Blue Bear_or the Impossibility of Anonymity

by Joseph Grady

  BLUE BEAR

  OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ANONYMITY

  Joseph M. Grady

  Palazzo Mortimer Press

  Fort Collins, Colorado

  Copyright © 2017 Joseph M. Grady

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:

  ISBN-13:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Josh Applegate.

  Vespa provided by Matthew Peters of Moto Italia of Northern Colorado

  PRAISE FOR BLUE BEAR

  I just finished Blue Bear – I think it’s amazing, downright brilliant at points.

  Marianne Medlin, Editor in Chief, Catholic News Agency

  Seriously, though, dude, this thing is well written. I’ve read plenty of people’s attempts at fiction and this is, by far, the best self-published thing I’ve read.

  Fr. Scott Valentyn, Diocese of Green Bay

  I really wanted Blue Bear to be terrible, that way I could make fun of Grady. But as I kept reading it, I kept getting more and more mad at him, because it was so good, and because I lost so much sleep staying up and reading.

  Fr. Michael Niemczak, Archdiocese of Santa Fe

  It was a really fun read, and I enjoyed it a lot.

  Samantha Cohoe, Author

  I’ve probably read over three hundred books in the last five years. Blue Bear is the only novel.

  Fr. Matthew Rensch, Diocese of Burlington

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ’STE CHIAVI

  LE RAGAZZE NON FANNO VISION QUEST

  IL PALAZZO

  L'INCULTURAZIONE FALLITA DEL CAFFÈ

  LEI È LA SIGNORINA LUCY FOX?

  I MOBILI SPEZIALI

  IL GIORNALISTA

  PICCHIATO IN FACCIA

  LA "B"

  ROMA, SEI BELLA.

  IL BAGNO TURCHESE E IL RIPOSO

  SIAMO DELL'AMBASCIATA SUDAFRICANA

  ANCORA IL GIORNALISTA

  PIOMBATO

  IL PIANO

  IL BAGNO TURCHESE E LA PISTOLA

  DE FRATRIBUS

  SBRONZA E POSTUMI

  COSA VUOI?

  ’NA GAMBA SPEZZATA

  LA CHIAVE DELLA CHIAVE

  IL BAGNO TURCHESE E LA CATENA

  LUX ET ANTHROPOS

  LA CHENOSI

  L'ESCATON E IL TEMPIO MORMONE

  You stare ahead of you, and behind your back stands your Life! It calls to you, you turn and cannot recognize it. Your eyes, unused to light, can grasp nothing. And then an abrupt word: your name! Your own dear name ... your being, your very essence – yourself – bounding from the mouth thought dead ... O word, O name, my own name! Spoken to me, breathed forth with a smile and a promise. O stream of light.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar

  CHAPTER ONE

  ’STE CHIAVI

  Running is a pretty universal activity. You throw one leg out in front of the other, then repeat the process with the other leg. Around the world, and from person to person, you have variations in time, distance, speed, terrain, etc. But the essentials are always the same: two legs and rapid succession of one after the other. It is also a pretty much universally understood rule of etiquette that when a person is out for a run, it can be rather rude to interrupt. It’s okay to stop a walker, no problem, but there is a rhythm and focus that sets the runner apart from the rest of the pedestrian world. This fundamental axiom is valid the world over, with only one notable exception: Italy.

  If a lost Italian needs directions in downtown Rome, he surmises that the stranger going by at a walker’s pace could very well turn out to be a tourist, so it might be a waste of time to stop and ask. But a runner — it is, of course, unimaginable that a sane person would spend precious vacation time exercising — a runner is most certainly a local, eager to dispense intimate knowledge of neighborhood shortcuts. Anywhere on the peninsula, that respect for the runner’s rhythm is not at all sacred. Rather, it is eminently interruptible. But speaking of sacred, this also is the same place where people manage to stay updated on village gossip and fulfill their Sunday obligation in one fell swoop, the same place where any given nonna will spend more than half of her time kneeling in the box confessing not her own, but her husband’s sins. Even though, on the whole, Lucy Fox found certain aspects of Rome to be a runner’s paradise — a good number of large parks, a long path by the river, ancient monuments and aqueducts anywhere you look — there was always that one drawback of the fact that any long run would almost always be interrupted, at least once, by a boorish Italian seeking directions.

