Excerpt of Dr Tenace :
Dr Tenace
©Yves Bernas 2014
Chapter 1: Morgue 15
As a doctor, you are interested in life, you fight for it and rejoice when you’ve healed, when the heartbeat is regular, the cheeks are pink and the eyes shine with hope and not with fever. After you’ve signed his authorisation to leave the hospital, you walk the patient to the door and say:
– I never want to see you here again Mr. Barns, you promise?
As a surgeon you’re usually sad when you did not manage to save someone, like the young boy whose parents brought him in so late that his appendix burst and produced the lethal peritonitis. You’re not sad because you messed up and were a bad doctor, ‘cause you surely weren’t. You’re sad because someone died in front of you and you couldn’t do anything about it. Perhaps this is why so many doctors have a couple of drinks more than the rest of us. It’s a hard job to clink glasses with the dead.
James Tenace was a doctor, but he wasn’t sad when someone died, he was interested. He had the professionally compassionate look on his face, so common to undertakers. He had always wanted to be present when someone died. He had even given instructions to the nurses to call him when someone was about to kick the bucket. When he came, he entered the room quietly, got closer to the dying person, caress his cheeks, maybe thereby smelling what was still left of the breath and coveting, would take both his cold hands and peer deep into the fainting eyes. He would then sit down on the chair next to the bed, still holding the dying person’s hand to avidly scrutinise all around his body in a frenzy.
To say that Doctor Tenace loved death is probably too much, but decay, especially mental or soul decay fascinated him. He was hypnotised by the last minutes of all sorts of living creatures struggling with death. He loved their panic, their trembling, their eyes at a loss, looking one last time around the room to see if they still knew someone, before this sudden calm would invade just before it was all over. This is when he would stand up, bend down over the corpse and possibly rejoice, holding the stethoscope, that the heartbeat would never be irregular again.
I always wondered what kind of physical pleasures such events triggered in his body, because afterwards he always looked sweaty, compulsively excited, and his eyes would glitter like engaging swords in the subdued room before he would routinely order the nurse to take the corpse to:
– Morgue 15 please!
Tenace had not always been like that. On the contrary, he used to fight for life even when most of his colleagues had already given up. It’s not clear what changed him. Some say it was a love affair, one that actually had not quite reached this stage.
Chapter 2: Sarah Schein
Sarah Schein was a Jewish beauty, dark curly hair, extremely vivid and mocking. Arrogant and elitist, she would despise a man as soon as possible if she could detect the slightest hint that he would not be up to her expectations and these were certainly great, all the greater since it might have been the only greatness she would ever achieve.
But Doctor Tenace had been fascinated by her in his youth, her eyes shining like the hearth of her soul. Her smile mocked the entire world and she was so sure of herself, like one can only be when one has had a perfect childhood. Her parents had loved her so unconditionally, in a glimpse of divineness she would never forget. She would radiate back this divineness at the most unexpected moments, even through the narrow doors of her smirk.
Poor Tenace fell for that, not only the quick mouth and the dark locks, her childishness and insolence; that was the sunny side of it, but he fell for the impossible, the perpetual challenges she kept on giving him, all he had to reach and change before she would finally let him have her. Tenace started to believe in this promise of a later paradise, in another life, and started to get used to the idea that happiness was not for now but for later, once you’re dead. Perhaps this is why he was so fascinated by death. He had renounced to be happy in his very life and was ready to endure the challenges and rejections, eternally waiting for the moment when she’d finally say yes.
His life had shrunk to checking a daily list of to–do’s and the only, but great, pleasure in it was when this list was done. He was so used to things going wrong that he could not enjoy things going right. They were a bad sign, the sign that it was going to go wrong again. This is why he enjoyed and preferred when things went wrong, end of story. It was secure, nothing could get worse and that was good, so good that he could relax and rest in this dead end.
But what Tenace didn’t realise is that in Sarah’s mind, even this other life was definitely not meant to include him. When he reckoned that, it was too late; he had already started to hate her. For Tenace, life was exterior to human beings; it visited them like the wind, blew over streets and houses and in a twinkle, it was somewhere else, leaving people at their windows, complaining, “It’s dead here!”
Chapter 3: Anna Haridana
These were his thoughts as he was looking out the window of his office at Falkennest, a medical institution specialised in trying to get patients back from the coma they fell in after surgery or accident. Tenace opened the file on his desk: Anna Haridana. Anna was the worst case, no sign of life except her breath. She had a poached eye which she had never bothered to vitrify. Perhaps if she had had the money she would have had it replaced, even with gold, since her father was Russian.
Tenace read “Married to the painter and lacquerer Miguel Sofrer since 1958”, then further: during the trial it was not completely clear either to the judge or to the General Attorney or even to Anna’s public lawyer, who was the accused and who was the culprit. But since one of them was dead and the other one about the same, none of these wigged officials was very much troubled by this uncertainty. Why Robert Stank, the Attorney General, insisted on Anna’s presence in Court was a mystery, since she could neither understand nor hear the questions posed by the court, not even the final sentence. She was just a flabby packet on a wheelchair disrupting the sudden silence of the high-ceiling church that served as a court room with her hoarse breath. If he could have, Robert Stank would have ordered the coffin to court. The circumstances of the accident -should I say murder- are unclear. All that is sure is that Anna and Miguel were found lying
on the round perron after having both smashed through the second-floor window of the dining room and flown to the ground screaming. Who pushed who is unclear. Miguel died instantly. The neighbours, Mr and Mrs Rütli, said that a fight about money had been going on. They testified that they have clearly heard Miguel accusing his wife of haven stolen money from him for years. He is supposed to have yelled at his wife just before the fatal flight:
– 200,000 Francs in that bank account! How on earth did you get it? If you weren’t so fat and ugly, I could guess how you got it.
This is when she grabbed the knife. Though small, it was glittering in her hands just like her eyes, and Miguel knew she was going to kill him unless he stopped her. But he was much angrier at her that she had been stealing from him than he was that she intended to kill him. Money was more valuable than life. He stood up, rushed at her, not caring about the knife, just longing for her throat. He clawed his hands around her throat, screaming and pushing her across the room, holding her gullet, his arms so stretched that it seemed to keep the knife away.
Most probably it was because the knife was too short, since it was an oyster knife. He began to shove her around the room with a strength and determination neither of them suspected him to possess. He kept on looking into her eyes and perhaps he saw in them that she still loved him and was never going to kill him, but then again why did she steal all that money?
