In Free Fall (16 page)

The last thing I need is a beheaded cyclist, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

Two days ago, the walrus-mustached police chief had honored him with a personal phone call and—a sign of the estimation in which he is held—canceled the holiday Schilf had planned. “The Freiburgers can’t cope,” the chief had shouted into the telephone. “The hospital scandal is driving the whole town crazy. First four heart patients die, then a senior registrar is murdered. Even the blockheads in the press can see the connection. Take your vacation later, Schilf. Clear up this Dabbelink business first.”

In other circumstances, Schilf would have obeyed the chief’s orders without resistance. He obeys now, but his resistance is enormous. When he considers the matter carefully, there is a problem asleep in his apartment, and another problem (perhaps even the same one) that has inhabited his head for quite some time. The detective does not want to go to Freiburg now. He feels repelled by the thought of the tiny police apartment not far from Heinrich-von-Stephan-Strasse. He is not interested in dead anesthetists or the megalomania of a medical director. He has worked nonstop for years and he needs a break. Right now, there are more important things than this Dabbelink, who is in the safe mitts of Rita Skura.

Schilf considers smoking a cigarillo on an empty stomach, and abandons the idea. For a while he peers into the stillness of the courtyard. Slowly a cat walks across the cleanly swept flagstones. When Schilf starts moving again, it flees into the nearest building with one leap.

Some days there is just no choice other than to leave through the back door, the detective thought
, the detective thinks.

He walks down the groaning metal steps. Ignoring the creaking in his knees and shoulders, he climbs sideways over the gate at the end of the fire escape and jumps the final one and a half meters down to the ground.

BARELY TWO HOURS LATER
, Schilf leans his head against the cool, vibrating glass of a window, feeling his terrible headache subside. The air-conditioning is blowing into his face through a vent. In a broad curve the train rounds a small town, which with its church tower, half-timbered houses, and tidy meadows looks like an exhibit in an open-air museum. As the rear of the InterCity train comes into view, Schilf thinks, as he does on every train journey, what a miracle of human endeavor he is sitting in. What powerful masses are accelerated by mankind, what pains it takes to wrest materials from the earth in order to forge them into something that serves a great idea. And how it strives toward a goal that, despite thousands of years of philosophical efforts by the cleverest of men, is still utterly unknown.

When the next stretch of forest wraps itself around the train, he turns his gaze away from the window and the world becomes a blur in the corner of his left eye.

Schilf managed to miss the five o’clock train to Freiburg even though he had reached the Stuttgart station with plenty of time to spare. A magazine held him up—it was lying on the platform and he nearly slipped on it. He picked it up out of the wind, which was riffling its pages, and read where it had fallen open.

The article, by a professor of physics, was about the theories of the time-machine murderer—the case that had brought Schilf a promotion to first detective chief superintendent and, moreover, secured him a modest place in police history. As he devoured the article, he felt as if it had been written just for him. He stood reading in front of the departure board, did not move aside when someone asked him to, did not
hear the announcement about the train’s arrival, and was quite unable to tear his eyes from the article. When he had finished, he looked up at the departing train in astonishment, ready to believe that he was sitting in his reserved seat—number 42 in coach 24—and was traveling, split from himself, on another train track into a parallel universe. His right hand fingered his temples as if he were looking for a lever to reverse his little mistake. He had simply looked up from the magazine too late, and not jumped onto the train. Such a detail could surely not have buried itself in the world’s memory so quickly and so irrevocably.

Schilf stood alone, lost in thought in the nighttime quiet of the platform, and remained in the same spot for one hour, without moving. When the next train drew in, he had not even started waiting.

