"How do you even know Mara? Or Aaron? I mean, well enough that you want to tell Mara things about him?" Saskia´s voice cuts through Bob like a hot wire that is wrapped around his neck as she is sitting in the passenger seat of his old and rusty car. What makes it worse is that she is not finished yet.
"I mean, you worked for the same people, that's obvious, but they employ thousands and I´ve been at that place. You wouldn't know anyone well enough unless you work on a project together. Which, clearly, you and Aaron didn´t."
Blinded by the rays of sun that are fragmenting as they enter the car through the dirty windshield, Bob starts sweating.
Can Saskia see it?
The eyes jumpy and nervous, he wipes over his temples.
As wet as after a shower.
Her expression is urging him to answer, but even though he feels her glances taking him apart, he is struggling to find the right words.
Can he trust her? Trust her enough to tell her the truth about the way that he met Aaron first?
About the many nights they spent together after that and about all the things that Aaron meant to him?
Still half blind, he sends his mind for a stroll down memory lane. The night they met is blurred. It's washed out by alcohol and wrapped up in whiskey stench. Despite his state back then, what he will, however, always remember is the moment that Aaron stood right next to him, and with his hand on his shoulder - oh, how strong and warm it felt! - he eventually said: "Your daughter and wife are dead, alright, but I honestly think that they would want you to strive. That is especially if you were the reason why they had to die."
He raised his voice.
"If someone dies because of you, the least you can do if you want to honour them is to live for them just as well."
Genuine. It sounded like something that came from deep within. Like advice that only a person could give who spoke from experience. Bob had never looked at it this way before, and at this moment Aaron, still a stranger to him then, changed his point of view.
There it is!
Not too revealing, and not too empty, either.
The answer for Saskia that Bob has been looking for.
At the next red light he brakes, the car halts, but the engine is running and howling as he turns towards her.
"Aaron and I had something in common, we had both lost someone we cared about. Let's just say he gave me something to help me over it before he took it all away again and left me broken."
The lights turn green, thank God!
Bob can turn away from her again and concentrate back on the road. He speeds up the car.
"Now your turn," he adds. "What the hell are you looking for Mara for? Have you ever even met her?"
If he were to face Saskia just a little longer, he would see how her expression changed now. All at once she looks like she is doing what he has just been doing. She's walking down memory lane and if Bob had stayed there longer, then they might have met.
"Sascha," she whispers. "The person who Aaron lost was his brother."
Suddenly Bob breaks hard, the tires screech.
Jesus, where did that come from?
A deer in the middle of the road. The car skids and the rear end swerves, before it halts amidst the street. Sideways and less than a meter from the crossing deer that is running towards the forest now and vanishes.
Holy Father!
The adrenaline!
Gasping for air with his mouth wide open and his eyes the same, Bob can feel it in his veins. Hopefully his heart that has been bad enough will survive the pondering.
For minutes he doesn't move the car, and neither does he move himself. But despite the shock that has taken him over, he remembers Saskia´s last sentence and just the same he remembers the question that he was going to ask. Before he puts the car back into gear or does anything else, he lets it out, still staring at the spot where the deer just crossed.
"Why would Aaron have told you? About his brother, I mean."
About the deer and half an accident Saskia didn't seem too shocked. As the answer to Bob´s question climbs onto her tongue, however, she looks distraught.
"Because I met him," she whispers. "I met Sascha. Just before he died."
"Oh, come on," Bob shakes his head and realigns the car on the empty street, but instead of accelerating he leaves it parked amidst the road, with the engine running.
"You couldn't have met him," he adds derogatively. "How old are you again, 23? Sascha died more than 40 ago."
"Yes, I know," she mumbles with dull eyes. "I didn´t mean Sascha´s death. I meant that I met Sascha briefly before Aaron died."
Her words don't seem to get through to Bob. He is moving the car ahead now. Steadily, no skidding, no swerving, as if he isn't shocked about her statement. That's because he truly isn't. He is the one who gave her the traineeship all those months ago, although she had no qualifications.
Why?
It wasn't really about the money that her father offered, Bob couldn't have cared less about it. If he is being honest, she got the job because she reminded him of everything that he had lost, of everything he could have had. Of Aria, the daughter that he should have saved in what seems like a different life to him. Could you have blamed him for having given Saskia the chance?
Aria would be about her age now. At a point when life that is just starting out feels overwhelming. A period when you easily feel lost. She would be looking for her way now, for a job and for direction. How could Bob have denied a young woman like herself a bit of help? How could he have said no to Saskia back then?
Maybe he should have. Especially when his background check revealed her troubled mental state. Prone to delusions and obsessions, it said. Bob can still see the print out of the document in front of him. Right now it nearly makes him blind to the road that he should be concentrating on.
Should he have taken it more seriously?
Maybe so, because she has to be insane if she actually means what she is saying now!
