Korridorium

♫ Leisure Hunters ♫

---

145/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. Pro­fes­sor Ceril calls the thing a “Leisure Machine,” but to me, it’s once again a tow­er­ing struc­ture of hall­ways, cham­bers, and con­nect­ing shafts, filled as always with an unpleas­ant energy that tin­gles on my skin and makes my hair crackle.

The pro­fes­sor’s lat­est the­ory goes like this: True civ­i­liza­tional progress only hap­pens dur­ing leisure time, since that’s when the pres­sure of career and profit van­ishes, and people—presumably inven­tors like himself—can let their thoughts wan­der freely and focus on things that actu­ally inter­est them. This way, fire, the wheel, writ­ing, den­tal floss, and the snooze but­ton were invented. At least, that’s Cer­il’s ver­sion.

We need more leisure time—that’s his motto. Not for him­self, since he’s already (thanks to my father’s spon­sor­ship) an inde­pen­dent scholar and thus a full-time leisure researcher, but for every­one. By every­one, he does­n’t just mean the pop­u­la­tion of planet Earth, but all the undis­cov­ered, unno­ticed, and unreach­able civ­i­liza­tions in the entire galaxy. How­ever, for our neigh­bor­ing galax­ies or the whole uni­verse, he says his machine would have had to be larger than our solar sys­tem, reach­ing all the way out to Nep­tune’s orbit. That’s obvi­ously unfea­si­ble, hence his atyp­i­cal self-restric­tion to the Milky Way—including, not to for­get, all par­al­lel Milky Ways in mul­ti­di­men­sional quan­tum real­ity, which, as we all know, allows every pos­si­bil­ity and prob­a­bil­ity to become real, on whichever of the infi­nite dimen­sional planes.

At least, that’s Cer­il’s take.

At the end of the cor­ri­dor, I find a con­trol panel with large, color-coded levers, behind which there’s a busy hum, scrape, and throb. This time, it’s sim­ple: I’m sup­posed to pull the yel­low lever. It will acti­vate a com­pli­cated mech­a­nism that—as I gather from the pro­fes­sor’s con­vo­luted explanations—soaks up and elim­i­nates mun­dane tasks and rou­tine work. These, his (leisure!) research has revealed, con­sist mostly of a spe­cific kind of sub­tle ele­men­tary par­ti­cles he calls ergons.

With my hand on the yel­low lever, it sud­denly hits me that my par­ents would­n’t have to work any­more either.

Hmm, that would be bad.

Even now, their scant free time is con­sumed with groom­ing their teenage prodigy for a bril­liant career as a genius and con­stantly boss­ing me around. If they had more free time, things could get pretty annoy­ing for me.

I drop my hand and leave the lever in its start­ing posi­tion.

“Well?” the pro­fes­sor asks enthu­si­as­ti­cally as I step out of his machine, relieved not to have got­ten lost in the maze of shafts and hall­ways, or worse, got­ten sucked up myself. I nod. As expected, Ceril thinks he can already feel the effects. “Don’t you feel it, too? Aren’t there fewer ergons around us already?” I nod again. “Finally, a desir­able form of unem­ploy­ment and a leisure-based soci­ety!” he exclaims excit­edly. But a glance at his gauges gives him pause. “Hmm. The con­cen­tra­tion is drop­ping much slower than I cal­cu­lated.” He looks at me, brow fur­rowed.

“Could­n’t new ergons be con­stantly gen­er­at­ing?” The pro­fes­sor scratches his chin, pulls the rel­e­vant for­mu­las from his index card box, and starts scrib­bling a mess of num­bers and vari­ables onto his graph paper. “Entropy! Darn it! I should have known…” he mut­ters. Whether it’s ergons or entropy, I don’t care—as long as some­one keeps my par­ents off my back.

(Then my par­ents sud­denly came up with entirely new plans for me, their prodigy, but that’s another story.)

♫ Before the Rit­ual ♫

---

148/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. A uni­formed offi­cer I’ve never seen around here before steps up to me. “I’m here to see Albo,” I say, and fol­low him down the hall­way until he knocks on a door.

Inside, the detec­tive sits in front of sev­eral mon­i­tors show­ing the inter­ro­ga­tion room. Sit­ting alone at a plain wooden table in there is a man. He’s wear­ing hand­cuffs with his hands flat on the table.

“We got him,” Albo says, look­ing up at me. “And I def­i­nitely want you in that room with me for the inter­ro­ga­tion.”

Maybe it would’ve been nice to hear an apol­ogy first for drag­ging me out to precinct head­quar­ters in the mid­dle of the night. But that’s just not Albo’s style. His call yanked me out of a dead sleep, and I still feel sea­sick, like the world is wrapped in cot­ton wool.

“He tried to break into the Alex. The TV tower,” he adds unnec­es­sar­ily.

“Was he try­ing to… put another heart in a cor­ri­dor up there?”

It’s a young guy with messy blonde hair. I can see dried blue paint on his hands and cov­er­alls.

Albo scratches his eye­brow and shakes his head. “He dis­guised him­self as a painter, com­plete with over­alls and a paint bucket, but he got busted when he tried to head up the emer­gency stairs.”

“So, no heart,” I say with relief. “What about texts?”

“Zip,” Albo says. “That would’ve been too early any­way. He just wanted to scout out the next cor­ri­dor. I’ve had my guys step up patrols around the city’s major land­marks the last night or two.”

“Did he say any­thing? Con­fess?” I try to size up the guy on the mon­i­tor. His eyes seem to be star­ing into noth­ing­ness, though the cam­era feed might be deceiv­ing. He’s young. Way too young, really. Wet behind the ears.

