The Cusanus Game

  * * *

  A LOUD NOISE brought him out of his unconsciousness. Rattling chains struck the car. He heard a male voice shouting orders. Winch engines whined, cables grated, and with a groaning creak the car was lifted up. Suddenly he could move his head again and his hands were freed.

  “Hey, there’s another,” said a male voice nearby.

  He turned his head with difficulty in the direction of the voice, but couldn’t make anything out.

  “Oh God!” said the voice.

  * * *

  HARGITAI GOT TO his feet and groped his way to the bathroom. He turned on the light and looked in the mirror. His face above the mouth was covered with a flat, sticky mass out of which two dead eyes looked at him as if out of a ski mask. His legs buckled, and whimpering with horror he sank down onto the toilet seat. He felt his bladder emptying, though he hadn’t had the strength to pull down his pajama pants. There was something comforting about the warmth streaming down his thighs. He yielded to it and felt it carry him away into the darkness.

  * * *

  WHEN HARGITAI CAME to again, days seemed to have passed. That train wreck … He had been rescued. He was injured, but he experienced no pain, felt strangely removed, as if the accident hadn’t befallen him personally. He was lying in a bed. Was he in a hospital? Somewhere a regular electronic signal could be heard. Was he in an intensive care ward? Perhaps he had been brought to Innsbruck by helicopter. His hands lay on smooth sheets. Darkness surrounded him.

  His face … His fingers felt bandages. So it was actually true. Carefully Hargitai stood up and groped his way to the bathroom. But it was his bathroom … his bathroom in his apartment on Wiedner Hauptstrasse! He turned on the light and plucked at the bandages. They came apart like cobwebs under his fingers. But what was revealed was not a face at all, but a rosy oval surface with no hint of eyes, nose, or mouth. What had they done to him? What had they done with his face? He ran his fingers over the strange skin. It appeared smooth, but had a distinct texture; it felt like handmade paper, hard and yet soft. Had he undergone plastic surgery? Had his face been covered with artificial skin? He stared at the reflection. How could he see it in the mirror at all without eyes? Did that texture consist of sensors that sent nerve impulses to his brain? Was he still a human being?

  Hargitai doubled up and vomited into the toilet bowl until the bilge of his stomach made his mouth bitter. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; his lips were dried out, hot and chapped. Had software been programmed into the artificial head, leading him to believe he was still himself?

  Then he straightened up and looked in the mirror. But he saw only the white door behind him, on which his blue bathrobe hung; apart from that, the mirror was empty. Had he become invisible? An error in the software?

  “What’s wrong with me?” he whimpered helplessly.

  Hargitai opened the door—and stood in his bedroom in his apartment.

  * * *

  “IT WENT ON like that for three days,” said Hargitai. “Over the whole weekend. I had a fever and horrible headaches. Probably I was hallucinating.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I was completely out of it. The telephone must have been ringing incessantly. The answering machine was full. Christian called a dozen times. He knew I’d been on the crashed train. But I must have gotten off in Innsbruck. I don’t know why. Maybe I wanted to buy an aspirin or another flask of rum. When I got to the platform, the Intercity was gone. I saw only the taillights of the rear locomotive. How I got back to Vienna and to my apartment I can’t say for the life of me. I have no idea. How lucky I was that I missed the train became clear to me only when I glanced at the Standard on Monday.”

  He pushed the newspaper from August 14 across the table.

  Vienna/Bludenz—“This is the horror vision you have sometimes,” said Martin Purtscher, the governor of Vorarlberg: A train is flung into a ravine by a collapsing bridge. The crushed cars lie below like Legos. Strewn around them are the dead and severely injured.

  Friday, just before 7 PM. A violent thunderstorm unleashes a mudslide. The masses of mud and debris cause the Masonbach Bridge to collapse. At that very moment the IC-566 Lower Austrian Tonkünstler Orchestra Vienna-Lindau with 200 passengers on board has reached the bridge. The express train plunges with the locomotive and three cars about 130 feet into the depths. The fourth car is derailed and suspended over the abyss. The eight cars behind it are stopped by the wedge. 17 people are severely injured. The locomotive driver, a 26-year-old woman from Vorarlberg and a six-year-old boy from Lower Austria lose their lives.

