In Free Fall

[1]

THE HOUSE IS IN THE FARTHEST CORNER of a cul-de-sac and keeps its distance from the other buildings, proud to be the home of a single person. Even in the darkness, you can tell that children do not play in the garden and that the lawn is mown by hired help. There is a stone statue on the strip of grass by the driveway, a crane stretching its neck up toward the sky, prevented from taking off by the plinth on the ground. It has the blank air of an object that brings pleasure to no one.

Sebastian did not even have to ring directory assistance to find Dabbelink’s address. He simply looked in Maike’s address book. He has been crouching behind the trash cans for two hours with his back against the wall of the house. He has watched a glorious sunset through the gap between the bins (the sky a three-colored sea, mountainous clouds with a halo of gold) and is feeling melancholy, as one does after witnessing the optical phenomena of the evening sky. Heedless of his feelings, night has fallen, and Sebastian has spent the time since looking at the flickering windows of the apartments next door. At least three living rooms are watching the same film. There was a fire a little while ago, and then a shoot-out. And now the murderer is taking his time explaining to his final victim the meaning of the plot so far. There follows the hectic flicker of hand-to-hand fighting, interrupted by the colorful flash of an advertisement break. Sebastian thinks he knows who the murderer is.

He shifts his weight and stretches his legs out from time to time in order not to tumble into the driveway at the decisive moment. A snail is moving astonishingly quickly across the spade that Sebastian found in the shed. Every time he looks at the spade it seems a little bit farther away from him, and he pulls it closer.

From the long spells of pale light shining through the windows, Sebastian can tell that the neighbors are now watching the late evening news. The doors and windows of Dabbelink’s house look as if they have been painted on. Just as Sebastian is starting to doubt whether the senior registrar will ever return to this place, the garden bursts into life. Headlights shine on a couple of trees and then cast them back into the darkness. Shadows scurry across the grass. The fence leans to the left and the crane revolves. Sebastian has tucked his legs under his body and is crouching in the position of a sprinter, three fingers of each hand pressed into the gravel. The gate slides open. The car stops a few centimeters from the house. The handbrake sighs and the headlights go out. Sebastian watches through the gap in the bins as Dabbelink gets out, yawns theatrically, stretching his arms, and turns to get his bag out of the backseat. There is no unexpected woman sliding out of the passenger seat; no one is walking past the gate. Dabbelink is alone.

Sebastian is basically a weak person. His friends and colleagues may say that he is strong-willed, but actually, he thinks, as he looks at Dabbelink, a strong will is precisely the mark of a weak person. For only the weak constantly desire things. They have to work and strive, experiment and practice, whereas strong people achieve things quite naturally. Some days, Sebastian can barely muster the energy to sit on a bench by the Dreisam and watch the river flow by in front of him. How much more energy he needs to reach out and clasp the handle of a spade! Sebastian puts the snail down on the gravel gently.

Dabbelink has been kind enough to stay in the same position while these thoughts have been running through Sebastian’s mind. The sound of his own footsteps seems strange to him, as if someone else were walking in long strides across the driveway—a man whom Sebastian is duty-bound to follow as an invisible observer. The senior registrar has heard the crunch of the gravel, too. He stands up and looks at Sebastian uncomprehendingly. The spade is raised high and the blow falls with a dull sound. Dabbelink draws himself up instead of falling down, and his face is surprisingly relaxed. Sebastian draws back to make a fresh attack, turns the edge of the spade downward, and strikes his victim on the head with full force. Immediately, everything human is wiped off Dabbelink’s face. There is a smell of grazed knees—sickly sweet and metallic. The car’s central locking system clicks in five places as the senior registrar’s hand clutches the key. Dabbelink falls over, catches himself, staggers, and holds on to his car with slippery fingers. The next blow makes his arms and legs jerk as if an electrical current were running through him. But his body still resists collapsing to the ground. He lurches to one side and Sebastian strikes into the emptiness; before he realizes what is going on, Dabbelink begins to run. Blindly, perhaps even heedlessly, he brushes against a fir tree, crashes into the gate, and manages to close his hands around the railing. He heaves himself up and over and falls into bottomless darkness. The televisions flicker luridly. Sebastian hears screams, shots, and the anxious whining of American police sirens. The reflections from the screens reach into the garden and move over the front of the house. The flickering takes on a regular rhythm—a blue light circling nearer and nearer. The air smells of freshly cut grass.

[2]

SEBASTIAN RUBS HIS EYES WITH HIS THUMBS: this is no good. Instead of coming up with a plan for murder, his imagination is coming up with schlock B-horror flicks. He washes his face at the sink and reaches for a tea towel, which has Maike’s fabric softener in every fiber and so does not absorb any moisture but merely spreads it over his skin. Then he stands still, listening to the hum of the fridge, which with sufficient imagination can sound like the crashing waves of a distant ocean.

Quite unexpectedly, he slept for two hours during the night, waking only when the doorbell rang. Dabbelink was standing in the hallway in his yellow jersey, asking in a very friendly manner if he could borrow a pair of poultry shears. Sebastian woke screaming, soaked in sweat. He sank back into bed, closed his eyes, and tried to let the memory of the previous day trickle into his consciousness as slowly as possible. There was a vortex spinning deep within him, with a strong gravitational pull. This was fear. Sebastian realized that it was possible to be afraid of absolutely everything—getting up, staying in bed, the nighttime, and the day ahead. Most frightening of all was the thought that this fear would itself bring further misfortune. The thought of Liam was paralyzing. Sebastian had to avoid thinking about his son at all costs. He recast the situation in his mind: Liam was not there because he was at scout camp. Sebastian would take advantage of his family’s absence in order to get rid of a rival. He had been assigned this motive by his blackmailers, and he was determined to follow their plans to the letter. Obeying them would bring freedom, he thought, it was his only chance. He was subscribing to a widespread fallacy, but it did not disturb him. He felt better for it, in fact.

