Herrie

“Last week I lost him
I sent him to the supermarket with two notes
One saying: ‘quark’
And the other saying: ‘help this man find the quark’
That was the last I heard of him for four days.”

Herman has an incredible talent for solving puzzles, but don’t ask him to go to the supermarket. You’ll never see him again. In the world outside his own room, outside his own head, he can’t put the pieces of reality together. His wife Gerda reads books about women worse off than herself. Those books are getting harder and harder to find, but that isn’t because of a lack of books and it isn’t her fault either, she says pointedly to Herman, just before she leaves him.

In an attempt to see inside Gerda’s soul and humanity as a whole, Herman seeks recourse to the book Gerda was reading just before she left. It is a book about the ups and downs of Mrs van Veen, who has to hold her own between the worries of lost souls who all have a dream but lack the tools and the balls to make their dreams come true. A collection of people who imagined life would be different. Easier. Happier. But all of them refuse to give up.

In front of the toilet mirror, she gets out her Real Life Deep Fake make-up set. She smears a cheerful colour over her eyelids, a competent blush across her cheeks, and – especially for the Boss’s Friend – an erotic gloss onto her lips. “You can do this”, she mutters to her reflection, which looks at her and shakes its head.