The Tenuous Line of Sanity by Frank Siegrist - HTML preview

« And thus you hear a ‘voice’, not realizing it’s just your own thoughts! » said Joe, completing Jack’s explanation.

Jack nodded and they fell silent for a moment. Then Joe said: « But having out-of-sync internal clocks is a very specific problem. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is not something specific, according to you. You keep telling me that being schizophrenic just means being plain crazy. So the voice in your head can have other causes, right? »

« That’s right, » said Jack, « and indeed there’s another theory - it could be due to incomplete lateralization of the brain… »

« Which means? » asked Joe.

« As you know, » explained Jack, « the brain is made up of two almost symmetrical halves. They can be backups for each other, of course, but they can also make us more efficient by specializing on somewhat separate tasks. This has been studied in chickens, and it seems that the left half of the brain is mostly specialized in dealing with regular things like pecking grains while the right half is more specialized in dealing with sudden threats like a fox appearing out of nowhere. So while the left half of the brain is concentrating on the grains, the right half is keeping a lookout for foxes. »

« In humans, » continued Jack, « we have the same basic pattern - the left brain does all the regular stuff, following rules step by step, thinking things through step by step… »

« I got it! » interrupted Joe. « And the right brain deals with sudden threats where you don’t have any ready-made rules and no time for careful deliberation, so it is widely creative! »

« Yes! » said Jack, « that’s about it! And that’s why there are all those popular theories about people being either dominated by their left or their right brains, in other words being either very rule-abiding and boring or wildly creative and unpredictable. »

« But you don’t believe in this kind of popular science much, do you? » asked Joe. « I just seem to have heard a pejorative tone of voice when you said ‘popular theories’… »

« You’re right, » said Jack. « I rather believe the two brain-halves are complementary. In maths, for example, the right brain has the intuitive, creative ideas, and the left brain organizes them into a step-by-step proof. It’s obvious you need both and you couldn’t be a mathematician without both! »

« Okay… » said Joe.

« In poetry and literature you need both too - the right brain might have ideas, but the left brain is the one putting them into correct grammatical form. »

« So the left brain is the one making sentences? » asked Joe.

« Yes, the left brain is the one mostly responsible for language, » answered Jack.

« And what about the schizophrenics? » asked Joe.

« In some schizophrenics, perhaps the two brain halves didn’t specialize properly, so they both do too much of both. That makes the brain inefficient in a general way, but the language centres being in both halves of the brain instead of mostly on the left poses an even bigger problem… »

« Because both halves can talk, you mean? » asked Joe.

« That’s right, » said Jack.

« You mean they talk to each other in words, and that’s where the incessant voices come from? » asked Joe.

« Simply put, yes, that’s it! » answered Jack.

After a moment of silence, Joe remarked: « But that still doesn’t explain why the brain as a whole doesn’t realize the voices come from within itself! »

« Well, maybe the two halves of the brains of these patients don’t communicate very well… » answered Jack. « This faulty communication between the two brain halves might even be the cause of the lack of lateralization. »

« How so? » asked Joe.

« Simply put, the two brain-halves couldn’t work out who should do what (because of not communicating well), so they both ended up doing too much of everything! »

« But isn’t that a bit anthropomorphic, saying that ‘they couldn’t work out who should do what’? » asked Joe.

« Sure, » said Jack. « But if we can’t even be anthropomorphic about our own brains, then what can we be anthropomorphic about? »

« Hm, yeah… » said Joe, « I hadn’t looked at it like that… »

« If you want a more physiological explanation, it goes somewhat like this, » said Jack. « Each brain-half sends GABA-secreting axons into the other, and whenever it becomes particularly active with something (like learning a language) it inhibits the corresponding activity in the other brain-half. Language, as a rule-based activity, is something the left brain favours, so it is first to take interest in it, so it has a chance to inhibit it in the right brain before the right brain has time to take much interest in it. And that’s how, in the end, language would be a left-brain thing… - in neurotypical people, that is.»

« Okay, » said Joe, « and in some schizophrenics it doesn’t work out like that because the two brain-halves don’t communicate well. But then how can the two brain-halves send voices to each other? When they don’t communicate well, I mean? »

« Well, » said Jack, « it seems they can send words and even whole sentences to each other, but without all the context. So each brain-half receives words from the other, but without enough information about where those words came from, it concludes they must come from outside the brain altogether… »

« And that makes it a hallucination! » said Joe, completing Jack’s explanation.

« Exactly… » said Jack.

« So schizophrenia is really a problem in how the brain is wired up! » said Joe.

« Yes, » said Jack. « And that’s why it’s so hard to treat! »

 

Later, Joe - still fascinated by the idea that chemicals could cause hallucinations - asked: « What about magic mushroom and LSD and such stuff? Do they act on the dopamine pathways like Ritalin and cocaine? »

Jack looked a bit uncomfortable and finally admitted : « No, not primarily in any case… They act on the serotonin pathways, rather… »

« Inhibiting them or stimulating them? » asked Joe.

« Stimulating them, » answered Jack, and as he had feared, Joe burst out:

« Really Jack, I’m going crazy with you! Whenever I feel I’ve understood something, it turns out it still isn’t like that! At first you told me it was all simple, that there was just serotonin and dopamine you could act on, and that serotonin is the ‘sit-on-your-bum-and-be-bloody-satisfied’ neurotransmitter while dopamine is the ‘move-your-ass-and-be-bloody-motivated’ neurotransmitter. Okay, I sort of accepted that being bloody motivated means being bloody alert and that being over-alert will end up making you see and hear things that aren’t really there, which constitutes a hallucination. But now you’re telling me that classical hallucinogens don’t even act on the dopamine circuits, but rather on the serotonin circuits! How the hell does an excess of ‘sit-on-your-bum’ neurotransmitter cause hallucinations? And what do you make of the nice, clear-cut difference between serotonin and dopamine if BOTH cause hallucinations? Earlier you even sort of admitted that serotonin and dopamine were kind of opposites, and now it turns out they can BOTH cause hallucinations! Really, I’m lost! »

« The short answer is they’re not the same kind of hallucinations, » said Jack. Then he settled down for a more lengthy explanation: « An excess of dopamine makes you frantic, manic, driven. Driven to act, driven to see meaning even where there isn’t any. A bit more dopamine than usual helps you concentrate, and yet a bit more makes you feel confident and strong, then yet a bit more makes you frantic. And when there’s really too much of it, you get manic and start to hallucinate. But it’s not just hallucinations - it’s also delusions. »

« What is a delusion exactly? » asked Joe.

« A delusion, » said Jack, « is a false belief. It’s not something you directly hear or see like a hallucination. It’s something you believe. Maybe your delusions come from biased perceptions, so they’re similar to hallucinations in the sense that they may depend on faulty perception. But perception can be subtly biased without it being an outright hallucination, so the two are still distinct, you see? »

« Sort of… » grumbled Joe.

« Anyway, » continued Jack, « with excess serotonin you don’t normally get delusions. You don’t even get deluded that your hallucinations are real perceptions - you KNOW they’re just hallucinations! So you can sit back and enjoy them. And you don’t feel compelled to act. On the contrary, while dopamine is all about strengthening the ego, feeling like the King of the Universe and conquering everybody and everything, excess serotonin is quite different. It’s all about feeling connected to everybody and everything, feeling the boundaries between you and the rest of the world melting away… »

« Why, that sounds all mystical! » exclaimed Joe.

« Exactly, » said Jack. « Psychedelic hallucinations are not at all like voices in the head dictating that you go kill your whole family or anything like that. Even though they can sometimes be frightening (which drug-users call a ‘bad trip’) they are usually very peaceful, colourful and enjoyable. Native Americans use them in their religious ceremonies to get in touch with the spiritual world and such. »

« Letting the boundaries between yourself and the rest of the world melt away, isn’t that what buddhist monks strive to do by meditating? They learn bloody difficult meditating techniques to reach a goal that could be reached much more easily by taking a little magic mushroom! »

« Exactly! » said Jack. « And not just buddhist monks. Christian monks spending hours in prayer, or dervishes turning round and round, they all seek the same! »

« Should they all just take magic mushroom instead? » asked Joe.

« Sure, that would be much simpler! » said Jack.

« And you’re sure they would get the same depth of experience from it? » asked Joe, but then he remembered that Jack was an inveterate atheist who thought any religious experience, of whatever kind, was pure bullshit anyway.

Indeed, Jack just laughed.

« So you think the whole thing is just bullshit? » asked Joe.

« What exactly? » asked Jack. « Letting go of the ego and merging with the rest of the Universe, or magic mushrooms? »

« Both, » said Joe.

« Okay, well, magic mushroom - or rather the ingredient in it called ‘psilocybin’ - shows promise as an antidepressant (which isn’t surprising since it stimulates the serotonin pathways). And it can also treat obsessive compulsive disorder. Maybe this ‘letting go’ isn’t such a bad idea, after all. We live in a society obsessed with ego, making more money than the Joneses and all that, and letting that go a bit can only be beneficial… »

 

Some other day Jack and Joe were once again enjoying a cold beer on the balcony of Jack's house, overlooking the lake and the mountains in the distance. It was a pleasant summer evening, the mountains were glowing softly in the gentle evening light, the surface of the lake a deep dark-blue.
“When did you become like that?” asked Joe.
“Like what?” Jack asked back.
“So cynical,” answered Joe.
“You find me cynical?” asked Jack.
“Well, you don't believe in your profession much, do you?” asked Joe.
“I've still helped some people,” said Jack.
“But did you help them thanks to all your training as a psychiatrist?” asked Joe.
“No,” said Jack.
“How did you help them, then?” asked Joe.
“Just as a human being, I guess,” answered Jack.
“So you don't believe in your profession so much, as I said,” said Joe.
“Okay, you're right,” said Jack, “I don't. The training I got was just for the diploma on the wall. Whenever I really helped someone, I guess I was just improvising.”
“So you're a cynic, aren't you?” asked Joe again.
“About some things I guess I am,” answered Jack.
“But what do you really believe in?” asked Joe.
“What do you mean?” asked Jack.
“Well,” said Joe, “you don't believe in your profession, so what DO you believe in?”
“I guess I believe in improvising,” answered Jack.
“And do you have any kind of method for that, or is there any kind of personal philosophy behind it?”
“If I did and if there was, it wouldn't be improvising, would it?” asked Jack rhetorically.
“So,” Joe went on insisting, “if you only believe in improvising, that actually means you don't believe in anything at all, doesn't it? No kind of method, no kind of philosophy, no kind of anything…”
“Well,” said Jack, “there was a time when I believed there was order in the world. But then I grew up!”
“What kind of order?” asked Joe.
“Fairness, for a start,” said Jack.
“You're the one saying the world isn't fair?” asked Joe. “But look at you! Look at all you've got! A nice family, a nice house and a Mercedes Benz, and you earned it all yourself through hard work! Isn't that fair? What more do you want? I should be the one going on about life being unfair, since I'm the one who dropped out of university and somehow didn't find my way!”
“Oh, you know, it's not all just about you or me...” said Jack, and a kind of pained look came over his face, together with a distasteful twist of the mouth, as if he were remembering something he was ashamed of.
Joe looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to elaborate.
Eventually, Jack did: “You remember that little boy in the green – or was it yellow? - corner house? The one everybody called <<hopper>> or something like that?”
Joe looked a bit doubtful, because he didn't understand how this “hopper” would have anything to do with anything: “You mean the one with the dimpled face who had Down's syndrome or something?”
“Yes, exactly, that's the one I mean,” said Jack. “I'm glad you remember him!”
“I didn't know you had anything to do with him,” said Joe. “We never played with him or anything. Anyway, he was a few years younger than us.”
“No, he wasn't,” said Jack, “actually he was a few years older than us.”
“Whatever,” said Joe, “my point is: he wasn't in our age-group and we had nothing to do with him, did we? Did you?”
“Not really, no,” said Jack, “but... Well, I once picked on him..., and I stole his lunchbox or something. There were little stickers of Snoopy on it. Somebody had decorated it for him...”
“What on Earth are you getting at?” asked Joe. He barely remembered this so-called “hopper”, and his brother Jack was going on about the stickers on his lunchbox!
“Okay, never mind about that,” said Jack. “The point is, I felt bad about it afterwards, that's all!”
“Well,” said Joe, “I felt bad about a lot of things in my life too, but I still have no idea what you're getting at!”
“Fairness,” said Jack, “fairness is what I'm getting at!”
Joe just looked at him, clueless.
“This guy was a mongo!” said Jack emphatically.
Joe looked at him, surprised and faintly amused: “Coming from a doctor like you, this is strangely unscientific language! Yes, he had Down syndrome, I remember that. So what's the point you're trying to make?”
“He was a mongo,” repeated Jack with conviction, “and I wasn't, so he was at my mercy. How's that for fair?”
“And you took his lunchbox,” said Joe, “and then?”
“I destroyed it,” said Jack, “I destroyed it with all the little Snoopy-stickers and everything. That's what I'm saying – it isn't fair!”
Joe just looked at him questioningly, prompting him to go on.
“I guess I have to explain better,” said Jack.
“Indeed,” said Joe, “because for the time being I don't at all get it what you're driving at!”
“Remember how our mother used to console us about not being so good at sports?” asked Jack.
“Sure,” said Joe, “she told us we were good at drawing and other artistic stuff, which is worth something too.”
“Exactly!” said Jack, bringing down his hand in the shape of a fist onto his knee, “that's EXACTLY what she told us!”
Then he settled back in his chair as if he were a tutor getting ready to explain something a bit more long-winded:
“I guess we all get consoled that way as kids, when someone else is better at something than we are. And from there comes the belief that everybody has strengths and weaknesses, but that they all average out so that in the end we're all worth the same...”
After an artistic little pause, Jack added emphatically: “Which is of course patently untrue! Let's just take this <<hopper>> as an example: if you're born with Down syndrome, you don't just look stupid, you really are stupid. Furthermore you have stunted growth, low muscle tone and deformed joints, so you're weak as well. But that's not all - your life-expectancy is low too, barely sixty years,” Jack looked at Joe as if this were his fault, “and you may have heart-problems and hearing-problems, and your risks of developing Alzheimer and other such stuff as you grow older are increased too. So, how's that for fair?”
Since Joe didn't say anything, Jack continued: “Oh, and I almost forgot - with Down syndrome you are very likely to be sterile as well! Which is perhaps a good thing, considering what a dummy you are if you’re a mongo!”
Joe still didn't say anything. He had had no idea that his brother cared so much about that mongo-neighbour they had had so long ago...
“You see, this got me thinking,” Jack continued, “if the world is so fucking unfair, why does the concept of <<fairness>> exist at all? Where does it come from?”
Joe didn't know what to say. Anyway, he didn't think it was necessary to say anything at this point. Jack was evidently going to tell him about his own thoughts on this matter. It was probably all an answer to the question about what Jack believed in. That was how the discussion had started, after all.
And really, Jack was answering his own question: “Well, I guess human societies, as well as wolf-packs and cow-herds and other such societies, are sort of fair, for the simple reason that the fairer ones out-compete the unfairer ones. It's kind of a Darwinian selection among societies - it's called <<group selection>>. So that's where fairness comes from, probably.”
Okay, so this was the scientific-minded doctor speaking once again.
“But what does this fairness in human societies mean in practice?” Since Joe knew his brother had embarked on a monologue, he didn't even try to find any answer, but just waited for Jack to provide it himself, which he did: “It means that we put the bad guys in prison and give Nobel prizes to the good guys, you see? That's what we call fair. And doing the opposite - putting the good guys in prison and giving Nobel prizes to the bad guys - would be considered unfair.”
Jack's concept of fairness, obviously...
“But if you think about it more deeply, then what kind of fairness is that? After all, how did the bad guys become bad in the first place?”
Good question, but Jack would once again provide the answer himself, which indeed he did: “The bad guys became bad because of bad genes or bad education, didn't they? It's not at all their fault that they became bad, is it? Is it fair to just put them in prison?”
Jack looked at Joe as if he were challenging him. Joe only politely raised his eyebrows, knowing that more was to come.
“And what about the good guys?” asked Jack, “Didn't they just have the good genes and a good education? What did they really do to deserve all that? Is it fair to give them Nobel prizes for that? A truly fair society would give Nobel prizes to everybody!”
A truly fair society would give Nobel prizes to everybody! That was really quite a surprising statement coming from Joe's hard-working brother!
Jack didn't wait for any reaction from Joe before elaborating: “If everybody got Nobel prizes, I guess the good guys would get a bit sick of sharing their Nobel prizes with dummies, so they would set up a kind of secret society for good guys. And in this secret society, bad guys would be rejected, because that would be the whole point of that secret society...”
Joe was beginning to see what Jack was driving at. He already started taking in air, possibly to say something, but Jack ploughed on without giving him time to open his mouth:
“In other words, sooner or later we would be back where we started, because in actual fact there is no true, deep fairness. The only fairness there can be is that good guys get Nobel prizes while bad guys get put into prison. If you start wondering why good guys are good and why bad guys are bad, then you won't really get anywhere, and in any case that's where fairness ends. That's the sad truth about this matter!”
For a while there was silence.
Eventually Joe cautiously broke the silence: “So that's why you don't believe in true, deep fairness anymore? Is that what you've just explained to me right now?”
“Yes,” said Jack, nodding faintly, “I guess that's what all that was about, yeah...”
But Joe sensed there was yet more to come. And really, after a few moments, Jack started talking again. Joe had rarely seen his brother so talkative.
“Do you remember the Vallorbe Grotto? We went to see it several times with our parents when we were kids...”
“Sure,” said Joe. “I even went to see it on my own since then. I took some friends there.”
“Yeah,” said Jack, “women!”
“Hm...” said Joe.
“The grotto was just an excuse for you to take them on a ride in your sporty car, knocking them about a bit in the sharp curves in the Jura, so that they would be all dizzy and ready for bed afterwards!”
“Is there actually any medical basis for this?” asked Joe seriously.
“Any medical basis for what?” asked Jack.
“For wanting sex when you've been knocked about?”
“I don't know, but it's a fact, isn't it?” asked Jack.
“Sure,” said Joe, “knock them about so you can knock them up! So what about the grotto?”
Jack seemed to give up the other topic with reluctance. He really was jealous of Joe's affairs! Ah, if only those affairs were as exciting as Jack seemed to think! Joe's reluctance to talk about them just made Jack ever more curious.
Okay, it was true, Joe was having his share of affairs nowadays, but sex was just one aspect of them. The rest was lots and lots of emotional energy being sucked up in more or less bitter breakups. Joe had a feeling Jack wouldn't have been interested in those, even if Joe had been willing to tell him about them... Jack just saw the Casanova in Joe!
“So,” said Jack, “the drip-stone caves... Draperies of calcite hanging down from boulders so that they look like giant jelly-fish, turned to stone as time slowed down and finally stopped… Stalactites and stalagmites meeting in midair, creating flute-like pillars, whole organs of them...”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Joe, “I know all that, I've seen them countless times too, remember?”
“The beauty of it!” exclaimed Jack in awe, and for a moment Joe couldn't tell whether he was serious or pulling his leg.
“You see,” Jack went on, whispering with a far-off sounding voice, “they are so pointlessly beautiful!”
Once again, Joe had no idea what Jack was getting at.
Jack went on: “There must be fucking beautiful drip-stone caves on other planets too, where no living beings ever set their feet to admire them, and where in all likelihood none ever will... The hard fact of the matter is that they certainly weren't put there for us. They rather just appeared there out of their own volition, sort of.”
“And this worries you?” asked Joe, incredulous. “Why do you worry about drip-stone caves being pointlessly beautiful?” Then he added, almost sneering: “Haven't they got a right to be beautiful for whatever reason suits them?”
“Ah yes,” said Jack, as if something had just occurred to him, “I hadn't really looked at it that way, but you're damn right! Damn right, really!”
“I have no idea what you're talking about,” said Joe truthfully.
“Well,” said Jack, “let me explain: you see, all you need in order to get such beautiful, interesting structures as drip-stone caves is an energy-density gradient, actually. In our case, it's the sun continuously pumping energy onto our planet. This energy makes the water evaporate which then eventually falls back down as rain. The rain-water infiltrates the cracks in the rocks, washes out chambers under the rocks... Some of these chambers just collapse again, of course, so those ones aren't with us anymore. But others perhaps get stabilized through the stalactites and stalagmites forming pillars through them (just inventing here - I'm not saying that's really how it is!), so these chambers can get much bigger. In the end these chambers form regular underground networks with rivers in them, and they work their way through the rock into a valley which they fill up with water, creating a lake. This lake evaporates again, creating more local clouds than there were beforehand, making rainfall more likely and therefore making new caves more likely to form too...”
Joe didn't say anything, but his brother seemed to be getting excited all by himself: “And you see, those caves that somehow promote their own formation, well, there will be more of them! And if some of those acquire yet more tricks for making more of themselves, well, they will make even more of themselves!”
So what, thought Joe, but he didn't say it.
“I hope you get it what I'm driving at here,” continued Jack, “some of these caves will get so good at promoting their own formation that they will literally take over the planet! At some point they will have acquired so many tricks for promoting their own formation that you can call them <<conscious>>. And then of course they will build rockets to fly to the moon and take over the moon as well! They will find a way to make it rain on the moon as well, so that they can spread out there as well. Or maybe, by the time they reach the moon, they will have found some way to exist and spread which doesn't even involve rain anymore, who knows?”
Jack was beginning to sound a bit crazy here. But he just kept on talking without waiting for any reaction from Joe: “You see, that's how it works! All you need in order to get such beautiful and interesting structures as drip-stone caves is an energy-density gradient.”
“I'm not sure I'm following you there,” said Joe, rather doubtfully.
“Let me explain about this energy-density gradient,” said Jack enthusiastically. “You see, the sun flings its high-energy ultraviolet rays at our planet, the rays bounce off the rocks and fly back into space, but not as ultraviolet rays anymore, but rather as lower-frequency infrared rays. The energy is the same, of course, because energy is conserved. But the energy density is not the same. Ultraviolet rays are very energy-dense, but the energy is more spread out in the infrared rays. When lots of energy is crowded together in one spot, like in the sun, its natural tendency is to spread out. So after a while, instead of having lots of energy here and none there, you will have the same amount of energy everywhere (wow, that's true, deep fairness, actually, so maybe the universe really is going to be fair in the very end!). Right now the universe is full of high-density energy spots like our sun. But if you wait long enough, all those high-energy spots will have diffused their energy, and the whole universe will just be a soup of low-energy photons flying around aimlessly, spreading out to all sides evenly... The universe will have become the most boring place you can imagine, ...with no more drip-stone caves anymore, of course! Until it collapses under its own gravity, maybe, which creates a new Big Bang, and the whole process starts all over again!”
Jack took a deep breath and went on: “It's important that you really get this: whenever there's lots of energy crowded together in one spot, it's as if this energy created a pressure against itself - it WANTS to spread out, like the air WANTING to come out of a balloon when you pop it. As I said, high-energy photons hitting a rocky planet and getting reflected back to space as lower-energy photons, that's one way in which energy can lose its density and <<spread out>>, but it's not the most efficient way. Infrared-light is still quite energy-dense, so maybe we could do better than that. If the photons hitting the earth make water evaporate, which then falls back down as rain, creating drip-stone caves, the waste heat from this whole process that will finally be reflected back to space will have much lower energy-density than the infrared-rays that would have gotten reflected directly off the rocks! So you see, creating drip-stone caves is a more efficient way to spread out the energy.”
Another deep breath, and Jack went straight on: “But what if the light from the sun also makes trees grow, helping them pump up water from the soil and letting it evaporate from their leaves? The waste-heat from that process is even less energy-dense, because the photons from the sun really get bounced around all over the place (making the trees grow and the water evaporate and all that) before being reflected back to space as infra-infra-infrared rays, you see? But you can waste away the energy-density even more efficiently than that, you know, by having animals eating the trees and then dissipating all that energy even more by walking around, fighting over females, and so on...”
For a moment, Jack looked all dreamy, but then he drew breath and seemed to decide a kind of summary was in order: “You see, when there's lots of energy in one spot, it WANTS to spread out. And it will take any shortcut it can to spread out as quickly as possible, losing its density as fast as possible. Water creating drip-stone caves is one such shortcut. Trees growing on the surface of the earth is another. And animals eating those trees is a further one. And then there's yet other animals eating the first animals... Do you see what I mean? Drip-stone caves are a shortcut for the energy of the universe to lose its density faster. And so are we! The energy-density gradient is what creates such amazing structures as drip-stone caves, trees and us! So much for beauty!”
Joe doubtfully scratched his head, then he said: “Let me get this right: you think the ultimate purpose of life, and thus of ourselves, is to dissipate energy more quickly. Is that it?”
“Yes, YES,” said Jack happily, “that's exactly what I was trying to say!”
“Well, that is really a somewhat depressing idea,” admitted Joe.

