The Cusanus Game

  I hadn’t prayed since my father’s death—out of protest, for I had never forgiven God for that. Now I’d come crawling back and felt like a traitor. I looked around. Numerous people absorbed in prayer. All women. Some were weeping.

  “Please,” I whispered.

  In a side chapel I lit candles: one for Frans, one for Renata, one for Heloise, one for Abe, and one for me.

  * * *

  I WANDERED ON to Campo San Giacomo dall’Orio. The Uncino, where I had been with Frans, was closed until January 6. I peered through the glass entrance into the empty restaurant. The hands of the large clock in the rear of the establishment still stood at a quarter to six. Behind me a dog growled. I spun around in alarm, but it was not a modified animal; rather, it was a completely ordinary, self-important little yapper bothered by my presence.

  When I left the square, the window of a tiny stationery shop happened to catch my eye; it displayed postcards of the city from the nineteenth century. Suddenly I recognized Frans in one of them. I caught my breath in astonishment. It was a photo of a scene on the harbor. Under the mast of a fishing boat, three fishermen were sitting and crouching, sorting their catch into shallow woven baskets. One of the men stood at the mast and with his left hand held on to the hanging ropes of the rigging—Frans! His head was bowed—he was watching the others work—so that only his foreshortened profile was visible, but by the casual, somewhat stooped posture, the height, and the hand holding the bundle of ropes I had recognized him at once. It was clearly Frans! He wore fisherman’s clothing, coarse striped pants, reinforced in front by strong cords, tucked into thick knee-length socks made of white wool, a vest buttoned up halfway, a long jacket of soft, light gray material, and on his head a pointed wool cap with a thick pompom that hung down to his chest. Like the other three men, Frans too had a long thin meerschaum pipe between his teeth.

  The door of the stationery shop was locked. It was a holiday. The moment I turned around to move on, the door of the café on the opposite corner opened, and a pale, elderly man came shuffling across the street. He fished a key from his pants pocket.

  “Can I do something for you, signora?” he asked.

  He smelled of peppermint liqueur.

  “I’d like to have that postcard,” I said.

  The man unlocked the door and we entered the tiny shop—it was packed to the ceiling with merchandise, and it smelled overpoweringly of mothballs. He fetched the card from the display window.

  “What are those photos?” I asked.

  The stationery seller examined the photo as if he were consciously seeing it for the first time and tried in vain to scratch off with his fingernail a few specks of fly excrement that were stuck in the laminate. It must have been holding out for years in the window waiting for me. He turned over the card.

  “Archivio Filippo. Vecchie immagini di Venezia,” he read from the back. “A historical photo of the harbor. Hm. Fishermen,” he said, shrugging.

  I bought the card from him.

  * * *

  KAZUICHI SMILED WHEN I showed him the photo later.

  “I remember,” he said. “He brought back one of those pipes for each of us back then. At the time in which he had work to do they were very popular. Must have been around 1896. A shipment of sepiolite had just arrived on a freighter from Bursa. The best meerschaum comes from there; it’s mined in Eskisehir. Frans had two dozen of the things made by a Nuremberg pipe carver, which he brought back and gave away at the institute.”

  “What are those cords in front of Frans’s fly there? I can’t make sense of them. Is that a cage?” I asked.

  Kazuichi took a look at the detail. His eyes narrowed to slits and he let out a brief, shrill chuckle. “Perhaps a security measure. You have to ask him that.”

  “Easier said than done,” I sighed, and then both of us were silent for quite a while. “Fifty-eight days have now passed. I don’t know what to think anymore. Has a traveler ever been gone for so long?”

  Kazuichi gave me an uneasy look. “Not here. But in Amsterdam they once had a case—it was a long time ago—in which a traveler came back only after a year. They had long since given up on him, but left the simulation as it was to be safe.”

  “A year!”

  Kazuichi nodded.

