Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  Now all that remains is to figure out what I'm going to do with it.

  I didn't realize this, but at one time Torino—the Italians have a sexier way of saying everything, don't they?—used to be the capital of Italy. Then the government had second thoughts and moved to Florence, and, when it tired of that, Rome. Finding itself stripped at a stroke of all political clout and at a loose end, Torino decided to reinvent itself, becoming a major industrial hub instead, famed especially as the home of Fiat cars and Pirelli tires. Also, some of the world's greatest wines are produced in the fertile soils of the Piedmont region around it. And perhaps most important, during the eighteenth century, it was in this city that hard chocolate was invented. “Hard” in the sense that it could be carried in your pocket. Before then, it was only available as hot drinking chocolate, which meant it was continually seeping through your pants.

  However, what Torino is most high-profile for, bizarrely, is the very least of its achievements: the Turin Shroud, a strip of linen that Jesus was supposedly wrapped in after his crucifixion (circa Ancient Historical Times). They know this because it bears his image. Although, before you get carried away with excitement, be warned; according to Science, the image is not of Jesus at all, just some guy who looks like him (very possibly Hulk Hogan—the resemblance is uncanny). The herringbone fabric of the Shroud, scientists insist, was woven much later (circa Historical Times), and is therefore a complete sham.

  Sadly, nobody's had the heart to tell the people of Turin yet.

  Hm. Now, there's something I could do today.

  Consulting the front desk of my hotel, I find to my delight that the Shroud is nearby, preserved in conditions of heightened security to prevent you trying it on, inside the royal chapel at the duomo, the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, which the receptionist assures me is within walking distance, but only if you enjoy walking for a very, very long time, which, it just so happens, I do.2

  Accordingly, I set off, following my nose through a circuit-board of eighteenth-century streets, most of them little more than deep stone shafts that shrink the sky to a strip of blue floss above my head.

  Torino looks like Paris. A lot like Paris, actually. In fact, if Paris ever gets destroyed, it's comforting to know we have a backup. Both cities share the same love of baroque grandeur and pretension and a similar clutter of side streets opening onto magical squares and arcades. Yet Torino manages to outparis Paris in certain key ways. Anyone can do tree-lined boulevards, cute patio restaurants, and cake shops, their windows piled high with extravagant tarts and fruit pies in storybook colors. That's architecture-by-numbers. It's the larger-scale spectacles—the blissfully photogenic mansions, bridges, and ornate bell towers, often dating back to the birth of the city in the 1500s—that elevate Torino from your average two-bit civic pageant into an all-singing, all-dancing parade.

  Before getting down to tackle the serious subject of the Shroud, I decide to fortify myself with a spot of lunch, and, a couple of blocks farther on, come across a lovely sunny restaurant that is very clean and inviting. Nearly every table is taken, a sure sign that the food is good. Or that they didn't buy enough tables. Better still, the menu has convenient little photographs of each dish that you can point at to save time. This spares visiting American yokels the sheer inconvenience of learning such complicated exotic words as lasagna and tiramisu.

  Jabbing at the entrées, I decide to celebrate my liberation from the restrictive rigors of making a TV series by going completely nuts for once and choosing pappardelle doused in a robust Bolognese sauce, which arrives thirty minutes later, steaming fresh, heaped in a bowl the size of a cartwheel, and looking just like the one in the photo.

  Afterwards, stuffed to bursting but highly satisfied, I set off once again.

  Torino's city center was fashioned under the supervision of the House of Savoy family dynasty, who were part Italian, but also part French, which must explain the Parisian flourishes. Somehow the architects condensed it all down and packed it tight, with streets so deep and claustrophobic in places that sunlight has given up hope of ever penetrating the four-and five-story baroque facades, except maybe at a freak angle or reflected off high windows, leaving entire blocks untouched by warmth and with an almost haunted feel to them, enough to give you chills as you hurry along their shadowy rat runs en route to somewhere brighter and more welcoming.

  Turning in to a spacious, cobbled yard, I hurry past an impressive church that, in any other city, you'd be tempted to explore and find out the name of. Not here. Here, among so many, you just go, “Pah, whatever!” and, pushing by a cluster of nuns—“Excuse me. Coming through.”—move on to the next fascinating thing.

