Splinter

by Sebastian Fitzek

  ‘Then the tyre burst,’ he went on. ‘The car spun round twice before it. . .’

  He tried to smile. For some absurd reason, he felt he had to play the tragedy down in a stranger’s presence.

  ‘I woke up in the Senner Clinic. You can read the rest.’

  Bleibtreu nodded. ‘How have you been feeling since then?’

  Marc reached for his glass. It was nearly empty, but he didn’t have the energy to refill it.

  How does anyone feel after killing his wife and unborn son?

  ‘I feel tired, limp. Every movement is an effort. My joints ache and so does my head.’ He tried another smile. ‘Stick me in an old folks’ home and I’d have plenty to talk about.’

  ‘Those are symptoms typical of severe depression.’

  ‘Or of any other fatal disease. I Googled them, and the first things to pop up were banner ads for undertakers and coffin manufacturers.’

  Bleibtreu cocked his left eyebrow, inadvertently evoking another memory of Sandra. Her eyebrows, which were naturally arched, had made her look permanently surprised.

  ‘And you’ve only had these symptoms since the accident?’

  Marc hesitated before answering. The truth was, there had been days before it when he felt wrung out and exhausted – hungover, too, even when he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol. Constantin, who was very concerned, had talked him into undergoing a thorough health check two weeks before Sandra’s death, including blood tests and an MRI scan, but they’d failed to turn up anything untoward.

  ‘Well, the accident hasn’t exactly improved my condition, let’s say.’

  Marc heard a sudden high-pitched buzzing sound. It was a moment before he realized that his wristwatch alarm was reminding him to take his pills. He fished two out of the tiny pocket which for some reason is secreted in the right-hand pocket of most pairs of jeans. In the old days he’d kept sticks of chewing gum in there.

  ‘You take those for the injury to your neck?’ asked the professor as Marc washed them down with the rest of the water.

  Marc nodded, instinctively touching his plaster. ‘The surgeons won’t risk operating. The splinter is only small, but it’s right next to the cervical vertebrae. The pills I take are meant to help the foreign body knit with the muscular tissue so it doesn’t cause inflammation or get rejected. If that doesn’t work, they’ll have to cut it out, though there’s a chance I’ll wake up paralysed from the neck down.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No, just itches.’

  The real pain was more deep-seated. The ridiculous splinter was nothing compared to the axe-stroke that had cleft his soul.

  ‘Well now. . .’ said Bleibtreu, but Marc cut him short.

  ‘No, that’s enough. This medication makes me feel dog-tired. I often feel queasy too, so I’ll have to lie down soon if you don’t want me to throw up all over your floor. Besides, I’ve had enough of this. You’ve been stringing me along ever since I got into your car. Instead of supplying me with answers, you and your colleague have given me the third degree. You’ve two alternatives: either I walk out of that door right now—’

  ‘—or I let you into our little secret at last,’ Bleibtreu interjected, flashing Marc another of his five-star publicity-brochure grins. ‘Very well.’

  He heaved himself rather ponderously out of his armchair, but his smile didn’t fade.

  ‘Come with me. You may be only a few steps away from a new life.’

  10

  ‘The human brain isn’t a filing cabinet,’ Bleibtreu declared as he shut the leather-covered door of his study behind him. ‘There aren’t any drawers you can open and shut as you please, to deposit information or extract it.’

  He seated himself behind a massive desk, but not before having to remove a stack of loose papers from the chair and add them to the other mounds of files and books on the floor. In the meantime, Marc sat down on an upright chair and gazed around him.

  The room looked almost squalid compared to the antiseptic neatness elsewhere in the clinic. On the desk, dirty coffee cups and a half-eaten sandwich kept company with an untidy jumble of textbooks and patients’ records. The harsh glare of the halogen ceiling lights showed up a gravy stain on the professor’s tie which had escaped Marc’s notice in the dimness of the limo and the examination room.

