TE22 Potpourri

You’re Not Dying

Kathrin Schmidt

‘Thatwon’t be for a littlewhile yet,’ thewoman says. ‘She’s being tube-fed for now, you see.’

now. She thinks she’s laughing. Her sons! Why didn’t she look at them sooner? Then she’d have been happy for even longer! One of them is at university. Where’s he studying again? In Weimar. Oboe. Yes, oboe. The oboe son holds a CD under her nose that he’s burned himself – there’s something written on it but she can’t make it out. He puts the CD into a little gadget and the headphones into her ears. Ahhh, that does her good, what lovelymusic. Oboe. Shemust surely look blissfully happy, she thinks. So now she starts to think about what she looks like. What does she look like? She has no idea, she can’t picture herself at all. They’ve pinched the picture of her! It’s like being in limbo, which comes before Hell proper, and proper Hell comes at night, when it’s dark. Somehow her sons have got to be made aware of this – they can’t just leave her here and go away again! Are you two listening? Hello, where are you? She looks up, exhausted: the boys have gone. Completely unaware of the danger. * * * A blonde woman comes up and busies herself with something next to her. She tries to turn her head at least a little bit. The blonde gives her a dirty look, but she manages to do it, and sees a whole load of monitors all piled up on top of each other. The blonde holds a pouch of mud-coloured mush in her hand. She hangs the mush on a hook and fastens a tube to it. ‘Lunch,’ she says, and laughs. 49

Tube-fed, see. Satisfied, she closes her eyes. * * *

A young man on the left, one on the right. They’re looking at her, and they seem familiar, but she doesn’t want to look them in the eye. Actually, she would like to know who they are. They’re smiling and talking quietly to each other over her head. She has a think. Wants to ask the one on the left to pull the ... a bit lower, so that it’s more in the small of her back, but she can’t think of the damn word – what on earth is it called? She makes signs to both the boys for what she wants, namely that they pull the ... a bit lower for her. They don’t seem to understand. What did she even use to make these signs? Her hands? The left hand is fastened down, with a tube in it. Is she still hooked up to the network, still being controlled remotely? She wants to signal her fear to them with her right hand, but it just lies there and won’t move. Strange. Why can’t she move her hand? They must be using the network to control all her movements. And the boys? Are they network operators? She has a closer look at them now. Relief: she knows them. They’re her sons. Their names won’t come to her, but that doesn’t matter right 48