The InterCity train in which he now sits is exactly the same as the one he has missed. Doggedly, Schilf sits in seat 42, coach 24. He places his feet to the left and the right of his bag, puts his hands on his knees, and stretches his back. In this position, he is able to stare off the headache that has resurfaced and also forget about his spine for a while. As he has known for some time, aging does not only bring the ability to wake at four in the morning without being able to go back to sleep. Aging is above all a continuing rendezvous with one’s own body, a dialogue with pipes, filters, hinges, and pumps that have been doing their work behind the scenes for years, but now suddenly impinge on the consciousness with their demands for attention. Mapping the self is equivalent to dying; to have totally grasped oneself is death, the detective thinks, sitting upright like a statue, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the train. Once again he says to himself that his badly constructed replacement life has finally been turned upside down. He feels ridiculously happy at the thought. Mentally he feels sharper than he has for a long time, precisely here: at the outer limit of his strength.

Outside, the landscape interrupts its hurried progress; a few passengers get off and on. Schilf lifts his bag onto the seat next to him so that nobody will sit there. The magazine that has gripped him sticks out of a side pocket willfully. If Schilf has understood correctly, the
physics professor’s statements seem to confirm the theories of the time-machine murderer. But it is not entirely clear if the professor is defending the Many-Worlds Interpretation or merely explaining it. The detective turns to the contents page once again. The square photo shows a blond, laughing professor. He looks happy. Schilf likes the caption: “Everything that is possible happens.” Somehow this fits with his hazy ideas about the program code for reality, even though the time-foam model seems much too clichéd.

EVEN AS A CHILD
, he loved the idea that the world could really be quite different from the way human beings perceived it. In summer, the little detective lay on his belly in the garden behind his parents’ house talking to a butterfly about whether the nut tree by the wall was really a single object or, as seen through the compound eye of the insect, a conglomeration of two thousand nut trees spliced together. There was no conclusion to the discussion, for both the little detective and the butterfly were irrefutably right. From this butterfly, from echo-sounding bats, and from mayflies, Schilf has learned that time, space, and causality are matters of perspective, in the truest sense of the word. Lying in the grass, distracted and focused at the same time, he did not find it difficult to let go of the guide-rail of familiar perception for a few moments and to float free over an unimaginable chaos. How nicely he chatters away to himself, said one delighted parent to the other. Whereas the detective came close to losing his mind at the age of ten.

His childish efforts have developed into a method of working now, except Schilf can no longer lie in the garden. With painful concentration, he bores holes into the desktop made up of crime scene descriptions and witness statements until it is porous enough to allow for conclusions about the program code, about reality. He sees coincidences as metaphors and contradictions as oxymorons, and the repeated appearance of details as leitmotifs. When Schilf gets a hollow feeling
in his stomach, as if he were on a trajectory at the very apex of a parabola, he reaches out instinctively to hold on to something (the corner of a table, a door frame, the edge of the sink) and reaps the reward for his efforts: premonitions, daydreams, feelings of déjà vu.

No one in his office understands how he works; they see only his successes. His colleagues shake him by the hand, call him a fantastic clairvoyant to his face and a lucky bastard behind his back. When the case of the time-machine murderer was solved, they said that he had done nothing more than sit around quietly for days until the murderer had contacted him and politely asked him to take down his confession.

THE DETECTIVE HAD ACTUALLY SPENT WEEKS
breaking down the cage of his perceptions into pieces in order to find the threads that connected him with the person he was looking for. He combined the study of files with meditation as he waited for a clue that would tell him where and when the coincidence that he urgently needed would occur. At some point the telephone rang and a woman who had dialed the wrong number kept asking for someone called Roland. That same afternoon, a bird crashed into the window of the conference room and dropped onto the window ledge as if it was dead, but when a young female officer tried to pick it up, it flew off, perfectly unharmed. A little later, the detective stumbled in the hallway and broke the glass of his watch against a door frame. In the watch department of the Karstadt department store, two young men were standing in front of him in line, one of them resembling the third murder victim. They were chatting and laughing about how a life without watches and clocks was not only possible but actually more pleasant. The detective decided not to repair his watch and went back out into the street, where he accepted a flyer for a performance at the Panorama Café in the Stuttgart television tower. That evening, he turned on the television and landed on
Vertigo
, a film about a dead woman returning, with an ending that the detective did not understand.