  ‘I used to think the brain had a quite specific place for each and every memory. It isn’t so, of course.’

  Bleibtreu trundled his chair across the room on its castors, deftly avoiding the stacks of documents on the floor. He opened a laminated office cabinet and came back holding a model of a brain. This he deposited with difficulty between the telephone and a paperweight the size of a dumbbell, right on top of an open journal devoted to neuropsychology.

  ‘Here, I’ll give you a demonstration.’

  Roughly the size of a child’s football, the model was moulded out of synthetic grey sponge and mounted on a wooden rod inserted in a polished metal base.

  By the time Marc had redirected his attention to Bleibtreu, the professor was holding a glass ampoule in each hand. The liquid in the one on the left was red, in the other colourless.

  ‘A conjuring trick?’

  ‘Something like that. Watch carefully.’

  Bleibtreu snapped the top off the left-hand ampoule and tilted it over the spongy grey mass.

  ‘A thought is like a drop of liquid.’ He dripped about a millilitre of the blood-red fluid on to the part of the model representing the cortex. Instantly, it meandered its way through the sponge’s capillary system.

  ‘When an experience becomes a memory, it deposits itself in billions of nerve-cell junctions.’

  ‘The synapses.’

  ‘Quite so. Watch closely, Marc.’ The professor picked up a ballpoint and tapped the model of the brain at various points, which were gradually turning red. ‘Every memory becomes stored in countless interconnections. The sound of a car’s engine, of people arguing, a smell, a certain song playing on the radio, an expanse of water, the rustle of leaves in a forest – all these things could reactivate your memory and summon up terrible recollections of the accident.’

  ‘So how do you propose to erase them from my brain?’ Marc asked.

  ‘I don’t.’ Bleibtreu snapped the top off the other ampoule. ‘Not separately, at least. I’m afraid we can only obliterate all your memories.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ Marc cleared his throat and tapped the last remaining grey area on the frontal lobe. ‘Am I wrong, or did you just say you propose to deprive me of all my memories?’

  ‘Total, artificially induced amnesia – yes, that’s the only possibility. That’s what we’re researching.’

  Bleibtreu turned the model towards Marc to give him a better view of the red fluid’s continuing advance.

  ‘Essentially, memory loss can be caused by three factors,’ he said. ‘Severe traumatic experiences which the human mind wants to forget, brain damage resulting from a blow, and active chemical substances such as anaesthetics.’

  Bleibtreu now tipped some of the colourless liquid in the other ampoule over the sponge model. To his surprise, Marc saw that in some places the red coloration was quickly fading.

  ‘Let me guess: you’re betting on chemicals – you’ve developed an Alzheimer’s pill and I’m supposed to swallow it, right?’

  ‘More or less. It’s a bit more complex than that, of course, but you’re right in principle.’

  ‘Purely as a matter of academic interest, what happens afterwards?’

  By now, the sponge had almost entirely lost its reddish coloration.

  ‘After we’ve induced total amnesia, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s easy: we reload you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But only, of course, with memories and experiences that you really want to regain. It’s like reformatting a computer. If you can’t locate a defect in the system, the best plan is to wipe everything and gradually reinstate the progr
ammes that work. That’s what we would do in your case. First, thorough questioning would elicit what you wanted to remember after undergoing artificial, retrogressive amnesia. Then, during the subsequent rehab phase, you’d be reintroduced to your past. Except, of course, for any experiences associated with your wife.’

  ‘But what about my friends and acquaintances?’ Marc objected. ‘What about my father-in-law? I’d be reminded of Sandra’s death as soon as I set eyes on him.’

  ‘Not if you never saw him again.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  Bleibtreu pushed his chair back with a smile, looking very much in his element and years younger than he had in the car. His voice, too, had gained strength.

  ‘That’s what makes you such an ideal subject. You’re a social worker, but you don’t have much of a social life. Your parents died young and you’ve lost touch with your brother. Your colleagues at work are forever changing and any contact you have with your clients is usually of brief duration.’

