I came over here to Ireland, many years ago, I was talking to those two men in a pub one night, when all of a sudden they started getting agitated in their funny Celtic language and then got into a fight. I am pretty sure it was about me.”

“No, it was about money. We hadn’t even gotten into that wine bar yet, and then those guys finished him off right at the door. They took him for someone else.” Mindy said.

“Oh, that’s terrible. The poor boy.” said Ronda.

“And then the paramedics came and took him to the hospital and stitched him back together.” Mindy then somewhat preoccupied with fumbling a little item under her blouse, she went on, “… They really took it out on him.”

“What? The paramedics, those bastards!”

“No, the two other guys in the bar.” said Mindy

“Oh, now I see, and then you went to visit him in the hospital?”

“Yeah, I even bought him some nice flowers.”

“Oh, you’re such a nice girl! Will you see him again?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” Mindy answered, “He won’t let me.”

“Oh, why not? What happened?”

“Well, he took a restraining order out on me.” stated Mindy, “I’m not allowed anywhere near him.”

“No, he did not?! That stupid son of a bitch! How dare he?!”

Mindy, with a devious look on her face simply said, “I let you in on a little secret, look.”, then opened the two upper buttons of her blouse and made her self-made necklace appear, on it the big, four rooted molar. She showed it to Ronda, smiling proudly.

“Jesus Christ! Is that one of his?” asked Ronda, wheeling a bit away from her. Mindy simply nodded in smug complacency

“Mindy, seriously, you are definitely one odd character. Who the hell are you? Are you the fucking tooth fairy?”

Memories

Christmas Eve 1982, I’m five years old. It is the first winter in the house of my father’s parents. A very distant view, you might think. Even before winter, in summer to be precise, when we moved in with them, it had already started to get very cold – emotionally.

The reason why I remember all this, is a photo in my hands. And because the date is scribbled on the back with a pencil.

In the photograph with the faded colours, I’m wearing grey-green dungarees and a black turtleneck jumper with white, red and brown stripes around the sleeves. On my feet I have red house shoes with a flap and a popper each, which keeps them from slipping off my little feet. I actually can’t really see them in the photo, but that’s the memories coming alive.

My hair looks like any other boy’s hair in that time in my country. East Germany in the early eighties. Long-ish over the ears and in the back and a fringe in the front. Yes, that was how boys used to look like, back then. Almost like modern day Spanish girls, except for the cow’s lick I used to have in the upper right corner of my forehead.

My parents took the photo with me sitting in front of a meagre Christmas tree. Next to me, on the left side, there is a huge red teddy bear with a white face, belly and paws. He is three quarters of my size and on the left side a doll is leaning against a wall of cupboards.

The photograph was taken indoors and I suppose some Christmas music was playing from the record player in the background. Behind my parents there’s a black and orange chequered couch, which is covered by a thin black blanket with red climbing roses on it. My younger sister giggles while she’s jumping around on the sofa. I’m just guessing.

I’m sitting on the carpet. On my lap I’m holding a big green dump truck. And there’s a broad and very proud smile on my face.

Looking back on that photo, which is more than thirty years old now, I’m feeling melancholic. The photo and all the things in it, including myself, emanate a certain air of innocence which seems to have gone lost long ago.

“Listen …” I say to Mini-Me in the photo, but stop myself. As if I was able to talk to a child in an old photograph?! I actually want to tell him to always cherish every single moment of happiness, because I know that there will be times ahead of him when it will be hard to remember what being happy even felt like. I don’t tell him, because then all the educational value would be lost like tears in rain.

Then, which surprises me more than anybody else, I go on, talking out loud, “…don’t be so hard on our parents, though. And start earlier than I did to forgive them for what they did. You know, they were just in their early twenties and probably thought it was a good idea. They just didn’t know any better. Today I can see that they’ve suffered a lot themselves, too. But you see, they’ve always managed to not let us children see their struggles, while carrying their own baggage.”

All of a sudden, Mini-Me smiles and waves at me from out of the picture.

“I know what you mean,” he says, “Christmas dinner today wasn’t as great as the one we had last year with all the others around.” and goes on, “Can you believe, we weren’t even allowed to speak at the dinner table and grandma shouted at us as soon as we did. And then she stared daggers at papa.”

“So you already get the whole picture, huh?! It is as it is, even parents are other people’s children.” I say to him and smile. Smart boy, I think to myself and keep on smiling.

He giggles about what I just said, then puts the truck aside and pulls a funny face at me, which makes me laugh. But then he slowly drifts off, wrinkles his brows and frowns.

“Tell me,” he asks, “from now on, will it always be like this? I mean with grandpa playing the deaf-mute and grandma shouting at papa and treating mama like a … what are those people called … the ones you can buy and sell and slap whenever you like? In films they are usually black.”

“Well, like I said, don’t be so hard on our parents, actually all of them. And try to see the good intentions behind it. Of course, there will be hard times, but there will also be happy times.” I say and to my very own surprise I add, “Regarding your current situation, 2004 will be a very happy year, believe me.”

Mini-Me sticks his hands out of the photo towards me, spreads his little fingers, wiggles them and says “See, until then that’s definitely more years than I’ve got fingers on both hands, and even with my toes” he looks down at his small feet, shakes them too, “it’s not enough.” This makes me laugh and that in return makes him smile again.

“Yeah, don’t you worry too much and laugh away the obstacles that will come along your way.” I say, which makes me feel a little bit stupid.

Mini-Me picks up the truck again and shows it to me. “See what I’ve got this year, I still can’t believe it?! That’s the best Christmas present ever! They are all in for a surprise tomorrow!” he says. He will be taking the truck to his cousins. And like me, back then, he barely can wait to visit our grandparents from our mother’s side and of course the rest of the family, too.

The truck itself, I remember very well, as if I had it here right in front of me. That’s why I tell him, “Listen! Be careful with the wobbly tires. They come off very easily.” He pulls one of the tires off and then winks at me, bold as brass.

“I’ll figure out how to put them back on, this way nobody will notice when they come off by themselves, because I can fix it myself.” he says with incredible logic.

While I’m talking to Mini-Me in the photo, I turn on the computer and check the internet for the lottery numbers for our eighteenth birthday. By the time I have them on the screen, however, Mini-Me has turned back into a small boy in a faded photograph from more than thirty years ago.

On the Beach of Amoy

I’ve seen things, you people wouldn’t believe – a burning ship on the beach of Amoy.

An old fat guy with a thick white fake beard is wedged in a glaring red neoprene suit that looks like it’s painted on his chubby frame. His huge bald head is covered by a tight red hood with white fluffy fur lining – only his big fleshy earlobes stick out.

The guy is standing on a sleigh-like thing which closely resembles one of these scrapped Chinese house boats. But the boat – hung with ridiculously colourful and flashing Christmas illumination – doesn’t lie in the water itself, it is carried by two skids which used to belong to a yellow water plane in a distant past. And if that picture wasn’t bizarre enough already, the whole Christmas-water-sleigh thing is pulled by the last nine specimen of the Yangzi river dolphin. The dolphins lie pairwise in their gear. On their heads they wear flashing plastic reindeer antlers. In the lead, a single river dolphin with a red nose is waiting impatiently – thrashing around.

My view goes back to the old fatso in the wetsuit. His face is now clearly recognisable as that of the Bodhisattva Maitreya, the pot belly Buddha. And the old round faced guy calls out to the red nosed Yangzi river dolphin in the lead “JIA YOU, LUDOLF! JIA YOU!” And off they buzz.

One of the last things I see, is a juicy explosion when the last Yangzi river dolphins and the Christmas-Bodhisattva’s water-sleigh-vehicle – while attempting to cross the Formosa Strait – run into a people’s republican underwater mine.

Feeling dizzy, I step aside to the left. Right beside me, a huge sack – a blue, red and white chequered bag with a zipper and long handles – filled with nicely wrapped Christmas presents hits the beach of Amoy. Worn out by the unusual visual effects and events I slump back into the sand and fall asleep immediately. When I wake up once more, everything starts all over again…

Painting, Shovel, Pomegranate

Inspector Li gets up. Walks around. And sits down again.

I assume that I was brought to the local police station after some law abiding citizen found me unconscious and heavily drugged on a beach littered with cardboard boxes. I am still a bit hungover and my memory seems to be connected to a Wi-Fi-hotspot other than my-self.

