She’s someone who had stoked the fire with furniture in order to stay warm. Someone whose neighbor had cut a hole in his floor and taken shits into the space above her ceiling, someone who during one hard winter set traps in the woods and consumed highly questionable game. Someone who’d been beaten up by alcoholic Nazis. What on earth could a little Russian, shaved head to toe, add to that? She lets him shove her off his lap in restaurants, smiles when he introduces her to acquaintances as “my whore.” Thinks of Poland, which she escaped, while he absentmindedly fucks her, and thinks of the absurdity of humankind. Beneath all the expensive bespoke suits, beneath the table manners, the ritualized small talk, beneath all their supposed importance and irreplaceability, they carry their genitalia. It doesn’t matter if a new era has begun for some out there, what remains are humans with their testicles, ass cracks, holes—draped in silk underwear, sat on toilet seats, taken in their hands, cradled, always ready, always on the lookout for a chance to get it on. When Peter’s mother is downhearted, when in rare moments she has the feeling that everything she is now living, the perpetual stress over looking good and fucking good, is all for naught, because she takes no joy in her home, her clothes, the view of the park, because she has nobody to share these things with, then she imagines all the people she encounters in the expensive boutiques and clubs as big, smelly genitals.

Then things are fine.

Meanwhile

THE CHILDREN

Have followed Peter’s mother, and the home address corresponds to the info provided by the hackers. The first target can be watched.

In order to attack at the right moment

Speaking of which

After

CARL

Had beaten his dim-witted neighbor to death. Well, what does that really mean, beaten to death? He rang at her door, a teary woman opened up. Actually a totally normal young dim-witted woman, as he had noticed to his surprise. Okay, so there was no fucking tranny or whatever standing there, but there was no going back. He punched her. Kicked her backwards into her room, then bit out her larynx and jumped on her corpse. Yep, the woman was dead at that point, and a few minutes later a division of the private police turned up to arrest Carl. One of the surveillance cameras had captured the whole spectacle from outside. And once again the populace was supposed to owe its gratitude as a result. The days when young women were shoved down stairs, old women robbed, respectable citizens beaten up by roving gangs of foreigners, are over thanks to the tireless expansion of security systems. The current absence of aggression in the public sphere speaks volumes. Which volumes? Doesn’t matter.