The members of the family are sitting together in seemingly perfect harmony, all in the best of moods and dressed in keeping with their social status, their shirts and blouses starched, their costumes and suits neatly ironed, their shoes polished to an immaculate sheen. The boys are well-groomed, the girls demurely coiffured, the ladies discreetly powdered and lipsticked, the gentlemen cleanly shaven. The grown-ups are engaged in polite conversation. Their well-behaved children are playing Ludo.Only a moment ago nothing seemed to be all that bad. Things had even got off to a good start. Quite a few long-awaited decisions had been made and all the necessary measures resolutely taken. Any problems that had cropped up had been objectively discussed and resolved. Indeed, everything they had hoped to agree upon had been agreed upon, but things felt different than expected, and then the situation simply got out of control. Since then, almost everything has been going wrong. The scope of the catastrophe defies all attempts at reconstruction. The immense psychological distress and extremely distorted accounts of the involvees render every serious analysis of what has happened impossible. Everything has turned strangely topsy-turvy, like a make-believe monster that takes ever more concrete shape, crushing everything in its path. This is no dream. It is really happening, albeit in obedience to the confused logic and accursed inevitability of a nightmare.The mass of noise is impossible to untangle. Its countless different sources would first have to be identified or at least isolated from each other. A hopeless task. A chaotic welter of frequencies. Inextricably interlaced layers of sound. A cacophony of distortions and interferences, harsh feedbacks and painfully prickly squeaks and squeals. A violently raucous feast that makes sheer fright – or savage delight? – flash across the hideous faces that loom and fade in the dark, much too quickly for us to make them out. What we perceive simply bends under the immense noise. Corridors, pieces of furniture, views – everything is distorted.The vault of the ceiling slowly comes closer and closer. Suddenly, the bend in the ceiling slips abruptly downwards, along a strut, which now buckles sideways and then, together with another, parallel strut, flanks one of the ceiling segments, which, as it flits by, increasingly narrows towards the now ever further receding vault of the ceiling. But then, making a surprising volte-face, our gaze comes to rest on a wall painted with an ominous, virtuoso mural of a dinner party, a dynamic gathering that seems to jut out from the fresco. A man in the picture gives us a winning smile as he takes hold of a beautiful, carefully balanced model handicrafted from pieces of wire and colourful, abstract board game figures and breaks it into pieces.Metallic twanging, slobbering, whimpering. Hellishly crackling sounds hurtling through the ethereal chaos, rushing by with energetic insistence, enigmatically plastic, succinctly present – ungraspable, self-transmogrifying agents of destruction, insensitive bringers of harshness and coldness. Suddenly the raging chaos subsides, peters out into tininess, fragments, electrostatic humming – until the isolated remains gather themselves together once again and set fire alight in the arses of other creatures. The latter, driven to absolute frenzy, lash out wildly on all sides.
Z.X.