The next day, Schilf sat for hours in the café in the television tower, eating plum cake and looking at the cars far beneath him negotiating their complicated routes through the pattern of streets, and at the Black Forest shrouded in mist on the horizon. He had put his broken watch down on the table. When a young man sat down at the table next to him and started scribbling busily in a notebook, a bird crashed into the large window. In his surprise the detective knocked his broken watch from the table. The man at the next table put his pen behind his ear and picked up the watch for him. They started talking. The young man was wearing a blue shirt with white trousers, and his mobile phone was in a leather pouch on his belt. After two hours of animated conversation the detective said he had to make a quick phone call. The young man lent him his mobile phone, and Schilf walked a few meters away from him out of politeness and called his colleagues at headquarters. It was only later that he found out the surname of his new acquaintance was Roland.

Schilf would never forget the accusing look of the murderer as he was arrested. The young man had trusted him at first glance. He had told Schilf that he came from the future, and that he had landed in this time in order to conduct a few groundbreaking experiments. He was working on nothing less than a solution to the grandfather paradox. He wanted to prove that changes in the past had no effect on later events at all; so a time traveler could kill his forebears without endangering his own existence in the future. Schilf continued listening with interest for another half hour before two plainclothes officers walked in and arrested the young man so courteously that none of the other people in the café noticed.

During the trial, the murderer had presented a file detailing the lives of his victims up to the year 2015. Desperately, he had assured the court over and over again that the victims were alive in the future, some of them were married and had successful careers. Moreover, they had agreed to the experiment. He himself was not like everyone else, he shouted. He did not live here, he was only a guest, on a work trip to a
world without consequences, and therefore was not responsible for any actions, however strange. In the jungle of time, the time-machine murderer screamed as Schilf was leaving the room, every moment was itself the next one.

Schilf leaned against the wall in the corridor outside the courtroom. He knew that the jury would convict someone who would not learn, someone lonely, someone innocent in the tragic sense.

[6]

THE DETECTIVE RUBS BOTH HANDS OVER HIS FACE
. When the InterCity train takes the next curve, he becomes aware of whirling flecks, as seagulls seem to follow the train like an ocean liner. Although the speed of the train clearly rules out the possibility of seagulls, which must be an optical illusion, he can even see their orange beaks and the black feathers on top of their heads when he squints.

Gently he strokes the smooth surface of the rolled-up magazine. It is not actually the contents of the article that fascinate him so much, but the feeling that he recognizes the voice of the person who wrote it. While reading, he could hear it in his head, as if the professor of physics were speaking to him in person. As to a friend. The detective is sure that this article has been written by someone who does not believe in what he is saying. Someone who doubts reality, despairs of it, as one who is lost in a labyrinth. The detective superintendent learned something else from the butterflies with their compound eyes: those who believe in nothing also know nothing. Without a reliable cure for doubt, there can be no cognitive orientation. Schilf would give anything to speak with this Sebastian about it. Perhaps he does not need a doctor, but a physics professor for the yawning abyss that has started opening up in front of him at the most inconvenient moments. His doctor had not done much more than ask him a load of questions. He
had asked about Schilf’s successes in his work and the ever-increasing price he paid for them—memory loss, headaches, a loosening grip on reality. The following week the detective was shoved into a scanner like a loaf of bread into the oven, so that magnetic fields could throw the atomic nuclei in his head out of balance. Sometime after that, he sat once again in the wood-paneled study and the assistant brought him a coffee so that he would have something to stir. Schilf dropped one lump of sugar after another into the cup and kept on stirring. While he was doing this, the doctor told him about the secret subtenant in his head. Name:
Glioblastoma multiforme
. Age: definitely a few months, perhaps even several years. Size: 3.5 centimeters. Place of birth: the frontal lobe, a little left of center. Function: causing memory loss, chronic headaches, and a loosening grip on reality.