In Free Fall(57)

“Who took you to Gwiggen?”

“My father.”

“Are you sure?”

“I was asleep. And when I woke again, it was dark, and I was in a strange bed. Isn’t that what it says in the file?”

“More or less.” With a swift movement Schilf wipes the laugh away from his mouth and chin. “But it’s my job to ask about things that I already know. Could it be that you were sleeping very soundly?”

“Children are like that,” Liam replies earnestly. “Besides, the motion sickness pills make me drowsy.”

“Can I have a look at them?”

“I only had one for the way there and one for the way back.”

The detective nods and looks over Liam’s head at a diagram in a glass frame on the wall. The solar system is depicted in the bottom right-hand corner, on a dark blue background. An arrow indicates the sun and its planets as a tiny point in a group of twenty fixed stars. Another arrow points from these stars to a barely discernible particle vanishing into the starry mist of the Milky Way. And the Milky Way itself is a fingernail-sized blob in a wider collection of galaxies, which, together with untold groups of other galaxies, form a supercluster. This supercluster is depicted as nothing more than a small patch of mist in the known universe, which is shown as a large hazy layer covering the diagram like a lid. Above it is a sentence: “Galaxies are to an astronomer what atoms are to a nuclear physicist.”

When Schilf changes the focus of his gaze, the glass covering the dark background reflects his face. He feels as if this picture is the only window through which he can look out of this room into the world.

“Does your father tell you about his work?”

“He thinks it’s good that I don’t understand everything yet, because explaining things helps him to think.”

“And you’re interested in what he does?”

“I research time as well. I often used to lie in bed and try to catch hold of a second. I lay in wait and then suddenly whispered ‘Now,’ but the second was either not there yet or already over. Now, of course, I know that time is quite different. And that they”—he points at the alarm clock ticking next to his bed—“are all lying.”

“And what is time?”

Liam turns and rustles in his desk drawer with unexpectedly lively movements until he has found a piece of paper and a pen. Schilf bends over him so that he can see better, smells the child-smell of the unfamiliar head, and starts breathing through his mouth. Liam draws two red circles a hand’s breadth apart.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“No idea,” Schilf says.

Liam taps his pen on the paper impatiently.

“Do they have anything to do with each other?”

“They look similar. I can’t say anything more.”

“Very good. And now?”

He puts the tip of his little finger down in one circle and his thumb in the other circle.

“Now they are connected,” the detective says.

“Just imagine that you and I are the circles and that the piece of paper is a three-dimensional space, and that my hand has come from an unknown, higher dimension.”

“You’re talking about coincidence,” Schilf says.

“No,” Liam says indignantly. “I’m talking about the fourth dimension. You asked about time, after all.”

“Your hand is a coincidence to the circles. Or a miracle.”

Liam thinks about this.

“Yes, possibly.”

“Did you think all that up yourself?”

“Almost. My father helped a little. He always says he is basically trying to solve quite simple puzzles.”

“What a pity that the two of us,” Schilf says, tapping himself then Liam on the forehead, “are only small red circles on a flat surface.”

Liam’s laugh does not yet have lines to flow along, but must carve out new paths on his face—yet it emphasizes his strong resemblance to Sebastian. He pushes both hands through his hair exactly like his father does. His forearms do not have a single mosquito bite on them.

“When you were little,” he asks, “did you like researching things, too?”

“Yes,” Schilf says. “I liked talking to insects.”

“But that’s got nothing to do with physics.”

“I used to stand next to the rain barrel for hours, saving bees that had fallen. I used to think about what that meant to the bees.”

“Did you want to be a vet?”

“For the bees, my hand was fate. And a kind of fourth dimension.”

“You’re a freak,” Liam says.

The detective tweaks the boy’s nose playfully, and the laugh they share comes easily this time. Schilf goes to the door. He feels light-hearted.