Inspector Li gets up again. He walks around with his arms folded behind his back. His back is slightly over bent. He apparently tries to look like a proud Mao (Zedong) in his best years, walking the lines of his fellow communist guerrilla fighters.

Inspector Li is keeping an eye on me while pacing from wall to wall – starting from the cross-barred window to a heavy wrought-iron door – back and forth. My arms are behind my back, too, even behind the back of the chair – not folded but tied to each side with handcuffs. I do not understand.

Inspector Li sits down, shakes his head and says he does not understand.

“What don’t you understand?” I dare to ask after a little while, in a very low voice with a bowed head.

“Why you are here.” he says.

“Your people brought me here.” I say a bit louder, testing his reaction upon my suspicion. He is puzzled and stares out of the window.

“That’s not what I mean.” he says absent-mindedly, still with his gaze pinned at something invisible to me outside the window and the room.

The room is white. White tiles on the floor and white tiles on the walls up to the ceiling. There’s a tiny white ceramic sink in the corner by the door. And a bottle of hand sanitizer. Apart from the window and the door, all is glaring white. There is a table in the middle of the room and two chairs – white of course.

Inspector Li is wearing a Chinese police uniform in dark blue, with all the insignia of a high ranking official. He is short, shorter than me. All people here in the south are shorter than me which seemed almost impossible just a couple of month ago, back in Europe.

When he takes off his police hat and puts it on the table, I can see his head. He’s balding. You can clearly see that he’s overly conscientious to hide it. The comb over looks so desperately elaborate, it could easily be taken for one of those traditional Chinese ink paintings – an abandoned pavilion on top of a lonely hill, surrounded by weeping willows, mourning the bearers receding hairline.

Inspector Li sits down again. Stares at me for a couple of seconds and then concentrates with his utmost care on my passport in front of him – leafing through it. Over and over again.

Since my hands are tied to the back of the chair, I try to move my legs to keep my blood circulation going. They don’t move an inch, either. I look down on me and the first thing I realise is that I am stark naked. I can’t see them but it feels like my feet are tied to the chair, as well.

Baffled, I look up at Inspector Li. He’s smirking at me now. His mouth and overbite look like an excavator’s shovel covered by too small a tarp. The shovel prongs – it seems – are still sticking out from under the tarp.

“Where are you from? What does this ‘Germany’ mean?” he finally asks me, holding my passport with both of his hands – still smirking.

“DeGuo” I say in Mandarin. ‘The Land of Virtue’ or ‘The Land of Willpower’, depending on the context, I think to myself.

“Ah,” he says “‘Xitelei’!” which is Chinese for Hitler.

“What about him?” I ask, barely hiding my annoyance. For fuck’s sake, do we always have to be reminded of the least popular figure of our history?

“He likes to bark.” Inspector Li goes on.

“He liked to bark!” I say with audible defiance.

“No, no, no, he’s old and frail, but he’s still alive and likes barking,” he says. After some time – and a look at my bewildered face – he eventually decides to add “my dog.”

“What’s your dog’s breed?” I ask quickly. Just for the sake of small talk and to distract myself from the nonsensical situation I’m in.

“Oh, a French Bulldog he is.” he says, gradually zoning out, again.

He doesn’t seem to be interested in small talk or in distracting me from circumstances like this. He has turned his attention back to my passport, again.

Seeing him like this, there is something disturbingly eerie about Inspector Li and I don’t know what exactly it is. I don’t think it is his frog-ish appearance – his flat head with gibbous eyes, prongs for teeth; neckless, stout, square-ish torso and lanky but short limbs. The longer I look at him – at his over bitten shovel smirk, his puffed-up eyes and his artsy fartsy hairdo – the more I want to run away – even without any clothing. I have never run naked before. But I think it ought to be okay, once you get used to your private parts swinging about. I think, I am losing it.

I am in this room for more than two hours now, I guess. It appears to me thattheir strategy is to drive me nuts with this goofy wannabe authority figure in front of me. He’s still examining my passport – after all this time. I gave it more than one try to engage him in a conversation, but all in vain. Whatever I say, his only response is always that he does not understand why I am here. In between there is only silence. Unbearable menacing silence. You could have heard a single eyelash smash into the white tiled floor, if only one of us had ever dared to drop one.

An annoyingly persistent ringtone is shredding this very silence in wafer thin slices and Inspector Li is digging his nastily vibrating mobile phone laboriously out of one of his tight uniform pockets. He answers the phone in local dialect. I don’t understand a word.

After he’s put the phone back in his pocket, he gets up and walks over to the far left corner in my back. I follow him with my eyes – turning my head. What I see in the corner makes me break out in a cold sweat. My previous assumption that the room is all white was actually quite incorrect. In the corner, there’s a huge splash of red. And there’s a rubbish bin underneath. Next to the bin on the floor there’s a glass jar with a metal lid. Inspector Li picks it up and returns to the table. He sits down.

Beads of sweat on my forehead and my eyes widened like portholes – short, the terrified look on my face coerces him to only one word of explanation regarding the bloody red mess. He stares at me for a couple of seconds and the only word he is willing to push over the edge of his lips is “pomegranate”.

He unscrews the lid from the glass jar and comes over to my chair. Without uttering a single word, he motions me to lift my bum. From under my behind he pulls a cotton cloth soaked with my sweat and puts it quickly in the glass jar and closes the lid tightly.

From somewhere in the room – probably from under my chair – he makes a canvas tote bag appear and sets it on top of the table – right in front of me. But I am still tied to the chair. The next thing he does is almost inconceivable. He comes over, sniffs my body odour and calls me a fox.

Eventually, he looks at my right hand, sees the yellow-brownish smoking stains on my fingers and puts a set of keys in my left hand instead. Then he opens the door and leaves. On his way out, he says “You’re free to go now.” The next second he’s gone.

This room seems to be in the middle of nowhere. I take a look out of the door and see only barren landscape. Lost in thoughts about unchaining myself from the chair, I look out of the door – staring into absolute nothingness.

Il Gran Rifiuto

I should have stayed with Anna that night. The love of my life? She was in for some adult naptime, our debut. But I rather wanted to go on a drinking binge with my friends. With a mocking smile on her beautiful face, she simply said “Oh, you silly men!” So much wisdom from an eighteen year old girl is so unbearably painful when you think about it now, after all what happened.

It was the night after our last exam of the Reifeprüfung. As a son of politically reliable working class parents, I was granted the privilege of attending extended secondary school. I excelled in languages. Russian, Chinese and Italian were my favourites, among others. Because of that, I was chosen from an early stage for diplomatic service. That was the way it used to be in my country. My country needed young and promising people like me. We wanted to build the first socialist model state on German soil.

Anyway, that night we had other – sillier – plans. After a pub crawl we had given ourselves enough liquid courage to challenge the system we all profited from. Fuelled with spirits, we staggered along the streets, singing songs from our school songbooks, dripping with ideology. The tone changed, however, the closer we got to the Wall. We were just in front of theAntifascist Protective Bulwark, pretty close to the first fence and half way into Bob Dylan’s most recent song “Blowing in the Wind”, bawling out “Yes, and how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?” when the sirens went off and the searchlights came on.

There was a lot of commotion – people bumping into each other, toppling over. I toppled over, fell and got stuck in the barbed wire, but the others were able to make a run for it. There are still visible scars on my hands and my arms and my knees and my legs, up to this day. Pale scars that tend to change colour and hurt a bit when the weather changes. Equally long lasting and painful but invisible scars, I was inflicted with shortly thereafter.

Soon enough, I was surrounded by border guards. The barrels of their guns pointing at me. Young men, barely older than myself. Nervous fingers trembling at the triggers of shaking guns. Shortly after that cars arrived, spitting out men in greyish trench coats and hats in similar colour. The coats ran around and asked questions. All sorts of questions.

With my hands cuffed behind my back, I was taken to one of the cars by a border guard, an order from a high ranking coat. “Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!” said the young guard. “Don’t let him bleed on the upholstery, put him in the boot!” was the coat’s reply.

I didn’t know where I was brought, because I had no idea, how long I had been cowering in the car. I couldn’t tell whether it was moving or not – the car. It could have been somewhere in Berlin or some other place far away. The only thing I knew, it was some kind of a prison. And they kept me there for four weeks straight.

