"Can I help you?" "I have to go back a bit." "I was 12 years old and on a school trip in the hills." "Are you making fun of me?" "What do you mean?" "You have this orgasm, not only an orgasm," " but a spontaneous orgasm." " Yes, it was an orgasm, though the doctor described it as a... an epileptic seizure." "And during that orgasm, you have this vision of these two women on each side of you?" "Was she holding the veil with two fingers like this?" "What's the matter?" "You don't even-- you don't even know who these women were, do you?" "No, but one of them did look like the Virgin Mary, now that you mention it." "Well, it wasn't the Virgin Mary, I can tell you that." "From your description, it must've been" "Valeria Messalina, the wife of Emperor Claudius, the most notorious nymphomaniac in history." "And the other woman, the one astride the creature, that was no one else but the great whore of Babylon riding on Nimrod in the form of a bull." "Your story is like a... blasphemous retelling of the transfiguration of Jesus on the mount... which is one of the Eastern Church's holiest passages." "It's when the humanity of Christ is illuminated by the divine light of eternity." "If anyone else would have told me that story," "I would've seen it as a blasphemous joke, spiced up with a biblical light emanating from nothing less than a spontaneous orgasm." "And then later, you lost your orgasm altogether." "Wagner. "Das Rheingold, the descent into Nibelheim."" "Was it that bad?" "Try to imagine that in one fell swoop, you lost all desire to read and all your love and passion for books and letters." "I don't even know if I can imagine that." "This is nothing less than Zeno's paradox." "You are Achilles and the tortoise is the orgasm." "Oh, come on." "Because you were giving chase, you couldn't reach satisfaction." "That's the paradox." "I'm sorry, but it seems as if you're not taking this very seriously." "I'm telling you about the worst thing that's happened to me, that I, at that point within seconds, lost all sexual sensation." "My cunt simply went numb!" "And immediately we have to hear about this ridiculous mathematical problem." "In fact, I'm in doubt whether you're even listening." "Why do you doubt that?" "Whenever I've told other men about experiences, episodes in my sex life, it was easy to see that they became quite excited." "I got excited." "Yes, about the mathematical crap, not about the story." "What kind of a person are you actually?" "I..." "You wouldn't know." "No, but I can guess." "Why didn't I get that earlier?" "The fact you don't get excited over my dirty stories is because you can't relate to them." "You've never been with a woman." "That's quite accurate." "Not with a man either." "Are you sorry about that?" "Well, yeah, but... out of curiosity." "Not out of lust, as you would think." "I consider myself... asexual." "Of course I... experimented with masturbation when I was a teenager, but... it didn't do much for me." "So there's nothing sexual about me." "It's not as uncommon as you would think." "And of course I've..." "I've read a lot about sexual subjects:" ""Canterbury Tales," "Decameron,"" ""Thousand and One Nights."" "You name it and I've read it with great interest and enjoyment... but only literary enjoyment." "But I..." "But I think maybe it makes me a better listener to your story." "I have no preconceived notions or... or preferences." "I'm actually the best judge you could give your story to." "And when it comes to deciding whether you're a bad human being or not, I'm..." "I have no problems with that." "Because I don't look at you through the glasses colored by sexuality or sexual experience." "I'm a virgin." "I'm innocent." "She's looking at me." "Yes." "It's an icon." "Is it Russian?" "Yes, it's... it's a skilled copy, maybe in the manner of Rublev." "Icons are usually connected to the Eastern Church." "The Eastern Church?" "I might become a bit theoretical." "You may." "I'd like you to tell me about your picture." "Although the Christian Church was split up in 1054 because of differences in opinion between the Eastern Church and the Western Church..." "What we today call the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church." "This is a typical Eastern Church icon." "And it usually depicts the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, and more rarely, for instance, the crucifixion, which in the Western Church was much more prevalent." "If you generalize, you could say that the Western Church is the Church of suffering, and the Eastern Church is the Church of happiness." "If you imagine a mental journey from Rome eastward, you feel how you move away from guilt and pain towards joy and light." "But you say you didn't believe in God." "No, but the concept of religion is interesting... like the concept of sex." "But you won't find me on my knees with the regards to either." "Let's call this chapter..." ""the Eastern Church and the Western Church."" "But it won't be..." "It won't be a story about traveling east from Rome towards the light, but rather the opposite." "So in order not to make it too sad," "I've pepped up the name of the chapter with an extra title." "In spite of my tireless efforts, my cunt totally