Y's Revenge. Lou Bihl

of oneself in their shadowy tranquility. I particularly appreciated the contrast between the grandiose decadence of several mausoleums and the plain baldness of other graves, either mocking the glory of their eponym or enhancing it.

      As soon as her mother was out of earshot, Micky came to an abrupt stop and asked me in a frail voice, “Tina said that if you get cancer, you will soon kick the bucket. Is that true?”

      “Tina is a dumb chick and has no idea what cancer is,” I replied. “Look, there is no such thing as the cancer. That is just a term ignorant people use because they think entirely different diseases are all the same. It’s like saying ‘automobile,’ when it could be a sports car or a big truck.”

      Micky nodded, and her expression regained hopefulness.

      I went on. “Cancer can be a big lobster, like the one we had at Grandma’s birthday, or a little shrimp or small crab.”

      She didn’t yet seem fully convinced. “So, why are you sick if you have cancer, when you look so healthy?”

      I showed her a grave with abundant vegetation, which evidently had not been tended to for some time. “Look at this grave, with its many lovely flowers but a lot of weeds as well. If the weeds get too dominant, the flowers will be outgrown and die. Something similar can happen in a human body, meaning that something can start to grow that does not belong there. Then the person has to see a doctor, and the doctor will either eradicate the weed or at least take care that it doesn’t grow any further. If it works, the cancer patient is cured.”

      Nodding again, she asked, “What kind of cancer do you have? I hope it’s just a small North Sea shrimp.”

      “Well, let’s say a small prawn.”

      I saw the radiant smile return to Micky’s eyes, and she embraced me rapturously. She dragged me on, and we stopped at the grave of Bertold Brecht. I told her about the poet and his wife, a famous actress.

      “This grave is boring,” she commented.

      I knew what she was referring to and explained that the tomb revealed the poet’s last wish to have a gravestone inviting any dog to pee on it. Accordingly, he had been buried beneath a crude lump of rock with the shape of an uprising mountain peak, whereas his wife Helene rested under a stone of identical consistency but crouched in appearance and, at most, only half the height of her spouse’s.

      Frowning, Micky stated, “So the poet is getting all the beautiful Alsatians and his poor wife is left with the Pekingeses.”

      We returned to the grave of my ex-mother in law, and Micky rushed into the open arms of her mother.

      “Mami, Grandpa is not going to die! He doesn’t have cancer, only a small prawn! And Tina is a dumb chick.”

      Maren stared at me, uncomprehending first, but then grateful, and she included me in her embrace.

      I gave a clandestine look around when I passed by a grave where pheasant’s eye roses already bore blossoms, before cutting one of them.

      Wolfgang Herrndorf’s grave featured no more than an ungarnished concrete block with a minimalistic inscription. It was jammed between a socialistic economist and an eastern opera director who had reached the age of 102 years. I added my little flower to the other devotional objects, placing it between a drift bottle and a pencil.

      Hi, buddy. You had no chance against your glioblastoma. Keep your fingers crossed that I survive my prostate cancer. You managed to transform the predictable brevity of survival into an artwork. When do you start to live each day as if it were the last one, when you are unable to predict the duration of your remaining life span as I am? I would love to know what you would had done if you were in my place. Well, at least I know a smoother exit than a shot in the head. But not yet.

      Cemeteries make a zest for life.

      The copper-blond wig made me look too pale, so I opted for the ash-blond one. I slipped into the patent leather boots without taking the trouble of putting a pantyhose on. I got into the robe from the latest Diane von Furstenberg collection. The wraparound conveniently permitted a grip inside while remaining perfectly dressed, which was one of the reasons it had continued to be my favorite ritual cloth throughout most of my life. In the seventies, mother had excited Stuttgart’s high society with the night-blue silk dress from the first line of the legendary series. Some years later, she’d had to discard it after her husband had spilled some Negroamarone, and I had clandestinely saved it from the waste container. Wrapping myself into the soft silk for the first time had overwhelmed me with such anticipatory excitement that further handwork became superfluous. Mother’s dress governed my ritual until I started university. Then, I exchanged it for a new one that took me ten hospital night shifts to finance. Later on, I went shopping with Alex every few years when a new series appeared, until direct delivery via the internet became available.

      Looking into the full-length mirror made me content. The delicate fabric flowing down on both sides of the center of action compensated for the minimal makeup—just a bit of Kajal for the lower lid; no mascara today. Since I wasn’t up to shaving again, powder was pointless, as it looked chalky on beard stubbles. I put a dash of Femme on my left wrist and red enamel on just one fingernail of my working hand.

      When I looked into the mirror, she was nowhere in sight. There was no chance of chasing “Y” away, and Kristina refused to appear. All I saw was the aging body of Kris—no way of overcoming the force of gravity tonight. Neither soft nor stronger stroking, not even sniffing the scent of Femme or the view of the red-enameled nail on its forefront, could bring my pecker even close to its target size, let alone to the desired stamina.

      Searching for an internal movie, I imagined sitting behind Gemma on a Harley she has snatched from her murderous Old Man. She just wears a helmet and leather boots, her voluptuous ass is nestling to the rigid saddle and the bumpy highway makes her tits swing. However, my manhood remained unimpressed.

      So, I tried another film, trying to visualize the Katheoy twins: Sunya with her girl’s pussy, Suna with the magnificently upright dick.

      Whereas mine remained on strike. So much for Freud’s theory of eros being a force of life. Deeply frustrated, I undressed and removed the makeup and nail polish.

      Switching back into my Kris-mode was not the usual painful self-eviction from paradise; instead, I felt desolate emptiness,with just a cemetery occupying the space between me and the intrinsic life I would fail to live.

      When I closed the drawer, the key was trembling in my hand. My heart was racing, as if the ritual had been excitingly successful. Cold sweat trickled down, finding its way through my eyebrows. A claustrophobic oppression gripped my chest. As the palpitations of my heart continued, I thought of calling the emergency ward but then decided for Noah’s Mill instead.

      The old bourbon succeeded in bringing the regular heartbeat back, but the chaos in my head remained.

      Later that night, sleeplessness sucked me into black swirls of sickness, frailty, and old age, followed by the merciless question of whether old age should be cherished as a gift, a present that I could, by no means, be certain of. Later, in my unrestful sleep, I got lost in icy dream deserts whose vastness had no horizon, and I was wandering aimlessly in panic and desperation. The cold made the blood in my vessels freeze and my lungs burn.

      Only by dawn did I regain orientation. At half past seven, I called Alex.

      She sounded empathic but not concerned. “Typical panic attack. Happens mainly to those who play it cool. It will happen again, but it will pass the same way. Like nightmares. At night, you are defenseless against the anxiety you’ve drowned in sarcasm during the day. Whiskey can fight the panic in the short term, but it doesn’t help with anxiety.”

      “In that case, I prefer panic.”

      “Sure