November 07.  I left my observatory around noon to visit the trade center, Fiera Di Roma, for an exposition entitled Elettronica Spazio Energia, or some such name.

The streets abounded with carabinieri, vigilanza, polizia and sicurezza:  the ubiquitous presence of the police force.  Sirens penetrated the city.  Surveillance helicopters droned through the sky.  Shortly before Sao Paolo, a metro stop already out in the suburbs, my ticket was checked by a control troop.
Police occupied the largest booth in the fair.  I entered with some hesitation and mingled with the other visitors, most of whom were attended by police personnel.  Though profusely displayed, the exhibits themselves didn‘t impress me:  a camouflage patrol car with computer-controlled laser tracking and infra-red video cameras,  a voice recognition computer,  a counterfeit detector, &c.
I proceeded fairly quickly to a giant tv, a Grundig Monolith, featuring a program on state-of-the-art, interception-proof police data networking.  A simple computer animation demonstrated diagrammatically how messages were carried by extremely faint flashes of light, only one photon per flash.  Each flash had a certain linear polarization, oscillating either horizontally or vertically, and a particular circular polarization with the electric field rotating in a left-handed or right-handed sense about its direction of travel.  There was no way to measure the linear and circular polarizations simultaneously.  Measuring one would disturb the other and unpredictably alter the polarization, thus irrevocably scrambling the message, alerting the sender of an eavesdropping presence.

Next to me stood a woman in officer‘s uniform.  She introduced herself rather informally as Fiorella, and offered to guide me through the exhibition.
Beside the Monolith, crouched on caterpillar tracks, brooded a small bomb deactivator, which she affectionately had named "Pedro."  Last week, tied to a remote-control console by a bright yellow umbilical cord, 125 m long, and directed via a concealed video camera, he had climbed 4 flights of stairs leading to the hide-out of a wanted criminal.  A rifle in his robot hand, he had broken through the barricading and shot and killed the man.  Fiorella described the mission with definite pride.  Did she like machines?  She scanned me with seductive delight and answered in a passionate "yes!"
She directed me into a separate, dimmed cubicle.  The sole object inside, lit with a spotlight, was a vertical glass plate in a metal frame, 1 meter in diagonal, 16:9 format.  The illumination faded.  On the glass appeared a hologram of the fontana di Trevi, somewhat overexposed, which conveyed the impression of peeking through an underwater observation window.  Caught frozen still, or advancing at an indeterminable pace:  a crowd of spectators wearing bluish coats and hats.  Vivid yellow neon letters illuminated a little background spectacle on the left: ANTICOLL shoes, RENDI shoes.  Pan to the center, past SEGATORI, the corner store, to the stone Neptune who pointed intentionally towards the fountain rim in the foreground.  There, drawn between the viewers, blurred as though recorded with a slow shutter speed, I distinguished the traces of what turned out to be a group of people in motion.  As I homed in on them, they, or rather their projection, slowed down even more.  I distinguished two Gypsy teenagers, a boy of maybe 12 and a tall girl, around 14, pestering an elderly Japanese man.  The girl fumbled his shoulder.  He warded her off with his right arm, opening his coat like a door.  The boy's left hand slipped from underneath a piece of cardboard, which he held with his right hand, into the coat pocket, extracting the man‘s wallet.  The group disbanded.  The kid dropped his prop which was now clearly recognizable as a laminated page, blood-stained and covered with illegible writings.  When he turned back to pick it up and faced towards me, I realized that the youngster was myself.
At this point the presentation broke off.  Although Fiorella disclosed some of the technical aspects  -the rendering by a massively parallel processing computer, the N-Cube- she ignored my question as to how I got to be part of this spurious replay.  She inquired instead about my reasons for being in Rome.  When I mentioned Athanasius Kircher, she became very excited.  She knew a Jesuit priest, from her university years, who worked on reinstating the Kircher Museum.
"If you want to, I can get you together with padre Guido.  Yes?"
Considering that Fiorella could possibly advise me how to proceed in getting the cassette back, I told her the audience story.
She suggested we check with the Identikit and took me to an Olivetti PC with a 21" color monitor.  Linked to the network, it could instantly access a data bank with over 1,000,000 faces of criminals, famous personalities, but also police personnel.  She closed the demo program which ran an automatic step by step reconstruction of the pope's face and waited to enter my descriptions of the security officer.  But in my memory, the face of the man -who had immediately disappeared after the incident- was fuzzy, stereotypical of any security man anywhere in the world, beyond recall.
My answers to her questions  -e.g., had I written a letter to Vatican police-  were negative.  She shook her head and said: "Male, male - not good at all."
She had connections to the Vatican police and the Curia.  Maybe, she could pull some strings though it would require time.
I called her a week later.  Meanwhile, she had already met with Monsignore Carlo, a secretary member of Vatican State, and had scheduled an appointment in his office on the third Loggia for December 13.
Padre Guido was in Moscow.  I wrote to him, including a letter of introduction from Fiorella, asking for an interview upon his return to Rome.
 