Me the ghost, I thought so too, and I decided to take a closer look at Jack's life. Destroying a Snoopy-lunchbox and visiting a drip-stone cave seemed to have had the most amazing effects on him. I decided to check that out more closely, so I ran backwards in time, trying to find him again in his adolescence.
In the process I found a rat, and since I got interested, I stayed with that rat for a while:
As it happened, this rat's name was Jack, just like the other Jack’s, the human one.

Jack was a cute little rodent with soft fur, long, yellow teeth and a long, naked tail. When he sat up on his haunches, he could use his graceful little front paws like little hands, and this anthropomorphic trait would have made him into an ideal pet if his tail hadn't been so disgustingly phallic in its nakedness. Of course the tail wasn't phallic to Jack – it was just a balance-keeping organ. Its nakedness also made it a precious sensory organ. The feelings in his tail could be a matter of life or death for Jack.
Jack had a pointed snout with many, long whiskers that grazed the surroundings when Jack moved around and thus functioned as feelers. He had two small, glistening, black button-eyes that weren't all that deeply embedded in the skull. Rather, it seemed they were ready to pop out! He also had two ears shaped like soup-bowls, and they were quite mobile for listening in every direction. A shiny little nose formed the end of his pointed snout.
Jack was living with many others of his kind in a big enclosure at a research centre of the university of Lausanne. He was living quite contentedly in this limited world and didn't spend much time wondering how life would be outside of the enclosure. He just knew that food came from there, somehow. It was brought regularly by some big, two-legged creatures. Jack knew the sounds made by these creatures very well, because he looked forward to his food every day!
Jack lived among many of his own kind, and he loved them all. He still counted as a pup in the pack, and for this reason he was allowed to crawl under the bellies of the others, even though they didn't appreciate it all that much anymore, now that he was already quite big. They almost got lifted off the ground when he insisted on crawling under them! Besides, he often did it when they were eating, since it gave him a chance to pinch a bit of food that normally wouldn't have been his...
The elder animals, knowing this, found it a bit irksome when Jack came over to them to crawl under them, but he was always so insistent that they finally just couldn't help themselves from protectively covering the seemingly so helpless pup. And that's how little Jack managed to be so well-fed, even when the two-legged creatures let the food get scarce. In the end, little Jack had even become quite a stately young rat!
There were two picturesque hills made of rocks and stones in the enclosure. In one of them there were several clefts, holes and little caves, and that's where the pack of rats lived. The other hill was more compact and thus less popular. There was just one cleft in it between two rocks, and this cleft led into a small cave without branching out further. This cave was uninhabited. Only Jack sometimes visited it, when he himself had grown tired of crawling under all his superiors.
After mealtimes, Jack sometimes sat all alone on the top of this second hill. With his tummy full he would sit there, self-satisfied and slumbering in the sunshine. Sometimes he watched his fellow-rats as they clambered around on the other hill and cleaned out their nests. All the animals except Jack seemed to be continuously busy, carrying their bedding around. Jack just sat there, on the second hilltop which he had all to himself, watched his fellows dreamily and from time to time blinked an eye.
And that's how the days effortlessly slipped by. Jack was always satiated and always contented, and nothing in sight was ever going to change that.
Until one day something happened that still did.
As Jack was hopping to the feeding ground, where the whole pack was already assembled and gibbering loudly, he felt something strange in the air. He was planning, as usual, not to fight for his position but rather to crawl under the others in his infantile way till he reached the best bits of food, so that they would grumpily let him be rather than chase him away. But this time it somehow didn't work that way. There seemed to be a nervousness stirring in the air. He didn't let the strange atmosphere lead him astray, but insistently crawled under one rat after the other, trusting that no adult would dare to bite an innocent child, however oversized! But today he was wrong – his fellow rats' attention was obviously elsewhere and they were in no mood to tolerate an oversize juvenile. As Jack shoved his way under another adult, he was suddenly bitten in the shoulder. It was more of a pinch than a real bite, but under normal circumstances it would never have happened. Apparently all the rats felt suspicious of each other today, and they would bite first and ask questions afterwards!
And then Jack caught a whiff of it too – the smell of an intruder!
This explained everything! An intruder, an alien, a spy was among them! It had to be identified immediately! It had to be identified, marked and killed as fast as possible!
Here and there some rats were already fighting among each other, but the fights were of short duration, because the opponents soon realized they actually belonged to the same pack.
Nobody could tell yet where the intruder was hiding... But all of a sudden the pack seemed to have made up its mind and the villain was confirmed.
The villain – who up till now seemed to have had no idea that he was the villain – ran off squeaking shrilly, because he knew what was in store for him now. He ran across the enclosure, the pack following closely.
Jack climbed up on his hilltop so as not to be overrun. The hunted animal had reached the edge of the enclosure and already the pack was closing in from all sides. It turned around to face them, literally like a cornered rat. It stood up on its hind-paws, as if it wanted to gaze into the distance above the pressing throng one last time, and its eyes met Jack's (although this might be an anthropomorphic interpretation, since rats don't exchange glances as humans do). Jack saw its white chest presented like an offering to the crowd. One can imagine its last imploring glance at the statuesque Jack sitting motionless on his hilltop while the rest of the pack was getting ready to pounce and kill, but rats are probably not capable of such imploring glances. Anyway, in the next moment its white throat was torn open and the blood started gushing out. The victim staggered above the tide of its attackers, bravely keeping its balance for as long as it could before it fell over backwards against the fence and drowned in the mass of angry rats.
As its last breath silently exited its lungs, it was already hit by a jet of foul-smelling urine – it was marked as waste now. The pack turned away from it and didn't spare it a single glance anymore. Peace came over the pack once again.
The human caretakers found it the next day lying in a puddle of its own dried blood. The eyes were glassy, the snout was wide open, showing the long, yellow teeth.
The other rats were running around, minding their own little businesses, as usual.
But Jack's behaviour changed from that day on. He didn't try to crawl under the others anymore. Now he fought for his place at the food pile like every other rat. You could say he had lost his innocence.
But otherwise his life soon got back to its usual rhythm. And since he was a big fellow now, there was no risk that he would starve because of not being able to conquer and defend his share of the food.
And yet this experience wasn't going to be the only one to shake up Jack's modest little life – there was still a great adventure in store for him!
Jack was sitting on his hilltop, cleaning his snout with his little hand-like front-paws, when he heard the clicking of the lock of the gate in the fence. One of these tall, vertical, two-legged beings that otherwise always brought the food came stalking into the enclosure. Jack wasn't afraid of humans, since they only ever brought food and cleared away the droppings, but nevertheless he became alert to this one whose behaviour seemed uncharacteristic. But he didn’t run away just yet. After all, even if it wasn't mealtime, Jack still wasn't going to miss a meal, however out-of-schedule it might be!
But this human wasn't spreading any corn or anything. He closed the gate behind him and came stalking through the enclosure right up to Jack. He didn't pay the other rats running among his huge feet any mind at all. Jack's hill was level with his midriff, so he could reach out to Jack without bending down. And that's what he did – he reached out to Jack with one of his hands. Jack was a bit alarmed at first, but the hand was holding a gift – a nice and smelly piece of cheese!
Jack's little nose began twitching uncontrollably. The human held the cheese right in front of Jack's snout so that he could take a bite. A finger from the other hand ran caressingly over Jack's back, but Jack wasn't paying attention to it, since he much rather drove his teeth deeper into the cheese. Jack wanted to grab the whole piece of cheese and make off with it, but for some reason the human wasn't letting go of it. Jack became annoyed. He stretched his neck to get a firmer grasp of that piece of cheese, but that was exactly what the human had been waiting for – his index and thumb clasped Jack's neck while his other fingers shoved themselves under his belly, and in the next moment Jack was lifted clear off his feet and carried away.
He was carried through the enclosure to the gate, and before he knew it, he had passed through the gate, still held fast in the firm grip of the human. After that, Jack soon lost every sense of orientation he had – the smells were strange, the light was strange, even the sounds were strange!
After a short while Jack was shoved into a little cage in a large white room. A small heap of straw, a bowl and a water dispenser were waiting for him in the cage.
Jack ran to the straw and hid himself in it. Only after an hour or so did he stretch his nose out of the straw and then let himself be guided to the food-bowl by the smell. After a good, long meal he crawled back into the straw and slept till the next day.
At some point in the morning, the straw was lifted off him, and before he even had time to be surprised, he was back in the grip of a human being. He was carried to a cold lab-table and let loose on it. He ran back and forth excitedly, but whichever direction he ran in, he always came to the edge of the table, and even though he couldn't see well into the distance, he could tell he was high up and didn't dare to jump.
Then he was grasped firmly again, and the next thing he knew he was shaved all over and then daubed with some kind of ointment that was burning on his naked, freshly shaved skin. He twisted and turned in the firm grip like a fish dangling on a fishing-rod. He tried to scratch his captor with his hind-legs, but whenever his claws touched his own sore belly it hurt so much that he rather gave up on that.
In the end he was put back into his cage which in the meantime had been cleaned so well that Jack didn't even recognize it and believed he had been relocated to a new place once again. He wanted to hide in the fresh heap of straw that had been spread out for him, but he couldn't because the rough straw was too painful on his irritated skin. He felt as if the whole surface of his body was one single huge wound. He tried to lick himself, but the ointment had a bitter taste. He tried to sleep, but the surface of his skin seemed to be on fire while at the same time he felt cold inside, and so he didn't know how to position himself in a way that would be halfway bearable.
He twisted and turned and yammered like he had never heard himself yammer before...
He didn't at all touch his food because he didn't feel any hunger. In the evening he finally slipped into a kind of sleep-like state, and the next morning he wasn't even aware of being lifted out of his cage. He was treated the same way as the previous day with more of the burning ointment. But this time it actually didn't burn quite so much anymore. He didn't feel that his skin was on fire anymore, nor did he feel cold inside. When he tried to lick himself, his skin felt like a hard crust. After being put back in his cage, he started eating again and he also drank a lot from the water-dispenser whose workings he had discovered by now.
After a few days of daily treatment with the ointment, Jack wasn't quite as stressed by it anymore. He let it happen without fighting it. When the treatment was eventually interrupted, the thick crust pealed away and healthy pink skin reappeared. And since no more ointment was put on him, even his fur started to grow again, sprouting everywhere like fresh young grass. Soon Jack looked quite the same as he had looked on the day when he had been captured from his hilltop in the big enclosure where he had lived previously. And that's where he was eventually brought back to.
Jack realized straight away that he was back home! He immediately went over to one of his smaller fellow-rats to show him that he was back. He wanted to allow the smaller rat to crawl under him and feel safe under this bigger and stronger member of his clan. But the smaller fellow-rat just flinched when he caught Jack's smell. Jack was so surprised that he actually stepped back from the smaller rat at first. The smaller rat made use of the opportunity to run off, squeaking loudly.
Jack felt this reaction was quite misplaced and that the smaller rat deserved a lesson, so he chased after him. The smaller rat ran desperately into the midst of a grouping of bigger rats, and they all scattered when Jack ran towards them. Jack felt a kind of righteous anger rise up in him – what kind of welcoming behaviour was this supposed to be?
Jack wasn't aware that he had lost the characteristic smell of the pack while he was in the lab and that his fellow-rats were thus perceiving him as an intruder. He himself hadn't forgotten the pack-smell at all and he recognized his former mates clearly!
Jack couldn't tell anymore which of the scattering rats was the one he had originally chased, but it didn't matter anymore. He wanted to catch one of them, it didn't matter which one, grasp it by the tail and teach it manners!
At last he came within reach of one of the fatter ones who had fled at first like the others but was now turning around. Since this was a big fellow, Jack felt it would be proper to crawl under him. He lowered his head in a most friendly way and looked up at the dominant individual with child-like innocence. But the big fellow didn't seem to see this – all he felt was the alien smell emanating from Jack. His fur bristled, his whiskers stretched out and his dark eyes seemed to swell to the point of almost popping out of his skull. He lifted his head, opened his mouth and emitted a piercing, Satanic cry. Jack saw the long, barb-like yellowed teeth, and his blood seemed to freeze in his arteries. Now it was his turn to flee.
Like a suddenly loosened spring he woke up from his stupor and sprang up and away!
Jack was afraid the whole pack was chasing after him already. Since it was hopeless to escape on the ground, he climbed up on “his” hill. The big fellow was behind him, but Jack knew this hill better than him. He knew every ledge and every rock spur, jumped from one to the other with ease and quickly distanced himself from his pursuer. He reached the top of the hill and sat up on his haunches, waiting for the wheezing snout of his pursuer to appear beneath him. The fat guy wanted to jump up and bite into Jack's exposed white belly and rip his guts out. But Jack was waiting for him. From his elevated position, he just let himself drop onto the fat guy as the fat guy's snout shot upwards, and sitting on the fat guy's face, he quickly stabbed his teeth into the nape of the fat guy's neck. The fat guy soon stopped struggling, Jack jumped off him and let his body tumble down the hill. It came to rest at the foot of the hill where the other pack-members ran around excitedly. Jack couldn't really understand the whole thing. He didn't understand why his own pack had turned against him. But he wasn't just going to submit to his fate. He had seen what had happened to the other rat who had been killed by the whole pack.
So for the time being he just remained sitting on the top of his hill, blinking in the sunlight...
When mealtime came, Jack patiently stayed on top of his hill. He knew that the hungry pack would rush to the food and fill their bellies, but more likely than not some remains would still be lying around afterwards. Because of the strange behaviour of the pack towards him of late, Jack decided he would wait for the end of the rush-hour and then go and collect those remains when they had left.
Jack waited a long time, but one pack-member was still at the feeding ground. It was a petite female who was patiently picking out her favourite grains from the scattered food. She was alone. All the others had long eaten their fill and left again.
Jack climbed down on the rear-side of his hill so that she wouldn't see him and slipped unnoticed towards the feeding ground. The little female was so absorbed in her task that she didn't notice Jack's approach. She was sniffing something on the ground and couldn't smell the enemy. Jack ripped into her from the side, jumped on her, laid one paw on her neck, the other on her snout and buried both his bucket teeth deep into the nape of her neck. Then he backed away from her and watched what happened next.
The little female turned towards him, made a soft but strange sound and looked at him with a kind of stupid intensity. She took a few more staggering steps then reeled over, her legs waving in the air. Soon only one of the back-paws was still moving, making circles in the air, until it too stopped with a sudden jerk. The little female was dead. Jack hungrily started eating the food-remains still lying around.
Jack spent the night in the small cave in “his” hill. When he carefully held out his snout the next morning, he saw and smelled a lonely wanderer at the foot of his hill. It was an elderly male who liked to take a stroll through the entire enclosure every morning. He was ambling along, making a little detour to inspect various objects along his way, but he was doing so in a purely playful way, because he was visibly satiated and self-satisfied.
Just as he let go of a rounded pebble that he had idly been rolling back and forth with his front-paws, he suddenly found himself nose to nose with Jack who had climbed down from his hill in the meantime. First he thought Jack was one of the pack, but soon he could smell something vaguely alien emanating from him. Jack was standing quite still, his eyes motionless, his fur ever so slightly puffed up, the long vibrissae of his moustache jittering ever so slightly. His long tail was lying on the ground behind him, quite motionless, totally relaxed.
Now Jack opened his mouth as though he had to yawn. His dark little tongue appeared and flicked across his flews, back and forth, back and forth...
The stroller rat found this a bit strange. It didn't seem like an adequate behaviour upon meeting one of your mates. Besides, this rat had an alien smell. So the stroller rat rose up on his hind-paws and towered over Jack. Jack didn't take up the challenge but rather remained on all fours. But then he suddenly twisted his head to the side and jumped up at the stroller rat from below. He caught the throat of the stroller rat between his teeth and tore out his windpipe.
Then Jack jumped to the side and watched his third victim as it tottered around snapping for air till it finally fell over and died. The last breath of air in his lungs came out through the wound blowing little bubbles of surfactant.
Jack climbed back into his hollow in his hill to sleep some more.
When Jack climbed out of his hollow again several hours later, it was almost feeding time. He climbed to the top of his hill and looked down onto the feeding ground from there. It didn't take long, and the keeper came in and spread corn and seeds on the ground. The rats came running from all over the place, but Jack patiently waited on top of his hill.
When most of the rats had eaten their fill and left and only two of them were still sitting there, chewing something, Jack stealthily climbed down from his hill and slipped towards the feeding-ground along the fence of the enclosure.
The two mates were peacefully sitting next to each other cracking tough nuts, eating the contents themselves or letting the other one have them. They didn't notice Jack who was coming up from behind. And even if they had felt him coming, they wouldn't have been alarmed because they would have taken him for one of them. They couldn't smell his alien odour yet, which was actually getting weaker from day to day.
Just before they could catch a whiff of his alien smell, Jack took a short run before jumping, and then he flew like an arrow onto one of the two mates. He stuck his forepaws into the neck of his victim and slipped his back-paws under his victim's soft tummy. This made the victim buckle, which seemed to be exactly what Jack had been waiting for – he stuck his buckteeth into the outstretched nape of his victim's neck. Then he jumped off his victim and ran away, leaving it to its death-throes, while the victim's mate chased after him.
Jack didn't intend to let himself be chased around for too long, because the other rats might take notice, and he remembered what had happened to the previous rat with the wrong smell.
So all of a sudden he turned around and faced his opponent. His opponent, unprepared, crashed into him with all his might. They pushed each other up onto their hind-legs as their forepaws and teeth got caught up in each other. They looked like a couple of lovers – or in any case that's what they would have looked like to a human observer.
Jack let himself be driven back towards his hill and up its slope. The slope in his back gave him more and more of an advantage. When the height difference between the two of them was big enough, he gave a mighty shove and his opponent tumbled backwards down the slope. Jack was right on top of him and sank his teeth deeply into his throat. Then he jumped off him again and watched him die. The victim didn't have time to righten himself before dying – he died lying on his back. His four legs were flailing helplessly as the blood rhythmically squirted out of his throat-wound.
Then Jack walked calmly back to the feeding-ground and started eating.
Ever since Jack was back in the enclosure, the rodent colony had been getting smaller and smaller. Every day there were a few new corpses for the caretaker to dispose of. At first he cursed with every new corpse he saw, but as time went by he got used to it and even left the little shovel for disposing of corpses in the enclosure next to the entrance gate, ready for the next day's corpses. He even started looking actively for the new corpses, as if it were unavoidable that there would be fresh ones every day.
The scientists of the institute couldn't explain what was happening. They dissected a few of the corpses. The immediate cause of death was evident – a deep wound in the throat or nape of the neck. But what these rats had been killed for was not evident at all – they were in their prime and healthy. There seemed to be no reason why the rest of the pack would want them dead. And they hadn't died in an ordinary scuffle either, because their wounds looked very purposeful, very target-oriented. The killer among the rats was obviously a specialist!
The scientists would have liked to know more about this mysterious plague that had hit their rat-colony, but nobody had time to observe the rats around the clock. The mysterious killings always seemed to take place in the evening when everyone had already gone home, or early in the morning when nobody was at work yet.
When you were innocently lingering on the feeding-ground after mealtimes, you suddenly got caught and bitten to death by Jack. If you were strolling through the enclosure on your own in the early morning, you suddenly found yourself nose-to-nose with Jack. At first you might not even have been scared, because Jack's alien smell had all but disappeared by now. But his behaviour would be strange – he would just sit there, in front of you, his beady eyes absolutely still, his long tail lying behind him in the sand, not giving the tiniest twitch, his plate-shaped ears lazily aligning with any sound you might make...
If you tried to move away backwards, Jack just followed you. If you tried to turn away from him, exposing your neck, Jack bit into it. His bite was utterly precise, like a surgical incision. If you lifted yourself up onto your hind-legs, Jack wouldn't rise up to the challenge and do the same (as any normal rat would) but rather jumped up at you from below and tore out your windpipe. There was no escaping him.
After a few weeks of this, the enclosure was so sparsely populated that Jack could walk around in it freely. He didn't need to fear the collective anger of the pack anymore, because there was no pack anymore.
One fine day Jack didn't find any fellow-rat to kill anymore at all, and so he decided to pay the other hill a visit. The other hill had many caves and hollows (not just a single one like Jack's hill), and that's where all the other rats had lived. Jack himself had been born in one of those hollows.
So Jack set off, leisurely strolling through the enclosure in which he would have been mangled and killed just a few weeks ago if he hadn't gone into hiding. He reached the foot of the other hill and he could smell the traces of the many, many fellow-rats who had lived here for years. Not a single blade of grass had been able to grow here under the countless scurrying footsteps of all those little rodents. But none of them were here anymore – they had all been taken up by the shovel of the caretaker. The place was absolutely deserted.
Jack climbed up the hill and stuck his nose into the first hollow he saw. Just a few days ago it had still been inhabited. Jack sniffed around, and in front of his inner eye he could see the life that had been lived here. He could smell the odour of good times and bad, of pleasure and hardship, of hatred and love. It was the smell of a life Jack had never had, even though he had known it from his childhood with his parents, brothers and sisters. That's because Jack had never had the chance to build a nest with a fellow-rat. Jack had never had a female. He had never known the ardent longing that makes a couple build a nest. For him, every day had merely been a replay of the previous one. There had been no goal, no aspiration, just endless repetition. Such repetition just tires out in the end and dies. It is not real life. Real life is watching your sons and daughters grow. It is this growing of the next generation that wins over tiredness and connects an individual's life to something bigger, namely to the survival of the species.
Luckily Jack was still young and not tired yet. There was still hope for him.
With nostalgic feelings filling his nose, he came out of the hollow and looked into the next one. They were all empty. All save one – in the darkest corner of the last hollow Jack found a mother-rat watching over her pups.
Jack's fur bristled, he stretched his legs so that his body was raised further above the ground and he looked bigger, and he approached walking stiffly. The slumbering atmosphere of the nursery held him back a little bit in his strutting, because it reminded him of his own childhood. The mother-rat looked at him with her big brown eyes. She could smell the odour of an alien male. She knew what this meant. Her rightful man wouldn't come back. She had to submit to this one or die.
Her young ones slept under her tummy – blind, naked little worms whose little limbs were not really formed yet. As their mother lifted herself off the nest, they twisted and turned helplessly in the sudden cold. The mother-rat sniffed at them ruefully, because she had only just finished licking this fresh litter clean. But Jack stood there, impassive and impossible to bypass.
She knew what she had to do. She gently took one of the young ones in her mouth, hesitated for the briefest instant, and then she threw her head back and swallowed it. When she opened her eyes again after the gagging effort, Jack was still standing there, unaffected. So she took the second pup in her mouth, threw her head back and forced the fat little worm down her throat once again. Then she took a deep breath, and without opening her eyes she took up the third pup...
Jack just stood there till the end, till the nest was empty. Then she turned around and presented him her rump. Jack came up to her all majestically and mounted her.
First he thought he would bite her in the nape of her neck like all the others. But then he felt some other stirrings in his nether regions. He felt a kind of new life, a kind of new excitement, fill him up. He felt the bulge between his back legs swell, and he began pumping into her with his rear-end. He dug into her fur with his front-claws and thrust into her with his pelvis, again and again.
The sensation he got from it was getting almost unbearable, but he couldn't stop. Something stronger than him had taken control of his body. The little bulge between his back legs had grown to a kind of stick. Jack felt some kind of electro-shocks in it, and then it was as if it had burst. He felt some kind of cathartic flow of some unknown liquid, about three surges of it, and then he grew so exhausted that he slipped off his partner and laid down in the nest.
When he woke up some time later, his female was lying next to him. He licked her gently behind the ears and settled down again.
A few weeks later she put a new litter into the nest, and this time everything was different. Jack looked upon the litter with fatherly pride. The young ones grew fast and became strong, boisterous young rats. Jack was a proud and good-natured father. He let his children crawl under him for protection as often as they liked, even when he was busily feeding. It didn't take all that long till those children had children of their own. Jack became the founding father of a whole new clan of rats. He became a huge and tolerant Pasha who let all his countless descendants crawl under him whenever they liked. When he died peacefully in his sleep a couple of years later, the enclosure was already fully populated again.

