Sports Play

  I fan the fire and then I stamp it out, however I fancy. All the while putting on a nice face and biting a piece off the cake that I wouldn’t dream of sharing. I can appear genteel, can present myself everywhere, even though I originally come from a simple background. I do not leave the side of the victim I have chosen. My environment always recognised me, but not as the person I really am. I created myself. The female body has to please and that is a lot of work. With regards my person, there is a new hip on the overdraft, that has to be deducted from the total sum. I wouldn’t be quite complete without hips, don’t you find? Now I’m going to test my foot, because if I have a wooden leg no one is going to take me on. And yet I am the one who takes. The winner takes all! I am the one who is desired, yet instead of arriving happily as a package, I open myself up and swallow the recipient. I am as insatiable as water that envelopes its own eternal, non-paying passenger. I only pour myself into the bath very gently. Not too warm and not too much. Always check that you’re right by the plug and can pull it out.

  Killing is a one-off matter, whereas for a woman, working on one’s own body never ends. Society wants a confession from me. They can have a fart from the dead. At least before they get a confession from me. He had a cardiac arrest. When he turned blue, I knew he was dead. Everyone will abandon me completely, which is why from the start I have to elevate myself up too high for anyone to reach. There was once upon a time when measuring man’s beauty came entirely from the dead, because there was no point in looking at a living person, as they’d be kaput in no time at all. People pictured looking so powerful in earlier times were barely out of the factory before they were dead! And with regards supra-beings, they’re well and truly extinct. Today it’s different, today bodies are simply measured, weighed and valued. But against what is no longer clear. Today, when it comes to defective bodies, it is said that anyone who has one has only himself to blame. Get rid of it quick! Or phone me, just in case cash or real estate are present. Yes, please do call during the dispatch. I’ll send every single one of you away! Just phone me! The weak, the defectives can be glad that I exist, provided it pays. To me, of course. I look at my little boy and I know: wow wee, he’s dead. Nothing to be done. If his body is as pretty as a picture, then he belongs to everyone. If the body is weak, old or ill, the burden of proof remains with him or is his to give. But I will remove this burden from you, Alois!

  You can thank me retrospectively! I am the mother who takes and never gives. Yes, the first commandment: don’t ever give what you once had yourself! I send blood sugar levels down and humiliate room temperatures until they kneel before me. Hello, who’s there? Yes, doctor. I’ve something distressing to tell you. The old fool no longer has a body! What have I done with his body? At the end he probably knew how a woman feels when good taste comes into the game. He died in front of my eyes! His whole body was full of shit and that then blocked the drains. So I pushed the shit in the bath down with a plunger. I was the water bride to my boy. Without a body and nevertheless overwhelming. Fortunately he didn’t swallow anything. Because then the pathologist might have said: aha, water in the lungs. Alois was simply just lying around. Nobody claimed him, or at least only afterwards, after I’d done all the dirty work myself. I’m a real laudable person, no, a loud person. I affect people solely through my appearance, people don’t notice that in fact it is my conversation that is effective and enchants them. I am simply enchanting. I gesticulate with my voice. Alois is finally at peace and has fallen asleep. A person’s rights only exist for as long as their body disports itself in an expression of the spirit. Otherwise the body’s spirit drops to its boots. Shit! Here the body is expressing itself as strong, fast, agile! I cause all other bodies to fall silent. Here a person is expressing themselves, but he can’t do it very well. He doesn’t have the energy to squeeze the tube. Or does he?