He doesn't give her a reply, but only navigates the car onwards to the next town. All around them the streets grow busier.
"Where are we going?" Saskia asks all of a sudden, anxiety in her voice. "If you want to drop me home then you have to turn around."
Bob knows where she lives. He doesn't want to drop her home. He wants to bring her somewhere safe. Somewhere where she will find help.
"You can trust me, Saskia," he replies as calmly as he can, despite the narrowness that he feels increasing in his chest. "I won't bring you home, okay? You seem distraught, and I think you shouldn´t be alone in this state. There is a place five minutes from here that can help you to sort your thoughts."
In what seems like panic her hand reaches for the door handle, but as much as she is rattling at it, the car door doesn't open - locked!
"My thoughts?" Her voice breaks. "What about yours then, huh? I know what happened between you and Aaron! Pull over and let me the fuck out, if you don´t want the police to find out that he broke your heart!"
What?
Impossible!
The vehicle in front of them brakes and Bob nearly crashes the car, that is how shocked he is about her threat.
Why would Aaron have told her anything about it?
Gasping, he pulls into the next side street, an empty alley, dark and barely asphalted. Nearly like the one that Aaron took him to on the very night that they first encountered.
"You shouldn't drive, let me drop you off." Aaron persuaded him in the parking lot, once they had left Bob's local, and Bob would be lying if he said that he didn't know already then why Aaron even offered.
This vibe, full of promise and excitement!
Bob hadn't felt a vibe like this since his teenage days. Not since he had first met his wife, and never before had he let himself feel it with another man. It was inappropriate when Bob was growing up, and it surely would have been to his father, a conservative pastor, who only recently has died. Even though Bob had never had regrets about his marriage to Anna - he did love her and she had given him Aria - every once in a while when he would see a man he liked he would start wondering how differently his life could have been, if he had grown up just a bit later when being with a man was perfectly acceptable.
That night with Aaron there it was: His chance to finally find out. His head still spinning from the drink and his eyes still glazed by it, he felt brave enough to commit to it, when, parked in an alley just like this, in the darkness of his car, Aaron´s firm hand stopped the engine. He took the key out of the ignition and touched Bob´s knee. As his hand slid further and further up his thigh, Bob wrestled down the first instinct to stop it. Finally reached its goal between his legs, and up there it stopped moving. It froze and was lying there, as if waiting for Bob to make a decision. The one he finally made felt right. It was deliberating to go for it.
He remembers kisses that were warming up his skin, like the daylight on a sunny summer day that you´d store it somewhere in your body´s memory, so for the rest of your days you can remember what it felt like.
He can feel it right now, parked in an empty alley with Saskia in his car who is still rattling at the door and trying to get out.
Does she think he brought her here to hurt her?
Maybe he should have thought the same about Aaron back then. Because that was what Aaron eventually did, he hurt him.
Is this what he told Saskia?
Does she think that Bob could have murdered him?
It sure seems this way right now.
Why else is she so eager to get out?
Bob unfastens his seatbelt. A clicking, after which he leans closer in order to grab her wrists and turn her towards him.
"Just relax, okay," he urges. "I'm not going to hurt you. And I didn´t hurt Aaron, either."
Her tension falls off when she looks at him, as if she can see in his face that he is genuine.
"I know," she whispers. "You loved him, didn't you? Perhaps almost as much as I did."
Love…
Bob coughs silently.
Does it even exist or is it just what you are made to believe that you should feel?
Then when you are growing up, you think you feel it once, but everything thereafter is only a desperate attempt to get over the first one you thought you found when everyone around told you it was time to feel it.
Did Bob love Aaron?
The man he spent happy days with? At barbecues, boat trips, bowling alleys, concerts? Passionate and satisfying nights, the pleasuring highs of which made him forget about the accident and the life he could have lived? The man who used to be Bob´s reason to get out of bed every day for more than half a year?
Wondering about it, he sighs.
"Well, what does it matter now?"
His hand starts knocking at the steering wheel.
"What I know for a fact is that he didn't love me, and now he is gone. Before I was ever man enough to tell him how much he hurt me."
Regrets are sinkholes. You are walking on a field of flowers and expecting solid ground, where all at once there is none, and with your disappointed expectations you are being swallowed by what lies beneath you. Until you cannot see it anymore: not the field of flowers and neither can you see the path that you have been walking on.
In the sinkhole of regrets that is swallowing Bob bit by bit, he slides down in his seat until his head is barely higher than the steering wheel. As Saskia watches him being eaten up by what Aaron´s death left him in, her eyes fill with her own regrets. She lowers her voice and gently puts her hand on his wrist.
"He might not have loved you, but he knew he hurt you, Bob," she whispers. "It was one of his biggest regrets. He wanted to take it back, but he didn't know how. He considered it an unrectifiable mistake."
