When they were defending their PhD theses, they no longer met on the bank of the Dreisam, but only for the occasional whiskey, sitting on lumpy stools at a bar. They were no longer of one mind on anything, except when it came to which one of them was the better physicist. It was Oskar; and after this conviction of theirs was confirmed by Oskar’s summa cum laude, Sebastian exchanged his morning jacket for jeans and a shirt, and got married.
The guests at the wedding whispered behind raised hands about the best man, who slid along the walls at the function room and whose presence seemed to be personally responsible for the shadows in the corners. From the expression on his face, it appeared that he had never been so amused about anything in his life. Instead of a veil, he told the painfully embarrassed guests, Sebastian should have put a green light on top of his bride’s head. All emergency exits had them.
[4]
“I’LL BET A CASE OF BRUNELLO,” Oskar says, “that they only asked for your article because of that time-machine murder.”
Sebastian is silent. That this is the case is clear as daylight. It is even in the description on the contents page: “Freiburg professor explains the theories of the time-machine murderer.” In his article, Sebastian has even tried to express certain things from the point of view of the murderer. After killing five people, the young man had explained that it was not murder at all, but a scientific experiment. He had traveled from the year 2015 to prove the Many-Worlds Interpretation. This theory considers time not as a continuous line, but as a vast heap of universes that expands minute by minute, like a kind of time-foam consisting of countless bubbles; so a journey into the past is not a return to an earlier point in human history, but a switch between worlds. Therefore it would be perfectly possible to reach into the past without changing the present. He could bear witness to the fact that all five of his victims were alive and well in 2015. In the world he belonged to, there were no murder victims and therefore no crime, and he did not feel subject to the jurisdiction of the year 2007, much as he regretted it. The advice of his lawyer, that he plead insanity, he had refused indignantly.
“So you end up writing something for Der Spiegel,” says Oskar, “that goes even beyond the ideas of this lunatic.”
“Is an insane person automatically wrong? That’s news to me.”
“What’s driving you isn’t even insanity. It’s your desire to relativize a personal reality.” Oskar casts the words into the room over his shoulder.
“Be quiet,” Sebastian hisses. “That’s enough.”
At the far end of the dining room, Maike is leaning over and holding Liam by the wrists. She is talking to him and pulling him toward her, and he is turning his head this way and that. Her hair is hanging over her forehead as she looks up at Sebastian, smiling.
“I know just what you’re talking about,” she calls. “The parallel universe in which Liam is not refusing to set the table.”
“Exactly,” Sebastian says genially.
“And a universe in which Oskar doesn’t stare so angrily.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“And perhaps even one in which I am not your wife and Liam is not your son?”
Maike laughs because Sebastian looks put out. The potential semi-orphan of a parallel universe has pulled himself free and is running past the table. He disappears into the hall, with Maike in hot pursuit.
“You long for other worlds,” Oskar says in a low voice. “For the notion that you might be able to be two different men at the same time. At least.”
Sebastian forces himself to let go of the curtain he has been fingering all this time and has wanted more than anything to pull off the rail in one violent tug. Oskar’s hand passes over his shoulder as he tosses his cigarette butt out of the window. Bonnie and Clyde race across two ripples, only to prod the sinking butt with their beaks, disappointed.
“Do you remember the world in which you said this to me?” asks Oskar: “‘I want to be the ground that trembles beneath your feet when the gods take their revenge on you’?” As he quotes his friend, two lines appear around his mouth—brackets of irony.
Sebastian has not forgotten—of course not. He said those words on the night that he and Oskar, with the help of a bottle of whiskey, had cracked Little Red Riding Hood’s assignment on dark energy. The chairs had been upended on the tables in the bar by that time, and the bartender had smoked his way through five cigarettes while waiting for them to leave. But the two of them had seen and heard nothing else—their eyes had been closed and their foreheads pressed together as their shadows on the wall accepted the Nobel Prize for the year 2020. That evening, over the talk of numbers, they had grown closer than ever before. Their minds had worked so perfectly together that they might have belonged to the same being. Sebastian had lifted two fingers to touch his friend on the cheek, and said the words that had come into his head: I want to be the ground that trembles beneath your feet…