Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes

How I Lied and Died

I met Luzia one Wednesday evening at a reception in the Bureau of Regulation of Telecommunications Licenses, and from that day on I became a liar and I was lost.

I had been together with Hannah for nine years—in principle at least, for she lived with our son and our baby daughter, a somewhat strange infant, in a peaceful dull town on a lake in southern Germany where I had been born and now spent the weekends. The workweeks, however, I spent alone in a gray suburb of Hannover which the enterprise that employed me had chosen as its headquarters. Hannah was a little older than I was and she was comfortable being on her own. I wasn’t that important to her anymore—she knew it, and I knew it too, and each of us knew that the other one knew. But she was Hannah, we had a noisily suckling baby at home, and it was clear to me immediately that Luzia must remain unaware of this.

I’ll describe her later, when the moment comes. Here, let me just say that she was tall, with dark blond hair, and her eyes were brown and round like a hamster’s: brilliant, never focusing on anything for more than a few seconds, a little anxious. I noticed her when she dropped her glass on the floor and then immediately broke a vase of flowers that someone had foolishly left standing around on a pedestal. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, the skin on her upper arms was flawless, and as I saw her standing over the debris, I knew I would rather die than renounce the chance to hold her in my arms, mingle my breath with hers, and watch her eyes right up close as they rolled back under their lids.

She was a chemist. I didn’t understand what she did; it involved carbon and the synthesis of something, and even tangentially with nuclear fusion and the production of energy out of nothing. I nodded a lot, said Aha, yes, of course, and bent over to smell her perfume. When she asked what I did and what had brought me here—I didn’t know if she meant the city or this reception—I had to think before I was able to answer her: the circumstances of my life now seemed as foreign and as far away as the weather on the other side of the planet.

I was—at that time at least, because I’m unemployed today, and the likelihood of being hired by another company is not large—the head of the department of the administration and assignment of phone numbers in one of the large telecommunications companies. It may sound boring, but in reality it’s even more boring than that. It wasn’t what was forecast over my cradle, and it wasn’t what my mother expected when she talked about her son’s brilliant future. I once played the piano well, I could paint adequately, and all the photos of me show a pretty child with intelligent eyes. But the world breaks almost all of us, and why should my particular dreams have come true, reading books isn’t a profession, my father said, and angry as I was at the time, when my children reach that age I’ll tell them the same thing: reading books isn’t a profession. So I studied applied electronics with an emphasis on mobile communications, learned about the then-still-standard analog mobile phones (it seems an eternity ago), about SID and MIN codes, and all the methods for sending a human voice around the world in millionths of a second, started work, and gradually got used to sluggish afternoons in the office with the pervasive smell of coffee and ozone. At first I supervised five people, then seven, then nine, discovered to my amazement that people cannot work together without hating one another, and if you tell them what to do they detest you, met Hannah, whom I loved more than she loved me, became head of a department, and then was moved to another town; it’s called a career. I was being paid well, I was very lonely, and in the evenings I read books in Latin with the help of a dictionary or watched TV sitcoms with laugh tracks and accepted that life is what it is, and that there were a few choices you could make yourself, but not many.

And now I was standing in front of Luzia, my heart was racing quite ridiculously, and I heard myself like a detective asking more and more systematic questions to find out whether she had a family or if there was someone in her life, in other words if there was any chance that someday or better quite soon or even better this evening I could put my lips on the little hollow above her clavicle. She laughed now and then, lifted and lowered her glass, and I saw her long neck and the play of muscles under the skin of her shoulders and the play of light on her silky hair, and all the while shadowy figures moved at the edge of my field of vision. Glasses clinked, people laughed, sentences were exchanged, and somewhere someone was giving a speech, but none of it interested me. She had only, said Luzia, arrived here recently, and, well, to tell the truth she didn’t really like it; she laughed softly and I wasn’t sure whether she’d really given me a flirtatious look or whether it was merely an illusion conjured up by the poor lighting and my desire.

“Do you have a phone?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised. “Do you want to call someone?”

“No, it’s ringing.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled it out. The music I’d been hearing for awhile did indeed get louder. Hannah’s name was on the screen. I hit the disconnect button. Luzia watched me, amused. I didn’t understand why. I felt hot, and hoped I hadn’t turned red.

