In Free Fall(39)
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.