Tomy and the Planet of Lies (6 page)

“And when the hell did you learn Arabic?”

“It's just the same as how I learnt Swiss German from Erich,” Tomy said. “From the commandant's memory.”

It's all too crazy, I thought, that Tomy could take over a hundred people from different countries and he would be able to speak all their languages. Wouldn't that drive him crazy? How could the human brain cope? Tomy's patience with us was exceptional, as I was to learn in the coming days and weeks.

For now, we stuffed ourselves full of ham and crispbread, all washed down with mineral water, but we couldn't help constantly asking Tomy questions. The commander of the barracks, Tomy told us, had only given in after Tomy's consciousness had signalized “no danger” and “good being, friendly being” and the commandant's ego had finally accepted this.

After this had happened, the commandant had listened excitedly like a researcher and started a dialog with Tomy. He had talked aloud, using his voice although this was unnecessary, and Tomy had answered with his consciousness. In Arabic. For anyone standing around it would have seemed as if the commandant was talking to himself, but luckily, they were alone in the room. After the commandant had heard about the situation that we were in, he said that he was powerless to help us—because we were on the other side of the border. He wasn't allowed to send any troops over the border, because it could lead to a political ‘situation' and he could be court-martialed and lose his job or even be sent to prison.

It was only after a lot of haggling that he had consented to send a truck and one single officer. If there were any problems, he could always claim that his soldier had simply lost his way. So he had chosen the young officer Mahmud, a mechanic from his division, to take on the mission of helping us. The operation would cost 600 U.S. dollars, not including the water and the Coke.

“Six hundred dollars?” I repeated. “Not bad for an army exercise at the expense of the Iranian Army. And how is he to get his money?”

“We're going to bring it to him,” said Tomy. “I promised him. Let's go!”

Resistance was useless. We still had $3,400 in cash and a further $6,000 in traveler's checks hidden in clothes, belts and mats: expeditions can be expensive. So we packed up our Bedouin tent and set off. It was 90 kilometers to Taftan. On the way, I kept thinking about what Tomy had told us. His very presence unsettled me. Many years ago, I had read a novel by my friend Walter Ernsting, who was well known by the pen name Clarc Dalton. In his story, a monk develops the ability to jump from one brain to another. Stories! Made-up fantasies! Now I was sitting in front of a being that really did have this ability. In the flesh and in my own—albeit thirty years younger—body! It was all so crazy! What sort of dream world was I living in? When Tomy spoke I heard my own voice, and that hadn't changed much over the last three decades. Tomy had said he knew everything up to my 22nd birthday and a few months. Could he do everything that I could do? Did he love the way that I loved? Did he comb his hair the same way that I did and would he, over the coming years, develop the same tastes that I had developed? For instance, for Johnny Walker Black Label? For well-cooked chicken? Did he have the same dislikes that I did? Did he hate liver, too? Did he find caviar disgusting? Did beer make him sleepy and champagne make him perky? How would my wife react to him? To an Erich who was thirty years younger? Would she fall in love with the younger me?

How could I explain Tomy to my relatives and friends? As my father's long-lost illegitimate son? Why would this son suddenly appear now, when he was 22 years old? What sort of stories would I have to make up? My goodness, I had some big problems ahead of me!

“Tomy,” I said after an hour on the road, “can you drive?”

“Of course. May I?”

He took the wheel and drove exactly the same way that I did. There was nothing I could have criticized. Normally, I'm like a driving instructor when I'm placed next to young drivers. Now I was in the passenger seat—Marc was behind us, sitting on a box, which we had covered in a woolen blanket. I switched on the radio. Everything was in Arabic. Tomy could understand the voices and translated the Arabic news. I turned it off and looked at him.

“What was all that about this morning with the exploding water bottles and everything?” I asked. “The way you turned up really had us in a panic.”

“I'm sorry about that,” said Tomy apologetically, “but I really couldn't do anything about it. I can still see you with the pistol in your hand. It wouldn't have taken much and you would have shot me down.”

“And then?”