  For a duomo dating back to the fifteenth century that may possibly house one of the most significant religious artifacts of our time, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista's dull, gray-walled exterior is disappointing and reminds me in more ways than one of the Alamo. Indeed, if, someday in the future, interest in the Shroud should wane and the building had to be vacated, it would probably make an excellent storage warehouse. Or even a flagship Taco Bell. Given the overall drabness of what I'm looking at here, I doubt the conversion would arouse much protest.

  As my eyes adjust to the interior, I pick out people wafting reverentially among the pews, generating the kind of noises you make when you're trying desperately to be quiet—muted coughing, whispers, the clack of fashionable high heels on marble floors, and occasionally, to someone's eternal shame, stifled laughter.

  Hoax or not, there's something enthralling about the Shroud phenomenon. So what if Science happens to be right for once and it's not Christ's burial blanket as he was lifted down from the cross at Calvary, but rather a medieval forgery devised to dupe religious nuts? Who cares, frankly? To a total sucker like me, the mere remote possibility that the tobacco-yellow linen I'm about to look at, touch, and possibly throw over my shoulder and prance around in for photographs, could conceivably have come into contact with Jesus of Nazareth's body all those centuries ago, gives me goosebumps.

  “I've come to see the Shroud,” I hiss to a little bald man who works here.

  “Okay, come,” he hisses back, and leads me along a pillared walkway to a far corner, where, cocooned within the dark solemnity of a praying area, stands an aquarium-type structure, out of which they drained the water, I guess, and laid the casket. A casket, by the way, that's been dressed up like a Victorian Christmas hamper, wrapped in a red ribbon labeled “Domine,” and topped with a pleasing coil of twigs for decoration. Inside, it's temperature controlled, waterproof, lightproof, and bullet-proof.

  “But where's the Shroud of Turin?” I ask, drawing close to the glass.

  “This is the Shroud. There is a casket, in which there is another casket…”

  “But I don't want to see caskets. I want to see the Shroud.” I sound as if I was expecting it to be just hanging there on a peg.

  Shaking his head: “Is not possible. The Shroud, she must remain in the dark, otherwise light can give less visibility to the image over time.”

  “But how do I know it's even in there?”

  The man looks surprised. “Because I tell you that it is.”

  “Oh,” I nod, “in that case it must be!”

  With their customary flair for drama and overstatement, the Italians have hidden it inside two boxes filled with argon gas, and refuse to bring it out. “It is a very exceptional case in which the Shroud can be visible,” he tells me, adding that the next one will be in the year 2025. And don't even waste your time storming up to one of the clerks and demanding a sneak preview sooner, because I tried that and they get quite snippy.

  However, for anyone who's impatient, or if you have a plane to catch and can't wait, then just down the aisle from the aquarium stands a life-size rectangular photographic replica dating back to 1898.

  At first glance—and I feel terrible saying this, because someone's bound to be offended—as is the case with the building it's in, the Shroud
is a little unimpressive. Like a faded hearth rug. There are burn holes in it, and bits missing. In fact, if some jokester told you it was a length of dirty roller towel, the sort you see crumpled up on restroom floors when the dispenser breaks, you'd be inclined to believe him.

  “Where does his head start?”

  My little guide points out the features. “Head, chest, arms, legs …”

  “Aah, yes.”

  What I'm looking at is the front and the back of the man they claim is Jesus Christ. And if it is him, then, believe me, he was quite a hunk, ladies! Muscular, bearded, about five foot nine, with long hair parted in the middle, exactly the way he appears in movies.

  There are two photographs on display, one in normal black-and-white, and then a second with the colors reversed for contrast, like a negative. It's in the negative that the features truly come alive, dispelling once and for all to my mind the theory that it's Hulk Hogan asleep. Most persuasive are the bloodstains: some close by his wrist, another alongside his waist, then many more down his legs, with a speckle of pinprick wounds around the forehead from his crown of thorns. The instant I see this, I'm a convert, utterly convinced of the Shroud's authenticity. No further proof needed. I'm in.

