Sebastian is in a state between waking and sleeping, interrupted by moments of consciousness in which he knows that, regardless of what the future brings, he will never again be the person he once knew. That he can never return to what his life used to be.
The ring of the telephone has the force of a stroke. His body contracts and his left arm jerks convulsively. Sebastian throws the phone off the table, then presses it to his ear, as if he wants to connect it directly with his brain. He conducts a conversation whose sense he understands only afterwards. Again Maike talked about mountains, wind and good weather, and asked if everything was all right. Laughing she put Sebastian’s halting replies down to his total isolation in the wasteland of physics ....
When the telephone is lying in front of him once more, he is trembling with rage. The wrong phone call has made the absence of the right one a hundred times worse.