These were the fateful seconds of his life; he did not have time to answer his questions. He did not have the patience anymore. He had asked himself these questions over and over again, forgiving her everything, her moods, her unfounded accusations, her animosity, her verbal abuse, her contempt, her refusal and domination. But this time, he’d had enough. He had come to the conclusion that the solution was this stained-glass window representing the dome of the Universe according to Flammarion. He did not even feel much when she stabbed him with that oyster knife; perhaps he thought it was the door to heaven. And anyhow he had his eyes closed and was thrusting her. He moved like a bull rushing to his torturer. She was imploring him with her eyes, but somehow it seemed that she did not care either. Whatever would come, if it was his way to show her his feelings, whatever feelings, at least feelings. Their voyage lasted an eternity and they went through the stained-glass like the milkman through the door. The window exploded and they stopped screaming for three seconds, honouring the silence, and then there was a big thump, like a big pat on the back. That was it. Tenace closed the file and his thoughts drifted. He remembered his father saying:
– I’m 54 and I’m done with my life. Ain’t that good, the next years are free, no duty! Duty is an excuse for not doing what you want! Tenace was afraid of not being afraid to die. He kept on thinking that if you’re not afraid to die, death would come and get you. There he was, abashed and not caring to survive, indifferent to death. He thought, it could come when it wanted. At the same time this very idea scared him because he thought it was like lowering your guard. Accepting the possibility of one’s own end coming any second, wasn’t that the ultimate wisdom and freedom? He could not totally adhere to that and kept on thinking he was somehow spitting at life. Maybe the answer should have been to want something, to really want something extraordinary, instead of surfing like a parasite on the organic waves of life. He also thought if you refused to live, you’d get another life, and that thought suited him because he wasn’t pleased with his, where he was born and how his life had started. Tenace placed the file back on his desk and looked through the window. Old Yvonne, who looked like a turtle, was being walked by young Maja. He fancied Maja, a young nurse, short blond hair, blue, slightly mocking eyes, sporty, joyful, 200 percent alive and always humming a tune like she would bring babies to bed. This story was too close to his; Anna Haridana could have been his mother. A tear drop was about to be conceived by his lachrymal glands, when, probably, the satisfaction of being alive, at least for the prospect of a dinner with young Maja, made his cheeks spread apart to press his lips together in a smile of solidarity for the living.
Chapter 4: Tennis
The music of a tennis match arose from his past, so did the green lawn they were sitting on to watch it. Well, he didn’t really watch it, he watched the buttocks of the spectators, and some of them had their wallets sticking out. He must have been nine. He walked behind them and took one of these wallets. He had stolen for the very first time in his life. And as if it had been a routine of his, he knew he should not carry the wallet with him, and immediately headed for a tree to hide it. The poor victim must have been fourteen or so, a young blond boy named Paul Eyre, who he thought was too handsome and too happy not to have his wallet stolen.
The handy thing about his strategy was that he could then run to the tuck shop whenever he wanted and buy sweets with the tuppence and thruppence coins of her Majesty. He was smart enough not to overdo it, and only used the inexhaustible resources near the oak tree with caution. He got through with it, well nearly. It seems that some suspicion was raised when, having had enough of the undeserved treats, he claimed to have found the wallet in the wood near a tree. The suspicion even took the shape of an accusation in the mouth of this 13-year-old curly-headed midget called James Bear. He remembered him solidly planted in front of the dark red brick wall near the kitchen, defiant and indignant:
– You found the wallet where you hid it! Because you’re the thief!
Then the rhythm of the tennis ball faded away and his father’s voice came out from the woods behind the court and the woods turned into the living room. He could then read these terrifying words on his father’s lips:
– Where has that money gone again?
And Tenace would tremble inside because he knew that he had, though very rarely, reiterated the wallet trick, at least in its main points, with his father’s wallet. And though he had the trick from his mother who he had surprised pinching some of the magic notes from his father’s wallet, he could not avoid feeling guilty, feeling it to be the cause of their divorce, as his father had also discovered that she had stolen from him for years. Though she definitely did most of the embezzlement, Tenace secretly blamed himself for all, their ensuing divorce and her tragic death.
Kids are like that: they take the blame on themselves for ever and ever, and the story of Anna Haridana reminded him of his own story and Anna of his own mother, except his father didn’t die then. This time the tear drop made its way to the light.
This is why he paid particular attention to Anna and visited her more than any other patient. He had even personally accompanied her to the trial and brought her back after the bewigged spazzes were done. How much he hated lawyers and judges! He despised them. They were professional liars who had learned all the tricks about hiding and turning the truth around to defend any one and any cause, applying their finely-oiled machinations to bleed hearts and purses with no remorse, no empathy and no feeling for justice. This is about the only point he agreed with Hitler on a land with no lawyers, except that Hitler probably saw lawyers as the Resistance to his corrupted “judges”. Of course, Tenace knew that there is nothing more dangerous than that feeling for justice. It is precisely in its name that the worst atrocities are committed.
He was therefore somehow relieved that any Joey Smith lawyer would just follow his paragraphs, if not like a Swiss watch, at least like a Bavarian cuckoo clock, and issue some absurd statement by the end of the trial, as timely as the clock cuckoo utters his cry. Right then, Tenace’s cuckoo clock uttered three o’clock.
Chapter 5: The Who
Tenace was excited, he was among the top three doctors to get the governmental mission of the century: the Definition of Death. DOD was the job. This was just his cup of tea, his hobby, his cherished theme, cut out just for him. He was going to get the job, he felt it, he knew it, he wanted it.
– Dead is dead, it’s clear cut! thought Tenace the Child, remembering when his mother had died. He had wanted to look at her one last time and as he had gotten closer to the coffin to see what a dead mother looked like, his Dad had opposed him: Why do you want to see her? As if death was only a grown-up thing.Death was clear cut, a real cut in his twelve-year-old heart. He remembered how it bled, on the bench in the town house park, for days and days after her death.
But Tenace the Doctor knew it wasn’t clear cut. When are you dead? Certainly not when the heart simply ceases to beat or when you stop breathing. When then? When your encephalogram is flat? When your temperature is below 15 degrees centigrade, or when everybody you know has forgotten about you?
The existence of this uncertainty interval was precisely what organ traffickers were taking advantage of. Their clear cut in the flesh robbed the organs away in a flash, rendering the matter suddenly very certain and dear. This is why the government had launched this project and this is why Doctor Tenace, who was eminent in this field, had received an invitation to apply for the job and had applied.
If he did get the job, he was going to decide who was dead and who wasn’t. Wasn’t it like playing God? He liked that. Of course there was a knock on the door at that moment and of course the messenger brought him a yellow letter with the official stamp of the Ministry for Health. Oh, how Tenace’s heart pounded! It pounded like the heart of a writer opening the answer letter from his editor. Will he, Tenace the Doctor, be allowed to publish his Law of Life and Death in the great Register of Medicine and thereby most probably escape his own law?
