The Insult (29 page)

When I saw Visser, over by the window, I had the feeling that he
was going to come clean at last. I’d been doing some thinking about it. Yes, he could feed anything he liked into my brain. But what good was it if he couldn’t monitor the process? He needed my co-operation in order to continue the experiment, so it was time for him to sit down at the negotiating table. I could read imminent capitulation in his face as I walked towards him. That was the reason why I could smile at his little joke. Obviously, there had to be some play-acting first. A bit of light-hearted banter, repartee. He had to ease himself into a position where he could admit that I’d got the better of him.

‘Cable?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m getting cable. I’m getting channels most people have never even heard of.’

I sipped my tea. Visser was looking well. He’d trimmed his moustache (though it still looked as dictatorial as ever) and he was slightly tanned. He must have been away – some kind of conference or symposium, no doubt.

‘It’s a nice café.’ He smiled and, turning in his chair, looked round. He seemed to be taking it all in: the marble tables, the waiters in their starched white aprons, the wall-lamps with their red shades. ‘You know, I used to come here when I was a student,’ he said. ‘That was years ago, of course. I used to think I was really living it up.’ He smiled again, this time at the folly of youth.

Living it up?
That was an unusual phrase for him to use. Almost slangy. He was probably just trying to create the right mood. Relaxed, informal.

‘It’s my first time,’ I said, and I, too, looked round. ‘But it is nice, yes.’ My eyes found their way back to him. ‘How have you been, Doctor?’

‘Very well.’ He paused. ‘You know, we had a break-in over the weekend.’

‘At the clinic?’

‘Yes. Nothing was taken, though. It’s a bit of a mystery, actually.’

‘So all your secrets are still safe?’ I said.

He laughed heartily – rather too heartily, I thought.

We both reached for our cups of tea and drank.

‘So tell me, Martin,’ he said, ‘why is it that we have to be so furtive? Why the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere?’

‘I’m giving you another chance,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s your last chance. I’d like you to tell me the truth.’

‘The truth,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ I leaned back, crossed my legs. ‘I’m not going to kick up a fuss about the fact that you’re experimenting on me. I mean, you saved my life and I’m grateful for that. It’s just that I don’t want to be alone any more. Alone in what I know. I need you to admit that you know, too. That you’ve known all along. Right from the beginning.’

‘Known what, Martin?’

‘Known that I can see.’ It occurred to me suddenly that if it was a state secret we were discussing, then he might not want anyone to overhear. And there was a man behaving suspiciously behind him. The man was pretending to be an intellectual. He had all the props: a left-wing newspaper, round glasses with wire frames, cigarette ash on his lapels. But the glasses didn’t sit quite right on him. And he kept glancing at me sideways, past the edge of the page. I leaned forwards. ‘Nurse Janssen knew,’ I said, in a low voice. ‘That’s why she took off all her clothes. You know, too. You wouldn’t have been following me otherwise. You wouldn’t have turned up at the hotel.’

Visser didn’t say anything, so I went on.

‘First you gave me nocturnal vision, a kind of night-camera effect. I expect you called it something fancy, didn’t you? Noctovision or something. Not much sense of colour, though, was there? Everything at the end of the spectrum looked black, for instance. White showed as pale-green. Yellow was slightly darker. Hard to tell the difference between a lime and a lemon. Could make gin-and-tonics difficult.’ I gave him a wry smile. ‘Then you began to feed the colour in. Just magical. But you know, it happened so gradually, I never even noticed. I just kind of took it for granted. And now, of course, I’m getting TV. And, I have to say, apart from the odd film, the occasional game show, I think I prefer the old night vision. Actually, I was thinking of asking you to reinstate it.’

I looked down at my hands for a moment. ‘About the pornography,’ I said quietly. ‘It’s a bit much. I mean, twice a week, fine. But not every night. Take Sunday, for instance. Sunday! I got nine hours of it. Nine hours of people taking their clothes off every time a door closes. Nine hours of women going,
Oh God, that’s so great,
and men with that stupid look on their faces going,
Yes, Yes, Yes.
Incidentally, why do the men always look much more stupid than the women? Or is it me? Anyway. All night there were people fucking in my head. And then, just to round it off nicely, that home movie someone kindly sent in with the two thalidomide sisters and the Alsatian. I mean, Visser. What’s going on? You think you’re doing me some kind of favour? Favours like that I can do without. So, please. Let’s have the old night vision back. In fact, that’s really why I’m here. I want to come to some arrangement with you. I’m willing to co-operate.’

