In Free Fall

  “‘Oh?’” Oskar says.

  “I’ve been surviving on that ‘Oh?’ for forty-eight hours.”

  Oskar presses his hand.

  “Is that why you came?”

  Sebastian does not reply. He turns in his seat and looks around the room.

  “I’ve made inquiries,” Oskar says. “It’s known as coercion. Anyone blackmailed into committing a crime cannot be held responsible.”

  “I’m responsible, without a doubt.”

  The bartender is drying glasses and the customers are talking among themselves. No one is paying the least bit of attention to the table in the corner. Amazingly, everything looks normal.

  “That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” Oskar says. “Are you afraid that they won’t believe you were blackmailed?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Maik?”

  Sebastian nods.

  “Does she know?”

  Sebastian shrugs his shoulders.

  “You haven’t told her … everything?”

  Sebastian shakes his head. He pulls the bottle toward him and empties his second glass in a single gulp. Peat and a touch of honey, it’s a good make. Oskar lights a cigarette and looks toward the window, which merely reflects his own face back at him. Sebastian’s hand grows numb in Oskar’s grip, and he pulls it away.

  “She thinks I’m a murderer,” he says.

  “Not without cause, if I’ve understood everything correctly.”

  “It would be simpler to tell her the truth if she wouldn’t anticipate the result.”

  “Aren’t you expecting a bit much?”

  “Oskar.” As Sebastian presses his hands over his eyes, he feels the effect of the chili again. “She won’t stand by me. I’ll lose her, and Liam, too.”

  Oskar stubs out his cigarette and lights another one; this is faster than he normally smokes.

  “You won’t give up,” he says.

  “What’s absurd is that I feel as if I’ve staged the whole thing myself. Not in practice, but in theory.”

  “Are you talking about your Many-Worlds Interpretation?”

  “If something can happen and not happen at the same time in a microworld, the same thing must be possible in a macrocosmos, too. Haven’t I always said that?”

  “Let’s put it this way: you cultivated a somewhat casual approach to the difficulties of moving from quantum mechanics to classical physics.”

  Sebastian wipes his streaming eyes with his cuffs.

  “Liam was kidnapped and also not kidnapped at the same time. Since then, everything has lost its validity. I now live in a one-man universe. Its name is guilt.”

  The coffee machine behind the bar hisses. Someone laughs politely. The pheasant’s neck still hangs over the side of the bowl.

  “Pull yourself together,” Oskar says. “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “No I’m not!” Sebastian turns his red-rimmed eyes to look his friend full in the face. “If I hadn’t been so obsessed with getting a few days of uninterrupted work done, I would never have taken Liam to scout camp. That’s causality. You like causality, don’t you?”

  “To hell with it,” Oskar says.

  “I’d left the Many Worlds behind me long ago.” Sebastian’s voice grows louder and more urgent. “I wanted to use physics to prove that time is nothing more than a function of human perception. I wanted to pull the rug out from under your feet.”

  Oskar catches the finger Sebastian is pointing at him and places it back on the table.

  “Sooner or later,” Sebastian says, “you will prove through quantization that time and space share most of the properties of matter. That will be the next turning point after Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. You no longer know the craving to achieve something groundbreaking. Inside that craving lies guilt.”

  His glass clinks hard against Oskar’s and they drink, holding each other’s gaze.

  “Even if that were true,” Oskar says, “my achievement would have been only to add to the endless series of errors that we call human history. That’s all. You know nothing of guilt.”

  “I’m going to put it to you simply,” Sebastian says. “You have chosen physics and you are loyal to it. I chose two people, and I have not been loyal to them.”

  Oskar blows smoke across the table.

  “You’ve really changed. I quite like it.”

  “Oskar, is there anything more important to you than quantum physics?” Sebastian asks.

  The armrests creak as Oskar jolts back in his chair with a laugh that changes his face completely. Sebastian has witnessed this laugh a thousand times, but it still astounds him. The corners of his own mouth turn up, and they are suddenly smiling at each other, sitting wrapped in a cocoon of warmth and mellow light that the outside world cannot touch. The moment passes as quickly as it came.

  “Are you really sitting there asking me that in all seriousness?”

  Sebastian examines his empty glass intently and pushes it aside.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Oskar says. “The day after the kidnapping you called me on the phone. After work, I drove straight to Freiburg, and got there very late. We sat up talking the whole night. I drove back to Geneva at about six in the morning and turned up at the institute more or less on time.”

  Sebastian’s mouth is hanging open slightly.

  “You’re mad,” he says.

  “And you should start protecting yourself.”

  “In my statement, it says that I was alone in the apartment the whole time after Liam disappeared.”

  “Maik wasn’t supposed to find out that you called on me for support instead of her.”

  “What were you really doing that night?”

  “Nothing that anyone I met would remember.”

  Sebastian is gripping the edge of the table with his hands. The whiskey is going to his head and he feels as if his skull is getting ready to detach itself from his shoulders.

  He pauses, then says, “I don’t want an alibi.”

