No, I don’t look at just the women. That would be weird. I see men doing it all the time: even the cops in Rome, who stand around the piazzas pretending they’re keeping guard (from what?) and all they do is the slow head turn with every pert ass that walks across the square. I never do that. Why can’t people be more discreet?
There were these two guys, college kids, shiny jackets, swirling letters in red and white on their chests. They had friendship threads (or cancer bands?) on their wrists. The shorter one was saying something, and his friend was laughing hysterically, hands on the railing above him and face bent down and all crumpled up. Basta basta, he pleaded. Stop, stop. I couldn’t understand a word of the joke. So I asked the joker the time. Just so he’d stop.
The crowd started thinning, and by the time the train reached my station (the last), I was sitting alone on a row of seats. In the middle, long-jacketed, back firm, hands on knees. If I had a long sword across my lap, I could have been a samurai. Ready for battle. Or for suicide.
Then I started walking. Office is like a numbing of the senses, seeping into you in slow, unyielding doses, like an insulin drip. Retirement by routine. Extinction through ennui. Maybe I should be a freelancer. Federico’s office is his taxi. He told me he once had an office and a house (in California). It was a bad time, his last two years in the States after he was laid off: he couldn’t get over his anxiety without medication, couldn’t get medication without insurance, couldn’t get insurance without a job, couldn’t leave the house to look for a new job because of the anxiety. How did you fix that? Fixed itself, he said: lost house, lost savings, came back to Rome.
I walked through large sensor glass doors. Sometimes I take a step forward and then one step back, so the doors stutter open and closed. I like confusing technology. Scoring one for humanity. When I got into the elevator, because it was Monday, everyone was talking about the weekend. How was your weekend? What did you get up to? Went for a jazz concert in Villa Pamphili. I smiled at that. We had some great steak: this new place called Eataly. I smiled at that too. How do you spend a lifetime with people who are barely tolerable? How did the Buddha spend his weekend? Berries, some leaves, sun-dried, walk in the forest. Talked to some deer. Crazy times.
Markus wanted to see me. I didn’t have the final draft of his project report ready.
Krantik, did you have a fabulous weekend?
Yes, I did. Markus goes to Bikram Yoga on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Great, I love it when I see people filled with energy.
Yes, of course. Markus has tennis lessons on Mondays and Fridays, the coach made it to an ATP Tournament. Once. In 1984.
You need to channel that energy. You have some great ideas, I can see that. But it’s all over the place.
I’ve been trying, Markus.
You know we have LBLF coming up? That’s Looking Back, Leaping Forward, our annual employee evaluation exercise. They give the winners little mementoes: steel pyramids with the company logo embossed. I saw a dildo shaped like a pyramid once (in a video, not in real life).
Yes, I’ve filled out my form.
And I need to fill out your form too, in two weeks. I’ll definitely say he’s intelligent. I’ll say he has good academic credentials. But, and I will have to say this, Krantik, there’s a distinct lack of focus. He has not, repeat has not, delivered on his key assignments. And I’m sorry, if this report isn’t ready on time, I’ll have to say that.
Yes, I understand. Markus has four steel dildos on his table.
I need you to work on this, Krantik. You can check the industry network resource base, find the figures for a sector-wide reference, check our rate of return, talk to Claudio about the last financial analysis. Are you taking notes?
Yes, I am. My pen moved on paper.
Our board wants a company that’s becoming more efficient. And I know it is. Why can’t you show that?
I need to go over all the numbers.
Do a review of all customer interface indicators, say our current product base is being rolled out with maximum efficiency. We need to show a 3 percent improvement from the last report. Also say the next generation products are already in line with expectations. Use the phrase ‘next generation.’ Between his Bikram Yoga and his tennis, Markus straightens his back by sitting on his steel dildos. All four of them.
This is not just about our annual report, he continued. It’s about your LBLF. Don’t make yourself redundant. Not when you can be a star. You can be on this chair in ten years; you need to start planning now.
Of course. Markus has thirty-two straight teeth and he displays them for my viewing pleasure now. His lips are stretched back, and he’s trying very hard to look like a father figure. Or a pyramid lover.
You are the future. YOU! His finger’s up till I turn and leave. He can be dramatic sometimes; maybe he did theatre in college? He’s drunk the Kool-Aid; in fact he’s got a whole enema with it. But I don’t hate him. I can be very Amish with people.
I met Massimo for a cigarette. We were standing in the sun, behind our office building and enclosed by large iron bars that ran across the backyard. This is not a metaphor; there was actually a row of ten-foot bars, each separated by a little gap. You could never make it out of there.
So you’re working on the efficiency report?
How do you know that?
Everyone knows. Vito told me in the loo.
Why the hell is Vito talking about me? Vito was the guy everyone had a crush on. And he was blabbering nonsense all the time. This wasn’t nonsense of course, I was working on the report. But it’s none of his business. All the cute guys can get by without any intelligence or personality. Thankfully, I’m pretty hideous. (At least, compared to Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling. Not compared to you sitting on your couch, or you in the gym pretending to work out to Fatboy Slim. I could be hotter than you.) The world doesn’t take great notice of me. I need to survive on instinct honed through careful observation. So I have a very evolved understanding of the world.
