Grime, page 33
The children leave the kitchen in its state, a state that looks as though a set designer had set up a bombed-out kiddie kitchen, and they lie on their mattresses to enjoy the best moment of the day. When the lights are out and the TV is on, all of them doing something by their nightstand lamps, reading or thinking or just not sleeping. I don’t want to go to sleep yet. The moment when it’s like being in a cave, when we all breathe as one, should never end. The moment before they’re all alone as the heroes of their nightmares, before you wake up in the morning in a light that illuminates the aimlessness and loneliness of the group too brightly. And
DON
Lies on her mattress, her legs twitch, she tries to read but can’t concentrate because her legs are twitching. And her brain isn’t trained for the grasping of long blocks of text.
“Is there a lot of dialogue?”
Asks Hannah.
“What do you mean, dialogue?” asks Don. “It’s a book about algorithms.”
Hannah lies down next to Don, whose skin immediately becomes sensitive. Nearly painful in the areas where Hannah’s body touches hers. From outside the wind blows through the drafty windows, a candle flickers in the kitchen; another nod to adulthood, they always light candles, adults, and then they drink wine. The children have also drunk wine today; it makes you bleary.
“My favorite part of books is the dialogue,” says Hannah. She stares at Don’s book. “Do you mean comics,” asks Don, shifting to the side a bit so she can breathe. “No,” says Hannah. “Dialogue, I can hear people talking, and they talk the way we talk, it draws me closer to the story.”
Don is silent. Her heart races, her head buzzes. She is. Simply out of her mind. Don hates books with dialogue and is convinced that it’s a lazy trick used by writers, this whole writing of dialogue thing. It fills pages so nicely. With the empty sentences that most people exchange, with all the incredibly meaningless words they use to demonstrate their self-importance or to talk about their relationships or just their fear of being nothing more than an aggregation of desires. “Do you want to kiss me?” Don doesn’t ask, staring into her fucking book. It’s about the benefits of an algorithm-defined society. And it has no fucking dialogue. But it is fucking horrible. Bots pushed it to the top of the best seller list. Bots push all kinds of shit, but people have gotten accustomed to it, or perhaps nobody cares whether they see real news or fake, whether they’re chatting with a bot or a human. The point is that someone is listening to them. Back when they were still around, many media experts had urged citizens to become critical, um, users. The truth of every news item, every article, every video could be checked through time-consuming research. Well. Okay. A kind of truth. Nobody did it. Truth is a feeling. A gut feeling, people say, people who should be smacked for the use of the phrase. But everyone just continues to believe what they want to believe—like an apocalypse brought on by jet airplane chemtrails, the victory of anarchists, or that vaccines are deadly. The more confusing the world gets, the more desperate individuals are to create an inner catalog of the comprehensible.
Hannah has returned to her mattress, has turned off her bedside lamp; now just the TV is on so the voices can calm the children, talk them to sleep, sleep that doesn’t want to come when it is too quiet.
It’s going well, thinks
THOME’S FATHER
He is lying in bed, watching TV. He needs a few minutes before he realizes that what he’s watching isn’t the eighty-ninth episode of The Walking Dead, that series financed by neoliberals, but rather a live report from the north of the country. The sweating man has really done top-shelf work.
Thome’s father needs to call him straightaway. But
THE SWEATING MAN
Doesn’t really hear the phone ring clearly. The call reaches him just as he is
Tying a scarf to the radiator, putting his neck into the loop, and forcing his body to defy its will to survive. Yes, and it’s true that during the fight, flush with hormones, he sees his life flash before his eyes, a life that had been made up of nothing. Hanging oneself on an object near ground level, like a doorknob or pipe valve, demands a strong will. At the very least. My goodness was it torture, this living, when you wanted nothing more than the respect of alpha males, who had never accepted you, how bleak is it when you can’t love? And when he, the sweating man, had ever fallen in love, it had always been short-lived and ended with him sitting helplessly at a table with a woman, drinking tea, and at some point she would always say, “Take your jacket with you when you go.” At least he has a strong will, the sweating man, who hears the phone ring in the midst of his death throes and in his fading consciousness pictures the ringing of the bells of heaven.
