Grime, page 22
The beginning. Which consisted of excitement. The four-hundred-square-meter building on Park Square East with a view over Regent’s Park, service staff who cleaned the boxwoods at the entrances to the buildings with feather dusters, and Peter’s mother thought: kudos, boxwood leaf miners have no chance here. Peter’s mother gave the Russian blowjobs euphorically, he fucked her in every room, on every piece of furniture, he fucked her the way she was accustomed to men fucking her. Like a hamster. They drove around in his Tesla convertible. They went shopping, they went out to eat. To the plastic surgeon. It was an exciting time.
In the meantime she has become—lonely. She’s grown accustomed to the staff, to the flat, to the delightful private park with its guards. She’s grown accustomed to the days at Harrods and Selfridges, to the comfort behind silk curtains, to appointments at the salon, to pedicures and manicures, she’s grown accustomed to being stared at, and to the children on the first floor of the building.
Whom she hasn’t seen for a week now.
Because of the risk of infection.
One must pay attention.
And
DON
watches the news coverage on a screen while sitting near the Palace of Westminster. The reporter is wearing a mask. First she’s in front of an entrance to a hospital. Her voice is high: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here at the entrance to St. Mary’s Hospital. Behind me you see—
Ambulances, arriving virtually”—say it already—“every few seconds. This is in all seriousness also a moment to be happy about our functioning, right, yes,
Now we enter the building…” (The reporter with the too-high voice enters the building.) “My god, it looks like the third world, when it still existed.” When the third world was somewhere in the southern hemisphere. When the third world wasn’t part of the Chinese colonies. And as a symbolic image you see here the European, white—well, yellow. Dying on the floor. There are patients lying all over the floor, the corridors are overflowing, the staff are outfitted in space suits, and so forth. The reporter has to gather herself, she is visibly shaken. “Children are dying,” she nearly screams. And bends over a dying child. She holds herself—unsteady, but stabilized by the task at hand. “Doctor, a moment.” The reporter pounces on a bleary-eyed assistant doctor in a protective suit. “People are dying, children are dying. What are you doing, what is the government doing?” The doctor answers, sounding strained behind her mask: “Nothing. We’re doing nothing. We’re just providing palliative care to give people some relief. We amputate rotten limbs. But. Multiresistant means multiresistant.”
Appearances of the multiresistant microbes had skyrocketed, so to speak. Public water supplies are badly contaminated, which could be the result of wastewater from hospitals being channeled directly into the Thames and other public water supplies. Or the cause could be something else. Animals pumped full of antibiotics, antibiotics in milk, in groundwater. And now. Measles, pneumonia, abscesses, norovirus, the flu, infected wounds. All are deadly. Particularly for the aged, the poor, the weak, and children; children are dying. Though principally it is the poor dying. Passersby hurry along the streets with masks on; most people wear gloves. The story of deadly microbes will have disappeared from the media again in two days, the poor and aged and children, children will continue to die in larger numbers, but nobody will be interested; attention spans, you know how it is.
And another ambulance with lights flashing
Blocks
Don’s view. She’s been watching the activity at Westminster for four hours.
The House of Lords. Or, to aficionados: the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. A third of the mummies who vote on the future of the nation are over seventy. Half of the honorable politicians live in London. No point. Unlikely that the infirm gentlemen roam around abandoned industrial wastelands in Leeds or Birmingham holding out a basket in order to cultivate relationships with good-hearted degenerates. The ignoble lord moves between Westminster and his club in Mayfair and his apartment in Hampstead or Kensington. On the weekend he heads to the Highlands in order to shoot a few poor beasts with his trembling hands.
Don is bored. Westminster is one of the saddest parts of London. Open-roofed tourist buses every minute; photographs are taken, for what reason nobody knows, you just do. And not to forget the bridge. Quite creepy. The bridge where earlier cars had constantly driven into tourist groups, catapulting people’s bodies into the water, leaving them lying around crushed. Or somebody with a machete or knife went crazy—which stopped happening some time ago. No more terrorist attacks here anymore. Tourists see the world as subject material for photos to be taken on their phones. That is, they don’t. Hurray, it’s still going brilliantly for me! I can fly from Prague to London for ten pounds on easyJet, push my way across this fucking bridge. Take a few shots on my mobile, then sleep in a youth hostel, get bed bugs, and then tomorrow fly back to my wonderful European city, where I’m doing as well as the people here, who get out of London on easyJet, too, and take a time-out, so to speak, from their many jobs. That’s the situation.
