When Julietta comes back three days later, The Bridge looks like a medium-size business during an audit. On the couch, the chairs, and the reception counter, on every flat surface including the floor, are piles of paper, manila folders, and plastic folders, overtopped by towers of ring binders. Babak and Britta examine, read, compare, hand individual pages back and forth, ponder résumés and personality profiles. Lassie’s droning has become mere white noise. The algorithm tirelessly fishes names out of suicide forums, analyzes writing styles and word choices, links the results to shopping lists, travel data, music and film libraries, e-book evaluations, surf biographies, and so on, and then lays her catch in stacks before her masters’ feet. When Babak pointed out that they already had four candidates under evaluation and that the large-scale searches they were conducting risked exceeding their capacities, Britta nodded and said, “Keep going.”
Babak had no comment when Britta told him how she’d got rid of her smartphone.
In passing, he’s assembled a few examples of mentally unstable, solo perpetrators who planned and carried out their attacks on their own, which didn’t prevent ISIS from claiming responsibility for them afterward. Nice, Würzburg, Bratislava. The selfie video of a young Afghan, waving a kitchen knife around and speaking to the camera: “I am a soldier of the Caliphate.”
Britta is, of course, familiar with these cases; she’s familiar with all such cases. But ever since the jihad lost its attractive force and The Bridge started fishing potential lone wolves out of the market, such berserker-like operations no longer take place. And there are further reasons why Babak’s broad suggestion comes to nothing.
“The perps in Leipzig weren’t solo actors,” says Britta. “There were two of them. Besides, solo suicide bombers target street intersections or regional trains or cafés or concerts, but certainly not airports. A terrorist who wants to get into an airport needs logistical support.”
But neither Britta nor Babak can disregard a basic contradiction: an institution, not individuals, was responsible for the action in Leipzig, but the work was so disastrously shoddy that any lone actor on psychotropic drugs could have done better. This contradiction is putting reams of paper on the furniture, bending their backs, making their heads spin. They’ve limited Lassie’s selection to around one hundred twenty very promising names, which careful vetting will reduce to forty. As for Julietta, they’ve already forgotten her.
“What’s going on here?”
Before anyone has seen her coming, she’s standing in the room. She looks to be in a good mood; there’s even something triumphant in her manner. With deliberate slowness, Britta looks up from her stack of documents and moves her lower jaw as though chewing gum. “Inventory,” she says. She rises to her feet in one quick movement, avoids Babak’s eyes, and picks up her jacket from the back of the chair. “Come.”
After a couple of summery days, the weather has turned cool again, and a surly wind is yanking on anything that’s hanging loose. Britta and Julietta wrap themselves in their jackets and put up with the light drizzle blowing in their faces. In spite of the weather, the city park is full of the usual activity. “Sport Is Public” groups, grandmas with little dogs. Young men using their unconditional basic income to sit on benches. Early retirees tending their tomatoes in the public planting areas. Mothers pushing baby carriages so thoroughly covered with plastic netting and cloth blankets that no one knows whether there’s anything inside.
By the time they reach the Babylon, they’re very wet and very chilly. They keep their jackets on as they sit on two of the folding chairs that the kebab shop, one of the last Arab bistros in the city center, is furnished with. Although they have yet to order, Sahid brings them green tea, asks if they want anything to eat, and withdraws behind the beaded curtain, sure that no more customers will be turning up at this hour.
Jittery, Julietta wiggles around on her chair, looks over at the door, smiles at Britta, rubs her thighs and forearms, looks over at the door again. Maybe she’s medicated. Or maybe it’s the fact that she’s understood something. Britta waits. The candidate must begin the conversation. This too is one of The Bridge’s rules: they want something from us, not we from them.
“Took me a while to figure it out,” says Julietta.
“What?”
“You send people away to see if they come back.”
She smiles and raises her eyebrows in a request for confirmation that goes unanswered. Britta has emptied her face of all expression.
“So here I am,” says Julietta. “Have I passed the test?”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
Now Julietta has reached Step 2. Small fanfare. Inaudible. Britta’s reluctance makes her clench her teeth while she stands up to ask Sahid for some writing materials. Julietta’s young and gorgeous; the media will love her. You can sense her determination, and underneath it something else, hardness, yes, even cruelty, not only toward herself but also toward all mankind. At first glance, the perfect candidate, and The Bridge needs perfect candidates, especially at the moment. But Britta doesn’t want that. She wants Julietta to disappear. The problem is, it would be against the rules to place her personal feelings above the results of the evaluation.
