“Savor that thought, Detective: You are improbable. I am improbable. We are a coincidence, with a probability of one in ten to the power of fifty-nine. A ten with fifty-nine zeros after it, Schilf! You would have to throw the dice that many times for your existence to happen at least once.
“Do you feel ill at the thought of numbers like that? Dizzy? I wouldn’t hold it against you. How stupid it was to get rid of a god who had been specially conceived of as the clockmaker of this precision machine called the universe! Abandoned, the physicist elevates his own existence into a matter of doubt and investigates against himself. What if the big bang had brought not just one, but ten to the power of fifty-nine worlds into existence? At least one of them with the right conditions for human beings to live in? Detective Schilf, that would turn the question of God into a problem of statistics.
“You’ve read that somewhere already? And I wrote it. So we nearly have something in common.
“Ever since quantum mechanics led to the discovery that—before the instant in which they are observed—the smallest particles exist not just as single bodies but as multiple layers, the Many-Worlds idea has become not only a philosophical convenience, but a consistent interpretation. Apart from that, it also leaves human beings their free will. For as long as we can call forth new worlds through our actions, it doesn’t matter how much we are affected by the cause-and-effect mechanisms within each world. So we remain free in our decisions.
“Those are the advantages of the Many Worlds. Their disadvantages turn even the most peaceful physicists into bad-tempered know-it-alls. They mutter that this is nothing other than a tortured attempt to circumvent the notion of an intelligent designer. Exactly, I say! The know-it-alls complain that the theory goes beyond verifiable assumptions. And again I say, exactly! They are right—the critics of the Many-Worlds Interpretation just as much as its advocates—and they are wrong in the same way. All of them. Because they are all—listen carefully—all materialists.
“I see amazement in your eyes. I’m trying to bamboozle you: I don’t give a damn about the Many-Worlds Interpretation.
“You remain impassive. You’re tough, Detective. In an interrogation—yes, I know, you’re just asking a few questions—everything has to come out, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you what I’m really working on. I’ll bet that you didn’t cotton on to any of the intellectual crimes committed daily at my desk while you were searching it. Yogi tea—a nice touch!
“Please record my confession herewith. I am a scientist, but not a materialist. What I am, I still do not know. In any case, I see not only space and time but also matter itself as the product of a collaboration between mind and reason. My world does not consist of fixed objects but of complex processes. All states of being and continuous forms are simultaneous and therefore timeless. What we see of them are merely clips, scenes from a spool of film running through the time projector inside our heads. They show us reality as a dance of concrete objects.
“Try this experiment, Schilf. Pack a camera and go to the top of a tall building one night. Choose an exposure of a few seconds and take a photograph of a crossroads. What do you see? The lights of cars and streetcars as straight or wavy lines. A network of lines. The longer the exposure, the denser the network.
“Take this cup. Imagine that you can photograph it from high above, with an exposure of a million years. It will not show as a cup, but as an impenetrable mesh. There will be a frayed, lighter patch in the middle where clay is formed in the earth. Around it will be the traces of the human beings who mine the clay and work it into porcelain. The forming of the cup. The transport of it. The use of it. Its disintegration. The material it is made of going back into circulation. You also see—we’re very high up and we have the ultimate bird’s-eye view of things—you also see the stories of how all the people involved in producing and using the cup come into existence and fall away. And the stories of their forebears as well as all those who are descended from them, and so on. You would see—no, don’t look away, look at the cup! You would see that this cup transcends time and space and is quite simply connected with everything, because everything is quite simply part of the same process. And if you were able to increase the exposure to an infinite degree, and the distance from which you view it to an infinite distance, you would see reality as it really is. Everything flowing into everything else, outside of both space and time. A tightly woven carpet by the bed of a god who does not exist. Amen.
“Are you still there? Can you hear me? I didn’t want to alarm you. Do you have a headache? Should I get some pills?
“Of course it’s fine. It always is. That is one of the things I’ve learned in the last few days.
“Allow me a final comment. A couple of words on coincidence, the mention of which makes your eyes light up. If you, Schilf, as I suspect, are also not a materialist, you will be able to make something of the following connection.
“Let us assume that a human being stands before reality like someone walking along the shore of a peaceful lake. The smooth surface of the water reflects a familiar world and hides what is beneath. Now a large bough floats to the surface, and only the tips of two separate branches emerge from the water in different places. The person by the lake will not perceive this as a bizarre coincidence. He will quite rightly assume that the branches are connected to one another beneath the water. Without realizing it, he has understood what coincidence is.
“You haven’t drunk your tea, Detective. Are you about to go?”
