Life as a Ghost by Frank Siegrist - HTML preview

They drove till they found a calm hotel somewhat outside of town. David took two rooms and they carried up their bags. Irena was a bit reluctant in saying which room she liked better. So they watched TV sitting on the bed in one of the rooms for a while, and eventually Irena said she was going to bed and left for the other room. She closed the door slowly, and when it was open just a crack she leaned into the room, saying: “Well then, goodnight!”
“Goodnight.” said David, hardly looking at her.
If there had been any hints, they were lost on him. If she wanted to sleep with him, she could say so, couldn’t she? That’s what human language is for, isn’t it?
Actually David couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever WANT to sleep with him. Maybe he would find someone one day who would love him enough to put up with it. Sex is something dirty that males have to trick females into. Everybody knows that. David just didn’t know the tricks.
Of course David could never have uttered such a belief consciously. He still tried hard to see some inherent value in sex. But deep down he was convinced there wasn’t any and that women really don’t need it at all.
He fell asleep thinking of the soft warm body in the room right next door... The next morning they met at the breakfast table. Irena seemed pretty happy, but there was that mocking smile around her lips again. David didn’t understand what it meant. She showed him some tourist leaflets she had picked up at the reception desk of the hotel
- places to visit. There was some kind of a bird-zoo where there would be something like a circus-show with parrots. That seemed quite interesting, so they decided to drive there. They found their way to a small town of stone-houses trembling in the midday-heat and the singing of the crickets, and from there they followed the signs till they got to the birdzoo. David was doing the driving, Irena the map-reading. They weren’t having any deep philosophical discussions, but they were enjoying themselves and happy to be together! The bird-zoo was some kind of messy park full of big bird-cages packed with noisy birds. It wasn’t as it would have been in Switzerland where every square-meter of grass would have been carefully raked. It all seemed a bit hapha zard, making the stroll through the park into some kind of adventure-tour, since you never knew what to expect around the next corner!
They were too early for the parrot-show, and because of the heat they soon got tired of walking around and lied down in the grass in the shade of a tree. They looked up along the trunk of the tree and watched the leaves gently rustle high up above them. There must have been a slight breeze up there - what a pity the air wasn’t stirring down here, too, it was so hot!
Then they went to see the parrot-show that was held next to the pick-nick area. The showmaster, a sporty-looking woman, came out with one big parrot at a time sitting on her arm. She held each one up to a stem at the top of a post, and he would willingly climb on to it. Each time she told the audience the name, age and gender of the parrot, and how long he had lived here at the zoo. They were different kinds of parrots, one of them a snow-white cockatoo with a bush of feathers standing straight up on his head. The woman explained that he was born in the zoo all recently. He wasn’t trained yet, and he was just brought here to watch and get used to the whole thing. She would decide later what exactly to teach him, depending on his character. Later he would also need to find a mate, and then hopefully he would breed, like his parents. For this he would be brought together with other cockatoos until one of them took his fancy. It takes a while for these cockatoos to find the right mate, she explained, because after having found him, they usually stay together for life.
While the other parrots were made to do their little performances, riding small bicycles and playing the xylophone, the white cockatoo quietly sat on his perch, his feathers all puffed up, babbling something to himself from time to time, the bush of feathers on his head bobbing up and down.
These parrots weren’t just birds, David realized - they were little PERSONS of their own, each one of them. David saw that none of them had any chain on their feet and that they weren’t tethered down in any other way either. At the end of the show, the woman even made them fly back to their cages over the audience, each one of them. The kids in the audience yelled with delight and held up their hands, pretending that theywere trying to catch them. The white cockatoo still wasn’t used to this treatment and shrieked his head off while flying past.
David was very impressed and clapped like mad. Irena didn’t. Maybe she thought clapping was stupid or maybe she hadn’t enjoyed the whole thing, David couldn’t tell. At the end of the show, they left the zoo and went back to the car. They drove further south during most of the afternoon, ate dinner in a nice little restaurant and found another comfortable hotel to spend the night.