When he opened his eyes, a man was standing at the foot of the bed. A paper bag covered his head. When Sebastian tried to escape, his feet got tangled in the sheets. He hit his head against the corner of the wardrobe, and woke up on the sofa in front of the television. The screen was filled with the very large mouth of a woman singing tunelessly. Sebastian padded around the apartment gingerly. The furniture cowered in the kind of muffled silence that comes with blocked-up ears. He touched the leaves of a potted plant cautiously, picked up stray letters and turned them over, and checked the books on the shelves and found they were in order. On the way to the bathroom, he glanced into the bedroom through the open door and noticed an unfamiliar bulge under the bedspread. Walking up to it quietly, he realized that the hump was rising and falling in time with his own breathing. He pulled the covers back and looked himself in the face, eyes torn open and lips stretched in a horrible grin. Time and space split apart in a sudden jerk, and Sebastian was lying in the place of his doppelgänger. He dug all ten fingers into his thighs, hit the wall repeatedly with his palms until they hurt, and finally got up and drew the curtains. A greenish strip of dawn was glimmering over the roofs of the houses.

THE SHOWER DID NOTHING TO CHANGE the impression of having woken too little, or too often, of being caught in a world where the rules have shifted. The worst thing was that there was absolutely no-bo-dy left who could help him out of this trap. He was to talk to no-bo-dy, and could ask no-bo-dy if he had merely dreamt the events of yesterday. Or if, on the contrary, at that service station on the A81, he had woken from a dream that had lasted decades. Reality, Sebastian thought, is nothing more than an agreement between six billion people. He had been forced to unilaterally renege on the overarching agreement. So waking in the morning no longer offered any guarantees. He had no choice but to face the new day without a certificate of authenticity.

Cold water brought strength back into his limbs. Wearily, he suppressed an urge to rush into his study and destroy all his theoretical writings, which suddenly seemed to him the work of the devil—aiming only to turn time and space upside down and thus cast into chaos the conditions required for the survival of reason. At eight o’clock sharp, he rang the number of the scout camp in Gwiggen and said that his son had come down with a sudden attack of flu. A girl with an Austrian accent replied that the deposit paid for Liam could not be refunded. Sebastian did not scream or cry, but simply said good-bye.

After this success, he decided to take care of the damaged Volvo. He needed a reliable car and it felt good to occupy himself initially with an everyday matter. So he drove into town, past the backdrop of a perfectly staged Monday morning—young men in suits cycling through the streets with briefcases on their panniers, visibly exulting in the beautiful weather. On the way, Sebastian decided on three principles to follow: twenty-four hours’ planning at most, the same for the execution of the deed, and a 100 percent guarantee of success.

Of course it would also be a question of leaving as few traces as possible, but that was just a vague matter of chance, not a necessary condition.

A mechanic with ponytail and steel-rimmed glasses tugged at the loose ignition cables and congratulated Sebastian on his good luck in still having a car at all. Sebastian did not enter into the question of whether he had been lucky or unlucky, but promised to return in an hour. At a high table in a bakery, he drank coffee. On the radio there was a report on the government’s new plans for reform. The woman in the bakery was selling bread rolls with names that sounded like fitness products and discussing with her customers the imminent end of the world. The only advantage in Sebastian’s situation was that none of this mattered to him any longer. He paid. He picked up his car—repaired and fully cleaned, too, thanks to a special offer at the garage that week. Even the trunk had been vacuumed.

IT IS JUST AFTER TWELVE. Sebastian hangs the tea towel on the hook and walks over to the balcony door. The sun has risen over the ridge of the roof, and casts a rectangle of light between the trees in the courtyard. A cat parades over the cobblestones, lies down on its side, and stretches one leg in the air to clean itself. The scene is simple and clear; the trip into town has done Sebastian good. But he is no nearer to his goal of coming up with a proper plan. Every imagined attempt to approach Dabbelink ends in fiasco. At least he feels no pity when he thinks of Dabbelink—only hatred. It seems to him that Dabbelink is, in some secret fashion, responsible for all of this. Sebastian is wary of this very useful conception on moral grounds. He is also happy that Dabbelink has neither wife nor children—not out of human kindness, but for logistical reasons.

He pulls open all the kitchen drawers for the third time, and also opens the little cupboard under the sink.

Bread knife and kebab skewers. A corkscrew and a potato masher. A hammer.

Although Sebastian knows that human beings like killing, he has never thought the process would be simple. He is annoyed by TV films in which a distraught woman reaches for the fallen pistol on the floor and kills her attacker with one clean shot to the head, despite the recoil and a lack of weapons training. The way Sebastian sees it, normal people can perhaps operate a gun, but will never hit their target. Normal people handle a variety of possible murder weapons every day—parcel string, plastic bags, rolling pins, not to mention kebab skewers (have these ever actually been used?)—but still wouldn’t know how to employ them in order to kill.

Ethyl alcohol. Insecticide.

Sebastian seriously considers getting a professional to do the job. It would be simple for an anesthetist to get the necessary drug, then ring Dabbelink and tell him some cock-and-bull story. They would meet at his house for the handover. They would clink glasses of red wine. With luck, it would look like suicide.

Pastry fork. Duct tape. Poultry shears.

Right at the back is an old bottle without a label, filled to the brim with a clear fluid. Sebastian opens it and sniffs. Nothing. Absolutely, markedly nothing.

His mother had always kept the distilled water for ironing high up on a shelf in the laundry room. If you were to drink it, the dead water would seep into your cells, bloat them, and make you explode. A cool wind touches the back of Sebastian’s neck. Dabbelink’s racing bike is kept in the shelter in front of the cycling club. Two water bottles are beneath the saddle.

When Oskar was asked about his methods at the university, he replied that the art of thinking did not lie in finding the answers, but in teasing answers from the questions. Perhaps, Sebastian thinks, the human being is also a problem that carries his solution within him. Perhaps that is what those who study the humanities call fate. A machine, like Dabbelink, has to die cycling.

Bent over the computer keyboard in the study, Sebastian cannot stop thinking about Oskar. Oskar in the full glory of his infallibility. Perhaps he, too, would be unable to come up with a way out of this straight off, but he would know how to rise above by force of intellect. For a moment, Sebastian feels ashamed of wanting Oskar’s support at this of all times. Then he found the right article on the Internet. Contrary to popular wisdom, drinking distilled water is safe. Some health fanatics even consider it good for you as it is sterile. Sebastian reads the article as if it is his own death sentence.

