Indigo (23 page)

I had to sneeze.

Dr. Rudolph opened the door.

– No wonder, he said. The cleaning women never come in the huts. They stay in the main building. So far no argument has been able to change that.

8.
Animals

If you had a hand with a few thousand fingers, you could count the number of nerve cells in an earthworm on one hand. And if you now pick any cell in the earthworm brain, note its properties and surroundings, you will find exactly the same cell, with all those properties, in the brain of another worm of the same species. From this it follows that earthworms have isomorphic brains.

There is only one earthworm.

Robert knew he had waited his whole life for this information; it came from Professor Ulrich instead of a stern lecture or an explanatory talk or whatever. Max had, while the biology teacher spoke, dissolved into thin air next to him. Like a sugar cube in coffee. Professor Ulrich mentioned studies in the United States and Norway. He looked at the magazine and kept gesturing to the ceiling while he talked, as if an interesting documentary on the same subject were playing there.

Robert took the information with him to bed, snuggled up to it, and thought of the cruelly tortured worm with the wire in its head. Why did he become so calm and relaxed in the face of this image? And the fact that there was only one worm—why was that so much more comforting than all the prayers and religious maxims he had heard in his life? He thought of tomorrow, of the moment Golch and the others would drive him into a corner or . . . what do I know? . . . they had definitely hatched some plan. But the thought no longer had anything frightening or dreadful about it. He saw two worms crawling in the dust, two living tubes that took in substance from the front, transformed it into worm mass, and excreted it behind them. And each one exactly the same, with the same thoughts:

Me: I am here.

Me: I see it exactly the same way.

Me: I know.

Me: I'm not entirely sure where we are.

Me: We?

Me: I.

Me: I came from that direction.

Me: Not me.

Me: That can't be.

Me: Well, the direction is perhaps not the decisive factor.

Me: True.

Me: I'm afraid.

Me: Fear is relative.

Me: Fear is not relative.

Me: Yes, that's the problem.

Me: How many are we anyway?

Me: I am here.

Me: And how many . . . ?

Me: I don't know how to respond to that.

In the days that followed, Professor Ulrich repeatedly provided him with relevant material. With the story of Mike the chicken, who survived for a year and a half without a head, was fed by his owner with a dropper, and each morning, in a futile attempt to crow, squeezed air out of his open throat. With the story of the two-headed dog created by a Soviet scientist; of the transplanted head of a monkey that survived for several hours and asked for water by pushing out his upper lip in a gesture he had rehearsed beforehand for several hours with his trainer; of the mysterious species of sea cucumber whose cells don't age; of the peculiar coot that had been owned by a Russian noble and exclusively laid eggs with already-petrified, mummified chicks in them. With articles on bioluminescence, transparent skin, and immaculate conception (aphids). With the wonderful mating ritual of the anglerfish. Or with the history of coelacanths.

Robert had been unable to tell Cordula what had happened at the reception in the bank lobby. And she didn't ask him to.

She preferred to let him into her body and stroke him, comfort him, this strange, constantly high-strung being whom she loved, every movement of his hips was like the plunge of a needle sewing up a wound. She kissed him and tried to get him to close his eyes while kissing, which he usually couldn't do. And then she succeeded, and she felt the tension in his shoulder muscles.

– Gillingen, she whispered.

It was a word with which she could tickle him.

– The world-famous cable car . . .

She felt the gentle trembling of his body inside her, the reaction to the intimate word. And then they brought Robert's small diamond-shaped computer into the bed and watched silly videos while they continued to make love. Outside it was raining, the first real late autumn rain, which already produced snow-light in the city and brought no lightning or thunder but instead hours of freezing drizzle alternating with heavy gales in which thick raindrops flew around like pearls that had slipped off a string. In the past few weeks the transition had announced itself: cool, long evenings, wet-trodden foliage-brown smeared like marmalade across the sidewalks. October on the threshold of November.

What else could you do at this time, thought Cordula, but hide in each other? She pressed her lips to Robert's chest and left them there, feeling his accelerated heartbeat.

On the Internet porn sites they watched together it was also autumn. The predominant categories were mature, MILFs, and a few longingly sun-drenched outdoor scenes. The chat rooms were abandoned, barricaded with boards like ice-cream stands and pavilions in a park. The pop-ups on the free tube sites, which usually lured you with hysterical fervor to live cams subject to a charge in front of which naked girls spoke to invisible phantoms, now directed you to links that were as dead as a skater half-pipe in winter: a snow-white cul-de-sac, a blank page. The comments became monosyllabic, the duration of the clips automatically suggested by the website longer—greater distraction, warmer spots to hole up in when it was cold outside. (A few animated, cursor-sized leaves even wafted through the Google logo on Robert's home page.) For Robert the most pleasant clips were those in which not much happened. Where two people just lay on top of each other and moved back and forth a little. Everything else flustered him or made him so nervous that his arousal disappeared. New to the list of his discoveries were those videos characterized by the strange word
bukkake
.
In them you always saw the same thing: a naked woman kneeling on the ground. And around her stood men who were themselves completely naked (except for their funny sneakers) and took turns ejaculating in her face. Because this process was rather static and apart from the discharge of seminal fluid not much happened, Robert found them pleasant. Cordula was amused by them, but couldn't really enjoy them. Robert himself actually couldn't watch these videos for too long, because after four or five loads the woman's face always looked like the melting face of the Nazi in
Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The effect was only heightened by the fact that the women in the video clips usually opened their mouths wide like chicks (which was probably supposed to be erotic), just as the screaming Nazi does when he is struck by the pillar of fire shooting out of the Ark of the Covenant. When the bukkake scene reached this point, the sight was nothing but horrifying, and the despair that hung in the cool season returned to him with full force.

