Night Work by Thomas Glavinic Read Free Book Online

hadn’t activated some mechanism or other, all was quiet. Now and then a beam would creak beneath his weight.
    On reaching the third floor, he stationed himself beside the balustrade overlooking the forecourt.
    Nothing was stirring down below.
    He drank his beer.
    Then he went lurching down a rope walkway in the shape of a spiral staircase.
    *
    At the shooting gallery he couldn’t resist the air rifle lying on the counter. He took his time aiming. He fired and reloaded. He took aim, fired and reloaded again. Six times the gun spat air, and six times came the almost simultaneous smack of the slug striking home. He examined the target. The result was not unsatisfactory.
    He hung up another target and slowly crooked his finger.
    He had always fancied that you could die of slowness by prolonging some everyday action indefinitely – to infinity, or, rather, to finality – because you would depart this world while still engaged in that process. A step, a gesture, a wave of the arm, a turn of the head – if youslowed that movement more and more, everything would come to an end, more or less of its own accord.
    His finger curled around the trigger. With surprising clarity, he realised that he must long ago have reached, yet failed to reach, the point of release.
    Unslinging the shotgun, he cocked it and fired. A gratifyingly loud report rang out. Simultaneously, he felt the weapon kick him in the shoulder.
    The target displayed a gaping hole big enough to take a man’s fist. Sunlight was twinkling through some other, smaller holes around it.
    *
    He went for a trip round the Prater on the miniature railway, whose diesel locomotive was simple to operate. The engine puttered, the air smelt of greenery. It was much cooler in the shade of the trees than among the booths in the amusement park. He pulled on his shirt, which he’d tied round his waist after its ride on the Flying Carpet.
    At the Heustadlwasser he climbed unsteadily into one of the boats moored there. Tossing the painter onto the landing stage, he pushed off and rowed vigorously until the boatman’s hut was out of sight. Then he shipped his oars.
    He lay down on his back and drifted. Sunlight flickered through the trees overhead.
    *
    He awoke with a start.
    Blinking in the gloom, he gradually made out the furniture’s familiar outlines and realised that he was at home in bed. He wiped his sweaty face on his forearm, threw back the thin linen sheet he slept beneath in summer andwent into the bathroom. His nose was blocked up, his throat sore. He drank a glass of water.
    Sitting on the edge of the bath, he groped his way back into the nightmare.
    He had dreamt of his family. The strange thing was, they were all his own age. He’d spoken to his grandmother, who was seventy when he was born and had died at eighty-eight. In his dream she was thirty-five. Although Jonas had never seen her at that age, he knew it was her. He’d marvelled at her smooth complexion and dark, luxuriant hair.
    His grandfather, likewise thirty-five, had also appeared. His mother, his father, his uncle, his aunts – all were his own age.
    David, his cousin Stephanie’s son, who had celebrated his eleventh birthday last February, sported a moustache and had chill blue eyes.
    Paula, another cousin’s seventeen-year-old daughter, whom he had bumped into by chance in Mariahilfer Strasse not long ago, glanced at him over her shoulder and said: ‘Well?’ Her face was older, more expressive and a little careworn. She, too, was thirty-five beyond a doubt. Standing beside her was the baby she’d given birth to last autumn, an aloof-looking thirty-five-year-old man wearing brown gloves.
    There was something else as well, some disquieting feature he couldn’t put his finger on.
    They’d all yammered at him in a language of which he understood only snatches. His dead young grandmother had patted his cheek and muttered ‘UMIROM, UMIROM, UMIROM’ – at least, that was what it had sounded like to