Fame Read Online Free

suddenly have no stories to tell at all. But she knew that Leo intuited certain things. She had the same profession as his heroine Lara Gaspard, they were the same age, and if she was right about his sparse descriptions of Lara’s appearance, the two of them also looked rather alike. This must be another reason why he found her interesting. She often noticed that he watched her with an almost scientific focus, his lips moving as if he were taking mental notes.
    A few weeks previously, he had given a lecture at the Academy of Mainz about the ongoing death of culture and the fact that this was not necessarily a bad thing, since humanity would be in better shape without the burden of knowledge and tradition. This was now the age of the image, of the sounds of rhythms and a mystical dissolution into the eternal present—a religious ideal become reality through thepower of technology. Nobody could figure out whether he was being serious or ironic, whether he was a nihilist or a conservative, but this was precisely the reason why the text was reprinted, all sorts of responses were solicited, and German cultural institutes all around the world invited him on lecturing tours. On a whim, he had agreed to do a circuit through Central America, and when he’d asked Elisabeth if she’d like to come along, to her own surprise she hadn’t even thought twice.
    Shortly before they landed, Leo fell into a restless sleep. Elisabeth was dreading what would come next: at their last stop, the moment they were in the airport he had been literally paralyzed with disgust at the sight of the head of the cultural institute in her traditional woolen jacket. He had sat in the car with Elisabeth in silence, jaw clenched, and had even reached for her hand when they were stopped at a police checkpoint. Nothing happened, of course, and the agents had immediately waved them on, but when they reached the hotel, he was totally undone, covered in sweat and terrified. He spent the entire afternoon locked in their double room before giving his evening lecture to twenty-seven Germans in a badly lit hall, after which the lady director of the cultural institute had insisted on taking them to the only pizzeria in town, where she had plied Leo with questions about where he got his ideas from and did he write in the mornings or the afternoons. He then spent half the night in lamentation, pacing up and down the room and cursing his fate until finally, more out of desperation than passion, the two of them fellonto the bed in each other’s arms. At five in the morning her cell phone rang, and she was told that three of her closest coworkers had just been abducted in Africa.
    “Did you see?” Leo was awake again, tapping her shoulder and pointing to the outside beyond the portholes. “Like a great big stage set. A grid with hundreds of lightbulbs. Maybe we’re not flying at all, maybe we’re not even here. Maybe it’s all a trick. And besides, what do we do if there’s no one there to pick us up? I’ve got a feeling, and I’m not often wrong. You watch.”
    The lady from the cultural institute who was waiting was named Rappenzilch, wore a traditional woolen jacket, and had buckteeth. Her first question to Leo was where he got his ideas from. Elisabeth listened to her voicemail. She felt hollowed out by fear.
    They were sitting in the car. Outside the little cubes that were the houses in the capital streamed by in the pale morning light. Shop signs, under them old women walking with their baskets of fruit, in the sky the yellowish smoke from distant factories.
    In the hotel, she called headquarters in Geneva. Her colleague Moritz, still at his desk though it was long past midnight, told her the situation was confused, the UN couldn’t help, and they had to assume the regime was complicit. Two years ago, when she was in that country, hadn’t she had personal dealings with a secretary of state?
    “Yes.” Her voice echoed off the tiled walls in the bathroom.