Bob pushes himself upright.
"Unrectifiable? It is not like he even tried to correct it!"
Agitated, he shakes his head and her hand - off his wrist. "He walked past me at work every day and wouldn't even look at me. He treated me like he didn't know me, like the time we spent together meant nothing. No, worse, like it didn't even happen. As if I was deluded and just made it up. Not for a second do I believe that he had regrets."
Saskia is silent for a while. Only the muffled sounds of passing cars on the main street and those of a cat that is knocking a few cans when looking through the bins for something to eat.
How is Bob here once more? In a sinkhole, a place where there is no chance of ever getting out? Somewhere, stuck and doomed to go down, further and further, until he is in the ground?
In his spiraling thoughts, Saskia´s voice, gentle and calm, reaches him like a lifeline that has been thrown to him to pull him out.
"You don´t understand," she says. "The person you were with and the man you met at work every day, they weren't the same."
Prone to delusions.
When Bob stares at her, he cannot see her anymore. What he sees, instead, are the words from her background check written all over her face.
"And that is what you want to tell his wife, is it?" He asks, and looks at her pitifully. "You can´t, Saskia, please don't, in your own interest. I know you cannot see it now, but you need help. There weren't two Aarons, okay? As much as you may want to believe it, because you don't want to face that the man you were obsessed with was a prick, to me he was. He used me to get a job, and once I had given it to him, he crumbled me up and dropped me like an empty box of fags. He stopped talking to me and when I said I wanted a chat, he threatened to open a sexual harassment case and tell everyone that as his superior I had used my position to seduce him."
While Bob is talking, he gets so enraged that his body starts trembling.
"What kind of person would do something like that? I´m sorry, but the man you loved was a sociopath, Saskia, maybe even a psychopath. Who else would be capable of targeting someone in a vulnerable state and using their vulnerability to their advantage?"
"Someone who is in a vulnerable state himself." Saskia´s answer comes so instantly that Bob is shook by it. "Someone who is sick, and believe it or not, I know that Aaron was."
"Yes, he was," Bob nods. "That is exactly the point I am making! He was a sociopath who did horrible things to vulnerable people without remorse. That is sick, alright."
"No, you are not listening! You aren't talking about Aaron! The person you are talking about is Sascha."
There are many things that are beyond Bob, but the look on his face after he hears her say just that indicates that there isn't anything, at all, that he comprehends less than her words. His eyebrows raised, he waits for her to explain and when she sees how lost he is, reluctantly she does.
"Aaron brought his dead brother back to life and created an alternate persona in himself to deal with the guilt that he was made to feel in regards to his death. I think the man who pretended to be in love with you wasn't him. It couldn't have been, because Aaron…"
She sighs the sigh of somebody in love.
"He was good, Bob, so good! He wasn't anything like what you are describing."
Prone to obsessions and delusions.
In the car with Saskia, Bob cannot help but see these words everywhere he turns, while she is telling him things that, no offense, clearly sound delusional. What she is saying sounds driven by her obsession. By her love for a man who she created in her head. A person who wasn´t ever real. Someone who wasn't ever Aaron. Bob cannot bring himself to trust her judgment, no one should.
By the look on her face he can tell that she isn't just lying. What she says is genuinely what she believes.
But doesn't that make it even less likely?
Isn´t everything that an obsessed person could say drenched in their delusions? A delusion, by definition, that is a false belief about reality. That considered, can the truth ever even leave a deluded person's mouth, or does it change its shape to fit the world they've built for themselves, when it is formed out by their lips?
Bob doesn't know what to say. All at once he feels responsible. He is the person who enabled her. Because of him she got the job. Because of him she got close to Aaron, even though Bob knew about her obsession with the man before he gave her the position. He knew she was delusional, he knew she was obsessed with him, and still he let her in. If he is being honest, he didn´t only do it because she reminded him of Aria. He isn't proud of it, but making Saskia Aaron´s trainee was perhaps to some degree Bob's revenge on him.
Faced with her, who was obsessed with him, Aaron would learn a lesson and maybe take back the threats to do with sexual harassment that he had left Bob with. So he remembers having hoped.
When he is looking at Saskia in the passenger seat now, he feels bad. Not so much for her, but for having put her where he has put her. In a place where her obsessive nature would flourish and rip apart her last thread to reality, so she would be at the brink of a mental breakdown. He studies her cautiously.
Is she already there?
To be fair, she doesn't look too well. Her hair, greasy. The clothes, dirty. No makeup on, and dark circles under her eyes as if she hasn't slept for days.
All at once a lump forms in Bob's throat, and he swallows hard on his own thoughts.
Is it his fault?
Saskia´s state right now, is he the one who caused it?
He shouldn't have let this happen.
Not after Aria!
Dow did he end up here again, when he had only ever one thing to do: keeping her safe!