They know everything, they’ve always known everything, no one needs to explain anything to them; they know it all too well. The first phrase out of their mouths is: I’ve always said. . They talk about money, politics, sports. Sometimes they lose it a little, and sniggering as they go, exchange information about the horrors of health checks, prostate and rectal exams and the like. They rarely mention women, and if they do, it’s to take the piss out of each other, like schoolboys. Eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-heee. They don’t know what they’re doing here, but they’ll be going back, they’ve got a share in a house, an apartment, a bit of land somewhere, it’ll be enough to survive on. The Dutchies will throw them a crumb or two, which by God they deserve, having blessed this country with their presence.
They drink coffee or slurp beer from the bottle, swap what they’ve read in the papers from down there, pick over the bones of Milošević, Tuđman, the present, Karadžić, Mladić, the future. . When’s down there getting into Europe? (What the fuck do you care? You’re already in Europe!) They’re the real victims of the war, and adding insult to injury they messed up their choice of country — they went from a small one to a smaller one, Christ, you can’t even see the sun or moon from here. The Poles get ahead better than they do (Goes without saying. Poles are like Jews), even the Bulgarians are doing better (Maybe so, but only the Bulgarian Turks, don’t you know the Turkish mafia runs everything here?), only Bulgarians would clean Dutch toilets, they wouldn’t do it dead. They’re the ones sucking the big one, sifting about here not knowing why, and down there everything’s going for cheap, everything’s been stolen or sold, foreigners have bought up the coast, and now they’re schlinging their schlongs, raving and partying, polluting our ocean (Whaddaya mean “ours” bro? Uh yeah, I meant the former “ours”. .). Down there foreigners are multiplying like Gypsies, that’s what you get for not respecting your own — others start living it up. . Eee-hee, hee-eh-hee, the whole world’s gone crazy, and those fags have been breeding too, you don’t know who’s a man and who’s a woman anymore (You don’t even know who’s a Serb and who’s a Croat! Look at that little shit on the Hema billboards. . Who? You know who I mean, the little fucker’s everywhere. That fag kid from Tuzla! Paić! Nah, it’s Pajić, Nah bro, it’s Pejić! If he was my kid I’d drown him with my own hands!).
The trio of my countrymen wouldn’t have heard of the “fag kid from Tuzla” if he hadn’t been plastered all over sumptuous billboards for the Dutch chain Hema, advertising a push-up bra. But who is Andrej Pejić? Andrej Pejić was born in Bosnia the same year Yugoslavia fell apart and the war machismo and thievery began. Andrej Pejić, the child of a Serb mother and Croat father, immigrated to Australia, emerging from the slimy Balkan darkness as a new human species, as a brilliant unicorn, a divine lily, a god and goddess in a single body, a miraculous metamorphosis, an enchanting transgender beauty, the world’s most famous catwalks falling at his feet. Pejić is a middle finger flipped at the land where he was born, a divine error to take one’s breath away, a middle finger to Balkan men, and Balkan women, too. Pejić is a symbolic figure who at this very moment is tearing down cruel gender barriers faster and more effectively than all the gender activists, academics, and advocates combined. Pejić is a middle finger to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, a middle finger to myths of Balkan heroism, to macho-martyrdom, a finger up the snouts of commanding officers, police, thieves, and politicians. Andrej Pejić is a boy with breasts, or a girl with a penis, or worse stilclass="underline" He’s a Croatian woman with a penis and a Serbian man with breasts, in a single body. Having gotten as far away as one could ever get, Pejić has become a dazzling ray of light for the tens of thousands of Yugoslav children dispersed to the four corners of the world by the wars. I often run into them on my travels: a smart girl from Pirot, hustling her way into an academic career in Berlin, a lesbian; a finely-etched young man (the son of a chest-beating, big rig-driving Serb and a cowering Croatian mother) conscientiously studying at Harvard, a homosexual; a young guy from Banja Luka, a receptionist at the Hilton in London, a Thai son-in-law and passionate reader of Hannah Arendt; and many, many others. .
My three from the café (just like their numerous male countrymen down there) are still crapping on about politics, dribbling, gulping their morning coffees or beers, sniggering away. Finally they get up, thrust their hips out, linger over their goodbyes, let out an eee-he-hee, hee-eeh-hee, just to carve their names into the indifferent surface of the surrounding concrete, just to leave some kind of scrape to mark their existence. Then they go their own ways, it’s lunchtime. They depart not understanding that they’ve been dead a long while already, that the morning encounter with their own has been but a brief outing from the grave.
