In Free Fall

  “And a good deal better than immorality legitimized by physics.”

  “Not one word more!” Sebastian screams.

  “In your double worlds,” Oskar says with feverish intensity, “you live a double life. And you pretend that you can do something and also not do it at the same time.”

  There is a merciless close-up of Sebastian’s Adam’s apple rising and falling as he swallows heavily. The unrest in the audience has increased again. One man raises his fist, but it is not clear against whom or what.

  “Let me put it in Orwell’s words,” Oskar says, standing up.

  He has left the microphone on the glass table. He points his index finger at Sebastian and says something that cannot be heard in all the commotion. The host’s mouth is opening and shutting helplessly.

  Oskar says something else that cannot be heard, and then the picture freezes.

  The detective has grown warm. He has grabbed hold of the mouse to pause the clip, and is looking for a way to play the last few seconds again.

  “That’s not allowed,” the librarian says.

  Schilf gives a start, as though someone has stabbed him in the neck. A shadow falls over the workstation.

  “You can’t download films here. The computers are here for research.”

  This country is made up of prohibitions just like a house of cards is made of cards, the detective thinks. Perhaps I ought to have applied for something on the other side back then.

  “This is a scientific program,” he says out loud. “I’m from the police.”

  “And I’m enforcing the rules,” the librarian says. “Do you have a search warrant?”

  Without waiting for his reply, she leans forward and closes every open window with a rapid tap of the keys. Schilf has to get up from his chair in order to create some distance between himself and the woman. Her eyelids are covered with a thick layer of purple eye-shadow.

  “Can I help you in any other way?”

  “No thank you,” the detective says. “I was just about to go.”

  On the street, he stands under a lowering sky and does not know where to go next. Cars pass in both directions and people stride toward secret destinations. Pain drills into his lower jaw. Schilf puts both hands to his face to prevent it from falling apart. He has to keep watching the cars so that they will continue moving, has to lean against the wall so that it won’t collapse. He has to watch the passersby so that they won’t crumble into dust. He is a pillar of the sky, a generator of time, the perpendicular in the earth’s axis. If he closes his eyes the earth will no longer exist. Only the headache.

  Not yet, not now, the detective thinks.

  His next few steps land on firm ground, small paving stones that are exactly the same size as the soles of his shoes. He takes out his mobile phone and gets through to international directory assistance. He asks for a number in Geneva.

  [7]

  BIRD FLU HAS SCURRIED INTO EUROPE on its clawed feet. Migratory birds spread the virus to the farthest corners of the world. Seagulls are dropping dead from the sky near the coast of Hamburg and mankind is preparing for an epidemic. Everything that flies is being executed. Soon the last feather will float to earth in a forest clearing. After that, Detective Schilf will be carrying the last surviving bird’s egg in his head.

  He puts down the crumpled newspaper that he found on his seat. Bird flu. As if there were no other problems. He has used up the doctor’s painkillers, and has managed to get only ibuprofen in the pharmacy at the station. Sitting opposite him is a mustached man in his mid-fifties, who is busy copying the train schedule into a notebook with a marker. The barren stomp and jangle of twenty-first-century music is forcing its way out of a girl’s headphones. Two rows down, a train conductor is rebuffing an angry woman’s accusations. Please let me finish what I am saying. The staff is doing its best. Everything that is possible happens.

  Outside, the gray ceiling of sky stretches westward. A successful performance of late autumn in July.

  When the train starts moving again, the gentle eyes of a few lost calves glide by. They are the reason the train has been held up in this field for almost an hour. A trampled-down fence, men in orange protective suits doing their work.

  Wet calves are a good omen, the detective decides. They are the opposite of black cats, crows, and hooting owls. The ZDF television station has agreed to send a video recording of Circumpolar to him today. Schilf rubs his hands together and tries to calm himself down by breathing in and out slowly. He cannot shake the feeling that he has missed something, as if he has made the irrevocable decision to be in the wrong place. Suddenly he sees a cat in front of him, and he recognizes it as the cat in the photographs on Rita’s bulletin board. It is sitting behind a patio door cleaning its front paws with a knowing expression on its face, as if it were responsible for the two wrists being roughly pressed together in an apartment at the other end of town. A boy’s fair head appears in the gap of a half-opened bedroom door. A look from those eyes, widened in shock, drives a splint into the father’s brain. A metallic click as the handcuffs snap shut. A hysterical blond woman runs down the hall, dissolving. She is not trying to scratch the people in uniform but the man in the middle.

  You have a son!

  The scream performs somersaults and is cut off by the crash of a door slamming shut. Blue light flashes rhythmically over the backdrop of an overcast day. The cat leans its head to one side and scratches itself behind an ear.

  The series of pictures does not stop when the man in his mid-fifties packs his markers and leaves the train.

  A woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan pushes her thick curls back. Sitting opposite her is a man, now free of handcuffs, but with a gray face. A lovely couple. The hatred between them spreads swiftly, like a gas diffusing through the room.

  Do you know why you are here?

  Where is Detective Schilf?

  I am the one heading this investigation.