The interrogations began soon after I had sobered up. I was brought into a room with two chairs and a table. Placed on a chair, I sat with my back to the door. Next to the door hung a portrait, depicting Walter Ulbricht, the Chairman of the State Council back then. I sat facing the Hauptmann from the scene at the Wall. The one who gave the orders. Now he ordered me “Hands under your thighs, inmate #1138!” I followed his instruction.

An impish smile unexpectedly appeared on his face, “What would you like to tell us?” I stammered that I didn’t do anything wrong, whereupon he started to read the indictment, “You are charged with attempted desertion of the republic.” Then he looked up at me and went on “I think you are familiar with the less bureaucratic term Republikflucht?” Even though he stopped after that, I didn’t say a word, for his face didn’t look like he was expecting any sort of response from my side. He just gave me time to let it sink in. “You were found trying to remove forcefully the protective measures from theAntifascist Protective Barricade. We know you were not alone, you had help. And we want the names.”

I was interrogated for hours on end during the nights. They wanted the names of my friends and the men behind this heinous crime. It was ridiculous. Insisting that I was on my own, I somehow managed to keep the names of my friends a secret. It was anything but easy, they, for some reason, seemed to buy into it.

During daytime I was kept in my cell. I was allowed to walk around or sit on the bench. But as soon as I tried to lie down, a guard would come and force me to sit up again. This went on for forever and a day. The sleep deprivation made me completely lose track of time. But I lost more than this. I eventually broke. It started with wetting myself and went on with crying fits – in the cell and even in front of the interrogator.

They were only after the organisation in the background now. My friends were of no interest anymore. To get out of this situation, I told them what they wanted to hear. I fabricated a story with fake names and fake plans. I couldn’t think of anything else, I was a mere picture of misery, having nightmares while daydreaming.

They must have gone after my names and story and found out that it was absolute nonsense and the whole ‘deserting the republic’ thing only a silly schoolboy prank. After some time they even let me sleep for some short intervals.

Close to the end of my stay in Hohenschönhausen their tone changed completely. Since they couldn’t pin anything on me, they tried to use me for their own purpose. I was asked to ‘inform’ for the Ministry of State Security, helping them to safeguard the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. They wanted me to spy on my friends, family and classmates. In return they already had tied up a very comprehensive package for me.

After the obligatory military service I would be offered a place at the college of the Ministry for State Security in Potsdam. Language Department and International Operations. After that a very auspicious career would wait for me in the Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, the foreign intelligence service of the country. “And think of all the perks that come with this offer, like international travel!” the Hauptmann said in one of our last ‘meetings’. Smiling conspiratorially, he added, “With your skills and talents, you’ll make it to the top!”

After this conversation I was given twenty four hours to consider their proposal. In my quarters, I was pacing the cell like a trapped animal or was just sitting on the bench. I didn’t even want to lie down and sleep. My head was spinning. My thoughts were racing. My vision blurring.

The next day, on the way to the interrogation room, I saw my reflection in a glass door. I looked as wrecked as in my first days here. In the room I was read the offer again. With a hopeful smile on his face, the Hauptmann was waiting for my answer.

The NO hit him off guard, I could see that. Still smiling – though the hope had vanished – he reached into the right pocket of his jacket and produced an envelope, placed it on the table and pushed it over to me. “Get ready then, in half an hour you’ll be taken back to your parents’ house.” were the last words the Hauptmann said to me. I would never see him again.

Blindfolded and hidden in a van, they drove me home and dropped me close to my parents’ apartment building. My family was more than happy to see me. They had been fed a pack of lies about what had happened and were left in the dark about my whereabouts. But I wasn’t allowed to talk about where I had been for the last four weeks and what had happened to me in the course of my absence.

I had waited until I was at home to open the envelope. It contained two letters. The first letter declared the results of my final exams invalid. The second one was my expulsion from school. I was cut off of education, I was never allow to attend any school again, anywhere in the country.

Even finding a job proved to be impossible. Wherever and whatever I applied for, I was rejected. I became unemployable. Over the years, I somehow managed to get some money from jobs, friends would be able to get me underhandedly on a short term basis. But these jobs didn’t fetch much money to sustain or even have a family. So Anna left me for the local party secretary.

To be honest, money wasn’t the real issue. We were, after all, living in a dystopian communist dictatorship (which tried to present itself as a utopian socialist society) that provided for all basic needs free of charge and was only asking for one thing in return – total submission. Bleak desolation, however, had to be covered with thick layers of soothing and mind numbing spirits. My increasing consumption was what drove Anna away.

After all the essences of the different substances eventually had evaporated from my consciousness, among humiliation, isolation and frustration, integrity and dignity where the two most important things left. And when asked, if I today would do it again, I again would say NO, meaning yes.

Conversation Hijacking Energy Vampire

We’re in the office. And I’m not sure how he’s managed to materialise right behind my chair. He’s just appeared out of nowhere. I know for a fact that behind me, he’s fiddling with his moustache. I saw him once, at his desk, when he was bored after staring at his fingernails that he massaged some wax into his moustache and then twisted the ends around his fingers.I turn around and the second he’s certain, he’s got my attention, he tilts his head slightly to the left. With his hands behind his back, he takes a bow while grinning like a moustached Cheshire cat, only, his mouth is closed.

“You’ve got questions, I suppose?” I ask him. He asks his question and I’m happy that this time it is something I actually know the answer to. But this doesn’t help. He won’t go away so easily.

Claire calls him “The Energy Vampire” and for Anikó he’s simply “The Hijacker of Conversations”. And he deserves them all, every single one of his names!

We’re done – his question’s answered. I tell him that I have to get back to my work; so I try to turn back to what I’m getting paid for. But as soon as I turn around, he drops one of his hands on the back of my revolving chair, preventing it from swinging around and me from getting back to work.

“You know, I’ve got these new brake pads,” he says “they are half as abrasive as the ones you usually get from the manufacturer. But they want twice as much for them, now.” Still not back at my desk and actually turned a bit away from him, I just ask “For the motor bike?”

I’ve opened the fucking box! Now he talks and talks and talks – very fast, through his clenched teeth, only his lips are moving. He always does that. This makes it enormously difficult and takes a lot of energy in the effort to follow his thread of conversation and puts the chance of taking part in it even closer to zero. Shredded snippets like brake pads, bike chains, engine oil, indicator light bulbs and paint preservatives – all is coming out of Pandora’s Box!

At some point, he’s doing all the talking – still standing very close to my desk – and I’m back at the computer, doing my stuff. I hear him like a background noise. After almost ten minutes I know, he won’t let go of me. So I think, I might as well just have a break.

When I turn around and get up from the chair, I can see his right hand pushing something into his trousers’ pockets. A tiny round tin box is showing in the pocket. He is wearing worn out leather motorcycle boots, denim trousers which are kept in place by a belt with a large wolf for a buckle, and a lumberjack shirt. When I look up at his face, both of his hands are twirling his moustache while he’s still talking to me. I go and get some tea. He follows me.

In the coffee corner, I put a tea bag in my cup and there he is again, with his Batman mug – the two wings for handles. He must have changed the topic of the conversation on the way out here, because now it is Trevor he’s going on about. He tells me, how in the first level, you have to kill your boss and then bang his girlfriend.

He lifts his cup – both wings between thumbs and middle fingers – and sips from his tea. I am a sociable person, but here I act a bit unwise. “What’s the game, you’re talking about?” I hear myself asking, but then it’s already too late. The sluice of his dam of words has fully opened and out comes stuff I really don’t want to know. “Grand Theft Auto!” he exclaims, starting a lecture on this apparently amazing game. But I’m too weak to say something or simply turn away, he clipped my wings of free will by sucking all my energy dry – like the vampire he is.

His moustache is moist from the tea and needs to be brought back into shape. So he takes a napkin from the dispenser and daps the tea drops from his heavy facial hair. Then he pulls out the tin box. Opens it and applies the wax to his moustache. Satisfied, with a broad smile on his face, he twists the ends of his moustache around his fingers, rejoicing.

Since this didn’t cause him any disruption, he goes on with his lecture while positioning himself constantly between me and the door to the office – no matter where I move. He’s doing this subconsciously while he talks and fiddles with his moustache.

Behind him a colleague passes by, a very sad and compassionate smile appears on her face before she disappears through the door into the office. I raise my eyebrows and my annoyance shows on my face. But he keeps talking and is so immersed in twirling and twisting his moustache that he doesn’t even notice – completely absorbed in himself.