  If only everyone in the world were as gullible as I am.

  Sadly, they're not. In 1988, Science, which hates mysteries, examined the Shroud and came to the conclusion that Christ's image had not been burned onto the cloth by his Divinity as much as it had probably been painted on with watercolors. And that includes the bloodstains too.

  Well, these were fighting words. Straight away, critics of modern carbon dating techniques, who had a vested interest in keeping their Christian superstitions alive, claimed that the material was contaminated and the tests were wrong, wrong, wrong.

  “The method with the carbon,” the guide says, “has a lot of problems, connected with the fact that the object, the linen, can have on it microorganisms, and also carbon from the fire that destroyed part of the Shroud when it was at Chambéry.”

  Chambéry's in France, and was the former seat of the Savoy dynasty. In 1532 the chapel there fell victim to a terrible fire that scorched the linen sufficiently to throw off carbon-dating calculations by a thousand years or more.

  Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, for its part, won't commit either way, stating that, if you want to believe that the Shroud was the burial cloth of Jesus, that's up to you, buddy. Which is exactly the stand I'd take, too, if I thought I might have a total dud on my hands but thousands of pilgrims kept descending on my duomo every year demanding to look at it.

  I ask my little bald friend what percentage sure he is that the Shroud is the real deal. “Sixty percent sure? Seventy-five percent?”

  Astonishingly, he says, “Ninety-nine. On it we can see all the characteristics of a very particular crucifixion. Exactly the same characteristics that were written in the Gospels about who Jesus was, and in particular …”

  As he's talking, something extremely odd happens, diverting my attention.

  I feel a sharp twinge. Underneath my rib cage on my right side. To begin with, I dismiss it as indigestion. The pappardelle repeating on me. But I've had indigestion before, and this—this seems fifty times worse. And in the wrong place. Also, indigestion subsides, doesn't it? Whereas what I'm talking about is a persistent grumbling ache that once in a while will ease off a little, enough to suggest it was just a spasm, getting me all riled up over nothing. Then, for no reason, it'll peak again with a searing twinge that has me digging a hand into my side for support.

  “Ow! OW! Jesus!”

  Too distracted for further Shroud talk, I'm forced to bid a hasty good-bye to my guide and rush down the steps of the cathedral.

  “Bleccccccccccccccccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Oh no.

  Along with the belching comes a dose of real pain. Kitchen-knife-between-the-ribs pain. A slicing, hacking, being-sawn-in-half sensation that won't let up.

  “Blecccchhhhhhhhhhh! Shit.”

  I throw up in a doorway. BLEEEECCCCCHHH. And again in an alleyway two streets down. Oh God. This is it, I realize. My time bomb, the one primed by a battered booger in Newfoundland, has begun its detonation sequence, and at the worst moment imaginable. I'm on my own in a foreign country with nobody to help me and no place to go until I get home tomorrow night.

  Thanks to a handful of Motrin and some deep breathing, the persistent stabbing unlocks its grip for just long enough for me to stumble back to the hotel, where I rush to my room, vomit three more times, then, bent double, sink onto the bed in fetal position, and settle in for an extremely grim and sleepless fourteen hours of pain, shivering, and hugging my ribs.

  “BLEEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCHHHHH!!”

  Oh, yes, and belching. Lots of belching.

  “Does it hurt if I press here?”

  OW!

  “How about here?”

  OWWW!

  “And here?”

  OWWWWWWWW! YESSSS!! EVERYWHERE! STOP THAT!

  Having made it back to Los Angeles, with the help and sympathy of a couple of United Airlines flight attendants and lots more Motrin—thanks, drugs, I owe you one!—I'm rushed to Emergency. First time I've ever been inside an ER, and now I know why: it's so depressing. Everybody's ill.

  “So?”

  A chunky duty nurse walks in with a file. He has a fuzzy ginger beard that looks like he fished a handful of cat hairs out from down the back of his sofa and glued them on.

  “According to the scan,” he says, though I can't see his lips move, “the doctor in Canada was right: it looks like you have gallstones. Your liver's congested too, so most likely one of the larger stones has become lodged in one of your tubes.” He draws a diagram with a ballpoint. “See? Everything's backed up.”

