Grime, page 38
Thome’s father throws the crystal glass against the wall. Solid glass, it doesn’t shatter. His wife doesn’t come, either. She sits in the adjacent room, coked out of her mind, killing the last bits of the unborn child’s brain, and she doesn’t even come to check on things. Of course not, the stupid cow. Thome’s father laments the decision to have married again. He had felt fleetingly virile. That is, he had felt sexual, but now that was over. Back to important subjects. There are only two ways to control the world, or rather to gain a monetary advantage for oneself.
First the liberal way. Meaning: we conduct our business and give people the feeling of freedom and altruism. We establish transgender laws, women’s rights; we establish laws against racism, and the prime minister appears at the Notting Hill Carnival; we act as if humankind had evolved, and gays and lesbians of all skin colors and faiths laugh from the rooftops where they are urban gardening. The city rides bicycles. We pull the drain plug out of the bathtub that is overflowing with hate. Or: we pump the idiots’ brains full of conspiracy theories, we find an enemy, we slash education, we slash everything, we reduce the state until it is unrecognizable, conduct business with our acquaintances, and afterwards sit with our friends in the club and drink expensive whisky.
The best investment in ages had been direct democracy, which Thome’s father, together with various lobby groups, fake news agencies, and hackers, had pushed through. Controlling people was so unbelievably easy. If you had the right tools at your command. Now the sheep can all vote for their prime minister themselves. And in all the polls, Thome’s father is in the lead.
But WTF
EX 2279
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THOME’S FATHER
Looks agitatedly at the poll ticker.
“What the fuck.”
Says
KAREN
To a man with a frog face. Pepe the Frog. The former symbol of oppressed morons. The symbol of those who fell into an endogenetic depression after Brexit because nothing stepped up to replace the wonderful endorphins created during all their demonstrations. The symbol of all those who were enthusiastic about a new enemy that made more sense to them than, say, the connection between groundwater and multidrug-resistant microbes. Karen has a bottle of brandy in her hand. She has no idea where it came from. Fucking LSD. She looks at her face in the reflection of a shopwindow. They’ve transitioned from painted masks to silicon pads that allow them to fall through the cracks of the biometric cameras’ gaze.
MI5 PIET
(clears throat)
And
KAREN
Wants to go home. She wants a different life. Wherein she earns a doctoral degree and becomes the head of a research institute. She wants to stand on the balcony of an overpriced flat on Westbourne Grove, listen to a few artificial birds in the morning before she heads for the lab. She no longer has any desire for this adventure-playground existence. For hunting criminals and eating noodles. She’s a bit bored—no, very bored—of the others. She’s even more bored since they buried their devices. It is a temporary distraction to audit classes at the university, to lug home books from the library. Still, it won’t lead to anything. But that’s another story. The current story is that Karen is still feeling the effects of LSD, leaning against a shopwindow. A new VR space is going to be opened here. Of course, yet another VR space. The city is being flooded with them. It doesn’t matter.
To the
CITY
What people do on this blurred surface. You know, the people who get tattooed with the logos of their one-hour employers as a sign of their loyalty. Doesn’t matter who owns the city, who removes the rubbish, which drones film what, or that the trains drive themselves. The city is smart, hurray, we have a smart city. The rubbish is automatically removed, the refrigerators are filled with the help of delivery robots, the trees are watered automatically, pollution is quantified, motorcars are led to available parking spots, the blinds are closed, opened, dog shit is disposed of by robots, bicycles are charged while riding. Drones surveil drones, always ready to shoot each other if one of them strays into the flight paths of police helicopters; the police drones now have grapple arms and are weaponized. Code strings determine right and wrong, threat potential and payouts, loans and the valuation of homes, health risks and cancer diagnoses. Is chemotherapy more profitable or are the cost benefits better if a life is just allowed to fade away? Who gets what job, who will be fired, who gets custody of children, which train lines are profitable, which buildings must be razed, where should new buildings be built, whose election to head up the government shall we engineer? Transactions, corporate direction, acquisitions. Artificial intelligence, which learns ever more quickly, learns on its own, teaches itself things, networks itself, which in a giant space without oversight collects information, evaluates it, tries to impose order on the world, stockpiles emergency generators, repairs faulty nuclear power plants, protects aircraft from hacker attacks, watches over the world like a friendly parent.
