There were also those who needed a challenge, though, so Brenner said, alas, there’s nothing on the other side, because with them it got you farther than if you guaranteed them a heaven.
And believe it or not, just a few weeks earlier, he’d tried that route with Natalie. But alas, just the painful realization that the old recipes weren’t working so well anymore. He thought he could provoke her with a few quotes from Knoll’s brochure, i.e., when does life begin? He spited himself nicely with that one, though, and he came to understand right away that Natalie stood head and shoulders above him. She had considered the problem in such a balanced way and had such an understanding of the opposition that it was almost too much for Brenner. It’s difficult, of course, the psychologist said, to determine the exact day when you can safely say, up until this point, it can still be removed because it’s not a person yet — well, soul and all still negligible- and from that point on, it can’t very well be removed anymore, because it’s already too much of a person and even a hint of a soul.
The insects tried every means of shaking him awake and forcing him to get up. They stung him and tormented him, but he wasn’t quite ready yet, he wanted to escape a little further into this nice memory. Of this good conversation and how he’d answered Natalie that it’s difficult everywhere in life to draw such exact lines. For example, in criminal cases there’s always this type of development, too, at first it’s harmless really and not an actual crime yet, you think about it only theoretically, who you’d have to kidnap if you were to do it-a party game, as it were. And then you contemplate how the ransom handover would have to be arranged, still not a crime yet. And then maybe you do a little prep work, buy a good roll of tape at the hardware store-still not a crime yet-and finally, tidy up the basement. That, too, still isn’t a crime yet.
But then there is the one step where you can’t go back anymore, where you can’t dismiss the reality anymore, where you’ve got the child irrevocably in your stomach or the kidnapped victim irrevocably in your basement.
The insects made Brenner understand that he couldn’t go back anymore either now. He’d come along like a man sentenced to death. Nothing else could help him now. He’s already here, he’s got to finish it, too. And so the searching takes on its own dynamic entirely, and even if you hope you don’t find anything, you keep searching. He was escorted by the gnats, which he didn’t really notice anymore. Just like you stop noticing your bodyguard over time-he’s just there, and he simply must have been there when Helena was kidnapped-so, too, the insects buzzed around him now and directed him along the west side of the cabin toward the driveway. The wood still retained the warmth of the sun and smelled terrifically good, the old wood that the cabin was built from, the wooden beams, the wooden shingles, the planks of the balcony, the railing on the stairs, the window frames, and the firewood, but the bleached wood lining the driveway smelled best, i.e., the age-old boards that covered the cesspit.
When Brenner removed the first board, of course, it didn’t smell so good anymore, because a cesspit like this greets you with the stench of many generations. And with the stench came swarms of gnats, climbing out from the slats between the boards, you can’t even imagine, as though the collective dead or unborn humanity were lurking there beneath the rotting boards for Brenner.
You’re going to say, why would the gnats take Brenner under their wings, what’s their motive? Because for the average gnat, a human murder isn’t the least bit interesting, and even if you believe all that-before life, gnat, after life, gnat-then it bears saying all the more, as far as of one of these eternal gnats is concerned, a human murder’s the least interesting thing that there is.
Look, my take on it-think what you want! All I know is that as Brenner searched the cesspit for the corpse by the light of the evening sun, he was surrounded by an almost supernaturally glowing aura of insects-half beekeeper-at-sunset, half Jimi-Hendrix-in-a-spotlight. And who knows, maybe Jimi Hendrix was only lit up so ethereally in those colorful hippie photos because the spotlight was fractured into millions of invisible festival insects that were already luring Jimi, at the age of twenty-seven, toward the exit, without anyone in the audience noticing.
From Brenner’s point of view, of course, nothing was illuminated at all, just black clouds rising from the cesspit, because that’s how it is in the physical world, solid matter, liquid matter, gaseous matter. And maybe from a distance it looked nicely lit and sparkling in the last rays of sun, but to Brenner it looked as if the brown sauce in the cesspit was transforming from liquid matter to flying matter. The swarms of gnats rose out of the cesspit but didn’t fly any farther. Instead, there just seemed to be more and more of them the longer he stared into the pit and hoped that it wouldn’t turn out badly for him.
He took a pitchfork down from the shed and poked around in the brown soup with the handle, not with the tines. Let’s be honest, though, if someone was down there, it really wouldn’t matter, handle or tines, but somehow it goes against something, purely some inner code, to jab a person with a pitchfork. At any rate, Brenner had the pitchfork flipped over and was poking with the handle. He noticed right away, though, that the pitchfork was too short and couldn’t reach the bottom, but just as he was about to give up and look for something longer, he hit something that felt suspicious, a strange resistance, half hard, half soft.
You can picture it for yourself now, and I’ll leave out the grisly details. I’ll just say that without the pills he would have lost his mind by now, at the very least. Although the corpse was still completely covered with, with, with… He couldn’t get a good grip on it, instead, picture it like this: someone with a pitchfork struggling against a sludge-covered underwater monstrosity. And at that moment, when Brenner realized that it wasn’t going to work any other way, when he flipped the pitchfork over and began jabbing at the corpse with the iron tines, and when, with his left foot at the very edge of the pit, the shit started seeping into his shoes, he heard a voice.
The voice of Jimi Hendrix. Brenner took his cell phone out of his pocket, and believe it or not, “Unknown Caller.”
“Brenner?”
That he even answered the phone, of course, can only be explained by the fact that in an extreme situation like this, man brings everything to bear on himself-epicenter of the world, as it were. And it wouldn’t have surprised him if, on the other end of the line, the good lord himself had laughed into the phone while observing Brenner through a telescope from his hiding place.
“South Tyrolean shpeaking,” a woman’s voice said into the telephone.
It took at least three seconds for Brenner to switch gears. Probably because he was struggling so hard to keep the slippery corpse from slipping right away from him. With his left hand now he simply reached into the putrid sauce while holding the cell phone in his right, but still his wires were crossed. Even though the voice said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” and not “It’s Monika,” because then it would have been excusable for him not to recognize it, or even more than excusable, it would have been understandable, because he had no idea that the South Tyrolean’s name was Monika. But even so, when she said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” it took him half an eternity.
At that moment Brenner was overwhelmed by the greatest feeling of happiness of his entire life. But not because of the South Tyrolean. Because at that moment he realized that it wasn’t a child’s body. You should know, fifty-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance, Knoll’s face came bobbing out of the mud.
“From the gas shtation,” the South Tyrolean said, trying to jog his memory.
He looked at Knoll desperately, as if maybe he could explain to Brenner how the South Tyrolean got his number.
“Or do you go shouting your telephone number out after every woman you meet?”
But it was all he could do to keep Knoll and his cell phone both from sliding into the cesspit, and you can’t be angry at him for not having a good line at the ready. He really couldn’t believe what an uncanny memory she had for numbers.
“What’s wrong with you?” the South Tyrolean asked.
“Why, what would be wrong?”
“You sound like you jusht saw the devil.”
“Why would the devil show his face to me?”
“Maybe this isn’t a good time? You’re gashping like you’re-”
“Why wouldn’t I be gasping?”
Then Brenner puked into the cesspit, but don’t go thinking that he at least hung up the phone first. No, the South Tyrolean was allowed to hear everything beautifully, and she asked him, “Did you jusht throw up?”
“Why would I throw up?” Brenner asked.
“There’s shomething important I need to tell you.”
Brenner would have preferred to tell her to keep it to herself, that important something. Because he’d never liked it when a woman started off with, there’s something important I need to tell you. It’s always, every single time, something unwelcome! And you always have to act interested because otherwise it instantly means: or are
