Of course you’ve thought about death, but you didn’t really expect that it would catch you like that. Your ideal would have been to drift away unnoticed at a great age. A hot bath and the right music in the background, a bottle of red wine, and you would have gone to sleep gently and contentedly. Instead you have this furious daughter yelling at you as if you were the lowest of the low. You should never have let it come to this. What were you thinking of?
Your death takes place in stages. Taja stands in front of you for a moment, shouting at you as you stub out your joint and hope she’ll calm down. A moment later there’s darkness and you don’t understand what’s happened. Something’s missing. The transition. The switch-off. You’re dead, without understanding it. And you always thought there would be an understanding.
Dead?
Dead.
The darkness persists. And in that darkness your body starts changing. From top to bottom, even though you can’t feel it, you know it’s happening. As if your body were bidding you a sighing farewell. As if all the light were vanishing from it, flowing and leaking away.
When the light comes back, it happens all of a sudden and you’re staring at the ceiling. The colors explode around you and you want to breathe out with relief and tell Taja that this has been the worst trip ever. But the trip isn’t over, it’s only just started. Everything starts and ends with death. But you really didn’t expect that it would catch you like this. If you’re honest, there are lots of things in your life that you didn’t expect—not a crazed father bringing you and Ragnar up like a dictator; not a brother who abandoned you at the age of twelve; but certainly not a life in Norway and a wife like Majgull. Not to mention your daughter.
“Dad?”
If you could cry, you’d cry now. Christ, how long has it been since she called you Dad? And she means it. It’s not her voice that gives it away, it’s her thoughts, her feelings. You can read her effortlessly. As if you had a mental connection. It’s a world suddenly opening up to you. You have access to every thought, every emotion. And what can you do with it? Nothing. You’re just an observer who can’t intervene. How fucked is that?
Really fucked.
Taja pulls at you, the ceiling vanishes from your field of vision, you are sitting up again and looking at your little one. Her fingertips stroke your face as if you might shatter if she made a false move, then she recoils and runs away. Shame, fear.
Poor girl.
And as she flees, you suddenly understand what has happened. Her thoughts come fluttering after her like nervous birds, they find you and talk to you and you don’t believe them. And don’t believe them. And don’t want to believe them.
You sense Taja’s presence in the room before you see her. Your eyes don’t obey you any more than your body does. You stare straight ahead. Taja comes and stands right in front of you as if to catch your eye. She doesn’t want to think the word death. She thinks everything else. She doesn’t want to touch you again. She breathes guilt and vanishes from your field of vision.
Taja is back. She’s been thinking. She’s been crying. One of her knuckles is dark. She must have hit the wall. She could never keep her feelings under control. Now she’s sitting next to you. Her hands touch you.
You feel nothing.
Her hands on your neck.
Nothing.
Her head on your shoulder.
Nothing. But you know what she’s thinking.
I hear her thoughts, and if I hear them, perhaps it’ll work …
No.
But if I can see and hear her, perhaps she can …
No, it’s over. There’s no going forward and there’s no going back. You can receive, but you can’t transmit. Get used to it.
And so it grows dark outside, and your daughter leans against your lifeless body and sleeps, while you listen to her thoughts as if to a secret radio station broadcasting only to you. You’re still stunned. You know you’ve gone too far, but do you have to end like this? You and your guilt and your shame.
You listen to your daughter’s anxieties, her helplessness, her fury. And the question comes back again and again: Can he forgive me? Will he forgive me?
You stare a hole into the room. A dead man waiting to see what happens next. And as you’re waiting, the dead cells in your body start breaking down. Enzymes rage through your tissue. Rigor mortis leaves you. Only your fist goes on clutching the remote control like a claw, and won’t let go of it. The rest of your body gives in. As if it wanted to be a gentle pillow for your daughter one last time.
Daylight comes. Taja wakes with a start and vanishes from your side. She’s repelled. She wants to wash and that’s fine, you would have done exactly the same. She’s revolted by death.
When she comes back the light is different, the sun has reached the opposite wall, hours have passed. Taja pushes the armchair further away from you. You see her arm, her leg, you only see her face at the edge of your field of vision. Your daughter doesn’t want you to stare at her. She studies her cell phone as if it holds all the answers. Her thoughts are:
What will Stink say …
Shall I call the police …
Shall I call Uncle Ragnar …
Or Ruth …
Shall I wait …
What will I wait for …
How can he just …
What if …
Perhaps I could …
She gnaws at her thumbnail. You thought she’d have shaken that habit by now, and as if she can hear your thoughts she wipes her thumb on her jeans, draws in her legs and hugs herself. You wish you could hold her, of course you forgive her. She’s your daughter. Even if no one deserves to die like that, you can’t be angry with your daughter. A father is a father is a father.
