Of course I did. For instance, I wondered where the hell she might’ve gone. I’d gone to Tiergarten, and naturally there was no Ane, neither the kiosk woman nor the people standing at the entrance had seen her. It was all a load of crap. Berlin. Willum and his installation, too. And myself. I was also a load of crap.
“Those are some fat assholes,” I said, pointing to the elephant’s iris.
“We slept in a forest,” Ane said.
Torben and Ane stayed in the apartment that night. They put their sleeping pads on the floor beneath the window.
Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, an extremely drunk Rose appeared. She kicked the kitchen chairs and shouted at Torben.
“What do you want?” Ane asked. “Can’t you just leave him alone?”
“What the fuck do you know about it, little Ane? Why are you getting involved anyway?”
“Well, I know he doesn’t want to be with you.”
“He doesn’t want to be with you either, you idiot. You insane little idiot. Sweet, stupid little Ane with all her sweet little stories. If you think he wants to be with you, you’re completely fucking wrong. You don’t know shit about him, do you? No, why should you? One woman’s not enough for him, capiche? He can’t keep his dick in his pants. Not that he goes around bragging about it. At least he’s smart enough for that. And that’s a whole lot smarter than you are.”
“Yeah. Well, and you, too,” Ane said, vanishing into the attic and slamming the door.
On Friday we set out our books on the floor and went through them. In terms of melancholy, Rose’s book was the best, and Willum admitted it was good, even though he thought it’d been an arrogant way to complete the assignment. Willum was also extremely pleased with Ane and Torben’s book. You just couldn’t tell, he said, if it was an eye or an asshole staring you down.
Torben is big. His body, his mouth, all of it. He majored in graphic design with a group of guys who sought, sought, sought toward the extremes. It has to be about men, they said, and established an artist group.
Their first show featured some paintings they’d schlepped to a barracks out in Slagelse. Once there they’d laid them in a pasture so a private could drive over them with a tank.
The exhibit was held in Kolding. At the opening, they sat in the gallery around a card table playing poker, drinking whiskey, and smoking cigars. Torben got so drunk that he shit his pants. In the wee hours of the morning he traipsed around the city wrapped in a T-shirt with shit running down his legs. The rumor made it around the whole school, but Ane, of course, didn’t believe a word.
After that it was exclusively about pushing limits. At one point the group ingested everything it could get its hands on, everything that could be introduced into the human body with reasonable ease.
One guy got addicted to some particularly hard stuff, and eventually he was thrown out of the academy for putting the fancy chairs in the banquet hall up for sale on eBay. After he left, the other guys started shooting at themselves with various implements or cutting themselves. Or they had the others cut them while they taped it on video.
Ane could watch an entire self-torture video to end without blinking, and there was one episode she found especially appealing. It featured Torben sticking a nail in his hand. He did it over and over again, even after he’d made a large, bloody hole.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”
She considered switching to graphic arts, since she thought it would be fun to be a girl surrounded by that sort of guy. I asked:
“What sort of guy?”
“Uncompromising,” she said. “Wild.”
However, then she attended one of the department’s get-togethers and the professor didn’t so much as acknowledge her presence. There were other new students that he questioned about this and that, including their interest in graphics.
One of the other aspirants had brought along some photographs that he’d taken the liberty of hanging around the room before everyone arrived. The pictures were taken one night when, returning from the city drunk, he’d danced around his bedroom before the camera in a pair of ridiculous underpants. The guy was chubby and pale, anything but a Chippendale, and the harsh flash only made a hapless situation worse. Despite the fact that there were some really raw pictures, and much was said about loneliness, self-exposure, and sex, the professor failed to see the quality in them. The guy, who was as deft at clarifying his work as he was at being his work, couldn’t make any headway. It was unbearable, Ane thought.
At first Torben wasn’t particularly interested in Ane, who bustled around in her rather overlarge smock and talked shop. However, his indifference, which persisted even after our Berlin trip, actually attracted her. He didn’t want to tie himself down, she said, and you know, she liked that. It was only following the Christmas party during our second year that she seriously managed to pin him down.
Some girls from one of the painting departments had transformed the party’s setting into a three-dimensional work of art. Cheeses hung against a black wall like pock-marked planets. Torben got extremely drunk after bragging that he could down a flask of schnapps in less than half an hour. In the middle of an anthem he fell off the table and split his chin.
Later he tried kicking out the DJ because he thought she was playing shit music, but before he could accomplish the task, a pair of the DJ’s friends came along and threw him out instead. They dragged him out the door and down to the plaza and only let him go when they’d gotten quite far away from the party. When he made his way back to the academy, Ane was there to collect him. She found him in the courtyard and put him in a taxi and and took him back to her place. Right after that he moved in with her.
He’s wanted to pulverize her from the beginning, to move in and force her out. I’m not just imagining it. Perhaps he doesn’t even know it. But I’m certain. Eventually, it’ll become clear. He’s together with her so that in some insidious way he can squeeze her life out.
Now. Vita’s towering up. She’s standing tall and white. From below, her face looks like two nostrils and a chin, and her breasts are two sacs with raspberry nipples, ripe for the plucking, they almost tumble into your hand, plop. They’re visible because her stomach is flat, her tuft of hair smooth. Vita stands directly over my head with legs spread and opens her mouth, dribbles silence.
If she could just relax a little. If she could just relax, she’d see it. Vita still has something we can share, but she tramps around my face and shoves all else aside, everything that I should reasonably be thinking about, everything that needs to be done, works that never even existed as ideas yet. Every time I think of something concrete, my thoughts stall, and there she is again. Her body. Her leg hair. She has goose bumps. She wants to be bitten on the thigh. She says: Bite hard, that’s what I want.
Topple her to the floor, screw her and her head on the floor, screw her hard, spread that flesh, woman, find that finger, rub oblivion into the juicy wound, suck, soothe.
Vita. I know what she means. No use in pretending otherwise. Take, for example, what can I say, take . . . that day at the Louisiana