failed to respond." "I have to admit there came a time when we had fun together." "I'll give you a fiver... if you can put this" "up inside your cunt." "A fiver?" "Right." "Shit." "Thank you." "You're welcome." " Didn't get any spoons?" " No, we didn't." "The most grotesque thing was that it was during that period where every sexual sensation was denied me..." "A period, I must admit, of secure and restful domestic comfort..." "We had moved in together and so on..." "That I became pregnant, because I was careless about my birth control pills." "Consciously or unconsciously, it was important for me to have a caesarean." "I mean, I was hoping that my cunt was going to fucking work again, and I had a feeling that a haphazard birth wouldn't make things better." "I may have been imagining things, but as I lay there the noise from the instruments rang out in a chord like the one from the little flock." "Yes." "And it wasn't fear." "More like a kind of disgust." "I could've sworn I saw him laughing." "A laughing son?" "In "Doctor Faustus," Thomas Mann describes the birth of Noah's son Ham, who was laughing when he was born." "Another satanic omen." "Incidentally, the innocent child was named Marcel, after Mars, the Roman God of war." "And motherhood?" "I assume maternal love didn't quite live up to its expectations." "No, I didn't have any expectations." "And maternal love wasn't a problem." "It was just that each time" "I looked into the child's eyes," "I had this unsettling feeling of having been found out." "I know it's probably a strange thing to say about a child..." "That my love wasn't being returned..." "But it was my perception." "If Jerome had hoped for a break from what was for him now mostly strenuous work, he could forget about it." "Fill all my holes." "I can't, Joe." "I'm sorry." "I'm sorry." "Can we talk about it?" "Of course." "I love you, I love your wildness and your desire." "I love you, Joe." "At the moment I don't seem to satisfy you in the way that I'd like to." "Don't get upset, Joe." "It doesn't mean we won't continue with our sex life, which is very important to me." "Very important to me." "When you buy a tiger, right?" "You also have to feed it." "Satisfy it, right?" "Long story short:" "I have a tiger on my hands." " You mean I'm too much for you." " No." "You're just the way you should be." "I was just thinking if you would consider that I get a little help with the feeding, that's all." "You're saying I should have sex with others as well." "That's a rather cruel way of putting it, Joe, but..." " But exact." " Exact." "For a long time I'd been playing around with the idea that the concept of the fuck-me-now clothes could be improved..." "You look nice." "and became the piano teacher." "You okay?" "No." "What's the matter?" "Well, I'm such an idiot with cars." "I don't really know what to do." "Do you mind helping me?" "Well, of course it won't work." "Sparkplug caps have been removed." "Yes, I did that." "Was that wrong?" "For the first time I had the pleasure of having an 8-cylinder car." "The possible combinations of eight spark-plug caps on eight spark plugs are 40,320, if I remembered my math correctly." "And only one of these will make the car run, which gave me all the time I needed." "Beethoven, huh?" "He was certainly very good, but, you know," " he couldn't write a fugue." " You think so?" "Well..." "Yeah, I think so." "It would be more precise to say that Beethoven renewed the fugue..." "But he was such a visionary that the old Bach purists, they accused him of not mastering it." "Good day?" "And now to reach the heart of your suffering Western Church," "I have to jump ahead three years in the story and talk about my meeting with what I would call" ""the dangerous men."" "I was alone with Marcel a lot during this period, as Jerome was traveling most of the time." "And when he was finally home, he spent most of the time accusing me of neglecting Marcel, which in my opinion was just a cover for his anger over my lovers." "Any sexual satisfaction, let alone orgasm, was further away than ever before." "I had to make a change." "And somehow the inspiration had been right there beneath my window the whole time." "I could feel that it turned me on enormously to imagine a sexual situation in which verbal communication was impossible." " Hello." " Hello." "I'm Tobias, the interpreter." "Hello, I'm Joe." "Come in." "I understand that you master the african languages." "I do have a basis." "Who and what needs interpretation?" "That man..." "The one with the green jacket?" "You are to ask him if he wants to have sex with me." "Yeah?" "Is it a go?" "It's hard to say." "I've written down the time and the place, but..." "Honestly I wouldn't like to take responsibility for the precise wording in this case, which I think, uh, accidentally may belong to a grey zone in my profession." "It was the address of a cheap hotel." "Why were there two?" "My words exactly." "Apparently N had brought his brother along." "Very sorry." "Sorry sorry sorry." "Why was he so angry?" "Clearly it was something personal between them, but later I heard that performing a sandwich requires great sensitivity, since the men apparently can feel each other through the