In Free Fall (15 page)

“No,” Sebastian says quickly. “Everything’s all right. I was simply… worried.”

While Liam thinks about this, Sebastian pushes his fist toward his mouth and bites into the white knuckles to stop the heaving in his gut from producing any unwanted noises.

“Some of the kids are homesick,” Liam says. “Maybe you’re homesick for me?”

This is too much, Sebastian has to get off the phone. He covers the
receiver, bashes his forehead against the wall, and takes another deep breath.

“Yup, you’ve got it!” he says in just the right cheerful tone. “Listen, Liam, I’ve got to go. We… I’ll call you later, or tomorrow. I mean, I’ll come to see you.”

“No!” Liam’s horror is unmistakable. “You can’t do that! Tomorrow we want to…”

“OK, Liam, have fun! See you soon! Bye, Liam! Bye!”

The receiver falls and Sebastian with it. The technician presses a button and
click
, all is dark. A softness comes over his eyes, a jacket he doesn’t recognize, it smells male. Someone allows Sebastian to slide slowly to the ground. The heaving in his gut forces out a scream.

[4]

SOME DAYS, DETECTIVE SCHILF KNOWS
as soon as he wakes up that he will not be leaving his apartment through the front door. Quickly and quietly, he slips into the army-green cargo pants that he buys in a work-uniform shop, and which he wore long before they became fashionable with young people. He pulls his travel bag out from under the bed and leaves the room, holding the door handle with both hands in order to close the door quietly. He stands at the breakfast bar for a few moments with a glass of Coke that is much too cold, and looks around his own apartment as if he is seeing it for the first time. For fifteen years these rooms have been somewhere for him to stay, but not a home. He feels especially out of place in the kitchen, as if some prankster has plonked him in an advertisement for modern living. He is surrounded by brushed steel and expensive kitchen equipment that he cannot operate. Even as a young lout sitting on a bar stool seemed laughable to him.
A real single person’s kitchen
, his landlord had declared when he moved in; and the rent is very reasonable for Stuttgart. Schilf had stuck a couple of postcards onto the fridge out of a sense of duty. They show Majorca, Lanzarote, and Gran Canaria. He had gotten them on vacation. The backs of the postcards are empty. He puts his Coke down, takes the bread bin, the unused fruit bowl, and a pile of newspapers from the windowsill, and opens the window.

To the east, the retreating night splashes the eastern sky with color, interspersed with graffiti made of clouds that the sun will soon have washed from the walls of the dawning day. Through a gap between buildings, Schilf sees a road junction. It is empty, as if cars have not been invented yet or have already been consigned to history. A lone pedestrian is creeping along by the buildings. A shift worker or a sleepless artist, the collar of his jacket turned up even though the nighttime temperature has not fallen below seventy degrees.

The detective turns his wrist: four thirty on Saturday morning. Perhaps he should take out a patent on this time of the day. Getting up early has long ceased to bother him. He can open his eyes at any given time and get out of bed as if nothing has happened, as if sleep does not exist, nor dreams, in whose corridors human beings waste a third of their lives. Rising early without difficulty is one of the few things that gets easier with age. When he was young, Schilf liked to claim that he would never grow old. The only thing old people had left to wait for was their meals.

He smiles and puts both feet down on the metal grating of the fire escape, which starts clanging like a large gong even though he has been careful. Why he leaves the building in this way on certain days, climbing like a burglar into his own life, he cannot explain. Sometimes it seems to make sense to slip around reality and all its preposterous vagaries and take it by surprise. He looks into the apartment one more time before he pulls the window closed from the outside. All is still. The apartment looks as if the detective were alone.

When Schilf looks back on his life, he thinks he was a perfectly normal person about twenty years ago. He had a job and a roof over his head, he had passions, possibly even family. Then came the fracture. While on duty, the young Schilf shot a man who was only reaching into his pocket to get his car key. Or perhaps Schilf had been driving out to wine country one weekend when a suspect forced him off the road—his wife and young son had been in the backseat. The detective insists that he cannot remember. “The fracture” is the name of a catastrophe that his bad memory conceals.

