Indigo (3 page)

I just nodded.

– And that time wasn't yet as hysterical as today. Back then you were still allowed to ask someone who was clutching his temples whether he had a headache. But nowadays, ugh! Impossible. Because right behind him there might . . . Oh, what a misery . . .

She laughed. And added:

– You know exactly what I mean, right?

I nodded uncertainly.

– How often have you made such a faux pas?

– A few times.

– Dr. Rudolph, Frau Häusler-Zinnbret said, shaking her head. I bet he even teaches his dog . . . Oh, never mind. It has no effect at all on animals, of course, apart from a few exceptions. Those cases are very rare, thank God. And they might even be completely normal statistical deviations. A monkey in a research institute, for example, it was, wait, I'll quickly look it up . . .

She stood up and went to her bookcase.

– I'll show you the picture, she murmured.

When she had found it, she held the open book toward me. The picture showed a monkey in a box. The face contorted with pain. I turned away, held a hand out defensively, and said:

– No, thank you, please don't.

She looked at me in surprise. Her right shoe made a little turn. Then I heard the book snap shut.

– What? You'd prefer if I didn't show you the picture, or—

– Yes, I said. I can't stand things like that.

– But you have to know what it looks like, if you're interested in these issues. It's not that bad, wait . . .

I held on to the seat of my chair. Julia had advised me in moments of sudden fear to focus all my attention on something from the past. As always, the white flight of steps came to my mind. Cloudless sky. Venus visible in broad daylight.

– Open your eyes, Frau Häusler-Zinnbret said gently. Everything is okay.

– I'm sorry, I said. I react really badly to things like that. Animals and such. When they . . . you know. It's a phobia of mine, so to speak.

A brief pause. Then she said:

– Phobia. I don't know whether that's the right word, Herr Setz. Are you sure you don't want to see the picture of the monkey? Shall I describe it for you, perhaps? The apparatus? Would that help?

– No, please . . .

I had to lean forward to breathe better.

– My goodness, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret. No, then of course I won't bother you with it.

– Thank you, I said.

My face was hot, and I felt as if I were looking through a fish tank.

– Have you ever been in treatment for that? she asked in the kindest tone I had heard her use up to that point. I could recommend someone, if you . . .

– No, thank you.

– Really? I do think you should face up to it. Writing exercises, for example. Attempts to visualize what frightens you.

– I-in your book, I said, you compare . . . well . . . in the very beginning . . . you write that the children are like that sunken steel in . . .

A somewhat longer pause. I made an apologetic gesture.

– Yes, well, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret, you must have read the old edition. I actually thought as much. But that doesn't matter, the mistake can easily be remedied.

She stood up and went to a shelf, took out a book, and brought it to me. When I opened it, I saw that the preface had been replaced by a new, much shorter one. And now there was a black-and-white picture of a baby in a crib. The baby, about two or three years old, stood upright and held on to the wooden bars with one hand. It was crying, but the face didn't look distraught, more curious and relieved, as if the person the baby had long been yearning for had finally come into the room.

– I took the picture, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret. With a telephoto lens.

As she brought the picture closer to my face, she laid a hand on my back.

Tommy

Tommy Beringer was born on February 28, 1993, in Rochester, Minnesota. He was the third child of Julian Stork, an electrical engineer and computer scientist, and Roberta Beringer, who was just twenty-four years old at the time of Tommy's birth. She had had her first child at sixteen. The couple had moved from Sharon Springs, Kansas, to Rochester in the late eighties, both of them came from families with many children. Julian had graduated with honors from the University of Kansas School of Engineering and soon found a relatively well-paid job, which allowed Roberta to stay at home and take care of the children.

Shortly after Tommy's birth, Roberta became ill. It began with impaired balance and nausea that lasted days. Later came severe diarrhea and short-term disorientation. Because Roberta had had health problems after her first two births, she didn't think much of it and didn't go to the doctor. But shortly thereafter, her two sons Paul and Marcus became ill. And they had similar symptoms.

A doctor suspected a problem with diet. Another said that the symptoms might indicate allergic reactions to certain synthetic materials used in the construction of the apartment. When Julian too began to suffer from severe headaches and nausea, the family decided to move. They gave up their apartment and bought a small house, for which they had to take out a mortgage.

The symptoms didn't subside, they actually intensified. Soon Julian noticed that he felt better when he was at work and that his splitting headaches always set in when he had spent a few hours at home. On the weekend they plagued him all day.

A weeklong vacation on Roberta's parents' farm in Sharon Springs brought about no improvement worth mentioning. So it must have had something to do with diet after all. A macrobiotic regimen was tried, also a month of raw food. At the end of the month, Roberta had to be taken to the hospital one night with acute breathing difficulty. There she recovered fairly quickly from her symptoms. The doctors told her that she was perfectly healthy, but pointed out that early motherhood and the constantly intense nervous strain that taking care of three little kids naturally entailed for a young woman could often cause such symptoms of fatigue. They advised her to book a stay at a health spa and hire a part-time nanny.

– Does that mean I'm crazy? Roberta asked the doctors.

They assured her that she was completely fine. She was very tired and might have passed that on to her children. It would probably do her and her three sons good to have someone new in the household.

