Night Work (29 page)

He thought of Marie.

He thought of the Antarctic. Of the signpost at the South Pole. He tried to send his mind there. No matter where he was, no matter what was happening, the Antarctic existed, the signpost existed. A little in his head but entirely so in reality. It would be there even when he himself was no more.

‘This can’t be happening!’ he shouted. ‘Help! Help!’

Mouth open wide, he positively wrenched the air into his lungs. He realised he was hyperventilating but couldn’t help it. He was wasting precious oxygen, that was no less clear to him.

At that moment, halfway through a violent intake of breath, time suddenly slowed. His breathing lost its spasmodic quality, he noticed, and all became calm and steady. He lay quite still. As the second’s duration of a breath expanded to an eternity, he heard a swelling roar.

‘No!’ said someone, possibly Jonas himself, and he surfaced once more.

He ran a hand over his sweaty face.

And tried hard to think. If the Sleeper alone was responsible for all that had happened in the last few days, this was mere shadow-boxing. No one could shut himself up in a coffin and bury it. If the Sleeper had incarcerated himself, there must be a way out.

He kicked and pushed. To no avail.

How long would he take to use up all the oxygen in such a confined space? Two hours? Half a day? What would happen to him? He would become sleepy, then confused. He would probably be unconscious by the time he died of suffocation.

Sleepy? He was sleepy already. Utterly exhausted.

He opened his eyes. Total darkness.

His limbs ached with tension and from lying on a hard surface. His feet had gone to sleep. His hand was clutching the handle of the knife.

He had no idea how long he’d been asleep, it might have been ten minutes or four hours, but he still found it hard to keep his eyes open. This indicated that he hadn’t slept for long. Besides, he hadn’t suffocated. A space as confined as this couldn’t contain enough oxygen to last him many hours, that much was certain.

Unless there was some hidden source of air.

Unless things weren’t as they appeared.

The knife in his hand … A friendly invitation? More of a prop in a comedy, perhaps? The Sleeper certainly wouldn’t entomb himself of his own free will.

Or would he?

No, he must have overlooked something.

He investigated his prison once more. There was no scope for movement on the side his head was resting against, nor on the opposite side. He tapped the wall on his right. No form of aperture or lock – or, if there was, he couldn’t find it.

It was different on the other side. The left-hand wall felt the hardest. Above all, though, it wasn’t the same all over. There were cracks in it.

Laboriously, he switched the knife from his right hand to his left and began to probe these cracks. The wall didn’t seem to be a proper wall, it consisted of two overlapping metal cylinders. He dug and probed away in the hope of finding a gap. The blade snapped, leaving him with the useless hilt in his hand.

He fought back his feeling of resignation. This was a game.

He ran his fingers over the upper cylinder. There! Between the cylinder and the roof was a gap just big enough to admit his fingertips. He exerted pressure on the metal and pulled. The cylinder moved almost imperceptibly. Gripping it further down, he pulled some more. Once again he felt a slight movement.

Painstakingly, little by little, he shook the cylinder free from between the roof and its counterpart below. This brought more and more of his body beneath the massive metal component. He tried not to think about this.

He slid the cylinder over himself, panting hard. Once he had distributed the weight of the load better, he could breathe. He managed to raise the lower cylinder and squeeze beneath it. This created enough room on the right for the first cylinder. He rolled the second one over himself and, after much pushing and pulling, placed it on top of the first.

On the left, where he now had some elbow room, he felt something soft and rounded: an expanse of cloth. When he applied pressure with his fist, it sank in.

That was when it dawned on him.

His hand felt for the crack and found it. Felt for the catch and found that too. Pulled it and, at the same time, gave the cloth-covered wall a push. The seat folded forwards. He crawled out of the boot and onto the back seat of the car.

It was night. Stars were twinkling overhead. He seemed to be in the middle of a field. No road or track ahead of him. He looked to his right. Saw the tent but failed to catch on right away. It didn’t dawn on him where he was until he recognised the motorbike with the slashed tyres.

