The Sun and Other Stars

by Brigid Pasulka

I move swiftly up the ziggurat of tables, a few sharpened pencils gripped between my teeth. I imagine tripping on a loose nail in one of the tabletops and taking a fall, hanging in the air for a couple of seconds before dropping like an anvil and crashing through the floor of Charon’s aula, leaving a perfect outline of my body. As the camera hovers over the hole, I would climb out, stars and birds swirling around my head, the pencils having knocked out a few teeth, splitting my mouth into a smile like the Joker’s.

  I boost myself up on the top table and stand up, holding my hand against the ceiling until the coolness fills my pores. I know exactly what I will draw today. Right on the ceiling—no paper or pinholes to buffer the anger or slow me down.

  The sixth panel. The Tree of Life.

  I’m not cautious with the lines, and they hold nothing back from me, either. As I draw, I can feel the rough bark of the tree rising to the surface, my fingers chasing the fleeing shadows of the pencil, smudging in leaves and branches. I run my hand over the skin of the snake and feel its coil and the ripple of its scales as it twists around the trunk, choking it. I feel the taut muscle giving way to the soft bosom of Tatiana the Showgirl, her chest swelling almost to her elbow, her hand dangling the hundred-euro note between the branches. My feet slide across the table, my neck cocked back at the angle of a man whose throat has been slit. I draw my own hand reaching out to take the tip, bribe, whatever. I fill in my arm, my chest, and my stomach, then stop, leaving my entire torso dangling in the air, holding on to that hundred-euro note for dear life.

  The first two panels, I’d drawn everyone as Michelangelo did—mostly naked. And you know, it really is a nice metaphor. Nakedness, purity, vulnerability, whatever. Until you find yourself contemplating the shape and color of your own junk. So I move to the other end of the table and start on the second half of the drawing. The After to the Before. The snake blooms a second head, Papà’s scowling face instead of the angel’s, his boning knife showing me the way to the desert. I draw another version of myself slinking out of the garden, hunched and wrinkled, shadows stamped around my eyes and across my forehead. But again, I can’t get past the waist.

  My foot scuffs one of the pencils, and there’s a delay before I hear it hit the floor. I lie down on the table and stare sideways at the tree, from this angle now fallen. Tiiiiiiiiiiimber. Did it really fall if I’m the only one who seems to notice it? I stare at both figures, at the smooth, white plaster below my waist. Half man, half nothingness, hovering in the air. And you know what? I’m tired of being the eunuch, of hearing myself say, “How can I help you?” and “What can I do for you?” and “Yes, Papà,” and “Sorry, Papà.” I’m tired of listening to Fede’s woes of getting too much sex. I’m tired of being the only guy in the region to turn down Signora Semirami, instead trailing behind a girl who barely talks to me, like a chivalrous knight on an imaginary quest, pledging my loyalty and waiting hopefully on the sideline. I am tired of being a slave instead of a son.

  So in the blank, white space between my legs, I draw the biggest penis anyone has ever seen. Bigger than Luca’s. Bigger than Fede’s, even. Bull-sized.

  I will not go back. I will not go back until he asks me. Begs me.

  I work the rest of the afternoon in a frenzy, filling in the figures. I try to remember Tatiana the Showgirl’s face—her hollow cheeks and her swollen lips. I spend a lot of time getting the junction right where the scales of the snake melt into Papà’s skin. I fill in the landscape in the background: the cobbled driveway of the villa, the iron gate, and the massive columns.

  By the time I climb down, it’s already dark. My eyes burn. When I turn my head, I hear the crack of the vertebrae, and when I pat my stomach, it thumps like a drum. I haven’t eaten all day, and I’ve cycled past the grumbling stomach and the hunger pangs. My body is already starting to hollow out the cells, filling them with adrenaline and lactic acid, speeding up the process of consuming itself.

  Eat up, brother. Buon appetito.

  My phone lights up. Fede.

  MARTINA’S LOOKING FOR YOU.

  I don’t answer.

  SHE’S BEEN HOLDING YOUR DINNER.

