This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here.
Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, 1973
Everybody talks about the weather. We don't. We talk of overthrow and safehouses, we talk automatic assault-weapon rates of fire, we talk about the physical elimination of barriers to societal change, we discuss betrayers and who needs to be avoided and who silenced forever. We talk about storms of history rising up and swirling round the weather systems of centuries. We have nothing to say about little drizzles that make the washing hanging out on the line all damp. We have no small talk.
That’s why we stay in our grubby flat and peek out through the lace curtains. If we could trust ourselves to just be normal around normal people, to blather convincingly about pleasant sunshine or horrible rain, we might venture outside. We could walk in the sun again. We already look quite different from when we were last seen in public, at the Weisbaden raid just before Christmas, when we shot a bank manager in the head and escaped at speed in a V6 Ford Taunus.
Jürgen the university professor has come round to deliver groceries and cigarettes, bring some newspapers. He cracked the windows and let in a little air. He sits there in the kitchen, smoking, babbling about strategies of cultural displacement and the war of position, of organic intellectuals, of Habermas and Althusser and Mao. I just think of how I'd like to fuck him.
This is an actual possibility: I could suggest it and then it would – or at least might conceivably – happen. But there are risks in physical involvement, not least the risk that at some point we might need to take Jürgen out into a piece of waste ground and put a bullet in his head. Physical involvement would complicate such a process.
He stays for supper, which I have to make. I may be a demolitions expert, apprenticed to bombmakers in Tunis, with sharpshooter training that enables me to clip a policeman in the temple at 200 metres – but I'm a woman, so it's up to me to dish out the spaghetti bolognese. What did Rosa Luxemburg say? The erotic dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, while the toil of woman within the four walls of her home is considered unproductive. I should do a fucking striptease instead.
She also says the most revolutionary thing one can do is to proclaim loudly what's happening. So at dinner I blurt out: "I'M BORED! I NEED A FUCK!" and there are grins all round, but no takers. Even though Jürgen looks set to take me up on it, Willi presses his arm and whispers in his ear. Pay no heed to the hysterical Karin. This is not exactly what he said when I killed the security guard who'd drawn a bead on him in the Wiesbaden Deutsche Bank. When he'd wet his little pants in terror and I shot the little man in a pale blue shirt on the dome of his balding head.
So Willi the wetleg and Jürgen the desperate put their heads together and discuss my hysteria, my lamentable condition of female unfuckedness. But they swivel their chipmunk faces and look up towards Georg when he speaks from the head of the kitchen table. They even bow their heads – just a little – a microsubmission that nobody notes consciously but me.
Georg is their boy hero, their glamorous pup and sweetdark angel. His tousled curly-brown hair, his boyish blue eyes and square-yet-delicately-cleft chin, they mark him out as the Wagnerian hero striding amid the bloodied thighs of giants, the corpses of gods.
They haven't tried to tease his floppy cock into stiffness at three o'clock in the morning as he sobs about how much trouble he's gotten himself into. Or maybe they have tried it, I don't know. By now, after five months hiding out in this bland apartment, we've been driven to the paroxysms of boredom, and all the permutations of desire have no doubt been played through.
So they gaze adoringly as the lithe form of Georg gets up from his plate of pasta and starts to stride around the kitchen declaiming his piece. His hips sway hypnotically as he speaks of revolutionary violence and seizing the moment. In his jeans and open denim shirt, his ghost of brownish-reddish stubble, he's stepped from the pages of one of those glam mags that lie around the place, Sexyman-Bild, Playgirl, or the like, and which make our time here in this unstable refuge, this tight damp prison, such a torment to us. Dreamy boys in sunlight-dappled fields of crocuses, the golden dust of dusklight swirling between the trees. It's the pornography of open spaces.
We have no small talk. That's why Georg's speech is so ferocious in its revolutionary fervor, and yet spoken in the humming throaty tones of a seducer. Answer repression with ever-greater force. Give it to them hard. Dialectic is just foreplay for us. We don't talk about the weather and we don't whisper lovetalk. We proclaim overthrow and we stroke our crotches while we plot strategies of armed struggle.