At dawn Jonas stopped at a filling station and heated up the contents of two tins on a squalid gas stove in the back room. He drank some coffee and drove on.

He was so tired he kept nodding off. On one occasion he would have hit the crash barrier if he hadn’t yanked at the wheel at the last moment. Undeterred, he drove flat out, racking his brains for some way out of this trap. Nothing occurred to him. His only recourse was to keep trying, to keep heading for Scotland and hope that he would get there before sleep overcame him.

Pills were a possibility, but where to get them? How was he to know which ones to take?

He drove on, jaws aching, eyes watering. His joints felt as if they were filled with foam. His legs were two numb stilts.

The M25. Watford. Luton. Northampton.

At Coventry he was so overcome with fatigue, he wondered what time of day it was. He saw the sun but didn’t know whether it was climbing or declining towards the horizon. He felt feverish. His cheeks were burning, his hands trembling so badly, he couldn’t open the ring-pull on a can of lemonade.

He was trapped in a limbo in which he dreamt and drove, dreamt and saw, dreamt and acted. He perceived sounds and images. He smelt the sea. He read signs that were transformed an instant later into scraps of memory, into dreams, into songs that were sung in his ear. Many of these dreams he retained for a while, wrestling with them or doubting their existence. Other, more abstract ones were of such short duration he doubted he’d had them at all.

Spacey Suite
.

He thought he’d read the words, but they turned into a building under construction by workmen. The walls
melted, dissolved, engulfed him. ‘I’ve nothing to do with this,’ said his inner voice. Feeling constricted for a moment, he coughed up some crystalline bubbles and breathed freely once more.

He dreamt he was climbing a flight of stairs, many hundreds of them, higher and higher. Then it seemed to him that, instead of dreaming it, he was recalling a dream, or an actual event from minutes or hours or years before. The effort of deciding which was right almost tore him apart.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ said his grandmother.

She was standing in front of him, speaking. Her lips didn’t move.

‘Stop that,’ said his mother’s voice. He couldn’t see her and didn’t know who she was talking to.

He saw the sun complete its day’s trajectory within a few seconds. Again and again it appeared on the horizon, glided across the sky, one two three four five, and sank in the west, leaving night behind it. Then it reappeared, only to speed on its way again and vanish. Night. Night lingered. It lingered and did its work.

He was roused by the cold and the whistle of the wind. He opened his eyes, expecting to see a road. Instead, he was flying. Or hovering in the air with an immense open space in front of him. He was at least fifty metres above the ground. Below and ahead of him glistened the sea.

After a few seconds he realised that he wasn’t flying or hovering; he was on board a ship, an enormous liner lying at anchor in a big harbour. He had no time to reflect on this, however, because another realisation hit him.

He was sitting in a wheelchair, unable to move his legs. Draped over his knees was a rug of the kind seen in films when paraplegics are taken out for an airing.

He made another attempt to move his legs. They didn’t move a single millimetre. He could wriggle and flex his toes at will, but that was all.

The wind was blowing a gale. He shivered. At the same time he was hot inside. He was too appalled by his crippled state to speak or think. Before long his mood changed. Horror gave way to dejection and dejection to fury.

Never to be able to walk again.

The fact that, being paralysed, he would probably never leave this ship, let alone reach the Scottish border or return to Vienna, came home to him in all its implications. What shocked him most of all, however, was that something irreversible had happened to him. Something would never again be as it had been. In their heart of hearts, everyone itched to commit some irrevocable act. Like pushing some inoffensive stranger in front of a train. Or jerking the steering wheel while driving at 180 k.p.h. Or throwing a friend’s pet dog out of a sixth-floor window. You didn’t have to be a murderer or a suicide to experience that urge. Just a human being.

And now it had happened to him. Something that divided life into before and after. In a way, this wheelchair meant something even worse than waking up in a world emptied of its inhabitants. Because it affected him directly. His body, his last frontier.

