The story of the Freischütz goes as follows: a sharpshooter made a deal with the devil and obtained seven bullets that will hit whatever he wishes. The first six were his and his alone, but the seventh was reserved for the devil to do as he saw fit.

It’s the end of autumn, when decay crosses the line from sickly sweetness to putrefaction; from the flaming red and orange hues of fresh-fallen leaves to gray, lifeless piles of nothing crushed underfoot. And I with them. New cuts are birthed along the lines of old scars; lit cigarettes and rusty razors are pickaxes tearing gashes into rock that’s long been cleared of any ore.

Piles of clothes cross the line from anything that might have had sentimental value to simply ‘mess.’ It’s filthy in here. The windows are open but all that does is send a cold breeze through my room, raising goosebumps on my frail arms.

Here is a crumpled can of beer lying on the floor. I’m sure it helped, if only a little, if only for a moment. Over there is another. I grab the blankets nearest me and flop down onto my bed like a corpse, letting go a quiet sigh as I do. It fights for air as it blends into the howling wind and for a moment I am elsewhere.

A few days ago in Berlin, a drunken man shot his childhood best friend to death at the bus terminal on the corner of Tiergartenstrasse and Herbert-von-Karajan-Strasse. Witnesses say he was screaming as he pulled the trigger. Several people were nearby at the time, and none of them recall any altercation prior to the shooting. One of them was totally drenched in the victim’s blood, which had ‘gushed out like a fountain’. Police detained the perpetrator soon after, and he is currently in their custody as they try to determine a motive.

[In a whispered voice:] What did you say he said?

That he couldn’t stop himself from pulling the trigger.

I jolt awake to a silent and windless night. My alarm clock reads 3:57 in the morning. Pushing myself slowly upwards, I sit and look around the darkened room. The silhouettes of trash and clothes pile atop one another and look to me very much like mountains, or perhaps clouds. On my cluttered desk, I can just barely make out the outlines of pill bottles, my aging laptop, and the roughly strewn shapes of charcoal pencils from when I gave up trying to finish a piece the other day. In the dark, I can’t see the outline of what I was drawing.

Rolling over to look at my phone, I have a missed call from Faust and nothing else; the same as every other time I’ve checked. The date on the notification reads April - when the weather was getting warmer, when I still went outside, when we still spoke. I throw the phone at my bed, where it bounces once or twice before coming to an unceremonious halt. I do not clear the notification.

What was she calling me about? I can’t remember... which I suppose is part of it. I’d like to imagine she’s still with me somewhere, only the press of a button away, ready to talk about whatever I want whenever I want. Which I suppose is part of it.

She finishes the piece and looks at me expectantly.

“Hey, you’re getting better,” I say. I haven’t got any ear for music, but I think I really mean it.

She rolls her eyes and launches into a spirited rendition of Clair de Lune. She always plays it faster and louder than you’re supposed to. I can tell that much at least.

On dreary winter nights like this all we do is sit here in the front foyer of the old university building with the out-of-tune grand piano and let the music speak for us in the dim yellow light. I always find myself looking at her and never know what to say. She tells me she learned when she was little and that she’d forgotten most of it by the time we met. I guess that’s why she’s always intensely focused on the instrument, her body swaying in time with the notes she plays and her eyes never leaving the keys. Sometimes I feel like a teacher, and I try to do what a teacher would do and close my eyes and just let the music wash over me - but I can’t do that. I can’t look away. My breath stills itself and I stand motionless.

Like this, we’d pass our time. Were it not for the piano we’d be in near-total silence.

I had resolved to finish up my charcoal drawing, but when I woke up again the light was shining through my window and I realized the outline was completely destroyed. Like someone had deliberately swiped at it with their hand every which way. It might have been a portrait in profile; or a picturesque port town with postcard houses and petite little sailboats; but now it was a cloud of smoke. Dust.

We never said much. Much of anything at all, I realize, staring at her name at the top of my phone screen. It’s an old photo there, from when she’d dyed her hair blond and thought it was the worst thing ever. I told her she still looked good, and taken the picture to prove it. Did it help? I doubt it.

There is murder by your own hand and then there is murder by inaction. Take the classic trolley problem. If I pull the lever, I will have murdered one person. If I don’t do anything, I will have ‘murdered’ five people. So what to do? Any idiot will tell you to pull the lever. These people are stupid, who think they can always solve problems with logical and sound mind. But any idiot will tell you to pull the lever.

Well, what if I’m scared of pulling it? And, and, (I say, waving my hands in the air like a madperson), and, is it really my fault if someone put them there on the tracks? What am I then? Nothing but a person covered in the victims’ blood, to be sure. And who exactly is there on the tracks? And, and...

Well, what if I’m scared of pulling it?

Here’s what I always ask them. What if you were the one person on the tracks, lying down and safe in the knowledge that a trolley will roll down the track next to you, splattering you in blood but leaving you totally unharmed? Would you then, if you had the power to, divert the trolley onto yourself?

