Splinter

5

Seen through the Maybach’s tinted windows, the buildings that slid silently past them looked unreal, like the façades of a film set. In the luxury limousine’s soundproofed interior it was hard to imagine that real people actually lived behind those grimy walls, and that the pedestrians on the pavements weren’t extras, not the old man searching dustbins for bottles with a deposit on them, nor the gang of truants overturning a bag-woman’s stolen supermarket trolley. There were also some wholly unremarkable individuals battling their way through the rain, of course, but even they seemed to be living in a lost, parallel world from which Marc had escaped since taking his place in the stranger’s car.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, leaning forward. The hydraulic cushions of the ergonomically designed leather seat promptly adjusted themselves to his new position. In lieu of a reply, the elderly man handed him a business card. It was unusually thick, about as thick as a folded banknote. Marc could have sworn it would smell of some rare wood if he sniffed it.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ the stranger asked with another good-natured smile.

‘Professor Patrick Bleibtreu?’ Marc murmured to himself, running a fingertip over the black engraved lettering on the linen card. ‘Do we know each other?’

‘You emailed my institute about two weeks ago.’

‘Just a minute…’ Turning the card over, Marc recognized the clinic’s logo. Some ingenious commercial artist had woven the professor’s initials into a figure eight lying on its side – the infinity symbol.

‘That advert… the one in the Spiegel… it was yours?’

Bleibtreu inclined his head. He opened the armrest beside him and took out a magazine. ‘We advertise in Focus, Stern and Spiegel. I think you replied to this one.’

Marc nodded as the old man handed him the open magazine. It was pure chance that the advertisement had caught his eye while he was leafing through it. He never read news magazines as a rule, let alone adverts. Ever since he’d had to have his dressing changed twice a week, however, he’d been obliged to kill a lot of time with the old illustrateds in the waiting area of his father-in-law’s hospital.

‘Learn to forget…’ he read out. The headline had exerted a magnetic attraction on him.

Have you experienced a severe trauma, and would you like to erase it from your memory? If so, email us. The Bleibtreu Psychiatric Clinic is seeking applicants to take part in a clinical trial under medical supervision.

‘Why didn’t you respond to our calls?’ the professor asked.

Marc briefly rubbed his ears, which were burning in that familiar, agonizing way as they gradually thawed out. So that accounted for all the calls from unknown numbers he’d left unanswered over the last few days.

‘I never respond to unsolicited calls,’ he said. ‘And, to be frank, I never get into strangers’ cars either.’

‘Why make an exception this time?’

‘It’s drier in here.’

Marc sat back and pointed to the side window. The airstream was dragging plump raindrops across the water-repellent surface of the glass.

‘Does the boss always attend to new patients in person?’

‘Only when they’re candidates as promising as yourself.’

‘Promising in what respect?’

‘Conducive to the success of our experiment.’

The professor retrieved the magazine and put it back in the central console.

‘I’ll be absolutely honest with you, Marc. May I call you that?’ His gaze fastened on Marc’s trainers and travelled upwards to the knee that was showing through his threadbare jeans. ‘You don’t look like someone who stands on ceremony.’

Marc shrugged. ‘What does this experiment entail?’

‘The Bleibtreu Clinic is a world leader in the field of personal memory research.’

The professor crossed his legs. His pinstriped trouser leg rode up over one sock to reveal the beginnings of a hairy shin.

‘In recent decades, hundreds of millions in research funds have been invested in discovering how the human brain works. In simple terms, the main focus has been on questions relating to the subject of “learning”. Hordes of researchers were and still are obsessed with the idea of using the brain’s capacity more efficiently.’

Bleibtreu tapped his forehead.

‘There has never been a finer high-powered computer than the one in here. Theoretically, anyone is capable of reeling off all the numbers in a telephone directory after a single reading. The ability to form synapses, thereby increasing our cerebral storage capacity to an almost infinite extent, is not a utopian dream. In my opinion, however, all these lines of research have been heading in the wrong direction.’

‘And I suspect you’re going to tell me why.’

The invisible chauffeur behind the opaque glass partition was negotiating a roundabout.

‘Our problem is not that we learn too little. On the contrary, our problem is forgetting.’

Marc’s hand strayed to the plaster on the neck. Becoming aware of this involuntary movement, he quickly withdrew it.

