In Free Fall (3 page)

On the first Friday of every month, Oskar allows himself to imagine for a few seconds that the InterCity Express is bringing him back to one of those farewells beneath the streetlamps of Freiburg. Back to a heated discussion on the banks of the Dreisam, or at least to a moment over a shared textbook. He feels his lips curve into a smile, but immediately falls into a peevish mood. Clearly the Freiburg of the streetlamps no longer exists. What does exist is this: a circular underground tunnel in Switzerland where he makes elementary particles collide at nearly the speed of light. And the Freiburg where he has been invited by Sebastian’s wife to dinner with the family. It was on a
Friday that Oskar had met Liam—tiny as a doll then—for the first time. It was on a Friday that he had learned about Sebastian’s renown at the university. On Fridays, they look each other in the eye and try not to think about the past. On Fridays, they fight. For Oskar, Sebastian is not just the only person whose presence brings him pleasure. Sebastian is also the person whose slightest movement can turn him white-hot with rage.

WHEN THE TRAIN COMES TO A STANDSTILL
on an open stretch of land, Oskar leans down to his bag to remove a rolled-up copy of
Der Spiegel
magazine, which falls open at the right page. He doesn’t need to read the article again—he practically knows it by heart. He looks at the photo instead: it shows a forty-year-old man with blond hair and eyebrows, and clear blue eyes. He is laughing, and his half-open mouth has taken on a slightly rectangular shape. Oskar is more familiar with this laugh than with his own. He touches the photograph carefully, stroking the forehead and cheeks, then suddenly presses his thumb into it, as if he were trying to stub out a cigarette. He is worried about the train stopping like this. In the seats across the aisle from him, a mother in a flowery outfit is handing out sandwiches from a Tupperware container. The smell of salami fills the air.

“So it’s four now!” exclaims the father, whose fat neck bulges over his collar. He slaps his newspaper with the back of his hand. “See! Four people have died now! Bled to death during surgery. The medical director continues to deny it.”

“Four little Negro boys,” a childish voice sings, “on the river Rhine.”

“Quiet,” the mother says, and she stops the song midflow with a piece of apple.

“‘Is the pharmaceutical industry behind the experiments on patients?’” the father reads. He shoves out his lips crudely as he drinks from his bottle of beer.

“Criminals, the lot of them,” the mother says.

“Ought to be locked up.”

“If only.”

Oskar puts
Der Spiegel
back into his bag and hopes that Sebastian will not smell salami on his clothes when they greet each other. He strides out of the carriage and almost stumbles when the train jerks into motion. Send all the stupid people to war, he thinks, as he leans against the wall next to the toilets. Let them burn to a crisp in some African desert or in an Asian jungle, it really doesn’t matter. Another fifty years of peace and the people in this country will have regressed to the level of apes.

Outside, the first well-tended front gardens of the Freiburg suburbs have appeared.

[3]

“SUMMER IN FREIBURG IS JUST WONDERFUL.”

Oskar is standing by the open window behind a half-drawn curtain, cradling a glass of wine and breathing in the scent of the wisteria that he had admired from the street when he got out of the taxi. He is wearing a dark sweater despite the heat, but he looks fresh as a daisy, as though sweating is not something of which he is capable. He hears the parquet creak behind him, and turns his head.

Sebastian is walking across the large dining room, arms dangling by his sides, deliberately relaxed, quite the opposite of his friend. His hair is as startlingly fair as Oskar’s is dark. While Oskar always looks as if he is attending a formal celebration of some kind, Sebastian has something boyish about him. His movements have a playful openness about them, and though he dresses well—today in a white shirt and linen trousers—he always looks as if he has slightly outgrown his shirtsleeves and trouser legs. On him, growing older seems to be a mistake, and age has merely deepened his laugh lines.

He walks right up to Oskar and places a hand that he knows is warm and dry upon Oskar’s neck. Sebastian closes his eyes for a moment as the smell of his friend sweeps over him like a memory. The calm way they stand so close together indicates habit.

“I’m going to murder someone in four days,” says Sebastian, “but I don’t know anything about it yet.”

