shovel down his wife’s wretched cooking, even more taciturn than usual. It’s long been in his mind to kill her, with a knife or his bare hands, but today’s the day he decides to go through with it. But that’s another story.
And Rosalie? She goes down the street, taking great strides, half unconscious with euphoria, and for a moment I feel I’ve done the right thing, as if mercy were all-important and one story less didn’t matter. And at the same time, I have to confess, I have an absurd hope that someone someday will do the same for me. For like Rosalie I cannot imagine that I’m a nothing if I’m not being observed by somebody else, and that my only half-real existence ends the moment that that somebody takes his eyes off me—just as, now that I’m finally ending this story, Rosalie ceases to exist. From one moment to the next. Without any death throes, pain, or transition. At one instant an oddly dressed girl in a state of happy confusion, now a mere undulation in the air, a sound that echoes for a few seconds, a memory that bleaches itself from my mind and from yours as you read this paragraph.
What remains, if anything, is a street in the rain. Waterpouring off two children’s ponchos, a dog over there lifting its leg, a yawning street sweeper, and three cars with unknown number plates rounding the corner as if they were coming from a long way away: out of another unknown reality or at least out of another story altogether.
The Way Out
I n the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, Ralf Tanner the actor began to feel he didn’t exist.
From one day to the next, phone calls stopped. Friends of long standing vanished from his life, business plans collapsed for no good reason, a woman he’d loved insofar as he was capable maintained that he’d mocked her cruelly on the telephone, and another, Carla, suddenly surfaced in a hotel lobby to make the worst scene he’d ever undergone in his life: three times, she screamed, he’d stood her up three times in a row! People had stopped, grinning, to watch, a few of them had filmed it all on their cell phones, and already in the very moment Carla had hit him with all her strength, he knew that these few seconds would make it onto the Internet and eclipse the fame of his best films. Shortly after that, he was forced to part with his German shepherd because of allergies and in his distress he shut himself up to paint pictures that he didn’t dare let anyone see. He bought albums of photographsof the designs on the wings of Central Asian butterflies, and read books on how to dismantle and reassemble watches without ever daring to try it himself.
He began to google his own name several times a day, corrected the Wikipedia entry on himself that was riddled with errors, checked the casting in his films in various databanks, and laboriously translated the opinions of participants in forums about them from Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Absolute strangers got into fights in these forums about whether he really had split definitively with his brother years before, and he, who had never been able to stand his brother, read their views as if there might be a chance he’d find in them the answer to his existential crisis.
On YouTube he found the tape of a performance by a pretty good Ralf Tanner impersonator: a man who was almost his double—with a voice and gestures to match. On the right of the screen, the system offered a list of links to other videos connected with his name: clips from his films, two interviews, and of course the scene with Carla in the hotel lobby.
That evening he went out with a woman he’d been chasing for a long time. But when he was sitting opposite her, he suddenly found it impossible to pretend that her chatter interested him. The glances from people at the other tables, their whispering, and the direct staring, all disturbed him more than usual. As they got up to leave the restaurant, a man came up to ask for an autograph with the usual
And Rosalie? She goes down the street, taking great strides, half unconscious with euphoria, and for a moment I feel I’ve done the right thing, as if mercy were all-important and one story less didn’t matter. And at the same time, I have to confess, I have an absurd hope that someone someday will do the same for me. For like Rosalie I cannot imagine that I’m a nothing if I’m not being observed by somebody else, and that my only half-real existence ends the moment that that somebody takes his eyes off me—just as, now that I’m finally ending this story, Rosalie ceases to exist. From one moment to the next. Without any death throes, pain, or transition. At one instant an oddly dressed girl in a state of happy confusion, now a mere undulation in the air, a sound that echoes for a few seconds, a memory that bleaches itself from my mind and from yours as you read this paragraph.
What remains, if anything, is a street in the rain. Waterpouring off two children’s ponchos, a dog over there lifting its leg, a yawning street sweeper, and three cars with unknown number plates rounding the corner as if they were coming from a long way away: out of another unknown reality or at least out of another story altogether.
The Way Out
I n the early summer of his thirty-ninth year, Ralf Tanner the actor began to feel he didn’t exist.
From one day to the next, phone calls stopped. Friends of long standing vanished from his life, business plans collapsed for no good reason, a woman he’d loved insofar as he was capable maintained that he’d mocked her cruelly on the telephone, and another, Carla, suddenly surfaced in a hotel lobby to make the worst scene he’d ever undergone in his life: three times, she screamed, he’d stood her up three times in a row! People had stopped, grinning, to watch, a few of them had filmed it all on their cell phones, and already in the very moment Carla had hit him with all her strength, he knew that these few seconds would make it onto the Internet and eclipse the fame of his best films. Shortly after that, he was forced to part with his German shepherd because of allergies and in his distress he shut himself up to paint pictures that he didn’t dare let anyone see. He bought albums of photographsof the designs on the wings of Central Asian butterflies, and read books on how to dismantle and reassemble watches without ever daring to try it himself.
He began to google his own name several times a day, corrected the Wikipedia entry on himself that was riddled with errors, checked the casting in his films in various databanks, and laboriously translated the opinions of participants in forums about them from Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Absolute strangers got into fights in these forums about whether he really had split definitively with his brother years before, and he, who had never been able to stand his brother, read their views as if there might be a chance he’d find in them the answer to his existential crisis.
On YouTube he found the tape of a performance by a pretty good Ralf Tanner impersonator: a man who was almost his double—with a voice and gestures to match. On the right of the screen, the system offered a list of links to other videos connected with his name: clips from his films, two interviews, and of course the scene with Carla in the hotel lobby.
That evening he went out with a woman he’d been chasing for a long time. But when he was sitting opposite her, he suddenly found it impossible to pretend that her chatter interested him. The glances from people at the other tables, their whispering, and the direct staring, all disturbed him more than usual. As they got up to leave the restaurant, a man came up to ask for an autograph with the usual
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