Meanwhile, In Italy

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The lampposts blinked against the black, the streets of the Capitol overcome by sheets of rain and the hyperactive heaving of their windshield wipers. She was drunk, and the rain and the Capitol tussled under the blanket of wind, the city’s bleary incandescence birthing halos like red and blue and yellow laughter. The night felt greedy to her, and hungry, and heavy. Finger skating over the misty window, she connected the dots of the metropolitan constellation.

The car’s tires swished and the engine downshifted and merged with a steaming circuit of brake lights. Red connecting black. White foam hit the medians. Lost in the span of D.C. night, their little car blew through the shards of void between the lamp-streaked streets, crossed by diminishing crimsons and hypnotic turn signals. Eleanor closed her eyes.

Notes on a cold old piano chased after her head behind them. She would have asked the driver to go faster but now it did not matter. He could not drive far enough.

The rain rolled off the windshield and sluiced away hissing. She began to write in her head:

Last night, Solomon Bunt died. Four months ago, few knew who…

What music he made has now been burned off and shoveled out like coke, like words read and released to make room for new memories. Barely alive unto death, Solomon Bunt never recorded a note…

Old enough to have been addicted and young enough to quit it. Didn’t, but supplemented his urges with drink and drowsy parables. Solomon Bunt, DEAD AT 53.

Neither the woman nor her driver were invited to Bunt’s cousin’s house in Baltimore, where the body would not be on display. But they were two of too many folks with pad and eager pencil waiting to put the legend to bed. Sam wrote that Solomon played piano like the devil was hiding under the keys. Solomon banged with a frenetic fear, his obituary read, either trying to outpace the creature or pound it flat. Eleanor wrote that he played the piano with his whole body, or that maybe his whole body was the piano, his heart a chipped and solid piece of ivory.

But Solomon Bunt is dead now, and now there is nothing but a cousin in Baltimore and unrecorded strife. A few bootlegs surface from time to time and sell for so much. But who knows what is really on those tapes? They never begin with an introduction, or conclude. It is just a rough amputation of cluttered jazz, improvisation until the banging stops. It rolls over as the tape flips into static. It was still raining.

“I have a job for you,” Sam said.

“I don’t want it,” she said.

The glowing rotunda of the capitol building peaked above the road. The rain bashed the hood of the car with renewed candor.

“If you don’t want it I’ll give it to someone else,” he said.

“Please do.”

A long pickup screamed past them on the shoulder.

Sam rubbed his chapped hands over the steering wheel and tried to catch her eye in the mirror. “As long as you’re working commercial pap,” he said, “and I’m stationed at the bottom of the barrel... I mean, I know your agency won’t be covering these guys.”

Eleanor pulled her slicker tighter around her shoulders and slid her finger down the line of her abandoned galoshes. Her bare feet glowed pale against the car seat. “I don’t want to think about music right now.”

“Please,” he said.

“I want to think about my cat.”

“You’re trying to forget that you’re hungry,” Sam said.

Nothing but a growl answered him from the back seat.

“I’ll buy dinner. Can we talk about it over dinner?”

“Leave me alone.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

The rain flecked against the glass. Harder, it hit the roof with a tinny bustle, like an army of skeletons marching over their heads. It flecked against the windshield, now the passenger window, her window, the back window. Instinctively, she reached for the back of Sam’s seat––

The wheels locked. Sam wrestled with the wheel without knowing what he was doing—the trunk of the car flailed around with a lively desire to get ahead. Soupy fires burned like centripetal fairies before their eyes, the city’s lights caught in the revolving blast. She had no time to think. Sam screamed.

She gasped when they did not hit the dividing wall; they continued to spin. Faster and faster. The walls rushed by and back but they did not hit. Cars in the approaching lane blared screaming in a frightened, disintegrating V. Sam stomped on the brake—the car just spun faster. They did not hit the wall. But as she tried to free herself from her tangled raincoat, Eleanor cracked her skull on the window.

The trees on the roadside reached out for their headlights. Eleanor’s galoshes pitched over the dashboard. A white minivan collided with the edge of their headlight and the light went mad. Eleanor collided with the passenger seat. She was bleeding.

The van slid with them as the world turned up and they all went backwards, all the cars in all the lanes to Baltimore, all the falling lights and falling rain. They went down, down, down, the street tilting higher and higher. The little blue car smashed against the far median and screeched. She couldn’t hear her voice over the whine of metal on concrete. Rain splattered the front windshield, headed straight down. They slid back. They fell away from the wall and dropped into the open night.

Branches snapped under the plummeting car. The trees reached. They flipped upside down, the gulf of horizon below, and crumpled upon the last tree. Black. She blinked. And black. Eleanor touched her wet forehead. And black. They slid back. Sirens. Purple and blue lights. Black sticky syrup in her hair. Purple and blue sirens. Black. Her wet hand shook uncontrollably. Lightning. She felt sick. They slid back. She called for Sam.

The glass splintered. They were in the river. Water began to fill the cab. It iced her knees, and her hips. She gasped for air, the firetrucks, and the ambulances. And the world began to turn again. Water showered down on her––her slicker had her in a chokehold, wrapped between her neck and the broken seatbelt––so she reached up, but fell back, too dizzy. And black. They slid back. She called for Sam. “Eleanor!” Sam screamed.

She took a deep breath. Her throat was sore and ragged, her face wet. Her body shook all over. She whipped her neck about––her seatbelt was still wrapped snug against her shoulder.

Sam had parked just beyond the overpass. Neither of them was underwater because the rain had stopped and he was shaking her awake. She had cried in her sleep.

Meanwhile, in Italy…

In Italy, every citizen grows a fruit tree and every yard is mingled. So if it’s within reach, it’s yours.

It’s important to remember this, first, because the country will make you very hungry. If you don’t believe it, starvation may be more important to you than the truth. And second, because you will not find tree trunks in the cities. Instead, branches sprout directly from the time hanging over your head.

You see, time stands still in Italy. In that place, it is space that moves fourth-dimensionally. Length and depth remain, of course, but time replaces width (if you examine a map you can see that this is true).

Because fruit is in no short supply, neither are neighbors, and no one worries about where to find water because the Venetians have built it a city to live in. So some things are no problem at all. Other things are problems of peculiar specificity. Lost dogs, for instance, live in the shadow of Campania’s volcano, where everybody locks their doors. Dogs should live in Umbria, because there trees wear dresses to block the sun’s stunning closeness, and house all sorts of squirrels and vermin to eat. But many dogs starve in Italy. The fruit is too high and time is inedible and the Campanians despise visitors of all breeds. They might just be volcanoes in disguise.

In Umbria, locks are ornamental and used as puzzles for children. But everybody knocks, no matter where they are. They knock out, they knock in, they knock knocks, but they don’t knock clocks. Time might stand still in Italy, but it does knock back.