“Some would say a crustacean’s form isn’t as interesting as its phylogeny. But of course others—”
“The only thing worth remembering is whatever’ll make us better.”
Which was a funny thing to say, because neither science nor history had anything really to do with goodness, though perhaps religion—which they both foreswore—began there. Not religion, she would’ve said, but morality. Not morality, he would’ve said, but survival. But survival, she would’ve said, was cannibalism; goodness was self-sacrifice.
He didn’t tell her about his diagnosis because that was real, and she was not; that was practical, something to be solved, and this girl was a cloud. Or: she was becoming the life he wanted, and his damaged nerves were not.
A suntanned man jogged past and spit at her feet. “Scimmia,” he said.
She kicked a spray of gravel at his retreating shape.
Shee-mee-a, a shimmery word.
“He thought I was an immigrant,” she said.
“We’re all immigrants.”
“Give me a break,” she said.
It meant monkey.
Beneath the villa’s terrace was a grotto where a stone woman was half-clothed in moss. Water trickled from hidden sources, and the shadows felt like a damp cloth to the forehead. The Janiculum girl was unswayed. She turned behind a column, squinted at him through the shade, put a finger to her lips. He was beginning to feel she didn’t always listen to what he said—or maybe he didn’t listen to her—and at some point, he feared, the sheen of her would be digested, no less delicious than diatoms in a seed shrimp’s belly, and he would find himself empty again. Independent. He crossed the stones slick with algae and pulled aside her finger and kissed her quiet mouth.
“You’re married,” she said.
The territory he’d recently entered, swampy and vast, had no edges. To confess to being married was to find a tree in this wide plain, cut straight and knotless planks out of it, build an even-cornered house from the wood, and then put himself inside it.
“I have been married,” he said.
She grabbed his face and pressed her nose angrily to his. “You self-involved bastard.”
Aldo the lab assistant was eating a bag of chips in the corner. He’d been helping with the mammalian subjects, i ratti, but was weak-stomached; they shifted him to the environmental sciences room, where it was believed nothing untoward happened. He mostly sat on a tall stool in the corner, snacking and taking notes. There was a suspicion he was working on a novel.
“Vai in vacanza?” he asked, one cheek pouched with chips.
Tom switched off the lights above a batch of small aquaria. “Cosa?”
Aldo repeated himself, then mimed swimming underwater. “You are preoccupato. I think maybe vacation.”
“You think I should go on vacation?”
“I can do this.” The young man gestured at the rows of tanks. “È facile.”
Tom laughed. The kid just wanted a raise. No, he assured him, he could perform his own duties.
Aldo shrugged, resumed his snack. Lazy bites.
And wasn’t Rome his vacation? [Rome is a dream; its cobbles are slick with sweat and lust, the stuff of sleep. You cannot move forward here, only up or down. Down: the Hadrian-built Aelian Bridge went tumbling in 1450, when the weight of jubilant Jubileers exceeded its architect’s wildest prophecies—the Tiber pulled under 172 souls. Up: above the Domus Aurea rose Trajan’s baths, and above that a neo-fascist club, and soon a 22nd-century Museo di Migrazione, paid for by the profits from genetically modified seeds. Or is it down: twenty-five feet below the building where the opera stores their sets, a Mithraeum abutted the Circus Maximus, so bulls bought at market could be slaughtered over grates, the blood dripping down onto nervous ancient heads. Or is it up: from the Castel Sant’Angelo, for centuries, fireworks dizzied over feast days, papal elections, pilgrimages—handprints in the night over the Tiber, over the 172 drowned souls. You cannot vacation in a phantasm.]
He finished shutting off the lights, giving one last swirl to the ostracods in their domains. Aldo was filling out the checklist left behind by the department chair. Tom lifted his satchel from a lab table and said, half jokingly, “Now, vado in vacanza!”
“Prova la Sardegna.”
