And thinks: Kale, seriously? The couple hosting him are people he would recognize and categorize on the street as belonging to his class. The woman is blonde, and at one time had a pretty face that has in the meantime gone a little gray. She wears overalls, combat boots, and is probably in her late thirties. The man is a good ten years older, he’s losing his hair, he is in tight pants, pointed shoes, a parachute-silk shirt that he wears half open. Undershirt beneath. You only notice at second glance that the clothes are very old. Same goes for the furnishings in the basement flat, which consists of a single room with a kitchenette. The flat costs the same as a basic income, it’s a little damp, but okay, it has a window that, if you lie down below it, reveals the gray sky. The woman has a yoga studio. Well, had. The rent was no longer within her means. Now she distributes business cards in café bathrooms. Yoga lessons in your home. The sessions typically end with a sad man inviting her to his sad basement flat and trying to fuck her. Recently not even that has happened. Her partner is a dancer and member of a modern dance company that is permitted to rehearse in school gymnasiums once in a while. There’s not much interest anymore in dance theater. To put it one way. To put it more precisely, they mostly perform in front of a few homeless people, who have disappeared in the course of the purge. The couple had met over the sofa-sharing app, they got on well, and there are no sexual problems on the horizon because the man isn’t gay, he’s asexual. “I always just wanted to write,” Jon hears himself say, he hears how idiotic the sentence sounds, a sentence from the year 2000, when almost everyone wanted to write because of Harry Potter. Every week a newly discovered shooting star shot into the best seller lists. Even then people no longer read, but owning hip books was a sort of branding. And branding oneself was the thing of the moment. The last rearing up of the so-called individual. The man and woman nod, they don’t give a shit about the story of yet another unsuccessful artist. “It’s going really well,” says Jon, stuffing a potato wearily into his mouth. Until a few years ago, he doesn’t add. Until a few years ago he always sold articles to online platforms, and he was even able to self-publish his first book. It has sold 123 copies to this point. Jon got by quite well for a long time. Lived in a shared flat, jobbed at bars, then the lease on the flat was terminated, sold to a Russian. Jon is on the lookout at the moment. “I’m looking for something new,” he says. And looks around the room briefly. Okay, this won’t be the new place. At the moment he sleeps on friends’ sofas when those friends haven’t rented their sofas out to a paying guest. But Jon has never been the type to settle down. He’s still young. Forty, that is. Things will get going again. Jon cannot imagine that there won’t be more to come, since he’s still young. “A little more wine?” asks the woman, pouring some out of a cardboard box that could be laced with strychnine. Wine, well, right. Doesn’t matter. Things spin. When the three are sufficiently drunk and are jointly doing the washing-up, the dancer says: “If we shoot a porno now and post it to an amateur site, we could earn a little something. Somebody in my troupe pays his rent that way.” Jon looks at the woman, who looks markedly older than she probably is, in the fluorescent light of the kitchenette. But a bit of money on the side doesn’t sound bad. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “Where are we going to do it?” “Here on the table is best,” says the dancer, who has an eye for aesthetics. The woman hasn’t said anything yet. She’s too drunk, and when she’s drunk she gets unhappy. She opens her overalls and pulls them down, hops with the pants and her underpants around her knees and lies down on the table. The dancer aims his phone camera at the scene. Now Jon is on, he rids himself of his pants and stands before the woman’s vagina.