Immediately after this, he is sitting at the kitchen table once again, head buried in his hands. He is a physicist, not a chemist, and certainly not a criminal; he is probably not even very practical minded. They have chosen the wrong man. For a frenzied half hour, he imagines an alternative past peppered with if-onlys. If only he had not set his heart on a couple of weeks of undisturbed work. If only he had not immersed himself in useless theories. If only he had used his time with Maike and Liam fully and wrung every bit of happiness out of it. Now he is being punished for his inattention.

When he stands up to get a glass out of the cupboard, his spine bears the memory of his tensed posture. The distilled water tastes of nothing, a liquid corpse. Sebastian suppresses his revulsion and drinks. After the second glass he is able to cry. He drinks a third, and his tears flow into his collar. The sound of crockery rattling in the apartment below comes through the open balcony door, marking the boundary beyond which an alien everyday is progressing relentlessly. If it were within his power to do so, Sebastian would silence the clinking plates, the hands that are stacking them, the twittering of the birds, the distant grumble of car engines, and the entire, bright harlequin world outside with a single blow.

As he stands there motionless, letting his damp cheeks dry naturally, enjoying the brief moment of peace after his outburst, his exhausted brain tosses forth something else Oskar has said. For you, my diligent friend, thinking is hard labor. A solution that is obvious the moment it springs to mind is best.

Sebastian leaves the apartment and walks down the stairs to the cellar, where his seldom-used tools are kept.

[3]

SEBASTIAN HAD NOT NEEDED THE MOBILE PHONE alarm to wake him up. He had not taken his eyes off the clock on the dashboard. The Volvo is parked on a track in the woods. Darkness has turned the bored pine trees into a wall. When Sebastian leans forward he can see the shaft of Ursa Major against a little patch of sky. He has always thought that this constellation ought to be replaced with a new and more interesting one. When he opens the car door, the smell of the forest hits him: plants that suck up nourishment from the rotting wastes of past generations. His foot lands on springy subsoil, a contact so natural that the next movement follows from it. Sebastian takes the rucksack out of the trunk and sets off.

A forest considers various processes going on in it to be perfectly normal. It does not strike Sebastian as odd to be climbing a mountain away from the road at half-past three in the morning. He can concentrate entirely on not stumbling over tree roots, carefully untangling thorny blackberry branches from his sleeves, and fighting the fatigue that is tempting him to lie down on the cool ground and see in the break of day peacefully. When he reaches the edge of the forest, the night has already withdrawn between the tree trunks. Dawn is breaking over the broad, grass-covered hollow high above, which is hugged by the Schauinsland road. A cow raises its head, and turns back to its endless munching when Sebastian lays a finger on his lips. He climbs through the barbed wire and keeps a respectful distance from the animals. Just as he has crossed the meadow in a diagonal line and entered the cluster of trees opposite, sun slants across the crevice between the tops of two mountains. The air is clear as glass, casting every contour into sharp relief. Every tree is an individual, every pebble is in its right place. Shafts of light pierce the patches of even ground. Grass grows wherever there is room. Insects circle over sunny patches. From a distance come the workshop noises of a woodpecker. All creation belongs to the animal world at this time of day, and every man is like the first or last on earth.

Sebastian has already walked this route during the dress rehearsal, no more than three hours ago. But knowing the ground does not make the final leg any less difficult. There are dead branches to stumble over everywhere and thick undergrowth that forces him to make detours. Sebastian has to use his hands to help him up the steepest inclines. After five hundred meters he is soaked with sweat and sits down on a tree stump to rest. He has barely taken off his jacket and tied it around his waist when the midges land on his arms: three on the left and seven on the right. He slaps them dead but the swarm is instantly replaced. Hundreds of midges dance around him jostling for position, landing and sticking their nozzles into his skin. Only female midges bite, Oskar once told him on the bank of Lake Geneva. Females fight, feed, and sting. That is why “ant,” “wasp,” and “midge” are all feminine in German. Sebastian squashes the tiny bodies between his hands, mixing them with his own blood.

When he cranes his neck to look up the mountain, he can already see the bushes lining the road. Two wind turbines murmur in the distance, the placid rotors turning above the forest canopy, looking out over the whole of Freiburg. A group of scouts are whispering their way through the forest, carrying cooking equipment and folding spades on their narrow backs. They gather at the edge of a clearing two hundred kilometers farther east, so Sebastian knows nothing of this.

But as he takes a sip of dead water, out of the corner of his right eye he catches a glimpse of something moving. The ferns are rustling. Something large is coming nearer. Sebastian jumps up. His stretched nerves conjure images of brown bears. Suggestions for an appropriate reaction do not follow. He watches as a figure unfolds in the ferns, but it does not swell into the threatening mass of a bear, only the trim form of a little man. Agewise, he could be Sebastian’s father. His face is hidden in the shadow of a floppy hat, his eyes looking around restlessly from under the brim. It is a while before Sebastian takes in this apparition. The man is festooned with equipment: a large net sticking up over his right shoulder, two cameras dangling from the left, a lantern-shaped cage in the crook of his arm, and a butterfly net in his hand. He purses and stretches his lips constantly, turning his head this way and that, as if he is greeting everything he sees with air kisses. Finally he stretches his arms out, as if he has realized that he was expecting to meet Sebastian here.

“Son!” he cries, rounding the “o.” “Rare to have company at this hour. It’s a good day. Look.”

His Wellingtons wobble around his calves as he approaches, raising his knees as if he were wading through water.

“The best ones are always the most difficult to catch. They like being alone, prefer the shadows at this ungodly hour. And they show the world a mask, or perhaps a second face.”

The butterfly net drops to the ground and the old man holds the lantern-shaped cage in front of Sebastian’s face. Unprompted, Sebastian takes it in both hands. Through the transparent walls a fantastical face grimaces back at him, round eye-whites showing, a broad nose, cheeks with dark shadows on them, and a mouth with pink flews, like the jaws of a predator. Sebastian, who could not have spoken even if he knew what to say, feels as if the hideous face is looking right through him in the most unpleasant way.

“From the family of hawk moths,” says the butterfly catcher, slapping himself on the thigh—not with joy but because of the midges. “Smerinthus ocellata, a fantastic specimen. Look at this lady’s real face.”

