Galaktika

Galaktika

Lord Schadt

––––––––

Translated by Steven Cronkhite 

Galaktika

Written By Lord Schadt

Copyright © 2018 Lord Schadt

All rights reserved

Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

www.babelcube.com

Translated by Steven Cronkhite

Babelcube Books and Babelcube are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

Table of Contents

1. Galaktika I

2. Somewhere over the Rainbow

3. The Dream Is Over

4. There is a party

6. Fire, Water, burn

7. No Limits

8. Pink Moon

9. Free Beer

10. Puff the Magic Dragon.

11. A Festival of Love

12. The End

13. White Christmas

14. Starship Edelweiss

15. Wish you were here

16. Galaktika II

Bonus Track I: Epilogue from Linda

Bonus Track II: Don Jon’s Manifesto of Freak Culture

1. Galaktika I

Night time in Middle City. During the daytime, wild, swarming, crazy kids occupied the public pool. The city was suffocating in a cloud of smog, hustle-and-bustle, and piercing background noise. In the evening, the city went to sleep and dreamt. At night, the streets were deserted, the ice cream shops were closed, and, at the job center, a forgotten neon light burned brightly. A bottle collector hobbled through the streets and ransacked the dumpsters; teens poured into Club Disco, where they had 2-for-1 drinks at their ‘Nice Price Party’. The asphalt released its stored warmth. It clouded the city whose residents tossed and turned in their beds and tried to fall asleep in sweaty sheets. 

I call upon you, Galaktika

From the distant star of Andromeda.

The Hello Spencer Show

Kalle and Don sat in the park, two dancing shadows in front of a campfire, one big and one small, one rounder and one more jagged. Don aimlessly dug around in the embers of the small fire with his beer bottle. Kalle took a bottle out of his army backpack. He opened the cork and wafted the fragrance of the drink. Don looked at him and wondered about that gesture, which he has never seen before. Then Kalle took out two glasses rolled in newspaper and threw the paper into the fire. Smoldering paper shavings were thrown into the air by a light summer breeze. Kalle filled the glasses. He looked at the waning moon before he started to talk with his quiet Johnny-Cash-meets-Clint-Eastwood voice: "Don, today is a real special night. I need to tell you something important. That’s why I brought this weird drink with me: Loch Lomond: The Lord of Scottish whiskeys. These pure drops are aged for sixteen years. Sixteen years it’s been waiting for us; sixteen years in solitary darkness. Each year, its taste becomes a little more mature. Now it’s right in front of us, begging for us to drink it. Loch Lomond stands out from other whiskeys like Scotland does from the sea. I won’t explain the taste to you. When you try it, you will taste the peat, the earth, and the fog of Scotland. Whiskey is like people, only certain ones are enjoyable, and this bottle not only has its own individual flavor, but also an individual story. Last week – let’s say – I stole it from Frank’s party.

Frank used to sit next me in advanced physics. I met up with him shortly in the city. We exchanged a few anecdotes from the old times and then he promptly invited me to the inaugural barbeque for his new building. I was on his good side, he said, because I always let him copy off me in physics. He was as dumb as his parents were rich and he absolutely had to get in to a good university in order to save his family’s honor. He would never have made it without me, so the invitation seemed more than justified. I couldn’t decline on the grounds of my mooching code of ethics. So, I rode to the housing development in Bumsbüttel and satiated my sociological knowledge interest. The district of new buildings was naked. The first bushes and trees had already been planted, but they were too puny to shield the houses from each other and struck me like cheap and completely out of place suburban decorations. No reasonable tree would have settled in this suburb on its own free will. The protective role was miserably played by these bushes, so I could recognize my party by the driveway from the street from several plots away. The hardware store grill had already sucked the gas cans dry. So, I snatched up a tasty steak, Argentinean beef, as it turns out, and let some chump pour me a big cup of beer. I was relieved when I spotted the hammock chair (obligatory for suburbia) and occupied it. I was the only single person at the party. With a bit of discomfort, I assumed that Frank invited me as a contrast to the housing development: creative houses with saunas and lawns with grass two inches high, yapping mutts, prime-time TV, two, maybe three, planned kids per family and me, in a good mood, drunk, my senses about me. So, I was sitting in the hammock chair, and then a random couple joined me, probably to start some small talk to distract themselves from their own boredom. 

Nice house, isn’t it? asked a uniform man with his uniform haircut.

If you think of a roof with four walls as an aesthetic indulgence, then you could call this a nice house I swung a little bit to build tension.

I’m Peter, and this is Petra, my wife, he introduced himself".

I’m Kalle, and this is Warsteiner, my beer, I answered.

‘Oh, so you’re a joker, huh?’

‘Nah, more like a jack.’

‘A jack?’ he asked, taking the bait.

‘As soon as you see me coming, WHACK, it’s too late.

