When someone is able to rise above the absurdity of teenage life, to point it out for all its ridiculousness, it’s best to befriend them immediately. I needed Kati. Even after so many years, this remains true.
BY JANUARY 2008, IT HAD become clear that my coworkers and I weren’t going to have jobs for much longer. Weeks went by, projects wrapped up, and no new ones replaced them. Then one morning, we learned that the company was getting bought out by a massive conglomerate on the East Coast. Ownership would officially change hands at the beginning of March, and the very next day they’d scheduled a company-wide meeting. In the intervening weeks, my coworkers and I did what reasonable people do when faced with the inevitable: we took two-hour-long lunches, we polished up our résumés, and we stole whatever wasn’t tied down.
There was nothing on the calendar after that meeting—not a single thing for all the days and weeks and months afterward.
And there was nothing to hold me back when Kati said, “Let’s do it. Let’s go to Italy now.”
So, rather than watch the bitter end unfold, I left the country on a chilly February morning, knowing that I would likely not have a job when I returned. My boss Angela wrote me a send-off email that said, simply, “Take care. HAVE FUN FOR ALL OF US.”
And though the eight-hour time change between Seattle and Italy proved advantageous (by the time I received the email from my coworker Philip informing me that nearly everyone at the company was out of a job, I’d already had the presence of mind to get drunk), having fun proved elusive. It soon occurred to me that I was losing more than camaraderie and a self-aggrandizing belief that we were making the world a happier place. I was losing all the stability and independence that came with a steady income, along with access to that rarely used bathroom on the tenth floor where I could poop in peace. How many places had that?
I had plenty of time to think far too long about all this on the flight over. Unlike normal humans who do not suffer from motion sickness so severe that they get nauseated while checking their watch (please, never ask me the time), I can do very little on flights that won’t render me a puking, sweaty heap by the time we land.
Reading a book or familiarizing myself with Vin Diesel’s extensive theatrical canon is out of the question. I’m also unable to sleep, which I think is probably a biological safeguard against me asphyxiating on my own vomit at thirty-six thousand feet.
Instead, I sit in my seat for hours, thinking about all the things that happened on the ground that I am presently unable to change. When other people have problems, they meditate, or see a therapist, or try a fad diet in which the only sustenance is words of affirmation from Gwyneth Paltrow. I, instead, save all my introspection and regret for the friendly skies. Mostly this involves me sipping ginger ale while scowling.
Snuggled up close to Kati in the temporal limbo that accompanies international flights, I thought back to when I first started at the game company. Rand and I were living together in a small apartment in North Seattle. He was an entrepreneur, which meant that he’d spent his early twenties wearing hoodies and going into serious debt starting his own company. Unable to find steady work, I had been stringing together as many temp jobs as possible, hoping that if I mashed them together they would sort of resemble a Frankenstein’s monster of a career, minus the health insurance.
This job had changed all that. I was able to pay the rent and spend money on frivolities like new shoes and root canals.
When I got home, it would all be over. And so I crisscrossed all over Italy, heavyhearted and trying to enjoy a vacation that was as fiscally reckless as the company’s last few months had been.
I CANNOT DEFINITIVELY SAY WHEN it was that Kati and I first fell ill. A safe estimate puts it at somewhere between five and ten minutes after landing, that upon breathing the sweet citrus-scented Italian air and realizing that the only obligation we had for the next two weeks was to eat copious amounts of carbs and to enjoy ourselves, our immune systems collectively said, “Fuck it.”
Whatever the case, it felt instantaneous: upon landing, Kati and I were struck by a virus that, had we been heroines in a Victorian novel, would have killed us. By the time we reached her cousin’s home in Genoa several hours later, she was already rationing out the few doses of NyQuil that we found at the bottom of her toiletry bag with a frugality usually found in someone who had been through the Great Depression.
