The Infinite Now

by Mindy Tarquini

  Was that possible? How long could we stay here, stuck in the perpetual pressure? Another week. Two. Why not months? Years?

  Outside, the war would end. The influenza would burn itself out and life would continue. New songs would be written, inventions invented, moving pictures made, and newspapers printed. The world would age, progressing around us until our neighborhood became a sideshow, like I’d read about in Mr. Barnum’s circus. A sideshow peopled by the sick with their skeletal coughing, by children who hid in corners and moved like rats, hair tangled, clothing wild. Visitors would come to gawk, maybe toss us food like I once tossed to the monkeys at the zoo. And one day, the coughing would finally give out.

  I knocked on Benedetta’s door and let the boys know their parents were sleeping and the mess cleaned up. Etti tugged on my waistband. “Dorothy didn’t mean to kill anybody, either.”

  He arched his hands over his body, then brought them down down down until his palms rested on the crown of his head, demonstrating, I presumed, how Dorothy’s house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East. But Etti kept pushing, squatting under the pressure, then blossomed his arms upward, like a flower, and stood straight. He gave me the sweetest of smiles, and ran back to rejoin Benedetta’s reading circle.

  Etti understood the change in the atmosphere. Maybe he thought I’d cast the bubble that first morning when I stood before him and his brother and waved my arms, threatening a spell, the morning the old man puzzled in his rooftop garden because the breeze had stopped blowing. Etti understood the pressure, understood the inevitable end of the process.

  The red circles on the old man’s map marked the bubble’s edge, each ring stretched thinner than the previous. So did the guaritrice’s spiral of red Xs. I compared both side by side in my mind’s eye. No longer maps. Targets. Aimed at a nexus, a spot of clear white, at the tornado’s eye.

  Mamma’s curtain.

  Sixteen

  Dawn came, gritty and gloomy, the sun hidden behind a despair so profound, even the humid malaise creeping over the attic sash felt chill.

  I missed Mamma. Missed her palm on my forehead when she woke me. Missed her talking while she worked. Missed watching her needle pierce the fabric in confident, practiced stitches. I missed Poppa, smelling of soap and peppermint. I missed his suspenders. Missed watching him button them to his knickerbockers when he dressed in the morning. Missed the careful way he combed his hair, the time he took to trim his mustache, how he rolled his shirtsleeves while he worked.

  I wanted to go back. Wanted it all to unwind. Wanted to be like Dorothy in the Oz book and wish myself home, back before the bubble, before the sickness. Back when Fiora Vicente was just a girl, in the market, walking with her mamma and arguing over what would be best for her future. I wanted to redo that conversation. Change the outcome. Go on to live my life as everybody did. Ordinary.

  I guess the curtain heard me. It let itself off its hook and settled over the window. The room fell into darkness, then brightened, revealing an upside-down market which flickered across the attic slope like the movies of the time. A market washed-out and pale, forlorn in streets near emptied by the sickness. One day, we’d grind to a halt, the pressure so great, we’d be tacked to the ground. Eventually, it all had to crack.

  I slipped out of bed, shut the window, and settled into the curtain’s soft folds, secure, wishing I could hide there forever. “Five minutes, Mamma.”

  Five minutes to pretend none of this had ever happened. Five minutes when she and Poppa could still be alive. Five minutes unburdened by boys underfoot, responsibilities overhead, the constant worry, the constant work, the constant wondering what would happen next.

  I’d taken a road unintended. I intended to turn it back. Make all that had happened, unhappen.

  The room grew snug. Mamma’s Big Ben slowed, the time between one tick and the next, infinite.

  Behind the curtain, the sun stalled. People in the process of getting up, or getting dressed, or getting breakfast, stilled. Time unwound, wrapped around me, flipped me onto my head.

  And rolled me into the curtain world.

  Time rolled with me, backward and bulky, weighted with every nasty word I could not unsay, every selfish act I could not undo, every unkind thought I could not unthink. My chest collapsed, my heart failed, my spirit flattened.

