Indigo by Clemens J. Setz

I don’t know why, but at that moment I couldn’t help taking a few steps toward her.
    â€“ Excuse me, I said. My hands are really cold, and my fingertips are practically numb. Might you touch them for a moment?
    She backed farther away.
    â€“ Sorry? she said.
    â€“ My hands somehow . . . I don’t know, maybe something didn’t agree with me, an allergic reaction, or . . .
    â€“ Should I call an ambulance? she asked, but didn’t come any closer.
    â€“ No, thanks, I said, withdrawing my hands. It’s already getting a bit better. Probably just a circulatory problem. Hm, strange . . .
    The young woman’s face was pale.
    On the way to the stairs I had trouble suppressing a grin. Only in the room did I begin to feel guilty. I called home and talked on the phone for a little while, then flipped through a few channels, skimmed my notes, and added a few things while I fought against the slight claustrophobia welling up in me.
    First I tried to distract myself by searching the hotel room for hidden cameras and microphones.
    â€“ Ferenz, hello? I murmured as I searched. Calling Ferenz? Ferenz calling!
    Then I checked the exact position of my suitcase’s wheels and inspected its contents. I hadn’t touched it since my arrival, and someone might have searched it in my absence. But everything was in its place, and I sat, breathing heavily, by the window and gazed into the night, which was adorned with a magnificent yellowish moon medal. Late at night came my salvation: a documentary about couples with Tourette’s syndrome. A man and a woman sat on a couch, he had his arm around her and hissed insults at her, dirty slut, cunt, bitch, and her left hand kept wandering to his face and his neck and scratching him with her fingernails, until she intercepted it with her other hand and held on to it. We can basically never fight, the man said in answer to the interviewer’s question. Every curse word that exists has taken on a different meaning for us. So we don’t even know how to do it, to fight, haha. Afterward a few more scenes were shown from the couple’s everyday life. While shopping, the man shouted nasty vulgarities at her while she threw things off a shelf and immediately picked them up again. People stopped, looked at the camera, then at the strange pair, and finally moved on. I was so excited that I bounced while sitting on my bed and clapped my hands.
    Soothed by the wonderful documentary, I fell asleep, without a blanket, in my street clothes, but soon awoke, because I had again dreamed of frame no. 242 of the Zapruder film. That happened to me perhaps two or three times a year, usually when I was traveling, and it was always a terrible experience. It’s the moment shortly after the first bullet hit President Kennedy in the neck. He is clutching with both hands at the wound, like someone trying to open a stuck zipper. And he looks to the side at his wife, who looks at him uneasily, but also kindly and helpfully: Yes, what is it? And he appears as if he wanted to say: Here, I can’t get this open, can you please help me? And in an instant she will move closer to him and touch him and cry for help, until finally the second bullet hurtles down from the cosmos and tears off half the President’s skull. But that explosive last impact is still many, many microseconds away. The universe remains at a standstill, held by the gaze of the fatally wounded man, whose voice probably fails, because he can no longer breathe, and he is actually already a dead man, who is trying to speak to a living woman, and the two of them are sitting in the backseat of a car, although they are in reality millions of miles apart; he is attempting to communicate with her, to explain to her what has happened, and she looks back at him understandingly and also somewhat worriedly.
    In other variations of this dream, frame no. 242 appeared to me on a cereal box, another time I sat across from the