tissue." "I imagine the quarrel had already started on the stairs and that one or the other party had laid claim to one or the other of my holes in conflict with his negro brother's interests." "You shouldn't use that word." "It's not what you call politically correct..." " "Negro."" " Well, excuse me, but in my circles it's always been a mark of honor to call a spade a spade." "Each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the democratic foundation." "Society demonstrates its impotence in the face of a concrete problem by removing words from the language." "I think society would claim that... that politically correctness is a very precise expression of democratic concern for minorities." "And I say that society is as cowardly as the people in it, who in my opinion are also too stupid for democracy." "I understand your point, but I totally disagree." "I have no doubt in the human qualities." "The human qualities can be expressed in one word:" "Hypocrisy." "We elevate those who say "right" but mean "wrong"" "and mock those who say "wrong" but mean "right."" "By the way, I can assure you that women who claim that negros don't turn them on," " they're lying." " So did they satisfy you?" "Those ne-negros?" "No." "But they showed me that there was a world far from mine I had to explore." "And there, or perhaps on the other side, get my life back." "Who are you?" "I know what you do." "I'd like to be one of the women you see." "That's of no interest." "Madame." "Princess," "I specifically said five days, and five days haven't gone yet." "So... you'll have to leave." "I'm sorry." "I..." "I don't think this is for you." "How mysterious." "Will you give me a reasonable explanation now or shall we wait?" "I can't give you an explanation, and certainly not a reasonable..." "What exactly were the rumors about him?" "That he was violent." "How can that be inciting?" "I think the easiest way to understand it is to refer to my rebellious nature." "This business of K's was something I was completely against." "So the fact that I was now contacting him was a last, desperate attempt to rehabilitate my sexuality." "The system was the overriding factor with K." "A system of violence?" "Well, you were the one who insisted on the Western Church, right?" "And I..." "I seem to remember that the systematic approach to the crucifixion is of a violent and not to say sadistic nature." "Oh yes, the passion of Christ is full of systematic violence..." "The Via Dolorosa, the nine stations of the cross and the 39 lashes." "You are beginning to irritate me." "Stand up." "I just want you to sit completely relaxed... while I hit you in the face." "Nothing special." "It's just a..." "It's just a slap." "Are you ready?" "Let me tell you the rules then." "The first rule is that I don't fuck you and that there isn't any discussions about that." "Then what do you get out of it?" "That's my business and I don't want you to mention it again." "The second rule is that we have no safe word." "Meaning that if you, uh, go inside with me, there is nothing that you can say that will make me stop any plan or procedure." "You must bring a brown used leather riding crop." "And not one from a shop selling sex toys." "It's not a masquerade." "Third rule:" "If I choose to let you in, you have to be sitting out here." "In other words, you... you won't know when." "Only that it will be sometime between... 2:00 and 6:00 at night." "I can't stay here that late." "My babysitter's not reliable and..." "I can't leave my child." "You don't even know my name!" "I'm not interested in your name." "Here your name is..." "Fido." "Marcel's awake." "Do you want to say goodbye to your mom?" "Goodbye." "I'll take your coat." "I'd like you to have your hair up." "You can use this." "Just in case it becomes necessary for me to hit you in the face." "Should I take my clothes off?" "I'll tell you what to do... and when." "Now you may bend down." "How?" "Approach the chair." "Now bend from the hips." "Look forward." "Look forward." "With your head up." "Head up." "Keep looking forward." "Keep looking forward." "You may stand up." "We have to use the couch." "Come this way." "Take it easy, take it easy." "Bend over." "Lay your arms out straight." "Take it easy." "Take it easy." "Take it easy." "Next time don't wear knickers." "Your ass is not high enough." "I don't think we can do this today." "What?" "I'd like to see you again on Thursday." "What's wrong?" "I think we should see how it goes on Thursday." "Hi, I can't come to the phone right now." "Please leave a message." "Yes, this is Marcel's mother again." "Uh, it's now 1:30." "We had an agreement." "I hope you get this message and come as quickly as you can." "Uh, Marcel is sleeping." "I have to go now." "Better." "Also so much better." "So much better." "I am now going to hit you 12 times... no matter how much you scream... 