Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

No one in his office understands how he works; they see only his successes. His colleagues shake him by the hand, call him a fantastic clairvoyant to his face and a lucky bastard behind his back. When the case of the time-machine murderer was solved, they said that he had done nothing more than sit around quietly for days until the murderer had contacted him and politely asked him to take down his confession.

THE DETECTIVE HAD ACTUALLY SPENT WEEKS breaking down the cage of his perceptions into pieces in order to find the threads that connected him with the person he was looking for. He combined the study of files with meditation as he waited for a clue that would tell him where and when the coincidence that he urgently needed would occur. At some point the telephone rang and a woman who had dialed the wrong number kept asking for someone called Roland. That same afternoon, a bird crashed into the window of the conference room and dropped onto the window ledge as if it was dead, but when a young female officer tried to pick it up, it flew off, perfectly unharmed. A little later, the detective stumbled in the hallway and broke the glass of his watch against a door frame. In the watch department of the Karstadt department store, two young men were standing in front of him in line, one of them resembling the third murder victim. They were chatting and laughing about how a life without watches and clocks was not only possible but actually more pleasant. The detective decided not to repair his watch and went back out into the street, where he accepted a flyer for a performance at the Panorama Café in the Stuttgart television tower. That evening, he turned on the television and landed on Vertigo , a film about a dead woman returning, with an ending that the detective did not understand.

The next day, Schilf sat for hours in the café in the television tower, eating plum cake and looking at the cars far beneath him negotiating their complicated routes through the pattern of streets, and at the Black Forest shrouded in mist on the horizon. He had put his broken watch down on the table. When a young man sat down at the table next to him and started scribbling busily in a notebook, a bird crashed into the large window. In his surprise the detective knocked his broken watch from the table. The man at the next table put his pen behind his ear and picked up the watch for him. They started talking. The young man was wearing a blue shirt with white trousers, and his mobile phone was in a leather pouch on his belt. After two hours of animated conversation the detective said he had to make a quick phone call. The young man lent him his mobile phone, and Schilf walked a few meters away from him out of politeness and called his colleagues at headquarters. It was only later that he found out the surname of his new acquaintance was Roland.

Schilf would never forget the accusing look of the murderer as he was arrested. The young man had trusted him at first glance. He had told Schilf that he came from the future, and that he had landed in this time in order to conduct a few groundbreaking experiments. He was working on nothing less than a solution to the grandfather paradox. He wanted to prove that changes in the past had no effect on later events at all; so a time traveler could kill his forebears without endangering his own existence in the future. Schilf continued listening with interest for another half hour before two plainclothes officers walked in and arrested the young man so courteously that none of the other people in the café noticed.

During the trial, the murderer had presented a file detailing the lives of his victims up to the year 2015. Desperately, he had assured the court over and over again that the victims were alive in the future, some of them were married and had successful careers. Moreover, they had agreed to the experiment. He himself was not like everyone else, he shouted. He did not live here, he was only a guest, on a work trip to a world without consequences, and therefore was not responsible for any actions, however strange. In the jungle of time, the time-machine murderer screamed as Schilf was leaving the room, every moment was itself the next one.

Schilf leaned against the wall in the corridor outside the courtroom. He knew that the jury would convict someone who would not learn, someone lonely, someone innocent in the tragic sense.

THE DETECTIVE RUBS BOTH HANDS OVER HIS FACE. When the InterCity train takes the next curve, he becomes aware of whirling flecks, as seagulls seem to follow the train like an ocean liner. Although the speed of the train clearly rules out the possibility of seagulls, which must be an optical illusion, he can even see their orange beaks and the black feathers on top of their heads when he squints.

Gently he strokes the smooth surface of the rolled-up magazine. It is not actually the contents of the article that fascinate him so much, but the feeling that he recognizes the voice of the person who wrote it. While reading, he could hear it in his head, as if the professor of physics were speaking to him in person. As to a friend. The detective is sure that this article has been written by someone who does not believe in what he is saying. Someone who doubts reality, despairs of it, as one who is lost in a labyrinth. The detective superintendent learned something else from the butterflies with their compound eyes: those who believe in nothing also know nothing. Without a reliable cure for doubt, there can be no cognitive orientation. Schilf would give anything to speak with this Sebastian about it. Perhaps he does not need a doctor, but a physics professor for the yawning abyss that has started opening up in front of him at the most inconvenient moments. His doctor had not done much more than ask him a load of questions. He had asked about Schilf’s successes in his work and the ever-increasing price he paid for them—memory loss, headaches, a loosening grip on reality. The following week the detective was shoved into a scanner like a loaf of bread into the oven, so that magnetic fields could throw the atomic nuclei in his head out of balance. Sometime after that, he sat once again in the wood-paneled study and the assistant brought him a coffee so that he would have something to stir. Schilf dropped one lump of sugar after another into the cup and kept on stirring. While he was doing this, the doctor told him about the secret subtenant in his head. Name: Glioblastoma multiforme . Age: definitely a few months, perhaps even several years. Size: 3.5 centimeters. Place of birth: the frontal lobe, a little left of center. Function: causing memory loss, chronic headaches, and a loosening grip on reality.

The sugar in the detective’s cup melted into the cooling liquid, forming a saturated solution. He had to stop stirring so that the doctor could pat him on the hand. On the table in front of him were the results of the MRI scan, photographs in tones of gray that Schilf found so attractive that he considered getting them framed. Glioblastoma multiforme sounded like a rare tree or a deformed insect, so he gave his subtenant a new name: ovum avis —bird’s egg. As the doctor was writing down the name of a specialist for the detective, Schilf rose and said farewell. He did not intend to return. And he would not go to the famous specialist. Anyone who regularly attends postmortem examinations does not expect much from having his own skull sawed open.

“ARE YOU STILL THERE? Can you hear me? Damn.”

Smiling, the detective shakes his head and stretches his spine until he hears a crack. Two rows behind him, someone is furiously pressing the keys of a mobile phone. The advent of the mobile has finally given human beings a means of expressing their metaphysical isolation and their deep-seated doubt about the existence of other life-forms. Can you hear me? Are you there? Who could claim with any certainty that the other person was really there and could hear you speaking? All sentient beings are necessarily solipsists and therefore occupied with ignoring that very fact throughout their lives, the detective thinks. He himself would have every reason to take his mobile phone out of his bag, dial the number to his own apartment, and wait to see if his new girlfriend picks up the phone—he still does not quite believe that she exists if she is not in front of him. Are you still there? He could ring himself or the bird’s egg in his head and ask the same question. If the doctor is right, Schilf has only a few weeks, at most a couple of months left of the rendezvous with the self that people generally call their existence. He would need this time for an investigation in which he himself would be the chief suspect. The connection between his new girlfriend and the bird’s egg had to be cleared up. Perhaps the time-machine murderer is an accomplice and the physics professor a valuable witness. The detective would also have to bridge larger gaps—to find out how the fragments of his life could make a whole. With some patience he would find a solution, one that at least he alone understood. After all, it is not every day that one is declared dead and then called the love of someone’s life within a few hours. Before he finally signs off, the only thing to be done, surely, is to make himself whole.