Matt Rubinstein

67.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:30:00 GMT

I stumble off the tram at Carnerigasse, stagger past the convenience store where I buy my Mini Fritts and Manner wafers�I wonder if they have any of that Vegemite yet?�and lurch towards my apartment. It's all right. I have to calm down. It's just a brain tumour, nothing to get worked up about. It's not like all my memories of Graz were just fabricated from scraps of the Internet, embellished like grains of sand into pearls. Wait�I've heard that somewhere before. Or maybe I haven't. Anyway, it's not that bad, it's just that I'm going to die. Or perhaps not even that. Maybe it's operable.

Kirsten is back at my apartment. I don't know how she got in. But she's sitting on the floor, cradling Bennett in her arms. She has the letter from eMonic.com uncrumpled on the floor beside her. Does she know that I read it? Did I crumple it wrong when I stuffed it back in the envelope? She's crying, great big American tears are rolling down her smooth, round cheeks. Does she know about my tumour?

"I'm sorry," she says.

Ofertas: Adidas Smooth Ride, Sony fita mini dv, Dolce & Gabbana The One , C�SAR MENOTTI E FABIANO .Com Voc�

66.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:30:00 GMT

I catch the #4 tram from the Hauptplatz towards Carnerigasse, as I've done all my life�or as I've done for exactly the past year and no longer. The tram rattles towards Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Kai and the waterfront of the river Mur, skirting the bottom of the Schlo�berg with its pathways and tunnels, its steps and funicular railway, the clock tower with the hands that don't mean what you think they'll mean. All these things are so familiar to me, they feel like the memories of a lifetime.

Is it possible�is it conceivable�that I was born in Sydney and not Graz, that it was in Sydney that my parents taught me how to read the book with the caterpillar and the watermelon, that nobody ever tried to teach me to read German or to speak it, they only taught me English�or Australian? Is it possible that I did see the whale with my own eyes, not in the Mur where no whale has ever been, but in the marvellous Sydney Harbour where the whales are known to come and play in the water by the Opera House�the Sydney Opera House, not the Graz Oper? Is it conceivable that perhaps hardly more than a year ago I travelled with my backpack to San Francisco and signed up for proof-of-concept testing with an Internet startup that tried to read the memories from my brain? Backpackers do a lot of risky things, particularly for money. And I do own a backpack, though I have no memory of taking it anywhere.

Could I have met Kirsten Taylor at the eMonic.com campus or basement and become involved with her? Was it her on the side of the hill with the American biplanes dogfighting above us, was it not the Schlo�berg at all but some Californian hill topped by a monument like our Uhrturm? Maybe I've seen a hill like that in a movie. But if it was her�is it possible that she could have somehow pressed the wrong button or tripped over the wrong cord and�I don't know�erased my memory instead of preserving it? The mind and the memory are complicated indeed, as Professor Womble told me�perhaps a memory can't be copied, only moved. Really? And then�and this is where the tram seems to be rattling off its tracks, off the surface of the earth, as we leave the river and scream up K�r�sistra�e�is it all conceivable, is it at all imaginable that Kirsten�or someone else at eMonic.com, more likely someone else�could have realised what had happened, seen my memories vanish into the electronic void, and tried to replace my memories with information from the Internet�reversing the process�putting back something like what they had taken? And after all that could it really happen, in any of the universes we know or can posit, that someone could be so stupid or careless�or panicked and guilty�that when uploading all the information they thought I might have had or found useful, when telling the data crawlers where to begin repopulating my neurons, they mistook Austria for Australia? Read it wrong or typed it wrong? Or just didn't know the difference? No. No. Surely not. Not even in America.

No, I'm just being paranoid. Nobody dumped me here in Austria with a suitcase full of money and the wrong memories�or not even memories but a bunch of random facts and statistics, low-resolution images, perhaps the odd movie or animation that my brain had to work at, to weave together into memories, maybe tapping into the echoing spaces where my real memories used to be, where the ghosts of my strongest memories might have held on for longer than the rest. No, that didn't happen. No strange interaction between the scorched memory centre of my brain and the relatively unscathed but baffled language centre, my Wernicke's and Broca's areas. None of that. Maybe I've got a tumour, that sounds much more likely, that's why I speak English with an Australian accent and can't remember things clearly enough and kidnap tree-kangaroos and have paranoid thoughts about Internet companies stealing my brainwaves. It must be a tumour.

I decide I'm going to take Bennett back to the zoo tomorrow, he won't survive if my tumour gets the better of me.

Ofertas: Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB, KINGSTON Data Traveler 2 GB

65.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:30:00 GMT

The Ratskeller Cafe-Restaurant is a typical Styrian place that's been here for ages, with tables and umbrellas spreading out into the Hauptplatz. It's getting a lot colder lately, but we still have bright clear days when people like to sit outside and gather up as much of the sun as they can before the winter arrives.

I get there in about twenty minutes and set up at one of the outdoor tables, I unfold my laptop and lean my backpack ostentatiously against a chair. There's an open wireless network from one of the other cafes so I open a window and look at the Internet while I'm waiting. There's something a bit chilling about it now, this Internet that holds almost no trace of eMonic.com, that could have had a special page just for me and my memories, copied straight from my head when they were still intact, but now seems just about useless, a collection of dead links and endless sites that mirror each other, mutating as they go, devolving into digital ruin. It's a little disorienting, almost dizzying... you can't spend too long out there.

To remind myself where I am, I return to the Wikipedia entry on Graz. Yes, that's it: the second-largest city in Vienna, the capital of Styria, its quarter-million people, its six universities and 40,000 students. There's even a picture of the clock tower at the top of the Schlo�berg, which I can't quite see over the rooftops but I know it's out there. I follow a link to a virtual tour of Graz which gives me a 360� view of the very Hauptplatz I'm sitting in right now, though in the picture it's market day and there are stalls crowding the flagstones. Another link takes me to a webcam sitting on top of the Rathaus, which lets me steer it around and zoom in until I'm actually looking at myself in a tiny window onto the Internet, a bit grainy and only updating every second but definitely me, and reassuring proof that even if I was never here before, I'm here right now.

I feel a bit better, and now I notice that two young women are walking towards me, leaning into each other and talking in low voices and both looking at me. It must be Kerstin Schopp and a friend brought along just in case. But I realise at once that I've never seen either of them before in my life. They both have jet black hair and very dark makeup, their clothes are red and black and white, they're clearly goths�and not in the sense that all of the Germanic peoples are to a greater or lesser extent Goths. They look a bit younger than I would have expected, though it's hard to tell with all the makeup.

As they get closer I smile and say Kerstin at the space about halfway between them, I'm not sure if they're fooled, they both look decidedly uncertain about me, but one of them smiles and steps in front of the other and says, "Matt?"

She's got the vowel right and I think maybe this isn't going so badly after all, she's changed over the years or I've just forgotten what she looks like but I haven't forgotten her, at the bottom of my confused mind there's still something pure and true.

"This is Eva," she says, and her friend smiles at me. Kerstin's lipstick is a dark red, the colour of dried blood, while Eva's is bright red like fresh blood. Kerstin has attractive pinched features; Eva's features are attractively broad. I'm concentrating on Kerstin, trying to coax some recognition from my memory. Nothing so far.

