Grime, page 32
Thinks
KAREN
As she runs past the losers. The immigrants, the alcoholics, the homeless, the number of whom seems to swell by the day. The homeless shelters were recently bought by a holding company and prices were raised. Karen follows the interesting research that began with the decoding of Neanderthal DNA in Germany. Years back, they had already grown mini Neanderthal brains, though only to the maturity stage of an embryo. But now scientists had succeeded in growing human brains with Neanderthal DNA inserted in them. It worked well. The next step was to abstract the feelings from brains. Goal! In the meantime they’ve produced fully functional brains. Brains without feelings, workers and soldiers without troublesome characteristics. And perfect, intelligent, troublesome-free brains for people who can afford to do well by their offspring. Karen knows she belongs to the second-to-last flawed generation.
Rubbish, thinks
THOME’S FATHER
Miserable do-gooders,
He mumbles. He’s just presented his plan to eliminate child benefits without a replacement, and to put what’s left of the health care system into private hands. He looks into the bright red, indignant, self-righteous face of a Labour woman. Unfuckable thing. She asks for the floor.
She is recognized and asks:
“The monstrousness our colleague once again recited here can only be understood as exhorting the needy to suicide. I have one question for him: When you create millions of homeless, ill and with no access to health care; when as a result of your actions millions of uneducated children are produced; when purchasing power is thereby reduced by the millions and subsistence crime grows by leaps and bounds; when these people completely disappear as consumers, where then is the economic advantage?”
Thome’s father smirks. “If I might be permitted to answer.
“Esteemed colleague. That is extremely simple—it will take care of itself by natural means.”
If you vanquish all things human.
Thinks
KAREN
Then feelings will also be under excellent control. Karen has become a machine. No fat. Only muscles. Bones. Sinews. She’s grown strong. She injects herself with testosterone that she gets from the lab director. She runs, does a thousand push-ups and pull-ups.
As if her brain had likewise been battered by the hormone, Karen simply has no fear anymore. Afraid of nothing. Even now, in Hyde Park as darkness gathers. It will all start in the dark. The first homeless will be lit on fire. Hurray, light in the dark—
Karen walks past a bench around which a few young men stand, looking at a homeless person.
Students from Trinity College. Karen recognizes them by their ugly blue jackets and gray trousers, despite their ridiculous clown masks.
The unbelievably overwhelming demands on the collective consciousness, that now manifests itself in the form of flaccid groups of idle men roaming the inner city to hunt down beggars. He doesn’t look up. The tramp.
“Hey, would you kindly get up,” say the
YOUNG MEN
CITIZEN POINTS: as a result of stable family relationships, no reductions despite multiple traffic violations, various accusations of sexual harassment
FUTURE PROSPECTS: pillars of society
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: perversion
The homeless man doesn’t get up. “So, you’re resisting,” says a tall student, nodding to the others, and they begin to punch the vagrant, almost halfheartedly. At first with their hands, which are covered in gloves, you certainly wouldn’t want to actually touch him. And hands don’t leave any marks, at least until you break the nose at some point, the snap is good, the blood is good, it gives you a rush. One of the three young men gets up on the bench and orders the tramp to the ground with a few kicks. Right, that’s better, now you can really step into it, at first in the side, the body, then in the face, something breaks. Then the three of them jump one after the other on the tramp’s head. Someone else can clean it up. For instance
KAREN
Who tries to find a pulse among the remains, but the vagrant is no longer alive.
Karen breathes to stop her urge to beat the shit out of the three Trinity College wackos. Fucking testosterone. So that’s how it is at the top of the food chain, shot to the top with the injection of a few doses. These female babies that begin shortly after birth, still half blind, to stare into faces and start to think how they can push the very people who are looking at them around in a wheelchair. All these woman-thoughts—how will I find a man, how will I get everyone to like me, what will I wear at my funeral, am I too loud, too demanding, am I shaved enough, nice enough, pretty enough—WTF, it could be cured. One injection per week and world history would be rewritten. Karen sweats. She sweats more now and usually has a strong rushing sound in her head that exits through her ears, as if water has flooded her brain and is washing away her thoughts. Think about it. What would happen if I were to smash my fist through a window? She doesn’t ask herself that anymore, the little delay that balances every act with a possible effect has disappeared. She has too much energy, which is why she started all this running, something she had previously regarded with contempt. It’s always the most inconspicuous creatures who beg for a longer life with every step. Karen runs. She feels good. It seems to her that after setting the virus adrift in the Thames and with the pressure inside her gone, she might for the first time in ages be taking some joy in life again. She looks at buildings and trees and it isn’t so bad to be alive. As long as there is something to do that challenges you and excites you, as long as that, it’s not so bad. Karen has forgotten the homeless. She forgets everything of late. Including the reason she is running around here. In the park, past benches.
