Indigo (7 page)

– Herr Setz? You fell down? Did you hurt yourself?

– No, it's just my head . . . Do you have something for a headache?

– You really don't look good. Come, sit down here. And look at me. You're very pale, do you know that?

– That's normal for me.

– You didn't get dizzy?

– Yes, outside my door, shortly after he left my office, said Dr. Rudolph, who had accompanied me to the infirmary.

– I'm sorry, I said.

– Well, he said, I have to go back. You're in good hands here.

He left the room.

– You really don't look good, the nurse said to me. And you're lucky I'm still here. I was actually planning to leave at eleven . . .

– You know what? I said. I'd like to ask you something—

– Please don't talk for a moment, she said, laying the back of her hand against my forehead.

I waited. Her eyes wandered to the ceiling.

– Well, she said, you have a slightly high temperature. Have you spent time in any
proximity
?

I tried to hold her gaze.

– That's what I wanted to talk to you about, I said. How often does it actually happen that someone comes to you, you know,
for that
?

She rolled her eyes again, shrugged.

– Oh, I don't know . . . hm. Hard to say.

Then she went to her medicine cabinet and reached for a box of pills.

– Has it ever happened?

She pressed a pill into her hand and gave it to me. It was pale gray and was reminiscent in form of a little zeppelin.

– What is this? I asked.

– Something for your headache.

– Might you have a glass of water for me?

She brought me one. I put the pill under my tongue, gulped down the glass, and waved goodbye to her.

In the corridor I spat out the pill and hid it in the soil of the puny climbing plant in its pot in front of one of the windows. Then I got my things from the teachers' lounge and walked to the train station. I ran into no one.

That was probably the moment I knew that I wouldn't return to the institute, even before the brief scuffle with Dr. Rudolph the next day.

Julia found me, when she came home from work, at my desk in a strangely agitated state. She brought with her, when she entered the room, a smell of convalescent bats and rats and asked me why I was home so early in the middle of the week. She at first mistook my agitation for anxiety and wanted to know whether I'd seen something awful again on television or in a picture in a book.

4.
Back Then, Robin

The nape of Cordula's neck, which she had in her panic scratched red, smelled like back then. He would never forget it. The three long weeks in the psychiatric clinic, the time
before
the medication,
before
the therapy, and
before
the evenings when they would watch a bloody action movie or an old kung fu drama together, in which Asians who were determined to do whatever it took caused the most varied manners of violent death.

Robert wore a T-shirt with the Batman symbol on it and lay behind his girlfriend, who breathed quietly. On the night table, the small iBall blinked at him. Robert gave it a dirty look, and the iBall lowered its lid.

He had noticed the smell immediately, back then, when he had visited her for the first time, three days after her admission (unconscious, her shoulder probably badly bruised from the fall)—that special psychiatric clinic smell. He had to admit: He found it interesting. A dog could undoubtedly have analyzed the smell as precisely as a music student an orchestral score: passionlessly cooked hospital food, meant to impart discipline and a pull-yourself-together-damn-it attitude, mixed with the sweat of anxiety sufferers, plastic straps and rubber feeding tubes, and finally the pills hurriedly and unnoticeably ground into powder—all this you were met with when you entered the building.

Cordula had been put in a room with three other women.

She was already feeling much better, she said. And it wasn't his fault (he had suggested the movie they were watching when it happened,
Tetsuo: The Iron Man
, a Japanese trash horror film in high-contrast, extremely attractive black-and-white), the attack had already announced itself over the past few days. An oppressive feeling here, a skipped heartbeat there, and sometimes difficulty breathing while watching certain scenes on television, for example, during the movie, in which people keep looking out the window of a very tall building, and down below those insect-sized cars are driving by, that was when everything in her contracted, but she didn't say anything because she thought it would pass, but this time it obviously didn't pass, hahah (when she was scared, her laughter always broke off before the last syllable), he must have been really worried, how long had she been lying there, defenseless, oh, I mean motionless, of course, is my face red?

– No, everything's fine, said Robert.