Nice images
Viewed by
THOME’S FATHER
In a BBC special called The Poor: How Much Do They Threaten Our Prosperity?
He straightens his blanket. Turns down the sound so his Russian hooker doesn’t wake up, and follows the special broadcast delightedly.
In a talk show format the problems caused by the poor are outlined. They hinder growth of a recovery, they lead crime statistics (which never include white-collar crime). The basic income could be 50 percent higher for “normal citizens” if payments to degenerates were stopped.
The next program up is on child gangs.
The enlightenment of the people is bearing fruit. A homeless shelter in Blackpool is burned down. Fifty-seven people die. There’s an expression of so-called official regret, not, however, without a relativizing comment by the prime minister that of course one must be aware of what one triggers among other, working people with one’s lifestyle—
And now
DON
Has completely lost her way in her book.
Don’s hand hurts so badly that she moans quietly. And doesn’t notice that she’s moaning, and only when Hannah turns on her bedside lamp and bends over her does she become alert, snapping to from half-sleep. “You can see the bones,” says Hannah, holding Don’s hand. From the bathroom she retrieves bandages, disinfectant, and antibiotics that the Friends bought via Tor. She disinfects the hand and bandages it and gets very close to Don while doing it. Don would only have to move a few millimeters and she’d be able to give Hannah a kiss. But she doesn’t. She watches as Hannah puts out the light, feels the throbbing spreading out from her hand through her entire body, corresponding to the beat of her heart, and she can’t sleep, of course not. Because it’s cold.
Despite the stove.
They got the wood stove from a
STUDENT
HOBBIES: masturbates (according to transmitted vibrator data) twice daily for ca. 1 minute
HEALTH CONDITIONS: passive-aggressive
POLITICAL ORIENTATION: inconspicuous
INTELLIGENCE: average
CONSUMER INTERESTS: TV series, magazines, cosmetic products, vegan, otherwise no interests
The stove. Well. The young woman studies. Something. Authentic. That is—shall we say—she had studied, before student fees and so forth. Now she’s more of an inner student or, as she likes to say: “I’m a student of life.” She studies life at three different jobs. One consists of her showing her breasts. The student has an entirely representative average early-twenties urban white middle-class life plan. The student is from a middle-class family of teachers in Norfolk. Two mothers. That was still okay then. Now it is. Illegal. The student hates her body. She doesn’t smoke—well, okay, who smokes anymore?—doesn’t do drugs, takes Pilates classes, and walks ten thousand steps every day, it gets you bonus points in the social points system.
MI5 PIET
“Ten thousand steps. I knew it, you sloppy cow. If it is any at all then it’s maybe one thousand steps a day. One thousand totally pointless steps.”
THE STUDENT
Likes to earn points. She likes to walk ten thousand steps a day and would double that number if not for her breasts. Which disrupt the lithe, streamlined shape of her body. The student is saving up for a breast reduction and has lived for four years in London. Subletting. And so on. Online the student opposes: circumcision, shechita, factory farming, climate change, the financial system, low income taxes for billionaires, fracking and nuclear power, atomic weapons, and surveillance. She has as her social media profile picture the symbol of the anti–coal, fracking, and nuclear power movement.
MI5 PIET
Spits his breakfast onto his keyboard, laughing.
“They make their own profiles. Do they know what a profile is? In the old days they existed for use in police records departments to classify criminals and the mentally ill. An accomplishment, so to speak. Today billions of people willingly and meticulously compile their own profiles. Hobbies, sexual and political preferences, networks, friends, family relations, consumption patterns, they even send in their DNA so they can tell people what ethnicities are in their genes, they send us their data twenty-four hours a day. The really clever ones blast all their info into the cloud. I could practically sing an ode to the cloud.
Sweet.”