I leaned back in my chair. There was a long silence while Visser stirred his tea. The way he studied the spoon’s elliptical motion in the cup, it could have been revealing something of the utmost importance.

‘Let me get this quite clear,’ he said at last. ‘You think that I’m responsible for these various forms of vision which you claim to have?’

‘I do.’

‘You think that I’m controlling your vision? You think that I can switch it on or off at will?’

‘Precisely.’

‘And how am I able to achieve this?’

‘I told you on the phone. You’re using the titanium plate as some kind of substitute for the visual cortex. It’s able to interpret the information that’s being gathered by my eyes. You’ve even found a way of overriding it. You can feed signals into it from outside. It’s remarkable, really. Very impressive. I should be congratulating you, Doctor.’

But Visser didn’t beam with pride, as I’d expected him to. Instead, he let out a sigh. ‘You know what I’m going to say, Martin, don’t you?’

I swallowed nervously, looked down into my empty cup. The tea-leaves on the bottom said that I would shortly be receiving some bad news about a personal matter.

‘You leave me no choice,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘Let me ask you something. Do you have any vision at the moment?’

‘Yes.’

‘What kind of vision is it?’

‘It’s night vision,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

‘All right. Suppose you describe something for me. Something in this room. Anything you like.’ His voice had lightened, as if we were playing a game.

‘What about you?’

‘Perfect.’

I sat back and looked at him. Where should I begin? Not the moustache. Too obvious.

‘Well, let’s see,’ I said. ‘There’s your shoes. They’ve got metal on them.’

‘You can hear that.’

‘Just testing.’ I smiled. ‘Testing your alertness. Your shoes are black –’

‘They’re not black.’

‘They’re such a dark brown, I thought they were black.’

‘What else?’

‘Your hair,’ I said. ‘It’s brown.’

‘You knew that already. I told you, in the clinic.’

‘All right.’ I stayed calm. ‘Your face, then. Let’s start with your moustache –’

‘I don’t have a moustache.’

I stared at Visser in disbelief. ‘But I’m looking right at it.’

‘You’re imagining it,’ he said. ‘The moustache is an illusion. It’s part of the imaginary picture you’ve built up.’

He was trying to undermine me, establish control. He had that
smile on his face, not so much indulgent now as patronising. We were back to square one. Square minus one.

‘You must’ve shaved it off,’ I said.

‘Martin,’ he said, still smiling, ‘I’ve never had a moustache.’

‘You’re lying to me. Why are you lying to me?’

‘No, Martin. You’re the one who’s lying. To yourself.’

I stormed out of the café. I was so furious, I knocked a table over on my way to the door and I didn’t even stop to apologise.

Loots brought the car to the kerb as planned and I jumped in. He took the first corner fast, the steering-wheel spinning. I saw a woman leap backwards, her arms and legs outstretched, like a starfish, her mouth the same shape as Juliet’s. I thought of Visser stirring his tea. Stirring it so fucking carefully, it could have been nitroglycerine.
You know what I’m going to say now, don’t you.
I smashed my hand against the dashboard. Then I smashed it again.

Loots slowed down. ‘It didn’t go too well, I take it.’

I took off my dark glasses and rubbed my eyes with the hand that wasn’t hurting. No, it didn’t, I thought. It didn’t
go too well.

Would it ever?

It was something Karin Salenko had said to me while she was standing at the apartment window in that glittery turquoise dress.
Up there in the mountains, it’s like a different century.
I asked Loots to look the village up for me. It wasn’t in the atlas, but he found it on a touring map of the north-east. The area used to be known for its hot springs, he said. His uncle had told him about it once. His uncle lived in a small town on the same latitude, some distance to the west.

‘Do you like your uncle?’ I asked him.

Loots looked at me oddly, his head seeming to rise into the air above his collar. ‘Yes, I like him.’

