Ever since he was a child, the detective has believed that there must be a kind of primeval reality beyond the visible world. Greater men than he have spoken of the-thing-in-itself, being as such, or simply information. The detective adds to this by calling it “the program code,” by which he means something lying behind the visible and practical desktop of the everyday. He likes this concept because it allows him to compare reality with a man-made machine, an intelligent product of intelligence. In his opinion, reality is nothing other than a creation born second by second in the head of every single observer, and thus brought into the world. A long time ago, the detective developed a method by which he attempted to read the program code. This is how he solves his cases. The fact that the ground sometimes opened before him—that, and unbidden and repeated headaches—was the reason for his most recent visit to the doctor.
Plastic bags rustled behind him. Then came a cry and a blow to the back. The impact ought to have pushed him into the abyss. He imagined himself falling, but felt no fear, only a great longing, so great that when he had taken a step forward and found firm ground beneath his feet, he turned to his attacker with an expression of deep disappointment. The woman laughed when she saw his face, shook her head cheerfully, and did not apologize. Instead, when the detective set off again, she followed him.
He had neither extended his hand nor introduced himself. He pulled her like a drag anchor all over the city center. After his visit to the doctor he had intended to do something normal, like buy a slice of pizza. But now all he wanted was to get rid of his new friend. She was carrying plastic bags in which—as became clear later—she had everything she needed to survive, and she followed the detective without asking why they kept walking past the same spots. Schilf had too little imagination, and the pedestrian zone was too small, to make such a long walk more varied. While they were waiting at the same traffic light once again, crossing the same streets, and glancing into the same shopwindows, the woman spoke unaffectedly about herself in a constant stream of chatter.
She had started modeling for life-drawing classes when she was sixteen, and soon earned so much money from it that she did not see the need for a so-called decent education. Over time, the painters became more famous and the wages higher. She had quickly realized that she was not being paid for her nakedness but for a feat of strength—her ability to remain motionless for hours. She perfected the control of physical pain in utterly dull rooms, enlivened only by the scratching of charcoal, the sharp intakes of breath, and the occasional sighs of the artists. To the delight of the painters, she was able to stand in a kind of acquiescent trance for a whole afternoon in the attitude of someone who had just received a shock. Word of her talent got around and she was never short of work. There were so many pictures of her that she never had to ask herself who she was. While other people crouched over desks in gloomy offices, she sat with her cup of café au lait in the garden of her favorite coffeehouse, feeling the breeze on her cheeks. She admitted to the detective that she had not really reckoned with having to change anything about this extremely comfortable lifestyle. That is, until an orthopedic surgeon had told her that she must never model again if she wanted to prevent the constant holdingstill from ultimately destroying her back, her knees, and her elbows.
What did the detective think of this story? the woman asked as they stopped in front of the glass doors of the McDonald’s on Schlossplatz, as if by mutual agreement. The detective had not realized that her tirades had constituted a story. A person who does not have to ask herself who she is can have little talent for the art of storytelling.
He had said this out loud, and the woman liked it. She laughed. At their feet, sparrows hopped after sweet wrappers and cigarette butts that were rolling away; it was a windy day. The long walk had exhausted the detective so much that the prospect of something edible and a cup of coffee made him feel intensely happy. They walked into McDonald’s together in the best of moods. Schilf held the glass doors open for the woman, sensing that the people coming toward him on their way out were looking at him strangely, and followed the determined steps of his companion to a table in the corner. She slumped onto the bench and shrugged off her jacket with a smooth movement of her shoulders. After the orthopedic surgeon’s diagnosis, she said, her savings had barely lasted for a couple of weeks. Like the cricket in the fable, during an endless summer she had not bothered herself with thoughts of the harsh winter days to come. That was why she was now looking for someone to take care of her.
The detective understood what was going to happen. He sat down, stood up again, and asked if he could get her something. A hamburger, perhaps, an apple pie, or chicken scraps in oily batter. With a reproving yet almost tender look, the woman asked him to sit back down again like a civilized person and look out for a waiter from whom they could request a menu. Now the detective not only knew what was going to happen. He was overcome by the firm suspicion that this woman, who had been sent to him quite by chance along with the death sentence, really did not exist at all. Someone who asks for a menu in McDonald’s fitted too well into the strange form of his imaginative power. In her position, nothing would be easier than simply to go mad, the woman said, still looking at him with those eyes that reflected everything. But what life had to offer was still more appealing to her than insanity.
Even before the detective walked up to the counter to order a meal for two from a pale girl, he had given the woman his address and the key to his apartment. When he came back from work that evening, she had tidied up, vacuumed, made the bed, and cooked some soup. As they ate together for the second time that day, she revealed her name: Julia.
That was four weeks ago. Since then, of course, the detective has tried his best not to make any noise when he gets up early. His new girlfriend lies asleep in bed.