  The woman’s look suggests a score of over 90 percent in the shooting range. The man grows paler. Schilf clutches at a suffocating feeling in his chest. The woman laughs through her nose and switches on a recording device. She tells the man about his right to remain silent, to lie, or to hook up with some crooked lawyer. The man does not want to know about his rights.

  He dictates his confession and says that he was blackmailed. The cat stops moving when a sparrow lands on the patio. The woman lets the man talk and updates him on the investigation. There are no traces in the car. The son knows nothing. The people at the service station know nothing. There are only those two calls to his mobile from withheld numbers, and he could have made those himself, if he doesn’t mind her saying so. The sparrow decides to look for another spot to rest. The cat feigns indifference. The man says something now about rights and justice. The woman flips through her papers and then she says:

  You may go now.

  The man is at a loss.

  What did you say?

  Don’t leave town, and be prepared.

  The woman assumes an official air and takes notes. The man does not move.

  Kindly put me on remand.

  The cat smiles. The train drills into the next wall of rain.

  If you’re going to rip my life to shreds, the man screams, then please at least keep hold of the remains!

  The woman in the flowery dress takes a deep breath and bellows so loudly that her voice echoes throughout the corridors of the police department:

  Out!

  The train has drawn into a station, so Schilf steps outside, paces up and down the platform angrily, and lets the rain cool his face. His heart tells him that it would have been better simply to have taken Sebastian out of the country, but his head tells him that it was right to follow the path of law.

  So Schilf stands in the rain and says to hell with head and heart, in equal measure.

  The good news is that he has gotten out of the train in Basel, where he has to change trains anyway. In the InterCity train a man in h
is mid-fifties with a handlebar mustache is sitting opposite him, looking down at a book without moving his eyes. By the time they get to Delémont, he has not turned a single page. He looks exactly like the man with the markers.

  If it is my consciousness that is creating the world, it clearly doesn’t have much imagination, the detective thought, the detective thinks.

  He gulps down two more ibuprofen. See you again soon, the man with the handlebar mustache says in Geneva.

  THE WATER OF THE RHÔNE HAS BEEN SCULPTED into blades of black that sweep into the city in long rows. It is unusually dark for nine thirty on a summer’s evening. Yellow light runs from post to post along the embankment and over the bridge toward the city center. In this bad weather, the detective is practically alone with the elements.

  Schilf tries out an Où se trouve on a taxi driver, and is rewarded with the dour pointing of a finger that takes him directly to the right alley. He steps into the entryway and presses the doorbell with his wet finger. He takes his time with the stairs. Light streaming through a door left ajar takes the place of a greeting from the host. A stack of rugs prevents him from opening the door fully.

  Schilf realizes what he expected to find behind this door only when he is confronted by its opposite. This is no minimalistic penthouse, there is no picture window, no Japanese furniture on shining parquet. Instead he finds an overflowing Aladdin’s cave that has not been cleared out since its occupant’s youth. Schilf obeys an impulse to take his shoes off. He steps with stockinged feet into a room stuffed with furniture like an antiques shop. Postcards and newspaper cuttings cover every available space on the walls. Shelves bow beneath jumbles of books. There are porcelain figurines everywhere, wrist-watches without hands, glass paperweights, and foreign coins. From the ceiling lamp hangs a stuffed crow whose wings can be moved by pulling on a cord. On a sailor’s chest beside the leather armchair is a child’s drawing: a small stick figure with yellow hair and a taller one with black hair; a great big smile shared between them; signed with a clumsy “L.”

  The master of the house sits cross-legged on a cushion in the middle of his private museum, waiting patiently for the detective to finish looking around. In this environment, his carefully combed hair and his white shirt are a kind of self-parody. When Schilf finally sinks into the upholstery of the battered sofa, Oskar lifts his chin, opens his mouth, and speaks.

  “Surprised?”

  “I have to admit I am, yes.”

  “I don’t see any point in cleaning up after my own past. Cumulative chaos is a way of measuring the passage of time.”

  He leaps to his feet with predatory agility.

  “May I offer you something to drink?”

  “Yogi tea, please, in honor of a summer that has suddenly died.”

  Oskar raises an eyebrow.

  “There is nothing that cannot be had in this apartment.”

  Almost as soon as he has left the room, Schilf struggles out of the sofa cushions and slips into the room next door. Under another petrified mass of objects is a desk with its top drawer pulled out. The photograph is in a silver frame of the type in which other men keep pictures of their wives. Sebastian can’t be older than twenty and is wearing a silver cravat and a frock coat. His laugh is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down to the observer.

  “A lovely boy, n’est-ce pas?”

  Oskar has entered silently over the stack of rugs. When Schilf turns around, they nearly clash heads. Schilf sees himself in the other man’s black eyes. The master of the house takes the picture out of his hand gently.

  “There are few things that are sacred to me.”

  “I felt a fondness for your friend right away,” Schilf says. “And I think he felt the same about me.”

  “That is the fondness of the bird food for the bird. Come with me.”

  Oskar puts the photograph back in the drawer and bundles the detective out of the room. The steaming cups of tea on the side table prove that Schilf has spent at least a quarter of an hour gazing at the photograph. Oskar pours a dash of rum from a white bottle into the cups.