WHO IS TIMMY MONSTER?
SOMEONE IN MY building in otherwise docile Amsterdam has been terrorizing the rest of us. How? Simply. Late at night and early in the morning the mystery man (or woman?) starts shunting furniture around his apartment. That’s our best guess as to what’s going on, we’ve got no way to be sure. There’s just this ghastly scraping that penetrates every floor and apartment, its effect like an electric shock. We all think the racket’s coming from the apartment directly above us. We suspect each other, and the more vociferous among us knock on doors, wag our fingers, and leave warning notes. We all plead innocence — no, it’s not us. When the mystery man cranks up his racket, we vent our distress on the central heating pipes that connect all the apartments. The scraping falls silent for a second, as if it’s received the message, and then the torture erupts again, more brazenly than before. We’re at war. And what drives us most insane is that we don’t know who our enemy is. For months we’ve been walking around with cupped ears, leaning against walls, none the wiser as to who’s behind the damn scraping.
Yes, we’re at war. Our fears multiply from one day to the next. They arrive as a scraping that makes the walls of our apartments quiver, they arrive via the television screen, the telephone, the Internet, Facebook, Twitter; the more we’re wired together, the more our fears are fuelled, like gas balloons. We’re all there on an invisible psychiatric couch.
I meet up with an acquaintance. She’s approaching sixty, two adult sons. She and her husband are modest Dutch folk. For a time she worked as a teacher, and then she starting doing charitable work teaching young Moroccans Dutch. She does so firm in her belief that the cultivation of neighborly relations, a smile on the dial, and small interventions make life on planet earth a little more bearable. She was telling me about something new she’d been working on; touch therapy, something between tapping therapy and haptonomy. She does it with Moroccan kids, boys mostly, the kind who mark the territory out front of their tower blocks until late into the night, brawling and stealing, dishing out beatings and dreaming up childish ways of making others’ lives hell. Sometimes it’s defecating on a neighbor’s doorstep, other times it’s peeing up the door.
“What do you do with them?” I ask.
“I tap them a little, give them a hug, like a mother would her baby. Touch reduces aggression, you know that.”
I look at my acquaintance — her face radiating a somewhat unhealthy enthusiasm — and I’m not sure what to make of it all.
There’s definitely something not right with humanity. Some psychopath from Belgrade bought a little girl from her father for a thousand euro. Why? So he could rape her on a daily basis. In Texas a twelve-year-old strangled a four-year-old with a skipping rope. Senior high school students from Karlovac raped a classmate with a chair leg. A fifty-year-old from Zagreb garroted his seventy-seven-year-old mother with a piece of wire. In a Croatian village a grandson twice set fire to his grandfather’s house, and eventually pummeled him to death. A husband and wife with a three-year-old jumped from the sixth floor of a Belgrade hotel. A Frenchman bundled his three-year-old son into the washing machine and turned it on. Why? The kid had been naughty.
Yes, there’s definitely something not right with humanity. We each haul an invisible psychiatric couch along with us. We seek understanding, yet few are ready to understand others. There’s only the market, ever ready to offer comfort. With every new year that rolls around more and more people have started wishing each other Happy New Fear. The words fear and stress have entered our everyday lexicon, like bread and milk. Fear of an itch, fear of the dark, fear of noise, fear of madness, fear of pain, fear of open space, fear of enclosed space, fear of the road, fear of crossing the road, fear of sharp objects, fear of cats, fear of the opinions of others, fear of dust, fear of driving, fear of insult, fear of looking up, fear of people, fear of anger, fear of floods, fear of touch, fear of bees, fear of amputation, fear of numbers, fear of fire, fear of falling, fear of thunder, fear of asymmetrical objects, fear of ruins, fear of failure, fear of filth, fear of loneliness, fear of flying, fear of microbes, fear of steps, fear of depth, fear of change, fear of mirrors, fear of bats, fear of money, fear of food, fear of theft, fear of sleeping, fear of the grave, fear of sweating, fear of glass, fear of animal fur, fear of crowds, fear of knowledge, epistemophobia, fear of ideas, ideophobia, fear of speech, laliophobia, fear of words, logophobia, fear of memories, mnemophobia, fear of everything new, neophobia, fear of everything, pantophobia. . In a long ago episode of The Muppets the forgotten comic Zero Mostel recites the Jerry Juhl-penned poem “Fears of Zero.” Mostel enumerates his manifold fears: fear of spiders, fear of dentists, fear of baldness. . Fear muppets appear from somewhere in the darkness and crawl all over Mostel, threatening to swallow him up. Although terrified, Mostel insists that he needs to count his fears, confront them, overcome them, and that they’ll then disappear of their own accord (Once they are counted and compelled, they can quickly be dispelled!), and miraculously, they really do vanish. The fears were figments of Mostel’s imagination. Having dissipated his lesser fears, Mostel senses that a new, greater fear is to come. And indeed one does come along, in the form of Timmy Monster, and this time Mostel’s magic formula proves of no help. Mostel disappears and from Timmy’s stomach we hear his voice. Mostel admits that he’s just a figment of Timmy’s imagination.