'cause no one can hear you down here." "That's, uh..." "That's not how it goes." "Most people don't scream until I hit them." "That's it." "Thank you." "You're very welcome." "I don't know where we get our sexuality from or where tendencies of this kind come from." "Probably a perversion created in our childhood that never manifested itself before." "Well, oddly enough," "Freud says the opposite." "He talks about the polymorphic perversion of a child." "Meaning that in a child, all kinds of perversions exist." "And then we use the childhood to diminish or remove some of them." "Basically a child is sexually polymorphic and everything is sexuality in an infant." "And yet it was deeply bizarre to lie there and especially to want to lie there." "It is an interesting point that you actually lubricated in expectation for a pain that you hadn't experienced." "Your body prepared itself for an intercourse that you knew wouldn't happen." "I can only describe the mood as sexual." "As I twisted and turned while he was whipping me," "I could feel how clever his knots were." "If I fought them, they would get tighter, and as I relaxed, it seemed they did too." "I don't know what kind of knot" "K used... but I know of a knot that tightens when force is exerted and vice versa." "It's called a Prusik knot." "It's after a man called Prusik." "He was a mountain climber." "And he and a friend were out climbing and they had an accident and his friend died." "And he ended up hanging at the end of a rope with no possibility of getting up." "You know, you can't climb up a mountain-climber rope." "It's too thin." "But he was an intelligent man, and with his back to the wall he was a genius." "And he took the shoelaces out of his boots and made two loops and affixed them to the rope." "And he could move these up when they weren't under tension." "And then he could step into them and climb the rope and save himself." "Prusik." "I think this was one of your weakest digressions." "May I continue?" "Well, be my guest." "I sometimes give a Christmas present." "But, uh, you have to do the work yourself." "This is called a blood knot." "You have to make nine ropes with three blood knots on each." "Let me see you do it." "You decide whether to make four, five or six turns in the various knots." "Joe?" "Hello." "Marcel?" "Marcel!" "Are you fond of me still?" " Yes." " More fond of me than the others?" " Yes?" " Yes." "You're not thinking of leaving again tonight, are you?" " No." " No?" " No no." "Not at all." " Are you sure?" "Yeah." "Are you lying to me, Joe?" " No." " Be honest." "It's all right." "Just fucking say it." "No, I..." "I just want to be here." "Why?" "I don't know." "If you leave tonight... you'll never see me or Marcel ever again in your life." "Do you understand?" "Is this goodbye?" "Is that what you're saying?" "Marcel, get up." " Stop it." " Is that what you want?" "Here, so you could see him." "Look at him, Joe." "Let's face it, Joe, you're not a mother." "Let's wake him up." "Marcel, baby boy, say, "Bye, Mom."" " Please put him back." " Is this what you want?" " Ma." " You see?" "You see, he wants you." "Come." "It's Christmas." "It's fucking Christmas." "What is this?" "Today it's madame who must wait." "Madame, I'm very sorry, but I have to have a few words with Fido first." "I really ought to send you home." "Happy Christmas, Fido." "I want your cock." "What did you say?" "I want your cock." "No." "No, you don't." "No, you don't." "No." "What's the matter with you today?" "On account of the holidays and your behavior today," "I'm going to give you the original Roman Maximum of 40 lashes." "Are you ready, Fido?" "I'm ready." "One." "Two." "Three." "Four." "Five." "Six." "I'd seen through K's knot technique, so I was able to loosen my position a bit to move my pelvis, and thereby stimulate my clitoris against the cover of the book." "And when you came home," "Jerome and the child were gone?" "I haven't seen Marcel since." "The sentimentality of..." "I hate it." "Why?" "Because it's a lie." "Are you sure?" "Jerome understood that he couldn't prioritize his life according to a child either." "So he put him in a foster home." "My only contact to the boy is the thousand pounds" "I put in his account every month." "Anonymously." "As a penance." "After all this sadness, may I ask... what happened to the silent duck?" "Oh, shit." "The silent duck." "I'd forgotten all about it." "One night K had been in what was for him an unusually good mood." "I don't know what caused it, but he didn't hit hard and he joked that he would introduce me to the concept of the silent duck." "One hardly dare imagine" ""the quacking duck."" "Well, deep down, little K seems to have been a jolly man with versatile talents." "But he got that bit about Roman punishment and the 40 lashes wrong." "Because it's true that the highest punishment was 40 lashes, but it had to be delivered in series of three." "That's why Jesus only got 39 lashes, because three goes into 39 but not into 40." "You have a mirror." "Yes." "It's like a thought, isn't it?" "Are you ready for another chapter?" "Go on." "Some years later, the bodily abuse began to have an effect." "First, rare bleedings from my clitoris, but then they became more and more frequent." "Come in." "Have you heard any of the rumors about yourself?" "They say you see men every evening." "And spend all night with them." "They say you can't be trusted..." "all of them." "Why do they say that?" "I suppose they're afraid that I..." "I can't keep away from their men." "Right." " And can you?" " No." "I've spoken with