With utmost severity it struck him, like a proditor leisurely creeping upon him, only to ram their dagger into his back the very next second. It all happened so fast, too fast. The pain overcame him like a fire, dozens of aching sensations flashing over his spine, up and done, setting his body aflame. A backstab! Somebody must had backstabbed him! Though he had not experienced such situation before, he could well imagine it to happen in exactly this way: no signs that would like a messenger forebode the pain to come. Yet as he convulsed and scouted around and pawed his back distraughtly, there was no dagger. Just like the wound he had believed to be there – there was none. And above all, no warm blood that would spurt out of such wound and soak his coat in warmly red. Nothing of such. Nonetheless the pain rushing through his body similar to a volatile, torrential current numbed all his previous thoughts that had peopled his mind and banished them. Less and less control he had over his body. He attempted in utter vain to not fall down to the iron floor, clinging to the wall as though clinging to life, yet his legs bereft of any strength would not be able to stand the weight anymore.

His consciousness began to fade and set off for a uniquely journey from this world to another, mysterious and unknown to men. Already could he make things out; things blazing in light. With the consciousness of a man on the move he heard people gathering around him, beleaguering him as though to ensure he could not escape. Hands touched him; they felt numb to his body, as if he was shrouded in a mantle of indestructible aching nobody could gut through. The hands tried to raise him up, until they realized they couldn’t. The next moment and at the same time the last he was allowed to witness, a distraught female voice rang in his ear. She cried for something, but he could not for the life of his make out what it was she cried after. It did not really matter anymore. Not to him. Then the lights turned out completely.

For what felt like world’s eternity he was in a land he had never seen before, the most bizarre. Time and space were forgotten, irrelevant. Pictures came and went, flaring up and dissolving again, out of touch with reality like they had been painted by the hands of Van Gogh.

But who had the stabber been? Could it even be some henchman? Had Haupt decided to send somebody for him, an honest-to-goshen hitman to bring it to an end? Entirely possible. It was well in her possibilities, and much more well in her moral codex, he was certain.

Time had become a great misty unknown shrouded in mystery to him, so he could not say how long he had stayed in this otherworldly fantasy he could not depict, even if his life depended on it. But at last he finally awoke again, and would soon find out what had happened.

Without consideration for his poor old heart, the doctors made it very clear what it was all about, something he at first did not care to acknowledge at all. Saying he was stubborn would have been a falsity, but on this rare occasion the facts the doctors presented him seemed only to exist for for ridiculing him, painting him an idiot, and some such. What they told him had no inner sense, although in the deepest of inner layers it had. But to him it had not, and that counted. It could not be possible that his body was, quote on quote, “overloaded”. That he had apparently “overstrained” his heart. While it was true that the shell his mind lived in had grown old and was not in the best condition for his age, he was still reluctant to avow himself that there had indeed been too many things at the same time for a long time. What a pathetic humbug! He had lived so long with the necessity to ever be on edge and wary, there was no way the tides had changed now.

The whole mess he had witnessed – who? Wunderbring, Falkenberg – both Falkenbergs –, and then the Doktor and with her the Ostara, like an avenging angel threateningly spreading its wings upon the Rose, on a quest to punish those who had forgotten. All the efforts to stop the Spring from happening. And then, this horrible cyberattack, letting the firestorm of distress and chaos burn and blaze through the corridors and decks of Bruchsal. That had been a week ago. Bruchsal since then was still in a state of general emergency. It possibly did not have room for all the graves of those who had perished. Even more had vanished; under them Oberst Falkenberg herself. The death toll had to be adjusted every few hours. Weis, a man he hardly knew, had been appointed new Oberst in the frenzy of battle and exasperation. A thought he could not dwell on for long as it made his heart feel heavier, as though made out of stone. Had it all really been too much of a burden? He could not have suspected this in the least, could not have foreseen it. But now it had struck him from behind. The character of his questions shifted: from “what has happened?” to “what am I to do now?”

For now, he was bound to the bed like to a rack that tugged at him at every turn. They had accommodated him in one of Bruchsal’s medical bays. To no surprise they burst at the seams. Amidst all the wounded people, amidst the dying, the morbid thought of him being in a living graveyard struck him. In his lifespan he had looked into Death’s dreary eyes a few times, and so was not overwhelmed by the sight of people breathing their last and sighing out their soul. It nonetheless got to him though, like a bad nightmare he could not escape and had to stay in instead.