“Can’t get a word out of him,” Albo says, though he still looks a lit­tle proud and relieved. He gives me a jovial punch on the thigh. “I’m hop­ing you can crack him for me. Before I have to resort to my own meth­ods.”

“And what if he’s not the guy?” I ask.

Albo shifts rest­lessly on his stool. “What else would he be doing at the Alex?”

“Sui­cide,” I say. “A bet with his bud­dies, a grand ges­ture for his girl­friend…”

Albo dis­misses it with a wave of his hand.

I don’t drop it. “I seri­ously doubt the guy knows what the Many-Worlds Inter­pre­ta­tion is.”

“Many-Worlds Inter­pre­ta­tion?” Albo asks.

“Text num­ber 63″ I say. “And I doubt he knows how to spell ‘Mega­lithic cul­tures,’ num­ber 97, or…”

Albo stands up. “How about you fig­ure out how we get a con­fes­sion out of him instead!”

“Uwe, man, face facts: this isn’t the guy we’re look­ing for. But if your team finds fifty type­writ­ers in his apart­ment, call me—even in the mid­dle of the night—and I’ll crawl back here on my knees and apol­o­gize to you.” Some­times you have to wave a fence post in Albo’s face—or bet­ter yet, hit him over the head with it—for him to real­ize he’s barked up the wrong tree.

He vis­i­bly deflates. “I was so sure.”

“You’re over­worked. If I can give you a piece of friendly advice: take a few days off, head out to the cot­tage by the lake, sit in the sun, and stare holes into thin air.”

Albo gives a sour smile.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell the words are prac­ti­cally being dragged out of him, “for drag­ging you out of bed. I was a bit quick on the trig­ger, I guess. Cof­fee?”

I shake my head. “Come on then,” he says, “I’ll drive you home.” I know how that goes. Scream­ing through red lights with the siren blar­ing. Never again. I’d rather call a cab.

The cab takes its time get­ting here, so I pop into the painter’s room after all.

“Hey,” I say, not wait­ing for an answer. “Maybe I can get you a per­mit for a graf­fiti piece on the TV tower. You just gotta know the right peo­ple. Is it a good quote?”

He stares at me like he’s see­ing a ghost. Finally, his mouth opens and moves a few times like a fish gasp­ing for air before he answers: “It was sup­posed to be our logo.”

“Ah,” I say. “A com­pany logo?”

“No, no: ours, mine and my girlfriend’s.” Wrong order, pal, I think. You two aren’t gonna last. I’m about to ask him what kind of logo it is, but the offi­cer who brought me to Albo steps in and whis­pers in my ear: “Your cab’s here.”

“Well, have fun,” I say, rais­ing my hand. The guy actu­ally raises his hand back, like we’re bud­dies. Ah, sweet inno­cence! This gen­er­a­tion prob­a­bly can’t think two cents’ worth because pfen­nigs were abol­ished. Everything’s going down the drain.

The taxi dri­ver wants to chat about some soc­cer games. Albo would say, “Shut up and drive.” I give it a try myself—and look at that, it works like a charm.

♫ To the Ghost Between the Pages ♫

---

149/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor, the only thing that feels famil­iar in the whirl­wind of col­ors and shapes envelop­ing me and mak­ing me dizzy. It’s com­fort­ing to feel solid ground beneath my feet. But is it truly solid ground? Every­thing here is strangely soft and doughy, the cor­ri­dor’s walls yield­ing, like silk stretched over mem­ory foam.

“Every­thing okay in there?”

Who is speak­ing? Is this a test? An exper­i­ment? An April Fool’s prank? Or has Amer­i­can intel­li­gence picked me up again?

“Speak up, man, I don’t have all night.”

The voice sounds like that of a teenager. I can’t pin­point its loca­tion as I stum­ble along the cor­ri­dor. Is it com­ing from the front? The cor­ri­dor is curved, its end unseen. “Hello? Is some­one there?”

“Tom. Nǐhǎo. I’ve got a few ques­tions, Cory.”

Cory? Yes, Cory. But who is Cory? My mem­o­ries con­tra­dict each other. I am simul­ta­ne­ously a jour­nal­ist, the stu­dent of a Bud­dhist mas­ter, the Mino­taur, a xeno-lin­guist… How is that pos­si­ble?

“You’re a clever guy. Writ­ten a lot. And I need your help now. It’s about the ‘Decline of Euro­pean Post­mod­ernism: A Lit­er­ary Blog Exam­ple from 2012.’ I need some input.”

What is he talk­ing about? The cor­ri­dor just never ends, and the voice stays with me. A dream? No: When­ever this sus­pi­cion arises in a dream, it trans­forms into a lucid dream. But it does­n’t work this time. I don’t wake up, not in the dream, not in bed. Yet it feels unreal.

“Can you make sense of that, Cory? ‘Decline of Post­mod­ernism’?” The voice becomes more urgent.

“The Kor­ri­do­rium…”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talk­ing about. Gotta write a term paper about it.”

“The Kor­ri­do­rium…” I attempt again, but I fall silent because sud­denly, I real­ize that I’ve writ­ten the Kor­ri­do­rium and all the sto­ries within it. I am not it; I have imag­ined it. Yes, that must be it. Hence the con­flict­ing mem­o­ries: sto­ries I’ve con­cocted in my mind.

“Where am I?” I ask into the curved cor­ri­dor. There are doors—did I not notice them before? They bear num­bers, like in a hotel. How­ever, it feels more like a library, like the cor­ri­dor between book­shelves, and it smells like one too. A hotel that smells of books. Not bad, actu­ally. The door reads 398. I press the han­dle down, but it’s locked.

“Every­where and nowhere. You’re a Yōulíng with the task of help­ing me with the term paper. ‘Post­mod­ernism,’ the Teach is trip­pin’.”

