Blow

by Daniel Nayeri

  ONCE THEY LAID Chloe’s body to rest in the mausoleum, Pierre crumbled under the weight of a colossal aching. I didn’t tell anyone, ’cause I didn’t want it getting back to Chloe, but I had to go there to pick up the hundred pieces of Pierre’s permanently broken heart. As she slept on the stone, Pierre slunk to his cottage, past the tree stump where she made him tea, past the headstone of her favorite goose, past the meadow where they picked flowers. Since he had nothing left, Pierre continued to sew. His solitary genius grew more and more legendary.

  When Giovanni saw the first vase of the new year, he was actually making fun of the Frenchman at the time, at a dinner party on his veranda. “The flowers he makes, they are like garnish to my marbles, like a sprig of parsley. Little accents on the main course, yes? And who eats the garnish? Nobody. But who eats the veal parm —?”

  A delivery boy brought in the new vase.

  Babbo stopped.

  He walked up to the vase, gauze gardenias planted in his own marbles. He lifted a finger toward the flowers, then retracted it before making contact. Everyone at the party saw a specter wash over him. Babbo’s mustachioed lip quivered. Then, with a roar of grief, he wept.

  Only Babbo could have seen it, the funeral in the fabric; only the eye of the great marble painter could have spotted the pain in the petals. The rest of the company, Giacomo included, stood at the dinner table dumbfounded. “What is it, Babbo Giovanni?” asked one of his patrons. “What news is this?” But Babbo could not talk. The great artist blubbered random miseries about his rival. Giacomo had to see the guests out, and Babbo sat on the ground, holding the vase like an injured child.

  And so for Giovanni, too, the time of Chloe’s absence became restless. Maybe under all the bluster, Babbo actually liked having Pierre’s constant epistolary abuse in the margins of his invoices, the backbiting he’d pass along through their mutual vendors, the snarky asides they would volley in their separate interviews with kings. Maybe Babbo had grown old into one of those mischievous geezers who picked fights to keep the blood flowing.

  But Babbo never let on that he cared for Pierre. And then Pierre simply disappeared behind the doors of his house, slouching through the halls like a tired skeleton. Both the great craftsmen of the age were adrift, one a sorrow-drowned tailor with a mermaid he swore he saw everyplace he looked, and another who missed his friend — well, maybe not his friend, but something close to it. Slowly, slowly, each man began to neglect his craft.

  In those two years, the homes of Old Timey Europe became drastically less well decorated. People started buying kitsch items like bones of the saints and fuzzy-colored reproductions of a sparkly cottage in the woods. Hideous, just awful stuff.

  Most people blamed the subsequent downturn in society on broken families. Ugly homes breed ugly lives. Incidentally, this was when killing became popular. So that was kind of a big deal. Another thing that happened was that Giacomo had to become a man during that time.

  With Babbo Giovanni doing nothing but moping over the worktable, Giacomo was left to run the house. He only knew how to make pasta e fagioli, but each day he would replace a new bowl by his father’s desk. Babbo never ate. He just sucked up tears from his thick beard. He had given up all his jovial songs and silently painted lonely stars into the heavenly spheres. Until one day, that spark in him, the sprezzatura, the fat frolicky horseplay, withered in my hands. The potbelly remained, but the spirit of the potbelly was gone.

  Meanwhile, Giacomo traded heavy lifting with the butcher and baker for wild boar and semolina bread. He drove Santa Maria, their mule, to deliver the marbles to the wholesalers. On his day off, he helped the old widow of Venice stanch her basement when the water levels rose too high or her home sunk too low — no one could tell which. He knew the time for play and the time for work. His shoulders were broad enough to carry burdens when others couldn’t, or thought they couldn’t. In short, he’d become a man.

  And finally, finally, the processing forms cleared Accounts Payable. And just in time, before Chloe started fermenting into a gorgeous French zombie (the way she would have purred, “Le brains!” while shambling in that white dress — don’t get me started).