  Martina has made dinner for Papà and me almost every night since Luca died, and the thought of her waiting for me and wondering is the only thing that makes me answer.

  TELL HER I’M SORRY, BUT I’M NOT COMING.

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  I’M FINE.

  I shut off my phone, go outside, and sit on the fifth-year bench. I take out a cigarette and stare at it in my hands, then put it back in the pack. The stars over the sea are infinite tonight. They say that since the big bang, the universe has been in constant motion, expanding at an accelerating rate, the spaces filled with dark energy and dark matter. And what we can see either by looking through telescopes or formulating equations only makes up five percent of what’s actually out there.

  Five percent.

  And the rest? No one knows. I was listening to this astrophysicist on TV a few years ago, and they asked him about it—what exactly this dark matter and dark energy was. Now, this guy won a Nobel Prize or something, and he’s supposed to be on TV as an expert, and you know what he said? He said it’s a complete mystery to him, too. And then he shrugged. This Nobel laureate. And it really didn’t seem to bother him. He went on to say that there have always been and will always be things the scientists don’t know, and it’s only the simpletons and amateurs who try to wrap everything into a neat little package, who try to explain away the mystery.

  I hear a rustle in the bushes from somewhere near the path.

  “Etto, you up here?”

  I can see the glint of his glasses and the heavy beard that makes him look like a monk instead of the chief of police.

  “Ciao, Silvio.”

  “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “I guess you win the prize.”

  “What are you doing up here?”

  “Making bombs.”

  “That’s nothing to joke about, Etto.” He sits down on the bench. “Are you okay?”

  “Fantastic.”

  “I heard you and your papà had an argument.”

  “There’s no argument. He told me to leave the shop, so I did. Finished.”

  “Come on, Etto. You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “He sure sounded like he meant it.”

  Silvio swats at the air and leans back against the bench. “Etto, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s the middle of the tourist season. He can’t possibly run the shop every day by himself. He’ll have to work fourteen hours a day.”

  “He should have thought about that before he said it.”

  “He would not be human if he always thought about things before he said them.”

  “Then it shouldn’t be a problem for him to ask me to come back.”

  “If you go to the shop tomorrow morning, I am sure he will apologize, Etto.”

  “I’m not.”

  Silvio sighs. “You’re a good boy, Etto. And your father is a good man. But sometimes you two need to be a little easier on each other.” He looks out at the sea, waiting for me to agree with him, but I let the silence sit instead.

  “Are you going to stay up here for a while?” he says.

  “Probably.”

  “Not too long, eh? Marinating in it isn’t going to make it go away.”

  “Maybe I don’t want it to go away. Maybe I want him to admit that he’s wrong for once.”

  Silvio sighs again. He puts his hand on my knee and stands up. “You know, your papà and you have more in common than he and Luca ever did. Both of you, paralyzed by your own pride. Stubborn as mules.”

  Hee-haw, hee-haw, I say in my head as Silvio makes his way down the path. Papà couldn’t even come to do his own dirty work. He had to send Silvio. That’s what he did when they found Mamma, too. He couldn’t even do that.

  * * *

  “What is wrong with you tonight?” Yuri asks, ten minutes into the game. “You play li
ke you have the ropes around your legs. Are you sleep? Are you drunk?”

  “Bad day.”

  “Bad day?” Yuri blows the whistle. “Stop the clock! Stop the clock!” he shouts, even though he’s the one keeping time. He jogs over to me. “What is this ‘bad day’?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He stares at me for a minute, then holds up a finger. “Wait. Wait here.” He goes to the sideline and fishes around in the pile of jackets and shoes.

  “Here,” he says, and he holds out an iPod, the earbuds wrapped carefully around it. It’s one of the new ones, small as a pack of gum. He presses the button in the center, unwraps the earbuds, and hands them to me. “Give your head rest. These problems you think about, they will be not so serious after game of calcio.” He taps his finger against the furrows in my forehead. “No worry.”