  Hargitai’s mother cast only a fleeting glance at the newspaper page. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere. He was surprised that she didn’t show more sympathy. Finally, he said: “I don’t know how to explain it, but I experienced that crash, literally right in front of my eyes. My face was maimed. It was exactly as it’s described here. I saw it! I felt myself get injured and stuck in the car! How is that possible?”

  His mother only nodded. He looked at her in astonishment.

  “Well, it was only a dream, of course,” he said dismissively, a bit disappointed about her seemingly indifferent reaction.

  He watched her furtively as he cut up the apple pie with his fork and ate it. She had turned sixty in March but was still an attractive woman. Her short black hair showed the first gray strands, which actually looked elegant. Her dark eyes were lively as always; time had engraved itself only in the area over her upper lip and on her cheeks over the corners of her mouth, a waffle pattern forming where there had previously been mocking dimples.

  After a while, his mother put aside her pastry fork, gave her son a serious look, and said softly, “No, Urban, it wasn’t a dream. I had hoped that you would be spared this, because I had never noticed any trace of it in you. But you seem to have inherited the Goldfaden gene after all, with which your grandfather and his father and his father as well were afflicted.”

  “Goldfaden gene?” Hargitai asked uncomprehendingly.

  The tall clock out in the corridor rattled as it struck. It was two.

  “You know that your grandfather was known as the dream doctor,” she went on.

  “I remember Dad sometimes making fun of that.”

  She raised her head and stuck out her chin. “Your father made fun of many things. For him it was all just crazy talk. He had other interests—God knows! Let’s not talk about that.” She drained her cup. “Do you want another piece of pie?” she asked her son.

  “Yes, please. But what’s the deal with the gene?” asked Hargitai.

  She didn’t respond to his question.

  “You were only ten when Grandpa died. You were entering Gymnasium. I had put away his things and packed everything in the suitcase in which he kept his notes. At the time I decided not to tell anyone about it. Not you either. Especially not you. But now the moment seems to have come for me to explain to you about that damn family inheritance.”

  “What are you talking about, for heaven’s sake?”

  “It’s the gift of seeing things that haven’t occurred but might well have occurred,” she said emphatically.

  He looked at his mother wide-eyed.

  “I’ve often had such strange dreams, but…”

  “They’re not strange, Urban. God knows,” she said with a bitter laugh. “They’re horrible. They shattered your grandfather’s mind. Back in London. The Nazis, the bombings. I was still little; there was a lot I didn’t understand. Father had fled with Mother to England in 1937, eluding the Nazis’ clutches. But that decision didn’t do him much good. He had physically escaped the torments of the concentration camp, but in his dreams he suffered them, was there night after night. He had tried laudanum, sleep deprivation, later morphine.”

  “But they were just dreams. Nightmares…”

  “He didn’t think so. He regarded it as a form of empathy. He believed firmly that he had a doppelgänger, who had to suffer for him, in h
is place, the agony and death he had avoided by fleeing. That doppelgänger, he was convinced, possessed the power to exchange souls with him in dreams.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but that’s a completely outlandish idea,” Hargitai broke in.

  “No. Grandpa wasn’t only a doctor; he had also always been interested in psychology. He was familiar with several cases. He had taken notes on them—patients who had similar dream experiences. I still remember Joshua Seidenspinner well. He often came to visit us, because he had no family. Josh was a gangly young man, who could make wonderful paper cuttings. I was fascinated by his dexterity. In a matter of minutes, he would snip whole garlands of rabbits, horses, birds, lizards, flowers, or faces out of blackout paper. He too suffered from that empathy, had the same nightmares as Father. One day in early May—the war in Europe had just come to an end—he stood in the doorway, pale and trembling. ‘We died, André,’ he said to Father. ‘The dreams have stopped.’ Father nodded. ‘Don’t say such things!’ cried Mother. But Josh would not be deterred. He was out of his mind. He pulled a copy of the American magazine Life from his coat pocket, in which for the first time photos of the German concentration camps were shown, horrifying photos. He opened to a page and laid it on the kitchen table, pointing with a trembling finger at the picture of a man who had squeezed halfway out from under a wall made of boards and met his death. ‘That’s Daniel, my friend. We were together until the end, when they locked us in the barn and set it on fire. He said we would make it. I was close behind him. But we didn’t make it.’

