In Free Fall

[1]

IT IS EARLY EVENING ON SUNDAY, two days later. Under a sky like this, Sebastian thinks, the world looks like a snow globe lying forgotten on God’s shelf, not shaken for a long time. His eyes and his arms are tired, so he has opened the car window a little. The breeze tugs at his hair and his shirt. Outside, meadows drenched in rich light roll by and utility poles stand proudly next to their long shadows. The winding road resembles a painted landscape, and it manages to look like ski country even in the summer. On the horizon, the slopes have been cleared—only a few pine trees remain in forlorn clusters. Wire mesh holds back the scree where the mountain encroaches upon the road. In the ditch lies a black cat who had the bad luck to cross the street from the left.

When Sebastian is not looking at the landscape, he rests his eyes on the line in the middle of the road. Its white dashes fly toward him, then strangely slow before disappearing one by one under the car. The longer he looks at them, the more he thinks he hears a sound like quiet footsteps—the passing of time.

Last night he slept no more than two hours. Having finally fallen asleep at about four, despite a pounding heart and sheets drenched in sweat, he was woken at six by a tetchy Liam demanding his full attention for the results of a calculation: In twenty-six hours, thirteen minutes, and approximately ten seconds at the latest, he shouted, he would be with the scouts in the woods!

Sebastian woke with the feeling that he had survived a disaster that he could not remember. But he had to smile at Liam’s excitement, and at the “approximately.” He could imagine how his son had sat down with pen and paper to work out the exact number of seconds, which, at the moment he recorded them, trying to fix them in place, became no longer right. As Sebastian swung his feet out of the bed and placed them on the floor, the memory of the previous evening returned and settled on his shoulders like a cloak of lead. The radio in the bathroom spat out a cacophony of sounds when he pressed the button, as if the noise had been stored up overnight. Fearful that he would hear his own name coming out of the speaker, he switched it off immediately. In the shower, he turned the hot water up to full. As the steam hit the glass, he told himself over and over again, arguing rationally, that nothing terrible had happened. Circumpolar had a relatively small audience, and his colleagues at the institute did not watch popular science programs. In any case, no one would take what had happened as bleakly as he did. Now no one could remember anything for more than a couple of days anyway, especially if they had seen it on television.

A stone’s throw away from the road, a fleet of shiny boats with horned figureheads glides over a sun-dappled lake. After a moment of confusion, Sebastian suddenly sees some deer—“Look, Liam! On your left!”—walking through a golden field of rape. And they’re gone. Trees hug the edge of the road Sebastian has taken. The air smells of mushrooms, earth, and a rain that has not fallen for weeks. Sebastian is gripped by the desire to keep driving toward the south, as if the south is a place one can reach. He tries to whistle a tune—“I haven’t moved since the call came”—but the sounds from his lips bear absolutely no relation to the melody in his head.

[2]

HE CALLED MAIKE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE PROGRAM. He had not said good-bye to anyone, but had gone straight to the cloakroom to get his bag and wandered the corridors of the television studio looking for the exit. When he finally got reception, he called the apartment in Freiburg and listened, astounded, to Liam’s excited whoops and Maike’s cheerful voice. “That was really something!” she laughed, but changed her tone as soon as she realized the state Sebastian was in. She searched for words of comfort, but did not grasp the seriousness of the situation. The noise on the set meant that Maike had noticed nothing more than a heated scientific disagreement. Sebastian was giddy with relief. He decided to drive back to Freiburg instead of staying the night alone in the hotel in Mainz. For three hours he drove blindly on the autobahn, his brain churning relentlessly in an attempt, after twenty years, to analyze Oskar’s personality, Oskar’s character, Oskar’s state of mind, and his entire nature from a completely different angle. He did not get very far. He found it difficult to concentrate and kept arriving at the same conclusion, like coming up against a wall: people like Oskar see life as a game that they have to win.

Maike was waiting for him at the door to their apartment with a freshly poured whiskey sour and, to his surprise, a similar conclusion: it is not enough for Oskar to win—others have to lose as well. He doesn’t even love you as much as he loves the fight. It seemed that they had not talked about Oskar for years; but they came to the same conclusion that evening. For hours Maike listened to her husband’s hate-filled tirade, said over and over again that she loved him, and told him that an idiot like Oskar ought to just drop dead. When Sebastian was finally drunk, she put him to bed.

