Authors: Clemens J. Setz
I had to concentrate to keep from losing the thread. Headache, dizziness, heart palpitations.
â Ferenz-Hollereith didn't call it Indigo Potential. We coined that phrase. For him it was simply known as Human Potential. He thought in more general terms. But the Hollereith treatment, as it is understood today, is something else again.
â But what does that have to do . . . with elephants painting flowers? I asked.
â Art is basically always something terribly pitiless and cruel, said Oliver Baumherr. I personally am sick and tired of it. These people who take up residence in villas or castles and then work on, what do I know, creating interventions in public space or some crap like that, and at some point they come out of the villa, erect a ridiculous sculpture, and that was all they were capable of. Absurd. Art is almost always cruel and disgusting. I'm telling it like it is. And that's exactly how it is with the elephants in Thailand, they're not well treated, they're tortured, and whatâ
â Okay, but what, then, is the Hollereith treatment exactly?
I had pressed my hand against my ear, the other was still uncovered. But my second hand was ready to fly up too and cover it.
â . . . and what do they make the elephant draw? An elephant holding a flower in its trunk, a huge flower, which it will probably present to the people. And everyone is saying Ooohh and Aahhh and is moved to tears and applauds. But the choice of this motif, this flower picture, this choice is, when it comes to cynicism, for me on a par with
Arbeit macht frei
or
Jedem das Seine
.
He went silent, just tapped with his forefinger a few times on the desk.
â Is this now the moment when I should protest? I asked.
â No. But I'll give you something you should read.
He pulled a green folder out of a file cabinet. He opened it and showed me the contents. Newspaper clippings. Interspersed with handwritten pieces of paper.
The Relocation of Magda T.
was written on the title page.
â Read through it. Then you'll understand better what we're about. Can you be here again tomorrow at eight in the morning? Then I'll introduce you to my colleagues, and we . . . we've also prepared a little demonstration for you. As I said, I read your articles back then with great interest.
â Thank you very much.
â And please forgive me that I'm now going to be so impolite and kick you out. I'm expecting guests this evening.
In my hotel room I poured shampoo and shower gel over myself in the bathtub until I became grotesque to myself, like those horrible figures in porn movies who are covered with the ejaculate of dozens of men and crawl around blind and sticky on the floor.
With slippery fingers I called Julia. She answered, and I could tell by her voice that her hair was wet too. Such long, voluminous hair retains a lot of water and changes the feel of the body.
â Do you know what's weird? I asked.
â What?
â Bubbles.
â What do you mean?
â They're here for a while, float around. Like little spaceships, and then they burst.
â Dogs love bubbles.
â Dogs, yeah . . .
â Are you doing okay?
â I don't know.
â Are there people making you uneasy again?
â No, this time there's no one . . .
â Following youâ
â No, they're not doing that, I mean . . . oh, I have no idea. I have these headaches again all the time and can't focus.
â Probably labor pains.
â Yeah.
â I told you not to go to Vienna. To see that Baum guy.
â Baumherr. He wasn't very forthcoming. That is, he was more confusing. But he gave me something to read. About a relocation.
â About what?
â Relocation.
â Clemens, you're getting much too caught up in this thing. Tell me instead where you're blowing bubbles. In the hotel room?
â Oh, no, I've just been playing with the shampoo. Do people actually do that? I mean, normally? Play with shampoo?
â Of course. It's completely normal.
â That means everyone does it, right? Pours it over their face and then makes bubbles. Because, it does burn your eyes . . .
â Yes. It's completely normal. Everyone does it.
â And you're sure about that, huh?
â Absolutely sure.
â I never know things like that.
For a while neither of us said anything. I splashed in the water a bit.
â I find the idea of bubbles strange, I said.
â Really? In what way?
â Well, I mean, that air, which is confined in those balls, that clear boundary between inside and outside, that . . .
I faltered. Stepped out of the tub.
Bathwater ran from my penis as if I were peeing.
â What are you doing? asked Julia.
â Hold on, I just realized something . . . the boundary between inside and outside, like a bubble . . . I just have to . . . I just need to write something . . .
â Oh, is this now that moment like in
House
or
The Closer
or
Monk
, when he says something that has nothing to do with the case, and suddenly he stops midsentence, and his eyes wander in that funny way to the side, and he has the solution?
â Um . . . what?
â Now the music should actually come in, something with vibraphone or whatever the thing in the beginning of
American Beauty
is called.
â Hold on a second, or else I'll forget what occurred to me.
â Tell me, then I'll remember.
â Well, so . . . I don't know exactly . . . Ah, this constant stabbing in my head . . . I can never focus on a single thing.
â This is all that institute's fault!
â No. No, it's not that . . . Oh, damn, what was it, now? . . . I've forgotten . . .
â Bubbles. The space in the bubble. The clear boundary between inside and outside. That's what you were saying. Should I rewind again?
â No, I . . . ah, I have no idea . . . Damn it, it's gone . . .
4.
Happy Accidents, Midi-chlorians
It wasn't hard to find out Clemens Setz's address. You only had to look it up in the telephone book. A house on the outskirts of the city. The newspaper article with the interview had revealed to Robert that his former teacher still lived in Graz.
And skinned other people, if he didn't like them.
After lunch Robert set off. Burnt out, burnt out, he murmured to himself in his head.
Gap-delay-deedoo . . .
A robust, lush autumn day. Even the trams moved as if their mouths were full. And the crows in the park seemed to be taking complicated measurements in the meadows, hopped three times, looked around, hopped another three times. Zone game.
