Death might be big. But so is Vienna. If you take the 5 from Westbahnhof to Nordbahnhof, you’ll be on the road for at least an hour. And you still won’t be anywhere near the Bronx. Or anywhere near Grossfeld or out by the racetracks, or out in Schöpwerk, where they’ve got all the rapists and the gangs of youths and the newspaper people.
And you read in the newspapers how dangerous it is out in Schöpwerk, because of the crack, or whatever that junk’s called that makes people so hot-blooded—makes them cut off your head. But nobody’s writing about the deeper causes. Nobody’s writing about the Burenwurst. Because eating a Burenwurst’ll make you so aggressive, you won’t hardly believe it. On the sausage spectrum, Käsekrainer, Zigeuner, Cabanossi, they’ll all make you aggressive, too, but on a fundamental level, they won’t make you anywhere near as aggressive as a hot Burenwurst, except, of course, for a hot Leberkäse.
When you’re an EMT, it’s not uncommon to end up with the stakeholders from a bar fight puking in the back of your ambulance. And you can be up to eighty-percent certain that you’re going to end up with the contents of a sausage stand on your hands, mainly Burenwurst. I don’t know if it’s because of the grease or because of the circumstances. Maybe the sausage-makers mix in some kind of powder that stokes aggression.
I might’ve guessed it’s from the mad cows over there. But cow meat, there isn’t any of that in Burenwurst. No meat at all, actually. That’s what Brenner’s grandfather said anyway in his last years: Nowadays there’s no meat in ’em anymore, only sawdust.
And so Brenner found himself reliving his old days because, as it turns out, his grandfather had been wrong. Because when they puked in his ambulance, well, it didn’t smell like sawdust.
But here’s what I’m really trying to get at. I was saying: death is big, and so is Vienna. And that’s true, too. But it’s a small world! Because Herr Oswald lived in Alt Erlaa, and so did Lungauer. And though it might be public housing, it’s no Schöpwerk or Grossfeld, neither. On the contrary, high-class projects. Middle-class projects. Eight high-rise towers with as many occupants as all of Eisenstadt. With swimming pools on the roof and kindergarten and everything.
But Lungauer and Oswald sure didn’t know each other from kindergarten. A of all, Alt Erlaa wasn’t even built yet back then. B of all, Lungauer had been living here with his mother ever since the accident. And besides, he was only thirty-eight years old, so chronologically speaking, he never could’ve been in Herr Oswald’s kindergarten class anyway.
Now, why do I keep saying “kindergarten”? Lungauer, a year and a half after his accident, was as helpless as a little kid. He sat there in his wheelchair, all sunken in on himself. Brenner could tell right away that even sitting was too much for him.
He was as gaunt as one of those models in the photos that earn millions today. I always say, a woman can rest easy on a little bit of padding. But needless to say, for a fashion photographer, the film’s the most expensive part. You’ve got to wind it and snip it and wind it and snip it, and come evening, you’ve used up a couple hundred meters of film already—costs a fortune. And so, needless to say, a scrawny model saves you a lot of film.
But fashion model’s one thing—Lungauer’s pitiful form was something else altogether. How he just seemed to be, I don’t know, hanging there in his wheelchair, all skin and bones. And for that maybe we should be grateful that he did weigh so little, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to hold himself up.
His greasy hair swabbed the collar of a brand-new jogging suit, and the way he just sat there like that, Brenner couldn’t help but think of that famous universe scientist. I bought the book, too, and I have to admit, I didn’t get very far, but still pretty interesting, what with the black holes and all.
Lungauer’s mother showed Brenner to her son’s room and introduced him. She spoke loud and clear like you would with somebody who’s not all there—upstairs, I mean. “This is Herr Brenner! A new colleague of yours! From the Rapid Response Center!”
“Good day,” Brenner said.
Interesting! Normally, Brenner never said “Good day.” Always, always “Hello.” He’d developed this habit back when he was fifteen or sixteen during a rebellious phase in Puntigam, and ever since, it’s been “hello.” And now, for the first time in thirty years, he says “Good day” all the sudden.
So you see just how far the rebellion had got with him. As if God had placed some kind of divining rod at the window, let the paraplegic dangle from it a little, gave a little wink: Look at you, already picking the “Good day” back up like some drunk bully picking up a Burenwurst, see here, you, too, could be a goddamned cripple.