Don waits for Thome’s father. Observing Thome’s environment is for the purpose of figuring out a sufficiently humiliating penalty. That’s what they’re doing with all the victims. Figure out the weak spots. And use them. To give the idiots an unforgettable moment. He has to come past at some point to get home, since he’s an old man. Don can’t imagine being so old. In her world it’s all over at forty. Forty is the oldest Don can imagine. It must be awful. It must be like being dead. Like standing here and staring.
There’s nothing happening. The private police stand at the entrance to Westminster. They look as bored as Don on their side of the street. The two of them have to go work out after their shift. Don knows about steroids. She’s seen everything online. The two men are a good two meters tall and must weigh 180 kilos. Each. They probably feel indestructible. Poor idiots. A well-placed shot and they’re a heap of dead muscle tissue lying in the street. The tourists would be thrilled.
Don stares at Westminster Palace. She can think of thirty-six other places she’d rather be. The first place would be with Hannah. At home on the mattress. Various places in warm locations, though imagining it quickly becomes boring because Don has no idea what it feels like in such a place. What it smells like and what you do there. Don can’t know that hardly any of those so-called holidaymakers, who had in earlier times let the world become an overcrowded place, that none of them know what to do on vacation, either. Since there’s always an awkwardness about being in unfamiliar surroundings. How long can you lie on a crowded beach and shimmy through markets; how many T-shirts can you buy?
Which brings us back to the morons standing in front of Westminster, hoping Lady Di will come out of the building. Some of them look at Don and take pictures of her in their desperate search for things to photograph. Don, we remember: war paint, oversize overalls, over which she has on a US Air Force B-3 bomber jacket. Don loves the mildly paramilitary statement of the outfit. She likes that the clothing doesn’t offer any clue as to her gender. Don still has the feeling that she’s a man, which sometimes makes her ask herself what this feeling is tied to. Most of the time Don feels like—nothing. Nondescript, too small, not particularly intelligent and not overly strong. Sometimes she sees herself from above and wonders whether everyone feels the same way. Whether they, too, feel ashamed about what kind of statement their every movement makes. Don had borrowed a giant book of anatomy. Fascinated and disgusted, she’d studied human remains. The corpses of drowning victims, autoerotic mishaps with deadly consequences, decomposed corpses, bloated corpses. Now she can’t look at passersby without imagining them decomposing. That’s what is left. Of all the important people who now run through the streets with masks on and are afraid it’ll get them. As if on cue, Thome’s father enters the scene. The old fool stands on the sidewalk, stretches toward the not-shining sun. His eyelashes are stuck together oddly, like in photos of corpses. Looking at which always made Don wonder: “Why the fuck do your eyelashes stick together when you die, and why is there always a shoe in the picture?” And what about this unusually nice weather …
THOME’S FATHER
Takes a deep breath. Beautiful day. Weather fit for a king. He thinks. The spry, nearly two-meter-tall man with a gloriously full head of hair that has turned a sort of piss color, with a rosy, nearly crease-free face and a very small penis, briefly smooths the vest of his bespoke three-piece suit. He has a good day behind him.
Thome’s father had been able to convince the House of Lords about a new strategy. Roughly speaking, it has to do with the point system, which he has dubbed karma points, and right of access of some segments of society to basic foodstuffs and medical supplies. The prospect of his vision for a just world being realized during his own lifetime has him in a mood to strut. Thome’s father opts to take the hour-long stroll through Hyde Park to his villa. His Hyde Park. His villa. His triumph. Thome’s father likes to cite Randolph Hencken: “Democracy is a dated technology. It has brought prosperity, health, and happiness to millions of people in the whole world. But now we want to try something new.”