Robert enjoyed the certainty that he was of no consequence to these gray-black birds. For them he was as real as Han Solo or a person from the year 3000 was for him. He remembered his enormous excitement when Dr. Ulrich had told him that a person who had smeared himself with mosquito repellent was not wearing a sort of protective armor made of unpleasantly smelling substances that scared away the little insects, but rather that he simply became invisible to the mosquitoes.
He imagined himself stepping in front of the teacher and the man looking through him. A human window, suddenly standing at his door.
My God, this city, how small everything in it became in autumn, even the shopping street seemed to him shortened. On Herrengasse he walked past the small church with the stained-glass window that depicted Hitler and Mussolini, past a beggar woman who was having a never-ending epileptic fit, twenty-four hours long, sometimes some saliva even ran out of her mouth. Her cup was nearly empty, and Robert had the suspicion that she ate coins.
His former schoolmates had all moved north. To Vienna, every single one of them. Like balloons that, once released, automatically floated upward. And from what you heard, they had all successfully found their place in life, protectively armored as always, as windproof and weather-resistant as nano-anoraks, and were probably at this very second holding pointers against diagrams in their enlarged conference rooms or shouting at people on the phone who afterward thanked them many times for the call, or they were simply sitting around and becoming more successful from minute to minute. Max Schaufler had entered his parents' business. What a shock. Robert still received an invitation from him every spring to some celebration on the company premises. Even the signature on it was printed and exactly the same every year.
He had written the teacher's address on his hand. He had actually been surprised that the man was still alive. Not because of his age, for how old could he have been now, forty maybe, at most forty-five, in any case nothing world-shaking, but he had always radiated such an unpleasant energy, as if everything he did occurred under a mysterious compulsion. Even when he stood around silently, he appeared possessed. When he smiled, he looked like those people who hold a copy of the latest newspaper up to the camera so that their family members at home see that they're still alive. And he hadn't taught them anything either.
Once they had covered trigonometric problems. One example had been about a room in which a man lived. The size of the bed is such and such and that of the wardrobe such and such, and a water vein runs across the room, intersecting the bed and the wardrobe at a particular angle. Now the man, who of course would not like to lie on a water vein, because he doesn't want to get cancer in his spine overnight, is forced to move his bed so that it is in an area unaffected by the influence of the water vein. And now the optimal position of the bed and also the wardrobe was to be calculated (for the clothes too could store the evil energy of the underground water vein in themselves at night and pass it on to their wearer by day). The math teacher was actually supposed to explain to them how they should approach the example, but then the situation of this man had apparently amused him, and he had begun to ramble. Holding in his hand the tiny piece of chalk (he always wrote with that almost circular lump and on top of that in those baby block letters that no one could read), he paced in front of the blackboard, looked now and then into the distant faces of his students, and said that the death of the old man (the example had mentioned nothing about the age of the man) was, in a way, preprogrammed: For he moves his bed again and again, because two different mediums, dowsers with their wire Y's, perhaps even three, were there, and of course there are contradictory measurement results, and the old man doesn't know which to regard as more plausible, so he looks for a compromise, for there is an area, in the front left (he pointed to the blackboard), where the desk is, which is indicated by all three measurements as safe, and so the old man thinks, better safe than sorry, and pushes his bed through the room for whole afternoons, in between he collapses on it in exhaustion and rests, and on the third day, hahaha, the water-vein-sensitive old man has a heart attack while pushing the bed and remains lying in the middle of the room. And from above his posture is reminiscent of a climber on an almost vertical mountainside. (The teacher drew a stick figure sketch of the dead man. It looked like a grasshopper that had been crushed underfoot.)
Granted, they had laughed heartily at the story, but the math lessons had nonetheless always been impossible. The teacher had wasted far too much time with his weird digressions, and had thenâyes, right, Robert rememberedâalso constantly complained of headaches, even though he had definitely been told how terribly insensitive that was toward the Helianau students. But for that very reason, because he made no secret of his frequently occurring headaches and attacks of vertigo and problems concentrating, some students had really liked him.
And the same guy had flayed a man alive. How the hell did you even do that? The screaming alone . . .
But he wasn't
. . . , Cordula's voice said in his head. She hadn't been reachable since yesterday. Probably needed a bit of time to cool off. He had apologized to her and everything. All right, she had run out and had shouted,
Congratulations, way to go
âas if he had now finally managed to drive her away.
Okay, he had made a mistake.
But we don't make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.
Like his first time. It wasn't something he remembered fondly. He was nineteen, andâin his headâhe still moved in the zone. What a warm, safe feeling that had been, at least now, in retrospect. He had made an appointment with a woman who cost sixty euros an hour, surcharges would be discussed only later, during.
Robert knew that he should actually be thinking about Cordula. But his thoughts were drawn into the past. The headwind of the present was simply too strong.
The woman had greeted him at the door to her apartmentâthat was what those little rooms had been called, which had posters of enlarged porn video cover images hanging on their doors. Robert entered the room and tried not to seem all too scared. The first thing he did was to hold out the money to the woman. She took it and stowed it in a wooden drawer. For some reason it was the sight of that drawer that relaxed Robert a little. It was a thing that also could have been found in fairy tales.
The woman spoke German only poorly, but with several clear gestures she communicated to him that he should demonstrate what he would like to do with her.
â Normal, said Robert.
Then he pointed to his mouth and to hers. She shook her head.
â But I can . . . , she said.
And acted out what she could do instead: spit in his mouth. The pantomime was very convincing, Robert understood immediately. Oddly, he even thought about this offer for a moment. Only after a while did he realize that it didn't appeal to him at all. Spitting in the mouth. Disgusting. He declined. Then he indicated an ordinary missionary position and moved back and forth.
The woman briefly put her hands to her temples, shook her head.