They Shall Begin Again

by Giacomo Papi

  He wandered down other halls, towards the exit. His fear had disappeared with Ametrano. The painted figures went back to being dead.

  That evening he was unable to reach Maria.

  Twenty-eight

  The first ones swam back on the night of the second day. They came in swarms during the most desolate of hours, dipping into the waters of the sleepy ports and nameless piers, setting out from the anonymous shores of sludge and weeds forgotten on dry land, swimming slowly in the middle of the lagoon, illuminated and darkened intermittently by the moon and clouds, emerging from the sea like crabs or frogs, climbing up on poles, on docked boats, on stairs cut into stone, and invaded the islands. For many hours no one saw them.

  On Saturday morning Adriano and Interminelli found the bridge closed off. It took them more than thirty minutes to reach the entrance. The reborn thronged around soldiers and long lines of cars, reaching out to touch their windows as they slowly slinked by. People looking to hitch a ride past the checkpoint could be seen every couple of meters. Interminelli’s cell phone rang. The official answered and listened in silence, stern faced. Beyond the traffic jam, past the guardrail, Adriano could make out the sea. The sky was still whitish and the blue-green lagoon was ablaze in the sun’s reflection. There, right in the middle the water, next to motorboats and merchant ships, he saw a swarm of tiny black dots.

  “Do you see them too, Dottore?”

  “What are they?”

  “Who are they, you mean. The reborn. They’re trying to swim to the city. They set out last night, they just told me. We didn’t expect this to happen.”

  “It’s best if we leave. Let’s go back. There’s no point in staying.”

  “Today is a very important day, Dottore, and I have things to do. If you want a ride home tonight, you had better behave.”

  No one could reach the city by foot anymore. People made their way in single file down the streets. Piazzas overflowed and in every street, every courtyard, human beings tried to escape from the growing throng. Time was becoming endless and space was shrinking. Fresh air disappeared, a range of stenches overlapped, making it difficult to breathe. In order to avoid crowded bridges, and waiting for ferries that would never come, the reborn jumped into the canals and swam like amphibians towards the banks.

  The third wave.

  Around nine o’clock, the blockade posts at the bridges were stormed. One after the other, they came. Sweating bodies of men and women pressed up against each other. Adriano, too, was dripping wet, he got mixed in with the reborn. Everyone looked the same, living or dead. Adriano tried to call Maria again and again. He grew anxious at the thought of something happening to her. At ten o’clock, he heard her voice, but only for a few seconds. The line went dead. She said not to worry, that everything was fine at the hospital. Adriano tried not to lose sight of Interminelli, who kept on insisting that they had to meet John.

  It was a party for lunatics.

  People laughed and hit each other. Some were having sex. Leaning against the railing of a bridge, a boy tried kissing an old woman but she fell into the water, laughing. A woman and a child, or maybe a midget, climbed up on the ledge of a building and forced open the windows in search of an empty spot. An oily multitude of beings spilled into the city, flooded every corner, every inch, euphoric in their comeback. No one feared death any longer.

  He tried convincing Interminelli that they should leave, but Interminelli just kept saying that they had business to take care of. He kept repeating that after they met with John, airplanes would take off again, the army would march and the final showdown would begin. The unnatural filth that cursed both God and man would be smothered with the blood of the dead, he said, whispering it in Adriano’s ear. Adriano said nothing about his chance encounter with John at the museum the day before, or about the fact that he was a reborn.

  They chatted a bit with other people who were standing in the crowd. Everyone was conscious that something irreparable was about to take place. “It’s the third wave.” But people hoped it wasn’t so. They hoped the invasion hadn’t arrived in other places yet. Adriano tried to convince himself of this too, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Maria. Maybe the reborn were gathering there, where she was, at that moment, because that was where important decisions would be made. Then again, perhaps back at the hospital things were really fine. Police helicopters circled above, emptying water over the masses, making the excruciating heat more bearable for the people on the ground. Suddenly, Adriano heard his name being called.

  “Dottore, Dottore!”

  He searched for a familiar face.

  “Dottore! It’s me! I’m right here! Over here!”

  He caught sight of a waving hand emerging from the throng. The hand came toward him, cutting through the crowd, pushing, jostling, dodging. A few seconds later he was standing in front of Michelangelo Lopez.

  “I didn’t think I would get in, Dottore.”

  Interminelli didn’t recognize him. The boy, in shorts and a T-shirt, smiled. Adriano hugged him.

  “Why are you here, Michelangelo?”

  “Do you hear how well I speak now, Dottore? I was even on television.”

  “Do you have any news of Maria?”

  He knew nothing. The doctor hugged the boy again, and then released him. The flood of people slowly dragged him away. Adriano knew that he was in the middle of a river and he needed to follow it. He kept very close to Interminelli, who had the car keys, and reached out at every jutting branch of the sprawling mass to keep up. The stuffiness was asphyxiating. Even the walls of buildings looked like they were sweating; time dripped into a slowed universe made smaller by the shortage of space. The crowd made everything more confusing. Soon even the living began to remove their clothes. Adriano was shirtless. His jacket, shirt and tie were shredded underfoot.