The next door is locked. And the next. And so on. Each bears the same num­ber. 398. Maybe I’ve gone mad? Or dead.

“Now spill it: What’s post­mod­ern about your scrib­bling, and how does it reflect the decline?”

“What is ‘Teach’?”

“My Ger­man teacher. But that’s irrel­e­vant. She’ll never know you existed. I recon­structed you using your texts. Pri­vate Yōulíngs are for­bid­den accord­ing to the Jīng­shén Rights Char­ter, but this is, so to speak, an emer­gency.”

Recon­structed? I walk along the cor­ri­dor, shake locked doors, all marked 398—along with my swirling mem­o­ries of a bunch of hip­pies, the plague, a nuclear waste repos­i­tory, Noah’s ark…

“A recon­struc­tion?”

“Yeah. Took a blank mind from my dad’s Lab-Táishì, fed it with your texts, and had it fetch sec­ondary lit­er­a­ture. Plus the essen­tial data from the early mil­len­nium, the zeit­geist pack­age from 1970 to 2012. The rest is han­dled by the stem.”

“Blank mind?”

“Nobody gives a Benz, man. That’s all after your time. I’m not here to explain the world to you.”

“The world from when?”

“67. I already said it: Long after your time.”

“2067?”

“Yeah, bingo.” His voice sounds annoyed.

2067. How is that pos­si­ble? I vaguely remem­ber dying. The tun­nel into the light. Or else, the sword in my back. But those are prob­a­bly just sto­ries, sto­ries upon which I was recon­structed. Hence, I can only know what’s in the texts—nothing about my death, the author’s death, whose recon­struc­tion I am. His — or her — sto­ries, how­ever, are con­tra­dic­tory. They seem designed to stay vague. How should I know who I am, not even if I’m a man or a woman or if I’m even a human being when that was pre­cisely the search game, the puz­zle? When every­thing appears pluridi­men­sional and frac­tally shat­tered? But no, does­n’t every­thing sur­pris­ingly dis­solve at the end of the blog, reveal­ing who Cory is and what all these sto­ries are about?

But I can’t fol­low that thought any fur­ther; I’m inter­rupted. “Okay, man, so the Kor­ri­do­rium: 400 blog entries, equiv­a­lent to a medium-sized novel. Some­where in there must be some­thing about the decline of postmodernity—or some­thing post­mod­ern that illu­mi­nates the decline. So get started, after all, you’re a scribe.”

“There are 398 texts. Not 400. Three hun­dred ninety-eight!”

“What­ever.”

“And they should­n’t be post­mod­ern but post-post­mod­ern. You get it? Inte­gral.”

“Lis­ten, this isn’t a math class.”

I get angry. Some­one recon­structs me in 2067 by feed­ing a blank con­scious­ness with my texts, and some com­puter extracts the spirit of the author, mean­ing me. Yet, it’s not a lit­er­a­ture scholar, not a his­to­rian, not even a lover of quirky short prose, but just some igno­rant punk forced to write about me for school, too lazy to read a sin­gle line of it!

“Now, you lis­ten to me, you igno­ra­mus! You must have mis­un­der­stood some­thing: I tran­scended post­moder­nity; the notion of decline is non­sense. Post­moder­nity can only be suc­ceeded and inte­grated into the next cul­tural stage, the inte­gral per­spec­tive! Moder­nity did­n’t ‘decline,’ did it?”

“No, on the con­trary: After post­moder­nity came the Remoder­nity, and then the Pre­nais­sance. Déle. It’s all after your time, and now let’s finally write the term paper.”

My head is spin­ning. Post­moder­nity with all its achieve­ments is sup­posed to have failed and van­ished with­out a trace? Surely not—because of me?!

“Did the Kor­ri­do­rium cause the decline?”

“Hardly. I’ve researched what this Corri-Dōngdōng is all about, but there’s noth­ing to be found. It prob­a­bly went unno­ticed, and I guess it’s thanks to the Ger­man lit­er­a­ture quota that the Teach dug it up. Oh man! Twenty thou­sand char­ac­ters min­i­mum, includ­ing spaces—would have pre­ferred to write about Chi­nese lit­er­a­ture!”

“But there must be a Wikipedia entry for the Kor­ri­do­rium!”

The voice laughs. A brief, annoyed laugh. “That’s prob­a­bly the post­mod­ern nar­cis­sism the Teach talks about: always revolv­ing around itself. No, Wikipedia is long gone; the Jeecee­bee turned it into Sùzhì­pe­dia after the melt­down.”

“Melt­down?”

“2030. After your time. And in the Sùzhì­pe­dia…”

“What is the melt­down?” I inter­rupt him.

“No one gives a Benz. Do you want to know if there’s any­thing about you in the Sùzhì­pe­dia or not?”

“Sùzhì like Sushi?”

“Not Japan­ese! That’s Chi­nese and means ‘quick knowl­edge.’ ”

“You speak Chi­nese?”

“Just Man­darin. Any­way, there’s noth­ing about the Kor­ri­do­rium in there. Only some foot­note. Just one.”

“What kind of foot­note?”

“No idea, did­n’t bother to remem­ber.”

“Related to ‘pluridi­men­sional world­view’ maybe? Or ‘frac­tal lit­er­a­ture’?”

“Man, you’re gong­ing!”

“After that melt­down, things went down­hill fast, did­n’t they? I mean, ‘Remoder­nity’ sounds like regres­sion. And with the ‘Pre­nais­sance,’ it seems human­ity was sud­denly thrust back into the dark­est Mid­dle Ages.”

“Well, isn’t that rich? The Teach is right. The main char­ac­ter­is­tic of post­moder­nity: its abom­inable hubris, along­side its fatal rel­a­tivism, of course.”

