When Shadows Come

by Vincent Zandri

  I shake my head slowly. “Something’s happening. But I don’t know what.”

  “If he shows up again,” she says, “we’ll call the cops. Okay?”

  Grace takes hold of my hand, and leads me home.

  I set my hands on the thick wooden door of what used to be a shop that housed rare books. So I’ve been told. Grace already has the keys in her hand. She is always thinking ahead now that she has been forced into the role of seeing-eye human. She pushes the big silver key into the dead bolt lockset and twists. Metal clacks against metal as the bolt releases and the green-painted door pops open. She grips my sleeve and guides me through the opening.

  “Watch your step, love,” she warns. Already, we have forgotten about the stranger in the overcoat. But then, that’s not right. Not by a long shot. Let’s just say we choose not to mention him for the time being. We’ve also forgotten about our little, let’s call it, spirited spat. Put it behind us for the moment anyway.

  I’m helpless without my Grace. And she knows it.

  I lift my right foot and step over the wood saddle, enter into the long, stone interior of the building. Here’s where things begin to get tricky. My eyesight is nearly gone. The eyesight is a tease. It comes and goes when it wants to. It plagues me like a demon. Maybe because I am a demon. Just ask the people of that village.

  Grace takes my hand, leads me through the dark interior of the building. Like every building in Venice, the place smells of must and mold and decaying mortar. If Venice doesn’t sink into the ocean one day, it will simply disintegrate.

  We come to the staircase leading to our top-floor studio apartment. How do I know this? When you can’t see, you learn to count footsteps. Ten steps to the staircase. Twenty steps up to the apartment. Another two steps to get inside the door, another four to reach the toilet inside the bathroom. Eleven steps to the kitchenette refrigerator and beer. Twelve steps across the living area to the place Grace and I refer to as “the bedroom.”

  At the top of the stairs, Grace unlocks the door and opens it for me.

  “I’ll get something going on the stove,” she says, but I know what she really wants to do.

  “Paint, Grace,” I tell her, as I remove my leather coat, feel for the hook on the back of the door, then hang the damp coat up. “You’ve hardly touched your work since we got here. It’s Venice, for God’s sake. Home of the Biennale. Artists kill to come here. So do semi-blind soldiers with mega connections in the US Army.”

  “Not funny,” she says.

  I picture her easel and paints set up at the far end of the small room directly in front of a French window, its shutters opened wide. There’s a work-in-progress canvas set out on the easel and it’s covered over with a paint-stained drop cloth.

  The small college where she teaches in Albany keeps her pretty well tied down for most of the week, but when she doesn’t have to teach art, she wants to be making it. It’s one of the things I promised her when we first met five years ago. I would finally write something and she would make art and write beautiful poems and together we’d conquer the world.

  That promise wasn’t altogether different from the one I’d made Karen just before we married. I was going to leave the army for good. Become the man I always knew I could be. We’d travel, see the world. Live like Bohemians.

  Then, on a hot summer afternoon in 2001, a police officer showed up at my front door.

  I was devastated, because I never saw it coming.

  Not long after that day, two airliners were purposely crashed into the World Trade Center. As the buildings fell one after the other, I wanted to run away. I wanted to run and I wanted to do battle, with myself and with the world. It was like a trigger had been pulled inside of me or a switch turned on inside my brain. The old soldier once again heard the piercing cry of Uncle Sam. But he also saw the pale body of his dead wife lying on a steel gurney in a basement hospital morgue, her long brown hair still soaked with river water. He saw a chance for escape and he took it.

  “I can paint after dinner,” Grace says, as she takes hold of my hand.

  We’re both still a little drunk, so I know full well what’s about to happen.

  She pulls me into her, like I used to do to her back when I could see her face and her green eyes veiled by her dark brown, almost black hair. But she’s my guide now. We’re standing together near the kitchenette, and as she leads me, hand in hand, toward the bed, I count the steps.

  One through twelve.

  She brings me to the bed, sits me down.