I tell Eva I'm pleased to meet her and Kerstin I'm pleased to see her again, which makes her look blank for only a moment. We order coffees and talk about the weather. Kerstin and Eva quickly get bored with that and tell me they've just seen pictures of the autopsy of J�rg Haider, the right-wing governor of Carinthia who was killed in a single-car accident last month. His autopsy was performed just down the road.

"He looked evil," says Kerstin.

"And drunk," adds Eva.

They go on for a few minutes about how Haider was supposed to be a Nazi sympathiser, a xenophobe and largely dismissive of the music of All Gone Dead and Frank the Baptist, with only a superficial and misinformed appreciation of G�tterdamerung. They're really just talking to each other.

Then Kerstin turns to me and says, "So, do you still think you know me?"

It's clear by now that she has no memory of me. Is it possible that we've never met before today? I drink the last of my coffee as I try to think about what to say. I like her and Eva, they're both sweet and impassioned, and I don't want to lie to them any more than I have to.

I tell Kerstin that I know her mostly by reputation. I maintain that our parents were friends�since I don't know for sure that they weren't�and that my friends and I used to talk about her all the time, we'd compare notes and sightings and dream about her. We were all very young and it was all very innocent, I hasten to add. We all just knew she was the most beautiful girl in all of Graz.

At that her face drops. I've never seen anything like it. She looked like she was flattered and amused by my explanation, but as soon as I mention the most beautiful girl in all of Graz a storm cloud descends on her. Even Eva swallows and looks nervous, her forehead creases with worry.

"Oh Gott," Kerstin says. "You're his friend, aren't you?"

Of course I have no idea what she means, and I ask her who she's talking about.

"Shitting Otto, of course," she says with venom. "You know I got a court order against that�that freak. He's not even allowed to contact me, so what you're doing is illegal."

I assure her I'm not doing anything, I don't know who Shitting Otto is. Kerstin just glares at me, too angry to speak. Only Eva seems to credit the bewilderment in my eyes, she looks at Kerstin and then at me with a very cautious kind of sympathy.

"He stalked her," Eva says. "He wouldn't leave her alone. He was a real nerd."

I tell them I don't know any stalking nerds, I don't know anybody. Kerstin continues to look at me suspiciously, but after a moment she decides she'll talk to me.

"He was the one who called me the most beautiful girl in all of Graz," she says. "He put it on that website, that Enzyklop�die that anyone can change. It was so embarrassing. He always was doing things like that."

She's talking about Wikipedia�maybe the page about Graz I was just looking at. There's a very strange sensation in my brain, it's like a muscular cramp or twitch. It feels like I imagine a certain type of aneurysm might. And it's spreading.

I flip open the laptop and find the page I was on. I ask her if this was the one Shitting Otto defaced with his hopeless love. But without waiting for a reply I'm already scanning the page for any reference to Kerstin or to the most beautiful girl in all of Graz. If I've never met her before, if I just read about her on�no, it's not possible. It's ridiculous. And there's no mention of her on the page: there's soccer player Markus Schopp, there's conductor Karl B�hm and of course there's Arnold Schwarzenegger, as always, but she's not there and I tell her so.

"It got changed back, of course," she says. "But it was there. About a year ago, it was there."

And of course you can go back and see what's happened to a Wikipedia page all the way back to the beginning, sometimes hundreds and thousands of changes as people argue over politics and expression or try to make themselves look good or other people look bad... it's all there. There haven't been that many versions of the Graz page, it's really not a controversial city. And almost exactly a year ago, on the 8th of November there was an entry in the list of famous Grazers:

Robert Stoltz, Austrian composer and conductor.
Friedrich St. Florian, Austrian-American architect.
Kerstin Schopp, the most beautiful girl in all of Graz.

It doesn't say who made the change, it only gives a series of numbers, but that must have been Shitting Otto. The entry was reversed shortly afterwards, but it was there for long enough to embarrass Kerstin�was it there long enough for me to read it? Almost exactly a year ago�just before I started writing all this stuff. Just before everything got so confusing.

There must be another explanation. I don't know Otto, I tell her again. But maybe he was like me, like all of us, he grew up hearing that she was the most beautiful girl in Graz, he grew up knowing it, and one day he decided to track her down. Like me.

"But I never was," she says. "I grew up in Bregenz and came here to study. I've only lived here for two years."

Two years. I simply can't believe it. My mouth hangs open. That twitch in my brain must have turned itself inside out. I have a terrible headache. I never knew her. I couldn't have known her. I don't know what's happening. I ask her, as if it matters, why she came to meet me if she knew I wasn't a family friend or a childhood friend, if she knew I was nothing to her?

She shrugs. "You sounded like you maybe were cute," she says. "And Eva likes Australians."

Ofertas: Ferrari Black, D-link DI-524, MP5 Player 2GB, D-Link 500b, Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB

64.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 02:30:00 GMT

There's only one person I can call, only one name I remember from my childhood. I must have met hundreds of people, thousands, but there's only one that lingers with me, who can confirm that I'm not insane or the victim of some bizarre experiment or high-tech venture. I haven't spoken to her in years, maybe not since that afternoon on the Schlo�berg with the biplanes flying overhead. I don't seem to have her phone number anywhere. But she's in the phone book.

"Hallo!" she says.

My tongue is thick in my mouth as I ask, nervously: Is that Kerstin?

There's a long pause on the line and I think it's all going to end badly.

Then, at last: "Yes..." says Kerstin Schopp.

At least she speaks English, and my hopes spike. She sounds nervous so I quickly reassure her, I tell her it's me, it's Matt.

"Mett?" she says, and I've got no idea whether it's my accent confusing her or hers confusing me.

I tell her my full name, and I'm about to remind her of our teenage experiences together but I can't be sure any of them really happened, I can't take anything for granted. I just tell her that I knew her when we were very young, our parents were friends. I have no idea how much of this information is true.

"I'm sorry, I don't remember," she says. I want to tell her I know how she feels, but this is different, this is just someone calling her out of the blue in the wrong language and she's the most beautiful girl in all of Graz, she'd have to be wary of calls from strangers claiming they knew her long ago and want to catch up.

But I knew her long ago, and I want to catch up�I need to catch up, to make sure I knew her long ago. I can't tell her the whole story. So I make something up, something like my father worked here when I was young but my parents moved to Australia and are now dead and I've come back to visit but I don't know my way around and I can't speak German�it feels good to say something I know is true�and I don't know what to do. I try to sound desperate but not sinister. I talk for a long time, too long.

"All right," she says at last. "Do you know the Hauptplatz�the main square? Do you know how to get there?"

I tell her of course, a little too quickly. I reconsider: I think I know, I think I can get there. I'm getting too excited, I try to calm myself down.

"Meet me at the Ratskeller in an hour," she says. "How will I know you? I mean, it has been a while."

I tell her I'll be the one with the backpack and the laptop.