“I’ve only had mine for a short time,” she said. “I find it eerie. It makes everything unreal.”

It took me a moment to understand that she was talking about her cell phone. I nodded and assured her she was absolutely right. I had no idea what she meant.

Only a few guests remained, glasses in hand, scattered around the room, and I wondered why she’d stayed this long, why in particular with me. I said we could go and find a drink elsewhere, the old well-worn formula, and she, as if she didn’t understand or as if I didn’t know she understood perfectly well, or as if she didn’t know I knew, said yes, let’s.

So we ended up in a rather uninviting bar, and Luzia talked, and I nodded, and now and again I said something too. The room seemed to be spinning slowly, I was incredibly conscious of her perfume, and when she touched my upper arm as if by accident, an electrical charge ran through my body, and when her hand brushed across my waist she didn’t pull it back, and when at some point I came so close to her that I could see the tiny veins in the depth of her irises, I realized that I wasn’t just living a wish or a dream anymore, or a fantasy born of my solitude, it was really happening.

“Do you live around here?” she asked.

At that moment my phone rang.

“Again?”

“A friend. He has a lot of problems. Calls at the oddest times: mornings, lunchtime, at night.” I wasn’t yet a practiced liar back then, and yet as I was saying it, I could see him in front of me in all his misery. Sad, drunk, unshaven, crushed by life, and desperate for my advice.

“Poor him,” she said smiling. “Poor you.”

“Yes,” I said, in answer to her previous question. “Right around here.”

It was actually quite far, the taxi took almost half an hour, and we sat side by side, embarrassed, like two strangers without a thing to say to each other. The driver smoked, oriental-sounding music was cooing out of the radio, and outside ragged-looking people were standing around under shop signs blinking meaninglessly into the night. It was cold, and the whole situation suddenly struck me as ridiculous. I remembered my bed wasn’t made and I wondered how I was going to hide the plush elephant that had been in every bedroom I’d had since I was ten years old. The problem still seemed almost insoluble when we were in the stairwell. But then she didn’t even notice it, and the unmade bed didn’t matter either, nor the many dirty teacups lined up on the table, for we fell on each other before we were even through the door.

I was out of practice and when she pressed my back against the wall and her lips against my mouth, I couldn’t breathe. Her hands were clamped around my neck, her knee pushed between my legs, beside me a book fell onto the floor, then she pulled me—I heard my shirt collar tear—into the middle of the room and shoved me so hard against the table that two of the empty cups were knocked off it. I threw my arms around her and held her tight against my body, partly out of desire and partly to prevent her from doing any more damage; for a few seconds that seem to me even now as being quite outside time, I saw her eyes a mere fraction of an inch from my own, and the smell of her surrounded me and our breath was a single breath. Perhaps this is the moment to pause and describe her.

She was half a head taller than me and had the broad shoulders of someone who grew up far from a city—quite different from my dark, fragile Hannah. Everything about her was massive; only her face was fine-featured, her brows delicately arched, her lips not too plump. Her breasts were larger and rounder than those of the distant woman I didn’t want to think about right now. Was she beautiful? I couldn’t have said, I still can’t say, she was just herself, and for that reason I desired her so much that I would have given a year of my life, her life, anybody’s life unhesitatingly for the privilege of touching her, and the moment when I actually did put my lips—she inhaled sharply—on her collarbone, my existence split into two halves: a before and an after, for all time.

An hour later we weren’t even tired. Perhaps it was even longer, perhaps much less: time seemed to race forward and wind back, it folded itself into bows and tangles like unspooling film and afterward I no longer knew whether this was a result of my disordered memory or reality itself had succumbed to confusion. In one of my recollections I’m stretched out while her body lifts itself above me, silvery white in the dull light from the window, her hands on my shoulders, her head thrown back; in another she’s lying under me, her hands digging into my back, her eyes turned away from me as my hand slides down her body to the place that makes her moan in despair or in pain. Or I in her arms or she in mine and the two of us half on the bed and half on the floor, so entwined that we could be one body or Siamese twins, her hand in my mouth and my arms around her hips—and at this precise moment Hannah’s face flashes in front of me then fades again. Then we’re on our feet and the back of my head bangs against the wall and I’m supporting her entire weight and the space around us disintegrates and then reassembles itself. Just at the moment when I succumb to gentle exhaustion, it all starts again and we clutch each other as if we were swimming in the Sargasso Sea because we don’t want it to end. But finally we become separate, and there’s her and there’s me and I would love to have listened as she started telling me her life story but I’m already drifting into a dreamless sleep.