“And who Cory is? Did you research that?”

“Nobody gives a fly­ing Benz. Stop gong­ing me already. I’m the one ask­ing the ques­tions! Who else could Cory be? Just Cory. You.”

“What’s with the ‘Benz’? What are you talk­ing about?”

“That’s Chi­nese. Pik.”

“ ‘Benz’ is sup­posed to be Chi­nese? And what is ‘pik’?”

“Well, pik. Piquant. In your time, they prob­a­bly would’ve said ‘cool.’ ”

“In my time… You just recon­structed me. I only know some sto­ries from back then. The real Cory, on the other hand—did any­one ever find out who’s behind the pseu­do­nym?”

“What’s there to find out? It’s just some post­mod­ern hide-and-seek. You should know who you are.”

I can remem­ber an award cer­e­mony. Was­n’t it even the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture? Appar­ently, just one of the sto­ries. I can’t trust my mem­o­ries. If only I could think about myself in peace! And how to get out of this end­less cor­ri­dor… I real­ize that my heart is pound­ing, and I’m gasp­ing for breath. It feels like I’ve just fin­ished a marathon. Or am I just angry? I’m not sure—also not sure if I even have a pulse or if I’m breath­ing. I’m just a sim­u­la­tion, com­posed of words. Can they bring them all back with this method? Joyce, Homer, Kafka, Goethe?

“You know what, man?”

I lean, breath­ing heav­ily, against one of the cor­ri­dor walls. What would Cory do now?

“I’ll give all this stuff to my mom. Recon­struct­ing you was a crappy idea. Mā thinks I need top grades for the future, career and all, and then she can do some­thing for it. The term paper is a piece of cake for her.”

“And what about me?”

“What’s the big deal? I’ll just delete you.”

“You can’t do that!”

“We’ll see.”

“Wait!” What was his name again? “I can help you, Tom.”

He takes his time with the answer. I feel sweat break­ing out.

“There’s this story,” I shout into the empty cor­ri­dor, “about the Chi­nese: they shrink them­selves until all of them fit into the For­bid­den City. A satire.” I have to impro­vise. A trial bal­loon, but I can’t think of any­thing bet­ter.

“Very bad. The Jeecee­bee won’t like this. Funny that it slipped past the Teach.”

“Who is this Jeecee­bee?”

“Our Great Impe­r­ial Bene­fac­tor. The one on the Dragon Throne.”

“A… Chi­nese world dic­ta­tor­ship?”

“Gǒupì!” It sounds like a dis­mis­sive “bull­shit!” when he says that. Now, don’t say any­thing wrong! I am a name­less pri­vate, the devil, an ele­phant, a silent monk, an old woman with Alzheimer’s, an assas­sin, a voice from beyond, a night owl, a com­puter algo­rithm… All at once, and all mixed up. To buy time, I must tell a story. The story he wants to hear.

I lower my voice and put empha­sis on every word: “But that could be a clue to the down­fall of post­moder­nity, you know?!”

“Hm. Not bad. I could work with that.” Tom seems to be tak­ing the bait.

“Hubris, you know? Post­mod­ern, nar­cis­sis­tic mega­lo­ma­nia. That’s how we all were back then.”

Maybe I exag­ger­ated because Tom hes­i­tates now. Even­tu­ally, he says slowly, “Did­n’t you say you were… inte­gral.”

“Yes, of course, that’s the mega­lo­ma­nia: to think you can com­pre­hen­sively encom­pass and inte­grate all aspects sus­tain­ably, replace power hier­ar­chies with com­pe­tence hier­ar­chies, find pluridi­men­sional-com­pre­hen­sive solu­tions to the most com­plex prob­lems, extol the decay of val­ues as a new value. That had to lead to down­fall, espe­cially given what was devel­op­ing in China at my time.”

“Devel­op­ing in China?”

“Well, the Remoder­nity. Or maybe already the Pre­nais­sance. The Jeecee­bee and the — what was the new Human Rights Char­ter called?”

“Jīng­shén Rights Char­ter.”

“Yeah, man, what­ever that is: the down­fall of Euro­pean post­moder­nity — it’s all in the Kor­ri­do­rium. I can tell you a lot about it.”

“Then shoot. You dic­tate, and Bàs Táishì writes it down. But nice and struc­tured, with foot­notes, you hear? I’ll put my feet up in the mean­time.”

Would Cory have done that? Talked about her or his life and revealed every­thing, the hope, long­ing, insights, and strug­gle for some­thing worth writ­ing and fight­ing for, just not to be deleted imme­di­ately? This must be how Scheherazade felt.

“You know, Cory, I just want to re-breed tigers later.”

“Re-breed tigers, really?”

“The Great Chi­nese Bene­fac­tor in Zhong­guan­cun has over a thou­sand researchers work­ing on it, but they just can’t fig­ure it out, despite DNA and every­thing. If I man­age to do it, I’m a made man. You can’t imag­ine what they’d pay for tiger dicks there. As Afro­sidia… diasi…”

“Aphro­disiac.”

“Yep.” And after a short pause, “You’re not as much of an idiot as I thought, Cory.”

And so I begin, deliv­er­ing an exten­sive lec­ture on the decline of post­moder­nity as mir­rored in 398 eccen­tric short stories—a labyrinthine game of hide-and-seek where mon­strous hubris and that equally abom­inable, fatally rel­a­tivist nar­cis­sism con­stantly peek through, ulti­mately ush­er­ing in the glo­ri­ous age of Remoder­nity, the Pre­nais­sance, and, of course, our Great Impe­r­ial Bene­fac­tor on the Dragon Throne: the Jeecee­bee.