The fracture called for an entirely new person. From the remnants of his life, Schilf picked out the bits that were still functioning. This included his work, which he was good at, better than most in equivalent positions. He got up in the morning. He ate at regular intervals, availed himself of public transport and the small pleasures of life, and he knew where his bed was. But he waited in vain for these things to make him into a new, complete person. His problem was that he could not find it in his heart to end his life simply because the man leading it had reached the end. At some point, he realized that it was a matter of carrying on. The detective became a master at carrying on. Until, barely a month ago, two things happened that upset his mastery: a woman and a death sentence.

He received the death sentence on the obscenely squeaky, sweat-inducing leather of a Chesterfield armchair. This armchair stands in a study decorated in the English style, to which Schilf’s doctor leads his patients after he has shone a flashlight into various orifices. There is a thick rug on the floor and the walls are paneled with dark wood. In a gesture of ludicrous excess, gold-tooled volumes of the classics can be reached by means of a mobile librarian’s ladder.

The woman whom Schilf met is to some extent the opposite of this study. She has lightly permed dark hair, a snub nose that seems quite implausible, flat eyes that reflect the scene around her, and a build more like a girl than a forty-year-old. The detective met her in the pedestrian zone of Stuttgart city center shortly after the fatal visit to the doctor. To be precise, she walked straight into him because he had come to a sudden standstill. The ground had opened right in front of him, a common occurrence of late. He looked down into a dizzying abyss, a state outside of space and time in which everything was connected.

Ever since he was a child, the detective has believed that there must be a kind of primeval reality beyond the visible world. Greater men than he have spoken of
the-thing-in-itself
,
being as such
, or simply
information
. The detective adds to this by calling it “the program code,”
by which he means something lying behind the visible and practical desktop of the everyday. He likes this concept because it allows him to compare reality with a man-made machine, an intelligent product of intelligence. In his opinion, reality is nothing other than a creation born second by second in the head of every single observer, and thus
brought into the world
. A long time ago, the detective developed a method by which he attempted to read the program code. This is how he solves his cases. The fact that the ground sometimes opened before him—that, and unbidden and repeated headaches—was the reason for his most recent visit to the doctor.

Plastic bags rustled behind him. Then came a cry and a blow to the back. The impact ought to have pushed him into the abyss. He imagined himself falling, but felt no fear, only a great longing, so great that when he had taken a step forward and found firm ground beneath his feet, he turned to his attacker with an expression of deep disappointment. The woman laughed when she saw his face, shook her head cheerfully, and did not apologize. Instead, when the detective set off again, she followed him.

He had neither extended his hand nor introduced himself. He pulled her like a drag anchor all over the city center. After his visit to the doctor he had intended to do something normal, like buy a slice of pizza. But now all he wanted was to get rid of his new friend. She was carrying plastic bags in which—as became clear later—she had everything she needed to survive, and she followed the detective without asking why they kept walking past the same spots. Schilf had too little imagination, and the pedestrian zone was too small, to make such a long walk more varied. While they were waiting at the same traffic light once again, crossing the same streets, and glancing into the same shopwindows, the woman spoke unaffectedly about herself in a constant stream of chatter.

She had started modeling for life-drawing classes when she was sixteen, and soon earned so much money from it that she did not see the need for a so-called decent education. Over time, the painters
became more famous and the wages higher. She had quickly realized that she was not being paid for her nakedness but for a feat of strength—her ability to remain motionless for hours. She perfected the control of physical pain in utterly dull rooms, enlivened only by the scratching of charcoal, the sharp intakes of breath, and the occasional sighs of the artists. To the delight of the painters, she was able to stand in a kind of acquiescent trance for a whole afternoon in the attitude of someone who had just received a shock. Word of her talent got around and she was never short of work. There were so many pictures of her that she never had to ask herself who she was. While other people crouched over desks in gloomy offices, she sat with her cup of café au lait in the garden of her favorite coffeehouse, feeling the breeze on her cheeks. She admitted to the detective that she had not really reckoned with having to change anything about this extremely comfortable lifestyle. That is, until an orthopedic surgeon had told her that she must never model again if she wanted to prevent the constant holdingstill from ultimately destroying her back, her knees, and her elbows.