Ofertas: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+, Swatch Full Blooded, Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue

63.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:30:00 GMT

I'm trying to put all of this together. Kirsten used to work for a company that dealt in memories�or at least planned to deal in memories, since there's no proof that they ever got off the ground. Companies have always promised things they couldn't deliver, from video game sequels to perpetual motion machines, and Internet companies are the worst of the lot: back in the day you could get millions in venture capital just for having an idea, there wasn't much point in actually producing anything. How far did eMonic.com get? What kind of a plan was that anyway�pulling memories out of people's heads and sticking them on a website? How was it going to work? And I think of the letter they wrote to Kirsten. Was it her fault it never worked? Did she accidentally fax a prospectus to an ethics committee or a religious organisation or something? Surely there were questions. Surely nobody actually wants to see anyone's unadulterated memories, least of all their own.

Nobody except me.

Imagine if it were really possible. A more or less pristine copy of what you actually went through, before time and reflection took their toll. I don't know how memories are stored or retrieved in the brain. What if it's not as inchoate in there as Professor Womble said? What would he know�that religious weirdo, as it turned out? What if it really is like a movie, or at least it starts off that way? And what if you made a copy of it, what if you backed it up before it was too late? You could relive the good times as many times as you wanted. You could go over the bad times to see what went wrong. What do people say? It all happened so fast, I can't remember�what if you could? The known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns�all known forever now, and there on the Internet in case you fall over and hit your head or suffer from one of those disorders that mean you just forget everything every so often. Even if they were blurry and unfocused, if there were bits missing, if you were looking in the wrong direction and had to rely on the corner of your eye�wouldn't it all be worth it, just to remember, just to know?

A chilling thought descends on me. A company that wants to copy your memories and put them on the Internet�just the thing I'd want. A grossly or criminally negligent employee or contractor who's suddenly in my life�in my bed�asking questions about my memories. What did she do to get herself so comprehensively fired? Did it�could it have had something to do with me?

It's an outrageous thought, it can't be true. I've lived here in Graz all my life. I've never been to America. And this problem with my memories�it's just a recent thing. I don't remember ever worrying about not remembering things. I have no memory of forgetting. There would have been no reason for me to be interested in this procedure, not then. Only now do I know how precious memories really are. The castle hills of your childhood. The whale in the river. That unforgettable night with the woman you don't deserve.

No. No. No. No.

Ofertas: Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB, Hugo Boss No. 6 , Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB

62.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:30:00 GMT

I know, I should have gone after her. I'm forever going after people when I shouldn't, and not going after people when I should, and expecting people to come after me when they don't, and so on. It's a hard thing to get right. And there was a lot going on with me right then�there's a lot going on with my head right now. I don't know where she came up with the Manner wafers and Mini Fritts. I don't know why she wants me to try this terrible brown paste. Is she a brilliant student or a criminally incompetent employee or contractor? What does she know about me, and what does she want to know? Is she Kirsten or could she possibly, after all we've been through, be Kerstin? All these thoughts stormed through my head and continue to do so as I stand by the door, almost going after her but not quite.

Instead I go for my laptop and take it out into the corridor, I sit against the wall where the signal seems to be strongest, and I open a window to the Internet. I type in eMonic.com�actually I don't bother with the capital M, I know it won't make any difference�and it quickly connects to a website.

But it's not a real website, it's one of those placeholder sites where someone has got hold of the domain name and is hoping to sell it to someone else. I am invited to follow a very strange series of links: How to Lose Stomach Fat, Bible Truth About Satan, Spiritual Warfare Keys�but I can't click through to any of them, they all lead to invalid addresses. It's like being stuck in the most frustrating kind of labyrinth, full of doors that won't open.

Nor is there anything useful in any of the search engines' caches, or in the archive sites. Maybe it never was a real website, or maybe they weren't kidding about their non-disclosure agreements.

But for some reason the Internet is full of these websites that just pull apparently random strings of text from other websites and splice them all together without any reason. Maybe it's purely to attract search engines for whatever innocent or nefarious purpose, I've got no idea. Maybe it's like the Internet's version of static, maybe it's just talking to itself. But search for just about anything and towards the end of the list you'll find a whole bunch of this stuff. Some of it's quite poetic, most of it's just weird.

And some of it goes:

How often have you taken a picture of an amazing experience and been disappointed by the reIt never quite captures what's in your memory, does it?eems somehow paler, less significAnd then there are the times you didn't bring a camerThey're getting smaller but not better, they'ou don't want to spend your whole time looking through the viewfinder and missing the experience, do you?r have you ever been lost for words, you can't do justice to what you've seen and dOr maybe you're afraid of forgetting it altogether. eMonic.com will retrieve the sounds and images from your memory and make them available to friends, family, historians, anybody you like on the World Wide Web.ou'll never forget anything again!

So that's what it is. It's not short for demonic, like the Spiritual Warfare keys or the Bible Truth About Satan. It's short for mnemonic, the memory aid, the thing I've basically been after for as long as I can remember. Digging out your memories and sticking them on the Internet? It sounds insane. No wonder there's nothing left of this company but a few references in the digital rubble.

And Kirsten, of course. There's still Kirsten.

Ofertas: Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB, Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB

61.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 02:30:00 GMT

Well! I can hardly believe that this is the same Kirsten I know, the student of marine biology who was so proficient in the library, who speaks at least two languages and knows her way through all the databases and journals that touch on neuroscience, language disorders and unexplained phenomena, who persuaded a tree-kangaroo to eat out of her hand�how can Kirsten be capable of any incompetence, let alone incompetence of a gross or criminal nature? No, I can't believe it, it's nothing but calumny. It's clear to me that this devious company, this company despicable in everything down to its name, invented this incompetence so that it could give Kirsten the sack without giving her notice or paying out her entitlements�she must have been entitled to some entitlements, even in America. And of course almost every company that ever had a domain name for a business name is now extinct or in great financial peril, and I'm sure this eMonic.com was no exception, it must have shed Kirsten and many others like her in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. Which of course is no excuse.

I want to find out more about this company that has treated my Kirsten so poorly, but once again the Internet fails to reach my apartment, the cloud stops at my door. I'm about to take the laptop out into the corridor or down to the floor below me, but Kirsten knocks on the door and wants to be let in. She's holding both Manner wafers and Mini Fritts: she obviously couldn't decide between them.

I tell her that she's chosen my two most favourite snack treats. The Mini Fritts with their matchless crunchy, their unique potato-taste, the fun with every stick. And the Manner Wafers, with their five layers crunchy waffles filled with fruity-fresh lemon-cream or else finest hazelnut-cocoa-cream. They stand for unique pleasure, for the especially affectionate pleasure, the especially crunchy seduction�and they're among my clearest childhood memories, have always been for me the most special of treats, even if they're a bit weird for breakfast. I get a little carried away when I'm telling her all this, and she looks at me with that expression of sorrow again, like she pities me for my attachment to these sweet and salty snacks. Or maybe it's not quite like that, but she gets this strange look in her eye, a cross between sympathy and guilt.

"What do you think of, like, Vegemite?" she says.

I tell her I've never had it, I don't know what it is.

"You don't know what it is?" she asks.

I tell her again that I don't. And she bites her lip and says, very tenderly: "You should try it. I'll bring you some next time. I looked for it in the store, but they didn't have any."

I tell her thanks, it's very sweet of her, and I ask her nervously what I should expect of this Vegemite.

