Indigo (5 page)

Called?

Robert opened the door a little wider. A representative object pricking up its ears.

– Um, I'd rather not repeat it, of course, I . . .

– No, said Robert, go ahead and say it, because I don't remember, honestly. I hear quite a lot of things. So what did he say?

– The
d
-word.

– Dingo?

His neighbor nodded.

– Okay, that's . . .

Robert searched for the right word. He couldn't think of anything.

– A-and . . . s . . . septic pig . . .

His neighbor's voice was barely audible. But Robert had understood.

– Fuck, he said, taking a step toward her out into the hallway.

– Oh, God, I shouldn't have said . . . I mean, repeated that, Herr Tätzel, I'm sorry, please, my son has no idea what those words mean. They just use them casually!

– Yes, said Robert. You should see what they do with the mongoloid from the yard next door!

The woman winced.

– You know, said Robert, feeling his heart begin to pound. The one with the big tongue with which he can . . .
llllm
. . . lick several stamps at once. Who laughs so much and always wants to hug everyone. They took turns punching him in the stomach. Your son was there too.

– What? I don't know who . . .

– The mongo—

– I don't know about any child with Down's syndrome, said Frau Rabl. My son was definitely not . . .

Her face was so furrowed that Robert became quite intoxicated by it. He was fond of such faces. He had once painted a portrait of a dog that looked just like that.

– Yes, you must know him, he said. Ask your son. He'll also tell you about his discovery, which he explained to me recently. Totally sick stuff, but also fascinating. If you punch a mo . . . person with Down's syndrome in the face, he will apologize to you as if he had done something wrong! Poor guy, picked on by everyone.

Robert made a vague punching gesture.

Frau Rabl now became completely flustered. Her face looked almost cubist. Robert gave her a brief wave goodbye and then closed the door.

He began to sing the “Rama Lama Ding Dong” song loudly, slurring the words, until he thought that Frau Rabl was out of earshot. Then he sat down on the balcony. It took a while for the shame to catch up with him. He could have kept running away from it, for by nature it moved with the speed of old memories. But it didn't matter. He had made his position clear.

Later he sat on the edge of the tub in the bathroom, the north wall of which he had had painted black a few years ago in memory of the Lichtenberg huts at Helianau, and considered what would be the most effective method to dispose of the stupid neighbor boy.

The problem was that he couldn't think clearly. Frau Rabl's visit had rattled him.
I'd probably feel better
, he told himself,
if I broke something
. He had already looked around for something. To no avail.

Of course, he could get those small containers of rat poison from the cellar, that would be the classic variation, so to speak. He played the scenario out in his head a few times and discovered that he felt no satisfaction at all. It wasn't that the kid wouldn't suffer enough, no, rat poison was really awful. It dissolved the stomach lining and you began to bleed like crazy and choked on your own blood and so on.

Maybe he should just frighten him, chase him around a little. But then the miserable homunculus would of course tell everyone about it. No, he had to find a final solution.
Final solution
, the term was forbidden, radioactive, you weren't allowed to think it, not in this context, it was disrespectful to use it this way, the millions of cold-bloodedly murdered . . . Robert stood up. His heart was pounding.

– Final solution, he said. Final solution to the neighbor boy question.

But the feeling in his chest was already gone. The allure of the forbidden phrase had become too weak. He sat down again on the edge of the bathtub.

My God, how ridiculous this was, he was sitting here uselessly on his butt, while that rat ran with impunity through the courtyard or the stairwell and experienced a carefree childhood. Maybe the mother had scolded him a little, that was quite possible, but definitely not too much, because she thought exactly the same as her wayward turd of a son.

Robert punched himself in the knee.

A natural disaster, he thought. You would have to unleash a natural disaster. A climactic event. Or climatic? The one was a sort of turning point, the other . . . What was it,
actic
or
atic
? . . . Damn gap. Indigo delay. The best thing would be, Robert told himself, sensing with a certain gratification how with this thought he crossed the borderline into insanity, the best thing would be to shoot himself directly in front of the neighbor boy. He gets a pistol or a rifle, then he goes into the courtyard and stands in front of the children. He aims at them and orders them all, except the dirty rat, to clear out at once. Then he says: Get on your knees, you little shit. And then he puts the barrel to his own chin and shows in the brief moment he has left a wild, cruel grin, the mouth wide open and the eyes two big white balls. And then he pulls the trigger, brain, gunpowder smoke, jawbone fragments, and teeth scatter in a red and black cloud through the courtyard and rain down into the child's future memory world, his whole life he will have to think back to this terrible moment, he will be in therapy for years, will turn back into the bed-wetter he once was, will react to every loud noise in school by cringing and suffering an epileptic fit, will then, after dropping out of school at the age of fourteen, never complete any vocational training, night classes are out of the question, because the now-eighteen-year-old can't go outside anymore after dark without having horrible panic attacks. On New Year's Eve, when the firecrackers and rockets go off, he hides in the bathtub with a mattress over him. He's unfit for normal family life, he becomes more and more addicted to alcohol, hangs around in parks during the day and tells everyone who stands still long enough about the brilliant future that was once open to him, in the abundantly tree-shaded, wind-sheltered inner courtyards of the neighborhood in which he spent his childhood, until he one day made a mistake, a grave, grave mistake.