When Sebastian turns the cage, he sees a miniature gas mask: bulging eyes and a trunk, feathery feelers sticking out of the sides like tiny fringes of fern. The hawk moth allows him only a cursory glimpse before it creeps into a corner and folds its wings together, transforming itself into what looks like a piece of bark. Sebastian passes back the cage.

“That’s nature for you,” the butterfly collector says. “A labyrinth of distorted images and trickery. Everyone deceiving everyone else.”

He positions the cage contentedly in the crook of his arm and lifts his equipment. As he is turning to leave, he looks Sebastian in the eye for the first time. “What about you?”

It is only now that Sebastian realizes who is standing before him: the witness who always materializes at the end of a murder case. Instead of panic he feels an impulse to laugh, which he suppresses with difficulty. Murder is one of the few things that he has always been absolutely sure he would never do. The presence of a neutral observer suddenly brings home the absurdity of his behavior with full force, and he realizes that he has not come to terms with the meaning of what he is about to do. “Thou shalt not kill” is not enough to make a clear-cut judgment, and they’ve forgotten to add the list of exceptions to this rule. In any case, he has little time to come up with the answer to a much simpler question.

“Mushrooms,” he says, rubbing his hands on his trousers as if he can rub away the absence of a mushroom knife and a basket as you would dirt. The butterfly collector sizes up his lack of equipment with amusement.

“A little early in the year.”

“That’s probably why I haven’t found any.”

The small man nods, seemingly pleased with this appropriate reply. He swings the hawk moth in the lantern-shaped cage in farewell and walks away. Sebastian shoulders his rucksack and continues his ascent. Soon he can no longer be sure if he has really bumped into the butterfly collector or not. In his exhausted brain, layered memories of the past forty hours and thoughts of the minutes ahead jostle each other. When he closes his eyes, he sees a hawk moth with the face of a cat. Distorted images and trickery, thinks Sebastian.

When he looks toward the direction in which the small man has disappeared, there are birds in the branches everywhere. Sebastian sees them sitting on the ground and swaying in the bushes. The longer he looks, the more numerous they become. Chaffinches, wood pigeons, jays, nuthatches, song thrushes. Sebastian wonders how he knows their names. And if it is possible that they, too, know his name.

[4]

HE FINDS HIS BEARINGS AGAIN EASILY once he reaches the road. Even though a dress rehearsal without the lead actor can hardly fulfill its purpose, he had taken things very seriously. He paced the road deliberately, calculated distances, checked lines of sight, and estimated the gradient and curvature of the corner. He examined tree trunks and finished with a walk around the area. At the Holzschlägermatte inn, he cast his mind over his day out with Maike and Dabbelink. There had been a fleet of shiny motorbikes in front of the dilapidated building that day. Swarms of cyclists had crawled up the mountain and raced down it with their tires singing.

He recognizes the right spot immediately. The road abandons the forest at the top of the hollow, and leads into a kilometer-long downward curve before disappearing between the trees again. The quality of the surface allows speeds of at least sixty kilometers an hour. A cyclist entering the twilight under the canopy of leaves immediately after the glare of the sun would be almost blind for the next hundred meters. During his rehearsal, Sebastian had sought out two trees standing on the left and right of the road like gateposts, and cut notches into the bark at a carefully calculated height, notches that he touches now with restless fingers.

A few meters up the slope, he finds a place from which he can watch the road unobserved. Then he sits down on the ground, unpacks his rucksack, pulls on a pair of plastic gloves that he has taken from the first-aid kit in his car, and lays out his tools in the order he has rehearsed. He has been able to plan up to now; he has no control over the next step. Dabbelink is either training early on Tuesday morning or not. If not, Sebastian will come again on Wednesday, Thursday, and so forth, for all eternity. Or, to put it precisely, until he is taken away and put in an asylum or in prison.

The rising sun dapples his shoulders with trembling points of light. The night air caught in the undergrowth cools his forehead and his neck. Despite this, moisture gathers in the fingertips of the plastic gloves, which Sebastian does not dare to take off. His rapid pulse doubles the length of every second. Half an hour passes without anything of note happening. The rustling and crawling between his feet increases. Some ants are sawing a caterpillar to bits, and carrying pale specks to the entrance of their nest. Sebastian enjoys watching the comings and goings of an entire society that hasn’t the slightest interest in the concerns of larger creatures. From the ants’ point of view, Sebastian’s activities must seem just as surreal as the movements of the stars seem to human beings. He would gladly submit his application to join the ants. He would carry out his duties conscientiously and not step out of line. He would be not an unpredictable loner but someone firmly in the middle—a small cog in the system.

Looking up, he catches the glance of a roundish bird that also seems to be waiting for something. A bullfinch, thinks Sebastian. Suddenly the bird shakes itself and flies off. Perhaps the whirring has disturbed it. Now Sebastian hears it, too: rubber on asphalt. That is all. No human sound, no scraping of metal under stress. Professionals make very little noise.

A yellow back is working its way up the road. The biker sways slightly from side to side in time with movement of the pedals, long limbs tensed, fighting against gravity. Although the man cycles past only a few meters below Sebastian’s position, the lowered face cannot be identified—it is hidden by a white plastic helmet. Sebastian calculates the probability of this being Dabbelink at 80 percent. Scientists are used to the lack of total certainty, it is normal for them. Through the trees, he watches as the cyclist passes the inn and works his way upward along the broad curve. Once the man is out of sight, Sebastian does not lift a finger for a further ten minutes. Then the forced calm uncoils into a frenzy of movement.

Holding his equipment in both arms, he runs down to the road. He uncoils the steel cable, slings it around the first tree, and threads the end through the eye of the clamping device. The clamp engages—Sebastian checks the lever a couple of times. The solid rasp calms his nerves. As he pulls the cable across the road, makes another loop around the second tree, and fastens it, his thoughts follow Dabbelink’s climb to the summit. Now he is on the steepest part and now he is entering the final bend. Together they feel the blood pulse under the skin—both men have sweat running into their eyes. They are working together on a task that connects them intimately. Dabbelink gets to the faded line marking the end of the ascent. Perhaps he checks his time, pulls on a jacket, and allows himself a victorious look down into the valley from which he has risen in thirty-five minutes using nothing but his own muscle. Perhaps he merely puts one foot down on the ground, turns his bike around, and hurls himself into the descent.

