Saskia would never have expected to end up in this position. On the ground, with her head on her knees, with her hair not washed for days, her clothes not changed for half a week, and her eyes alarmingly sleep deprived, because she is constantly alert and cannot risk giving herself a break.
What do you do in a place like this? And more importantly how do you get out of it?
She has never been in this state. Well, close to it perhaps, after a few break-ups, but then a friend would come over with a Caramel flavoured coffee and a few donuts and she would see light at the end of the tunnel.
There is no light at the end of this one, the actual tunnel that she is hiding in right now. Dark, wet, and cold. So cold that her petite body is trembling, and she regrets that she didn't eat that piece of cake, that slice of ham, that pack of crisps, only so she would be skinny. Right now she could use all the extra-layers she could get.
With little strength she lifts her head from her knees and sends her eyes out scouting, but she only sees darkness. How long has she been here? Hard to tell without daylight.
At the start she tried to count the minutes, but after minute 109 she decided to stop, because only insane people count invisible things that don't matter to anyone. Despite her looks right now that is wasting away, despite her hiding in a tunnel, and despite her incoherent thoughts: insane Saskia is not. She has a good reason to be here. Perhaps the best: her life that, as she was warned, would most likely end if she were to be found.
Could this be paranoia?
An episode triggered by drug consumption perhaps? She isn't really a waster, but she wouldn't refuse to get wasted either, when offered to do so on a weekend. However, she doubts that what she's going through is due to a warped state of mind. The last time she had a weekend off and allowed herself to get fucked up was ages ago, she can barely remember when. Since last September she has non-stop been working on the project that she fought so hard to get onboarded for.
Oh, how she regrets it now! Why did she not just leave it alone? Or, should she say: Why did she not leave HIM alone?
It is hard to concentrate. Constantly she hears dripping water, and it isn't even raining out there. Dripping and dripping, monotonous, it makes her think of death. Right now everything does perhaps, because hers is out there, only steps away.
Can this tunnel fill up with water, she wonders, when it eventually rains, so she would be left to drown in it?
She tries to look around and figure it out. With a relieving conclusion: no, it can - most likely - not. It is an old train tunnel that she is hiding in. She is sitting on the tracks - her temporary bed - and after all this time they have become more comfortable than they look at first sight. The tunnel is long, and the territory - even, so water wouldn't gather in here, not even if there were a monsoon out there. There isn't one out there, but there is one in her head. All this water up there, and her thoughts are slowly drowning.
Should she evacuate the important ones before they start sinking and dying? Or would she be better off to push them down until they drown, so her mind would finally be quiet?
She wants everything up there erased, first and foremost maybe her memory.
Why can it not just stop? Why is she still thinking about him?
Prof. Dr. Aaron Curbler, or should she say: the person it started with. Why did she have to start thinking about him in the first place? And yes, she started long before their first encounter. Other teenage girls have posters of Justin Bieber, but that was never her. For Saskia it has always only been Aaron. Oh, she still can't believe that he asked her to call him just that on the first day they met! The day she started working on his project, and blushing, she took it as a sign that the affection was mutual.
Didn't she always know it? Hasn´t she always seen him as her soulmate? The very moment when they met she finally got confirmation for that. But now he's dead.
She puts her head back on her knees and starts sobbing. He is actually dead, it wasn't supposed to end like that!
They only just started to connect, after nights and nights of work together. Without anyone's consent he only just gave her access to classified information that no trainee has ever been invited to see.
"Well, I need you here," he'd say repeatedly. "Without you, I´d be stuck."
Stuck without her... She was sure that he meant stuck, as in lost, as in he would not know what to do without her, and with these few words he made her feel like the bond between them was real.
"The lift, I mean, of course," he tried to talk himself out of the hole that she had dug for him. "Look, as you know I don't drive. I don't even have a license, so in the middle of the night how would I get home without you?"
"Ya, right", she smiled and gave him a wink, as she persuaded herself that he´d only said it, because the lab was constantly being filmed. "I know, you want to go home to your wife."
Maybe she should have left it at that, but most of the many times this conversation took place she couldn't help but add: "Why does your wife never come to pick you up?"
For months whenever she would ask him, he would not give her an answer. He'd go silent, turn his back on her, and try to find his composure again before turning back. Not so last week. Last week he finally replied.
"My wife… " A sigh, as if saying it was tough for him. "To be honest, she doesn't really know."
Eyes wide open, Saskia pretended to be surprised, but she truly wasn't. She has studied him for years. Him and his wife, which is why she wouldn't have expected him to tell her, but even though she was anything but shocked that he left Mara in the dark, she couldn't make it obvious to him. Otherwise he would have known. He would have realised that she had started watching him years ago.
You cannot let that happen, Saskia, she thought to herself. Be oblivious to what is happening1
"Your wife doesn't know… what exactly? She doesn't know about... what the two of us have been doing, you mean?"
Aaron turned away from her. He pretended to take a note, and his hand was trembling. God, that's sweet, Saskia caught herself thinking, is he actually nervous?
But then he threw the pen on the table and looked up.
"She doesn't know about any of this here. She doesn't even know that this is where I work." He wiped over his face, and sighed into the palm of his hand. "So, yes she has no idea about the things that you and I are doing."
Such desperation in his voice, such pain, and all at once he looked smaller than Saskia had seen him before. He was shrinking right in front of her, as she realized there and then that he was just a person. With an extraordinary mind perhaps, but with ordinary problems. A person like herself that longed to be seen by the ones they love.
Her mouth opened, but she didn't know what to answer to make him feel better. For a second she hesitated, then bit her lip and chose silence. No words, because there weren't any to console him. She went over to him, pulled him in and embraced him.