[5]
THE DETECTIVE, WHOSE EYES HAVE OF COURSE been anything but blank throughout, thinks it quite unlikely that Sebastian has said all this. But the professor would certainly have said something, and Schilf has filled in the rest himself. He had stirred his tea through the entire lecture, as if expecting to hear another death sentence. Now he stands up, swaying lightly, like a doll struggling to maintain its balance. Fighting his headache, he waits for one of the questions that are the purpose of his visit to surface.
“Who described you as esoteric?” he finally asks.
“Oskar,” Sebastian says.
He looks at the detective through pale eyes. He has some color to his face now, and the way in which his fingers are playing a piano sonata on his lap shows that the talking has done him good.
“Who’s that?”
“That’s an excellent question.”
Leaning his head back, Sebastian listens, as if he is trying to pick out the right answer from the song of the titmice in the wisteria. Favorite person, they twitter, favorite person.
“A great physicist, who is working on a new particle accelerator in Geneva. If you’re interested in physics, you should go. The very bowels of the universe are studied there.”
“By materialists, I assume.”
“You’ve got it.” Sebastian laughs. “Although I’m not at all sure about Oskar any longer. I was wondering only yesterday if we haven’t misunderstood each other all our lives.”
The detective looks at him for a moment longer than necessary before he nods. “Does the particle accelerator have any practical use?” he asks.
“Its by-products do, Oskar would say. For example, accelerated particles are used to irradiate tumors in medical science.”
“Look.”
Schilf is swaying even more than before. He makes a grab for the armchair and his fingers catch hold of a Swiss Army knife that has been driven into the leather of the chair. He puts it on the side table. There is blood on the blade. Schilf’s headache is suddenly gone, as if someone has thrown a switch.
“You’ve been very helpful,” he says.
Sebastian looks at the knife thoughtfully and wonders if it’s a sign, and if so, of what. In an instant he feels completely drained, and when he finally looks up, the detective is already in the hall. He is not walking toward the door, but farther into the apartment.
“The door’s that way!” Sebastian calls, following him.
“I’d like to meet your son before I
go.”
“But he’s sleeping.”
“Not anymore.”
His eyes blinking like someone emerging from a matinee into the daylight, Sebastian stays in the hall while Schilf walks toward his son’s room and turns the doorknob.
LIAM SITS ON A CHAIR that he has yet to grow into, with an open book that he is not reading. The room is dim and so small that the furniture seems to be jostling for space. A ray of light coming through the curtains gilds his head with silver and gold. An angel with a crown of sunshine. Schilf swallows to suppress his emotion.
“Hello,” he says after clearing his throat. “I’m from the police.” And when Liam does not respond, he says, “I’m a proper detective, like on TV.”
The book is clapped shut and Liam turns his chair around.
“I’m little, but I’m not stupid,” he says. “You can talk to me quite normally.”
Looking at Liam’s worried face, Schilf wonders how old the boy is. His soft hair has been pressed down by sleep and his scalp shows through in some places. The face beneath is serious and attentive. Schilf suddenly wonders if this child with his sharp ears can hear the voice of the observer who is asking himself if the sharp ears of a child can hear the voice of the observer. And if that is why Liam is looking at him so strangely.
“Are you in pain?” the boy asks.
Schilf looks around for somewhere to sit and settles on the edge of the unmade bed.
“No,” he says. “Not at the moment.”
Liam puts his book down, which takes three years off his appearance, and turns the chair a bit more so that he is sitting directly in front of Schilf, their kneecaps almost touching.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m investigating your kidnapping.”
Liam looks at his hands in silence, as if he is wondering whether his fingernails need cutting.
“Yes,” he says finally. “The kidnapping.”
“Are you angry about leaving scout camp early?”
“What do you mean, angry?” He rubs his eyes so hard that Schilf feels like taking hold of his wrists to stop him. “My father just picked me up early this morning. He was acting very strangely, and he didn’t tell me what was going on.”
“I know the feeling,” Schilf says. “No one tells me what’s going on either. But there have to be people like us, too.”
A smile spreads across Liam’s face, making him look pleasant as well as precocious and intelligent. There is something helpless in his eyes, like a small animal looking into the face of an approaching disaster that it can do nothing about.
“Will you clear this all up?”
“Most probably.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The boy looks down at the floor to hide the glimmer in his eyes, and Schilf puts a hand on his shoulder.
“Liam,” he says. “Were you kidnapped on the way to Gwiggen?”
“Did my father say that?”
“Just give me an answer.”
“My father doesn’t lie. He loves truth above all else.”
“He loves you first,” the detective says. “Then the truth.”
When Liam lifts his head, he looks like a shrunken adult again.
“If I were to say that I wasn’t kidnapped, and my father says the opposite, can we both be telling the truth?”
“Yes,” the detective says quickly.
“Then I’ll say that I don’t know anything about a kidnapping.”
“Who took you to Gwiggen?”
“My father.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was asleep. And when I woke again, it was dark, and I was in a strange bed. Isn’t that what it says in the file?”