Now he is swerving into the oncoming lane to avoid driving over the flattened remains of a hare. A bird of prey is sitting on the guardrail, eyes dark.

Perhaps the whole thing was a stroke of luck, Sebastian thinks. A warning sign, a narrow escape, so that a real tragedy will not happen. Of course he realizes what he has in Maike. But since last night, he feels more keenly than ever before that he does not really deserve this gift. Wealthy patrons put their hands on her bottom by way of greeting, something he knows only because she tells him about it; he no longer attends her gallery receptions. When Maike stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom, painting herself a prettier face (or so she thinks), he leans into the doorway and says that physics is a hard taskmaster, by which he means that he, too, has to work over the weekend. As soon as she is gone, he sits down with Liam on the floor in his room and talks about the theory of the big bang. The walls of their apartment are hung with large, framed pictures, in which Maike sees things that he does not understand. Sebastian knows the young artists, who always seem too small for their trousers and their spectacles, and who speak in sentences consisting only of nouns, faces averted. He knows the collectors, who spend a fortune on suits designed to make them look impoverished. That Sebastian has no cause to feel jealous is due neither to the lack of opportunity nor to the respectable nature of the art world.

As soon as she had gotten to know Dabbelink, she’d insisted on introducing the two men. Sebastian had shaken the senior registrar’s hand at the cycling club, and felt pity for the thin, drawn man, who had limbs like twisted cable and a face etched with exhaustion. Two large full-stops for eyes, a comma for a nose, and a mere line of a mouth, even when laughing. Sebastian borrowed a bicycle from the club and ignored the looks from the other cyclists, whose faces reflected the exact number of times Maike and Dabbelink had met.

The senior registrar overtook them at the first steep section of the Schauinsland. Maike good-humoredly accompanied her husband as he pushed his bike on foot. They met Dabbelink again on the summit of the mountain, which he had conquered in an incredible thirty-five minutes. He was lying on the ground with his calves on the seat of a bench, lifting his torso and alternately touching his forehead to his left and then his right knee. While they were having coffee, he gazed impatiently at the view, as if he was thinking about how many mountains it would have been possible to conquer during that time. The last Sebastian saw of Ralph Dabbelink that day was a back covered in yellow polyamide, leaning dangerously close to the pavement as he sped downward in a tight curve. Maike and Sebastian had taken their time, and had stopped at a good restaurant for a meal on the way back through the valley of Günterstal.

“Are you OK?”

Liam is too quiet.

[3]

SEBASTIAN ADJUSTS THE REARVIEW MIRROR so that he can see his son. Liam is leaning against a corner of the backseat with his head tipped to one side. His body is held in place only by the safety belt, a broad band across his neck and torso. The travel sickness pills are obviously working. When they left the house, Liam had waved as if they were off to sail around the world. Sebastian closes his window and reaches out to switch off the radio, which isn’t even on. Sleep is definitely the best thing for his son at the moment.

The farther they get from Freiburg, the more freely Sebastian’s thoughts flow. He locks his arms; a yawn pushes air into the farthest corners of his lungs. He will have plenty of time to be angry with himself over the coming weeks. He is angry not only because he had once again found it necessary to accept a challenge from someone stronger, but also because he had not felt himself to be above accepting a challenge from someone weaker. He writes articles such as the one in Der Spiegel because the scientific journals do not publish his work. He tells himself that there is nothing dishonorable about wanting to bring his ideas to a wider public. But when he thinks about Oskar reading these pieces, he flushes.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation, Sebastian wrote, was nothing less than an escape from the central paradox of human existence. From the viewpoint of classical physics, it was still impossible to explain why the universe was arranged for the needs of biological life with such astonishing precision. For example, mankind would not exist if space had expanded at a speed that was only the tiniest bit faster or slower. At the time of the big bang, the probability that a universe with the necessary conditions would come into existence had been 10^-59. That meant the existence of the earth was as unlikely as winning the lottery nine times in a row. From a stochastic point of view, mankind could be viewed as nonexistent. Man was completely overwhelmed by the improbability of his own existence, and this was precisely the cause of his urgent longing for a Creator.

