Indigo (13 page)

The smell of air freshener, with which I was met already in the hall, was even more unbearable than the day before. I was about to ask whether a window could be opened, but Frau Stennitzer immediately led me into the living room. She had sweaty hands, and her cell phone hung on her belt in a flip-open case.

When I entered the living room and saw what was sitting there on the sofa, I dropped in shock my notebook and the muffin I had bought at the train station bakery on the way up here, and ran back into the hall. Only from the amused face of Frau Stennitzer, who followed me, holding up her palms reassuringly, did I realize that I must have screamed loudly. I heard laughter. Frau Stennitzer put a hand on my chest, then on my shoulder.

– You okay? she asked with a giggle. You got scared, heeheehee, you . . . did you really?

– What the hell is that?

She walked back into the living room with me, still giggling to herself.

– Ah, it's a mask, I said.

– Heeheeheehee, said Frau Stennitzer.

– And under it is . . . ?

– Yes, we prefer it this way, the mother said to the monster. Don't we?

The masked figure, which was apparently her son Christoph, stood up from the sofa and approached me. We shook hands. His was ice-cold. The huge, grotesque Easter Island head made of cardboard wobbled on his shoulders.

– Does it have a special meaning?

– He likes it this way. Right, Christoph?

A wobble that was probably supposed to be a nod.

– I really got scared, I said, picking up my things from the floor. The muffin, I immediately noticed, was completely flattened. Had I stepped on it when I had run out in shock? That wasn't very likely; at least I couldn't remember doing so. I took the muffin out of the paper bag. It looked like a run-over rodent.

– Heeheeheehee, Frau Stennitzer was still cackling.

I looked at the uncanny head. For an ordinary carnival mask it was too large, but that was quite possibly an optical illusion because it was being worn by a child. For his fourteen years, Christoph seemed rather small, he was thin, the skin on his arms was strikingly pale, and the tips of his feet when he walked were almost in snowplow position. Now, from up close, the head was no longer so frightening, I thought. The serious brow and the long distinctive nose that cast a sharp shadow even reminded me a little of the friendly face of John Updike.

We sat there for a little while like that, I speechless, mother and son in polite silence, surrounded by bright windows.

– Three minutes, Frau Stennitzer said softly.

She had learned to calculate it to the second, she explained, even for other people. That is: for strangers, like me. She knew exactly when it would be better for me to distance myself.

– Does his value change?

Frau Stennitzer shook her head silently, closing her eyes for a brief moment.

– Hello, Christoph. My name is Clemens. I'm writing an article on . . . Well, I wanted to ask how you're doing with it, I mean, to know . . .

My sentence broke apart in the middle, and both halves fell to the floor.

– Okay, said Christoph.

His voice was muffled by the mask.

– You are home-schooled, is that correct?

– Mm-hmm.

– I used to work in a boarding school where children like you live. Do you ever think that a school like that could—

Frau Stennitzer interrupted me:

– We've made an arrangement. He doesn't know the conditions there. How can he answer that?

– All right, then, I said. Sure, of course.

– I like reading comics, said Christoph.

– Oh, which ones?

– All different ones, he said. And wrestling.

– You like wrestling?

– Yeah.

– I haven't watched it in a long time.

Frau Stennitzer gestured to her watch. I felt nothing. She put her hands to her temples but went on smiling. Then she took a deep breath and cleared her throat. Christoph left the room.

What happens to Indigo children when they get older and finally grow up is a controversial question. A common view is that Beringer syndrome doesn't even exist and everything is only a matter of attitude. There's a well-known case in Australia of a now-twenty-year-old man named Ken S., who claims to have developed very intense Indigo symptoms as a child, which supposedly ultimately caused his parents to divorce and plunged his father into a deep and life-threatening depression. Currently he works in a call center and appears now and then on talk shows, where he likes to talk about how you can use positive thinking to distance yourself from your own fate. (During my own work at the Helianau Proximity Awareness and Learning Center in the Semmering region of Austria, I witnessed children's value gradually increase and their effects decrease. But even in those cases, the causalities were often not clear.)