Markus told him in the café.
Fuck.
People are worried. If your report’s not good enough and if it doesn’t tell the right story, the board’s going to do some slash-and-burn around here. And if people lose their jobs, they’ll probably blame you.
Great. Thanks for turning an insignificant report into the end of the world.
Maybe it is the end of the world.
No, it’s not. There would be signs if it was the end.
What kinds of signs?
I think Oprah would stop talking.
And Van Damme would be involved in some way, he added.
Definitely Van Damme. Maybe a killing cyborg that also gives the perfect blow jobs. That would do away with straight sex and reproduction altogether.
What about the homophobes?
They could always become priests. I lit another cigarette, cherry to cherry. I wanted to be outside those iron bars. I didn’t know where. I wanted to be an animal that didn’t give a fuck. Maybe a llama. Nothing could bother a llama. Hey, Pedro’s throwing a massive salsa party! Fuck that, I’m chewing my grass. Hey, your mother’s being dragged away to the llama-Mac grinding factory. Can’t you see, I’m sitting on this rock? Holy shit, you’re being eaten alive by Van Damme and a meteor is hurtling down to kill all life on earth. I’ll think about it when I’m done sniffing this tree.
If you could be anywhere, where would you be? Massimo asked me. Sometimes he can read my thoughts. I often think of his father sitting at home getting high on the marijuana tree.
I’d be anywhere but here.
That’s not true, there are worse places to be.
Such as?
You could be a miner in South Africa, getting your lungs lined with copper and your eyes filled with mercury.
Or I could be chained to a wall in someone’s sex cellar.
Or I might be in Google, Massimo said. No one ever leaves the building. And they pretend it’s some kind of twenty-four-hour fun-day,
get your pet over, grab a Coke from the fridge, get dinner in the office, hang out with all the other cool Googlers so you don’t even need a social life outside. Congratulations: this is the life you’ve always dreamed of. He twisted his dead butt into the ashtray.
Sounds horrible. How do you know so much about the work there?
I keep applying. And never hearing back. Massimo goes to visit his dad every weekend. And now, he’s trying to sniff something on his nails. I hope his nails weren’t investigating down his ass when I wasn’t looking. I’ve seen that happen.
Are you okay? After your trip back home. Everything okay?
Yes, of course. And then I added: Only my ass is bleeding.
That happens to me all the time. Too much meat.
Liesbeth mailed and asked if Massimo and I wanted to hang out. I said I had too much to do, buried under work, will need all evening to plough through. Then Massimo called on my extension and said I should come: she might even bring Sandra along. But I told him I couldn’t. And that Markus was calling me, so I had to hang up.
I stopped at the supermarket and picked up some aubergine, zucchini, and minced beef. And then some random shit: one of the only two Pringles flavors available and Diet Coke. When I got home, I sliced the veggies really thin; it’s nice to have them mushy with the beef. While the meal was cooking (I like it to simmer for a long time), I sat on the laptop and before I knew it, there were five Facebook tabs open, three Cracked articles, and half a dozen reddit pages. Liesbeth had gone to Madagascar and had pictures of golden beaches and turquoise skies, also a fisherman who held a crab by a rope. Pooja’s wall was inactive, but someone had tagged her in old school pictures. She was in the second row in pigtails and her male classmates were commenting on how they all had a crush on their class teacher who was sitting in the front row centre, her sari falling perfectly into place. On reddit, I saw a skinned thumb; the bone sticking out after a home-décor accident, but thankfully the poster still had his iPhone with him in the operation room so he could post the picture. Someone’s dog had killed and dragged home a giant mole and it was now on the living room carpet, its shoulder torn into shreds and its mouth still wide open in shock. At a party, a fat guy with only a party cap on and a star tattooed on his bicep was trying to set his dick on fire. He also had a brown scarf on, but he didn’t think that worthy of destruction. I opened a few office files, but obviously I didn’t work on them. Switched between them a few times. Wrote an e-mail to Chiara and then discarded it. Wrote another one, saved it in my drafts.
The beef smelled good now. I had added turmeric, coriander powder, and cumin. I waited at the window for some time, I could see a bar downstairs, people trickling out to smoke, ask each other for lighters, and sip their cocktails in the pauses between conversations. One guy leaned over and kissed his girlfriend. She tugged his scarf; it wasn’t cold enough for a scarf, but he looked good with it. Above them, street lamps were strung on wires that stretched across the road. On one end of the road rose the remnants of an ancient Roman temple, about five storeys high. It must have been massive. Where I was standing on the second floor must have been inside the temple.
When I finished eating, I had some music on, but I wasn’t sure what was playing. I lay down on the couch and stared at the ceiling. There were all these voices in my head. Maybe not different voices, just one voice saying lots of different things. But I asked them to stop anyway.
MORNING
I got my nightmares from Netflix and my poetry from Facebook. The poetry wasn’t great, but the nightmares weren’t that bad either.