Sebastian stands panting behind the last tree at the edge of the hollow, staring so intently down at the start of the bend that the colors swim before his eyes. He is concentrating so hard, he nearly misses the moment when Dabbelink’s yellow jersey first flashes between the trees in the distance. The senior registrar is fast. At this speed, Sebastian barely has a minute to get under cover. In a few paces, Sebastian reaches the cable and tightens it to the maximum resistance. Then he stumbles into the undergrowth, making an effort to keep his legs from giving in to gravity and running on and on through the forest, over the meadow, and finally into the car. Sebastian forces himself to stop, lies facedown on the ground, and folds his hands over his head, as if waiting for an explosion.

The beauty of time is that it passes unaided and is undisturbed by what happens within it. Even the next few seconds will disappear, and what seemed impossible a moment ago will be over and done with. Waiting is not difficult. Life consists of waiting. Therefore, Sebastian decides, life is child’s play.

The whir of the tires approaches. It grows louder and higher; it wants to move on quickly. Before the pitch can sink again in accordance with the Doppler effect as it rushes by, it is interrupted by a damp slicing. At the same time there is the sound of a human voice, the first syllable of a word that is not completed. “Wha—”

Hard pierces soft. A curious moment of stillness, then metal meets the road in screeching protest. Impact and the slide of a heavy body. Metal rods strike the road—tiny parts clattering in all directions. An object flops into the undergrowth, hopping and rolling, as if an animal is running away in great bounds.

Then there is silence. Something has crashed into this new day and sunk quickly into its depths: the concentric ripples have dispersed and the surface of time is smooth, like an impenetrable mirror in the morning light. Unmoved, the orchestra of birds resumes its interrupted performance. Sebastian looks up. The color of the light is unchanged; a slight breeze rustles the leaves. In such a simple way does a man leave this world: a gateway of trees, a little noise. Immediately after, everything is the same as it was. It has almost been fun, in the way that things can be fun when a little effort reaps a great reward. Good that it was Dabbelink and not someone nicer. The whole thing was a fantastic idea, Sebastian thinks, and his bile rises so sharply at this thought that he bends over and waits to throw up.

When he climbs toward the road again, he is swaying like a drunk. He has lost all control over his limbs. That was it: his only chance. He just wants to get away. The release of tension has opened the floodgates of exhaustion. He is now scarcely interested in whether the cable really caught Dabbelink or how severely. Decency alone demands that the trap be cleared away. Sebastian thinks that he owes that much to humankind; though why, he does not know.

A speed of nearly seventy kilometers an hour will carry an unrestrained body a long way. Hopefully way into the next bend or right into the town, Sebastian thinks, preparing himself for every possible sight. But when he steps into the road, he clutches his hand to his heart like a bad actor. Although he has prepared himself, what he sees exceeds his ability to comprehend.

There is nothing at all, only asphalt warmed by the sun, with leaves and branches casting art nouveau patterns upon it. The scene has been swept clean by the velocity of the act itself: every last screw has scattered into the undergrowth. The steel cable glistens like a taut guitar string, and the only change in it is a dark stain left of the center. Sebastian lifts the lever, loosens the clamp, and rolls up the cable, smearing himself with fresh red blood. The skin under his gloves is wrinkled, as if he has spent too long in the shower. He uses his last ounce of strength to pack his rucksack.

[5]

FEW PEOPLE MASTER THE ART OF FEARING THE RIGHT THINGS. Many a one boards an airplane with knees trembling but doesn’t hesitate to climb a stepladder to change a lightbulb in the bathroom. When a bird drops dead out of the sky, people think the world is coming to an end. And when there is a real tragedy—which is never a general tragedy but a personal one—they believe that nothing worse can possibly happen, though the actual horror still lies before them. In the dark pit of despair, they sit in limbo, clutching their heads, which are pounding from the impact. They think that this is the worst it will ever get and plan to pick themselves up again after a brief period of recovery. They do not realize that they are in the waiting room for the actual catastrophe, which will come not as a blow, but as a free fall.

Shower doors all over town are being opened and closed. Naked men and women are stepping onto cold tiled floors, regarding their wet faces in the mirror with mixed feelings and toweling their damp hair. The time of day could lead Sebastian to believe that he has just gotten up and is getting ready for a perfectly normal Tuesday at the university. His exhaustion has evaporated. From the moment he changed his clothes in the car and tossed them—along with the steel cable and clamping equipment—into a trash can standing ready to be emptied, his head has felt light, as if he were about to rise to the ceiling like a helium balloon. He has bought bread rolls, parked the car, and brought the newspaper up to his apartment with him. He takes a summer suit out of the wardrobe and dresses as if for a celebration, head to toe in the colors of innocence. The parquet feels good under his bare feet and the freshly brewed coffee smells wonderful. Standing at the open balcony door, Sebastian is filled with a blessed certainty: his son is alive. A morning so bathed and clothed in breeze and filled with birdsong might be missing a crude creature like Dabbelink, but certainly not a little miracle like Liam. The same sunlight that is warming Sebastian’s face must be caressing the hair of the sleeping child somewhere not too far away. A hint of the air that Sebastian breathes, Liam is also drawing into his lungs. Sebastian even feels his son’s heart beating in his fingertips as he touches a spray of wisteria.

He pours coffee, out of habit not making any unnecessary noise, and sits down at the table with the newspaper. For a moment he allows himself the illusion that it is Sunday morning, and that Maike and Liam are still asleep in bed while he has woken too early once again and is relishing the gift of two whole hours to himself. The smell of the bananas in the fruit bowl is intense, as though they were planning their return to South America. Sebastian just wants to sit there and read the paper until he hears the pitter-pat of Liam’s feet approaching in the hall. That would probably be the best, perhaps the only sensible way to get his son back—were he not lacking the last shred of belief. When a mayfly drowns in the coffee, he is almost distraught by its death until it occurs to him that these tiny flies are so similar and so numerous that they must surely be reincarnated, if only for practical reasons.