  The past is cruel. It welcomes no visitor, tolerates no intrusion, gives not a whit for the ramifications of what has gone before. The past is dark. It is dense. It is dangerous. Worst of all, the past is impossible to change.

  The projection tumbled me back to the present in a lump, heart-sore, and bruised, and clumsy as clay, my lungs squeezed, my bones all but broken. I wanted to be brave. I was Fiora Vicente, Rosina Vicente’s daughter.

  It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Mamma warned me. I hadn’t listened. “You can’t stop the future, Fiora. You can’t change the past. Nobody can.”

  “Then of what purpose is the curtain?”

  The minutes ticked by, the curtain’s upside-down market flickering five minutes into the future. Silent.

  But for hooves. Those damned hooves. Clip-clopping over the cobbles, pulling a wagon piled high with bodies destined to lie, unattended, in the basements of overwhelmed undertakers. Because the city had run out of coffins and there was nobody to dig all the graves.

  Or so I imagined. My eyes were closed.

  I sat up. Straight. So was the window.

  So how could I hear all that clip-clopping?

  In the market projection, the wagon moved upside-down along the inverted cobbles of the curtain world, entering stage left. Not piled with bodies, piled with crates. Of apples, and carrots, potatoes and more. Last of the harvest, and heading toward the grocers, soon to be ready for sale.

  I shook out my skirt, buttoned my shirtwaist, pulled on stockings and shoes, my plan to be first in line. I stopped. The hooves weren’t part of some imagined vision. They were real, audible, part of the projection, and they were still five minutes into the future.

  Fancy that.

  I got up close to the curtain. My whole imagining changed from watching, to being, from observing, to participating. The smells of the market rose around me. Damp paper and wood, stone and sweat. And the horses. The horses. Hay and deep earth and leather and straw.

  Without effort, I was there, able to go door to door, and pass through the windows, unfettered by the bubble’s weight. I stood in corners and watched hungry children paw through yesterday’s pot, looking for a scrap, a morsel, a bite to quiet their stomachs. The piles of dishes and dirty laundry, vomit-stained sheets and blood-tinged handkerchiefs smelled so strong my eyes watered, my stomach heaved.

  I pulled back from the scene, settled my spirit on my own stoop, then passed through the door, and checked in on the boys. They knelt under the kitchen table, playing dropsies with their marbles. The constant clack-clack must be driving their parents to madness. Etti looked toward the door, and I wondered if he saw me, a spirit girl, likely floating head down and feet up. I even waved, but Etti returned to his play.

  The aroma of oregano and basil filled the air, drifting me up the stairs. A pot simmered on Benedetta’s stove. Benedetta emerged from behind the curtain which concealed her sleeping space, swollen and ripe, her belly button stretched tight over the life within. She pulled a dress over her head and buttoned it from the bottom up.

  My cheeks flamed. I squeezed past the crack in the doorframe and stood on the landing.

  Should I go upstairs? Glide past the old man, still snoring on his cot, and on up to the attic to see myself, staring into a projection, my back turned to me.

  Oh yes.

  A boundary, more profound than the bubble’s, stopped me at the attic doorway. Okay, fine. I knocked.

  And heard nothing in the attic, at least, not from my side. That knock was five minutes into the future, and I thought it would be about the most interesting thing I did that day to wait around to hear it. I might even go down and answer the door
before the knock landed.

  That thought removed me from participation in the projection. I again became an observer, watching the little girl with the tangled hair enter stage right, her doll dragging in the street.

  Grazia.

  She walked slowly, head down, sneaking glances from one side to the next. She stopped a little short of the grocer’s.

  A cart waited before the grocer’s stand, horses docile. The delivery-man unloaded. Crate after crate. The street children moved in, from one corner to the next. They lounged against lampposts, bounced balls against walls. The deliveryman moved a crate into the store; the grocer took another. Both men disappeared inside the building, leaving the other crates piled by the cart.

  The children swarmed. A bunch of carrots, a couple of potatoes, a hunk of cheese. Disappearing under coats, up sleeves, beneath caps. The little girl rushed in, too. She ducked under the cart, doll’s head bouncing on the cobbles.