[5]
SCHILF CAREFULLY PUTS ONE FOOT IN FRONT of the other on the clanging metal grate. He sucks the excessively warm morning air through his teeth and gazes at the facades of the buildings around him. People are sleeping behind all these dark windows, in layers beside and above each other like pupating maggots. This image does not exactly make him feel any keener on today’s continuation of his existence. Just as he is halfway down the steps, the inner observer starts talking.
Once again, Detective Schilf left the apartment by the fire escape, the voice in his head says. He was not keen on his new case.
Schilf has known this voice for over twenty years, ever since the fracture that divided the story of his life into two halves. From time to time the urge to comment off-camera on all his actions overwhelms him like a chronic disease. Then there is no longer a present tense in his head, only a narrative preterit, and there is only the third person instead of “I.” His thoughts suddenly start sounding as if someone in the future were talking about him and this early morning, which is fastened to the wall of the building by a zipper of metal grating. Schilf has learned not to defend himself. It is possible to run away from many things, but not from what is going on in one’s own head. He has christened this voice the “inner observer,” in the way that human beings give names to things they do not understand. Sometimes the observer’s visits last only a couple of hours. At other times, he stays close for weeks and turns the world into a radio play without off-switch or volume control, with Schilf as writer, speaker, and listener all in one. The observer keeps silent about some things, but then goes into great detail on other occasions. He can always be relied on at the beginning of a difficult case. He loves nothing more than to repeat what the detective is thinking.
The last thing I need is a beheaded cyclist, the detective thought, the detective thinks.
Two days ago, the walrus-mustached police chief had honored him with a personal phone call and—a sign of the estimation in which he is held—canceled the holiday Schilf had planned. “The Freiburgers can’t cope,” the chief had shouted into the telephone. “The hospital scandal is driving the whole town crazy. First four heart patients die, then
a senior registrar is murdered. Even the blockheads in the press can see the connection. Take your vacation later, Schilf. Clear up this Dabbelink business first.”
In other circumstances, Schilf would have obeyed the chief’s orders without resistance. He obeys now, but his resistance is enormous. When he considers the matter carefully, there is a problem asleep in his apartment, and another problem (perhaps even the same one) that has inhabited his head for quite some time. The detective does not want to go to Freiburg now. He feels repelled by the thought of the tiny police apartment not far from Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse. He is not interested in dead anesthetists or the megalomania of a medical director. He has worked nonstop for years and he needs a break. Right now, there are more important things than this Dabbelink, who is in the safe mitts of Rita Skura.
Schilf considers smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach, and abandons the idea. For a while he peers into the stillness of the courtyard. Slowly a cat walks across the cleanly swept flagstones. When Schilf starts moving again, it flees into the nearest building with one leap.
Some days there is just no choice other than to leave through the back door, the detective thought, the detective thinks.
He walks down the groaning metal steps. Ignoring the creaking in his knees and shoulders, he climbs sideways over the gate at the end of the fire escape and jumps the final one and a half meters down to the ground.
BARELY TWO HOURS LATER, Schilf leans his head against the cool, vibrating glass of a window, feeling his terrible headache subside. The air-conditioning is blowing into his face through a vent. In a broad curve the train rounds a small town, which with its church tower, half-timbered houses, and tidy meadows looks like an exhibit in an open-air museum. As the rear of the InterCity train comes into view, Schilf thinks, as he does on every train journey, what a miracle of human endeavor he is sitting in. What powerful masses are accelerated by mankind, what pains it takes to wrest materials from the earth in order to forge them into something that serves a great idea. And how it strives toward a goal that, despite thousands of years of philosophical efforts by the cleverest of men, is still utterly unknown.
When the next stretch of forest wraps itself around the train, he turns his gaze away from the window and the world becomes a blur in the corner of his left eye.
Schilf managed to miss the five o’clock train to Freiburg even though he had reached the Stuttgart station with plenty of time to spare. A magazine held him up—it was lying on the platform and he nearly slipped on it. He picked it up out of the wind, which was riffling its pages, and read where it had fallen open.
The article, by a professor of physics, was about the theories of the time-machine murderer—the case that had brought Schilf a promotion to first detective chief superintendent and, moreover, secured him a modest place in police history. As he devoured the article, he felt as if it had been written just for him. He stood reading in front of the departure board, did not move aside when someone asked him to, did not hear the announcement about the train’s arrival, and was quite unable to tear his eyes from the article. When he had finished, he looked up at the departing train in astonishment, ready to believe that he was sitting in his reserved seat—number 42 in coach 24—and was traveling, split from himself, on another train track into a parallel universe. His right hand fingered his temples as if he were looking for a lever to reverse his little mistake. He had simply looked up from the magazine too late, and not jumped onto the train. Such a detail could surely not have buried itself in the world’s memory so quickly and so irrevocably.
Schilf stood alone, lost in thought in the nighttime quiet of the platform, and remained in the same spot for one hour, without moving. When the next train drew in, he had not even started waiting.