Sahid sits at his camping table, working on a crossword puzzle. Next to him is a tablet with a television series running soundlessly on its screen, and also a radio, softly babbling to the mute pictures. He’s happy to lend Britta pencil and paper, and she goes back to Julietta. Her handwriting is so bad that she doesn’t have to hide what she writes.
“Why do you want to kill yourself?”
“Why not?”
Good answer. Britta has never received a better one. However, she must insist on further explanation. “I’ll ask the question differently. Why do you want to be dead?”
“Always wanted to. Just like other girls wanted a horse.” Julietta shrugs. “Humanity’s repulsive. Everyone should do the same as me and arrange to disappear quick.”
“Sounds pretty decadent.” Britta makes a note. She’s writing down points she’ll want to go into more deeply later; the first conversation chiefly serves for taking stock. “In other places, girls are literally fighting for their lives, and you’re sitting here and suffering.”
“You don’t get it.” Julietta sips at her tea. “I’m not suffering. We all are. That’s the problem. In a world where the people doing the best feel the shittiest, something’s completely wrong.”
“Complicated sentence.”
Julietta shrugs again. “I don’t care what you think.”
“So there’s nothing holding you back?”
“My cat will miss me.”
“And your parents?”
“Why are you asking me about my parents?”
“I always ask about the parents.”
Julietta shakes her hair and runs her fingers through it. It’s starting to dry, there’s a damp smell in the room, the hot tea’s doing her good. Outside the rain has stopped; for a moment, the sky opens up and lets some freshly washed light get through, but then fast-moving clouds shove it down under the street. Paper scraps and empty bags blow through the light-and-shadow theater. Even in a tidy city like Braunschweig, the wind can always rummage in the remotest corners and find some trash to play with.
“The question sounds like psychotherapy.”
“This is psychotherapy.”
“Spare me.”
“The confrontation method—”
“No, no, anything but that!” cries Julietta. “Can’t we do without psychobabble?”
Britta sucks on her pencil until she realizes that a slight flavor of cooking fat is clinging to it. Suppressing her need to dash to the restroom and rinse her mouth, she considers whether she should go back to Step 1 and send Julietta away. The girl’s staring at her as though she’s already thinking about getting out of here. Nevertheless, Britta opts for a different way. Julietta’s young and shrewd, and she’s also a woman. With her, there won’t be any need to break down dominance behavior; the young thing’s primarily afraid of not being taken seriously.
“Now I’m going to explain to you what The Bridge does,” says Britta. “What we can do for you.” She drains her teacup. “We guide you through a twelve-step process that enables us to discover whether you really want to end your life.”
“I already know the answer to that.”
Britta leans forward and looks straight into Julietta’s eyes. “It’s absolutely crucial for us to assess your decision from all sides. That is what we do. We break down suicidal thoughts.”
Julietta’s rage changes into pensiveness. “Do a few of them remain intact?”
“A few.”
“What really happens if I pass all twelve exams?”
Britta keeps quiet.
“You place me with an organization that can use my death.”
Britta keeps quiet and puts on her impassive mask once again. Julietta starts nodding slowly. “Okay,” she says.
Britta spins her page of notes around and pushes it across the table. “Write your name and date of birth.”
Julietta takes the pencil. “I can e-mail you my résumé, if that would help.”
“Not necessary.”
The girl laughs. “By tomorrow morning at the latest, you’ll know more about me than I do, right? You’ve got an algorithm. That’s why that den of yours buzzes so much.”
To this observation, Britta makes no response. Julietta leans back, pushes her hair away from her face, stretches her shoulders. Her whole body relaxes. For the first time, she looks frankly into Britta’s eyes. Her beauty is shocking. Smooth skin, straight nose, arched eyebrows, long dark eyelashes. Julietta’s lips are a little pale and look bitten, because when she’s thinking hard, she sucks them in between her teeth; but this blemish, rather than spoiling her perfection, completes it.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” says Julietta, reading Britta’s thoughts.
“I know.”
“My looks have never done me any good.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. Tell me about your parents.”