  “None for me,” Schilf says.

  “I make the rules here.”

  The fumes of alcohol prick the detective’s nostrils like long needles even before he takes his first sip. Behind his forehead, something contracts and then expands to twice its original size. Schilf drinks. He feels the alien heartbeat in his head more clearly than ever before. The crow hanging from the ceiling lamp flaps its wings and shadows glide up the walls. Oskar’s face is a solid plane in a web of intertwined curves. Say something, the detective thinks.

  “Has Sebastian confessed?” Oskar asks.

  “If not, you’ve just betrayed him.”

  “Surely not, Detective. I know that you’re not as stupid as your profession would suggest.”

  “Did Sebastian tell you that?”

  “If you’ve come here hoping that I’ll incriminate him …” Oskar leans forward. “I’d rather rip out my tongue with my bare hands.”

  “Now you’re the one playing dumb,” the detective says.

  The next sip of tea is better than any medicine. The pressure in his head eases off and the alien heartbeat becomes a monotonous buzz that affects his hearing but not his ability to think clearly.

  “I’ve handed the murder case to someone else, by the way.”

  Oskar does not permit himself the slightest flicker of surprise. He looks at the detective’s mouth expectantly and lights a cigarette, which Schilf counts as a success.

  “I’ve seen you on television. I was impressed by the program. May I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  It is impossible not to like Oskar when he laughs.

  “Sebastian was right,” he says. “You are an unusual detective.”

  “So he did talk about me.” Schilf blushes—perhaps it is the alcohol. “Will you answer my question?”

  “I’m a religious atheist.”

  “Why religious?”

  “Because I believe.” Oskar blows smoke off to one side politely. “I believe that the existence of the world cannot be conclusively explained to us. It takes a truly metaphysical strength to accept this.”

  “A strength that Sebastian does not possess?”

  “You’re touching on a sensitive point. The grown-up Sebastian you have met is actually still the boy that you saw in that photo. Like all boys, he longs for a world in which one can be both a pirate and a bookworm.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Oskar watches as Schilf pours himself more tea and pushes the bottle of rum across the table.

  “Sebastian loves his life,” Oskar says, “but he still wishes he had not made a certain decision many years ago. Back then he leapt over a wall to save himself.”

  “What’s behind the wall?”

  “C’est moi,” Oskar says. “And physics.”

  “A tragedy of classical proportions.” Schilf blows at the steam rising from his cup.

  “Irony doesn’t suit you.”

  “I meant that seriously.”

  “Then you’ve understood what I am talking about.”

  They hold each other’s gaze until Schilf looks away and takes his cigarillos out of his pocket. Oskar stretches across the table to give him a light, and stays in that position.

  “Intelligent people,” he says, “often pour their despair into scientific formulae. In order to be happy, a man like Sebastian would need a second, a third, perhaps even a fourth world.”

  “So that everything that is possible happens,” says Schilf.

  Oskar’s features soften into a laugh again, and he runs his fingers through his hair.

  “You really are good,” he says, letting himself sink back. “So you’ll understand why the idea of several contradictory things happening at the same time is very attractive to some people. And why it’s like a nightmare, too.”

  He looks intently at the glowing tip of his ciga
rette, takes a final drag, and stubs it out in the ashtray. The stuffed crow has swung nearer. To Schilf, it looks like it is hanging directly over Oskar’s head.

  “Thinking like that negates the validity of every experience,” Oskar continues. “It negates us.”

  “Perhaps Sebastian has realized that now.” Schilf lets ash fall onto the carpet. “After the kidnapping, which he’s constantly talking about.”

  The remains of a laugh play in the corners of Oskar’s mouth.

  “Yes,” he says, “perhaps.”

  “Sebastian and his family,” the detective says, “are an equation with one unknown. Someone has adjusted one of reality’s screws. It’s the right way to create a false picture. When a person deludes himself into thinking he is in charge, reality puts her fat arms on her hips and leers at him. On the contrary, a good lie is the truth plus one. Don’t you think?”

  “To be honest, you’re talking rather confusedly.” Oskar’s eyes bore into Schilf’s face.

  This time it is the detective who laughs.

  “You may be right,” he says. “Do you know that your friend doesn’t really hold to the Many-Worlds Interpretation at all, but is pursuing advanced theories on the nature of time?”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  Schilf nods.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Oskar says, suddenly brusque. “He’s looking for new ways to escape himself.”

  They are silent until the final echoes of the last sentence die away. Schilf’s body fills the corner of the sofa like a soft mass that would feel comfortable in any given position, while Oskar sits with his legs stretched out before him, looking ahead with hooded eyes.

  Finally the detective speaks. “Do you love Sebastian?” he asks.

  “A good question,” Oskar says, still sitting in the same position.

  There is a pause, and Schilf stands up. With his cigarillo in the corner of his mouth, he walks over to the dormer window, where for a moment the view takes his breath away. The steps to Oskar’s apartment have taken him right up to the sky. From this bird’s-eye view, the city is a circuit board of twinkling lights. Rows of diodes connect up into a network of communicating lines, like letters of the alphabet.