He sat back on his chair. He could have rushed to the envelope and torn it apart to either voluptuously read his nomination aloud through the walls of the entire clinic or read in a desperate mumble the usual apologies:
We have read you with a particular attention but regret to have to inform you that you do not quite match our very special needs…, bla bla bla! Don’t hesitate to run for our next office…
Thank you Margot! He finally uttered, not realising that Margot was already bringing other letters to other occupants of some neighbouring offices equally at odds with their own hopes. He wanted to throw a last glance at Maja that would give him the necessary kick to open the letter. The virtue of short glances at beautiful young girls is magic. Suddenly elder men start to sing or whistle and they have no clue why they do so. Only the wife guesses, and for no other reason than jealousy, she kills that ephemeral flight of joy by some dreadful sarcasm, so that the love bird drops dead in the kitchen, in all kitchens of the world. Tenace was in his office and he appreciated it. Maja wasn’t out there anymore. He didn’t open the letter.
Chapter 6: Falkennest
The familiar blue van drove up the alley. Falkennest had a new pensioner and as Tenace had always done, he would go down and greet the newcomer personally. Something must have been rejoicing him extremely, because he had that funny look on his face that only young boys have when they’re up to something very stupid.
– Good afternoon, Mrs Van Brandstaetten! Welcome to Falkennest.I am Doctor Tenace, in charge of this place, but most of all, in charge of your well-being! And he giggled cheerfully, not even looking at her but throwing a dirty smirk at the male nurse operating the crane that lowered the wheelchair Mrs Van Brandstaetten sat on. Mrs Van Brandstaetten, you can call me James, but only if I may call you Walburga! He said with a false smile and reached his hand to hers.
– She’s degree five! muttered the nurse, trying to hide his dislike of Tenace. It wasn’t so much the false teeth that made Tenace’s smile so false but some kind of creepy prospect that oozed out of his professional doctor mask. The only part of Walburga that moved was her grey locks, which the wind gently caressed.
– Fantastic, you are wonderful! added Tenace pressing her hand against his heart with both hands.
– Get her straight to room 15! he yelled at the nurse and walked down the perron onto the main alley of the park. He suddenly had the urge to walk, actually to run, but his back ached, so he accepted the compromise. Something was creeping in his stomach. Wasn’t he doing the right thing? Why did that stupid nurse grin at him with such contempt? These treatments were no experiments. It was the only way to get these comatose patients back to consciousness. Who cared whether it was legal or not? Great scientists always broke the law, even their own law.
He was a Professor and a Doctor of Medical Sciences, originally a gynaecologist but now specialised in brain surgery, neurosurgery, anaesthesia and reanimation. As the Head of the Falkennest Clinic Faculty for treatment of comatose patients, he would most probably be imminently nominated by the WHO for leading the soon-to-be created IDDT, International Definition of Death Team. Such a definition was urgently needed for the eradication of organ trafficking related murders.
It was his favourite subject and he secretly regarded himself as the premier specialist on soul matters, near death experiments, and, should he confess: soul transfer? This was the crux of his vocation but he could not print it on his business card nor impress any female with it.
It was not that nurse’s look that was going to make Tenace stop. He had stopped too many times in his youth. He had stopped running when mum had called him. He had stopped crying when Dad had yelled at him. He had stopped eating his beloved chocolate ice when that bitch at the nursery had wanted him to go lie down. He had stopped fucking when Sarah Schein had not wanted to, stopped drinking when he had studied for his damned exams, stopped talking when his father had commanded it.
No! No! No! This time he was not going to stop. His heart pounded, his entire body was about to explode at the remembrance of all these interdictions piled up from the bottom of his stomach up to his gullet. Still pacing up the alley, he started to hit the oaks with his stick, like a teacher his pupils’ fingers.
He suddenly remembered Gaby, the tomboy, that obnoxious hoyden who wore a black and white cap à la Belmondo, except that she was a romp appointed as an “éducateur” in a French holiday camp. She had them all lined up on the stone wall between the dry fields out in the middle of nowhere because none of the 8-year-old boys wanted to say who had pulled some little girl’s nickers down.
Belmondo had then ordered them to pull their own pants down, showing their willies to the crows while she would walk from behind and smack each of their buttocks with her callous hand like a field marshal on troop inspection. And Tenace the Child was touched for the first time in his life by feelings of injustice, shame and indignation. If he could have gotten Gaby’s soul right now, he would have transferred it into a rat before squeezing it to death with a stick yelling No! as he was doing right now to a slug in Falkennest’s park.
Chapter 7: A Photograph
Ralf Weber liked his new black-pointed shoes even though they had just started to hurt, squeezing his toes together against the shoe cap. The leather soles were slippery, but the shoes reminded him of his time as a student, where, employed in a shoe shop, he’d spent most of his time listening to LP’s while rearranging the shoe boxes, his back facing the customers, instead of turning down the volume, which chased them away.
– How is your twinkly wonky doodle doing today, Mr Randy Vous? Oh, your name isn’t Vous but Wu. I’m sorry, I didn’t study Chinese; should I have? You’re not worried are you? We are just going to take a little picture, a family picture Randy, ‘cause we’re all a family, Randy, a nice one!
He gave Randy a pat on the back through the waxed cloth of the wheel chair. The pat was a bit too rough to be a friendly one, and Randy’s head jerked forward, but Randy didn’t complain. Randy Wu had served in Vietnam, so he was not a weak sister.
– Hey Randy! Does your name spell Wuss? and Ralf Weber let out one of his dirty corporeal laughs.
– You’re no Wussy, Randy? and another pat on the back. This is when he heard someone in the park scream “No!” He recognised Tenace’s voice. As if struck by lightning, Ralf Weber’s hand stopped dead a few inches away from Randy’s back this time, and he quickly slid to Elsa Piolet.
Though he had intended, for the picture of course, to pull that nasty white hair out of her nostril with his bare thumb, squeezing it against his index, the echo of Tenace’s word had still enough strength to make him renounce it.
– My lovely little goat, I’ll leave it there. You’re pretty enough today. Hope it’ll shine.
Then he rolled Mrs Van Brandstaetten next to Haridana, so that she’d be close to the centre of the picture. Ralf was afraid of Mrs Van Brandstaetten. It was not the imposing gold chain and bracelets topped by the vivid Chanel red on her lips that impressed him, he was simply afraid of newcomers:
What if she was a checker, one of those Gault et Millau-style testers converted to hospices and asylums? And though Ralf’s impulse was to wipe the red off her lips and confiscate the jewellery, since it was against Falkennest’s social policy, he postponed it, awaiting a clearer assessment of her state of consciousness. He would then proceed, but with the whole strength he had accumulated through his restraint, like a long-awaited tide.