In these days of desolation he could not help but think of her every now and then. Sometimes in the morning when he had just awoken, other times when he was about to fall into a sleep that reality always usurped. The picture of her, burnt in on his inner eyelid, crystal clear, the one with the smile she liked to wear on her face when she saw him. For once it put him in a mood he could not name. Usually he was lord of his emotions, and could name anger to be anger, and distress distress, and happiness to be just that. But what this emotion was he had not the faintest idea. Perhaps it was yearning, he realized after contemplating about it, both yearning for the past and for a better future.

The thought of her always raised his mood and made him forget the death and pity that surrounded him. So one day he brought himself to do something he had not done a long time. He wrote something, though it was not just something. There was still and old channel that was gathering dust. He wrote the following, his fingers stumbling over the keyboard.

“Dear Elise,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. It has been too long since our last talk and I deeply apologize for that. Please believe me. Circumstances held me off from writing you.”

Circumstances; a word that said nothing and everything, and he knew that she would know that. He carried on.

“Currently, I am unfortunately bound to the bed of a hospital room. The doctors told me that it is nothing serious though. So you don’t have to worry about me too much. I will be as fine as ever given enough time.

How are you though? Do you still work in that bureau you used to? With the petulant employer? I cannot recall his name right now.
And what about the children? Can Erich talk already? I bet he can. How is Karla doing at school? Does she have good grades?

I hope to hear from you soon, my dear.

With love,
Emmanuel”

His heart ran as he sent the message – in fact some doctors even came as to see for his well-being. The words had felt peculiar to write. Similar to how a leg-amputee must feel during an attempted sprint. All the time he had doused the Rose, made it sprout and blossom, what had written all those communiqués, print media or speeches for the Congress had solely been his brain. With an eye for logic, for argumentation, for rhetoric. But this letter had been a different story. There was something else that had tried to express itself through these words.

With a mixed feeling of anticipation and dread he waited and saw. It had not even taken a day until he had his PDA right next to him, for whenever he had a notion of boredom. A notion he had not felt often in the past, but one that seemed to creep up with every day passing that he could not stand or walk or do anything of true meaning and substance and instead vegetated. And so every now and then he skimmed through the Neural Net, in a vain attempt to stay up-to-date about everything around him while everything around him had decided to move on; without him. What he had defined himself as a man – a man who could make a difference – he no longer was. Right now, he was just a man with an ailing heart, and that in many ways.

And with day and day passing and growing longer and more excruciating for him, the disenchantment grew. Every morning, before any other action, he eagerly took a glimpse on his PDA to see if any message had arrived. Each time knowing time that this would finally be the day, the day he would receive an answer. Only imagining it filled him with glee. But none of these days happened to be that day, and though he baulked to let this piece of enlightenment into him, the embittered thought appeared that none would be in the future, either.

The doctors came and went like ants with seemingly no order or plan in their heads. All possible sorts of them – preoccupied ones, empathetic ones, uninterested ones, though the latter better did their best to hide their disinterest when they met the bedridden politician. Myriads of meaningless phrases purled out of their mouths. “It will take its time,” they kept saying. “No use in pressuring yourself,” they argued. At one point, when the situation seemed the most unbearable to him, he even considered making a clandestine getaway in the midst of night. But he would never put it into practice – he still had the right mind to know it made no difference. They would catch him like an eloped animal.

One day as he browsed through the Neural Net to distract himself, he heard something. There were plenty of noises around him in the room, all day and all night, cries, sobs, groans that could only be nourished from appalling anguish, but this time it were true words. Though it was by no means a strong voice that uttered them, more so a silent, guttural whisper in the wind, a breath in the air.

“Aren’t you one of the Obersts?”

He looked up from his PDA and turned his head around. He saw a miserable figure of a bruised person on the bed beside him, and put the PDA on the lap. He did not fancy interacting with the patients around him, letting all the pity get to him, but right now he could not act as though he had not heard. “Why, yes.” Many people on board knew him, since he was a prominent figure of the movement, but he quickly realized: the man had asked because one of his eyes had been gouged out in the most vicious of ways, and the other one was not in a good shape either. Add to that the twisted face of the man, epiphany of his inner suffering, and it was a miserable sight through and through, almost out of touch with reality.

There was some silence, but the stare already told them enough. He knew the man could not see well anymore, but something told him he had a better vision than the most, better than him, despite his eyes having gone nigh blind. There was a strange sparkle in them, he found.

“Right now, I’m actually more a patient than an Oberst, though,” he said after a while with a rueful smile on his lips.

The man’s glance pierced through him unsettlingly like a shot arrow, all while having a mien put on as totem mask that would not bespeak of any interior processes. But then his face formed a grimace. “Please, can you grant me a wish?” The voice, wavering and with no strength behind it, spoke enough to illustrate the atrocious inner life the man went through.

