sciences, you still just took a pudding, baby!’
‘No I didn’t!’
‘I can’t just run around here chucking forty portions of custard into teenage faces that nobody’s paid for. What am I supposed to call you now? Impotent wanker?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Shut your fucking mouth, you smart arse.’
‘Get up, you cunt, and bow.’
‘Pardon?’
‘GET UP YOU CUNT AND BOW!’
Ophelia threw a large ladleful of buckwheat bake at me. I chucked my classmate Olivia Stüter’s custard at her, she emptied a portion of spinach intended for two hundred thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds over my head. While the two of us maintained strict eye contact all along. We conjured up a channel between us, through which we managed to stare at each other as if we were head over heels in love.
She informed me that she was the perfect mirror for my true yearnings. And I just swallowed it, dialled her phone number, listened to her saying I urgently had to throw away a number of items of clothing she didn’t like, and answered that she was a dead woman.
‘If there’s one thing you can count on in this world, it’s being mentally and physically violated.’
It may all sound pretty implausible, but that’s just the way it was back then.
From:
Ophelia
To:
Mifti
Subject:
Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Sun, 4 November 2007, 22:12
I have to tell you my dream. You’ll like it. We wanted to get together and I was supposed to visit you at your place. A huge old apartment building. Mirrored stairwell. Twenty doors per floor. I’ve even done a drawing of it, shame I can’t scan it in. I went up the stairs. There were dogs fighting over the remains of a donkey. It was quite dark because there was only one window in the entire hallway. In a corner was a table and chairs. I looked around and realized that this vestibule covered in vulture-shit was part of your flatshare.
I was curious because there was an unlocked door. The gap between the door and the frame was really wide and I could see it wasn’t locked. I opened it and looked into a little room with a metal bed inside, and on it was an old man covered in zillions of pus-filled wounds. He heard me and moved. I left the room. A girl came out of a double door. I didn’t quite know if it was you but she looked like you, and she went to the washbasin and washed her hands. I didn’t dare ask who she was because I’d forgotten your name. I couldn’t remember if it was Ute or Uta. At some point I asked if she was Mifti. She said in an unfriendly way, no, she’s inside.
It was your flatmate. Her name was Claudia.
We went into the bathroom, and there was a crowd of people in flipflops made of old car tyres, all in just as bad a state as the guy on the bed. You’d invited all these people round and I thought, she really is disturbed! They were all vying for your attention. Two women even got in the bathtub naked to impress you. All the others, there were at least seven of them, stood around the bath. I just carried on walking without saying a word to you. And you looked totally out of your depth. In the next room, which was incredibly large, there was an orgy going on. A man got down on all fours in front of me and pushed his arse out so I could fuck him. And I suddenly had a cardboard dick but it was only two-dimensional, just like the condom I wanted to put on it. And of course that didn’t work. The End.
From:
Mifti
To:
Ophelia
Subject:
RE: Go Fuck Yourself
Date:
Mon, 5 November 2007, 00:12
And how do you interpret all that?
In my last dream I flew to the Amazon in an inflatable plastic helicopter. After a while we had to make an emergency landing in the rainforest in the dusk and my brother said, ‘You can decide now whether to get dressed or not.’
Then someone shouted: ‘Oh, a melody in the night!’ and we saw a huge, vacant hotel with a pool and a squash court. All the passengers spent their time lying around blind drunk on car roofs discussing