Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann

drugs right away, don’t you?’
    ‘I love you, Mifti.’
    ‘Who’s Emre anyway?’
    ‘The man of my life.’
    ‘And what’s he like?’
    ‘On benefits, permanently wasted, Chanel suit.’
    * * *
    At 3:55 a.m. I wake up on Ophelia’s bedroom floor and decide to leave her apartment without passing Go. Ophelia’s heavy-breathing on top of her double bed, which is covered in puke. I scrabble around the room, collecting up enough coins for cigarettes and a short-hop train ticket out of strategically placed porcelain dishes filled with five-cent pieces. Once I’ve closed the bedroom door as quietly as possible, I sprint along the mile-long corridor towards the exit, both hands full of small change. From one second to the next I start suffering from a psychological disorder accompanied by a temporary loss of connection to reality: I hear voices. I get hysterical. Hallucinations are clear symptoms of psychosis. I regard not myself but my surroundings as altered and can’t recognize my abnormal condition; that’s what occurs to me spontaneously right now. The voices are coming from the kitchen, only a few hours ago still smoked up with heroin trails, and they’re talking about an art form that finds its expression in the production of moving images: ‘Well, perhaps you can walk over there, OK. Then I’d like you to act out recognizing your own desperation in Marie’s anger.’
    When I enter the kitchen, there are fifteen people standing around, either talking about the contradictions in their roles or correcting backlit lighting effects.
    I ask, ‘Excuse me, but what’s going down here?’
    They look at me as if I were the world’s thinnest-skinned person.
    ‘I know there’s nobody who’s NOT staring at me as if I was the world’s thinnest-skinned person, but what’s happening here right now? Have you talked to Ophelia about it?’
    A stick-thin unit manager in a cheap brand of jeans looks over at me with such an ominous expression that I fall suddenly silent and creep inconspicuously out of the kitchen and back to Ophelia’s bedroom. I wrench the door open and scream, ‘Ophelia, there are fifteen people in your kitchen!’
    She wakes up with a jerk and throws the same freaking shoe at me that she threw over the door of a toilet cubicle last week. Then she sinks back on to her feather pillows.
    ‘What’s going down, Ophelia? There’s fifteen people in your kitchen.’
    ‘Are they really here already?’
    ‘Yes, they’re really here already!’
    ‘Have they got cameras and lights and stuff with them?’
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘Then my friend Frauke’s filming a scene for her final exam project, where this guy puts cyanide in his girlfriend’s tampon so that she dies. Wicked, huh? As long as people make a film in my apartment it’s guaranteed to stand out from all that young German social realism crap.’
    Back in the kitchen, I help myself bold as brass from the buffet spread across a trestle table. Nobody takes any notice as I eat a roll spread with nutella and watch a heavily made-up woman in fishnet tights screaming, ‘Just give up your fucking drugs, Jürgen! I don’t want any fucking drugs in my place!’
    Jürgen is played by a man completely undisturbed by the hand-held camera close to his face, sniffing blueish powder.
    I say, ‘That doesn’t look very realistic, does it, if you want to make a drugs film and he’s snorting blueish powder. What’s that supposed to be then?’
    ‘Fuck, who are you anyway?’
    ‘D’you mind if I use the bathroom for a minute?’
    ‘No, you can’t go in there, someone’s getting high-collagen tissue painted on their back in there right now.’
    I stomp angrily across the middle of the kitchen, say, ‘Go bury your fucking film in the desert then!’ and slam the front door behind me.
    Mental blackout.
    I shout, ‘Hey, fuck, who shat in your brain?’
    Annika flinches. At 7:20 a.m. she conscientiously emptied a bucket of water over me as I lay weeping