  The iPod is turned up to full volume, and it’s almost all in Ukrainian or maybe Russian—Soviet anthems, folk songs, classical music, arena rock, chanting monks, and bad hip-hop. But it works. With Yuri’s sound track booming in my ears, I don’t hear Papà’s voice criticizing me. I don’t hear the wheezing of my lungs begging me to stop, or the clock ticking away Zhuki’s days in San Benedetto. She and the others appear and disappear in front of me, their movements unfolding slowly and gracefully, and the field seems like another world, floating out in space, the floodlights at the corners penetrating into my heart and taking away its weight.

  I score a goal. It’s the first goal I’ve ever made. Ever. Granted, it’s not a pretty one, bouncing off my knee and barely dribbling across the line. And granted, there’s a six-year-old defending the goal. But a goal is a goal is a goal is a goal.

  “Goooooooooooooool! Gooooooooooooooool!” I shout over the music as I run around the field, and I can feel the blood coursing to my head. I do it Vanni Fucci–style, leaning in around the corners, hands in the air. “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool!”

  The others stand by, at first smiling, then staring at me in disbelief. Ihor moves his shadow over Little Yuri to protect him. On my third lap, I slow down and realize they’re not staring at me at all but at the line of cypresses.

  Shit. I yank the earbuds out of my ears, and the music stops abruptly.

  “Papà . . . what are you doing here?”

  Yuri and the bodyguard conference in Ukrainian while Papà quietly surveys the scene. I wait for his face to change into anger, or at least that look we used to get as kids, the look that said, I know we are in public now, but just wait until we get home. But the look never comes. Instead, he sets a small paper bag on the ground and starts back toward the path, his shoulders slumped, not even raising his hands to protect his face from the scratch of the cypresses. I feel the muscles in my legs loosen, and I sink to the grass.

  “Shit.”

  Yuri covers Principessa’s ears, and Little Yuri clamps his hands over his own.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” I sit down on the ground and start rocking like the kid who ate the paste back in asilo. The Ukrainians hover over me.

  “Are you okay?” Zhuki asks, cautiously, in English.

  “Yes. Sorry. Shit. Sorry. Shit.”

  “What is it?” Yuri asks. “What is this ‘shit’?”

  “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  “I do not believe you,” he says. “No hands on head, this is nothing. One hand on head, this is problem. Two hands on head, this is Chernobyl.”

  “It’s Chernobyl, then.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That was my papà.”

  “And this is so bad? He is your papà. You will ask him to keep secret, and he will not tell no one we are here. Anyway, paparazzi are already in Rome, chasing Totti and Ilary. No worry.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We are Slavs. We like long stories.”

  I look up at Zhuki’s face, pale as the moon in the dim light, and I start babbling like a deficiente, telling them everything. Well, the edited version of everything. I tell them that Luca and Mamma died in an accident, and calcio is really the only thing Papà has left that makes him happy. “And now he’s going to think I’ve been seeing you every day behind his back.”

  “You do see us every day,” Yuri says.

  “Yes, but he’s going to think we’re best friends or something.”

  “We are not best friends?” Yuri puts on a pout and laughs, then stops himself when he realizes I’m not laughing.

  “You don’t understand. Papà is obsessed with you.”

  “Obsessed?”

  “He is a big fan of yours. Your biggest. He remembers every goal you ever scored and every interview you ever gave. He’s had your picture up in his shop since your days at Dynamo, and he fights with the knife between his teeth for your honor every time someone says you are guilty. When he found out you were here in San Benedetto, it was one of the greatest moments of his life.”

  “You exaggerate.”

  “No.”

  “And you play calcio with us every day and you do not tell him this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, you are a bad son,” Yuri says.

  “Yes.”

  Ihor has retrieved the paper bag and is eating Martina’s chocolate cake with his fingers. He walked all the way up the hill to bring me a fottuto piece of chocolate cake.

  “Well, it is finished now,” Yuri says. “But no worry. Tomorrow we fix.”

  “Trust me. There’s no way you can fix this.”

  “Ah, ah, ah.” He wags his finger at me. “Trust me. Calcio fix everything. You do not know the power of calcio. Calcio put back order in universe. Calcio make everything better.”