a psychologist." "He says you're addicted, but that it's not the kind of addiction that can't be treated." "They have some groups." "I know about these kinds of groups." "I don't have anything to say to a psychologist." "I'm not suggesting therapy." "I'm demanding it." "Even if you leave us, it'll be the same at your next job and the one after that." "My name is Joe..." "Hi, Joe." "and I'm a nymphomaniac." "Sex addict." "My name is Joe and I'm a nymphomaniac." "We say sex addict." "Here everyone's the same." "You should only speak when you feel you have to." "What you're saying is that no one can remove their sexuality even though it's destroying everything for them." "I wouldn't say no one." "But let's say, at most, one in a million manage to live a life without sexuality." "But you can't be basing your therapy" " on that one in a million." " No." "The first and most important step is to remove incentive and to reduce exposure." "You have to ask yourself what kind of incentives you have and then make it difficult for yourself to come into contact with them." "Basically anything that makes you think about sex." "Joe has something she'd like to share." "My name is Joe..." "Hi, Joe." "and I'm a sex addict, but I haven't had sex for three weeks and five days." "Tell us how you did it, Joe." " You brought notes?" " Yes." ""Dear everyone, don't think it's been easy, but I understand now that we are all alike."" "Are you okay, Joe?" "Yes yes." "Would you like a glass of water?" "Thank you." "Would you rather share another time?" "No, I'd like to speak." "Dear everyone, don't think it's been easy, but I understand now that we're not and never will be alike." "I'm not like you, who fucks to be validated and might just as well give up putting cocks inside you." "And I'm not like you." "All you want is to be filled up, and whether it's by a man or by tons of disgusting slop makes no difference." "And I'm definitely not like you." "That empathy you claim is a lie, because all you are is society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." "I'm not like you." "I am a nymphomaniac, and I love myself for being one." "But above all," "I love my cunt and my filthy, dirty lust." "Watch out" "You might get what you're after" "Cool, babies" "Strange, but not a stranger" "I'm an ordinary guy" "Burning down the house!" "What just happened?" "I didn't get that... with the car that burned." "No, I'm sorry." "I was just in too much of a hurry to get to the last chapter." "I understood that society had no room for me, and I had no room for society and never had." "I'm sure it was quite natural for you to furnish your room as a monk's cell, but as an inspiration for the story chapter headings, it hasn't been easy." "There's simply nothing left for me to use." "Well, I'm sorry about that." "But if I may, I can give you a tip." "Yes, please." "You know, I occupy myself mostly with text, but sometimes the text can seem so... so empty, so unfathomably empty." "It could be the best text by the most famous author." "The solution might be to change your point of view." "I-I don't get that." "Things hide... when they become familiar." "But if you look at them from another angle, they might take on a new meaning." "You're right." "Before this was just the stain from the tea I threw." "Can you see what it could be?" "A revolver." "No, a revolver has a drum that revolves." "It's a pistol." "Can you see what kind it could be?" "No, I don't remember anything like that from my literature." "Oh, but it's something I can remember from mine." "Ian Fleming." "Not familiar." "If you haven't read that, you haven't read anything at all." "This could be, with a little imagination, a Walther P.P.K. automatic, the same gun that was issued to Bond after his preferred pistol, the Beretta, had jammed." "Is that something you can use?" "Oh yes, it is." "Burning down the house!" "Hold tight" "Wait till the party's over" "Hold tight..." "Whether I left society, or it left me, I cannot say." "I suppose you could make an argument for both sides." "Burning down the house!" "I was on my way to the shady side of the debt-collecting business, which among other things involved stuff like burning people's cars." "I had for a long time known about this man, L." "Hi, my name is Joe." "I know that." "Come in." "I'm looking for a job." "I've been working in an office, and I was never really good at it." "I can understand that." "I mean, what's the point?" "I believe I possess some qualifications and that I'm rather unscrupulous." "I know all about your qualifications and they're excellent." "I would suggest that you start your own little business with my help." "I understand you possess a great deal of insight about a rather broad spectrum of men." "This could be..." "or should be capitalized on." "I need sub-contractors who can put moderate pressure on individuals with whom my clients, rightly or wrongly, have a bone to pick." "Understand?" "Extortion." "No." "No no no no." "I always prefer the term" ""debt collection."" " Yeah." " I refrain from judging whether my clients' wishes are legitimate or otherwise." "A point of view" "I strongly recommend you follow." "My main qualification of course was my considerable