What did the detective think of this story? the woman asked as they stopped in front of the glass doors of the McDonald’s on Schlossplatz, as if by mutual agreement. The detective had not realized that her tirades had constituted a story. A person who does not have to ask herself who she is can have little talent for the art of storytelling.

He had said this out loud, and the woman liked it. She laughed. At their feet, sparrows hopped after sweet wrappers and cigarette butts that were rolling away; it was a windy day. The long walk had exhausted the detective so much that the prospect of something edible and a cup of coffee made him feel intensely happy. They walked into McDonald’s together in the best of moods. Schilf held the glass doors open for the woman, sensing that the people coming toward him on their way out were looking at him strangely, and followed the determined steps of his companion to a table in the corner. She slumped onto the bench and shrugged off her jacket with a smooth movement of her shoulders. After the orthopedic surgeon’s diagnosis, she said, her savings had
barely lasted for a couple of weeks. Like the cricket in the fable, during an endless summer she had not bothered herself with thoughts of the harsh winter days to come. That was why she was now looking for someone to take care of her.

The detective understood what was going to happen. He sat down, stood up again, and asked if he could get her something. A hamburger, perhaps, an apple pie, or chicken scraps in oily batter. With a reproving yet almost tender look, the woman asked him to sit back down again like a civilized person and look out for a waiter from whom they could request a menu. Now the detective not only knew what was going to happen. He was overcome by the firm suspicion that this woman, who had been sent to him quite by chance along with the death sentence, really did not exist at all. Someone who asks for a menu in McDonald’s fitted too well into the strange form of his imaginative power. In her position, nothing would be easier than simply to go mad, the woman said, still looking at him with those eyes that reflected everything. But what life had to offer was still more appealing to her than insanity.

Even before the detective walked up to the counter to order a meal for two from a pale girl, he had given the woman his address and the key to his apartment. When he came back from work that evening, she had tidied up, vacuumed, made the bed, and cooked some soup. As they ate together for the second time that day, she revealed her name: Julia.

That was four weeks ago. Since then, of course, the detective has tried his best not to make any noise when he gets up early. His new girlfriend lies asleep in bed.

[5]

SCHILF CAREFULLY PUTS ONE FOOT IN FRONT
of the other on the clanging metal grate. He sucks the excessively warm morning air through his teeth and gazes at the facades of the buildings around him. People are sleeping behind all these dark windows, in layers beside and above each other like pupating maggots. This image does not exactly make him feel any keener on today’s continuation of his existence. Just as he is halfway down the steps, the inner observer starts talking.

Once again, Detective Schilf left the apartment by the fire escape
, the voice in his head says.
He was not keen on his new case
.

Schilf has known this voice for over twenty years, ever since the fracture that divided the story of his life into two halves. From time to time the urge to comment off-camera on all his actions overwhelms him like a chronic disease. Then there is no longer a present tense in his head, only a narrative preterit, and there is only the third person instead of “I.” His thoughts suddenly start sounding as if someone in the future were talking about him and this early morning, which is fastened to the wall of the building by a zipper of metal grating. Schilf has learned not to defend himself. It is possible to run away from many things, but not from what is going on in one’s own head. He has christened this voice the “inner observer,” in the way that human beings give names to things they do not understand. Sometimes the observer’s
visits last only a couple of hours. At other times, he stays close for weeks and turns the world into a radio play without off-switch or volume control, with Schilf as writer, speaker, and listener all in one. The observer keeps silent about some things, but then goes into great detail on other occasions. He can always be relied on at the beginning of a difficult case. He loves nothing more than to repeat what the detective is thinking.