In the early morning it began again. Was I the one who shook her awake, or did she drag me from my sleep? I don’t know, all I see is a clear, singularly pure sky in the window. Her hair on the white pillow had changed color in the dawn light and now was giving off red glints, but—she gave a sigh—we both sank back into sleep and the last dreams of the night that was ending.

When I woke up, she was fully dressed, murmured a goodbye, and was out the door; she had to get to work. I was late too. Without stopping for breakfast I ran to the car and while I was stuck as always in the 8 a.m. traffic, I called Hannah.

“Yesterday? Boring. The usual bunch of bureaucrats.”

Even as I said it, I wondered about two things. First that people, even those closest to us who know us best, don’t notice when we lie. The cliché holds the opposite, that you always betray yourself somehow and begin to stutter and sweat when you utter a falsehood, that you sound odd, that your voice changes. But friends, it’s not true. And the fact that it’s not true surprises nobody more than the liar. Besides, even if it were true, even if your voice tightened, even if we did sweat and blush and twitch, none of it would give us away because nobody notices. People are credulous, they don’t anticipate being deceived. Who truly listens to other people, who concentrates on the chatter of his nearest and dearest? Everyone’s mind is somewhere else.

“You poor thing. Those bores! I don’t know how you stand it.”

I detected no irony in her voice. And that was the other thing that surprised me: everyone makes fun of officials, bureaucrats, pen pushers, and paper tigers. But that’s us! Every one of us who’s an employee feels we’re an artist, an anarchist, a free spirit, a secret lunatic who recognizes neither norms nor constraints. Every one of us was once promised the kingdom of heaven and none of us wants to acknowledge that we’re part of these people we never wanted anything to do with, have been for years, that nothing about us is exceptional, and that it’s precisely the sense that we’re different that makes us so banal.

“And the children?” Now my voice sounded uncertain. Her saying “you poor thing” to me, just as Luzia said yesterday, hit me with unexpected force.

“Paul insulted his teacher. He’s been difficult recently. You need to talk to him on Saturday.”

“I can’t come home this Saturday. Unfortunately.”

“Oh.”

“Sunday.”

“Fine then, Sunday.”

I said something about appointments, things happening unexpectedly, and the appalling chaos in the office. I said something about a new colleague and incompetent workers. Then I had the feeling I was pushing it too far and I stopped talking.

My crew were waiting for me with the usual anxiety. I knew they hated each other and could understand it, that they hated me was in the nature of things, for I too felt a violent aversion for my boss, one Elmar Schmieding from Wattenwil, but why in the world were they afraid of me? I had never made trouble for anybody, and I didn’t care what they got up to. I know the system and I know that even medium-serious errors don’t cause fundamental upheavals, don’t change anything, simply aren’t important, they irritate this or that client, but we never hear anything about it and they don’t bother us.

So I greeted Schlick and Hauberlan, clapped Smetana on the shoulder, and called a loud “hello” a little emphatically into the room where Lobenmeier and Mollwitz sat opposite each other. Then I sat down at my desk and tried not to think about Luzia. Not about her skin, not about her nose, not about her toes, and absolutely not about her voice. There was a knock, and Mollwitz came in, sweating as usual, struggling under his grotesquely fat body, short, entirely lacking a neck, pathetic.

“Not now!” I said sharply. In a flash he disappeared again. I called Luzia. “Are you free on Saturday?”

“I thought you weren’t in the city on weekends.”

“How’s that?” I got a fright. How did she know that, what had I said to her? “I’m here!”

“Good,” she said. “So Saturday.”

Another knock, Lobenmeier came in to complain he could no longer put up with Mollwitz.

“Not now!”

He could, said Lobenmeier, put up with a great deal. But at a certain point, enough was enough. That he did absolutely nothing, well okay. That he spent his time posting like a maniac on Internet forums, well okay too. One could even get used to him cursing to himself all the time. But his lack of personal hygiene was more, or perhaps less, than could be tolerated in anyone.