“Don’t take two rooms,” Irena told David at the reception of the hotel, “that’s just a waste of money.”
“Okay.” said David and asked for a double room. They went up and inside there was a big double bed. Irena sat on it straight away and tried out the springs of the mattress. “A bit bouncy,” she declared, “a bed like this every day and you’d end up with quite a backache. Which side is mine?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” David said vaguely, “you choose.” Actually he felt quite strange with the idea that she would just stay here all night in his room. It didn’t even occur to him that it wasn’t his room if they were both going to stay here - it was THEIR room. Of course it was very exciting. On the other hand, nobody had claimed that anything would really happen. Maybe they were just going to sleep, saving money, as Irena had said. David joined Irena on the bed. “I don’t want to watch TV.” she said.
“I wasn’t going to switch it on.” he answered.
“You quite liked those parrots, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yeah, specially the white one... Did you know that they were monogamous?” “Sure,” she said, “everybody knows that. Are you trying to tell me that this is another proof that monogamy is the natural thing and the only way to become happy and so on?” “Hey, I didn’t say anything of that kind...”
“Anyway, parrots are birds and we’re mammals, that’s not at all the same. There’s heaps of monogamous birds but hardly any monogamous mammals!”
“I didn’t say anything of that sort at all! Why are you...?”
“But you still think monogamy is the best thing for us humans, no?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I do. You see, we humans are sociable creatures. We can do all kinds of great things working as a team that we would never manage alone. We can play symphonies as an orchestra or send rockets to the moon as a nation. But in a team we never really need all our talents. You might work in a team as an engineer. But nobody is nothing but an engineer.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Irena, “even an engineer needs a fuck from time to time!” “As a matter of fact, yes, he does.”
“And so he needs a little wife at home who also cooks him nice meals and washes his underwear.”
“I didn’t say that. Why are you so provocative?”
“It seems to me that it’s just old crap that you’re telling me here, as if it were an original new thought that just came to you.”
“Yeah, well you don’t listen till the end. How can it be interesting if you don’t even hear me out!”
“Okay, I’m listening. Go on.”
“Well, what I’m trying to say is that it’s a bit like the cells in our body. As an organism we are bloody highly evolved. But the cells in our body are rather simple beings compared to an amoebae or a bacterium which can move on her own, hunt down food for herself, exchange genetic material with a mate, stuff like that, while most of our braincells, for example, can do little more than pass on the impulses they receive. When cells associate to become highly evolved organisms like ourselves, they become more simple creatures, individually speaking.”
“Yeah, I understand,” said Irena, “ so, with continued evolution, one day there will be engineers who don’t even need any fucks anymore. They will be nothing but engineers. Of course, under such circumstances, there is no future in the whore-business, and you’re right to talk me out of it!”
David chose to ignore the provocation and to answer, instead, as if he had taken her completely seriously: “No, maybe not. You see, that’s how it was for cells associating to become organisms, but that doesn’t mean it has to be the same when organisms join together to become civilizations. Evolution doesn’t just repeat the same patterns at higher and higher levels - cells joining together to become organisms joining together to become civilizations joining together to become super-civilizations joining togethe r to become super-super-civilizations ... It’s not that simple. Evolution wouldn’t be evolution if it were that simple. It would just be a stubborn, repetitive process.”
Irena didn’t have anything to say at this point.
David continued: “A highly evolved organism such as a human being can do stupid things, like committing suicide. A single-celled being wouldn’t have such a crazy idea, but in a more complex being there are more chances that something can go wrong, and then some misfiring neuron can mean the death of the whole organism, of all the billions of billions of cells it is made up of...”
“Oh, I see, “ said Irena, “people committing suicide just suffer from a misfiring neuron!” “No, no, forget about it! Whatever they suffer from, the point is that it can condemn billions of cells in one go, and...”
“This is boring,” said Irena, “come to the point.”