  “Mother had glanced at the photo, grabbed me by the shoulders, and pushed me out of the room. Scarcely had the door shut behind us when I heard a scream unlike any I ever heard again in my life. Half an hour later they took Joshua away. I never saw him again, and my parents never mentioned him again. What remained of him were rabbits, horses, birds, lizards, flowers, and faces made of blackout paper. Mother eventually burned them, when we packed our things and returned to Vienna. She believed firmly that those horrors were over, a thing of the past…” Hargitai’s mother broke off. After a while she then said softly, “But they weren’t over. No, they weren’t over.”

  “The concentration camp dreams?” asked Hargitai.

  “There were different ones. The Americans, Father claimed, had dropped the Bomb on Vienna. He was out night after night treating the mutilated and radiation-poisoned, providing relief to the dying and bringing the dead to the Franz-Josephs-Kai, where they were cremated before daybreak.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but that’s completely crazy,” he blurted out.

  “You’re saying that after describing your completely crazy experiences to me?” she replied vehemently; she pressed her napkin to her mouth and wiped away her tears.

  “Well, the train crash really did happen. But the Americans never dropped an atomic bomb on Vienna. That’s a difference, isn’t it?”

  She shrugged. “And if there weren’t only one reality?”

  “But, Mom, that’s absurd.”

  “Oho! No, my dear, there you are mistaken. There’s an entry in your grandfather’s notes that he regarded as very important. It was an experience that seemed to have been a revelation for him. That was why he recorded the scene in detail. It was a conversation with his friend Samuel Liebermann, who had returned from exile in the United States. Both of them had attended the Albertus Magnus Gymnasium in the eighteenth district and knew each other well from there. After his return in the late fifties, Liebermann had a lectureship at the University of Technology. He was a theoretical physicist—quantum physics, if I remember correctly. They often met at the upper end of the Naschmarkt for a glass of sparkling wine and a few oysters. Grandpa had his practice a few paces around the corner, on Getreidemarkt. Liebermann was a funny bird who enjoyed a drink, was witty and full of unconventional ideas. Grandpa liked him.”

  “Do those notes still exist?”

  “He had kept all the notes in a suitcase. After the funeral I put it in the attic and never touched it again.”

  “Can I take a look at it?”

  With a deep sigh Hargitai’s mother stood up. “I had always hoped I wouldn’t have to show it to you. But it’s probably better that I do, so that you know what you have to contend with.”

  They climbed up to the attic. Under the roof of the single-family house, summer had nested. Hargitai’s mother carefully lifted a bald, dusty celluloid doll from a medium-sized brown cardboard suitcase with reinforced corners and pressed it to her chest.

  “This is Liz,” she said. “A real Schildkröt doll. I brought her back with me from London. Liz and I told each other stories during the nights in the air-raid shelters. Long stories, for we believed firmly that nothing could possibly happen to us as long as a story had not yet been told to the end—no matter how many bombs the Nazis dropped on us.”

  She placed Liz in a beige wicker baby carriage and blew the dust off the suitcase lid. Dreams was written on the taped-on yellowed label with a broad fountain pen, in that old German script that only few could still decipher, and underlined twice. The clasps were rusty and gave way grindingly. In the suitcase were several sheaves of preprinted yellow patient cards, which were folded into pockets in DIN-A5 format, as doctors had used them before the advent of computers. They were arranged in blocks and held together by pale rubber bands, which had become brittle and so greasy with age that they stuck to the box like limp worms.

