The Cusanus Game

by Wolfgang Jeschke

  The water was choppy and sprayed up over the railing, but the boat didn’t rock, moving astonishingly smoothly and evenly. The boat driver sat motionless on his raised seat in the stern—his red cap pulled down low over his forehead and a black scarf wrapped around his head, leaving an opening only for his eyes. The passenger room was empty except for a young couple in an oblivious embrace, occupied with their caresses.

  The boat made a loop until the traffic light over the flat arch in the crenellated wall turned green and we could pass through the entrance to the arsenal. To the left, small boats bobbed in the spacious halls of the former shipyards. Some of the facades had been covered with glass and equipped with large rolling doors; on others rotten nets hung from bars that had been inserted across the arches. Between the buildings we saw the massive bodies of old military facilities soiled with bird droppings and the truncated cones of ammunition bunkers discolored by the rust of their half-eroded metal parts. In between were wildly growing bushes and pines, an unadorned flat building to the right, and a representative building with elaborate masonry over the entrance.

  I had never taken this route before and looked around with curiosity. We passed the twin towers of the main entrance. The three clocks of the tower on the right displayed three different times. At the Tana the young couple got off. The woman was very small, and I noticed that she was wearing laced boots with abnormally high platforms, with which she could hardly walk.

  Then we rode through under the low arched bridge and in a wide right turn out into the Bacino di San Marco. Suddenly the sun broke through for a moment in the southeast. To the right, near the bricole of the southern harbor entrance, toward San Servolo, a flickering and flashing could be seen on the water, and out of the fog emerged, crowded together, masts and superstructures—pennants and standards of blue silk, shiny brass fittings, narrow galleys next to bulkier chelandia with catapults on the high deck and gatti with covered siege towers—and in their midst, with its huge baldachin, the bucintoro of the admiral.

  “Are they shooting a film here?” I asked.

  “A film?” Frans replied with surprise. “In this weather?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. “Looks like the whole fleet has been raised.”

  “Where?” Frans asked, turning his head. I pointed, but the ships had vanished. The screen of fog in the harbor entrance had closed again.

  “I just thought I saw the Venetian fleet.”

  Frans gave no reply, looking silently straight ahead again. I eyed him from the side; he looked very focused, as if he himself had to steer the boat through the fog.

  A large ship blasted its horn nearby. The dark, indistinct silhouette of a car ferry drifted by.

  “I thought large ships are no longer permitted in the lagoon,” I said.

  The vaporetto lurched in the bow wave and turned right toward San Marco.

  Frans shrugged and replied, “There are often exceptions. You need a special permit.”

  The sound of an organ came from the shore. From Santa Maria della Pietà? A boys’ choir took over the melody. Voices of an almost painful clarity and freshness.

  In front of the Danieli a fairground was set up—a children’s carousel and several booths. The short-winded blare of an old barrel organ could be heard, and the flat claps of air rifle shots. Two days earlier I had walked by here. The pier had been empty then. But that didn’t mean anything. Showmen often set up their attractions overnight.

  A strange daze overcame me. I grasped the railing—and drew back my hand in shock. It had felt warm and soft like skin, as if I had inadvertently touched an arm or a leg. I eyed the railing mistrustfully—it looked like a completely normal, white-painted metal tube. Had I been mistaken? Carefully I reached for it again. I must have been mistaken: It felt cold and hard, like a completely normal metal tube covered with a thick layer of white paint. I held on and took a deep breath. The air suddenly seemed warm and stuffy to me, but immediately improved when we had passed the Palazzo Ducale and entered the Canal Grande.

  “Strange weather today,” I said.

  Frans raised his head and looked up as if he were searching for the sun. But it was nowhere to be found. He nodded at me encouragingly. “We’re almost there.”