"It's a dark brown savoury food paste made from yeast extract," she says. "It's a by-product of brewing, they scrape it off the bottom of beer barrels."

I raise my eyebrows and tell her that it doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd like.

"No," she says very sadly. "It's disgusting. But it's one of those things that if you had it when you were little you probably love it, and it'll always make you think of home."

I tell her that that's all very interesting, but I never had it and I'm sure I'll hate it. Her eyes fill with sudden, inexplicable tears.

"I'll bring you some anyway," she says. "I have to go."

She gathers up the handbag, the letter from eMonic.com that I stuffed hastily back in its envelope, her purse. She leaves me with the Manner wafers and Mini Fritts and pushes past me, the way I pushed past her in the library all those weeks ago. I can hear her sobbing as she strides down the hallway and away.

Ofertas: MP4 Touch Screen Touch 8GB, Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB, HTC Touch HD

60.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 03:30:00 GMT

In the morning we realise that the only food in the flat is Bennett's, and he needs it. For Kirsten even the convenience store is a tourist attraction, so she volunteers to go out and find us some processed delicacies for breakfast. I lie on my mattress in the pale autumnal light and think about the night before. I'm half pleased and half ashamed to admit that my memories are like the result of a madman with scissors in a room full of pornographic magazines, an outrageous confusion of penetration and engulfment encompassing more angles and positions and kinds of light and darkness than we could possibly have managed in one evening. For a dizzying moment I even imagine that it was Kirsten on the side of the Schlo�berg beneath Snoopy and the Red Baron, and I have to get out of bed before I fall into a reverie of the most damaging self-indulgence.

I see that she's left her handbag on the kitchen bench and I hope she hasn't gone all the way to the convenience store without any money. I don't really think as I open up the bag to make sure her purse isn't there, I honestly don't feel like I'm rifling through her handbag, though that's clearly what I'm doing. There's no purse there, she must have taken it with her, she's deciding between the Manner wafers and the Mini Fritts with her purse in one hand, heavy with euros and dollars and a driver's licence from California or wherever she's from.

In fact�it is California, because there's an envelope here addressed to her in San Francisco. It's from a company with its name and logo stamped on the front of the envelope: it's called eMonic.com and its logo is a silhouette of a person's head, but instead of a brain he or she has a puffy cloud, and the cloud isn't bounded by the person's skull but extends way out the back of his or her head and just kind of fades out. I'm not sure what it means, but it looks uncannily familiar to me, just as the name or web address eMonic.com triggers something in my memory, with its annoying capitalisation and its tech-bubble-era use of an Internet domain name as a business name. It all seems to familiar that I can't help but think that the person in the logo is me, the cloud is my brain, and that's the only reason I keep looking long enough to see that the envelope has been torn open and there's a letter still folded inside, and it's the only reason I take the letter out and read it under Bennett's disapproving gaze.

It reads, very simply:

Dear Ms Taylor

Taking into account what can only be described as gross if not criminal incompetence on your part, we have no choice but to terminate your engagement with eMonic.com, effective immediately.

The terms of your Non-Disclosure Agreement will continue in perpetuity and we remind you of your obligation to treat all confidential information, intellectual property, trade secrets, designs and patents whether registered or unregistered, the fact and nature of your engagement with eMonic.com as described in any terms whether general or particular, come to think of it even the name or web address eMonic.com or the names of any of its principals, employees, agents or contractors, with utmost confidence and secrecy. Any breach of this obligation will result in civil and criminal prosecution under all and any applicable laws and statutes.

We wish you good luck in your future employment, and we wish your future employers even better luck: they're going to need it.

Ofertas: Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB, Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB

59.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:30:00 GMT

And it all works out surprisingly well. I haven't had much practice lately, as you've probably realised. It's not easy when you don't speak the language. There have been some tourist girls, tanned and adventurous or pale and nervous, all of them surprised and impressed by how well I speak English. But over the last year I've become introverted, plagued by these feelings of foreignness and these questions of what I am and why. I'm pinched and weird from walking around town all day and spending my evenings with a tree kangaroo. My brow has developed a permanent crease, like a letter folded and left in an old book for many years. Sometimes I don't recognise myself in the mirror: but why should I expect anything else?

Despite all that, it seems I haven't forgotten what to do. It's pitch black in the apartment: we know Bennett can still see us with his excellent night vision, but we don't want to see him seeing us. There's no moon in the sky; or rather there'd be no moon if it wasn't overcast, if the blinds weren't closed. It's very dark. And yet I manage to kiss Kirsten without knocking our teeth, and my thumb moves from her throat to her nipple and on to her hipbone with the accuracy of a surveyor. I know where to find her in the dark. And I know what she likes, or she likes what I do. I certainly like what she does. We go at it like old pros, the whole thing's a triumph of coincidence and that's how it ends, thrillingly, inexplicably. I have to tell her that I don't remember it ever being like this.

She looks sad and shy at once. "How do you remember it?" she asks.

I don't want to have that conversation at all; I don't want to hear about all of her times with quarterbacks, with prom kings, with audio-visual clubbers. So I just tell her, you know, the usual, and I leave it at that.

But she says, "Tell me". I forgot for a moment�well, longer than a moment, I'm happy to say�how interested Kirsten is in what I do and don't remember, what I do and don't know. And I feel a wave of suspicion, but it quickly passes: here in the darkness, as Bennett shuffles around the room, I feel I would do anything for this woman, I would tell her anything I could.

But for all the fragments that fill my mind, the stretches of skin, the sweat, the exhilaration and disappointment, the ache and laughter, I find I have a clear memory of only one actual time, my first time. So I tell her about that. On a warm day at the end of a hot summer, among the paths and follies of the Schlo�berg, deep in a fold of the castle hill that only we knew about. And I tell her that what was memorable wasn't so much the sex, which was a little awkward and uncomfortable and hurried, the afternoon not nearly as warm or our patch of grass as isolated as they should have been�but when we looked up and saw that two biplanes were flying almost directly overhead, one red and one yellow, twisting around each other and dragging trails of coloured smoke that also twisted together in a way that seemed both ludicrously significant and sadly inappropriate, since we were just having sex one afternoon on a hill and might never again and we both knew it. So we joked that it was probably Snoopy and the Red Baron, and laughed nakedly together as the sweat dried on our bodies and that was probably the best part of the whole experience.

And now I think what a strange conversation that was, particularly because although Snoopy is not unknown here in Austria, you can even buy toys in his image in certain American fast food outlets as long as you also buy food of a certain kind, he's hardly what you'd call a cultural touchstone around here, he's never made it into the zeitgeist, and his dogfights with the German national hero Baron von Richtoften have never been popular and might not even have been translated, for reasons that should be obvious. I knew all about them, I'd read all the children's books in English by then, but it was surprising that the girl on the hill did too. And now I start to wonder whether it might even be my memory playing tricks again, like the whale in the Mur.

But before I can think too long about that I hear a ragged breath from Kirsten, I reach over and feel that her cheek is wet. I have no idea why she's crying at my story of the hill and the biplanes, so I ask her what's wrong. She snuffles and wipes her nose and says nothing. Then she asks, "Do you remember her name?"