Then Taja disappears again.
You see the sun wandering across the living room.
The opposite wall turns dark, the wall turns light.
You hear music from the floor above. Your toothpaste jingle blares twice from the phones, then silence. Taja’s probably taken the batteries out. You prefer the music anyway. Alabama 3. You gave her the CD because you thought then she might sit next to you one evening and you could watch The Sopranos and enjoy the title song. She thought the series was strangely quiet. That’s exactly how she put it. Strangely quiet. But she liked the music.
She appears in front of you. She’s been drinking. She’s plundered the bar. Cognac, Metaxa, schnapps. If you could smell her you’d know she smells bad. She’s already thrown up twice and at any moment she’s going to go to the fridge and get the vodka out of the freezer. She’s like you. Weak and in search of release. Forgetting is the magic formula of the cowards. There’s so much she wants to ask you, her head is a book full of questions, then she laughs, because she knows it’s stupid to talk to a dead person.
“And now I’ll drink your vodka,” she says and disappears again.
The living room turns dark.
Your daughter stands in the kitchen drinking your vodka.
The CD comes to an end, the CD starts over again.
Woke up this morning.
Night.
Light in the corridor. Taja staggers through your field of vision. She hasn’t slept, her thoughts are overwrought, she’s drunk and teary and throws a plastic bag down on the table. Almost as an accusation.
You’re surprised that she’s found the heroin. Even though you haven’t made much of an effort with the grass and it’s lying around all over the place, you’ve always been very careful with the hard drugs. Once again it goes to show how naïve you’ve been. Your daughter knows everything about you. Where the drugs are, where you hide your dirty secrets. She probably found your private stash of porn ages ago, and knows about the cameras as well. It wouldn’t surprise you, everything’s possible where Taja’s concerned. And if someone doesn’t come by soon and save her, your little one could go completely crazy.
To watch your own child going increasingly to pieces over the course of two days is pure pain. But hearing all of her thoughts and being powerless, perhaps that’s the true hell after death. Not really disappearing, persisting in a state in which you’re aware of everything that’s happening around you, observing the decay, helplessly, in a state of nonexistence. And to be carried to the grave like that—knowing, but unable to do anything with your knowledge. After millennia of evolution, finally taking another step forward and not being able to use the knowledge because you’ve ceased to exist.
On Friday evening Taja turns crazy. Perhaps it’s your smell, perhaps it’s her doubts. What is she supposed to do? Hello, my father’s been sitting around dead for two days since I killed him, can you come and collect him? You can see it in her, guilt, and more guilt. She’s drinking, she’s barely eating, she looks at you, she looks at the heroin. You want to warn her. She doesn’t know what she’s got in front of her. That heroin’s dynamite. Totally pure. Stuff like that is rare on the market. Hardly anyone can cope with quality like that. You could make neural bombs with that stuff, it’s nuclear.
Please, little one, don’t.
She’s done it. She sits there and raises her glass to you. If you could, you would look away. You can see everything. Her euphoria and her sleep, how she gets her strength back and then collapses in on herself like an empty balloon. And then how she throws up on the floor, she is not strong enough to make it to the bathroom, she is so tired of herself. Every now and again she explodes with exaggerated activity, running with the cell phone clenched in her fist from one corner of the living room to the other, she doesn’t make a single call, wants to sort it all out by herself, doesn’t know how, but wants to. Stubborn and guilty. Her face above the table, the straw leaving a clean track on the wood, her contented ahhh, rubbing her nose and looking at you and looking at you and then deciding.
She takes you under the armpits and struggles as she drags you down the stairs. She’s crying as she does so. Your strong girl is crying. Her plan isn’t the dignified departure from this world that you imagined. But it’s only temporary. That’s what you hope. And besides, she’s talking to you again. Her thoughts are one thing, her voice another.