  Two years after she had taken her exquisite flight from the balcony of the theater, in the early morning of a Wednesday, the wrought-iron gate of the Vouvray mausoleum squealed on its ancient hinges. The morning birds had just begun to warm up their love songs and alibis. Chloe, in her ball gown, rubbed her eyes, yawned and shivered and stretched and sighed all at once. Then she simply walked home as though it had been nothing more than a weeklong nap.

  That morning, when old Pierre walked downstairs, he found his daughter standing in front of the kitchen sink trimming the stems of freshly picked flowers. She looked just as she had two years ago. He said, “Oh, thank God I didn’t jump from the bell tower,” and fainted to the ground.

  WHEN OLD TIMEY Europe heard of the sleeping beauty rising up from her stone bed in the woods, it caused such a stir that writers immediately began plagiarizing the story for themselves. The idea was too enticing. A babe in a slinky outfit, breathing softly from lips imperceptibly open — who wouldn’t write himself into the story as a dutiful prince, there to kiss her awake? Over time the details got butchered, but they kept the sewing theme, and the evil witch became real instead of a staged ballet, and the prince must have come from some collective wishful thinking. But hey, historians, what are you gonna do? Mostly lonesome types.

  The story was an overnight bestseller. Once it got around, along with an engraving of Chloe, I had something close to twelve cases of village bachelors getting fatally sick from making out with corpses. But you should have seen that engraving.

  Even the people in Chloe’s village bought it. And like all the big stories, it felt instantly classic, new but with the sense of ancient truths. The anecdote became a good yarn. The yarn a legend. Till finally the legend became myth, mixed up in the cultural ether, a branch of the eternal redemption story.

  In just a few weeks, no one would believe that their own village beauty was the source of the story. Their memories started blurring. That Vouvray girl must have just gotten up after her fall from the balcony. It couldn’t possibly kill someone to fall from that height. She dusted herself off and ran away, mortified with embarrassment.

  She had probably been keeping a low profile for the two years. Maybe she’d given birth to an imp in secret. Some people could have sworn they had seen her around town. None of them could recall what they wore to the funeral.

  Suddenly, Chloe had always been there, and the Sleeping Beauty was a fairy tale everyone had loved as a kid. You people really are sheep sometimes.

  Pierre was in and out of consciousness during the days immediately after Chloe’s return. He would see her, faint, wake up, faint. It was kind of cute. Slowly, between fits of passing out, Pierre began to accept the impossibly merciful reality that his daughter was alive. And very slowly, after more paperwork for Dora, Pierre’s heart rekindled, too. His flowers, so to speak, began again to bloom.

  And of course it was only proper that the first bouquet be sent to his arch-rival, his once-again enemy: Giovanni di Cortona. Babbo received the bouquet with a note: “These tulips have never seen dirt. Kindly prevent your recently amateurish gewgaws from making it seem as though they have.”

  Babbo read the note in front of Giacomo. Giacomo, who had already read it, expected an outburst. There was definitely an outburst. Babbo Giovanni laughed aloud and grabbed Giacomo in a bear hug, saying, “That snobby garden wench, he’s back!”

  Babbo set himself to painting all day, sniggering under his beard. Giacomo went out to look for their mule, Santa Maria. He found her by the barn, grazing on wild rosemary, and took her to the hill in front of their house. Santa Maria liked a good stretch before bearing the bridle for a long journey. Giacomo had the return of his father to celebrate. So together they rolled on their backs and kicked their legs at the clouds.

  That evening Giovanni
, Giacomo, and Santa Maria set off for the Alps with a cart full of their finest work — aggies and opals, a cat’s-eye marble that winked when spun, tinted crystals you call “princess,” ones with a drop of crimson called oxblood, and round galaxies that twinkled and breathed like real galaxies. Along the way, each village turned up at the side of the road to see them through. Babbo tossed marbles painted in patterns of corkscrews and bumblebees and turtle shells to the kids who ran alongside the cart.

  Every village had heard that Babbo was coming. They lined up in the byways, threw their goats to the bridge trolls to clear the paths, and young heralds-in-training blasted cacophonous toots from their brass horns. It was as if the little cart was an army going to war.