Out of the blue I ask him “What’s the wax you use for your moustache?” His smile broadens and he fumbles and digs in his pocket for the tin box. By the time he’s finished, I am gone.

The Molar

I got in a fight the first time I took Mindy out for a drink. Well, I should not have taken her out in the first place, anyway. It was bound to happen, and I knew it.

She was a girl from the office building across the street from my work place. Not particularly cute or something. More of a plain Jane than anything else. The first time I noticed her was in the canteen in our building. Not only people from my company had lunch there.

I was hunkering down on the floor, trying to pick up my wallet and was just about to get up, when she inattentively manoeuvred her food laden tray extremely hard into my somewhat prominent voice box.

Since the tray came to a sudden halt, a bowl of hot stew skidded towards me and spilled into my face, trickling down on my shirt. She was over caring and worried that she might have caused some permanent damage. I could not speak and breathing proved to be difficult, as well. So she made me lie down on a bench in the canteen and bent from my head somewhat awkwardly forward to clean my face and shirt thoroughly with napkins. After she had finished, I got up, gesturing that I was fine and left quickly.

After five minutes, I had just arrived back in the office, when my phone rang. The secretary said that a very distraught girl named Mindy wanted to say sorry. These calls continued to happen for the duration of an entire week, always around lunchtime. On a Friday I turned to jelly and answered the call. She invited me for a coffee after work.

Needless to say that the outcome of this endeavour was almost as disastrous as the stew episode.

When she picked up my cup from the counter and brought it over to the table, she was so excited that she squeezed the paper cup so much that the lid popped off and the hot coffee spilled all over me. Again. Thanks to her thoroughness I looked presentable after ten minutes of meticulous cleaning. Again.

She was all in tears about how sorry she felt. Since I did not want to see her crying, and to stop her from sobbing in public, I said without due consideration that next time I would invite her for a drink. This made her smile. Again.

One day the following week after work we went to a place called Pedro’s. They are known for good wines and they serve tapas, as well. It usually is a quiet place. But when we arrived, an obviously inebriated man came tumbling out of the front door. Still following the tottering guy with my eyes, and very curious about what had happened to him, I left all my gentlemanliness and Mindy behind and was the first one to enter the door … well, I did not see it coming, not in a million years … and then it hit me … like a wrecking ball.

It all happened like in the Matrix, the film I mean. Slow motion. I turned slowly. Very slowly. Although in slow motion, everything that happened to me seemed to happen much quicker. The first thing I saw after the initial punch was one of my molars – a big one, number thirty I suppose – spinning through the air with beads of blood orbiting around the big tooth and its four roots like little red satellites.

I immediately knew that it was one of my precious teeth, because I connected the throbbing pain and the unmistakeable taste of iron in my mouth with the molar pirouetting in mid-air, right in front of me.

It was all slow motion. But unlike in the film, I was not able to move any faster than my surroundings. It felt like skipping rope in a pool of thick honey.

The next time I clearly saw it coming, but could not do anything about the situation. The adrenaline was released in the same manner, painstakingly slow and in spurts. The stimulus-response chain seemed way too long. So, neither fight nor flight were even viable options.

But still, an angry man’s fist was closing in with a ferocity that even slowness could not diminish. Now the other side of my face absorbed the impact of the punch, submissively. I could even see the skin of my cheek sluggishly wobbling up before my left eye. I faltered, but somehow managed not to fall. Respond, however, I did not. Could not.

Punch number three – the last one I remember – came from behind, unexpectedly. In retrospect, it felt like a rubber mallet for a high striker coming down on the back of my head. While tipping over like a plank, one of the very last things I saw, was my precious big molar in a pool of its now liquefied red satellites in the corner close to the bar. My face and body made heavy contact with the ground before stretching out flat on the wooden floor. Then, remarkably quick, I drifted off into unconsciousness.

As soon as I regained consciousness again, I started feeling absolutely whacked. Mindy was hanging over me with a worried, but smiling face. A pink napkin in her hand, she was dabbing the remaining blood from my bruised and swollen face. Next to me a huge pile of more, but deep red, napkins had gathered.

A minute later, I turned to the corner of the bar where the big molar had been lying in a pool of blood, but it was gone. I asked Mindy if she had seen my molar, but she said that she had not. With an awkward smile on her flinching face, she said that the dentist could easily fix my molar problem and it would feel even better than before. I found that remark rather strange.

Then the paramedics came and heaved me onto a stretcher, carried me outside, put me in the back of an ambulance and drove off. The next day Mindy came to visit me in the hospital. Through a bouquet of flowers, she started to tell me the story of last night.

Apparently, three guys had a fight over the bill, when one of them walked out on the other two and left the restaurant. When I entered the dimly lit premises, shortly thereafter, the other two equally intoxicated men mistook me for the guy who had actually made a run and almost beat the living daylight out of me until they realised that I was not their lost friend.

After quite some time Mindy had eventually managed to put the flower bouquet laboriously in the big clay vase on the table close to the window. Her cleavage, all of a sudden, caught my attention. Her V-neck jumper framed something very familiar. But I was not sure if my vision was trying to trick me.

It turned out that Mindy was a dental hygienist, quite an expert on teeth herself, working for a dentist in the building across from my office. She said that even though there usually was a long waiting list, she already got me an appointment with her boss for next Wednesday to fix my molar problem.

As soon as Mindy realised that I was staring at her chest, her face started jerking again. And all of a sudden, she seemed to be in a hurry. Walking backwards towards the door, she waved good bye and left me alone with the flowers in the otherwise empty and clinically white room.

The day of the dentist’s appointment came quickly. I was lying on the chair and the doctor was getting ready for the treatment, when Mindy entered the room. With her she brought a big pack of napkins and sat down next to me, smiling.

The moment Mindy bent over me, stretching open my mouth for the doctor to work with the instruments, a skilfully self-made necklace came hanging out from Mindy’s white blouse. On it a spotless white object with a professionally drilled hole in it. Under the pain caused by the dental instruments, the doctor’s relentless hand and last but not least Mindy’s necklace, an intended scream regrettably drowned unheard in my own saliva, which was gathering in my mouth. I only could stare aghast at the thin silvery cord dangling around Mindy’s neck, holding my molar.

Ovary

Ovary in itself is not a weird word. Not at all. As we all know, the ovary is a very essential part of the female reproductive system and that fact makes the word ovary an important rather than a weird one. It is, moreover, the circumstances it has been used in, which makes it a weird word to me. Or was it the circumstances that were weird in the first place?

I don’t remember his name. But this shouldn’t prevent me from telling the story, should it? Of course, he had a real name, a Chinese name, but I can’t remember it, because the events have obscured my memories. Maybe later it will come back to me, while I am reading to you. If so, I am going to let you know. But for the time being we’ll have to go without it.

There’s something that I remember about him, though. He was balding. That’s what it was. And you could clearly see that he was overly conscientious to hide it. The comb over looked so desperately elaborate, it could have been easily taken for one of those traditional Chinese ink paintings – an abandoned pavilion on top of a lonely hill, surrounded by weeping willows, mourning the bearer’s receding hairline.

He was one of my student at the time when I was giving language classes for adults in China. He was one of those students who never said a word during class but became quite inquisitive after all the others had left the room. He always allowed himself plenty of time to get his belongings back into his knapsack. This way making sure that the other students had already vacated the room so that he could ask his questions without risking to make a proper fool out of himself. But he wasn’t a fool, he was only a bit bloody-minded.

There is something else that I remember about him. And maybe it will help me to recall his name. When he was smirking, his mouth and overbite looked like an excavator’s shovel covered by too small a tarp. The shovel prongs – it seemed – were sticking out from under the tarp.

When learning a foreign language one ideally tries to study it with the assistance of a native or near native speaker. And since most of the Chinese people could not afford to go abroad and study their preferred language properly first hand, so called foreign experts were called upon to upskill the people of the People’s Republic of China in any desirable language.

However, not all of us who came to the Middle Kingdom had an inkling of how the Chinese language works, let alone the pronunciation. To be honest, only an insignificant number of foreign experts were able to speak Chinese. To help all the others, the Chinese were more than willing to find a suitable solution – names more familiar to the foreign expert’s ears and tongues were taken on. The class rooms where filled with Peters, Pauls and Marys during English lessons, while mostly Wolfgangs and Hildegards attended German classes and Chinese Carmens and Fernandos could be seen studying Spanish.