experience with men and sex." "But even my more specialized skills came in handy." "No, now this is not how it goes." "You have to wait until you're hit." "The two helpers that L had recommended were okay, but they were predisposed to a rather repetitive technique, which consisted of creating as much havoc as possible with a pair of iron bars." "Destroying your things doesn't seem to have much effect on you." "Here was a man" "I was unable to read sexually, so I became persistent." "Tie him to the chair." "Don't hurt him." "I can't find a stain on you, but my experience tells me that no man is spotless." "Luckily, you're equipped with a very reliable truth-detector." "I'm going to tell you a few stories." "All you have to do is listen." "You're in a bar watching a couple..." "I now meticulously went through the catalog of sexual deviations in fictional form." "Stories about sadomasochism, fetishism, homosexuality, you name it." "But he didn't react." "And I'd almost given up when I said:" "On your way home, you walk through the park." "And something makes you stop." "You hear something." "Yes, that's it." "You can hear the children in the playground." "You sit on a bench nearby and watch them play." "There's a little boy in shorts." "He's playing in the sandpit." "He looks at you with his blue eyes." "He smiles at you." "I think he comes to you." "He sits on your lap and looks up at your face." "He says he'd like to come home with you." "At home you can't fight the idea of being naked together." "He crawls all over you." " You get an erection." " Won't you please stop?" "He lies on his stomach." "You pull down his pants." "I'll pay!" "You did what?" "I gave him a blowjob." "Why?" "That pig?" "!" " I took pity on him." " Pity?" "Yes." "I had just destroyed his life." "Nobody knew his secret, most probably not even himself." "He sat there with the shame." "I suppose I sucked him off as a kind of apology." "That's unbelievable." "No, listen to me." "This is a man who'd succeeded in repressing his own desire, who had never before given into it right up until I forced it out." "He had lived a life full of denial and had never hurt a soul." "I think that's laudable." "No matter how hard I try," "I can't find anything laudable in pedophilia." "That's because you think about the perhaps 5% who actually hurt children." "The remaining 95% never live out their fantasies." "Think about their suffering." "Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings." "To be born with a forbidden sexuality must be agonizing." "The pedophile who manages to get through life with the shame of his desire while never acting on it deserves a bloody medal." "But there was another reason for my sympathy, which you find so mysterious." "I saw a man who was carrying the same cross as myself." "Loneliness." "We were both sexual outcasts." "In any case, some years passed, during which my business grew, enabling me to step up my anonymous deposits to Marcel." "Your business is doing great..." "You complete all the jobs I give you to perfection and I hear only words of praise from your other clients." "But..." " But what?" " We aren't getting any younger." "No, that's for sure." "I think you're getting to that age where you have to start thinking about a successor." " I don't need a fucking successor." " Listen." "A person should take their crime seriously." "You need someone to be your right hand, someone to help you." "A crown princess." "The normal process is to find out what colleagues are in prison or are drug addicts, and thereby unable to fulfill their roles as parents." "Then you find out where their kids play football... and you get involved." "You cheer them on for a couple of years no matter how bad they are." "Actually, the worse, the better." "That way gradually you take on the role of the parent until in the end you have a loyal helper that will walk through fire for you." "Even do time for you." "It sounds like a... kind of an entrapment you're suggesting." " An unsavory entrapment." " Call it what you want, but if you believe at all in the effects of good parenting, that kid will have much greater opportunities with you as a mentor than without." "And since I like you," "I've been looking around for a suitable subject." "She's 15 years old from a family of hardened criminals, and she's been through a lot." "Last couple of years she's been institutionalized." "Her father is in prison and her mother died of an overdose." "She's a smart girl." "And although she doesn't play football, she does play basketball..." "Very badly." "She's chosen a team sport because she's lonely." "I saved the best part for last:" "Her right ear is slightly deformed..." "Which she's very ashamed of, and of course this serves to isolate her even more." "It makes her an easy target for even the slightest bit of attention or sign of empathy from you." "Despite my protests, the clever L somehow talked me into actually having a look at P." "The longer I watched the poor girl with the deformed ear, the more repulsive I found the whole plan." "But as if L had foreseen this, the meeting with P filled me with pity and emotion." "And without wanting to," "I found myself, weekend after weekend, at her games