  It happens unwittingly? He’s barely lain down before he shits himself. Well thanks a bunch, and then I have to bathe him again. Which is why he died in the bathtub. And no one helped in any way. And that he threatens me and says: I’ll catchya, I’ll catchya! Well, what’s he going to threaten me with, the old devil? I am innocent and if you are innocent, you can move about freely. It was a perfectly normal death. But of course. Tell me, what thought-way are you walking here? Look: all of Alois’ qualities have long hidden themselves modestly behind the curtain, in front of which others normally bow, but we know the photos. Through me you have also got to know Alois, if only posthumously. Yes, everything is clearly coming to the fore, more clearly than when Alois was alive: yes, everything you could possibly imagine, including his savings book, his little house with a garden. That’s everything that gave this body any meaning retrospectively. And now even Alois himself is coming, because he believed that the applause was for him. Whoah there, I see now he really will become famous through me. That wasn’t in the plan. They’re swarming about him. They’re swarming about me too. They touch me without me having invited them to do so. To think of the energy required to ensure that Alois finally stopped breathing! To think of the poisonous and caustic substances I used so that others can no longer breathe. Traffic is nothing in comparison, and that expends a gigantic effort.

  I kill with meals on wheels, I kill with water in vats! Killing is my favourite sport, it combines sweat with blood and excrement and that leaves me pristine. However I still drill into others like a torpedo. If touching another’s body is completely unnecessary in golf, sailing and tennis, I practise my favourite sport – killing – actually within another body. I splash about in it. The other body surrounds me like water and I paddle in it. I am disgusted by every touch and yet the foreign body encompasses me like a second skin. Clutches at me and I encompass it.

  Do you have a good feeling, doctor? Has nurse Josephine already kicked the bucket? Well, she can go and get stuffed. There are no savings books. I don’t know where he’s buried them. I know what he said: girl, you’ll soon see what you’re going to get. So, where is it? The swine went and croaked and I’m supposed to rummage around? I’ll find them. In February something might well happen with the inheritance. So, Herta – hang around and drink tea. What concerns me is that savings book, you know. I’ll just say I took the money out and handed it over to him. In the surgery, a whole line of sick people. Revolting. I come in and they just don’t get that I’m an autocrat: your hostess. They don’t recognise me. They don’t kiss my hand. I look like any old person and so return home from my triumph with fruit trees and terraced houses. Okay, perhaps I am a bit like other women, viewed superficially, and yet I am as different to them as day is to night. I am my sole measure and my own measurement. Who on earth under seventy would want to have my body? They prefer to look at girls in bikinis. To the very last! What staying power! I judge myself. But no one has to starve because of me in order to fit into their clothes, and then, when the summer comes, take the last scrap of clothing off. I leave that judgement to the newspapers, who act as if they are friends to all and sundry, although not all and sundry can appear in them.

  Soon it’s my turn. Beforehand I’ll return in a good mood from meeting people that I’ll never meet again in my life, which is solely to my credit, back there from whence I started. Only this time I’m richer by a few hundred thousand. Soon they’ll all be looking at me, when the beam from the projector that I have been sunning myself in is turned on me. I am subject and object in one. Clock-hand and clock, on show and on the cheap, but one who nevertheless spends with their hands full. It’s no good. And yet I take responsibility for not corresponding to any image and at the same time being an image in a magazine. Shine. Colour. Hair-do. Paradox! Should others animate images with themselves without ever having been the image of a woman! They will never able to be photographed as much as me! Excuse me. I have to go back now. What’s waiting for me there? A very small dark room. I blow the last sign of life out beforehand, because if it is too late, then I see my own limitations. I can’t bear that. How on earth could one slee
p then!

  ANDI:

  Listen up! I’d barely finished engraving the hieroglyphics of the sport onto my body, when sport – its dearest host, the one with the cosy bright pictures in front of the homestead – began to eat up my body from the inside. Sport has made running metres of man out of me, which I, its very own carpet, have constantly to push forward into the unknown. And that’s where I’ve ended up. One thing I knew for sure: my goal. But where has it gone? My sight is getting worse! Fog. Everything hurts! The alpine pastures of my Heimat have outgrown me. They made me happy as a child but hanging around like a cow is not for me. Brings no return. I’m not going back. This contentment slowly created by reason during long working hours has all of a sudden turned into a snappy dog that chases us out of the quiet house, well bye-bye. Where am I? Of course, the first thing I had to do was destroy my contentment by slowly rising in myself as container, like a liquid, right up to the edges. And then, at some stage, I outgrew myself. Who would have thought that possible, me, a poor farmer’s boy. So now I make myself available to my greatest role model, Arnie. He has accepted me as his child and his pupil. But modelling myself on him is something I’ll have to do all alone. Arnie is allowed to retain his face. He’s allowed to present himself to the world as someone who created himself. But what should I do? Although – my Arnie did once impersonate an artificial being very naturally. He was an alien who was created in a factory. A superman factory, of course, that manufactured the unnatural. I myself always remained natural. That’s no good to me now. Even us normal immortals decide for ourselves who’ll remain a stranger to us and who’s allowed to be a god.

