Indigo (33 page)

So soon, thought Robert.

He said nothing.

– How old? the woman asked, pointing to him.

– Nineteen.

He showed his ten fingers, then just nine. She nodded and conveyed to him, yeah, yeah, she had understood the first time. Then she helped him take his clothes off. Now and then a sort of moan escaped her, and she took a deep breath.

She didn't take his penis in her mouth, but instead only rubbed it on her face, on her unhealthily shiny cheek. Robert closed his eyes and tried to imagine something erotic.

– All right, said the woman, lying down.

She spread her legs, revealing the ugliest thing Robert had ever seen. It looked like modeling clay. Like a crumpled-up octopus, which had been stuffed into a narrow cave. Like the shadow profile of Alfred Hitchcock. Soft, drooping flaps of skin with something nose-like in the middle. And that was supposed to be the mystery of life? He looked away and lowered himself onto her, his penis had shrunken to the size of a shrimp. She reached through under his arms and began to knead him, while cooing in an irritatingly maternal way, a sound that you otherwise heard only in documentaries about an indigenous people, who always lay naked in the dust and once in a blue moon smeared themselves a bit with blood and feathers, those damn idiots, and let someone film them doing so, really great . . .

– Okay? the woman asked him.

Robert nodded with his eyes closed and dropped onto her entirely. He supported his weight a little with his arms, but not too much, he wanted to feel her chest under his, her labored breathing. In the room hung a sharp, slightly sour stench, which wasn't too strong but made him think the whole time that hundreds of men before him had left their traces, on the plush pillows, on the lampshade, behind the mirror, even under the woman's fingernails. Robert opened his eyes tentatively and looked into the face under him. She smiled, but you could see the strain in her. Below her temples were a few beads of sweat. Her neck was sweating too. Of all the parts of her face, the eyebrows spoke most plainly: They were, despite the friendly mask she maintained, severely knitted and moved incessantly.

She ran her hand over her forehead, massaged it briefly with circling movements. Robert felt himself getting hard.

She put a condom on him and let him penetrate her. Robert thought of the smooth, uncomplicated genitalia of a female statue. He thought of the sketches he had sometimes made of that place. But a turkey head kept intruding on his vision. A turkey head that shook so that the red, chafed-looking thing on its beak waggled.

He again shrank a bit inside her, but he managed nonetheless to keep his head enough above water with fantasies about Felicitas Bärmann strapped to wall bars with black ropes to be able to pound away at her for a few more minutes with his hip thrusts.

He focused on her eyes, for there was nothing wrong with them. Human eyes. Tiny, like an amber insect, his own figure was visible in them, his pale, moon-round face. But now the woman closed her eyes, and a hand wandered to her temple. She rubbed and rubbed and took deep breaths. Then she opened her eyes again, and Robert could tell from their brief oscillation (experts called this phenomenon
nystagmus
) that the room was spinning around her.

She stayed as she was. He had paid, she stuck it out.

Robert felt for the first time something like tenderness. Perhaps even love. He stroked her head, she was a bit startled by the touch, but smiled again, then her head sank back, and she moved it from side to side on the pillow. He could have told her now that this would most likely only make the spinning sensation worse, but he didn't. He just looked at her, studied the hint of an Adam's apple on her female throat.

He was now aroused. His hands touched her breasts.

– Ohh, she said.

It was the sound people make before they vomit.

But she didn't vomit. She let her client continue to pound away at her, withstood each thrust with her pelvis, and now and then even stroked his neck with her hand.

Robert came hard. Part of him wished the condom would burst. He thought of proposing marriage to her. He imagined trips to distant lands. He lay panting on her chest, she conveyed to him with gentle touches in particular places that she would like to get up. But he remained lying for a few more minutes, inhaled her sweaty, sticky smell, and whispered:

– Thank you, you damn animal, thank you, thank you, I love you, thank you, thank you . . .

Afterward he waited politely until the woman returned from the bathroom. He asked her name. She pointed to a poster on the wall.
Alicia
was printed on it. The woman named Alicia didn't look the least bit like her, but Robert nonetheless held out his hand and said:

– Nice to meet you, Alicia, I'm Arno. Arno Golch.