On one of which sits
DR. BROWN
He likes to sit on a bench of an evening. He runs his hand along his flat stomach, fit from working out. It had been a good decision to open a beauty-to-go practice in London. Members of the disappearing middle class love it. The startup slaves with their multiple degrees and foreign languages, Dr. this and Dr. that in all sorts of disciplines, hiring themselves out in Open Spaces without proper employment contracts in order to share in the great, prosperous dream of the developer family. For the most part they earn barely five hundred pounds a month, but on the other hand there’s a refrigerator in Open Spaces with energy drinks and energy bars, a foosball table in the lounge, and you can speak informally to the bosses. The bosses are all men. Startup firms that take money off people who barely have any money left, by delivering diapers to them daily, dispatching cleaning slaves, dispatching old ladies who cook simple, good-hearted dishes, desperate pensioners who are living beneath the poverty line and can be had for any old shit, delivering socks or gluten-free food daily. That’s the stuff they develop. Ridiculous platforms for a ridiculous life.
The startup slaves have cool job titles that always include the word manager, and in the evening they play ball with their coworkers, always good to be seen doing that. Nine out of ten startups go bankrupt after a year. In which case the job is gone. The rest succeed. And are sold to China. Job gone. But as long as you have the job, you want to look good. They come in during lunch and leave the practice with cheap muscle or breast implants from India, Botox from Russia, and whatever other cheap shit Dr. Brown can procure from around the world. Dr. Brown has also started giving abortions since they’ve been made illegal, and since you now have to pay for the pill yourself and reproductive decisions are in the hands of the state. Women disappear out the back door afterwards. Some of them take their aborted fetuses with them. Others have a little something done after the abortion. “This is just for me, so I feel good.” They leave the practice with the hope of looking like everyone else. And thereby to be invisible. Please, please, if they just were part of the huge mass of identical-looking assholes, perhaps they’d be spared the downfall. They can pay in installments. They can pad their asses, have fat sucked out, have fake six-pack muscles put under the skin of their stomachs, they can be let straight back out onto the street afterwards where with their artificial stomach muscles they can duke it out with the little metal boxes that take away their jobs. Will. Dr. Brown knew the world pre-internet. It was unfair, it was dark and boring, but more comfortable. People sat in front of their buildings and—in the absence of other excitement or Netflix—watched cars go by. They spoke to each other. And when you killed someone, because back then the right existed to kill someone, it was a personal, almost loving act. Today that, too, is taken care of by machines. Killing.
“Pardon me, you’re Dr. Brown?”
Dr. Brown looks up; in front of him is a peculiar person. Giant, scrawny, with high cheekbones, slanted eyes that glow red in the dark, white hair, and a giant mouth.
“What can I do for you?” answers Dr. Brown angrily, because the injections in his penis are doing their job. Dr. Brown clears his throat.
“Nothing,” says the white ghost, not in a friendly way, and walks with long strides toward the darkness of the park.
Dr. Brown thinks he hears snickers. He watches the thing go and wonders what is off about the person. Some body part isn’t right. As if the head were attached between the legs. Brown looks at the time. He heads for his practice.
And
KAREN
Follows him into the courtyard of a circular social housing block situated on a street of affluent houses. It’ll soon be on fire.
The medical practice is on the ground floor. A bathroom window is tilted open, and Karen climbs in through it.
She passes a kitchen where sad yellow light illuminates medical equipment, a toilet, and—the examination room. Karen sees the open crotch of a woman and the back of Dr. Brown’s head, hair is growing out of his ears. Karen leans against the wall. A flashback. Bodily details of all the male bodies of the previous few years pass before her eyes. Hair creeping into the light from ears and noses, yellow teeth, breath that smells like old rubbish, dried spittle in the corners of mouths, strings of saliva between upper and lower lips. Small, white, tapered bottoms with black hairs, between thighs testicles dangling down toward the knees. All kinds of little, crooked cocks, smegma on the cocks, drooping arms, hairy backs, eyes close together, inflamed. Stomachs in all shapes and colors with smelly belly buttons. Makes sense that people have such an unbelievable propensity for violence inside, people who look like that are evil.
Dr. Brown pulls down his pants. They gather around his ankles. His underwear stretches between his knees. Looks ridiculous, but
DR. BROWN’S
Penis still stands out from his body like an imposing architectural structure. As if it weren’t part of his body, as if it had been retroactively attached. Dr. Brown is going to stockpile a fuck. A chance like this doesn’t come round every day. Such a good-looking unconscious person. Conscious sexual partners cause hassles, since they talk, breathe, they make false moves, they lie, they feign excitement, excitement about his penis and his technique. The difficulties of a woman’s bodily openings aren’t unknown to him. The dumbfucks can’t come unless he manually fiddles with their clits for ages. But what man wants to do that? So he likes them best when they’re calm, silent, open. Just a few more thrusts and … Dr. Brown doesn’t feel the blow. He doesn’t feel anything. He is out like a light.