‘How long since you saw him? Two years? Three?’

‘About eighteen months.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time you saw him again? I mean, after all,’ and I paused heavily, significantly, ‘he isn’t getting any younger.’

Loots’ head was still suspended in the air – puzzled, curious, and slightly blank, like a balloon. He suspected me of something, but he didn’t know what it was. I was not unfamiliar with the look.

‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘We could get away for a few days.’

‘It’s a long drive.’

‘I know. But you could use a break. You look terrible.’

Loots laughed, but he knew I was right. Not long after he’d driven the getaway car for me, he’d punctured Juliet. He’d thrown a knife too close to her and it had grazed her rib-cage. She didn’t explode or burst. She just withered, aged – which, if anything, was worse. He mended her, using a bicycle-repair kit, and blew her up again, and she stayed blown up, but his confidence was damaged. He’d stopped throwing knives in the afternoons before he left for work. He’d started dreaming about The Great Miguel. I knew why, too. It was that gatekeeper’s ear. He’d read an article about it the next day in the paper. A small headline on page nine. MAN HAS EAR PINNED TO TREE. There was no comfort for Loots in the fact that he hadn’t been identified. He’d hit somebody with a knife for the first time, and it had shaken him.

‘So what’s in it for you?’ he said.

While he was visiting his uncle, I told him, I’d stay in the village, which was in a valley surrounded entirely by mountains. In the mountains, I said, people often had problems with their TVs. With reception …

Loots interrupted. ‘You’ll stop getting those programmes!’

I went to seize him by the shoulders, but in my enthusiasm I missed completely, embraced the air instead and overbalanced.

What was in it for me? What
wasn’t
in it for me? The signals that Visser was transmitting would lose their way. The further north I went, the weaker they’d become. Until they faded altogether. I’d regain my night vision by a process of elimination, as it were, and Visser would have no say in the matter. The mountains would defend me. In the mountains I’d be free.

‘It’ll be like old times,’ I said. ‘You know, when we were looking for The Invisible Man.’

There was no breaking and entering involved, I told him. No dangerous driving. In fact, for one of my ideas, it was astonishingly mild. Harmless, even. We could travel up and back together, in his car.

‘Just like old times,’ I said again.

We left at six in the morning, while it was still dark, but daylight came
and, with it, nothingness. The hours passed slowly; I’d forgotten how dull it was, how utterly interminable.

I’d spoken to Karin Salenko the day before. I wanted to learn a little more about the village. But when she answered, I didn’t know how to begin. It was awkward, since our only common ground was Nina. I said the first thing that occurred to me: ‘I met your husband.’

‘Jan Salenko?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was telling me about when you were eight, climbing into your father’s truck –’

‘He doesn’t forget a thing, does he.’

‘He said you were the most beautiful girl in the village.’

‘That wasn’t difficult.’

I smiled.

‘You didn’t ring up to talk about me, though,’ Karin said.

‘No.’ I told her about the trip I was planning. I couldn’t go into the real reasons behind it, so I presented it as a pilgrimage, a journey to the birthplace of someone I still loved, a kind of homage.

Karin was quiet for a few seconds, and when she spoke again, her voice was uneven, as if she’d been crying. ‘I’ve only been back once,’ she said, ‘and that was years ago.’

‘What was it like?’

‘A mistake. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since.’ I heard her tall glass clink against the phone. ‘You mentioned my father,’ she went on. ‘It was to do with him.’

When she was fifteen, he had a stroke. He couldn’t talk much after that. The next year, in the spring, she ran away, and it was impossible to keep in touch with him. Sometimes she called the hotel where her mother worked. She used to think she could hear him listening on the other end. She wrote letters, too. But it wasn’t enough. Still, it was three or four years before she returned. Her mother was standing on the porch that day, wearing a pair of spectacles that made her eyes look twice the size of other people’s. There was no sign of her father. Karin asked where he was. Upstairs, her mother said. In the back.

She found him sitting by the window, strapped into a bath chair
with leather belts. The room smelled of his incontinence. He didn’t know her at first. He leaned forwards, peering at her through his eyebrows. One of his hands moved constantly, the way plants do underwater. She took the hand and held it. Then he said her name.