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  I’m actually too strong. Being strong isn’t just an advantage. You can tolerate more, you can get into even deeper trouble, and it’s harder to give up. The washed-out, the empty, and the spineless, who have nothing to lose if they lose themselves, can all just hang themselves someplace. But there’s something inside me that won’t allow that.

  I like being in my dressing room, there are very rarely problems in here. Seventeen black bespoke suits hang in a row, thirty-nine white shirts are stacked on the shelves, and the tie rack holds twenty-five flawless ties in the selfsame shade of red. Sometimes people give me other ties, mostly with sophisticated patterns, and I throw them away. I have one black one, for funerals. On the floor there are twenty-one pairs of well-polished shoes.

  It’s weekends that are hard. On your free days you can’t wear a suit, nor can you keep wearing the same checked shirt. It would be sensible and rational, so of course if you did it people would think you were weird. So I have a closet for weekends, days off, and holidays. In it are all kinds of colorful shirts: solid colors, checked, striped, even one with dots. Laura doesn’t like it, but I claim it’s my favorite. People ought to have a favorite shirt, it’s expected, it’s appealing. The closet also houses jeans, corduroys, leather belts, every kind of jacket, sports shoes, hiking shoes, fishing boots, though I’ve never been fishing and have no intention of ever changing that.

  Luckily today is a weekday, so I’m done in five minutes. Black suit, white shirt, red tie. Everything feels better when you’re dressed in a suit. I nod into the mirror on the wall, my reflection nods back without hesitation. The world is functioning.

  As I step into the hall, Laura is standing there.

  “Did you sleep well?” I ask. I ask her this every morning, although I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Either you’re asleep or you’re awake, but I know from television that people ask one another these questions.

  She takes a step back, in order to leave room for the answer.

  How beautiful she still is! I nod and say, “Aha!” and “Oh,” while she talks about a journey and a magician and a rose bed. Thousands upon thousands of roses, a whole wide sea. Can you really dream any such thing? Perhaps it’s all invention, the way I invent almost everything I tell people.

  “Are you listening to me?” she asks.

  “Of course. Bed of roses.”

  As she talks on, I stealthily log on to my phone: August 8, 2008, two thousand seven hundred and thirty unopened emails. And even as I’m looking at the screen, in come another two.

  “Is that more interesting than what I’m talking about?”

  “Darling!” I hastily stow the gadget. “Princess! It couldn’t be less interesting! Do please go on.”

  This is in fact true, I haven’t read a single email for weeks, but because it’s the truth she takes it as a lie and sticks her lower lip out in a sulk.

  “Laura! Please go on! Please!”

  Obviously I’m not managing to hit the right tone today, for her brow furrows reproachfully. “Marie needs tutoring in math. You have to find a teacher. Mr. Lakebrink says it’s urgent.”

  This is all going too fast for me. First roses just now, and here we are already with Lakebrink. “Is that her teacher?”

  Her frown deepens.

  “Lakebrink,” I say. “I know. That Lakebrink. That man.”

  She takes another step back.

  “Okay, so who is he?”

  “Eric, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Shall we just fly off somewhere?” I ask hastily. “Next weekend, just you and me …” Now I have to think of a really hot place, and quick. Where have we been recently? “To Sicily?” It was Sicily, or I’m pretty sure it was. Or just possibly it was Greece. Damp and hot as hell, absurdly high prices, impudently whispering servers, mangy cats staring down from sharp rocks like gargoyles, but Laura was in heaven.

  She opens her arms, lays her head on my chest, and hugs me. Her hair smells sweet—a little like sage, a little like lemon, in fact she always smells good. She murmurs that I’m wonderful, generous, one of a kind; I can’t hear her that well, because her face is buried in my jacket, and I stroke her back.

  “The headmaster,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Lakebrink is the headmaster of Marie’s school. You talked to him last week. At the parents’ meeting.”