Frau Stennitzer was, of course, familiar with such tales of
burnt-out cases
, and she sighed when I brought them up with her. Yes, sometimes it disappears in time or burns out, she said. Burnt-out I-kids are a fact. But:

– To be honest, none of that means the least bit to me. I mean, things like that always happen in Australia, far, far away . . . Next it's probably going to happen on the moon. But here, I mean, we see it, we live with it. It's not abating.

– Have you noticed no development at all?

– Apart from the fact that I'm getting used to . . .

– In the literature some cases are mentioned that—

– Yes, that's exactly the problem, they're always only mentioned, and the people being described are represented only by initials, and no one knows what it's actually all about, this secretiveness.

There was a pause, during which I politely closed my notebook to allow Frau Stennitzer to get really angry.

– I mean, I don't understand these people who write such nonsense, she said. They don't have to live with constant nausea and dizziness and with rashes and diarrhea, that's just a list of symptoms for them! It's nothing that affects their lives. It's always the same crap, everywhere! But as soon as anyone says it, it starts: Yeah, she's just burnt out, she's simply not the family type, must have to do with the emotional overload—no! You try living for twenty-four hours in the vicinity of this . . .

She put a knuckle to her upper lip to restrain herself. It worked.

– Sorry, she said. You probably don't want me to heap complaints on you.

I suppressed just in time the remark,
But that's actually why I came
, and only nodded in what I hoped was an understanding way.

– But do you wish it for Christoph?

– What?

Her look was sincerely at a loss.

– That it will get better when he grows up.

– No, I don't have any hopes in that regard, she said. In all honesty. I'm a realist.

The dry air in the room had made my voice hoarse again. I asked whether we could go out into the yard. Frau Stennitzer smiled.

– He's already gone, she said. It'll pass in a moment.

– No, it's more the air in here, I said.

– Okay, she said with a somewhat perplexed expression. Okay. Whatever you want.

The presence of the apple trees did me good, and a warm south wind blew around the house, which gave your body the sensation of growing lighter, letting itself be caught by the moving air. I noticed the conical mound of earth at the edge of the property and walked toward it. Frau Stennitzer followed me. When I was close enough, I asked what it was.

– Just an attempt, she said.

Then she mentioned, as if we had been speaking about it all along, that there are even specific funeral regulations for Indigo children. On private property they are permitted to be buried in ordinary graves, but in public cemeteries only in an urn, as ashes. Yet it had not even been settled with any certainty whether their harmful effects persist beyond death. All that struck me as extremely implausible, and I had a feeling that my host was pulling my leg. But Gudrun Stennitzer said it all as if she were talking about the weather. When I finally grasped that she meant it seriously, her story seemed to me like a terrible robbery. As if one of the two great tasks for which we're in the world were snatched from a person, namely, to participate in the delightful celebration given a dead body in the earth by all the microorganisms, which like ants carry away tiny pieces, digest and metabolize them, by the little worms and maggots, which dig their tunnels through the corpse. In an essay by the Czech writer and immunologist Miroslav Holub there is a description of these wonderful and monstrous processes. A rat falls into Holub's swimming pool, and before he can take it out, a passing neighbor runs home to get his gun and shoots at it, scattering the animal all over the place. And Holub, who, of all writers in the previous century—with the exception of Sebald and Kafka—is perhaps the one with the most strongly developed but also the most idiosyncratic capacity for empathy, goes on to describe what happens to the dead rat, to its blood cells, to the microscopic puzzle pieces of its body, the fluids and solids of which it consisted, he describes the transformations and chemical interactions that immediately begin—until, in the face of all the earth and blood and creatures, you have in the end completely forgotten the death of the rat. It's as helpful as it is disturbing to know that Holub's bread and butter for long years was the systematic torture and poisoning of lab animals. As an immunologist specializing in the combating and prevention of epidemics, he had to expose rodents specifically bred for the space-station-like life in the lab to the most horrible influences one can imagine, deadly pathogens and toxic substances, vaccines unexplored in their effects, and extreme temperatures. In an interview he once said that the poems he wrote in the evening usually arose in response to a workday spent with senseless cruelty to mice. How can we explain the fact that this man, who used his science fiction apparatuses to destroy one nude mouse after another in the most horrible ways conceivable, composed the most moving butterfly poem ever written (the competition is great!) and even renders the description of an anencephalic baby—lying shortly after birth with his empty, still slightly pulsating, baglike skull in a container in which he waits for death, which is somewhat late in coming—so tenderly that when you read it your breast inflates as if you were turning into the
Hindenburg
zeppelin itself—how in the world is something like that possible?