Cordula asked him whether he wanted to watch something else. She was lying on her belly, he behind her, so she had to type in the new keyword.

– Type in, Robert panted. Type . . . Oh, wait, I think . . .

– You're already there?

– Oh, wait . . .

He slowed down, lowered his head onto hers.

– Think of something neutral, said Cordula. And just breathe deeply.

– Okay.

– What are you thinking about?

– Why do you want to know? he asked.

– No reason.

– I'm thinking about how it must feel to be acquitted even though you're guilty.

– Oh, no, Robert, not again . . .

– You wanted to know what I'm thinking about!

– Yes, but . . . why are you thinking about
that
, of all things, while we . . .

– No idea. Now you're thinking about it too.

– Yes, but that's your fault. I wouldn't have come up with it myself.

–
You
showed me the newspaper article.

– But only so you . . .

Robert moved back and forth inside her in slow motion. Cordula signaled with a movement of her hips that she wanted to turn over. He slid out of her and remained hovering over her in push-up position, like a human cage, within the narrow confines of which she had to move. Then she lay in the position of the Christian missionaries, and he came back into her, warm, hard, her tissue (it was a sexy word, when you thought it at the right moment,
tissue
) stretched, and she drew him closer to her.

– I don't want you to think about such awful things, she purred.

– He must have been happy, said Robert.

– I want you to enter me completely when you . . .

The sentence hadn't really turned out as she had intended, it sounded somewhat strange, but Robert was already too far away to pay attention to such little things. He was in the zone. Panting, eyes closed, mouth half open, on the verge of climax.

– I bet it was him. But the evidence . . .

He now thrust somewhat harder.

– I want you to forget everything around you, she whispered in his ear. I'm here, and you . . . and everything that happens out there, all those awful things . . . forget all that, just come inside me, touch me all the way inside . . .

She pressed her pelvis forward so that the tip of his cock penetrated to that place deep inside her that was otherwise never touched by anything, the keyhole of a secret door . . . Robert knew what she was thinking. She had to nurse back to health this injured, distressed animal, which trusted her and had come to her. After all, she was closer to him than anyone else, she knew the smell of every spot on his body, and she had swallowed his semen several times, the protein of which had meanwhile settled in her bones and teeth and helped keep her from breaking apart. She had always assured him that she didn't experience his orgasms as burdensome tasks with which she had to assist him, but rather they seemed to her more like a joyful overflow error of the universe, a glitch in the Matrix, like the double cat, a magical, regenerating, fortifying déjà vu, the repetition of which always meant a young, fresh new beginning, even if the whole thing, you had to admit, did look somewhat funny . . .

– Come, she said (as she had that time when she had taken his hand and pulled him along with his skates, in which he wobbled like a poorly anchored Christmas tree, across the ice). Right there . . . come . . .

– I bet it was him, Robert moaned in a voice dull and hollow with excitement.

[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]

9.
Class F

Dr. Rudolph's remarks on the list:

Schaufler, a thousand seconds and even more. On good days you can spend whole hours in his vicinity without feeling anything. No idea what he's even doing here. Well, his parents are rich. Developers from Styria. And Waldmüller makes a secret of it. In his case some speak of four to five seconds, others of up to half an hour. Probably a puberty/identity thing. He needs his privacy. As if he didn't already have a whole truckload, oh, what am I saying, a whole amusement park full of it. In Wobruch's case the value might be closer to 600. But she's a Goth and in the process of discovering her identity, what do I know, so we humor her and accept her ridiculous value. It would be funny, of course, if it were correct. Maybe you'd like to test it with a stopwatch? Or maybe you'll find a volunteer in the class and make a social project out of it? Tätzel is a problem child. Parents relatively well off, but not so rich that you'd notice. Also rather reserved people, pleasant on the whole. Mother comes regularly to visit, father has never shown his face. Classic bullying target. Requires socially sensitive framework and treatment. Responds well to flip chart, brainstorming, poster making. When the usual suspects organize a spa bath with him, he usually doesn't come to class. Relatively predictable patterns in this regard.