  So while I was wasting time puttering around St. Peter’s Square, seeing the sights and smelling the smells, at 3:30pm, Lucy exited Via del Gianicolo number thirteen, like she did most every afternoon. She took a knee to tighten her left Brooks and, because Gambetti wasn’t in the porter’s office, she spent a moment stretching before leaving. The horizon threatened her with a rainstorm, but a little water won’t stop a true addict from getting her fix. At a warm-up ten minute per mile pace, she headed towards Villa Doria Pamphili, a spacious park just outside central Rome.

  I used to do a lot of my normal afternoon puttering around in that park too, and, believe it or not, even sometimes accompanied Lucy on very short stretches of her runs. It’s a common misconception. People think I should have poor vision. I don’t. My eyes are just normal. I’d sit there on the hill by the gate, and if I was awake, I’d see her coming from a long ways off. Even with good vision, it didn’t matter. I knew her athletic running gait well. Efficient. Precise. Not like most Italian women, who bounce around aimlessly in their stride. Now, okay, I realize my habits already sound kind of strange. And it’s true. I didn’t have much else to do in those days. But I am certain that there has never been a more platonic relationship than that which existed between me and Lucy. So then what was it? It’s hard to say. I would simply maintain that our interactions were on such a level of particularity that anyone would be hard pressed to find an analogue in any other friendship. At least I’ve never found one.

  A mile from home, she cruised through the park gates at eight and a half minutes per mile, her tied back wavy black hair barely moving from side to side. At this point, she would be warm enough to cross that threshold into a perfect flow and cadence, where the morning’s stress would melt away, ceding ground to the simplicity of breathe and numbing exertion. Her eyes squinted up to the grassy knoll where I like to lie and soak up the sun. (I was still in the piazza, evaluating the salesmanship of a team of immigrants hawking lightweight scarves and rosaries to passersby.) Lucy’s fixed gaze on my usual patch of grass prevented her from noticing a disgruntled Italian man in a red tracksuit and red Nike sneakers running down the path in her direction. His form was terrible, but he was really hauling, and his form was not helped by the way he kept looking back over his shoulder.

  Nobody would have thought too much of this, except that when the two of them finally did converge at a point on the path, the upset tracksuit man looked straight at Lucy with faint recognition in his eyes. He stopped, threw out his arms and shouted at her, “Oi, Ragazza! Puoi fermarti un attimino? Mi fai un grande favore?”

  Before she could pretend to ignore him, Lucy failed to avoid eye contact and stopped in her tracks. Come on, she thought, This is a park! Who the hell needs directions in a park? So she put on a thick foreign accent and called upon her backup tactic for avoiding conversation.

  “Non parlo italiano.”

  �
��Yes you do,” the man didn’t skip a beat. His own accent was thick, but his English was quick and efficient.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You speak Italian! You are the American girl from the Palazzo Mortimer. Yesterday you were speaking the Italian. I was there. I heard.”

  Lucy turned beet red. The odds of running into an Italian who spoke English well, and who also somehow knew that she spoke Italian, were extremely low. She’d made a good bet, but even good wagers sometimes lose.

  “At any rate, it is of no importance,” he went on, and had already thrust a pair of keys into her hand, which Lucy, because she was too embarrassed by her failed attempt at language ignorance, did nothing to resist receiving. “I have need of a very big favor from you.”

  “Um… wait… but who are you? Do I know you?”

  “I am nobody. You make a great favor for me, okay? And you listen to me clearly, okay? These keys, you are to render them only to me, or to Ginevra.”

