Grime, page 21
One person, that is, of course.
One evening as he looked from outside at all the solitary people in their tubes, a new business idea hit him, and he became a toucher.
It’s like this:
Most people no longer have physical contact. People just don’t interact with other people anymore, and whatever this circumstance offers individuals as far as peace, the flip side is that it takes a negative toll on the body. They book online, people, check in online, shop at stores with automated self-checkout, talk to service bots, have food delivered by drones, mail by postal robots. All good fun. But it causes sadness and loneliness in one’s body. The bodycam man understands the body. He’s extraordinarily physical. He looks like a two-meter-tall red-haired bee. He smells like vanilla. And his business is working. He’s just come from a large office where he works once a week. The staff, low-level IT personnel, have pooled money to pay him. Each of them gets five minutes of bodily contact. For many, the only contact they experience each week.
The bodycam man hugs, presses, pats. The art is to do all of it without any sexual undertones whatsoever. For a moment, these tense English people soften in his arms. Many cry. And afterwards they function phenomenally. So. Door open, here’s his studio. A little cuddling package is available for just ten pounds, a deluxe session costs fifty. He works nonstop. Weeping oligarch’s wives convulse beneath his hands on the mattress, bankers who have because of stress ground their molars to blackened stubs curl up in his arms, sobbing. When it comes to collecting plus points, the bodycam man’s business is perfectly suited. Nearly every customer gives him a good rating. Immediately, with their mobiles. In the points app. Kiss my ass. You can access the public point standing of any citizen online. If someone has accumulated a certain number of points, it indicates a cash value that will be added to the basic income. If someone has no points or even a negative point total, you can reckon with a shitstorm, though a more civilized one than prior to the era of points. Nobody says things like “You should be gassed” anymore; women are no longer called “cunts” and “sluts” and “whores who should have their brains fucked right out of their bodies,” because you get points subtracted for verbal abuse. Quiet, disdainful censure by others is almost more painful than the previous vulgar attacks people had been accustomed to. Apart from praise or criticism from the hive mind, the point system is also interesting for landlords, banks, insurance companies, and potential sexual partners. Or not. Every week a Loser of the Week is announced, someone at the very highest rung of the negative rankings. The losers, who appear on the karma points home page, see their status follow them online in the following weeks: with a drop in social contact (people shun losers), with the loss of their flats, their jobs, their heat, their water. Societal satisfaction reaches its apex when such a subhuman ends up on the street after all the public attention. At which stage the point system losers get beaten up. Beating up a point system loser does not entail a points penalty.
Once a week the bodycam man turns off his camera. On Friday. After his final client. And he writes additional reports. Requests. Letters of complaint. In order to bring attention to the connection between arson, unlawful gains, and fraud and murder of the real estate firms. He won’t give up.
Good that we persevered—
“There she is,” says Peter, pointing at
His, which is to say
PETER’S MOTHER
Who is standing with a group of women in front of the hotel. Maybe they’re exchanging dates for some designer sample sale or news of a successful new beauty procedure, and they look eerily similar to each other. They’re all thin and have nearly identical facial features. Straight noses, high cheekbones with a natural shine and full but not-unnatural-looking lips. Difficult job for five-factor biometric facial recognition. The faces were constructed by a plastic surgeon using knowledge of the optimal “calculable beauty,” an algorithm that has to do with how the various facial features relate to each other and their symmetrical arrangement. And these faces are what come out of it. The women’s legs are thin, their breasts firm. Fuck puppets. They think they can control men. That they can fleece them for a bit of sex and feigned love. What they don’t know is that men don’t care at all what women think. They value the feeling of having bought women, seeing them dependent, they like being conscious of their financial subjugation, their greed. That way they leave the man in peace and don’t demand any emotions, which the cruel oligarch displays, if at all, only to people sprung from his loins.