  Actually, the war was more of a crafts fair, the first crafts fair put on by the royal family of Bavaria, by invitation only, for the grandmasters of crochet, mosaics of macaroni or sea glass, outdoor playhouses, and pretty much all things découpage. Two weeks earlier and Babbo would never have made it. Now he was ready to take his rightful place beside his rival, billed together as co–guests of honor in the brochures (try to guess whether that ticked them off).

  The rivals would finally meet. Promoters were billing it as “The Rumble by the Jungle Gyms.” Never mind that comparing the two was like comparing gorillas and chinchillas, vanilla with manila, but whatever; it sold news parchments.

  The Black Forest of Bavaria was a dangerous place in those days, lots of baby stealing going on. If you were in the peppermint bricklaying or gingerbread siding business, you’d be making a killing. It was a good time to be a lumberjack, a terrible time to disobey your parents. Cats did well, mice not so much. Stepchildren could go either way.

  And unless you had an invitation with the seal of the House of the Royal Family of Bavaria, you and I would be sharing a cab out of the forest. This was especially true when Prince Dimple Pimple turned eighteen and took over as Kaiser for his senile uncle Gustav, who would arrange flotillas of paper ships in the royal fountain and tromp in the water in full regalia shouting, “People of foldy town, the tax is axes on your axis!” I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s because he was senile.

  The prince had a regular name, by the way; I just don’t really care what it is. I’ll give him one thing: he had spectacular dimples. He wore only white tapered shirts with overlong sleeves and red leather pants. His dirty blond hair had more highlights than a Rembrandt and spiked out like a palm tree or fell in his face like moody curtains.

  As he swaggered through the halls of his castle, a troupe of musicians followed to provide a “hella-cool” soundtrack. When he’d enter a room, he’d stop and pose, first one profile, then the other. With each profile, a drummer and trumpeter would bang a sonic exclamation point, one for each of his dreamy dimples.

  The guy could charm the scales off a gorgon. Also, he might have killed his parents.

  YOU’D THINK OF all people, I could tell you if Dimple Pimple’s parents were murdered. I should know these things, right? Why would I have anything better to remember than when and why that random old couple from someplaceville shoved off, right around the same time a billion others did it?

  Why, for example, do I spend my evenings cutting up bok choy and placing bite-size pieces in a trail for my bunny to follow around the house, when I could be cataloging every sun that flickers out, every virus you ever fought off, every birch that slumps in a field somewhere under the gentle crush of snowfall?

  I’ll tell you why. It’s a grave world, full of last rites, and ghosts are what we breathe. And at least for me, sometimes you feel like a Tut; sometimes you don’t. It gets tiring. Sometimes you do your job, and sometimes you hunt for nom-nom treasure with Mr. Bunnersworth.

  I have no idea what happened to the king and queen of Bavaria. The prince showed up to his eighteenth birthday party by himself, and when people asked, he said, “My good father and mother have passed on, terribly, with a lot of screaming involved. Is this cake lemon?”

  He was immediately made Prince Kaiser, no questions asked. The whispers at court were that the king’s and queen’s cessation of breaths was the work of Dimple Pimple’s second-in-command and bodyguard, Brutessa, the dwarf general always by his side.

  They called her Brutessa the Brutest. She was captain of a gang of land pirates, who roamed the forest and pillaged travelers. I got to see a lot of their work firsthand. The thing about land pirates is that even though they don’t get as much media coverage as the seafaring variety, they’re much more . . . well, brutal. The most the two types have in common is that they both run the Jolly Roger, the black flag with that skull everyone says is my head (gives me the hibbly-jibblies).

  Land pirates travel on carts that have been cobbled together from the pieces of other carts, pulled by wolves and wild dogs. They can gain on a four-horse carriage at full gallop. And instead of sending a boarding crew, they have keelhaulers, who’re basically dwarves who went crazy in the coal mines. They stand on the running dogs, and when they pull alongside a speeding carriage, they’ll curl themselves up into a ball and jump into the spokes. The wheels crunch on the dwarf, and wood goes splintering in every direction. The carriage goes flying over its own startled horses, all to the tune of the keelhauler going, “tee-hee” somewhere in the middle of the whirling smashup. They’re lunatics. Like, howl-at-moon, smoke-dirt-in-their-pipes, cartilage-eating types.

