Things I'm Seeing Without You

by Peter Bognanni

  I tried reading an in-flight magazine, but the lives of the people inside were so full of enthusiasm and confidence that I couldn’t even distract myself by pretending to be them. And the more I sat there, the more the doubts started to creep back in. I took a few deep breaths and let them out through my nose. Eventually, the woman in the seat next to me leaned over and extended a pack of gum.

  “The air pressure bothers me, too,” she said with a smile.

  I pulled out a stick. It was easier than turning it down. The woman was about my mom’s age, with dyed blond hair and light gray roots. And she was clearly in the mood to chat.

  “What brings you to Italy?” she asked.

  “A funeral,” I said, and turned away.

  “Oh,” said the woman. “I’m sorry. What a shame.”

  I put the piece of gum in my mouth; the artificial sweetener coated my tongue.

  “Why is it a shame?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said the woman again, blushing a little. “I don’t know. I guess I just meant it’s such a beautiful country. I wouldn’t want to visit it for something like that. But I’m sorry for your loss. I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  I saw my opportunity to disengage if I wanted to. Instead, I spoke again.

  “I actually agree with you in a way,” I said. “In fact, if you want to know the truth, the dead person isn’t even from Italy. We’re bringing him in ash form. I have him right here.”

  She looked at the Tupperware bowl and inched slightly closer to the window.

  “This is just part of him,” I said. “But, as I was saying, if you look at the situation in one way, the whole thing is kind of a giant waste. He’s a pile of dust. He doesn’t care where he is. And he never even went to Sicily while he was alive. Why would he want to come here now when he can’t actually experience it?”

  The woman’s face was locked in a tight-lipped grimace.

  “And believe me, this is not the way I wanted to see Italy. I thought I’d be going to Venice with a sexy Philosophy major to drink Bellinis and make out on a gondola. I didn’t think I’d be coming here to plan something for a dead person. This was not the way I had it drawn up, I’ll tell you that much.”

  The woman was miraculously still making eye contact with me. She was, however, holding tight to her armrest.

  “But then, I’m also thinking: maybe this is the right way to see it. Because, maybe the one good thing about the dead, if there is anything good about them—which there totally might not be—is that they remind us that it’s actually going to happen. Any old time.”

  I motioned toward the small window to my right.

  “And meanwhile, there’s all this stuff. Crazy, sublime stuff. And we’re blind to it all the time. Or, at least, I am. I don’t know about you—I won’t speak for you—but I don’t notice anything. I’ve been walking around like a goddamn zombie for months. I don’t even hear the birds. I don’t hear them! They make such beautiful little chirps, and I don’t care. I don’t care about their chirps. I don’t care if they find mates. But I really want to try to care. I want to try to pay attention to the sublime, amazing stuff. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  I took a breath and brought my seat back up to its original position. A passenger from the row in front made eye contact with me through the crack between seats but quickly looked away. I closed my eyes. The woman next to me was quiet. After a moment I leaned over to her and said, “Thanks for the gum.”

  Then I looked down the row at Daniel. I wondered if he’d heard any of the conversation, but it was probably too noisy to hear much. I only saw a sliver of his face through the seats. He was leaning against the window like a child. I wondered suddenly if he had a bad association with air travel because of his dad’s work. I hadn’t asked him anything about himself in days.

  Suddenly, I had a profound urge to have him sitting next to me. Just sitting there, talking about everything in his soft, deliberate voice. Also, I liked holding hands during landings, and he had humored me on the other two flights. I had reached for him and he was there. He didn’t even look at me in those moments. He just grasped my hand and closed his eyes. And, both times, it had eased the anxiety.

  But the woman next to me probably wasn’t going to change seats. Especially now. I’d be lucky if she hadn’t reported me to a flight attendant. So, for the moment, I just sat there looking at the side of his face, rows away, wondering if he was the last person on earth who didn’t think I was completely out of my mind.

  33

  Now seems like a good time to admit that I’ve never really been out of the country. I was in Canada once when I was a kid, but Canada doesn’t really count. It’s Minnesota with Mounties. The only reason I had a passport at all was because my mom was always threatening to take me away on spiritual journeys to lands unknown. Anyway, this is all just to say that I was not really prepared for the city of Palermo when we arrived.

  It was midday when we got there, and the traffic was a total cluster: one huge game of chicken between hundreds of Fiats and motos, all carrying an improbable number of humans. In the cab to this intersection called the Quattro Canti, I looked out my window and saw an entire family riding on a single scooter. Seriously: four people. One scooter.

  The toddler was first, just kind of perched on his father’s lap. Dad was next, one hand on the throttle, lit cigarette dangling from his lip. Behind him was the mother, holding on to her husband like she was giving him the Heimlich. And behind her, barely on the seat at all was a sullen teenage boy. All of them were tan. None of them wore helmets. And just when I was about to point this sight out to Daniel, the family took off at an inhuman speed, balancing like acrobats.