“Lobenmeier,” I said gently. “Easy. I’ll talk to him and take care of it.”

I should have reprimanded him for speaking like that about his colleague, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, the more so since Mollwitz, particularly at the end of the day, really did smell appalling.

On Sunday at around midday I entered my row house in the town by the deep blue lake. Hannah was pale, she had the flu. Paul had shut himself in his room because of some fight, the little one was whining and upset, and I suddenly felt so dizzy it was as if I were drunk. I could still feel Luzia’s hands touching me all over my body.

“Till tomorrow?” she’d asked.

“Of course,” I’d replied without thinking.

I already knew I’d have to invent something to deceive her, but at the same time the lie seemed insignificant; the only things that did signify were this room and this bed and the woman lying next to me, and my other life, Hannah, the children, this house, were like some implausible fiction—just as now, when I sat down at the table after the long drive, pushed a rubber duck to one side, and looked at Hannah’s reddened eyes, Luzia became a distant ghost. I leaned back. The little one stuck her spoon into her mashed potatoes, then smeared the yellow mess all over her face. The phone in my pocket vibrated. A message. Luzia wanted to see me, right away.

“Now what?” asked Hannah. “Not on a Sunday, please.”

“They’re so incompetent,” I said, thumb-clicking: office emergency, colleague, death. I pressed Send and had no sense, to my own amazement, that I’d lied—it was as if I really had left another me back there, who was now setting off to the home of the victim: Hauberlan or Mollwitz? Maybe Mollwitz would be better. I nodded in a preoccupied way and left the room to have a serious talk with Paul. After that I’d send Luzia a message describing how I’d arrived in the dead man’s apartment and forced myself to be calm and make the first arrangements. Not too many specifics, just the main outlines, plus two or three well-observed details: a door half off its hinges, a cat searching vainly for its little bowl of milk, the label on a bottle of pills. How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space existed before we had little walkie-talkies and wrote letters that arrived in the same second they were dispatched.

Deep in thought, I switched off the phone in case it suddenly rang. No reception, I’d say, it was always plausible; and God knows network outages were always happening, I knew this, it was my job, my expertise. Then I made a fist, banged on Paul’s door, and yelled, “Open Up, Young Man!”

How long can it keep going? I would have said three weeks, maybe a month of danger, freedom, and playing a double game. But the month passed, more weeks went by, and I still wasn’t unmasked.

How did it happen in the old days? How did you lie and deceive, how did you have affairs, how did you get away and manipulate and organize your secret activities without the help of ultra-sophisticated technology? I had lived in those times. Yet I could no longer imagine it.

I sent Hannah messages supposedly emanating from Paris and Madrid, Berlin, Chicago, and even, one memorable day, Caracas: I described air yellow with pollution and streets crawling with cars in a hectically charged paragraph which I composed on my laptop in Luzia’s kitchen while she stood barefoot and in panties in front of the stove and the autumn rain drummed its fingers against the glass. She dropped a cup of coffee, shards exploded all over the floor, the black liquid formed a Rorschach image.

“What are you writing?”

“An audit report for Longrolf.”

And when I told her about poor Longrolf (three children, four wives, alcohol problems, I was now a habitual liar and invented things for no reason at all), I saw myself four days later in my dining room with the little one crawling around on the carpet while Hannah organized holiday photos on the PC which I never used for safety reasons, pictures of the four of us on some overcast beach—having to write Luzia a report on my meeting with the aforesaid Longrolf: the dreariness of the corporate floor, the interoffice intrigues, Longrolf’s look of perpetual malice, and Smetana’s porcine face, the sheer misery of the whole thing and oh my darling I wish I were back with you. After which I’d slip out to the front of the house (“I’m taking out the garbage!”) to prop myself against the wall in the lee of the wind and use my cell phone to call her and tell her how I’d managed to sneak out into the stairwell for a moment just to hear her voice.