“This body would have been dead; the process would have been interrupted.”

I said nothing, because I didn't really understand what he was talking about. Marc picked up the thread and repeated the question about the exploding water bottles and the water. Although Tomy had saved us from dying of thirst, Marc still didn't trust him. Tomy's tone was that of an older man talking to a child. He was trying to clarify certain things and sometimes he just didn't have the words to explain things because—as he said—human tongues had no words for them. After the “original impulse”—whatever that was—had “ignited” his space, the “nucleus had rolled”. Energy was the same everywhere. A human body consists of oxygen, carbon, sodium, potassium, zinc, iron, bromine, manganese, copper, chromium, magnesium, molybdenum, titanium, iodine, strontium, rubidium, selenium, boron, nickel, sulfur, arsenic, cobalt, silicon, tin, barium, lithium…

I had interrupted him there. Tomy held the steering wheel in exactly the same way that I did, functioned the same way I did, and could do several different things at the same time while driving; he noticed everything and reacted to everything on the desert track. Marc wanted to know more about this “creation” and Tomy answered as if it was the most banal thing in the universe.

Everything that the nucleus had needed to create the body had been naturally available in the environment, except for the small detail of certain substances in the car, such as the water. To put the body together as quickly as possible, the nucleus had needed more water than the finished body would actually contain, because some of the water would be used up in the chemical processes. He was, Tomy explained, made up of the same 33 chemical elements as we were, his molecules had the same structures, and nothing in his body was extraterrestrial.

“Except for your—what would you call it—spirit?”

“That word doesn't really describe it that well,” said Tomy shaking his head while he expertly drove over the extremely rough terrain. “By spirit, you mean the individual, something intangible, immeasurable or, in the case of a haunted house, a ghost. When you say spirit, you're thinking of something like vitality, the soul, because when someone dies you say his spirit has left him. All of that doesn't really define my ‘spirit.' The closest I can come to it is ‘intelligent energy.'”

Marc shook his head and scratched his blond hair. The more Tomy tried to teach us, the more we realized we didn't understand.

In the distance, we recognized the grey outline of some low buildings, and a couple of kilometers further on we came across Mahmut's military truck blocking the road. Tomy stopped the car and spoke with him. Then he got out and climbed into the truck. We were to cross the Pakistani-Iranian border like any normal person; Mahmud and he would be waiting for us on the Iranian side in front of the barracks. The camp was so large we wouldn't be able to miss it, he said.

I understood immediately what the problem was. Tomy didn't have any papers, so he wouldn't have made it over the border. The commandant had obviously realized it too. So, he was smuggling Tomy, Mahmud, and the truck over the border via an illegal route, while we went through customs in the normal manner. We had what's known as a ‘carnet de passage,' a kind of passport for the car, made out by the city where the car is registered. Without a legitimate entry and exit stamp we wouldn't have been able to get out of Pakistan or into Iran.

The Pakistan border crossing consisted of a shed with a straw roof. Four shabby-looking uniformed men with ripped vests and dirty hands wanted to look through our luggage. I offered them a carton of cigarettes, which I had packed especially for such occasions. At last the carnet was stamped, but not before the guard had spat profusely onto the stamp pad to moisten it. The Iranian border crossing, just a few meters further on, was passed without incident, excepting the usual bribes. Baksheesh, it's called in this part of the world. We were probably in the only vehicle that these people had seen the whole week. Taftan turned out to be a settlement consisting of a few dozen houses and huts. At its center was a small mosque, next to it, squatting in front of a corrugated iron shed, were several bearded men wearing turbans. They stared at us in a greedy and unfriendly manner.

I drove aimlessly through the place, hoping that the barracks would soon appear. On the outskirts of the village, we found a run-down gas station with two pumps and lots of trash lying all around. There were old oil cans, crunched up canisters, ripped open barrels, broken axles and everywhere an overpowering stink of gasoline. I needed gas but didn't trust this gas station at all. Who knew what the attendant might be pumping into the Range Rover. Finally, I found a wall, topped with barbed wire with two large concrete buildings behind it. I drove along the wall until I finally saw Mahmut's truck. As I drove by him towards the camp gates, I suddenly asked myself whether we could trust this camp commandant. What would happen if he changed his mind, confiscated our expensive automobile, stole the money, and even had us arrested?

