Night Work

24

Jonas awoke with a taste of blood in his mouth. He was feeling simultaneously drunk and hung over, and his head seemed to be floating above him.

Opening his eyes, he ran his tongue over the row of teeth in his upper jaw. The tooth that had tortured him yesterday had been replaced by an enormous, yawning gap. It wasn’t just the bad tooth that was missing; its immediate neighbours had gone too. The taste of blood intensified when he put pressure on the gum.

He simply lay there for a while. The images that swam through his head were too potent and feverish to be pinned down. Questions, again and again: When? How?

He sat up. It was midday. The pillow was sodden with blood. The camera was standing where he had set it up before going to sleep. The bedroom displayed no noticeable changes. He felt his cheek. It was swollen.

He staggered and almost fell when climbing into his trousers. What was the matter with him? He felt as if he’d been on a bender.

There were some half-obliterated spots of blood on the edge of the bath. The waste bin contained nothing that hadn’t been there the previous day, and he noticed nothing out of the ordinary in the kitchen. Feeling dizzy, he sat down and tried to collect his thoughts, work out what was happening to him. He was completely drunk, no doubt about it.

He cocked his shotgun and went out into the street. The Mercedes was parked behind the Toyota, the Toyota behind the truck. The kilometre readings of all three vehicles were the same as they had been the night before.

When he went to rewind the tape he found that it had disappeared. He looked everywhere. It had gone.

He unearthed a box of Diclofenac in the medicine cabinet. The accompanying leaflet stated that it was anti-inflammatory and analgesic. It was inadvisable to take more than three tablets a day. He squeezed two out of their blister pack and washed them down with tap water, then followed them up with an Alka-Seltzer. It was years since he’d had such a hangover. He changed the pillow case and got back into bed.

Two hours later his raw gum began to ache again. He took another two Diclofenac, then heated up a tin of beef stew. He was more than once on the point of hurling his plate into the backyard, but he forced himself to eat everything up.

He buried his face in his hands after swallowing the last mouthful and gave an involuntary belch, sweating and panting in his efforts to keep the food down. He remained like that for several minutes. Then he felt better.

He fished a card out of his pocket.

Get out, it read.

*

Jonas drove through the streets wearing his blinkered ski goggles, which were a tight fit. He tried to distract himself as he followed the instructions of the computerised voice, so as not to register the route he was taking.

All at once he wondered if he was awake. He wasn’t sure that what he was thinking and feeling at this moment was real. Was he really here? This steering wheel, this accelerator, this gear lever, were they a part of reality? This brightness he saw through the slit in the goggles, was it the real world?

He heard a scraping sound. The car went jolting over the kerb. He braked and drove on more slowly. He felt tempted to tear off the goggles but resisted the impulse.

‘Turn right at the next intersection.’

A beep. He turned right and accelerated away.

He had read somewhere that your eyes initially saw everything inverted by 180 degrees. That they transmitted an upside-down image of the world to the brain. But because the brain knew that people didn’t walk around on their heads and mountains were broader at the base than the summit, it turned the image round. Your eyes deceived you, in a sense, and your brain acted as a corrective. Whether true or not, this posed an important question: how could he be certain that what his eyes were seeing was genuinely there?

He was really just a lump of flesh groping its way through the world. His knowledge of that world derived mainly from his eyes. They enabled him to get his bearings, make decisions, avoid collisions. But nothing and no one could guarantee that they told him the truth. Colour blindness was just one harmless example of this potential untruthfulness. The world could look like this or differently. To him it existed in only one possible form, the one allowed by his eyes. His self was a blind thing in a cage. It was all that his skin contained. His eyes formed part of this — or not, as the case might be.

The disembodied voice announced that he had reached the required destination. He pulled off his goggles.

The suburbs. Some outlying district, at all events. Expensive cars parked alongside garden fences. Detached houses with satellite dishes, balconies with ornamental plants. Jonas saw a broken branch lying in the roadway at the next intersection.

The street looked familiar. He checked the address. Something flashed through his mind, but he couldn’t pin it down. It wasn’t until he got out that the memory resurfaced: the suburban house he was standing outside was only 100 metres from the one he’d searched weeks ago. The one to which he’d been directed by his own phone messages, and in which he’d shied away from entering a particular room.

He read the name on the garden gate: Dr August Lom. He rang the bell, lifted the latch. The gate swung open with a rattling sound.

Jonas had a momentary vision of a shaggy beast cavorting around the garden on the far side of the house, its long tongue slapping each ear in turn as it lashed to and fro. The creature was only waiting for him to dare to go in.

Outside the front door, on which a wreath woven from sprigs of fir was hanging, he unslung his shotgun, listening intently. He cocked the weapon and concentrated.

Something told him that he’d reached a dead end.

He tried the door. Locked. He smashed a window. The burglar alarm went off. He registered it for a second, no longer, then it receded into the background. The moment his feet touched the carpet in the hallway, he heard nothing, smelt nothing. He set off.

A room. Furniture, a TV, pictures.

Another room. More furniture. House plants. Strangely, puzzlingly untidy.

The next room. Gym mats, a punchball, a home trainer.

And the next. Shower, bathtub, clothes horse.

He searched the place with a firm gaze and brisk movements, turned off the burglar alarm, tramped across carpeted floors, felt things, went down into the basement and up into the attic. Now and then a lucid part of his brain warned him to retract his hand or turn on his heel.

By the time he was back outside and gradually coming to his senses, he felt convinced that nothing in the house could be of any help to him. And that was all he’d wanted to know.

He smelt of sweat, he noticed as he got back into the car. It was the acrid smell he gave off when very tense. That annoyed him. There was no need to be scared, he’d proved it that night at Kanzelstein.