A mother
Is something everyone should have, thinks
KAREN
Who has somehow managed to make it back to the wasteland on the outskirts of town, and is nearly home. Nearly sober. No longer staggering. No longer talking to her hand. No longer unhappy. But also no longer alone, because, in the mud between the catchment basins, settlements have popped up overnight. Tents are set up. Plastic tarps draped over boards, campfires, and—as always, when people settle down somewhere—piles of rubbish. Illegal itinerant workers. Young and sort of young men from Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland. Before the country’s departure from the wonderful European political union they’d been happy. In places like Manchester, Blackwater, and Birmingham. They saved for small houses, the things people do when starting out. Since Brexit most of them had lost their residency permits. And then stayed for a while in the dreary areas where they’d been, where there was no sympathy for them, where the long-established residents reported them. So now they’re here. The second-to-last station. None has money for a ticket home, none wants to go home, to some dark place where there’s nothing awaiting them but liquor and cold winters. They sit here in front of lodgings made of tarps, which is better than sleeping on the street in the city. That has become dangerous, as now they aren’t even the hated foreigners with jobs anymore and are instead considered lepers. They are the offerings that had to be sacrificed to save the world. The men smell. The possibility to wash their clothes or themselves in the oily runoff streams is of little interest. They seem almost relieved now that their fear is gone. The years-long fear of losing the amenities, the leakproof windows, the flowing warm water, the incomes, and the mattresses had been so great that a sense of relief now wells up. They have arrived back where they started. A tarp on the ground, a couple of pieces of furniture scrounged up, and beans. That’s what life provides for them. Like all here in the wastelands, these men are so far removed from the idea of having a hearth and library that they don’t even get envious when they walk through central London looking for a chance to get into a bit of petty crime. They would never conceive of their lives as so boring that they would voluntarily forsake it for hours-long voyages into virtual reality. They’ve never thought of optimizing themselves with the help of apps and trackers, only to then have the optimized version of themselves evaluated in the virtual world by unknown idiots. They have never paid for anything with an app, have never stuck an internet-enabled dildo in their orifices, they have lived 1.0 lives with the romance of 1.0 life, pubs, friends, staring at women, falling in love and dreaming of owning a house of their own. And that’s why, dear scum of society, that’s why you are here, staring into the night at your wits’ end. Some distance away
In Holyroodhouse
HANNAH AND DON
Are sitting at the table, and no water is dripping. They are sitting at the table for no clear reason, since they actually all prefer to lie on their beds in front of the TV, but that wouldn’t be grown-up. To be young is not to be able to imagine yourself older. When you believe in yourself infinitely. And that your body will not change. A young person doesn’t doubt. A young person just is. And above all a young person is virile. Endless virility and the ability to sleep on the floor, just fall over and sleep without sleeping pills, without the need to urinate overnight. To be young is to believe things will go on, except that it’ll get better, because you’ll be smarter, later, in your still-young body, and that the world will have become a brilliant one. Hannah is in love. And it’s worse than for an adult, this condition of being involuntarily out of your head, this excitement, that knows not what it wants. What does it even mean beyond hugging the other person? Don is in love. She accidentally touches Hannah’s hand while handing her the bowl of spaghetti and thinks, I’m going to cut my hand off and put it in the freezer and take it out once in a while and lick it. To be young means falling in love in a way that is no longer possible later on. Because you know what comes next. Awkward sex that is never as imagined, awkward conversations and insecurity, and in the end you’re always alone, and true union, the dissolving of your boundaries, hasn’t happened. There’re just two people who look at each other while they sleep and see the spittle in the corners of their mouths, but you don’t know that, as a young person, when it seems holy and sacrosanct and untouchable, this being in love, that is always conjoined with pain that carries with it the first inkling of misery. One will never be loved the way one hopes. Unconditionally. One will never not be alone. Later. And love will just be love. And now Karen arrives home, she’s pale and says nothing, she sits down and stares at the spaghetti. And Don thinks: too bad, I might have touched Hannah on the neck, there where the collarbones can be seen to the left and right.
And
Karen suddenly sees the squalor in which she lives. The charred pots and pans, the full rubbish bin, the fruit flies, all the crap.
To be young means not seeing the chaos in which you live because there is nothing to compare it to. There is no need to purify yourself of your toxic humanity with a maniacal urge to clean.
Don can no longer sit at this table, no longer sit and admit to herself that she might never touch Hannah. “Relax,” an older sister would tell her. “Step back from the ledge!” But there’s no older sister, and Don is in love, and Hannah is in love, but not with Don, and so begin all wretched stories, so begin weeks that are horrid and have to do with hormones. And
DON
Gets up and looks out the window.
“There’re people out there,” she says. And looks at the tent camp.
It must have been put up in just the last few seconds. Yesterday there was nothing except plastic litter and old rolls of cable. And now there are scrap-wood huts, six of them, seven, and two fires burning in front of them. Around the fire sit a few remnants of men. Nothing worth shooting at. Of the men, there are maybe ten, no idea whether there are others in the sad huts, three are minors; they squat, barely talk, roasting potatoes on the fire and spooning something out of tin cans. No good food, no precious meal of meat.
Their clothes speak of homelessness, their faces of having given up. A little way from the saddest of the tents sits an old man who, with his suit, stands out from the others.
The suit must have really been something. Before it had gotten stained and the seams had ripped. The man must also have really been something before he’d given up.
