Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

She doesn’t have much time to brood. Schnurpfeil wrenches the driver’s door open and slips behind the wheel. While Sebastian gets into the back and puts the cooler back on his lap, the senior policeman sits motionless with both hands on the steering wheel, his head hanging like a schoolboy’s.

“Stage fright?” Schilf asks.

“I don’t think I want to go on,” Schnurpfeil says.

Rita sizes up everyone in the van with an appraising look. All at once, she thinks she knows how Sebastian feels. And how Schilf feels. Maybe even how Oskar feels. In the end, it’s simply about confronting total defeat with a brave face. She stretches a hand out quickly and places it on the senior policeman’s shoulder.

“Schnurpfeil,” she says, “ I am leading this investigation.”

A smile flits over his face.

“What now?” he asks.

“Back home,” Schilf says, “to wait.”

JULIA RUSHES TO MEET HIM IN THE HALLWAY of the police apartment with such expectancy that Schilf is happy to have something to offer her. His girlfriend links arms with him as he introduces her to the murderer. Sebastian is lingering by the door that has just closed behind him, and seems quite helpless: too tall and angular for the narrow space. He grips the handle of the cooler. Schilf and his girlfriend are both smiling at him and he looks at them shyly, as if he is facing a court of law.

Schilf had not wanted to leave Sebastian alone again, so had asked him to spend the final few hours before the big event together. When Sebastian hesitated, Schilf turned the invitation into an order. Now Schilf realizes that a detective can no longer be an official when he is at home, in front of his girlfriend. Sebastian is suddenly presented with a stranger and his younger girlfriend, and is wondering what these two people think of him. In front of the police, a murderer is not ashamed of his crime, just as a patient seeing his doctor is not ashamed of his illness. But Sebastian does not have any practice in living with his crime in the personal realm. Like an accident victim, he must learn everything from scratch: speaking, hand gestures, looking people in the eye. The sooner you start, the better, the detective thinks.

Julia reaches out to shake Sebastian’s hand and says that she likes him in person even more than she did on television, and he relaxes visibly. As the detective walks ahead of them into the living room, he realizes that the result of an important experiment has almost passed him by. While climbing the stairs, he was nervous about this meeting between Julia and Sebastian. He had imagined his girlfriend extending her hand to Sebastian and a lightning bolt striking at the same time, reducing her to a puff of smoke. Or, worse still, he had imagined Sebastian entering the apartment and simply walking through Julia as if she were simply not there. Schilf feels a fleeting prick of conscience. He is not sure why this fear surfaced at the crucial moment—because it was so absurd or because he now no longer cared whether Julia disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Sebastian looks around the apartment, and says something pleasant but untrue about it. The detective positions his girlfriend in the open-plan kitchen with her back against the wall and indicates that Sebastian should bring the cooler. Schilf has brought not only the murderer with him, but something special that more or less belongs to the murderer. This needs to go into the freezer, urgently.

“A picnic?” Julia asks.

She chats away, joking about ice cream and cold beer while Schilf lifts the blue lid off the cooler. Dabbelink’s stare turns Julia’s voice into background noise, as if someone has turned the volume down. The skin on the face has dried up and drawn tight over the bones, so the eyes are open and staring, as if the cyclist were speeding toward a taut steel cable for all eternity. The nose is out of joint and the mouth is stretched in an evil grin. The cervical vertebrae stick out of the tangle of severed tubes, white and clean like a handle. Sebastian pushes in front of Schilf; he wants to lift the head of his victim out of the box himself.

“Careful,” Schilf says. “It’s only held in place by skin.”

When they had been standing over the large aluminum drawer in the forensic department, Sebastian bent down low as if to kiss his victim, then looked at the detective with shining eyes. Thank you, he said. Whatever you’re planning, you’ve just saved me from going mad.

Now, although Sebastian takes hold very gently, Dabbelink cannot help grimacing between his hands. Schilf casts a quick glance at his girlfriend, whose gaze is fixed on the head of the dead man, this three-dimensional caricature that was once a living face. Julia does not look as though she intends to become hysterical.

“So that’s what’s left,” she says.

Schilf nods at her. He is relieved to realize once again exactly why he liked his girlfriend from the moment he met her.

Dabbelink does not fit in the freezer at first go, so they scrape the lumps of ice off the sides of the compartment with a knife. Having succeeded, they feel quite comfortable with each other. Julia makes spaghetti and Sebastian lays the small table. Over dinner, they avoid talking about anything to do with Dabbelink, Oskar, Maike, Liam, or what could happen later that night. The only shared topic of conversation is the hospital scandal. Medical Director Schlüter has been suspended, not on grounds of bodily harm with fatal consequences, but because of inadequate supervision of his staff. The familiar public debate over poorly financed hospitals had started again immediately. Schlüter will pursue his career elsewhere. The rest is politics.

They don’t talk much. Schilf is the only one who has a second helping. Never has a meal tasted so good to him.

JULIA INSISTED ON GOING TO BED AFTER DINNER. Why sit around endlessly at the table, weighed down by troublesome thoughts, when they might as well sleep for a couple of hours and wake up at a set time? Schilf envies her deep calm. Her head barely touched the pillow before she fell asleep, as if at the flick of a switch. Her ability to give her body clear commands means that she is as good at falling asleep as she is at sitting still for hours in a life-drawing class. She once said to Schilf that she could not understand the phenomenon of insomnia at all: you have only to turn on your side to embrace a temporary death.

Propped up on one elbow, Schilf watches his girlfriend sleep. She has kicked off the blanket but is holding on to a corner of it, which covers her shoulders, neck, and part of her face. She bears no resemblance to an unplugged machine that by day pulls the wool over Schilf’s eyes. She breathes evenly, snuggled up in her own body warmth like a little planet with its own atmosphere. The longer Schilf looks at her, the more he thinks he has a miracle right in front of him. How can this be: a perfect system which, other than food, contains everything it needs for life!

The astonishment he feels rouses such a clamor within him that he is afraid the sound of his thoughts will wake Julia. He gets up quietly and closes the bedroom door behind him.

He stands in front of an open window. His head is clear, with no pneumatic drill trying to demolish the load-bearing walls. Behind him on the sofa is a large, dark shape: Sebastian, who is perfectly still, as if relieved he no longer has to come up with any answers. The zebra stripes across the room have grown sharper and the moon is tussling with the streetlamps over the color of the light. The street beneath is still covered with a carpet of wood shavings. Schilf remembers the feathery feel of it beneath his feet, and the smell of it, like a circus ring. He lights a cigarillo. The smoke casts shadows on the windowsill that curl around each other, fade, and then start swirling again when he blows the next puff out of his lungs. This is how he imagines the mysterious mesh of reality, the primordial soup at the heart of it all: shadows of a god smoking by a window.