Suddenly Georg stops striding and closes his blue eyes. He looks up and recites the words of Holger, who died in a hunger strike in prison. We protested at the time that the Pigs had allowed Holger to die, forced him to die, but secretly we were glad. His intense purpose was always to achieve martyrdom, and his agony of starvation was the sublime culmination of that wish.
Georg stands with eyes closed and sways. He speaks, and halfway sings, the hymn of our martyr Holger. We don't talk about the weather; we surge with the cadence of lyrical terror.
Either a Pig or a human.
Either survival at any price
or a fight to the death.
Either problem or solution -
There’s nothing in between.
He grunts like a snuffling wolf, cracks his jaws with a pop. And opens his eyes, which are now deep and dark, all blue now gone, with pupils like black holes into eternity. What he doesn't know, and what the others don't know: I dropped a phial of liquid LSD into the spaghetti sauce. I snagged it from Silvia when she visited us from Kommune-A.
Why? I'm bored. People say 'bored to death', but they don't mean it that way, it's just chit-chat like the weather. I'm bored to death. I mean it. Acid seems like something to do, a roll of the iron dice for fully-armed stir-crazy fugitives in a crowded Bonn flat. We're now on the revolutionary starship to beyond – and what could possibly go wrong?
A bootleg cassette of Can from their Stuttgart gig is playing at full volume. Damo is screaming Japanese lyrics backwards. Neighbors might come, the cops might be called. So what? Let them come, we will handle them.
We're in a heap in the living room, writhing on the beanbag, naked and slithering in our own drool - all except Georg who stares into the TV. Looks into the eyes of Henry Kissinger, Ho Chi Minh, Johann Cruyff, Jane Fonda, Richard Nixon, Willi Brandt, Linda Lovelace. He tongues the TV screen and licks their power all up.
Oh Yeah, screams Damo Suzuki. The signal.
We all come together: Tricky Dick, Jane Fonda, Damo, David Bowie, Rosa Luxemburg, Jürgen, Mao Tse-tung, Carlos the Jackal, Willi the Wetleg and me, killer terrorist Karin Hofmeister, bound at the hip to my hysterical bitch twin Hermengilda von Trapp. All shuddering in the same orgasmic ecstasy of sublation, of breakthrough into the netherworld of revolutionary triumph, a dripping-wet dictatorship of the proletariat.
All except Georg. He stands there watching in his jeans and denim shirt, distracted from the TV by our cries of release. He's switched off the Can tape and now there's just the crump of projectiles into Vietnamese jungles and the warm gush of napalm from over his shoulder.
There's no desire left in Georg: not for revolution, not for sex, not even for companionship. Just a weary and sated curiosity, as with a child who's opened all his presents and has no surprises left. His eyes remain deep and black like opals with glinting fires of an obscure origin. He has something to show us, he says.
I slip on my kaftan as he goes off to his room. I look down at the beanbag, where Willi and Jürgen doze and fondle, grope and dream. Their glistening bodies are sleek like dolphins, their eyes open but unseeing. I put on a Pink Floyd cassette and switch off the TV, just as a young girl wearing tatters of skin like a festival clown strides crying down a country highway with fronds of giant fern hanging down to stroke at her tender burnt flesh.
Pulsations and throbs in the walls, the hideous wallpaper of op-art greens and salmon pinks promising to reveal a beast nature at any moment. I'm all alone in the room, facing a cadaverous Georg, who's come back in and stands opposite me holding a big green egg, and alone with the dreaming dyad of glistening newborns clustered and gripping each other's cocks on the beanbag just at my feet.
I'm alone now with the pulsing beast of the cosmos under the wallpaper, raging to get out. No dialectic on the material earth can save me from that throbbing void on the other side.
Georg holds the green egg up to my face. It has the word SPLINTER in crude yellow lettering on its lower half. We are a splinter – we splintered from the Fraction, who splintered from the Tendency, who hived off from the Movement. We are a tiny fragment of revolution in a cramped Bonn flat in the small hours of the morning, with the pulsing walls of bestial nature wrapped in a green and salmon op-art pattern, panting gently and waiting to spring.