♫ Silencer ♫

---

151/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor lead­ing to the “Room of Silence” inside the Bran­den­burg Gate. Before Uwe Albo called me, I had no idea a place like this even existed. “Silence” is writ­ten on the wall in var­i­ous lan­guages. A pretty fit­ting place for Easter, really, but I already have a bad feel­ing about what’s wait­ing for me here.

Every­thing is cor­doned off. Albo’s col­leagues rec­og­nize me and wave me through. The detec­tive him­self stands in the small, unadorned med­i­ta­tion room like a lum­ber­jack in a per­fume shop. My gaze imme­di­ately drops to the floor, and sure enough, right on cue: in the mid­dle of the room lies a stack of paper, topped with a bloody lump of meat.

“Another heart,” Albo says when he sees me. “Num­ber three.”

A sharp wave of his hand scat­ters the young offi­cers. We’re alone. “This room is locked at night. Yet this morn­ing, the heart was sit­ting right here.” Albo grabs my arm. I can clearly see the whites of his eyes. “That bas­tard scares me, you know? He writes a story every day on one of his type­writ­ers, and when­ever he fin­ishes his run of fifty type­writ­ers, he calmly drops another one of his hearts some­where in Berlin—without us get­ting an inch closer to catch­ing him!”

I can smell Albo’s breath; he’s stand­ing that close. Is this a cry for help? Is he crack­ing? Is he at the end of his rope? But Albo relaxes his grip, lets go, and clenches both fists. His eyes nar­row to slits as he says, men­ac­ingly low, “I’m gonna nail him with these bare hands, and once I’ve got him, he can play all the hide-and-seek he wants in the cell where he’ll spend the rest of his life.”

He looks at me, as if look­ing for backup. I give him a stern nod. That seems to sat­isfy him. “Come on, let’s move. Foren­sics can han­dle the rest.”

Later in Albo’s office, we study copies of the new texts. Famil­iar themes, new twists—the play­ful, com­pul­sive streak shines through again and again.

“I paid the Inte­gral­ists a visit,” I say. Albo looks up, intrigued, hav­ing clearly for­got­ten he asked me to infil­trate Berlin’s Inte­gral scene in the first place. “Decent peo­ple across the board who think they’ve found the Philoso­pher’s Stone—a kind of cut crys­tal with a whole range of facets that all need to be accounted for when look­ing at human­ity and the world.”

“Facets?” Albo asks, frown­ing.

“Yeah, just like the killer’s texts. Every­thing can be viewed from dif­fer­ent angles and per­spec­tives…”

“Which I can then con­ve­niently pick and choose from.”

I shake my head. “No, no—the whole point of the inte­gral approach is that it’s holis­tic. You don’t just limit your­self to sin­gle aspects.”

“In other words: you felt right at home with them.”

“Point is, it’s a phi­los­o­phy that val­ues life in all its forms. It does­n’t breed killers, if that’s what you’re ask­ing.”

Albo scratches his stub­ble. “So where do we find him then?” I rap my knuck­les against my stack of copies. Our only lead.

A uni­formed offi­cer with a goa­tee and pony­tail knocks on the open door to grab our atten­tion. Albo steps over to him. I immerse myself in the pages in front of me. There’s men­tion of a twin. Inter­est­ing. A lead to the vic­tims, the first two of whom were appar­ently iden­ti­cal twins? “Then get back to work!” I hear Albo bark.

Snort­ing, he comes back into the office, wav­ing a thin folder. “The heart’s got the same DNA as the other two.”

“A third iden­ti­cal twin?” I ask, sur­prised. “Is that even a thing? Iden­ti­cal triplets?”

Albo slams the file onto his desk with a loud bang. “They’re so rare that every sin­gle one of them is reg­is­tered. But none of this makes sense, quite apart from the fact that no pair of triplets has been reported miss­ing.”

I let his “pair of triplets” slide. “Then they must be unreg­is­tered triplets. Or the lab made a mis­take…”

Albo nods, look­ing sud­denly exhausted. “Told them the same thing. They need to recheck every­thing, step by step.”

“—Or,” I con­tinue, “they’re clones.”

Albo stares at me. “Those were three hearts from adult human beings,” he says hoarsely. I nod.

Albo leans heav­ily on his desk and looks me dead in the eye, worn out. “Offi­cially, human clones don’t exist—and cer­tainly not adults.”

I nod again. “Offi­cially,” I say.

“Man,” Albo groans, slump­ing into his office chair. “Hous­ton, we have a prob­lem.”

♫ Falling to the Sky ♫

---

152/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor, com­pletely unsus­pect­ing, when sud­denly I’m struck by a blind­ing flash of a vision: Simul­ta­ne­ously with me, thou­sands, even tens of thou­sands of peo­ple around the world enter a cor­ri­dor. For some rea­son, I sud­denly sense them, feel their emo­tions, think their thoughts. I am, at the same time, old and young, sad and happy, relaxed and stressed, man and woman—it’s all there, all at once, in count­less cor­ri­dors.

An indige­nous child runs down a hall­way with a toy air­plane, mak­ing loud vroom­ing noises. A jan­i­tor pre­pares to get the boot out­side the exec­u­tive’s office at the prop­erty man­age­ment com­pany. A plumber searches for the cor­rect name­plate; a requested mas­sage ther­a­pist looks for the right room num­ber in a motel. Inside the mind of a young Chi­nese vio­lin­ist on her way to her les­son, a Mozart sonata soars, and an Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor with a thrown-out back on his way to his lec­ture hall silently recites a Shake­spearean son­net. A sense of rev­er­en­tial won­der creeps over a Bud­dhist pil­grim in a gold-adorned tem­ple, a Russ­ian cos­mo­naut floats through the sta­tion with a screw­driver in hand, and a mid­wife in Hawaii, almost run­ning late, hears the screams of pain from a woman in labor…

Col­leagues help me up. “Are you feel­ing okay?” “Should I call an ambu­lance?” “You look so pale!” I shake my head to wave them off. My knees are still com­pletely wob­bly, and I can barely stand on my own. “You passed out briefly. What hap­pened?”