  The boat seemed to be making faster headway now. We passed under the Rialto Bridge and got off at Ca’ D’oro. Frans pressed the white button in a round, brightly polished brass bowl next to a heavy dark wooden door with massive wrought-iron fittings. It unlocked with a soft click and swung open soundlessly. There was no one in sight.

  We entered a small inner courtyard tiled with old marble slabs. In the center stood a beautifully hewn pozzo made of pale stone. An old, well-trodden staircase with a carved banister led along the wall of the house to the second floor. The lower end of the railing was guarded by a small bronze lion. Its head had been ground down into a shiny sphere by the touches of hundreds of thousands of hands. Frans led the way up the steps.

  He pulled on a brass stirrup hanging on a thin chain next to the door. No sound could be heard, but the door was opened immediately from inside. A young, dark-skinned woman in a nurse uniform silently invited us in.

  We entered a high-ceilinged anteroom. From the artfully decorated stucco ceiling hung two magnificent glass candelabra. The floor was carpeted with a floral pattern in light blue, tobacco, and saffron. On the walls to the left and right hung large paintings in massive dark blue wooden frames, but the varnish was so darkened that you couldn’t make out anything that was depicted in them. To the right against the wall stood a dainty old gold-lacquered table with curved legs, on it a medium-sized bell jar sheltering a Madonna in a blue robe. Strangely, instead of the baby Jesus she was holding a sheaf of grain in her arms.

  We stepped out onto a spacious terrace, which was open facing the Canal Grande, with a floor of red and black marble slabs, spanned by airy openwork arches. The ceiling of massive, darkly stained wooden beams, whose edges were trimmed with a cable pattern, sagged under the weight of the upper stories. Through the side windows made of leaded bull’s-eye panes of varying thickness and curvature, the sunlight cast a variegated pattern on the curtains of pale raw silk. The sun seemed in the meantime to have fought its way through the fog, for the water of the canal glittered and painted trembling reflections in the intrados of the arches.

  The nurse signaled to us to wait a moment and slipped through a door. It was flanked by two stone lions, which denied admittance with wide-open mouth and raised paw.

  A minute later the door was opened.

  “The signora has gotten up and will see you now,” said the nurse.

  We entered—and I faced the strangest female figure I had ever encountered. She was—bizarre.

  Supported by two strong young male nurses, the old woman stood in front of us on legs wrapped with terribly thick bandages. Although she must have left the sickbed just a few minutes earlier, she was fully dressed. She wore an ankle-length blue brocade dress, which despite her disability had a slit all the way up to her thigh and on which golden star patterns were embroidered; over it a wide fur shawl with dangling white … yes, it actually must have been ermine! Her long, dark blond hair was piled high and pinned with mother-of-pearl combs. Falling curls framed a majestic face that must once have been very beautiful and seemed to belong to a far younger woman than the frail body suggested.

  “Spola!” she cried, joyfully surprised, raising her heavily painted eyebrows and spreading her arms.

  Frans approached her and she pressed him to her with excessive warmth.

  “How are you doing, my boy?” she asked.

  “I’m doing well, signora. You too, I see. You look dazzling!” he replied, beaming. “May I introduce Signorina Domenica Ligrina,” he added somewhat lamely, pointing to me.

  How embarrassing, I thought, involuntarily curtsying. But the signora had only an imperceptible nod to spare for me, as she took Frans’s offered arm and supported herself on it.

  While she chatted
with Frans, I felt terribly superfluous. I regretted having come along. It was hard for me to conceal my displeasure about the disregard with which this decked-out matron treated me.

  I looked around the room. It must once have served as a salon, but had been converted into a sort of intensive care unit, with a modern functional sickbed flanked by two mobile stations full of electronic monitors, with which the nurses fiddled.

  I looked into one of the tall, narrow mirrors on the wall. It was so deformed and murky that it reflected only shadowy images, but by some effect of doubling and redoubling every movement was reproduced so many times that it was as if with each gesture whole hosts of specters were roused, which scattered away through milky, cloudy corridors into infinity.