 

I accessed Città del Vaticano through the Cancello di Sant' Anna.  Stopped and queried at two checkpoints, I was at last admitted into the Bastion of Nicholas V.  The architectural immensity of the interior impressed me as reminiscent of the government building in Monty Python's Brazil.
A wrong turn in the Belvedere hallway and I was lost.  Deserted corridors branched right and left like streets in a city of the dead.  A strange though not unpleasant smell of sacred lemon-scented detergent rose from the floor.  Obscure stairways ever narrowing, sparsely adorned with antique statues, eventually tapered to a dark passage leading into the thickness of the wall.  My curiosity tempted me further…

"Che cerci?"  A voice from behind me.  A course of fear.  I turned and, to my great relief, confronted a Swiss guard.  This time, at least, I could communicate.  He escorted me to a waiting elevator, attended by a discretely uniformed operator.
Third loggia.  Monsignore Carlo appeared immediately.  A short, dark-haired man with puffed eyes.  When he talked, he avoided looking at me, and before every new sentence, he would almost close his eyes and rotate his eyeballs up, so that only the white remained visible. 
He gave me the phone number of maresciallo Cibin, chief of the guardia vigile, whom I should give a ring in about a week.  By then, the return of the cassette would be arranged.

I called, several times, but always got the same, though very polite answer by some anonymous operator that the maresciallo had just left, was out of house, his time of return uncertain, maybe to try again in ten minutes  - no, that wouldn't be good either, maybe better the next morning &c.  Finally, one operator told me that all confiscated material was regularly screened by a panel of pontifical censors.  The undesired scenes would be erased and the cassette sent back to me.
As advised, I rang back two months later.  None knew about any censuring panel.  This was pure nonsense.  I should discuss the matter with Cibin personally, later…
In the following months, I attempted time and again to consult with monsignore Carlo, but he reacted ever more distant, evasive, seemingly annoyed about my inability to contact Cibin.  Only shortly before my departure from Rome he told me not to bother him anymore.  The affair was much too delicate and dangerous to his career, and hung up.
(Later, Fiorella told me that he had been extremely bothered by my wearing an earring…)

March 19, 1991.  A crash of the Syquest drive corrupted the large interactive Hypercard document "The Kircher Itinerary," blasting most of the data which I had accumulated over the past two years into magnetic oblivion?
 