  Land pirates think of sea pirates as the spoiled upper class, what with their “code,” and their noses not falling off, and all that sea water for their bubble baths.

  Think about that. To the land pirates, Blackbeard was too professorial. One-Eyed Jane was a yacht-club princess to these people. You really have to have made a few wrong decisions along the way if you’ve gotten to a place where you’re thinking the infamous marauders of the Barbary Coast are too civilized.

  The way Brutessa met Dimple Pimple is predictable enough. He was joyriding through the forest with half the tavern wenches in Bavaria, just about to start a bodice-ripping edition of the Alphabet Game, when all of a sudden his carriage went flying in the air and landed upside down in a ditch.

  Fortunately for him, Dimple Pimple had just bought a vowel, if you know what I mean (like, you know, you know). It’s best to leave the details alone. He climbed over the dazed tavern babes and found himself face-to-face with Brutessa. He was still standing in the ditch, so the height thing worked out.

  Dimple Pimple immediately recognized the pirate queen, and, like most greedy rich kids, he wanted her in his collection. He would need a pet assassin for his future plans, someone with both ears to the ground. Meanwhile, Brutessa had a sharp eye and immediately realized she had hit the mother lode. She had ambitions of her own and needed a corrupt princeling to manipulate.

  And a few years after that, Babbo Giovanni and Giacomo came down the same road toward the crafts fair. The land pirates had changed career paths by then, to royal guards — well, a grubbier, less-regimented version, anyway, involving a lot more exposed innards than seems usual.

  I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE thinking. You’re thinking this is a terrible love story, on account of the fact that the two lovers haven’t even met. Plus when Chloe took the terminal plunge, Giacomo didn’t even know about it. Maybe his own spirit — which had been fused to hers — should have been ripped from his chest and left nothing but human post-consumption waste, a love-shorn collection of bio-organic watch parts, a homunculus.

  After all, that’s what should happen when our love leaves us. We turn into those secret experiments of alchemy.

  Fair enough. Maybe a love story should have the lovers within a hundred-mile radius of each other at the beginning. But in my experience, it’s not so much the beginning as the ending that matters for most people. And endings are kinda my specialty. I mean, you can start anywhere if you think about it, but you’re gonna end up like everybody else someday, listening to Dora clacking on her typewriter till your name comes up next on her clipboard.

  And the wh
ole point is who you were up until then, what justifies you. What reason you got for door number one or door number two. I mean this seriously. There are only two doors in the room, and Dora keeps great files.

  And I’ll tell you a secret about the two doors. You always get the one you walked in from. So really, every story’s different, and every story is the exact same.

  As for Chloe and Giacomo, they finally met on the first day of the crafts fair. Around lunchtime they both wandered away from their father’s booths to peruse the tchotchke shops. In between the dream-catchers and the infused oils, merchants of mixed reputation sold turkey legs, mead, fried boar, grog, wine, cupcakes, and ale. The crowd was half fairyland, half anonymous alcoholics.

  I will admit I was tempted by the bulletin board made out of wine corks arranged in a frame, with all the stamps of the different chateaux and vineyards on them. Classy, functional, would have looked great in a den, home office, or kitchen. Kicked myself that I didn’t have my wallet.

  Anyway, like most instances of love, it was just an accident that Chloe and Giacomo ran into each other in the middle of the raucous crowd, with a loud Spanish baker yelling, “Churros! Get your churros. Hot churro. Not burro. They’re sticks you can eat!”

  As Chloe and Giacomo strode through the medieval festival, they were unaware that their stars had almost completed the long and winding course across eons and would come crashing into each other right then, as they turned a corner. Chloe and Giacomo barely knocked into each other. The baker didn’t even notice as he peddled his pastries. But high above them, where no one could see it, two space rocks rammed into one another, tiny stars that simply refused to pass each other by.