He carries a plate of cheese rolls and more coffee with him into the living room. He presses the remote control, feeling like he is waiting for his favorite film to come on while he has a picnic on the sofa. When he does not manage to interest himself in a program on the river flowing through his hometown, he switches from the regional channel to Channel One. He turns the volume up high to keep himself awake. After an hour, he switches on the radio as well. The coffee has grown cold and the bread rolls are practically untouched. Sebastian switches between channels and programs constantly; screaming voices intermingle. When the hospital scandal is mentioned, he listens. Some expert or other explains that the pharmaceutical industry makes no bones about testing drugs on human beings: new blood-clotting agents, for example, that are tested on heart patients during operations. But mostly in Africa until now, not in Baden-Württemberg. Apart from that, the mass media is filled with reports on seals in Canada, cancer research in Asia, and bands from Scandinavia, all without mention of a bizarre murder that has taken place in the immediate vicinity of the broadcast region. Images of war in the Middle East are punctuated by bad pop music from the radio. A woman reads out the stock prices to scenes from an American family sitcom. Everything has something to do with everything else; everything is connected. Only one thing is missing in the great web of connections—the news that a senior registrar at the university hospital has met his maker in mysterious circumstances.

Sebastian’s rage at the unreliability of TV and radio programs is exceeded only by irritation at his own stupidity. What if the body is not found? What if Dabbelink’s absence from work is insufficient proof of death for the kidnappers? Or what if the accident has not been fatal after all? What if he got the wrong man? A levelheaded person would not have left the scene of the crime so hastily, but tracked down the victim, established that he was dead, and then made sure that the body would be discovered immediately. Sebastian however, as he well knows, has been anything but levelheaded. What he has done was far beyond his capabilities.

The itch from the midge bites travels over his spine and neck and drills into his brain. Sebastian crosses his arms and scratches with his bent fingers, staring fixedly at the television, cradling his upper body like an institutionalized animal.

It is already early evening and Sebastian is just about to leave the apartment to return to the scene of the crime, like a garden-variety murderer, when he finally hears what he has been waiting for on a local radio station. Soon after, the television also knows about it. Sebastian sees flickering images of the patch of forest that he now knows only too well, but onscreen it seems to have little in common with his memories of it. Red and white police tape, bicycle parts lying in the ferns. Three cows chew their cud at the camera. A powerful zoom lens turns the colors to grainy specks. With some imagination, it is just about possible to make out the twisted limbs of a body lying between dead leaves and blackberry bushes. The palm of a policeman’s hand covers the lens. The harsh evening sun has brought beads of sweat to the forehead of the excited reporter, who, while not wanting to anticipate the conclusions of the police, must mention here that the dead man worked in medical director Schlüter’s department at the hospital. He presents the juicy details of his report with triumph. The police found the head of the corpse only after a long search. It was wedged in a forked branch above the heads of those looking for clues, and had followed the proceedings with wide-open eyes.

When the television falls silent, Sebastian feels as if he is sitting underwater. Every movement is slower, every breath he takes creates an eddy, and every thought is a bubble rising. He has carried out the task and thus lost his justification for existence. There are no plans to be carried out now, no reason for him to move. During the night he developed a theory of the meaning of life, a theory that appears clearly before him now in the underwater stillness of the apartment.

Like every other story, life flows backward toward its own cause. The meaning of existence is hidden to most people because human beings normally think things through from beginning to end. The man who recognizes and discovers the principle of the future purpose he serves is able to view every event between now and then as a part of his personal destiny. And so bear it all with equanimity.

Without a doubt, Sebastian’s personal destiny is to save Liam. Among the events that he wishes to face with equanimity, he imagines discovery and arrest, Maike’s horror and his parents’ collapse, crises of conscience, and imprisonment for many years. He believes himself to be prepared for all this. He sits in the same position, with a rotten taste in his mouth—of industrial wastewater and a sky that has remained unchanged for too long—as it becomes impossible to hide his real problem from himself any longer. There are two telephones on the coffee table in front of him: his mobile and the cordless landline phone. Both have just been charged, and checked many times: they are ready. But they do not ring. Their manner of not ringing signals the final severance with reality. Nobody is calling—not the kidnapper, not Liam, not even Maike or the police. Scarcely has Sebastian understood this when the false floor is pulled away. Free fall begins.

[6]

IN HIS LECTURES, SEBASTIAN LIKES TO PRESENT A TYPOLOGY of waiting that he has come up with himself. Waiting (so he begins) is an intimate dialogue with time. A long period of waiting is more than that: it is a duel between time and the person who wishes to investigate it. Ladies and gentlemen, when you are next waiting in the student administration office for some information, do not bring a book. (Laughter.) Give yourself over to time, subjugate yourself, deliver yourself to it. Have a discussion with yourself about how long a minute is. Find out what on earth the instrument on your wrist has to do with you. Ask yourself what this waiting is meant to be: a betrayal of the present in favor of an event in the future? (Silence.) But what is the present? (More silence.) In waiting, you will establish that the present moment does not exist. That it is always over or not quite there when you try to grasp it. Past and future, you think, are directly connected. But where, ladies and gentlemen, does the human being find itself? Do we perhaps not exist at all, in truth? (Restrained laughter, dying down quickly.) Are we not really here at all, because the suit of time does not have holes for arms and legs? And think: man does not only wait for the never-ending lunch break of our department secretaries to be over. (A single laugh, followed by whispering.) You, for example, are waiting now for the end of my lecture. After that you will wait in the canteen for your lunch. During lunch you will wait for the start of the next lecture and during that lecture you will wait for your free time. Of course you wait the entire time for the weekend, and for the holidays. Waiting, ladies and gentlemen, consists of many layers. You are all waiting to pass your examinations, to finish your degrees, and to find jobs. You are waiting for better weather, happier times, and your one true love. We are all waiting, whether we want to or not, for death. We fill the layers of waiting time with all kinds of activities. Have you noticed something? (A long, artificially inflated pause.) Life consists of waiting; waiting is what we call “life.” Waiting is the present. Man’s relationship to time. Waiting sketches the silhouette of God on the wall. Waiting (Sebastian raises his voice at the end) is the stage of transition that we call our existence.

His lectures are popular. They give the students the impression that he has cracked the phenomenon, and that he will lead them out of their everyday ideas into a new understanding of time.