April 15, 1991.  Collegio Romano, nine o‘clock meeting with padre Guido.  He had written back early April, saying that for a while now his letters were always beginning with excuses;  in my case he was particularly sorry to respond so late.  Reason being what could only be called a state of trance from burdenings in various fields.  The long period of his quiescence over, he would be glad to show me some of the latest acquisitions in his collection of curios.
The portiere lead me up to a dusty attic, explained how to get to the study of the padre and took his leave.
Dim overhead lighting cast long shadows down to the narrow corridors between boxes of uncatalogued material, inventory of the former Kircher Museum:  animal specimens, stones and fossils, antique artifacts, forgotten musical instruments and diverse automata, mechanisms with perforated cards, most of them neglected or damaged in adverse times.
Suspended on a long cord below the ceiling, a circular, dusty mirror, blind remnant of the catoptrics section.  In the heydays of the museum, a visitor would have seen the reflection of his own head slowly transforming into a donkey, a pig and other animal heads projected onto the mirror from a rotating disk hidden inside a cabinet below.
Not far away, the noseless stone bust of a fortune-teller which once deluded the spectator with speech emanating from her mouth, uttered with a terrifying voice.  The prophecies had fallen silent long ago but for a subdued static background noise, which trickled over her mute lips, as though rising from a secret interior duct of unfathomable depth.  The wooden dog beside it used to respond by barking, a sound so realistic that it could excite real dogs to bark.
Suddenly, between these two figures, appeared a man in Renaissance garb, staggeringly drunk, a golden nose adorning his reddened face.  He produced a stick and assumed a rather precarious fencing stance.  He did not challenge me or even notice my presence, but addressed an invisible opponent to my right, and began air-fighting with exaggerated vehemence, as though it were a matter of life and death.  Defense, then attack, and with a final stab, he pierced a cardboard box.  Its lid burst open and a rat jumped at him.  He parried rather adroitly, flung the rodent away and dissolved into an anthropomorphic female bat, stapled to a wall.  The rat landed beneath her, bounced, and split into three.  The apparition froze.  The bat and the three rats vanished before my eyes…

Where the storage area ended, a narrow spiral staircase lead down to an empty gallery.  Way back was the office of padre Guido.
The Jesuit, in his seventies, looked familiar.  As soon as he started to speak, I remembered:  the lecture on anamorphosis by Jean-Pierre Le Goff, concluding part of the lunedi della prospettiva series at the istituto.  During the following discussion, padre Guido, "only a poor Jesuit" (his own words) had dilated on Athanasius Kircher‘s anamorphic exploits, and concluded declaring him a predecessor of today‘s computer hackers, yet slightly unevenly because of an impediment of his speech.
Today, he stammered severely, excusing himself with the pretext that through continually working in optics and, more recently, in electronic imaging, he had nearly lost the faculty of speech.  The illusion in the attic, entitled "Brahe disappearing," was conjured up by a predecessor of the projettore di animazione, which I had seen at the Fiera Di Roma.  This apparatus and other donated scientific equipment would be part of the future nuovo museo Kircheriana.
Carefully omitting any further proposition to show me more of the Kunstkammer, he asked, or rather interrogated me about my interests in perspective, reading from a questionnaire.  He suggested multiple choice answers, acknowledged each of my responses with a "hm" and correspondingly checked black or white squares or circles printed on a separate sheet.  After exactly 45 minutes, he terminated our session.  Propounding I should see the carteggio Kircheriana, Kircher‘s manuscripts, he gave me a card, hand-written ?padre Monachino, archivist, Università Pontificia Gregoriana.  April 16, 1991 9:00 am.?

Padre Monachino, a very youthful octogenarian, spoke German with remarkable fluency.  Already informed about the purpose of my visit, and convinced that I had a scholarly concern for the matter, he asked which document I wished to look at.  A letter by Nicolas Steno came to mind, of which I had once read while working on "Dirt Site."  I hesitated - and hazarded to confess that I simply wanted to see the manuscripts, possibly video tape them.
He gaped at me, as though irritated by the brazen request, but immediately relaxed, his countenance becaming overtly amused: "Ah, Sie wollen das sacro sanctus sehen! - Ah, you want to see the sacro sanctus !"

Padre Monachino unlocked the door to the archive and turned on the fluorescent lights.  Arrayed in six or seven rows and studding the walls, the metal shelves abounded with bound manuscripts, some in mint condition, others crumbling away in dire need of preservation.  Kircher‘s correspondence, collected in 14 books, was located in the rear.  Padre Monachino pulled out volume XI, containing Steno‘s letter, from a lower shelf and carried it to a desk by the entrance.  He leafed through the laminated, semi-transparent pages.  „65…  I believe, this should…“  He broke off and checked with the index.  „No, it‘s on page 269.  One moment…  67, 68…“  He rubbed page 268 between thumb and index finger, but page 269, Steno‘s letter was missing.
I wish that I had video taped our meeting in its entirety.  Reviewing the fragmented scenes now, from three years‘ distance, I could at best hypothesize, how he deduced a perpetrator:  padre Celia (?), a scholar of Steno.  Wanted by the Nazis, he escaped to Brazil in 1944 and possibly took the letter with him;  a conjecture substantiated by the shot of a postwar listing showing a gap between letters # 266 and 271.  We both laughed at the posthumous discovery of padre Celia‘s misdemeanor from half a century ago.