“We entered the cor­ri­dor,” I mut­ter tone­lessly, with­out any of the bystanders hear­ing me. Although all of this only lasted for a split sec­ond, it has become indeli­bly etched into my mind. I retreat to the restroom down the hall, where I splash cold water on my face until I feel like myself again, and only myself.

♫ Sloe Sea­son ♫

---

153/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor at the sta­tion, clutch­ing the stack of copies con­tain­ing the writ­ings of the triple murderer—texts lit­er­ally stained with blood. The blood of ille­gal clones?

Albo is engrossed in his files. I skip the pleas­antries: “Is there such a thing as iden­ti­cal quadru­plets?”

Albo looks up. “Just had some in Leipzig recently. Damn rare, but not impos­si­ble.”

I grab a cof­fee. No sugar left.

Albo keeps his eyes on me. “Why do you ask?”

“Because then it might finally be over.”

Albo laughs bit­terly. “Over? I have to catch a killer, regard­less of what hap­pens in fifty days!”

“—Forty-eight,” I cor­rect him. Albo gives me a look that would­n’t pass day­time TV cen­sor­ship.

“Ray Brad­bury,” he says then. I look at him, slightly con­fused. “Amer­i­can author,” I say.

Albo nods. “Any Friend of Nicholas Nick­le­by’s Is a Friend of Mine.”

I shrug. Albo tosses me a thin, worn paper­back: Ray Brad­bury’s I Sing the Body Elec­tric! “Any Friend of Nicholas Nick­le­by’s…” is one of the sto­ries listed in the table of con­tents.

“You read stuff like this?” I ask, sur­prised.

Albo shakes his head. “One of our foren­sic guys put me onto it. There’s a guy in there who thinks he’s Charles Dick­ens but can’t put any­thing worth­while on paper. He buys six dozen type­writ­ers and writes like a mad­man…” With that, he stands up, walks over, and takes the slim vol­ume back from my hand. He flips it open, finds the spot, and quotes: “The poem. The essay. The play trag­ique. The farce. The short story. And it was all bad.”

“What are you try­ing to tell me, Albo?”

“That’s him, don’t you see? The type­writ­ers, the dif­fer­ent texts. And then he sits…” Albo taps the book­let. “…at the back of a train and throws all the pages out one by one, and they flut­ter away. Thou­sands of them.”

“But that’s just a story, Albo. We have three dead bod­ies and a ser­ial killer.”

Albo slams the book onto his desk. “Just a story, you say? But these are all sto­ries, too! The typewriters—don’t you get it? He knows the Brad­bury story and iden­ti­fies with it!”

“Take it down a notch, Albo. He iden­ti­fies with every­thing and noth­ing. That’s pre­cisely our prob­lem. He’s a shape-shifter, and we can’t get a grip on him. One minute he’s ‘inte­gral,’ the next he’s sur­re­al­ist. We don’t grasp him, get it? You can’t just pick out one facet and call it a day. Not here. Not with him. And six dozen type­writ­ers aren’t fifty.”

Albo looks like he’s on the verge of blow­ing a fuse. He must have latched onto this Brad­bury thing out of sheer des­per­a­tion. I don’t give him room to breathe: “Num­ber 122 is another one of those. Incom­pre­hen­si­ble gibberish…”—I pull the sheet from my copies—”…until you find the orig­i­nal.”

“Which orig­i­nal?” Albo asks, frown­ing at the page.

“A Braulio Are­nas is men­tioned, right? Chilean poet. Just so hap­pens he wrote a poem titled ‘Errata’ that lists a bunch of print­ing errors found in an unnamed text. A sur­re­al­ist poem.”

“And?”

“Num­ber 122 is that text. It con­tains every sin­gle error listed. For exam­ple, in the poem, it says, ‘Instead of mak­ing two hits with one shot it should be mak­ing two lips with one mouth.’ Sound famil­iar? Or ‘Instead of the youth the beauty the mill it should be the mill the beauty the youth.’ Ulti­mately, it was the miss­ing com­mas that tipped me off that his text was built on that poem.”

Albo looks at his copy, rubs his stub­ble, and thinks it over. Finally, he asks: “Does it make any sense?”

“None,” I say. “It’s just—and I quote—‘a grotesque par­ody of some­thing that is already absurd.’ ”

“Uh-huh,” Albo says.

I tap his copy. “There’s one error miss­ing, by the way.”

Albo’s brow fur­rows.

“One line reads: ‘Instead of I love you it should be I love you.’ ”

“Where’s the error?”

“That’s the whole point of Sur­re­al­ism. And the same goes for the killer. He’s no more Braulio Are­nas than he is Charles Dick­ens!”

Albo nods with­out look­ing up. “So how do we nail him?”

“Let’s talk about some­one who decided to stretch his bizarre mind games so far into real­ity that the homi­cide squad has to deal with them,” I say, hold­ing up the copies. “Let’s talk about incom­pat­i­ble claims and col­laps­ing belief sys­tems.”

Albo looks up. “Always a good idea,” he says. Do I spot a wry smile tug­ging at the cor­ners of his mouth? Maybe it feels to him, too, a bit like thirty or forty years ago, when we used to sit up all night debat­ing life, God, and the universe—and all the insan­ity we humans inject into it.