Sebastian could have said that without telling a lie. Instead he says, “Summer in Freiburg is as beautiful as those who appreciate it.” His words strike a false note—they betray his uneasiness rather than conceal it. Sebastian’s hand slides off Oskar and falls into emptiness as his friend steps smoothly to one side. Below them, outside, Bonnie and Clyde have reached the start of the street. They turn and float past the house like flotsam and jetsam.

“Let’s get to the point,” Oskar says, his eyes resting on the ducks in the canal. “I read your outpourings in
Der Spiegel
.”

“I take it you’re congratulating me.”

“It’s a declaration of war,
cher ami
.”

“My God, Oskar.” Sebastian shoves one hand into his pocket and passes his other over his face. “The sun is shining and the birds are singing. It’s not a matter of life and death. It’s about a theory of physics.”

“Even a harmless theory like the earth being round cost a lot of people their lives.”

“If Copernicus had had a friend like you,” Sebastian replies, “the earth would still be flat.”

The corner of Oskar’s mouth twitches. He takes out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and waits until Sebastian, who doesn’t smoke, has found some matches and given him a light.

“And if Copernicus had believed in the Many-Worlds Interpretation,” Oskar retorts, the cigarette between his lips jerking as he speaks, “mankind would have been wiped out by idiocy.”

Sebastian sighs. It isn’t easy arguing with someone who is part of the greatest intellectual endeavor of the new millennium. Oskar’s goal is to unite quantum physics with the general theory of relativity. He wants to bring E = hν together with G
_αβ
= 8πT
_αβ
and thus make two views of the universe into one. One question and one answer. A single equation that describes everything. He is not alone in searching for a
theory of everything. There are hordes of physicists working on it, all competing with each other, knowing that the winner not only will receive the Nobel Prize, but will also follow in the footsteps of Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg in gaining a piece of immortality. The winner’s name will forever be associated with a certain epoch—the age of quantum gravity. Oskar’s chances of winning are not at all bad.

Sebastian’s focus, to put it carefully, lies elsewhere. He is an experimental physicist in nanotechnology at the University of Freiburg and is regarded as brilliant in his field. But from Oskar’s point of view, Sebastian is a mere bricklayer and it is theoretical physicists who are the architects. Sebastian is not engaged in fighting for immortality. His free time is taken up by the Many-Worlds Interpretation—whose very name, from Oskar’s point of view, reveals that it is not a theory but a hobbyhorse. Sebastian is grazing in an empty field. The great physicists left it behind some fifty years ago. In Oskar’s eyes, it is now of esoteric interest only, or for show-offs. A dead end.

Sebastian knows that Oskar is basically right. Sometimes he feels like a child who stubbornly persists in trying to make a lightbulb out of a preserving jar and a piece of wire despite his parents’ objections. But in front of his less gifted colleagues, in front of his students, and, most of the time, to himself, he claims to be looking for a new approach to questions of time and space. An approach that would leave the Many-Worlds Interpretation behind. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Sebastian still believes in it or not, for he has no choice but to continue on the path he has carved out. Even if he were to take it upon himself to join the race Oskar is in, he would never be able to make up for the ten years he had lost. The final push to find the theory of everything had begun once the existence of W and Z bosons had been successfully proved in experiments. Oskar and Sebastian had been in their twenties then, the age at which people have the best ideas of their lives, the age at which Oskar had his only idea. Oskar had devoted himself to his theory of discrete time, behaving like an obsessive lover. Hour after hour, week after week—for ten years he had pursued it,
regardless of whether it would eventually yield to him. Sebastian had not wanted anything to do with it. At an appropriate juncture, he had turned his attention to other things—not only to another theory, but, above all, to another life.

THE MAN WHO HAD THE DUBIOUS HONOR
of presiding over this turning point in Sebastian’s life was called Little Red Riding Hood. He had earned the nickname because of the bald pate, glowing red from wine, that emerged through his threadbare fringe of hair. He always wore a shabby corduroy jacket, the shoulders of which were covered with a white layer of dandruff. Unlike many of his colleagues, Little Red Riding Hood was adored by his students. And while he took them seriously, and stimulated their intelligence with complicated assignments, the affection was not mutual. Little Red Riding Hood especially disliked students who challenged what he said.