That was Jack the rat. But there was also Jack the human who was a medicine student and who put in some hours of his spare time helping out at a biology research centre at his university. Jack the rodent had been named after Jack the human because Jack the human had grown fond of him after the experience with the ointment.
When the helpless little rodent-Jack had been put back into the enclosure, it had turned out that he wasn't so helpless after all. The human Jack had watched, fascinated, how the little rat had reacted when the pack wouldn't take him back – he had simply annihilated the pack and built up a new one of his own!
The human Jack lived in something like a pack too, except it was just a family, namely his parents and his twin-brother Joe. His family was his home and at the same time his prison. Of course there was an outside-world too. There was university. But he saw his studies there more as a preparation for a future life rather than a life in their own right.
Jack felt that he somehow wasn't entitled to a life outside of his family. If he did have one, he might take alien smells back to his family, and who knows what would happen then?
In the rat's case it had been simple – whoever carries alien smells back to the pack will be killed (unless he manages to kill the pack first)!
In Jack's case, the healthiest solution would surely have been to simply leave the family and start a life of his own. But this wasn't so easy for a student. Even though he earned some money helping out with the rats at the research centre, he was still mostly financially dependent on his parents...
So he couldn't just leave the pack, and he wasn't allowed (or didn't dare) to pollute it with alien smells either.
And that's why he just melted with delight as he watched his namesake annihilate his whole pack! Yes, Jack the rat had killed off a whole rat pack just to make space for himself! Jack the human would have loved to be able to do the same!
Of course the two situations weren't really all that comparable – Jack the rat had lived in a big, anonymous pack, while Jack the human lived in a loving family. Nevertheless he had been able to feel for Jack-the-rat's plight, and all his senses had feasted on the wonderful solution Jack-the-rat had found for his problem!
One fine evening as Jack straddled his small motorbike - just like most other evenings - to drive home, he started musing about his plight in more concrete terms. His body was flying above the asphalt, the wheels touching the road seemed far away below him. He felt the wind in his face, heard the screaming of the engine, but in front of his inner eye things were happening that were so awful that it wouldn't be possible to describe them. During the whole drive Jack cherished and nurtured his unspeakable fantasies, but when the wind dropped as he slowed down and the engine grumbled more and more peacefully, his thoughts became less murderous too.
When Jack opened the door of his parents' house where he lived, he was quite tame again. He greeted his mother and asked her what there was for supper, then he sat down in the living-room and leafed through the newspaper.
Later in the evening, as he stood under the shower, he suddenly wondered what the hell this thing, called a “family”, really is ?
What is this thing holding me fast, stopping me from having a life of my own ?
Scientific-minded as he was, Jack collected his thoughts: a family is a social unit, and like any other social unit it also has its own pecking-order. Without a hierarchy it wouldn't be a social unit but rather just a haphazard collection of people. But there is more to a family than simply a hierarchy. In a family, there are specific roles going beyond just being top-dog or under-dog or whatever there is in between – in a family there is a father, a mother and the kids. And among the kids there is usually an eldest, a youngest, and there can be any number in between as well. In Jack's family there was no eldest and youngest, because his brother Joe was an identical twin. But Jack had still been the first out of the womb, and maybe he was the first in other ways too. After all, Jack was a university-student, while his brother Joe was a university-dropout...
So anyway, a family is defined by the specific roles of its members – father, mother, eldest, youngest and so on. In Jack's family, Jack was the one who occupied the post of the eldest, he guessed, because he was officially the “smarter” one, wasn't he?
All this meant that if Jack disappeared, or simply left the family, his post in it would become vacant. There would be a “hole” in the family. And maybe that's why families resist this, especially in the case of the eldest who is usually the first to tear this hole into it. Perhaps it's rather hard for the youngest to leave the family too, because he or she is the last, and when the last one leaves, the family ceases to be a family altogether, which might be hard on the parents.
All this still didn't explain why Jack couldn't take any experiences from the outside world back into the family. So he thought about this some more too (soon his mother would call out to him that he should come out of the shower at last, since there wouldn't be water left for the rest of the family if he stayed in there so long...).
Just because an association is very exclusive and its members fill very specific roles, that still doesn't make it a family. What's so special about a family?
Well, thought Jack as an answer to his own question crystallized in his mind, a family pretends to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient. That's probably what sets families apart from other human associations.
If the family were really self-sufficient, the outside world would be superfluous and could be ignored and forgotten. Of course a family isn't really self-sufficient, not in today's interconnected world anyway (and probably not even in the time of the cave-dwellers), so the illusion has to be maintained through various tricks. One of these tricks is just to pretend that the outside world doesn't exist, and that's why a highly qualified uni-student will still defer to his father even if he knows much more about much more stuff than his father does. The competencies he acquired outside of the family, namely at the university, don't count inside the family since the family pretends that the outside world doesn't even exist at all!
Jack of course understood why the father would be happy with this arrangement. Who wouldn't be happy to be the boss forever? But he couldn't understand what the son had to gain from such an arrangement. Why does he straight away forget that he's come of age as soon as he comes across his father?
Because his father is the one who pays the bills, of course!
If he was lucky, Jack would himself become a father some day too. He would have a family of his own in which he would be the big boss forever too! Then the fact that he was still a seven-year old first-grader in his own parents' eyes wouldn't disturb him anymore, since that would just be a small part of his life.
Yes, that's how it should be! If his life took place mostly somewhere else than with his parents, he wouldn't need to care how his parents treated him!
But that was exactly the problem – his parents' home was his home, because he didn't have another. As a student he couldn't afford another. Since a common life with his parents was unavoidable for the time being, why couldn't they just treat him as a grownup now? Why did they go on pretending that nothing had changed? Why do families work like that?
Well, maybe they need to work like that.
Jack imagined a highly respected director of a big company, used to giving an order just once and being obeyed straight away. Now let's imagine this director becomes a father, and now he has a kid at home who just won't eat his greens. How can this director, used to being obeyed at the merest hint of a raised eyebrow, tolerate that his toddler at home would throw a tantrum? The only way he can tolerate such a thing is if he clearly separates his family from his job!
But why would he need to tolerate such a thing?
Well, toddlers are nobodies with respect to society. But if they were nobodies with respect to everybody, they would never be able to grow into somebodies. They need parents who take care of them, interact with them, take their little whims seriously.
So the parents need to separate themselves and their toddlers from the world at large so as to form a little world of their own, a little world that is as complete as possible in itself. Within this protected world, the toddlers grow into school-children and later on into fully fledged members of human society at large.
But before that they need to live in a protected world, namely a family.
And that's why the great director of a great company, used to being feared and obeyed at the merest blink of an eye, ends up crawling on the ground on all fours, playing “horse” for his children! He couldn't do that within society at large, or he would lose his social standing immediately, but at home in the bosom of his family these things become possible, because society at large is simply locked out.
In the beginning this locking out of the world at large is necessary for the development of the children, but there comes a time when children must learn to move about in the world at large too. Yes, they have existence rights within their family, but their family is not self-sufficient as it pretends to be. If all kids stayed with their parents forever, then families would eventually become so heavy and sluggish that they would die out, and actually the whole of humankind would die out in the end. Human society at large is self-sufficient, but families are not, however much they uphold the illusion that they are.
So it is necessary for children to become grownup and leave the bosom of their family eventually,

and the day this happens is mostly determined by the fact that the children have grown big enough to hold a position of their own within society at large.
Jack had come of age, and already obligations and responsibilities were heaped upon him (he filled out his own tax-declaration, even though he had little more than zeroes to fill in, and already the threat of being called up for military service was looming...). These obligations just landed in the family's letter-box all by themselves, as though it were all natural that Jack had already conquered the corresponding rights by himself (namely the right to have a life of his own).
Why did the family desperately hold on to its existence when its existence had outlived its point?
A family is mostly a fairy-tale, and all its members hold on to this fairy-tale. When one of the members of the family drops out of school, college, university or whatever and becomes a loser (like Jack's brother Joe), he is a loser only in the eyes of society. The family ignores what society thinks. The family goes on welcoming him as their lost son. The family ignores the rules of society, because it is a little society in itself with its own rules.
The worst criminal can always return to his family and be welcomed back!
Within every family there is at least one member who has some standing in society at large as well. And this one member pays for all the losers in the family. That's the family-rule. And yes, if you look at it like this, a family is like an insurance policy. For losers it's lucky that such a thing as a family would exist!
If Jack now destroyed his family – like Jack-the-rat had done with his pack – he would also destroy this insurance policy. He would henceforth stand alone to face the world. Which might be preferable, he mused, because his family was just a prison nowadays.
Could he still continue his studies if his family disappeared? Yes he could! As an orphan, he would get a state scholarship and he would have a little place of his own, maybe even a battered-up little car of his own if he was thrifty enough, and most of all, he would have a LIFE OF HIS OWN!
Wouldn't that be so much better than slowly suffocating within his sweet, loving family, as was the case right now?
But shouldn't there also be a way to have a life of his own while still living with his parents? After all, he spent lots of time outside of the house anyway. What he did at his parents' place was mostly eat and sleep. Surely there was nothing wrong with that? Why did he feel like his parents kept him imprisoned?
Wherein exactly lay Jack's problem?
Perhaps it was mostly about daring (or rather not daring) to bring home alien smells, like Jack-the-rat had done inadvertently. Jack-the-rat almost got killed for that, but of course that's not what would happen to Jack-the-human, was it? So why couldn't Jack-the-human bring home foreign smells shamelessly without being afraid of what his parents might think? Why did he rather have fantasies of killing his parents?
Well, coming back to rodents... Every mouse has its own little hollow, subdivided into separate chambers. There's a living-room, a pantry for stores and even a “bathroom” for leaving the droppings. From time to time a mouse would go up to the surface of the earth to look for food or for a partner. All kinds of things can happen during those excursions, but when the world above becomes too threatening, the mouse just runs back home along the shortest way and dives back into its hole! There it can rest for as long as necessary, gathering enough energy for its next excursion to the surface world.
This, of course, is how it should have been for Jack-the-human as well.
Jack-the-human had no large cats to fear. He didn't risk death, like a mouse, at every step outside of his hollow, or in any case not unless he created the risk himself, for example by speeding unreasonably with his motorbike.
But he still needed somewhere safe, a home, a place to rest. Because outside of his home there was human society at large, and human society is something big, it stretches across the whole world, since all the different nations are interconnected nowadays. If you wanted to be part of human society, you couldn't help running into new situations and having new experiences almost daily. Of course this is exciting, but it can be tiring as well. From time to time it is necessary to escape for a moment from the flood of new experiences. From time to time Jack-the-human felt a need to hole up somewhere in a place he could call “home”.
And the only home he had was the house of his parents.
If the outside world temporarily became too much for him, he could fall ill and stay home. Most people don't fall ill on purpose, or at least not consciously, but in any case it's still a fact that falling ill is an excuse to hole up. Then you can stay in bed the whole day and let your mother cook tea for you. Your family can provide for you for a while. If everybody fell ill at the same time, nothing would work anymore, but mostly that's not how it happens. We fall ill in turns, when we need a rest.
So the family is like an insurance policy or a safety net.
Yes, from time to time Jack really appreciated it that his life would consist of nothing more than taking warm showers, brushing his teeth and sleeping. From time to time everybody needs that to recharge his batteries! R&R you call that – rest and recuperation.
Of course you need this all the more when you've gotten into mischief! That's when you need the possibility to hole up, rest and recuperate the most!
If the world is in an uproar because of you, and you feel you're being hounded – or chased by a cat like a mouse – then you'll want to hole up, exactly like a mouse!
Then it's good to feel your warm and familiar hollow all around you! The outside world may have become a dangerous and unpredictable place, but at least your hollow hasn't changed – at least you're still safe there!
But Jack's hollow wasn't like that. It didn't stay warm and familiar, because when he brought alien smells into it, the hollow reacted!
Let's say the alien smell was the smell of a girl's perfume. Let's say there was a long, golden hair on Jack's jacket. His mother would comment on it, his brother Joe would snicker, and even his father wouldn't be able to hold back a smirk! The whole family would smile in a knowing way.
But the hair could have come from a fight, a rape or even a murder. Or from a prostitute... The hair and smell could be the unfortunate remains of a fleeting adventure with a bad ending leaving mostly bad memories, who could tell? Maybe Jack would just like to wash them off and forget about them as quickly as possible. But in this particular hollow this wasn't possible. How could he ever hope to get past his ever watchful and ever curious mother on his way to the bathroom? And once she had caught the alien smell, she was bound to bring it up at the dinner-table, and there would be the knowing smile of his father and the snicker from his brother!
So much for the uninvolved, un-judgmental hollow that just welcomes you back, without asking questions, from wherever you may have come from!
This particular hollow, Jack's family, was bound to chafe and excoriate any wound he might already have. In that sense it wasn't a safe haven at all.
If Jack had a place of his own, a safe house where he could really hole up for R&R, then perhaps he would become a daring young man, as young men are supposed to be!
But Jack didn't have a place of his own. He was trapped in his family, and often enough he felt things would be better if they just all... disappeared!
Now if he had a place of his own, he could even take a girl there, and then one thing might lead to another, and who knows where it would end? But even if everything went wrong and she just left with ill feelings, the walls wouldn't comment on it. He would just close the door on her and wash himself, wash off the memories of whatever did or did not happen. He wouldn't need to keep a straight face if he didn't feel like it. You don't need to do that in your safe haven. His toothbrush wouldn't ask any questions either, because toothbrushes don't do that.
But Jack didn't have a place of his own.
What would happen if Jack tried to take a girl to his parents' place? It was unthinkable anyway, but let's try to think the unthinkable for a minute. What would happen if he tried to sleep with her? Even more unthinkable...
Let's just say Jack and that girl were still talking in Jack's room late at night. By the latest when Jack's mother felt ready to go to bed, she would knock on the door of Jack's room and let them know it was late and maybe even ask if she should prepare the guest's room.
And what would the girl do? She would stand up immediately and say no, no, she was on the verge of leaving anyway. And thus the magical moment, when she would have realized that the last train or bus or whatever had already left, would never come about. And whatever could or could not have happened after that would never come about either.
But in any case Jack never brought home a girl anyway. The whole thing was much too unthinkable in the first place. Actually he didn't even know any girls. He didn't have the courage to get to know any.
Perhaps he should just leave everything behind and emigrate to the jungle somewhere. But perhaps he wouldn't even manage to survive there.
So he rather just stayed infantile, and sometimes he even seemed quite okay that way. He was studying like a good boy. He was the joy of his mother, the pride of his father, and an example for his good-for-nothing brother. And that's pretty much all he was. That was all his life. Whatever else he dreamed of was just that - a dream.

