L'ennui est la grande maladie de la vie.

(Boredom is the biggest ailment in life.)

- Alfred de Vigny

„After my jump out of an air plane, which was flying at too low an altitude for my parachute to properly deploy, I was of course taken to the next hospital“, Mr Tuniak said.

“I can understand that you got into the emergency room every hospital would take you with two broken legs”, I said. “But afterwards? You were not insured, were you?”

“No, but the Spider was paying for everything.”

The first visitors who were allowed to see Alexander were his mothers. Thanks to their time machine they had arrived at the same time at the hospital as him and they had assured him that he had nothing to worry about. They had everything under control.

“Thank you”, Alexander said, looking down at his two legs that were hidden by their casts. Miriam and Helen were sitting on two chairs right next to his bed. Looking at them, Alexander had to laugh out loudly. “You know, I'm nearly as old as you are now and you still have to take care of me.”

“You are still our child”, Miriam answered.

“Especially, if you do childish things, like jumping out of an air plane”, Helen added. “How do you feel?”

“Quite well, considering”, Alexander said. “I don't feel any pain. My biggest problem is actually that I'm just lying around every day with nothing to do.”

“Every day?”, repeated Helen. “You just came here yesterday.”

“With nothing to do! There's just that television and... By the way: Who is paying for the room?”

“Johannes”, Miriam said. “He is outside. He wants to see you too.”

“Well, then send him in.”

Johannes' wheelchair was pushed into the room by a nurse. Helen and Miriam left the room to go buy some books for Alexander so that he had something to read.

“My mothers told me that you were paying my bills here”, Alexander said. “Thank you.”

“Don't mention it”, Johannes said. “If I wasn't doing it, Philip would be. He has even offered to split the costs, but I told him that it is my fault that you are lying here. After all, it was me who sent you to visit Gemini.” Alexander wanted to protest, but Johannes raised a hand to signal that he hadn't finished yet. “No, I never explicitly told you to go and investigate that organisation, but we both now that I'm more... subtle in my requests.”

Alexander nodded. “I'm surprised you would ever admit that.”

“It won't happen again”, Johannes promised. “Did they tell you how long you would have to wear those casts?”

“Four months for sure, probably five or six”, Alexander replied.

“That long?”

“I'm old. My bones heal that quickly any more.”

“Do you want me to bring you one of my wheel chairs?”

“So that I can get out of here? Immediately!”

Johannes smiled. “You are one of the most impatient patients I have ever known and I have spent a lot of time in hospitals.”

“How did you spend your time? There' absolutely nothing to do here”, Alexander wanted to know.

“Oh, that reminds me that Dilara and Sean have asked if they could come and see you”, Johannes said instead of a reply.

“Of course. I am glad about every visitor.”

“You have spent one whole year in a temple. I'm sure there wasn't much more going on there than in a hospital”, I said. “Was it really that bad or...?”

“...or is it just my memory of that time?”, Mr Tuniak finished the question. “I may be exaggerating a bit, but I assure you not a lot. And there were a lot of things to do in the temple: gardening, doing repairs, mental and physical training...”

“What about your television?”

“Well, I never watched a lot of television”, Mr Tuniak said. He shrugged. “Fortunately, many of my friends came to visit me.”

Dilara and Sean entered the room. Five days had passed since Alexanders' fall and since then they had only seen him once when they had found him in the desert and brought him to the hospital. They had brought the finished photos they had shot and showed them to Alexander.

“The cat also wanted to come, but they are not allowing any visitors in here”, Dilara said. “Why did you jump after her? Don't you know that you need to be at a certain height or higher, before parachutes start working?”

“Then why were we wearing them?”, Alexander asked laughingly.

“Do you know the story of the man, I think he was French or Austrian, who invented the parachute suit?”, Sean asked. Alexander shook his head. “He basically did the same stupid thing you did.”

“He wanted to test his suit and climbed the Eiffel Tower to show that it worked”, Dilara continued the narrative. “The original plan was to the test the suit with puppets, but at the last moment he decided differently and wanted to jump himself.”

“Did it work?”, Alexander asked.

“It would have worked, if the Eiffel Tower had been higher”, Sean said. “But since it wasn't... His fall was too short for the parachute to properly deploy. And he did not have as much luck as you had.”

“When did that happen?”

“At the beginning of this century, a few years before the First World War”, Dilara said.

“Did you look that up so that I would feel better?”, Alexander asked. “So that I wouldn't think I was the only one doing a stupid thing like that?”

“No, that is a well known story at Gemini”, Sean told him. “Our founder... the woman who inspired Gemini, was there, that's why we know it. The whole thing was even filmed. We can show you the film, if you want to.”

Alexander declined the offer. “No, thank you. But I would like to know more about that woman.”