  Daniel was passed out anyway. He didn’t do well on planes, he told me, and I’m pretty sure he downed half a package of Dramamine before we left. While he slept with his mouth open, I tried to soak up the street life on the ride to the hotel. The sun-whitened Baroque churches and smoking shop owners, the flocks of kids my age with plumed haircuts typing frantically on their phones. I only caught glimpses as the taxi pinballed its way through the city.

  Finally, we arrived at the Centrale Palace Hotel, which was way too nice for us. We stumbled into the frescoed lobby and stood beneath a dazzling antique chandelier. Daniel had booked the hotel and the place was completely bonkers, a former eighteenth-century aristocratic residence remodeled into a hotel for travelers. In other words: the kind of place I never stayed, and probably would never stay again.

  “How the hell can you afford this place?” I asked.

  “I paint houses in the summer,” he said.

  He looked up at the chandelier.

  “This room was like . . . ten houses.”

  Daniel walked to the desk and rang the bell.

  A clerk strolled across the marble floor dressed in a powder-white linen suit. His neck and face were covered in expertly groomed stubble.

  “Benvenuti a Sicilia!” he said. “You are on your honeymoon, yes? You said this in your reservation. But, regazzi, you are so young!”

  I was still staring at his suit. Fortunately, Daniel came to life beside me.

  “Yes,” he said. “Si. We’re on our honeymoon. We’re young, but we’re super Christian. Bambino Gesú! We love that guy! So that’s why we’re so young and everything. We saved ourselves for the Lord. Sexually.”

  I think Daniel was still high on Dramamine. The clerk just smiled, his blue eyes sparkling in the light of the chandelier.

  “Bene,” he said. “Bambino Gesú. Bene.”

  He winked. Then he took our passports and typed our information into a computer. All the while he kept sneaking glances at us. Either he was stealing our identities or picturing us having sex. I couldn’t decide which I preferred. Then, abruptly, he began walking toward a minuscule elevator, speaking over his s
houlder.

  “Andiamo,” he said. “I show for you now, the room, ragazzi. Follow me. Follow me.”

  We went up a few floors and the room he showed was beautiful, but small, with two toilets. My glance volleyed between the two.

  “That one is the bidet,” said Daniel, reading my mind.

  I turned it on and it shot out a stream of boiling water.

  “How do you know all of this?” I asked.

  He shrugged and sat down on the bed.

  “My dad used to be in the Air Force. We traveled a lot. I’ve seen my share of toilets.”

  “I see,” I said. “A real toilet connoisseur.”

  “Something like that.”

  I nodded. And then everything got sort of quiet. It took me a moment to realize it was because we were in a hotel room together. Alone. In another country.

  Did I mention alone?

  Up until now, most of our interactions had been chaperoned in some way. Now there was no one in the room but us. So, I stayed in the bathroom for a minute, switching the bidet on and off, pretending to be fascinated by it. Finally, I walked out and just looked at Daniel on the bed. His face was really tired. His eyes were slits. His dark hair was sticking up in the front.

  “What are we really doing here?” I said.

  He opened his eyes a little more.

  “We’re creating something for Jonah,” he said.

  “Is that true?”

  I walked over and sat at the foot of the bed. There were fresh flowers in the room and the smell was overpowering.

  “I don’t know anything about this place,” I continued. “I don’t know what he would want here. And I don’t know if I’m really here for him.”

  I slumped over on my side and watched the gauzy curtains ripple in a breeze.

  “So, why are you here then?” said Daniel.

  His voice was quiet.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe it’s just to escape. Maybe it’s . . . for other reasons.”

  He leaned back against his pillow and closed his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. “Say that’s true. Is it so bad?”

  “The whole idea was to plan a funeral for Jonah.”

  “So what?” he said.

  I looked at him through narrowed eyes.

  “What do you mean ‘so what’?”

  “I mean there’s no protocol for this, Tess. We’re on our own with our grief. But at least we’re not pretending that nothing happened. At least we’re trying something. Maybe we can forgive ourselves a little bit.”

  I stayed where I was.

  “If you wanted to get me in a hotel room,” I said, “we didn’t need to fly all the way to Italy. There’s probably dirty motels in New York.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said.

  He sounded genuinely hurt, but I didn’t turn around to see his face. We were quiet then for a few minutes. Outside, I could still hear the traffic in the street. The staccato honk of the horns. I heard Daniel breathing heavily and I thought maybe he had gone to sleep. But, then he spoke up again.

  “You don’t really think he’s watching us, do you?” he said.

  He paused a moment.

  “I mean, you don’t believe . . .”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s hard, but I don’t think so. I thought he was still alive on the Internet for a while, but it just turned out to be some creep who was stalking me.”

  Daniel sighed.

  “Why would anyone who’s dead spend their time watching the living?” he said. “That’s what I want to know. If there’s an afterlife, there have to be more interesting things to do.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Flying. Being out of your corporeal body. Living outside of time. Any of that would beat the TV station of my life. I can tell you that much.”