The locations where these types of women mingle always have to do with chrome and liveried doormen. They always have to do with the ostentatious display of money, which should damn well produce a sense of euphoria. It doesn’t. But whatever. The means by which the rich shape the contours of their lives is just as depressing as those of the poor. It would seem that people with assets of—let’s just say—ten million have to live in a gated community where they learn a standard way of dressing and how their apartments are to look.
The flats. Ostensibly mimicking the royal family, not knowing that the king in exile spends his days with drafty windows and, thanks to the dogs, ratty carpets.
There’re always heavy curtains, hanging uselessly in the room, with those tassels. The fucking tassels that you compulsively want to stuff into bodily orifices. The orifices of your parents. Even if they’re dead. Also indispensable: an interior designer who buys up old engravings to be resold at a steep markup and sticks them in equally steeply marked-up antique (according to the seller) frames. Hanging things salon style gives the space a sort of eyebrow-raising flair. Interior design is a recession-proof job. Design apps will never be able to miss the tasteful mark to the absurd extent a real person can. Even in a decade of decline, there still needs to be gilt work in a flat. Gold, the immortal burial gift on the voyage to the next life. If it would just come already. The constant stress is no good for the nerves. Peter’s mother is constantly afraid. Of having her cover blown. Of being traded in. Of having to go back. But where?
Peter’s mother’s story of being an oligarch’s girlfriend features tedious triviality and humiliating dependence. It consists of blowjobs that Peter’s mother gives the Russian upon waking up. She looks for a moment into his slightly bulging eyes, then slides down his well-defined, shaved body, takes a deep breath, and sticks his genitals into the space within her mouth, which has taken on an unpleasant taste overnight. She read somewhere that according to Jerry Hall, the secret to a long marriage is to constantly blow your husband. They love it. Peter’s mother does her job. Sucks the appendage. Laughs effervescently. Throws her head back coltishly. Her sex life involves shit-and-piss games. With piercings and diapers which the Russian wears. But their home is top-notch.
It’s a beautiful villa. Peter’s mother works out, keeps herself fit, squeals delightedly at the Versace dresses the Russian buys her. And the quiet contempt with which he regards her. She wears size 2 or 4. That’s, well, that’s not a size 0. The old idiot’s forgotten that you simply can’t get silicon D cups into a fucking size 0. Peter’s mother. Squeals with delight at the Russian’s jokes. Which mostly have to do with humiliating the staff or making derogatory remarks about Poles. She thinks: I’ll get you. She doesn’t think. Of her son.
Unless she forces herself to. Mostly she forces herself to think of her child while sitting in front of the three-way mirror in her dressing room. The view of her beautiful, pain-drawn face sometimes puts her in a self-pitying mood. She cries then. The few times she’d felt something for her—go ahead, say it—child had been long ago. Sometime before Peter’s third birthday, before he started to become weird, and before she realized there was something worse than living in a shithole in Poland. That was living in a shithole in Poland with a fucked-up child. Peter’s mother had been so poor that she now deems it her right to be rich. If that means sucking on a sausage for a few minutes a day, then please. She’s the perfect lover. Good-humored, open to experimenting with drugs. Charming to her Russian’s colleagues, a perfect hostess. She had, as mentioned, had her breasts. And lips enhanced. Every centimeter of her body is taut and groomed. The Russian’s taste has for decades been unwaveringly old-fashioned. Triple-A women had to look like 2017 influencer-hookers. In Europe this look was a bit embarrassingly antiquated and betrayed one’s origins in the developing world. Or what the English took for the developing world.
“Show me Shit Happens,” says Peter’s mother to her fucking Amazon Echo device. The latest episode of the beloved BBC show appears on her flat-screen. Ever since the BBC had been privatized, the programs, unlike the unbelievably dreary old garden shows, are supposed to elicit huge interest among the viewing public. Shit Happens is one of these shows. People are crazy for it. The show’s about the greatest possible humiliation you can inflict on a person. Friends and family members nominate candidates to the BBC, algorithms take care of the rest. Search the net, create a profile, and hit the candidates where it hurts them the most. They take mothers hostage and isolate them from their newborns. Show wives recordings made in a brothel. Show butt plugs in teachers’ backsides. People in front of their computers wanking to cat videos. Speaking of which. Peter’s mother is beyond humiliation.