He had a particular aversion to the two young men who stood blocking the entrance to the lecture theater every morning. Their arrogance was legendary and their friendship was the subject of gossip even among the lecturers. They were said to love physics even more than they loved each other, and they fought over it with the passion of rivals. Little Red Riding Hood could not bear listening to their bragging conversation. Their backs were far too straight as they stood there surrounded by a circle of listeners, reciting formulae like the verses of a libretto, ordering the universe with conductors’ hands. Every now and then Oskar would turn his head to draw on one of his Egyptian cigarettes, doing so with an affectation that stirred his audience into nervous movement.

The entire faculty had long since been made acquainted with Oskar’s view that the world was a finely spun web of causalities, with a hidden pattern that could only be deciphered either from a great distance or from up close. Recognition of the pattern, he intoned, was a matter of being at the right distance, and was therefore possible only
for God and for quantum physicists. Normal people remained in the middle distance, blind to the nature of things.

Sebastian, who always spoke a little less loudly and also more slowly, called his friend a despicable determinist. He claimed not to believe in causality himself. Causality was, like space and time, a theoretical problem of cognition. To provoke Oskar and everyone around them, he cast doubt on the validity of empiricism as a method of establishing scientific findings. A man who stands by the river and watches a thousand white swans swim by cannot conclude that there are no black swans. Therefore physics is ultimately the servant of philosophy.

Little Red Riding Hood pushed past the arguing students impatiently. It was impossible to give a lecture any longer without hearing their intrusive voices. Sometimes he looked up grumpily from his notes, thinking that their whispering would drive him to the brink, only to realize that Oskar and Sebastian were not even present.

But they were very much present on the day that Little Red Riding Hood set a problem on dark energy, which could be solved only by the assumption of an Einsteinian constant that was not a constant. The next week, Oskar and Sebastian were not standing before the doors when Little Red Riding Hood arrived, but already sitting at their usual places, looking him in the eye. He summoned them to the board even before he had reached the lectern. They rose in unison. Oskar went to the right-hand side of the board; after a second’s hesitation, Sebastian went to the left. They flung their frock coats over their shoulders, and each held his with one hand as the other hand scratched frenziedly with a piece of chalk on the board. They wrote like men possessed: Oskar from the right and Sebastian from the left. The lecture theater was silent apart from the squeak of chalk that accompanied the growth of the equation. When their hands met in the middle of the bottom line, all fell still. A few faces in the auditorium cracked into smiles. Oskar completed the final lambda and clapped his hands together to shake off the chalk dust. Little Red Riding Hood was standing behind
them looking at the panorama of equations with his mouth half open, like someone gaping at an impossibly beautiful view. Oskar turned around and tapped him on the shoulder with the tip of his finger, as if he were striking a triangle.

“Do you know what we have just proved, Professor?”

His voice was loud and resonant, but Little Red Riding Hood was too deep in thought to reply.

“Physics is for lovers.”

If Little Red Riding Hood made any retort, it was drowned out by the laughter and unrest that had broken out in the room. The sound of chalk breaking between Sebastian’s fingers was also obscured. While Oskar drank in the admiration for their work of art, Sebastian was still standing in front of the blackboard looking thoughtful. He finally pulled on his jacket and left the lecture theater, unnoticed by his friend. What had shaken him was the certainty with which Oskar had stepped to the right-hand side of the blackboard while pointing him toward the left.

The knowledge that Oskar had in no way meant to overshadow him did not make it any easier for Sebastian. The feeling of his own unfairness mingled with his foolish sense of humiliation. Oskar reveled in the spectacle and the exhilaration of pulling off a performance together, but Sebastian wanted to be a good physicist more than anything else in the world. For Oskar, being right was never any effort—it was the natural state of things. He had simply assumed that, unlike himself, Sebastian would be unable to write the mathematical derivation from back to front. The worst thing was—he was right. The moment their hands met in the middle of the blackboard was a onesided victory, and Sebastian felt the urge to punish Oskar for this. Only Oskar saw it as a celebration of their friendship and their brilliance. Sebastian saw it as proof of his own inferiority.