Indigo (41 page)

11.
The Walk

[GREEN FOLDER]

The light on this early summer day was hazy, moist, and vibrating. Like a nystagmus of the sun ball. The whole area, the whole district was filled with a Van Gogh surge in the bushes and shrubs, making everything slightly vertiginous, the clouds drifted heavily and thickly across the sky, like stencils being slid over the image of an overhead projector, the wind awoke every few minutes from uneasy dreams and swept over everything as if it wanted to wipe the slate clean, forget everything, soccer balls and plastic bags left behind by their owners lay on a meadow, and over the bare walls of the high-rises near the park drifted cloud shadows, which alternated with a briefly gleaming glaze of sunlight.

– Xenopathic people? asked Julia.

– Yes, that's what they called it, during that sweat cure, it was on the roof, and someone said: I'm half xenopathic! Wow, great . . . Do we feel anything? No. Say Indigo, you idiot! Xenopathic, stupid goddamn word! You're an Indigo, a digger! And then they all laughed.

– I don't understand, said Julia, you're talking so incoherently. And so fast. Come on, let's walk this way.

We turned onto a path that ran along the pond. On a meadow a few teenagers were playing soccer with an old black hat.

– But it's wrong, isn't it?

– What?

– The word
xenopathic
, I said. It doesn't mean that I make other people sick. It means that I get sick from strangers.

Julia took my hand and stuck it in her coat pocket. My fingers bumped into her bubble dispenser and a crumpled tissue.

– You stray so easily from the subject, she said.

– Yeah, I said. I probably have a way of speaking stuck in my head from the people in Brussels. I mean, we were in that bar, or no, it was a club, with a weird Flemish name, no idea, X-1 or something, and everyone was talking so fast there, the chatter . . .

– It's worse than usual, said Julia.

She was right. The evening before I had sat down and after long abstinence tried once again to do some mathematics, but my eyes kept slipping away from the curved set braces, the paper full of group theory blurred before my eyes, and the symbols performed a strange masquerade, a dance in a vacuum.

– Have you actually sent anything to Residenz Verlag yet?

– What?

– You know, to the friendly editor who called. I told you. I wrote down his name for you. He said he would be happy . . .

– Um, I don't know, I said, but . . . you know, those teenagers have no right to behave like that, I mean, look at the T-shirt that one over there is wearing.

The teenagers were several yards away, and Julia didn't even look, but instead tilted her head a bit so that I could tell her the answer:

– Dingo Rat.

– Hm, weird, said Julia.

I looked briefly into the sky, and the sun was a spinning wind wheel shimmering above the high-rises. A white, temperatureless pain pierced my head.

The label was doubly and triply unfair, I said to Julia, because it had been proven that rats were the most remarkable creatures on the whole planet, even more fascinating than the immortal jellyfish
Turritopsis nutricula
or that mysterious species of sea cucumber whose cells stop aging at a certain point in their development. Rats, I said, were organized according to an infinitely complex social hierarchy, so multilayered and rich with nuances that it naturally struck us human observers in most instances as a chaotic swarm, a senselessly teeming mass. The opposite was the case, every rat had in its head a precise image of the entire rat population to which it belonged, and when one died, its place in the larger whole shifted by a microscopic unit down or up, left or right, as the case might be, the rat population in the subterranean worlds of cities, in the sewers or subway shafts, was comparable to a school of fish held together by enigmatic, probably ancient lines of communication, the density and the connective element of water were merely replaced among them by something that was not yet known to us, possibly one of those morphic field things, I said, but since those were a pure article of faith, we of course couldn't believe in them.

– Maybe we have to imagine it like that zone game, have I ever told you about that?

Julia linked arms with me and said:

– Tell me more about rats instead.

– Rats, okay. Let's talk about rats. Rats are more important.

– Go ahead.

– Well, they exist in that in-between area that divides bedrock and earth's crust from modern civilization, and of course a few people live there too, mostly homeless people, and it depends, of course, on the particular city whether they can really live there or just go there to die. I once saw a report about people in disused tunnels. There were a few creepy things in it, for example, someone lay for a whole month with a deep wound somewhere underground where it was damp and muddy, and then, when he thought he could get up again, he had grown together with some sort of pipe that came out of the ground or something.

– Yeah,
or something
.