  “Bien,” Oskar says. “How about another story.” He looks at his reflection in the mirror again and smooths his hair. His hands are trembling. “We’re in Switzerland. That gives us a couple of days. I can get my affairs in order within two weeks.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This,” Oskar says, knocking on the table, “is not the only continent on this earth.”

  “You want us to run away? Go into hiding? Live with the Bedouin?”

  “Not exactly.” Oskar leans forward. “There are research centers in China. And in South America. At my level, certain irregularities will be mere trifles. We would be welcomed with open arms.”

  It takes Sebastian a few seconds to register the meaning of these words. He lets go of the table, shifts in his seat, tries to prop himself up on one elbow, and sits still again.

  “What about Liam?” he asks.

  “We’ll take him with us. As far as work goes, you’ll have to stay in the background for a bit. You’d have time for him.”

  “You’re not serious,” Sebastian whispers.

  “Yes I am,” Oskar says. “For you, the last few years have been all about your wife. About your family. About physics. For me …” He places his cigarette packet and his lighter in parallel before he continues. “It was only ever about us.”

  Their knees touch under the table. Oskar reaches out with his hands and pulls Sebastian’s head toward him until they are bent over the table, forehead to forehead, breathing the same air. Sebastian leans forward with his whole weight, concentrates on the warm point where their heads meet, and wishes he could flee his own body through this point and find refuge under the crown of his friend.

  Of course. It would work. It even had a certain logic to it. Running away, not the first time, but the last. In retrospect, it would give the long series of small escapes a goal and a cause. Everything would acquire an order, even start to make sense. He would be no longer just the ball in the game, but t
he master of his own misfortune. This time he would kidnap Liam himself and acknowledge what he has long been: a criminal. The passage of time would help him to regard the exceptional situation as normal.

  And normality as the past, Sebastian thinks.

  Only when their foreheads crack painfully together, because he is shaking with violent sobs, does Sebastian notice that he is crying.

  “You know I have always …”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Oskar says. “This isn’t a good moment.”

  “When I look at Liam …”

  He finds it hard to speak. He is clasping his friend around the neck, holding tight to keep himself from collapsing onto the table.

  “When I look at Liam,” he says, “it’s impossible to regret anything.”

  “I can’t regret anything either,” Oskar says. “The past is a stingy beast. It doesn’t relinquish anything, especially not decisions.”

  Oskar takes a handkerchief out of his pocket. He dries Sebastian’s eyes and cheeks before pushing him away and sitting him upright again.

  “You’ve had a few drinks,” he says. “Are you driving back anyway?”

  Sebastian nods.

  “That’s a terrible shame.”

  Sebastian turns away and presses his lips together.

  “This way or that,” Oskar says, “it will pass. After that, you’ll be a new person. Not a better person, but still there.”

  His unfiltered cigarette has burned down to a stub in the ashtray. Oskar flinches as he burns his finger trying to put it out.

  “Do tell me why you came to Geneva tonight,” Oskar says.

  “To tell you that we won’t be seeing each other anymore.”

  The man who looks up at Sebastian as he rises from the table no longer looks like himself. His face has no greatness, no beauty, and no aristocratic air. It is suddenly so helpless that the changing expressions on it look like blueprints. The sketch of a smile, a diagram of mockery, a draft of exhaustion. The anatomy of sadness.

  “Do me a favor,” Sebastian says. “Stay there and don’t watch me as I leave.”

  The pheasant has opened its eyes and is gazing into emptiness. Glasses clatter behind the bar. Outside, the night is waiting. The streets of the city are filled with mist. It smells of rain.

  [5]

  THE DRUMS HAVE BEEN CALLING TO HIM for an hour now, sounding the beat to which he should march. He knows they are right, that it is time to finally make a move. Nonetheless he hesitates as if he still has something important to do, something to verify and to understand. Then a scream, piercing like a battle cry.

  The digital display of the alarm clock shows a four and two zeros. The detective often wakes exactly on the hour. There is no end to the scream, which turns out to be the cry of a baby in the apartment next door. The drumming, on the other hand, is coming from the rain falling against the window with the relentlessness of a machine. Schilf swings his legs out of the bed. He feels more rested than he has for a long time, and is startled to find that the day is far from beginning. He presses the light switch to no effect and walks over to the balcony door. Drops of water are racing across the glass in horizontal lines, as if the building were traveling through the night at speed. Outside there is a darkness that has no place in a city. The streetlights are not working, and only the yellow glow of a blinking warning light illuminates the hell outside. There is a tree lying in the road, and another has fallen on top of three parked cars. The storm tugs at the branches, still dissatisfied with its vanquished opponents. Schilf enjoys watching chaos that, for once, has not been created by human beings.

  Shivering, he turns away and sits down at the desk. He finds a stack of postcards in the drawer. By the flame of a lighter, he writes on the back of the first one: “Dear Julia, When you come to visit, bring this card with you as evidence that you exist. Urgent [in capital letters with three clumsy-looking exclamation points]. Schilf.”

  He burns his thumb on the lighter and lowers his head over his second card: “Dear Maike, Whatever happens, you must not stop believing. You have no right to destroy Sebastian. Please [a splotch of ink where he strikes out three exclamation points]. Yours, Detective Schilf.”