  I nod, as if I’d always known that. Of course I’ll have to come up with a convincing reason why we can’t go to Sicily. She’s going to be so disappointed that I have to come up with an even bigger promise, to sweeten her up, and then I’ll have to break that one too. All of it because of this parents’ meeting, that I can actually remember all too well: low ceiling, some kind of artificial flooring, harsh lights, and a poster with a slogan about getting yourself inoculated against something as soon as possible.

  “Just one more thing, Eric!” She strokes my cheek. Her emotion makes me recall just how much I desired her even recently. “The day before yesterday, you told Marie the most important thing is never to stand out. Never to arouse other people’s jealousy.”

  “So?”

  “She took it very much to heart.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “But yesterday you told her that one should never make compromises. Keep fighting, keep trying to be the best you can. Never duck a fight.”

  “And?”

  “Now she’s confused.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a contradiction!”

  “Sicily!” I cry.

  Her face lights up at once.

  We embrace again, and I am overcome by a sense of déjà vu so powerful that it makes me dizzy. I remember that I stood here once before and held her in my arms and had exactly this conversation with her, in a dream or in another life or even in this life, two or three days ago. And soon we’ll be standing here once again, and then probably Mr. Lakebrink will appear again, and the ax will fall, and the police will storm in, and the loop will finally stop replaying itself. I give her a horribly damp kiss on the forehead, head quickly for the stairs, and say “I love you” without turning around. Why, when it’s true, does it feel like a lie?

  “Love you back,” she calls, and although it sounds fake, I know it’s true.

  Being distracted, I take the first step of the stair with my left foot. Such a thing should never happen; in this house of all places I cannot afford to be careless. From the beginning, even the very first time we looked at it, I didn’t feel good here.

  Do not think about the attic, not right now. I have to pretend I’ve forgotten it’s even there. Everything about it is repellant: the slope of the roof meets the floor at a particularly hideous angle, mud-brown rectangles are printed on the wallpaper, because of the blobs of dirt in the glass shade the old lamp casts a most horrible pentangle on the floorboards, and behind the narrow table, put there by someone, who knows who, many years ago, is an awkward gap. You only have to spend a few minutes up in it to know someone died there.

  There’s nothing too unusual about that. In an old house someone will have croaked in almost every room. But what happened in this attic was a particularly hard way to die. It was long and drawn out, and it was extremely painful. Ghosts appeared and demons made themselves visible, attracted by the death throes. But how could I have explained all that to Laura? Seven and a half million. She fell in love with the house at first sight. Moorish tiles on the terrace, five bathrooms, a media room. What was I supposed to do?

  So one night I went up there. It’s possible: people can confront fear, until it submits and retreats. I lasted almost three hours. The table, the shadows, the lamp, me. And someone else.

  Then I ran. Down the stairs, across the hall, into the garden. A half-moon in the night sky was surrounded by shimmering clouds. I must have lain in the grass for a good hour, and when I slipped back into bed, Laura woke up and told me about her dream, some brightly colored bird, a friendly mailman, and a locomotive. And I stared up
at the ceiling and thought about how there will be that room up there for as long as we live. Even when we no longer live here, when other people have replaced us for the longest time, it will still be there.

  I open the front door. My God, it’s hot. The car is waiting, with the engine running, Knut sitting sullenly at the wheel. He hates waiting. I have no idea how someone like him became a chauffeur. Besides which I’m baffled about why he’s called Knut. He’s Greek and looks it: stubble, black hair, brown skin. On a long journey once he told me the story of his name, but I didn’t listen, and if I asked again now, he’d be offended. I get in. Knut drives off without so much as a hello.

  I close my eyes. Already I hear him honking the horn.

  He yells, “Idiot!” and honks again. “Did you see that, boss?”

  I open my eyes. The street is completely empty.

  “Smack at us from the left!” he yells.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Idiot!”