His eyes drifted towards Tenace’s hunting trophies: two deer heads, a bear head and a couple of other animals. He wished the patients had been stuffed too, since those padded faces looked definitely more alive than the patients. Ralf Weber heard the distinctive pace of Tenace behind him.
– Get Harridana’s face up, I want her to look at the camera. What did you load it with? Tri-X pan?
This was not a question but an order, and Ralf nodded. He hated Tenace’s quirk to straighten the heads and the inert limbs attached to nylon strings hanging from the ceiling. God knows what Tenace was doing with these pictures anyway and why he insisted on using a plate camera. He remembered Tenace’s answer a year ago:
– They’re ideal subject for photography with a plate camera. They don’t move, you can close at F8, take advantage of the fine grain of a 50 ASA film and leave the shutter open for an eternity, catching second after second all the particles of their soul to engrave them in the chemistry.
Ralf remembered remaining perplexed at this answer, but now, a year later, he understood a little more, especially after having peeped at Doctor Tenace’s manuscript entitled: “On a field theory of consciousness”.
The pictures taken under these conditions were scary, particularly the black and white ones, exactly as if they had caught the soul. Ralf had witnessed himself trembling while watching them, especially the positive glass plates that Tenace had been experimenting with for a while. He was struck by the astounding crispness of their looks, and much to his surprise, they all looked much more alive on these photographs than in reality.
Perhaps Tenace was right. Accumulating the “soul particles” over such unrealistic exposure times made their feeble life radiation that we call coma, suddenly cross through accumulation the threshold that defines life.
When everything was about ready, Tenace bent down behind the camera under the black felt and looked through. He came out again and impatiently complained:
– Pull the curtains together! I don’t want to see the nylon strings!
Ralf, who had pulled the ugly orange curtains apart precisely to let the sun shine on the strings to counteract the flashlight and make the nylon strings less visible, pulled them back together. As if Tenace had guessed his questions, he uttered:
– When the flashlight hits the strings, it’s better they’re lit from behind, but today we don’t use flashlight, Ralf.
Tenace pressed the button, the shutter opened, and in that silence where no one moved, he counted up to 30. He released the trigger, the shutter closed again and with a grin of satisfaction, Tenace pulled the tray comprising the exposed plate out of the camera.
Chapter 8: Atomic Density Tomography
It was years back that Tenace had the idea. He was still a student, and as a student you question everything, and particularly all that is sacredly given as wholly true by any of your imposed spiritual fathers, beginning with your own. Tenace’s father was an atheist, an atheist of the most stubborn species, and he had started to work on his sonny as soon as the latter could talk. The poor kid had learned very early in his life the tricks and bits of rhetoric you need to fool anyone with your own rubbish.
Little sonny Tenace would entertain whoever wanted to listen to him on the bus trips organised by the school or during the holiday camps he was so often dumped at. On economy or religion, or the necessary infinity of space, with the argument: if it’s finite, what’s behind it? He’d explain market law to flabbergasted, chubby football fans wondering what kind of alien had landed on the seat next to them. And tiny Tenie made it, or thought he did: The girls in the front looked at him, his 10-year-old’s energetic face, accompanying his words with the adequate unforgiving grimace of a Hyde Park speaker, his hands sweeping the air like Roberto Benzi to the music of his bullshit, while his heels would stomp the floor below the bus seat in front of him.
But the girls would still be looking, and this is what confirmed Jimmy Teeny the tiny that his father was right to argue and grin, to wag his hands as if they were the tail of a horny dog, spitting endorphins-loaded saliva instead of drooling slobber.
So God did not exist! These girls were the proof, and his father was right, and tiny Teeny walked in the footsteps of his father like any toddler would do, until he finally gathered that daddy did not believe in God only because God had told him not to! Daddy Tenace was obedient, and obedient to the currents he had chosen to belong to, probably because of the war: materialism, Marxist- Leninist materialism. And when your master tells you not to believe in God, you just don’t, even when later, in an instant of weakness, as you must prepare yourself to close the big shop and your master has become God himself, you say you don’t believe in him and that’s because HE told you not to.
But Tenace was no longer tiny, nor was he teeny and he had definitively rejected the idea that consciousness ended with your death, with the same old stupid fatherly argument: If it ends then, what’s next? Though it did not make much sense there. But then again, who really cares? Should it make sense? Sense is an illusion you only care for when you’ve got all the rest and nothing to do. Do you care about sense when you’re in intense pain, when you die or when you crave to kiss a pretty, unknown mouth that you don’t even want to listen to?
So Tenace had decided at the age of 21 that the soul outlived the body, period. He did this as he was climbing the mountain like a guerrillero with his friend Ronnie Chair, carrying a backpack radio transmitter broadcasting illegal programs from tapes playing on the tape player mounted on Tenace’s shoulders, and let me recover my breath. “Radio Che” was back on Campus and surroundings, and no radio-goniometry was fast enough to locate the revolutionary climbers. That was good so, because to become the best scientist, the most talented doctor or the most effective capitalist, you have to have had been a god-dammed good revolutionary in your twenties or at least a taxi driver in New York.
So Tenace, although his Uher Report 2010 was weighing hard on his reddened clavicle, had decided to believe that the soul existed independently of the body whether or not it weighed 21 grams, whether or not you could see it, whether or not it was dark matter, invisible moulded cheese or hyper-violet light. Well influenced by his four years of physics before he converted to medical sciences, he postulated the theory that whatever the soul was made of, it was only able to connect to the body under certain circumstances. What he was interested in was not the connection itself, which was the study of all the philosophers and writers throughout history, but it’s reconnection and disconnection, birth and death.
In other words he focussed on observing reincarnation and disincarnating, and since he had a very small budget at that time, his focus remained purely intellectual, just like Einstein’s when he focussed on the restricted relativity theory. Tenace came up with his theory that only when the body is in a certain atomic state, a soul entity, be it energy, dark matter or intergalactic fart condensation, may connect to or disconnect from the body. From then on, his project was to study the whole body at atomic level at the capital instants of life: birth and death.
This is why, if you study the registers at the Margarita Central Hospital where he served 5 years, you will notice an important number of dubiously-justified tomograms of foetuses in the womb at various stages of the pregnancy, all ordered by Doctor Tenace in persona. Of course the Hospital did not care, because someone had to pay for the machines. Of course Tenace did not find any answer to satisfy his demoniac curiosity. Not only was the resolution of these prehistorical tomograms too low but, should it be true that the soul walks into the foetus flesh, at what time in the pregnancy then? And even if he had by any chance hit the right moment, how would he on earth recognise it? But creative scientists don’t always bother with such details, they just go ahead. One can be lucky that Tenace had a plan, some don’t even have a plan, like Fleming and his penicillin.