  “Are you taking it down with you?” she asked.

  “I’m just going to have a quick look at it.”

  His mother left him alone.

  He began to rummage through the documents. Most of them were dream logs of patients in alphabetical order. Some bore in the margins the note “probably fabrication,” others “correlation possible.” Attached were newspaper clippings, mostly reports of accidents, of shipwrecks, names marked with crosses on casualty lists. The relations of the facts to the dream descriptions appeared quite vague to Urban; sometimes he couldn’t discern any connection at all. One of the sheaves contained his grandfather’s records of his own dreams. Some of the texts were harrowing, images of awful, unimaginably brutal events, which had haunted him for months and years. He also came across a copy of Life magazine. It was the issue of May 7, 1945. It was folded open to page 34. Among other things, the page displayed the photo of a young man who had squeezed his head, shoulder, and left arm out from under a wall made of boards—indeed, had literally tunneled through the hard ground in his mortal fear before the flames had overtaken him nonetheless—Joshua Seidenspinner’s friend Daniel.

  Another sheaf contained theoretical considerations. Urban hadn’t known that his grandfather had had a twin brother who had died on the day of their birth. For a long time, the idea seemed to have preoccupied him that that brother had not really died, but lived in a sort of intermediate world, from which he made contact with him in dreams. I’m firmly convinced, he wrote at one point, that there are perhaps not many, but nonetheless a considerable number of people who possess the gift of communicating with dream worlds in which things take a different course than in this our world, dream worlds in which a divergent fate befalls their doppelgängers.

  Urban raised his head and closed his eyes. The interplay of sun and cloud shadows was chanted by the metallic creaking of the gutters expanding and contracting in their attachments. The slavery of matter under the inexorable laws of thermodynamics, a constant senseless back-and-forth of energy, which obeyed the thrust toward entropy. Those were calculable and comprehensible physical facts, but what sort of laws would enable the human brain to depart the limits of its reality and perceptually infiltrate other realities?

  Finally he came across the notes on the pivotal conversation with Samuel Liebermann.

  At that time I had lapsed somewhat into parapsychological speculations, studying the life courses of identical twins who had lived apart for a long time, but I had the sense that this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had once again met Sam for lunch at
Strandhaus; we had drunk a fresh Chablis and were in a cheerful mood. As we strolled toward Karlsplatz, I noticed that one of Sam’s shoelaces had come undone and was dragging through the puddles.

  “Your shoelace is untied, Sam,” I said.

  Sam stopped and looked down at himself thoughtfully. Then he scratched his side-whiskers and shook his head.

  “The price of tying it would be too high,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam made a theatrical gesture that encompassed the silhouette of the city before us. “A new Karlskirche, a new Secession—even if unfortunately still without the golden head of cabbage—a new Stephansdom, a new Vienna along with its environs, a new Austria—God forbid!—a new Europe, in the end a new solar system, not to mention the galaxy and the universe. Tell me, André, doesn’t that sound somewhat too costly to you too? Well, then.”

  He shuffled on impassively, the open shoelace trailing behind him.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Sam replied with dignity. “That’s what it would indeed amount to.”

  “If you bent down and tied your shoelace?”

  “That is correct,” he replied.

  “Would you allow me to tie it for you?”

  “Please. In doing so, you would relieve me of the great responsibility, my friend, of having doubled the world—no, the universe.”

  I kneeled down and tied his shoe.

  “All right, seriously now,” I groaned, as I stood back up. “What do you mean by all this?”

  “That the world reproduces itself with every decision made.”

  “And you believe that?” I asked him.

  “I haven’t completely made up my mind yet, but the idea is remarkable. An extremely interesting interpretation of quantum theory. Elaborate, yes, but substantially more simple than the Copenhagen interpretation, which not even Einstein understands—or rather doesn’t have a high opinion of, because it presupposes that the human mind can through a mental effort force matter in a mystical fashion to arrive at a decision.”