A lie? Of course, but hadn’t I truly been thinking about her all the time, wasn’t I eating my heart out with longing to be near her, while I played with the children or had the same old conversation with Hannah about taxes and the water bill and kindergarten and the mortgage, wasn’t I obsessing about her body, her face, and her slightly hoarse voice? What difference did it make whether it was Longrolf who was keeping me away from her or a more or less alienated companion with two noisy children who regarded me as a stranger, and whose existence for as long as I was with them struck me as the product of some confused dream? And conversely, when I locked myself in Luzia’s bathroom to run the taps while I talked to Hannah and then the boy (“That noise? It’s a bad connection!”), my distant family seemed closer and more dear to me than ever, and Luzia out there in bed a sudden weighty encumbrance like the Congress I’d just claimed to be attending on the phone. I loved them both! And most of all I always loved the one I wasn’t with at that moment, the one I couldn’t be with, from whom the other one was keeping me separate.

I began to wonder if I was crazy. I woke up in the middle of the night, listened to the breathing of the woman next to me, and wondered for several anxious seconds not so much which one she was, but who I was at this moment and what labyrinth I’d strayed into. Only one step at a time, none of them a large step, none of them difficult, but without realizing it I’d gone so far into it that I could no longer see the way out. I closed my eyes and lay still and surrendered to the cold rush of panic. But when day dawned and I got up and donned each of my roles as if I had no other, everything seemed easy and almost back to normal again.

. . .

Two days before the Congress of European Telecommunications Providers, I sat in my office on the phone with the babysitter we’d arranged for. Hannah and I wanted to go together, finally we were making time for each other. My presentation was to be short and didn’t require any preparation, and the hotel promised luxury and a spa. As I hung up, I saw that an e-mail had just arrived from Luzia. Just one line: your congress. I’m coming too.

I rubbed my eyes and thought, as I had every hour of every day, that sooner or later everything was going to explode and a flaming catastrophe was bearing down on me.

“Better not,” I wrote, “a lot of work, dreadful people.”

That’s when I realized.

If Luzia knew about the Congress, for I had said nothing about it, that meant she knew someone who was also going to be there. Then I couldn’t go with Hannah; far too big a risk that Luzia would hear about it.

And conversely. What if I took Luzia? Hannah didn’t know many of my colleagues. She almost never came to this city, and my job had never interested her. But the risk was too great. For a moment I hated both of them.

I called Hannah.

“Oh, what a pity!” She sounded as if her mind were elsewhere, something was preoccupying her completely. I saw her in front of me: buried in a book, eyes bright but dreaming, and the situation—that I wasn’t there with her, that I had another woman, that nothing was the way it was supposed to be—brought tears to my eyes.

“It’s not going to work,” I said. “Have to stay. Too much going on in the office.”

“Whatever you think.”

“Another time, yes? Soon.”

She cleared her throat distractedly. In the background I heard the burble of music on the radio. “Yes, yes, fine.”

Luzia’s reply popped up on my screen: ridiculous, it’s going to be fun. I need to get out from time to time as well. If you’re going, I’m going too. End of discussion!

“Don’t be sad,” I said.

“I understand,” said Hannah. “I understand.”

I hung up. With Luzia it was going to be more difficult, because she was always wanting to know things about my work. Why, when I didn’t want to know them myself! But the department had to be represented there: if I went alone, Luzia would come, if I went with Luzia, Hannah would hear about it, if I went with Hannah, Luzia would hear about it; there was only one answer. I summoned Lobenmeier.

Impossible, he said. Trip to Paris. Long planned. Wife’s idea. Wedding anniversary.

I called for Schlick.

Impossible! Parents, birthday, big party, only son, had to be there. Besides which, family farm. Outbreak of foot-and-mouth just diagnosed.

I didn’t get the connection, but I sighed and let it go, and called Hauberlan, who couldn’t because he’d booked a nonrefundable cruise to the Hebrides. Smetana was off sick, and my secretary, whom I’d have drafted in desperation, had a long-standing commitment to the National Paintball Championships in a village in Lower Saxony. In no circumstances could she stand in for me. So there was no avoiding it. There was only one last possibility.

Can’t do it, I wrote. Have to send Mollwitz. He has friends in Corporate, he’s become too influential. I had trouble typing, my hands were shaking—with agitation, naturally, but also out of fury with Mollwitz and his intrigues. So sorry.

Mollwitz, she replied at once. Thought he was dead.