In truth, Sebastian has not even grasped his own typology of waiting. He has blithely overlooked an important category. It does not have much to do with time at all—at most, with the suspension of it. It is a waiting that is completely absorbed in itself and does not allow for any distractions: no watching TV or reading a book; no eating and no going to the toilet. This waiting consists of preventing reason from collapsing, and keeping the body from committing suicide. It is the waiting of one who is falling for an impact that does not come.

SEBASTIAN IS SITTING with his head tipped back against the sofa. His hands are lying on his thighs and his feet are shoulder-width apart. The body does not need a sense of equilibrium in this position. Even a dead man could maintain his balance. Through half-closed eyes he gazes at the upper half of a bookcase, the luxuriant tufts of a houseplant occupied with producing ten shoots a week, the top edge of one of the paintings that Maike has on loan from the artists in her gallery. Lots of red on a black background. He cannot remember the title of the painting. Even so, he is perfectly happy with what lies in his field of vision. Nothing is bothering him as his thoughts shuttle between two points to no avail. On one side, the conviction that continuing to obey instructions is the only right thing to do (no police, tell no-bo-dy). On the other side, the fear of endangering the life of his son through inaction. There is no room for other considerations. Not for asking how long it will take till they get in touch with him. Nor for the thought that he should at least be happy the police have not shown up: every passing minute gives him hope that he has managed to get away with the crude murder.

The sun has set; the air no longer smells of Liam alive somewhere. There is nothing to indicate that Sebastian’s waiting is not the start of a lifelong vigil. His beard is growing, and his fingernails and hair, too. It is dark for a long time; then it slowly grows light.

THE RUMBLING IN HIS STOMACH STOPS just before noon the next day. The stores of sugar and protein have been used up, and the body is setting to work on the fat reserves now. The pain in his back had become unbearable at some point and finally disappeared. Sebastian is no longer sitting on the sofa, but has become part of it. He has blurred at the edges and is now a permanent part of the room that is part of this building, which is in a town in a network of streets, train tracks, waterways, and flight paths that stretch all over the earth, which revolves around a sun, which is part of the Milky Way, and so forth. Sebastian is in a state between waking and sleeping, interrupted by moments of consciousness in which he knows that, regardless of what the future brings, he will never again be the person that he once knew. That he can never return to what his life used to be.

The ring of the telephone has the force of a stroke. His body contracts and his left arm jerks convulsively. Sebastian first knocks the telephone off the table, then presses it to his ear, as if he wants to connect it directly with his brain. He conducts a conversation whose sense he understands only afterward. Maike once again talked about mountains, wind, and good weather, and asked if everything was all right. Laughing, she put Sebastian’s halting replies down to his total isolation in the wasteland of physics. She didn’t have much time, she was going out for dinner, and Sebastian did not want to speak for long either, he was in the middle of an important train of thought.

When the telephone is lying in front of him once again, he is trembling with rage. The wrong phone call has made the absence of the right one a hundred times worse. His agitation drives Sebastian to get off the sofa and walk through the apartment. His arms start jerking again, with a violence that increases the racket in his head to a mocking volume. Sebastian tugs one drawer after another out of the cupboard in the living room and throws them down to the floor until he has found his pocketknife. He scratches his swollen insect bites with the blunt side of the blade—the letting of blood brings relief. He drives the knife into the side of the armchair. He punches door frames and kicks over chairs. Newspapers fly through the air like startled birds. A vase hits the wall and leaves a water stain in the shape of a hand held up in defense. Sebastian beats his head against the stain until the room around him has turned into a monotonous hum. At some point he stands on the balcony sucking air into his lungs, clinging to the railing as if it is that of a ship racing into the oncoming night with breathtaking speed. When a pigeon lands in a flower box, he screams at it. Where is my son, you airborne rat, you scavenger, where is Liam?

He makes a grab for the bird and the tips of his fingers graze its tail feathers before the startled animal drops over the edge of the balcony. Showing that waiting is not without its dangers.

[7]

OSKAR PICKS UP THE PHONE AFTER THE SECOND RING.

“Forget it, Jean!”

“Who’s Jean?”

“Sebastian!” Oskar’s laugh of relief would certainly have made Jean, whoever he was, happy. “I’ve been waiting days for you to call.”

It’s clear that Oskar is still smiling during the pause that follows. A sofa creaks. Sebastian can imagine Oskar, wearing the black trousers and white shirt that suit him so well, stretching his legs out leisurely. He must have only just come home. At night, he had told Sebastian once, you can fish people from Geneva like trout from an over-full breeding pond.

Sebastian is sitting hunched over at the dining table, in the same place as the last time he had dinner with his family and with Oskar, not so long ago. His shirtsleeves are rolled up and his arms are crusted with blood. The pale material of his suit is also stained in many places. He can smell himself with every movement. The sweat of fear and sleeplessness and the stink of waiting—he can no longer tell how many days it has lasted.

“What time is it?”

Oskar’s smile turns once again to laughter. “Have you rung to ask what the time is? It’s three in the morning.”

“My God,” says Sebastian. “It’s going to be light soon.”

“You sound odd. As if you were a thousand light-years away and had been dead for a thousand years.”

“That’s about right.”

There is a certain tone of voice, a darkly vibrating melody in the undertones, that sets in whenever Oskar and Sebastian speak to each other on their own. The sound of their voices together creates an intimate space cut off from the rest of the world. To create this space, Sebastian sometimes closes his office door and rings Oskar’s work number. Then he asks him how his day has been, if he’s making progress with his work, and what the weather is like in Switzerland. Now, too, he feels the desire to get Oskar talking, to ask him about how his night has been and to listen to him talk about who he has met and what he has been doing. Lulled by the familiar tones, he would put down the telephone after a while and surrender himself to the emptiness from which he has been trying to escape by calling Oskar.

“Why have you been expecting me to call?” Sebastian asks.

“So that you can tell me the end of the Many-Worlds fairy tale.”

Sebastian has not thought about Circumpolar at all. In retrospect, his agitation over it seems so ridiculous that his forehead and cheeks grow warm with embarrassment.

“It’s about something else,” he says quickly. “I’ve killed a man.”

“Oh?” Oskar says.

