Meanwhile, In Italy

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

He dropped her at the small apartment on the edge of the city where they said their goodbyes. He asked if she wanted him to come up. She said no. It was too messy. Before that it was too plain. Previously, the cat had shed over everything. And before that there was no cat.

Before that they shared the rent. Now they just shared faith in each other. At this point, figured Sam, the apartment itself existed on faith. He had to believe that it was still there. Otherwise, it might be gone tomorrow, and her with it.

It was three in the morning and he really wanted a sandwich, and maybe some kind of enlightenment, if it could be had at a decent price. All that was open was the cheap diner across from his office, and it was full of gravy. So he took that and then he went to work.

The studio was cramped and contained two desks, one of which had become an open-air filing cabinet. The other had just enough space for a forehead.

Sam sauntered behind the space, breathed in its thick must, lit a bent lamp and let himself be sucked into the old leather chair. Pulling a fat manila folder from a pile of fat manila folders stacked waist-high with his desk, he swiped it open and perused again its slipshod contents. It had arrived a few days before they’d left for Baltimore.

The phone rang.

“Do you want to go out?” Eleanor asked when he answered it.

“I’m still out,” he said. “I’m at the office.”

“You call it an office...”

A comfortable pause settled between them. He had not realized he’d been smoking. “Where do you want to go?” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just realized I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m too tired. Your cups are still here. And your chair,” she said dreamily. “I’ve been meaning to ask what you’ve been drinking out of.”

“I haven’t,” he said.

“Not at all?”

“No. I’ve given up on drinking. I now get all my moisture from standing outside with my mouth open.”

“Stop it,” Eleanor said. “I need you to be serious.”

“OK,” he said without hiding his disappointment.

“What job did you want me to do?”

“I thought it would take your mind off Solomon,” he said. “I felt bad we couldn’t run your interview before he—before this week,” he finished.

“I wish you had,” she said.

“I know. We just didn’t have the room.”

Eleanor sighed. He heard her bending and returning to the receiver. The cat was with her now. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m running it for mine and it’s probably going to get twice the attention it would have when he was alive.”

“See,” Sam said. “It all works out.”

“Oh you’re a piece of work,” Eleanor muttered into the cat’s fur. “What job did you want me to do? I don’t think I can stand another local band.”

“They’re not local.”

“No?”

Sam turned in his chair and leaned back, far back, into the eddies of dust curling in his lamp’s one eye. “I know you went through the folders. I think you know what I’m going to say.”

Eleanor sighed. “I don’t want to see Reginald Sly play rhythm guitar,” she said after a prickly silence.

“They’re called ‘Docile Satellites’ and they play by the water tomorrow. If I go I won’t write about it. If you go, we can do something. They’re here for a week.” Sam flipped through the folder again, a few pictures, posters and adverts, a demo tape, and a stained plectrum. “It’s easy money. And it’s up to you.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Why would I spend a week with any of these kids and their magniloquent imbroglio—”

“The last group you interviewed was in their thirties.”

“Children, you’re all children,” she continued.

“Docile Satellites.”

“Exactly.” He heard the cat moving around. “Why not ask Erica to cover them? They’re supposed to be good.”

“That’s what I hear. That’s what he tells me, anyway.”

“You talk to him?” she asked.

“A few times a year,” he said. “More often since the band came together. Erica is in Charleston this week.”

“And that’s the scope of your magazine’s staff,” Eleanor said.

“I had a better journalist but she left me for the big leagues,” he admitted. “The pay is much better.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“I do but it doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “She was right to go.”

“Fine,” Eleanor said. “I’ll go.”

Meanwhile, in Italy

Not to put too fine a point on it, but because space is fourth-dimensional, it is also relativistic. Depending on how fast you live, you may be everywhere. If you live slowly, you may stay hidden for years. You can imagine how slow a day is, and an afternoon, if you have nothing much to do.

Dusk is infinite in some places. Elsewhere it is only morning. The night is expansive, and stars are raised on fruit and stray dogs wide enough to have died.

Souls radiate from Italian soil. This can be frightening, but the noisiest ghosts are the ones pinned under chunks of concrete time. In life they were splattered, and all they can do as ghosts is complain.

They will often ask other ghosts or even passersby, depending on the time, to pull them, free them, etc. They extend their ghostly flippers and lament like loons. But splattered in life, their spirit is gooey. So you can tell a tourist by whether or not their hands and clothes are covered in mashed disbelief. They will be sticky for the rest of their journey. Their vacation will smell and they will forget everything about Italy except that it was hot and putrid and that dogs barked at them as if they carried jam in every pocket.

I realized this just after a mid-afternoon tavola when I helped a stranger to his feet. He told me he was on his way to gather flowers when he was waylaid.

“Have you been to the flower shop on the road to Gehenna?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, sniffing the air. Had I spilled juice on my clothes? “I’m trying to find Milano,” I explained, and handed him my map.

“It’s that way,” he said, and pointed to the northernmost tip with fingers that passed over it like a cloud.