Oh God. Breathe calmly, I thought, calmly. When in doubt, flee forward. That was another guy with the same name. Strange coincidence. I looked up. Mollwitz was standing in the door. “You’ve made it!” I told him authoritatively. “You’re leaving tomorrow.”

He was sweating more than ever. His little eyes twitched uneasily. He seemed to have put on even more weight recently.

“Don’t pretend to be surprised. You’re going to represent the department at the Congress. Well played, neatly done, I congratulate you.”

Mollwitz panted. Tomorrow, he said quietly, wasn’t so good. He had a lot to do. He didn’t like traveling. He really did smack his lips when he talked!

“Let’s not exaggerate. You know you want to go, I know you want to go, and on the floor above”—I raised my forefinger—“they know too. You’ll go far, my friend.”

He gave me a pleading look, then decamped. I imagined him next door, back sitting at his desk like a big toad, cursing quietly, and posting online somewhere.

I called Luzia.

It wasn’t so bad, she said immediately, it didn’t matter, I shouldn’t take it to heart.

I nodded silently, already feeling better. She was so good at consoling me.

When Luzia called to tell me she was pregnant, I was at the open-air pool with the children. The sun was playing on the trembling surface of the water, its reflections cut down deep, the whole world seemed shot through with light. Children shrieking, water splashing, the smell of coconut oil, chlorine, and grass.

“What?” I lifted my hand to my brow, but my arm was moving with a delayed action and my fingers seemed to be wrapped in cotton wool. My knees went so weak that I had to sit down. A fat little girl came trotting up, bumped into me, fell over, and began to cry. I blinked. “That’s wonderful,” I heard myself say.

“Really?” She didn’t seem to completely believe me and I didn’t quite believe myself either. And yet: why did I feel such a surge of joy? A child—my first! I had never felt so strongly that I was made up of two people, or rather that I had split one and the same life into two different variants. Over there, on the other side of the pool, my daughter was crawling across the grass. Farther in the distance my son was leaning in what was meant to be a casual pose, hoping I couldn’t see him and talking to two girls his own age.

“I don’t know if I’ll be a good father,” I said quietly. I stopped, I was finding it hard to speak. “I’ll try!”

“You’re wonderful! You know, back then when … where are you, actually, there’s an awful lot of noise!”

“On the street. Not so far from your office. I wish I could come and see you …”

“So do it!”

“… but I can’t. An appointment.”

“Back then, when I got to know you. I’d never have believed it! You were like someone under a deadweight and at the same time … how can I put it? Someone forcing himself to stand upright at all times—I found it hard to believe you.” She laughed. “I thought you weren’t being honest.”

“Strange.” My daughter was looking for the edge of the pool. I stood up.

“If anyone had told me back then that it would be you of all people I …”

The little one was too near the water. “Can I call you back?” I hurried over toward her.

“But why do you think …”

I pressed the disconnect button and began to run. Sharp blades of grass prickled my naked feet. I hurdled two children who were lying there, dodged a dog, pushed a woman aside, and caught my daughter three feet from the water. She looked at me, puzzled, thought for a moment, and began to cry. I lifted her up and whispered soothing nonsense in her ear. I’ll call later, I thumb-clicked on my phone. Subway, lousy reception. I was about to send it, but then added I’m so happy! I looked at my daughter’s face, and once again was struck by how she was looking more like Hannah with every month that passed. I blew the hair off her forehead, she giggled softly; she’d already forgotten she’d just been crying. I hit Send.

Mollwitz was in a complete state of shock when he got back. He was muttering to himself, was almost un-talkable-to and didn’t want to say anything about what had gone on.

Sooner or later, said Hauberlan, it had to happen.

His presentation had been a disaster, said Schlick. Everyone was talking about it. Really embarrassing for the department.

And there was worse, said Lobenmeier. Apparently he’d forced his way into a hotel room and …

“Everyone makes mistakes,” I said, and they went quiet. It suited them that nothing interested me anymore. I had lost weight and even the classics no longer held my attention, Sallust seemed verbose, Cicero empty, for neither of them addressed the question that preoccupied me to the exclusion of all else, making my mind turn in circles the way water drives a millstone—wasn’t it possible to have two houses, two lives, two families, one there, one here, a me in this town and a me in the other one, and two women, each of them as close to me as if she were the only one? It was only a matter of organization, of train timetables and airline schedules, of cleverly judged e-mails and a little foresight in making arrangements. Of course it could all collapse, but it could also … yes, it could work! For a short while. Or maybe longer.