  I always had to do everything on my own, unlike Arnie, that human temple I so admire. He delivered himself in one piece once he’d blown the others to pieces. The more he talked about his mama, the less it seemed that he came from her. He was successful, dammit! The richer he’s getting, the better he’s getting. Unlike me. At first he had to be evil, and then he was allowed to be good with us. I can’t express it in any other way: a god. A flash that goes through one’s forehead, the furthest edge from which a man can jump without being smashed to pieces on his own balcony, which from above he’d taken for two pieces of breast. At least two metres deep and fifty centimetres wide is the depth, so no choice but on down. The mountains too are only there to be conquered. Success alone was able to transform my Arnie. Imagine what success could do with me! I am so much more obedient and malleable. Even waves on a pond would make fools of themselves if they just gave in to all weathers. I followed every suggestion as to how I could get stronger.

  Evil is as featureless as a worker amongst millions of others. It only wants something to do, it’s without aim, without desire, without anything. Good on the other hand, the ethos, has its own specific tone. My dear role model, Arnie, now he’s spreading his wings and positioning himself for a flight way up high, the views all belong to him. Now he no longer needs to be the bad guy! Now he’s almost got his own face! He always rubbed his wings against his picture and a shrill tone rang out as he and his image jumped into each other. Just like a cricket. A burning tyre through a burning tyre. Fancy that, now the images are doing it with each other. Soon they’ll do it all by themselves. But for now we still stare and urge them on until our pupils turn red. The glass in front of the television explodes with rage. If I were to try something like that then only a horrid baiting mother’s voice would be heard. Is never satisfied. Too early, too short, too slow, too much like myself. Too little like someone else. Forever giving me instruction. Be another! Quick march! And yet she’s not even my mother. This woman does not want me. She does not want what she created, she always wants more, always more. She wants her one and only to be the one who belongs to everyone. Like Arnie. Right, no one has ever kept a one and only like him to themselves. But I believe my mama would have liked him. Well, now she got it.

  Stop, now that I’m down below I can see Arnie’s roots! They couldn’t hang onto him once he was able to get away from mother earth. Is the earth my real mother, too? Now I’m with her and in her. I see urges sprouting! Are they the right ones? Arnie’s showing them to me, I’m the only one he allows to see this upright posture made of flesh. He received this posture as a loyalty gift following thirty years on his beloved earth. I’m trying to imitate Arnie, like this: even my roots are holding in this lush earth, but why can’t I get them out? That was modelled for me in quite another way! I’m stuck up to the hips in my grave, I’m trying to work my way out. The knitted fabric of my tendons is bluish. It’s no use. Death is the only possible appearance for man – evil concepts of life, enmities, war. With women it’s the opposite – motherhood. Why do these mothers always want different sons to the ones they have? No matter how much I struggle, and sweat, I got stuck in mother earth for some time when in fact I wanted to set out on an odyssey into the unknown. At heart, I never really got away from my abject ideas about Heimat.

  Amongst admirers no woman waited years for me, so I had to take my girlfriend everywhere with me as provisions. The marriage’ll only go ahead once my girlfriend has become world champion. Yes, her too – years and years of hard training! It was no good. She didn’t excite me enough to go irrepressibly wild.