Those who did not believe in God, he’d posited in the article, had to call upon statistics. If not just one universe had been created in the big bang, but 10⁵⁹ different universes, then it was no wonder that one of them could support life. The only logical, non-theological explanation of human existence lay in thinking of space (and therefore time) as an enormous heap of worlds that was expanding minute by minute. A growing time-foam, in which every bubble was its own world. “Everything that is possible happens”—Der Spiegel had liked the caption.

Nothing in the article is wrong. Rather, such thoughts belong to a realm where “wrong” and “right” barely play a role. But that is exactly what provokes Oskar’s biting mockery. That’s exactly how stupid people behave! Sebastian hears him say. They take a question of some kind, any old “why,” hurl it against the world, and are amazed when they do not get a sensible answer. Cher ami, every bird on the branch that just twitters and refrains from this ridiculous questioning is cleverer than you!

SEBASTIAN LIFTS A HAND FROM THE STEERING WHEEL and wipes the beads of sweat off his upper lip. Even worse than Oskar’s contempt is the fact that his work on these theories is taking over his life. He has started shutting himself in the study almost every day after dinner. There he broods over his papers until some fragment of an equation starts whirling through his head like an abandoned LP. Some nights he does not dare go to bed, because the noise of his thoughts can increase to an intolerable level in the dark stillness of the bedroom. Maike came to him once, long after midnight. Her bare feet in the hall sounded like the footsteps of a little girl. When he looked up, she was standing in front of him in her nightdress, looking small and fragile. Stay with us, she said. Before he could reply she had turned away and vanished. Sebastian did not follow her, because he was not sure if he had really seen her at all.

After nights like those, he barely knows which world he is in when morning comes. At breakfast, he sat down not as a husband next to his wife, but as someone who is shocked to find two strangers in his own home. Liam suddenly seems far too old, his childish laughter false, his beloved face unfamiliar. Sitting with his family, Sebastian feels as if he has stumbled into an unknown universe by mistake. This terrible feeling of being a guest in his own life has been with him for a long time. Since Liam’s birth, there have been many moments when he has felt like an impostor, as if he has cheated his way to some good fortune which was not his by right, and for which he would be severely punished. At times like this, he wants to put aside his skin like a borrowed coat, and destroy everything he loves before it can be taken away by some counterbalancing force of justice. It is only recently that he has begun to think that this feeling is not a personal problem, but a matter of physics.

He had once described these confused feelings to Oskar as the side effects of a big idea. Oskar had pointed an index finger at him sternly. Don’t trouble yourself with your neuroses, he said. You’ll never be a great man. Everything that has meaning for you bears your surname. That’s how you can recognize it.

Sebastian was incandescent with rage about this remark at the time. Now he finds Oskar’s words calming. As a child, he often lay in bed tortured by the question of whether, faced with a barbaric murderer, he would save his father or his mother. Now, if he had to choose between Maike and physics, or even between Maike and the rest of the world (with the exception of Liam), his wife would have absolutely nothing to fear, despite all his scientific and other obsessions.

He took her to the station in the afternoon. When the train drew alongside the platform, he grasped her arm and told her he loved her. She patted him on the back like a good horse, told him to take care of himself, and passed her lightweight racing bike to the conductor. She blurred into a light patch behind the carriage window, and Sebastian’s arm started to ache with waving. He felt himself getting smaller, shrinking constantly until he disappeared behind the long curve of the tracks.

This holiday is an exception, he thinks now. After this, he will not endanger his family’s happiness any longer in pursuit of a frenzied obsession. He will forget last night’s pathetic TV program and complete “A Long Exposure.” And he will ring Oskar and ask him not to visit on the first Friday of the month any longer.