♫ Still Echo thru my Mind ♫

---

154/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor, and ever since the sud­den vision that over­whelmed me right here the day before yes­ter­day, I’ve had this uneasy feel­ing every time I step out the door that it might hap­pen again: feel­ing con­nected with every­one else in that same moment, or even feel­ing as one with them.

This time, on my way to the cafe­te­ria again, it hap­pens. But it’s weaker and does­n’t knock me to the ground imme­di­ately. Again, I sense peo­ple inside me, though fewer this time, and it does­n’t feel quite so strange and diverse: as if I’m already famil­iar with these peo­ple, as if we’re old friends. For a split sec­ond, we are one—my broth­ers and sis­ters in spirit and I—people with whom I share a strong spir­i­tual bond, with­out know­ing them or even hav­ing guessed they might exist some­where in the world. The intense feel­ing of unex­pect­edly redis­cov­er­ing long-lost, unknown fam­ily mem­bers makes me stag­ger for a moment. Then, it’s over. A few col­leagues give me sus­pi­cious looks—small won­der after the inci­dent two days ago. But I don’t let on.

Who were all these peo­ple? Do they really exist some­where on this planet? And can they per­ceive me, too? Is there any way to track them down? And what does any of this have to do with this cor­ri­dor?

I’m absent-minded and use­less the rest of the day because these ques­tions weigh on me. But over the next few days, the expe­ri­ence fades, and since noth­ing extra­or­di­nary hap­pens when I enter the cor­ri­dor, I finally attribute the mat­ter to my over­wrought nerves.

♫ Mare chronium––Focussing ♫

---

156/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor. Pas­cal’s Coq au vin smells deli­cious once again. The twelve strokes of the church clock are just fad­ing away. I’m a lit­tle early and stand wait­ing out­side Room 27.

“But I ordered us food!” I hear the voice of Mr. Korian­der, our guest for the night, from behind the door. Some­thing clat­ters. I can’t make out the response. “Oh, but you can, I insist!” Mr. Korian­der asserts. Some­thing bangs again. “Please wait at least for the meal!” Mr. Korian­der pleads. Even though I’m sure I’ll turn red with excite­ment, I decide to serve imme­di­ately. I knock. Mr. Korian­der opens the door. “See?” he says, turn­ing back toward the room.

A small man is stand­ing on the bed. He has a bald spot with just a few white hairs in the back, wears glasses, and has a rather amus­ing round face with stick­ing-out ears. How old might he be? Sixty? Eighty? Hard to tell…

“Oh,” he goes, and steps off the bed. He inspects my tray, and he seems to like what he sees. I serve them their meal at the table. “Just water?” he asks as I pour table water into two glasses. He has a slight accent that I can’t quite place.

“Of course,” Mr. Korian­der says. Then he opens his note­book and begins his ques­tions while his guest starts to cut up the chicken and pep­per it vig­or­ously. I step back a few paces beside the bed, hold­ing myself in readi­ness to top up their water.

At first, the con­ver­sa­tion revolves around Mars—I might have guessed. Since they’re speak­ing Ger­man, I under­stand every­thing this time. And yet I com­pre­hend almost noth­ing. “Arlan­thro­pos” seems to be the name for a Mar­t­ian that is merely a piece of brain inside a giant metal machine and shares no human inter­ests. Korian­der’s guest, how­ever, does­n’t seem inclined to talk about it and grum­bles dis­con­tent­edly again and again. Judg­ing by his accent, he seems to be from some­where in the East, Rus­sia per­haps, or Roma­nia. I’m not sure.

“Where has Golem XIV van­ished to?” Mr. Korian­der wants to know, but his guest informs him that that’s not how it works and that entirely dif­fer­ent things mat­ter, espe­cially given the short amount of time.

Mr. Korian­der seems a lit­tle miffed. He presses his lips together and snaps his note­book shut. His guest smiles, takes it from his hand, looks inside, and says, “Pirx.” But Mr. Korian­der shakes his head. He wants to talk about evo­lu­tion and con­scious­ness.

His guest smiles mis­chie­vously and asks, “In a small black box?” Mr. Korian­der bites his lip and says, “Trurl.” “Kla­pau­cius,” says his guest. Their crazy con­ver­sa­tion goes on like this. Some­how I gather that the vis­i­tor has evi­dently given far more thought to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and nan­otech­nol­ogy than oth­ers. For a while, they talk about some­thing they call “Phan­tomat­ics,” then about a cer­tain bac­te­r­ial “Erun­tics.” They might as well have been speak­ing Ancient Egypt­ian for all I under­stood.

Finally, it’s time to clear the table. Mr. Korian­der looks some­what des­per­ate as he stud­ies the long list of unasked ques­tions in his note­book. His guest laughs, and I can still hear his laugh­ter as I stand by the ele­va­tor and the church clock strikes one.

♫ Tem­plescape ♫

---

157/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor, almost hav­ing for­got­ten my visions that had sud­denly and with­out warn­ing over­whelmed me there some time ago. How­ever, I find myself stand­ing there, almost beside myself, some­where in the moun­tains, gaz­ing up at an old man with a white pointed beard, wear­ing a sim­ple, faded robe. My heart flies to him; he is the Mas­ter, my Mas­ter, call­ing me to the Himalayas to become his dis­ci­ple and receive the pre­cious spir­i­tual gifts he has pre­pared for me.

“Hey there,” greets me a pass­ing col­league. I don’t respond, still enrap­tured by my vision and the over­whelm­ing desire in my heart—a devo­tion, an enthu­si­asm that I had almost for­got­ten I was capa­ble of, back when I was a young woman.