  Wherever I stood, I was like some male version of the star coin girl overwhelmed by the bell-call of homesickness. Why does a man have to go away? Only my Arnie ever managed to do that: be loved and yet he got away. Nevertheless, like him, I too hang onto my dear parents, the little piece of ground and soil, the little house in the mountains. I tug at him, the terminator who cannot terminate his calendar. The places he has to appear! Oh, if only I could be there too! But I have to remain here lying underground. His body is his uniform, his mark. His very own mark, and that means: nothing. A nothing that stands opposite the made.

  As for me, I was scraping the barrel, let me tell you. I had to pay with my whole body. Was I not ashamed to appear in public with it? And so it came to pass that I’m now dead. Just because I wasn’t really watching what I ate for a couple of months. I too was allowed to absorb something myself, just slightly different to what people thought. I dressed myself in my masculinity in secret. Checked that no one was looking! Everyone was able to curb their cravings. Only I didn’t spare myself. My liver, my kidneys gradually turned slack, flapped around inside me like curtains. Yes, and what was in it for me? Now I have to lie here quietly, dressed in the shroud of my self-begotten manliness, which every doctor would be happy to confirm in writing. “Let’s craft ourselves a man out of five substances”, it said on the syllabus for super-humans. So you learn and learn, but you don’t get anywhere. I deliver up my last act of love to my mother, I owe it to her, since she’s never happy with me: an act of devotion somewhere between motherlessness, self-creation and self-destruction. Yup, that’s us, we recognise each other as we constantly run back to mama from abroad. My mama’ll only be happy once I’ve become someone else, namely, nobody. Nobody any more. And here, you can see, she’s achieved it. Now she’s getting me paid out, but as someone different to the one she made. There’s my purse, my keys, my credit cards, my wind breaker – into whose sleeves nothing will reach anymore. I was transported into the light a long time ago. Yes, I was supported, yet underneath on balance there’s nothing on the executioner’s block. Nothing permanent can come from a woman, first of all it has to be completely different before she’s finally able to adopt one as a child. And what’s more, a future Styrian lighting storm. Good god!

  Performance is in good hands in my body, and to such an extent that outside of performance my body cannot exist. Locked out and the key thrown away! That’s how it was whilst I was alive. And so now I’ve got away from myself only so that I can stay, asleep. Please, I want to be like Arnie, but how does that work? He’s still alive! Sadly I’m no longer alive and yet I don’t begrudge him standing there or racing across the screen. The way he was running around your screens today! Super! Out of the plane without a parachute! As if he was at hom
e in the air! I was only ever at home at home. He pretends to be familiar with me on screen, my hero, but he’s lying! He does exactly the same with millions of others! He acts as if I could simply follow him. But I have things to do here. Must get better than him! Must! Must!

  Please, I know Arnie as if he were mine, as if he was me. I research him on the lovely poster that I’ve hung up in my grave. I study his features as to when I can really go after him. And I’m off! Downhill at great speed. My own hospital ward committee. I saved his extra-large garland especially, it oozes, earth, slowly into me until I quake right into my poor soul. That was not part of the original plan! Sadly I don’t look much like Arnie, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Who’s looking at the face anyway? And here under the earth absolutely nobody’s looking at me. I work hard and yet I always cut myself down to size too early before I can break through. Arnie, he wraps himself in his body, as if the body really was him and he even writes something on it! He writes to me every day, how many leaps, seconds, minutes is he rushing ahead of me. I know all his letters by heart, even before he writes them. But he is not Jesus, who I met every day in our little kitchen. So I was able to compare. My God, the other one’s my god, Arnie. Not God, the one you probably mean when you say angrily: my God! This mass of muscle does not grow of its own accord, even if that’s what you were promised. God had purely nothing to do with your body. What he gave you is nothing. I get that now, now that I myself have become nothing. Although I can still watch Arnie on the screen in my head from which the bones grin, as if they’d seen my picture instead of Arnie’s. From close by and in close-up. Tried both – no comparison! I want to be a child again so that I could at least once earn just so much recognition. Because I, at least once, will have done my homework on my body properly.