In Free Fall(14)

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.