Global Deception

“I’m out of my mind right now. Please leave a message.”

It was a clever joke on the t-shirt. It was no joke to him.

As he sat on the stone wall, the sound of water trickling gently in the fountain behind him, he was sure he was going mad. Half-turning to look, he wondered if the fountain was real itself, or just a projection. He wondered if he dared wade into the fountain to see, but wasn’t sure enough the policeman across the way watching him wasn’t real. So he sat, rocking slightly to and fro, waiting for the fall of night.

It began last Sunday, best he could reckon. It felt like ages, considering he had slept so poorly since then. What was most maddening was he couldn’t quite remember where it was when it happened. Somewhere in one of the public streets, he stood far off to one side where people never walked. Normally it was covered by the river’s flow, but that day the water had been damned upstream while some repair took place under a bridge. For just a moment, he stepped down the slippery stonework on the embankment, because he wanted to see downstream from that lower angle, normally not possible without stepping into the water.

Perhaps he was already mad from birth. No one else ever asked the questions he asked. Not just the silly childlike questions, such as, “Why is the sky blue?” After he understood the physics of refraction and atmospheric gas mixtures, he would ask what would have to be added or removed to make it green, or some of the other common colors.

Disappointed the view from below the normal water level offered nothing interesting, he turned to climb back up the muddy stone slope. As he did so, for just an instant, his eyes passed over the far side of the open plaza — one of dozens in the city — and he saw something he never noticed before. It was a tiny glimpse of framework just over the top of one building. It seemed odd, because as soon as he took another step, it disappeared. He nearly fell, and couldn’t quite regain that spot, and wasn’t quite sure exactly where it was again.

Standing on the top of the bank again, he stared for quite some time in the general direction of where he thought he spotted this strange thing, but never saw anything but the ancient stone, wood and ceramic structures of centuries past. Had the framework been simply black, he would have dismissed it as something stuck in his eyes, but it was clearly aluminum colored, and very precisely curved and round, like well designed lightweight framing for an experimental aircraft, or some of the architectural student projects at the university.

He walked toward where he thought it had been. Shop fronts, multiple floors with storage or apartments, uneven roof lines and a few facades. As he walked closer, he tried to remind himself not to absorb the scene as something he passed a hundred times before, but to see it afresh. As he stood examining the awning of a bakery, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a movement. Something in his brain registered it as an anomaly, though not fully conscious. Behind him a couple of people suddenly began yelling rudely at each other. Even as he turned, a mob was gathering, and before his eyes quite took in the scene, the sound of police whistles and a couple of sirens. It meant, of course, he needed to leave the area immediately, as the police notoriously rounded up everyone in the vicinity of any unusual noisy mob like this.

Again, somewhere in his mind, just below the conscious level, it registered his hand had brushed a flat surface, yet he was at least two full strides from the nearest solid structure, and no other person was near him. As he ran down an alley leading away behind the shops, his mind suspended the signals for awhile. All his attention was focused on getting away from the plaza, and this meant zig zagging through a warren of alleys, ancient stairways, porticoes, etc.

Alone in his bed that night, he dozed, troubled with insistent mental activity just off to one side of his exhaustion. Suddenly he came upright. As the fuzz and smoky dream world faded, the image stood in stark clarity: His hand had brushed a flat surface where there should have been open air. He glanced at the spot on the edge of his hand, which in memory tingled from the feel of something almost like fine-grained sandpaper. He didn’t sleep any more that night, as he struggled to connect the odd sensation with a specific place.

For reasons no could ever explain, he failed to match the place with the experience. The next day, after finishing his job, he wandered, searching for the place where the river, which meandered throughout the entire city, had been drained for the bridge repair. He never found any sign of it. Just about every open plaza faced the river, backed by pretty much the same architecture. So he kept checking each bakery, as there were dozens. He walked around in front of each, but worried about putting his hands out like a blind man. Odd behavior like that brought too much attention, first from some helpful passerby, and then the ubiquitous police.

Still, he persisted in an almost feverish effort every evening. Each night, he went home and slept poorly, if at all. It was always the same. As soon as the real world began slipping away, the sensation would strike him with forceful clarity, and the glimpse of the framework haunted him. Finally, he decided there was no point in going back to his tiny apartment, since he wasn’t going to sleep. Instead, he vowed to stop and wait until it got dark, when feeling his way around would not draw so much attention.

Having numbered each plaza in his mind, he went to the first in the sequence and waited. It occurred to him he was very lucky it was Friday night, when wandering around until the wee hours of the morning was not all that unusual. As he sat, his mind wandered again through all the possible explanations. His tentative conclusion was utterly insane: One part of that plaza, at least, was fake. There was some kind of screen covering the real world, and an image was projected onto this screen which no one seemed to notice. As it rose upward, to prevent a wandering gaze from noticing the distortion as from standing too close to a theater movie screen, he figured it was formed of angled panels, or perhaps even curved. Somehow, his brief exposure from an unusually low angle of view had allowed him to see through a gap in these various sections of the projection screen.

Or he was completely insane. It was almost dark, and the window in the bakery was dark. Just another five minutes…