Is
THE STUDENT
A feminist, blonde, young woman who on dates insists on paying for her own organic falafel. Who gets very angry if anyone touches her without asking or comments on her body. The nude photos she considers art. The student regularly has her teeth cleaned, eats vegan, and yes, she makes a big deal about it. Some new superfood or other is always making it into her meal plan, usually the hype conforms to a blueprint created by the economic system of foodstuffs that are overproduced or underpriced. Stuff that just has to be gotten rid of. Oats, quinoa, avocados, coconut oil, spelt, kale, fork it over. The feeling of living in a body whose guts are forming good, healthy excrement from healthy, nutritionally valuable, environmentally friendly products is indescribable. These days the money no longer suffices for that sort of fun. These days the student subsists on the same thing as everyone else she knows: good, cheap meat. The student is political. Like nearly everyone she knows, she is obsessed with freedom fighting. That is, theoretical freedom fighting for the oppressed. The Palestinians, for instance. She knows a few personally. She feels for them. She’s opposed to Jews, well, not on the whole, she doesn’t know any Jews except those at Goldman Sachs, who now control the cryptocurrencies, and those who have spread through the city of London. The student demonstrates in front of supermarkets against the purchase of Israeli chervil. It gives her a really good feeling. The student stage manages plays in fringe theaters with refugees who have experienced hardship. She had thought for a time about a theater piece with kids from troubled neighborhoods, but then it seemed too unattractive to her. It doesn’t make sense to her, because the poor in this country aren’t poor in the same sense as refugees. They speak English. They have themselves to blame for their situation.
To a certain extent.
The student overestimates her worth to society and leads a normal average young person’s life. Meaning the student is going mad like everyone else. She can’t keep up anymore, doesn’t understand the immediate drop in value of newly purchased technical devices and the simultaneous pressure to always want the latest devices, doesn’t understand what these devices that are falling in value want. They are constantly asking her to update her software, the refrigerator wants to newly configure its app, the hoover needs to fix a security breach. You could say that the student spends six hours a day with the devices, she waits, installs uploads, reconfigures, watches tutorials, fails at something and then is badgered by some other device. Her devices perpetually make noise, with which they demand respect.
And outside.
Something is hacked every day: banks, email accounts, airlines, chemical factories, governments. Personal devices are already bugged by the government before they’re sold. Whatever. Who gives a shit. The student is nervous. Everyone is nervous and phlegmatic at the same time, thanks to the new order, passive-aggressive.
“The unrest in the world can always be felt before major upheavals,” says
ROB
HOBBIES: talking
HEALTH STATUS: optimal
STATE OF MIND: young man
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: interested in sex. But not with the student
FEAR: of being insignificant
Who has for a while been the man the student is in love with. Theoretically, that is. In practice, this love hasn’t led to an exchange of anything at all. Rob sits on her bed in her shared flat and talks. Something he can do well. “The world is developing the same way humans age. In stages. Before each newly manifesting stage humans experience crises. They sense something but don’t know what it is. When they then arrive in their next age phase, this nervous situation dissipates again.”
“Aha,” says the student while thinking: Take your clothes off!
“Yeah, we are at the dawn of a new era. The revolution 4.0 during simultaneous overpopulation.”
“Right, of course,” says the student, opening her blouse. She suspects that Rob is a fucking know-it-all, but she’s not the brightest, either, and her blouse is open. And she’s frantically rubbing Rob’s arm and brightly laughing and throwing her head back like a young foal. No reaction. Reactions from men have been missing for some time. The student is sure it’s a result of her lack of sexiness. No whistles on the street anymore, no unsolicited penises flashed at her, no random brushing up against her body parts on the tube, and most of all no sex. The student confuses sex with affection and has felt cold for some time, she feels invisible when the gropes and shouts fail to materialize, she misses the feeling of superiority during the sex act, when she could observe men unaffected by the proceedings in her body. Jesus, the way they lose themselves. You really feel very little at all with such a small penis inside you. But—
Suddenly there’s nothing there anymore. Rob has finished talking. He looks at his watch, which is connected to the chip implanted in his hand, and says: “I have to be going.” And then he leaves. Not even a goodbye hug. The young men have no urge anymore. They’re busy. On the computer. And with music. And games. And movies, and hanging around. And having no clue.
