Sand

by Wolfgang Herrndorf

  “Like this.” Carl lowered his hand. “First slowly, then it really got going.”

  “And you think a man waited below for the thing to crush his skull while the thing rattled and started to fall in slow motion from six meters above him?” Helen drew chain links in the hatch and on the circular head of the stick figure. “He would look up. If someone was standing there he would look up. If you ask me, there are only three possible reasons he wouldn’t look up. First, he’d deaf. Possible, but not likely. Second, he’s sleeping. Which, given the noise you had already made up to that point, is also highly unlikely. And the third possibility is he’s dead already. Unconscious or dead. Because someone had already whacked him with a carjack.”

  Carl scratched the back of his head.

  “And look at your wound. Do you know what a carjack is? If somebody hits you with one of those your head is nothing more than mush. What you have is a cut, there’s no way a carjack touched you.”

  She turned the paper around and drew another stick figure on a moped at a distance from the barn and wrote “Cetrois” in quotation marks above the figure.

  Carl said nothing.

  “If you ask me, it makes total sense,” said Helen. “Of course, I can’t say it with certainty. But when there are multiple possibilities, go for the simplest. First, I don’t believe that you misunderstood the men. Second, I don’t think you misunderstood the girl. I would assume there were three parties.”

  She pointed to the three parties on the paper one after the next. “You are one party. Your pursuers are a second, and the fellah family is the third. An old man with two sons. You follow me so far? And I am assuming that at the moment in question only the two sons were in the barn. Maybe the old man as well, but definitely the two sons. Pulley son and moped son. And then you show up. You are fleeing the men, and you storm into something that looks like an illegal distillery with something that looks like an assault weapon. I’m assuming the reception would be none too warm. You’re crazed because you’re being followed, and the sons are crazed because they are bootleggers and you’re running around with a weapon that, as you yourself said, looks deceptively real, even up close. And is it light in the barn? No, it’s dark. So you have an AK-47 and no matter what you tell them they know that trouble is on the horizon. Maybe you ask for help, maybe you even threaten them. And maybe they also see your pursuers coming and take them for your backup, so as a precaution one of them smacks you from behind. They hoist you up into the attic with your minor wound… or maybe you had already climbed up into the attic and it’s up there that they catch you and smack you, doesn’t matter. And now they’re really panicking. They’ve cracked one person’s skull and there are three more on the way. So son number two grabs the moped and races off into the desert. Maybe to get help, maybe just to get away. Doesn’t matter. When the men pursuing you reach the barn, only son number one is still there, and they ask him where Cetrois is and he doesn’t answer. Because he doesn’t know. So they crack his skull with the carjack, which they soon proudly report to the fourth man. While you are lying unconscious in the attic and the man on the moped has basically saved your life. Because they chase him next. They probably catch him, too, somewhere back there, and realize he’s the wrong man, so they come back to look for you. But Monsieur Cetrois has left in the meantime, and the upshot for the old fellah is: one son killed, one disappeared. Mystery solved.”

  Helen drank the last sip of coffee and went into the kitchen to make a fresh cup.

  Baffled, Carl stared at the sketch that Helen had covered with arrows and Xs.

  “And the wooden gun? Why would I be running around the desert with a wooden gun?”

  “I would suggest that you ask yourself that question.”

  Carl tried to go through everything again in his head. He counted the stick figures, he picked up the pen and read the word Sheraton on it. The certainty and ease with which Helen dismissed all his objections offended and confused him. He found it difficult to picture everything in chronological order. How was Helen able to put all the puzzle pieces together so effortlessly? Was she really able to? He felt obligated to find a mistake. With his finger on the stick figure that was supposed to be him, he said: “When I was at Adil Bassir’s, he spoke of two men.” He avoided using the word sausage. “Two men, me and my partner.”

  “He must not have been there.”

  “No… but up to now I thought Cetrois was my partner. If I’m Cetrois, who is my partner?”

  “Is that an important question?” Helen opened the coffee can and looked around for the measuring spoon. “Or can we turn to the question of whether it was really school children who stole your blazer?”

  “I’m not sure what makes you so confident.”

  “What did the children look like?”

  “Forget the children! What is it with you and these children? You’re not going to find them anyway.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is about them. As far as I know there are no schools in the slums.”

  “And what made you think of all of this?” Carl asked without addressing her point. He lifted the drawing and waved it in the air.

  “Because the personal description fitted. In the commune. Fowler and the others described a man almost exactly like you. Checkered suit, thin, thirty years old, one meter seventy-five tall. A bit Arabic-looking. Although that was all they knew. They didn’t know anything else. What you were doing there at the commune you either didn’t say or they didn’t understand. You must have introduced yourself as a journalist, but then you only seemed to ask about the valuables, the suitcase of cash and all that, so they figured you were from the insurance company that they were in the process of trying to defraud. Cetrois, insurance man. Or extremely incompetent journalist. Something like that.”

  49

  Foul Thoughts

  Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is green and brown.

