But behind the shed door that hung on rotting hinges, no Helena, beneath the shed’s outer steps, no Helena, in the firewood bin, no Helena. He turned every woodpile over, all but reaching into the molehills. He slowly began to realize that the insects were leading him in circles. Here and there he’d make a point of walking away from the gnats and flies and searching off on his own. Even though he knew for a fact that he had to be inside the swarm for the gnats to lead him, not out on the flowering meadow.
But easier said than done of course, when your greatest fear is that in searching you might find something. He stepped off course again now, away from the foul recesses where the squadrons of insects wanted to lure him, out to the yarrow, out to the chrysanthemums, out to the spignel. To the burnet, to the white clover, to the lady’s mantle. Out to the devil’s claw. He was so exhausted by his fear about Helena at this point that he lay in the grass and thought about how easily he used to deal with the basic questions surrounding death. How he used to have a good handle on the hereafter when he was a young man.
There are many schools of thought on this, and I tend to say you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it because it won’t get you anywhere. Brenner was different. Early on he’d staunchly believed that the most beautiful women would want to know whether you were one man for one brief life, or whether they could count on you in the afterlife, too. And so he developed a staggering sense for which answer would make the best impression in any given situation. For a time Asian beliefs were in demand, and reincarnation all the rage, then back to everything being contained somehow within nature as a whole, then you’d be well served by the shamans again. There were also those who needed a challenge, though, so Brenner said, alas, there’s nothing on the other side, because with them it got you farther than if you guaranteed them a heaven.
And believe it or not, just a few weeks earlier, he’d tried that route with Natalie. But alas, just the painful realization that the old recipes weren’t working so well anymore. He thought he could provoke her with a few quotes from Knoll’s brochure, i.e., when does life begin? He spited himself nicely with that one, though, and he came to understand right away that Natalie stood head and shoulders above him. She had considered the problem in such a balanced way and had such an understanding of the opposition that it was almost too much for Brenner. It’s difficult, of course, the psychologist said, to determine the exact day when you can safely say, up until this point, it can still be removed because it’s not a person yet — well, soul and all still negligible- and from that point on, it can’t very well be removed anymore, because it’s already too much of a person and even a hint of a soul.
The insects tried every means of shaking him awake and forcing him to get up. They stung him and tormented him, but he wasn’t quite ready yet, he wanted to escape a little further into this nice memory. Of this good conversation and how he’d answered Natalie that it’s difficult everywhere in life to draw such exact lines. For example, in criminal cases there’s always this type of development, too, at first it’s harmless really and not an actual crime yet, you think about it only theoretically, who you’d have to kidnap if you were to do it-a party game, as it were. And then you contemplate how the ransom handover would have to be arranged, still not a crime yet. And then maybe you do a little prep work, buy a good roll of tape at the hardware store-still not a crime yet-and finally, tidy up the basement. That, too, still isn’t a crime yet.
But then there is the one step where you can’t go back anymore, where you can’t dismiss the reality anymore, where you’ve got the child irrevocably in your stomach or the kidnapped victim irrevocably in your basement.
The insects made Brenner understand that he couldn’t go back anymore either now. He’d come along like a man sentenced to death. Nothing else could help him now. He’s already here, he’s got to finish it, too. And so the searching takes on its own dynamic entirely, and even if you hope you don’t find anything, you keep searching. He was escorted by the gnats, which he didn’t really notice anymore. Just like you stop noticing your bodyguard over time-he’s just there, and he simply must have been there when Helena was kidnapped-so, too, the insects buzzed around him now and directed him along the west side of the cabin toward the driveway. The wood still retained the warmth of the sun and smelled terrifically good, the old wood that the cabin was built from, the wooden beams, the wooden shingles, the planks of the balcony, the railing on the stairs, the window frames, and the firewood, but the bleached wood lining the driveway smelled best, i.e., the age-old boards that covered the cesspit.
When Brenner removed the first board, of course, it didn’t smell so good anymore, because a cesspit like this greets you with the stench of many generations. And with the stench came swarms of gnats, climbing out from the slats between the boards, you can’t even imagine, as though the collective dead or unborn humanity were lurking there beneath the rotting boards for Brenner.
You’re going to say, why would the gnats take Brenner under their wings, what’s their motive? Because for the average gnat, a human murder isn’t the least bit interesting, and even if you believe all that-before life, gnat, after life, gnat-then it bears saying all the more, as far as of one of these eternal gnats is concerned, a human murder’s the least interesting thing that there is.
Look, my take on it-think what you want! All I know is that as Brenner searched the cesspit for the corpse by the light of the evening sun, he was surrounded by an almost supernaturally glowing aura of insects-half beekeeper-at-sunset, half Jimi-Hendrix-in-a-spotlight. And who knows, maybe Jimi Hendrix was only lit up so ethereally in those colorful hippie photos because the spotlight was fractured into millions of invisible festival insects that were already luring Jimi, at the age of twenty-seven, toward the exit, without anyone in the audience noticing.
From Brenner’s point of view, of course, nothing was illuminated at all, just black clouds rising from the cesspit, because that’s how it is in the physical world, solid matter, liquid matter, gaseous matter. And maybe from a distance it looked nicely lit and sparkling in the last rays of sun, but to Brenner it looked as if the brown sauce in the cesspit was transforming from liquid matter to flying matter. The swarms of gnats rose out of the cesspit but didn’t fly any farther. Instead, there just seemed to be more and more of them the longer he stared into the pit and hoped that it wouldn’t turn out badly for him.
He took a pitchfork down from the shed and poked around in the brown soup with the handle, not with the tines. Let’s be honest, though, if someone was down there, it really wouldn’t matter, handle or tines, but somehow it goes against something, purely some inner code, to jab a person with a pitchfork. At any rate, Brenner had the pitchfork flipped over and was poking with the handle. He noticed right away, though, that the pitchfork was too short and couldn’t reach the bottom, but just as he was about to give up and look for something longer, he hit something that felt suspicious, a strange resistance, half hard, half soft.