It gave Robert a terrible scare when the door to the bathroom opened. He came within an inch of falling into the tub.

– What are you doing here? asked Cordula. Didn't you hear me?

– Are you already . . . Why are you home already . . . ?

Robert looked at his watch.

– Everything okay with you? asked Cordula. Should I leave you alone?

– No, no . . .

– Are you sure?

– Yeah, I was just . . . You know, that asshole down there, that fresh kid of Frau Rabl's, he said, well, that is, she rang the doorbell a little while ago and told me what he said, because she's just as stupid as her son, he said—

– Shh.

Cordula caught his head in her hands.

Robert froze. Canary cage over which a sheet is thrown.

– And that upset you? she said.

– You haven't heard what he said about me.

– Oh, he's just a kid.

– He said, upstairs lives a sep—

– No, Robert, said Cordula, squatting down in front of him.

At eye level. He was forced to look directly at her.

– I know, he's just some . . . But . . .

– Should I bring you a matchstick house, hm? To break? That will probably make you feel—

– No, I don't need that. Thanks.

– You sure?

– Yes.

– You know what? said Cordula. I got you something from the Chinese place on the way home. Do you want it?

– Why are you so late anyway?

– I had to finish the accounting. Angelika isn't there, and of course allowances are always made for her, and—

– Yeah, so did you study accounting too? asked Robert. I mean, you never even told me that. That's news to me. You have all sorts of things, but not a doctorate in accounting, as far as I know.

– Why are you so aggressive? she asked gently. Come see what I've brought for you.

In the corridor, between the kitchen and the living room, he grasped her by the arm.

– I have something for you too, he said. The painting that I . . . today I was . . .

– Oh, it's finished already!

He led her by the hand into the corner of his room, which always seemed to be dreaming of one day expanding into the whole room and transforming it into a real painting studio.

Outside the storm had passed, the lightning bolts had changed into distant flashes. A vain horizon, having itself photographed again and again. When no audible thunder followed lightning, Robert always felt compelled to clear his throat.

Cordula squatted in front of the painting of the monkey with the metal thing in the back of its head and looked up at it as if it were a stained-glass window in a church and she were contemplating the city, a familiar world in altered colors, behind it.

– What do you think? he asked.

Cordula turned around and looked into a different corner of the room.

– Is he real? she asked.

– What? Oh, you're asking if today . . . Yeah, today was the appointment at—

– Oh, God, she said with a shudder.

– What do you think of it?

– You know that I can't stand things like that, Robert, why do you show me these awful things?

– So you think it's bad?

– No, Robert, I don't think it's bad, I just think . . . Why do you always have to paint such horrible pictures? The poor animal . . . I . . . I think I'm going to be . . .

Her face looked a little like Frau Rabl's. Cubist distress. The way the eyebrows bent in the middle. Like snapped twigs.

– Oh, come on, said Robert.

And then:

– Oh, come on, this isn't believable . . .

She left the room, heading for a sink, any sink.

While she vomited, her hands wandered to the back of her neck, and she made a movement like someone trying to take a deep breath underwater. Then her legs gave way, and she collapsed on the floor. An attack, Robert registered it and tried to remember how long ago her last attack had been. A few seconds passed, then reality streamed back into his veins, he realized that he had to do something, he began to dial the ambulance, but at the second number Cordula stood up again, apologized softly, and went to her room. He followed her.

– Now, this really isn't believable, he repeated pleadingly.

3.
The Messmer Study

She still remembered well, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret, how the phenomenon first came to her attention. She had read in a magazine article that in Hungary after a long political to-and-fro (which finally ended in a backward-looking fro) several homes for I-children were closed due to flagrant deficiencies and some of the unemployed nurses came to Austria to look for work here. She had then searched for reports on those homes and eventually came across coverage from a Belgian camera crew that had visited one of them. The conditions had been indescribable. The children and their supervisors had been forced to live side by side in the most cramped quarters, had suffered from chronic fatigue, nausea, migraines, irritability, and extensive eczema. The Hungarian name of the institution,
fert
z
gyerekek otthona
, meant
home for infectious children.
The term
Indigo
was not yet used at the time, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret. It came, like so much strange nomenclature, from Germany. From there it spread in recent years all over the world and replaced the name Beringer or Rochester syndrome. In 2002 a guest on a well-known talk show who called herself an angel-seer and medium claimed that she could perceive people's aura. For years, the woman explained, she had classified everyone according to the traffic light system: Those with a red aura were unpleasant types, quick-tempered, fussy, slow-witted; a yellow aura meant patience, caring, understanding; green meant silliness, wildness, sometimes laziness. But for a few years she had been noticing here and there little blue beings, children with an indigo-blue aura. The host asked her about them, but the seer, who was dressed like a bat, shook her head and declared that she couldn't for the life of her say what qualities that color represented, but she suspected it had to do with the coming of a new age, that of the fish. This connection was comprehensible to no one, and so the woman explained that these children might be more spiritual, intelligent beings who had come to earth to save the planet.