I don't know whether it was Gudrun Stennitzer's intention simply to leave me standing next to the little enclosure with the conical mound of earth. It's quite possible that she hadn't even thought about it, but had at some point simply gone back to the house, at a moment that seemed to her no more appropriate than any other. In any case, I now stood alone in the sun, drank in the buzzing of bees and various shades of green, and waited, looking several times in a row at my watch for a few minutes, until I was again to some extent composed and presentable, and then returned to the house. I admit that at that moment the sentence
I am in hell
went through my head, and for some reason, as I left behind the mysterious presence of the cone of earth, I couldn't help thinking of James Merrill's remarkable insight. N
O SOULS CAME FROM
H
IROSHIMA U KNOW
/ E
ARTH WORE A STRANGE NEW ZONE OF ENERGY
. In Chernobyl too, I thought, spirits of the dead were definitely nowhere to be found, not even in dreams. The radioactive ruins are too far away from us. They're metaphysically sterile, cleansed,
formatted
. When I reentered the kitchen, I saw Frau Stennitzer spreading on her forehead and neck a white cream from a small black can that looked like a container for a roll of film.

– Would you like some too? she asked. It helps.

Since I had no idea how to respond to that, I began to tell Frau Stennitzer about the preface to
The Nature of Distance
, the story of the sunken warships and the uncontaminated steel.

She nodded. Yes, she had heard about that. Quite often, to tell the truth. That had been the tiny sliver of hope back then that these children have some advantage, maybe even some spiritual abilities that others don't have, and so on.

She screwed the top on the can and wiped her fingers on her pants.

But of course the reality looked entirely different, she said. There were some gifted I-kids, but only in the area of reading skills.

– There are studies on that? I asked.

– Well, it's hardly surprising, said Frau Stennitzer. If wherever you go you always form the center of a restricted zone roughly ten yards in diameter, then you eventually begin to read books or amuse yourself with the computer. That's the way it works, not the other way around.

– Do you enter the zone regularly? Or do you consciously remain outside it?

Well, she said, she didn't actually see it as a zone that you can approach and with which there can be overlaps. She saw it more as a Ferris wheel. On a Ferris wheel there were different cars and the distance between the cars always stayed the same, they couldn't get closer to each other, the structure simply didn't permit that. And so you just went in a circle, the whole time, more or less separate from each other, every man for himself. If you had to use illustrative comparisons, Frau Stennitzer said, then at least use ones like that, not that sacredly sober magical steel on the sea floor! Incidentally, keeping one's distance was also healthy, in and of itself; in certain dances, for example, people didn't touch each other at all, she said, you just played with the other person's aura as if on a theremin, and in ballooning too it was well known that you were not supposed to get too close to another balloon floating in the ether, because then, oh, I don't know, those swirls of air or whatever it is. They were thermal phenomena of some sort, said Frau Stennitzer, but exactly what she had forgotten.

Without thinking, I told her about a duel I had recently read about. It took place in Paris in the early nineteenth century between two daring men, Monsieur de Grandpré and Monsieur Le Pique, for the favor of Mademoiselle Tirevit, a famous dancer. The rivals rose in two balloons about seven hundred yards over the Tuileries and took turns shooting at the skin of the opposing balloon. Grandpré won, Le Pique crashed with his balloon (and his second on board) into the roof of a building and died.