Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

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.

Now he is swerving into the oncoming lane to avoid driving over the flattened remains of a hare. A bird of prey is sitting on the guardrail, eyes dark.

Perhaps the whole thing was a stroke of luck, Sebastian thinks. A warning sign, a narrow escape, so that a real tragedy will not happen. Of course he realizes what he has in Maike. But since last night, he feels more keenly than ever before that he does not really deserve this gift. Wealthy patrons put their hands on her bottom by way of greeting, something he knows only because she tells him about it; he no longer attends her gallery receptions. When Maike stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom, painting herself a prettier face (or so she thinks), he leans into the doorway and says that physics is a hard taskmaster, by which he means that he, too, has to work over the weekend. As soon as she is gone, he sits down with Liam on the floor in his room and talks about the theory of the big bang. The walls of their apartment are hung with large, framed pictures, in which Maike sees things that he does not understand. Sebastian knows the young artists, who always seem too small for their trousers and their spectacles, and who speak in sentences consisting only of nouns, faces averted. He knows the collectors, who spend a fortune on suits designed to make them look impoverished. That Sebastian has no cause to feel jealous is due neither to the lack of opportunity nor to the respectable nature of the art world.

As soon as she had gotten to know Dabbelink, she’d insisted on introducing the two men. Sebastian had shaken the senior registrar’s hand at the cycling club, and felt pity for the thin, drawn man, who had limbs like twisted cable and a face etched with exhaustion. Two large full-stops for eyes, a comma for a nose, and a mere line of a mouth, even when laughing. Sebastian borrowed a bicycle from the club and ignored the looks from the other cyclists, whose faces reflected the exact number of times Maike and Dabbelink had met.

The senior registrar overtook them at the first steep section of the Schauinsland. Maike good-humoredly accompanied her husband as he pushed his bike on foot. They met Dabbelink again on the summit of the mountain, which he had conquered in an incredible thirty-five minutes. He was lying on the ground with his calves on the seat of a bench, lifting his torso and alternately touching his forehead to his left and then his right knee. While they were having coffee, he gazed impatiently at the view, as if he was thinking about how many mountains it would have been possible to conquer during that time. The last Sebastian saw of Ralph Dabbelink that day was a back covered in yellow polyamide, leaning dangerously close to the pavement as he sped downward in a tight curve. Maike and Sebastian had taken their time, and had stopped at a good restaurant for a meal on the way back through the valley of Günterstal.

“Are you OK?”

Liam is too quiet.

SEBASTIAN ADJUSTS THE REARVIEW MIRROR so that he can see his son. Liam is leaning against a corner of the backseat with his head tipped to one side. His body is held in place only by the safety belt, a broad band across his neck and torso. The travel sickness pills are obviously working. When they left the house, Liam had waved as if they were off to sail around the world. Sebastian closes his window and reaches out to switch off the radio, which isn’t even on. Sleep is definitely the best thing for his son at the moment.

The farther they get from Freiburg, the more freely Sebastian’s thoughts flow. He locks his arms; a yawn pushes air into the farthest corners of his lungs. He will have plenty of time to be angry with himself over the coming weeks. He is angry not only because he had once again found it necessary to accept a challenge from someone stronger, but also because he had not felt himself to be above accepting a challenge from someone weaker. He writes articles such as the one in Der Spiegel because the scientific journals do not publish his work. He tells himself that there is nothing dishonorable about wanting to bring his ideas to a wider public. But when he thinks about Oskar reading these pieces, he flushes.

The Many-Worlds Interpretation, Sebastian wrote, was nothing less than an escape from the central paradox of human existence. From the viewpoint of classical physics, it was still impossible to explain why the universe was arranged for the needs of biological life with such astonishing precision. For example, mankind would not exist if space had expanded at a speed that was only the tiniest bit faster or slower. At the time of the big bang, the probability that a universe with the necessary conditions would come into existence had been 10 -59. That meant the existence of the earth was as unlikely as winning the lottery nine times in a row. From a stochastic point of view, mankind could be viewed as nonexistent. Man was completely overwhelmed by the improbability of his own existence, and this was precisely the cause of his urgent longing for a Creator.

Those who did not believe in God, he’d posited in the article, had to call upon statistics. If not just one universe had been created in the big bang, but 10 59different universes, then it was no wonder that one of them could support life. The only logical, non-theological explanation of human existence lay in thinking of space (and therefore time) as an enormous heap of worlds that was expanding minute by minute. A growing time-foam, in which every bubble was its own world. “Everything that is possible happens”— Der Spiegel had liked the caption.

Nothing in the article is wrong. Rather, such thoughts belong to a realm where “wrong” and “right” barely play a role. But that is exactly what provokes Oskar’s biting mockery. That’s exactly how stupid people behave! Sebastian hears him say. They take a question of some kind, any old “why,” hurl it against the world, and are amazed when they do not get a sensible answer . Cher ami, every bird on the branch that just twitters and refrains from this ridiculous questioning is cleverer than you!

SEBASTIAN LIFTS A HAND FROM THE STEERING WHEEL and wipes the beads of sweat off his upper lip. Even worse than Oskar’s contempt is the fact that his work on these theories is taking over his life. He has started shutting himself in the study almost every day after dinner. There he broods over his papers until some fragment of an equation starts whirling through his head like an abandoned LP. Some nights he does not dare go to bed, because the noise of his thoughts can increase to an intolerable level in the dark stillness of the bedroom. Maike came to him once, long after midnight. Her bare feet in the hall sounded like the footsteps of a little girl. When he looked up, she was standing in front of him in her nightdress, looking small and fragile. Stay with us, she said. Before he could reply she had turned away and vanished. Sebastian did not follow her, because he was not sure if he had really seen her at all.

After nights like those, he barely knows which world he is in when morning comes. At breakfast, he sat down not as a husband next to his wife, but as someone who is shocked to find two strangers in his own home. Liam suddenly seems far too old, his childish laughter false, his beloved face unfamiliar. Sitting with his family, Sebastian feels as if he has stumbled into an unknown universe by mistake. This terrible feeling of being a guest in his own life has been with him for a long time. Since Liam’s birth, there have been many moments when he has felt like an impostor, as if he has cheated his way to some good fortune which was not his by right, and for which he would be severely punished. At times like this, he wants to put aside his skin like a borrowed coat, and destroy everything he loves before it can be taken away by some counterbalancing force of justice. It is only recently that he has begun to think that this feeling is not a personal problem, but a matter of physics.