Over the next few days, she and I would take turns sneaking into the bathroom to down water by the cupful so as not to alarm her relatives. When they learned of our illness, they shared with us the rather confounding wisdom that too much water would make us sicker. Kati and I didn’t argue, which is the best course of action when dealing with full-blooded, native Italians (never debate people whose ancestors conquered most of the known world while wearing mini-skirts and sandals). Instead, we simply smiled and excused ourselves to suck on the bathroom tap while trying not to aspirate a lung.
We’d been staying with Kati’s cousin Silvio and his parents in Genoa. After several days of watching Kati and I lying around, emitting low, miserable moans, Silvio decided that he needed to show us around, rather than have us squander our vacation watching House, MD dubbed into Italian.
I had mixed feelings about this plan. We were very close to Cinque Terre, supposedly one of the most beautiful parts of Italy, and arguably the world, but listen: the dubbed version of House in Italy is a masterpiece. Since MD doesn’t mean anything in Italian, the announcers called the show House, MEDICAL DIVISION. They practically shouted that last bit, in heavily accented Italian.
“ME-DEE-CAL DEE-VISION!”
I’m not sure if the soundtrack is actually different, or if it’s simply because they are now speaking the language of Tosca, but the show feels infinitely more dramatic.
Every few minutes someone would look off camera and ask, accompanied by a thundering musical crescendo, “Que facciamo, House?”
And then House would reply, in equally dramatic fashion, “Non lo so.” Cue deafening piano accompaniment.
In the haze of my illness, I was enthralled. Plus, I was learning all sorts of critical Italian vocabulary, like the words for chlamydia, lupus, and one-night stand. (The last one being a conoscente di una notte—literally, “an acquaintance of one night.” It’s profoundly poetic and nonjudgmental, which makes sense from a country that reelected Berlusconi.)
Despite my claims that sitting around watching any one of Italy’s three television channels while simultaneously eating green pasta was a viable way to appreciate the country and its culture, Kati was hell-bent on actually seeing Italy. Since she was sicker than I was, I relented; when Silvio generously offered to take us to the Cinque Terre on one of his days off, we agreed.
The three of us took the train to Monterosso from Genoa. Slowly, as we rolled south along the coast, the sun began to burn off the marine layer, and I could see the Ligurian Sea, calm and shimmering and blue green. I’d never seen the Italian Riviera.
The Cinque Terre are a cluster of five small towns that sit on the northern Italian coast, built precariously into the cliffside and right up to the water’s edge. Our train arrived in the northernmost village of Monterosso. The town is a long crescent that mimics the curve of the turquoise bay it looks out upon. The shoreline is flanked with sun-bleached buildings the same creamy color as the beach. It was too early in the year for sunbathers, who would overrun Monterosso in the coming months, but there were people clustered along the shore, sipping coffees as they enjoyed the view. We walked around, taking in the sunshine, snapping a few photos, and doing what I thought was an admirable job of not collapsing into a feverish heap on the piazza.
The specifics of what happened next will likely remain up for debate in Kati’s family for many years. But as she and I remember it, her cousin casually asked us if we wanted to go for a little walk.
That is what we both, specifically, recall him saying. Una piccola passeggiata.
In his defense, there is no w
ord in Italian for “hike.” Certainly no phrase for a “two-hour-long-journey-that-you-may-not-survive.”
You can see why we readily agreed to una piccola passeggiata.
In hindsight, I suppose most things that go awry do so incrementally, and I should have realized that. The bowl cut that I somehow elected to have just as I went into the sixth grade (I still do not know how this happened, but my mother, to her credit, did try to stop me) was not a matter of one swift cut but many calculated snips. The demise of the game company where I had been employed had not been the result of any one act. Instead, it was a series of small decisions, each one mostly innocuous on its own, but together resulting in the financial mess that meant the company was selling pennies on the dollar.
And likewise, the “little” hike from Monterosso to Vernazza happened slowly, one feverish step at a time.
