didn’t like to move about openly on the streets, he avoided that as often as possible. Before it hadn’t felt like that at all, but now he’d become furtive. There were occasions, however, like this evening, when he made exceptions to the rule.
He regretted it the moment he stepped into the café. He thought everyone was looking at him, and he quickly sank down into a booth far inside the place. He ordered pancakes, syrup, and coffee, knowing it was unhealthy, but hunger conquered good sense.
Thank heavens for Snake Marek, he thought. Services and counterservices. Manipulations and promises. With Marek on the scene as a mole quite near the bear, he in any case didn’t need to worry that something would happen that he wouldn’t find out about.
They would never get anywhere.
Then the pancakes came to the table and he lost interest in Eric Bear and the Death List.
HYENA BATAILLE
Worse than pain, worse than treachery and beatings. Worse than the most intense anxiety or the most dreadful humiliation; worse than all of this is cursed memory. Days on end can go by, then the clouds draw in over the city, the sky darkens, and rain dampens the wrecked cars around the place where I live: large raindrops that indolently settle onto mangled metal car bodies. Then the past forces its way through the membrane of time, in the empty hole in my chest a heart is pulsing anew. And when I awaken and everything around me is refuse and putrefaction, the collision between then and now is violent. It causes me to lose my breath. This cursed Garbage Dump was my destiny long before I came here.
I met Nicole Fox through an editor at the publishing house—I don’t recall his name. I still hadn’t published my first book; my collection of poems, to which I’d given the title approach…honeysuckle, would be coming out the following week and I was already scared to death about its reception. I don’t know if what frightened me most was the thought of being publicly criticized, or if it would be worse to be passed over in silence. It seemed to me that the looks I encountered everywhere were insidious and scornful and I was on my way to the exit at high speed when I stumbled over Nicole Fox.
She was sitting in an armchair, and her long legs became my deliverance. I fell like a tree, but thank goodness she was the only one who noticed. Together we fled from the place. Nicole became my savior and my deliverance. Life before I met her had been a single long denial, and the poetry collection was the climax of wretchedness. The poems had been written over a period of ten years, and when I locked myself into the cellar of a condemned building in Yok with cigarettes and moonshine alcohol, I didn’t give a thought to tomorrow. I’d pissed on my friends, betrayed my family, and done my best to strip myself of all pride and dignity. It was a wreck who stumbled into that cellar in Yok. I drank to fall asleep. I relieved myself on the floor in a corner of the room, but after a few days I didn’t shit anymore because I didn’t have anything to excrete. It was the pains in my stomach that finally forced me out of that cellar. The poems were finished, I don’t know if they’d been finished for weeks or only for a day or two, but with the manuscript under my arm I made my way up to the street. I cringed in the sunlight, I thought that the wind was ripping and tearing my fur, and I thought everyone I encountered was staring at me. I walked hour after hour with my gaze on the colorful asphalt until I suddenly recognized where I was. I was in Angela’s neighborhood. Because I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and I knew where she hid the key, I let myself into her empty apartment and managed to eat my way through the major part of the contents of her refrigerator before she came home. When she saw me she screamed like the guenon that she was, and she didn’t stop screaming before I left. I forgot the manuscript on her kitchen table, but didn’t have the energy to go back and fuss about it. The poems weren’t worth it. Out of pure sadism Angela turned the manuscript in to Doomsbury Verlag. The result was that