In Free Fall (6 page)

“ZDF started a new science show some time ago—
Circumpolar
,” Oskar says, standing up. “I’ve agreed that both of us will go on it. We’re going to Mainz tomorrow evening.” He is by the door now, raising a finger. “At eleven p.m. exactly. It’s live.”

Liam’s excited whoop gives Oskar the opportunity to leave the room. The boy runs excitedly around the table and grabs Sebastian by the shirt. At the same time, Maike has run to the open window. She is shooing a fluttering something back into the darkness.

“That was a tawny owl!” she shouts. “Did you see that? Unbelievable!”

“Daddy,” shouts Liam, “are you going to be on TV?”

“It feels more like I’m going to war.”

The bathroom door slams shut. Sebastian tries to catch Maike’s eye but she is still hanging half out of the window, looking down at the impossible bird. The last thing Sebastian feels like doing is laughing, but then his stomach begins to twitch. A laugh rises up in him like bubbles of air and shakes Liam’s small body, which is leaning on his. When Sebastian hears the sound of his own laughter, he realizes that the die has been cast. Oskar has reckoned with Sebastian’s pride, and has engineered everything so that it is impossible to refuse the challenge.

“You scoundrel!” he shouts down the hall.

Why this ridiculous word has occurred to him, he cannot say.

[7]

THERE ARE THREE EMPTY WINE BOTTLES
left on the table. The window is closed and moths are flinging themselves against the glass. The grown-ups have moved to the living room; two rooms away, Liam is practicing insomnia. Low music weaves through the smoke curling up to the ceiling. Sebastian is sitting on the sofa, cradling an amber splash of whiskey in a tumbler, relishing the burning sensation in his stomach, not knowing if it is due to the whiskey or to happiness. Oskar and Maike are dancing, limbs heavy from the wine and from fatigue. Her eyes are closed and her cheek is on his shoulder. Sebastian looks on, feeling himself sink into the upholstery. His free hand scrabbles in the sofa cushions, as if searching for a lever that will stop this moment from disappearing. It is the last evening of happiness in this apartment, and it is a mercy—for Sebastian more than for the others—that humankind is not able to see into the future.

CHAPTER 2, IN SEVEN PARTS

The first half of the crime is committed. Man is everywhere surrounded by animals.

[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 10
⁵⁹
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.