The InterCity train in which he now sits is exactly the same as the one he has missed. Doggedly, Schilf sits in seat 42, coach 24. He places his feet to the left and the right of his bag, puts his hands on his knees, and stretches his back. In this position, he is able to stare off the headache that has resurfaced and also forget about his spine for a while. As he has known for some time, aging does not only bring the ability to wake at four in the morning without being able to go back to sleep. Aging is above all a continuing rendezvous with one’s own body, a dialogue with pipes, filters, hinges, and pumps that have been doing their work behind the scenes for years, but now suddenly impinge on the consciousness with their demands for attention. Mapping the self is equivalent to dying; to have totally grasped oneself is death, the detective thinks, sitting upright like a statue, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the train. Once again he says to himself that his badly constructed replacement life has finally been turned upside down. He feels ridiculously happy at the thought. Mentally he feels sharper than he has for a long time, precisely here: at the outer limit of his strength.
Outside, the landscape interrupts its hurried progress; a few passengers get off and on. Schilf lifts his bag onto the seat next to him so that nobody will sit there. The magazine that has gripped him sticks out of a side pocket willfully. If Schilf has understood correctly, the physics professor’s statements seem to confirm the theories of the time-machine murderer. But it is not entirely clear if the professor is defending the Many-Worlds Interpretation or merely explaining it. The detective turns to the contents page once again. The square photo shows a blond, laughing professor. He looks happy. Schilf likes the caption: “Everything that is possible happens.” Somehow this fits with his hazy ideas about the program code for reality, even though the time-foam model seems much too clichéd.
EVEN AS A CHILD, he loved the idea that the world could really be quite different from the way human beings perceived it. In summer, the little detective lay on his belly in the garden behind his parents’ house talking to a butterfly about whether the nut tree by the wall was really a single object or, as seen through the compound eye of the insect, a conglomeration of two thousand nut trees spliced together. There was no conclusion to the discussion, for both the little detective and the butterfly were irrefutably right. From this butterfly, from echo-sounding bats, and from mayflies, Schilf has learned that time, space, and causality are matters of perspective, in the truest sense of the word. Lying in the grass, distracted and focused at the same time, he did not find it difficult to let go of the guide-rail of familiar perception for a few moments and to float free over an unimaginable chaos. How nicely he chatters away to himself, said one delighted parent to the other. Whereas the detective came close to losing his mind at the age of ten.
His childish efforts have developed into a method of working now, except Schilf can no longer lie in the garden. With painful concentration, he bores holes into the desktop made up of crime scene descriptions and witness statements until it is porous enough to allow for conclusions about the program code, about reality. He sees coincidences as metaphors and contradictions as oxymorons, and the repeated appearance of details as leitmotifs. When Schilf gets a hollow feeling in his stomach, as if he were on a trajectory at the very apex of a parabola, he reaches out instinctively to hold on to something (the corner of a table, a door frame, the edge of the sink) and reaps the reward for his efforts: premonitions, daydreams, feelings of déjà vu.
No one in his office understands how he works; they see only his successes. His colleagues shake him by the hand, call him a fantastic clairvoyant to his face and a lucky bastard behind his back. When the case of the time-machine murderer was solved, they said that he had done nothing more than sit around quietly for days until the murderer had contacted him and politely asked him to take down his confession.
THE DETECTIVE HAD ACTUALLY SPENT WEEKS breaking down the cage of his perceptions into pieces in order to find the threads that connected him with the person he was looking for. He combined the study of files with meditation as he waited for a clue that would tell him where and when the coincidence that he urgently needed would occur. At some point the telephone rang and a woman who had dialed the wrong number
kept asking for someone called Roland. That same afternoon, a bird crashed into the window of the conference room and dropped onto the window ledge as if it was dead, but when a young female officer tried to pick it up, it flew off, perfectly unharmed. A little later, the detective stumbled in the hallway and broke the glass of his watch against a door frame. In the watch department of the Karstadt department store, two young men were standing in front of him in line, one of them resembling the third murder victim. They were chatting and laughing about how a life without watches and clocks was not only possible but actually more pleasant. The detective decided not to repair his watch and went back out into the street, where he accepted a flyer for a performance at the Panorama Café in the Stuttgart television tower. That evening, he turned on the television and landed on Vertigo, a film about a dead woman returning, with an ending that the detective did not understand.
The next day, Schilf sat for hours in the café in the television tower, eating plum cake and looking at the cars far beneath him negotiating their complicated routes through the pattern of streets, and at the Black Forest shrouded in mist on the horizon. He had put his broken watch down on the table. When a young man sat down at the table next to him and started scribbling busily in a notebook, a bird crashed into the large window. In his surprise the detective knocked his broken watch from the table. The man at the next table put his pen behind his ear and picked up the watch for him. They started talking. The young man was wearing a blue shirt with white trousers, and his mobile phone was in a leather pouch on his belt. After two hours of animated conversation the detective said he had to make a quick phone call. The young man lent him his mobile phone, and Schilf walked a few meters away from him out of politeness and called his colleagues at headquarters. It was only later that he found out the surname of his new acquaintance was Roland.