As soon as he has decided this, he feels free, as if a thorn has been pulled from his flesh. He checks on Liam in the rearview mirror and looks at his peaceful sleeping face for a long time. A wide-tailed buzzard is tearing white intestines from the next piece of roadkill by the edge of the pavement. Since Sebastian started noticing birds of prey, he has counted more than fifteen of them. They sit in the trees, or even by the roadside, staring at the traffic with eyes unadorned by lashes. It seems to him that there are an unnatural number of them. Or, worse still, it is always the same one.

At Geisingen the Volvo leaves the country road and moves onto the A81.

[4]

THE PUMP GURGLES AS IF IT IS SUCKING PETROL out of the tank instead of filling it. While the digits race over the price display, Sebastian uses a sponge to scratch the yellow and purple bodies of flies from the windshield. He buys a chocolate bar at the counter and drops it into the side pocket of his door when he gets back to the car, as Liam is still asleep. He turns the key in the ignition gingerly, as if this will dampen the noise of the starting engine. The car moves slowly around the petrol station.

The parking lot behind the building is almost empty. A couple is sitting on camping stools next to a caravan, having their dinner. A young woman is walking her dog on the strip of grass, a light wind blowing her hair across her face. The sun is slanting through the tops of the trees; as the light hits the branches it breaks into mawkish stars. Sebastian stops the Volvo once again, next to some dirty trucks. He has started out of an empty blackness several times over the last few kilometers. Asleep for a split second. He needs a rest.

The air smells of axle grease and cooling engines. Swinging his arms and hopping from one leg to another, Sebastian goes over to the edge of the service area. The wind sings in chorus through the railings. In the valley there is an insignificant little south German town—its roads shine like rivers. Lake Constance is not yet in sight, but it will appear between the trees in half an hour at most. They will drive its length and cross the invisible border to Austria at the easternmost end before they reach their destination near Bregenz. Latitude 47°50′ N and longitude 9°74′ E. He has looked up the coordinates in an atlas with Liam. There is always a vast amount of information in the world, just not the information you might need in order to know what will happen in the next second. To avoid having to stop again, Sebastian decides to go to the toilet.

He is washing his hands when the phone rings. He dries his hands on his trousers hurriedly, wedges his mobile between shoulder and ear, and leans against the door to push it open. In the hallway a fat woman in a surgical green housecoat points at a plate with a single coin lying in the middle of it.

“Maike?” Sebastian ignores the toilet attendant and walks down the corridor with his head bent. “Did you get there all right? How is the hotel?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you. I’d like to ask you to stand still for a minute and listen to me.”

The voice in the distance sounds familiar to Sebastian. It is young enough to belong to one of the few female students in the institute. He takes the phone from his ear so he can look at the display. Unknown number.

“Who is this?”

“Vera Wagenfort.”

In his head, Sebastian goes through all the women in his faculty. There is no Vera. “Listen, this is not a good moment for me. I’m just leaving a public toilet, if you must know.”

“I’m saying this for the last time. Stand still. For your own sake.”

This woman is not trying to sell anything; she has also not dialed the wrong number. A cold shock cements Sebastian’s legs to the tiled floor. There is a glass case in front of him, filled with colorful stuffed animals, watches, and toy cars. Liam loves these machines. One euro sets in motion a claw, which can be steered and lowered with two buttons. It’s generally possible to grab hold of something, but when the arm moves back, it bumps into the edge of the chute, and the prize almost always falls back into the case. Liam never lets lengthy explanations of the chances of success spoil his fun. If he were here now he would certainly be cajoling a stray coin out of Sebastian.

“First, I must ask you to keep calm at all costs. My employer thinks that you can do that.”

The woman sounds as if she is reading from a piece of paper.

“The most important thing is: tell nobody. Do you understand? No-bo-dy. Leave the building now. I’ll call you back immediately.”

The line goes dead. Sebastian shakes the phone as if he is hoping an explanation will fall out of it. His eyes meet those of a pink toy dog, which seems to be looking at him pleadingly. He finally tears himself free, clears the final stretch of tiled floor, and opens the door to the outside.