Outside, a greenfinch rustled in the stone pine above him. He sat on a bench near an overgrown oleander and pulled the fishhook from his satchel. A young woman was guiding a group of visitors along the diagonal path that cut across the cortile. He hadn’t thought they’d give the same kind of admissions tours as American universities, but there she was, walking backward while speaking with great animation. A woman in the group was writing in a small notebook and wearing a green skirt, and this combination caused an unexpected ache in his heart—no, his hand—and when he looked down he saw that he’d clenched his fingers around the hook. Blessed literalized feeling.
It had only left a red groove in his palm, but he took the barbed end and began stroking the heel of his hand, lightly at first, then hard enough to be ashamed of what he was doing, then harder. The skin was thicker here, but he couldn’t abandon the pressure. Man versus body, the hook a tool, his one hand opening the other, wanting that red as evidence he could make a choice, that in his whirlpool life he had some measure of control, the pain a reminder he was alive and feeling was good, feeling was to be savored, not suppressed, that even hurt was better than numb.
There was the blood. He stopped, was horrified. Wondered what category of sin this was, and how it would be confessed. Il masochismo, mio figlio? No. Research.
His phone rang in the valley: like a warbler, only meaner.
He was untangling pteridophytes from spermatophytes. A microcosm was just a small world. Imagine a fish down there, an eel, caught in the limits of its environment—a lifetime spent circling a muddy room. It hunted for food, burrowed away from a heron’s splaying feet, called out on blue moons in case its sound echoed off the body of another eel. An eel who would find its own eel body smooth enough to adore. The plants were decoration. The water was invisible substrate. The drama was in the searching—in the not finding—in the waiting to find. When it was caught, would the drama end? [If I said happiness was in the relinquishing, who would believe me? Ask the eel, who spawns and dies. Ask your daughter, who’s learned to see first how others feel. Is the world losing her fiery shout, or is her whisper pushing the world on its rotation? What sacrifice have you made, son of God?]
The phone was calling from California. Daphne would be in school, so either his wife wanted to say something horribly practical about the future, or his wife wanted to tell him that the fourth-grade bullies had driven their daughter to flee through a window and she was lying in the hospital.
“How is it all feeling?” she said.
“Can I call you back?” he said. “I’m in the field.”
He shouldn’t have brought his phone at all.
“You know you’re not alone,” she said. “I mean, I think it must be nice to imagine that you’re alone over there. Maybe even a test run at splitting up. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it too. How good it feels to just— But you could stay over there for twenty years and you still wouldn’t be alone. You’re a human; you have memory.”
He sat back on his heels. “No one wants to isolate themselves,” he said, feeling like isolation was quite precisely what he did want, just for a while, like a long stay in the sensory deprivation tank, long enough to pinpoint which choices were his alone.
“Is it just that you’re tired? Bored?” She didn’t know him well enough to guess scared, or she knew him well enough not to say it. “My parents say I’m an idiot.”
“You seem very mature to me.”
“Well, there’s that. Maybe it’s just in my nature to exist in suspension without too much damage. Or I’m the one who’s tired. You have a way of making me— But your child needs some clarity. I’d like to tell her whether you’re coming home for Christmas, for one thing, a
nd whether you think you might ever come back to me—in a whole way.”
But there were no eels in the nymphaeum; they were river dwellers, needed access to the sea. They weren’t circular, like Tom.
“Tom?” He could see her holding the edge of the counter by the phone, her fingers tight on linoleum. Fingers he’d tasted each knuckle of. “Just say if you want to stop.”
His chest began to convulse. He closed his eyes. The Devil was scrabbling in his ventricles. This wasn’t an attack; this wasn’t an attack. Something in him separated, homunculi, one standing to the left and imagining the plane trip home (where was home? [wherever one does the most damage]) and that moment at the end of security when the arrivals were pinched past the detectors and shot out into the crowd of the waiting, all open-faced, expectant; and one standing to the right, imagining how it would feel to say just then, This is love, but this is not a marriage.
