In A Dark Wood

What is he doing there, kneeling in front of the box?

Is he watching the porn channel, which provides comfort for so many businessmen on their lonely quests in strange places?

No, they haven’t got that here. (And besides: it’s 1980, a time when pornography has just fallen out of fashion and hasn’t yet fallen back in. The last great feminist wave of the millennium is washing over the continent, carrying with it the stylish wreckage of dungarees and purple overalls and the hardly statistical notion that pornography equals rape, a notion that isn’t even one of the more extreme declarations, because there are even among new feminists some who consider that penetrative sex is an act of violence and therefore, and because of the more general oppression of women, declare themselves ideologically lesbian.)

Is Marcus, then, for want of erotic amusements, watching a German channel showing some rather risqué dance?

Not that either.

Figure skating, perhaps, the comfort for the eyes of older men who have gone too long without the sight of young women’s full buttocks?

It isn’t the season for that.

No, Marcus Kolpa is on his knees jerking off to the early-evening news, his face close to the screen, his right hand resolutely clutching his legendary dick, jacket open and trousers around his ankles.

The man who knows everything about German literature from between the wars, pre-Renaissance painting and early industrial machinery, the man with a brilliant future behind him, is kneeling here, we might well say devoutly, in front of the television news. The veins swell at his temples. His perspiration (Marcus Kolpa would never say ‘sweat’) trickles along his temples and down the stiff collar of his shirt.

He isn’t the only one perspiring. It’s hot under the lamps of the television studio as well. The lady newsreader’s hair sags slightly and hangs in tired, heavy tendrils around her pancaked face, making her big grey-blue eyes, those weary, sympathetic eyes, look even bigger and more tired and sympathetic and her face even paler, her alabaster cheeks and her lipsticked mouth even more gentle and understanding, and he, knees hurting, brings his face close to her face, so close that he sees her mouth disintegrate into grains, her eyes dissolve in the grey of the picture lines, her skin a haze of electrons, he rests his forehead against the cool screen, where her forehead is, close to her, licks the dust from her face, her whole face, the whole screen, as she finishes off the financial summary, the ailing national budget, the rising interest rates and falling growth figures, the decline in purchasing power, new mass redundancies, and he looks for her pupils, as if he could look through them, through the pupils, behind the pancaked image, and see the woman who wakes up in the morning on smiling sheets the perspiration between her breasts the pillows that kiss her cheeks and … God yes to kiss her there between her breasts to lick her salty cleavage as he is now licking the screen her grainy eyeshadow the wings of her nose God that and that voice originating in her throat so full his name fuck me everywhere Marcus fuckmeeverywhere Jesus-painknees your servant lady or rather in her suit against the wall and her skirt pulled up and notherenotnow oh when long ago at a student party and her looking out of the attic window bending over the town looking the undecided isshethinkingwhatimthinking doesshewantwhatiwant her black skirt her white blouse a lady but young still just like him oh Christ the weather sun and rain and low temperatures and everything on go on yes then tipsy already and no longer entirely master of what raged and stirred and she looked sideways and he looked sideways her dark eyes so big and moist and her hair in a ponytail the short distance between them … ah … a space of unspoken thoughts and will and … suddenly the firework that exploded outside dripping fiery flowers of rockets and firecrackers and his hand doing what he himself didn’t want to do and rested on her neck pulled her roughly to him lips that sought and opened and found each other but didn’t kiss just feverishly touched skin felt other lips but not the kiss no and still that hand on her neck that guided her clasped her turned her to face the windowsill head-first out of the window his other hand on her hip clawing at the fabric of her skirt that tugged her skirt up and the hand on her neck forcing her forward and the other hand pulling her panties down … God … his sword his member his hardasahammer lifted into her … and the fading light of the firework behind the windows which also burst the soap bubble of his imagination and he and she looked at each other faintly smiled hello you here too yes me too … his slight hesitation at the thought of the vision that had seemed so real that he was afraid that she had seen the lust in his eyes.