I mentioned the near native speakers because it was a common practice to sell non-native speakers for native ones. People will pay more money when they are under the impression of being taught by native English speaker, for example. I had been chosen to pretend to be Marcus from Scotland. This was my boss’ idea. He was a sleazy spiv from Hong Kong. And proud to be in the possession of a British passport, he hated his fellow Chinese brothers and sisters from the mainland. Instead he liked to fleece them by selling them fake mother tongues.

I watched a lot of Sean Connery films, back then, to get an idea of the Scottish accent but gave up soon, because what is an accent to a person who doesn’t even know how to speak the language. I don’t know what my colleague Natasha, the enigmatic beauty from Siberia, did. A pale and lanky ginger herself, she was supposed to come across as Irish. Maybe she developed a liking for Liam Neeson?

It was in one of my first classes that I gave in English when I met him. There was something disturbingly eerie about this man and I don’t know what exactly it was. I don’t think it was his frog-ish appearance – his flat head with gibbous eyes, prongs for teeth; neckless, stout, square-ish torso and thin but short-ish limbs. The longer I looked at him – at his over bitten shovel smirk, his puffed-up eyes and his artsy fartsy hairdo – the more I knew that he was going to be difficult to deal with.

I’m so sorry, but I still can’t remember his real name. And no matter how hard I try, it won’t come back. At least not in time for me to finish the story here. So let’s just assume that his name was Li, Mr Li.

Everyone had already chosen a name and most of the names were actually nice and real ones. Only one wasn’t. But Mr Li insisted on keeping it. We told him what it meant in Chinese. Even showed him pictures. But he liked the sound of it. It had a very nice ring to it, too, he said, and stubbornly refused to take on another name. That’s how the word became a weird one to me, because of these peculiar circumstances. He was so adamant about being called Mr Ovary Li.

Skunk Weed (In Praise of sweaty socks)

In Bangkok nobody cared what I’d backpacked.

I hoped that in Dublin it wouldn’t be checked.

That they’ll find out about the weed,

Is the reason why I’m so afraid.

And yet it happens, the guy in customs insists.

But open the backpack, I don’t.

Then the sniffer dog comes, since their claim still persists.

So keep the backpack closed, I won’t.

The smell of the content crazy him drove,

Like a pot of shit on a heated kitchen stove.

And soon you can see the repellent effect,

Of smelly laundry which they’d love to neglect.

The dog’s nose wrinkles, even his hind legs give in,

The smell is too strong for the dog ‘n my kin.

No one dares to touch, so the weed isn’t found,

Too strong the smell, which makes the dog spin around.

Then they take him away and say “No offence!”

So I still have the weed which was sewn int’ my pants.

Who do you think you are? a.k.a. The Morning Things Changed

I

Him

As I awake this morning from an uneasy dream, I find myself without a nocturnal penile tumescence. I lie on my back with slightly more weight on my chest than usual. Lifting the duvet to see what is going on, I see that I am wearing my girlfriend’s pyjama – girlishly pink fleece with floral design. The warm and cosy one – actually a present of her mother’s. She always puts it on when she stays home reading or talking to her friends on the phone.

What has happened last night? I went out and had a few drinks. Me and the guys from work – a usual Friday night. Do I remember how I got back home and into bed? No, I don’t. I had a couple of pints and apparently seem to have a blackout, but I don’t feel hungover, at all.

I turn around to the left side of the bed, to where my girlfriend usually sleeps, to see if she is there and what she is wearing. But wait, I am already on the left side of the bed. What is going on? I turn to the right. And there she is. She is wearing my stuff, no question about that. But wait again, there’s something not quite right here either. She is not that bulky – never used to be. That is definitely not her. Where is she? Because that over there is – me?

I turn around and lie on my back again – clueless, I stare at the ceiling for a little while.

The other me is still sound asleep. But is it really the other me? The questions is, who am I? Again I lift the duvet and embark on a journey of discovery. I unbutton the pyjama’s front.

Jesus! Boobs! Nice ones, I have to say. I kind of know them and I love them. Now I touch them which feels good and weird at the same time; good, because they are like my girlfriend’s and have exactly the same soft feel, but then I have the sensation that somebody else is touching my breasts which feels awkwardly weird! Having boobs – in particular – is something completely new for me. Further down I discover why the morning wood was actually impossible. What is going on here?

The other me is moving. It turns around and now I see my face as if I have a look into a mirror. I am stunned! But now again, who am I? There is unfortunately no real mirror around, anymore. Just a couple of days ago, we had taken the big one off the ceiling above the bed.

I turn to the nearby bedside table and find my girlfriend’s phone. It takes me quite some time to unlock the screen, but then the camera tells me that I am my girlfriend. At least I look like her. I am in my girlfriend’s body. Probably she is in mine, too?

The other me opens its eyes. Slowly. It recognises me. As my girlfriend? With a smile on its face it comes over. The other me looks at me like a famished man looks at food. And then she kisses me. It feels like kissing my girlfriend. But she tastes like an ashtray – yuck! It feels good, even though, I don’t like her beard. It is whiskery.

I feel drawn to my girlfriend, but she is inside my body. I move towards it and she comes closer to me. We kiss and touch each other. I really wish I could go all the way but I can’t. I am not ready for this, yet. I want her but not within my body, that feels a bit strange.

Go and fuck yourself?

I turn away from her and my body. I say “I am exhausted and I don’t feel well, sorry!” And it is actually quite easy to fake it and even convince her. Slowly, I turn around. She stops urging me. But she, with my hands, is still all over her body caressing me from behind. Then she comes a bit closer again. She, with my mouth at her ear, says something very thought-provoking “Under different circumstances, this probably would have been my line in the script.” I can’t see it, but I know she’s smiling with my mouth. Then she kisses her ear and I close her eyes.

---

 

Her

As I awake this morning from an uneasy dream, I find myself with a nocturnal penile tumescence. I lie on my left side and my head is as big as the universe – big bang, expansion, super nova – everything seems to happen at once in there. My mouth tastes like a small animal has died a terrible death in it.

I lift the duvet and see that I am not wearing my soft and fleecy pyjama. I am wearing a t-shirt and stretched shorts – which looks like a tent has been put up down there. How come, I am wearing Marcus’ stuff? And why do I have a penis, for Christ’s sake? And fucking hell, every move is just another journey into the land of self-inflicted pain. So I stay put.

But what has happened last night? I remember staying home and talking to Rachel who was nervous about her date on Saturday. I didn’t have the usual two or three glasses of wine which I need when talking to her on the phone. Why am I hung over, then?

Someone else is in the bed and moves around, but I stay where I am – it just feels better that way. But I have to figure out why my arms and legs are hairy and why I am having a boner. I just realise now that I am not on my side of the bed. What is going on here?

The other person in the bed is moving around again. But I don’t. I do not feel comfortable in my current constitution which is pretty much the whole of my physical sensation at the moment. It feels like one of those out-of-body-in-somebody-else’s-body experiences. I am hairy all over my broad chest as well – probably even my back is covered in fur. I will check that later. For now I am busy discovering my penis and my balls. Why of all the things in the world a cock with two balls? This is stimulating because they have a very familiar feel – like my boyfriend’s crown jewels.

But still, it feel as if somebody else is touching my private parts – and it feels good and strange at the same time. The strange part is that it is completely new for me to have this very sensitive package between my legs. It responds to every touch. But unfortunately, every pleasurable touch – which spurs the blood circulation enormously – is followed by the painful realisation that I am – for some incomprehensible reason – still hung over.

The other person just let out a muffled sigh. Where I am now, I can feel that someone is watching me. I would really love to know who I am! And I am lucky, because across from my side of the bed is the wardrobe. It has a mirror-like glass front. With a closer look I can see my boyfriend lying there. I wave at his reflection and he waves back. But this is impossible! Does that means, if I am not mistaken, that I am him? Am I in his body?

I start moving around very slowly, which causes surprisingly less pain now, but still. I want to know if Marcus is here in the bed with me and I want to know what he is. So I turn around. But I keep my eyes closed to give the impression that I am still asleep. I have to prepare myself for what I am going to see when I open my eyes. At the moment anything could unhinge my fragile mental constitution, as I don’t know who I am and why my body is covered in hair and my face is – for my taste – in demand of a proper shave.