  I felt an increasing unease in my chest and would have liked nothing more than to escape onto the terrace, but politeness forbade it; so I tried to calm down and grazed a bouquet of yellow silk roses with my hand. The flowers felt almost insubstantial, like flaky ashes. Nonetheless, they did not crumble at the touch. When I inadvertently ran my knuckles across the rim of the porcelain vase that contained them, I felt such a sharp, aggressive vibration that I recoiled in shock. But when I touched it cautiously with my fingertips to find out what that could have been, it felt cool, smooth, and completely normal.

  A small glass vase with lilies of the valley stood on a shelf under one of the clouded mirrors. Lilies of the valley at this time of year? I took them in my hand and sniffed the flowers. They had an intense scent, so were actually real. As a result of a clumsy movement, three or four of the panicles slipped over the edge of the vase and fell on the floor. I was about to bend over and pick them up—but they were gone. I could find them neither on the carpet nor on the floor tiles. The vase in my hand suddenly lost its substance, becoming slippery, as if it were made of a soft water-filled film. Shocked, I balanced the wobbling container with the liquid and the remaining lilies of the valley between my two palms and tried to set it down on the shelf, but the slippery vessel would not part from my hands, it seemed to be stuck to my skin. I began to panic, but gradually it reverted to its original form and I could finally return it to its place. What sort of strange material was that?

  In the meantime, the nursing staff had escorted the signora back to her bed, but made no move to extricate her from her ostentatious regalia of brocade and ermine. As Frans took his leave with a bow, I murmured a good-bye and fled through the exit and down the stairs.

  I heaved a sigh of relief when we were finally in the open air again, waiting for the vaporetto. The sun had evidently not managed to prevail; Santa Maria della Salute was enveloped in fog and could scarcely be made out. All around us the purring and chugging of boats could be heard as they glided by like shadows.

  My mood was at a low point. I felt imposed upon by Frans taking me with him on this excursion. I remained stubbornly silent, but he seemed not even to notice it. I gazed at the strong hands of the boat woman as we docked at a station; with practiced movements she looped the rope, which creaked from the burden, around the belaying pin and then unfastened it again. With what simple elegance, precision, and efficiency she performed her work. I smiled at her, but she did not return the smile. She looked at me—no, she looked through me, as if I were invisible to her.

  The clocks on the twin towers of the Arsenale still indicated the same times, none of which could be correct.

  “What time is it, Luigi?” I asked.

  He did not respond. I flicked the microphone bud on my lapel with my finger.

  “It’s eleven fourteen,” said Frans.

  “Something’s wrong with my ICom.”

  “Yes,” he replied, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

  I was about to snap at him angrily, but his smile disarmed me.

  “Strange, the dense afternoon fog today. A little while ago, I thought the sun had broken through.”

  “It seemed that way to me too.”

  “Peculiar pet name that odd bird gave you,” I said. “Spola.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do. For a man, in any case. Unless…”

  I paused, for the implications were too grotesque.

  Frans shrugged and said, “Oh, I do a lot for her. Am at her service.”

  He grinned challengingly.

  You idiot, I thought, I won’t let myself be provoked by you.

  “I hope she appreciates that.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The fog lifted somewhat as we walked down Calle Sagredo to the rear entrance of the institute.

  “Who is that bizarre signora anyway?” I asked him.

  “You didn’t recognize her?”

  “No. Am I supposed to know her?”

  Frans stuck his key-chip in the automatic mechanism of the steel door. “There are dozens of representations of her.”

  Someone above us called: “Sequence three four three six eight—concluded.”

  I looked up, but saw only the facade of the institute.

  “It was the signora herself who received us,” said Frans.

  He opened the door. I pushed against it with my elbow, but felt no resistance and saw with horror that half my arm had sunk into the steel and had disappeared, while several inches away my severed forearm stuck out. With a cry I broke free and pressed my arm against my body. I felt no pain; my arm seemed unscathed. The walls of the corridor in front of me suddenly had the consistency of spiderwebs, which disintegrated within seconds and dissolved into nothingness.