Pepe, do you want to get something from the buffet? Petra asked to pull him away. Her feminine intuition assessed the danger correctly. Only an isolated person can take that kind of woman seriously, and every interaction that her Peter had with strangers presented potential danger to her future offspring. My intuition put her in with the type of calculating women that exchanges fake orgasms for shoes, all-inclusive vacations or a marble fireplace.

I’m gonna stay here for a little while, Peter said. Petra disappeared, clutching her paper plate a bit too disdainfully, to the buffet; I still had him on the hook. He fidgeted. I’m an electrician. What do you do? he asked to keep our conversation going.

Theoretically I study theoretical physics

And in practice?

In practice, the university has not seen me for the past three semesters; I’m doing an additional diploma on the master of being.

For the next three hours, I told him, interrupted by my beer and pee breaks, some details from my life story. I told him about the festivals in the old city, the many nights in the park, the Castor, the fire in Bumsdorf, the poetry slam, the newcomer tour, the basket cases in the lowlands and the many freaks at Zytanien and, last but not least, Plant’s birthday. He was my opposite. He had everything, but no stories to tell. Still, he was nice, with his funny mustache and his questioning eyes. He just chose the wrong degree, the wrong wife and the wrong life, but shit happens. Maybe he’ll break up with the old cow, start using the right drugs and get a second chance at the good life. His time will come too.

From time to time, Petra came over, nagged a bit, gave Peter a demonstrative kiss on the mouth and fled home alone. I reckoned that Peter had a stern lecture ahead of him, but he listened to me a little while longer and thanked me at the end. Well-behaved for good company. I think he would have wanted to be my friend. His eyes blazed somewhat wistfully over his funny mustache. A humble fire. I’m not a sympathetic person, but I felt a little sorry for Peter. The way he lives on his little island with Petra and a few electricians and how he forgot that, with a bit of creativity, he can build a boat and flee from the island. Boring and safe or crazy and dangerous: Those are the two poles of life. Peter chose safety, a dangerous decision that normally ends in premature mental death. All things considered, he folded and admitted that a large, unenjoyable portion of his life would comprise of boredom, even if he couldn’t quite put it into those exact words.

At some point I had the feeling that I had conversed with him enough and I went into the house to examine the new construction. It was disgusting. Absurd colors sneered at me from all sides, unnecessary tasteless knick-knacks in every corner, without a doubt selected by someone’s wife, and then these unbelievable voids between the furniture.  It doesn’t make any sense to me that someone can put a twenty-five-meter sprint between the kitchen and the TV. I became unreasonably angry. I wanted to run amok, butcher the guests with a sword and torch the house, but then I was distracted by the house bar. It was already beautifully arranged, and between vodka, nasty fruit schnapps, and gin, I discovered this bottle of Loch Lomond. ‘That can’t be’, I thought to myself, this whiskey did not mature for sixteen years to a personality just to be sipped on by Frank. First, I thought about the farmers who tirelessly harvested the malt, about the spring water, about the American oak barrels and the friendly whiskey distributor. Then I thought about Frank and it became crystal clear that I had to do something. So, I put the bottle in my backpack, waved goodbye and took off.

Don, be glad that we are sophisticatedly crazy! Well, whether your craziness is sophisticated is another question, but that’s exactly why I like you."

Kalle took a shot of whiskey.

"Maybe I don’t have a long story. I’m not a hero, athlete, celebrity, manager, Rockstar or amazing scientist. All things considered, I’m just a freak. Dragon keeps trying to wear me down with that. At least I have my own stories

Fuck Dragon!, Don murmured, but without conviction.

"I know you don’t believe Dragon. Sometimes I don’t even know whether I’m schizophrenic and took too many drugs or if Dragon is real. No idea. But Dragon is right about one thing: Objectively speaking I am nothing. A small spec in an enormous universe, an ephemeral heap of bioactive material without freedom, without reason, without existence. An insanely infinitesimal freak in a universe that’s bigger and more insignificant that we can imagine. The only thing that I have are stories.  The stories of an infinitesimal freak on a small planet on the edge of an insignificant galaxy.

Maybe these stories aren’t anything special. Maybe everything seems so strange to me because I can only see from one, namely my own, perspective. But when I look at the Peters and Petras, then I have to inevitably describe my life as strange. The day-to-day worries of the excess-tedium-crowd: having kids, paying off credit cards, the endeavor of obtaining season tickets for the Lions, all that crap they use to distance themselves from their short, earthly existence never interested me. I only have my experiences."

Rich in experiences! Don interjected.

Exactly. Rich in experiences. Don, can you do me a favor? Kalle drank some whiskey. A cricket chirped.

Depends

How should I start? I only have my old bass, my stamps and our stories. Don?

Yea, Kalle?

I have to tell you something before I tell you my request.

Well then, lay it on me! Is DJ BoBo meeting you as the holy Virgin Mary again?

