Free Wrecked by Charlotte Roche Page A

“Sleep, Children, Sleep,” and the second is an English children’s song called “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” which is about a sheep that takes its own wool to various customers’ homes. No idea what lesson it’s supposed to be teaching.
    Finally I lie next to her in bed until she falls asleep. Our apartment is like a dungeon. There are only a few windows onto the street. The previous owners did all kinds of renovations in the building, almost certainly illegally. There’s just no way they would have gotten permits for all the things they did. Long, narrow hallways, miniature rooms without windows. Because some rooms are in the basement, it’s like a cold rabbit hole. People always get lost, even Liza sometimes. It’s a very intestinal apartment—as if the rooms and hallways are part of a giant, subterranean colon.
    I’m also slowly beginning to worry whether the apartment makes us happy or not. When we moved in, newly in love, we didn’t care about the apartment’s backstory. Now that the honeymoon phase of our relationship is over, the story of the previous owners bothers me more and more. When you’re first in love, you think you are immune to anything bad in the world. Once daily life has begun to encroach on that feeling, you notice you’re not so unique, as you so arrogantly thought at the beginning. And then the things that happen to others suddenly make you think, too. In the case of the previous owners, she had money—she was in banking—and he was an ordinary worker. She started to waste away. He did, too, for a while. Then he got a liver transplant and was suddenly healthy and lively again. Then he left because he couldn’t stand her anymore.
    And we moved into their apartment without even thinking about it for a second. If it were a movie you’d think,
Oh, boy, there’s definitely trouble in store if you move in there
. Or maybe you’d move into a place like that if you didn’t know about the history. But never with all the information at hand.
    Liza lies down and acts as if she is ready to go to sleep. As a good example, I’ve closed my eyes and am breathing deeply, in and out. I learned to breathe that way from a masseuse—it’s a way to stave off panic attacks. You fall asleep better that way, too. It makes you feel as if you have your life under control. Crazy. It also shows how poorly you breathe otherwise, during the rest of the day. I listen closely to her breathing, to see whether it’s changed from the way it is when you are falling asleep to the way it is when you are deep asleep. But suddenly she speaks in the darkness.
    “Mama, is Hitler still around?”
    “What would make you think of that?”
    Oh, man, please fall asleep. This is bad.
    “At school, one of the kids said to another when they were fighting, ‘You’re as bad as Hitler.’”
    “No, don’t worry. He killed himself a long, long time ago.”
    “Oh, good. In that case I can fall asleep. If he hadn’t have killed himself, would he have gone to prison?”
    “Of course he would have been put in prison. He killed so many people.”
    “Mama, do we know anyone who has been in prison?”
    “Why?”
    “I’d like to visit someone in prison sometime. I want to see what it looks like in there.”
    “No, unfortunately not. Maybe someday.”
    I would love to take revenge on the newspaper publisher who capitalized on my family’s car accident to earn dirty money selling our blood and agony to voyeuristic readers. If I didn’t have a husband and child, I would have founded a terrorist organization immediately. I’ve sworn that as soon as my child is out ofthe woods, I will kill myself—which I want to do anyway—and take those responsible with me. If I get up the nerve. If the plan works and I don’t die, I’ll be put away for the murder of at least three people—as well as whoever else happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—and you’ll have someone to visit in prison, my child. Maybe I won’t