*
A bare room. No furniture, not even a window. White walls, white floor. Everything was white.
The naked figure on the floor was also white. White and so motionless it was a minute before Jonas realised he wasn’t looking at an empty room. He didn’t look more closely until he detected movement. Gradually, he began to make out shapes. An elbow, a knee, the head.
After ten minutes the figure stood up and walked around. It was covered from head to foot in white paint, or possibly dressed in a white leotard. Its hair was invisible, creating an impression of baldness. Everything was white: eyebrows, lips, ears, hands. It walked around the room in a seemingly aimless fashion, as if lost in thought or waiting for something.
Without a sound.
Over half an hour went by. Then the figure slowly turned to face the camera. When it raised its head, Jonas saw its eyes for the first time. Their appearance fascinated him. They were clearly wearing contact lenses, because no irises or pupils could be seen. The figure stared at the camera with two white orbs. Motionless. For minutes on end. Tensely.
At length it raised its arm and tapped the lens with the knuckle of its forefinger. It looked as if it were tapping its way out of the TV screen.
It tapped and tapped again. Mutely, white orbs staring, it continued to tap the screen.
Somehow, Jonas managed to operate the remote. He meant to switch off, but he pressed fast-forward instead. The tape ended after an hour.
*
Fresh air streamed into the stuffy interior when Jonas opened the tailboard. He drew several deep breaths, then picked up a pair of binoculars and jumped down onto the roadway. He spent a long time scanning the area with the binoculars clamped to his eyes.
Lifeless clusters of houses, abandoned cars up to their hub caps in mud. A scarecrow in an overgrown field, broomstick arms extended. Scattered clouds drifting across the sky. The only sound was that of his footsteps on the brittle asphalt.
In the cab he made a note of the truck’s kilometre reading and locked himself in. Without setting up a camera or getting undressed, he flopped down on the bunk and, with a final effort, pulled a blanket over himself. His eyelids felt like sandpaper.
Saarbrücken, 10 August, he thought. Now for some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll drive on. Everything’s OK. Everything’s fine.
Calm down, he told himself.
The motorway. Cars drove along motorways. Sitting in the cars were the people who drove them, their shoes planted firmly on the gas pedals. Those shoes contained feet. Austrian feet. German feet. Serbian feet. Feet had toes. Toes had nails. That was the motorway.
Stop thinking, he told himself.
His face sank ever deeper into the decrepit mattress, which smelt of a stranger’s sweat, as if someone were pinning him down.
He turned over, wondering why sleep wouldn’t come.
He heard noises he couldn’t identify. For a while he got the impression that someone was rolling marbles across the roof of the cab. Then he thought he heard something creeping around the truck. He was past moving. The blanket had slipped off. He felt cold.
*
He leant over the driver’s seat and peered through the windscreen, blinking. A red sun was edging above the hills on the skyline. Lying on the road in front of him was an object.
A camera.
He felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. Half senseless with fatigue, he climbed down from the cab. A dream from last night flashed through his mind, so he must have nodded off at least.
He made one circuit of the truck, swaying like a drunk. There was no one to be seen. He picked up the camera and climbed quickly back into the cab.
It struck him after a while that he was sitting limply in the driver’s seat, staring at the road. What was he doing there? He ought to be in the back — he wanted to watch the tape.
The camera. He examined it. All his cameras had been numbered since his video trip in the Spider. He checked. It bore the number of the one that had disappeared some days ago.
Something told him he would do better to leave here, not get out again to watch the tape. He locked the doors and helped himself to a can of juice from the glove compartment. Then he drove off.
The dream came back to him.
The images were clearer this time. He was standing in the bathroom of his flat on the Brigittenauer embankment. He could see in the mirror that his face, or rather his entire head, was undergoing a transformation. He acquired a different creature’s head every second. One moment he would be standing there with a bear’s head, the next with the head of a vulture, a dog, a pig, a stag, a housefly, a bull, a rat. Each metamorphosis took only the blink of an eye to complete. Head followed head in swift succession.
*
Jonas set up the eleventh camera on the road near Metz and programmed it for 4 p.m., like the others. He had breakfast in the back with his feet comfortably propped on the sofa table. The powdered coffee, which he drank from the new mug bearing his name, tasted bitter. The peach compote, on the other hand, he ate with gusto. It was a brand he’d often had as a child. The taste of it was on his tongue the moment he spotted the tin in the supermarket.
Still chewing, he jumped up and squeezed his way along the side of the truck to the driver’s door of the Toyota. He checked the clock. It read thirty kilometres more than the day before.
His weariness returned with unexpected intensity. He mustn’t sleep now, not for anything. He poured cold water over his head, soaking his shirt. Icy shivers ran down his spine. He did some exercises to stimulate his circulation and shook a few coffee bonbons into his palm. Instead of sucking them, he washed them down with an energy drink.
*
The unknown video was in black and white. It showed a hilly landscape clothed in woods and vineyards, but without any roads. The camera panned to a woman’s face and zoomed in. The face came nearer and nearer.
Something in his brain refused to understand, so it was several seconds before he grasped the significance of what he was seeing. He leapt to his feet and stared at the screen transfixed.
The woman on the screen was his mother.
The camera lingered on her face for some moments, then panned left to someone else.
His grandmother.
Her lips moved silently, as if she were speaking to him. As if the distance the words had to cover were too great.
Jonas wrenched out the lead that connected the TV to the camera. As he hurried to the rear of the truck, squeezing between the Toyota and the Kawasaki, he gashed his arm on a projecting piece of metal and felt a fleeting stab of pain. Still holding the camera as if it might explode, he hurled it as far as he could into the maize field beside the road.
Shuffling impatiently from foot to foot, he watched the tailboard close with agonising slowness. Then he shot the bolt and jumped into the cab.
*
He drove as if he’d turned on an autopilot. His mind was unavailable. Now and then he registered some feature of the world outside. He noticed abrupt changes in weather conditions, but they didn’t affect him, they were like something seen on TV. He read place names: Rheims, St Quentin, Arras. They meant nothing to him. It was a new smell that brought him back to the present. The air was heavy with salt. He would soon be at the coast.
This realisation seemed to cheer Jonas and remind him of why he was here. He had banished the videotape to the nethermost region of his consciousness. He was hungry, he noticed. Not knowing whether he would come to another service area, he pulled up on the hard shoulder in the shade of some tall weeping willows. The sun was high in the sky. It was sweltering.
While applying a dressing to the gash in his arm, he ruefully contemplated the devastation brought about by his hurried departure. The butter was on the floor, likewise the bowl containing the rest of the peach compote. Bits of peach were scattered all over the three-piece suite. The upholstery was stained with spilt coffee, that was the worst thing. Jonas got busy with a swab. After that he lit the camping stove and heated up two tins of stew.