Anyhow Tenace held on, nomen est omen. It was in his garage- he had long sold his beloved 1938 Jaguar XK- that he had created, with pots and pans, and after numerous ifs and ands, his Atomic Density Tomograph (ADT) which gave such dense imagery that there was no room for tinkers.
That cost him his wife. Sarah Schein could not take it, week-end after week-end, savings after savings, and worst of all, it was all that Tenace talked about, his bloody ADT. She left him one morning with the dog. Though it is not clear if Tenace concentrated on his ADT because he already could not bear Sarah any more, just like sporty husbands spend their week-end mending the car, or whether Tenace was so into it that he took no prisoners, which wasn’t that bad ‘cause Sarah was definitely not the type to be taken prisoner. The poor dog, his name was Badger. He was the first living creature ever (after the dead rats Tenace had picked up on the channel’s bank, near the flat boats) to enjoy the honour of being scanned at atomic level. This took place when he discovered that the dog’s alleged hip dysplasia had actually turned into bone necrosis and since Tenace was close to broke, he shot him on the spot with a good dose of potassium and also took a snapshot of his death in his tomograph at atomic level.
Chapter 9: Autocorrelation
Even with his super-duper tomograph, Tenace found no trace of a soul leaving. The only departed souls he noticed were the ones of his wife and his dog. He fell into a deep depression and started to hang out at the village’s taverns. And as if chance was nothing but a meticulously designed plan, he heard the conversation of two mathematicians, most definitely drunk at the neighbouring table, and one, probably the more sober of the two, mumbled this very philosophical question:
– What do you do when there is no signal? When there is just noise, random and deceiving nonsense, just fucking bullshit? The man, who according to the owner responded by the name of Lebel, started to shake his buddy angrily: Bullshit, like the one you’ve been telling me for the last hour, what do you do when your own encephalogram is flat, no signal, no meaning no results for 3 years and your boss asks why? And the man started to weep, and Tenace felt a big ball in his throat and he could have wept just as well except he was too curious about the answer. Then the other man, who wore a ginger beard and looked more like a woodcutter, burped, and Tenace thought he was vomiting but he wasn’t and between two hiccups he pushed Lebel on the shoulder and spat out these words:
– I’ll tell you what I’d do Lebel, burp… Auto… burp… correlation, burp… He repeated one last time, waving his finger at the waiter who had gotten closer to the noise: Autocorrelation! The waiter did not have time to tell him they didn’t serve that, as the man’s head dropped dead on the old oak table. Tenace’s heart started to pound, blood rose to his pale cheek, his eyes lit up like life itself, he screamed, stood up, kissed the comatose woodcutter on what was visible of his forehead and disappeared into the snowy night of December.
He had drunk all his William’s Pear on autocorrelation that night, scribbling equations and other cabalistic signs from his first life as a physics student down on paper. He had a goddamn hangover in the morning, but he knew where to go and that made up for the hangover by far.
It is not the locus here to provide a detailed explanation about the insight Tenace had just gained through the rather short conversation at the pub, but a few tips to the novice, though not indispensably necessary for him to feel at ease with the present narration, would certainly help him to understand the feelings of immense hope and ecstasy that Tenace suddenly experienced.
Autocorrelation, or how to detect meaning out of chaos? How to bring life to what merely appears as silence or signaletic death? Imagine someone tells you something but is so far away from you or you are both in such a loud environment that you can’t hear it. If by any chance this person repeats regularly, let’s say each second, the word LOVE again and again, like the beat of a heart, you will still not hear it. This person can speak this word during his entire life, but you will never hear it.
However, if you should record this apparent silence or noise, cut the signal into bits of one second each and add their acoustic signal over and over again, and if the word LOVE was always be pronounced exactly the same way, there is a big chance, that after having added it a thousand or a million times, your impaired ears would finally hear the word LOVE, because it would suddenly be a thousand or a million times louder. It would stick out from the noise, like Berkeley Physics students would say. Actually there is another step to the recipe to really please the gourmet lingua of a mathematics student of the Zürich Polytechnikum. This step is that he should not so much add them but multiply them, over and over again.
With such a method you could probably hear someone saying: SHIT on the other side of the planet, provided your microphone is delicate enough to pick up such a word from the other side of the earth. What did this spacey autocorrelation business have to do with detecting when the soul walked in or out of a body? You’d have to be a former student of these top universities to envisage fooling yourself with the prospect of such a connection. Well, Tenace was such a student and he did it: His idea was based on a law of nature, actually the very corollary of autocorrelation, namely that a state or situation does not really exist for just one split second, be it a nano- or a microsecond, but repeats itself at a given frequency in order to get the seal by the Norms Institute of the Universe: “It exists!”
In other words, once is not enough, or like the Germans say: one time is no time. Translated into Tenace’s soul theory, it meant that the state in which the body was able to receive or let go of the soul did not occur one single time but repeatedly, at a given frequency, for a certain lapse of time. It would allow the soul to become aware that a body was available for walk-in or that the body was available for walk-out, just like an acoustic modem used to repeat its horrible scream before it would shake hands with the internet server.
To conclude, for the bored and impatient novice, all of this means that Tenace suspected a certain periodicity of the readiness of the body to let go of or to let in the soul, just like females are ready for mating. He could find this period by systematic trial and error on the high-definition tomographic videos of the dying body or of the growing foetus. He would find out which “word” it was “saying” when it died or was born, that is, what the tomographic takes looked like when they highly correlated in time. This is the conclusion Tenace had arrived at, some point down the William’s Pear bottle. Unfortunately, he realised in the same split second that he needed a tremendous amount of computing power to process the gigantic amount of data his ADT would spit out, in order to autocorrelate Death or Birth. That gave him the final knock-out for the night. His forehead banged down on his white desk next to his Mac, just like the woodchopper’s at the Inn.
Chapter 10: Parallel Infection
Strangely enough, when Tenace woke up, as the sun invariably fulfilled its duty to irradiate the planet with its pinky snowy light at its well-known periodicity, Tenace had the solution to his unsurmountable problem. He had to infect as many computers in the world as possible with a tiny virus, whose unique task would be to process a distributed computing task on the host, using the host computing capacity, and send the partial results back to Tenace’s computer.
This was not new; this was called parallel processing. The biggest computers in the world were made up of hundreds or thousands of computers connected to each other in order to parallel process. What might be new, though it is very doubtable, is to infiltrate private computers without the consent of their owners with little programs called bots (stemming from robots) so as to borrow part of their computing power to perform alien tasks. This is precisely what Tenace had in mind when the sun made him raise his right eyelid like a crocodile thinking about breakfast.