August 25, 1991.  Early morning rain fell at almost a 45º angle upon the Institute.  St.Peter's had vanished from my view.  The Pantheon maintained visibility, though only as a slight disturbance or impurity in the fog.  A nice day for departure.
11 a.m., out of the blue, a call from Stella.  She had found the cassette in Cibin‘s archive.  It was not viewed yet because of difficulties in finding a playback machine for Hi8, a format not popular in Italy, but it would be sent back to me eventually.
At 7.p.m., my booklet "One Hour of Deception" was ready for pickup at the printer's.  I deposited the required 100 copies at the istituto, in front of the director's door, and quickly packed my things, video camera, Macintosh  &c.
 

Roma Termini, about 9:30 pm., by a newspaper stand.  Waiting for the train to Switzerland.  The August issue of sapere featured an article "On Preservation of Old Manuscripts" with a chapter on lamination.  This method, promoted by the chemical industry in the sixties, sandwiched the documents between two thin plastic foils, invariably sealing tiny air-bubbles, an ideal climate for bacteria which digest the paper, i.e., in time transforming it into microbial feces…
Screams…
The newspaper lady gestured wildly after a woman who hastened away and disappeared among the crowd before I could make the connection between her and the pool of blood on the near platform.
I asked the newspaper lady to keep an eye on my bags and went to investigate the puddle whose surface suddenly began vibrating.  From its center bulged a mat of wiggling cyan-colored fibers.  One of these writhing strands broke loose, and rose, swelling with rapid reptation.  It burst into a spray.  A cloud of bubbles formed, which subsequently coalesced to a spumescent globule with oscillating folds and kinks.  Within a few turbulent seconds, the foam shed and exposed a tiny brown rat, hovering some short distance above the mass of still slithering fibers, defying gravity.
A new strand reached up, clung hold of and coiled around the rat.  Other strands followed suit, in time covering the whole of its fragile body.  A sudden impulse to save the rat.  I grabbed it, ferociously peeling off and discarding the serpentine creatures.
The rat still shivered when I passed it on to the newspaper lady.
"Il ratto di Schrödinger  -  Schrödinger's rat", she remarked and by an impervious sleight of hand, it simply vanished…
The train arrived, and the lady said good-bye to me.
On the platform, there was no trace of blood.

In the compartment, just as the train departed, I noticed the rat, fast asleep next to my seat.  It had pissed on the cover, leaving an inexpressible stink.  Worse though, the bag which contained my computer, the video card and the Syquest drive was missing…