  The church bells scattered over the hills take turns ringing midnight. When I stand up, the Ukrainians seem relieved that the vigil is over and they can finally go home and go to bed.

  “Will you be okay?” Zhuki asks.

  I hesitate. How fast things change. This morning I was a rebel. Tonight I am a refugee. Yuri can see it in my eyes. Zhuki says something to her brother, and he nods.

  “Come with us,” he says. “You come with us to villa and we relax a little before you go home. Everything will be fine. You see. No worry.”

  They collect the floodlights and start toward the scribbles of brush and brambles that conceal the breach in the wall at the back of the terrace, that rabbit hole they disappear through every night. Ihor goes first, his voice reappearing somewhere above, and Yuri hands Little Yuri and Principessa up into the darkness. Zhuki scrambles up behind them and holds out her hand to me. It’s a steep slope strewn with rocks and a few crumbling steps, and I’m surprised by her strength as she pulls me up onto the next terrace.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting when Yuri opens the front door of the villa. A flash of light? A flock of white doves? An earthquake? Instead the door opens into an ordinary front hall. Ordinary for a Hollywood movie director or a calcio star, at least. The walls glow a soft yellow, with white moldings piped around the edges of the room like icing. Baroque or Venetian or rococo, or whatever that style was back in the 1600s. Or maybe it was the 1700s I’m thinking of. I can never keep that stuff straight. The floors are cool white marble, a crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and on the right is a giant portrait of Signora Malaspina sitting coquettishly to the side in one of those low-hipped, one-piece bathing suits from the fifties or sixties. She really was a good-looking woman, even in that suit.

  Mykola and Ihor line up the floodlights along the wall, ready for the next day.

  “Have you ever been in here before?” Zhuki asks.

  “Never,” I whisper.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” she says, almost purposely loud, and her voice echoes down the long hallway in front of us.

  “Isn’t Tatiana already asleep?”

  “Don’t worry about Tatiana. She takes enough pills to keep a bear
asleep all winter.”

  “And Vanni?”

  “He’s in the guest wing. He can’t hear a thing.”

  “Why didn’t he play tonight?”

  “He say air is too dry here,” Yuri says, shifting Principessa to his other shoulder.

  “By the sea?”

  “He say something about salt. Salt is bad for his skin, and bad for his French cosmetics contract.”

  “He is not allowed to get wrinkles,” Zhuki says, smirking. “It says so in the contract.”

  I want this on record. Vanni Fucci, dream of every woman in Europe, has been cowering in the villa all day long, rubbing two-hundred-euro lotion into his skin.

  They all change into slippers. Zhuki gives me a pair of beat-up slip-on Adidas from a pile, and I follow the others down the long hallway. It opens into a massive living room and kitchen, with sleek divans like the ones at Le Rocce and a flat-screen bigger than Martina’s.

  “Sit down, Etto,” Yuri says. Principessa is still fast asleep on his shoulder, and Little Yuri is walking like a zombie, his eyes half closed. Yuri says something to him and holds out his hand, and in slow motion, Little Yuri reaches up and tucks his fist into his papà’s palm, which closes over it like a ball-and-socket joint. I remember when Papà used to take Luca and me up to bed, each of us sitting on a foot, wrapping our arms around his thick calves, laughing the whole way as he went stomping up the stairs.

  “Say ciao, tutti. Buona notte.”

  “Ciao, tutti,” Little Yuri says, his eyes closed. “Buona notte.”

  Ihor flops down in one of the chairs flanking the divan, puts his socked feet up on the coffee table, and makes a noise like an animal lying down in the hay for the night. I hope for a second Zhuki will come and sit next to me on the sofa, but she chooses the other chair, sliding off her slippers and tucking her feet beneath her.

  “This is a nice place,” I say.

  Mykola looks around the room and shrugs. “It is okay.” Everyone laughs.

  “It’s definitely not Strilky,” Zhuki says, and they all laugh harder.

  “What’s Strilky?”

  “It is the village Yuri and I are from.”

  “I thought you were from Kiev.”