  While he bangs on the steering wheel, curses, and points this way and that, I ask myself for the thousandth time how I can get rid of him. Unfortunately he knows too much about me; I’m sure that the day after he was fired, he would be writing anonymous letters to Laura, to the police, to anyone that occurred to him, what do I know? The only possibility would be a discreet assassination. But if I really did want to kill someone, he’d be the only person I’d know to ask for help. He’s one tricky customer. I pull out the telephone and look at the market. Prices of raw commodities have fallen, the euro hasn’t recovered against the dollar, and the IT papers, which were overvalued, are exactly where they were yesterday. I don’t get it.

  “Hot!” cries Knut. “So hot, so hot!”

  I was convinced that IT stocks would fall. On the other hand I’ve seen the opposite coming—not out of some insight into the market, but because in the meantime I’ve accustomed myself to the knowledge that everything that happens is the opposite of what I expect. But what should I follow: my insight, or the knowledge that I’m always wrong?

  “March, April!” cries Knut. “Always rain. May—rain. Always!—and now this!”

  But losses don’t frighten me anymore. If the market had developed the way I said it would, nothing would have changed. Rising share prices won’t save me anymore. It would take a miracle.

  The phone vibrates, the screen says, Are you coming today?

  Of course, I type.

  As I’m hitting the Send button, I’m thinking about what excuse I could use in case she writes back that I should come at once. I have no time. Adolf Kluessen has checked in; he’s my most important client. But she’s usually working during the day, and if she writes that I shouldn’t come until the evening, she’ll feel guilty and that’s helpful, it’s something I can build on.

  I stare at the phone. The screen with the gray face stares back. No answer.

  And still no answer.

  I close my eyes and count slowly to ten—Knut talks and I pay no attention. When I reach seven I lose patience, open my eyes, and look at the screen.

  No answer.

  Okay, forget it. I don’t need her, I get on better without her! And perhaps this is her revenge for last Sunday.

  We met outside the entrance, it was an art movie house, they were showing Orson Welles’s last film, she absolutely wanted to see it, I wasn’t interested, but so what, no other film would have interested me either. The lobby stank of frying fat, and as we stood in the line for tickets we ran out of things to say. We were just taking our seats when a man jumped up in the row right in front of me and yelled my name.

  It was such a shock that I didn’t recognize him right away. The first things to organize themselves were his features: mouth, nose, eyes. Then the ears resumed their usual places, and the entity became Dr. Uebelkron, the husband of Laura’s best friend, who was a fixture at all of our garden parties.

  I hugged him like a long-lost brother. Then I hit him on the shoulder a couple of times and began to ask him questions like how his wife was doing, and his daughter, and his mother, and what were we all supposed to be making of this heat wave. The film had already started. People around us were shushing and clearly even Dr. Uebelkron wanted to leave things be, but I kept on talking, asking questions, didn’t give him time to answer, and kept manipulating his shoulder mercilessly. When I finally let go of him, he sank into his seat exhausted, without managing to ask who the woman with me was. I checked the time, waited exactly four minutes, pulled out my phone, cried, “Oh no,” “Oh God,” and “Coming right away,” leapt up, and ran out. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the taxi that I realized Sibylle was still in the cinema.

  The phone vibrates. Good. Come!

  When?

  Three seconds later: Now!

  Can’t, I type. Important client. It’s habit, so it feels like an excuse, but it’s the truth. I hit the Send button and wait.

  Nothing.

  So what’s going on, why isn’t she answering? Mobilizing my entire willpower I put the phone away. We’re here.

  As always I get out on the street and leave Knut to drive into the underground garage. I can’t go down there, it’s simply not possible. Quickly through the blazing heat, the glass doors are opening already, and I’m in the lobby. The elevator takes me to the twelfth floor. I hurry through the open-plan office, full of identical faces in front of identical screens. Some of them I know, some I don’t, I’m glad that none of them speaks to me. Recently I’ve been forgetting too many names.