She’s someone who had stoked the fire with furniture in order to stay warm. Someone whose neighbor had cut a hole in his floor and taken shits into the space above her ceiling, someone who during one hard winter set traps in the woods and consumed highly questionable game. Someone who’d been beaten up by alcoholic Nazis. What on earth could a little Russian, shaved head to toe, add to that? She lets him shove her off his lap in restaurants, smiles when he introduces her to acquaintances as “my whore.” Thinks of Poland, which she escaped, while he absentmindedly fucks her, and thinks of the absurdity of humankind. Beneath all the expensive bespoke suits, beneath the table manners, the ritualized small talk, beneath all their supposed importance and irreplaceability, they carry their genitalia. It doesn’t matter if a new era has begun for some out there, what remains are humans with their testicles, ass cracks, holes—draped in silk underwear, sat on toilet seats, taken in their hands, cradled, always ready, always on the lookout for a chance to get it on. When Peter’s mother is downhearted, when in rare moments she has the feeling that everything she is now living, the perpetual stress over looking good and fucking good, is all for naught, because she takes no joy in her home, her clothes, the view of the park, because she has nobody to share these things with, then she imagines all the people she encounters in the expensive boutiques and clubs as big, smelly genitals.
Then things are fine.
Meanwhile
THE CHILDREN
Have followed Peter’s mother, and the home address corresponds to the info provided by the hackers. The first target can be watched.
In order to attack at the right moment
Speaking of which
After
CARL
Had beaten his dim-witted neighbor to death. Well, what does that really mean, beaten to death? He rang at her door, a teary woman opened up. Actually a totally normal young dim-witted woman, as he had noticed to his surprise. Okay, so there was no fucking tranny or whatever standing there, but there was no going back. He punched her. Kicked her backwards into her room, then bit out her larynx and jumped on her corpse. Yep, the woman was dead at that point, and a few minutes later a division of the private police turned up to arrest Carl. One of the surveillance cameras had captured the whole spectacle from outside. And once again the populace was supposed to owe its gratitude as a result. The days when young women were shoved down stairs, old women robbed, respectable citizens beaten up by roving gangs of foreigners, are over thanks to the tireless expansion of security systems. The current absence of aggression in the public sphere speaks volumes. Which volumes? Doesn’t matter.
Now Carl sits here, and outside, in front of his cell, preparations are being made for the event. He’ll be the first client to have the pleasure of the new disciplinary measures the people wanted so strongly. The referendum had been unambiguous. Eighty percent wanted the death penalty, and all of them had their own image of the bad guy. Kiddie diddlers, woman killers, or perhaps just people who were somehow different.
Carl doesn’t understand it all yet. Not the evening of the murder, and not the fact that he is about to die. He understands only his fear. Which floods his body with stress hormones, an ice-cold sensation. He wants to live, and to forget the depressing evenings in his apartment. He thinks of spring, birds, food, all of which will be gone forever, never to take another walk, never—
And
Now the door opens. Two elegantly uniformed women lead him outside. Carl can no longer feel his legs.
In a well-lit room fitted with a range of cameras sit various representatives of societal authorities. There would be enough space for family representatives, but. A judge is there, a doctor, a Plexiglas box, sealed airtight. That’s where Carl is taken. Now he loses control of his bladder. Now he sits on the floor whimpering. The cameras broadcast it.
To every screen in the country, on the BBC.