And I tell her of course I remember: of course it was Kerstin Schopp.

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58.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:30:00 GMT

We catch the tram back to my apartment. It's only a few stops from the Schlo�berg, we have a glimpse of the river and the bridge as we turn into the K�r�sistra�e, clanking against the smooth right angle of the tracks, and then a few more clanks take us up Theodor-K�rner-strasse. The tram is full of people heading home for work, but someone stands up for Kirsten. I keep looking down at her as the few empty straps sway with the motion of the tram, and the tanned curves of her breasts keep attracting my attention. It's not that I usually look at women's breasts, no more than anybody else does, but there's something about these breasts and I can't stop looking at them. An angry-looking woman who I can't help noticing has hardly any breasts at all glares at me with understandable disapproval and I have to look instead at the reflections of Kirsten's breasts in the tram window, where the angle isn't quite so advantageous. I can't deny it�there's something seductively familiar about those breasts, and I feel I know with absolute certainty how they would feel beneath my palms, beneath my fingers, beneath my tongue. Though of course nobody can know such a thing unless they have dealt with a pair of breasts before, and sometimes not even then.

But it turns out that I'm right.

She loves Bennett, of course: how could anyone not love a tree-kangaroo in an apartment in Graz? And she spends about five minutes lovingly feeding him leaves from the umbrella plant where I found her sitting�which he loves, and why not, what kangaroo wouldn't love being fed the native leaves of his homeland by a beautiful young woman with breasts like that? But after about five minutes she seems to be distracted�and, inexplicably, she seems to be distracted by me.

I know, I don't believe it either. But she wants to know if I've ever been to Australia, and searches my eyes when I say that I haven't. She wants to know if I've been to America, and she seems disappointed when I tell her I've never left the city of Graz. So she asks me to tell her about the city, and I tell her more or less what I've told you, my troubles learning German, the book with the caterpillar, my days on the Schlo�berg, my time speaking English and searching out people who spoke English, the suitcase of money left by my parents, now empty.

"What happened to them?" she asks.

I have to tell her that I don't know. I remember a time when they were there, teaching me how to read, and then a much longer time when they weren't there to teach me anything. I don't remember what happened to them. I remember searching for them�I remember mourning them�I remember realising they weren't there and doing absolutely nothing about it. I don't know which of these memories is true.

She sees that I'm getting upset.

"Is there anything�anything happier you remember," she begins, then bites her lip as she tries to think what to say... "Anything that doesn't quite make sense, any memories that you're not quite sure where they came from?"

And I wonder where this woman has come from, and why she's so interested in my memories�why she's asking about exactly the things that have been occupying my mind for as long as I can remember. But all I can think is that I've been waiting for this woman for exactly as long. So I tell her about the time I sat outside the Graz Oper and watched the whale frolicking in the river Mur, how clear the memory is, the colour of the water as it heaved off the whale, the blue and the green and the white of the foam, and yet how impossible I know it is, how those things happen in Australia but never in Austria, in the Sydney Harbour and not the river Mur. And as I tell her something starts to happen to her eyes, something happens to her face, and then she takes my hand and presses it into one of her lovely breasts, and it feels just as I imagined it, I mean exactly as I imagined it. And she bites her lip again, she gives me a look like she might give to Bennett, almost like she feels sorry for me for having such a ruin in my head, but it's not quite that, it's more like she just looks sorry. But then she pulls down her top and presses my palm more firmly against her naked breast and I can't think of anything anymore, and there's nothing in the past worth remembering.

Ofertas: Palm TX, Sony Pro Duo 2 GB Memory Stick Duo / Pro Duo 2 GB, Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB

57.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:30:00 GMT

Kirsten doesn't seem surprised to see me. She looks up from where she's sitting against the umbrella tree and says, "Oh hey, I thought I might see you here."

She looks better than I remember, though it's only been a month. Her hair seems blonder, her skin browner after the last of the summer, and something about her is overwhelmingly warm and inviting. It feels like I've run into an old friend or flame, not someone I met once in a university library. She pushes her hair out of her eyes and her perfume rises up to me, and once again it reminds me of nothing�but an urgent nothing, the most important nothing.

I fight down these nonsensical feelings and ask her why she could possibly think she'd find me here, when I'm only here by accident myself. She looks thoroughly relaxed about the coincidence, she shrugs and says, "Well, it's an Australian tree, isn't it? I think it's the only Australian tree on the hill."

I tell her that I'm not Australian, I'm Austrian, and there are thousands of Austrian trees on the Schlo�berg. And I almost say it wrong, I almost say Austrian instead of Australian and Australian when I mean Austrian. In fact, maybe I did say it wrong. It happened a moment ago and I can't remember.

"I know," Kirsten says, "But you talk like an Australian."

I ask her if I really talk like an Australian, is she really sure, how does she know?

"No, I don't know," she admits. "I'm an American, so all y'all sound English to me. Oh my God, did I just say 'All y'all'?"

I tell her that, as far as I can remember, she did just say "All y'all".

"But you were reading that article," she says. "Those articles. About the Austrian who talked like an Australian. And you got so upset, I thought it must be you."

Or maybe she's just said an Australian who talks like an Austrian. This is quite literally doing my head in. I can't think about it any more. And I remember why I'm here in the first place, and it gives me my escape.

I tell her that I have to get back to the kangaroo in my apartment. I can hear how crazy that sounds, but it doesn't matter. If she thinks I'm a lunatic, so much the better.

But she says, "No way." And she says, "I would love to see that."

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56.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:30:00 GMT

The keepers at the Botanischer Garten are becoming suspicious�keepers all over Graz and its surrounds are looking at me funny�so I have to think of something else, at least until they've forgotten who I am. Luckily Graz is a verdant city, like most of Styria; there are various kinds of trees along the streets and the squares, and all kinds of plants and bushes in the Volksgarten, the Burggarten, and along the river the St�dtischer Augarten where the sensory deprivation tank is still sloshing around in the Museum of Perception. The summer is pushing on through what would normally be considered autumn, the days are long and warm and the evenings still mild; the squares are full of people drinking beer like they know what's coming. I surreptitiously break off the leaves and twigs from the streetside trees, the squares' pots and planters, and all the bushes of the gardens. I have no idea what kind of plants they are, what they'd be called in Australian English or Austrian German. All I know is that Bennett doesn't like them. He has a sniff and a nibble, he'll eat just enough that I hope he can keep going, but he's not enjoying it, he's not thriving.

Maybe I should sneak him back into the Tiergarten, or just leave him on the doorstep in the sleeping bag with a note like the foundlings of old. He's my only friend and I want to keep him, but he's started to look at me with a new and discomfiting emotion, incomprehension and blame in the most painful combination. I don't know what to do.

Back on the Schlo�berg there are careful lawns and paths edged with flowers, there are arches of hedge over the walkways and all kinds of trees along the funicular tracks. I don't know what kind of trees they are. And for a moment as I'm crunching up the mountain tracks I forget about the trees and remember only the times I spent here as a child, exploring with my friends�perhaps the last friends I had�and gossiping with them in ways I now can't imagine. Did any of it really happen? The feeling that strikes me as I round each corner and duck beneath each tree isn't really one of familiarity. Or if it is, it's a strange kind of familiarity, like seeing for the first time something you've only heard about before. Or perhaps visiting a city you know only from the movies. But how do I know what that's like? I've never seen a movie filmed in Graz, and I've never been anywhere else. Have I even been here?