I had been watching a true crime series. I saw a chain saw whining through a woman’s limbs, its sound shredding the air into purple, the hand of the murderer shaking while pressing down, jagged bones with ribbons of meat hanging off them like confetti strewn around a basement floor. I couldn’t see the monster that did this. But I was deep in the series. I wasn’t the murderer, but I was mute.
I dreamed that I walked into the largest shopping complex in a riverside town that used to be a village and bought a nightmare. They had discounts and blockbuster offers. They said they had the latest models and I would keep coming back for more. Back home, I unwrapped the packaging and found a gun and a bullet and a question. The question floated up in the air and then coiled around my head. I wanted to imagine it was a crown of thorns or a halo. But I found a mirror and saw that it was a dunce cap.
There was an open window next to where I sat in the morning. I could have flown out and seen the world. I could also have jumped out and seen no more. The world was out there, and so was the end of the world.
I went to Ikea and bought myself some plastic furniture.
COME ON TAKE A TRIP
The end of that week, Friday, Liesbeth called me. I was checking for a gastroenterologist to get my ass examined. Again. She does have a heart of gold, Liesbeth. It’s soft and malleable, also it deforms under stress: Tanzanian malnutrition gets her down, so does Wall Street arrogance. And repeated refusals. So I said I was coming. Sometimes she beats her heart into a pulp and smears it in thin paste over ugly things, to make little gold trinkets. I may bitch about her, but we end up hanging out a lot. And she had some good stuff, she said.
I got on the metro and found a seat at once, which is always a miracle. There was a blonde girl opposite me with glasses on. I looked at her and she was looking at me, and then we both turned away. An older man was standing near me. I didn’t offer him my seat; he had a beard like Sean Connery so probably didn’t need it.
The metro had cradled us down one stop when a hobo entered the carriage. He had no shoes, and no pants on. Just a long coat that went down to his knees and a dirty cap. He bared his ugly misshapen teeth. And then he slouched against a railing and started his speech. I couldn’t understand some of it, but this is more or less what he said (in Italian of course; because I know you don’t read Italian, I’ve written it out in English): Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I’m a poor man, poorer than any of you. I don’t have enough money for a meal and haven’t eaten a full meal in days. So if you have some spare change, you can give it to me.
He stank up the whole compartment; he hadn’t showered since the Berlin Wall fell. (Of course, we don’t remember that, do we? No one remembers the wall being torn down, at least not since the two towers fell.) And it was as if he just read out his litany, there was no feeling. He didn’t need any pleading: he was probably thinking, I don’t need shoes, hell I don’t even need pants, do you think I need your money. He had no drama. And he had no dignity. We like our poor dignified.
So I took out a few coins. I had to reach over and drop them in his hand, which didn’t stretch far; it was probably fossilized with dirt.
Everyone looked away. Fuck you all, I thought. Fuck you and your purses and your iPads, fuck your hair and your shoes, fuck your mom who died of cancer and your brother who’s just been diagnosed, fuck your red skintight pants, fuck you if you didn’t get your promotion, and fuck you if you lost your job. Fuck you if you’re dying and fuck your newborn child too. I’m getting out of here. It was my stop anyway.
I was calmer as I climbed into the skies on the escalator. Sometimes my anger is fake. Often my sorrow is fake too. If I don’t fill my soul with wind and bluster, the world may know it’s empty and crush it like a Coke can. You could add gold plating on it, but it’s still just an empty Coke can.
When I was walking to Liesbeth’s place, I crossed a yard with books, furniture, CDs, a birdcage, some old suits littered on the lawn. So I walked in. It was an estate sale: some guy had kicked the bucket and now his whole life was for sale. Everything he owned at least. “Todd Williams, lover of books, birds, and beauty in the world. Husband, father, friend. We will miss you.” The placard read. An American; I wasn’t surprised. No Italian family would sell their memories; this whole place is built on memories. People milled around the tables, picking up stuff, putting them down respectfully, as if the lampshade was dying of kidney failu
re too. I went through the books; I read a lot, but you’ve probably figured that out by now (and no, not just random websites, sometimes actual books too). Dostoevsky for three euros, but he was too heavy; Safran Foer for five euros, nice but I’ve got most of them; maybe Jeanette Winterson since I haven’t read anything but Oranges. And then I saw the Graham Greene. He had only one. The Quiet American. Funny that was on sale here. Because the only quiet American is a dead American.
When I reached Liesbeth’s place, she asked me if I had paper. I said no.
But I told you I had stuff.
So I assumed you had paper. In fact, I even brought the rolling machine.
What do we roll with? Toilet paper?
We could do that, Massimo said, and then smoke that shit.
I can do it in a cigarette, I offered. I started twisting the tobacco out of my cigarette while Liesbeth scooped a little to mix with her weed.
On my way here, I saw a yard sale. Some guy who died and now all his belongings are up for sale. It’s in one of those big houses in Garbatella.
I’ve never seen that here.
No, he’s American. Was American.
No Direction Rome Page 6