Thome’s father is a great admirer of Richard Thaler. The two hoary heads share a disdain for the irrational, utterly moronic masses. Thaler is a cofounder of Nudging, a brainwashing method that uses framing and reformulation as an intelligent, manipulative way of lying. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for it by a bunch of old men who later were to attract attention for sex scandals and corruption. Suddenly the masses are constantly manipulated by their heads of state. Take the weather. Everything cold has for years been negatively portrayed as an anomalous emergency. The permanent spring and summer heat as normal. This reduces people’s fear of climate change. This system of dumbing down now just has a name and a Nobel Prize. Thaler was the godfather of the breakup of the EU. Thome’s father really didn’t believe in the EU. At its core, the EU was, even for him as a neoliberal, too much. Too blunt, the idea of control behind it. It was all too clear that the goal was to allow Germany, this still occupied nation, to become a superpower again. Thaler, incidentally, had inspired in Thome’s father the idea of karma points. The word inspired made Thome’s father purse his lips. Inducements, controls, getting rid of cash, dividing society, total surveillance, militarizing private police. Thome’s father wants more. Wanting more gives him a feeling of limitlessness. The foundation of this desire for more is vulgar greed and the urge to hoard, an affliction most wealthy people have.
Thome’s father has a plan. That he had come up with at his club, along with a few colleagues. Boy, had they been drunk. The Earl of Caugingham pissed into the umbrella stand. Which he had mistaken for one of the waitstaff. “One must govern the country,” Thome’s father had said. “We already do,” answered the Earl of, wherever. “Govern correctly,” said Thome’s father. The earl shoved his phallus into his trousers, which he did not close. “One must make Great Britain a place of tradition again, liberated from filth,” said Thome’s father, looking at his colleague’s open trousers and the white sausage that seemed to beckon from the dark.
On that night years ago, a plan was hatched that still stood the next morning. One must again marshal people’s fear. Thinks Thome’s father. Hire once again Harris Media, a toxin-spewing PR firm from the USA, in order to give fear a face, buy a few newspapers, hire a couple online manipulators, and call his friends. Friends in business, in government, in media. The content of the campaign is simply brilliant, and nothing more than a somewhat optimized rerun of the Brexit number; basic principle: fear. Alongside the desire for sex, the fear of death is the biggest trigger for people, as idiots would put it. There is nothing that can’t be sold by the clever activation of fear. Thome’s father just needs to come up with an idea as to whom he can use beyond the Muslims to raise the level of fear. Because they aren’t so stupid, the people, so as not to notice that while withdrawal from the EU succeeded, the foreigners are still here. They have British passports. The idea that at least 80 percent of the citizenry is as dumb as rhubarb seems drastic. Though it is accurate, the earl knows. And he knows how to win them over, this silent majority, and how to unleash them. A raucous leftist minority had for decades compelled the majority toward civilization. Introduced the curse of political correctness, of embracing others as you would yourself, and so forth. Though people’s empathy doesn’t extend beyond themselves, and most can’t even manage that. And then, owing to the new openness, people were supposed to celebrate gay marriage, let women abort babies, sort their own garbage, save water by flushing their excrement just once a week, and in exchange for all this effort people got: nothing. Or more precisely: less for their money, less money, and in the end the total assurance that work alone is insufficient to finance a life if that work isn’t to do with programming, biotech, research, the defense industry, or big pharma rather than with some antiquated 1.0 bullshit.
The people.
Thome’s father is turning seventy-one. A fact that with the help of his new wife he does not forget. The birch in the forest of his inner sense of death. He doesn’t think to look at his body next to hers and ask himself what excites her about nuzzling his liver spot–covered skin. He is a man who doesn’t question why a woman would fancy him. He assumes his manhood is sufficient reason, and nevertheless asks himself in the company of the Russian what actually connects them, him and this woman who could be his granddaughter.
Thome’s father clears his throat in disgust, there’s a vagrant sleeping on a bench. The city is full of them, almost as objectionable as the Muslims. Thome’s father freezes. He has an idea. He’s speechless, his heart beats double time. He practically runs home. Ducks into the entrance of the private road where his family seat is. When he sits down at his desk, he excitedly sketches out a campaign that has just occurred to him. He hears the door open downstairs. His son.
