Shred it, you’ve got to shred the newspapers and roll the sides up, otherwise it’ll be packed too tight and won’t burn well, or won’t burn at all, even with the wind blowing, which it does pretty much around the clock here at the seaside, constantly blowing your hair into your eyes, which irritates you, and you keep one foot on the paper so it won’t blow away while you toss the broken mahogany chair and the mangle, or whatever the damn thing’s called, onto the pile, followed by the cracked cupboard which has rosemaling and is stamped with a date, or at least it was, though after losing a battle with your axe it’s just a nice bit of dry kindling, you know your way around an axe, though you’re not quite sober, but then you’re not quite drunk either, your soul’s just a little empty (that’s how you like to express it), and you’re not afraid to use your fists, they’ve had calluses in their day is what it’ll say in your unwritten biography. You follow the flagstone path up the beach toward the open cabin door once more.
Bingo, Advent stars, pulse-rate and blood-pressure monitors, video tapes in cases, lace panties (black or white), video games played with joystick or light gun, a quartz clock, radios you can mount on your handlebars, a mountain tent, inflatable islands with palm trees, a pirate flag, a set of socket wrenches, a cuckoo clock, sun glasses, dildos (18 or 25 cm in length), leather slippers, a baseball cap topped with a bell, lady’s razors, musical Christmas elves, tennis rackets, a model airplane, rubber boats, and movies, the movies went up the best, the whole thing was a roaring success, you remember, but the movies definitely went up the best, each and every one of them, and in answer to the question of what exactly you were doing, you could confidently say Bissniss, immportn, and you remember exactly what you said next (for some reason or other, you have a much easier time remembering what you say to others than what others say to you) Yep, there’s some differences for sure for example people in the East can work their hands to the bone without demanding huge bonuses or silk pillows for their precious asses but you gotta get something out of the deal you know.
Nothing happened until the third day on the job, you remember, inside the warehouse, behind two boxes of dildos you never did manage to get rid of (the problem was they were too big, so customers kept returning them and demanding their money back); she pretended to resist, and you liked that, you’ve always gone for nice girls, you think, and you laugh as you take down a picture showing him dressed in a sailor’s outfit and sitting at the helm, one hand on the wheel and the other holding a champagne glass. Next to where the smiling captain was on the wall are a few “artistic” drawings; to you, they just look like the random doodles of some macrocephalic kid, they’re nothing but thick, coarse, black streaks and colorful dabs of red, yellow, and blue, sometimes following, sometimes crossing the lines, there’s a name in the lower right-hand corner, someone got taken for a ride on these, you think, but not you, no sir, not today, you tear the drawings off the wall, and for good measure you smash their frames along with the photo’s on the corner of a pine table; there are some pictures still left on the wall, and at least you can tell what these represent, but you don’t like them either, so you smash them, tear them up, kick at the last few shards of glass that hang like transparent fangs around the edges of their frames, though you’re not afraid of them, because they can’t bite. Next, you smash the brandy bottle and the two carafes against the opposite wall. Then you start hacking up the remaining bar stools, though you’re not in any hurry. Splinters already litter the rag rugs and the broad, sanded white floorboards, as if the furniture had fur and has been shedding.
You used to play with a drummer who pounded his sticks to splintery stumps, who banged away until slivers of wood were flying through the air after his maniacal rimshots, and you used to imagine him still drumming away when all he had left were a pair of flimsy stubs, no, a pair of broken toothpicks, and when he had nothing left he’d use his hands, he’d drum the flesh right off his hands, blow after blow, he’d drum them down to the bone, until all the bones in his hands were shattered, and after that he’d use his arms, then his legs, and, finally his head, he’d bang his skull against the snare drum, and it was only when his cranium was pounded to dust that the music would finally stop, or perhaps it would continue in the hereafter. What was it you read in the weekly paper? Oh yeah, that article about the guy who used a short-wave radio to listen to the dead, he even managed to record them, because the dead sent him special messages, messages he archived on meter after meter of tape, they’d prattle on about this and that, and, oddly enough, they spoke German, and even though the man didn’t understand a word of German, he knew what they meant when they said Wir sind die Toten, which the newspaper had translated. We are the dead.
You keep having to push the hair out of your eyes, it’s a constant irritation, in fact, it reminds you of a nagging woman. First comes the newspaper, carefully shredded (not the whole paper, mind you, especially not the pages printed on glossy paper, since they’d only choke the flame), then the kindling, then the larger pieces of wood (mahogany, pine), then the sailor suit, cap and all, then her bikini, because if they like it hot, they might as well burn, you think, burn on the bonfire. The pictures go on top of the clothes, good riddance, you think, to weigh everything down. You push your hair out of your eyes and look out (through your sunglasses) at the sea. They’re sailing (or puttputting, thumping, speeding, whining, etc.) past the bend, a whole drove of them, an armada, going in circles till evening, as though putting on a show, and you think that that’s exactly what they’re doing, they’re pretending to take it easy, pretending to enjoy the holiday, when in reality all they want to do is drink and puke and party till they drop.