Read Doppler for Free Online Page A

live with them. You sit in the same car, eat the same dinner and celebrate the same Christmas. But that’s not the same as being in the car together, eating dinner together or celebrating Christmas together. It’s two extremes. Two planets. And now, by the way, they’ve found a heavenly body some say is a new planet and some say isn’t. We believe we know so much, but in reality we don’t even know what planets are, and even less who our fathers are. Or were. And you certainly don’t know, I say to Bongo. You have no idea who your father is. Perhaps he lives in a box, too. In a box in the forest. The only thing you know for sure is that he’s a moose, I say. And most probably quite a big moose, since he managed to mate with your mother, who herself was quite a size, not to say large. You’re going to be big too, I say, and take him outside the tent and measure him against a fir tree. I see to it he keeps his head up, and place a book on top and cut a notch in the tree and carve in the date. So that we can keep track of how quickly you grow, I say.
    A few days later, in the evening, as the fire is burning out, it occurs to me that the comparison between Schrödinger’s cat and my father was too nice. I was trying to be nice again. Even when I’m alone and I’ve decided not to be nice, I’m nice. It’s a sickness.
    Another, and in many ways, rather disturbing piece of information my mother gave me about my father was that during one of their many journeys to southern Europe, after an evening of good food and drink, if I understood her correctly, he had said that if he died before her she should make sure he was buried with a rhythm egg shaker. She was to put it in one of his suit pockets, he had said, and then she should tell the undertakers to dress him in the suit. She had taken him seriously even though the context had been Mediterranean and animated. And that was as much as my mother could remember; the only time in his life my father had used the expression ‘rhythm egg shaker’. After he died we had a lively discussion about whether we should comply with his wish or not. My sister didn’t think we should, but in the end we did. I went to a music shop and bought a red egg shaker. It wasn’t very expensive and I shook it a few times as I left the shop to see if it worked. It was impressive. Exciting, in a way. And I had no problem imagining how it could helped to build up a hypnotic atmosphere when combined with several other instruments. First of all, a base rhythm, of course. Afterwards a more complex beat with intriguing syncopation. And then the egg shaker on top. As a kind of sublime seasoning. You don’t think about it when it’s there, but you can feel there’s something missing when it’s not. That’s the way it is with the egg shaker. And at the same time that’s how my father is. But, to my knowledge, he never expressed any particular liking for rhythms or rhythm instruments. Perhaps he had had a bit to drink that night on southern shores and was happy and his head was full of the Mediterranean music which would have accompanied them through the night, and with a sudden flash of insight, the kind one sometimes has, it struck him his life ought to contain more rhythms, more dance and music and abandon, and fewer of the normal, dutiful and tedious things, you can easily slip into this kind of thinking, in flashes, there’s nothing wrong with that, virtually everyone does it, I assume, one’s life is filled with something or other it shouldn’t be filled with and we notice it lacks something that others have got, for instance rhythms or happiness or depth or children or something that is generally felt to be good and meaningful. My father may have had such a moment down there in southern climes. Or it may have been an attack of nerves about the hereafter and a notion that an egg shaker might somehow be able to assist him on his way, that he could conjure himself up with it after death, that