  The grocer and deliveryman exited, with much waving of hands. The children scattered. The horse shuffled, back, then forth, then back again. The little girl disappeared beneath the cart wheel. I didn’t need the sound to know her scream rose above the commotion.

  Somebody knocked on the attic door.

  Five minutes.

  Five whole minutes.

  Less than five minutes because I wasted time taking in what I’d seen.

  However that amount of time translated in the bubble’s strange slugabed world.

  The future was not the past. Every decision that needed to happen had not yet happened. Every action that could possibly happen was still in the mind.

  I could change it, I could. And I would, just as soon as my curtain world self, the projection I’d had so much fun with a few minutes earlier, stopped standing on the other side of the attic door.

  Because I couldn’t leave until my curtain world self left. Because time didn’t allow me to meet her. Because my actions of the previous five minutes couldn’t be changed. So I had to wait, letting my curtain world self do all she had been doing up until the point she showed up at my attic door. And knocked.

  Yes. Confusing. And too frustrating to think about as I toe-tapped the seconds, pegged into place, and unable to avoid the upside-down scene continuing to unfold on the attic wall. The fear, the frenzy. The blood.

  In my world, the real world happening at that moment, the little girl was alive and breathing and walking toward her doom. I was delayed because I thought it would be funny to see how far I could make the curtain world loop back on itself.

  The old man’s Big Ben continued its dispassionate rhythm, uninterested in the panic pressing on my breastbone. I tried to move after five seconds, then ten, and again at twelve. Finally, finally, there was a thud and a great heaving crack, one which caught me about the ankles and sent me to the floor. I scrabbled up, elbow bleeding, and moved like a crab, down my stairs, and clawed at the knob, turning and shoving and turning again. The door wouldn’t budge.

  I pounded. “Don Sebastiano. Please.”

  He opened for me, his perpetual calm draining from his features. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  I barreled past him, taking longer to descend the stairs than I ever had, my every footfall seeming to land in quicksand. This was not the bubble. It was not the curtain and it was not the projection. Something else stalled my progress. Something deep. Something malevolent. Something determined I should fail.

  The seconds ticked away.

  “Mamma,” I whimpered. “Help me.”

  “Stop fighting yourself. Time is not your master, it’s your servant. What was good is still good.”

  In the bubble, nothing happened, yet all things were possible. In the bubble, time followed no rules. In the bubble, the only moment over which I had any control was Now.

  I took a breath and thought of good things. Clear light, fresh breezes, children laughing in the sunshine. I released my breath, and the power which held me relaxed its grip. I moved. Fast. Across the landing. Down the stairs. And over the stoop.

  The children already swarmed the grocer’s crates. I took one more breath, then took every one of those one hundred and seven steps three at a time, arms waving, heart pumping. And shouting shouting shouting. “No. Stay away. Get out from under the cart.”

  The children stopped swarming. They looked up. Beneath the cart little Grazia turned, her doll clutched in her hand. The grocer and the deliveryman exited the building, hands waving as I’d already seen in the projection, and with cries of alarm I hadn’t been able to hear.

  I swooped in, like I’d seen a player do in a long-ago baseball game, grabbed Grazia by her skirt, and pulled. Hard.

  The horses startled, the wheels moved back, but Grazia was safe in my arms. Crumpled with me in a ball beside.

  The grocer hauled me up. He took Grazia and held her like a precious package, smoothing and resmoothing her hair. “What were you doing? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” I smoothed my own hair, and my skirt. “I was doing what anybody would do.”

  The deliveryman held the horses by their bridles, his face white. He slid his cap off his head. Held it over his heart. “Thank you.”

  I put out my arms—“I’ll take her.”—and looked at a crate of potatoes. “And I’ll take those potatoes. Six large ones.” I hefted the little girl onto my hip—“Do you like potato stew?”—then dug into my bodice, meaning to retrieve the handkerchief hanging there and untwist it. “How much?”

  “No. No.” The grocer put the potatoes in a sack. He added a bunch of carrots and a couple of onions. “Take them. No charge. Do you need help getting her home?”