Although you’d like to believe that, over the past few months of working as an EMT, Brenner had seen enough sickness and suffering that a sight like this couldn’t shock him anymore. No such luck, though. As long as you’re just the one driving and it’s the other guy that’s the cripple, it doesn’t fully scare you. But when the poor dog’s basically your own co-worker, of course, completely different situation. So “Good day” just sort of slipped out of Brenner. And I don’t think any worse of him for it, either.
When Lungauer didn’t respond, Brenner wasn’t surprised. Because he didn’t exactly look like somebody who could still talk—Brenner had to give Angelika a little credit on that one. His head was saddled to the side, leaning on his right shoulder, and a thin thread of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. The one eye was kaput, while the other seemed to stare all the more for it. Despite the catheter bag hanging off the side of his wheelchair, you wouldn’t have exactly got the idea that this was a top athlete submitting his doping-test sample.
But as Brenner turned back to Lungauer’s mother, he noticed Lungauer very slowly raise his right arm, centimeter by centimeter, and after an eternity, he stretched his hand out to Brenner.
“I wouldn’t know,” Lungauer managed to get out. It wasn’t easy to understand. Brenner needed a few seconds before he was able to string the sounds together. But, then, needless to say: I wouldn’t know!
Lungauer didn’t actually speak all that unclearly. It’s just that Brenner wasn’t expecting the disabled man to bird-dog him like that. That somebody who hadn’t seen a “Good day” in some time should make fun of a cowardly “Good day” from a healthy person.
It’s pretty true, though: Only a person at his fighting weight could act like such a puny coward. Although in Brenner’s defense, I have to say: Lungauer had the advantage of being disabled this whole time, whereas for Brenner, this was a whole new arena that he’d been tossed into.
“Herr Brenner is here because of Irmi!” his mother said, loud and clear again.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You know what happened?” Brenner asked him, not as loud as Lungauer’s mother, but still, louder than he normally talked.
Lungauer jerked his head back and forth on his shoulder because that was his way of nodding, and then he said: “From the lampshade.”
“He heard it on TV,” his mother whispered. “People think he’s mentally handicapped,” she said briskly under her breath, as though she were hoping: If I talk fast, he won’t understand me.
“But the doctors say he’s not. He’s completely normal. He understands everything. Just like before the accident. Except the language center of the brain was damaged. The doctor showed it to me on an X-ray, where the screwdriver destroyed his language center. But it’s not mental—it’s got a name of its own.”
“Aphasia,” the disabled man mumbled from his wheelchair.
“You see, he understands everything,” the mother sighed as if it were somehow unfair to her. “He understands it all even better than I do. Aphasia. Do you know what that is?”
“I drove an epileptic this one time. He had it, too,” Brenner recalled. “He always called me ‘crane-driver.’ I think because cranes are yellow and our ambulances used to be yellow, too.”
“He just mixes up words,” his mother said, nodding along nervously. “But his thinking is completely normal. Just the words he mixes up.”
Lungauer watched the two of them avidly as they exchanged pleasantries. His healthy eye traveled back and forth, always to the person who was speaking at that moment. It seemed to Brenner as if his healthy eye had doubled in size to make up for the other.
Back when Brenner was in the police academy, video games weren’t around yet, but in the rec room, they already had an early precursor. And Lungauer’s eye suddenly reminded him now of that game where you could play tennis with a white dot. For a few months there, he went up against Irrsiegler—practically every day they played Tennis for Two. When you hit the ball, it made this distinct sound. Irrsiegler went on to get in a motorcycle accident, and then, he automatically quit tennis.
When Brenner awoke from the hypnosis of Lungauer’s eye, he asked him about Irmi.
“She was my coat.”
“He means: his girlfriend,” the mother translated, and Brenner came close to asking her to leave him alone with her son for a little while. “He probably said ‘coat’ because she always had that white lab coat on.”
“Or because he had her love to keep him warm,” Brenner said. “Or because she was just a buttoned-up kind of gal,” he continued, and a little haughtily at that. “Or because she hid all his trouble spots. Or because with her on his arm, he felt like he could brave any conditions. Or because when he was a boy he had a camel-hair coat, and Irmi had fantastic humps.”
