Free Every Seventh Wave by Daniel Glattauer

dress warmly. Winter seems to be on the way again. Cold, train air can give you a stiff neck and restrict your range of vision. You can only look straight ahead to your supposed destination, not to either side where those moments happen that make the journey worthwhile.
    Emmi
    Two days later
    Subject: Just tell me …
    â€¦ whether you
    a) Delete my emails without reading them
    b) Read my emails and then delete them
    c) Read them and save them
    d) Don’t get any emails from me at all
    Five hours later
    Re:
    c
    The following morning
    Subject: Good choice!
    That was the best choice you could have made, Leo! And how elaborately you’ve described, justified, and formulated it! Erm, has the effort of replying given you carpal tunnel syndrome, or is there something else on the way?
    Best wishes,
    Emmi
    Two days later
    Subject: Analysis of “c”
    Hi Leo,
    You must have known the extent to which your first and only offering from the alphabet in sixteen weeks would lend wings to my fantasies. What could Leo the Language Psychologist possibly have wanted to say with an answer like that? What did he expect to achieve by it?
    a) With that most minuscule written sign of life, was he hoping to gain a place in my personal book of Leo records?
    b) Is he captivated by the notion that the recipient of the “c” will spend at least an hour with her therapist pondering the difference between “c” followed by full stop, “c” with a full stop and parenthesis, and “c” stripped bare, au natur , as Leike created it?
    c) Was “dropping me a line” in this perfectionist, minimalist way an attempt to come across (yet again) as more interesting than the situation warranted?
    d) Or was it purely content-driven? Was he trying to say: Yes, I am reading Emmi’s emails, I’ll even keep saving them, but I’m definitely not going to go on writing to her? And I’m being polite and telling her so. I’m sending her a signal, a feeble signal, but at least it’s a signal, even if it’s the smallest signal possible, still, it’s a signal. I’m sending her a chicken’s toe ring with a bite taken out of it. Was that it?
    In joyful expectation of another “letter” from you,
    Emmi
    Three hours later
    Re:
    A question of my own, dear Emmi: When you say THE END so definitively (as you last did sixteen weeks ago, the day after … you might remember what it was the day after), what do you actually mean?
    a) THE END?
    b) THE END?
    c) THE END?
    d) THE END?
    And why can’t you stick with either a), b), c), or d)?
    Thirty minutes later
    Re:
    1) Because I like writing.
    2) O.K.: because I like writing to YOU.
    3) Because my therapist says it does me good, and she should know, she studied it.
    4) Because I was curious to know how long you would manage not to write to me.
    5) Because I was even more curious what your answer would be. (I admit, I’d never have guessed it would be “c.”)
    6) Because I was and still am even more curious to find out how you were.
    7) Because these kinds of curiosities for external things improve the air around here, the atmosphere in my tiny, sterile, empty new flat with the silent piano and bare walls, which keep on flinging baffled question marks in my face. A flat that has set me back fifteen years in one fell swoop, but without making me fifteen years younger as a result. And now, at thirty-five, I’m at the bottom of a twenty-year-old’s stairwell. Which means I’ve got to climb all those stairs again.
    8) Where were we? Oh yes, at “The End,” and why I don’t mean “The End” when I say it: because there are certain things I see quite differently from how I saw them sixteen weeks ago, if perhaps less conclusively.
    9) Because the end doesn’t quite mean the end, doesn’t quite mean the end, doesn’t quite mean the end, Leo. Because in the end, each end is also a