The barrier rose, allowing us access to the site. Left and right of us half-naked soldiers were crouched in the shade of the crippled trees. Directly in front of the main entrance, there was a deck chair where a tanned man in a bathing suit was sitting. In front of him, on the ground, lay an olive green officer's hat and a tin can, which contained the remains of a stinking cigar. His bearded face and black hair reminded me of a young Fidel Castro. The edges of all his fingernails were black. We got out of the car, Mahmud called out something, and “Fidel” stood up. With a look of recognition, he wandered around the Range Rover. All of the doors were open; “Fidel” looked at the aluminum cases containing our metal detectors. I had already told Tomy what was in these cases and he now explained this to “Fidel.” He even went into detail, such as how they could detect metal objects at up to three meters deep and in the process distinguish between precious and non-precious metals. “Fidel” nodded appreciatively, his greed seemed to grow.

I recalled the Indian-Pakistani border crossing, which we had crossed three weeks previously. The customs officers on both sides were convinced that every technical appliance was some sort of espionage device. The Indian guard at the Wagah post had pointed with his wooden stick at the aluminum cases and demanded that we open them. It took a lot of talking and gesticulation to persuade him that the metal detector was a broken radio. I turned the volume on the device up to full and—because the car was full to the brim with tools, cans and other metal—the loudspeaker provided a series of squeaking, crackling and whistling sounds which made a pretty convincing old radio. Our “Fidel” here didn't look like the kind who would fall for that kind of trick. He seemed well educated and lot craftier.

We entered a cool room as big as a small gym, which had the Iranian flag hanging from the ceiling, green, white, and red stripes with a red crest in the middle. In one corner of the room stood a large, antique desk; next to it, on a wooden bookshelf, lay yellowing books, which probably hadn't been looked at in years. On a tattered leather chair lay a pile of illustrated magazines with odd corners folded over to mark pages and covered in brown cigarette burns. “Fidel” pulled on a shirt, squeezed into the second leather chair, and indicated a wooden bench on the opposite side of the room where we were to sit.

The cold stone floor made the place seem incredibly clean, for some reason, in contrast to the tired old fans, which whirred and clattered on the ceiling. “Fidel” spoke to someone on the telephone and said, to Tomy of course, that the commandant was currently busy, and then he lit up a stinking cigar and set himself to wait. I did the same with a cigarette.

“I don't like this,” said Marc dryly. “This barracks is like a den of thieves.” Looking through the windows, we could see the soldiers outside wandering around the Range Rover, peering through the windows to see what was inside. I stood up and went outside: “Fidel” seemed unconcerned. I sat myself down on the steps outside. The soldiers grinned at me but made no move to touch the car. Marc appeared next to me and squatted down beside me and asked what I thought of all this.

“Let's just wait,” I said. “The commandant is supposedly an educated man from a good family. And don't forget, we have our own guardian angel: Tomy.” Marc looked skeptical. We wandered back into the hall and asked Tomy what he thought of it all. He was convinced of the commandant's honesty. I noticed a rack on the wall with steel helmets and suddenly wondered if these might not have an effect like a Faraday cage and block Tomy's “intelligent energy.” He waved our worries aside, saying: “There's nothing that can stop that, not even meshed materials.” I tried to explain to him what a Faraday cage was and that a network of metal could cause electrical impulses and radio waves to bounce off itself. But Tomy said I should try to imagine an atomic nucleus the size of a pea. The electrons racing around it would be 100 meters away from the nucleus. I understood what he meant. He was reminding me that all matter consisted of hardly anything more than empty space.

After about an hour, “Fidel” stood up. He had, in the meantime, put on some long pants, done up his shirt buttons and tucked his army beret under his arm. We followed him up some stairs to the second floor. He knocked on a heavy looking door.