I Love My Neighbors
Wedding, Berlin smells like dog shit and döner. The homeless are friendlier here than anywhere else. Mobile phone shops and betting parlors line the street like some commercial joke. I’m on the second floor of a pseudo-old building near the ghetto center, and my neighbors make sure I’m never bored.
Sara and Paul moved out and I figured it’d get quiet. That’s not what happened.
Upstairs: Ulrike and Ferdinand
Late eighties, somewhere on the A3 between Oberhausen and Aschaffenburg, a gamma bomb accident. They’ve been massive green creatures ever since, and they now occupy the flat directly above mine. Sunlight doesn’t work for them, so they sleep during the day and start moving furniture around midnight. Not normal furniture. Anvils. Wrecked airplanes. They wear steel armor and iron boots and dance to some kind of Czech ancestor music until sunrise. I go through earplugs like water.
Next door: The Prtzuioplsxvbmd family
The father works at the crematorium in Weißensee. When he gets home, he starts yelling. Four and a half hours without a breath. Just at the wife, the kids, the cat, until his brain empties. That’s when she hits him with a frying pan while yelling louder. The kids join. At some point the cat is involved. It usually stops about thirty minutes before the Hulks wake up. Then it starts again. This has been going on for years. It’ll probably end when he gets fired or runs out of animals to burn.
Downstairs: Chantal and Rolf
Chantal’s actually nice. She dropped out at fifteen, never worked, watches RTL soaps all day. Her boyfriend Rolf looks like he might be a Nazi. When Rolf and his friends show up with a 94,000-watt system, Chantal’s place becomes an underground club. Monday through Sunday. The bass is so heavy I have to grip the window frame. Sometimes a baby cries down there. I don’t know whose baby and I don’t ask.
In my head: Swedish models
Two blonde sisters named Elin and Hanna live somewhere in my head. Swedish, gorgeous, models or something. Very eager to spend time with me. When I think hard enough about them, they call me over to bake cookies. They spill milk on themselves while laughing. We have naked pillow fights and listen to ABBA. Then they use telepathy to detonate everyone else’s heads—the Hulks, the Prtzuioplsxvbmds, the Nazis, all of them.
After that they convince the landlord to fill the apartments with girls like them. I become king of the whole place.