They never know the answer. I don’t either. Real life isn’t as predictable as a runaway trolley. Who knows what will happen when you pull that lever? A hundred thousand bloodthirsty trolleys flood through the streets of Munich like a tidal wave, trampling white roses as they go. Perhaps the lever is already on.

From his case he pulls one out, twirling it around with his hands and admiring its glossy sheen, its machined perfection. With bated breath, he slides it into the waiting receiver, cups his hands, and for a brief moment there is the brilliant glint of fire. A practiced motion. The end of the barrel is smoking, a small red dot now the only source of light in the dark cinema. He inhales deeply and breathes back out again, this time with gusto. He has just lit a cigarette.

The film is Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day. He sits and watches, vision clouded by a haze of smoke. Through it, he can catch glimpses of the ending scene. Having seen it so many times, it still always brings a tear to his eye - or perhaps that’s the cigarette smoke.

He’s finished his smoke. He needs another.

I look at the drawing - an abstract, wispy form of... something. Or nothing - when I look at it that’s how I feel. Like walking past a drab building I walk past every day. Like looking down at the pavement, at my tattered tennis shoes.

It’s not anything. When I look at Kandinsky, when I look at Mondrian, Malevich, Pollock, Rothko, I feel something. In their compositions I see something of them, their worldviews and their hopes and their dreams and their despairs. In the dark, foreboding Seagram murals, the canvases draw me in like black holes. I see his intention, the unmistakable touch of his hand. I see the depths of the void and apparitions of myself. In this cloud of charcoal - I see nothing. It’s nothing but a readymade... and even Fountain (to even think of it - Duchamp’s Fountain!) makes me feel more. Here, I’ll pin it on my wall and look at it when I go to bed. Then maybe I’ll think of something.

I need a fresh set of eyes as well, if I am to continue seeing, to continue feeling... a new pair of eyeballs to go with the rest of this body. I get a glass of water and quickly down three pills. Needed that.

It’s her third time coming to the Institut. The first time had been a bit of a fluke - he had simply been walking around, a little lost, meandering aimlessly this way and that, until he came to this place with per scientiam ad justitiam (through science to justice) carved into the walls. On the second time Herr Hirschfeld had greeted him warmly, introduced him to the surgeon, Levy-Lenz, and brought tea and biscuits while the two were conversing. Walking through the front door now, she is not one bit nervous. Any qualms she carried with her had been dropped on the ground at some point during the walk.

Levy-Lenz comes out to welcome her. She shakes his hand and assures him she hasn’t changed her mind one bit since last week. He smiles. Some time later, her eyes flutter open in a hospital bed. By the window, watching the setting sun, sits the nurse, Gretchen. The two women lock eyes for a moment, and Gretchen comes over with a glass of water. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better,” she replies. Gretchen nods her head knowingly and tells her to call if she needs anything before quietly stepping out of the room. The door shuts almost noiselessly, and the small medical room with dying sunbeams shining through the window suddenly feels like a church.

Alone now, she is abruptly struck by a strange premonition. As if the cobblestones of Berlin were speaking to her all at once. “In twenty-two years,” they begin, and her fading smile carries the lament that she was born in such a body at such a time.

The sun is out for the first time in a good while (as far as I can remember) so I’m out for a walk. But the wind is still ceaseless and my thin tartan scarf tries its best to hold fast, the ends fluttering beside my face in the breeze. Getting back to my room, I’m struck by how cold I really am. I blow hot air on my hands and rub them together but to no avail - they’re still freezing and I can’t do anything about it.

So I sit back in bed and stare at the charcoal drawing now pinned to the wall. I bite my nails, more out of habit than anything. It’s nothing. But at the same time, it could be anything - I remember Wagner telling me to always think positively, like an optimist. I think to myself how damning such a worldview is.

Blank slate; tabula rasa. When I see it I am filled with feelings of nothing at all. When I look at my body, my hideously scarred, pockmarked, burned, and bruised body, in the mirror, I wish I felt nothing at all. At the end of the day that’s what I wish for.

And so this feeling of ‘nothingness’ I get is really a feeling of jealousy. I want to be an object that someone could gloss over, that someone could see as totally natural - not as something unwanted or wanted, but merely as something that was supposed to be there. A ‘something’, that could be anything...

I think that’s what Faust did for me. Those snowy, frigid nights, when I would stand inches away from her as she played the piano. She didn’t look at me at all; or if she did, it was as a natural part of the scene - of course a player should need a listener. The sublime music she was playing took her very soul for itself. In that room, she was carried along by the music and I was content to be carried with her. I was the potted plant in the corner; the flickering halogen lamp; her shoulder bag, carelessly tossed on the floor beside her...

A voice in my head: Tell her! (I didn’t.)

[Scene V - Two ANGELS fly over Berlin. They are tired - tired of seeing, of witnessing.]

I: Why would he do that? It would have ended in due time anyway. And more peacefully, too.

II: He was hurting. Deeply. [A sigh; a pause.] Even so, you’re right...

I: It’s irrational! There’s no reason for it.

II: None at all.

[A pause. Far below them are the twinkling lights along the river Spree.]

I: [softer] I’m sorry you couldn’t do anything more for him. It isn’t your fault.

