In Free Fall (11 page)

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.