  My secretaries greet me silently. One of them is beautiful, the other capable, they hate each other, and they’re not that fond of me either. I’ve slept with the beautiful one, her name is Elsa, six or seven times. I would have gotten rid of her a long time ago, except she could blackmail me. The other one, Kathi, I only slept with once, under the influence of new medication that made me do all sorts of things I don’t want to think about anymore.

  “Mr. Kluessen is waiting,” says Kathi.

  “Fine.” I go into my office, sit down behind the desk, fold my hands, and slowly count to ten. Then I finally pull the phone out of my pocket. No answer. Why is she doing this to me?

  I administer Adolf Albert Kluessen’s entire estate, and I’ve lost everything. All the statements and accounts he’s received in the last two years were faked. The man is old and not very clever, and even if I’m no longer in any condition to win back his money, I can still manage to invent impressive balances and report gains I would have made, had I foreseen the movements of the market. I also add all sorts of curves to the figures, drawn in red, blue, and yellow, which increase trust. But every conversation with him has its dangers.

  I stand up and go to the window. The view is spectacular; it’s hard to accustom yourself to the sheer extent of it, and the brightness. As ever, when the world, uninvited, threatens me with its sparkle and brilliance, I have to think of Ivan, and a long-gone afternoon in Arthur’s library. We were twenty-two, it was shortly before Christmas, Ivan had come from Oxford, I had come from the sanatorium.

  “Tell!” he said.

  I had almost no memory of the last months. Everything had been eggshell colored, the walls, the floor, the ceilings, the staff’s coats. At night you didn’t know whether the voices you were hearing came from the other patients or out of your own head.

  “You have to play along,” said Ivan. “That’s the whole trick. You have to lie. You think people see through you, but nobody sees through anyone. People are impossible to read. You think other people get what’s going on inside you, but that’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s the right answer. Watch, bend the rules. People are almost never spontaneous; mostly they’re machines. What they do, they do out of habit. You have to undo the rules, and then you have to follow them as if your life depended on it. Because it does. Your life depends on it.”

  I stared at the table. Very old wood, a family heirloom, it once belonged to our great
-grandfather, who had supposedly been an actor. The black grain made an unbelievably beautiful pattern. It surprised me that I should even notice such a thing, but then I realized I wasn’t the one who had noticed. It was Ivan.

  “Truth!” he said. “That’s all well and good. But sometimes none of it gets you anywhere. Always ask what people are expecting of you. Say what people say. Do what people do. Ask yourself who exactly you’d like to be. Then ask yourself what that person you’d like to be would do. Then do it.”

  “If the cell hadn’t split back then,” I said, “there would only have been one of us.”

  “Concentrate!”

  “But who would it have been? Me, or some third person we don’t know? Who?”

  “The trick is to sort things out with yourself. That’s the hardest thing. Don’t expect help from anyone. And don’t imagine you can go into therapy. All it’ll teach you is to accept yourself. You get good at excuses.”

  I should have told him he was right, I think now, I should never have gone into therapy. I would like to talk to him, even today, I need to see him, I need his advice. Maybe I could borrow money from him and disappear. A fake passport, a plane to Argentina, just me. It would still be possible.

  I pick up the phone and unfortunately hear Elsa’s voice, not Kathi’s: “I need to speak to my brother. Call him, ask him to come here.”

  “Which brother?”

  I rub my eyes. “What do you mean, which?”

  She says nothing.

  “So call him! Tell him it’s really important. And will you finally get Kluessen in here!”

  I hang up, cross my arms, and try to look as if I were sunk in thought. Suddenly it occurs to me that I didn’t see Kluessen outside in the waiting room. The couch was empty. But didn’t she tell me he’d arrived? If he was already here and not in the waiting room, would that mean …? Worried, I look around.

  “Hello, Adolf!”

  He’s sitting there, staring at me. He must have been there the whole time. I smile and try to look as if it had all been a joke.