‘So sorry,’ Marc whispered in the direction the unknown woman had taken, disappearing like a name you can’t remember.
So sorry.
Looking down, he noticed that he was standing in a puddle of melted snow and had lost control over his wet, trembling fingers. He was feeling hypoglycaemic but not hungry in the least, dead tired but as overwrought as someone who has drunk a whole pot of coffee on an empty stomach. All he wanted to do was cry. For his wife, his life, himself. But the floodgates refused to open.
I’m losing my mind. For the first time, he formulated it as a statement, not a question. Then he shut his eyes and buried his face in his hands, heedless of what the passers-by must be thinking as he got in their way.
Or did they exist at all? Perhaps he wasn’t standing on a pavement with his eyes shut. Perhaps the big-city cacophony was just a figment of his imagination.
Perhaps I’m lying in a hospital bed and the parking meter beside me is a drip. I’m wearing a catheter, not a pair of jeans, and the roar of passing traffic is the sound of my ventilator.
He dreaded to open his eyes. He feared the worst – in other words, was afraid to confront the truth that would reveal his life to be a lie. When he finally brought himself to do so, he put his head back like a child trying to catch snowflakes on its tongue. The initial shock was not so great because the cloudscape in the cement-grey sky distracted his attention from the scaffolding. Then the plastic sheeting fluttered, plastered against the office building by the wind.
This is impossible.
The realization exploded like a bomb, setting off an earthquake inside him. He reeled, although he didn’t move.
Slowly, as if he really did have a splinter in his neck, Marc turned on the spot and scanned his surroundings like a 3D camera, storing items of information that vastly intensified his bewilderment. He saw the baby boutique, the car-hire firm, the medical bookstore, the entrance to the underground garage and, beside it, the inflatable mascot bobbing in the wind outside the mobile-phone shop. He remembered all these details, having seen them once before from a different perspective.
While peeing. On the sixth floor.
And then, when he had come full circle and returned to his original position, and when Emma cautiously put her hand on his shoulder from behind, he saw the final proof: the polished brass plate that discreetly identified the psychiatric institution situated inside the building:
BLEIBTREU CLINIC
It was back.
And he was standing right outside its imposing entrance.
58
She spotted it at the same moment as Marc but reacted faster. He felt the hand on his shoulder relax its pressure and slide off. The next thing he saw was Emma’s back. She was heading for the clinic’s revolving door, carefully putting one foot in front of the other as if in response to a hypnotic command.
‘Emma, no!’ he wanted to cry, but it was too late. Two men had opened the glass side door and emerged into the cold with cigarettes and lighters at the ready. Emma squeezed past them and slipped inside before the door could shut.
Marc had no choice. He followed her.
The entrance hall looked at first sight like an airport’s check-in area. A strip of red carpet led to a brushed-aluminium reception desk, and awaiting visitors behind it was a young woman in a kind of uniform. She was chatting to a white-haired gentleman who was standing in front of the counter with a cup of coffee in his hand. Classical muzak provided a soothing acoustic background.
‘But that really isn’t your job, Professor,’ Marc heard the young woman say as he slowly came up behind Emma. She had paused about halfway to the reception desk and was looking up. Like the clinic itself, the lobby was a prime example of wasted space and energy. The atrium extended as high as the third floor, where the suites of offices began. The glass walls created the impression that one was standing in a gigantic aquarium from which the water had been drained. Every footstep re-echoed, churchlike, from the ceilings and walls.
‘The silly thing is always going wrong,’ trilled the receptionist, pointing to her computer screen. ‘We couldn’t even access the Internet yesterday.’ Neither she nor her companion had noticed them yet.
‘We must get out of here,’ Marc whispered, taking Emma’s hand. It felt cold and moist.
‘I told you so: the clinic exists. It hasn’t disappeared.’
Emma was far too agitated to keep her voice down. ‘They gave you the wrong address, Marc. They wanted to lure you to that building site – that’s just what they were discussing when I overheard them.’
Her voice had risen steadily, attracting the attention of the blonde behind the desk.
‘Can I help you?’ she fluted. The white-haired man turned round. His expression conveyed a touch of annoyance at being disturbed while flirting with the blonde, who was forty years his junior, but his displeasure persisted only as long as it took for the coffee cup to slip through his fingers and smash on the marble floor.
‘Thank God!’ he exclaimed, half surprised, half relieved. He whipped out his mobile phone. ‘Frau Ludwig is back. I repeat, Frau Ludwig is…’
Marc was now tugging harder at Emma’s hand, but she seemed rooted to the spot. He couldn’t get her to budge a millimetre.
Back to the exit and out of here, fast!
While he was wasting precious seconds the white-haired man bustled over to them, panting as if his short sprint from the reception desk had left him drained of energy. He raised both hands as a token of goodwill.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Emma’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You remember me?’ she asked timidly.
The man was now only two steps away. Marc had let go of her hand in readiness to beat a retreat on his own if necessary.
‘But of course,’ the man said. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
Everything happened very quickly after that. The lift on their right disgorged three male nurses, who came rushing out even before the aluminium doors had fully opened. It took them only a few seconds to force Emma to the floor and pin her hands behind her back. She was immobilized a moment later by a shot in the arm.
Marc, who didn’t have a chance to help her, wondered why they had spared him so far – why they were tolerating his silent presence in the clinic’s reception hall and when he would share her fate.
He shrank back as a figure loomed up on his right. It was the white-haired man, who did the last thing his brain, which was programmed for escape, expected. He put out his hand and expressed his thanks.
‘You’ve been of great assistance and saved us a great deal of trouble. It’s a real blessing you’ve brought her back.’
‘Huh?’
Marc stared after the nurses, who had ensconced Emma in a wheelchair and were trundling her over to the lift.
‘I hope she wasn’t too much of a handful?’
‘A handful?’ Marc repeated.
A car sounded its horn outside, but to him it seemed like a signal from another universe.
‘Frau Ludwig badly injured two of our nurses when they tried to apprehend her in the street yesterday. She tends to become violent when suffering from one of her bouts of paranoia. Where did you find our patient, Herr…?’
The white-haired man withdrew his hand, which Marc still hadn’t shaken, with an air of disappointment.
‘L-Lucas,’ Marc said automatically. ‘Marc Lucas.’ He clutched the back of his neck. Another reflex action, even though the dressing was no longer there.
‘Ah yes, I remember now. Weren’t you a patient here?’
‘You know me?’
‘Yes, of course. When was that accident of yours? Six weeks ago?’
Mark’s head started spinning. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. He’d never seen the man before in his life. Neither the jacket-crowned smile nor the high forehead nor the star-shaped birthmark on the throat, just below the chin, evoked the faintest recollection.