The double life: the redoubling of life. Only a short time ago I was merely a depressed head of department. How had I come to the point where I suddenly understood them: the bogeymen portrayed in the tabloids, all the people who had secrets just because you can’t live without them, and absolute transparency means death, and a single existence is not enough for human beings.

“What?” I jumped. Lobenmeier was standing in front of me. Behind him, Schlick. I hadn’t heard them coming. Then I realized that it had happened the other way round. The others had left the room and only these two had stayed behind.

Schlick began to talk in a low voice. Clearly something really terrible had happened: a memo from Security had informed us that several hundred phone numbers in the databank had been given a wrong date for general availability, so there was a danger that although they were already in use, they’d be assigned to new customers. Lobenmeier had forwarded it to Mollwitz, who had set it aside because, as they discovered subsequently, he was absolutely set on writing a post for SpottheStars first.

“For what?”

Didn’t matter, said Lobenmeier, not important right now. Anyhow, that’s what had happened and several dozen new customers had been given already-assigned numbers. The press had got hold of it and at least two claims for commercial damages had already been filed. The main error came from our department.

The screen on my cell phone lit up. Hannah’s name, and underneath: We’re coming to visit you! My pulse began to race.

“We’ll talk about this later!” I got to my feet.

He was sorry, said Lobenmeier, but the situation was too serious. It could—

Would, said Schlick.

Lobenmeier nodded. Would cost several people their jobs.

I pressed several buttons, but there were no messages. Could I have dreamed it? Had I erased it by mistake? I had to be sure, it was critical that I not make a mistake.

“Be right back,” I cried, and ran out down the corridor to the elevator, which took me noisily downstairs, then through the main hall and into the street. That’s it, I thought, that’s what’s happening to me. You don’t founder because of circumstances, you don’t founder because of bad luck, you founder because of your nerves. You founder because you can’t take the pressure. That’s how, sooner or later, the truth comes out. I turned around slowly. I noticed that passersby were looking in my direction, that a child on the other side of the street was pointing at me, only to be dragged along by its mother. Pull yourself together, I thought, just pull yourself together, if you don’t give up it can work, but you have to pull yourself together. I forced myself to stand there calmly. I glanced at my watch and tried to look like someone mentally checking the day’s appointments. Turn around, I told myself, and go back inside. Get in the elevator. They’re waiting for you. Sit down behind your desk. Save what can be saved. Do something—defend yourself, don’t run away. You’re not going to fall apart. Not yet.

“A problem, dear sir?”

Standing next to me was a startlingly thin man with greasy hair, horn-rim glasses, and a bright red cap.

“Excuse me?”

“Life is hard?” he said with an ingratiating smile. It sounded more like a question than a statement. “Every decision is hard, even organizing the everyday things is so complicated that it can drive even the strongest of us mad. You agree, dear sir?”

“What?”

“So many things are not subject to our will, but some things can be made a little easier. I have a taxi at my disposal.” He pointed to a black Mercedes standing next to us with the door open. “And here’s my suggestion: if there’s someone you would like to see in the next hour, call them. Life is over so quickly. That’s what these little phones are for, that’s why we have all that electrical gadgetry in our pockets. Don’t you agree, dear sir?”

I didn’t understand what he wanted from me. His appearance was repulsive, but his words had a calming effect on me. “That’s a taxi?”

“Dear sir, get in, give me the address, and, you’ll see, it’ll become one.”

I hesitated, but then nodded and let myself sink into the soft leather of the backseat. He got behind the wheel, took some time adjusting the driver’s seat, as if this were not the car he’d come in, repositioned the rearview mirror, and slowly fingered the ignition. “Your address,” he said softly. “Please. I know many things but not everything.”

I gave it to him.

“We’ll be there in a flash.” He turned on the engine and steered out into the traffic. “Are you sure you want to go home? Not somewhere else? No one you’d like to visit?”

I shook my head, pulled out my phone, and dialed Luzia’s number. “Come to me!”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“What are you doing here anyway? I thought you had to be in Zurich for the whole week! Did something happen?”