One evening as Jack was driving home in the old car of his parents on a dark national road, he had really dark thoughts once again. He was on his way back from a class meeting with his former high-school class which had been rather disappointing. Stupid jokes and a bit too much wine, that had been about it. But now Jack enjoyed the ride in the car, at least. He had managed to borrow the old family car from his parents for this evening, which wasn't always easy. He had fun with the glowing sticks at the side of the road, as they appeared one by one in the light of his headlamps and then swished past, disappearing again in the darkness behind him. After a curve he saw a light that didn't fit into the endless row of glow sticks. It was the taillight of a moped. Jack despised mopeds, the main reason for this being that he himself had never owned one. Nowadays he owned a real motorbike, but when he was younger and could have driven a moped, he hadn't owned any vehicle at all.
But today Jack was sitting at the wheel of a car, and under his foot there were about sixty horsepower waiting for some pressure from his sole. The moped was driving close to the edge of the road, giving him lots of space to overtake it. Jack intended to pass it without giving it much space. He wanted the driver to feel the gush of air as he passed! That would serve him right, since he was driving such a stupid moped!
But as he drew closer, his headlamps illuminated the back of the driver, and he could see a slim waist and somewhat wider hips as well as long hair spilling out from under the helmet. It was a girl!
On the spur of the moment, following a sudden impulse, Jack tore his steering wheel to the right and pushed the breaks hard. The car ran up the embankment, came to a standstill and then rolled back down onto the road. The moped, whose path had been cut off, reared up, flew over the embankment and landed on the other side. Jack grabbed the big screwdriver from the glove-box, threw open the door and jumped out of the car.
The girl was lying on the embankment, dazed. Three running steps and Jack was standing above her. He leaned down, found the collar of her blouse and dragged her up. He held the screwdriver against her throat and whispered into her ear: “Get undressed now!”
She looked at him as if she hadn't heard right. Jack let her go again and stood against the side of the car. First it almost seemed as though she would sink back down to the ground.
“You okay?” he asked gruffly.
“Yeah, I'm okay, thanks,” she answered harmlessly when she had managed to properly fill her lungs again.
“Get undressed!” said Jack. He held the screwdriver firmly in his right hand, ready to stab if necessary. The girl opened her eyes and stared at Jack full of surprise. There was no fear in her eyes yet. Somehow the situation hadn't properly registered.
Jack was a firm believer in people's guilt. Everyone was guilty of something. Original sin or whatever. He would have understood her fear. But her innocent surprise knocked him for a loop.
It took him a while to repeat his order: “Get undressed!” There was a sudden urgency in his voice. He was urging her because he was beginning to be afraid of losing his resolve.
The face of the girl stretched itself, making her eyes even bigger: “But..., but...” she stuttered.
Jack came back towards her and tickled her neck with the tip of the screwdriver. The girl lifted her arms, held her hands up to her throat as if to protect herself, but then her fingers went to the first button of her blouse.
Before she could slip out of her blouse, she first had to take off her jacket. With his right hand, Jack still held the screwdriver to her throat. With his left hand he grabbed her jacket-collar. He caught the zip between his fingers and pulled it all the way down in one quick gesture. Then he helped her out of her jacket. Now she could continue unbuttoning her blouse. His left hand wandered down to her trouser waistband. He found the press-button and forced it open. The zip beneath it slipped downwards all by itself as Jack pushed his hand into her trousers. His fingers found the upper edge of her panty and slipped in.
His warm fingers wandered over her ticklish underbelly and pushed in between her legs. She flinched, but the cold screwdriver pushed against her thyroid gland warningly. The girl lifted her head and looked up into the starry sky, probably trying to let her spirit escape from the present situation. Her hands had automatically worked their way down along the blouse, opening all the buttons, and were now approaching the left hand of the man.
Jack shamefully pulled back his hand.
The pressure from the screwdriver against her neck subsided.
Jack stepped backwards, away from her. He still held the screwdriver fast, but he was doing so defensively now. Without any further prompt, the girl took off her blouse, then she slipped out of her chemise and her bra, and Jack stepped further backwards, away from her, when she stepped forwards to lay them down on the roof of the car.
She had a flat, soft belly, two small rounded breasts some distance under her collarbones. She pulled down her trousers too and stood next to the car in nothing but her panties. Small hairs standing on end were visible on her long legs in the red light from the tail-lamps of the car.
The girl grabbed her panties on either side of her hips, and then she let the panties slip down along her long legs...
Yes, Jack definitely felt something stirring in his trousers, something that had become more difficult to accomplish on his own at home in the bathroom or in his bed, but he didn't dare to approach her anymore.
“Turn round!” he said roughly, “and then keep turning!”
She held up her arms to the sky and turned around, almost like a dancer or an ice-skater. Jack saw her naked, naked, naked all over!
Not a single piece of clothing was hanging on her body. Her body was nothing but streamlined skin! She was beautiful! Jack would have liked to let his hands run down the whole length of this streamlined, beautiful body!
He imagined this body in a stream of water. The water would just wash past the smooth skin as if it weren't even a hindrance to its flow at all!
Jack wanted to hurl himself – not onto her, but rather into his car and drive away! This was too much for him! But the girl's gaze would follow him, and what would she see? The number plate of the car!
Stumped by this realization he stood in front of the naked girl, his hand cramped around the handle of the screwdriver. He knew he would have to kill her now. Then bury her somewhere in the forest. And get rid of the moped somehow... And then, whether he still somehow got caught or not, he would have to live with what he had done for the rest of his life.
But he couldn't do it, just as little as he could bring himself to rape her. Finally he lowered his hand with the screwdriver, then he lowered his eyes as well and whispered as loudly as he could (for his voice failed him too by now): “Please get dressed again...”
The girl seemed to wake up from a trance and obeyed so fast that Jack got startled.
And then something strange happened: half dressed, she ran her hand through her hair, smiled almost coquettishly and said almost perkily: “I can only congratulate you for being the sickest guy I've ever met!” She was ready to bolt off if he tried to approach her again.
He didn't react. He didn't move at all. Apparently he was petrified.
She looked to the side and... with three swift bounds she had disappeared over the embankment.
“Oh!..” Jack suddenly heard her call out from beyond the embankment. Jack was immediately back in the real world and climbed over the embankment to see if she needed help. She was cowering down next to her moped. The front wheel was bent out of shape. He hurried over to her and she didn't shy away from him. Together they stood up the moped and carried it over the embankment. It was clear the girl wouldn't be able to drive on this thing anymore in its current state. Jack opened the hatch of the car. It was a station wagon, a real family car, and the back seats could be folded out of the way. Together they shoved the moped into the car and a moment later they were sitting next to each other in the front seats.
“I'll drive you home,” said Jack, starting the car.
The girl commented on the convenience of a station wagon. She had an uncle who owned a station wagon too.
“What's your name?” she suddenly asked.
“Jack,” answered Jack, “and yours?”
“Theresa,” said the girl.
They reached the next village and Theresa showed Jack in front of which house he had to stop. They unloaded the broken moped and carried it into the back yard. When they had put it down, Theresa held out her hand to Jack and said earnestly: “Thanks for bringing me home! See you!”
Jack felt his heart cramp up as he touched her hand. “Yes, see you,” he confirmed, not knowing whether seeing her again would be in front of a judge, or whatever else she had in mind.
Then he went back to the car, and before he shut the door he looked back and memorized the house-number. Then he started the car and drove off.
Theresa gazed after him and memorized the number on the number plate.
On his way home in the car, Jack wondered who he had just raped right now. He hadn't raped Theresa, obviously. He had been unable to do it. Had he raped the moped at least? Well, not really. It could easily be fixed again, he guessed, so that wasn't much of a rape...
No, he decided, tonight he had mostly raped himself!

A toilet mostly consists of a bowl, and this bowl sits at the end of a pipe. When you want to take a crap into the toilet-bowl, you lay a ring on top of the bowl, so as not to sit directly onto the bare porcelain of the bowl. You sit on this ring, and after having taken your crap, you push a little lever, and the crap disappears down the pipe below the bowl. After this you may close the bowl with a lid, and then the toilet looks completely harmless, just like an ordinary seat.
Jack often had dreams about toilet-bowls. There would be the ring on the toilet-bowl, waiting for the next customer to take a crap, and somehow Jack didn't like this waiting attitude, so he wanted to shut the toilet by throwing the lid onto it. But as soon as the lid touched the ring-shaped toilet-seat, it transformed into a new toilet-seat, and the toilet-bowl remained open.
At the backrest of the toilet a new lid would be waiting, and Jack would throw it onto the open toilet-bowl, but this lid would again transform into a ring and the bowl would again remain open.
Jack just couldn't bear the sight of the open toilet-bowl, covered with a ring still bearing the imprints of the last ass that had sat on it. Either the ring had to be lifted up, and then the toilet would just be a harmless hole, a hole in front of which you might stand upright to piss into it, or the toilet had to be covered with its lid, so that it would just be a harmless seat.
It was this expectant position of the toilet, ring down and lid up, that Jack couldn't bear. He saw himself caught between those two jaws, ring and lid, and screaming for help as the toilet tried to swallow him...
When the dream of the never-ending rings lasted too long, Jack would eventually wake up and stagger over to the bathroom to convince himself that the toilet's muzzle was well and truly shut. So that his parents wouldn't have any strange ideas about his nightly wanderings, he would then flush the toilet, leave it gurgling pleasantly, and shamble back to his room to go back to sleep.
Till the age of five, Jack had always refused to sit on a toilet. He didn't mind standing in front of one and pissing into it, but for solid waste he insisted on his potty, quite to the despair of his parents. His mother had tried out all kinds of coercive measures to make Jack sit on the toilet, but this had only made his fear of toilets worse.
It was his brother Joe who had finally managed to convince him to sit down on the toilet. Joe had sat on the edge of the bathtub, holding the lid so it couldn't fall on Jack's back while he sat there, and allowing Jack to hold onto his knee the whole time.
After this, Jack managed to take his craps on the toilet like everybody else. He got a present from his mother for that, as she had promised. But since he felt his brother deserved at least half of it, he shared it with him in a way they didn't share other toys. Adults don't understand such things...
So Jack had got over his toilet-complex, more or less, but he still never sat on a public toilet. During ski-camps at school, he would just not take a crap until he got home. If the camp lasted one week, then he held it back one week. If, God forbid, the camp lasted two weeks, he really held it back for two weeks.
At home, he liked the bowls of the two toilets in the house to always be completely open or completely shut. The ring down and the lid up, he just had a great aversion to that, because the toilet could have snapped at him from behind. With the advantage of landing a surprise attack, the toilet might have won in the end!
Jack remembered the endless minutes he had sat on the toilet as a child, calling for his mother to come and wipe his bum. This waiting time was like a small victory of the toilet over him.
When little Jack was naughty, his mother would lock him up in the small toilet that was hardly bigger than a closet and contained only a tiny sink in addition to the toilet.
There, next to that bleak toilet-bowl, he had his timeout until he had calmed down again.
In contrast to Jack, Jack's father had a rather bawdy relationship with toilets and the business of taking craps and such. He liked to sit there with the door to the rest of the house wide open, happily entertaining the whole family with his farts. After his visits to the toilet, the ring was always lying on the bowl and the lid was resting against the water tank at the back. The bowl was smeared and the ring was spangled with little bits of dry skin, like dandruff. The smell was of course beyond description.
When Jack was small, his father didn't at all mind coming into the bathroom while Jack was taking a shower, settling down comfortably on the toilet next to the bathtub and pleasurably taking his crap.
What can you do with parents like that?
Is it any wonder that Jack had nightmares about toilet-bowls on which towers of rings grew without ever letting themselves be shut, because every lid instantly transformed into a ring?
Now the story with that girl he had almost raped, Theresa, was something similar. It was like some crap you just couldn't flush down, and however many lids you threw onto it, they all transformed into rings and just wouldn't hide the crap!
For weeks on end Jack looked at every official-looking envelope with apprehension, winced and became red in the face whenever the telephone rang during family mealtimes when nobody expected a call.

Apart from the fear that Theresa might suddenly decide to press charges against him, there was also the deep shame for what he had done to her, and even more so for what he had planned to do to her. It was normal and natural for Jack-the-rat to just do to others what was right for himself, and mounting a female was part of that. Perhaps it was natural that some of this tendency (to just do what’s right for himself) would exist in Jack-the-human as well. But humans are more complex than rats - there are other tendencies in them too, in particular an extraordinary capacity for empathy. This extraordinary capacity for empathy is really a defining feature of human beings, Jack decided. Like being able to fly huge distances is a defining feature of albatrosses. A human who won’t empathize is like an albatross who won’t fly - a shrivelled up, handicapped version of what he could or should be!

On the other hand, maybe Jack was destined to be a rat rather than an albatross… But rape was still punishable by law. Maybe it shouldn’t be, since it’s something completely natural for rats like Jack. Then again, cancer is completely natural too, and that’s not a reason not to fight it!
So he wondered again and again what he had been thinking when he had run Theresa off the road. Didn't he realize he might be changing the course of his whole life with this one crazy gesture? What the hell had he been thinking?
It had been the frustration building up in him, he knew.
He had been brought up in the belief that girls and boys are exactly the same. His mother wouldn't hear of any difference between boys and girls. She categorically refused to buy gender-specific toys for her sons Jack and Joe. She had suffered as a child when her brothers had been sent to college and university, while herself being told she was going to get married and be a home-maker and wouldn't need higher education. It was hard enough to force her brothers through higher education, she was told, didn’t she see? She didn't need that. She was just a girl. Jack and Joe had heard this story countless times. About how their mother had wanted to have a career, but then she got pregnant, had to marry, and really became nothing but a home-maker (just like her parents had predicted)…
Jack and Joe's mother didn't want to make the same mistake with her own children. They shouldn't be brought up with gender-specific roles in mind. They should be brought up in a gender-neutral way and learn to respect women!
For this reason they were not supposed to play with toy-cars and toy-guns. They were supposed to be interested in loftier things, as their mother was. They were sent to piano-classes. They were meant to be interested in music and literature, not cars and guns!
Joe and Jack's mother had some lady-friends with daughters, and these daughters were really interested in such loftier things. They still played games, of course, but calmer, more acceptable ones. Why couldn't Joe and Jack be more like them?
So while Joe and Jack's mother insisted that there is no difference whatsoever between boys and girls, their own desires and aspirations clearly showed them this wasn't so. The evidence clearly showed them that there are, after all, such stupid and despicable things like cars and guns that only stupid boys could ever be interested in.
Later on, when sexual feelings gradually crept into Jack's mind, it was clear this was another one of these things like cars and guns that their mother of course wouldn't want to hear about.
So, Jack concluded, sex is another one of those stupid things that only boys could ever be interested in.
Maybe, if you became a great doctor or professor, you would find a woman who would love you so much for this accomplishment that she might even give in to a little bit of sex from time to time, just to satisfy the stupid boyish desires of her otherwise noble husband. It had to be like that, since that's how children are made, after all.
Sex, Jack had worked out for himself, is mostly something dirty that women have to be tricked into. Unless you are a great doctor or professor, that is, in which case your wife might leniently give in to some sex since you're such a great man otherwise.
Jack wasn't a great man yet, so he would need to know the tricks. But he didn't know the tricks, so he got frustrated, and it all culminated in his running this girl, Theresa, off the road!
Time flowed by without any consequences. But this didn't mean Theresa had simply forgiven Jack, as Jack knew full well. She could decide at any moment to do something about the attack. Jack knew this and he kept telling himself that he should have raped her properly, then killed and buried her. That would have been the proper thing to do, as Jack-the-rat would have done, rather than having this sword of Damocles hanging above him that could fall on him any moment.
But Jack hated this thought, because he had somehow perceived the girl as a fellow human being, and it was this that had stopped him from fulfilling his duty towards himself. It was also this that held him back from thinking logically about the whole thing even now.
Instead of emptying himself into her and then gratefully leaving her as a dead body, he had created a situation that wouldn't stop haunting him. Theresa followed him in his dreams. He saw her surprised face again, when the fear had still been missing, which had made him hesitate. He saw her naked body turn in front of him. In his dreams he stretched out his hands towards the naked skin but he just couldn't reach it, as if the body had been nothing but an optical illusion.
Theresa was a fellow human being, and the only way Jack could have penetrated her, first with his penis and then with the screwdriver, would have been by ignoring this fact. And Jack hadn't been able to ignore it. Maybe his fine upbringing had come in the way, or maybe his heart, he just couldn't work it out.
Jack thought about sending her a letter excusing himself. He knew where she lived and it would be easy to work out her address, at least if it was a one-family house. But what if it wasn't? What if the letter got into the wrong hands?
Besides, if he wrote her he would have to ad the money for the repairs of the moped, and he had no idea what those repairs might have cost. All this just wasn't so easy!
Poor, stupid Jack, what was he to do?

And, some other part of him wondered, how was Theresa going in the meantime? What had he done to her, to her self-confidence, self-respect and feeling of self-worth, to her trust in other human beings, in particular men?
Every day he asked himself these different questions, and as time ran on he grew really tired of it. Were there going to be consequences? Consequences other than the fear and shame and guilt plaguing him? Should he go on waiting for those consequences?

But he was sick and tired of waiting for something to happen that hopefully wouldn't ever happen!