“The point is,” said David, “that human beings associating to become a military power can get out of hand the same way and create a holocaust. But if they each keep a conscience of their own, ideas of their own, have a private life of their own in spite of belonging to a bigger organization as well, then such things as holocausts couldn’t happen.”
“But without adequate discipline, a military superpower is just a joke. People have to put aside their personal feelings and take orders, else it can never work. So what are you saying? Superpowers are bad?”
“All I’m saying is that they would be even worse if their citizens didn’t have individual lives of their own as well.”
“So, in other words, it’s good that even engineers still need fucks.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of what I’m saying. You see, you can’t ever influence a team as much as you are influenced by it (unless you are the boss). Not every suggestion from every member can be taken into account. You and your opinion are bound to be overlooked sometimes when you are in a team. But in a one-to-one relationship this is all different. If you don’t agree with your partner, and since it is a one -to-one relationship, you can actually block him, and since he can block you too, the two of you will be forced to find a solution together, creatively, that suits both of you. You can never be overlooked like in a bigger team.”
“Why not do things on your own, then, and be really free?”
“Oh, because when you’re on your own, without ever a reference point outside of yourself, you might go insane.”
“I see, but why would this partner, with whom you have this one -to-one relationship, always need to be the same person? Why not sleep around? ”
“Oh, if you have several partners, then you might play chess with one of them, and when you’re ready to play tennis, you meet another one. But the other one might have already played tennis with some other partner of his that day (he would have several partners too, of course). He would rather play chess. But since you have already played chess that day, you would rather play tennis. You see what I mean? If you keep several partners, you end up needing to keep a detailed agenda, so that you, and all your partners too, get enough chess, tennis and all the rest. This would kill spontaneity, which means freedom. It’s much simpler and more straight-forward if you play chess and tennis with the same person. Then you can decide together when you play what, and it doesn’t affect the activities of a whole network of other people. Playing chess AND tennis with the same person, that’s what I call love. Playing only chess or only tennis with a person, that’s friendship. In its own specialized area friendship can be just as deep as love, but it still isn’t love.”
“Ah, ah, beautiful definitions! Love and friendship, you know it all! But let’s come back to that chess-and-tennis partner: why would he have to be the same person throughout your life?”
David didn’t know the answer.

They were getting ready to go to bed. Irena went to the bathroom first, spent quite a while in there (David could hear the gushing water and imagined her body stretching and twisting itself under it) and came out with some kind of pyjamas on. For a fleeting moment he wondered how easy it would be to rip them off her body, but then he dismissed the thought. It was his turn. He went in and instinctively reached for the lock under the door- handle, but there wasn't any key there. He scolded himself for his stupidity – what was he afraid of, that she would come in and rape him or what? He stepped into the shower and washed himself very well, especially all the regions of his groin (one never knows, he told himself, feeling faintly ridiculous all the same). He dried himself, dressed for bed, brushed his teeth and came out. Just a bedside-table lamp was burning, else the room was dark. The cover on his side of the bed was pulled aside, ready for him to get in. Of Irena he could only see the hair on her pillo w.
But as soon as he was in bed, she reached over to the lamp and switched it off. They were plunged in complete darkness. For a moment David felt very uncomfortable. Then Irena's voice rang out, fresh and clear, in spite of the darkness: "When did you make love the first time?" she asked.
He was afraid his voice wouldn't want to come out of his throat, and he was surprised when he heard it: "Well… I didn't ever really do it…"
"What does that mean - you tried and it didn't work?"
There was silence. Finally David said: "I think I don't like to talk about it." "Aha," said Irena, "you THINK you don't like to talk about it. But you're not sure!" "Yeah," said David.
Irena's hand reached out and touched David's cheek. It was a warm hand. "Maybe I can help you," she said.
"Yeah," said David, swallowing hard.