  “Um… sure… but why? Do we know each other?”

  “Only to me or to Ginevra! Nobody other. Understood?”

  “Yeah. Only to you or Ginevra, but… I mean…” Lucy even added local emphasis by placing both palms together, with fingers pointed in the air, thrusting forward with each syllable. “Yeah, but who are you?”

  “Already I have told to you that I am nobody. You give them just to me only, or to Ginevra only!”

  An old digital ringtone started playing, and a small cell phone emerged from his pocket. He rattled off something into it using a funny sounding language that Lucy couldn’t recognize at all (a bilingual Italian is a rarity; trilingual is off the charts), “Hallo? Wat maak jy hier? Is jy in Italië? Nee, jy moet nie hier nog wees! Bly net daar, ek kom om jou te kry. Bly daar!”

  He hung up and looked back at Lucy, “Now I must go. Thank you! Thank you!”

  The man took off running again in the direction of the park entrance. A black Subaru Impreza pulled up right in front of the Park’s gate. Lucy could just barely see the outlines of two large men in black leather jackets getting out of the car. The tracksuit man got a view of them too and suddenly changed direction, heading off towards the other end of the park. The leather jacket people, meanwhile, got back in the car and sped off.

  Lucy slipped off the path up to the hill, hoping I might be in the vicinity. Finding nothing, she zipped the keys in the small back pocket of her running shorts, told herself that nothing weird had just happened, and did the one thing she did compulsively whenever she really felt the need to clear her mind (which was also the one thing she did compulsively even if she didn’t really feel the need to clear her mind). She ran.

  The lap around the lake and the rolling hills of the Villa grounds did something to alleviate the queasy intuition the tracksuit man had left in her gut, but not much. She steadily quickened her pace, but the slight increase in lactic acid ebbing into her thighs and calves was not enough to eliminate that gut reaction. In the more populated areas of the park she had to zigzag around, giving a wide berth to anyone wearing a tracksuit. But the deeper she plunged into the old estate property, the thicker the tracksuits got, so earlier than normal, she changed her bearings and headed back towards the Palazzo, avoiding the walking paths altogether.

  The park gate spilled out onto Via Aurelia Antica. Ahead of her, a very familiar massive figure — lighter than me, though — was steadily traipsing forward in the same direction. He was hard to miss in a yellow onesie with red polka dots and blue frills on the collars, cuffs, and ankles. His head was covered in white make up, a white bald cap, and fake curly blue hair around the ears. Two clown shoes dangled from his right hand, and a plastic Carrefour bag with a payload full of chips and Pepsi from his left. The truly remarkable thing, though, was that his appearance no longer struck her as remarkable.

  Instinctually, without even realizing what she was doing, and without skipping a beat, Lucy quieted her steps. She bit her lip to keep herself from grinning. She had to stay focused on her mission. Making her approach, she matched his footsteps and pace until she was directly behind him. As the clown shifted his weight to his left leg, and started moving his right knee forward, Lucy held her breath and lifted her own right foot off the ground. She waited, poised in the air for just a quarter of a second until the critical moment. Then she unleashed her foot, tapping the precise point on the backside of the clown’s leg, just below the knee, at the exact moment of vulnerability in his stride that would cause a loss of balance. His whole right side faltered and gave way. He almost collapsed, but was able to stumble forward a few steps, catching himself and recovering, even lunging forward to cradle the grocery bag like an infant in danger of being dropped.

  “Fricking-A, Lucy!” he yelled, even before he could see who his attacker was.

  When his balance was back, he turned and swung his clown shoes at her huge smile, just barely grazing her dry fit t-shirt. Lucy backpedalled. The clown launched one of his shoes at her, striking her hip, but causing no real damage. Lucy laughed all the more. Whenever running failed to calm her nerves, the only surefire backup was picking on Brian.

  “Lucy, this is not the time to be messing with me! If you had any idea what kind of day I’ve had.”