Opposite me, positioned upright against the forward facing window seat:  a dwarf.  Though the only other passenger in the compartment, he seemed to ignore me and my nugatory attempts to somehow discover or conjure back the lost bag among my luggage.
When the lights were turned off, I sensed that he stared at me, but in the darkness I couldn‘t tell whether his eyes were opened or closed.  A circular after-image from the lamp rising in front of my eyes diverted me.  Gradually, its initial purple periphery streamed towards the colorless center, followed by blue and other spectral hues, fading to a pale tin gray disk which dropped to the floor with a dull knock.
I touched it, felt metal surface and seized it.
It was a can of cat food.
I thought of feeding the rat, but, when I turned my head, having felt a touch and breath from my right, there was a lion.  It took hold of me by the thighs with its claws, without harming me and, humbling itself before me, as though asking forgiveness, began to lick me.
The doors were opened with a loud report, blue lights turned on and two customs officers entered.  The lion had disappeared and the rat was nowhere in sight.  The dwarf was still standing, a rigid statue oscillating to the rhythmic bumping of the train.  Neither interested in passports nor luggage, though commenting on the smell, the officers sat down on the two seats by the entrance and started to play dice.  My protests were silenced by their simultaneous: "Psst…, we are gambling over the fate of the rat."
An elderly man appeared in the door frame.  "Signore An?"  I acknowledged.  He handed me an envelope, had me sign a receipt and turned to leave.  The officers saluted:  "Ciao Schrotinger?"
"Schrödinger??"  I jumped up, made for the corridor and was stopped by the officers.  Now, they insisted to see my passport?
I had been deceived by a misapprehension.  Schrödinger the physicist, of course, had died in 1961.  The person, the newspaper lady and the officers were referring to, was in fact signore Schrotinger, the sleeping-car attendant.  The envelope contained padre Guido‘s questionnaire with the evaluation of my answers.  The number of squares determined my historical affinity and the total of white and black dots respectively signified empirical and cerebral dispositions.  The score classified me as a human of the twenty-first century with Goldorac inclinations, attributes like the alliance of the angel with the computer, of the samurai with the flea, the future engender of the new crusades…
I woke up.
The dwarf had turned on his reading light.  He presented me a sheet of laminated manuscript covered with extremely dense and intricate designs, concentric circles, intersecting arcs and lines, and bands closely overwritten with very tiny alien letters.  Following the text with his left index finger he read, whispering:  "On handling signs  - an alteration to the conclusion of studies."  He scratched the plastic surface, loosened, peeled away and flicked the twisting protective foil on to the paisley blanket covering his seat.  When he tried to pick up the foil again, it moved across the fabric and slithered between the woven plant stems and leaves.  It disappeared where the main roots twined together in a curious knot as if they had been molded out of plastic.  The dwarf grinned and said it was only a slow-worm, then lost his balance, tilted clockwise, clapped to the seat stiff as a board and simply fell asleep…
Distressed thoughts fought off my sleep and dream.

Rapperswil, August 26.  My claims to the insurance company to cover the loss of the Mac were turned down.  To deduct it from my taxes, I needed a police report, and thus called up Fiorella.  When I began describing the bag to her, she interrupted me: "A gray travel bag?  Red zipper straps?  A golden label tag POROX?"  She broke into laughter.
Police from Valmontone, a village 40 km south of Rome, had just reported that a bag, as it turned out, my travel bag had been deposited in front of their station.  Fearing a booby trap, they had requested Pedro to go into action  - and Fiorella had just dispatched him…

Berlin, October 20.  The computer arrived in a wooden shipping container.  Still in the gray travel bag, together with other small personal items (an unfinished letter, the tessera for the Vatican library &c.) it seemed undamaged.  I connected everything and pressed the power button on the keyboard.  The computer simply booted up and a happy Macintosh icon appeared on the screen…

On November 12, the cassette was sent back to me, rewound. As I shuttled forward past 20 minutes with scenes of migrating starlings blackening the Roman sky, my hopes kindled that the tape was left intact.  The image turned suddenly white. I hit the play button. Out of this white, blurry at first and gradually caught by the autofocus, appeared the first of a series of cardinals, shot on October 28, 1990. A zoom-in for a close-up. He looked into the camera. Drop-outs occurred. I heard a "zip," and the dignitary collapsed into white noise.
The remainder of the cardinals and the incriminating scene were removed;  not electronically erased, but physically cut out - evidenced by a crude splice on the tape - as though the snippet was meant to be kept and stored somewhere in the archives of the Vatican. A scholar of late 20th century marginal church history might some day rediscover the footage.

I called the rat Felix. He lived behind the disused tiled stove in the bed-room, vanishing and reappearing as he liked. At nights, I would sometimes wake up, alerted by a blackness entering my dream, open my eyes and perceive Felix, a shadow perched on the quilt, next to my head, watching me. On June 27, 1993, when I looked for him to feed him supper, he lay dead on the tiles, already cold and stiff. I buried him under a tree near the little lake in the park of Schloss Charlottenburg.