“Are you still collecting information for your friend?”, Dilara asked.

“No, that's just my natural curiosity”, Alexander answered honestly. “And as you can see, there is not much else here I can do...”

So Dilara and Sean told him about her.

“Did you really stay for several months in that hospital?”, I asked.

“No, that would not have been necessary”, Mr Tuniak said. “After all, I didn't need intensive care of constant supervision, but simply a place where I could relax and wait for my bones to heal themselves.”

Miriam and Helen entered Alexander's room.

“If one of the nurses asks, we are your older sisters”, Helen said.

“Why?”, Alexander asked.

“They didn't believe that we were old enough to be your mothers”, Miriam explained.

Alexander took the little mirror he used for shaving from the small table next to his bed and looked into it. He compared his face with the faces of his mothers. Yes, he could see why a stranger might think that he was only a few years younger than his mothers. None of them really knew the age difference between them, since none of them had bothered to keep an exact count through all of their separate travels, but they all knew that the age gap between them had shrunk throughout the years.

“But it doesn't really matter anyway, because in three days you will get out of here”, Miriam promised.

“Back to Leviathan?”, Alexander asked. It was the only place he could think of where he could go.

“Yes, Leviathan”, Helen confirmed. “But not the Leviathan of this day, but the one in the future. In the year 2005, to be precise.”

“I hadn't planned to jump nearly another decade, the last one was enough”, Alexander said. “Why can't I go in this present?”

Miriam and Helen exchanged a quick glance, before Miriam said: “There is a better medical equipment on the island in 2005. Estevan needed it.”

“Needed? Did he die?”, Alexander asked.

Both his mothers nodded. “We will bring you to Leviathan a few days after his death. Most probably, you won't need any of this stuff anyway, but we both think that it's better to be on the safe side in this case.”

Alexander agreed with them. “One more question: Why did Estevan die? What happened?”

“He was simply old”, Helen said. She noticed that her answer had forced a reaction within Alexander. “Does this surprise you?”

“No, no...”, Alexander said. “It's just... I'm thinking about our big family gathering.”

His mothers knew immediately which family gathering he meant. Strictly speaking, there had only ever been one. Only three people had been invited to it: Miriam, Helen and Alexander. But since they had all visited it several times throughout their lives, dozens of versions of each one of them had been there.

“When I was jumping out of the air plane, there was a short moment I really fell, the second before the parachute opened”, Alexander told them. “And for just this moment, I thought the parachute wouldn't open. But it did, of course, and I remembered that I had seen older versions of myself at that gathering. But I realised another thing: I was now one of the older versions. There are only a few left, who are older than me.”

“I know how that feels”, Miriam admitted and Helen knew the feeling as well. “We travel through time but we do not escape it.”

“The last few years I lived as if I had an infinite amount of time at my disposal”, Alexander said. “But once I am dead, there will be nothing left of me, except maybe a few strange footnotes in the history texts.”

“We are time travellers. We are only observers”, Helen said.

“But we must be able to do something”, Alexander said angrily. But immediately he calmed down again. “I'm sorry. I know that we are not allowed to make any big changes to history. It's just lying here in this bed the whole day, staring at the walls... well, thoughts like that are coming to the forefront.”

Miriam put a hand to his shoulder. “You will find some distraction on Leviathan”, she assured him. “And once you are well again, we will talk about this some more.”

Alexander was thankful for that. He may have looked the same age as his mothers, but they were right: He was still their child. And on days like these, he wasn't sure if he had really grown up or just grown old.

“The time spent on Leviathan was a lot more agreeable than in the hospital”, Mr Tuniak said. “There was enough distraction there to keep my mind occupied. I even got my own wheel chair to roll around on the island. Or get pushed around.”

“Did you teach?”, I wanted to know.

“Of course”, Mr Tuniak said. “And there was one student who stood out among the others. He was called Ethan and had been born in Australia. He was especially interested in history and we often talked about times past for long times. We could spent whole nights talking, because he didn't need to sleep.”

“How is that possible?”, I asked. “Don't we humans go crazy after a few days, maybe a week, without sleep?”

“Not, if you sleep like a dolphin”, Mr Tuniak said. “In most humans, the two hemispheres of the brain are connected in the middle. But Ethan's brain was missing that connection. Some seemingly simple things are more difficult for him because of that, but he has trained himself to sleep with only one hemisphere at a time. If you see him and he is 'sleeping' like that you don't really notice anything different. He is a bit slower than usual and there are a few things he can not do, but he is still awake.” Mr Tuniak sighed. “Back then, I didn't know that his interest in history had an ulterior motive.”

NEXT WEEK

Seine Briefe sind das schönste Andenken, das ich von ihm besitze...