  “Three hundred and forty-two days. But subjectively he had aged only two weeks. He had stayed in the past only that long.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  “Destination-time presence and the span between the transitions are not proportional.”

  I looked at him inquiringly.

  “The time spent subjectively in the past and the time span that opens up in the here and now between the departure and the return are not congruent.”

  Kazuichi swept one hand in a wide arc over the other, which lay motionless on the table.

  “Someone can stay a day in the past, and he is gone for a year,” he went on. “Someone else is back the next day and has gotten a year older, because he spent a year in the past. There’s no connection there. That’s what makes the traveling so difficult and nerve-racking.”

  “I’ve come to know that.”

  Kazuichi nodded.

  “So keep waiting.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  He closed his eyes and ran both hands over his face. I had never looked at it consciously from such close proximity. His lashless eyelids were shaped like egg cowrie shells, gently rounded and smooth as porcelain. He seemed exhausted. His beardless face was sunken, and from up close he looked older than usual. Over the corners of his mouth, wiry black hairs sprouted from a dozen deep follicles, hanging down like the barbels of a catfish. Did they enable him to detect patterns of cosmic order in the mud of reality?

  “There’s really very little we can do, Domenica,” he said in an unusually soft voice. “We shouldn’t deceive ourselves. Ultimately, we’re dogs that have learned to ride the subway. We have no idea about the schedules or the route network; we don’t know what drives the trains or how they are steered. We know only that we have to board when the doors open and that by doing so we can get to places that would otherwise be unreachable for us. Our activity is purely parasitic.”

  His black eyes flashed at me from under his heavy lids.

  “What we can do—and what we do—is the following,” he went on. “We minimize the details. They’re important for the accuracy of aim during the journey there; for the journey back, however, they’re more of a hindrance. The traveler does this—to the extent it’s feasible for him—on his side, on-site. On our side we make the corresponding changes in the simulation. The steps of the detail reduction are precisely arranged in advance. They facilitate the alignment, the association. It can, of course, occur that something in the target site unexpectedly changes that we know nothing about and that he cannot influence. If it is for some reason impossible for him to make it to the target site, he has to find his way to another prearranged site that we keep open for him as an emergency exit.”

  “And if that possibility is barred to him as well?” I asked worriedly.

  “Then things get somewhat more difficult. If an undocumented change has occurred at the target site, there’s a danger that he could slip into a reality that is not our past. That would involve an Everett deviation, an offshoot of our universe, a developing parallel universe. That used to signify a theoretical solution to the quantum paradox. In the meantime, we know that those deviations are reality—even if not our reality.”

  “If he has ended up there, then he’s lost.”

  “No. No traveler has ever gotten lost before. More than two thousand transitions have been successfully carried out to date. All the travelers up to now have returned to our universe. Those Everett deviations are subject to a regression. That is, they are reintegrated, so to speak, into the main strand, when the alternatives that have arisen are not so grave that they retain their own weight. Imagine it like this.” He cupped both hands and placed them together. “You have two soap b
ubbles that are stuck together. Suddenly the dividing membrane between them disappears. They have united. There seems to be a force inherent to the multiverse that counters Everett inflation. Dorit van Waalen hypothesized as early as in 2028 that solitons bring about that effect. He called it ‘Uitborstelen,’ brushing out. In any case, all travelers who had slipped into a clearly deviating reality were borne home by the solitons to the here and now.”

  “But there’s no guarantee that it couldn’t happen at some point,” I insisted.

  Kazuichi shrugged. “Guarantee? — No. There’s none,” he said, sticking out his chin confrontationally. “But it might be the case that his trip went off without a hitch.”

  “Went off? Did I hear you right: Went off?”

  “You heard me right. He has long since returned, only the soliton carried him some distance into the future and dropped him off there. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to explain to you.” He blew air out of his broad nose, causing his barbels to flutter. “Destination-time presence and the span between the transitions are not proportional.”