Peter’s mother sees the execution only vaguely, as she is kissing
THE RUSSIAN
The Russian shoves her aside like a leftover scrap of food. He’s watching TV. The glass box is filled with gas. Maybe sarin gas, who knows. The death throes come quickly and entail convulsions and foaming at the mouth. A camera pans along the corpse, lying curled up on the floor. The first execution is over. People will notice. So.
The Russian goes back to working out. When he’s working out, he can forget his rage. He is an angry man. He says of himself: “I’m an aggressive man.” He’s not tall. And a short man has drawn evolution’s short straw. A small man must become rich, become powerful, he must always have at his command the option to have someone killed in the case of disrespect. Thanks to a fatal mix of inferiority and delusions of grandeur, the Russian had felt untouchable. Like so many rich men, he was sure he was the only one able to catch on to things. What things? Doesn’t matter. All things. Then a recorded voice message turned up online where he called for overthrowing the government. He was sure it was a Lyrebird fake. His voice had been mimicked by a very intelligent program. That was the latest technology back then, dreamed up by some twat. He also knew that it must be possible to disprove the fabrication, but not if you were sitting in pretrial detention.
So now he lives in this foggy place in a pompous flat and is
Within the ranks of the wealthy, part of the underclass here. The Russian had invested what was left of the fortune he had parked in the Cayman Islands and Patagonia into this piece of real estate in Regent’s Park as well as a sex business. Done.
The Russian heads into the private gym and joins Peter’s mother, who is working out on a rowing machine. The Russian stands next to her. Peter’s mother looks at his face, with its narrow lips and bulging eyes. “What an ugly frog,” she thinks.
“You need to pay attention to your figure,” says the Russian. “Have you stopped wearing your fitness tracker?”
The Russian sees himself as a nerd. As clever. As a modern man. His apartment is a smart home. He’s got the smartest fucking apartment in all of London. Not open source–slash–Raspberry Pi smart, but rather, simply user smart. Even before the sheep allowed themselves to be implanted with chips, the Russian had one. It’s how he opens his car, his safe. It’s what he opens the lock on his Polack’s cunt with, which he secures when he’s not around. Little joke there. The Russian is disgusted by his feelings for Peter’s mother. He hopes the hormones that turn him into a complete idiot whenever the woman is around him will calm down. When she’s not around, he misses her. An unfamiliar feeling. Goddamn hormones. To spite his hormones, the Russian treats Peter’s mother worse than his staff. People and their feelings. Utter chaos.
The Russian owns a refrigerator that restocks itself with the help of a Whole Foods app that delivers goods in the blink of an eye. All the home technology runs on a voice command system—the blinds, the climate controls, the music, the lights, the washing machine. The Russian had the first Tesla in the city and now he has the first self-driving car. The Russian loves technology, he loves the feeling of controlling something. The Russian is planning with some experts to transfer his brain onto a chip. The Russian has never grasped that he will die. But he shares this quirk with many others.
Dying,
THE PROGRAMMER
Knows,
Is for losers. Mate.
This is so cool.
The programmer stares at the wondrous monitor, divided into hundreds of little screens. He has set the AI, which he programmed, for interesting optical key stimuli. Keyword: weapons, keyword: sex, keyword: violent crimes.
His little band of thieves, his codes, the extension of his ego, now trawling the world like tentacles.
And still not yet functioning perfectly. A huge amount of boring shite is also transmitted from the delinquents’ bodycam glasses. A man who looks like a giant bee—running him against the database, it says he’s a former fire investigator who aside from his tendency for troublemaking hasn’t distinguished himself—has a woman in his arms. One of those plasticky oligarch’s birds, who is resting in the arms of the bee, weeping. Man, oh, man, people. Windbags.
The oligarch’s bird
Sobs
Because
For
PETER’S MOTHER
Her longing to be hugged is unpleasant. The man who looks like a bee has barely put his arms around her before she starts to cry. She cries for twenty minutes and can’t say why. Or what about. She doesn’t know a better version of herself that she could miss.