Jack came out of his room and went down the stairs to the dining room to share supper with the family. Just then the phone rang. His mother was handling clattering dishes, his father had gone down to the cellar to get a bottle of wine, and his brother Joe was still in his room, so Jack took the receiver himself and said the family name. He heard the voice of a girl, asking if this was Jack. She seemed insecure, perhaps even distraught. Jack hardly hesitated before he answered: “Yes, it's me. Hello Theresa!”
Then, as his heart pounded faster and faster, there was simply silence.
Maybe it wasn't Theresa, after all? He saw and heard Theresa everywhere nowadays – he was hallucinating!
Finally she spoke again: “I ran away from home.”
Then suddenly the words came very fast: “I have no money anymore. I'm in Freiburg at the railway station.”
There were many smart and reasonable things that Jack could have said: go to the police, for example. Or take the next train home even if you don't have the money. They will check your identity and send you a bill...
But Jack said none of these things. All he said was: “Stay where you are. I'm coming!”
“Okay,” she said with obvious relief. “Till soon!”
“Till right away!” he answered and hung up. Then he went to the front-door, forced his feet into his shoes without bending down, grabbed his jacket, his gloves and helmet and left the house unnoticed.
The engine of the motorbike started easily enough. He had used it earlier that day, and it always started easily after that. Once you had managed to start it in the morning it was no problem anymore the rest of the day. He threw his right leg over the saddle, clung to the machine with his thighs and drove off. In front of him the single headlamp was piercing through the darkness. First he drove along a short, curvy road through the forest, bending low in the curves, letting the two-stroke engine howl. Then came a main road, and in front of him there was an endless black band unrolling itself. He had time to let his thoughts wander.
It was disquieting that Theresa knew his phone-number. Surely she had traced it down earlier already, because she surely hadn't found it in the phone-book in a phone-booth at the railway station in Freiburg. Phone books don't translate car license plates into phone-numbers... Theresa must have found out Jack's phone-number earlier already. She had written it down in her personal address-book, and today, feeling lost, she had had nobody else to call.
But how had she gone about it to find out Jack's phone number? She hadn't said anything about it when she had called and of course Jack hadn't asked her. She seemed to be having some kind of hard time, and she had called Jack in distress, so undoubtedly she wouldn't have felt like explaining to him at length how one goes about it to find out a phone-number on the basis of a car license-plate. She had more important things on her mind...
But Jack considered this as a kind of conspiracy of society against him – everybody knew how to transform the number of a license-plate into a phone-number, but nobody would explain it to him!
People who are deprived of certain information are left-out people. They are the ones at the edge of society, those who aren't fully part of it. Jack was such a fringe person. He wasn't really part of things. He wasn't invited to parties – everybody knew he wouldn't be able to return the favour and throw one himself, since he lived with his parents. It wasn't that his parents would absolutely forbid him to have a party at their house. But they had certain ideas how a party should go, and Jack would have been too uncomfortable to invite friends under the watchful eye of his mother. Other parents went out, had a life of their own. Not so his parents – they were always at home, permanently making their presence felt, gradually suffocating Jack as he grew older.
And yet, in spite of his parents always being around, Jack had also somehow missed out on something that probably should have come from them. Something that all humans possess except him. Something mysterious that allowed you to survive within society and that included – among many, many other things – knowing how to transform a license-plate number into a phone-number!
Since this mysterious something – this savoir-vivre that everybody possessed except Jack – was supposed to come from your parents, you wouldn't learn about it anywhere else. Not at school, not from your friends... You were just naturally expected to have it. And if you didn't, people would just look at you as though you were crazy, but they certainly wouldn't stop and take the time to explain it to you. It probably wasn't even something you could explain – it was something you naturally grew into (if you had normal parents, that is).
Such was the flow of Jack's thoughts as the wind was rushing past his motorbike helmet. Ever since he had reached adolescence, this had been the default pattern of his thoughts – ever recurring musings about how his parents somehow kept him away from things and kept him from being NORMAL!
The motorbike swept through the grey fog and over the black bitumen, its headlamp cutting a narrow path of light through the darkness in front of it.
Jack found the railway station of Freiburg easily. He parked somewhere in front of it, and soon he was wandering along the deserted tracks under the tall roof inside the station.
He thought of the family at home. After his mother would have called him down to the dining room for supper about three times, she would send his brother Joe to go and fetch him. Joe would barge into Jack's room, tearing him out of the musical trance he would undoubtedly be in, his ears covered with headphones.
But this evening Jack's room would be found empty. What would the family think? Actually this was unthinkable! Such a thing had never happened before!
A freight train was slowly clanking and screeching past Jack as he walked along the platform. After the heavy engine with its three headlamps Jack only saw the dark contours of the wagons against the lighter sky in the distance. He heard the rumble and clatter of the wheels on the rails, the rattle of the chains linking the wagons, the moaning and soughing of the buffers as they pushed against each other, and he felt the wind front of each wagon separately, swooshing over him as it passed.
Jack pictured himself trying to jump onto the train. He thought of his hand that could get caught between the buffers, of his feet that could get crushed under the wheels... All his body-parts could end up all over the place, but one thing was certain – the train would continue on its way mercilessly and leave the mangled corpse in pieces along the track.
Human society is just like this train, thought Jack. The family you grow up in is like the platform on which Jack was standing right now. At some point you must jump from the platform onto the train.
But wait! This wasn't logical! Human society isn't like a train which only has an engine at the front end. No, human society is the sum of many more or less independent individuals, while a train consists of nothing but wagons pulled along passively.
So human society is more like a highway full of cars rather than a train. Young adults like Jack drive along the slip road (if they are lucky enough to own a car) and try to find a spot between the cars already on the highway.
Jack didn't own a car and didn't know how he could go about it to own one. He couldn't even imagine such a thing! For this reason he compared human society to a train rather than a highway full of cars, a train whose driver sits far in the front and doesn't see what happens at the back.
It's as though Jack hadn’t realized that each car has its own driver, and that each one of these drivers would make space for him if he tried to enter the highway. Jack wasn't able to see it like this, because he didn't own a car! What Jack saw was just a train being pulled along, creaking and rattling, and squashing everything in its path ruthlessly! No wonder he didn't dare to take the leap into adulthood! It was because he didn't own a car! A car would have helped him to see things differently and that would have given him confidence!
And the reason he didn't own a car was because his parents didn't buy him one. He couldn't buy one himself because he was a student and had no money of his own, or in any case not that kind of money,…
Sometimes he wished he had started some stupid apprenticeship rather than medicine studies. By now he would already have a salary, and he would own a car of his own!
The last wagon loudly rolled past Jack and he saw the blinking red tail-lamp. He gazed after the receding train lost in thought. Full of macabre feelings he watched the long dead snake winding away and disappearing in the distance.
Theresa was sitting on a bench on her own some way further along the platform. Behind her, on a holding track, a refrigerated wagon was parked. The refrigerated wagon was in operation – there was a little engine attached to it that was happily rattling away. As Jack came closer he could smell the exhaust fumes. It was hard to imagine that this refrigerated wagon contained the kind of fresh produce that always looked so colourfully cheerful in TV-ads.
Abandoned on this holding track, with only the rattling engine for company, the fresh produce was waiting in the moist night for the early morning when it would be distributed to the supermarkets.
Next to this abandoned freight wagon Theresa was sitting on a bench, as if she were waiting for a train.
Someone at some point must have started the little engine of the refrigerated wagon, and eventually someone would also switch it off again, once the yogurts were unloaded. But in the meantime the freight wagon was just left there to its own devices. It was expected that it would take care of itself on its own. Theresa was sitting next to this rattling emblem of human existence, but not a soul was taking notice of her. Not a soul was taking care of the freight wagon either. It had just been left there, just like Theresa.
Jack had had macabre thoughts when the freight train had rolled past him noisily. And now, as he came closer to this rattling engine, he had more macabre thoughts. The soulless repetitive movements of that little engine, spinning endlessly round and round through the action of some little cylinders, were like the lifeless witnesses of some former intent. Someone, long ago, had once started that engine with the intent of refrigerating the contents of the wagon, but this person was long gone. In the meantime the little engine just went on spinning mindlessly, and it would go on doing this until someone eventually came back to switch it off, or until it ran out of gas.
As Jack came closer, he set his eyes on Theresa, and suddenly the rattling from the engine seemed indecently loud, even though his ears had been filled with it for quite a while already. He came up slowly to Theresa.
She stood up, but she didn't throw herself at him as would have happened in a film. It wasn't even clear that she stood up for him. Maybe she just stood up to stretch her legs. It wasn't even clear that she had recognized him. Perhaps she hadn't even seen him at all?
She came up to him, hesitated a little moment about how to greet him and finally pressed herself against him lightly. He barely felt her weight. She rested her head on his shoulder without saying a word. It was as though the encounter lacked any kind of deeper impact – she hadn't jumped into his arms and she was so silent. Just the little engine of the refrigerated wagon was still rattling in the background. It was as though Jack had clasped thin air.
After a long, silent minute she finally said: “I'm glad you came.”
He asked: “How did you get my phone-number?”
She answered dismissively: “Well, I saw the licence-plate on your car that night.”
Of course she wouldn't explain more. She preferred to stay silent rather than discuss such stupid details. She didn't know that this question had bothered – not to say haunted - Jack on the whole way to Freiburg. It wasn't a detail to him! But to everyone else it obviously was, so Jack didn't insist further.
He let his cheek rest against hers and caressed her back with his hands. She let him do it. He had already touched her once before, and she had survived it. Ever since puberty she hadn't let even her parents embrace her anymore, but as far as Jack was concerned it was different somehow. He wouldn't ever do anything she didn't want, she knew that. If he was that kind of guy (and earlier he must have thought he was), he would have done it already on that fateful evening.
Jack didn't try to kiss her, and the embrace remained totally non-erotic.
After a while some unconscious message passed between their bodies that it was okay if they let each other go again, and soon they walked side by side, neither one having pushed back the other, along the deserted platform.
Eventually Jack felt it was time to try to speak: “You have problems at home?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Theresa.
“Don’t you think your parents love you?” Jack asked in a voice that was supposed to sound compassionate, but that sounded stupid to his own ears.
“Yes, they do,” answered Theresa, “but they are not my real parents.”
“Oh,” said Jack.
Then there was a moment's silence.
“Do you know anything about your real parents?” asked Jack, trying again. He felt he was allowed to ask so directly. For Theresa he was just a creature of the night that didn't exist in her daily life. She could tell him whatever she liked, it wouldn't change anything in her daily life.
Indeed, she hardly hesitated before answering: “As good as nothing... I just know what there was to know.”
“Namely?” asked Jack, trying not to sound insistent.
“I know my mother was in her twenties and that she was on a booze-cruise with some other people. The car in which she was driven around by three young men had an accident. They all died. My mother was brain-dead, but she was pregnant and so her body was kept alive long enough to give birth.”
“And your father?” asked Jack.
“He was never found,” answered Theresa, “and even the identity of my mother was not determined in much detail. All I know was that she had two brothers for whom the French police had a warrant and who were never found. Other next of kin were never found.”
“How did you find all that out?” asked Jack admiringly. Really, he had no idea how you go about finding out such things! “Did your adoptive parents tell you?” he asked hopefully.
She shrugged her shoulders and all she said was: “No, not my adoptive parents.”
Jack felt she would just get annoyed with him if he insisted more on how she got the information. Those details were not what she wanted to talk about.
“It's terrible,” he finally managed to say, desperately trying to put some honest-sounding feeling in his words.
“For months I grew in a living corpse!” exclaimed Theresa. “Can you imagine that?”
“No,” admitted Jack.
“After I was born, her body served as an organ donor. She was taken apart and distributed to strangers, can you imagine?”
“No,” said Jack truthfully.
“As my mother was lying in hospital, the doctors took a vote about whether to let her live long enough to give birth to me, or whether to let her and me inside her die.”
“That's terrible,” said Jack.
“In the end they decided to let me live. My mother stayed hooked up to the machines keeping her alive till I could safely be delivered by Caesarian.”
“But who told you all that?” asked Jack.
“My adoptive parents,” answered Theresa.
“Do you love them?” asked Jack.
“They always told me how much they desired a child. They couldn't have one of their own because my adoptive mother had an illness that rendered her sterile as a child.”
“So they came forward to adopt you?”
“Yes, they did this even before I was born. They witnessed my development, they felt the tummy of my dead mother and looked forward to my birth.”
“So you love them?” Jack asked once again.
“Well, they took me in...” Theresa had to think it over for a minute, but finally she managed to get it out: “Yes, I guess I do love them.”
But then she felt she had to add: “But they just aren't my real parents, even if they wanted me, even if they looked forward to my birth...”
“Well,” said Jack interrupting Theresa, “in some sense you are still the continuation of their own life-stories, and of their own love-story, just like a biological child would have been!”
“But I'm not just that...” said Theresa. “I'm also the daughter of an unknown woman who was on a booze-cruise. I'm also the daughter of an unknown man who probably never even knew that he had conceived me.”
“But what's that to you?” asked Jack.
“There are things that my parents can't understand, because these things don't come from them. Whenever something like that turns up and causes them problems, I always feel guilty and ungrateful. Because actually I have no right to live, or in any case not as this separate entity, detached from those who took me in and love me. The doctors in the hospital wouldn't have needed to let me live. My parents could have found another child to adopt, someone better suited to them.”
“Well,” said Jack, not knowing if this would really console her, “I have such feelings too sometimes, in spite of being a real biological child of my parents.”
“That's not the same,” claimed Theresa.
“How could you know whether it's the same or not, since you've never met your real biological parents?” asked Jack rhetorically. But before Theresa could protest, he continued: “You have the feeling that you should EARN your right to live, just because there is no story you can fall back on that logically leads to you.”
“I feel I'm indebted to them...” said Theresa.
“And this debt is such that you can never pay it back, right?”
“Yes...” said Theresa.
There was a moment of silence. Jack had been all keen on telling her something, but now he remained silent. They had almost reached his motorbike when he at last spoke again:
“Listen, Theresa, your ideas about this whole thing are all wrong. You were given life, and nobody has a right to take it away from you again. You don't need to earn your right to live. You can be whatever you want to be.”
“Theoretically yes, but I can be despised because of my ungratefulness. I even despise myself...”
“No!” said Jack emphatically. “Nobody has a right to despise you, and this is why: when they decided to let you live, it wasn't because of some kind of patronizing generosity. No, it wasn't that, I assure you! They were just doing their fucking job!”
“They could have decided differently,” said Theresa. “They could have decided to abort me. There was no next of kin of my mother to ask, nothing. They could just have aborted me, and nobody would have blamed them for it. And yet they decided to let me live. Now I am indebted to them, to my parents who took me in, to everybody! I mustn't disappoint them! I mustn't let them think that they should rather have aborted me - or just let me die in the dying body of my mother!”
“Well,” said Jack, “let's look at this reasonably: what kind of reason could they have had to abort you? Maybe they could have thought that knowing close to nothing about your real parents would make you into an unhappy child and so it would be better to abort you straight away. Yes, they could have thought that. They could have thought that it would be better to spare you the burden of life. But you know, an argument like this makes no sense. It makes no sense to say that it would be better for someone not to live, because if that person doesn't live, then that person doesn't even exist, and then it makes no sense to say that something was <<better>> for that person, since there wouldn't even BE any such person!”
Jack took an artistic little pause while Theresa looked at him doubtfully, then he ploughed on:
“The doctors might also have thought that it would be better not to let you live because you might just grow up as a psychopath who would be nothing but a burden to society. Yes, I guess they could have thought that. But who is society? Society is not a person. Society is just the sum of the people making it up. And each of these persons has to decide for him-or herself. No one, not even a doctor, can claim to be the representative of society. Each one has to decide for him-or herself what he or she considers right. Okay, some people might think that they are somehow entitled to be representatives of society. But most people know that they have to decide for themselves, and only once all the individual decisions are summed up can we say that we've got a decision from society as a whole. In your particular case, none of the doctors was going to be personally responsible for you. None of the doctors was going to be directly involved with the rest of your life. So logically they just couldn't have any reason not to let you live. And that's why they decided, in the end, to let you come to term before cutting out all the organs from your mother's body!”
Jack looked over at Theresa to see if she was following him. She was looking a bit doubtful. Not in total disagreement, just doubtful. So Jack decided to come to the point:
“There was no LOGICAL reason not to let you live, neither a humanitarian nor a selfish one. There was just no reason at all not to let you live. Doctors have an old dictum: <<first do no harm>>. Maybe that's even part of the Hippocratic oath or what. By following this oath they were FORCED to let you live, so they didn't do it out of kindness. And so there is fucking no reason for you to be particularly grateful! You don't owe them anything!”
Theresa nodded vaguely, but then she pointed out that there still are people who think it best to put others out of their misery, however much that didn't make sense according to Jack.
“Well,” said Jack, “I think those who want to put others out of their misery, they actually just can't bear their own misery at seeing others suffer, that's all. But those doctors weren't going to see you suffer or anything. Whether they thought your life would just be a burden to you or not, it really wasn't their business to take it from you. Perhaps one single doctor might have decided to abort you, but luckily it wasn't a decision to be made by one single doctor. Since there were several doctors, I'd say it was highly unlikely that they would have reached the decision to end your life. Logically they had to reach the decision to let you live. And since it's like that – since it was only logical and not an act of kindness or anything – you don't owe them anything!”
And just in case this wasn't good enough an explanation, Jack added: “The story of your origin is all YOUR story. It's not the story of some doctors who generously decided not to abort you. No, these doctors weren't generous at all – they were just doing their fucking job, that's all! They just did what logics demanded. So you don't owe them anything. Besides, they didn't sign a contract with you that you should be a good girl else they would have aborted you. There is no such contract or anything. They just did what they logically had to do, that's all. The rest is YOUR story, not THEIRS! It's YOUR story, your very own! It's up to you what you do with your life now. Up to you and you alone!”
Theresa nodded once again.
She hadn't been able to bear the emptiness within herself anymore. Adolescence is a time in life when everything becomes so uncertain... That's why she had run away from home. And then she had called Jack, this creature of the night who once could have killed her. Maybe she wanted him to kill her, just so that she could get rid of the painful emptiness inside her!
Well, the creature of the night had come, and he hadn't killed her. On the contrary, he had unrolled her whole past in front of her eyes and given it back to her and told her that it was hers, all HERS!
Yes, it helped somehow. She had been right to call him!
Jack motioned towards the two-wheeled contraption in front of them and asserted that this was his motorbike.
“Where are we going?” asked Theresa.
“I don't know...” said Jack. “Where would you like to go?”
“Let's drive back to Lausanne!”said Theresa.
“Sure!” said Jack, gave her the helmet to put on, slid the bike onto its wheels and started the engine. They both mounted it and Jack threw it in gear and drove off.

For half an hour, Jack and Theresa had nothing but the swoosh of the wind in their ears. A conversation was hardly possible, so they could keep silent without feeling awkward.
After a while they reached more familiar terrain. Should Jack drive Theresa home? When the turn came he slowed down and finally almost stood still. The noise of the wind and the engine abated.
“Should I take you home?” he asked.
“Please not!” she answered.
“But I can't take you to my place – my parents wouldn't understand,” said Jack, “so where shall we go?”
“Wherever you like,” she answered.
“Okay,” said Jack, threw the bike in gear and drove off again as if he already knew where they would spend the night.
Actually he had no idea where they should go. Should he offer Theresa a hotel? Would that be the kind of thing a gentleman does? The kind of gentleman who is successful with women? Jack didn't know, and he didn't know what a night in a hotel might cost either. A few franks or hundreds of franks? Everybody knows this kind of thing, only Jack had no idea.
And if they went to a hotel, would they take a double-room with a big double-bed, or should he take two separate rooms? Would one of these solutions seem too forward, or the other too cold?
Jack decided he surely didn't have enough money on him anyway. He would drive to the beach in Vidy. There he would find a barbecue-spot and they would lie in the grass, waiting till morning.
But then he remembered that he hadn't eaten yet this evening. Theresa's stomach was surely just as empty as his. It was a strange thought that beneath Theresa's skin there would be a stomach which could be empty or full... Jack wondered whether he might be able to touch that skin soon, caress it, kiss it... This was an even stranger thought and his testicles started tingling with anticipation! It was the same kind of tingling he felt when he looked down from the diving board into the swimming-pool. It was excitement, of course, but also mingled with... fear! Yes, Jack was afraid he had to admit that to himself: it was fear!
At least his money should be enough for a decent meal, he thought.
The motorbike entered the well-illuminated town.
Jack drove down to the lake-side where there were many cafés and restaurants and parked the bike.
“Shall we find a place to eat?” he asked.
“I'm not even hungry,” said Theresa shyly, as if this were a terrible confession.
“But I am!” said Jack forcefully. He was sure Theresa would eat too, once it came to it. Theresa finally got off the motorbike somewhat abashedly, so that Jack could throw his leg over and get off too. He stood the bike on its stand, took the helmet from Theresa's slender hands and fixed it to the back of the bike with the padlock he always used for that.
A moment later they entered an Italian restaurant, Jack ahead of Theresa. She tried to behave naturally, but the nervous way in which she tried to hold back the door, even though Jack held it open for her, betrayed her anxiety. Jack sat down at a table and she was more or less forced to take the seat facing him. He asked her if she'd like a glass of red wine and she said yes, even though she had never tried any in her life yet.
The waiter brought the menus. Theresa looked at hers studiously. It gave her something to do, and in the end she settled for ravioli. Jack ordered a steak with chips and a small bottle of red wine.
The wine came before the meal. Jack and Theresa clinked their glasses, then Jack drank two or three mouthfuls, smacking his lips. Theresa drank a mouthful too and found the taste absolutely foul. After that she just sipped from her glass, and then she felt something else - each drop had a chance to develop its aroma in her mouth, and now she felt the subtlety of it. There was something almost a bit bewitching in it. Sip by sip, her glass gradually emptied too, and Jack filled it up again. The meal came, and they plowed their way through it with their forks and knives. With the wine helping, Theresa started feeling pleasantly relaxed, like on a Sunday morning when you've already woken up but don't need to get up just yet.
Eventually the wine-bottle was empty, the plates were empty and Jack had already payed the check. Jack got up. Theresa got up too, holding onto the edge of the table, and pushed the chair under the table with more might than she had intended to. She giggled! She followed Jack out of the restaurant, paying attention not to graze the other diners as she maneuvered between the tables.
Outside the motorbike was standing ready.
“Are we going to bed now?” asked Theresa, quite unaware of any latent double-entendre in this question. She really looked tired.
“Where would you like to sleep?” asked Jack, and it was a serious question. He really didn’t know where to go now.
Theresa furrowed her brow, almost lost her balance and had to hold on to Jack. She breathed in the delicious freshness of the evening air and said: “In the city park!”
“Okay,” said Jack, relieved that this was a suggestion he would be able to realize.
He started the engine of the motorbike, gave the helmet to Theresa, threw his leg over the saddle and waited till she had settled down behind him. Then he gently drove off. She threw her arms around his belly and nestled herself against him. Like two spoons in a kitchen-drawer, thought Jack. He drove to the lake-side in Vidy.
He parked the motorbike somewhere on one of the countless, now deserted, parking-lots for picnickers and bathers and continued on foot to the lake-side with Theresa holding his arm.
On the lake they saw a lit-up classical steam-boat (probably converted to diesel, Jack thought) plough through the water. Dancing music with loud bass was drifting all the way over to them.
Theresa looked at Jack. The lights from the lit-up boat were shining in her eyes. Her lips were parted and she breathed through her mouth. Her eyes held Jack fast. Jack lowered his head and came closer to her. He saw the pupils in her eyes dilate, and he closed his own eyes, because hers were so close.
Then he felt her soft, warm lips on his mouth.
For years Jack had only ever stroked his cat, but when he felt the pressure on his lips, somehow he knew what to do.
Soon they were lying under the twigs of a tree with low branches. They were lying on Jack's jacket, covered by Theresa's jacket. They were lying close together. Jack caressed Theresa's face. Following the curve of her jaw, he ended up caressing her under the chin as well, just as he had learned to caress the cat. Cats have an odoriferous gland there, he knew. They like to push it against things they own to mark them with their smell.
Human bodies are really warm. Sharing the warmth, Jack and Theresa became sleepy and eventually dropped off.
The next morning they were woken quite early by the full power of the sun. When you sleep under the open sky, there are no blinds or curtains to hide you from sunrise. Jack and Theresa felt as fresh and alert as they never had this early in the morning ever before. They sat in the grass together and looked across the calm blue water of the lake. Theresa took off her shoes.
Barefoot they chased each other over the dew-wet grass and between the trees.
Then, without any particular goal, hand in hand, they walked along the water's edge.
Later they found a bakery that had opened early and where they could get bread-rolls fresh out of the oven. They crammed them in their mouths and found them more delicious than anything they had ever tasted before!
After a while they had the feeling that they couldn't just go on playing around aimlessly for ever. It was time to decide what to do. Theresa thought of her parents and felt guilty. What Jack and Theresa had shared together till now had been like a kind of interlude, but it couldn't last for ever. They had to make a decision now. Jack knew it too, and after picking up their jackets, he led the way to his motorbike.
“Shall I drive you home now?” he asked.
“I'd be grateful,” answered Theresa.
After about half an hour's drive through the cool morning air they drove past the road sign indicating the place where Theresa lived. The name prickled Theresa's eyes with sweet bitterness, but she ascribed the tears in her eyes to the head wind. After a few more turns, Jack stopped in front of Theresa's house. He put his feet down on the ground as soon as the bike stood still. He waited for Theresa to get off the bike so that he could swing his leg over the saddle and get off too. But she didn't get off straight away.
“We've arrived,” he said laconically.
“I know,” answered Theresa just as laconically.
The bike was not in neutral. Jack was holding the clutch and the little two-stroke engine was rattling gaily. Theresa had this irrational fear that he would just pull on the gas with his right hand, loosen the clutch with his left and drive off as soon as she climbed off the bike. She hesitated a while longer, so Jack turned the ignition key and the engine died off.
Jack and Theresa were still sitting on the little machine. Around them everything was quiet and still. Mothers were cooking and fathers were not yet home for lunch. The smells of diverse lunches wafted past them. Theresa wished Jack would just switch the engine back on and drive away with her. She wanted to feel the head wind again, she wanted to keep holding on to Jack as the little bike carried them onwards... But he didn't, of course. There was nothing but stillness. It was her turn to act. Jack wouldn't suggest anything more and the bike wouldn't carry them over the asphalt through the landscapes forever.
So she got off.
Jack could get off too, now. He threw his leg over the saddle and stood in front of her, without any metal between his legs anymore. He stood the bike on its stand and held out his hand to Theresa. She put the helmet in his outstretched hand and he laid it on the saddle of the bike.
Again he held out his hand, but Theresa had nothing more to give him. He just wanted to shake her hand and say goodbye all formally!
Finally Theresa found her voice again: “Come with me till the door, please.”
“Okay,” said Jack, but he felt very awkward. Not knowing what to do with his hands, he followed Theresa through the garden-gate and looked at the dried-up flowerbeds as though he was greatly interested in them. Theresa rang at the door and waited.
Why was she ringing at her own door, Jack wondered, feeling ever more uncomfortable.
Theresa's mother opened the door. Luckily it wasn’t her father, because he would have slapped her face on both sides. Her mother didn't have such fast reflexes, and after the first split seconds it was already too late for bodily punishment, since it wouldn't have seemed like a natural, spur-of-the-moment thing anymore. All she said was: “Oh my God!”
Then she just stood there amazed.
Finally she called out: “Come in, come in!”
She pulled Theresa into the house, looked up into the sky with a frown as though a heavy thunderstorm was just about to begin, then shut the door behind herself and Theresa.
Jack, his legs still a bit stiff from the ride, waddled back to the garden-gate. He had to drive back to his own home now, and he was not looking forward to it.
The door of the house opened once again and Theresa's mother stood in the doorframe.
“Please come in for a moment, sir!” she called out.
“Good morning, m'am,” Jack answered with his best manners and obediently came back. He wiped his feet on the little carpet at the entrance and entered the house. He took in the first impressions of this alien household. Theresa's mother closed the door behind him.
Jack was led into the living-room, told to take a seat and left to his own devices.
He stretched his legs and tried to relax.
He was in the home of an alien family, and he saw all the alien objects that belonged to Theresa's most familiar surroundings. He felt a bit lost. He was dirty and he could smell his own stale sweat. He didn't fit into this clean, sober and chaste ambiance. His moist body didn't fit into the soft leather armchair that he was impregnating with his sweat.
The woman came back. Jack stood up. The woman smiled - as good housewives always do when they offer something to a guest – and said: “Would you like to stay for lunch? We invite you cordially!”
Theresa appeared behind her. She had freshened up, and Jack believed he could smell the soap even from where he was standing, on the other side of the room.
“If you're sure you don't mind...” mumbled Jack, trying to make eye-contact with Theresa to read her expression, and quickly looking away again so as not to embarrass them both. He still seemed to have seen in Theresa's eyes that she too would like him to stay a while longer.
“Please, you are very welcome!” said the woman smiling.
“Okay then, thank you very much,” said Jack.
“I have to leave you for a moment,” said the woman and disappeared in her kitchen.
Jack and Theresa stood together in the living room. They were alone together, but for a long moment neither one knew what to say. Finally Theresa asked Jack to come to her room. Jack was not sure this was the proper thing to do under the circumstances, but he let her guide him up the stairs, along the corridor and to her room.
Her room was a typical girl's room, and Jack also realized that Theresa was several years younger than he was. She was still half a child. The way things were set up was girlish, but the objects in themselves were of good taste, even if somewhat erratic. On the bookshelf several plush toys formed a peaceful round. On her desk stood a wood-carved giraffe which seemed to be eating from the potted plant next to it. On the wall there was a glass case with little animals made of china in it. Some of them had a young one next to them, others had the lid of a smarties box in front of their snout like a feeding bowl from which they appeared to be eating...
Wherever Jack looked he saw the loving care of a dreamy girl. But there was none of the kind of off-colour cliché femininity that would differentiate the model of a girl's room from the model of a boy's room in a furniture shop. None of the objects were willfully feminine as they would have been in the room of an expensive prostitute, where the atmosphere is made intrusively feminine on purpose. Theresa had just set things up as it suited her, without consciously trying to impress her femininity onto them, but since she was a young woman they automatically exuded a certain femininity nevertheless.
On the bedside table there stood a compact hi-fi unit. While Jack was examining the scene on the bookshelf, Theresa asked him if he liked the songs of a certain Chris de Burgh.
Jack had never heard of this singer. “He's a British pop-singer...” explained Theresa.
She invited Jack to listen to her favourite songs with titles such as: “I'm counting on you”, “Borderline”, “Crying and Laughing”...
Jack liked the melodious songs and their texts which sang of the misery of the world. They were without philosophical grandeur, but they had all the more unassuming humanness.
After Chris de Burgh Theresa switched to the sentimental Garfunkel: “Ninety-nine miles to L.A.”
Jack liked all these songs (for ever after they would always remind him of Theresa and the time they had spent together at the lake-side). Jack hoped Theresa could see that he was entranced. He tried to comment smartly on the songs, but it was hard to find something smart to say. Anyway, there wasn't really any need, because Jack barely had time to say more than “Yeah, that's great!” before Theresa put on another song. Apparently his expression was enough proof for her that he really appreciated her favourite songs.
Theresa was putting away a cassette and pulling out a CD while Jack clumsily tried to offer smart art criticism of the songs he had just heard. But Theresa wasn't even listening. She interrupted him.
“Do you like Bach's music?” she asked.
“Bach as in Johann Sebastian Bach?” asked Jack, surprised.
“Yes,” said Theresa, standing there with the CD in her hand, not daring to move. Her eyes were begging him not to laugh at her.
Jack wasn't laughing. He knew Bach's music mainly as a self-supporting structure with which you can't express yourself, unlike the music of classical and romantic composers that came later. Was Theresa pulling his leg? It didn't look like it. Rather, she looked afraid that Jack wouldn't understand.
“Well, I must say...” said Jack.
Theresa quickly put the CD in the hi-fi unit and switched it on.
“It's Bach's triple concerto,” she said.
“A triple concerto?” Jack had never heard of Bach's triple concerto. He hadn't known that Bach had written something like that.
But then he kept quiet because the music began. And he heard real sorrow without a trace of sentimentality or corniness. The serenity of this piece of music - carefully structured and crafted through and through as Bach's music always is - formed a strange contrast to the desperate voices of the pop-singers they had listened to just a moment ago.
Without being invited to, Jack sat down on Theresa's bed. Theresa sat down next to him and they listened to Bach's triple concerto together.
Eventually calls that lunch was ready reached them from the dining room and pulled them out of the timeless music.
“Lunch is ready,” said Theresa and switched off the hi-fi unit at the next upbeat, as Jack noticed.
Jack followed Theresa down the stairs. A man had come into the house, taken off his shoes and was in the midst of putting on his slippers. He was well-dressed and well-groomed with a smart moustache and rather cold, blue eyes. It was strange to see such a businessman in the familiar surroundings of his home. He wondered why such a worldly man would have brought his family to a small countryside town like this rather than one of those sleek, newfangled residential areas in the city or at the lake-side.
The man looked Theresa over in silence. He didn't say a single word to greet her, and she didn't say anything either. He turned towards Jack instead and said dryly: “Good afternoon, Sir!”
“Good afternoon,” answered Jack simply.
An uneasy tension hung in the air. Theresa's mother tried to defuse it by saying gaily: “Would you like to sit here, Sir?”
Jack thanked her and moved over to the chair she had indicated. He remained standing behind it for the time being.
Theresa's mother brought another steaming dish from the kitchen. Theresa's father sat down in his chair at the head of the table. Theresa sat down next to Jack. Theresa's mother was still scooping food onto the plates.
“Please sit down!” ordered Theresa's father, and so Jack obeyed and immediately got a full plate to put down in front of himself. Theresa's mother was still scooping. Now she handed over a full plate to her husband. He set the plate down and waited, looking bored. Theresa's mother was still scooping. Now Theresa got her plate and her mother was finally scooping for herself. When she had finished and sat down at last, Theresa's father said, as though he had been the one carrying the responsibility for this meal: “Enjoy the meal!”
“Thank you, you too...” mumbled the two women as well as Jack.
The meal consisted of rice and meat with some kind of sauce. Jack was hungry and enjoying it.
“It's good,” he said after a while.
Theresa's mother acknowledged his comment gratefully and started explaining something about the meat, a kind of ragout. But Jack had nothing more to comment about it and the silence came back.
Now it was Theresa's father breaking the silence. He cleared his throat and turned towards Jack: “Where did you get to know my daughter, Sir?” he asked.
Jack almost choked on a forkful of rice. He quickly drank a mouthful of the cold tea in front of him and straightened up. He looked at the man and wondered what he should say. What could Theresa have told her mother?
He had no bright ideas what he should say, but he definitely had to answer fast, because a long hesitation would surely be even worse than a stupid answer!
What he finally said was the most stupid thing he could say, but he really hadn't had any better idea: “On the street.”
“During daytime or nighttime?”
“In the evening.”
Jack wasn't making it easy for Theresa's father with his short answers (but that was probably still better than getting caught up in a complicated web of lies, thought Jack).
Theresa's father gave up this line of questioning. He would get the truth out of Theresa later, he thought.
With feigned, polite interest he asked: “And what's your occupation, Sir?”
“I'm a student.”
“May we know what you are studying?”
“I'm studying medicine,” said Jack, feeling self-conscious. That at least was a good answer. Everybody likes a medicine-student!
“And do you enjoy your studies?”
Now Jack felt he was on safe ground at last! He became quite talkative. He explained how he learned things laboriously without seeing any point in them beyond passing the next exams, but then one day he would suddenly make the surprising discovery - maybe just by picking up some conversation about someone's health-problems - that he could see very clearly how two things fit together that otherwise would have seemed quite disconnected and coincidental. He explained how feelings he had in his own body, like the exact course of a muscle ache, suddenly made sense because of what he had learned in anatomy. Often, while learning, the subject matter seemed loose and disconnected, and it was only later, in some unrelated life-situation that had nothing to do with his studies, that things suddenly fell into place. While studying, it was often frustrating to be absorbed in little details and not seeing the big picture. But then, with sufficient knowledge of vast quantities of such small details, the big picture suddenly sprang out at him unexpectedly! He described what a satisfying feeling that was!
Suddenly the knowledge he had acquired step by step all came together in front of his inner eye and offered a logical explanation for something that might otherwise have seemed like magic.
Theresa's father listened, mesmerized. His fork was lying in his plate, quite forgotten.
Jack put a lot of emphasis on these positive experiences, rare though they were in real life, and left out any description of the huge, windowless lecturing theatres where knowledge was imparted (or supposed to be imparted). He didn’t describe the lonely platform where the professor stood, far below the top row of benches, all alone and looking tiny, busily scribbling on a blackboard or white-board. The rows of benches and tables reared up to infinity (or almost) in a semicircle around this platform. The top row of benches where Jack usually sat was right under the high ceiling where the ventilators hummed soporifically. Behind it was the lecture theatre’s back wall and the students’ entrance where Jack usually slipped in once the lecture had already begun, because for some reason he was always a bit late…
Seen from the outside, the entrance to a lecture theatre looked just like the entrance to any kind of ordinary seminary room. Only when you opened the door did you get a bird's eye view over an avalanche of benches and tables down to the far-off valley at the bottom where a lonesome figure was lecturing.
Yes, Jack usually came to the lectures when they had already started and just sat down in one of the back rows in a hurry. His gaze would slip over the bent heads of his busily scribbling fellow-students and finally impact on the far-off blackboard. Then he would try to understand what was written there. It usually took a while till the professor’s scribblings started to make any kind of sense in Jack's mind. He would listen to the professor’s voice, and he would try hard to sharpen his wits and follow the reasoning. But after half an hour of concentration at best, his attention would start to slip again, and the professor's voice would become a murmuring sound more and more like the gentle purling of a rivulet. The humming of the ventilators overhead would turn into an endlessly rising and falling drone becoming ever more insistent. Jack's head would sink to his chest, and suddenly he would have a feeling of dropping off his bench and landing on the row in front of him. Startled, he would pull himself together again, but the professor's voice would still be purling on, and the student in the row in front of him (maybe a pretty female student?) would still be scribbling madly, so Jack obviously hadn’t fallen on top of her… In actual fact, as he would soon realize, he had only ‘dropped off’ to sleep, not dropped off his bench…