  She takes both my hands in hers. Like the old-fashioned television tubes I recall from my childhood, it can take a few minutes for the light to fade away once the switch on my sight is turned off. All I see now is a blurry, dark silhouette of a woman surrounded by a glowing halo. She is not so much an apparition to me, but more like the last image I will see as I die, or perhaps the first thing I laid my eyes on when I was born.

  Grace squeezes my hands.

  I squeeze back.

  It’s then I realize I’m trembling. Me, the professional soldier. I’m trembling on the edge of the bed, my fiancée’s hands gripped in mine.

  “I want to try, Nick,” she whispers, her sweet, quiet voice like a hallucination. Like something I’m imagining.

  “I know,” I say. “I . . . know.”

  My eyes wide open, I smell her rose-petal scent and feel her heart beating. Her touch is at once gentle, but explosive, as she runs her fingernails up the length of my forearm. It’s like making love with a ghost or with a woman in my dreams.

  She pulls on my hand, as if asking me to stand. I do. She moves my hands up toward her shirt, presses my fingertips against the topmost button. She doesn’t have to speak a word for me to know what she desires.

  I pop the button.

  Then I undo the one under it.

  And the one under that.

  The light surrounding her begins to fade, her dark silhouette losing its human shape, like a droplet of blood introduced to a tiny puddle of water.

  By the time my fingers reach the waist of her short wool skirt, I find that I can hardly breathe. I’m not seeing through my eyes, so I can only see within myself. The image of Grace’s flat belly and the silver hoop piercing her naval fills my brain more vividly than if I were seeing it for real.

  Gently running the edges of my fingertips against the smooth skin and up toward the space between her breasts, I bring both my hands around her back and unclasp her bra. I remove her shirt and the bra comes away with it. I kiss her breasts one at a time, her nipples erect against my lips and tongue. I see them in my mouth and grow rock hard. Once, I bite her slightly with my teeth, and she makes a sound that is both pain and ecstasy.

  I open my eyes to make certain I am not dreaming . . . that I’m not about to awaken on my back on the gravel-covered ground of a battlefield, awaken anywhere else other than right here, right now. But for a second I do.

  Click . . . On my back . . . paralyzed . . . a woman’s gloved hand caressing . . .

  I pull back, for a brief moment.

  “You all right, Nick?” Grace whispers. “You okay? Do you want to stop?”

  I breathe. “No, please let’s not stop.”

  She moves in closer to me then, kisses me on the mouth. Our tongues dance and I gently bite her bottom lip. When we release, I place my hand on her bare breast, cup it, pinch it. I kiss her neck in the sweet-smelling place below her ear and hairline. She’s breathing harder now, and I feel my heart pounding against hers.

  Taking hold of my hands once more, she brings the tips of my fingers to her face. I touch her lips, her nose, her warm cheeks, her eyes. She runs my hands through her hair and she kisses my palms before pushing me onto the bed. I reach up under her skirt and slowly pull down her panties. She drops her skirt and then proceeds to undress me, one piece of clothing at a time. We crawl in under the covers and hold one another tightly. So tightly I can hardly swallow. I close my eyes, but somehow I am staring into her
green eyes.

  Outside the open window I can make out the sound of the water gently lapping against the stone walls. Positioning myself over her, I enter her and move in time with the motion of the never-still water, my face pressed to the nape of her neck, my teeth biting her skin and flesh.

  The more I feel her, the more my vision turns to total darkness.

  She moves with me, to the sound of the water lapping against the stone wall, and I feel myself coming to that place and we both breathe harder. She begins to cry out, her voice deep and loud in the studio apartment.

  All vision fades.

  “Please, Nick. Please, oh please, Nick. Please don’t stop.”

  When I release, so does she and together we tremble for what seems forever, her whispered voice exhaling above the canals. I feel the sweat on my chest and forehead and the good tight pain in my arms. I kiss her mouth hard and settle my face against the warm skin of her throat and I listen to her heart beating.

  “I love you,” I breathe. “I . . . love . . . you.”