supporting the poor player." "Thanks for cheering me on." "You're welcome." "You played really well today." " No, I didn't." " You did." "You really improved yourself lately." "I was proud to introduce P to my father's passion... and to his world." "It's actually... the souls of the trees that we see in the winter." "I think they look like human souls." "You're right." "They do look like human souls." "Twisted souls, regular souls, crazy souls." "All depending on the kind of lives human beings lead." "I found my tree, my soul tree." "This is my tree." "It's not an ash tree." "No, it's an oak tree." "My father found his soul tree, but I've..." "I've never found mine." ""You will know it when you see it,"" "that's what he said." "When P reached the age of majority and I became her personal advisor," "I asked her to move in with me." "I've never seen you with your hair up." "It's so pretty." "All this time all my sexual activity had stopped." "My groin was one big sore from my abuse that wouldn't heal and made even masturbation impossible." "I experienced definite abstinence symptoms:" "Fever and cramps." "Joe, what's going on?" " Careful." " We need to clear this up." "I just get this sometimes." "It's okay, it's okay." "Perhaps she really loved you." "I couldn't accept it." "Perhaps because you really wanted it to be true." "Perhaps I hoped it." "It's very touching, all this about P." "Then you've probably misunderstood the whole thing." "Don't." "I wanna see you." " Don't." " Why?" " Please don't." " Why not?" "No." "No, I have a wound." " I have a wound." " It doesn't matter." "No, you don't understand." "I have that thing with my ear." "I'm so ashamed." "Do you like me?" "You're so beautiful." "There's one thing I don't understand." "Did she know what you did for a living?" "P was very discreet and a girl of few words." "Oddly, although I worked strange hours, she never asked about my work." "But one day she had a question." "Joe?" "Why did you start coming to my basketball matches?" "It wasn't a coincidence, was it?" "No, it wasn't a coincidence." "I didn't tell you because I..." "I thought you'd be upset... and that you'd get angry at me." "I won't get angry." "What I do..." "My job isn't a normal job." "It's not legal." "No one in my family does anything legal." "A man that's helped me in my business suggested that I watched you." "The plan was that I..." "I should look at you to see whether one day" "I could use you in my work." "I should make friends with you, because I knew you didn't have a mother or a father." "What's wrong with that?" "Don't you see how evil that plan was?" "I felt terrible." "You shouldn't have." "Why not?" "Because if you hadn't... we'd never have met." "I'd like to go with you to work" " next time." " No." "Will you think about it?" " No." " Yes." "No." "She didn't take no for an answer." "No, of course not." "How do you keep a wave upon the sand?" "With the risk of being too clever for myself, social inheritance is an irrefutable fact." "If anyone knew about the laws of the street, it must've been P." "You're more right than you know." "Let's shoot the fucker." "Stop!" "Stop!" "We don't use firearms." " I'd like to have the gun." " The others have weapons too." "Well, I didn't know that." "But in any case, you're not to have one." "But guns aren't dangerous." "It depends on how you use them." "Yes, exactly." "I wasn't going to shoot him." "We wouldn't have gotten any money out of him that way." "Can I have the gun?" "Thank you." "You're evil." "And now I'm afraid one of those coincidences that you have such a hard time with occurred with a very special person." "It was P's job to take us to the debtors, so until I saw the name on the door," "I had no idea whose house we were at." "Are you sure this is the right place?" "Yeah." "I was thinking maybe it's time for you to do this one on your own." "Yeah?" "Thank you, Joe." "I don't want anything destroyed and I don't want anybody hurt." "Okay?" "You just show yourself and offer him a reasonable payment plan." "If you say so." "Of course that's how I'll do it." "Whether the feeling when I saw Jerome again was love, I couldn't say." "But it was a feeling, and far stronger than I liked." "I was actually walking home through the alley here." "No two neighborhoods are totally different but still so close together that the shortest route from Jerome's house towards the center was through the alley." "Hello!" "How did it go?" "Brilliant." "Yeah, really well." "I made a reasonable payment plan like you told me to." "How did he look?" "Scared." "How old did he look?" "I dunno." "Ancient?" "Jerome was to pay off his debt in six payments." "Every time P went to Jerome to collect," "I paced around restlessly until she was back home again." "I even had to find my mother's sad old solitaire cards in order to make the hours pass." "Each night I was less reassured by her coming home than the night before." "The question of whether jealousy is the fear of sharing or the fear of losing was of little interest to me." "But yes, it was a fact that this unworthy feeling I had managed to suppress for so long was creeping up on me." "The evening she was to collect the final payment she didn't kiss me." "I took