Like a
PROFESSOR
HEALTH CONDITIONS: depression
HOBBIES: collect(ed) first editions
LISTEN(ED): Mozart
USEFULNESS: 0
That’s what the old man looks like, as he sits on a beer crate and rocks back and forth.
Murmur, stream, the vale along
Without pause or peace,
Murmur, whisper to my song
adding melodies!
Goethe. An echo from before, memory and smell and taste, of the fireside, in the library. Recollection of the time when consumer decisions fulfilled wishes, not needs. Of the time not long ago when coal power plants had resumed operation. And he—
He would love to have been a professor of German and English literature, the professor, who had only become a tax advisor. And whose comfortable life was in a two-room flat on Kensington Church Street. Had been. Amazing that there was a time when you could live there as a fucking tax advisor. But that didn’t go well. The tax advisor’s work had been made easier by devices. We all know the rest of the story. The tax advisor’s tension caused constant stomach problems, which led to loud abdominal noises at his weekly book club meetings. Until he no longer dared to take part in the evening events. The tax advisor found himself increasingly unable to understand the world. He was fitted with a chip, began to collect citizen points, unfortunately received miserable ratings from his neighbors, from shop assistants. He didn’t do any exercise, crossed the road without WALK signs, took hot showers, tried fruit in supermarkets before buying it, didn’t sort his rubbish; at the pub he spoke disparagingly of the government, and suddenly his problems grew worse. He stood at the entrance to the tube and wasn’t allowed through the turnstile. His funds to pay for food at the shops were frozen. His water would no longer warm up. Same for the heater. Payments were no longer made. He wasn’t the least bit surprised by the termination of the lease on his flat. In order to celebrate his departure from the world of the arts, the professor ordered himself some company.
The
EIGHT-YEAR-OLD PROSTITUTE
Will soon be nine. There won’t be any birthday cake. The children, at the moment there are thirteen, who live on a floor of the enchanting building in the choicest location on the park, cannot see out the window. Passersby could take notice. Drones could take films. The windows are for this understandable reason two-thirds frosted glass. One third is clear. Way high up. Unreachable by the children. Only by lying down can they sometimes look up and see the sky. Every last inch of the flat is monitored by video camera. Little blinking red lights and microphones all over the place. One doesn’t know. One doesn’t know what to do with all these goddamn child soldiers here. Because—there’s not much for the eight-year-old prostitute to do anymore. As with all the child soldiers. It’s become calm in recent weeks. It doesn’t matter to the eight-year-old prostitute. She lies on the floor, looks at the thin slice of sky and has no idea how a life can be provided that doesn’t take place here in this prison. Like all of them here. Their stories are similar, they’re so boring, the stories of their lives, and they all have to do with a lack of affection. With parents who for various reasons were too busy with their own survival or who just hadn’t survived. The previous year someone had gone to the trouble to count the number of homeless children in the country. And how exactly do you count homeless children, by waking them in the middle of the night in their gutters and then, once they’re statistically registered, clapping them on the shoulder with a back-to-sleep-you-little-rascal? It ended up being several hundred thousand, nearly a million, but who knows. Maybe they all looked very similar to each other, crusted in filth. A little boy, Ben, had for a moment been the darling of the press and an inspired public. He was five, homeless, and had the advantage of being blond and charming. Ben was unbelievably photogenic, the way he sat there with his blue eyes radiating out of the muck. He had dimples. He had fucking dimples. And after the big SAVE BEN campaign had found kindhearted, rich foster parents for him, who were primarily interested in publicity and attention for their laundry service, they subsequently barely spoke to little Ben. In his cellar room.
None of the children here in the villa think to flee, because their past in old sewer pipes, in train stations, and in cellars is of limited use in luring them out of a heated flat. They don’t even speak English. They speak Russian, Polish, Romanian, Bosnian, Hindi, so the communication among them is also very limited. For the most part the children sit in front of computers and look at the websites they are allowed to view. Cartoons and porn. Nobody here cries. Or looks particularly unhappy. They’ve accepted their destiny, you could say, like hundreds of thousands of children in the country who are superfluous at a time when others are already being born with modified DNA. There is a right to genetic modification that one should make use of if one wishes to enable a good start for one’s children into the bright future. Without inherited diseases, without dwarfism, without brain deformities, without an overly pronounced sensitivity to pain. Without resentment of authority. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
All the stories about the great, unconditional love of parents for their children had never been anything more than a moral construct. Occupational therapy for people who even then were already extraneous. Who were bored to death by their existence and invested all their creative energy into their offspring. That’s now become unnecessary as the middle class no longer exists. Showing excessive attention to your offspring no longer occurs to anyone. No person loves another unconditionally. Nobody even loves anymore.
Societal standards which had long held sway, the reenactment of morals and benevolence, have been pulverized as quickly as an acquaintance bids farewell. Had been. The new system of order is to be embraced for that reason as well—the era when every second British child was abused, wives were beaten half to death, when firemen or rubbish collectors were assaulted because they caused backups is over.