  Chapter 4

  We lie on our backs with the covers off and listen to the water and the boats that paddle gently by. I soak up the sound of the gondoliers singing and in my head I see the wonder-filled smiles of the young couples. The sweat that coats my skin is quickly drying in the cool air and soon Grace’s hand searches for mine. When she finds it, she squeezes it.

  “Was it good for you, tiger?” she says, and together we start to laugh. Suddenly, I am no longer the tough guy I was playing at the outdoor caffè. No longer the man who imagines with perfect clarity what might have happened between Grace and her ex-husband on a single lonely night when I was away at the war. My dark mood has fled the scene, just like I left the concern over that overcoat-wearing, black-eyed stranger at our apartment doorstep.

  Grace caresses my chest with her fingers, runs her fingertips over the jagged scar on my left shoulder.

  “You never told me how you got this,” she says.

  “Honestly can’t remember.”

  “Can’t remember? A scar like that and you can’t remember?”

  I run my fingers over the scar. “Strange, isn’t it?” I say. “You would think I’d recall precisely how I was cut, or even being sewed up later on. But . . .”

  “But what, Nick?”

  Once again, the dizziness sets in, as if it’s triggered not by a memory that’s fleeting, but one that isn’t there at all.

  “But,” I go on, “I guess war is war. What I mean is, I’ve been in a thousand situations where it could have occurred. Hand-to-hand combat situations.” I turn to her, as if I can see her. “War isn’t always fought with guns and drones. Sometimes it goes down like it did two thousand years ago. Five thousand.”

  She nods, but I can tell she’s not quite understanding me. But then, I’m not quite understanding me.

  “Let’s please talk about something else.”

  “Okay, Rambo,” she says. Then, her hands back on my chest, “No dog tags. Isn’t that a violation, Captain?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But then, so is going AWOL. And right now, I am AWOL. Technically speaking. Even if a friend or two in high places helped make this trip happen.” I roll over and kiss Grace’s mouth. “Listen, I’m sorry about this afternoon, babe. Sometimes I don’t know myself.”

  “I’m still trying to get to know you too. Have been for quite a while now.”

  “Now . . . just now. I knew exactly who I was. Who I am. And why we’re together and how I’ve got to put it all behind me, try to love you without all that shit in the way.”

  She circles her arms around my neck. “Put what behind you exactly?”

  Click . . . Karen and me in bed . . . Her head resting on my chest, her fingers rubbing my arm, my shoulder, the skin smooth, unblemished, uncut . . .

  My throat closes up. Dizziness returns. I want to answer her, but it’s impossible. I don’t like these visions, whatever they are. Something that comes free of charge with the hysterical blindness? I refuse to believe they’re evidence that my brain isn’t right. That I’m getting worse.

  When the telephone rings, my heart seizes.

  Apparently so does Grace’s, because although I can’t see her, I know she has shot up. “Who could be calling here, in this apartment?”

  “I can’t imagine. I don’t even know the phone number to the joint. When my contact handed me the keys he didn’t give me a phone number.”

  “We have mobile phones,” she points out. “It must be for the owner of the apartment. But isn’t that the US Army?”

  “I think Uncle Sammy just rents it,” I say. “Maybe we should let it go.”

  “But what if it’s important? Like a family member in trouble?”

  “Hope your Italian is sharper than it was at the caffè.” I laugh.

  The phone keeps ringing.

  “That means I’m getting it?” she poses.

  “I’m blind,” I say, rolling over onto my side under the comfort of the covers. “Besides, I might stub a toe or something. It’s a health risk.”

  “Oh, now I see what you’re up to.” She slides out of bed. “Poor, poor, pitiful me. Some G.I. Joe you turned out to be.”

  “Hoo Rah!” I bark.

  She lifts the receiver. “Pronto,” she says. Then, after a silent beat, “Hello. Hello . . . No one there, Nick.”

  “Just hang up. Probably a wrong number.”