It's while I'm distracted by these distressing thoughts that I notice a particular and singular tree, waving above the others. Perhaps I've never seen this tree before, but I've seen pictures of it on the Internet: it's an umbrella tree, but different from the one in the Botanischer Garten. It might even be the kind Bennett likes, the Schefflera actinophylla also called Brassaia actinophylla, with its broad, greasy-looking leaves and its dark red spikes of tight flowers. Is it the leaves or the spikes, or the juxtaposition of their colours and shapes that fill me with the most intense nostalgia, as if I've just seen for the first time in twenty years a picture from a book I read over and over again as a child and thought I'd forgotten, the caterpillar who liked watermelon, the mouse who befriended a whale? I can't imagine. And I don't know what on earth this tree is doing here, but that could be said of a lot of things.

And sitting on the grass at the bottom of the tree, wearing a loose white skirt, her back pressed against the familiar trunk, is Kerstin.

No, wait�I mean Kirsten.

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55.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:30:00 GMT

Reading back over the last few entries I realise that I've been calling Kirsten "Kerstin". I've confused the helpful American who so skilfully found her way around the University library�Kirsten Taylor�with the most beautiful girl in all of Graz, the famous Kerstin Schopp. How long have I been doing that for? A few weeks, it looks like. How did it happen? Well, their names are very similar, they're homonyms (or are they feminyms?) and also anagrams, spellings more arbitrary than most. And perhaps it's natural that I should unconsciously align this new stranger with the girl who loomed so large in my childhood and my memories. But I still feel bad about it.

It's been a few weeks. Bennett has been with me for about half that time, which might explain some of my distraction. It's the most wonderful thing to have a kangaroo in your apartment! I want to tell everyone I meet�that is, everyone I see walk past me with their shopping bags and lonely expressions. Find yourself a kangaroo! I want to tell them. They really are the most perfect companions. Bennett has the run of the whole apartment. He doesn't hop very much, he rocks around with his arms and legs and the bend of his tail, sniffing things, rubbing his nose. He pulls the leaves off the branches I took from the zoo and eats them with a snucking sound, and he turns them into little black marbles of shit that don't smell at all and are easy to roll into a dustpan and into the rubbish. After all his time in the zoo he doesn't seem interested in the world outside, he seems perfectly happy to nose around the apartment. He has the most soulful eyes I've ever seen on any creature, human or not.

The only problem is he's running out of food. The branches from the zoo were never going to last long, and there's no way I can go back for more. I didn't see anything in the papers about a missing kangaroo, but of course I can't read German and I'm sure the word is out. So I've been spending my days looking for things for him to eat.

There's a Botanischer Garten in the Institut f�r Pflanzenwissenschaften, which is part of the Karl-Franzens Universit�t but about a few blocks north of the main campus on Schubertstra�e. It has parabolic glasshouses with three kinds of climate inside them, beautiful flowers in all shapes and colours from all over the world, all kinds of trees in the arboretum outside, and even a tiny but crowded moss garden. I find something called an Australische Grasbaum which I think can't be too far off; it's a shock of grass with a great fleshy stalk of seeds and things sticking out of the top. I decide I'd better leave the stalk alone but I pull off a couple of the blades, sharp and hard to tear. I take them home to Bennett, but he doesn't like them.

I read on the Internet that he's from the rainforest, so I go back to the glasshouses and manage to pull off a few of the smaller of the floppy big leaves and fold them into my pocket. I'm sure they said he liked the leaves of the umbrella tree, and he looks interested but takes a few bites and then turns up his nose. There are different kinds of umbrella trees, of course, and I must have got him the wrong one. He gives me a look of disappointment and betrayal, and I tell him over and over that I'm sorry.

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54.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:30:00 GMT

It was surprisingly easy. The zookeeper must have forgotten his suspicion, because when he left he let the door swing behind him and I managed to get to it before it closed. I took the sleeping bag out of my backpack�I don't know why I have a sleeping bag, either�and held it open on the ground. Bennett jumped to the floor of the enclosure in one go, then rocked his way over with his tail and tumbled straight into the bag. I pulled off a couple of branches so he'd have some leaves to eat, I left the top of my backpack open so he had plenty of air, and I walked straight out of there and hitched a ride with an American student whose young cousins were visiting.

"Why don't you put your pack in the trunk?" the American said.

I told her I'd rather keep it with me in case she or her cousins were rapists and I had to get out of there in a hurry.

"Oh, I love British humor," she said.

It actually sounded different to humour and I wondered whether we'd really been talking about entirely different things all these years.

Bennett kept perfectly still all the way back to Graz, and only started to stick his head out of the backpack on the #4 tram. People started laughing and chuckling to themselves; they must have thought I was some kind of eccentric or street performer. It gave me a strange but distinct feeling of well-being. For the first time in a long time I felt like I might belong here, I felt like I wasn't alone.

Now I'm sitting in my apartment and Bennett is rocking his way over the carpet. He picks up one of the branches with his little hands and strips the leaves off it. He seems to eat a lot of leaves, and I wonder where I'm going to find more of the kind he likes. But for now he's happy enough. He watches me write, and soon he noses into the sleeping bag and rolls himself into a heavy ball.

Ofertas: Sony Memory Stick Micro - M2 2 GB, Sandisk Memory Stick Micro - M2 1 GB

53.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:30:00 GMT

I'm not really sure how I ended up here. I must have found my way to the UPC-Arena and the spur of the S�d-Autobahn; I don't remember waiting, but I must have looked the most desperate of all the hitchers, and sometimes that can help. I'm still clutching a pamphlet for the Tierwelt Herberstein with its yellow lion that looks like the sun, so maybe I held that up by the side of the road until someone took pity on me. It's possible they thought there was something wrong with me, I remember some concerned and soothing voices, but of course I couldn't understand them. I suppose there is something wrong with me. You have to be crazy to hitchhike all the way to the zoo, wearing your backpack, if you're not a tourist but all your life a Grazer.

I don't know why I brought my backpack. I don't even know why I own a backpack, since I've never left the city or even planned to. I got here at around lunchtime and realised I had no idea what to do next, no idea what I was doing here. But here I am with my pamphlet and my backpack, standing in front of the tiny Australian enclosure watching Bennett the tree-kangaroo. Bennett watched me for the first few minutes, and then went back to chewing on his leaves and rubbing his snout against some bark. But he keeps looking at me every so often, as if he's trying to tell me something. But he might as well be speaking German.

I hope I wasn't too rude to Kerstin. I probably was. But I had to get away from the library as quickly as possible. All that information�I don't know how people stand it. Maybe I'm better off the way I am, knowing hardly anything. Nothing I've learned has made me any happier, that's for sure. Kerstin was only trying to help, for whatever reason. She's about the only helpful person I've met here, and I should be grateful. But she's the one who exposed me, the one who left me alone.

