Authors: Clemens J. Setz
Indigo (43 page)
â Max, the rooster, repeated Herr Setz, as if it were a profound philosophical statement.
He tilted his head and repeated the name softly. Robert had for some time been convinced that this man was out of his mind, but he went on anyway:
â I got him out, one evening.
â Yes, said the teacher. Maybe you really did.
He nodded as if he remembered. Robert let out his breath with annoyance, an aggressive sigh, and decided not to say anything else. His former math teacher was useless, there was unfortunately no denying it. Even if his wife pretended not to notice. Well, all right, who knows, maybe every bizarre remark the man murmured, however softly, made perfect sense to her. In that regard, women were equipped with mysterious talents. Lockkeepers of their men who gradually withdrew into nonsense and were in the process of dissolution.
â Max. That's a nice name.
Robert nodded.
â I once took a desensitization course in Vienna. With the money I earned from my second novel. Because of animals and such. The terrible things that happen to them. But it didn't do any good. We all sat in a circle . . . and were supposed to beat stuffed animals. Ridiculous. And then a few videos. Of snakes, rhesus monkeys, guinea pigs, hairless lab mice. I just sat there with my eyes closed. Well, anyway. Wasted money. Really a shame.
Robert waited, but the math teacher didn't go on. Like a car that had only a few drops of gas at its disposal. It drove a few yards and stopped. After a while the waiter came to their table and asked whether there was anything else he could bring the gentlemen.
[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]
far, far away, on an almost planetary scale, and this was the so-called
Moon Museum
, a small ceramic tile on which six artistsâRobert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Forrest Myers, and Andy Warholâeach drew a tiny picture. Warhol drew a penis consisting of his initials. This smallest museum in the world was attached to the landing leg of the Apollo 12 lunar module and has remained on the moon ever since. To this day no one has visited the little museum.
13.
The Letter
[GREEN FOLDER]
On the horizon hung the heavy dark blue of a prestorm sky. The drifting clouds had temporarily cleared and huddled like football players at the beginning of the game, hatching plans beyond the horizon, from where they would soon spread out over the whole land to make everything wet. When we stood outside our front door, a reflection of light trembled on it; the sun, which had grown heavy late in the day, illuminated a window on the opposite side of the street. A jellyfish projected on a wall.
Since my return from Brussels I hadn't been able to touch door handles. They made me think of the widespread theory that every person is no more than six or seven handshakes away from practically every other person on earth. Another reason to keep your hands in your pockets.
â The secretary called from Oeversee High School and asked whether you would be returning to work on Monday, said Julia.
â What did you say?
â I said that you're already feeling better.
â Hm.
â Brussels didn't do you good.
â No. On the last day I should have just locked myself in the hotel room.
â Probably.
â Those people are totally obsessed. One of them they called an
end product
. They were all really in awe of him. An old, withered man who has already been through God knows how many Hollereith treatments.
We climbed the stairs to the third floor. Julia unlocked the door.
I flopped down on a chair in the kitchen. During the days in Brussels I had, strangely enough, found myself constantly thinking of the description of the extermination of the dodos in Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow
, probably because it captures humanity in an incomparably expressive image. A Dutch adventurer named Frans van der Groov at the end of the seventeenth century reaches the island of Mauritius and there kills hundreds of the flightless dodos with a new type of gun, the harquebus. These legendarily trusting animals, named by their discoverers for their unmistakably melodious ducklike call,
doo-doo
, whichâif contemporary accounts are to be believedâresounds far across the landscape, naturally put up no resistance. Soon they are all dead, and their rotting carcasses cover wide expanses of the land. Van der Groov ultimately finds one last egg, lying in a little grassy hollow on an abandoned hill. He sits down in front of the egg and waits with leveled gun for the little dodo head to show itself.
There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer.
Now and then van der Groov dozes off, awakes with a start, quickly looks at the egg to check whether anything is stirring. All night long. Finally he walks away without having achieved anything, back into the loneliness of the hunting parties, where everyone gets drunk together and fires at clouds and treetops.
â I remember, said Julia. You read me the passage.
â My absolute favorite book, I said.
â Yeah?
â Absolutely. There's no better image for humanity than that . . .
â Here, a letter for you, said Julia. With a . . . mmh . . . yeah, there's a black border. Oh, no.
The letter was from Frau Stennitzer. I tore open the envelope. On the death announcement was a drawing of a small telescope, above it a black full moon looking down at the earth with a sad face and half-open mouth. Under the moon it said that the funeral would take place next Tuesday. There was even a small section printed from Google Maps, which was meant to facilitate the journey to the cemetery in Gillingen. A little green 3-D pin marked the spot.
1.
Pieces of Paper. Red-Checkered Folder
[HANDWRITTEN PIECE OF PAPER, BACK OF A DEPARTMENT STORE RECEIPT]
Last day. At Getuige X-1 again. A young man named Wilhelm is there. Speaks German with an Austrian tinge. He wears a little silver thing on his chest. When he hits it with his palm, a strange high sound rings out, as if a tiny robot's neck were being broken. Ferenz is totally enthusiastic about the little gimmick, in the end W. gives it to him as a gift. When we are alone for a moment, W. asks me where I'm from. I just shake my head.