The hand wandered down along his neck, through the collar of his pyjama -shirt to his chest, then out again. "Take it off!" she whispered. He took it off, twisting and turning in the bed nervously. Her warm hands, this time both of them, soothed him again. Irena knew she mustn't take too long to get to the point. He wasn't experienced enough for that. He would lose any erection that might be in the workings right now. She checked it out through his pyjama shorts. Yes, things were looking up down there. Her hand cupped the penis in just the way that felt right and squeezed it a tiny bit, not so much that it would frighten the erection away. Yes, she knew how to do it. She had had plenty of practice. Her hand found the way into the pyjama shorts. Ooh, that penis was grateful to her hand, growing into it big and hot! She stripped off the shorts.
Without stopping the work on the penis, she leaned over and kissed David's neck, then his chest, then his tummy…
David did n't exactly know what was happening. All he knew was that she had stripped off his last bit of clothing and that he was completely naked. He should have felt exposed, but instead of that his body was just yearning for more of that warmth of hers. Her moist kisses moving steadily downwards were burning on his skin. He couldn't believe it when the first suspicion of this moisture applied itself to the tip of his fifth limb. Only corresponding parts of the two bodies should ever meet, right? Everything else is utterly disgusting and pervert, right? That too is completely inborn, and anything else is deviant and ultimately won't make you happy, right?
Wrong! Or rather, at this moment David couldn't care less. As he felt himself, or rather this outer extremity of his, which had grown beyond any sensible proportions, go in to be massaged and then drawn in yet further, all he wanted was MORE of the same… And then, when he couldn't hold it back anymore and came, he made a beastly sound he hadn't ever heard himself make before, and he felt the flow of sperm being taken in greedily till the last drop, till he was completely dried out and felt completely empty. All he felt now was a tremendous sleepiness…
He vaguely felt that Irena laid down her head on his tummy, and he put his hand down on her shoulders. Then he fell asleep.

The next morning he woke up early. The room was stuffy and smelly. He was still naked and felt a bit cold. Irena was fast asleep on her side of the bed. He tried to cover himself better, but the cover was in such a mess that he couldn't manage to arrange it properly over his body. "Some kind of topological problem we have here" some boring teachervoice said inside himself. He got up to find his pyjama shorts and shirt that had been torn off him the evening before. He found them, dressed up in them and walked over to the window. He opened it and stood in front of it. He soon got really cold, but it somehow felt refreshing. He was looking into some kind of back- yard. There was an old lawnmowing tractor and some other equipment he couldn't identify. It wasn't interesting, but he stared at it for a very long time. He couldn't tell if he was happy. He felt relaxed like never before, but at the same time he also felt down, somehow.
He was still standing there when Irena woke up, got up and walked over to him, put her arms around his waist from behind, pressed her whole body against his and said: "Good morning! Did you sleep well? What are you thinking about now? Still about monogamy?"
"No, rather about sex…"
"Did you like it?"
"By God, I loved it! But now I feel lost…"
"Of course you feel lost," she said, "because it wasn't at all real sex, you know. I did everything. You just came along for the ride."
"Why did you do it?"
"Oh, because I felt like it, of course!"
"You did, you really did?"
"Of course I did!"
"But it wasn't the real thing."
"No, it wasn't the real thing."
"Will you do the real thing with me one day?"
"That depends on you."

Over breakfast she started explaining a few things to David:
"You still have lots to learn" was how she brought up the topic.
"Yes, but what exactly do you mean?" asked David.
"You know," said Irena, "in principle the boy should be the active one right from the start. He should be the one working on the girl, while the girl resists him. He should keep going till the girl gets so worked up that she wants him."
"But why is it like that?" asked David. "I don't understand. Girls and boys need sex equally much. Why don't they just get together and do it? Why are there so many tricks to learn?"
"I can't believe you're saying this," said Irena. "You were the one going on about monogamy and how you need to find the right partner and so on. How will you find the right partner if people just get together and do it?"
"But they're not finding the right partner or anything like that," said David full of desperation. "They just take the ones who happen to know the tricks, that's all!" "No, no," said Irena, "it's not that simple…"
"Anyway," said David, "if boys and girls need sex equally much, why would the boy have to be the active one while the girl resists him. That just doesn't make sense." "Oh," said Irena with another one of those mocking little smiles of hers, "because it's inborn like that. It's instinctual. You're the one who keeps going on about how everything is instinctual. I thought about it and in some sense I quite like it – everything can be explained so easily that way!"