I open my eyes. Slowly. What I see doesn’t make me sway because I look straight into my face, like into a mirror. But I am perplexed. My body is just lying across from me in this very bed and my eyes are looking at me. The more I look into my own eyes, I don’t see myself over there but my boyfriend. He is in my body and I am probably in his.

My view – for some reason – changes from my face to the unbuttoned front of my beloved fleece pyjama in front of me. I can see my boobs which sets a peculiar chain reaction in motion. The sensitive package between my legs gives a signal that it is very much alive and growing. Even though this makes my blood boil, the hangover seems to have vanished altogether. My hands and mouth want to go over there and touch and kiss them and all is driven by these very demanding genitals. There is nothing I can do, so I let myself go. I love it when the mob of hormones defeats reason.

And then I kiss myself. It feels like kissing Marcus. But I can sense that he doesn’t like my beard and the taste of ashes in my mouth. We kiss and touch each other and I feel extremely drawn to my boyfriend even though he is in my body. I want him! But he doesn’t seem to be comfortable with the idea of getting fucked by himself.

He turns away from his body and says with my voice “I am exhausted and I don’t feel well, sorry!” He turns around now. So I stop urging him but am still over my body caressing his back.

Then I get again closer to my ear. And with his voice I say “Under different circumstances, this probably would have been my line in the script.” I smile and kiss my ear. From my position I can see my eyelashes move when he closes my eyes.

---

 

Them

There is a hairy chest lying beside him.

“Jesus, that looks like a dead monkey here next to me!” Marcus burst out, but instantly realising that this is actually his chest, only seen from a different angle.

“No, it is not dead it is still moving, look …” Julia says with his voice, taking a deep breath, which makes his chest move up – and then after a little while go down again.

“We have to go back to that restaurant.” he hears himself with his sleepy voice saying.

“What restaurant?” Marcus asks.

“The one, we went for dinner on Friday night,” says Julia “the Chinese restaurant run by that strange guy called Pedro.”

“Oh yeah, I remember him. Where was he from again?” Marcus asks, but he already knows. Pedro was born in the suburbs of San Francisco to Mexican parents in hiding. Soon after his mother gave birth to him – and because he was a cry baby – his parents were found out and deported back to Mexico. He, as a proper American orphan, was then raised by Chinese immigrants in the fourth generation. They brought him up like one of their own kids. That’s why he doesn’t know any Spanish but is instead fluent in many Chinese dialects and knows all their customs. When he was a kid, he went even so far to sacrifice the contents of his daily lunch boxes – on an altar, he specifically built for that purpose – to the kitchen god, for his dream had always been to open his own restaurant.

Torn between his dissimilar origins, he is wearing a thick black moustache and runs a dubious but hugely successful Chinese restaurant with a lot of basement activities. Rumour has it, he is running a human trafficking hub somewhere under Parnell Street in Dublin. For a nice bit of money – which he usually loans out directly to those gullible East European girls – he supposedly arranges illegal travel documents for these involuntary sex workers and gets them ready for shipment over to the States and Canada.

The Chinese restaurant he runs, is actually called Tijuana, only written in Chinese characters, which nobody really notices, for nobody really knows Chinese. Strangely enough, the place, in the middle of Chinatown, is only known as Pedro’s. On the menu – apart from mind-blowing traditional Chinese MSG dishes –find delicious fusion titbits like sweet-sour enchiladas, guacamole filled fortune cookies or stinky tofu burritos can be found.

“Well,” Marcus says after a little while “the food wasn’t that great. I wouldn’t want to go there again, to be honest.”

“It is not because of eating out, you simpleton. There was something wrong with the food, we had. At least I had some serious issues afterwards. And I think you too.” Julia says.

“What do you mean? I had issues?” he enquires “I didn’t have anything! I went for a drink with the guys from work afterwards, didn’t I?”

“That’s what you think!” says Marcus’ voice sarcastically.

“Oh please, spare me this that-is-what-you-think bullshit!” he say “What did I do according to you then?”

“As soon as we got home, you stripped naked and we had the most ludicrous fight ever!” Julia says.

“Well then, what was it about – the fight?” he mocks her.

“Over my pyjama – the pink one. You wanted it for the night!” she says.

“Oh c’mon, don’t be ridiculous! That did not happen! You are shitting me?!” Marcus says, but losing conviction very slowly.

“No, I am not! You were wearing it this morning, weren’t you?” Julia says.

“Not exactly, I mean, you were wearing it and I woke up in your body! That’s something different, isn’t it?!” he says.

“Well, okay. But I just want to find out what happened and reverse our sex change. And that’s why we need to go back to the restaurant.” says Julia reasonably.

---

 

II

Him

As I wake up, I am still in my girlfriend’s body. And she in mine. For the time being, there is obviously nothing we can do about this peculiar situation. We’ve tried, but weren’t able to wake up from this bizarre dream. Since we still feel rather young and full of juice we decide to try sex. From my point of view, I have to say, I wouldn’t have thought that penetrating myself could be so full of pleasure.

It is Sunday morning and my girlfriend’s phone is ringing. We are still in bed and I wait for her to answer the call. After a while the phone is still ringing, but she is not moving an inch. I get the phone and hold it in front of my face, so that my girlfriend can see it.

“Baby please, answer the phone, will you? She is your mother, now!” says my voice, coming from my head resting on my girlfriend’s soft chest. Lifting my girlfriend’s head, I can see that obnoxiously impish smirk on my face. Only then I realise that I have to answer my mother’s call.

“Hi Mom, what do I owe the honour of your call?” I hear myself snappishly with my girlfriend’s voice asking. The moment my girlfriend bites one of her nipples with my teeth, which is awfully painful, I know that the tone of the opening was somewhat inappropriate.

“Julia, you sound a bit grumpy today. Am I disturbing you?” my new mother asks.

“No, not at all!” I lie “I was just thinking of you and Étienne.” I try to save the situation.

“Oh that’s nice, because we were thinking of you, too!” mother says “And we thought that it would be a great idea to have you and Marcus over for lunch.”

Étienne is my mother’s new lover. She took her yoga instructor after Julia’s father had come out, a couple of month ago, and moved in with his long-time love affair. He lives now with his assistant, a Ugandan guy called Joseph Amin – allegedly a son of one of Idi Amin’s nephews, in Dublin, where he is holding a chair in African studies at Trinity College.

“And do you know who is going to be here, as well?” she asks, and without even bothering to wait for an answer, she goes on “Your brother and his new girlfriend will be here any minute! Isn’t that fantastic? They have great news, they said.” Oh no, we cannot refuse her invitation, no we can’t, not today! We will have to manage, somehow!

“Oh sure, it will be grand to have the whole family around!” I pretend unconvincingly.

We are short of time, get up and then shower together. Julia wants it because she likes it, but it is just time efficient – that’s how I see it – now. To be honest, it is still kind of a challenge for me to soap my own body from my current perspective. But Julia, on the other hand, really enjoys to be gentle to hers, which I, of course, relish enormously.

But the shower wasn’t the worst part of getting ready for mom’s invitation. It is, to get properly dressed.

“Do you really think, I should wear this?” I ask Julia.

“You don’t like it, do you?” she says, but doesn’t wait for me to respond “But you bought it for me on our last trip to London, remember?!”

“Well, of course, I do and I like you wearing it, but not me.” I say, lagging miles behind, mentally.

“But I am afraid, you will have to!” she sneers at me “Believe me, at the moment it looks way better on you than on me.” She has got a point there.

I put it on, even though my mind keeps screaming inside my head – “Please, not this colour! Not! This! Colour!” But I have to get my ego to step back for a while. I like it really on Julia! But on me? Being inside something remotely yellow makes me feel nauseous. To be abandoned in a canola field, for me, is the most hideous torture ever.

It is really hard for me to give in. And I am like a small child now, a child that doesn’t get what it wants. And that’s usually when they get very nasty.

“It makes my belly stick out and it looks like I am bloated.” I say defiantly.

“No, it doesn’t!” Julia says.

“Yes, very much so!” I continue “And just have a look at my bum, it is so massive!” I know that this gets to her. But it won’t change her mind.

“Stop it, will you!” Julia says calmly, but with determination I didn’t know my voice possesses. It is the second day and she already knows, how to use my voice to intimidate me.