Georg speaks, the dark opal eyes glinting now with recognizable delight and hate, his twin fires: The DM41 Grenade, a West German copy of the US M26A1 fragmentation grenade. Manufactured under license by Rheinmetall GmbH, where the company not too long ago employed slave labor from Buchenwald. A true success story of the German Post War Economic Miracle, I'm sure you'll agree.
I take the green egg from him – or perhaps it is a bitter green apple. It's dense and heavy. A handle curves from the apex along one side. A ring attaches to a pin that slides through the top of the handle. I pull it out and feel the tension of the spring against my fingers as the handle strains to leap out into the air. It has its own desires, just as the beast behind the walls has his.
Georg talks on and on, and his words begin to trail like slugs behind time’s lettuce. As he talks of letting go the handle and allowing the apple to speak for itself, the handle lies already on the floor. As he starts hissing words of revolutionary rupture, the fuse on that green apple is already hissing out a warning of a great shattering tornado approaching fast.
And as Georg reaches the culmination of his call to arms rupture and rapture the grenade in my hand frags and the arm walls breathing a tatterdemalion girl on a switchoff TV the gray jowls of Richard Nixon the opal fire of Georg's eyes the lemon green the grasping frond the bursting cocks of sleeping Willi and sleeping Jürgen my hazel eye regarding the cassette bootleg of Can at Rockpalast the fractured desires of a late capitalist subject a ripped blue shirt a starving man wailing a hymn in a prison cell a glossy magazine page showing a sweetfaced boy in low slung jeans my ear with a diamond stud frisbeeing free a ripped copy of What Is To Be Done by Vladimir I. Lenin the salmon pink scrap of wallpaper the tongue of a lollygag beast
all explode out into the expanding cosmos at the speed of light, and then faster than the speed of light in violation of spacetime and its bourgeois restrictive laws
The cosmos expands faster and faster to accommodate the forces I have released.
By the end of the first second it has doubled in size and all the world and the Pigs in it have been twisted out like taffy, spaghettified by its transgalactic stretching.
By the end of the second second time has surrendered and history reaches an understanding with itself, the dialectic has been stilled, and the universe stabilizes.
By the end of the third second angelic proletarians wander sylvan meadows singing hymnals to the all-or-nothing.
In the maelstrom of pieces whirling around us, I take the fragments of Georg's hands in my own. Our fractured eyes look into the cracks in the other one's gaze and register the new glittering voids bursting out of the black within.
He seals my body in his embrace. He seals my historically-determined destiny in his own.
In the wrecked pieces of the swirl of world a new wholeness is made.
Our revolution is the eye at the center and in it we are safe.
We clasp around the egg of dreams.
TWO FRAGMENTS RECOVERED AT THE SCENE
It is not a criminal act to drop napalm on women, children, and old people; protesting against this act is a crime. It is not a criminal act to destroy the harvests necessary for the lives and the survival of millions; protesting against this is a crime. Terror tactics and torture are not criminal acts; protesting against them is.
The fun is over. Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.
Ulrike Meinhof
Poetry is instant metaphysics. In a short poem it must deliver, all at once, like a grenade, the vision of a universe and the secret of a soul - an insight into being and objects, evoking on the spot the dialectic of joy and suffering.
While the way to every other metaphysical experience is prepared by endless prologues, poetry rejects preambles, principles, methods, and proofs. It rejects doubt. At most, it calls for a prelude of silence.
By first knocking upon hollow words, poetry hushes the din of prose that would leave a continuous trail of thoughts and murmurs in the reader's soul. It drugs your conscious thought, makes it dream. Then it yields its instant explosion of insight.
It is in order to give rise to a complex instant, brimming with simultaneities, that a poet shatters the simple continuity of shackled time.
Gaston Bachelard
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Everytime I read this, I find another fragment. The relentless rhythm of the prose and the mad spiral is very satisfying to bean bag into my head hole.
Thanks for your kind comment Zivah, really pleased you felt that intensity!