  “Are you saying that he … that he might now be living in the future?” I asked.

  Kazuichi let out his shrill laugh. “No, Domenica. He isn’t living in the future. Rather, that means that he will appear in the simulation when we will have reached the point in time when he was dropped off. Granted, it’s difficult to understand. The grammar of our language is ill-suited to express such matters. You have to imagine it visually.”

  “That he has overtaken us, who are on foot, or—in a way—flown over us?” I asked.

  Kazuichi nodded. “Exactly! He is in the process of surfing over us, so to speak.” He once again swept one hand in an arc over the other. “Frans is describing a curve in a higher dimension, before he lands again on our familiar one-dimensional timeline. Right now he’s somewhere up there, over us, in a sense. Somewhere out there. No problem.”

  I took his hand between both of mine and squeezed it. “It’s sweet of you, Kazuichi, to try to bolster me up, but I can tell by looking at you that you’re really worried.”

  “No, no, no,” he protested vehemently, and his barbels bristled as if he were picking up a scent.

  Dogs on the subway.

  * * *

  THE WHOLE MONTH of January went by. Frans did not turn up. February began.

  I now visited more and more often the garden of San Francesco della Vigna, the real one. I always faced Saint Francis. Flanked by two old cypresses and oleander bushes, he stood in his hooded robe on the high brick pedestal and prayed. Sometimes I joined in his prayer.

  Occasionally I felt as if any moment Frans would step out of the semidarkness of the cloister, the pompom cap on his head and the meerschaum pipe between his teeth. I was jittery with anticipation—ready to jump up and rush down the gravel path to him. But no one appeared, not even tourists. They were denied access to the monastery courtyard. The sexton let me in, because he knew me. I had told him I was waiting here for someone. He had furrowed his brow thoughtfully and then nodded sympathetically. He thought I wasn’t quite right in the head, but took pity on me.

  What had Renata said about the bells of the campanile of San Francesco della Vigna? They tolled on Ash Wednesday? That night, I told myself, I would be out. Perhaps under one of the masks that were traditionally removed at midnight Frans’s face would appear.

  No, it did not appear. The bells had faded.

  XI

  Death Raft

  Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

  JORGE LUIS BORGES

  Renata called. She liked it in Amsterdam, she said. There were a lot of really nice and helpful colleagues at the CIA. As soon as her medical conditioning was completed and her wardrobe was finished, they would perform the first transition test with her. A leap into the middle of the fifteenth century and back. She was pretty nervous, she confessed. Now she was calling all her friends one more time, because soon her ICom would be shut down and she would be elevated to NEA status.

  “I never would have thought that I would one day be granted this privilege,” she said. “Not to be electronically reachable, like a celebrity or an important politician. I’m simply no longer reachable, No Electronic Access, no security snoop can scan my personal data anymore. Quite a nice career for a former terrorist, Domenica. Don’t you think?”

  I told her that Heloise Abret had died on Christmas.

  “Did you give her my gift?” she asked.

  “No, I have it at home.”

  “Would you like to keep it?”

  “No,” I said. “Maybe we should give it to Abaelard as a memento.”

  “He must have long since been reprogrammed. He probably can’t even remember her name,” she said.

  “Then we should keep it as a memento of her. I’ll bring it with me to Amsterdam.”

  “When are you finally coming? I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

  “As far as I know, soon, but I haven’t been given an exact date.”

  “How’s Marcello doing?” asked Renata.

  “He has a girlfriend here. A nurse, I think. He shows his face only rarely.”

  “Things are similar with Ernesto, but he has a relationship with his computer at Mission Control.”

  Both of us laughed.

  “Frans still isn’t back, right?” Renata asked after a pause.

  “No,” I replied, and had to pull myself together to keep from crying.

  “Sorry to say this to you so bluntly, Domenica, but it’s not good in this job to get into committed relationships.”

  “You mean because it’s easy to lose someone,” I replied.