  Morning became noon and noon became afternoon, and with the heat and fatigue, and the slowing down of all movement, the difference between the living and dead faded in an indistinguishable clot of damp, sticky limbs and wet bodies.

  An enormous flow of naked bodies dripped into every vein of the city. Seagulls cried out as if it was a normal day.

  The sun went down behind the roofs. Sweat evaporated from bodies, leaving behind the stickiness that comes after a night of dancing. They were trapped in bottlenecks and were spat out into unexpected piazzas. Helicopters tossed bundles of food from the pinkish skies. Thousands of hands and mouths grabbed and devoured them before they even hit the ground. They walked, exhausted, only several meters per minute, and only at eight in the evening did Adriano and Interminelli arrive at the designated meeting point with Ametrano. The official was anxious, and excited. He insisted on walking to the building on their right, about one hundred meters off, separated by an exasperated and aggressive sea of people.

  In the center of the piazza, a group of people had torn down a kiosk and used it to build a bonfire. The flames raged and people laughed, illuminated by the fire. It was a square piazza with a sort of L-shaped peninsula made up of row of squat houses. A crooked tower leaned toward the moon on their left. It might have been sinking. Everything in that place weighed down heavily in the mud. Adriano could feel the ground underneath his foot, the pavement felt like rubber. Interminelli was the only one who was still fully clothed. He wedged himself in between hips and shoulders, elbows and backs. Adriano stayed closed behind. Something metallic poked through Interminelli’s jacket, something sharp and irregular. The car keys. Adriano put his right hand in Interminelli’s pocket and took them.

  Interminelli didn’t notice—he was arguing with a man with bleach-blond hair who didn’t want to let him go by. Suddenly the crowd cheered. A big, bearded man opened the first floor window of a building and walked out onto the balcony. He had no shirt on. A group of helpers stood behind him. It took several seconds for silence to fall. The man raised his hand to the sky and the crowd waited for him to speak. His voice was powerful.

  “I see we’re al
l here …”

  A silence fell over the piazza.

  “… everyone: the living and us—the dead.”

  People hollered boisterously, praising him, clapping their hands and stomping their feet. They moved in unison like a single organism. All of the individuals had been born, died and reborn in that same place. They shared time, space and language. The man took a step forward and leaned on the balcony.

  “Some of you could have stayed home, look at the size of this crowd!”

  People burst out laughing. Adriano rushed over to an empty spot he saw, straying from Interminelli’s side. Interminelli stared at the balcony, his neck stretched out and his mouth wide open. In that moment, the moon freed itself from behind a cloud and cast a greenish light on the scene below. The man who stood towering on the balcony, the greatly revered chief of the dead, the man who was announcing the new beginning, was none other than John Ametrano.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Friends! For those of you who still do not understand, the living was about to issue our holocaust. I think it would be a real pity to let our new lives go to waste like that, don’t you? But no need to worry—that’s not going to happen.”

  The crowd erupted in cheers.

  “The third wave has come! We will finally take over the living. From now on we will be the ones calling the shots. Let the celebrations begin!”

  The crowd went wild.

  “But … before we celebrate, I’d like to clarify something. May I?”

  The crowd roared.

  “We must make a sacrifice, as tradition commands. Down there in the crowd, I spot an old friend.”

  Like a fool, Massimo Interminelli raised his hand, perhaps disillusioned, perhaps hypnotized, perhaps wanting to die.

  “Yes, right there, the man who raised his arm. That is Dottore Massimo Interminelli. Out of seven billion living men, he is the biggest son of a bitch of them all.”

  Adriano kept retreating, taking advantage of every empty space that opened up behind him. The crowd surrounded Interminelli and lifted him up over their heads. Dozens of hands and arms passed him along like a rag doll towards the spitting mouth of fire. Thousands of fingers grabbed at him. They tore him to pieces, like fish on a carcass. Adriano kept walking away and with each step back, a little piece of Interminelli was torn off. His clothes. His belt. His watch. His skin. His eyes. His tongue. He was last year’s doll, ripped to pieces for the new one. As he was being handed over, hundreds of nails clawed at him, digging deep into his flesh, without haste or urgency. It happened naturally, because it was meant to happen, no one was to blame. Each one of his assassins had only scratched, squeezed, scraped, and dug. And there wasn’t one of them, not even one, who could have imagined killing Interminelli on his own.

  By the time they threw him into the fire in the center of the piazza he had no more skin on him, but he was still alive. A screaming and bloody being, skinned by thousand of hands. Adriano made his way through the bodies and was now on the bridge. He turned back for a second to look at the shape of that human being, now blackened by the red and yellow of the fire.

  There were less people around. The dead had ransacked homes and the plunder poured out onto the streets. Millions of candles flickered behind open windows. Street lights were off. A pale and sickly moon stared out at the roofs. Guided by its light, Adriano crossed the entire city until he reached the canal. He recognized the road that led to the parking lot. He retraced his steps in search of the bridge, but as he was crossing a portico, he found himself surrounded by five men. He recognized one of them. A shabby old man from the Wa Zí conference who had been sitting several rows behind him. He looked tense. His eyes were ferocious. He came at him, in the dark, removing his dentures as he walked.