When the student lies down in bed, freezing because the heater doesn’t work, the voice-activated virtual assistant consoles her. “You’re sad because Rob left.”
“How do you know it was Rob,” asks the student, slightly shocked by the little tin can’s attentiveness.
The little tin can answers: “Rob Walter, twenty-four, theater student, moderately gifted, poor marks, numerous missed classes, bank account currently overdrawn: three hundred forty-five pounds. Suffers from chlamydia, white middle-class family from Birmingham, parents divorced, previous girlfriend had an abortion, moderate threat potential.”
WTF, thinks the student. That’s cold. She’s in arrears in karma points. When she went to buy beer yesterday the price had risen by a factor of six because she’d stayed out partying at the pub too long on two previous nights. Last night she was so drunk that she tried to cut off her breast with a razor blade. But it hurt, and on top of that she hadn’t covered the camera on her phone and today two hundred penalty points had been subtracted. Which is why she gave up the heat. Children. Hopefully she would get positive points for that.
The next day
PETER
Is with Don in a so-called public space, which is accessible to the people but doesn’t belong to them. How nicely the so-called populace conducts itself while populating when they’re suddenly no longer anonymous. Aware of being recorded and evaluated every second. A totally abstract but somehow revalued existence, that transcends the meaningless performance of shopping, which has long since become hollow. Had. Over. Peace. They’ve been phenomenally well trained to be seen. Ten years of social media has left behind vast mental devastation. Speaking of damage—
Most webcams transfer their material to the internet, where it lives forever. That way everyone can archive all evidence of one’s existence on the planet. Can profile and exhibit oneself, reread the comments about oneself in a bar yesterday evening. Hey, you in the red dress, you’re hot, want to meet up? Super performance, thanks. The comments are almost all positive. It appears as if all the hate of recent years is being siphoned off to some gully, as if there’s no more reason to be angry at the world now that one is taken notice of, now that there’s money just for showing up, now that the island is swimming alone in the sea and everyone has for various reasons really shown the elite a thing or two. Now there’s nothing left to hate, Brussels is gone, the elite defeated, the foreigners stuck in Calais, the poofs are afraid to show themselves on the street ever since a referendum repealed marriage rights for such obviously deranged people. And the public display of affection between those of the same sex is also punished as indecent behavior. People are no longer distracted by abnormality during social gatherings and can dedicate themselves to themselves. So to speak. Through the removal of paper from the street, driving in an orderly manner, showering in an environmentally conscious way, by the approved consumption of approved foods, by keeping physically fit, by refraining from visiting the doctor, and by picking up dog droppings. Even from other people’s dogs. All dogs. Humanity picks up a giant pile of dog shit in order to grab bonus points in order to augment the basic income. Some earn as much as a hundred pounds, and their photos are pinned at the top of the karma points website. How pleasing. The new life.
A WOMAN
UTILITY: utterly insignificant, appears only to illustrate the scene
Walks into one of the concrete street barriers that had been erected all over the city to protect against Muslim-oriented individuals who, by order of some operator or other, had flattened people with a motorcar.
She had.
Seen.
PETER
like the cover image of one of those cheap tearjerker romances that had existed back when people still read books. The longish blond hair, the broad shoulders, the narrow waist, muscles and spermatic cords distributed along 190 centimeters, and something in his appearance causes erratic behavior in passersby who encounter him. Memories, perhaps. Sexuality has almost completely disappeared in the city or is limited only to tourists, men who stare and whistle and scratch their crotches. The local men have changed, though most wouldn’t be able to say exactly what had changed. Peter feels uncomfortably tense from the stress of standing out, for whatever reason, whether it is a result of skin color, body type, intelligence. To be different from average people is to be in a constant state of crisis. Most people want to get rid of anything that’s different from them, anything that doesn’t look like them they want to see dead. Most people are comfortable being subject to this general view. Inconspicuous, out of harm’s way. What an extraordinarily lovely boy.