“A wish?” asked he incredulously. Searching his soul he realized he did not want to hear that wish, least grant it – he wanted this conversation to stop right now.

The man did not answer anymore, and thus he turned his attention back to the PDA, only for his first hand motion to be interrupted by the croaking voice that filled his ear again in a flood remarkably volatile for the quiet sound of it. “Make something out of this chaos, please,” whispered the strained voice. “Something beautiful.”

This time it was him who remained silent, though not by free will entirely. As if something out of his reach had enchained his tongue and had ridden it of any moistness, he could not speak a word no more. His mind ran wild and without boundaries, like a horse set free on a wide prairie, frolickingly, but the bridge between this and his utterance lay in ruins. He found himself chewing on his lower lip and staring at the wall opposite him, but concurrently at a distance far away. How could something beautiful be created out of this atrocious, dark night? It was out of his weakening hands now, and he thought to know this state to be forever. But had it not been said once that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn?

“Thank you,” said the man in a thin voice. He could see him out of the corner of his eye as he turned his head away and sank into the bed. The man would utter no more, silently like a statue, but with enough to be said through his mere posture. Despite his maimed face he shed a sort of mysterious grandeur. Whether it had been the final words that had kept him from passing into silence forever or whether there were just no more words to be said, he could not daresay. But the figure looked dead to him. The sparkle had left his eye-sockets

It were months he had to pass in this never-changing hell. Of course, the faces on the station changed, but in his acrimony he could not possibly care for those faces. They were all the same. Too much he was busy with contemplating how unbearable this situation was. There were newspapers, magazines, books and all sorts of things with which he could force time to pass, but enjoyment lay far away. Especially seeing how everything went utterly astray in the outside world, or at least so he thought in his straitened belief that there was something he had to do.

These months of not doing much drew on his body which slowly, but surely fell into decline. Muscles disappeared, as if conjured away by some force that meant him harm. The body felt heavier, and so did the chest with every breath like an iron plate he had to lift. With every day he was becoming more akin to a living corpse. And yet the doctors perseverated: “Just give it some time. You need to relax. Stress is not good for your body right now.” There were other things that were far worse for his body, he argued, but they did not want to hear of it. They were at wit’s end with him.

Maybe as a last hope to assuage him, they gave him reading material. First he lay it on his nightstand, and did not deign to look at it for another few days. But he could not hold off the boredom for long, and as this monstrosity impended with most nothingness in it, he took the book and began to read. “The Collected Works Of: Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius And Other Stoics”.

Oh, and what a hoard of age-old wisdom lay entombed on those pages, between the lines, only waiting to be found by a wayfarer of today’s age who in doing so traverses pastures of green, unknown land. A land with flowers sprouting all across the meadows, each one with a different scent, and thus with different meaning. One alone might not impress the wayfarer on his journey, but the meadow in its entirety expressed a whole New World.

Admittedly it had taken time for him to fully recognize the beauty of the book he held in his hands, but once he did, he had found an exorcism for the striking boredom in his mind. Even a single sentence made for enough bread for him to chew on for a day. Some would have said that a spell lay on him. He could not explain it himself, but to him it lacked the need of any explanation. There in particular was one favorite of his that he could not stop thinking about. “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters,” said an old Greek named Epictetus. Since the moment he had read this line, he tried to embrace that tenet every day, whenever disturbing thoughts of why’s and when’s came up on the horizon again. At first it had worked just moderately, but soon was like a shield.

Time went faster, finally. The days felt shorter, the hours more bearable, the minutes more – yes – actually meaningful.

And soon afterwards, as though the insight he had gotten from this green pasture he had wandered on for a while had set in motion an avalanche, the doctors finally came to him, yet this time with no serious, but solemn play on their face. And the message they were bringing with them made him exult and feel warm all over. The months were ultimately gone, a closed chapter in the story of his life. And, like every good chapter, it had not been for nothing. His body was a catastrophe through and through, but in it resided a mind that was acuter than before. It would take time to rebuild it, like the ruin of a building that had been victim of a bombardment, – a necessity, for mens sana in corpore sano.

The next chapter could be written. Maybe the utopia the Bundschuh dreamt of would prove to be just that – an utopia, a chimera in the heads of a few eccentrics, begotten from a pest of corruption that could not be altered. Maybe he would not be able to realize it. Maybe he would never be able to meet her – Elise – again and embrace her and tell her of all the things he wished had gone another way. He was not able to control all that. But the things he could change and do – may he be damned if he did not grasp and do what he had to do.