Inside the air-conditioned service station, he has forgotten how warm the evening is. Images from the journey still fill his head. When he closes his eyes, the broken white line flies toward him, a bird of prey looks on, a dead cat is at the side of the road. Sebastian walks around the building and stands on the spot surveying the parking lot. There are the trucks. The caravan is gone. And the space where the Volvo was is also empty. Sebastian does not wonder for a moment if he might have parked elsewhere. He knows exactly where he left his car. The space is unbearably empty, emptier than anywhere else on the planet. It takes several seconds for him to understand this.

He walks in an arc across the asphalt divided by white lines, and although his stride gets longer with every step, he feels unable to move from his spot, as in a nightmare. It is only when he gets to the exit ramp, and is looking at the autobahn with its shiny cars disappearing at high speed over the hill, that the rise and fall of the occasional horn brings him to his senses. The frequency of sound waves, Sebastian often explains to his students, depends on the relative motion between the observer and the source. The Doppler effect. It’s the same with light. If Sebastian’s senses were a little sharper, he would register that the vehicles moving away from him are red while those coming toward him are blue. Every one blue, like the Volvo that he has lost.

He runs across the grass, past overturned bins and crudely made picnic tables. Some distance away, two truck drivers are standing next to the raised hood of an engine, cradling cups of coffee in front of their stomachs, watching him. For some reason, Sebastian has his hands in his trouser pockets, which slows him down as he runs. His mouth is already open and he wants to shout, but something clicks in his brain. Tell no-bo-dy.

“Lost something, mate?”

The fat one’s voice is too high for his girth. Sebastian waves the question aside and forces himself to slow down to an innocuous stroll. He has to dictate every movement to his limbs and he almost stumbles; he must look like a madman. He comes to a halt again in the middle of that ghastly void where his car had been. His heart feels constricted in his body—it is looking for a way out through his left lung. Growing in the hollows of a manhole cover is a fleshy plant that Sebastian has seen in Japanese rock gardens. The parking lot swims around him in a blur. This is what the world looks like from one of the roundabouts that Liam preferred over everything else in the playground before he grew too old for them.

Sebastian’s temples are cold as ice. Time is a card index with an infinite number of cards. He starts flicking through it, looking for the parallel universe in which he had not left Liam sleeping in the car. Or one in which Maike had not come up with the idea of scout camp. Or even one in which he had studied mechanical engineering and lived in America. He takes a step to one side to make room for the Volvo, which any moment now will emerge from thin air in the spot where it was parked before. Sebastian grips his forehead. The truck behind him shakes and rattles like a beetle before takeoff, angles its nose to one side, and rolls toward the exit. Vera Wagenfort. Wagen fort. Car gone. Jokers, jokers everywhere. All will be revealed.

A family is returning to its yellow Toyota. Two children climb into the backseat. The girl is Liam’s age.

Sebastian’s phone rings.

[5]

THIS TIME HIS BODY does not require specific instructions—it reacts before it has received any orders. Lips, tongue, and teeth crash together and scream into the mobile.

“What do you want? I can get anything!”

A hand lands over his mouth and stops him from speaking; it is his own hand. There is an uncertain pause on the other end of the line. A woman clears her throat.

“Herr Professor, I’ve been instructed to give you a message. A single sentence. I’ve been told you will understand. Are you ready?”

“My son,” Sebastian groans.

“Excuse me, I don’t know what this is all about. I just have to make sure that you understand the sentence. Shall we continue?”

It is the woman’s friendliness that does it to him. He never knew that pain could come from so deep within the human body. He never knew how it could claw at his throat, desperately trying to reach his brain. Vera Wagenfort takes a breath. Then she says it.

“Dabbelink must go.”

The sun has set behind the treetops and taken the shadows with it to preserve them till the next day. There are still a few cars parked here and there, but not a soul in sight. A random wind races over the ground, chasing empty paper cups in circles and flapping his trousers. Sebastian looks at his watch as if he had an important appointment and no time for further chat. Just after nine thirty. The time tells him nothing. He has never felt so alone.

“Would you repeat that?” he asks.

“I’ve been told to add this when questions are asked: ‘Then everything will be all right.’ Did you get that?”

“You can’t do this,” Sebastian says. “I’m begging you.”

“Apart from that, you probably know the rules: No police. Not a word to anyone. Not even to your wife.”

