Prologue - In between
As the pain came back, Katherine inevitably had to smile.
I had already asked myself where you had been all this time—she greeted it as it took control of her with brute strength and its force left her breathless. A grey nothing spread before her
eyes.
»No, Katherine!« warned the professor’s soft baritone voice. »Don’t pass out. Endure the pain just a little bit longer.«
»No problem,« she whispered, almost without a voice. She meant it cynically.
The pain wallowed delightfully inside of her, but the professor didn’t seem to notice it. »That’s my girl,« he said. It was supposed to sound fatherly, yet it echoed hollowly and phonily in her head. This man didn’t give a damn about her. She knew it. She knew all about indifference. She would have liked to hit him, but at the moment, she felt unable to even move her little toe. The pain paralyzed her, throbbed in her head, gnawed on her lungs, burned on her skin. And she let herself be consumed by it.
Katherine Williams knew the pain well.
Since the age of fourteen, it had been her confident, her companion, her invisible friend. Her entire glamorous, shitty, professional lifetime as a model. The pain followed her everywhere.
No body search at the airport discovered it. No customs officer in the world required her to declare it. It flew with her over oceans, raced from one show to the next, let make up be applied and have its hair done with her, strutted with her on the runway, threw on another sinfully expensive rag and wiggled back down the runway—with her, the one they reverently called ‘The Goddess’ and the one that was no more that a tasty piece of meat on a stick.
Middle age women held their breath at the sight of her, fingered their wrinkly necks nervously and immediately prescribed themselves a diet or an operation for their used remains. Fat, tanned men licked their lips, picked at the pants of their suits in order to cover up their erection and fucked her in thought when she briefly paused at the end of the runway. Camera flashes pierced her, thousands of eyes examined every centimeter of her skin—and the pain was always there.
At every photo shooting, he posed with her, toked on every joint, partied with her until the early morning, greedily shared with her in the black light a bluish-glowing line and let itself just as willingly get screwed in some restroom of some exclusive club in some more or less important metropolis from some more or less important man.
In these moments, in which she was totally distanced from herself, in which her perfect chrysalis executed things which her spirit, her mind would never have expected—when her arms embraced the body of her Adonis of the week, her fingers dug themselves into his dark hair and she could recognize the triumphant expression on his harmonious, sweating face that he of all people was granted the privilege of having sex with one of the most beautiful women on this planet—in these moments, the pain briefly took a step back—back to the darkness from which it had come. It then would go totally silent and peaceful inside of her and, for a few moments, she felt completely free.
But then this moment of silence and freedom was gone and she again heard their collective, heavy breathing, the scrat chy reverberation of her stilettos which were rubbing on the tiled walls and leaving behind small black streaks. The distant hum of the basses, the chatter of two women in front of the large mirror and the moaning of the two gays in the stall next door.
»That’s enough,« she’d then say most of the time. Adonis kissed her thankfully on the neck, pulled off the condom and they shared the toilet paper in order to clean themselves up - well rehearsed like an intimate married couple. Then they adjusted their clothing, quickly snorted another line, left the stall and threw themselves into the bustling maelstrom of bodies of beauty and emptiness.