"Yeah, yeah, sure, but I still need to know WHY it is inborn like that and HOW it is programmed that way. I want to understand it."
"Well," said Irena, "I guess the usual explanation is that females make a big investment when they get pregnant, while males just provide the sperm. That’s why females are more reluctant than males - they need the sperm of a really worthy male for the child they're going to carry in their womb for so long. Males, on the other hand, can never be sure that any child is really theirs, but at the same time producing sperm is very cheap for them, so their best bet is to fuck around as much as they can so that at least some of the offspring would really be theirs. You can read such stuff in good biology books."
"Yeah…" said David.
"That's your own way of arguing," said Irena laughing. "I learnt it from you to bring up arguments like that!"
"Yeah," said David again, "that explains the WHY, but it doesn't explain the HOW. If boys and girls need sex equally much, HOW can the girls be more reluctant, wait for the boys to work on them, resist them and all that…"
"Yes, I see your problem," said Irena. "I think girls really need to feel that they are wanted. The boys have to make a show of wanting them."
"Didn't I make that clear all my life?" said David annoyed. "And yet it didn't work!" "Oh no!" said Irena, "not like that. If they just see you sitting there with your tongue hanging out, slobbering like a dog, that won't at all attract them."
"And why not?"
“Because then they could just come and do something to you to make you happy, as if they were your servant or something.”
“Like a prostitute, you mean?”
“Yes, like a prostitute.”
“But if they need it themselves just as much, what’s the problem?”
“The problem is, I think, that they might end up not getting what they need.” “But if the boy has to be the active one, he too might not get what he needs in the end. What’s the difference?”
“Oh, it’s not at all the same. The boy is the one who has to do the penetration. He can’t do that if he doesn’t want to. He’s in control. Boys can rape girls, but girls can’t really rape boys.”
“I don’t get it.” said David with a whiny voice. “You say the boy has to be active. But if he’s active, then he’s precisely MORE like a rapist. If he just sits there with his tongue out, waiting for a girl to notice him, then he’s not at all likely to rape her.” “Well, boys precisely need to have a bit of the rapist in them...” Irena surprised even herself when she said this.
“This is crazy!” was all David could say.
“No, look, I think this is how it works: when a boy has sex with a girl, it can only be because he wants it. Else he wouldn’t have an erection, right?”
“Right.”
“When a girl has sex with a boy, it can basically be for two reasons: either she wants it, or she submits to him to gain some advantage. She can do that, since she is able to have sex, or at least some kind of sex, even when she doesn’t want it.”
“Yes.”
“When she wants it, it has to be CLEAR that she wants it and that she’s not submitting to the boy. Else the boy will think that now he can lead her by the nose, and she’ll have to fight later on to prove him wrong.”
“Yes. So far I can follow you.”
“Well, if the boy just waits for the girl to let him fuck her, or whines for her to let him fuck her, then all she can do is come and do him that favour, and that’s whorish.” “But it’s not much like submitting to him, is it?”
“Yes it is. You know, I saw some film about chimpanzees once (you see, I’m arguing completely according to your lines of thought - chimpanzees are our closest cousins in terms of evolution, aren’t they?). Anyway, these chimps, whenever they saw something that scared them, they quickly turned their bum to it to be fucked. Offering yourself to be fucked like that, it’s the most humiliating thing you can do. You only do it to a bloody scary big boss to distract him from hurting you.”
“Even if you need it bloody much yourself?”
“Of course! If you can’t make it clear that you bloody much need it yourself, the humiliation of offering yourself for a fuck is exactly the same as if you did it only out of submissiveness.”
“Why don’t you just make it clear, then? ”
“Sure, that’s how women do it. But for that they need the man to do something to which they can react. The man needs to do something so that the woman can show him: that’s right, baby, that’s what I want! They don’t just offer themselves! Only whores do that!” “So it’s humiliating to be a whore?”
