“Of course I do.”
“Really?” She didn’t know what she expected him to say. Any answer would have surprised her.
“Don’t you?”
Anna’s shrug told the truth.
Bruno shrugged back at her. “If there isn’t a God then what’s the point of anything? Without God, what matters?”
Anna didn’t know. She said so.
“Without God, nothing matters. But Anna? Things matter.” He said it in a way that was meant to school her.
“Do you believe in destiny? Salvation? Do you believe that we can save ourselves?”
Bruno shook his head as if to say Why the fuck are we talking about this? “My father believed that we are broken people who live in a broken world. I believe that too. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a God. It just means we aren’t him.” Bruno cleared his throat. “Is that all?”
“Yes.”
Bruno turned back to the screen. “Enjoy your walk.” He’d forgotten that Anna said she wasn’t taking one. She didn’t correct him.
“HOUSE FIRES ARE ALMOST always preventable,” Stephen said, though Anna already knew it. “But under certain circumstances, probable.”
“Like?” She played along with this lecture.
“Smoking in bed, of course. Cooking. The unsupervised burning of candles.”
“You sound like a fireman, not a scientist.”
Stephen shrugged. “Fire is fire.”
Yes, Anna thought. And it is never safe.
“A PERSON CAN BE fully conscious and still make terrible choices. Consciousness doesn’t come with an automatic ethic.”
They had been discussing Anna’s most recent dream. It began in the grocery store, where so much of Anna’s life took place. Her basket was full, but when she got to the checkout, she realized she didn’t have any money. She told the cashier she’d return the items to the shelf but when Anna went into the aisle with the basket she hid as much of the food as she could in her pockets. She knew it wasn’t right but didn’t care. Outside the store she stopped a man who was on his way in and told him what she’d done; she was proud of it. He was shocked and threatened to call the police. Anna said she’d give him a blowjob if he didn’t. They went behind the grocery store. Across the alleyway, the local high school. Anna knelt and gave him head while students watched from a classroom window. In order to keep them from telling anyone what they had witnessed, Anna lifted up her shirt and showed them her breasts, which, in the dream, were leaking milk. The dream ended at the bus stop. She may or may not have boarded the right bus, she couldn’t remember.
“You do nothing in this dream that isn’t the commission of some sort of crime—theft, adultery, exhibition …”
Anna interrupted. “You can’t seriously judge someone against what she does in her sleep. I can’t help what I dream.”
“That’s not entirely true, Anna. What we dream, we are.”
Anna frowned. There was nothing of this conversation she liked.
Doktor Messerli didn’t pull her punch. “You recognize each consequence. You do the damage anyway. The dream is emphatic: you’re spinning out of control.”
17
EVERY FEW WEEKS AND SOMETIMES MORE OFTEN THAN THAT, the Benzes would receive in the postbox affixed to the wall outside their front door a notice printed on a half-size sheet of white paper, bordered in a bold black line. They were death announcements. Ein Bestattungsanzeige. The postman delivered them along with the mail whenever a Dietlikon resident died. It was a small-town courtesy, not a typical Swiss practice. The notices began with the decedent’s name and then below that, his or her birth and death dates. They ended with information about the funeral.
Anna saved every death notice they received. She kept them in a shoebox in her Kleiderschrank. She had collected at least three hundred of them over the span of nine years. When Bruno found the shoebox, he threatened to throw it away. “You have an unhealthy fixation on death,” he said.
Anna was emphatic in a way she usually wasn’t. “Don’t you dare. I keep these because someone has to. The worst thing that can happen to a person is to be forgotten.”
“That’s not the worst thing, Anna.”
“Don’t touch this box. I’m telling you.”