  ‘But my friends would miss me.’

  ‘The ones who work for big law firms and would forget your birthday if it wasn’t stored in their Outlook file?’

  ‘All the same, I don’t live in a vacuum. What exactly do you envisage? Would I have to leave Berlin?’

  To Marc’s astonishment, the professor nodded. ‘We would naturally take care of your new life. That, too, forms part of the experiment. We’d install you in another part of the country, find you a job and integrate you into your neighbourhood with an appropriate legend. We would even pay your removal expenses. We work with experts from the witness protection scheme, I might add.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ said Marc. It was more a statement than a question.

  ‘Our methods are extreme, it’s true, but no one ever discovered a new world by sticking to the beaten track.’

  The professor cocked his left eyebrow again. ‘Consider the possibilities, Marc. You’d be one of the first people on this planet to start again from scratch, psychologically speaking. You’d be free from all mental ballast – as unencumbered as a newborn baby. I’m not just talking about the accident. We would make you forget anything that ever traumatized you.’

  He pointed to the brain model, which was now as grey as it had been at the outset of his demonstration.

  ‘Back to the default position?’ said Marc. ‘A total reset?’

  ‘The choice is yours.’

  Bleibtreu opened his desk drawer and took out a small but densely printed sheet of paper.

  ‘You need only sign this application form and we can start at once.’

  11

  It was a mistake. Marc knew he shouldn’t have let himself be talked into it, but he thought that submitting to the preliminary examinations and just never coming back would be easier than entering into a long discussion with Bleibtreu about the pros and cons of his wholly unacceptable experiment.

  That was why he had only pretended to agree to be examined for any physical or mental condition that might preclude him from taking part.

  Who knows, perhaps you won’t prove to be a suitable subject after all, had been Bleibtreu’s final argument.

  An undetected mental illness, a serious infection or a weak heart would render him useless as a guinea pig. Even his rare blood group, AB negative, was something of a problem.

  Another two and a half long hours elapsed before the Maybach dropped him outside his rented service flat in Schöneberg. A hundred and fifty minutes during which they’d taken his blood, tired him out on various pieces of gym equipment for an ECG, and electroencephalographed his brainwaves for abnormalities. He’d felt like a national service recruit when a GP asked him for a urine sample and checked his heart-lung functions while he was waiting for the oculist to test his eyesight.

  The doctors had shown no interest in the fact that many of these examinations had been carried out by his father-in-law only a few weeks earlier. The Bleibtreu Clinic was unwilling to rely on extraneous data, so he’d even had to undergo more CT and MRI scans.

  But most of the time had been taken up with ingenious psychological questions. Unlike the personality tests in women’s magazines, which Sandra had always been so fond of, those seemingly innocuous questions had left Marc wondering what on earth their purpose could be.

  If you had the choice, which would you rather do without, one eye or your sense of smell?

  Which do you dream in more often, colour or black and white?

  Complete the following sentence: ‘I’m in favour of the death penalty for. . .’

  Marc had already forgotten what answers he’d given, he was so exhausted. Besides, his joints ached with every step he took. All he could think of was the sleeping pill and the hot bath he would soon be taking. He was so engrossed in his thoughts, it was no wonder he failed to see the dark figure lurking beside the entrance to the flats, where it had been waiting for him for a considerable time.

  12

  ‘Leana Schmidt?’ He repeated the name she’d given him once before. That day, a few hours earlier, immediately after Julia’s attempted suicide at the open-air baths in Neukölln. Her hair still looked as if it had been ironed flat at the back and he thought he glimpsed a plain, pale-grey trouser suit beneath her trenchcoat, which was buttoned up at the neck. The only thing that slightly dented the somewhat stern impression she made was a supermarket plastic bag overflowing with ‘women’s purchases’ – the sort of goods which men ignore on principle, like bunches of radishes or sticks of celery. Sandra and he used to laugh at their disparate shopping habits. She would fill her supermarket trolley with fresh fruit, low-fat cottage cheese, fabric conditioner and parsley, whereas he lingered in front of promotion racks stacked with blank CDs and cordless drills, or bags of crisps.

