Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

“Dad?”

Liam’s voice is coming not only from the telephone receiver but from a box on which a spool of tape turns.

“Hang on, Dad. Hey, stop that!”

Liam is speaking to someone else. A giggle is heard in the background, and there is a bump and a bang. Then he’s back.

“Sorry,” he says, laughing. “There’s only one telephone here and it only takes fifty-cent pieces. Philipp and Lena keep tugging my arm. They think it’s funny or something.”

“Liam,” says Sebastian.

“Dad? Are you angry because I haven’t called for so long? I really couldn’t. We went off straightaway with rucksacks and tents. I was put with the oldest group from the start, because I talked about how to make a fire and about the bundling effect and exceeding the ignition temperature. And about how it’s not flint but pyrite that you need, and then they took me with them on the hike right away—”

“Liam! Are you OK?”

Sebastian’s broken cry interrupts Liam’s stream of chatter. There is a hesitant pause, stretching out of the phone and wrapping itself around everyone in the room, filling the hallway like an invisible gelatinous mass.

“Of course. I’m great,” Liam finally says. “Is something wrong, Dad?”

“No,” Sebastian says quickly. “Everything’s all right. I was simply… worried.”

While Liam thinks about this, Sebastian pushes his fist toward his mouth and bites into the white knuckles to stop the heaving in his gut from producing any unwanted noises.

“Some of the kids are homesick,” Liam says. “Maybe you’re homesick for me?”

This is too much, Sebastian has to get off the phone. He covers the receiver, bashes his forehead against the wall, and takes another deep breath.

“Yup, you’ve got it!” he says in just the right cheerful tone. “Listen, Liam, I’ve got to go. We… I’ll call you later, or tomorrow. I mean, I’ll come to see you.”

“No!” Liam’s horror is unmistakable. “You can’t do that! Tomorrow we want to…”

“OK, Liam, have fun! See you soon! Bye, Liam! Bye!”

The receiver falls and Sebastian with it. The technician presses a button and click , all is dark. A softness comes over his eyes, a jacket he doesn’t recognize, it smells male. Someone allows Sebastian to slide slowly to the ground. The heaving in his gut forces out a scream.

SOME DAYS, DETECTIVE SCHILF KNOWS as soon as he wakes up that he will not be leaving his apartment through the front door. Quickly and quietly, he slips into the army-green cargo pants that he buys in a work-uniform shop, and which he wore long before they became fashionable with young people. He pulls his travel bag out from under the bed and leaves the room, holding the door handle with both hands in order to close the door quietly. He stands at the breakfast bar for a few moments with a glass of Coke that is much too cold, and looks around his own apartment as if he is seeing it for the first time. For fifteen years these rooms have been somewhere for him to stay, but not a home. He feels especially out of place in the kitchen, as if some prankster has plonked him in an advertisement for modern living. He is surrounded by brushed steel and expensive kitchen equipment that he cannot operate. Even as a young lout sitting on a bar stool seemed laughable to him. A real single person’s kitchen , his landlord had declared when he moved in; and the rent is very reasonable for Stuttgart. Schilf had stuck a couple of postcards onto the fridge out of a sense of duty. They show Majorca, Lanzarote, and Gran Canaria. He had gotten them on vacation. The backs of the postcards are empty. He puts his Coke down, takes the bread bin, the unused fruit bowl, and a pile of newspapers from the windowsill, and opens the window.

To the east, the retreating night splashes the eastern sky with color, interspersed with graffiti made of clouds that the sun will soon have washed from the walls of the dawning day. Through a gap between buildings, Schilf sees a road junction. It is empty, as if cars have not been invented yet or have already been consigned to history. A lone pedestrian is creeping along by the buildings. A shift worker or a sleepless artist, the collar of his jacket turned up even though the nighttime temperature has not fallen below seventy degrees.

The detective turns his wrist: four thirty on Saturday morning. Perhaps he should take out a patent on this time of the day. Getting up early has long ceased to bother him. He can open his eyes at any given time and get out of bed as if nothing has happened, as if sleep does not exist, nor dreams, in whose corridors human beings waste a third of their lives. Rising early without difficulty is one of the few things that gets easier with age. When he was young, Schilf liked to claim that he would never grow old. The only thing old people had left to wait for was their meals.

He smiles and puts both feet down on the metal grating of the fire escape, which starts clanging like a large gong even though he has been careful. Why he leaves the building in this way on certain days, climbing like a burglar into his own life, he cannot explain. Sometimes it seems to make sense to slip around reality and all its preposterous vagaries and take it by surprise. He looks into the apartment one more time before he pulls the window closed from the outside. All is still. The apartment looks as if the detective were alone.

When Schilf looks back on his life, he thinks he was a perfectly normal person about twenty years ago. He had a job and a roof over his head, he had passions, possibly even family. Then came the fracture. While on duty, the young Schilf shot a man who was only reaching into his pocket to get his car key. Or perhaps Schilf had been driving out to wine country one weekend when a suspect forced him off the road—his wife and young son had been in the backseat. The detective insists that he cannot remember. “The fracture” is the name of a catastrophe that his bad memory conceals.

The fracture called for an entirely new person. From the remnants of his life, Schilf picked out the bits that were still functioning. This included his work, which he was good at, better than most in equivalent positions. He got up in the morning. He ate at regular intervals, availed himself of public transport and the small pleasures of life, and he knew where his bed was. But he waited in vain for these things to make him into a new, complete person. His problem was that he could not find it in his heart to end his life simply because the man leading it had reached the end. At some point, he realized that it was a matter of carrying on. The detective became a master at carrying on. Until, barely a month ago, two things happened that upset his mastery: a woman and a death sentence.

He received the death sentence on the obscenely squeaky, sweat-inducing leather of a Chesterfield armchair. This armchair stands in a study decorated in the English style, to which Schilf’s doctor leads his patients after he has shone a flashlight into various orifices. There is a thick rug on the floor and the walls are paneled with dark wood. In a gesture of ludicrous excess, gold-tooled volumes of the classics can be reached by means of a mobile librarian’s ladder.

The woman whom Schilf met is to some extent the opposite of this study. She has lightly permed dark hair, a snub nose that seems quite implausible, flat eyes that reflect the scene around her, and a build more like a girl than a forty-year-old. The detective met her in the pedestrian zone of Stuttgart city center shortly after the fatal visit to the doctor. To be precise, she walked straight into him because he had come to a sudden standstill. The ground had opened right in front of him, a common occurrence of late. He looked down into a dizzying abyss, a state outside of space and time in which everything was connected.