That summer they had gone to her cousin’s wedding, where someone in a tie-dye dashiki made a speech about love’s soothing properties while Daphne audibly groaned. It sounded like a drug. He had nodded along because some version of this benumbment was his lot too, and his wife reached for his fingers and pushed her own among them. Those once-devoured knuckles. What made people barnacle to each other if not fear? [Here’s a comfort: the ascendance of hope and fear are parallel; as you lose one, lucky boy, so too goes the other.] They danced during the dancing portion, spun slowly around the bride and her father, and only looking back was he shocked that he had held her body, any body, so casually. He felt the acid in the back of his throat.
“I want to stop,” he said.
The American war movie was dubbed in Italian, but the characters were too busy dying to speak much. Tom and the Janiculum girl had been driven inside by an afternoon storm. To the sound of artillery, he traced the skin of her arm, looping infinities between her elbow and wrist. A horse on-screen was caught in cross fire and bucked its way down to stillness; she dug her nails into his palm. Tom’s favorite part of moviegoing was the feeling of being cut off from the tangible world, from one’s own body—a sense of vacuum. Touching was not a part of it. Maybe it was because the celebrity on-screen was commanding his troops in a language Tom didn’t understand, but something allowed him to be both there and here, his body porous and autonomous. After the intermission, when a boy came around selling candy from a tray, Tom pushed the armrest up and twisted against her, his arm circling her waist and his head suctioned to her neck like a mussel to a rock. He heard her mouth open.
Stasis suddenly was the sweetest possible thing. He would take the batteries out of all the clocks and keep this film on a loop and give up his organs so he would have no needs other than to stay with his body around this body. She held his leg, her hand finding the spot where he’d cut into his skin, as if hurt were a magnet.
“Will you take me to the valley?” she said under the dubbed laughter of troops at rest.
Why did his fingers chill? [Because you’ve made the wild a hideout. Your Eden is where no moral decisions are made. But let’s get the chronology right; post-Eden can never be Edenic. The first sin was the ticket out of stasis. And the sin isn’t hers, she who’s exploring, questioning, consuming; it’s yours for thinking you’re somehow exempt. Do I need to crimp your neurons again?]
“There’s nothing really to see,” he said.
“Isn’t that the point?”
The postcard had been sent three weeks ago, a fossil from before the diagnosis.
Daddd,
Nothing happening here, Mom’s planting tomatoes that I won’t eat. No invitation to Benji’s birthday, it’s baseball-themed, no girls in MLB. If I got an invitation, I’d eat it and then fart it out, that’s how much I care about Benji. Invented new sport: boob-ball, Mom doesn’t think it’s funny. When I’m old I won’t need to go to Rome, I’ll be queen of my own universe. xoxoxo
The mailbox for his apartment, a soldier in a line of fellow boxes, had been empty since the beginning of September. No voice from the void, except for her. He flipped the postcard over: a photo of the Cabazon Dinosaurs. He remembered the stop off I-10, the towering Brontosaurus helpfully explained by the adjacent creationist museum. One of the world’s marvels that were so marvelous they paralyzed us with unbelief. He brought the card to his face, as if he could smell his daughter in its fibers, as if her touch hadn’t long been effaced by the friction of a thousand other envelopes, the steel hull of a ship, the ash from a clove cigarette smoked clandestinely in the mail-sorting facility in Ostia.
The Janiculum girl could use her cheek to search for the dead; Tom found himself too attached to the living. A fierce craving sprung up in the center of him, between his heart and his bowels—did he want to show this postcard to the Janiculum girl and watch for the reflected glow on her face, or did he want to tell his daughter about his unexpected infatuation, confess to her how lily-livered humans could be, how she would have to learn such unbearable patience to survive all the Benjis of the world? [Is that really her job?] No—that wasn’t her job; it was his job to be better.
Upstairs, he made a snack of grapes and honey and pulled out the blank card he’d been using as a bookmark in Paradiso, which he’d never finish. The terrace was flaming with sun. A fly settled on his plate and rubbed its hands together.