A grumpy-looking zookeeper gives me a suspicious look as he opens a door in the side of the enclosure, climbs into this little Australia and starts to tidy up, scooping some algae from the surface of a pond. Bennett turns and gives me an embarrassed look as the zookeeper starts to shovel his droppings into a pile and then into a bag. I didn't know kangaroos could look embarrassed. Although�maybe it's something else. Can it be a look of desperation? A look of pleading? The kind of look I must have terrified Kerstin with in the library?

Then Bennett looks over to the door, and I know why I'm here.

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52.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:30:00 GMT

The library is changing shape around me, the walls and ceiling wheeze in and out. The stacks are toppling, crashing in their rows. Womble is some kind of last-days nutcase, he thinks I'm a prophet of the apocalypse. (I'd know, wouldn't I? Or what kind of prophet would I be?) I thought he was going to help me, but he's thrown in the towel, he's gone loopy. I don't care about the scriptures of desert tribes. I want to know what's wrong with my brain, its language centres, its memory zones.

But the worst thing is that that Welsh guy, that M�nchhausen guy was wrong. Did he just read Womble's article too fast, or did he exaggerate it to make his point? Either way, he was wrong: there were no subjects, there was no they. There was only me. There's only me.

I thought there were 300,000 people in Graz, but there's only me. Kerstin has gone, or I can't see her. I push past where she was, and the library is empty, there's nobody studying for the coming exams. What will they do, will they still have the exams? There's nobody outside in the university. A giant screen in the Hauptplatz shows footage from the Olympic Games, where our 73 athletes have been confined to the Olympic Village to remove them from the temptation of doping, but nobody is there to cheer our canoeist Helmut Oblinger, our cyclist Monika Schachl, and of course our beach volleyball teams. Nobody cares that our Schwaiger sisters just beat the Greek team, not a bad result if you consider that they have thousands of beaches and we have none; or that the men's team was beaten by China, which is now good at everything. There's only me, dashing past the sparkling lights of the screen, through the old and empty streets.

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51.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 03:30:00 GMT

The Record of Unexplained Phenomena isn't in any of the online databases, which makes me wonder what kind of journal it really is. I make disappointed noises at Kirsten's shoulder and she turns and tells me to hold on. She flips the windows on the screen with a deft key combination: she really is good at this stuff. And it turns out that the library has the complete run of the journal on old-fashioned paper, sitting in the stacks at the opposite end of the floor. It strikes me as strange that a university library in a city of fewer than 300,000 Austrians should collect a American magazine that seems at least obscure if not esoteric. Then I remind myself that this is, after all, a town with a Museum of Perception in its parklands.

Kirsten has a bit of trouble finding the right stack and shelf, as if she's much more comfortable with electronic information than with the three-dimensional world. But once she finds the little folder of recent issues she grabs the right one immediately, like she recognises it. It actually looks like a regular academic journal, no pictures on the front and only a different pastel background to distinguish one from the next. Kirsten flips quickly to an article towards the back of the issue and hands it to me. It's just a note, really, and all it says is this:

On a recent visit to Austria I met a young man with an unusual problem. He said that he had lived in Graz all his life and been born to parents who spoke only German. And yet he had no knowledge of his native tongue and spoke to me in the most typical vernacular English�typical, that is, of the Australian dialect with its distinctive accent and intonation. Although my primary interests are in neurology and linguistics, there is little in either of those fields that can explain some of the phenomena I have witnessed or had reported to me, and I am reminded of the old scriptures of various desert tribes that tell of the coming of prophets who speak languages other than their own.

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50.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:30:00 GMT

All kinds of emotions are having their way with me. I'm furious at this Welsh guy for his suggestion that I'm making all this up�I don't know whether it's better to be crazy or a liar, but right now I'd rather be crazy. I'm a bit defensive towards Professor Carlton Womble, who didn't seem that gullible to me�but then I'm outraged that Womble has exposed me to international academic ridicule like this, and even for treating me as a curious case study to be written about when I'd asked him for help. And finally I'm flooded with relief and optimism by the smallest detail in Womble's report and its Welsh dismissal: the plural. Subjects�and they. The professor found some more like me. Maybe not here in Graz, but maybe not so far away. There are other people out there like me.

Kirsten finishes reading the article a few seconds after I do. There's a strange expression on her face: who can blame her? Her eyes are wide and soft, it almost looks like sympathy�it almost looks like hope.

"Is this what you were after?" she says.

I just nod at her mutely. The emotions are getting too much as I imagine a collection of foreigners scattered throughout the world, separated from the towns and countries of their birth but united by the same thing: an inexplicable and unlikely Australian accent. We can't all be lying, and we can't all be crazy.

"Can I help you with anything else?"

I ask her please, can she help me find Womble's article about me, about all of us, and she's only too happy to help.

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49.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:30:00 GMT

The computer screen clears and the article paints itself across the whiteness. Kirsten rolls her chair to one side and I lean in. There's static electricity in her hair and a few blonde strands lift towards my cheek. I'm only barely conscious of it as I read the first paragraph.

The inherited neuropsychiatric tic disorder Tourette Syndrome is named for the French neurologist Georges Albert �douard Brutus Gilles de la Tourette, who described the syndrome in nine patients in 1884. In its most famous though hardly most common form, it is characterised by coprolalia: the repeated involuntary expression of the foulest imaginable profanities. Though patients describe it in terms ranging from inconvenience to anguish, many healthy individuals envy them their freedom and their licence, and some with borderline personality disorders - such as teenage boys - claim the syndrome in order to rant and curse with impunity or for other reasons. Though it is also unquestionably a real and debilitating illness, Tourette Syndrome may in these cases present as a factitious disorder related to the famous syndrome named after the German fabulist Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von M�nchhausen, whose sufferers invent wild and exotic illnesses to attract attention or sympathy.

Kirsten seems to know how fast I'm reading, and she scrolls the page down as soon as I get to the end of a line. I catch a waft of her perfume or body spray, and it instantly and deeply reminds me of�nothing. It reminds me strongly of nothing, it evokes nothing, it takes me back to nowhere. I turn my attention back to the screen, though I don't like the way this is going at all.

Language disorders may be particularly prone to simulation, since language is often perceived and experienced as the profoundest emanation of the soul but is almost entirely under the control of the somatic nervous system. Many real language syndromes may be feigned for various reasons by the immature, the intoxicated and the psychologically infirm�indeed, it is not always simple to classify the manifestation as invented or involuntary. A child who repeats everything his mother or brother says may simply be being annoying, or may be displaying clinical echolalia. A Pentecostalist speaking in tongues may believe himself to be the passive vessel of religious xenoglossia�speaking through divine grace another language he does not know�but is more likely to be engaging in voluntary glossolalia�rearranging the known phonemes of another language into a plausible nonsense.

Also interesting is the case of foreign accent syndrome, in which a brain injury results in the shift or mispronunciation of certain vowels or syllables, which may be interpreted as a specific accent by listeners. This syndrome says as much about the reception and organisation of language in the brain as about its preparation and pronunciation. Diagnosis is more complicated in the recent case raised by Womble (2008), who reports subjects who spoke near-perfect vernacular English exhibiting the monophthongs and diphthongs typical of Australian English (AE) though they had never lived in any English-speaking country. But we can safely assume that some combination of invention on the part of the subjects and gullibility on the part of the researcher will furnish the best explanation.