– Goll, the woman said with a nod.

It was strange to shake a prostitute's hand.

Robert took a twenty out of his wallet and gave it to her.

He would have liked to linger a bit longer over this gentle image of a simple transaction between two people, but something had leaped into his view: In a coffee shop across the street from the tram stop he saw—yes, that was clearly Willi's idiotic hat, the one with the tuft of chamois hair. Embarrassing, the way he always went around. Should he go in and speak to him? Would Willi go for him again, like yesterday? All crazy people. You had to be careful. He decided to walk inconspicuously by the little café.

Then Robert fell into a deep well shaft.

Cordula was sitting next to Willi.

There was no doubt: His girlfriend and Willi were sitting side by side at a table in the café. He was explaining something to her. And then he took her hand and explained to that hand the same thing again.

The walls of the well shaft turned red.

He turned around and headed back. Back—where? It didn't matter, just away from here. He almost would have jumped over the guardrail of the Kepler Bridge. He only barely managed to hold himself back. A girl with a wool cap passed him, and he had to put his hands in his pockets to keep from snatching the cap off her head and throwing it in the river.

Then he stopped, and the world rolled over him, as if he were being broken on the wheel. The primeval brass plaque of the sun hid in the gloomy haze of the city.

I know where you live
, he thought.
You motherfucker. You filthy, goddamn motherfucker.
He meant Willi. He had to poison him. He had to plant a bomb in his apartment. He had to make him disappear. A bit of fighting, tussling, my God, he had been drunk, and besides, they had really provoked him! Had battered him like a dog. From all sides! As if he were a punching bag. Yes, Robert knows a lot about old kung fu movies.

He knew where Willi lived.

You shouldn't
, said the voice in his head.
Calm down first.

– You calm down, Batman! he shouted, and a man on a bike who was passing him gave him a stupid, wide-eyed look.

He rounded a corner, stopped, tried to breathe, but it didn't work. It felt as if someone had torn a cellophane wrapper from his body and he was naked underneath, raw and scarred. As if he were lying in the grass of the institute meadows, which stank of cow and fertilizer, and a hundred Golchs were sitting around him and sticking their fingers in every orifice of his body.

He headed toward Willi's apartment.

First he stepped in a pile of dog shit.

Even a journey of a thousand miles, Robin, begins with the first step.

As if in a trance he arrived half an hour later at Willi's, with jet lag, because his soul was still standing in front of the little café near the Kepler Bridge and staring at Cordula, who . . . Why with that kiss-ass, of all people? He should have strangled them both! Yesterday he had been strong enough!

Without knowing what he was planning, he walked up the stairs. He didn't run into anyone. He stood outside the door. An advertising catalogue lay on the doormat. What should he do? Kick in the frosted glass window and open the door from inside? Outwit the lock? Maybe the door was unlocked. If it was locked, he would turn around and beat Willi to death right in the café. Pummel his stupid face until the bones gave way.
It's your own fault
, he thought.
If you locked the door, you're dead. It's entirely up to you.
He stared at the door, at its handle, at its keyhole, at the doormat, as if to make clear to it the enormous significance of the imminent decision.

He pushed down the door handle.

The door didn't give way.

Damn! Robert made a hiss of despair.

He held his head with both hands, turned back and forth, what should he do, what should he—

– You goddamn piece of shit!

He gave the door a powerful kick. At first it appeared unimpressed. But then it suddenly cracked. Something small made of metal fell on the floor. Robert pushed tentatively with his hand against the wood.

He had to hold two fingers to his lips so that they didn't spring open and let out a cheer. With the foreign apartment he entered another dimension. The dimension of fantasy. He removed his shoes. This polite gesture gave him a perverse feeling of satisfaction. He would destroy everything here.

In the apartment it smelled like woman.