Sebastian is silent. This indifferent “Oh?” is a crime almost equal to his own, yet it is also a precious gift. It is a tiny but razor-sharp weapon that he can brandish in the face of his conscience whenever necessary from now on. Of course he might have expected this. Oskar is not the sort of man to jump up with fists clenched. He doesn’t throw his hands up into the air or tear his hair out. His relaxed manner is not a front concealing a fearful nature—it is made of granite and its only boundary disappears at the very point that Sebastian’s worldview begins. As always, Oskar is a fatalist, which is why Sebastian hates him most and why he is now eternally grateful to him.

“Dabbelink?” Oskar finally asks.

“How do you know?”

“His picture’s in all the papers. The steel cable got me worried. You remember: Liam and the Nazis in the jeep.”

“I’d forgotten that. I thought it was my own idea.”

“One’s own ideas are rarer than we would wish them to be.”

While Sebastian sinks his head down onto the table in Freiburg, Oskar moves from side to side on his shabby sofa, trying to find a comfortable position. Compared with the flawless appearance of its owner, the state of the sofa is a scandal, but one that Oskar can well afford. He looks up through the skylight. The moon is bright as a spotlight in the theater, bathing the room in white. Oskar lights a cigarette and exhales languid curls of smoke from his mouth and nose.

“Jealous?” he asks. “Over Maik?”

“Nonsense!” Sebastian retorts, a little too indignantly.

“Then what? An escape attempt?”

“Oskar…”

“Or an experiment to prove the irreversibility of time?”

“Oskar! A man is dead. Don’t you give a shit?”

Coming from the mouth of the murderer, this sounds like bad cabaret. Only the seriousness of the situation prevents Oskar from using this opportunity to tease his friend.

“Cher ami.” Oskar takes two more quick puffs, then stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray on the floor next to the sofa. “Life is merely an exception in nature. Did you like Dabbelink?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it!”

“Answer me.”

“No, I didn’t like him.”

“Does he have family?”

“Everyone has family.”

“A wife and child?”

“No.”

“Did he have style?”

“Now you’re going too far!”

There is a rustling sound over the phone as Sebastian tugs his shirt out of his trousers to dab his forehead with the tails.

“Mon Dieu,” Oskar says. “You’re behaving like any old hypocrite.”

Oskar has stood up and opened the skylight. He rests his elbows against the ledge and stretches his back, as though he is going to speak to a large audience. His fatalism is not entirely responsible for his calm demeanor, as Sebastian thinks. Ever since he read about Dabbelink’s death in the newspaper, he has had time to consider every sentence in this conversation. The difficult part lies before him. From now on, every word must count. From now on, every word is a fiber in the rope with which Oskar wants to pull his friend over to him.

He wants to remind him that the entire universe owes its existence to a break in symmetry. Also that the existence of human consciousness is merely a result of this terrible breach, the space between its poles (big and small, hot and cold, black and white) spanned by thought. Without opposites there can be no distinctions, no space and no time; without opposites everything and nothing would be identical. Since distinctions are the basic condition for the material world, how is man supposed to believe in the moral validity of the distinction between “good” and “evil”? Why should one feel appalled about the extinction of a Dabbelink—when it was not even known if the man had style? Oskar laid particular importance on the first few words of the introduction: Morality is the duty of the stupid. Intelligent people exercise freedom of choice.

He has just drawn a breath when Sebastian cuts in.

“That’s not all, Oskar. Liam has been kidnapped.”

Individual stars hang on tight in the glow of light over Geneva. The city, thinks Oskar, is an enormous sack full of fear, sorrow, revulsion, and a tiny bit of happiness, tied up at the top.

“Liam is in scout camp,” he says slowly.

“Listen to me,” Sebastian says. “Dabbelink’s death is Liam’s ransom. Do you understand?”

The sofa is directly under the skylight, so Oskar merely has to turn around to sit down again.

“And…” Oskar does not normally break off midsentence. “And is Liam back?”

Sebastian covers his face with his fingers. This simple question would be reason enough to end the conversation and go back to lying on the sofa in the living room. Instead, he starts talking.

After a few coherent sentences (Sunday evening, service station, motion sickness pills) he starts losing himself in details. He talks about laughing truck drivers, ants carrying dead caterpillars, butterfly collectors, and an extended typology of waiting. Talking works well—everything can be described, everything consists of harmless details that add up to an event. When Sebastian has finished, he feels as if he has spoken for half an hour, but Oskar has smoked only a single cigarette in that time.

The silence that follows is a pause at first, then it grows intolerable, and finally becomes a matter of course. Sebastian has told Oskar everything he knows, and the speech that Oskar has prepared is meant for another situation altogether. The silent telephone line is like an open door between two empty rooms. In Freiburg, the first light of dawn is creeping toward Sebastian’s fingertips. In Geneva, Oskar lights one cigarette after another. The twitter of lone birds waking can be heard in both cities. Merciful night dissolves and flows in all directions. In both places, the new day dawns—a rock with sharp edges, ready to peel the skin from the body of anyone who challenges it.

It is light when Oskar speaks again. His voice is a whisper that barely makes it across the distance between the telephones.

“Maik knows nothing?”

“Not yet.”

“Go to the police.”

“What?”

“I’ve thought about it. Go to the police.” Oskar’s breath hisses into the covering of the microphone. “Just tell them that Liam has disappeared. Once he’s back… Sebastian? Liam will be back. Tell me that you heard that.”

“Yes.”

“As soon as he’s back, we’ll worry about the rest.”

Very little has changed in Sebastian’s posture, although the morning light makes him look even more pathetic than before. His face has lost its luster. The absence of light shows that he has just reached the bottom of the pit. Free fall has ended. Oskar’s decision has exploded a world in which there is no demonstrable reality, and in which there is always the same number of reasons for and against every action. Sebastian stretches out to touch the armrest of the chair where his friend sat the last time they had dinner together, but he can’t reach it—his arm is too short.

“Do you want me to come?” Oskar asks.

“What?”

“Do you want me to get on a train and come to you?”

“No.”

“I’d have done it gladly. Think carefully about what you’re going to tell them.”

“Sure.”

“Sebastian, I…”

The line is dead. Neither of them could have said with any certainty which of them hung up first.