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48.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 03:30:00 GMT

As I watch her tapping expert queries into the German interface, I start to wonder where I've seen her before. Something about the shape of her face, the smoothed angle of her jaw, the flicker in her eye as she turns to give me a look that says she's pleased with herself and things are going well�all of it seems more and more familiar. But is that just because I've been staring at her for the last ten minutes, the neurons grabbing each other in my brain? No�I'm sure I saw her in the convenience store last week, or in the library last month, on the tram or on the street some time in the past year, or even on the Schlo�berg long ago. And the more I think about it, the harder it is to choose between these possibilities�the more I am convinced that she was everywhere, in all those places. I remember it distinctly.

But we all know what that's worth.

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47.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:30:00 GMT

She tells me her name is Kerstin, which comes to me as a shock. I ask immediately, by reflex, if her surname is Schopp, though of course it isn't. Kerstin Schopp was never American, or Canadian; like me she was a native of Graz. And yet�for a moment I go off into a reverie in which all of us back there on the Schlo�berg and around the Burggarten were somehow bestowed with unfamiliar languages and accents, one of us Scottish, one of us Greek Cypriot, one Kyrgyzstani, and one Australian, talking together however we managed it on the hills and pathways, little knowing that we were united after all with the famous Kerstin Schopp, bewildering her Grazer parents by speaking English in an American or Canadian accent, saying rutabaga and loonie while I was struggling with watermelon. It only lasts for a moment, until this Kerstin tells me that her surname is Taylor, and her first name is spelled Kirsten and pronounced "Keersten" for some reason.

She's blonde and a bit younger than me, probably in her mid-twenties. She says she's a student here, studying marine biology. I think that's a strange thing to be studying in Graz, so far inland, and then I remember the whale I saw in the river by the Opera House, and then I remember that the river is nowhere near the Opera House and I never saw the whale. She's quite tanned in the way that Americans often are, but she doesn't look as outdoorsy as Canadians usually do. She's kind of soft around the face and the shoulders, like young people sometimes are, and it makes her look sexy in a generous kind of way. I'm not sure what I mean by that. She tells me she speaks all kinds of German and knows how all the databases work.

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46.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:30:00 GMT

So I'm back at the university library, the Universit�tsbibliothek�I'm back in the ZEIT. Time has been going on without me. The academic year is at an end, the semesters have come and gone, and what have I learned? That the Austrian football team is not very good, managing only two losses and a draw against Poland in the group stage of the recent championship; that memory is a mystery, especially mine; that there are kangaroos in Austria, though they don't seem very happy; that there is such a thing as an Australian accent; and that I have one. Then there are the things I always knew, rivers and populations and the most beautiful girl in Graz, and the things I never knew: why is Arnold Schwarzenegger so famous? What did Kerstin Schopp even look like? The known knowns, the known unknowns, and beyond them the unknown unknowns. All this time, all this zeit, and what do I have to show for it? If I were a student here I'd have failed.

All this zeit. And here I am in the zeitungen, the zeitschriften, the datenbanken. There are shelves of journals, loose or bound into volumes, there are microfilm booths that look like old Soviet arcade games, there are banks of shiny new computer terminals. I scan the shelves for the Welsh Journal of Neuropathology, but there's nothing between Welfare and Weltschmerz. I sit down at one of the computers, but everything's in German. There's no friendly little Union Jack or Stars and Stripes to change the language. I click on what looks like a search box but I can't understand what's happening. The fluorescent light above me is buzzing and stuttering; they probably won't fix it until next semester starts. The new academic year. A skeleton crew is looking after the library for the holidays; they are old and Austrian and none of them speak English, or none of them want to. I'm running out of time.

I keep repeating the name of the journal. The Welsh Journal of Neuropathology, I keep saying. Welsh. No, Welsh. I say Velsh and Yournal, like it'll help. I sound neuropathological myself.

Then someone says, "Maybe I can find it for you?"

It's a woman, a young woman. And before she says anything else I know from her vowels and from her lilting inflection that she's American. Or possibly Canadian, it's hard to tell.

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45.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:30:00 GMT

I have to find that article.

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44.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 03:30:00 GMT

I was talking about accents. And at last, after weeks of directed and distracted searching in the library, on the Internet, and in the sensory deprivation baths of the Museum of Perception, I have found a clue. This came up near the end of an Internet search request that took milliseconds to execute but days and weeks to trawl through:

... subjects who spoke near-perfect vernacular English exhibiting the monophthongs and diphthongs typical of Australian English (AE) though they had never lived in any English-speaking ...

I'm kneeling in the hallway of my apartment building, resting on my elbows, the laptop pressed against the wall. It's raining outside, which never helps. Of course I click on the underlined title, I curse and wait as the connection falters and stalls, I reload the page. But it won't give me anything. When the page finally comes up, it tells me I need a password to read any further. There's no cache; it's let in the algorithms, the helpful crawlers, but it won't let me in.

It's an article in the latest issue of the Welsh Journal of Neuropathology entitled "De La Tourette or von M�nchhausen?", which means almost nothing to me. But the idea that there are other people out there like me�it shakes me to my feet. For the first time I can remember, I feel�well, I still feel like a foreigner. But maybe a foreigner who belongs somewhere, or with someone.

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43.

blogs@interney.net (Matt Rubinstein) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:30:00 GMT

Our local doctors have performed an MRI scan on Poland's goalkeeper Tomasz Kuszczak and decided that he has suffered from "changes in the spine" that will keep him out of the rest of the UEFA football tournament. The Polish team lost their opening match to Germany by two goals to nil in Klagenfurt, on the same day as the Austrian team lost their own opening match to Croatia, this time by one goal to nil in Vienna. Our national team was unable to exploit the famous home side advantage, a phenomenon that has been attributed to the interplay of many factors including familiarity with the home ground, always being able to play in your preferred colours, the effects of travel, and the home crowd trying to distract the visiting team or sway the referees. Recent studies have, of course, found that home side advantage is much more complicated than people think, and varies a lot from sport to sport, but is at its most significant in international competitions like the current tournament.

Home side advantage fails to explain the penalty awarded against our Ren� Aufhauser and converted by Luka Modrić from the Croatian team a mere four minutes into the match. This was reportedly the fastest converted penalty in the history of the finals, though I'm not sure what exactly that means. It was the first time in ten years that Croatia had won a game at a major championship. Because the Austrians wear the red and white of our national flag, the Croatians had to play in their away kit, which is mostly blue with only two narrow panels of the red-and-white chequy of their coat of arms. The red and white pattern of the �ahovnica is said to be everywhere in Croatia, and can even be found on the cravats that are named after that country. These were originally worn to remind a man of his wife or girlfriend and to show his commitment to her, and have inspired many other kinds of neckwear including stocks, scarves, bandanas, the long tie and bow tie, and of course the elasticised or clip-on tie. These last are not always worn out of laziness but may be safer than traditional ties in certain occupations involving heavy machinery or violent criminals. Ties can easily transmit disease and have been banned from British hospitals since 2007.

But where was I?

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