“Hahahahahaha!” Paraplegic Lungauer nearly shuddered right out of his wheelchair. His face was drooped downward the whole time, so it’s impossible that he saw much of his mother’s reaction out of the corner of his eye. He sure could’ve felt it, though, just how much Brenner’s outburst had needled her.
Lungauer was beaming, incredible really, how his one eye could just beam like a beacon over his entire face. But all the sudden he gave an imperious stomp with his voice: “Room!”
“But while Herr Brenner’s here, you have to keep us company.”
“Brennerroom, too!”
“But Herr Brenner might still like to speak with me.”
“With me he wants to talk.”
“He wants to talk with you in his room,” she translated, as though she thought Brenner was a little mentally handicapped, too.
I don’t know why that was so uncomfortable for her. Not to mention the view from Lungauer’s room—unreal, you wouldn’t believe it. Only now did Brenner become fully aware of the fact that he was on the twenty-third floor. St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Ferris wheel, the Danube tower, the UNO building—all kilometers away, but you had the impression that you could reach out and touch them. On the far left, you could even see the towers of Vienna General. And one of those anti-aircraft towers that they put there during the War—the black behemoths just never got torn down. But the most conspicuous thing was that, in all of Vienna, there were practically no buildings left that didn’t have those colorful splotches all over them.
“Hundertwasser must’ve tagged the whole damn city,” Brenner said.
“Hahahahahaha!”
It gave Brenner a real kick in the ribs, the infectious laughter of this one-eyed Chuckle King. It’s through peoples’ laughter that you come to know them best. Because a cruel person can only put up a front for so long, but if you make him laugh, he laughs cruel. And a dumb person laughs dumb. And a prude laughs prudish. And a cynic cynically, and a complicated person, complicatedly—so you see, you can scroll through them all, but it’ll always hold true.
Very rarely, though, do you hear someone who laughs quite like Lungauer. Pretty much the complete opposite of people with nothing to laugh about. Because they might be pretty and healthy and well-dressed and have a bunch of money and work in film or “media” or architecture. On the inside, though, they’re so empty that the moment they open their mouths—immediate casualties. On account of the vacuum implosion. My two cents.
“At first I thought you might be working for Junior,” Lungauer said, suddenly very serious.
“Well, that’s true.” Brenner was just playing dumb, though. Already he could tell that Lungauer wasn’t trying to make a point just because he was on Junior’s payroll.
“So you’re a dog?”
“I sniff around, yeah.” Because once you spend a little time with a word-twister like this one, you start to understand him better and better—it happens faster than you might think. And once you’ve been with him a little while longer, you even start to word-twist yourself. Brenner, though, no problems now: “Do you remember Lanz?”
“Angelika’s father.”
“He got arrested.”
“I know.”
“But his daughter thinks that he didn’t do it.”
“And he didn’t.”
“What?”
“Lanz didn’t kill Big.”
Was Brenner just imagining it, or did Lungauer suddenly get a little more fluent just now?
“I started at Rapid Response twelve years ago. We were three times as big as the Pro Meddlers were at the time. That was still under Senior. Then, out of nowhere, Pro Med grew so fast, they nearly caught up to us.”
Every sentence took Lungauer forever. And even as bad as Brenner usually is about this kind of thing, I can tell you right here: Brenner’s operating speed was exactly right for listening to a sick man tell his story in his own good time.
“After Senior died, Pro Med pulled the better political contacts. They picked up Watzek as a sponsor, and in return they got city contracts. We still had the better donors, though.”
Brenner almost got dizzy, looking straight down twenty-three floors at the street below, as Lungauer continued talking.
“People don’t know what to do with their money after they die—if they don’t have kids, that is. Most of them leave everything to the church. Trying to secure their spot in heaven. Some of them appoint us as their beneficiary, though. That helped keep us ahead of Pro Med for a while. On the other hand, modern medicine. So, people are getting older and older and living longer. So we started getting fewer big donors. Because people just weren’t dying.”
I’ve always been vertigo-free, Brenner reflected. But the tremble that slowly entered his knees now had nothing to do with the twenty-third floor. No, listen up to what Lungauer had to tell him over the next half hour. It might’ve taken a healthy person only five minutes. But Brenner was glad it didn’t go that fast. It was hard enough to digest as it was.