That’s how Jack knew where the saying « to drop off » really comes from. When you just don’t manage to stay awake, it really feels as though you were « dropping off » from somewhere (slipping off your bench or whatever) even if it isn’t literally true. We probably inherited such sensations from our monkey ancestors who were sleeping in trees and really risked « dropping off » if they fell asleep without being firmly wedged in place.
Oh yes, and there were the hours and hours he spent in bed with a book nestled tightly in his hand till the poor hand fell asleep, and he would be reading the same few lines again and again, just not taking in the meaning, even though he definitely understood all the words.
True knowledge, Jack thought to himself, was only conveyed by the assistants during lab-work. These assistants were older students, you called them by their first names and you could interrupt them at any moment if something wasn't clear. An explanation only works when it is regulated by feedback from its audience, Jack mused. A professor talking to a packed lecture theatre - where there is no hope of adjusting the lecture to each of the three-hundred students - just isn't the best way to convey knowledge. It was perhaps a useful way in the old days when books were expensive (or possibly when the printing press hadn't even been invented yet) and students had to take their own notes just to have something in their hands for studying later. But nowadays it's just a waste of time to listen to a professor rambling to a lecture theatre full of students. The establishment is holding on to this method of teaching for lack of imagination, that's all.
But Jack didn't say all this to Theresa's father – he only said positive things about the university and its professors. By criticizing the establishment he would only have lowered his own value in Theresa's father's eyes, he felt that intuitively.
And his intuition must have been spot-on, because Theresa's parents were obviously quite taken in by him. They saw him as a bright student, a boy they would have been proud to have as a son!
For a while they didn't know what to say when Jack stopped talking, so Jack cleared his throat and talked some more.
He explained how he still had to do a lot of reading, in spite of all the excellent classes. By reading about the same topic in different books, the dry subject matter would get fleshed out more and more, Jack explained, and become more and more alive in his mind!
Jack explained that the histological structure of an organ would only start to make sense once he knew what the organ actually did in a physiological sense. On the other hand, you couldn't understand the physiological processes before knowing how the organ was built up. So it was a matter of reading a chapter in histology, then reading the corresponding chapter in physiology, then reading the same chapter in histology again (understanding it better this time), and finally reading the corresponding chapter in physiology once again too, by which time things would definitely fall in place in his mind!
Theresa's mother commented admiringly that medicine studies were obviously really tremendously demanding and challenging!
Theresa's father nodded in silent agreement.
Jack realized happily that he had won them over! They would now be proud that their daughter had such a brilliant young man as a friend, and they would not punish her too harshly for her escapade. Furthermore, Jack would now be welcome in their house any time!
After the meal Jack thanked them may times for their hospitality, shook their hands and let them wish him all the best for his studies again and again.
When he touched Theresa's hand, he felt her gratitude and her wish not to lose him.
“We will meet again soon!” he promised her.
Should he give her a kiss?
Not in front of her parents, he decided. But he gave her the cheek-rubbing kind of pseudo-kiss that was in fashion among friends in this part of Switzerland. He could do that, even in front of her parents. And without them seeing it he laid his hand on her hip and let a finger slip beneath her blouse onto her bare skin. It was just a little sign hinting at the intimacy they had shared.

After that, Jack clamped himself onto his motorbike, drove off the driveway and then swiftly accelerated away on the road, the familiar engine-noise filling his ears.
He got home in the course of the afternoon. He drove up from the parking lot onto a strip of grass, up a short slope next to some stairs, then followed a footpath leading to the houses. The small motorbike howled past the gardens in first gear, then Jack pulled the clutch and maneuvered it around a tight corner with his feet. Then he let the engine die, leaving the motorbike to roll silently right up to the door of his parents house. There he parked it under the awning next to the door. His parents didn't much like his bike to be parked there, but if he left it in the parking lot, he would have to cover it up against the weather so that it wouldn't rust away in the rain or snow. But covering it up was a messy business, going round the motorbike several times tucking the corners of the cover down on all sides. And you couldn't do it straight away after arriving. You had to leave the exhaust-pipe to cool down first, else it would burn right through the fabric of the cover. This meant going back out again to cover the motorbike later, unless you forgot...
Jack single-handedly tore the helmet off his head, laid it down on the saddle of the bike, bent down to close the petrol-inlet, straightened up again, plucked his gloves from his hands and stuffed them into the pockets of his jacket, opened his jacket, pulled the ignition-key out of the ignition and stowed it away in his trouser pockets, took the helmet from the saddle of the motorbike and opened the door of the house.
He stepped into the house, left the helmet on the bench above the shoes, slipped out of his jacket while his feet stripped the shoes off each other. He hanged the jacket on its hook and pushed his shoes under the bench with one foot. Then he fished out his slippers with the other foot and slipped into them.
All this was quite automatic, requiring practically no thought at all. And whatever Jack had done in the outside-world, the hook would still be waiting for his jacket. The slippers wouldn't have run away on their own either, and they would be as soft and warm as ever. The space for his shoes would be free as always. This was the world to which Jack could come back anytime, whatever had happened. This was the world he could count on, the place where he could eat, sleep and wash himself till he was ready to confront the outside-world once again.
But now his mother came up the stairs from the cellar. She had heard Jack's home-coming noises. The glance she gave him showed him clearly that his home was not a safe haven after all. Her eyes didn't say: “Welcome!” Her eyes said: “Where have you been?”
In that sense Jack couldn't shut out the outside-world. It was as if a piece of outside-world was still sticking to him. And his mother's eyes were searching for it. Jack didn't know what she could see, but he tried to hide it by giving himself an unconcerned air.
His mother couldn't have a clue, could she? But her searching eyes would continue to pierce through him for quite a while yet, and he would have to control his facial expressions in the strictest manner for quite a while too. After all, he couldn't allow a piece of outside-world to pollute the safe family-world, could he?
Jack had taken in an overdose of outside-world, and in order to digest it he now needed undemanding, familiar surroundings. He already had too many new impressions to digest. He needed surroundings that would stay neutral without demanding attention themselves.
But his mother's behaviour was far from neutral. It wasn't meant to be neutral. She definitely meant to make an impression on him. She wanted him to feel her disapproval that he had disappeared so suddenly, just when it had been time for supper, and stayed away for the whole night!
“Where have you been?” she asked again.
Jack answered as brightly as he could: “Oh, I just went for a drive!”
“I was worried...” said his mother in a low voice and regretted it straight away, because she knew she was giving Jack power by exposing her feelings like that. But she quickly got a hold of herself again and let out a chain of reproaches: What did he think? She didn't even know if she should keep the meal warm for him or what, whether he would be here for breakfast and lunch or what! Why didn't he say where he was going and when he would be back? Why didn't he leave a note at least? Why didn't he tell anybody when he would be back?
Well, Jack himself hadn't known when he would be back, had he?
Just to be melodramatic, he answered: “I didn't even know whether I would ever come back.”
It was meant to sound cruel, but it sounded ridiculous to his own ears. How would he have financed his studies on his own? He wasn't entitled to a scholarship because his parents were too rich for that. In other words: he was a prisoner of this house!
Jack pictured the scene of the previous evening in front of his inner eye once again, just after the phone had rung and he had promised Theresa to meet her straight away. Now let's assume he would have gone into the kitchen after that and told his mother: “I'm going now.”
“Where?” she would have asked.
“Somewhere, anywhere...” he would have answered.
“But what about supper?” she would have asked. “It's practically ready, you can't go now!”
“Fuck supper!” he could have said. But of course he wouldn't have...
No, no, let's start again - he would have gone into the kitchen and said: “Bye, mom, I'm leaving now, got things to do!”
“What about supper? You can't just go without supper!”
“Fuck...”
No, this didn't work either. What about: “I said I would go, so I'm going now!”
“But Jack, you can't just leave without supper!”
Jack would have left nevertheless, banging the door. And now his mother would be standing before him with exactly the same reproaches. So telling her anything before leaving wouldn't have made the slightest difference!
So that's why he had left without saying anything, actually.
Jack pushed his way past his mother and went up to his room where he grabbed a paper-back science fiction novel he had been reading, hoping it would distract him. But he didn't manage to concentrate. It was like trying to memorize anatomy...
His mother resumed her household chores, but she couldn't concentrate anymore either. The manner of Jack's return had shocked her more than how he had left the evening before. She didn't know why, and she didn't know what she had expected. She knew he was a young adult now and that she had to let him go. But she couldn't fathom why his behaviour needed to be so impossible!
Of course she knew he was grown up and should be treated as such, but often he really just behaved like an immature adolescent!
As evening came, Jack was lying on his bed reading. When he was called down for supper, he came down and greeted his father with the same noncommittal tone as always, but his father answered as curtly as if he had recently been flouted by him. Both his parents were impossible!

If Jack had spoken to his mother before leaving on that evening when Theresa had called him, she might have managed to convince him to at least have supper before leaving, or she would have tried anyway and got him mixed up in an endless argument. She would of course have hoped that his sudden urge to go for an evening-ride on the motorbike would have evaporated by the time he finished supper.
But of course Jack would still have left, if not before supper, then at least afterwards. He would have arrived much later at the railway station in Freiburg, and maybe he wouldn't have met Theresa there anymore. Maybe he would just have found mangled pieces of her on the railroad-tracks..., or maybe that is still just a much too melodramatic fantasy after all.
In any case his meeting with Theresa had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. And didn't Jack have the right to make such spur-of-the-moment decisions? But his family made them almost impossible. His family was like a big millstone hanging around his neck...
For years Jack had been dreaming of having his own car. His parents said no. It wasn't so much that they really couldn't have afforded to pay him a car of his own. It was rather that they found it excessive.

Oh dear! Me the ghost, following Jack as you are following him too by reading all this, I just got utterly bored by what’s bound to come now: an endless rambling about cars and why Jack definitely needed one!