Humanity has never been more terrified than it is today. We each haul our psychiatric couch along with us. People cry as if hit by tear gas and withdraw into their safety zones. Computer screens are our bunkers, the virtual world offering security, a place no one can reach us. People hang out less and less frequently, they avoid relationships, avoid touching, are scared of one another, intolerant of one another, get along only with the greatest of difficulty. Of course some men make appropriate arrangements and buy “real dolls,” “boy toy dolls,” “love dolls,” perfect silicone partners. They sleep with their “babies,” clothe them, bathe and comb them, take them out for walks, on little adventures, spend the weekends with them, and occasionally take them in for repair. The wealthier are collectors and have multiple partners. Some, like Kevin, are in complex relationships: He keeps “real dolls” at home, and goes out with organic women. Some claim the dolls are “perfect listeners,” others that “they can’t get pregnant,” others that a doll “improves quality of life,” others are enchanted by their “beauty and stoicism,” others maintain that only a doll is able to “love them in spite of everything.” Gordon from Virginia dreams of joint burial (“We’ll be turned into dust together, and it’ll be a beautiful thing”). Matt, a doll maker, claims his handicraft is therapeutic, because it’s better “to have sex with a piece of rubber than not have it at all.”
Some women are also taking appropriate steps. The marketplace has provided them with “reborn dolls.” At first glance it’s hard to tell the difference between the artificial and the organic. Sharon Williams has a collection of forty-one such “babies,” all one of a kind, totally unique, each sleeping in his or her own idiosyncratic way. Maybe these “baby” owners, these weirdoes and sickos, are the moral avant-garde of our time. Instead of shoving their children in the washing machine, or waiting for someone else to, it’s possible these women have worked out that it’s better they cradle and coddle hyper-realistic silicon surrogates. Perhaps the many aging mothers who have raced out to buy reborn babies are acutely conscious of the fact that they’ve given birth to potential monsters, who tomorrow might rape a classmate with a chair leg, so these women buy a comforting ersatz, a simulacrum. Reborn dolls, they say, “fill the emptiness in your soul,” they don’t scream, don’t pee, don’t let out a squeak, they don’t grow up, they sleep an eternal sleep. Family life with them is straightforward, just sometimes you need to wipe the dust off them, position them, reposition them. Simulacra are simultaneously our defeat and our solace.
Manufacturers try their hands at making all kinds of stuff “lifelike,” from chocolate-scented USB sticks to strawberry-scented earrings. Autumn Publishing, for example, is preparing a collection of children’s books, which they’re going to call Smellescence. At the touch the books are to release the scents of chewing gum, berry fruits, and the like. “This advanced technology and the smells it creates are so real they take children’s reading to a magical new level. We wanted to inject some fun into the reading experience and this is a powerful way to do just that,” said company director, Perminder Mann. Given that farting has recently made inroads into children’s publishing (Walter the Farting Dog; The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts; The Fart Book; Doctor Procto’s Fart Powder, and many, many others), Autumn Publishing is having a go with its own picture book, The Story of the Famous Farter, which on the last page is to smell like a lowdown, dirty ripper.
Yes, there’s something not right with people. Whether with our voluntary acceptance of the virtual world we are to mutate into different people — just as pet kitties that play with artificial mice eventually turn into different kitties — it’s hard to say. One thing is certain: We’re all volunteers in a mega-experiment. We’re all the figment of someone’s imagination. And just as no one in my building knows who among us is making that hellish scraping, humanity doesn’t actually know who the Timmy Monster is. Or it’s pretending it doesn’t know. What if Timmy Monster is all of us?