"You know, Aaron," she whispered, her arms wrapped tightly around him, "I see you. I am not your wife, but if she doesn't know that you work here and doesn't know what we are doing, then she doesn't know who she is married to. And you deserve better than that."
Instantly he broke out of her embrace. Even though she was trying to lock him in, he succeeded in taking a step back and started shaking his head.
"I cannot tell her." His voice broke. "I would like to, but I can't. She´ll never look at me the same again."
He left Saskia standing there, with her arms still wide open. Stuck somewhere in the air, as if she was waiting for him to return, when he would stop pacing up and down.
"Well, maybe that would be for the best," she sent words after him when she realized that he wouldn't come back."Would you not rather have her look at you for exactly who you are, than for her to see a stranger in you and not know the real you at all?"
He froze in the middle of the room, his eyes to the ground. For a minute it was silent, before he looked up again.
"Who am I then?" He sighed. "How will she look at me when she sees me, I mean, the real me?"
There it was, Saskia´s opportunity, and presented with it, she couldn't help but take it. When she gave him an answer, her heart jumped more than just beat. It jumped like its destination was the moon.
"I don't know your wife, and I can't tell you how she will look at you. But I see you for exactly who you are, Aaron, and look at me! I look at you like this, can you see it?" She paused when they locked eyes, before she silently added: "I look at you in awe."
What a moment! What a connection! She could feel it in her bones. Just for a second, though. Then his eyes went blank, and when he said what he said next, it came out of nowhere. She couldn't have seen it coming. Or maybe she could have if she hadn't been blinded by her feelings.
"Do you not think it's wrong? What we are doing here, I mean… Do you not think it makes us... narcissists? Just horrible people?"
"Well, I'm sure we aren't horrible people." She shrugged, and despite her genuine surprise her response came fast.
"I just think in certain situations good people are forced to do questionable things in order to preserve themselves. And that is what we are doing, isn't it? Both of us? I mean, we are trying to preserve ourselves."
She approached him as she went on. "To be honest, I feel like I would not survive if we didn't do what we are doing. Do you not feel the same?"
Relief. She had finally sent those words out for him to hear. She needed him to know what he meant to her. Since she had first seen him on TV in her teenage days, she had felt this draw, this pull. A magnetic force that would rip her apart, she was sure, if she weren't going to try and make her way to him. She had always felt like she had to pursue him. By going after him she was preserving herself, and that night in the lab she had finally been given a chance to say it.
Oh, what a huge mistake! How she wishes she hadn't told him! She was selfish, she shouldn't have been! Would she be in this cold tunnel now, if she had kept it to herself?
She knocks the back of her head against the wet tunnel wall. Stupid, stupid, stupid you are, just like your father always told you, you brat! Why did you have to overwhelm him with something that he was not ready to hear?
When she had sent her words out to Aaron that day they had taken some time to reach him, but as soon as he had fully taken them in he took a step back, and distance slipped into his gaze.
"Look, Saskia, I was talking about our project. About the full extent of it." Doubt crept into his gestures. "I'm just wondering, are you?"
He knew she was not, and he would still know it even if she took it back. However, she tried to make it undone by giving him a nod. With a smile on her face, but her voice couldn´t hide her disappointment.
"Yes, of course, I was! What else would I be talking about?" She forced a chuckle. "You didn't think I was talking about us, did you? As in, about the thing with me and you?" She threw her head back, laughed and waved it off. "Oh, come on, no, of course not, will you stop!"
Laughter isn't always infectious. Hers that day was not. His face grew tense and he raised his voice.
"Now, listen to me, there is no us, no thing with me and you, alright? There can´t be! And if I made you feel otherwise, then I apologise, but we have bigger things to worry about. Would you not agree?"
She did agree at that moment by nodding submissively. She didn't do it because she really agreed with what he had said, but men like Aaron are teachers. They don´t like for their statements to be questioned or argued. They are used to talk about universal truths, and those are meant to be agreed upon by everyone.
A man like Aaron talks facts, he is always right. Apart from this one time. This one time Saskia was sure that he was wrong. There was an us, a her and him, and as it was growing bigger and stronger, like a baby in the womb, he was getting scared that it would be born before he would be ready to nurse it. This was at least how Saskia chose to explain his harsh reaction to herself, and she believes it to this day, as she leans against the tunnel wall and hides away to preserve her life. She believes that he was on his way to get ready for her, and regrets deeply that he had no time to do so at his own pace.
Why can he not be here with her? He should be after everything that she was giving! He should be here with her, alive and breathing. Not dead somewhere and leaving her with a promise that can now never be fulfilled.
Just the other day she got his things out of his house, he was getting there, getting ready to be with her. But now he is gone and will never know what she could have been to him.
"Hide!" was the last thing he said to her, clearly because he cared. He was growing feelings, or so she thinks. But why did he always feel like whatever feelings he grew were harmful weeds that had to be pulled out?
She raises her head. Maybe she shouldn't have done what he last asked her to do. Maybe she shouldn't be hiding. Clearly he always felt like he had to hide from everything, even from himself, and what he was hiding from when he was still alive was nothing that she wouldn't be able to face. Slowly she gets off the tunnel ground and stands up straight.
That is it for her, she has made a decision. She is done hiding.
She will face what is out there, just like Aaaron should have done when he still had a chance, and maybe if he had done so, he would still be breathing. Saskia doesn't regret it. She doesn't regret anymore what she did for him last. She had to do it, even though it is why she ended up in this tunnel, and now she has to expose him. She has to make known what he was doing. Otherwise he will never be seen for who he truly was and would have died as someone else.