‘According to the latest statistics,’ said Bleibtreu, ‘one child in four is abused and one woman in three sexually harassed or raped in the course of their lives. There are few people on earth who have not been victims of crime at least once, and half of them have needed some form of psychological therapy thereafter, at least in the short term. But irreparable scars are often inflicted on our mental “tissue”, not only by crime but by numerous everyday experiences. From the psychological aspect, for instance, lovesickness possesses an almost greater negative intensity than the loss of a person close to us.’

‘Sounds as if this isn’t the first time you’ve delivered this lecture,’ Marc interjected.

Bleibtreu removed a dark-blue signet ring from his finger and transferred it to the other hand. He smiled.

‘Up to now,’ he said, ‘psychoanalysis has tended to unearth suppressed memories. Our research proceeds in the diametrically opposite direction.’

‘You help people to forget.’

‘Precisely. We erase negative thoughts from our patients’ consciousness. Permanently.’

That sounds alarming, thought Marc. Having guessed that the experiment would amount to something of the kind, he’d felt annoyed by his tipsy response soon after sending off the email. He would never have replied to the Bleibtreu Clinic’s dubious advertisement had he been sober, but that night he’d made a disastrous mistake and inadvertently told a cabby to take him to his old address. He had suddenly found himself back outside the little house that still looked as if the door would burst open at any moment and a barefoot, laughing Sandra come running out to meet him.

It was the ‘For Sale’ sign outside that had brought him face to face with his loss. He had turned away at once and run back down the street where local children played in the road in summer and pets dozed on dustbins because no one there, neither man nor beast, feared the advent of evil. He had run faster and faster, back into his new, worthless existence – back to the bachelor flat in Schöneberg into which he’d moved after being discharged from hospital. But he hadn’t run fast enough to escape from all the memories pursuing him. Their first kiss at the age of seventeen; Sandra’s laughter when she gave away the plot of a film before he guessed it himself; her look of disbelief when he told her how lovely she was; their tears when the pregnancy test turned out positive; and, finally, the advertisement he’d just reread.

Learn to forget…

He expelled a deep breath and strove to concentrate on the present.

‘The advantages of deliberately induced amnesia are immense. A man who has accidentally run over a child will never again be haunted by terrible visions of the paramedics failing to resuscitate it. A mother won’t spend the rest of her life waiting in vain for her eleven-year-old son to come home from swimming in the lake.’

Smoothly though the chauffeur braked, there was a faint clink from the cut-glass tumblers in the limo’s walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet.

‘The world’s intelligence services are interested in our findings, I fully admit. From now on, there’ll be no need to eliminate agents who threaten to defect to the enemy, taking all their knowledge with them. We’ll simply erase the vital information from their minds.’

‘Is that why you’re rolling in money, because you’re funded by the military?’

‘It’s a billion-dollar business, I grant you, and of unparalleled importance to the immediate future. But the pharmaceutical industry has always been like that. It may make a few people wealthy, but it also makes a lot of people healthy or even happy.’

Bleibtreu stared at Marc with the piercing intensity of an interrogator. ‘We’re still at the very beginning, Marc. We’re pioneers – that’s why we’re looking for people like you. Guinea pigs who have had to cope with traumata as severe as yours.’

Marc swallowed hard. He was feeling just as he had six weeks ago, when his father-in-law brought the terrible news to his bedside.

‘She didn’t make it, Luke…’

‘Just think,’ Bleibtreu told him. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if you could wake up in the mornings without your first thought being of your dead wife? Of the baby that never saw the light? You wouldn’t feel guilty any more because you wouldn’t know you’d driven the car into a tree. You’d be able to go back to work, socialize with friends and laugh your head off at some comedy film because the splinter in your neck wouldn’t be a perpetual reminder that you escaped with a scratch whereas Sandra was hurled though the windscreen and bled to death at the crash scene.’

Marc ostentatiously unbuckled his seatbelt and reached for the door handle.

‘Kindly let me out.’

‘But Marc…’

‘At once!’

Very gently, Bleibtreu put a hand on his knee. ‘I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I was merely repeating what you yourself wrote in your email to us.’

‘I was at the end of my tether.’

‘You still are. I heard you at the swimming pool. You said you were contemplating suicide.’

Bleibtreu removed his hand, but Marc could still feel its weight on his knee.

‘I can offer you something better.’

The glasses clinked again, like a couple of ghosts derisively toasting each other. Marc noticed only now that his back was wet with sweat despite the pleasant temperature in the car’s air-conditioned interior. Nervously, he fingered the dressing on his neck. This time he left his hand on the plaster over the itching wound.

‘Speaking purely hypothetically,’ he said in a hoarse voice, ‘this experiment of yours – what form would it take?’