  Content with his work, he addresses the first card to his own apartment in Stuttgart and the second to the Gallery of Modern Art. As a precaution, he takes the last two pills that the doctor prescribed him for headaches, then sits down on the sofa with the chess computer.

  He has paid too little attention to his king from the start. He has watched pale-faced but unwavering as his major pieces died heroes’ deaths. A large proportion of foot soldiers have also fallen victim to Schilf’s fanaticism. He is sending his last pawns, rook, and knight to lay siege to the opposing king, who is barricaded behind a standard defense, bored and probably smoking one cigarette after another. Schilf pictures him with his shirt half open, holding a pistol in his limp fingers. If the detective were to grant his opponent a pause for breath, if he doesn’t force it to move to save its king, he is finished. Even as he brings up the game, he is filled with rage against the superior enemy force, against its solid formation and distribution of pieces, which are always in the right place at the right time. The computer catches every one of his attacks in a net of calculations. Schilf is fighting against a determinist, an ultramaterialist who with precise knowledge of a situation and the laws that apply can determine past and future, and whose most important ability consists of predicting the moment and the manner in which everything that wishes to live will die.

  The detective decides to beat the computer using its own weapons. He lifts his feet up onto the sofa and sets to work calculating every possible move and countermove.

  By the time it grows light, he has not shifted one centimeter from his position. His deliberations are now being accompanied by the whine of an electric saw, which is biting into solid wood on the street below. The rain machine has shifted down a gear or two, and glaring light that leaves no shadow makes everything in the room look washed-out. At about eight o’clock the detective stretches his legs and massages his neck. He has not made a single move. But he now has a vague idea of where the next attack against his opponent should be made.

  Out on the street, he walks over a carpet of wet sawdust. It smells like a circus ring. He steps over branches that have been torn off in the storm, and drops the two postcards in a mailbox on his way to the streetcar stop. Onboard, strangers are telling each other about the damage done in their neighborhoods. Their eyes are shining with the happiness that is only ever brought about by a natural catastrophe representing the comeback of a half-forgotten god.

  Schilf gets off the streetcar near the Institute of Physics and takes a detour along Sophie-de-la-Roche-Strasse. The peaceful canal has been transformed overnight into a muddy torrent filled with leaves and plastic bottles. Bonnie and Clyde are nowhere to be seen. Schilf manages to duck behind a parked car just as Sebastian appears from around the corner. Sebastian’s arms are wrapped tightly around his body. He does not have a jacket, a bag, or an umbrella. He looks like a man who has spent half the night on the autobahn and then slept two hours on the swivel chair in his office at the institute.

  So you’ve come back to us, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

  With difficulty he suppresses the impulse to follow Sebastian.

  NOT LONG AFTER, he is standing in front of the locked glass door of the natural sciences library looking at the posted opening times. It is a while before he realizes that it’s the weekend, so he will have to wait another hour. Resigned, he follows his own wet footsteps back through the Gustav Mie building and goes to the cafeteria, which is empty but open. He calls out in a loud voice for a double espresso before he sits down at one of the freshly wiped tables. He puts his mobile phone down and places his hands on either side of it. Barely five minutes pass before it rings.

  “Miserable criminal!”

  Schilf is happy to hear that Rita Skura avoids repeating herself when she di
shes out insults. It is good to hear her voice.

  “I have you to thank for the most ridiculous Sunday morning of my life,” she says.

  She sounds relieved. Schilf wedges his phone between his shoulder and his cheek.

  “Good morning,” he says. “Lovely weather, isn’t it?”

  “Of course I had to lie,” Rita says, undeterred. “Sooner or later I could have brought in the murderer by other means.”

  “Of course,” Schilf says. “Sooner—or later.”

  Rita’s snort makes the diaphragm of the speaker vibrate.

  “Do you know the chief public prosecutor?” she shouts. “Have you tried dictating terms to a guy like that?”

  Schilf not only knows the man but can also visualize him, hunched into his own body fat, perched behind a desk of presidential proportions. When the newly appointed chief public prosecutor had the immense piece of furniture delivered at his own cost, the laughter of the Freiburg judiciary had been heard all the way to Stuttgart.

  This colossus of a man hates being on call during weekends. And he also hates summer. In summer, women like Rita Skura walk around in flowery dresses while men have sweat running down their buttoned-up shirt collars. The chief public prosecutor has probably not invited Rita Skura to come in. The door was wrenched open the very moment she knocked. She has already ruined the previous evening with her phone calls; now she stands before him like a Joan of Arc from Baden, offering herself up as her heaviest cannon, the hands on her hips a challenge. As she speaks, the chief public prosecutor plucks at his hair, observes her for a moment, and visualizes her floating to the ground. All the while he grinds his jaw incessantly, as if he were chewing on something. As soon as Rita has finished, he heaves himself out of his armchair with a groan and closes the window. What he has to say does not need an audience.

  “Listen,” Rita says on the telephone now. “No forty-eight-hour remand if he makes a full confession. That’s all that was possible. I had to swear to God that he is not a flight risk.”

  “If he were a flight risk he would be long gone. It’s not far to Switzerland.”