You’re right, Rome’s for knaves, he wrote, but please mail yourself over anyway.
“Glad to hear all things going apace. I’ve got you down for two sections of Intro; Lieber’s doing Senior Seminar. Once you get past midtenure review, you’ll get better picks. Speaking of that devil, it’d be great to have a commitment from Hydrobiology before your file gets passed up the ranks. Let’s get that squared by May. Soon you’ll be over here in the green pastures of crushing committee work. Nose to the grindstone, or whatever the Romans say.”
Sgobbare, to slave away, labor being not the price of freedom but its reverse.
Tom could carve a cave into the fresh mud along the Almone, and he wouldn’t miss a single element of the nonwild world except that which he’d created with his own body: his child and his precarious desire.
“I don’t want to teach two sections of Intro,” he wrote, and deleted.
Dr. Tromba asked doctorly questions while he obfuscated. He worried his soul would show up as a black mark on the MRI.
“Are you getting enough sleep?” she asked.
“Yes,” he lied. Easily.
“Are you feeling betrayed? At all?”
“Pardon?”
“There is a common feeling when our bodies cease to be reliable. An anger. And this can have effects on the emotions.”
He’d read in the brochures about the higher rates of depressione, disturbi dell’umore, disturbances of the humors. His humors did indeed feel more turbulent than normal. If lesions were available to be blamed, he’d take them up on the offer.
“Yes,” he said. “Betrayed.” Tradito. Treason being a cousin to tradition. The giving over of things. He had given too much, and yet the fact that he was still alive, whole, capable of happiness, was proof he hadn’t given enough. He had never before despised his humanness, but now he saw it as weak and wobbly; it was everything he distrusted about religion. Believers beholden to an absence. No terms, only feeling.
The hot street was a return to the material. Men in tiny cars, women with baskets. The sweat started on his upper lip. He wandered deeper into the Aventine, away from the Tiber. On his left winked a yellow brick basilica, squeezed between two larger buildings, unlocked; he’d inadvertently shown up at the priests’ begrudging half-hour open house. Through ancient columns he walked, through the small wooden door within the large wooden door, into the stillness again. The breath of a church. He willed the particles of incense to infiltrate his marrow.
There was no one. Not a woman in the pew to mimic the woman he might hope to see, not a dark-habited priest clucking at him about improper clothes, not a Scandinavian tourist whose whiteness and camera flash lit up
the side chapels. The coffers in the ceiling were unpainted; the columns didn’t match. He toured the relics, stared without looking at the frescoes of saints, all unknown to him. A girl knelt next to two lions. The same girl declaimed in front of men in robes. No one had written her name. He imagined Daphne singing her equinox song, and the boys turning away. The table next to the entrance to the crypt was stocked with brochures about poor Africans and a few bags of homegrown lavender, but no one sat on the three-legged stool to sell them. As he descended, the air grew ever sweeter, dustier.
He couldn’t make sense of what he found below: a network of small rooms, some with parallel stone benches and broken statues of bulls, some empty, one with a series of stone seats in a row around three walls, each with a hole. If he didn’t think it was impossible, he’d call them toilets. He shone the light from his cell phone into one of the openings, but it only revealed more darkness. He sat, surprised at how guilty he felt, or was it giddy. His elbow twitched. He closed his eyes. He loved in ancient places to listen for whispers, but had long since decided that whatever voices echoed were his own.
She doesn’t love you or You don’t love him or What you want is not a kiss but a family. The self is a small thing. The self is the smallest thing.
But that wasn’t him.
The body is a testament. The soul is fleeting. The self is the smallest thing.
A thin worm of pain stretched through his head. His bottom on the open seat felt colder than the rest of him, and when a breeze seemed to pass below, he jumped up. One of his molars began to throb. He couldn’t help laughing—afraid of ghosts in the crypt, no less. He hoped there’d be a priest above so they could share an awkward exchange about i fantasmi, but the nave was as empty as he’d left it, the air still prickly with scent.
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