In a last attempt of defiance, I say “What about the one you got from your mother? Wouldn’t she be happy to see it on you today?” I say that, because I know that Julia hates the dress and therefore never wore it.

I do not want to either, but then I hear my own voice with the words of my girlfriend – deeply satisfied – saying that now I have to put on the awfully tight, mint green dress and the white high heels. With a look at my stern face she’s put on, my resistance crumbles. And it is needless to say that walking in dress and shoes is a challenge impossible for me to accept at the moment. But we do grow through our challenges, do we not?

In the car it is all different. When I try to get into the driver’s seat of my car, Julia pushes me away with my hands and says sneering “That’s my car now, sweetie!” I get in the passenger seat and try to relax because the dress is so unpleasantly tight. How does she manage to breathe in this?

Étienne welcomes us at the door. As a proper macho man he cheek-kisses me and then – to my surprise – kneads my buttocks shamelessly. I look at Julia who has already sneaked through the door into the house with my body, knowing what would happen to hers with me inside. She forces a smile on my face which is more contorted with pain than she really intends to show.

“You look so beautiful in that lovely dress, sweetheart!” mother chimes and after a little while she asks “Don’t you think, Marcus?” it takes her a while but then Julia nods my head. With her focus back on me, her daughter, again, mother goes on “You still fit in the dress after all this time.” Julia rolls my eyes, she knows, what I don’t.

Thomas, Julia’s younger brother, gets up from the lunch table – almost taking the whole table cloth with him –, puts the knife to his wine glass whereby he almost breaks it. He is in his mid-twenties, clumsy and careless, and has already fathered three children with three different women. Now he announces that his current girlfriend – a pale and lanky ginger in her late teens – is pregnant by him, as well.

He is beaming and his mother storms over to him and hugs him. But then she realises that his inconspicuously pallid girlfriend is at the table, as well. The poor girl perfectly blends in with the white table cloth that Thomas has accidently draped all over her. Mother unveils her, gets her up and showers her with kisses even though the girl is two heads taller than herself.

I can feel my own eyes staring at Julia’s body. Julia indicates me with my face that as her brother’s older sister I am expected to behave as such. I quickly proceed over to mother, ginger and brother and hug them awkwardly. Given the circumstances and all the unnecessary excitement, Siobhan, Thomas’ contemporary girlfriend, now storms off towards the bathroom with both her hands covering her mouth and bloated cheeks.

I am in the kitchen with mother now. We’ve done the dishes, an old family tradition, even though the brand new dishwasher was constantly seducing me with its presence to use it.

It is one of those rare hot days and the humidity in the kitchen is pretty close to one hundred percent. A bead of sweat is running down my chest. It tickles and I can’t resist. I reach over to the clay bucket with the cooking utensils and grab a wooden spoon. I shove it down the cleavage, between Julia’s breasts. The look on my mother’s face is an unmistakeable combination of bewilderment and disgust.

Still a bit confused, she tries to divert and quickly changes the topic. “I really like this dress on you, sweetie. But do you know what I really would have loved even more …” mother says. I am utterly clueless. But she goes on anyways “… that Marcus would have given a speech like this at the table and that your dress wouldn’t fit any longer, because someone new would grow inside your tummy.”

“You know, I am not the one who is not ready. It is Ju…” I hear myself with my girlfriend’s voice saying, but I stammer on “t…t…to be honest, Marcus really wants kids, but I am the one who is not ready yet. And now that I got the job, I always wanted…” I am being honest on Julia’s behalf “…and at the moment it is really not the right time.”

“Oh, not the right time, not the right time?!” she parrots me. “You are in your thirties and your biological clock is ticking louder and louder every second! Can’t you hear it?” she says, almost screaming. Eventually realising that this might have been a bit too aggressive, she adds apologetically “I am just saying.”

But then all of a sudden she throws herself at me, sobbing “I can’t take it any longer, I want my own grandchildren! I do not want to see any of those sad little school girls anymore. He knocks them up and then they leave and take their babies with them when it pops into his mind to shag another one of them. He is like a dog. I wish he came a bit more after his father … No, not really, but you know what I mean.”

I hold her like a real daughter would hold her mother in a situation like this. I am brave, even though her snot is running down the front of the breathtakingly tight and mint green dress, which makes me nonetheless gag.

“Baby, you have always been the more reasonable one – compared to your brother, of course. And even though I think he is a bit dull and you could have done way better, Marcus, nevertheless, might be a good father, don’t you think?!” mother says. My eyes go wide. I am fuming. But I swallow hard, pull myself together, and bite my lips.

“Mom, this is really not the right time, believe me.” I say to calm her and myself down.

“What is wrong with you today? I don’t understand you!” she says.

“No mom, you really wouldn’t understand …”

In the hallway I see Julia’s face in the mirror. The humidity has killed the make-up. I enter the living room. With an expert’s look on her face Julia intercepts me and directs me out of the room into the nearby bath room.

“You have got lipstick on my teeth.” Julia says “And the makeup looks like your face is melting away. Did you cry?”

“No I wasn’t crying. But I came pretty close.” I say.

“Your … ahem … my eyelashes have come loose! What happened in the kitchen?” Julia asks.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” I say.

“C’mon tell me, what did my mother do to you in there?” Julia asks “She can be very blunt sometimes.”

“Listen! Careful now! I don’t want to talk about it! Do you understand?!” I say, on the edge. She looks into her own distorted face and I can see in the mirror how my hands reluctantly refresh my girlfriend’s make-up. When she tries to put the long fake eyelashes back on, she blunderingly uses too much of that glue. The eyelids stick together. That’s all I needed on top today. Blind like a mole, I can’t open her eyes.

“She asked about grandchildren, didn’t she?” I am asked. And then it breaks loose – I can’t hold it back any longer – the strange mixture of hormones and anger. One single tear at a time, I squeeze out between her gummed up eyelids, which runs down her freshly rouged up cheeks, like the Colorado River cuts through Arizona forming the Grand Canyon. And deep inside her, I start sobbing silently.

As we leave, on the way out, Étienne does it again. As soon as he touches my behind, my fuse eventually blows and my blind rage erupts into mindless violence. Like a scared up snake, Julia’s hand darts between his legs and I grab his balls through his baggy trousers. I twist them. He groans. Julia’s mother comes over to see what’s happening. She’s observing the scene speechlessly.

After the failed attempt to cheek-kiss and touch me again, his head is now resting on Julia’s right shoulder. He is in pain and can barely stand by himself. Even with Julia’s mother nearby I don’t let go of his balls. He doesn’t say a word, he is just whimpering – quietly, into Julia’s ear.

With his ear close to my girlfriend’s mouth, I, with Julia’s soft voice, whisper calmly into his ear “The next time this happens, I am going to pinch them off! Did I make myself clear?”

His shaven head is red like a tomato and the veins have emerged from under his skin. With a whimpery moan he assures his adherence. I let go of him and he reels back into my mother’s arms – still whining.

She looks at her battered and temporarily useless lover and then stares daggers at both of us.

“Julia, honestly, I am seriously worried, you are not yourself today…” mother says.

We leave. My-self in the passenger seat while my body, with Julia’s serenity, is driving my car.

To be continued …

I am a Snake

On an elevated spot, a smooth stone is soothing my scaly skin.

Rays of sunlight from above give me warmth.

I’m doing nothing, just basking.

It is said, the world’s wisdom reflects in my actions.

So skilfully slow with determination I go,

About the things in life.

With limbless elegance I make my way,

Without wasting too much energy.

The Chinese call me the little dragon,

But fire I can’t breathe.

Nor do I bite, but nevertheless,

My forked tongue is venomous.

From up above then down below,

Vibrations I can sense.

Low frequency, though invisibly,

For me, however, intense.

A nagging thing can hunger be,

So out of nowhere suddenly,

I jump!

My prey isn’t granted much time,

Slinky body twists around a fluffy lump,

I choke the squirrel in its prime.

Resistance is futile it quickly learns,

The squirrel’s breath is gone.

A lifeless body in the ferns,

Dinner preparation’s done.

Before slipping into a food coma,

I slither my swollen body elegantly back

To the elevated and cosy spot.

Thereafter, I’m doing nothing, just basking.