With a heavy metal ashtray
ARTHUR
HEALTH RISKS: highly excitable
POLITICAL ORIENTATION: prior antifa activities
HOBBIES: drug abuse
OTHER HOBBIES: becoming a father
Well, even though
Stands in front of the doctor’s body. Well mashed. He thinks and breaks out in a fit of laughter that despite the term’s misogynist connotations is best described as “hysterical.” Now, it’s not every day you strike somebody on the head so hard that part of his brain is laid bare. Arthur’s wife is anesthetized. He looks with bewilderment into her open vagina. He’s in shock. He’s going to be a father. His wife won’t abort the child. He’s going to be a father, and everything will be sorted again. He starts to sing. His wife will not leave him. She wanted to leave him. That is, a few days before she had said she could no longer stand him. But you should know.
That Arthur can’t stand himself, either. Ever since Scriptbox technology started to choose screenplays, that is for two years now, he hasn’t been able to sell a single play or screenplay. At first he had still thought: Well, guess I missed the mark. You should know that Arthur is in his mid-forties and for twenty years had been able to more or less live off his screenplays and theater pieces. The plays ran successfully in off–West End venues. The screenplays were a bit more fraught. Up to thirty-two rewrites for independent films. But he was satisfied. He was an artist. Now he receives a basic income. The Scriptbox algorithm has saved every theater piece and film screenplay that’s ever been produced, all of which are analyzed for profitability and risk, and the algorithm then gauges the prospects for success of new works. That is, based on what sentences and other elements appear in successful works. If little or none of that appears in a new work, the piece doesn’t have mass appeal. Bye-bye.
Arthur sits in the one-room flat he shares with his wife and tries to think in terms of mass appeal. That is, to think up plots with mass appeal. Something about love. And problems. And twists. And a happy ending. The old Hugh Grant type of films. Or something about spies. Countless beginnings, legs twitching, increasingly agitated. Every day the same. Start. Something with sun, autumn foliage, a wild but at the same time sweet girl strolling through Soho. Then. Arthur begins to poke around on social media. From current events to newspaper reports to the filter bubble of idiocy—the Nazi accounts—he gets excited, then tired, then he has a nap. No success. He has no success at anything; every new attempt to produce something with mass appeal is met with a proverbial shake of the head from the machine. Arthur writes a script about a machine gone awry that makes decisions about all things, subject only to its own absolute discretion. Decisions about life and death in hospitals, couples’ suitability for marriage, court verdicts. When it’s finished, the Scriptbox speech generator asks: “Where is the gag?” That night Arthur rapes his wife. Well, really, come on, rape? He just didn’t listen too closely when she said: “Nah, not tonight.” His wife, who is planning her departure. Getting away from the grouchy dope smoker who sits home at night awaiting her return after her shift at a restaurant to the little flat they were recently allotted. Before them, a fitness trainer with cancer lived in this dark hole. There were still photos on the walls. His wife later got pregnant, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is a miracle if you consider that the sperm count in the gonads of the Western world have already dropped 60 percent and that by the year 2030 men will be infertile, which explains why they’d all become so angry even back then.
In any case, his wife was not so enthused about this fluky biological bull’s-eye. She’d said: “I don’t want this.” And Arthur had thought: What do you mean you don’t want this? He had already seen his life with the baby flash before his eyes. A life where he didn’t sit at his desk all day and try to write a Hugh Grant film, god rest his soul, and in so doing despair about his lack of talent and so on, and instead he’d have a purpose. A meaning, in an I-can-raise-this-baby-and-do-baby-appropriate-things-with-him sense. He had figured out that his wife wanted to get rid of the fruit of her womb. Which is so incomprehensible. That a woman can decide what is to happen to a seed he planted. That a stupid cunt can kill his creation.
Which is why he follows her as soon as she leaves home. Why he hooked up with the group called the Others, who hunt doctors who perform abortions, which is to say commit murders. Or women who want abortions. Who are then—how shall we put it—pressured by the group. Their addresses are posted on a website. Easy.
And now he tosses away the ashtray and runs into the night. Perhaps he can still beat up a homeless person so as to explain the blood on his collar.
It smells of food
When
KAREN
Enters the factory. It’s after midnight, and the others are lying on their mattresses, tomato sauce smeared on their faces. Leftover noodles still in the kitchen. “Dr. Brown died with an erection,” she says. “From or with?” asks Don. “Eat something first,” says Peter. The children who are no longer children—what do you call people who are still growing, for fuck’s sake?—sit at the kitchen table with Karen and watch Karen shovel herself full of lukewarm noodles. She’s not hungry, but sitting here, with the others, like a real family, is a ritual they’ve established, sitting together and talking, as if they could be each other’s family. They sit at the table, because grown-ups always sit at a table and make serious faces. They make serious faces and discuss adult things. The price of water has risen in the city again. It’s shut off every day for a few hours. People no longer bathe, barely shower, and there’s powder to fight the odor created by an unwashed body. Showering. What a thing. The children sometimes wash themselves in the little stream outside, sometimes in the kitchen sink. Often, though, not at all.
Despite its loft-style loftiness, the factory hall still looks like something. That animals live in. The mattresses on the floor, the laundry they wash in a trough in the kitchen hangs from lines all over the place, pizza boxes in the corner. Cardboard on the windows so as not to reveal at night to any potentially passing drones that it’s occupied.