Late at night in bed, the Mas­ter comes to mind again, and my heart aches briefly with long­ing. How­ever, my hus­band, peace­fully snor­ing beside me, would nei­ther under­stand nor approve. What could I tell him? And where in the Himalayas should I search? Cer­tainly, it would be an adven­ture to give up every­thing at once, to go into the unknown and seek a new spir­i­tual home there. It sounds like some­thing that could bring some excite­ment back to my life! On the other hand…

As my eyes close, the long­ing fades away, and I find my well-earned sleep.

♫ Hunt­ing Spree ♫

---

158/398

I enter the cor­ri­dor of the precinct and close the door to the john behind me. Every now and then a good idea hits me while sit­ting on the throne, but this time, my mind is a blank slate. I’ve been holed up with Albo for way too many hours, going through the killer’s hun­dred and fifty texts with him like we’re piec­ing together a puz­zle. Some­where in there, a clue has to be hid­den about who he is and why he carves the hearts out of inno­cent triplets.

Albo is on the phone when I get back. This late at night? It seems true that the homi­cide squad never sleeps. Albo hangs up and stares at me with blood­shot eyes. “The con­verted dou­ble-decker bus that tours through the back­wa­ters at night…” I resist the urge to grab another cof­fee and sit down instead. “With chill-out music and philo­soph­i­cal self-dis­cov­ery.” Albo holds up the page in ques­tion. “Made it up. Does­n’t exist in real­ity. I had my guys check.”

Fig­ured as much. It started with the fifty type­writ­ers. The guy who sup­pos­edly bought them one by one, sec­ond­hand, only exists as a for­mer eBay han­dle, “SpellingError68,” with a Berlin address and a Pay­Pal account. He’s since deleted all the accounts, and no one’s lived at that address for years. Every trace has been metic­u­lously erased; all inquiries lead to dead ends, just like in the texts: as far as we know, hotel chef Pas­cal is just as fic­tional as house­boat dweller Norbu or some Cory d’Or, male or female.

“A rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enigma,” I’d mut­tered ear­lier in the evening.

“Hape Ker­kel­ing,” Albo had offered with a nod, but I shook my head. “Win­ston Churchill.” Albo smirked crookedly. “Either way, all clues lead nowhere.” Which holds true for me, too, as a psy­chol­o­gist and—as Albo likes to ele­vate me—a pro­filer. Even the “KISTe,” the Fed­eral Crim­i­nal Police Office’s text analy­sis data­base used to eval­u­ate writ­ten state­ments by criminals—confession let­ters and ran­som notes—couldn’t get us any fur­ther.

We’d last been debat­ing the alien. “I would have so liked to speak with him about God. Then it must be done this way,” it reads in Num­ber 106, right as the alien kills the human astro­naut with whom com­mu­ni­ca­tion seems impos­si­ble. Crazy story. Who comes up with this stuff? A reli­gious fanatic?

I step over to the win­dow. The city is silent. Even if Berlin never truly sleeps, around 3:30 in the morn­ing it at least drifts into a brief half-slum­ber. “Maybe he thinks he’s doing some­thing good,” I say. “There’s a movie where a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor fakes a mur­der that turns out to be a sui­cide at the last second—but as a cri­tique of the death penalty and the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem, he waives his appeal and goes to the exe­cu­tion cham­ber as the alleged killer.”

Albo stretches his back with a groan. “How do you pic­ture that? The triplets were in cahoots with him? He bred clones of him­self, breath­ing husks with­out feel­ing, and he’s cut­ting them open to cri­tique the moral­ity of our sci­en­tists?”

I tug at the win­dow, try­ing to pop it open. It’s been stick­ing for years. “I’ll get it fixed,” Albo says, and for a sec­ond I feel like I’m trapped in a time loop, hav­ing heard him say that at least a dozen times. “I say that every time, don’t I?” Albo asks, clearly hav­ing the exact same thought.

“If he were a psy­chopath, he could­n’t put him­self in other peo­ple’s shoes the way he con­stantly does in these texts.” I real­ize I’m start­ing to lec­ture as I pace back and forth. “Of course, we’re still not sure if the texts even came from the killer. Maybe they came from the triplets. But assum­ing the mur­derer wrote them: then the texts point to the murders—and the mur­ders, in turn, point to the texts.”

“We’ve cov­ered that ground. We’re going in cir­cles, pal,” Albo grunts sul­lenly.

“No,” I say, “because your flash of bril­liance about a cri­tique of the sci­en­tific estab­lish­ment is the best idea we’ve had so far. Mur­ders that aren’t really murders—meant to raise ques­tions and shake peo­ple up.”

“Switch­ing sides now? Plan­ning to cozy up to him, grab a drink, be his buddy?”

I stop pac­ing. Albo’s sore. No wonder—the case is tak­ing a nasty bite out of his pro­fes­sional pride.

“I wouldn’t be sur­prised,” I say, “if it was his own heart. Sym­bol­i­cally, I mean—that he’s tear­ing it out as the author of these texts because some­thing in them cuts him to the quick, because one of these texts is gen­uinely real and he’s reveal­ing him­self to us. Maybe with what­ever he’s stor­ing behind the black door? Or the busi­ness with the shat­ter­ing world­views?”

Albo looks at me, tired but with a slight provoca­tive edge. “In a case like that, you look at the sus­pects and cross off every­thing until only the most likely ones are left, right? So go home, man, and do your home­work.”

Dawn is already break­ing when I step out of the precinct. The crisp air feels good. The Life of David Gale sud­denly pops into my head—with Kevin Spacey. That was the title of the movie about the phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor. But how did Cory d’Or man­age to tear their own heart out three times and plant it at three dif­fer­ent Berlin land­marks? My thoughts haven’t made sense for a long time. High time to get some sleep.