Tenace had come a long way since the moment he did not believe computer viruses existed. He remembers buying one of the first books ever on computer viruses, thinking it was just a journalistic joke bred from total technical ignorance and amateurism. He had come such a long way since then that he was in the position to design such a bot, no question, and he loved programming. The only thing that worried him at that very moment, when his second eyelid went up and he wondered in parallel whether he still had some coffee grains in the cupboard, was how on earth he could spread the goddamn cyber-bacteria fast enough to get the power of a secret CRAY 1000 megacomputer before March the 23rd, the date at which his credit would run out and he’d have to get another one?
And since Doctor Tenace was not applying for patents on any of his alleged technological or medical breakthroughs involved in his Frankenstein-like enterprise, there was very little stuff with which he could impress and convince the bank to lend him more money, except some more tangible results. Tenace was lucky that the bank director Walter Luetzi was about just as crazy as he was. They had met on a binge as students when the latter was going to St. Gall’s School of Economics. Luetzi was just as bad as he was, divorced, too, so he had time now to pursue the meaning of his life, a super duper Kalmann Filter to predict stock values, meaning which he was generously, equally sharing with his other meaning of life: Booze, Sex and Vinyls.
By the time the espresso coffee had erupted like the Stromboli in its aluminium top reservoir, Tenace, who had not stopped thinking, even during his sleep, already had a solution for that second problem, which you have probably forgotten about and I therefore allow myself to remind you of: How to spread the villain, the computing power thief? This virus, which would inevitably slow down the host computer it had infected at the speed of light, at the very moment when all its power was needed.
Tenace visualised HER avidly licking HIS strawberry ice cream up to its creamy topping, contaminating the YOUPORN screen with the cold it radiated, so that the screen would freeze at the most thrilling instant, thereby frustrating the million impatient husbands who could not synchronise their molecules anymore with the bytes enlightening the screen’s pixels.
Such a villain it would be! And precisely that effect gave Tenace the third decisive symbol of his triptych. He would spread the naughty one over porn sites. Who was running a porn site on the side, thinking Uncle Tenace did not know about it? Who else but innocent Ralf who had never done anything really naughty in his life, and who at the age of 35 was still “sage comme une image”. He would first spread it through the site Ralf was unduly running from the premises of Tenace’s Institute. And Tenace, who had the peculiarity to never react in a hurry, was particularly thankful to himself to have shut up when he discovered a month ago that Ralf was running such a porn site from the office’s computers, and thereby making quite a bit of pocket money with it.
Satisfied and eager to go on, Tenace had to spit out the coffee: the rubber seal was burned and you could tell by the taste of the coffee. Tenace walked to the shower and though the shower had mouldy sealing rubber strips that perfectly matched the orange- tiled shower floor and the chalky plastic curtains, he sang happily, in his strong Swiss German accent:
Oh! Je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes, des jours heureux où nous étions heureux, les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle et les souvenirs aussi”.
Chapter 11: Dog Burial
Though he had a hangover, Tenace was a man to stick to plans,
specially the plans he had made up himself. He was extremely
tenacious in all he did and this is precisely what had brought him
so far. He would just hold on and never let go, nomen est omen.
Well, he did let go once and that was when he let go of Sarah and
that was an incredible task for him, but he’d had to.
She would have eaten his guts all the way through till she could have
stuffed him with straw and hung his headed bust as a trophy over
men in the hall of her villa. Of course she would have added horns
to the skull to make him even more a mythical animal from the land
of her fantasies and it would definitely better render the reality
of their marital life. So even though the breaking up of their
marriage was a kind of defeat to Tenace, who liked to lead things
to their end and could not stand going back or losing, Tenace
managed to decree it a victory.
He had led the thing to an end, to avoid the end meant by the priest and the mayor: Till death do you part! Which, sadly, so often means the end of one, induced by the harassment by the other. That was not in the Bible. It took him some months to see his divorce as a victory, but he eventually did.
Tenace’s plan for this Saturday was to bury the dog. The dog he had murdered or “relieved” in his super-duper tomograph. Its death was weeks ago and the poor thing would have rotted away somewhere to the disgust of the fleas, if Tenace had not put Badger in the morgue of his Institute. He had been lying there, very well- conserved, for six months now, and that was enough. It was, to be honest, not very hygienic, even for the dead, but that was only a fake reason; Tenace had some kind of intuition that he did not want to face: he needed one more free drawer in the morgue.
Tenace decided to have breakfast at Falkennest and get on with the job. He jumped in his beige Mehari, which still smelled of stable and horse shit. He had bought it from a horse tamer and the goddamn stink was about as tenacious as he. But that car was good on snow because it was so light, the French military say. Where Falkennest was erected, there was often enough snow to make the smell of horse shit enjoyable.
For a reason known only to himself, he walked in through the kitchen. Most probably he didn’t want any one from the medical crew to see him carrying a big white bag from the morgue to the back of his car. The Mexican cooks might see him, but he didn’t care about that. He hated Mexican cooks, not because they were Mexican or cooked badly, but because they were so bloody loud and always listened to that South American music over and over again at a volume that could compete with Ralf’s punk shoe shop. So he gave a nasty look at Ignacio instead of telling him that he didn’t like his music. The poor guy looked away, scared. Though a couple of butter Gipfeli accompanied by a cup of coffee which would not smell of burned rubber was most certainly his bodily priority, he started heading for the morgue.
In the staircase he unexpectedly decided to walk upstairs to the computer rooms. The door was half-open and to his interested surprise, he could hear a female voice moaning, followed by the grunting of a male counterpart. Tenace, who thought some of the younger staff were having a good time, smirked, and discreet as he always wanted to be, was on the verge of stepping back, but curiosity or perhaps jealousy traitorously tackled him. Who was it? Was it Maja? So he walked in, to realise by the light thrown into the subdued room, that someone was watching porn on a computer. By the amount of the scrunched tissues he suddenly spotted under the desk, the person must have been there often, or long enough. The person? This was a rhetorical question because from the minute Tenace realised what was going on, he knew who it was. He could surprise him, but he wouldn’t enjoy the power of humiliating him.
He could see him recall the blood mobilised elsewhere back to his usually pale face, and make it blush. The way his tiny eyes, ashamed, would then try to look at him from underneath, like a beaten dog avoiding the hits. He imagined how the wounded sparks in them would kindle the fire of his long dragon tongue, spooled in his stomach, and make it throw up and reach for Tenace’s mocking eyes like a giant lizard’s tongue at ants, to blind him for ever to what he had just seen.
So Tenace slowly retreated on tiptoe, soon enough to still enjoy his self-made magnanimity, slightly eroded by his equally self- made, frightening speculations. He was not the kind to blackmail or bully either, he would get all he needed from Ralf, just like he’d always done and he needed no trump for that, at least not yet.