I rubbed my forehead. Right, I had said that, so that I could get away the next day and spend the weekend with Hannah. “It didn’t come off.”

“Mollwitz again?”

“Mollwitz again.”

“I’m on my way.”

I disconnected and stared at the phone’s tiny screen. And if Hannah really was on her way here? Then I’d done the exact wrong thing, and Luzia couldn’t come anywhere near my apartment. I’d have to call right away—but which one of them? Why were things slipping away from me already? The thin man stared at me in the rearview mirror. I felt faint, and closed my eyes.

“You’re asking yourself why so many things aren’t doable, dear sir? Because a man wishes to be many things. In the literal sense of the word. He wishes to be multiple. Diverse. He’d like to have several lives. But only superficially, not deep down. The ultimate aspiration, dear friend, is to become one. One with oneself, one with the universe.”

I opened my eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t say a word. And if I had, it wouldn’t be anything you don’t already know.”

“Is this even your car?”

“Should that really be your most pressing concern?”

I fell silent until he halted outside my apartment building. For some reason I’d assumed he wouldn’t take any money, but he named a wildly high fare. I paid and got out; when I looked back, the car was already gone.

Luzia was waiting in the corridor outside the door of my apartment. She must have set off immediately. You could really rely on her. “What is it?” she asked. “What?” She was looking at me attentively.

I opened my mouth and shut it again.

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

I didn’t move. We were still standing in the corridor. I took a deep breath and didn’t say a thing.

We went inside. Through the hallway, through my untidy living room, and then, as always, into the bedroom.

Seconds later we were lying there and I felt the firmness of her limbs, saw close up the darkness of her eyes. Her hands fumbled with my belt, my hands slid under her blouse, all of their own accord, without hesitation or reflection, it seemed to happen without our intervention. Then the covers and the nakedness and the panting and her strong hands, her clutching me and me clutching her and then we were already apart again, lying exhausted beside each other, out of breath. There was a thin coating of sweat on her skin. The sight made me melt, to such a degree that I was on the point of saying things that I would have needed to take back a few minutes later. Was she really carrying my child? But I already had two, and they were difficult and disconcerting enough, they looked at me suspiciously and asked questions to which I had no answers, and I wasn’t a good father to them.

“It can’t go on like this,” she said.

My stomach went into spasm. “What?”

“This Mollwitz. You’re too nice. You have to do something.”

I slid my hand under her neck. How soft her hair was. The golden fuzz on her arms. The soft curve of her breast. I would have done anything for her and abandoned anything.

Anything?

Anything except the other one who would call me in a few minutes or perhaps next week or next month or sometime this year at the most inconvenient moment, to tell me that she was coming for a surprise visit and was already in town, on my street or already in the building, on the stairs, right in front of my door. If this were a story, I thought, there would be no point in delaying things, and it would happen right now.

The doorbell rang. I sat up with a jerk.

“What is it?” asked Luzia.

“The bell.”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

I stroked her head in silence. I can still confess everything, I thought, I haven’t yet been convicted of anything. Would you forgive me? But I knew she wouldn’t.

Without pulling on my clothes, I went out into the hallway. If I opened the door now and Hannah was standing outside, what should I do? Maybe there was a way to fake my way out of it. In films and stage farces there’s always one, just as everything looks hopeless. The leading actors find the most brilliant subterfuges, open and slam doors, push one woman into one room and the other into another, they maneuver whole groups of people around the smallest spaces without anyone bumping into anyone else. An entire genre specialized in nothing else. Anyone with sufficient determination could surely do the same thing. Almost anything could be accomplished with the necessary strength of mind. Even a double life. But who has it, I asked myself as I stood there naked in the hallway; who has that kind of strength?

I reached for the handle. Even the certainty that there’s absolutely nothing now between you and catastrophe gives a certain assurance. For one last moment I hesitated. Why not have an even bigger scene, an even more powerful effect? If Hannah was standing outside, why not the children too, why not my parents as well, come of their own accord from their dismal retirement home, and while we were at it, why not Lobenmeier, Hauberlan, and Longrolf from Accounting, why not Mollwitz too; all come to see me without my clothes on, without secrets, pretences, illusions, and deceptions, just as I really was.

“Come in.” I opened the door. “Come in, everyone!”