  “Mine too, I guess,” I said. “Except when I’m naked.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. I raised my body off the mattress and crawled up to the top of the bed and settled into a spot next to him. We lay still for a minute, only inches apart. I felt like I could feel every ounce of blood pulsing through my body.

  “Put your arm around me,” I said.

  He put his arm around me.

  “No,” I said. “Like this.”

  I moved it over my hip and across my waist. He kept it there.

  “Look,” I said. “I didn’t really mean what I said before. About the hotel. But I just want you to know, I have to be here for Jonah. It’s the only thing that’s holding things together right now.”

  I rested my hand on his chest.

  “I understand,” he said.

  I blinked. The jet lag was finally kicking in, and I found I could barely keep my eyes open.

  “Some honeymoon, huh?” I said.

  He let out a long breath.

  “I don’t have any others to compare it to,” he said. “Maybe it’s perfect.”

  And with that, we both closed our eyes.

  34

  The next morning, we grabbed our small bags and boarded a tour bus and took off through the heart of Sicily. The bus was big enough for fifty, but there were only five of us. Me and Daniel and some random guys on a TV film crew from the States. There was a hefty dude named Paul, who had the largest, thickest black glasses I have ever seen, and another slightly less hefty man named Archie, who had tattoo sleeves and a fanny pack.

  The film guys were camped out at the back of the bus, surrounded by black cases of equipment, passing a tablet Scrabble game back and forth without speaking. Finally, there was our driver, a white-haired Sicilian who only answered to Capo. Within the first ten minutes of the ride, he shouted a word that sounded like “catso” over and over again. I asked Daniel to look it up on his phone and we found out it meant “dick.”

  I kept thinking that I should have felt calmer—I was on a bus, finally heading to Siracusa, a place with real meaning for Jonah. Instead my nerves were fraying one at a time. The problem was that there were still so many loose ends. We didn’t have a plan yet for the ceremony. We didn’t even know where we were staying. And I had yet to turn on my phone to see the barrage of messages from my father and others.

  As soon as this bus came to a halt I was going to have to create something meaningful with nothing but a tiny container of ashes. I tried to do some deep breathing, pulling the stale air of the bus through my nostrils. After a few breaths, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Daniel, reaching over from the seat next to me.

  “Look,” he said, motioning out the window. “It’s so green.”

  He still looked a little out of it from the Dramamine. His hair was messy, and his eyes were glazed. But I followed his pointer finger to the landscape rushing past the bus, and it was, without a doubt, green.

  I didn’t know much about Sicily, but I had imagined it sunbaked and dusty, beige cities edged by rinds of twinkling turquoise water. But this was the height of spring, and the land outside was an unending sweep of green hills leading to the foot of olive-colored mountains. The only break in the wall of green was the occasional citrus grove, bursting with fat lemons.

  I felt a momentary calm come over me. How could anything bad happen in a place that looked like this? I wasn’t the only one moved. When I turned to look at the back of the bus, I saw Paul aiming a state-of-the-art digital camcorder out the window, trying to capture what I’d just been admiring. He was showing a sizable amount of plumber’s crack, and Archie was behind him, helping him hold the camera steady.

  An hour passed like this. A series of gorgeous landscapes and hairpin turns down narrow roads. After a while, I started to take the scenery for granted. My eyes glazed over and I let the green of the land and the blue of the sky blur together. I had been dozing off and on for about fifteen minutes
when the bus took a sharp turn around a bend and I opened my eyes wider. I caught sight of something in the distance. Up a steep grassy hill, split in half by a row of cypress trees, was a tight cluster of little houses. A small walled-in town.

  The layout was a perfect rectangle. I had never seen a town so compact and perfectly planned. But that’s because it wasn’t a town at all. As we got closer, I could see that the small-scale houses were made of stone. And they weren’t houses. They were mausoleums.

  “Stop!” I said. “Stop the bus, please!”

  At the sound of my voice, Capo stomped on the brakes, and the bus jerked to a skidding halt on the winding road. I held on to Daniel’s arm and braced myself. Behind me, Paul slammed into a seat back, somehow keeping hold of the camera as his black-rimmed glasses launched from his face.

  “What in the hell was that?” he said.

  I met each of the men’s eyes individually. I cleared my throat.

  “I apologize for the abrupt stop, guys, but . . . um . . . I’d like to step outside just for a moment to see something. Thanks. Grazie. Thanks.”

  I motioned to a stunned-looking Daniel, and he followed me off the bus and onto the gravel-strewn road. There were no other cars and the air was as fresh as I’d ever breathed. I crossed the road and began to walk up the hill toward the walled cemetery-town before me. Daniel was a step or two behind.

  The others were slow to leave the bus but, by and by, I heard the sounds of their voices, too. Eventually, I reached an open gate and stepped inside to find a series of streets, complete with tiled signs, lined by one-story crypts, each bearing a small black-and-white photo of the entombed.

  I started walking down a street named Viale San Giovanni, and as I got farther toward the center, the tombs became more ornate. Some of them were more like churches than homes, their facades swirling with carvings of angels. But of course there were churches; I was in a city for the dead.