He walked past the three refrigerated glass closets sheltering the computers, through which you could see those inevitable LED garlands. They looked like broken-toothed rows of a smiling mouth munching the necessary bits and bytes to control the “autojector”, which was how he secretly called Falkennest. He then went down the stairs straight to the cellars.
Tenace had always been utterly disgusted by Bryukhonenko’s dog decapitation experiment, probably as much appalled as the Soviets were proud of it (they were also proud of roasting Laika the dog- cosmonaut as its rocket fell back to earth). Bryukhonenko had designed a heart-lung machine that he had called the autojector, cut a poor dog’s head off, connected it to the autojector and showed that the dog’s head still lived apart from the body. As if this was not enough, he had stopped the machinery for 10 minutes, showing how the dog’s head would die, and then, and this was the crux of the film -which was not at the 60th page of the script but at the end, contrary to Syd Field’s theory- he had resuscitated the damn thing at the eleventh minute by turning the heart-lung machine back on.
Tenace thought such an experiment was superfluous and just showed, once more, the cruelty of humans. He had put his own dog in his ADT and killed him, but that was to relieve him, wasn’t it? Suddenly doubts overwhelmed him, and as if to try and shake them out of his body, he started to walk like a soldier, stomping the floor to the rhythm of his denial, he could have raised his legs to a goose walk if his abdominal muscles had gone along with it, but they didn’t. He headed to the morgue, troubled, realising he was no better than Bryukhonenko, and he squinted so as to lock this fact into the necessary realities. He unlocked the door of Morgue 2, walked to drawer 23, unfolded the corpse bag rolled under his arm pit and pulled the drawer out. Tenace was good at blinding out all emotions, as many surgeons probably are. Life must go on. He looked at his dog briefly, stroked its head gently and said:
– You were a good dog. We’re all someone else’s good dog! He shoved it into the white shroud and threw it over his shoulder. He met no one on his way to his Mehari, not even the Mexican cooks. Lifting the car’s plastic back shelf, he dumped the bag between the shovel and the sled which lay on its back like a dying cockroach. Then, just before stepping into his car, he was moved by a sudden sense of rebellion, threw a mischievous look at the building and shouted at the windows, louder than the music:
– Yes, I bury my dog, it was in a human morgue! We all have to bury our dead before we die ourselves. It’s no good to keep them in the cellar. It’s high time! He laughed and closed the plastic door of his car.
It was a five-minute drive and the Mehari did well. Then Tenace pulled the sled on the snowy path through the woods for a good 300 meters at the rhythm of his mountain shoes cracking the wet snow. The white bag was tied up to it with rubber bands, like on a bicycle rack, and the poplars saluted the fallen scapegoat of mankind.
He stopped near a big silvery one 30 feet away from the path and started digging. The soil wasn’t frozen. When he finally started to sweat, he was done. He undid the rubber bands, opened the bag and tucked its rims around the dog’s neck to free the head, like bedding a child. Since it was its last sleep, it’d better be comfortable. He then pulled a flask out of his jacket, drank half of it and, spreading the dog’s lips apart, baring its teeth, he poured the rest into the canine’s gullet.
– To all the bunks you did, Sonny! and he lifted the flask.
–‘Cause you ain’t gonna do no more! he kissed his muzzle, heaved the front of the sled, and the bag whooshed into the hole. It might have been the spirits in the flask but Tenace hummed on his way back, the shovel on his shoulder dangling to the rhythm of his tune:
I’ll die on the other side of a road,
poor and forgotten,
like a dog in the mud,
I’ll die with tears in my eyes,
Eaten by the birds.
I’ll die on the other side of the road,
poor and forgotten,
from all the words I heard,
but not for those I said,
too weak to bury myself,
but I’m in no hurry, no hurry.
Chapter 12: Banking
– Boy! You’re just as mad as me. Christ! You know what? We don’t know what to do with ourselves anymore.
Walter Luetzi held a box of cigars in front of Tenace’s
hypnotised face, but Tenace just picked up one of the Rothhändle
cigarettes bedded with the real males. He wasn’t a banker, he was
a banker’s client. He put his whiskey down. Walter went on:
– First, we play with dinky toy cars and cry in mum’s breast, then we play with real cars and kiss our wife’s breasts and then we go back to our cars, except there are no cars anymore. Tenace, who just spilled half of his whiskey trying to light his cigarette with the pistol lighter on the table, countered:
– We never leave cars, we are the universal plumbers and you know why? We think that’s why females love us, but I’ll tell you what, they don’t like us to be plumbers, actually they hate that, they just like us to do what they want. It’s a sort of revenge for their narcissistic wound, accumulated over centuries… Walter coughed and interrupted:
– What are you talking about, narcissistic wound?
– Yeah! They get old, and we’re not responsible. They get all wrinkled and loose. It must be hard to get floppy, since they were so used to being admired, desired everywhere by any man, even when carrying a 24 toilet roll pack out of the supermarket and suddenly… that’s the narcissistic wound you know. So they start bossing us around to make up for it, to try to convince themselves that they’re not old and ugly, that it’s all like before, when they were young and beautiful and we did everything for them… They start shouting around, hitting around, wounded to death by time, secretly challenging our patience just to prove their value on the universal meat market. We clink glasses with younger ones but whine invisibly, walking home late at night. They call it the climacteric syndrome and it’s supposed to be hormonal, but I don’t believe it!
Walter dried off something in his right eye and mumbled:
– Their own bloody fault, loving their looks like that! Do you know that women spend one and a half years of their life in front of the mirror? Think about all the years spent in front of a mirror by all the women in the world in history! You end up with a billion years and that doesn’t count the ones who don’t have a mirror. No wonder. We ain’t like that, we grow a belly and we like it, goodness gracious!
– Yeah, and when they’ve bossed us around long enough, we leave and play with cars again, except our cars are much more expensive and they don’t look like cars anymore.
– Yeah, and they see that as betraying them. How dare we play with bigger cars? How dare we have another project in mind than getting a hard-on at the sound of their tune like a tamed snake?
– Oh stop it, Walter!
– Don’t you think Sarah left you ‘cause you were working on your tomograph? ‘Cause you were trying to become immortal without her.
Tenace, who was starting to get nervous, said, although he didn’t want to agree:
– Yes, she did, and I need some more cash to become immortal, Walter. Tenace did not listen to Walter’s answer. He was drawn again into the labyrinth of his scientific thoughts. He knew from his readings in cosmological physics that matter could be characterised by a bunch of fields, electromagnetic, gravitational, weak nuclear, the strong nuclear attraction of Femton, Akashic, Zero Energy, you name it. He had the intuition that all these fields were interlocked and that a signature of part of them was enough to characterise the entire state of living matter. However he did not believe that the field at the surface of the human being would be enough to characterise it, contrary to how Maxwell’s equations had. Tenace wanted the repartition of the electromagnetic sources in the body and dreamt of electromagnetic holographs.
