In full blast

It’s hot. And completely quiet.
The car is standing still. I’m sitting still.
The window is running down the door in thin streams, burning my arm.
On the horizon, there are three ossified atomic clouds, like pale castles of far hope, wonderful in the golden light of the set. Sun.
Sunk. Into the torn, black asphalt under the car. Slumped behind the wheel. The gravity of my body presses on clutch and accelerator. The engine screams in ultimate speed.
The gear is not hooked up.
I can feel the cogs spin.
Go crazy.
Like knocked-out conversations.
About me.
Slowly, calmness floods into my eyes.
And bites.
Like the white, dusty grass around me. Like the empty crossroads ahead of me. Like the grey pavements. As far as the eye can see. Everywhere. Anywhere. Any thought. Empty.
I feel like expelled. Not deliberately. Inevitably.
Lost.
You wanted to destroy this world together with me. Extinguish every fucking feeling being in this universe. The two of us alone had survived. That’s what you’ve said.
All right with me. For your wonderful arse I had done anything. Even that.
Burn bridges, open dams, poison ground waters, spread diseases, twist systems, torture governments, abolish mankinds, raid gas stations. Only to watch you kill. You look so fucking sexy when you hate.
A reason, just as good as every other one.
And, well, you were kinda right.
We had filled my car with highly twitchy napalm and uncompromising impact fuses. A bomb on wheels with a cooling box, in holy mission, with two interstuck angels on the falling ground of the divine extermination.
Then we had driven past them for a long time.
As speedy as fuck at first. Past the idiots, the losers, the cowards, the ugly, the failures, the self-blamers, the dead.
What a life. What a frenzy ride. Your laughter splashed out of your lips like the beer out of the ice-cool bottles and soaked my arse. I puked into the footwell and you flashed your pale, glorious butt out of the window. We threw the empty bottles into the approaching traffic and listened to the soft crackling of their skull caps on our buzzing engine bonnet.
Then we went at walking pace. We were exhausted. Your hair was stuck to your face. So fucking wild. A sound like on rims came out of your astonished mouth.
The goals outside became more insistent.
More intrusive.
Past shopping, departure, drop-in, drop-out, and decision centres, mortuaries, refuse pits, escape bunkers, pogrom stadiums, final stops. Enter via exit, please.
In slow-motion. Through streets full of property. Full of insurance-covered rejection. Through the halls of the rats. The dooryards of the bosses. The arses of the fucked. The faces of the smashed. The bodies of the fat. Through the necks of the broken. Via open backbone fractures, through closed institutions and past sold-out will.
Finally, the last spark of energy, will, and passion had expired. At these crossroads in Nowhere Land. Arrived in the desert of
uselessnesses. With running engine.
You took my head into your hands, gave me a long kiss, and said, “They all know. Everybody knows that something has gone wrong. That something has started. Something that can only be stopped by total destruction.” A crystal-clear tear left your eye and chopped a white path into your melted make-up. “They’d be thankful when we extinguished them.”
Your goodbye kiss was dripping from my lips while you got out of the car to disappear in the white light out there.
You have to understand that you can’t get away like this. Napalm burns until it has reached the very end. Always. It was naive of you to believe you could blow it out.
I can see the flashing blue lights of a cop car in the rear-view mirror. I can see the face of the idiot who, in the thick, yellow smog fog of the daily evening traffic-jam, ignores the twentieth green phase of the lights. Has stopped.
Has geared down.
They will ask questions. Why I don’t go on.
Why there is blood dripping out of my exhaust. They will find the napalm in my tank. You.
In the trunk.
I’m going to lie. As usual. Join in.
“Awright, mate, then go on. An’ remember for nex’ time, will ye?”
“Aye, sure, officer. Sieg Heil.”
I almost was off the hook.
But. You never know before. How it goes.
Neither after, though. Idiocy, what else.
The others are always to blame.
The cop draws his colt and my head finally slumps on the wheel, sending a never-ending hoot, not quite according to the traffic rules, through my head. Projectile tinnitus.
I have been deceived...

© translation: Ní Gudix 21.10.15