Julian didn't like the idea of a nanny. He was worried, and justifiably so, about the family's financial situation. After all, they had just bought this house here and were a long way from being able to regard it as their property. To hire a nanny was quite simply unfeasible, he said. But of course he understood that things could by no means go on as before. Every time he visited his well-rested wife, free of all maladies, in the hospital, he was struck by the difference. She was full of energy, played chess with Paul, who was eight or nine years old at the time, in the hospital lounge, and spoke with a louder voice than usual—indeed, she was even in a joking mood and bantered with the young doctors.

Julian continued to suffer from severe headaches, but these could be managed to some extent with painkillers. And in the meantime the children were doing a little better too. It was summer, Paul and Marcus played a lot during the day in the yard of the small house, and the older brother taught the younger how to ride a bike. But shortly after Roberta returned home, her symptoms reappeared. In autumn the whole family, with the exception of little Tommy, suffered from bloody diarrhea and rashes. To prevent him from becoming infected, they brought him to Sharon Springs to stay with his grandparents for a few weeks. The diarrhea afflicting the whole family got better immediately, and the other symptoms disappeared too, practically overnight.

When they received a call from Roberta's mother, Linda, after a few days, and she told them that they should probably come and get little Tommy, his parents were alarmed. Linda complained of diarrhea and vomiting and intense attacks of vertigo that would suddenly overcome her; this morning, she said, she had even passed out in the kitchen with a cup of hot cocoa. Think of what could have happened!

They picked up Tommy. In the car Julian felt sick, and he had to pull over to throw up. Afterward he began to have difficulties with motor skills. He couldn't turn the key in the ignition.

– It's the worst feeling in the world, he said later. When you're too weak to do anything, even the smallest thing, actually physically too weak. It's as if your own body had decided just to call it quits, to waste away.

And Roberta summed up the subsequent months and years as follows:

– No one can imagine the odyssey we've been through. If it weren't about the welfare of our children, I would have given up years ago.

The picture everyone associates with the name Tommy Beringer shows him as a baby. His disgusted and thus unusually adult-seeming facial expression and his mistrustfully tilted head might well account for the extraordinary popularity of the photo, which seems to have struck a nerve, so to speak, and adorns T-shirts, posters, album covers, and, in the form of a stencil image, graffiti walls all over the world.

The picture of the divided chamber has become equally famous. In the middle is a thick lead wall. To its left little Tommy Beringer is playing in a box full of colorful foam balls, while to its right the female test subject is hooked up to various medical devices measuring her skin resistance, heart rate, brain activity, and other bodily functions. The picture was taken by Australian photographer David J. Kerr during one of the numerous tests. With a telephoto lens. Because all pictures of Tommy shot at close range were either out of focus or looked as if the photographer's hands had been trembling violently.

The test subject had no idea which child was on the other side of the wall. It could be either an I-child or a completely ordinary child, she had been told. The young woman's face displayed skepticism toward the purported effect. After only half an hour, the project had to be aborted, because both the young woman and a doctor got sick.

Tommy was moved to an isolation ward, in which usually only radiation victims were treated. The whole ward was empty, Tommy cried often and was attended by a nurse who came hourly for no more than five minutes, fed and cleaned him and put the toys he had thrown on the floor back into the crib with him.

In 1999, when Tommy was six years old, the family, overwhelmed by the prospect of further tests and interview requests, immigrated to Canada. Julian divorced his wife in 2002 and has since moved back to Rochester. He doesn't like to talk about the past. In 2004 Roberta Beringer and her three sons became Canadian citizens. They lead very reclusive lives, don't participate in the worldwide debate about the Indigo phenomenon. Any attempt to locate Tommy Beringer is consistently blocked by his mother. He isn't enrolled at any school in the country, and a website with his name, on which now and then photos of a teenager on a bicycle and short, melodramatic texts about the universe and loneliness were posted, turned out to be a hoax by two college students from California.
*

2.
Robert Tätzel, Twenty-nine, Burnt-Out

They brought him the monkey in a wooden box. The box didn't look at all like lab or science equipment, it was dark and had a few lighter spots and traces of wear. It was hard to say what was normally kept in it.

Robert had set up the easel, the dabs of paint on the palette (he preferred a smaller one, for too much choice paralyzed him) looked like a rainbow designed by a planning committee. All the brushes were new, five minutes ago he had taken them out of their packaging. He loved the smell of virgin paintbrushes.

The picture he was going to paint would be on the small side. Thin paint on a thickly applied background. A thin paint will stick to a thick paint, Bob Ross (the other deep voice besides Adam West that was directly related to God) had said on the instructional iVD.

The monkey made a face as if he recognized Robert. He extended a wrinkly black hand toward him. When the hand was not taken, he brought it to his mouth and bit gently into it. The coordination of his arm movements apparently caused the monkey great difficulty. Particularly the left side of his body seemed impaired.

– What's wrong with him? Robert, without looking up from his canvas, asked the young lab technician who had brought the animal.

– He's not used anymore, the man answered.

The technician walked once around the box, laid his gloved hand on the monkey's back, and tilted him forward. Robert saw: The back of the monkey's head was shaved, and something that looked like a tiny faucet jutted out of the cranium, complete with shutoff valve and a damply glistening outlet.

– What's that for? asked Robert.

He tried to lend his voice the most emotional tone possible. That wasn't easy, but the focus on the preparation, the slight turns of the brush, which soaked up paint, helped him.