Daniel Kehlmann - Fame - A Novel in Nine Episodes

I woke up to pounding head. Everything soaked, banging behind my forehead and taste in my mouth as if some animal had died in there. Seven a.m. Seven messages on the phone from mother. Had slept in my clothes again. Two clicks and it all came back to me.

I had to talk to him. That was it: talk to him, admit everything exactly the way it happened, the way I’ve just told you now. Didn’t matter what he did next, he wouldn’t be able to resist it, because it was a real story. My entry into fiction. Right now, at breakfast.

So took myself to breakfast room and waited. Ate toast, ate muesli, ate scrambled eggs. Drank coffee. Leafed through two newspapers. Not familiar with TheeveningNews in print version, only online, interesting, there was a tech-page that wasn’t half bad, but it only reminded me that I couldn’t get online, so I quickly set it aside. Ate some rolls, two sausages, some salmon, chunk of salami, two pieces of toast with marmalade, more scrambled eggs. Mother never makes a decent breakfast. Always says “make it yourself, buy your own stuff if you don’t like mine!” and so on. So nervous. He’d be here any minute.

But he didn’t come. Only nerds from yesterday who looked at me and grinned and whispered. I swear to you: if I weren’t such a peaceable person, then it would be pumpguns, hell, shots to the head, inferno, the whole load.

Finally went out into the hall. The woman behind the Reception desk was already shaking her head: “no, no, no Internet yet.”

“Want to speak to Leo Richter!”

“He’s no longer here.”

“What?”

“Left last night.”

Okay, so I got a little loud. I shouldn’t have banged on the table, at least not with both fists. But I shouldn’t have asked her whose room I’d just totally zeroed. Luckily her understanding pierced nothing and I clammed asap, I do not have a brain of mush. Then I abandoned the field and called mother.

All alone, she said. Had cried all day. “Are you going to keep doing this? Do you have a tramp?”

None, I promised her. Anywhere!

“Don’t believe you!”

I began to cry too. I know it sounds crazy-pitiful. But I’m telling you because you don’t know me and you don’t know who I am. Right there in the lobby.

Okay, she said, it’s all right. “I do believe you. But promise you won’t ever do it again. The whole weekend. Alone in the house. Never again, okay?”

I promised.

So okay, why not? I had no problem with it. Would anyone else ever want to spend time with me? At least I now had some stuff for the SpottheStars forum. But I can see already that it has no punch line, no hooks, nothing. No basis for a story.

For I’ll never see Leo again. I did a posting on literaturehouse.com that his books are all shit, did it on Amazon too, bigtime. But this changes nothing. He’ll never read that stuff.

The hotel guys didn’t want to give me a thing, no address, no phone number. He won’t write anything about me, I’ll never meet Lara. Reality will be the only thing I have: job and mother at home and the boss and the Überpig Lobenmeier, and the only escape forums like this. (At least I’m no troll like lordoftheflakes, or a brainless custard like icu_lop or pray4us.) All I have forever is me. Only right here, on this side. I’ll never get onto the other side, never. No alternative universe. Early tomorrow, back to work. Weather forecast terrible. Even if it were good, so what? Everything goes on the way it always has. And I know now that I’ll never, ever, be in a story.

I met Luzia one Wednesday evening at a reception in the Bureau of Regulation of Telecommunications Licenses, and from that day on I became a liar and I was lost.

I had been together with Hannah for nine years—in principle at least, for she lived with our son and our baby daughter, a somewhat strange infant, in a peaceful dull town on a lake in southern Germany where I had been born and now spent the weekends. The workweeks, however, I spent alone in a gray suburb of Hannover which the enterprise that employed me had chosen as its headquarters. Hannah was a little older than I was and she was comfortable being on her own. I wasn’t that important to her anymore—she knew it, and I knew it too, and each of us knew that the other one knew. But she was Hannah, we had a noisily suckling baby at home, and it was clear to me immediately that Luzia must remain unaware of this.

I’ll describe her later, when the moment comes. Here, let me just say that she was tall, with dark blond hair, and her eyes were brown and round like a hamster’s: brilliant, never focusing on anything for more than a few seconds, a little anxious. I noticed her when she dropped her glass on the floor and then immediately broke a vase of flowers that someone had foolishly left standing around on a pedestal. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, the skin on her upper arms was flawless, and as I saw her standing over the debris, I knew I would rather die than renounce the chance to hold her in my arms, mingle my breath with hers, and watch her eyes right up close as they rolled back under their lids.

She was a chemist. I didn’t understand what she did; it involved carbon and the synthesis of something, and even tangentially with nuclear fusion and the production of energy out of nothing. I nodded a lot, said Aha, yes, of course, and bent over to smell her perfume. When she asked what I did and what had brought me here—I didn’t know if she meant the city or this reception—I had to think before I was able to answer her: the circumstances of my life now seemed as foreign and as far away as the weather on the other side of the planet.

I was—at that time at least, because I’m unemployed today, and the likelihood of being hired by another company is not large—the head of the department of the administration and assignment of phone numbers in one of the large telecommunications companies. It may sound boring, but in reality it’s even more boring than that. It wasn’t what was forecast over my cradle, and it wasn’t what my mother expected when she talked about her son’s brilliant future. I once played the piano well, I could paint adequately, and all the photos of me show a pretty child with intelligent eyes. But the world breaks almost all of us, and why should my particular dreams have come true, reading books isn’t a profession, my father said, and angry as I was at the time, when my children reach that age I’ll tell them the same thing: reading books isn’t a profession. So I studied applied electronics with an emphasis on mobile communications, learned about the then-still-standard analog mobile phones (it seems an eternity ago), about SID and MIN codes, and all the methods for sending a human voice around the world in millionths of a second, started work, and gradually got used to sluggish afternoons in the office with the pervasive smell of coffee and ozone. At first I supervised five people, then seven, then nine, discovered to my amazement that people cannot work together without hating one another, and if you tell them what to do they detest you, met Hannah, whom I loved more than she loved me, became head of a department, and then was moved to another town; it’s called a career. I was being paid well, I was very lonely, and in the evenings I read books in Latin with the help of a dictionary or watched TV sitcoms with laugh tracks and accepted that life is what it is, and that there were a few choices you could make yourself, but not many.

And now I was standing in front of Luzia, my heart was racing quite ridiculously, and I heard myself like a detective asking more and more systematic questions to find out whether she had a family or if there was someone in her life, in other words if there was any chance that someday or better quite soon or even better this evening I could put my lips on the little hollow above her clavicle. She laughed now and then, lifted and lowered her glass, and I saw her long neck and the play of muscles under the skin of her shoulders and the play of light on her silky hair, and all the while shadowy figures moved at the edge of my field of vision. Glasses clinked, people laughed, sentences were exchanged, and somewhere someone was giving a speech, but none of it interested me. She had only, said Luzia, arrived here recently, and, well, to tell the truth she didn’t really like it; she laughed softly and I wasn’t sure whether she’d really given me a flirtatious look or whether it was merely an illusion conjured up by the poor lighting and my desire.