  E. HOWARD HUNT

  HE CRAWLED BACK into bed late in the night. Helen tucked him in, sat for a while on the edge of the bed and stared at him with a look that, had his eyes not already been closed, would not have sat well with him.

  Still, he spent the night—the last night—peacefully. Early in the morning he was pulled out of bed. Someone had him by the neck and dragged him into the other room. With a voice that was neither inquiring nor upset, but rather just cold and cutting, Helen said: “What is this? What. Is. This.”

  Carl stood beside her in his underwear with the worn-out elastic, in front of him twelve scraps of paper loosely assembled into three rectangles. He recognized them immediately. A thirteenth piece lay to the side. It was slightly singed but was of the same material as the rest and had the same red pattern. Three ID papers. Three Officers of the Virtue Committee.

  Leaning over them, Carl suddenly said: “What is that?”

  “It was in your shorts. I was going to have them washed. Don’t lie to me now.”

  Carl rubbed his chest with his hands and, still not sure why Helen was so upset, he told her about finding the IDs on the body in the desert. Or rather, the pieces of paper. A body in a light-gray suit and a wire noose around his neck that he had stumbled across… that’s where he’d got these. In one of his pockets.

  “And what is this?” Helen tapped her finger on the sections of the IDs typed out with red ink.

  Carl read and stopped short: Adolphe Aun… Bertrand Bédeaux… Didier Dequat.

  “A, B, D!” said Helen loudly. “One, two, four!”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, shit, Monsieur Cetrois. Now stop telling me shit about where you got these. Don’t tell me any more shit. You shove that story about the body up your… You’ve played the amnesiac long enough, and now, please: Do. Not. Lie. To. Me.”

  Carl picked up the singed piece of paper. It said “Nom:” and after looking at it for a second he put it back on the table and repea
ted the story of stumbling upon the body. A wire noose. Two halves of a pencil… and an Adolphe Menjou mustache. The dead man had a Menjou mustache.

  “Bullshit,” said Helen. “You are talking bullshit.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “What?”

  “That I’ve only been pretending to have lost my memory.”

  “I believe what Dr Cockcroft believes.”

  “How do you know what Dr Cockcroft believes?”

  “Because you told me, my dear boy. Are you suddenly really suffering from memory loss? Tell me where you got these things, and don’t say from a dead man. Have you had them the whole time? Who are you? You had them the whole time, didn’t you? You knew all along who you were, and—”

  “I can show you the corpse.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, I can—”

  “No, you can’t! Do you really think I would drive into the desert with you now to look for a dead man with a Menjou mustache? It’s over. The trip to the Salt Quarter was enough. That’s when I began to think something wasn’t right. That you’re a liar. A liar and a faker. Don’t look so offended. And in case you can’t imagine how I see things I’d be happy to tell you.”

  “Helen.”

  “What are the facts? The facts are—no, listen to me. The facts are: I pick up a man at a gas station in the middle of the desert who says he’s lost his memory. I believe him. I take care of him. I’m not put off by the fact that he doesn’t want to go to the police. I’m not put off by the fact that he doesn’t want to go to the hospital and that a specialist says that an explanation for such memory loss doesn’t exist.”

  “Probably doesn’t exist.”

  “Probably my ass. But it’s nice that you want to talk about probability. I was just about to get to that. So I’m taking care of this man. I’m taking care of this man whose identity is completely in the dark, a man who claims not to own anything more than the things he has on his person, along with the singed corner of an ID the crucial part of which was burned by some hippies. What is the probability of that? And he’d barely been with me before he was kidnapped by a gangster boss. He had a letter-opener jammed through his hand and even under extreme pain didn’t reveal the fact that he’d lost his memory or that he had a friend named Cetrois. Or believed he did. For days we desperately searched for this Cetrois, and it emerges that it is the man himself. What is the probability of that? And we’d barely found that out when our man turns out to be carrying three IDs in his pocket. Three silly, forged IDs which match wonderfully the fourth, silly, forged ID burned by the hippies. And how did they suddenly turn up? He found them on a corpse in the desert, a corpse with, and I quote, a Menjou mustache, that he happened to stumble upon among the dunes, and all of this yesterday—without ever paying much attention to the IDs or bothering to mention them to me. The man who pours his heart out to me every night—this one thing he forgets to mention. I happen to find the things in his pocket. What is the probability of that?”

  “It’s not too probable, but—”

  “And last of all, our man is searching for a mine. What kind of mine? He doesn’t know. But due to a happy coincidence he suddenly finds or at least claims to have found his mine, which it turns out is the ink cartridge of a pen, actually of a ballpoint pen, a quote cheap ballpoint pen, and this fucking pen, which has all the fucking answers to all his fucking problems, he allows to be stolen in the Empty Quarter by, and I quote again, a schoolboy, while he sends me in the car to the Salt Quarter. You still have your wallet, the money I gave you, the second key for the bungalow, you have all of that. The only thing gone is the blazer with the pen. What is the probability of that? Put yourself in my place. I mean, do you think I’m an idiot?”

  Helen’s voice had lost any sluggishness or droning. She spat out the final sentence in a staccato that sounded like a machine gun.