Sure, it wasn’t really about the car. It was about being an adult in Western society. Jack saw the car as an inherent part of this. In another culture, in another tribe, it might have been the right to carry a spear… Or whatever. It was a symbol. Jack was half aware of this himself as became evident in his ramblings…
For years Jack had spent two hours on each way to and from the university, on foot, by bus and by train. He always had to run to catch the train so as not to miss it. When he got to town, he had to run some more, up a steep slope, because the buses going to the university started from a square in the town’s centre, not at the railway-station. Of course there would have been yet other buses going from the railway-station to the town-centre, but they took the long way around, stopping for countless grandmas with countless shopping bags, so it was faster on foot. The university bus finally took Jack out of town to the campus which was on the other side of town than where his family lived. But even this bus didn't take a direct route. Before dropping students off at the university, it passed a big shopping centre where countless old women got in and out with countless shopping bags almost getting stuck in the doors. Often these old women only took the bus till the next stop, thus forcing it to stop again just for them. The more such women boarded the bus, the longer the trip took. So Jack hated all these women.
Often he was the only male passenger in the bus. A young, dynamic student among all those old women. Of course it was expected of him that he would give up his seat for them, and perhaps even that he would help with the bags. A nice young man would definitely do that!
Of course Jack would have done that too, if he had only occasionally taken that bus. But he was in that bus every single day! So he just put his headphones on his ears, set the volume loud enough to hear the music above the engine noise, and was dead to the world. The old women only shook their heads at him – what's wrong with today's young people?
When Jack finally arrived at the university, he was always either much too early or much too late – it was impossible to estimate the duration of this complicated trip accurately. After all, it depended on all those old women and the number of additional stops they would force on the bus.
The trip home was just like the trip there. But while there were quite a few buses driving to and fro, the trains running to the station closest to the luxury housing estate where his parents lived were much rarer. Often Jack thought he was lucky, and that the bus would arrive in town just in time to take the next train, only to be bitterly disappointed because so many old women would stop the bus and climb in with their endless bags..., that the bus-trip would take just that much longer, and Jack would miss his train by mere seconds and have a long wait at the boring railway-station.
When Jack got home at last, he had to rest – not just because of the hard work at the university, but because of the tiring trip as well.
But his parents didn't want to buy him a car. Not so much because it was too expensive, but rather because they didn't want to spoil their children. For some reason their biggest fear was that their two boys, Jack and Joe, would get spoiled.
A car for the kids was out of the question, but they still let Jack know that it would be acceptable if he got a small motorbike. Of course Jack's mother knew that Jack didn't want a motorbike. She knew he would rather go on taking the train and bus (which was what she really wanted for him), because she knew he hated motorbikes and wouldn't be seen dead on one!
But Jack saw through her, so he still got that motorbike.
It had always been his mother's trick to suggest alternatives she knew he didn't want so that he would give up on his stupid ideas altogether.
If Jack had said something to his mother when Theresa called, his mother would have told him not to leave before supper, hoping that by then he wouldn't want to leave anymore at all. Of course Jack would still have left in the end, but then he might not have found Theresa anymore. Theresa might have killed herself in the meantime, mightn’t she? What was she doing at that railroad station, so close to the tracks, anyway? Jack didn’t know if she had had suicidal thoughts, but it was quite possible.
And so it was with the car versus motorbike too! Jack’s mother had told Jack to get a motorbike rather than a car, knowing that he didn't want a motorbike and that he would most likely give up on the idea altogether. Of course he still got that motorbike, but then he might end up killing himself with it, mightn't he? Just like Theresa might have killed herself too…
Like all mothers, Jack's mother wasn't so keen on the idea that her little baby would have his own means of locomotion.
But if your baby still insists on his own means of locomotion, shouldn't it be a car rather than a motorbike? His mother's trick had backfired, hadn't it?
Actually it would be a good punishment for her if he really killed himself with that motorbike! Then maybe she would learn not to hold back her sons at every turn!
But even if she learned that, who would benefit from that? Not Jack, since he would be dead…
So what was the point of daydreaming about the guilty thoughts she might have at his grave? He would never benefit from those guilty thoughts! (Besides, she might not even have any guilty thoughts, but rather just lament how unreasonable he had been not to travel by train and bus.)
So rather than half hoping that he would really kill himself with the motorbike, Jack should rather make sure he got a car, shouldn't he? He had asserted himself halfway by getting that motorbike, but halfway was not good enough! He should buy that car whatever the cost, on credit or whatever!
And most of all, he should stop driving around with that stupid motorbike! In summer it might still be halfway okay, but in winter, on the slippery icy roads, it was absolutely murderous...
Buy your own car! Don't even ask your parents! Don't be so considerate of them! Do what's right for YOU!
Who knows what Theresa would have done if you had listened to your mother! She might have killed herself all alone in that dark and windy railway-station in Freiburg, next to that macabre refrigerator wagon, while you were ceremoniously having supper with your family! You might yet die yourself if you go on listening to your mother!
Theresa might have died, and you might yet die yourself! Maybe that was too melodramatic, but maybe it was true as well!
Those were the words of Jack's inner voice, but he wasn't strong enough to follow its advice. The months went by and he drove to university every day with his motorbike. His mother had accepted it and his father paid the insurance and the petrol. It was convenient that way.
Jack would never in his life take a bus again. He was a real man now, the little two-stroke engine of his bike growling at the red lights, ready to take off in a great howl as soon as the light turned green. “Takeoff” was actually quite a literal description since the front wheel of the bike occasionally lifted off the ground when he let go of the clutch too brutally...
And then the bike would tear off like a wild stallion!
The front of his body bent forward over the handle-bars, his legs clamped around the bike, that's how Jack was glued to his machine, just like a crazy male frog that somehow mistook this metallic structure for a female.
Actually, long before he had his own bike, Jack had always hated to see this obscene mixture of organic flesh and metallic machine. In winter the heavily-dressed bikies didn't look too bad on their bikes. But in summer, when their bare legs embraced the hot metal, that just looked grotesque! Jack never rode his bike bare-legged!
But bare-legged or not, in case of an accident flesh and steel-plates would still get caught up in each other, and blood would mix with petrol...
And yet, driving a motorbike is manly! No man would need to be ashamed of his motorbike.
Sitting in a bus full of old women and their shopping-bags, day-in and day-out, that on the other hand just wasn't manly. Maybe Jack wouldn't have minded so much if he had felt like a man otherwise. But since that wasn't the case, having to sit in such a bus was like an affront to him!
Even if you can't afford a car, there are still more dignified two-wheeled vehicles than motorbikes, namely scooters. You don't clasp those with your legs like a crazy male frog trying to mate – rather, you sit on them almost like on a chair. The bigger and more luxurious models have discreet four-stroke engines that don't growl at the red lights, because you don't continuously need to feed the engine with little bursts of gas like a primitive two-stroke engine that keeps wanting to die off (at least if the throttle for idling isn't set right).
And when you drive off as the light turns green, there is no howl and the front-wheel doesn't lift off the ground because the automatic transmission engages gently however nervous the driver may be. The engine never revs up like mad in neutral, because if you give it enough gas, the transmission engages and the scooter drives off.
So a scooter is definitely a more civilized vehicle than a motorbike.
And why hadn't Jack bought a scooter?
Well, the simple answer was that scooters are more expensive than small motorbikes...
Jack would have had to save up money longer, and his mother would have been happy, hoping he would end up giving up the idea of having a vehicle of his own altogether.
That was the reason (or at least it was the reason Jack could admit to himself) that he had bought a primitive motorbike rather than a dignified scooter.
In any case he had freed himself from the bloody buses!
Now he didn't need to travel with the grandmas anymore. All the bus-drivers ever got to see of him nowadays was his fiery exhaust pipe! And the trip that used to take him two hours or more was doable in under twenty minutes nowadays. Jack practically always managed to keep it under twenty minutes, thanks to his aggressive driving-style and slipping through traffic jams quite illegally with the small bike.
But why had traveling with the old grandmas been so bad? Why did Jack despise those grandmas so much? Any of those grandmas could have been HIS grandma, after all. Jack still had both his own grandmothers, and he didn't despise them, even if they took buses. So why did he despise all those old women he met on the buses?
Contempt just consists of convincing yourself (and others around you) that someone else isn't worthy of your respect. And if someone isn't worthy of your respect, that might be because he or she doesn't deserve his or her existence in the first place. And if they don't deserve their existence, then there is reason to believe that their existence will only be transitory, since it's just based on luck rather than true competency. And if their existence is only transitory, then there is no need to come to terms with it.
So if you despise someone, you just ignore his or her existence because it's undeserved in your eyes and thus can't last. That's what contempt is all about.
But what's the use of contempt?
The use of it is probably that it's contagious, like yawning and so many other things we do. If we steadfastly ignore someone else's competency, then other people will start to doubt this person's competency too. In other words – despising someone is a way of discrediting him or her. And if you manage to sufficiently discredit your enemies so that nobody gives them a chance anymore, then they will have a hard time proving themselves again.
So contempt has its uses – as a tool to deal with your enemies!
Contempt is a perfidious way to finish off your enemies! It's also a very clever way, because you don't confront your enemies directly and so stay out of harm's way. You just withhold recognition, maybe because you begrudge them their success, or maybe simply because you're just jealous.
But what on Earth did Jack begrudge the old grandmas he met on the buses?
Of course, if they had been medicine students like him, it would have been logical not to acknowledge their existence much, because they would have died before finishing their studies and thus really wouldn't have been worthy of taking seriously.
Jack used to spring up into the bus all light-footedly, and he sprang out again just as light-footedly. If any of those old women had tried to race him, they would have failed miserably. In that case they wouldn't have deserved to be taken seriously either.
But these old women had never said they wanted to race him. They never claimed to want to take him on, neither physically, nor in terms of his studies.
On the contrary, if they had ever had a chance to chat with him, they might even have admired the idealistic young student in him! If he had used his charm on them, they would have concluded that young people aren't as bad as they sometimes seem and that there's still hope for the future of mankind!
So why on Earth did Jack despise these old women who weren't even in any way challenging him?
Well, in order to answer that, you first had to realize there were some things the old women definitely had in common with Jack:
They didn't earn money (anymore) but lived off a pension. Jack the student didn't earn money either but lived off his parents.
The old women couldn't move around independently because they were too old for that.
Young Jack couldn't move around independently because he was too young for that (didn’t have a job yet).
They were equally dependent and constrained, Jack because he was too young and still a student, the old women because they were too old and retired.
Jack felt the world had somehow mistaken him for an old woman. The world didn't seem to notice his youthful energy or his male gender.
So now Jack had to show in every possible way that he was NOT one of these old women. He wasn't one of them! He couldn't be one of them, because he despised them with all his heart! That was the only way to definitely show he wasn't one of them himself. If he could find a way to express his contempt for them more clearly, he would do so, because it was the only way to teach the world that he didn't belong with them!
If Jack had taken the bus out of his own free will, surely he would have been kind with the old women, and surely nobody would have mistaken him for one of them.
But he didn't take the bus out of his own free will. He had been classified into this group of old women. If now he was even nice with them, that would be like a confirmation that the classification had been correct. But Jack wanted to show that this classification was wrong. Just look at me! I have nothing in common with these pitiful old bags! Get me out of here!
The women themselves had never claimed that Jack was one of them. They never would have had that idea. Jack didn't need to despise them just to make that clear.
But in some sense mankind, society or whatever, had claimed that Jack was an old woman by lumping him together with old women. Mankind, society, or whatever else it was, had to be taught differently. That's why Jack despised these old bags and hated them with all his heart! It wasn't that he wanted to crush them. He didn't care about crushing them or not, he just wanted to lift himself up to the place in society that he felt he was due.
Unfortunately it seemed he would have to crush those old women to reach that place, or so in any case he felt.

Or maybe he should put on a belt of explosives and blow himself up in one of those buses full of old women? Maybe that would teach the world that it had been wrong to lump him together with old women?
For an old woman with the feelings of an old woman it is not even demeaning to be an old woman.
But for a young man with the feelings of a young man it is definitely demeaning to be taken for an old woman!
An old woman in the role of a young man is not good for anything, just as little as a young man is suitable to play the role of an old woman. Being one or the other isn't demeaning as such. But being given the wrong role with respect to who you really are is very demeaning! That's the problem!
Now Jack had solved the problem by buying a motorbike. Now nobody would ever mistake him for an old woman ever again!
And so his hatred of old women evaporated at last, and Jack felt much, much better and much freer.
But apart from the short, refreshing drive replacing the endless trip in the bus, the motorbike hadn't changed his life as completely as he would have hoped. There are countries where neither old women nor young men own motorbikes. There are countries where nobody can afford a motorbike. In such a country people would have laughed about this spoiled Westerner who thought he needed a motorbike for his salvation!
But as is so often the case, it wasn't really a matter of the objects as such (motorbikes, in this case), but rather of their meaning in a given society. And this meaning varies from one society to another – from an exorbitant status symbol to the expression of a normal and healthy sexual potency. That in any case was its meaning in Jack's eyes...
But maybe Jack was wrong to ascribe such meaning to that motorbike. Maybe mankind (or western society or whatever) didn't even care whether Jack rode a bus or a motorbike. Western society had never even mistaken Jack for an old woman as he imagined. Western society didn't care whether Jack was an old woman or a young man, because one way or another, Western society didn't even see Jack at all, whether as one thing or another. Western society was indifferent to Jack. That's what Jack just couldn't seem to comprehend.
Jack thought he could teach society to see him as one thing rather than another. He saw society as a kind of huge beast that he had to tame.
But society is not a beast that will learn something from you. Even if it really is a kind of beast, it is blind. If you get in its way, it will just crush you. You can make use of it by riding along on it. But you cannot teach it lessons. It's naïve to think it will ever learn anything from you.

You can blow up a bus full of old women (or an airliner, for that matter) and still the world, Western society or whatever big entity you hold a grudge against (even God) just won’t learn its lesson. So it’s no use!
Actually Jack's real problem was not even this beast called society, but rather his relationship with his parents who didn't let him become an adult, and also with himself since he didn't know how to assert himself as an adult.
Society at large wasn't interested in Jack. Society at large doesn't take this kind of personal interest in one of its members, unless you break the law or do some other extraordinary thing (in which case it just locks you up).
But society wanted Jack for military service! He had already received a summons, which under the circumstances he saw as an insult! Before even receiving any of the rights of an adult, they were already trying to burden him with the duties of an adult!
Luckily it was usually easy for students to get this particular duty postponed until after the end of their studies.

One fine and cold morning, Jack drove up to the hospital of Riggisberg on his motorbike. He had to do a practical nursing course here. It was compulsory for every medicine student to complete such a nursing course (just helping out the nurses) before the end of his second year of studies. He was carrying a big backpack on his back, and in the top-case of his motorbike he had a pile of textbooks. That was all he had with him for this four-week-long course. He would live here in this hospital for the duration of the course.
The hospital looked like a big school-house in a small town, built in this old-fashioned, characterless style typical of a certain time-period between the two world-wars, or so Jack guessed. The main entrance was by no means as imposing as Jack would have expected, but that was because he had only known bigger hospitals so far.
Jack didn't exactly look forward to this practical nursing course, but he wasn't afraid of it either. Rather, he was curious. And he had thought about it more than he had admitted to himself, trying to imagine how it would be. How do the inner workings of a hospital look? What exactly do the nurses do all day? It was once again the kind of thing that everybody knew except Jack (thus nobody talked about it, since everybody knew anyway, and thus it was very hard to learn about it if you still happened not to know about it).
But now he would find out.
An inner tension had built up in Jack, and now that he was finally pushing his way through the double doors of the main entrance, he felt it clearly in his stomach.
He went to the reception and informed the secretary there in a carefully crafted « tired voice » (that would betray his inner agitation the least) that he had come for the practical nursing course. He was told to wait. He sat down in a waiting area and leafed through a magazine. He had left his luggage outside next to the motorbike and wondered if he should lug it into this waiting area or what he should do with it. If he had come by car, it would of course have remained locked up in the car and that wouldn't have been a problem. But Jack of course didn't own a car...
His luggage contained everything he needed to survive in an alien place for a while – well, objectively it didn't contain anything of “real” survival value, but it definitely had symbolic value. It contained his personal belongings that he could lay out to make the alien place “his”. They would give him a room to sleep somewhere in this hospital, and Jack would lay out his personal things and the room would become temporarily his own. That's why this luggage was important.
A young woman in a white lab coat had suddenly appeared and addressed him: “Jack?”
Jack tore himself out of his reverie, looked up and said: “Yes?”
“Good morning, Jack! I am nurse Anna!”
“Good morning...” answered Jack, standing up quickly and holding out his hand.
A slim, cool hand touched him briefly.
“Please come with me,” said nurse Anna briskly.
She led Jack down into the cellar explaining this and that in a conversational tone. Jack didn't really grasp any of it, but he acquiesced politely nevertheless. He had to try on a lab coat. When his size was found, he got a whole pile of them on his arms, and then he was told to change into one of them.
Dressed in an immaculate snow-white lab-coat and his arms full of similar lab coats for the next few days, nurse Anna took him back up in the lift.
“If I remember correctly, you'll be needing a room, won't you?” she asked. Without waiting for a reply, she added: “One was vacated this morning, but it's still being cleaned.”
Only now did Jack dare to mention his luggage that he had left outside next to the motorbike and that he should put away somewhere before being sent to work.
“You came with the bus?” exclaimed the woman, as though she were surprised. Maybe she was just surprised that Jack hadn't mentioned it earlier. But Jack had the feeling she was surprised he hadn't come by car as would befit an able-bodied young man.
“I came with my motorbike. My luggage is out there.”
Jack felt awkward saying this. Normal people travel by bus or by car. A bus means that you carry your luggage with you and can't just leave it in the boot of your car. Nobody takes it into consideration that you might have a personal vehicle but without a boot, namely a motorbike. Only crackpots and weirdos drive motorbikes. And even if some normal people might possibly sit on a motorbike occasionally, it would just be for fun, not for driving to work with, especially not to a place where you're going to stay for several weeks! Who ever heard of such a thing!
Jack felt once again how his hatred towards his parents (for letting him have a motorbike but not a car) rose inside him like heat rising from his tummy, up through his throat, threatening to choke him!

Nurse Anna kindly came outside with him, all the way to the parked motorbike.
Did she see Jack as a wannabe rocker, maybe? She didn't comment on his crude motorbike. No comment except maybe for her benevolent smile when Jack gave her his pile of lab coats to hold so that he could put on his big backpack.
Jack felt like a tramp, tramping through life with all his belongings in a backpack.
A backpacker keeps his belongings in a backpack because he has nowhere else to put them, because he doesn't own a place of his own. With his huge backpack on his back he advertises to everybody that he doesn't belong here, else he would have a place to put down his belongings rather than carrying them on his back. Jack had never been attracted to the backpacker-style of life.
A car-driver is different – he has his car, he keeps his things in there. Wherever he goes, he belongs there, he has a place of his own, namely his car. Wherever he goes, he's never further from his personal things than the parking-space where he left his car. He doesn't carry his belongings on his back like a damn turtle!
You recognize the car-driver by his light step. You can see that he belongs here, that he has his own territory somewhere nearby, namely the inside of his car!
Jack didn't have his own territory near-by. He had arrived here loaded up like a beast of burden. He didn't belong here, and anybody could see that!
He was deeply ashamed of his backpack!
A backpack hinders you in your movements, but when you put it down, someone might steal it! In that sense, a backpacker is a clumsy beast – he can't defend himself very well with that heavy backpack on his back, but he can't put down the backpack either, because it could be stolen. In that sense a backpacker is at everyone's mercy!
Jack took off his backpack and carried it in his hand, like a bag. Just to show everybody that he wasn't really a backpacker, or not habitually, anyway...
Indeed, Jack wasn't a true backpacker – he didn't have a territory of his own right here, so he couldn't lock himself or his backpack up in a safe place, but he could still jump on his motorbike and flee (or attack) with a loudly howling engine! Nobody would be able to stop him, or in any case not without hurting themselves in the process too.
Interrupting his thoughts, nurse Anna told him to put down his bag in a storeroom containing flower-pots and cleaning equipment. His room-to-be that was still being cleaned was just around the corner. It was room number 59 on the second floor. Now Jack was brought down to ward number 7 where he would work. His luggage was in the storeroom on the second floor – it was as though the hospital kept it as a hostage so that Jack wasn't free to leave anymore, and so he was like a prisoner now...
On the ward he was assigned to a nurse who greeted him curtly, they exchanged first names, and then off they went to see the patients.
Jack’s first impression was of a wizened, old man sitting on his hospital bed as if it were a go-cart, beckoning to Jack with big, expectant, watery eyes, since Jack was obviously just another white-bloused orderly to him. As soon as he caught Jack’s attention, his fingers - looking like swelled-up sausages - started making circling movements in front of his face.
« Wa-wa-washing now! » he said. « Hey you! Wa-wa-wa… »
Jack was standing all lost in the middle of the room. Three old men, looking wasted and shrivelled-up, were all staring at him. Obviously it was time for their breakfast, but before breakfast they would need to wash, and that was what they were all waiting for. Under normal circumstances, Jack would simply have looked away, not feeling any commonness of spirit with them.
« Hey you, you, you! Hey you! » The old guy on the bed in the corner just wouldn’t give up. Since Jack still wasn’t sure what he was meant to do around here, he looked over towards him.
Delighted, the old man called out: « Wa-washing now! Now washing! »
Jack couldn’t turn away because he had nowhere to turn to. If only the nurse would tell him at last what he was supposed to do! To get a simple, boring task appointed to him, just something clear-cut to do - that would have been his dearest wish at this very moment. Anything to escape from the insistent stare of this obviously mentally challenged old man!
When the man saw that Jack wasn’t moving, he drew the cover aside and pointed at his leg that was set in a cast. Jack saw that the man wasn’t wearing any kind of pants or underwear. His bloated testicles were bald like a child’s, and from his shrivelled-up, blackened penis a plastic tube was running to a plastic bag fastened to the side of the bed.
Jack unconsciously ran his hand over his own trousers, just to make sure his own penis was still there as before, without having grown a similar plastic hose…
The old man was still pointing at his broken leg: « Fell over! Stupid! Shouldn’t have done that! One doesn’t do that! One doesn’t just fall over! Stupid! »
Jack, still at a loss about what exactly was expected of him, was examining the expectant moon-shaped face of the old man. Apart from the fact that the face seemed both old and at the same time childish, it looked almost normal, almost banal. Thin fringes of grey hair fell on his brow in a very unfashionable way. The thick eyebrows gave his stare a certain sternness that could have scared small children, and his watery, light-blue eyes glistened with feverish liveliness. His nose was like a dried-up strawberry stuck in the middle of his face, his lips were moist and trembling with anticipation, his chin was blunt and the skin below it hung loose like used-up sand-paper. His Adam’s apple was jumping up and down.
The man looked like a caricature. But a caricature of what?
The man obviously felt Jack wasn’t attentive enough. He spoke louder with his deep, gravelly voice. He emphasized certain words that he kept repeating.

Indeed, he was being quite didactical, making sure Jack would follow him!
« The idiot! Why does he fall over? One doesn’t just fall over! Not should have done that! Not fall over! His own fault! »
His eyes glistened nastily: « The idiot! »
Jack felt more and more uncomfortable. If that self-declared idiot would just shut up for a minute, maybe he could get a hold of himself again! Then he realized that the nurse was in the midst of explaining to him which wall closet belonged to which patient.
For each patient she fetched two basins and two facecloths. One set for the face, the other for what she called « intimate wash ». Jack didn’t know what she meant by « intimate wash » and had to ask. « The genitals » she said impatiently. She obviously didn’t like being interrupted.
So now Jack had to help to wash the bony but warm bodies from head to toe as they lay there like brittle sticks. That’s how he started his practice work at the hospital of Riggisberg.
Even before the midday-break, Jack learned that a white blouse was not good enough - his trousers needed to be of the white, standard-issue kind too, not a pair of jeans of his own. Yes, the doctors just threw a white blouse over their usual clothes, but that was their privilege. The orderlies had to be snow-white from head to toe.
Of course, thought Jack, a doctor is a real man who slips into a blouse so as not to scare the patients. But under the blouse he remains a real man. The trousers are the piece of clothing containing his manliness, and that’s precisely the piece of clothing he doesn’t need to change or hide. That marks him out as a normal, sexually active member of society. The doctor remains a man, even among his patients. An orderly, on the other hand, must hide his sexual status beneath an immaculate white uniform. Everything white stands under the jurisdiction of the hospital, which includes the genitals in the orderly’s case…
Any stain - any trace of any improper behaviour - would of course stand out against the purity of whiteness…
So Jack had to go back down to the cellar to try on white trousers. His old pair of trousers, as well as a pile of standard-issue white ones for the next few days, he was allowed to take to the rest of his luggage on the second floor.
Then, when the patients had been fed their midday-meal, it was time for the midday-break in the canteen downstairs. Jack learned that he should have ordered his meal in advance and that he would need to see the administrator to decide what kind of catering was appropriate for him. In the meantime he still got something to eat.
After the meal he could at last take possession of his room that was ready by now. The first thing he did was to take off the white lab coat under which he was still wearing a singlet, a shirt and a jumper, all of which he had needed on the drive with the motorbike. But now that he was working in the well-heated hospital, he was getting very warm. Just a shirt under the lap-coat was plenty warm enough!
He laid out his books on the desk in the corner. His pocket-TV and « discman » (as those gadgets were called in the days before all these functions and many more were assembled in a single device called a smart-phone) he put on the bedside-table so they would be within easy reach from the bed. He laid out his favourite CDs next to the discman, and immediately got a sense of satisfaction - the main homely touches were done and he had thus taken possession of the room!
Then he unpacked his toilet bag and brushed his teeth. After that he left his toothbrush standing in the glass on the sink.
And then he lied down on the bed and just stared at the ceiling. After the long motorbike drive in the early morning, he hadn’t had even a moment’s peace. Obviously nobody had thought that he might need one - normal people don’t arrive at work after a lengthy squat in the icy wind… Normal people have cars!
In the afternoon Jack went back down to the ward where he had been working all morning. After all the washing and feeding that had taken place in the morning, there wasn’t much to do, or in any case nobody told Jack what he should do. Just wait for one of the patients to ring the bell because he or she needed to go to the toilet or something like that, Jack guessed.
After standing around feeling a bit lost, he finally sat down at a window in the corridor and looked at the mighty mountains on the other side of the valley.
He was so lost in thought that he at first didn’t even react when he was spoken to. When he gave a jerk at the second « hey! », the woman speaking to him automatically interpreted it as an expression of guilt.
« Don’t you have anything to do? » she asked.
Jack was still blinded by the bright light outside the window and couldn’t discern the woman facing him clearly.

