La Petite Mort

von Marcus Krug

 

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!