Haiku Galore

A field of roses

Wide and red and green, no white

Fertilised with rotten lilies

 

On Mutton Island

Strong gales come from the west

Slippery boulders

 

A new camera

Such splendid scenery

The battery, flat

 

It’s just a few pages

Still, many open questions

But soon it will end

 

Countless shelves of books

Hundreds or even thousands

But only one life

 

Slowly the door opens

Squeaking hinge in need of grease

Yet I do not move

 

Arsenic extract

First sweet, later acerbic

In chilli tasteless

 

Music fills the room

Surrounded by the masses

All dancing, but him

Jorge

He was sitting on the old worn out leather chaise longue across from me. I sat in his comfortable armchair. There was only a small coffee table between him and myself. Black coffee for him and a cup of green tea for me. He leaned back, seemed relaxed. His left arm rested comfortably on a cushion, which he had placed next to his leg.

“You are not responsible for what happened up there on that building!” I said, trying to comfort him, because he was shaking, just a minute ago.

“Uh-huh, what do you know? Let me tell you something! I don’t care what you think or even know, I know that I am! I am responsible for it! I was her therapist!” he looked bashfully at his left hand, which was clenching the cushion, again.

“You know, that day when I got a call for a jumper. It was her, Siddhi, the young girl, pregnant, and probably infected with some awful and incurable sexual transmitted disease. Completely strung out, she was. One of the truly doomed, after all what happened to her in this country. She asked me why she should even bother living.” he stopped, took a sip of his steaming hot coffee and mumbled “Cual es el punto de vivir?” and then put the cup with his, again, shaking right hand noisily back on the saucer.

“They train you to tell people all sorts of nice things. For instance, to ask them about their dreams, and to remind them of all the other people who would miss them – as a last resort, of course. But then with her, I hesitated, only for a second, and she saw it. Within that second I honestly couldn’t think of one optimistic thing to say to her. So she spread her arms and jumped.” He fell silent for a couple of seconds, lowering his head, lost in thoughts.

“What is wrong with this world? Honestly, what is wrong with that fucking planet?” he started agitated anew.

“There is nothing wrong with it. It is just that you need some rest. And you shouldn’t let things get to you.” I said.

“I can see what happens when people have too much rest and don’t let anything come near them at all. Then others take over and things get way too nasty and we are all fucked!” Again a pause. But this time he didn’t let me even open my mouth. As I was just about to say something, he simply raised his hand and shut me out, while he himself was still brooding about something in ruminant silence.

“You are right, the planet is all fine. It is just the overbred human race that has gone raving mad. We act like we own the place. We deprive this poor blue planet of all its natural resources and leave deep scars on and underneath its skin. We drive all animals into extinction like we own them too. But the worst we do to our own species. Chasing the idea of the one true thing has brought us to a point where we massacre ourselves about believes and superstition. We neglect knowledge because we have surrendered all responsibilities to non-existent deities. In the name of the fucking father, I can’t stand it anymore! It’s not that I don’t like people; I am just physically repulsed.” he said, leaning back and staring at the chandelier.

“You went a bit too far here with your judgement, don’t you think?” I said frowning.

“No,” he went on, very calm “not at all. Let me tell you a story, will you?” I simply nodded and he continued “There is this village somewhere here in India. And there lives this guy, let’s call him Pramod, okay?! Pramod seems to be a nice guy, but also a bit bored and so he engaged himself in extramarital activities. For those he had chosen the village headman’s daughter. They met in secrecy, but were found out eventually. To restore the headman’s family’s honour and to punish Pramod’s family the village elders decided that a gang rape would suffice. Apparently a common practise in this region and in absolute conformity with the villagers’ gods. Soon, Pramod’s younger sister – female and therefore an inferior and expendable member of the family – was chosen to function as the scapegoat in this collective punishment. The retribution was carried out without delay. The both physically and spiritually broken creature was then abandoned by her family due to the desecration she had brought upon her family. What an absurd logic!” He paused, waiting for me to let it sink in.

“See where I am coming from?” he asked. And if you wanted, you could have seen a strange look on his face, grimly satisfied. But only briefly, because then he lowered his gaze again and one hand clenching the other he went on.

“A friend of mine, Miguel, found Pramod’s sister in the streets of a town close to the village she came from and brought her here to this hospital. He asked me if I was able to help her. Yes, I said in all my gullibility.” he stopped, swallowed hard, then stared at the ceiling, blinking he tried to hide his watering eyes.

“I failed him. And I failed her. Especially her!” he said.

“No, you didn’t fail anybody. It was not you who did this to her. It was them, the villagers!” I said, trying to make a point.

“Huh,” he laughed dryly “if I was not responsible for Siddhi, then we all are responsible for this! Somebody has to do something about this delusional extremists! We cannot let those fools take over the ship!”

Ennui (In Praise of Philip Glass)

You’re wondering, if I am bored. And I say, yes, I am bored. Which is not to say, I am boring, mind you. But this is for others to judge. To be bored usually is a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement. Boredom, as it happens, is defined as an unpleasant, transient affective state in which one feels a pervasive lack of interest and hence has difficulties concentrating on the current activity.

Being the person that I am, I happen to have a low boredom threshold. This basically means that I am hardwired to pursue novelty and inspiration, and to run as fast as I can from admin work and drudgery.

Susan Sontag is supposed to have said that “The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” But as with many things in life, I venture to disagree. It is not to be avoided, it is to be sought after.

I am sure he does not like it when I say this and most of you will definitely not agree with me on it, however, I think Philip Glass’ compositions are boring, causing boredom. But I will come back to my claim later in this essay – if only for the sake of contradicting myself.

I am bored when I am on the train. That is basically the reason why I get on a train, in the first place. And I try to get a window seat, as well, all the time. Seeing houses, people, cows and sheep pass by, I soon get lost in thoughts, space out, which already is a reactive response to boredom. It is a meditative state in which I can become my most creative self. And do you know who helps me with that? You may not believe me, but it is Philip Glass.

I am bored and I sit there close to the window, listening to Philip Glass’ pieces on my headphones and my mind won’t stop coming up with idea after idea and thought after thought. And my hands won’t get tired of putting those thoughts into words in a file on the laptop in front of me, while houses, people, cows and sheep fly past. The trick with being creative with the assistance of the new technologies is, to be able to withstand the temptations of ordinary distractions like the deep spaces of the internet. Do something for you, instead of with you. Use your boredom wisely.

I have to correct myself yet again, Philip Glass’s music is not boring at all, but it helps me to get the most out of a situation when I am bored. It is like a state of ecstasy. Boredom does not only give us the time but also the freedom we need to do the things that are good for us. It smooths the way for us to disconnect and gives us free rein over ourselves, meaning our mental faculties, our very own creativity.

If you have come to the point where you can accept boredom for what it is – an opportunity and not a threat, to be avoided – then you will be able to get the most out of it for yourself. Use your boredom wisely.

I am bored at work. Everyone might have already been given the opportunity to attend meetings and workshops, which seem specifically designed to put all attendees to sleep. From an evolutionary point of view, sleep – with its inherent exposure to dangers of all kind – poses a threat to the individual’s life. Boredom, like pain, is often protective, serving to spur us away from repetitive and predictable experiences and situations of entrapment that it would be in our best interest to escape.

I am bored when I am out with people who I do not have any connection to. From a spiritual point of view, this can be life-threatening as well. Boredom, it seems, might also be so universally despised, because it is indicative of an unhealthy mental state. Being surrounded by people who do not share your interests are preventing you from becoming who you are supposed to be.

And yet again, Philip Glass’ compositions are not numbing my senses, they rather spur my creativity with their repetitive waves of innovation. An explanation for this rather oxymoronic phenomenon is that the repetitiveness of his compositions lures you into a boredom-like state which the music itself is going to interrupt soon enough when he changes only one single note in a sequence, at a time. This very note drags you out of your lethargy and sends you off into the realm of inspiration. It is like whipping a top. It spins and spins around, but keeps getting slower, which we may even want to call drifting into boredom. Then you whip the top, like Philip Glass whips the one single note in the sequence, and it picks (you) up again. You are back to attentiveness.

When I am bored, I see it as a reminder to change something. Boredom shows me that I am not developing myself further with the things I do. It shows me that I am stagnating. And this is what we have to avoid at all cost – inertia. Boredom helps us to identify our indolence. And by avoiding lethargy we can also spur our creativity.