“Sorry?” he said, but then his brain got back into gear and he explained: “Well, actually nobody told me what I should be doing right now...”

He rubbed his eyes and now he recognized the woman. It was the head-nurse who had pointed out that he needed white trousers, not just white blouses. Probably it was the same woman who had also answered his phone-call weeks ago when he had gotten registered for this practical work-experience.

She was short, her hair was cut short too, and there was something permanently mocking in her gaze. She had a habit of clicking her tongue in the midst of talking. When you talked to her, it gave you the impression she was only half listening, that she was busy with something else...

Her smile was permanent too. She said everything with a smile (even nasty things, Jack guessed). And she was always clicking her tongue impatiently, as though to show you that she was just losing her time with you.

Now too she was smiling and clicking her tongue. Her smile looked very self-satisfied, even though her tongue-clicking definitely gave you the impression she was in a hurry and would rather be doing something else than giving you directions.

She stopped a passing nurse and asked her if there wasn't anything for Jack to do.

“Not for the moment,” answered the young nurse, but the head-nurse told her that Jack was here to learn everything about the inner workings of a hospital. So the young nurse said that he could read to Mr. Zbinden.

Jack stood up and followed the young nurse to room number 9, the same room number 9 that had been the first hospital-room he had ever visited in his life. Well, apart from the one he had been born in, presumably, but of course he didn't remember that...

The talkative man with the broken leg luckily wasn't there anymore. He had been wheeled out to some common room somewhere in his wheelchair.

Mr. Zbinden was sitting all by himself on a recliner next to his bed. On a little table in front of him there was a half-full glass of water. Otherwise there was nothing within reach of his thin, wasted arms. He wasn't complaining. He just looked tired.

The young nurse went up to him and spoke rather loudly into his ear: “Hello, Mr. Zbinden! How are you today?”

“Fine, fine,” he answered in a raspy voice, nodding in slow-motion.

“Mr. Zbinden,” said the young nurse in his ear, “would you like us to read you something?”

Mr. Zbinden lifted his head slightly and answered calmly: “Yes...”

He had answered exactly the same way that same morning when he he had been asked to turn over, so that his back could be washed. It was a harmless, placative kind of “yes...” This man just gave the answers expected from him.

The nurse took out a book full of Bible-quotations, opened it at some random page and read a sentence, loudly and clearly.

“Yes...” said Mr. Zbinden, but it wasn't so clear what he meant. Did he signal his agreement with the quotation, or did he just say “yes” to show the nurse that he had heard her?

The nurse looked up from the book and told Jack: “Well, actually you should be doing this now, shouldn't you?”

Jack didn't so much feel like putting himself on show like this, not in front of this self-assured young nurse. He quickly thought of something else, turned to Mr. Zbinden and asked: “Can't you read by yourself, Mr. Zbinden?”

He didn't at all mean it in a demeaning way. He was just trying to gain some time to think of something better to say. But the nurse didn't like it. She wrinkled her nose at Jack, but she didn't say anything. She probably felt she couldn't scold him in front of Mr. Zbinden.

Mr. Zbinden wasn't offended at all. He addressed Jack in his raspy voice, completely ignoring the nurse: “I don't know where my glasses are. I need my glasses.”

Now it was Jack's turn to look at the nurse uncomprehendingly: How could this poor Mr. Zbinden just be deprived of his glasses? She started looking for Mr. Zbinden's glasses.

Jack saw a framed-in Bible-quotation hanging above the bed. He lifted the thin glass-frame from its nail and held it in front of Mr. Zbinden's eyes.

“Can you read this, Mr. Zbinden? Even without the glasses?”

Mr. Zbinden tried. Jack was holding the frame very still, and Mr. Zbinden deciphered the big, black letters quite easily. Jack turned around the frame and looked at the Bible-quotation himself (although he had already seen and read it several times earlier).

“Exactly!” he said finally, just like a school-teacher praising a pupil. “You can read very well, Mr. Zbinden! What a pity books aren't written in such large letters, don't you think? Now we just have to find your glasses again, then you can read on your own!”

The nurse was wrinkling her nose again. The way Jack was talking to this patient was evidently very improper. Jack guessed she would never have praised a grown man for reading well like Jack had just done.

But Mr. Zbinden still wasn't offended. All he said was: “Yes...”

“What used to be your occupation, Mr. Zbinden?” asked Jack, feeling the moment he said it that this must surely be another mistake – you can't ask someone what his occupation USED to be like that, as though you were talking about the distant past. On the other hand, it was clear the old and frail Mr. Zbinden wasn't working anymore... And hadn't been for a long time!

Besides, he wasn't offended. He just answered: “I was a farmer.”

“Did you have cows?” asked Jack. What a stupid question!

“Yes...” Always this gentle, placating “yes”...

But Jack cheerfully went on with his line of questions: “Did you let your cows have calves?”

“Yes...”

“So you had a bull as well?”

“Yes, we had a community bull.”

Jack had no idea what a community bull was, and so he asked, and Mr. Zbinden explained in his raspy voice that it was a bull belonging to several farmers and being passed around depending on which cow was ready for him. Jack asked if the bull was aggressive, but Mr. Zbinden said he wasn't at all. He was tame, even affectionate.

And how was he with the cows, Jack asked. Did he treat them roughly?

Mr. Zbinden explained that he wasn't rough with them, just single-minded.

Jack asked more and more questions. Did the cows need help when they gave birth? What happened to the cows when they grew old? How did Mr. Zbinden feel when he had to sell one of his cows to the butcher?

Nothing but naïve questions, but Mr. Zbinden didn't seem to mind. On the contrary, his answers gradually became longer and more detailed. He even started telling little anecdotes, and his eyes sparkled with more liveliness than usual.

The nurse also tried to take part in the conversation a little bit, helping Mr. Zbinden find the answers to Jack's questions, ridiculing Jack's naïve questions a bit on the same occasion. But Mr. Zbinden stayed focused on Jack. He practically ignored the nurse who was once again holding the book out of which people kept reading to him. Jack would have been bored to tears by this book if people kept reading it to him, and he was sure Mr. Zbinden felt the same!

At some point their conversation was interrupted when another nurse came into the room saying she needed a strong man to help her with lifting a heavy patient into his bed. So Jack took leave from Mr. Zbinden for the time being and left with this other nurse.

The first nurse would surely read to Mr. Zbinden some more now, and Mr. Zbinden would say “yes...” every once in a while when a quotation pleased him especially, or perhaps rather when the nurse paused in her reading long enough so that he felt some reaction from his part was expected...

 

From this day on Jack never sat around on his own anymore when nobody told him what to do – instead, he went over to Mr. Zbinden for a chat!

Every morning the patients got washed in their beds with facecloths. When Mr. Zbinden sat naked on his bed, Jack was always reminded of an anatomical preparation of the kind he had to dissect in the anatomy lab at university – the same raw-boned limbs covered in paper-thin, brittle skin...

But this body was alive! Under the brittle skin (that you had to be careful not to bruise with the facecloth) there was still a pulse, there was still some warmth. It was an unassuming, helpless kind of life, but as long as it wasn't given any particular reason to die, it would go on living.

Two pink nipples pointed out of his feeble chest. They were somewhat hard but still flexible and reminded Jack of small penises. Around those nipples there was a zone of pinker skin (which Jack suddenly remembered was called “areola”). When Jack was concentrating on washing Mr. Zbinden with enough vigour to refresh him but still not hard enough to bruise his brittle skin, he barely saw those nipples and their areola. But when he looked elsewhere (while squeezing out the facecloth, for example) and only saw Mr. Zbinden’s body with his peripheral vision, the contrast between those pink nipples and the surrounding pale skin was so stark that they seemed to light up like flash-bulbs! When Jack turned back to Mr. Zbinden with a shock, all he saw was once again just a harmless old man whose pink nipples were nothing more than innocent nipples...

In general Jack washed this old man in the same kind of frame of mind as he would have groomed a horse. Grooming a horse is not disgusting or shocking. It's an unproblematic thing to do (unless you happen to be allergic to horses, of course). Jack would never have thought that he would be able to touch a human being this intimately without being overwhelmed either by a retching feeling of revulsion or conversely by unbearable lust. Being able to wash a human body without feeling either of these extremes, without having neither an urge to retch and vomit nor to ejaculate wildly, was new and reassuring to Jack.

Of course, there were moments when the incongruous humanness of the anatomical preparation in front of him struck him, as when the strangely pink nipples seemed to flash at him from amidst the expanse of pale skin. But all in all, these moments (when Jack was torn between a feeling of revulsion on one hand and shame at being so repulsed by kindly old Mr. Zbinden on the other) were easily overcome, and Jack was even a little bit proud of himself that he managed so fine...

Yes, Jack mostly managed to wash Mr. Zbinden just as he would groom a horse. Most horses don't mind being groomed by a human, just like a human doesn't mind grooming a horse. Horses are too different from humans, so they don't evoke the same feelings of revulsion or lust. They are neutral for humans, just as humans are neutral for horses too (horses that are mean with other horses can still be perfectly fine with their human caregivers and riders, because that's simply not the same thing).

In fact, Jack concluded, Mr. Zbinden should be washed by a horse. A horse wouldn't worry about his strangely pink nipples!

Humans usually don't mind undressing in front of a pet-animal either. Their genitals are meaningless to a cat or a dog.

So Mr. Zbinden should be washed and dressed by a horse, dog or cat, and should only ever appear before fellow-humans when he was smartly dressed in suit and tie.

Of course Jack realized this wasn't really possible at this point (maybe one day it would be, depending on how these other species evolved over the eons), but he felt it would be a first step if the people washing him at least weren't the same as those reading to him, or talking to him... or simply socializing with him!

As things stood now, all the people who kept Mr. Zbinden company throughout the day were the very same ones who also washed him from head to toe, rubbed his brittle skin, wondered at his strangely pink nipples...

Was this a problem? Does nudity impede the formation of a friendly relationship between people?

No, not necessarily, Jack thought to himself, but nudity should be mutual! The nurses should undress in front of their patients every morning. As far as male patients are concerned, this would be very healthy for their blood circulation as well! Just watching wouldn't be enough, of course. Mutual washing would be the thing!

Of course that's not how things are done at all – even the toilets in the corridor are separate for patients and staff. And many of the patients have to be accompanied to the toilets, while they themselves are of course locked out of the staff-toilets...

The problem with all this is that some of the older patients, like Mr. Zbinden, would probably stay in this hospital till the end of their days. The hospital is their whole life, and the nurses know everything about it and control everything in it. The nurses, on the other hand, have a whole life outside of the hospital as well, and the patients know nothing of this other life, since they only ever see the nurses in their role as nurses, nothing else.

All this gives the nurses immense power over their patients – they control the world of the patients who themselves don't control anything. At the same time the nurses have a whole life in an outside world as well to which the patients have no admission.

And all this means that the nurses have a lot to give their patients, in every sense, while the patients have nothing to give in return. Indeed, whatever the patients could give the nurses would be scooped up from the world the nurses control anyway, since the patients don’t have access to any other world…

So the patients give themselves, having nothing else to give. They give themselves up to the nurses. They become more and more naked, but even that isn't enough – they shrivel up, losing all their flesh, till they disappear altogether.

But maybe they would still have had something else to give, thought Jack, something other than their own languishing bodies. Something they could give without losing themselves in the process. Stories from their past, maybe? They may never leave the hospital again, but they still had a whole life outside of the hospital earlier, didn't they? Like Mr. Zbinden and his stories about the community bull...

But the problem is that the nurses have no use for these stories. The patients shouldn't tire themselves telling such stories. They may never leave the hospital again, they've reached the end of their lives, so why would anyone ask for anything more from them than just to let themselves be carried along by the gentle hands of the nurses?

But Jack felt these geriatric patients needed more than that. Maybe it was because he himself was so young that he just couldn't understand old age.

Anyway, Jack felt living isn't just about living in the present moment, but also about projecting oneself into the future. Once you're nearing the end of your life, the only part of you that you can still project into the future is the part that you can somehow entrust to a younger person who will carry it onwards when you are gone.

And these parts of yourself that you can entrust to a younger person, what are they if not stories? The stories of your life. The younger person will build some of that into her own life and then hand it over to a yet younger person when she herself becomes old too. That's the way it goes.

Old people like Mr. Zbinden can only live on through their stories while the rest of their body and mind is dying. So it is important to listen to their stories!

And Jack was quite capable of listening to stories. He may have been slow on the uptake when it came to the precise folds required for the sheets of the hospital beds (when it was time to make them afresh), but he was still capable of listening to stories! Even to the stories of people completely different from himself, like Mr. Zbinden.

Physically, Jack and Mr. Zbinden couldn’t have been more different. Jack was quite aware of being a regular beefcake compared to fragile Mr. Zbinden. And Mr. Zbinden was just like a fragile little porcelain-doll compared to Jack. A porcelain-doll that wasn't even beautiful...

How much nicer it would have been to only ever meet Mr. Zbinden in a neutral room, not smelling of pee or shit, and not to see him in nothing but his brittle skin with the incongruously pink and almost feminine tits, but rather to see him dressed-up in suit and tie and looking smart!

Each one of them would be coming from a world the other one didn't know, so each one would be free to project whatever image of himself he wanted.

Mr. Zbinden would be able to tell Jack about how he had met and seduced his wife, how he had managed the farm, tamed the community bull, fought the elements with his bare hands... And it would all be credible, because Jack wouldn't have the image of the wasted, naked body in front of his inner eye. He would be able to picture Mr. Zbinden as he had once been, rather than trying to fight off the image of that wasted body with the catheter hanging out of its shrivelled-up dick...

But that wasn't all. Mr. Zbinden would be much freer to say whatever he wanted. He could even complain about the nurses, if that's what he wanted. Or tell Jack, from man to man, that he found one of them particularly attractive. He would be free to tell Jack all these things, because Jack would be from a different world. The information wouldn't go back to the nurses. The nurses wouldn't change their attitude towards Mr. Zbinden just because he had entrusted some burning piece of news to Jack, since Jack would belong to a different world, separate from the nurses' world. And that's how it should be. Everyone should be allowed to have a chat with people who aren't the same ones as those who wash your shrivelled-up dick every day.

But as long as Jack was the caregiver and Mr. Zbinden the care-receiver, none of this was possible. Mr. Zbinden would never be free to really say whatever he wanted, since anything he said was liable to change what Jack thought of him. And since his whole life depended on caregivers like Jack, it was really important not to antagonize them. This meant he couldn't just say whatever he liked.

Whatever Mr. Zbinden and Jack would ever discuss together, there were bound to be unconscious tactics behind it somewhere on some level. For example: “If they realized I could read on my own with my glasses, they would never come to read to me anymore and I would be even more lonely than I am now, so it’s better if I don’t insist too much about needing to find my lost glasses again...”

Whatever was being said was bound to be distorted by canting and even outright lying on some level. This is unavoidable when the person listening to you is the same as the one who washes your dick.

When elderly people lie, you're more likely to cotton on to them because they can't think as fast as you can anymore. Of course you don't let on. You rather assume that they believe their lies themselves because they're not so clear in the head anymore. You assume they're happy, because you assume they believe their own lies. You think they're fooling themselves and you play along.

But who can tell if that's really what's going on?

Maybe their lies are in reality white lies, and they would much rather tell the truth if only they had someone to tell it to!

Jack had already heard his share of rubbish too. Like when Mr Zbinden darkly foreshadowed that we would see who inherited the paddock down at the forest edge... As if Jack cared about that. Mr. Zbinden just said that because Jack had run off to help another patient, leaving Mr. Zbinden alone. Perhaps Mr. Zbinden's trick - about who inherited what - used to work on his sons. But Jack wasn't his son. Jack couldn't even believe he had any sons. When Mr. Zbinden told Jack of his sons, Jack couldn't help thinking of Mr. Zbinden's emptily drooping testicles. Out of these testicles, and through the tiny penis resting on the bedsheets like a dead, dried-up earthworm - out of these empty testicles and that puny dick - Mr. Zbinden claims to have conceived several proud, ax-toting sons?

It just isn't believable! Even if you know that it must really be true (maybe because you’ve even seen those sons at some point when they came to visit their father), you can still not believe it and you can still not listen to such stories with a truly open mind as the person telling them would deserve!

If he had heard less rubbish coming from the fogged-up mind of Mr. Zbinden, and if he hadn't seen his wasted genitals, then it wouldn't have been so hard to just believe him. And then it wouldn't have been such an effort just to listen to him either!

Because it really was an effort! Even if it was better than sitting in a common room looking out of the window, waiting for the head-nurse to come by and scold you.

It's a sad situation, Jack now thought to himself: old people are left to feel that nobody cares about what they have to say anymore, because their old-fashioned views are of no use to anybody anymore anyway. But in addition to that they are forced into a situation where they are not free to say whatever they like because they are too dependent on their audience (since their audience consists of the very same people who also wash them every day). And finally they are made to say complete rubbish, because you see through every single one of their white lies straight away, forcing them to substantiate the first lie with even crazier lies. Then of course you conclude that they're just senile, and that may even be true on some level.

But maybe true senility begins when you just don't have any reason to keep your presence of mind anymore, since nobody believes anything you say anymore anyway?

And yet it shouldn't be so hard to make elderly people happier. All you would need to do is to see some value in what they have to say. And that shouldn't be so hard, because however much the world has changed, the depths of human nature have stayed the same, and in this respect the life experience of older people stays just as valid today as it was in their own time, however much science and technology have transformed the world otherwise.

But just showing interest isn't enough in itself. If you want to hear true, heartfelt stories, you shouldn't be in a position of absolute power with respect to the story-teller. That just transforms everything they say into canting and white lies.

Your caregiver and the person listening to your stories shouldn't be one and the same person. It's the feeling of utter subjection and impotence that distorts everything you say, forcing you into white lies that are never quite good enough, making you feel yet more helpless, until you give up and submit to senility.

When Mr. Zbinden was freshly washed and properly dressed he looked quite handsome. He had the good-natured face of the kind of man with whom you wouldn't mind chatting at the wayside, leaning on your pitch-fork. He had fine features and big, friendly eyes. He spoke in a slow and deliberate manner, and what he said sometimes harboured more meaning than was obvious at first sight, and maybe he wasn't even aware of it himself. He had been a farmer his whole life, was well-known and respected in his home village in his time, and this respect wasn't due to anything extraordinary he had done or anything like that. It was just due to the fact that he was a dependable character whose opinions could be counted on.

Now Mr. Zbinden was ninety-and-some years old and lived in the hospital as a nursing case. Unfortunately there wasn't anybody here with a pitch-fork who had time for slow discussions with him at the wayside. At the hospital, everybody except the patients always has something more urgent to do. Mr. Zbinden's room-mates were in various states of intellectual decline, and the younger, intellectually nimbler patients were in other rooms. Nurses are always in a hurry, and if they're not, that's because they're not on duty, and when they're not on duty, they're not talking to the likes of Mr. Zbinden because they're not even here at all...

There weren't just people like Mr. Zbinden in this particular room at the Riggisberg hospital. There were also louder ones like Mr. Burren whom everyone called “Burri”. Everyone spoke to him in an easy-going and familiar tone since that's how he spoke to everyone too. He was the man who had rounded upon Jack on Jack’s first day when Jack had been standing in the middle of the room feeling desperately lost: “Hey you! You there! Wa-wa-washing now!”

His eyes were not gentle and sensitive like Mr. Zbinden's. Rather, he had an empty, watery stare, and his features were rough-hewn. In spite of this the two of them shared the same room as though they were a good match.

At first Jack didn't at all get along with Burri. The first time he brought Burri to bed, he tried to take off Burri's jacket while Burri was still sitting in his wheelchair. But Burri was obviously in a hurry to get to bed and tried to stand up in spite of his plastered-up leg. Jack pushed him back down into the wheelchair hissing: “Remain seated now, so that I can take off your jacket!”

He didn't want to raise his voice, because a nurse was nearby, putting Mr. Zbinden to bed. It was always difficult to talk to patients while a nurse was listening, because he was sure he kept saying the wrong things.

With time he had learned the unwritten rules somewhat about how you were supposed to talk to dim-witted, old or sick people. First of all, you had to only ever say things that you might have said to a normal person as well (and since these people definitely weren't normal, the range of things they would understand while also being things you could say to a normal person was very limited). Secondly, you never said anything relating in any way to their handicap.

There just aren't that many things fulfilling both conditions that a dimwit would understand. For this reason conversations with Burri mostly consisted of endless remarks about the nice weather, the nice flowers and the nice food...

But right now Burri started swearing. He clumsily swayed his arms, trying to hit Jack.

“Would you just hold still now?” Jack hissed with somewhat more exasperation, so that the nurse who was busying herself with Mr. Zbinden looked up.

Finally Jack said to the nurse (since she had looked up anyway): “I can't manage him.”