He was briefly tempted to put on the blinkered goggles and go back inside. Without his gun, what’s more.

‘No way,’ he said, and turned the car.

*

He was gazing at the cathedral from the terrace of the Sky Bar. His coffee cup stood untouched on the table beside him. Without really thinking, he swallowed two Diclofenac. Something was bothering him. It was minutes before he realised that they’d stuck in his throat. He washed them down with some water.

He wandered around the terrace, flapping his arms for warmth. Spat over the balustrade and saw the spittle splash-land on the canopy below.

Good. The time had come. He must leave. Preferably today. That was asking too much, but he might have completed all his preparations by tomorrow.

By a conservative estimate, at least a third of the world lay beyond his reach. He could drive to Berlin, Paris, Prague or Moscow. He could inspect the Great Wall of China. The route to the Saudi Arabian oilfields lay open to him. He could visit Base Camp below Mount Everest if he could get used to the altitude and raise enough energy for a two-week trek on foot. What he could never get to was America. And Australia. And the Antarctic.

With a feeling of envy, he recalled his youthful dream. At some stage in his life, he had promised himself, he would stand amid the ice and touch the signpost reading Geographic South Pole. However he got there, whether with a traditional expedition of the kind that was seldom undertaken these days and would probably not accept him, or whether he landed in a chartered Russian military machine, he wanted to touch that signpost, shut his eyes and think of home. Of Marie doing the shopping at that moment, of his father playing chess in the park, of Martina rejecting a design at the office. Of the alarm clock ticking away in his flat. Unnoticed, because there was nobody there. It didn’t matter to the alarm clock whether Jonas was at the South Pole or in the kitchen next door. He wasn’t there. The alarm clock was all on its own.

To touch that signpost in a white wilderness. Not to go for a walk or a short trip by car, but to be fifteen hours by air from civilisation. That had been his dream. To go as far south as possible, to indulge his yearning for far-off places.

He would never see the Pole.

Jonas sat down again and put his feet up on the balustrade. He scanned the roofs below. How old were those houses? A century-and-a-half? Three centuries? And how many people had lived in them? The world changed little — the world he knew, at any rate. But it changed constantly and lastingly. Someone was born every second, someone died every second.

Austria. What was Austria? The people who lived there. The death of someone meant no essential change. Not, at least, from the country’s point of view, only from that of the person in question. And of their relations. Austria didn’t change much when someone died. But if you compared the Austria of a few weeks ago with Austria a century ago, you could hardly claim there had been no change. No one who had lived in those houses was still alive. All were dead. All had departed one by one. A big difference from their angle, none from that of the country.

‘Austria.’ ‘Germany.’ ‘The United States.’ ‘France.’

People lived in houses they’d inherited and walked streets paved by others long before them. Then they got into bed and died, as they had to. To make room for another ‘Austria’.

Everyone dies for himself alone. Statistics, fellow citizens, community, us, TV, football stadium, newspaper. Everyone read a certain writer in the paper. When he died, everyone read what his successor wrote. They all thought, ah, that’s that guy, he writes this and that. And when he died they’d say, ah, a new guy, he writes this. They’d go home, still a part of the whole. Lie in bed and die, and suddenly no longer be part of the whole. No longer members of the Alpine Association or the Academy of Sciences or the Union of Journalists or the local football club. No longer customers of the best hairdresser in town or patients of that nice lady doctor. No longer fellow citizens, just ‘the dead’.

It made a difference to the people who had disappeared. Or did it? Did it make a difference only to him, the one left behind?

*

Jonas emptied the back of the truck completely. He swept and scrubbed the interior until the metal floor and sides had almost regained their original colour. Then he lined the floor with self-adhesive, non-slip carpet tiles.

He trundled a three-piece suite and an additional sofa out of a furniture store on the Lerchenfelder Gürtel and manhandled them into the back of the truck. To these he added a massive coffee table, a scroll-fronted TV cabinet containing a TV and a video recorder, two standard lamps with broad bases, and an additional armchair. He put throws and cushions on the sofa and a bound stack of Mort & Phil comics beside it. He pushed a fridge up against the side and plugged the lead into a transformer he’d got from Machine Park South. He also took two generators.

He filled the fridge with mineral water, fruit juice, beer, lemonade, pickled gherkins and other things that tasted better chilled. Beside it he stacked crates of long-life milk, tinned food, vacuum-packed pumpernickel, biscuits, bags of flour and similar stuff, not forgetting such extras as salt, pepper and sugar, oil and vinegar.

More crates were needed. One for cutlery and crockery, another for batteries, a camping stove and cartridges, and several for the cameras he fetched from the Brigittenauer embankment. He unscrewed the tripods and laid them down wherever there was room on the floor. He stacked six-packs of mineral water along the sides.

He checked the stability of his load. Anything that threatened to fall over he secured with tape.

He chained the DS to the vertical load bars. To the horizontal bars on the opposite side he secured a Kawasaki Ninja with only 400 metres on the clock, which he wheeled straight out of the dealer’s showroom and onto the hoist. Last of all, having filled the Toyota’s tank as well, he drove it on board. He might have measured the available space with a ruler, it fitted so perfectly.

*

Jonas put his plate in the dishwasher and turned on the light. He went over to the window. The sun had sunk below the rooftops, the clouds were glowing in various shades of red. He cast a last glance at the truck standing ready below, then shut the window.

He had a feeling that the journey ahead of him was the prelude to a final act. Everything seemed so clear all of a sudden. Tomorrow he would set off in search of Marie. Then he would return here with or without her. Probably without her.