Maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t feel anything anymore. Then again, my brain’s working incessantly. I remember wanting to talk to Sven. He’d rescue me, I thought. But then he suddenly seemed surreal to me. A flat, cardboard figure. As though I’d invented him. How can you be rescued by your own invention? Please let me in on that secret when you’re finished giving your statement to the police, dear sir or madam. And don’t forget to speak with the coast guard. They must search the Atlantic Ocean for the remains of the actress or the writer. Maybe even for the remains of both. Down forty meters deep.
15
Before I reached the sandlot, I could already see that Antje wasn’t home. In all our years in Lahora, I’d never been able to teach her to shut the gate only when the VW van was parked on the property. Whenever I came home, I always had to climb out and open the gate. There were days when that inconvenience galled me to my soul; on this day, however, seeing the gate standing open caused me only frustration. It meant that Antje wasn’t there. I’d been looking forward to spending the evening with her, to eating and chatting, to discussing the day just past and the new day tomorrow. To putting our heads together under the light of the dining-room lamp. It almost seemed as though I was observing that scene through a lighted window, while I myself stood outside on a cold, wintry German street.
Without Todd’s yapping, the house positively boomed with silence. There was nothing extraordinary about Antje’s driving to town in the afternoon to do some shopping, meet girlfriends, or tend to a holiday apartment. It was only that she usually called me up before she left and asked what I was doing at the moment and whether she should come to the dive site and bring fresh scuba tanks or hot soup. When there was nothing on schedule for the evening, we’d sometimes arrange to meet for coffee and cheesecake at the Wunder Bar café. Or to take Todd for a walk on the promenade. Suddenly it became clear to me how much had changed since Jola and Theo arrived on the island.
I put the wasp-waisted espresso pot on the stove and filled a big glass with lemonade. “Making things nice for yourself” described a method women resorted to; nevertheless, male though I was, I was determined to give it a try. I picked up the scattered pages of Theo’s short story from the floor near the living-room couch and put them in the proper order. I carried the coffee, the lemonade, and a bucket of ice cubes out to the terrace and pushed a deck chair into the shade.
Two hours later, I called Antje’s number. All I got was her voice mail. Just in case she was in a dead zone, I called her three more times at intervals of a few minutes.
It had cost me an effort to read Theo’s story all the way through. In the end I’d felt downright loathing for the typed pages themselves. It was as though the content of the words had bled onto the paper. As though they might dirty my fingers.
The sun had sunk behind the flat roofs of the neighboring houses. Antje knew a lot about literature. I wanted to ask her how much real life entered into storytelling. Would she think an author who described something abominable in great detail must necessarily have had practical experience in his subject? I didn’t understand why Theo had given me that story. The feeling it had produced in me was that I never wanted to see him again. Several times, while I was reading the thing, I’d been on the point of calling up Bernie and asking him whether he’d agree to take over my clients. One of my basic principles was to accept money from my clients only at the end of their course, which meant that I hadn’t yet seen a cent from Jola and Theo. If I terminated the contract now, I could most probably kiss all fourteen thousand euros good-bye. Antje and I needed that money badly. That was why I wanted to talk with her. I wanted to ask her whether it wouldn’t be better to cut all ties with a guy who was capable of writing such stuff. I figured she’d look at me as though I’d made a joke. She’d say something like You want to ditch the best contract you’ve ever had in your life because your client wrote a story about two people who aren’t nice to each other? Hasn’t anyone ever informed you that literature is never about nice things, not even on islands? You’re acting like a child who’s seen a scary movie and now he’s afraid of the dark! Maybe the wretched feeling I had would go away if I could hear her talk like that.
Her voice mail again. Antje never turned off her cell phone. That little gadget was always freshly charged and ready to work. For her, the ability to be reached constituted a kind of proof of existence. Just as some physicists thought that if no one looked at the moon it wasn’t there, Antje believed that anyone who couldn’t be called up disappeared. Voice mail, one more time. I resolved not to try her number again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the sort of person who always jumped to the direst possible conclusions. You just had to bear the normal probability distribution in mind. Getting in an automobile accident was much less probable than losing a cell phone or not hearing it ring. Even in Antje’s case. It struck me that I couldn’t think of anyone I could ask about her. I didn’t even know the names of most of her girlfriends, much less their phone numbers. Quite apart from the fact that holding a telephone conversation in Spanish was a physical impossibility for me. Bernie didn’t really have anything to do with Antje, and if I called him and inquired about her, he’d answer by immediately asking me what the devil was going on with us. I had no contact with her parents in Germany. And in any case, it was only eight in the evening.
A strange restlessness drove me to pace through the house. I might also have been a little queasy. And probably hungry as well, but I couldn’t make up my mind to eat anything. As though attached by barbs, Theo’s story hung on my thoughts. There was even something baleful about the sunset in the beginning of the story, when he had his two characters go out for an early evening walk: The sky was an arrangement of bloody pieces of cloud, as if some enormous being had exploded overhead. The gathering darkness was a cloak, the gulls’ cries a jeering sound track. Even a literary lowbrow like me could tell that the woman wasn’t identical with Jola. Her name was different too. On the other hand, she seemed to share many of Jola’s characteristics. First and foremost, a dark beauty. And a certain unpredictability. It slowly became clear to me why I didn’t care for literature. Like jurisprudence, it was about the art of judging. The author acted as the highest judge, decided the facts of the case, called in witnesses, and in the end handed down the verdict. Punishment or acquittal. Unlike in the legal process, there was not even a possibility of appeal.
I roamed around the living room like a man looking for something. Everywhere in the house, there were objects I would have sworn I’d never seen before had they been pointed out to me in some neutral place. It was time for me to get a grip on myself.
I went into the kitchen and whisked three eggs and some Maggi seasoning sauce, tore off a big chunk of bread for dipping, and carried everything into the office. By way of distracting myself, I wanted to watch one or two episodes of Jola’s series. If it succeeded in making me sleepy, I’d be able to take advantage of Antje’s absence by spending a night in the bed for a change.
For the sake of completeness, I’d started watching the series in chronological order from Bella Schweig’s first appearance. I sat at the computer, opened the Up and Down archive, and clicked through to Episode 589. Just as I hit the START button, I saw him. He was lying on his back just a few centimeters away from the mousepad, his four delicate legs with their high-tech suction cups thrusting stiffly upward. It was as though he’d been positioned to send a message: Look here, this thing’s dead. I jumped up and probably cried out. Emile. The chill of his little body burned itself into my hand. I prodded him with my index finger again and again, tried to warm him, turned him right side up, and set him on my arm in the usual spot. He fell back onto the table, reduced to a piece of rubbery matter. I thought there was a vaguely chemical scent, perhaps insect spray, in the room.