  “Oh dear. And what's the solution?”

  Blecccccccccchhhhhhhhh. Blecccccccccccchhhhhhhhh-hhhhhhhhh!

  “We have to get you into an operating room this afternoon.”

  Whoa, hang on! Let's not rush into this.

  “Okay, here's the deal.”

  And I launch into a nutshell explanation of why that's not possible; about the show I'm making; my anarchic schedule that would challenge the might of, not one, but five gladiators; the pressure I'm under to get all the loose ends tied up; and so on. As it is, I'm at the tail end of everything, I tell him. I have a single piece of voice-over narration left to record for the very last episode in the series, which is due to be broadcast in a week's time, and I must complete it. But then it's over. The narration is nothing. It'll take three hours, tops. I can do that first thing tomorrow morning and be back at the hospital by lunchtime, promise, at which point, “I'm yours. You can operate all you want. How does that sound?” In the circumstances, it's my best offer.

  But Fuzzface is apparently in no mood for negotiation.

  Wearily removing the glasses from his nose to the top of his head, he digs two sets of chubby knuckles deep into his eye sockets, lets loose a monster yawn that lasts ten seconds at least and ends with him making wet cham-cham-chamaaaaaaah noises with his lips. Then he slides the glasses back down again and fixes me with his now slightly red, puffy eyes.

  “And here's my deal, Mr. Peters.” He sighs. “I can't stop you walking out of here, okay? This is America. Go if you want to. All I can tell you is, you're in bad shape. Real bad shape. Right now, your system is shutting down—and I'm talking literally. Your liver's not working. Your body's backed up. I'd say you have about twelve hours.”

  “Twelve hours for what?”

  Shocked that I'm not grasping the full gravity of what he's telling me, he tries again, making it simpler still. “If you don't let us operate within the next twelve hours …”

  “Yes?”

  “… you're going to die.”

  Five hours later, I wake up in an uncomfortably hard bed with the smell of disinfectant in my nostrils, a sharp cramp in my gut, and a tube from an IV pole attached very painfully to a hole in my wrist.

/>   I'm sharing a room with another patient. Youngish-sounding guy. I can't see his face owing to a plastic curtain drawn between us, but I eavesdropped on one of his phone calls earlier on my way to the bathroom and overheard him telling someone he'd come in for a routine biopsy after finding globs of blood in his urine. Yeuw.

  Popular “dude,” though. Very Hollywood. Sounds like one of those well-oiled business types you might encounter at the Hyatt Regency in Century City, the place I first met The Thumb, the kind who are always “on,” always wheeling and dealing to stay afloat. Roses arrive for him by the truck-load almost daily. Some are delivered, others brought personally by a steady chorus line of male friends, plus a few—usually male—associates from his office, who drop in with scripts for him to read or contracts to sign.

  Throughout his stay, the man's BlackBerry rings almost nonstop with work-related matters, whereas mine rarely stirs, although I did receive a couple of supportive messages yesterday, including one from The Thumb, which was good of him.

  Nothing from Fat Kid, I notice. No e-mails, no calls, no cards or flowers. Naturally, this leaves me troubled. The host of a major cable travel show nearly dies on your watch, and you don't even check in to see how he's doing? I mean, it's crazy. Then again …

  There's a rule in television: it's never your fault, even when it is. Any display of interest or concern at this pivotal time might be interpreted as an admission of guilt, or that he contributed to the problem in some way, and nobody wants to place themselves in that position. Therefore silence is the best option for now, he's probably thinking. Stay quiet, keep his head down, and let the crisis pass. Which means, no get-well e-mails, no calls, no cards, no flowers.

  Ho-hum.

  It's very boring lying in hospital. The doctors won't discharge you immediately after a gall-bladder operation, in case something went wrong during surgery and your bowels have stopped working. Plus, in my case, they have to completely flush the laplap, oily sardines, cod's tongues, pappardelle, and God knows what else out of my liver and get it back up to speed. Result: I'm confined to bed with the IV tube jammed into my wrist for almost an entire week.