Think about something else. Just think about something else. No laundry service in this hotel. Not that it matters. If they had one they’d bring your shirts back boiled to bits and ironed till they shone. The Hilton in, what was it … Oh, with those terrific sandwiches with spicy chicken and brie with cranberries. A Chinese wash house that did the laundry. Shirtssocksboxers came back as if they had personally received the attention of a direct descendant of a thousand-year race of Washermen from the Upper Mandarin, washed with Confucian precision in clear spring water from Szechuan, ironed with a silver iron and … There she is again her pancaked face her deep emotional voice her big eyes like pools of desperate desire or desiring desperation, chat with the weatherman, people’s endless obsession with the weather, probably uncertainty about what to wear the following day dungarees or C&A, nother-notshe, in her pastel suits, her chintzily gleaming stockings, her suede shoes which he, provided that they were new and not worn out, so wished to lick just as he, yes, there she is, yearned to my girl lollipop lick from head to toe, tongue in her ear her throat her eyes.

lady no one so

devoted to you no one who in the summary

of today’s news has so kissed your throat

the gently beating pale blue vein thumping

in your throat thumping lifted up and your legs wrapped

around me and locked behind my back

because never before no one who so

understands you so devoted so wants

to vanish inside you dissolve until there’s nothing but your eyes

the electronic haze of grey-blue

in your pancaked face the lipstick lips

opening to receive my lips your tongue

venturing to my tongue,

seekingyouandthearmsmyconsolingarms,

the unexpected moist warmth

of

yourmouthyourgodopenyourmouth

comeinmeMarcuscome

inme

in

me

in

And there, at the moment suprême

(because that’s what it is)

Marcus Kolpa hears his sperm hit the screen.

Splat!

(Yes, he really hears that.)

It splashes in the newsreader’s face, between her eyes, and drips like a sagging blob of paint down her nose, her mouth, down along her throat.

It’s an epiphanic moment.

It’s the end of the news.

It’s what the creator must have felt when he said let there be light and there was too.

And while the liberating emptiness of the orgasm shoots through him,

outofhisbellybackthroughhisspinalcolumn

betweenhishoulderbladesthroughthebackofhishead

tohisbrain,

the frightening post-orgasmic chill fills him up and he sees in a single glance the smeared screen, himself (man, black suit, trousers round his ankles, a putty penis), the carpet with the worn patches where other men have stood, sat, God knows perhaps knelt like him, and the desolation of what he is and what his life has become.

He sits there like that for a few seconds and then pulls himself up, with one hand on the TV, his other hand holding his trousers up. In the depths of his chest a tulip of desperation sprouts, bursts and fades, all in the blink of an eye, as if it’s a time-lapse sequence from a film by David Attenborough. His head sags, his chin on his chest. He suppresses the raw scream that rises up in him and staggers to the bathroom.

And then there’s the steam, the water clattering down, his hair turning liquid, his skin, himself. Water, clear, clean. This is the moment when he’s empty and without thoughts. For a moment even without memories, without worries and fretting, and without the brilliant ideas for which he is famous and which make him so terribly tired. Just the water streaming over him and he a thing, yes, that’s what it feels like, as if he’s an object, a wall, a roof, a street, a clinker path beneath heavy trees as the first drips fall tapping on the roof of leaves and the downpour that then explodes spills through the foliage and turns the stones dark and gleaming, and while the water slithers down the gutters and washes over the pavement, over the thresholds of houses, into cellars, up stairs, among chairs and tables, armchairs come running and rolling, bobbing from the houses, the whole world is water, the treetops are little islands of dripping green above the surface, so he, Marcus, is flooded and vanished, something that is nothing and something that no longer matters.

He is, face raised into the needles of water from the shower, pure. Empty and pure. His fingers unwrap the greaseproof paper of a piece of hotel soap that imagines it smells of roses. He lets his big hands run with the tiny bar of soap along the slopes of his armpits, over the ridges of his pelvis, through the thicket of his crotch, the long journey down his legs to his feet and then back up again, his ribcage, back, arms, till finally, as if he hasn’t been standing long enough with his head thrown back in the falling water, his face.