  The deliveryman spoke up. “I’ll take them.” He took the bag.

  A strong set of arms swept the bag away from him. “Thank you, signore, but deliveries are my specialty.”

  Carlo.

  He looked past me. “Are you the Pied Piper?”

  Carlo said “Pied Piper” like a regular American. He would do fine when he took his test for citizenship. I turned and saw children, three wide and half a dozen deep. Dirty. Disheveled. Their hair tangled, their expressions determined.

  A path, and a purpose, opened before me.

  I grabbed a crate off the grocer’s stack and held my hand up to Carlo, palm out. “Wait.” I dashed back to the house, heart light, my way unencumbered. I passed the old man, stepped up our stoop, then through the street door, beelined across the vestibule, up the stairs and onto Benedetta’s landing.

  I pounded on the door. “Benedetta. Open up.”

  I pounded again. “Benedetta.”

  She answered, hair messy, eyes shadowed, face drawn. “What is it?”

  “Have you flour?”

  She yawned. “Yes.”

  “Good. I need you to bake. Ten loaves. No. Twenty.” I handed her the crate. “Whatever you have in your kitchen now, pack in here. The parents are sick. Children are roaming the streets, fighting for food, and nobody is paying any attention. We can’t do anything about the sickness. Nothing at all. But we can make ourselves useful. We have to help them. We have to help all of them.”

  Benedetta set the crate on her table. “Is it all right if I pee first?”

  Depth of Field

  Seventeen

  Yes, of course. Help the children. Help them all.

  Easier said than done.

  Door, to door, to door. Like the times I’d looked for a job. I tossed another piece of mending onto the pile growing at my feet. “Their parents do not trust me. They never will. They would rather choke on their own vomit than allow the fortune-teller’s daughter to hold the basin.”

  Carlo looked up from his shoe form. “Only because you have not been properly introduced to them. Or their basins. Tomorrow, we will go together.”

  Together, like we sat then, like the three of us sat every night those first few evenings, at Benedetta’s table, the aroma of baking bread thicker than the air.

  My back ached. My feet hurt. And I
’d twisted my wrist. It ballooned in shades of purple and yellow. I reached across Benedetta’s table for the next item. A shirt that was more rips than fabric. I pawed through a collection of swatches from my attic, seeking a suitable match. “For the Corini boy. Looks like he got dressed from the rag pile. He must have sold his other clothes to buy food.”

  Carlo twisted a grommet into place. “What’s the little boy wearing now?”

  “My camisole.” The heat rose under my collar. Stupid. It’s not like undergarments were secret. They had a whole department on display at Lit Brothers, and Sears Roebuck carried illustrations of them for pages. Still, at that time, at that age, to say it out loud . . .

  I snuck a glance at Benedetta.

  But Carlo laughed. “I’ve got a set of underdrawers to contribute to the cause.”

  I pulled another stitch. “Don’t offer what you’re not willing to give.” I held up a piece of burlap, the words, PILLSBURY FLOUR, clearly imprinted. “Benedetta stole this. Tucked it under her waistband.”

  Benedetta wrapped her apron around her hand, opened the oven door, and pulled out another loaf. “I should have stolen the flour, too. The baker’s prices are ridiculous. He claims he’s giving me a discount, but he’s giving himself one first.”

  Carlo set his work aside. He turned his chair around and straddled it, leaning his chin on its high back. “We have to convince the grocer, the baker, the others to give donations. The seamstresses, houses where people are not sick, all can donate a little something. A sheet, a towel, a pot of soup.” He pointed to my pile of mending. “A shirt that is not in rags.” He wiped his hand on his pant leg. “Soap.”

  Benedetta upended the bread onto the marble, the loaf landed with a satisfying thump. “Let’s ask the priest to ask them.”

  “Or maybe Don Sebastiano.” Carlo flipped the shoe he’d been working on and caught it. A child’s shoe. “There. Three bad shoes make two good. I found the hatmaker’s son in stocking feet.” Carlo patted his pockets.