“I don’t know what else to do. I … I don’t want them to come and get me. And … I don’t want you to … I can’t bury you either, Dad, I can’t …”
She clears out the chest freezer and piles up the frozen packets, fish and meat. A lot that you’ve hunted yourself, with Tanner by your side, early in the morning in the forest north of Berlin, the fairy-tale silence, branches breaking and then the shot. When Taja has made enough room, she heaves you into the freezer. If your body was still in a state of rigor mortis, it wouldn’t work. But you bend easily and she lifts you onto a bag of fish and you sit there almost in the same position as you were in on the sofa. When you topple slightly to the side, Taja wedges two packs of sirloin between your shoulder and the wall. That’s better, even though you’re leaning slightly backward and looking up. Taja tries to free the remote control from your hand. Nothing to be done, you won’t let go of it. She bends down to you in the freezer, strokes your head, and promises she’ll be back soon.
“I’ll be back soon.”
There’s a whup.
It’s dark.
You’re sitting in the cold.
Soon is just a word.
And you sit in the cold. And you sit in the cold.
And you sit and sit in the cold.
The freezer opens, and there’s a scream. First one scream, then three, in the end it’s four screaming girls staring down at you. Their screams subside. You’re proud of your daughter for finally overcoming her stubbornness and calling her friends for help. You can tell them apart, even though you have to get their thoughts in order first. StinkRuthNessiSchnappi. Taja used to give a pajama party every month. When she did, you left the house voluntarily. Any single father should respect his daughter’s wishes.
It would be nice if you could calm the girls down with a few words. It’s not as bad as it looks like, you would say, but of course that doesn’t happen, only the cold from the freezer reacts, it rises into the warmth in threads of mist and settles on the girls’ faces as if your soul were stretching its fingers out to them. Feeling nothing has its advantages. After five days you’re a lump of deep-frozen meat.
“Is he really dead?” Schnappi asks.
“Do you think he’s sitting in there to cool himself down?” Stink asks irritably.
“That’s perverse,” says Nessi, and as she does so you know that she’s pregnant. You also know the name of the boy who deliberately didn’t put on a condom because he thought it would be okay without. Nessi trusted him. Poor Nessi, you think, and hear the unborn child’s heartbeat like whispered drumming. You know what it is going to be.
“Why did you just stick him in there?” Ruth asks. She’s the sensible one who always questions everything. Once she asked you if it wasn’t incredibly boring, squandering your talent like that. She thought jingles were commercial shit. If she hadn’t been your daughter’s friend, you’d probably have thrown her out on day one.
You concentrate on Taja. She’s completely wrecked. Her body is pulsing greedily for the heroin, it’s a dull, weary sound. Her heart’s racing, her lungs are sluggish, her jaw is trembling, and there’s a rotten taste in her mouth as soon as she thinks about heroin. And she thinks about it almost constantly.
Longing, she’s longing.
Taja tells the girls about her fear of ending up with her relatives. She knows your brother will never take her in. She’s right to suspect as much. Ragnar has enough to do with his company. As soon as your death is official, your aunt will take care of Taja. Your little one is a minor, what say does she have? It would mean a new life in Dortmund. Her third life. Taja doesn’t want a third life.
“And how long were you planning on hiding him here?”
“I don’t know. I thought …”
Taja hunches her shoulders. Helpless and anxious.
“I really didn’t mean to kill him, I was just furious and all of a sudden …”
Silence. Stink’s snotty voice.
“What’s that crap all about?”
“Who says you killed him?”
“But he is dead.”
Schnappi joins in.
“Just because you want someone to die, it doesn’t mean he dies because you wished for him to die. If that was the case half the city would be dead. Christ, Taja, he could have had a heart attack or one of those stroke things. The amount of drugs he did, it would hardly be a surprise.”
Thanks, Schnappi.
Before Taja can process all that, Stink speaks again. Even though she’s got on your nerves more than once, you admire her at that moment. Because she never keeps her head down, because she always sees the funny side in every tragedy. Like now, when she says, “Maybe he’s just pretending.”
Her face suddenly appears in front of yours. Freckles and that little gap between her front teeth. She bats her eyelashes at you and says, “Hello?!”
Hello.
“That’s not funny,” says Ruth.
Stink disappears from your field of vision. If you were sixteen again, you’d fall in love with her in an instant. Because she’s a mystery and nobody knows what she’s going to get up to next.
“Was that why you pumped yourself full with drugs?” she asks Taja, and doesn’t wait for the answer, but adds: “How stupid are you, by the way? We live in the same city, have you forgotten that? If you’ve got a problem, you come to us, you don’t get shitfaced.”
“I know,” Taja says in a small voice.
“Leave her be, this isn’t going to do any good,” Nessi cuts in. “We should be thinking about what to do next.”
They all look at you.
“The party is over,” says Stink.
She steps forward and slams the freezer shut.
Darkness, my old friend.
