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.