It was a long while before Kati and I actually realized what was going on. Silvio was a good stretch ahead of us, and we followed, dutifully, not wanting to seem ungrateful to Kati’s cousin, who had selflessly given up his day off to lead us to our deaths on a picturesque mountain.
The sun we’d been basking in back in Monterosso was now beating down upon us. The trail was steep, rocky, and dry. With each step we kicked up a little bit of dust that fell on our newly washed hair and stuck to the backs of our already parched throats. I realized that none of us had thought to bring water. I’d figured that if I needed hydration, I’d just down a couple of frozen confections. But there was nothing—no people, no signs, and certainly no gelato stands—in sight.
It was Kati who finally spoke up.
“Silvio,” she said, pausing to wheeze and release a well-timed but nevertheless genuine cough, “how much longer until?…”
She let her question trail off there, realizing that she didn’t know how to finish. Neither of us knew where we were going.
He looked around noncommittally, as though the landscape—rocky, unwelcoming, and covered in bramble—might provide a reply.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “If we pass anyone, I’ll ask them.”
For another ten treacherous minutes, we encountered no one save for a few feral dogs that lived high up on the mountains. We would eventually come across two hikers who stared at Kati and me with looks usually reserved for three-legged kittens or children who’d cut their own hair.
Silvio chatted with them while Kati and I drifted in and out of consciousness.
“Good news,” he said, as the hikers skipped down the hill, flaunting their hydration and appropriate footwear. “It’s only another hour or so to Vernazza.”
Kati and I let this horrifying information sink in. Somehow, we, feverish and sick, had inadvertently agreed to a nearly two-hour-long dusty hike under the searing Italian sun between two of the five towns of the Cinque Terre.
It was around that time that my dear friend, the voice of reason and moral compass for my teen years, turned to me and whispered, “I’m going to kill him.”
“You can’t,” I replied. “He’s the only one who knows where we’re going.”
I don’t remember much of the rest of that trek. It is lost to illness, to the sun, to the dust and heat of that mountainside. I only remember when we rounded a corner, breaking through the prickly, dry shrubs, and saw Vernazza for the first time below us.
Perhaps it was the sacrifice of the time and what was left of our immune systems that made it look as it did. There is a distinct chance that I may have been hallucinating. Or perhaps it really was that beautiful. Whatever the reason, Vernazza was, at that moment, the loveliest place I had ever seen.
From this angle, we could see it perfectly—the buildings were crowded together, a messy pile of jewel-colored little boxes. They extended from near the top of the mountain all the way to the water, carving out a small harbor in the turquoise blue waters of the Ligurian Sea. It had all the unplanned precariousness of a tower built by toddlers: bright, chaotic, and leaving you with the sensation that at any moment, it might go tumbling down.
Even now, when I consider that the hike likely prolonged our illnesses, causing us to be miserably sick for the entire duration of our trip, I have no regrets about not murdering Silvio on that hillside.
This is the strongest testament to the beauty of Vernazza that exists.
When we reached the bottom we found a café where Kati and I, starved and exhausted, ate lunch while Silvio stared at us with a look of terror (and, I would like to think, a measure of admiration) on his face. Have you ever seen how pythons eat? How they swallow adorable woodland creatures whole and without chewing? It was like that but way faster and with bruschetta. When we’d finished, Silvio asked us if we wanted to hike back. Kati emitted a low guttural growl and I pushed her knife out of reach.
We took the train.
In the coming months, I’d think about that hike we took. How I’d never have done it if I’d known what lay ahead of us. I’d have stayed in Monterosso, safe and comfortable. And I’d have missed the sight of Vernazza from above, now indelible in my memory. I’d probably also have gotten better sooner, but that’s antithetical to the moral of this story, which is this: sometimes it’s best not to know what you are up against; if you are acutely aware of the challenges involved, you’d never do a damn thing. Being clueless is weirdly empowering. You can’t worry about the things that you don’t yet know you should be worried about. You end up doing wonderful things that you never would have had you been the least bit informed. You run off to Italy. You take horrific and beautiful hikes. You ruin your hair and your makeup and any chance of a future political career. And when it’s all over, you can’t help but feel anything but incredibly, overwhelmingly grateful.