  “This one, for example, is alive.”

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “I saw him at a lecture the first few days of the conference, as soon as I had snuck in.”

  Adriano froze, searching for a way of escape.

  “What should we do to him?”

  “Let’s play with him a little bit.”

  “Hey, living man, answer this question: what’s it like to be afraid of dying?”

  “Come on, tell us, because we’ve forgotten.”

  They surrounded him. They held sticks in their hands. His only escape was to hop the railing and jump into the canal.

  “Leave him alone. That man is more of a reborn than all of you put together.”

  The voice bellowed from somewhere distant. Adriano couldn’t make out where it came from, but knew that it was several meters away.

  “And how do you know that?”

  “I know him well. 1870–1940. Adriano Karaianni, carpenter, he was at the hospital with me.”

  The man with no teeth stared into the doctor’s eyes and walked around him, sniffing him out like an evil dog, guided by his nose. He hesitated for a second, and then turned around.

  “Let’s go, the kid is right. This guy is deader than we are.”

  “More dead than alive!”

  He watched them walk off, and walked up a stone bridge, his hand clutching the keys. The man who had saved his life was waiting for him, sitting on the parapet, basking in moonlight.

  “Dottore … it was my pleasure.”

  “The pleasure is all mine, Michelangelo, thanks.”

  “Has your daughter been born?”

  “Not yet. How do you know it will be a girl?”

  “What will you do now?”

  “We’ll find a safe place to stay.”

  “I know it would have been easier to kill me.”

  “And it would’ve been easier for you to not get mixed up in all of this. But that’s the way we are.”

  When he reached the car, it was already six in the morning. He could hear the sounds of a never-ending party coming from the city: the laughter and the shouting, the echoing of the wildest carnival that ever took place in the history of man. Phones stopped working. When he got to the parking lot, he clicked the automatic lock, and it was almost as if the car greeted him with its four blinkers and internal light. He opened the door and got in. He fastened his seat belt across his bare chest and fixed the rearview mirror. He turned on the engine. He was on his way to Maria.

  Twenty-nine

  Maria checked the time on her cell phone. It was midnight. She hadn’t heard from him in fourteen hours. It was ten o’clock when she last heard from him, but the line went dead. He had just enough time to tell her that he was leaving, and that he would arrive later that night. She could barely hear him. There was too much noise in the background. She told him everything was under control at the hospital. She lay down on her back and stared at her belly. It was enormous. It looked like a hat on a bed, something she knew brought bad luck. She turned onto her side and fixed the pillow under her cheek. If everything went according to plan, Adriano would be there soon. She reached for her cell phone, which she had left on the bed, and dialed his number again, but got nothing, not even a busy signal. She turned the light off and rolled onto her other side. She thought of those tragic stories of war and death, and how she wouldn’t be one of the lucky ones to survive. She was alone.

  To stop these thoughts from racing through her brain, she started to fantasize about sex. A pair of manly hands, a mouth, his scent, breath, and back. She was in an airplane, sitting next to a faceless person with no body. A businessman. A doctor. A passenger. A pilot. All that mattered was that he had manly fingers, manly movements, manly desires, and she dived into that splintered mosaic, her right hand between her thighs. But soon she lost interest, she couldn’t get into her fantasy, it soon disintegrated, the scene unraveled, it became absurd, best to sleep, sleep, let herself go. Her baby girl would be born soon, as long as she kept her inside nothing would harm her. She fell asleep.

  She woke up, abruptly, three hours later, to a loud noise. It couldn’t have been him. She grabbed her cell phone. It was 3:43. She tried turning on the bedside lamp but it didn�
�t work. There must have been a blackout. The light from the street lamps filtered in. The first thought that came to her was that she was afraid of giving birth in the dark, the second thought was that there had to be an electric generator somewhere in the hospital. Light was bound to come back. The voices coming through the windows had become louder. It sounded like there were a thousand people outside. Someone shouted—what sounded like commands—over an agitated and incomprehensible chatter that rose and fell, like a large animal with many mouths, each one making a different noise. Then, broken glass. That was the noise that had woken her up. She tore off the sheets and ran to the window. The linoleum underneath her feet was warm.

  She stood on tiptoes and pressed her cheek to the window to get a better look. She was wearing was one of Adriano’s large blue T-shirts. She couldn’t stand underwear anymore. The elastic was too tight on her belly. People were frantic down below. They tore down the gates and flooded the hospital. Almost all of them were naked. They stomped on the flowerbeds and marched through the entrance. Someone shouted.

  “The maternity ward is this way! Over here.”

  More windows shattered, possibly from the first floor. She heard another crash. She was getting scared. She crouched to get a better view. Seated on a bench, she saw an old woman holding a baby to her breast. The baby cried as if possessed. She got a little higher to see more clearly. Three men were beating up a girl in a robe. She collapsed to the ground. The old woman shook the newborn child like a doll and pushed his face to her breast. She heard doors being broken down and heavy objects hitting the floor, the swarming rush of a group of men and women at the entrance. Maria heard a woman’s voice.