The only disappointment in his life.
That was nothing.
Says
DON
By the fire in front of
Holyroodhouse.
Hannah puts on music. That, too. That, too, is a human trait, to cover everything up, drown out any quiet in a room or in a mind with noise. There is a difference, after all, between you shuffling across a concrete floor to go to the moderately clean toilet and then grabbing some sour milk out of the refrigerator and hearing all the ridiculous human noises you create, which make clear that a human is nothing more than an organism that needs to be fed. And using music to turn your life into a track.
And while we’re on the subject.
The children have tried to make music themselves. To become grime stars, a collective, Ruff Sqwad 3.0. As in
Hoods over their faces, the intro to a Lady Leshurr track in the background,
Bobbing their heads to the beat. Don began to read the lyrics that she used to have on her phone but now, now she’s standing there with a piece of paper in her hand and her handwriting, which she can barely read because nobody writes by hand anymore and
If you want hate,
You can have it,
I’m staring at you but you won’t look.
If you think that we should die,
Then I guess you just don’t get it.
This is the downfall of the people,
that’s already gone on too long,
This is the world of the living dead.
At that moment Don ended her attempt—that is, her career, so to speak. She had suddenly seen and heard herself, to an extent, and it was incredibly embarrassing. The others stopped awkwardly bobbing their heads. “It’s not going to work out, eh?” Hannah had said.
“Somehow I don’t want to comment,” said Karen.
“Maybe we just need to practice a bit more?” Don said to herself but knew: no. Hannah and Peter had already gone to the kitchen, they silently began to peel dinner. The kind of stuff you peel. Instead of scary gangster rappers they stood in a moldy jerry-rigged kitchen peeling proletarian vegetables. Don was disappointed in herself. Disappointed in the day about which she had dreamed of giving interviews in the future. Interviews about the moment. When something magical happened. But. There was no fire waiting to burst out of her.
“Too bad,” says Don, now back by the fire in front of the building. “I guess we’ll just have to keep being criminals.” The others nod. No career after all. Just staring at the fire, staring at the sky, and trying to come to grips with the fact that they’re nothing. A few dots on a little planet hurtling through infinity.
MARS
Which you can’t see. But it’s up there, up to the left. And soon people will arrive there. Yay, people.
Good luck. And
BEN
We may remember him as one of the Friends,
One of the nerds, who is sitting at his computer in the new hacker space, looking at what’s happening on Mars. Living environments are going in. A covered oasis is being built. Which brings up questions. The questions are: Can the will to survive defeat the gratification of shopping? There are, after all, no Dior boutiques on Mars, no electric limos, no gold cigarette lighters. Instead there are palm trees, lakes, pelicans. Why pelicans? Anyway it certainly looks more compelling than the little egg carton modules that had been planned for a bunch of idiots. The idea of staging a reality TV show with poor bastards running a dress rehearsal for the billionaires fell through. They couldn’t even line up some white trash willing to stagger around the craters in permafrost with no return ticket. So now it’ll have to be done without a test run, now there’ll have to be a way to get back, now it’ll have to be the luxury version. So people who were instrumental in the destruction of the earth can ruin a new planet. An exclusively male club. Based on what you hear, the first inhabitants should arrive soon, in the next few weeks. Musk will be there. Musk is always there. His leg begins to twitch. Ben can’t concentrate anymore. Of course, he never could for long unless he took Ritalin, but now he’s barely able to stay on one topic for more than ten minutes. They can’t fucking concentrate on anything anymore. Three years ago they had begun to rebuild the entire net. As a computer-to-computer network with no centralization. Peer-to-peer. A genuine alternative to Tor, which from the start hadn’t been prepared to fend off powerful intelligence services with global capabilities. So then, build a new internet with a few activists who are still nearly minors. Do it even though the other side includes highly funded secret services, the FBI, Homeland Security, Mossad, and whatever all their brethren are called, who are kitted out with the most expensive programs in the world. With budgets in the billions. Some days it seems hopeless, this idea of saving the internet. And barely anyone is even interested in it; people don’t understand how a mobile phone works, much less the internet. You push something and you can post a picture online. Cool.