– I'm not making this up! You can check, the film must be publicly accessible, if it was on television, I assume . . . Anyway, they did this interview with him, it was totally sick, because . . . they interviewed him while he's there with his head on the ground and so on, that was so perverse that I had to change the channel. Well, anyway, as for rats, they have this infinitely ramified and intricate social system, okay? And it's so tightly woven that they sense precisely when another rat, say, one that occupies a higher position, is in trouble or when it has self-doubt or has gotten lost. But they don't help it, because they're not human beings, after all, right? For them the whole social thing works differently. Well, and . . . they have this structure and . . . and that's not all, though, because the network, it's so fine that they often even include inanimate objects, as symbolic fellow creatures, honorary rats, so to speak. Those could be objects that are important for the preservation of the population as a whole, a dripping heating pipe in a shaft, for example, or the sun, or what do I know, the grate of a ventilation shaft through which a particularly large number of cigarettes always fall. Things like that. In general, rats always think only in total populations, never just in families or clans or packs. They're egoists anyway, of course. That's easy to understand too, in terms of game theory, because . . . um . . . take, for example, a business in the human world, okay? For example, a company that produces only weapons and, what do I know, sells terrible nerve gas grenades to some other dubious companies and nothing but irresponsible crap like that, but every individual in the business, every human being is a really nice, friendly citizen, who wants only to pay for his children's university education, who is content sitting in the garden with a cigar in his mouth in the evening after his work is done or rearranging the stones in his garden so that, seen from above, they form a geometric message, or sitting in front of the computer and watching harmless movies with weeping women. Completely normal people, men and women, nice and affable, even reasonable. And that goes all the way up to the top, only with different accessories and in luxury apartments, but . . . where was I? Rats, they—

– Read me some graffiti, said Julia.

We were passing the wall at the far end of the park, which was updated regularly by its stewards armed with spray cans.

– There's not much new, I said.

– No Banksy rat or anything . . . ?

– Yes, of course, up there.

I pointed to a spot that was much too far away for Julia to make anything out.

– There it is, I said.

– Describe it to me.

– It has glasses on, I said.

– And?

We walked on slowly.

– It's balancing across a rope. With one of those tightrope walker sticks in its paws. And looks like a rat and . . .

– And is anything written there?

I reflected.

– No, I said. Not a word.

– Your voice is completely back to normal, said Julia. Come on, let's go this way.

I actually did feel a little more focused than before. More clearheaded.

A dog was going for a walk in the park with its owner. The leash was wound several times around the man's hand.

– Rats, I said, are completely different from dogs.

– Really? In what way?

– Well, dogs have been bred by us, in painstaking work from generation to generation. But what was actually the point of the slow breeding of the canine species? Guarding property boundaries and flocks of sheep, man's playmate, well, all right . . . The result is this strange love machine that worships its master . . . Maybe that was the plan too, to create an animal with which we could communicate. A sentimental companion to make the loneliness of our own species seem less complete, less unbroken and absolute . . .

I noticed that my voice had again taken on a life of its own, and paused, focusing on the brown-trodden gravel on the park path.

– Yes, that must be what's behind the friendship between man and dog that's lasted thousands of years, I said. Every temperament, every shape of the human heart is reflected in a particular breed of dog. The dog is a creature that we can actually prefer to other people, you know? That gradually, over the many, many generations in which it was kept in human company, learned to feel emotions similar to ours, separation anxiety, what do I know, obsessive-compulsive disorder, fear of death, hysteria, none of that is unknown to the dog, probably even anorexia and bulimia, a dog . . . a dog can succumb just as easily to one of those conditions as its owner. But it's still not in the same boat as us, that's why we can look at it without horror, without our deep-rooted need to destroy every simulacrum.

– Mmmh, Julia said, holding my arm somewhat tighter.

– But look at this life they lead, I said, gesturing to the small dog bustling about among the bushes. You live with large figures uttering incomprehensible sounds who are in command of food, toys, and your chances of running around outside. You wander all around for hours alone with them and suddenly you discover at the end of a promenade or on the other side of the street someone who speaks the same language, who has a tail and ears, who would even like to approach and present himself—and then you're yanked back by a rope, forbidden to move one centimeter toward the other. And with time that forceful jerk is transferred to your mind, you feel it inwardly when you see a fellow member of your species, and eventually there's nothing but enemies, each with its own restricted-zone radius around it, and when . . . and when these radii then, then intersect, you panic, pull and pull and bark and have to be calmed down.

Julia's hand on my cheek was cool.

– Banksy rat, I said softly. Banksy rat.

– Yes, describe it to me again, she said.