You

“Who is he?” asks Ruth.

“Who’s who?”

“The guy with the Jag.”

“Oh …”

Stink pulls a face as if she’s got a toothache.

“What’s up?” you want to know.

“Hey, hot mama, what’s up?” asks Ruth.

Even the pizza guy leans in curiously as if he knows what you’re talking about.

“I forgot to ask him his name,” Stink says, making the sort of big innocent eyes that people can only make if they know that innocence is a load of lies that would drop its pants for a measly slice of pizza.

You all walk down to the Lietzensee. The guys want to go to the park because they think that if the moon’s shining and you’re all sitting by the water it’ll be romantic and they might cop a feel. You let them believe that, because then they’ll shut their traps and try to behave properly.

By the shore you make a dip in the grass, scrunch up some paper, and lay dry twigs over it. Indi rolls the second joint of the evening, and then you are sitting there, blowing smoke at the mosquitoes and talking quietly as if you didn’t want to disturb the night. Jasper is playing some kind of racket through his phone, a dog barks from the opposite bank, and now it would be good if you could shut your eyes and go off on one of your blanks, because you don’t really want what’s going to happen next.

One of the guys spots it first.

“What’s up with Nessi?”

You look around. Nessi isn’t sitting with the rest of you anymore, she’s squatting down by the shore. And as you are looking, she slides silently into the water. Fully dressed, of course. The guys burst out laughing. You try to get up. Eric holds you back and asks if you’re about to go for a swim too, or what.

“Nessi!”

Stink runs to the shore, suddenly everybody’s at the shore and you’re alone sitting in the grass like a parcel that someone’s forgotten to send, and when you catch up with your girls at last, you see Nessi drifting in the middle of the lake with her arms spread. She’s just lying there playing dead, and the guys are calling out and calling her Loch Nessi, and you call her to come back, even from the hotel opposite someone calls out of a window, but Nessi doesn’t react.

“She’ll come back,” says Stink and points into the grass where Nessi has left her wallet and phone. “Someone who doesn’t want her phone to get wet is always going to come back.”

“I’m not going to collect her,” says Indi and spits into the water.

“I’d have been surprised,” says Stink.

The guys are sitting around the fire again. They’re only interested in whatever’s actually happening, and nothing’s happening on the Lietzensee right now. You girls keep standing by the shore and Ruth says Nessi must have had a row with Henrik, and you say Henrik’s an idiot, and Stink says what else is new, and adds, “The way Nessi’s behaving, she must be knocked up.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Your girls look at you in surprise.

“I really didn’t say that,” you add quickly.

“Oh, shit,” says Ruth.

“Oh, shit,” says Stink.

No one needs to point out that you’re one of the worst secret-keepers in the world.

“I really didn’t say that,” you repeat, and it sounds so lame that you can’t think of anything else to say for a while. You just stare at the Lietzensee and hope that Nessi will stay in the water for a bit longer.

II (#ulink_8e420fd8-c386-551d-a02e-3ac5f1ab7a79)

so you lost your trust,

and you never should have

Coldplay SEE YOU SOON

THE TRAVELER (#ulink_bfef8e14-b4be-55ad-8559-d0104ecc81b4)

The country heard nothing more about you for two years. You hadn’t disappeared, and you hadn’t gone into hiding. You’re not one of those people who have a second identity. Jekyll and Hyde are a nonsense as far as you’re concerned. You’ve returned to your life. Silently. There were eight hours omitted, eight hours when no one missed you.

Your life took its course.

In the morning you woke up and had breakfast. You were reliable at work. You had lunch with your colleagues and chatted. No shadow haunted your thoughts. You were you. On the weekends you did your family duties and visited your six-year-old son for a few hours. Your wife made lunch for you both and then tacitly handed you the bills. You parted in peace, no one mentioned divorce because no one wanted to take the last step. So every weekend you put the bills in your pocket, kissed the boy goodbye on the top of his head, and then drove back to your three-room apartment.

Some evenings you met friends or sat alone in front of the television and watched the world spinning increasingly out of control. You went on vacation, you set money aside and had two operations on your knee. You never thought about the winter two years ago and the traffic jam on the A4. You saw the reports and listened to the features on the radio. When there was a report on TV, you switched channels uninterested. You know what you’ve done. There’s no reason to go on worrying about it. You’re you. And after two years the Traveler is coming back.

It is October.

It is 1997.

It is night.

We’re in mid-autumn, and you can’t shake off the feeling that summer is refusing to go. The weather is mild. Storms rage on the weekend and it’s only at night that the temperature falls to below ten degrees. It feels like the last exhalation of summer.

You’ve been on the road for four hours and you want to stop at a rest area, but all the parking lots are full of semi-trailers so you drive on and turn on the indicator at the next gas station. Here again there’s hardly a free space. The semis with their trailers remind you of abandoned houses rolling across the country, never coming to rest. It’s still a hundred and twenty miles to your apartment. You aren’t one of those people who go to the edge and then collapse with exhaustion. Not you.

After you’ve driven past the gas pumps, you park in the shade of a trailer, get out and stretch. For a few minutes you stand motionless in the darkness listening to the ticking of the engine. In the distance there are footsteps, the click of nozzles, engines are started, the rushing sound of the highway. Then there’s a croak. You look around. On the other side of the parking lot a row of bare trees looms up into the night sky. A crow sits on one of the branches. It bobs up and down as if to draw attention to itself. At that moment you become aware that you’ve never seen a crow at night before. Seagulls, owls, sometimes even a hawk on a road sign, but never a crow. You tilt your head. The crow does the same and then looks to the side. You follow its gaze. Three hundred yards from the gas station there’s a motel. A red neon sign hangs over the entrance. A woman steps out. She walks to her car, gets in, and drives off.

You remember exactly what you were thinking.

You were thinking: Now there’s a free space.

Seven cameras at the gas station and about eight hundred cars that fit the time frame. The police checked all the number plates. A special commission was set up, and over the years that followed it was dealing only with this case. Overtime, frustration, suspicions, and a lot of idiots claiming it was them. The papers went mad, all other news paled. And they had nothing to offer the reader. Except the dead.

You walk over to the motel and step inside the foyer. You aren’t surprised that there is no one at reception. It’s late. Above the reception there is a black sign with a white arrow pointing to a bell. On the sign it says: Please ring.

You don’t ring.

A television flickers from a back room. You go into the room. A woman is sleeping on a fold-out sofa. She is covered to the neck by a woolen blanket. On the table in front of her there’s a plastic bowl containing a ready meal. The remains of peas and mashed potato. A bit of meat. And beside it a half-empty bottle of Fanta and an empty glass. You sit down in the armchair opposite the woman and relax. The murmur from the television, the sleep of the woman, the silence of the night. As you leave the room, you don’t turn the television off. The blanket has slipped; you lay it carefully around the woman’s body and tuck it in at the ends.

The motel has two upper floors, each with sixteen rooms; there are ten rooms on the first floor. You look at the plan. Under the counter at reception you find a box. There are three skeleton keys in the box.

You go up the stairs.