You (9 page)

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.

On the second floor you open the first door and go in. You stop in the anteroom and go back out again. You leave the second room after a few seconds as well. Children. The smell of children. After you’ve gone into the third room, you take a deep breath, a single breath replies. You pull the door closed. The darkness embraces you.

This is the right place.

If you drove past the gas station today, you’d see a closed-down motel. The sight of it would remind you of the night twelve years ago—no light in the windows, motionless curtains, stillness. The flickering neon sign above the entrance is broken. And even though the rest area is always full, nobody parks in front of the motel.
Cursed
, they say. Weeds have fought their way through the cracks, they press against the building as though to support the façade. No one lays flowers outside anymore. The grave candles have disappeared. There’s only an ugly yellow graffito on the front door:
Forever Yang
.

Almost two years after the A4 you’ve set off on your travels again, and everyone recognized your signature. The papers called you
The Avenging Angel
. On the internet you were
The Traveler
, sometimes
The German Nightmare
or
The Big Bad Wolf
. Fanatics called you
The Scourge of God
. By now the police knew you were acting alone. The clues were everywhere, and the clues didn’t lie. You were aware of that. Clues mean you’ve been there. Honesty is important to you. There’s nothing you want to hide. Everyone should know you exist. Of course your fingerprints were no help to the police. No previous convictions. You exist only in your own world.

Your myth grew beyond the borders of Germany, you made waves all around Europe. In England a bank cashier ran amok, in the Czech Republic it was a customer in a supermarket and in Italy a woman who said she couldn’t stand the pressure anymore. Events began to accumulate. In Sweden a man killed his family and wandered through his apartment block with bloody hands until a Doberman went for his throat. In the Netherlands a boy put explosives in a McDonald’s, joined the queue, and set off the explosives when his turn came. A television evangelist spoke of the Day of Judgment, studies were produced, prognoses filled the commercial breaks. Humanity seemed to be walking toward self-destruction with its arms spread wide open. None of it had anything to do with you.

Not rage, not despair, not self-destruction or revenge.

Not hate, not love, not religion or politics.

You’re in no hurry. You go into the rooms one after the other and sit down on the edge of the bed. You watch them sleeping, the way you would watch a patient who has a fever and needs a cooling hand. You wonder what’s happening to you. The Here, the Now, and you on the edge of a stranger’s bed. With your hands around their neck and your fists in their face. You. Not hesitating for a moment. And they. Defending themselves and then giving up. And there’s always this feeling of sympathy. As if they knew why you’re doing it. As if at that brief moment of dying they understood. At least that’s how it feels to you. As if they understood: that you’re on a quest, that you have to explore the darkness. Because the darkness is always there. And in the darkness there’s nothing to find.

That night you go into forty-two rooms and leave thirty-six corpses. After that you put the skeleton key back in the box and step out into the night like someone who has rested and can now continue on his journey.

The crow has vanished from the tree, the neon sign above the entrance still flickers. Three hours have passed. The traffic moves tirelessly in both directions. The world outside the motel has hardly changed.

On the journey home you look at your hands on the wheel. This time you didn’t wear gloves. Your hands are bruised, the knuckles bloody, the pain feels good.
I am, I exist
. You’re aware that you’ve left lots of clues. It feels right and good.

Oskar isn’t the first corpse you’ve found yourself sitting opposite. If you’re not careful, someone might think this is a family tradition. Even if you don’t think that’s funny at the moment, a few hours later you’ll make a joke about it and once again you’ll be the only one laughing.

Your first corpse was a lunatic who behaved normally during the day and came home in the evening and went totally nuts. You’ve read a lot about mental illnesses and schizophrenia. You’ve engaged intensively with the mental effects of wars, because you wanted to understand your father. But how are you supposed to understand the paranoia of a man who’s never been to war?

You found out that one of your uncles suffered from similar delusions. Perhaps it was a genetic defect. Everything’s possible, but not everything’s excusable. Everyone is responsible for his own life, and excuses are for cowards. Your father was definitely one of those.

He worked as one of eight bricklayers with a construction company and met your mother in Oslo in the early 1960s. He proposed and brought her to Germany. The first years of marriage ran smoothly, and it was only when Oskar and you appeared on the scene that everything changed. Your father started training you boys when you were six and Oskar was three. Outside of your apartment he was the most normal person you could imagine. But once the door closed, silence fell. The television was turned off, conversations lingered only as an echo in the rooms, sometimes you even
held your breath. As soon as your father entered the room, a different life began for you.

Two decades later you asked your mother how she could have allowed it all to happen, and whether she’d never had any doubts about her husband’s mental state. She didn’t understand you. She wanted to know why you felt the need to drag your father’s memory through the dirt.

After he had stepped inside the apartment, he took his shoes off and disappeared into the bathroom. Meanwhile your mother put the chain on and bolted the front door with extra locks. With your help she took the metal plate out from behind the wardrobe and pushed it against the door. Two clamps were placed around it and the door was secure. For you it was the other way round. You were trapped.

Once you made the mistake of opening the bathroom door, even though your father had forbidden it. You were curious, and in those days your father’s madness seemed to be only a slight drizzle that would eventually pass. You were seven years old and just needed to find out what he did in the bathroom after work every day. You waited till your mother took Oskar into the kitchen to get the food ready, then you pushed the handle down.

Your father was standing naked in front of the wash basin, washing himself with a sponge. There was nothing else to be seen. You were so relieved that you nearly burst out laughing. It was all you had wanted to know. Your relief lasted only seconds. Your father told you to come in and shut the door behind you. He didn’t look at you as he spoke, he didn’t need to look at you. You obeyed. He set the sponge aside and told you to turn the light off. You obeyed. Your father pulled the curtain over the narrow bathroom window. It grew dark, really dark. Your father asked you if you knew what fear was. You nodded. Your father wanted to hear an answer. So you said:
Yes, I know what fear is
. Silence. You sensed him standing right
in front of you. The smell of his naked body. He must have leaned forward, because his breath wiped over your face like a flame.
You have no idea what fear is
, he explained. Then you heard water running, and a moment later a wet towel was wrapped around your head. The towel was a shock. Suffocating and cold. You couldn’t see at all, and he used a towel anyway. Your father asked you again if you knew what fear was. He also said:
I’ll teach you fear. I’ll teach you everything about fear, so that you venerate and respect it. Because you can’t live without fear. Fear is air, fear is water, fear is everything
. You reacted instinctively, the towel was just too much for you, you couldn’t breathe, so you started to swing your fists around.

That was all you could remember.

Later your mother picked you up from the floor and carried you to bed. At six o’clock in the morning she woke you again. You had to wipe up the filth in the bathroom. You caught your breath when you saw what you’d done. There was vomit on the tiles, there was urine and two bloody handprints on the whitewashed wall, which you rubbed away at with a cloth and soapsuds until two gleaming white patches remained. Never again did you make the mistake of surprising your father in the bathroom. You learned to respect fear.