A week later we’d made our way from Genoa to Naples, and I received the not-at-all surprising news that I no longer had a job. It came over email. A quick note from Philip, from his personal account, because his work account had already been closed. It was over. My layoff wouldn’t be official until I got back, so for my remaining week of vacation I was left in a sort of limbo.
I can’t remember what I wrote back. I just remember leaning back on the stiff bed of our Naples hotel, Kati hovering over me, her face gently etched with concern.
“You okay?” she asked.
I didn’t answer right away. Perspective would eventually come to me. It would hit me after talking to friends who’d also lost their jobs but had to contend with mortgages and car payments and feeding their children. I would find it after realizing that the rest of the world, when faced with setbacks, did not have the luxury of running off to a foreign country, drowning their sorrows in massive plates of carbonara and countless cups of mint chocolate chip gelato. That they did not have dark-eyed men waiting for them back home, ready to make everything right.
I would learn that I didn’t know a damn thing about hardship. That when someone asks you what you do, there are worse things in the world than having to answer “nothing” or “I haven’t decided yet” or pretending you don’t speak English. That being adrift in a sea of blue enamel paint wasn’t that scary when you had a secure-enough lifeboat.
Lying on that bed in Naples, with Kati staring at me, a mixture of concern and amusement on her face, I didn’t know any of this yet. I didn’t know anything, really. In particular, I had no idea what to do next.
I told her this, and she nodded. She made me drink a glass of water and then led me out into the dark, winding streets of Naples in search of gelato.
2
SOMETIMES YOU RUN SCREAMING FROM THE PERSON YOU’RE MADLY IN LOVE WITH
KATI LAID A TRAIL OF biscotti crumbs behind her and I dutifully followed them, eventually making it back to the States. I briefly considered staying in Italy and consuming so much gluten that I’d eventually transform into some sort of human-lasagna hybrid, but several things called me back home, back to Seattle: I couldn’t be formally laid off until I showed up at the office in person. My resources (both in terms of clean underwear and fina
nces) were running low. And most importantly, I missed Rand.
Our wedding date was a few months away, in September. I hadn’t planned on throwing the biggest party of my life while newly unemployed. But I’d started to accept that nothing ever goes as planned. The absurd, nausea-inducing-for-onlookers love affair that I found myself in was a testament to that.
When I’d first met Rand six years earlier, at the end of 2001, on the late night bus heading back to Seattle’s University District, I was looking for someone who
• was not an alcoholic,
• owned a bed (and not, say, a futon shared with roommates who worked the night shift),
• knew my name (I was flexible on this point, and willing to respond to Gertrude, Genevieve, Jennifer, Giselle, or Gwendolyn. Not Gretchen. Never Gretchen.), and
• wanted to have sex with me.
Please note that love is conspicuously absent from this list.
I was in a funk. My college boyfriend had dumped me unceremoniously the summer before, in the wake of both of my grandparents passing away. (“She handled that well,” said absolutely no one.) I’d spend the next few months devising shortsighted ways of easing my loneliness, which usually involved a frat boy and bottom-shelf liquor.
I would eventually seek out a therapist when I realized that my current methods for handling my depression (which can best be summed up as “Eating gyros while crying”) were proving ineffective. She dumped me after three sessions.
Had I been an artist, this would have been known as my Blue Period. But since I was twenty-one and a communications major, it is known as my “Midori Sour Period.”
I’d even gone so far as to tell my roommate I was through with relationships, which, if sincerely spoken, was a profoundly stupid thing to say. Those words are essentially an incantation to the heavens to send you the love of your life. Precisely when you are most miserable, and angry, and completely fed up with things, and love is more or less the last thing on your mind, that’s when it appears, screams something incoherent directly into your face, and crawls down your pants.
All Over the Place Page 2