“Yes, mostly it is. Not with all customers. Some of them are seductive. They do stuff to deserve you. But most of them just want you to offer yourself. It made me sick in the end.”
“In other words, asking for sex, that’s already wrong.”
“Yes, definitely. You mustn’t ever ask. You have to do something. Brush against the girl, touch her cheek, all casually, of course, and only in the exact moment when it feels right, else you’re a rapist. If she likes it, she will press against your hand, she will do all kinds of things to keep your attention. Eventually you’ll end up in bed with her. But if you tell her ‘I don’t know the tricks, let’s just do it’, then she’ll dismiss you straight away!” “I’m not sure I really got it why.”
“But I just explained it all! It’s a beautiful theory, and it’s all built up on the fact that, mechanically speaking, the man has this one essential role in sex, namely penetration, that the woman doesn’t have. It’s the kind of theory you love to make!”
“Yeah, well please explain it to me once more. I got lost in it somewhere.” “Okay. So: before having sex, a woman has to make it clear that she does it because she wants it and not because she’s scared or trying to gain an advantage or anything like that. Else she’ll feel humiliated, however much she needs sex.”
“Yes, that much I understood.”
“If the man just expects her to come and offer herself, then it doesn’t work.” “Okay.”
“But if the man reaches out to her with a certain amount of pushiness (but without ever going too far in one go, of course, because then it’s nothing but rape and she has no time to get into it), then he gives her a chance to get turned on and show him how she likes it.” “But then too she could just be giving in out of submissiveness, couldn’t she?” “No, not at all. Once the man is active, she can guide him. She resists him, but he keeps trying other things, and when she likes it, she reacts more positively, and by and by he learns to please her, and that’s how in the end they do it all. If the man isn’t active to start with, she can’t guide him.”
“Why couldn’t she just tell him how she likes it?”
“Oh, there aren’t enough words in verbal language for that. Besides, maybe she doesn’t even know it herself, how she likes it. She discovers it when it happens to her, when it feels right. They discover it together.”
“But why wouldn’t the woman come at the man the same way? Why does he have to start?”
“Oh, that happens sometimes, you know, like yesterday evening...”
David blushed like mad.
“But it’s still more the man’s role to start, because he definitely can’t be doing it without wanting it himself, just to please her, out of submissiveness. Or if he tries, then it becomes obvious straight away and doesn’t work, because he doesn’t get an erection.” David said: “I still don’t get it. If the woman gets into it, even if the man started it originally, it can still be submissiveness. How can you be so dead sure that it isn’t?” “Why, because the woman doesn’t just give in like that! The man has to do all kinds of things, listening with his hands to the reactions of her body, in order to properly get her in the mood. He really has to deserve her. Only then they will finally ‘do it’, and then there’s nothing humiliating in it anymore.”
“You think we’ll ever do it like that, you and me?”
“Ah, ah, ah!!!” said Irena “you mustn't ask! That’s the whole point of what I was trying to explain to you!”

That day they went to visit a crocodile “farm”. Actually it was some kind of zoo again, except that this time it was for crocodiles instead of birds. David had seen crocodiles before, in vivariums, where they just stayed absolutely still all day, their piercing reptile eyes open but looking at nothing. Here in this crocodile farm there were many, many crocodiles in a setting as natural as possible (many pools, artificial water-falls, tropical plants). There was a foot-bridge above the whole thing for the human visitors. Of course here too the crocodiles were mostly sunbathing and keeping absolutely still, their mouths (the insides of which looked dry and unreal) half-open. Sometimes one of them clumsily climbed over his mates to find a better spot, but otherwise there wasn’t much activity. But further off, in one of the pools, a huge commotion suddenly started. Two crocodiles were fighting! They were beating the water to foam with their powerful tails, their bodies were twisting around each other like humans in foreplay. The pale under-belly of one of the crocodiles was clearly visible for a while as he struggled to wriggle back to an upright position. Then it was all over. The loser