He gazed out to sea. Far below him, waves were breaking against the ship’s side with a monotonous, resounding crash. The wind carried the sound upwards, set a canvas awning fluttering, caused some tackle nearby to vibrate.

‘Yes.’

He had to clear his throat.

‘Yes, yes, that’s the way it is.’

Could a paraplegic really move his toes?

Could he really feel his thigh when he slapped it?

He tugged at the rug. It was so firmly pinned beneath him, freeing it was quite an effort. At last, with a sudden jerk, he pulled it off his lap.

And saw that his legs were tightly secured to the chair with insulating tape.

There was something shiny beneath his feet: a snapped-off knife blade. Performing painful contortions, Jonas managed to bend down and pick it up. He cut his bonds. The blood streamed back into his legs so violently he cried out.

It was several minutes before his limbs felt somewhat less numb. He stood up, holding on to the back of the chair. Dragging his left leg, which had gone to sleep, he hobbled into the cabin.

He’d never seen such a luxurious suite in any hotel, let alone on board ship: fine wood and leather, lights everywhere, comfortable armchairs, an outsize plasma screen on the wall. An elegant spiral staircase leading to an upper deck.

Some notepaper was lying on the bureau. Jonas looked at the letterhead:
Queen Mary
2
.

Southampton docks were the biggest Jonas had ever seen. Their size meant he very soon found a car with the key in the ignition.

He drove slowly through the deserted streets in search of a bookshop. At one point his route was blocked by a truck, but he didn’t dare get out to investigate. He felt he was negotiating a minefield. Although this English seaport seemed no more menacing and mysterious than any other deserted city, he found its lifelessness unpleasant, far more so than that of Vienna, where he was at least familiar with the streets.

A bookshop at last. He got out. A binbag full of empty wine bottles was lying on the pavement. He picked it up and hurled it blindly at some shop windows, hunched his shoulders and performed a clumsy dance, giving an impression of a drunken hooligan.

The door of the bookshop was open. A spacious two-storeyed establishment, it was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. Aluminium ladders were leaning against them. The musty interior smelt of paper, of books.

He found the reference section after fifteen minutes and a pharmacopoeia after another ten. Then came the hardest part of his task. He didn’t even know the German term for what he was looking for. There had to be some remedy for sleeping sickness. Sleeping sickness was also known as narcolepsy. So he looked up Narcolepsy. Nothing under that heading. Narcolon, Narcolute and Narcolyte were the first terms that appeared on the relevant page.

The nature and effect of those drugs were described in detail, and Jonas had to devote some time and effort to each entry before he could be sure that none of them would be of help. They were soporifics, not sleep-inhibitors. But what would a drug against sleeping sickness be called? Antinarco? Narcostop? He bit his lip and went on turning the pages.

Although it wasn’t midday yet, he could already feel tiredness stealing over him. This spurred him on. What he was doing now he should have done yesterday or the day before. If he allowed things to get to a stage where the Sleeper merely woke him up for brief periods in random locations before sleep overcame him once more, he would be …

Lost.

Yes, lost.

No, he was lost already. If the Sleeper gained complete control over him, he would be something other than that. What would he be then?

Conscious that he was staring into space, he straightened up again.

That afternoon he found it. He turned the page on impulse. At first he thought he was mistaken, believing that his clouded brain was merely misrepresenting what he was reading. But he checked and checked again until he was satisfied that, according to the pharmacopoeia, the drug Umirome contained various stimulants such as ephedrine and was one of the most effective remedies for sleeping sickness available.

A nearby chemist’s stocked Umirome. Jonas took a bag and filled it with boxes of the stuff, ten of them with sixteen tablets in each. If need be, he would take every last one.

There was a fridge in the back room. Jonas looked for some mineral water, but all it contained, apart from a slab of butter and a piece of vacuum-packed steak, were some two dozen cans of beer. He shrugged his shoulders and cracked a can. Modern drugs were OK with alcohol. Besides, gastric discomfort or mild inebriation were the least of his concerns. He swallowed a tablet and put the box in his pocket.