There is a pause, as if they are in the middle of a difficult personal conversation and don’t know how to continue. The caller’s voice is not unpleasant. Sebastian imagines her to be a healthy young woman. Perhaps, he thinks, we would get along well under different circumstances.

“Go into the restaurant in the service station,” the woman says, rustling her piece of paper. “Are you still listening?”

“Yes.”

“There is a service station and a restaurant where you are right now, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down near the counter. Get a beer and a newspaper. It might be a while before I call again. Keep your phone on.”

“Wait!” Sebastian shouts. “I will—We can—”

The buttons on his phone have always been too small for his fingers. At last he finds the list of calls received. Two calls from “Unknown number.” He would have liked to ring back and explain that he has absolutely no experience with such things, that he needs a few tips. He also wants to ask why he of all people has been chosen. What he should do now. And how. And when. Just as Vera Wagenfort suspected, the rules are actually clear to him. They are shown several times a week on television in those badly lit thrillers Sebastian has never been able to stand. Absurdly, none of the films ever taught you what you were supposed to think and feel in such a situation. They also did not teach you what to do with a three-word sentence. It is always three-word sentences that change the life of a human being in a decisive manner. I love you. I hate you. Father is dead. I am pregnant. Liam has disappeared. Dabbelink must go. After a three-word sentence, one is totally alone.

Sebastian spends a while trying to remember the behavior of people with time on their hands. He widens his stance, folds his arms, and drops his chin to his chest. An empty paper cup rolls over the asphalt. Sebastian looks at it and waits for the merciful effects of shock.

When he raises his head after a few minutes, the surroundings look unnaturally clear to him, as if seen through diving goggles. His breath is even and his heart is not beating faster than once per second. He looks around (the swerving beam from a pair of headlights, a woman in a pink coat getting out of her sports car) and the innermost forces that hold the universe together are within his grasp now, if he felt like thinking about it. He thinks he knows now what they want from him. He even knows who did it. He can imagine how they pressed a chloroformed rag to Liam’s mouth and nose as he slept, and brought him to some apartment or other, or perhaps straight to the intensive care unit of some hospital. It is easy for doctors to keep a child in an artificial coma for as long as they give Sebastian to complete his task. It would be just as easy for them to get rid of Liam forever. They know that he cannot rely on getting his son back, but that he still has no choice other than to follow their instructions.

If Dabbelink talks, Sebastian thinks, the entire hospital will collapse. A medical director has done something wrong, and now he needs not only the person who knows about it to die, but the right person to kill him. They have found that person. Sebastian’s wife is close to the victim, and jealousy is one of the most common motives for murder. The kidnappers probably know that Sebastian understands all this. Intelligent people can be honest with each other. Sebastian starts laughing. He presses his clothing to his body with both hands to stop the wind flapping it as he walks through the dusk to the service station.

[6]

THERE ARE NO TABLES NEAR THE FOOD COUNTER, only a refrigerated display in which the same green apple glistens over and over again. Sebastian estimates the distances as painstakingly as a land surveyor until he is sure which seat is nearest the bar. He picks one next to a towering plant, which on closer inspection turns out to be made of plastic, and therefore out of countless plants. The weight of the earth compressed them over millions of years into a greasy substance until mankind was developed enough to extract it and make artificial branches and leaves. The chemical exhalations of the plant are so strong that Sebastian feels nausea rising. He marshals his thoughts as if he is whistling a pack of barking dogs into order, and stands up again to get a beer and a newspaper in accordance with his instructions.

The restaurant has windows all around. The dusk presses close against the panes of glass. Three tables away, a man in a suit is eating something brown with gravy, dabbing his mouth with his napkin after every bite and turning his wrist to look at his watch. Behind the next potted plant, the young woman in the pink coat is composing a long text message. All the diners in the restaurant look as though their cars are waiting outside. Without a car, Sebastian is a castaway among sea captains and will surely be recognized as such by the way he is glancing around wildly. The woman smiles when her mobile beeps. Perhaps she is waiting for a lover, with whom she will betray her husband on service-station furniture. Perhaps she calls herself Vera Wagenfort at these assignations. Strangely, Sebastian would not give a damn.