it to be forgetfulness, but the hours passed and she didn't return." "Every time I saw car lights," "I thought it was P being driven home." "I had decided to flee." "I couldn't stay in this town with her and him." "I had cowardly made a plan to escape and head south, like from some ice age I didn't have the guts to turn around and face." "But the goodbye was sad and strangely unfulfilling." "And something called me on to seek further up the mountain." "It's said to be difficult to take someone's life." "I would've said that it's more difficult not to." "For a human being, killing is the most natural thing in the world." "We're created for it." "Wonderful." "No, get off!" "Sorry." "Fireman's grip." "Oh yeah." "Fill all my holes please." "I still don't know why the gun didn't work." "I did check to make sure that there were bullets in the magazine." "It simply malfunctioned, just like Bond's Beretta." "I think I know enough to say that even if you had rounds in the magazine of the Walther P.P.K., and you'd taken off the safety... you cannot shoot until you rack the gun." "You pull and release the sliding mechanism." "And P hadn't done it because, as she said, she had no intention of shooting the man." "I don't know about Bond, but I assume it has to be apparent from his books and his films that you have to rack an automatic pistol." "Of course, you're right." "I've seen it in films a thousand times." "It's morning." "And the snow is gone." "So the sun must be out?" "Yes, there is sun." "I've never managed to figure out where it comes from." "It must be some interplay between windows and towers and high buildings." "It's not much, but it's the sun you get here at my place." "It's beautiful." "In the beginning you said that your only sin was that you asked more of the sunset." "Meaning, I suppose, that you wanted more from life than was good for you." "You were a human being demanding your right." "And more than that, you were a woman demanding her right." "Does that pardon everything?" "Do you think if two men would've walked down a train looking for women, do you think anybody would have raised an eyebrow?" "Or if a man had led the life you had?" "And the story about Mrs. H would've been extremely banal if you'd been a man and your conquest would have been a woman." "When a man leaves his children because of desire, we accept it with a shrug, but you as a woman, you had to take on a..." "a guilt, a burden of guilt that could never be alleviated." "And all in all, all the blame and guilt that piled up over the years became too much for you, you reacted aggressively... almost like a man I have to say..." "And you fought back." "You fought back against the gender that had been oppressing and mutilating and killing you and billions of women." "But I wanted to kill a human being." "But you didn't." "Because of a chance event." "You call it a chance event." "I call it subconscious resistance." "On the surface you wanted to kill, but deep down you celebrated human worth and a veil of forgetfulness draped itself over your knowledge of how to rack a gun." "Although all this sounds frighteningly close to the clichés of our times..." "And I'm predisposed to knock holes in your arguments..." "I'm too tired." "Well, that's good." "Why don't you lay down?" "Yes." "Let me just say that telling my story as you insisted... or permitted... has put me at ease." "At this moment my addiction is very clear to me... and I've come to a decision." "Even though only one in a million, as my dubious therapist said, succeed in... mentally, bodily... and in her heart of ridding herself of her sexuality, this is now my goal." "But is that a life worth living?" "It's the only way I can live it." "I will stand up against all odds... just like a deformed tree on a hill." "I will muster all my stubbornness... my strength... my masculine aggression." "But most of all I want to say thanks to my new, and maybe first friend." "Thank you, Seligman... who perhaps is happy when all is said and done." "I'm happy at any rate that the shot didn't go off and made me a murderer." "If I may, I'd like to sleep now." "I'll make sure you won't be disturbed." "Good night, Joe." "Good night, Seligman." "No!" "But you... you've fucked thousands of men." "Hey, Joe" "Where are you going With that gun in your hand?" "Hey, Joe" "I said where are you going With that gun in your hand?" "I'm going down to shoot my old lady" "You know I caught her Messing around with another man" "I'm going down to shoot my old lady" "You know I caught her Messing around with another man" "And that ain't too cool" "Hey, Joe" "I heard you shot your woman down" "You shot her down now" "Hey, Joe" "I heard you shot your lady down" "You shot her down to the ground" "Yes, I did, I shot her" "You know I caught her Messing around town" "Yes, I did, I shot her" "You know I caught my old lady Messing around town" "And I gave her the gun" "I shot her" "Hey, Joe" "Where you gonna go to now?" "Hey, Joe" "Where you gonna go to now?" "I'm going way down south" "Way down to Mexico way" "I'm going way down south" "Way down where I can be free" "Ain't no hangman gonna" "He ain't gonna put a rope around me" "Hey, Joe" "You'd better run on down" "Good night."