How Junior formed a trauma team with Lungauer and Bimbo. How Bimbo and Lungauer were always the ones to get dispatched where there were rich old ladies to be chauffeured. How they took a cue from Czerny, who’d coaxed a villa out of a widow. Unlike Czerny, though, not for their own personal gain, no, they did it all for Vienna Rapid Response.
“Unfortunately, that only worked some of the time, though,” Lungauer stammered out. “So you court ten ladies, and maybe one of them gets the idea of leaving us something. And in spite of all of this, Pro Med still managed to expand faster and faster. Because needless to say, Pro Med had its own brand of widow care. So Junior starts to get suspicious that Pro Med is cutting in on his share of the elder-care market.”
Brenner wondered why suddenly Lungauer wasn’t mixing up his words anymore now. By his account, it was often just a matter of planting the idea in the old ladies’ heads of leaving their fortunes to the Response Center. Because often they were so senile that they didn’t know they even had fortunes anymore.
“So, Junior got a better idea. You know how much insurance paperwork there is, don’t you, with the Scheisshäusltouren. So it became really quite simple to coax a signature out of an old woman without her even noticing that she’d just signed away her entire fortune to the Vienna Rapid Response.”
“Could it be that you’re only playing the part of the aphasic because you’re afraid of what Junior would do if he found out?” Brenner asked rather abruptly.
“Hahahahahahaha!”
Then Lungauer was silent a moment. He took a breath so deep that Brenner got scared it might be his last. But then he carried on, as though Brenner hadn’t said anything. “We weren’t necessarily doing anything bad yet. Because if an old woman like that leaves her whole fortune to a bunch of hardhats or us, what’s the difference? And the hardhats have got their own elder care, too. And so, all the sudden we had twice as many wills and testaments as before. So we were able to keep our lead over Pro Med for two more years. But then they inched back up on us again.”
Brenner was still surprised that Lungauer wasn’t mixing up his words anymore. Had he really been playing dumb this whole time? Or was it just the result of momentary concentration? Or did Brenner himself have a part in it—maybe he was unconsciously correcting for the mixed-up words?
I don’t know. All I know is that as Lungauer went on, Brenner would’ve given anything for it to be a simple case of pathological word-twisting.
“The problem was that we were sawing off the branch we were sitting on. The better we worked, the fewer people died. The less often it was that we got left anything. But then suddenly three huge wills got executed in one month. Normally, three wills in a year would’ve been a lot. And the next month, four wills. Always on the calls that Bimbo and Junior took.”
Maybe it’s all just one big mix-up of words, Brenner thought, clutching at straws, as it were. And the saying’s not for nothing when they say: you shouldn’t clutch at straws.
Because when Lungauer said “died,” he didn’t mean “survived,” but “died.” When he said “euthanized,” he meant “euthanized,” not “resuscitated.” And when he said “killed,” he meant “killed” and not “saved.”
“Then, three died in one thing,” Lungauer said.
“Three in one thing?”
“Two in one day even. And the third later that same thing.”
Week. Brenner wondered if there was a rule for when Lungauer mixed up his words and when he didn’t. But you see, it’s always the big questions that you send skipping down the longest pier because there’s always something more important to inquire about.
“What was the cause of death?”
“Always the same thing,” Lungauer said. Without batting an eye, he simply used the word “thing” for “thing.”
“You know as well as I do that one Scheisshäusltour’s just like the next.”
Scheisshäusltour. I say, how sick can you be not to forget a word like that?
“Dialysis or diabetes,” Brenner said.
“In this case it was diabetes,” Lungauer answered. “The old ladies that Bimbo was supposed to bring to the hospital to get their sugar levels checked? Well, he’d just put them on a drip.”
“That’s what we do anyway with acute diabetic shock.” Brenner didn’t want to believe it at first.
“Sure. But Bimbo’s drip was pure sugar water.”
Brenner just whistled softly to himself. Not in the way that a person whistles when they’ve just heard something sensational, but that melody of his. You know the one.
But he was whistling so softly that it was inaudible, practically pantomime. The way a person whistles who’s afraid of waking somebody up. A sleeping dog, say. Of course, it would’ve been better for him not to whistle near one such sleeping dog. Say, a bloodhound.