  Mystified, Carl looked her in the eyes. Was she really as sure as she was making out, or was she just testing him? He didn’t know. And what if she were right? Was it possible that, despite not having been there and using nothing more than combinatorics, everything Helen had figured out was true? Was it possible, as Dr Cockcroft had suggested, to fake something without realizing you are faking it? Was that the inevitable conclusion to be taken from the scraps of paper?

  It felt for a moment as if he might go crazy. He tried to work his way back through the memories of the last few days to what he had learned about his life and to try to reassemble it all into another somehow also consistent whole, but he wasn’t able to. It was no longer a question of thinking, it was a descent into a fog. How could Helen cast a glance at the strewn paper scraps and so unambiguously see what it was she wanted to see, namely an image full of contradictions and improbabilities?

  The possibility of losing the trust of the only person he was close to put him in a panic. He groaned. He fell silent.

  “If that’s all you have to say, then that’s it,” he heard. “It’s over. I helped you in every way I could, but I’m not going to shelter a liar. If you want to tell me what these IDs are and how you got them and, most importantly, who you are and where the cartridge is, then you can tell me now. Tell me. This is the last chance. Who are you? And what is with the fucking cartridge?”

  His mind was racing with no result. Helen swished the paper scraps off the table with a swat of her arm. “Fine,” she said without any noticeable emotion. “I’m going to the beach. You can wait until your clothes come back from the hotel cleaner, but you’d better be gone when I get back.”

  She grabbed her bathing suit and two towels from the bathroom, then went to the phone and had herself connected to the US. Carl sat slumped on a chair trying to straighten things out in his mind. Through the fog came the contours of other unexplained details. The wooden gun. A fake gun, a fake ID. The fog began to cause physical pain. He knew he was lost without Helen. He heard her speaking to her mother and he stopped trying to figure out an answer and just tried to think of something he could say that would calm her down. He had told the truth throughout, but the truth was improbable. He knew it himself.

  “It is certainly unlikely,” he began again. “But I want to ask you something. If I had really wanted to deceive you, if I had really known all along about those IDs in my pocket and wanted to lie to you about where I got them—would I really have come up with something so absurdly improbable as a corpse with a Menjou mustache? With a wire around its throat? Couldn’t I have simply come up with something much more plausible?”

  Helen’s answer came straight back: “Like what?”

  She took her hand away from the telephone, which she had covered for a few seconds, and began talking again.

  “No, nobody, mother,” she said.

  “Yes, fine,” she said.

  “Then I wouldn’t have tried this morning,” she said.

  Carl attempted to imagine what Helen’s mother was saying on the other side of the ocean. Then he thought about the wooden gun again. He went over it in his head again and again.

  “Yeah… yeah. No, it didn’t turn up and won’t ever turn up. I’m sure. I called the company, they’re sending a new one. Three new ones would be better, of course… three are always better than one, yeah… immediately, when else? I’m going to the beach now… the same everywhere… yeah. Carthage is good. Say hello from me,” said Helen and hung up.

  “Who is Carthage?” asked Carl.

  Helen didn’t answer.

  “Who is Carthage?”

  “My dog. Remember: when I return, the bungalow is empty.”

  She put her beach bag over her shoulder and left.

  Carl picked the scraps of paper up from the floor, reassembled them with trembling fingers and saw what he had seen before: ridiculous IDs from a ridiculous “Virtue Committee”. He swished them off the table again, went out onto the terrace and watched an already small Helen as she disappeared between the pine trees. The ocean rolled onto the beach in small waves.
Helen was barely gone when a man appeared on the path and stopped among the trees. He was very far away, but Carl had the impression that the man was staring at him. One or two minutes, then the man turned around and went back down toward the beach.

  Carl flopped down on a deckchair. He felt leaden with fatigue. Something had worn him out to the core. The thoughts no longer raced through his head, they just limped around. Out of fear of further angering Helen for not following her order, he pressed himself out of the chair with a groan, trudged down the path to the second terrace and climbed over the railing there. Teetering on the downslope side, he scoped out a suitable spot to sleep in the undergrowth and then nestled himself among some genista shrubs. The light was grainy. He lay on his stomach. Then he turned onto his back. From time to time he sat up in fright, as if a thought had hit him, but each time lethargy overwhelmed him again. He didn’t feel capable of making any decision. His gaze wandered to the swaying treetops between which the evening sun hung like violet-colored glass, and he wished he were dead.

  50

  Contrazoom

  Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

  PROTAGORAS

  HIS DREAMS WERE STALKED by endless herds of stiff, wooden goats inside which timber worms worked dressed as priests. With a swat of his hand, as if he were casting out ghosts, he sat up in the morning light.

  After he had stewed for fifteen minutes or longer, he walked up to the bungalow. Twenty or thirty steps below the terrace he hesitated. He crouched behind a tree and cried. And waited. Finally he knocked on the door. He put his eye on the outside of the peephole, knocked again, and then went around the building and looked in the window. The blinds in the bedroom weren’t down. The bed was empty. Helen’s suitcase was no longer on the dresser.