No. You know that life fucks me very subtly. Every day, I think that my heart could stop all of a sudden and my life could come to an end and I wouldn’t have fulfilled my purpose, even though I have no idea what that might be. And now I know that I don’t care about a broken heart. I’m going to die soon anyway. Kalle took a quick sip of whiskey. Two months ago, I was in the hospital because of my headaches. My blood was transposed with radioactive products, I was pushed into a tube and my brain, my most intimate organ, was x-rayed. ‘Brain tumor’, the doctor told me. ‘Too close to the brain stem, not operable’, he said and hid himself behind his desk. Not operable, a nice euphemism for a death sentence. Now I can only wait, drink whiskey and tea, and die prematurely. But I will not weep nor make a scene about the absurdity of life. I’m just gonna say ‘thank you, life, for having been.’ Still, it’s hard for me to audition the saddest song because the loudest cry under the sun above is the silent goodbye from the ones you love.

Don took a drag from his cigarette and didn’t know what to say.  Typical Kalle, he thought, he talks about his own death like he talks about his breakfast. Don sized him up. Did he just land in a bad movie? Did Kalle just want to mess with him? What did he expect from him? Is he supposed to cry now? Pick up a packet of tobacco from the gas station? After two whole minutes of silence, he was sure that Kalle wasn’t joking. Don has comforted a lot of women, but now he was unsuccessfully looking for a comforting solution and he could not find one. He just had Hallmark stuff, store-brand sympathy. But that was not the right time. That is why he first looked at Kalle in disbelief, then with wide eyes and a fixed stare.

Kalle sighed. "Sorry, Don. I didn’t want to ruin this gorgeous night for you, but I can’t do anything about it. It had to come out. Don’t give me any sympathy. I already feel bad enough. I still have an important question to ask you. Don, are you listening to me? If I die, I want you to write down our experiences. I don’t want to owe anything to the Peters or Petras and, above all, the Franks of the world.

Ok! Don said, vaguely guessing at what he just signed up for.

Thanks. That’s reassuring. You know, everything is just communication. There are only broadcasters and receivers. I was on the receiving side until now, but I don’t want to be fall into oblivion as a receiver. After my death, future generations should remember me. If you publish my stories, then everything will be alright.

Don took the bottle and looked at the label. He took a drink from the bottle. When he realized that he had a glass in his hand, he filled it up. Both of them were silent. After a while, Kalle spoke further: "By the way, I’ve been thinking about what stops of our story we should inaugurate to our readers. I haven’t slept well for the past few nights and I’ve been thinking about our last ten years. I was kept alive by the fear that my life would go the way of my band. The worst part about DJ Simon from Singsing and the Hardcore MCs was that we never used them in the studio. During the last few years, I always wanted to hear our music again. We weren’t really a good band, but it was our music and since we didn’t take any pictures, it is now lost to Ethereum and is never coming back. Our experiences are like music that we composed together and still have to be conserved. That is your task now. I’ve already decided on a track list.

2. Somewhere over the Rainbow

I remember the exact moment when I first met you. I don’t think I ever told you, but I thought you were a little crazy. I asked myself how someone could really be that crazy. That was also why I called you the same day to meet up with me. I thought you could use a friend. I always wanted a little brother like you. You had a kind of talent that I really liked: You, too, could drunkenly philosophize without going on and on like a grandiose moron. It was ten years ago, about as old as this Loch Lomond. I wish I could have aged longer with you. Thank God that we never have to be seventeen again. Cheers! Let us take a journey to the day that we met!

Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high,

There’s a land that I’ve heard of

Once in a lullaby.

Rio Reiser

Johann, as was customary for every break, stood behind the gym in the secret smoker’s area when Linda came blown by the fresh spring wind. She was so small and thin that Johann was afraid that a gust of wind would blow her away. If she weren’t such a bubbly vegetarian, he would have thought she was anorexic. She spun around aimlessly like a leaf in the wind. Whenever Johann reached for her, she flew away again, to her friends, to her protests, to her dance group, to her fears.

Do you have any papers?, Johann said, trying to bum one off her. My last one got soaked in the rain.

You can have a regular one. I have enough. So, how was your math exam?

Great. I smoked a joint before class, so I was feeling funky fresh about my answers. As Timothy Leary once said: A joint before class, you’ll kick math’s ass.

You weirdo! Are you coming to the Old City Festival tonight? Anna’s coming too. She bought a bottle of tequila and we can pre-game at her house if you want. Linda grinned at him. She had bright plastic beads braided into her dreadlocks and answered Johann. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Funny, Linda, do you really think I’m a weirdo?

Linda was taking too long to make up her mind. She looked cute with her freckles that she caught at a socialist summer camp like shooting stars.

"You’re different from other people. I don’t know anyone who reads Timothy Leary, Buddha, Marx and Hermann Hesse. If you ask me, yeah, you’re a weirdo. You have long hair, wander around like a hippie and sometimes people never know, what you’re really trying to say.  You’re just different from the other guys at school. I really can’t picture you driving a fast car, smoking