The first gulp of beer hits him like a dull thud in his arms and legs. As the shock wears off, so does the feeling that he has understood everything. Sebastian realizes that he was wrong in thinking he had fully grasped the situation. In physics, when an attempt is made to go beyond the limits of the knowable, mathematics takes over from the imagination. But the sentence “Dabbelink must go” cannot be expressed as a mathematical formula, so it stays outside the parameters of Sebastian’s understanding. This has consequences. Until now, Sebastian has looked toward the future believing that he is looking out at an open prospect. From this day onward, he will be looking down at his feet. His new world is the little patch of ground beneath his next step. He won’t run across exit ramps anymore. He will not even try to locate the perpetrators in his mind. He will simply do what is being asked of him. As cleanly as possible. Surgically. His blackmailers have chosen him because they need someone who will do the job properly. Sebastian will do everything to make sure he does not disappoint them. Resolutely he opens the newspaper to the contents page.

When the clock above the bar displays ten thirty, his mobile phone has only one bar of battery left. Almost as soon as he picks it up, a ring pierces the air. Tables and chairs crash into each other and settle down again as the woman in the pink coat stands, pressing her phone to her cheek. Nodding and talking at the same time, she walks out of the restaurant. While Sebastian is looking after her, there is another ring. He cannot muster the same sense of shock.

“Hello?”

“Sebastian, you won’t believe how beautiful it is here!”

The sharp pain in his gut had died down with very little resistance after he had sat down in the restaurant. But Maike’s voice brings back the pain. Between her words Sebastian feels he can hear his son, and he feels this so keenly that Maike must surely notice it. “In twenty-six hours, thirteen minutes, and approximately ten seconds, I’ll be with the scouts in the woods!” Sebastian has to get off the phone and conserve his battery. Maike chats about misty mountains and little lakes looking up at the sky like blue eyes. She talks about swimming pools, the sauna, and massages. Cuba libres at the bar.

“Maike!”

That comes out harsher than intended. Sebastian does not have the patience to try for a specific tone of voice.

“What’s up?” A faint reflection of his shock colors her voice.

“I have to get off the phone. The battery is low.”

“Did everything go OK with Liam?”

“He slept through the whole journey.”

“Are you back at home?”

“Almost.”

“Are you sure everything is all right?”

“Of course! Maike, the battery…”

A little jingle sounds and the display shows two intertwined fishes. Sebastian has never understood what the phone manufacturer meant to say with this symbol. When he tries to turn his mobile on again, he gets as far as typing in his PIN before the display goes dead. He feels like letting his head sink into the open newspaper, only to realize it is already there. Three centimeters away from his right eye, a blond man is laughing out of a photograph. It is he. He knows the caption by heart. “Everything that is possible happens. Freiburg professor explains the theories of the time-machine murderer.”

When someone calls his name, he does not even have the strength for astonishment. The cashier comes to the table—the yellow and red pattern on her apron swims before his eyes.

A woman rang but did not wish to speak to him. She just wanted to leave a message to let Sebastian know that he could return to his car when he wished.

[7]

THE STREETLAMPS AT THE EDGE OF THE PARKING LOT are wearing broad skirts of light. Without the trucks flanking it, the spot where Sebastian had parked is no longer a gap, just a random space on the black asphalt. Now everything is a gap apart from the Volvo, which is standing in its previous position as if it had never been gone. Sebastian’s shadow hurries before him and casts itself against the driver’s door; it is unlocked and the backseat is empty. Liam’s bags are gone. The floor of the trunk needs a good clean.

The ignition does not react at the turn of the key. Sebastian bends down and finds a couple of wires hanging loose beneath the dashboard. As he twists the two ends together, the engine springs to life. When his shin brushes against the tangle of wires, the headlights flicker and the engine splutters. Sebastian spreads his knees as far apart as he can, gets into gear, and drives off.

There are a handful of cars on the A81, heading toward unknown destinations. After the first few miles, Sebastian turns on the radio. I haven’t moved since the call came. He sings along quietly in a monotone.