  Now at a safe distance, Lucy pretended sympathy, “Oh no, is somebody having a bad day? Oh, you poor thing. Come on. Let’s go get you a coffee. You want some coffee?”

  “Lucy, you are a disease.”

  “Come on. Let’s go. Sounds like you need a little pick me up after a bad day.”

  “You’ve been out running. I don’t want to be in a public place with someone gross like you.”

  “Brian, I barely even went four miles, and it’s chilly out. I’m hardly sweating.”

  “Four miles? Do you want to know what I would look like after running four miles?”

  “Actually, I would like to see that.”

  “Whatever. Let’s go.” They started walking. “I swear, though, Lucy. Some day, you’re going try to pull some crap like this, and you’re going to get what’s coming to you, and you’re going to deserve it, and I am going to laugh at you for it.”

  “Hurry up. It looks like it’s going to rain.”

  They headed towards their local coffee bar, at the base of the Janiculum hill in Piazza della Rovere. Across from the piazza and the traffic they could just make out the banks of the Tiber River, if they sat up straight. But most of the time, when seeking refuge in coffee, they preferred to forget they were in Rome. Brian and Lucy’s antagonism of one another had grown over a number of years of being the only Americans living together in student housing in a foreign country. Lucy had been the first English speaker at the Palazzo, arriving one year before Brian. Their mutual teasing had nothing to do with flirtation. That’s not to say it was without affection. It was just closer to sibling rivalry than anything else.

  The afternoon clouds had been spitting rain when they started walking together, but it really started to pour once they reached Piazza della Rovere. Lucy sprinted ahead and got out of the rain before it had a chance to soak her. She gloated from underneath the awning at Brian, who was waddling as fast as he could.

  Inside, Lucy ordered for both of them, as Brian was too out of breath to speak, “Ciao Giorgio. Due caffè, un’americano e uno macchiato.”

  The strong coffees came served in small ceramics, perched on mini saucers. Brian turned towards Lucy, resting his elbow on the bar and stirring sugar into his coffee with his free hand. Regaining his breath he said, “Alright, so do you want to know how I spent my day today?”

  Lucy nodded and stirred.

  “Okay, so it takes me an hour and a half to get way the hell out there to Via Boccea. The metro, then two busses. So I finally get to this nursing home, where this hundred year old lady is supposed to have her birthday party, and nobody knows who the hell this lady is, and nobody knows what I’m talking about. All they see is a foreign clown trying to explain why he’s there. Fricking Italy. I even called and
confirmed with the guy just last night. And of course, he has his cell phone off all day. Wonderful. So I walk around the whole neighborhood trying to find these people. Nothing. Then I sit in the lobby reading Io, Donna for two hours and leave. And then it gets even better. I go to my next appointment at the car dealership, and guess what.”

  “You bought a car?”

  “Another hour on the bus to get there, and the car dealership doesn’t exist. It’s been closed for two years! Or at least that’s what the guy across the street tells me.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Yeah, I know. Like… what the hell? Italy could be a paradise for clowns. People get us here. They love us. Clowns in America were done fifteen years ago. If only they could learn to make appointments in this country I’d actually have a job.”

  “I don’t know if you can blame this one on Italy,” said Lucy. “I know they’re not great at appointments here, but I’ve never had something that bad happen to me. Who are these people?”

  “I don’t know. They said they found me on Craigslist.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Hey,” Lucy changed the subject, “so something really weird just happened to me in the park.”

  “Oh, I guess it’s time to talk about you now.”

  “No, really, this was weird.”

  “That’s fine. That’s fine. Let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about all the things you want to talk about.”

  Lucy plowed ahead. “So I was just running through the park and this random guy I don’t know flags me down and gives me a pair of keys. He tells me to hold on to them for him and then he runs away. And now I’ve got his keys.”

  Brian thought for a second and could only say, “Yeah, that is weird.”