Later F. and W. talk about high-speed cam art. It takes me a while to understand what this means. You film a person imprisoned in a room from above with a webcam that shoots a picture only every few seconds or even minutes, these pictures are then made into a time-lapse recording of his movements. The model for this art form is, as they explain to me, the video of a man who was stuck in an elevator for more than twenty-four hours. The video itself is only a few minutes long and readily available on the Internet. The movements of the man in the elevator are hectic and fast, he races through the picture, leans for a second (in reality probably half an hour) against the wall, lies down, rests for a few seconds, stands up again, goes on racing through the narrowly confined space. Finally he is saved, the doors open, and he disappears from the picture. I ask how long a recording like that takes. In general two to three days, they answer. It depends entirely on the person. Some hold out longer than others. W. and F. laugh.
[2 PRINTED-OUT SHEETS, STAPLED TOGETHER]
It's a peculiar apparatus. A sort of tank in which the sweating men sit. Many with an eye patch, some also with a snorkel in their mouth, probably a sort of inside joke. I take a seat between a man with side whiskers and a Rumpelstiltskin-like creature giving off a sharp smell of Styrofoam, as refrigerators or other kitchen appliances do, shortly after you've lifted them out of the box in which they were delivered. The geometry of the bodies taking the sweat cure is impressive. All types of head shapes are among them, the most frequent is the lightbulb shape.
Since my childhood, rhomboid figures of all sorts have played a recurring and central role in my dreams. That's why the face of the shriveled creature I sit down next to is so attractive to me, virtually irresistible. I'd like most to measure it, get at it with compass and ruler or subject it to various elementary geometry transformations such as reflection, rotation, and translation. It would fit excellently into the UFA film studio logo. I have fun guessing the occupations of the men sitting in the tank and their positions in the hierarchy of commercial and industrial enterprises, make the man with the striking side whiskers into the head of a many-branched family clan and the shrunken creature into an influential art collector.
After some time a red bulb lights up above us, and the sitting men stir. Those who up to now were holding a book put it down. Some take off their outer garments.
The effects set in after some time. Intense dizziness, accompanied by the feeling of being the only person in the world. Then the desire to quit my job at the high school and become a writer, the most significant in the world . . .
After a while my brain becomes completely empty.
Afterward I talk with the shriveled old man. He turns out to be a hotel owner. Every year he goes at least once to Getuige X-1. It's a rare treat.
I cautiously agree with him.
I imagine that I can detect a relaxation in the flow of my thoughts. Images from my childhood surface in my mind, a bicycle dismantled into its component parts, but maybe I'm confusing things. Confusing things is always a good sign. Mixing up the time periods.
It took him a long time to make it through the entire procedure, says the old man. It took him several attempts, so to speak. But it was worth it, of course.
Of course, I confirm.
Later a tour of the facilities. The courtyard with the identical doors and intercoms. On the doors to the chambers are little stickers with smiley faces. Feeling of another time, another era. At the end of the treatment everyone gets a lollipop. F. refuses it on account of his diabetes. The shriveled man gives me his. Sweets don't do him good either, he says. But he wants to know how it tastes.
Like a Koch snowflake, I reply.
[HANDWRITTEN PIECE OF PAPER, LOOSE, WITH TORN HOLE-PUNCHED EDGE]
Evening of the last day. Together with F. visit a so-called end product. This end product is a man whose age is hard to determine. He looks a little bit like a turtle, his movements are ponderous and clumsy. He walks with a cane. At the same time, he possesses a certain energy, which is conveyed mainly through his eyes and his voice. He has been through more than a thousand sessions and now gives off something like Indigo effects himself. In any case, after a few minutes I feel a slight dizziness. When I inform him of this, he seems to be delighted, he practically begins to glow. How strong is the dizziness, he wants to know. I tell him (exaggerating a bit) that the room is spinning around me. Ah, he says with a nod. He closes his eyes contentedly and seems to be enjoying the effects I've described like the aftertaste of a good wine. So what sort of dizziness is it exactly, he asks, more a spinning sensation or more the lack of an orientation point, that is, more anchorless swaying, or more the feeling of bottomless falling, or maybe more a sort of fear of heights, a terrible, diabolical suction from below? I answer, to test him, that it's a spinning sensation. That does in fact seem to disappoint him a little. He sits there and stirs in his cup. The cane stands between his knees. He talks about his childhood in the countryside. There was a rooster on a neighboring farm that often crowed, several times a day; the rooster was always crowing loudly. And one day it suddenly stopped crowing. And on that day he himself became ill, a severe fever of unknown origin. He almost died back then, the man says, and shows us a notch on his cane, as if it had to do with the story. Here, he says, and also here. He points to a second indentation, several centimeters below the first. F. changes the subject and wants to know whether he still exposes himself to the sweat cure daily. And how are his hip joints? On the whole, quite good, the man answers. He has the energy of ten jazz musicians, he says. Free jazz, he adds more precisely, and laughs. His laughter is accompanied by the tapping of the cane on the floor. This cup, he suddenly says, pointing to his half-empty café au lait. This cup was safe from him for years, but now those days are over. F. and I exchange a glance. Look, says the man, extending his hand toward the cup. Nothing happens. We watch the cup closely. But it doesn't move. If you tried the coffee now, says the man, you would discover that it's cold. Before it was hot, I burned my lips on it several times. The coffee is always served to me too hot here in the nursing home, the people simply have no feeling for it. We nod. F. takes the coffee cup and examines it. His movements appear as if in a dream, and I have to turn away to keep from losing my mind.