– Really, because I have the feeling that my face might be red, I mean, not like fleshy red, but really red, like it's been smeared with lipstick, that must be the effect of that thing there, oh, I feel so shitty, I'm so embarrassed, I'm sure it was a good movie, but I messed everything up once again, just as I always mess everything up, I—

– It's all right, Robert forced himself to say. The movie wasn't even that good, in my opinion. Artistically, I mean. Not really successful.

– No? Cordula asked.

It sounded so hopeful, as if a negative judgment of the Japanese movie held the key to her ultimate recovery.

Robert had noticed that at the foot of the three occupied beds in the room little Post-its were stuck, on which smiley faces were drawn. His practiced eye registered immediately that the faces were made by different hands. He checked whether a piece of paper was stuck to Cordula's bed frame too.

– That's for . . . when we . . . how we feel, said Cordula, and squirmed as if she had put on a too-tight skin this morning. I find it childish too, but that way they don't always have to ask us how we're doing.

For some reason Robert had to laugh. He tried to keep his face, which wanted to contort into a silly grimace, under control, turned away, went to the window and looked, his hands clasped behind his back, out at the parking lot or whatever that strangely bare area was supposed to be. Beyond it the woods. He remained standing that way for a while and made quiet throat noises.

– What's so funny? asked Cordula.

– Oh, nothing, Robert said quickly, turning around to face his girlfriend. It's just, I saw a hot air balloon out there.

– Really? Where?

– No, now it's descended behind the hill, said Robert. I was just imagining the people in the hot air balloon talking to each other, that's all. That was funny.

Cordula took a deep breath. Then a strand of hair fell in her face, and she caught it with a finger and held it under her nose.

She stood up and washed the strand of hair at the sink.

Robert hadn't noticed the sink until now. It was missing all the protruding elements that sinks usually have. The water came out of a seashell-like, edgeless opening over a photoelectric sensor. At night this technology, the invisible beam stretching across the room like a ghostly clothesline, must have frightened Cordula and the other women in the hospital room. Perhaps they even had to stick a Post-it over the photoelectric sensor. At the thought of that Robert again had to laugh.
Stop!
he admonished himself.
Just stop thinking.

– Embarrassing, murmured Cordula, as she washed her hair strand under the running water.

– What's embarrassing? he asked.

– Oh, nothing, she said. Just smells like puke.

She checked the smell of the hair strand again. Her expression showed that she was fairly satisfied with it. Then she brushed the strand into her hair with her fingers and went back to the bed.

– The photoelectric sensor, said Robert, almost choking on the word.

Stop, you idiot!

– What?

– Oh, I just said, the . . . um . . . that thing there.

– Where?

He pointed to it.

– What is that? asked Cordula, and her voice vibrated with slight unease.

– Just a photoelectric sensor, said Robert, as reassuringly as he could. Nothing to worry about. But it goes across the room and directly over your bed into the wall. The beam, the infrared . . .

Cordula looked behind her at the wall. Then she shook her head.

– I feel weird from the medication. Why aren't they giving me Trittico again? I tolerated that much better back then. But it's not made anymore, they say. Why not? How can a drug that helps you suddenly be taken off the market? It's exactly the same with grocery items you like. You can be absolutely sure that in six months they'll disappear from the supermarket shelves. Always the same . . .

She shook her head more vigorously, and then came the tears. Robert wondered whether, as when someone goes into cardiac arrest on a TV medical drama, he should press the emergency button so that a hysterical team in white coats would come running into the room. Electroshock. One, two, three—clear!

But Cordula was only crying.

– I definitely wouldn't want to trade places with you, he said to her.

She stared at him, aghast. Weeping woman face.

– Why would you say something like that?

– Well, I just wouldn't want to trade places with you. I imagine it must be pretty awful, getting up early and . . . also those beds and the sink, which . . .

He went silent.

– Something's wrong with you, Robert. How can you say that to me? In this situation!

Shortly thereafter, he felt it. Maybe a consequence of the slight guilt Cordula's last words had planted in him. Worry. He was already sitting in the dark gold tram, but wanted nothing more than to turn around and stay by Cordula's side.

That was new.