II: I wish I could have. Yelled at him to stop, grabbed him by the waist, forced him back up.

I: You did all you could.

II: And what good is that?

[The two fly on in silence for a period of time, banking lower and lower. Contrasting yellow, blue, and red lights highlight their expressionless faces in a myriad of colors. Like reflections on wet marble.]

II: [wistfully, glancing somewhere in the distance] Sometimes I do wish I were human.

I: So you could do more for them.

II; I wish that were it. No - so I can stop witnessing. Stop looking. So I can close my eyes and turn away.

I: [gently] It’s so very difficult to be a human.

II: [harshly] Or to be anything at all.

[A pause. What more is there to say?]

I: Yes... [sigh] it’s so difficult.

[A much longer pause. The rustling of the angels’ wings in the wind can be clearly heard.]

II: God never made a child without suffering.

I once went to see Michelangelo’s Pietà with Wagner, when we were in Italy. He got bored of it after a little while, but I insisted on staying longer. To me, the marble flesh of the figures was transfixing, at once both mesmerizingly lifelike and not - to me, it radiated a certain sterility, a divine perfection unfit for any depiction of dirty, wretched, human suffering. But I suppose, for the Lord, it was suitable.

It’s so damn smooth. There lies Christ, the scars of the crucifixion barely noticeable, gaping wounds reduced to little more than blemishes, inviting you to reduce them further down to tricks of the eye - no, it’s not imperfect, it’s just how you see, your cataract-ridden stained-glass eyes... and Mary untouched by age; the two figures are ethereal, timeless.

I once read that in 1972 the statue was smashed to bits. I saw a photograph of it in that state. And I went, and stood there in front of it, looking at the perfectly smooth marble skin, with not a crack in sight...

Timeless. Michelangelo said: “image of the heart.” The image of a mother and child. Timeless.

I hate the Pietà.

Michelangelo gazes into a rusty silver mirror, chisel and hammer in hand. With a grimace, a chunk of flesh is eroded off. A sharp cry of pain; ragged, raspy breathing. He looks up again. His hands, so deft in their movements, strike with a trained precision. Shrapnel shards of white marble. He continues.

There is a tiredness; a knowing sadness in his eyes - the weariness of being watched. He knows better than anyone that a statue will outlive a man. Who sculpts the sculptor? He raises the chisel again.

It hurts... it hurts... I can’t do it... mother, it hurts.

I wonder what became of Wagner. We didn’t speak at all after I saw him off at the airport in Rome.

All we have left of each other are the burn marks on our backs. He wanted to do it and I didn’t say no. I didn’t say much of anything at all. From Faust I have a little scar on my neck where her teeth drew blood. When I saw the Wall come crashing down on the television, I thought back to when I stayed out for too long and my mother would come find me under a streetlamp and box me on the ear.

There is moss growing over the crumbling remains of the Atlantic Wall. When I saw the Pietà shattered in pieces I saw myself in Mary and Jesus both. To ‘restore’ a piece of art: what’s the fucking point? So they can show it as it was? Why does that matter? Show it as it is. I wake up every day with this body. Chisels and hammers have been replaced with cigarettes and razors. In Oranienburg, tourists mill around Sachsenhausen.

It’s jealousy, I know it is. I can’t make myself anew just as much as you can’t erase the twentieth century.

Or maybe we’re one and the same. In a marble statue or a smudge of charcoal we see our unattainable ‘ideal.’

I sit at my desk and stare at a cloud of charcoal dust and in it I see her face. And I think - subpar; dime-a-dozen; not worth the time it takes to play. And in her clumsy handling of a decrepit piano I find a work of art a thousand times more real than the Pietà. (Jealousy) I watched her brush a lock of hair away from her eyes and I felt like I was meant to be there.

There’s nothing logical to any of it. Maybe that’s ‘love.’

With six of seven bullets exhausted, and a lit cigarette in my mouth, I realize what Mephistopheles had planned all along. The cold steel of the pistol is pointed directly at my temple. From that distance, I can’t miss - he can’t miss. This is how it has to end.

The gun goes off. In a fiery explosion of vapors and gases, the bullet cursed never to miss its target pierces through my skull in an instant. It’s traveling so fast that it shoots out the other end; it draws further and further away, a comet trail in the night sky - and I open my eyes and realize that I’ve been left completely unharmed.

For who or what is the devil, but a scapegoat for when we lie to ourselves?

“The devil did it.” I did it, through what I didn’t do. I’ve never ‘made’ anything. I just sit there and take it.

Ennui - “weltschmerz.” There’s nothing left here for ‘us’ - only ‘me’ or ‘her.’ I destroyed it all, didn’t I? It’s all my fault, isn’t it? Not what I said but rather what I didn’t.

There is no devil, is there? There are but the bullets we load ourselves, firing them at the threads from which we hang.

No, there is no devil. On my right shoulder, the voice that compels me to inaction is none but my own. On my left shoulder, an unmoving and unspeaking angel looks with glassy eyes to the world. I don’t dare look there, lest I find my own reflection upon its face.