“More or less.” With a swift movement Schilf wipes the laugh away from his mouth and chin. “But it’s my job to ask about things that I already know. Could it be that you were sleeping very soundly?”
“Children are like that,” Liam replies earnestly. “Besides, the motion sickness pills make me drowsy.”
“Can I have a look at them?”
“I only had one for the way there and one for the way back.”
The detective nods and looks over Liam’s head at a diagram in a glass frame on the wall. The solar system is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner, on a dark blue background. An arrow indicates the sun and its planets as a tiny point in a group of twenty fixed stars. Another arrow points from these stars to a barely discernible particle vanishing into the starry mist of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself is a fingernail-sized blob in a wider collection of galaxies, which, together with untold groups of other galaxies, form a supercluster. This supercluster is depicted as nothing more than a small patch of mist in the known universe, which is shown as a large hazy layer covering the diagram like a lid. Above it is a sentence: “Galaxies are to an astronomer what atoms are to a nuclear physicist.”
When Schilf changes the focus of his gaze, the glass covering the dark background reflects his face. He feels as if this picture is the only window through which he can look out of this room into the world.
“Does your father tell you about his work?”
“He thinks it’s good that I don’t understand everything yet, because explaining things helps him to think.”
“And you’re interested in what he does?”
“I research time as well. I often used to lie in bed and try to catch hold of a second. I lay in wait and then suddenly whispered ‘Now,’ but the second was either not there yet or already over. Now, of course, I know that time is quite different. And that they”—he points at the alarm clock ticking next to his bed—“are all lying.”
“And what is time?”
Liam turns and rustles in his desk drawer with unexpectedly lively movements until he has found a piece of paper and a pen. Schilf bends over him so that he can see better, smells the child-smell of the unfamiliar head, and starts breathing through his mouth. Liam draws two red circles a hand’s breadth apart.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“No idea,” Schilf says.
Liam taps his pen on the paper impatiently.
“Do they have anything to do with each other?”
“They look similar. I can’t say anything more.”
“Very good. And now?”
He puts the tip of his little finger down in one circle and his thumb in the other circle.
“Now they are connected,” the detective says.
“Just imagine that you and I are the circles and that the piece of paper is a three-dimensional space, and that my hand has come from an unknown, higher dimension.”
“You’re talking about coincidence,” Schilf says.
“No,” Liam says indignantly. “I’m talking about the fourth dimension. You asked about time, after all.”
“Your hand is a coincidence to the circles. Or a miracle.”
Liam thinks about this.
“Yes, possibly.”
“Did you think all that up yourself?”
“Almost. My father helped a little. He always says he is basically trying to solve quite simple puzzles.”
“What a pity that the two of us,” Schilf says, tapping himself then Liam on the forehead, “are only small red circles on a flat surface.”
Liam’s laugh does not yet have lines to flow along, but must carve out new paths on his face—yet it emphasizes his strong resemblance to Sebastian. He pushes both hands through his hair exactly like his father does. His forearms do not have a single mosquito bite on them.
“When you were little,” he asks, “did you like researching things, too?”
“Yes,” Schilf says. “I liked talking to insects.”
“But that’s got nothing to do with physics.”
“I used to stand next to the rain barrel for hours, saving bees that had fallen. I used to think about what that meant to the bees.”
“Did you want to be a vet?”
“For the bees, my hand was fat
e. And a kind of fourth dimension.”
“You’re a freak,” Liam says.
The detective tweaks the boy’s nose playfully, and the laugh they share comes easily this time. Schilf goes to the door. He feels light-hearted.
“Will you remember your promise?” Liam says.
“Do you know Oskar?”
“Yes, Oskar’s cool.”
“Do you think I should visit him?”
“Definitely.”
The detective raises a hand in farewell and Liam waves back.
Sebastian is still out in the hall. He hasn’t moved at all. He is overcome with confusion after hearing murmuring voices and laughter coming from Liam’s room. Schilf walks past him on his way to the front door.
“Good-bye,” the detective says and then repeats, “You’ve been very helpful.”
As Schilf shambles down the stairs to the street, tiles start coming off the roof above him. Beams and rafters and joists fly apart in all directions. The rapid crumbling of the walls runs along the top of the whole building like stitches unraveling in a sweater. The foundation disappears and the earth closes over. A pencil sucks up the lines of an architectural drawing until the piece of paper is blank. The idea of a four-story building in the Wilhelminian style evaporates into mist in the head of the architect. Somewhere in the distance, a cockatoo flies up into the air with a shrill cry of warning.
[6]
“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT NOW?”
“Yes. The heat. Thank you for the water.”
The detective has spent a lot of time recently telling people how he is feeling and thanking them for something or other. It is probably part of getting old, like waking up early.