Frank Schätzing - Limit

‘I feel the same.’

‘So what are you afraid of?’

‘Right now? I’m worried about Amber. Very worried. About my wife, about my father—’

‘About your sister—’

‘Yes. About Lynn too. See you later, Sophie.’

‘That wasn’t nice,’ Heidrun mocked, after the others had fled the pool area. Only she and Finn were still drifting in the black water of the crater, somewhere between idyll and apocalypse.

‘But true,’ said Finn, launching into a crawl away from her.

She pushed her wet hair behind her ears. Below the surface of the water her body was compressed into a bony caricature of itself, as if the waves were starting to dissolve her. Finn cut a swathe through the water like a motorboat, sending watery chaos in all directions, great surges that a swimmer could never have produced in terrestrial waters. An amusement factor reserved only for moon travellers. You could catapult yourself out of the water like a dolphin and, when you splashed back in again, set small tsunamis on their way. You were operating in arrogant opposition to the laws of gravity, but Finn’s mood was closer to the grey of the surrounding landscape. Heidrun stretched, dived, slipped after him and past him and burst through the surface. Finn saw that the way to the opposite edge of the crater was blocked, and balanced himself in the water.

‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Bad mood?’

‘No idea.’ He shrugged. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be going up?’

‘And what about you?’

‘I haven’t made any dates with anybody.’

Heidrun thought for a moment. Had she made any dates? With Walo, of course, but could you really describe the day-to-day magnetism of marriage as a date?

‘So you’ve no idea what your mood is.’

‘I don’t know.’

It was true, she guessed, Finn probably just had no idea why his mood had so suddenly soured. He had been in great form all day, making her laugh with his laconic sarcasm, a gift that Heidrun valued above all others. She liked men whose wit sprang from easy understatement, which gave them the ultimate accolade of cool. In her opinion there was hardly anything more erotic than laughter, sadly an attitude fraught with difficulties, because the majority of the male sex tended to try to produce it intellectually. The result was usually tiresome and discouraging. In their constant bid to score points with hilarious thigh-slappers, these suitors lost what remained of their natural machismo, and there was much worse to come. For her part, Heidrun derived intense and noisy pleasure from sex, and had ended up in paroxysms of laughter during so many orgasms that the gentlemen in question, convinced that they were the object of her laughter, were thrown spontaneously off their stroke. The drop in pleasure pressure was always followed by the same embarrassment, she always felt guilty, but what was she supposed to do? She loved laughing. Ögi was the first to understand. Heidrun’s natural responses neither inhibited his erections nor slowed him down in any way. Walo Ögi with his chiselled Zürich physiognomy, which could break out into ringing laughter at any time, took sex no more seriously than she did, with the result that they both enjoyed it a great deal.

Finn, on the other hand. Viewed objectively, in so far as the objectification of beauty was ever justified, he was far better looking than Walo, in terms of classical proportion at any rate: he was perfectly built and a good sixteen years younger. Apart from that, he had the appearance of an uncommunicative and sometimes sulky melancholic. He concealed his stroppiness behind insecurity, his shyness behind indifference, but he was enough of an actor to flirt professionally with all of these qualities. As a result he was surrounded by the aura of mystery that turned millions of emancipated female individuals into spineless mush. Supposedly shy, he cultivated the pose of the eternal outsider in a world whose cofounder and original inhabitant he was; he acted the part of the lout, as if Marlon Brando, James Dean and Johnny Depp hadn’t already taken the idea to ludicrous extremes, and exuded a sweaty rebellious appeal. He couldn’t, with the best will in the world, ever have been described as the life and soul. And yet behind the forbidding façade Heidrun sensed an inclination to excess, to anarchic fun, to wild parties, as long as the right people were invited. She had no doubt that one could fool about with him, and have laughing sex until libido and diaphragm both gave in, after hours.

‘They’re getting on your nerves, aren’t they?’ she surmised. ‘Our lovely fellow travellers.’

Finn rubbed water out of his eyes.

‘I get on my own nerves,’ he said. ‘Because I think it’s my problem.’

‘What is?’

‘Not rising like a spiritual soufflé up here. It seems almost unavoidable. Everyone is constantly coming out with the loveliest philosophical observations. There isn’t anyone who hasn’t a clever thing to say. Some of them burst into tears at the very sight of the Earth, others wallow in self-mortification at the thought of their earthly striving. Eva sees injustice and Mukesh Nair sees miracles and wonder in every grain of moon dust. A complete social elite seem determined to relativise their previous lives, just because they’re sitting on a lump of stone so far from the Earth that you can see the whole thing. And what occurs to me? Just a stupid old saying from the Pre-Cambrian era of space travel.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Astronauts are men who don’t have to bring their wives anything back from their travels.’

‘Pretty dumb.’

‘You see? Everyone seems to find himself up here. And I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be looking for.’

‘So? Let them.’

‘I did say it isn’t their problem. It’s mine.’

‘You’re complaining on quite a high level, my dearest Finn.’

‘No, I’m not.’ He glared at her angrily. ‘It hasn’t the slightest thing to do with self-pity. I just feel empty , crippled. I’d love to feel that same powerful emotion, vaporise with reverence and get back to Earth inside out, to preach the word of enlightenment, but I don’t feel any of it. I can’t think of anything to say about this trip except that it’s nice, it’s a bit different. But it is, and remains, the bloody Moon, damn it all! No higher level of existence, no understanding or comprehension of anything at all. It doesn’t spiritualise me, it stirs nothing in me, and that’s got to be my problem! There must be more! I feel as if I’ve withered away.’

Doggy-paddling, they drifted towards one another. And while Heidrun was still wondering what she could reply to this outburst without sounding like a maiden aunt, she was suddenly close to him. His lines and wrinkles revealed a life of clueless carousal. She recognised Finn’s inability to make his brilliant talent chime with the banal realisation that in spite of his special gift he was not a special person, simply alive and, like everyone else, damned, on the highway that they were all hurtling along, one day to crash into the wall without ever having come close to the meaning of everything. Not a trace of apotheosis. Just someone who had had too much of everything without ever feeling sated by it, and who now, in his total cluelessness, reacted more honestly to the impressions of the journey than the rest of the group put together.

A moment later she sensed him.

She felt his hands on her hips, her backside. She felt them exploring her waist and back, his lips strangely cool on hers, wrapped both legs around him and pulled him so tightly to her that his sex pressed against hers, ambushed by the brazenness of his approach and even more by her own simmering readiness for a fling. She knew she was about to do something incredibly stupid that she would bitterly regret afterwards, but the whole catechism of marital fidelity was consumed in the heat of that moment, and if men thought with their dicks, as was so often rightly said, then her will and intelligence had just irrevocably faded away in her cunt, and that too was something so terrifyingly banal that all she could do was erupt with laughter.