In the course of her work for The Bridge, Britta has heard countless life stories. She’s spoken with people who regretted committing a crime. With fathers who had lost a child. With men abandoned by the women in their lives or tormented by desires they themselves found repellent. Britta has looked into all the possible human abysses, and in doing so has learned that when it comes to tragedy, there’s no sort of fixed scale. Many people suffer more because their parents have bought them the wrong gym shoes than others do because they receive three beatings every day. If there’s a difference to Britta, it tends to lie in entertainment value. In this instance, it quickly becomes clear that Julietta’s story is one of the boring ones.
Only child, academic household. Terrifying perfectionism, compelled happiness. Father would come home for dinner, kiss his idiosyncratically dressed wife and silent daughter, sit at the table, and talk politics. Efficiency, renationalization, popular hygiene. Both parents were CCC voters from the very beginning. Julietta would clean her plate, no matter what was on it. She’d always go to bed at the same time, no matter whether she could sleep or not. Her father doted on her. She was such a good girl, strikingly pretty besides, and always cheerful.
“You spend much time at a computer?”
“I like the Darknet. And suicide forums.”
If Julietta were a man, Lassie would probably have identified her years ago, and Julietta would have received mail from The Bridge. But women are Lassie’s lowest priority. Women talk a lot about suicide but rarely commit it. Moreover, the target of their aggression is chiefly themselves, which makes them useless as assassins. There’s no rule preventing The Bridge from taking on female candidates. But no woman has ever scored very high on the indicators in Lassie’s system. Britta prefers to work with men. Men are what she’s used to.
“Do you live in Braunschweig?”
“I’ve rented a room.”
“Please move into the Deutsches Haus hotel. We have a business agreement with them. We’ll cover the costs.”
“Suppose I disappear in two weeks?”
“That’s a risk The Bridge is willing to take.”
“How can you afford that?”
“People whose lives we save are happy to give us money.”
“And the others?”
Britta smiles. “Them too.”
Julietta grins broadly. “Does this mean I’ve been accepted?”
“Congratulations,” says Britta, wondering what Babak will have to say about this.
“I still have a condition,” Julietta adds.
Britta, who was already getting to her feet, slowly sits down again.
“It has to be for the animals.”
“We’ve already discussed that,” says Britta, controlling herself. “We evaluate your suicidal tendencies, nothing more.”
“But in the end,” Julietta insisted, “when I’ve gone through all twelve steps. Green Power would be super. Or something else to do with protecting animals.”
“The Bridge’s candidates don’t impose conditions.”
The fact is, The Bridge’s candidates typically don’t know what they want.
“But who makes the final arrangements? Don’t the candidates have the right to participate in the decisions?”
As a rule, arrangements are made conjointly; The Bridge offers recommendations, the candidate selects one, and then the firm verifies the demand for the chosen service. Britta doesn’t take the selection process lightly. The choice must be suitable. But none of that is material for discussion at Step 2.
“Don’t muck this up,” Britta says, pushing back her chair.
“There’s one thing you have to know.” Julietta points directly at Britta’s face. “I’m going to do this, one way or another. With or without you. It’s your decision.”
“Finish your tea.”
The rage that takes hold of Britta is both powerful and unprofessional. She leaves the table and locks herself in Sahid’s tiny restroom, sits on the toilet lid, puts her hands on her knees, and tries to account for herself. But new waves of rage keep rising up in her; what Britta would really like to do is to destroy something, the mirror, say, or the paper towel dispenser. She’s got a good mind to run Julietta off, not so that she’ll come back, no, not this time, but so that she, Britta, can be rid of her forever. Why? Because she’s not suitable. The Bridge’s candidates have no goals; instead they suffer from the absence of goals. A person who has goals doesn’t want to kill herself. In the end, the few who successfully make it through the evaluation are grateful to be provided with a purpose.
I sell convictions, Britta thinks, and I can’t sell this girl anything.
Most of all, Britta is furious at Julietta’s self-confidence. The passion in her voice when she said “I’m going to do this, one way or another” gave her—gives her—exceptional force. She’s half a child, and she’s sitting there like a boulder. Being next to Julietta fills Britta with a sense of her own weakness. Her own fluttering, her soft vacillation. There are things that Julietta hates. Britta hates nothing and no one. In order to hate, you first have to understand what matters.
After a couple of breathing exercises, Britta leaves the restroom and signals to Sahid that he should put the bill on her account, as usual. Julietta is sitting bent over in her chair. When she hears Britta, she doesn’t raise her head but instead rolls her eyes up and gazes at her from below, like a lurking animal. Britta doesn’t like that gaze. It says: I win. Always.