“I’m going to tell you a story, and then you’ll know who I am,” you say, leaning forward slightly.

It’s a wonderful feeling. The pulse of the house flows through your fingers, you knew there was still some life in it, you go on.

“The summer I turned twelve, I was secretly reading by candlelight one night, when a moth flew through the window into my room. It circled the candle flame, and after less than a minute it burned up. I wondered how the moth could be so stupid. And then it occurred to me that the moth might have seen something in the flame that I couldn’t see. Did it want to die, or did it know nothing of the danger? And what if it had known about the danger and flown deliberately into it? I thought about it a lot and wondered what it would be like to fly into the flames without burning up. Where would I be then? Would I be at the center of the fire? And what if nothing happened to me there, and if from that moment onwards I was untouchable? And if I was untouchable, would I still be me?”

Ragnar Desche looks at you, he begins to understand, you can read it in his eyes. Where you see the flame, he sees his father. You go on talking.

“For a year and a half I’ve thought about it, for a year and a half I’ve thought about these questions and nothing else. One day I pulled a boy down to the bottom of a swimming pool and let him die. It was very simple, it wasn’t planned and it wasn’t an accident. I flew right into the flames and nothing happened. At that moment I became invincible, do you understand that? I became the person I am now. No guilt, no regret, and no morals either. I became a part of the flames and there was no retaliation, there was no punishment. No god came down from heaven to strike me dead. No one pointed a finger at me. The impossible became possible. This experience ran against all the rules of our society. It was intoxicating. And I asked myself the most important question you can ask yourself as an individual: If the flames can do nothing to me, how can I stay away from the flames?”

You pause for a moment, before you add, “That’s why we’re sitting here.”

Silence. You don’t know what he’s thinking, his face gives nothing away, his left hand has woken up now too, it’s opening and closing. And if you could look into his head, you’d see a fifteen-year-old Ragnar Desche leaving the apartment block after his father’s death and walking away. Not on the pavement, he’s walking down the middle of the road, because he needs space because he’s suddenly big and violent and the pavement isn’t big enough for him. You stepped into the flames in your way, he did in his. The result is the same, you have both grown with it. And now he’s sitting opposite you, and he’s not taking his eyes off you. He’s reliving his own moment, standing in the flames and looking out at you.

“We’re the same,” you say.

No reaction. Perhaps everything really is very different and he’s not thinking anything and wondering how quickly he can get to his gun. Everything’s possible.

At last he speaks.

“What makes you think we’re the same?”

“The darkness and the depth,” you answer.

“You’re a sick fuck,” he says.

“And you have no heart.”

“What?”

“And I have no soul. You and me, me and you. We’ve found each other. Now we’ll come to rest.”

And so you tell him who the Traveler is, you don’t leave out a single victim, you tell him every detail and describe your quest. And tell him of the depth from which you always had to rise to open the door to the darkness.

After thirty-four years your search has brought you here to this place.

To this room.

To this table.

Arrived.

Ragnar Desche just looks at you. He doesn’t reveal himself. He is not interested if you’ve been looking for him for a hundred or a thousand years. You know it can take a while. He will show you his true face. It will just take a while. His facial expression gives nothing away, only his body reacts. His shoulders hunch, his hands lie flat on the table so that he’s sitting there like you. One foot drums, you can feel it through the floor. His breathing grows faster and more confident, ready for anything.

The drumming stops.

“Now we’ve arrived,” you say.

“Now we’ve arrived,” he says.

Two men in a kitchen.

In a ruined hotel.

On a cliff.

Alone.

No Me anymore, no Him anymore.

Only one thing is left.

You.