  Frans put his arm around me and patted my shoulder reassuringly.

  “Don’t worry, it’s completely normal,” he said.

  Kenichiro Akabane was still sitting in his seat next to the entrance, had the data glasses over his eyes, and was touching illuminated fields on his control panel. The steel door dissolved in a crackling shower of sparks, which immediately died out. I stared uncomprehendingly at the photosensor-covered wall of the studio.

  “You’ve been better, boys!” Frans called to the control room.

  Kazuichi in the glassed-in cockpit shrugged and spread his hands regretfully. Akabane pushed the data glasses up on his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He seemed to have been on duty at the control instruments during the whole period of our absence, for he looked overtired and had trouble finding his way back into the reality of the studio, which was now superimposed over the fading contours of cyberspace on his retinas.

  “You can now use your ICom again, signorina,” he said, giving me a friendly nod. “Sorry, I had to block it for the duration of the simulation. It interferes with the signals of the holoprogram, you understand.”

  No, I did not understand.

  “We conduct simulations here on various levels of abstraction,” Frans explained. “Up to the structural level.”

  Gradually it dawned on me what had played out here.

  “She … the signora was a simulation?” I asked, taken aback.

  Akabane looked at me with surprise, then laughed. “You didn’t know that?”

  “It was a test,” explained Frans, and turning to me, he went on: “She was the Serenissima, the city itself, Domenica. The sensory representation of billions upon billions of facts related to this city. A computerized avatar, so to speak.”

  “And I was angry about her bad manners. Was even a little bit jealous. Of a simulation!”

  Frans grinned. “It was all a simulation, Domenica: the boat ride, the palazzo … only the two of us were real. Everything else was holographic projections—of very high density, to be sure—and other sensory stimulations. We never took a step outside this studio.”

  I couldn’t believe it. But there had been moments …

  “Sometimes I had such a strange feeling of unreality. As if something was somehow wrong with my perception.”

  “Oh, your perception is excellent. I observed you closely. You passed the test brilliantly. When you came across gaps in the simulation—there were several—you closed them immediately. Your
gift for synesthesia and confabulation is excellent.”

  “Hey! I’m a botanist, not a psychologist.”

  “Hm,” he murmured, pursing his lips. “It’s like this”—he tapped his temple—“the human brain constantly produces a model of the environment, which it updates every three seconds. If dubious data arrive from the sense organs, the top priority is completing the model under all circumstances. What does the brain do? It cheats a little bit by correcting the sense data, and it deceives itself by inventing some just so everything fits together believably. Hearing steps in for seeing and vice versa. That’s synesthesia, and it has evidently stood the test of evolution. Better to cheat than to doubt. It seems to facilitate our survival, in any case.”

  “And confabulation?”

  “Another deceitful trick to fill gaps. Here we invent additional things we never perceived at all.”

  “Even a mentally healthy person?”

  “Yes, indeed! You can observe it in yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “An example. Every evening you see a television anchorwoman behind her desk. She’s pretty, has a nice figure…”

  “Okay.”

  “One evening, the news is over, the camera stays on her. She doesn’t get up to leave the room; an assistant hurries over to help her. He pushes her in a wheelchair out from behind the desk. She’s a leg amputee. You didn’t know that. For her—or rather, for yourself—you invented legs evening after evening. You can’t say whether fat or skinny legs, but legs. It hits you like a shock that there aren’t any there.”

  “Hm. Got it. I think I’m going to throw away my Scarabeo. You do that much better,” I said.

  Frans laughed. “You would have found the simulation even more convincing if you had sprayed yourself with smartdust not only on your hands; then your haptic and your optic sense perceptions would have been better correlated, and you would not have had the feeling of uncertainty and unease that occasionally overcame you.”