  She issues one more exaggerated “Hello!” and gives the nobody who’s there a couple more seconds to answer. When it doesn’t happen, she hangs up, and starts back toward our bed.

  And then the phone rings again.

  Chapter 5

  Grace stops before she reaches the bed. I hear the sound of her bare feet stomping on the floor. In my brain, I see her rolling her eyes, shaking her head. She just wants to get back into bed and cuddle before we get up for good, pop the cork on a bottle, and make something fantastic in our kitchenette. Rather, before she makes something and I sit on the stool, drink wine, and listen.

  “Whoever it is must be calling back,” she says.

  She lifts the receiver from the cradle once more.

  “Pronto!” she barks. Grace isn’t fooling around anymore. “Excuse me?” she adds. “I’m not understanding you.”

  I sit back up again. My pulse picks up. “Grace, do you want me to take it?”

  In my head I see her waving her hand at me while she presses the phone hard against her ear.

  “You see what?” she says. “Non capisco. I don’t understand.”

  I’m sitting in bed trying to comprehend what’s happening. Who is seeing who or what?

  Silence fills the room for another beat. It’s louder than the water splashing against the stone walls in the feeder canal outside the open window.

  Grace hangs up the phone and shuffles back to the bed. I feel her climbing onto the mattress, curling up beside me. I feel her warmth, smell her sweet skin and hair.

  “Strange,” she says.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “The man on the other end of the line. He kept repeating, ‘I see. I see. I see.’” She snickers. “I had to ask him, ‘What do you see?’ But he just hung up.”

  I roll onto my side, facing her, as if I can see her. But then I do see her. I see her dark hair fluffed back, her green eyes open, staring into me, through me, onto some distant possibility.

  “Did he sound Italian?”

  “I’m not sure,” she exhales. “The accent was different. I can’t put my finger on it. But the sound was distorted. I don’t think the call came from here. From Italy.”

  I turn onto my back, stare up at the ceiling. A big, black, blank nothing of a ceiling. “I’m guessing whoever owns this apartment made the call, thinking someone he knows is staying here. Must be they rent it to non–US Army people too.”

  “Sure,” Grace says, after a beat. But I know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking she’s weirded out, just like she was when the man in the ove
rcoat stared at us this afternoon. Grace is in tune with her inner voice. Her mantra. Her karma. The man on the phone with the strange accent telling her “I see” falls into the realm of “be warned.”

  I pull the covers off.

  “Vino rosso for the great artist?” I pronounce it arteest. “Or would she rather have beer?”

  Grace slides off the bed, stands. “I’ll get the wine.”

  “Grace,” I say, “I’m perfectly capable of seeing in the dark, even if there exists the clear and present danger of stubbing my toe.”

  “On second thought,” she says over the rustle of her slipping back into bed, “I think I’ll lie here for another minute and drink up Venice.”

  “Splendid choice, Madame.”

  “I am your state of Grace,” she says. “Never forget it.”

  Chapter 6

  I’m dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, while Grace has tossed on one of my big green “Go Army” tees over a pair of silk black panties. Or so she informs me. But I run my fingertips gently across her bottom just to make sure, and the charge the touch produces in my body nearly causes me to take her back to bed. T-shirt and black panties is the standard Grace sexy post-romp uniform I remember so well, and that makes my heart skip a beat. The very outfit I would dream about while sleeping on the cold hard ground in Afghan country, night after lonely night.

  I’m sitting on a wooden stool between Grace’s easel and the kitchenette. To my right is the open window. To my left, a wood harvest table that’s become a kind of catchall for our computers, spare eyeglasses, paper, smartphones, and Grace’s shoulder bag, as much as it is a place to sit and eat together.

  I hear the sounds of pots and pans banging, and already I’m smelling fresh garlic simmering in olive oil. I also hear Grace chopping up vegetables to make a salad.

  An idea enters my brain. Without giving it further thought, I slide off the stool, position myself behind her, grab the French knife out of her hand. I feel for one of the vine tomatoes she bought this morning, slice and dice it as if I were a pro.