  ‘How on earth did you find me?’

  The slim creature put her shopping down and kneaded her fingers where the handle of the bag had cut into them.

  ‘I went to your office. They gave me your address.’

  She spoke briskly, almost as if she expected him to apologize for keeping her waiting so long.

  ‘Well, what do you want?’

  ‘I’m. . . I was the nurse on your brother’s ward.’

  ‘Well?’

  He took out his front-door key, not that he had to use it. Although one of the list of house rules he’d been handed when moving in exhorted tenants to lock the door to the street after eight at night, they observed it as seldom as they did the ban on dumping glass bottles in the communal refuse bin.

  ‘I’m worried about Benny,’ she said firmly, and Marc gained a pretty good idea of how this resolute woman treated her patients. Her tone was professional without being intimidating – a combination to prevent them from feeling patronized but authoritative enough to deter them from questioning her instructions. Leana Schmidt was probably not an ordinary nurse but the sister in charge of a ward, or at least on the way to becoming so.

  The automatic light in the lobby came on as Marc went inside. She picked up her shopping bag and followed him in.

  ‘He told me you saved his life once.’

  ‘Really?’ Marc said curtly.

  Eighteen months ago he had found Benny in the bath with his wrists cut. They normally met only once a year – at Christmas beside their parents’ grave – but that morning his mobile had registered three unanswered calls and his mailbox had recorded a message – almost unintelligible it was so broken up and overlaid with static – in what sounded like his brother’s voice. When Benny didn’t respond to his calls, Marc had obeyed a spontaneous impulse and driven to his place. There he received a drastic demonstration that the message on his mobile had been intended as a last farewell.

  ‘I don’t think you should have retracted your statement.’ Leana blinked. ‘To the judges and doctors, I mean.’

  Marc still couldn’t fathom where this odd conversation was leading. When he’d saved Benny’s life by calling the emergency services, he’d employed an old trick that always led to an a
ttempted suicide being placed under immediate psychiatric supervision: he stated that Benny had previously threatened to kill him as well. This automatically branded his brother a danger to the public. It also constituted a criminal offence. Since Benny had already attempted suicide several times, an overall view of the circumstances warranted his temporary committal to a secure institution. Marc’s lie had been a means to an end: getting his brother off the streets and out of an environment that was quite clearly dragging him ever deeper into the mire. Besides, Benny wouldn’t find it as easy to get hold of a belt or a razor blade in a psychiatric ward. He would also be out of Eddy Valka’s orbit at last.

  ‘Look,’ said Marc, ‘I’ve had enough would-be suicides for one day. . .’ He tried to open his letterbox, but some vandal seemed to have messed up the lock with a screwdriver.

  Not that on top of everything else!

  The key wouldn’t fit, so the only post he could get at was a furniture brochure stuck in the slit.

  ‘. . .so, if you’ve no objection, I’d like to call it a night and—’

  ‘Your brother changed so suddenly,’ she broke in. ‘From one day to the next.’

  She caught hold of his sleeve. He was tugging at it in an attempt to free himself when the light went off. The timer had run out, and since the antiquated switch in the hallway wasn’t equipped with an LED in the usual way, he took a while to grope his way over to it. By the time the light came on again he was feeling utterly exhausted and incapable of putting an end to his conversation with this mysterious nurse.

  ‘Of course Benny changed,’ he said. ‘He was in a loony bin.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t mean that. He’d let himself go for months on end. Wouldn’t shave, wouldn’t eat, lay awake all night. He often refused to leave his room – became genuinely violent when asked to do so.’

  Marc nodded resignedly. This was no news to him. It was why the doctors’ prognosis had been so poor and Benny’s temporary admission had turned into long-term confinement.