When he came back to Walter, it was to hear:
– Another 300,000 for your soul dirigible then!
Chapter 13: Marrow Road
It had rained again and the narrow road could be slippery. The car was surely made for it, but Tenace didn’t want to provoke the Gods, not in this matter at least and he could not claim that only they knew how slippery clay could get. Sharp rocks dangerously coveted the tyres. Their colour reminded him of shark teeth, especially with these graceful rivulets of red clay that slowly drained to the earth, entrained by the rain water that had mixed with it, like the blood of an ingested prey. But Tenace was grateful to this threatening white, because he could at least see these rocks. It was not like this winter on this very road where they punctured his tyres in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a freezing winter night when you could not change a wheel ‘cause the damn jack would sink in the snow instead of lifting the car.
Maybe it was the Gods again who sent him this van packed with four removers who gently lifted the car while he would change the tyre, but this time, the white rocks on the side of the road did not hide in the snow. Tenace’s side vision, which appeared to be directly linked to his hindbrain or reptilian brain, left him all the freedom to enjoy the view of his beloved mountains, beloved because they were the setting of one of his recurrent dreams in which:
He would be driving this road, when he would suddenly get intrigued by the fact that someone with a similar car to his would be driving a similar road at a similar speed and height on the other side of the valley. He was aware even in his dream, that in reality, there was no road there. He would stop the car to get his binoculars from the boot to have a closer look at the other side of the valley, and as he would stop the car and get out, he would notice that the other car had also stopped. His heart would start to pound, he would rush to the boot, get the field glasses hidden in the emergency kit and aim them at this car on the other side. And he would see a man who looked just like him standing by his car and watching him with his binoculars. He would be extremely excited and would free one of his hands and start to wave it to this other man and the other man would look more and more like him and would wave his hand back as if this mountain was just a huge mirror.
This is why he loved these mountains so much. Perhaps he loved them so much that he dreamt about them, whichever. One day, he swore to himself with a smile that he would go there for real and meet himself on the other side of the mountain, even if there was no road there. It all looked like a glossy black and white photograph which the early dusk turns anything into, and Tenace admired the scenery. He felt happy and confident, he had secured the financing, even for the case he would not get the Definition of Death job. The yellow envelope was right there, in his pocket, and he still had not opened it. He had carried it along for days now, like a bill that no one wants to open, so afraid of the amount to pay.
But Tenace was not afraid of the content of this letter. Tenace the Magician was secretly trying to influence its content. He was secretly convinced that its content was not yet written and that it depended on what he wanted. He decided on the outcome. Tenace, who already knew that it was in life like in quantum physics, where the outcome depends on how you observe, wanted it to be the same with the letter in the envelope. He waited till he was sure the answer was the one he wanted before he’d open the letter, and this time was about to come.
It started to rain again, the wind blew stronger, and he sensed it in the steering wheel, then there was thunder and the lightning gave the last polish to the silver halide picture. It is in that moment that he thought of Sarah again, Sarah here, Sarah there. He would even see her jumping from behind the trees on the side of the road in front the car, black and white Sarah, Sarah the Witch, lunging out of the bushes accusing him, her finger pointed at him in the eternal night of the forest, of all the crimes she could think of. It didn’t matter what she was accusing him of; it never mattered to her. He was just the eternal culprit, guilty of everything. You name it, it was him. He turned on the windshield wipers but Sarah’s face did not disappear; it jumped again, right and left. The face was screaming:
– You, you, you betrayed me! How dare you? How dare you leave me after all this abuse on my side? This abuse was love! I loved you unconditionally. This is why I allowed myself to treat you that way, so badly, because I knew you didn’t! It was despair! Then the face disappeared in the woods. Tenace’s heart pounded; he was sweating again. He felt like stopping the car and resting for a while, but he didn’t dare, as the Witch would come back again. She would open the plastic door and tear him to pieces in the mud. He thought he had fever, and he must have had. There was no vodka in the glove box. He had to carry on driving, like he had to carry on driving the night they married. He should never had married her.
Suddenly his back ached, his left hip hurt like hell, just like after the wedding, and then it was his right knee. He could not sit; he could not press the pedals. He started to panic -this disease was not going to come back again. This disease which filled the marrow with water. No! No! He started to shout, to yell this witch away, back into the night of time. He needed air, the road was getting so narrow, so quick. He found the strength to press on the gas pedal, but his knee hurt like hell. He could hear its bloody bells.
The tree branches were smashing his peripheral vision; he should not stop, although he felt an incredible force trying to stop him, to attract him like a powerful dark magnet into the woods, but he knew he shouldn’t. A commander sitting in his brain like his super ego was ordering him to keep on driving. The road had turned into a tunnel, like birth, her remembered birth, and he had to keep on, stick to it, be a man. But something in him was telling him to stop. Of course, he should stop and take a good look at himself on the other side of the valley, where it is always greener. He’d just go and get his binoculars in the trunk and see if it was really himself who had just stopped his car at the top of the mountain on the other side. It was his chance to get to the bottom of it, and his guts were telling him to stop, have a look. It might be where he really lives! But his little commander in the back of his head was pulling other strings:
– Don’t you dare stop. There is no one there, it’s a delusion. Drive, drive!
And Tenace hesitated and was barely breathing as he looked at his face in the rear-view mirror to ask himself what he should do. But he only saw this terrorised face of his that didn’t know any better and was itself asking him what to do. Then suddenly, as too often happens when you hesitate long enough, something decides for you and perhaps this is what Tenace wanted. He heard a blast and felt the car limping like a wounded animal hit by a hunter’s bullet. He felt an acute pain in his back, his marrow reminding him of his sorrow. The rear left tyre had burst. Holy Shit! He was terrorised, and the car was undoubtedly telling him to stop.
Tenace stayed prostrated at the steering wheel, not even daring to get out. He looked at the other side of the valley and saw that the car there had stopped too. He was sweating and his temples ached. Something was telling him to stay in the damn Mehari, which he did. He thought he would just wait till his heart stopped pounding, then just step out, go to the boot, pick up the spare wheel and the jack and change the wheel. That was the only natural thing to do. So after he had looked at the moon, suddenly free from the clouds, he pushed the plastic door and stepped out, deeply convinced he was just going to the boot.
After his first step in freedom, he realised something utterly powerful was drawing him towards the woods. He did not go to the boot, he started running into the woods right away, as if attracted by a supernatural force. Tenace ran; his heart was getting in the mood for a marathon. He ran after her. He knew it, as after a while he was crying her name: Sarah! But Sarah did not answer and Tenace ran like a madman in the forest.