On a shelf he discovered several books by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. He was astonished to find such obscene muck here. Also sci-fi, of course, filling half the bookcase, appreciatively he ran his hand along the spines, took out a volume and imagined this activating a mechanism in the wall, a platform turned and opened the way into the depths on two sliding poles. And you slid down them into the earth, into ridiculously labyrinthine dungeons, where animals and people waited in cages to have medical experiments performed on them. And Robert freed a rooster, which had gone half mad in its isolation, from its cage, and the man in the next cage, a swollen specimen of a human being, begged to be released too, pointed to his tongue that had been seared, and he got out a few scraps of human speech, which sounded as if someone were trying to speak Latin with a mouth full of stones, but Robert turned away from him and led the rooster by the hand (wing tip in palm) as with a child back the way he had come. Then he faced the problem of getting back up into the apartment via the sliding poles, and lost interest in his fantasy. He put the book—Samuel Delany's
Dhalgren—
back. He had read it years ago and understood scarcely a page of it. Something with two moons and a gigantic red sun and a city that was constantly changing. This here, however . . . Robert had discovered another book, which was more to his liking:
Boy Wonder—
the autobiography of Burt Ward.
You know, Robin, writing books is the key to world peace. If all people wrote their autobiography, then we would all understand one another.

Willi had good taste, on the whole. (Robert bit his finger to suppress the need to shout.) Apart from the Swiss end-of-life companion, that intolerable woman with the never-changing questions, his books were quite all right.

The afternoon sun shone into the room, a reddish shine, which said: I know that you're here, you don't belong here.

Robert stood in front of the window and looked out. Ferenz, interference, he thought. Old stories that he no longer knew. The man at the award ceremony. Clemens Setz. Stripping off skin.

Hey, who the hell are you?
said the bedroom when he entered it. Because the objects in this room seemed to be a bit hostile toward him, he closed the curtains. The same thing was done with certain birds of prey. If they were blindfolded, they became peaceful and were no longer afraid of the people planning to do incomprehensible things with them.

Robert looked around and reflected. He recalled the image of the two of them. Cordula's arm, which was around Willi's shoulder, and then that Eskimo kiss, the rubbing of noses. Noses . . . He couldn't help thinking of bad smells, of the stench in the room with the whore, with whom he had played the mating game for the first time. His thought that residues and DNA samples could be found everywhere in the room, in tiny traces, on the bristles of the toothbrushes, in the knots of the curtain cord, on the dark blue and red plush pillows on the bed . . .

He went back into the hall and got his shoes. A nice big glob of dog shit was stuck to one of the shoe soles. Robert breathed through his mouth. He brought the shoe into the kitchen and there put it on the table, on a newspaper. Then he looked for straws or something similar. Finally he found Japanese chopsticks, made not of wood, but of black, grooved plastic. He took them in his hand and checked the tip. He would have liked to have a brush now. Or a palette knife. He had seen Bob Ross episodes in which the master had painted a whole mountain landscape solely with the knife.
People will believe it's magic. So from all of us here: Happy painting. And God bless my friend.

In a kitchen drawer he found a long-haired brush with which Willi probably spread sauce or egg on a roast.

Equipped with the two utensils, he got to work scratching a tiny portion of dog excrement off the sole and checking it for its consistency. The excrement had not dried and hardened, still stuck. Robert smeared the tip of the chopstick with a sample of the disgusting substance and left the kitchen. The furniture and objects looked at him with horror:
What the hell are you planning to do with that?

First up were the door handles. The undersides. They were no more than homeopathic doses of dog excrement, which Willi—and whoever else might stay with him and bill and coo through the rooms with him—would receive in this way.
Midi-chlorians are a microscopic life-form, which swims around in your intestines, little Anakin, and lives with you in symbiosis.

Next he went into the bathroom and spread some dog excrement on the rim of the toothbrush cup, a trace so fine that it was barely visible.
Why do I have to brush my teeth every day, Batman? – You know, Robin, proper oral hygiene is essential in our dealings with our fellow human beings.
When he sniffed it, he noticed that you almost couldn't smell it if you weren't expecting it and paying attention. He went back into the kitchen and loaded up the brush. Then he ran water into the kitchen sink and held the brush for a fraction of a second under it, not even all the way. He added a bit more shit. By now he could breathe through his nose again. He drew a few pale brown streaks across the newspaper, until the brushstroke became almost transparent.