His index finger traces the grain of the wood on the other side of the table and when Oskar reaches out to grasp it, he gives him his hand.
“It can only be days now,” Sebastian says.
“Hours,” Oskar says.
“A detective is onto me. Either he understands nothing—or everything.”
“Everything, probably. Or were you foolish enough to hope that they wouldn’t find you?”
“Hope is the last thing to die,” Sebastian says lamely.
“And honor never does.”
Oskar drinks from his glass, then puts it down on the table.
“Cher ami,” he says, “there is this thing called life and there are stories. The curse of the human being is that he finds it difficult to distinguish between the two.”
“Say it again.”
“What?”
“When I told you about Dabbelink on the phone, what did you say?”
“‘Oh?’” Oskar says.
“I’ve been surviving on that ‘Oh?’ for forty-eight hours.”
Oskar presses his hand.
“Is that why you came?”
Sebastian does not reply. He turns in his seat and looks around the room.
“I’ve made inquiries,” Oskar says. “It’s known as coercion. Anyone blackmailed into committing a crime cannot be held responsible.”
“I’m responsible, without a doubt.”
The bartender is drying glasses and the customers are talking among themselves. No one is paying the least bit of attention to the table in the corner. Amazingly, everything looks normal.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you say that,” Oskar says. “Are you afraid that they won’t believe you were blackmailed?”
“It’s not that.”
“Maik?”
Sebastian nods.
“Does she know?”
Sebastian shrugs his shoulders.
“You haven’t told her … everything?”
Sebastian shakes his head. He pulls the bottle toward him and empties his second glass in a single gulp. Peat and a touch of honey, it’s a good make. Oskar lights a cigarette and looks toward the window, which merely reflects his own face back at him. Sebastian’s hand grows numb in Oskar’s grip, and he pulls it away.
“She thinks I’m a murderer,” he says.
“Not without cause, if I’ve understood everything correctly.”
“It would be simpler to tell her the truth if she wouldn’t anticipate the result.”
“Aren’t you expecting a bit much?”
“Oskar.” As Sebastian presses his hands over his eyes, he feels the effect of the chili again. “She won’t stand by me. I’ll lose her, and Liam, too.”
Oskar stubs out his cigarette and lights another one; this is faster than he normally smokes.
“You won’t give up,” he says.
“What’s absurd is that I feel as if I’ve staged the whole thing myself. Not in practice, but in theory.”
“Are you talking about your Many-Worlds Interpretation?”
“If something can happen and not happen at the same time in a microworld, the same thing must be possible in a macrocosmos, too. Haven’t I always said that?”
“Let’s put it this way: you cultivated a somewhat casual approach to the difficulties of moving from quantum mechanics to classical physics.”
Sebastian wipes his streaming eyes with his cuffs.
“Liam was kidnapped and also not kidnapped at the same time. Since then, everything has lost its validity. I now live in a one-man universe. Its name is guilt.”
The coffee machine behind the bar hisses. Someone laughs politely. The pheasant’s neck still hangs over the side of the bowl.
“Pull yourself together,” Oskar says. “You’re talking nonsense.”
“No I’m not!” Sebastian turns his red-rimmed eyes to look his friend full in the face. “If I hadn’t been so obsessed with getting a few days of uninterrupted work done, I would never have taken Liam to scout camp. That’s causality. You like causality, don’t you?”
“To hell with it,” Oskar says.
“I’d left the Many Worlds behind me long ago.” Sebastian’s voice grows louder and more urgent. “I wanted to use physics to prove that time is nothing more than a function of human perception. I wanted to pull the rug out from under your feet.”
Oskar catches the finger Sebastian is pointing at him and places it back on the table.
“Sooner or later,” Sebastian says, “you will prove through quantization that time and space share most of the properties of matter. That will be the next turning point after Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein. You no longer know the craving to achieve something groundbreaking. Inside that craving lies guilt.”