  “Yes, but not in the sense that you might mean. Frans will return eventually. Up to now, no one has gotten lost yet, as far as I know. No, that’s not it. But here in Amsterdam I’ve heard troubling things about travelers. They don’t only visit a strange time, but also enter a strange world; they see incredible things, terrible things, which they could often prevent through their knowledge, but they are not permitted to intervene. That turns them into different people. You don’t have a guarantee that the person who returns is still the same one who parted from you—even if you’ve known him for so long. That has led to tragedies.”

  I was silent.

  “Think about it,” she implored.

  “Stay the way you are, Renata, for heaven’s sake. No matter where they send you. I don’t want to lose you too.”

  “I’ll try my best. Do you remember the advice Heli gave you? She said: ‘Nothing will happen to you, if you do not stray too far from yourself. It won’t always be easy, but you can return to your world. You only have to want to.’ And she knew what she was talking about. She got through the longest and farthest journey ever undertaken by anyone.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Good luck, Domenica.”

  “Good luck to you too, Renata.”

  * * *

  ON A FOGGY morning in late February, I rode across to San Michele, driven by a vague presentiment and inner unease. It was damp and chilly; a cold spell had put an end to the dreams of an early spring. The bridges on the Fondamenta Nuove were covered with frost, the planks of the pier slippery. The ferry appeared out of nowhere; the navigation lights were surrounded by halos.

  Venice disappeared behind us, and ten minutes later we moored at the pier of San Michele. The cypresses rose into the fog; their tops were invisible. For over an hour, I walked along graves and studied the names: the last resting places of the Caragianis, the Zorzis and Brazzoduros, the Saccomanis and the Pasinetti-Zanchis. None of the names meant anything to me. How alike the bearded faces looked—well nourished, the brow righteously raised in civic pride and self-satisfaction. The salt dealers and confectioners, the hosiers and silk merchants, notaries and bankers, all craving a small piece of immortality.

  Among the simpler gravesites in the east, three gravediggers were sitting on a board and an
overturned wheelbarrow next to a small excavator. They were eating bread and salami and drinking hot tea with rum from a large thermos. The scent of the alcohol was strong.

  “Can we help you, signorina?” one of them asked, standing up.

  “Are there graves somewhere around here from the sixteenth century?”

  All three shook their heads.

  “No,” said the one, “the oldest are from the end of the eighteenth century, up near the chapel.”

  “Are you looking for the grave of a particular person?” asked one of the others.

  “Yes, the grave of a Dutch man. He was named Frans.”

  “I know that one,” said the third man. “It’s a pretty new grave. Very close to here. I’ll show it to you, signora.”

  He led the way.

  What nonsense, I told myself. Why would he be buried in a new grave?

  It was a fresh grave with a wooden cross and a small plaque with simple official letters that read:

  FRANS VAN DEN BOOGARD

  03.06.1998–11.08.2052

  The man had died the day Frans had departed.

  “No, that’s not him. I’m looking for a Frans van Hooft.”

  The gravedigger self-consciously shuffled his rubber boots in the frost-covered grass and hunched his shoulders as if he had to apologize for failing to come up with the sought-after grave.

  “I might have been mistaken,” I said. “I was probably mistaken. Please forgive me. Many thanks for your help.”

  The man’s wrinkled brown face stretched into a smile.

  “Maybe he’s still alive,” he said with a shrug. “Those declared dead live longer. Isn’t that what they say?”

  * * *

  ON THE WAY back the sun had broken through the fog. The gray of the lagoon was marbled with streaks generated by the currents between the countless shallows. I never ceased to admire the hydraulic engineers of previous centuries, who had developed with inflated pig intestines and pieces of wood instead of with computers and flow diagrams a perfect system of supply and disposal.

  Venice once again looked the way Turner had painted it, in dissolving colors and forms, suffused with a golden light that cast no shadows but rather seemed to emanate from the objects themselves.