Okay, he had to take a deep breath, figure out what this was about. Perhaps he had inhaled chemical dust on the clinic premises, which was now playing with his brain, pressing buttons, turning taps on and off, as on the backs of lab monkeys' heads . . . The thought of those monkeys did him good, he calmed down.

When it came down to it, it was only a feeling in the chest, he thought, nothing more. Your thoughts gained centrifugal force and you felt like a rubber band being painfully expanded. Your fingertips were unaffected by it, they could move completely freely, your toes too. He wiggled them a little. No, everything was normal. Only in his throat or just below it, in his chest, was that thing. When he stretched, it was particularly unpleasant, then something told him he should immediately collapse limply again.

I'm just going to get some clothes
, Robert told himself.

And a moment later he wondered what the hell was the matter with him.

I'm just going to get some clothes?
Who was he talking to, damn it?
I'm losing my mind. I'm a burnt-out lightbulb, which has lost its corona, and, my God, now this too.
He wiped his face with his hand and tried to focus on the feeling again.
Want to go back. Not home. Have to stay there.

Stop, stop, stop! I'm just going to get some clothes!

When the tram stopped at Merangasse, the sign for a pastry shop happened to catch his eye. And when the tram began to move again, he realized that it had caught his worry too, dragging it out of him and away.

The smell of the old travel bag in which he was about to pack the clothing for Cordula reminded him of the black coat of tar on the outside of the Lichtenberg huts at Helianau. Robert pulled various items from Cordula's wardrobe without thinking much about whether they would make sense or look good as outfits. He also searched for a shower cap (the shower rooms in the clinic were not to be trusted with regard to the risk of infection), but he found nothing, only a small nest of fashionable sunglasses wintering here.

The open wardrobe, now it had another job, it was a supply cabinet, no longer a vanity case . . . Open, yawning, it stood there, mirrored inside . . .

What's the point of all this?
thought Robert.
Why panic attacks?
He came across an old
Star Trek
shirt he had once bought for Cordula, a fruitless attempt to lure her into his universe. It showed the triumvirate Kirk, Spock, and McCoy against a red background. Hyperspace, he thought. Did the word even appear in the original series? Was it a
Star Trek
term? First episode, Cordula in Hyperspace.

I can understand your doubts, Robin, but sometimes you have to give a person space. – Holy electroconvulsive therapy, Batman, you're right!

On the tram heading back to the hospital he felt nothing. He sat between blocks of people and was safe. The iBall over the driver's cabin looked elsewhere. Robert caught himself giving a friendly nod to the sign for the pastry shop as he passed it. Maybe nothing but a memory was to blame for the irritation before. When he was taken out of Helianau to visit his uncle at the hospital. Okay, at the time they had, of course, shielded him well, in several respects. He could still remember that afternoon, when he had shouted to his friend Max (relocated in 2006, chimney sweeps bring good luck) in the yard at Helianau: My uncle is suffering from psychiatry! The usual Indigo educational impediments, particularly clear in linguistic expression,
you septic pig
. The famous delay. Dingo delay. And Felicitas Bärmann, the overachiever, had immediately corrected him. Half gesticulating, half yelling across the schoolyard. What had become of Felicitas? Did former Helianau students ever meet? Was there something like a reunion from which he was excluded? Maybe in an airplane hangar or on a soccer field, like back then for the class picture . . .

Robert's uncle Johann had from his earliest youth been afflicted with a strange counting compulsion, which in later years decreased in range but increased in intensity. He stopped counting lamps, bathroom tiles, freckles on faces, or the windows of distant buildings, and was now obsessed exclusively with a single number, to which he had to add 1 every few hours. It had in the meantime become a six-digit number, and if you asked him what it was, he would fire it back at you, but then immediately add 1 and repeat, somewhat more softly, the new number. To have a rational conversation with him was impossible. He was interested solely in matters related to this number, such as the question of whether it might at present be a prime number again or display another interesting arithmetical quality—as at that memorable moment when it had been exactly 111111; Uncle Johann had supposedly run out of his room and had stood in the hallway in front of an open window and gratefully greeted the fresh new world and its glorious light, passionately blowing a kiss and somewhat awkwardly making the sign of the cross, which had caught the attention of one of the nurses and led to a rather unpleasant hallway conversation.