Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

Sebastian is basically a weak person. His friends and colleagues may say that he is strong-willed, but actually, he thinks, as he looks at Dabbelink, a strong will is precisely the mark of a weak person. For only the weak constantly desire things. They have to work and strive, experiment and practice, whereas strong people achieve things quite naturally. Some days, Sebastian can barely muster the energy to sit on a bench by the Dreisam and watch the river flow by in front of him. How much more energy he needs to reach out and clasp the handle of a spade! Sebastian puts the snail down on the gravel gently.

Dabbelink has been kind enough to stay in the same position while these thoughts have been running through Sebastian’s mind. The sound of his own footsteps seems strange to him, as if someone else were walking in long strides across the driveway—a man whom Sebastian is duty-bound to follow as an invisible observer. The senior registrar has heard the crunch of the gravel, too. He stands up and looks at Sebastian uncomprehendingly. The spade is raised high and the blow falls with a dull sound. Dabbelink draws himself up instead of falling down, and his face is surprisingly relaxed. Sebastian draws back to make a fresh attack, turns the edge of the spade downward, and strikes his victim on the head with full force. Immediately, everything human is wiped off Dabbelink’s face. There is a smell of grazed knees—sickly sweet and metallic. The car’s central locking system clicks in five places as the senior registrar’s hand clutches the key. Dabbelink falls over, catches himself, staggers, and holds on to his car with slippery fingers. The next blow makes his arms and legs jerk as if an electrical current were running through him. But his body still resists collapsing to the ground. He lurches to one side and Sebastian strikes into the emptiness; before he realizes what is going on, Dabbelink begins to run. Blindly, perhaps even heedlessly, he brushes against a fir tree, crashes into the gate, and manages to close his hands around the railing. He heaves himself up and over and falls into bottomless darkness. The televisions flicker luridly. Sebastian hears screams, shots, and the anxious whining of American police sirens. The reflections from the screens reach into the garden and move over the front of the house. The flickering takes on a regular rhythm—a blue light circling nearer and nearer. The air smells of freshly cut grass.

SEBASTIAN RUBS HIS EYES WITH HIS THUMBS: this is no good. Instead of coming up with a plan for murder, his imagination is coming up with schlock B-horror flicks. He washes his face at the sink and reaches for a tea towel, which has Maike’s fabric softener in every fiber and so does not absorb any moisture but merely spreads it over his skin. Then he stands still, listening to the hum of the fridge, which with sufficient imagination can sound like the crashing waves of a distant ocean.

Quite unexpectedly, he slept for two hours during the night, waking only when the doorbell rang. Dabbelink was standing in the hallway in his yellow jersey, asking in a very friendly manner if he could borrow a pair of poultry shears. Sebastian woke screaming, soaked in sweat. He sank back into bed, closed his eyes, and tried to let the memory of the previous day trickle into his consciousness as slowly as possible. There was a vortex spinning deep within him, with a strong gravitational pull. This was fear. Sebastian realized that it was possible to be afraid of absolutely everything—getting up, staying in bed, the nighttime, and the day ahead. Most frightening of all was the thought that this fear would itself bring further misfortune. The thought of Liam was paralyzing. Sebastian had to avoid thinking about his son at all costs. He recast the situation in his mind: Liam was not there because he was at scout camp. Sebastian would take advantage of his family’s absence in order to get rid of a rival. He had been assigned this motive by his blackmailers, and he was determined to follow their plans to the letter. Obeying them would bring freedom, he thought, it was his only chance. He was subscribing to a widespread fallacy, but it did not disturb him. He felt better for it, in fact.

When he opened his eyes, a man was standing at the foot of the bed. A paper bag covered his head. When Sebastian tried to escape, his feet got tangled in the sheets. He hit his head against the corner of the wardrobe, and woke up on the sofa in front of the television. The screen was filled with the very large mouth of a woman singing tunelessly. Sebastian padded around the apartment gingerly. The furniture cowered in the kind of muffled silence that comes with blocked-up ears. He touched the leaves of a potted plant cautiously, picked up stray letters and turned them over, and checked the books on the shelves and found they were in order. On the way to the bathroom, he glanced into the bedroom through the open door and noticed an unfamiliar bulge under the bedspread. Walking up to it quietly, he realized that the hump was rising and falling in time with his own breathing. He pulled the covers back and looked himself in the face, eyes torn open and lips stretched in a horrible grin. Time and space split apart in a sudden jerk, and Sebastian was lying in the place of his doppelgänger. He dug all ten fingers into his thighs, hit the wall repeatedly with his palms until they hurt, and finally got up and drew the curtains. A greenish strip of dawn was glimmering over the roofs of the houses.

THE SHOWER DID NOTHING TO CHANGE the impression of having woken too little, or too often, of being caught in a world where the rules have shifted. The worst thing was that there was absolutely no-bo-dy left who could help him out of this trap. He was to talk to no-bo-dy, and could ask no-bo-dy if he had merely dreamt the events of yesterday. Or if, on the contrary, at that service station on the A81, he had woken from a dream that had lasted decades. Reality, Sebastian thought, is nothing more than an agreement between six billion people. He had been forced to unilaterally renege on the overarching agreement. So waking in the morning no longer offered any guarantees. He had no choice but to face the new day without a certificate of authenticity.

Cold water brought strength back into his limbs. Wearily, he suppressed an urge to rush into his study and destroy all his theoretical writings, which suddenly seemed to him the work of the devil—aiming only to turn time and space upside down and thus cast into chaos the conditions required for the survival of reason. At eight o’clock sharp, he rang the number of the scout camp in Gwiggen and said that his son had come down with a sudden attack of flu. A girl with an Austrian accent replied that the deposit paid for Liam could not be refunded. Sebastian did not scream or cry, but simply said good-bye.

After this success, he decided to take care of the damaged Volvo. He needed a reliable car and it felt good to occupy himself initially with an everyday matter. So he drove into town, past the backdrop of a perfectly staged Monday morning—young men in suits cycling through the streets with briefcases on their panniers, visibly exulting in the beautiful weather. On the way, Sebastian decided on three principles to follow: twenty-four hours’ planning at most, the same for the execution of the deed, and a 100 percent guarantee of success.

Of course it would also be a question of leaving as few traces as possible, but that was just a vague matter of chance, not a necessary condition.

A mechanic with ponytail and steel-rimmed glasses tugged at the loose ignition cables and congratulated Sebastian on his good luck in still having a car at all. Sebastian did not enter into the question of whether he had been lucky or unlucky, but promised to return in an hour. At a high table in a bakery, he drank coffee. On the radio there was a report on the government’s new plans for reform. The woman in the bakery was selling bread rolls with names that sounded like fitness products and discussing with her customers the imminent end of the world. The only advantage in Sebastian’s situation was that none of this mattered to him any longer. He paid. He picked up his car—repaired and fully cleaned, too, thanks to a special offer at the garage that week. Even the trunk had been vacuumed.