Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

But now what the proper authorities are doing is making him nauseous. They seem to be doing a great deal, but none of it seems to be directed at trying to get Liam back. Every time he tells himself that the police are following a tried and tested routine, the same retort sounds in his head: They are only human beings and can do nothing.

He stands in front of the open wardrobe in the bedroom, tearing the paper suit off his body as if unpacking an enormous present that he never wanted in the first place. He wants to lie down on the bed and lose consciousness, hand over the rest of his life to someone else who will know how to do something useful with it. As he gets dressed, he sets himself an ultimatum. He will give the police until midnight. Then he will tell them what the kidnappers really wanted from him. Tell them that they should ask Medical Director Schlüter where Liam is.

In the hall, the technician gives the thumbs-up—the interception circuit is almost ready. When Sebastian walks into the living room, the psychologist smiles at him, a horizontal gap opening beneath her bird beak. She has not said that Sebastian must be hiding a nasty family secret, but she is watching his every move from the corner of her eye and has been looking through that photo album for ages. Liam’s first years are thoroughly documented. After that, there are only a few photographs of him here and there, in which Sebastian—who took the photos—is practically never to be seen.

“Almost done. Then we’ll be off.”

The psychologist has persuaded him that Maike should be the first person to be told about all this. If he refuses to tell her, the psychologist herself will ring Maike in Airolo. Their keenness to get the line bugged before this phone call suggests that they suspect Liam is with his mother. Sebastian knows that there are countless cases in which parents abduct children from each other. But he does not know how to make it clear to his guests that this is not the situation.

“All working now,” the smoking technician says, as if his colleague has just repaired a broken toilet.

He beckons Sebastian over and passes him a telephone receiver with a spiral cord ending in the black box. Sandström brings his ham sandwich into the hall and smells of mustard. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand, pushing it upward at the same time, turning his face into a porcine grimace. The psychologist leans against the door frame, pushing her thumbnail between her incisors, constantly nodding at Sebastian in a friendly manner. If it were possible, he would ring Oskar instead of Maike and ask him to repeat what he had said the night before: Do you want me to come to you?

This time Sebastian would reply, Yes .

The old-fashioned receiver feels heavy in his hand. The policewoman’s gaze bores into his back as he dials the number of the sports hotel in Airolo.

This was only to be expected. Maike is not there. She didn’t go to the Alps to sit around in her room. She’s on a cycling tour, isn’t she? A hundred kilometers, right? No, definitely no mobile phone—true luxury is being out of reach. Isn’t that right? A forced laugh. Yes, by dinnertime at the latest. She will return the call.

Sebastian asks the psychologist to let him have the sofa. He does not want to answer any more questions. He tells the technicians that they are not allowed to have music or the television on. Sighing, the policemen take books and magazines off the shelves and start leafing through them. The psychologist opens a window and listens to Bonnie and Clyde, who are in the stream below quarreling over the way things are progressing. Sandström’s mobile rings in the kitchen. There’s no news from the A81, where two police officers are questioning truck drivers, toilet attendants, and restaurant employees at the service station that Sebastian told them about.

Waiting. Sebastian has had so much practice waiting that it takes only a few minutes for him to lose awareness of everything around him. He lies with his head thrown back and stares at the ceiling—its white surface seems pleasantly in tune with his state of mind. His body seems to be sinking into a warm sand dune while his consciousness rises, circling gently around itself. Sebastian has the palpable sense of time becoming disjointed. The chain of seconds breaks down into tiny particles. His self dissolves, though leaves something behind that he can identify with. It is a kind of observation post outside body and soul. From this vantage point, Sebastian can think about why he held on so long to a theory that did not reflect in the least his feeling for space and time. They are not many, the worlds in which he moves. He is in a single cosmos, a great roar in which he feels the presence of other entities aside from his own. Names can be put to them—Maike, Oskar, and Liam—and they form a weave in which energy and matter are really the same thing: information. A human consciousness that consists of nothing besides memories and experiences is pure information. The observation post called Sebastian thinks that he could sit down at a desk and make notes. He should find out if Oskar’s attempts to extrapolate from the big bang through the quantization of time are ultimately aimed at comprehending the world as one big information machine. Have they not been working on the same idea for years but from different sides: that time, not only in the philosophical but in the physical sense, is a product of consciousness and also identical to it? He should speak to Oskar straightaway, find common ground… he should… When the doorbell rings, Sebastian’s daydreams collapse and leave a single sentence: Man is a hole in nothingness.

Someone enters the apartment. A female voice calls Sandström an idiot and asks what has happened that afternoon. It is a good question. Sebastian’s watch indicates that he has spent five hours staring at the white surface of the ceiling. The woman comes in and bats the TV magazine out of the hands of the smoking technician. Sebastian has seen the woman before, that morning, when she was running up the stairs in the police station. He found her unsympathetic even from behind. Now her gaze flickers through the room as if she once lost something here and has come to get it. When she walks toward Sebastian, her curly hair is like a symbol of permanent agitation around her head. Under the tightly buttoned cardigan, the large breasts protrude more than is strictly necessary. With a paw of surprising dimensions, she crushes Sebastian’s fingers.

“Rita Skura, detective.”

At least she leaves him in peace and asks her colleagues questions instead. Sandström and the police psychologist are apportioning Sebastian’s statement among themselves. They have barely finished speaking when Rita Skura tells them that that bastard of a medical director has not appeared in the hospital all day, and that the staff continue to protest their innocence. So there is basically nothing new in the case of the murdered senior registrar, and therefore the suits are having their asses kicked. While she is still cursing, the telephone rings.

The scene freezes, then chaos ensues. In the midst of the scuttling and chattering, Rita Skura takes control. She sends a technician to the black box, Sandström to the balcony, and the police psychologist to the phone with Sebastian.

“Pick up when I give the sign. Stall for time. Play dumb. Ask questions. Understood?”

“That will be my wife,” says Sebastian.

Rita shakes her head impatiently and leans back against the wall with her arms crossed, maintaining eye contact with the technician. Sebastian is overcome by a desire to put a giant glass over her, push a piece of card under it, and throw the detective out into the courtyard like a twitching insect. When she clicks her fingers, the technician hands him the telephone receiver.