Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  “Hey, Velma. Connect these dots.”

  Barb had put it together herself by now. The UN rep was pulling the goods from his briefcase, a sheaf of hand-sized pamphlets, and seeing those, she recalled that she’d read something about this. Maybe she’d heard about it on the good Fordham NPR. There’d been a similar crisis after the Christmas tsunami a few years back, over in Southeast Asia, and again down in New Orleans following the bad hurricane. The disaster had caught a number of victims with their pockets empty, their wallet lost somewhere along the way—without identification. The authorities had needed to go around making lists. Also they’d needed to come up with a substitute.

  “Temporary papers,” Kahlberg said, nodding towards his seat-partner.

  The other coat-and-tie began handing them out: staple-bound pamphlets on some sort of specialty bond, light but tough and bearing a watermark. The paper had the roughage of an old scar.

  “Earthquake I.D.,” said the man from the UN.

  “Temporary,” repeated the NATO officer. “But for the time being, in certain cases, a lifesaver. You have to remember that the ones who lost the most tended to be the kind of hand-to-mouth old boys we were just talking about. The refugees.”

  As Barbara took her packet, couldn’t help thinking that, in this van, she was the one who needed it most. She was the one headed for a scarifying new world. The paper before her, however, wasn’t so out of the ordinary. It featured a well-scanned reproduction of her latest passport shot and long-familiar data entries: a birth-date from not quite forty-five years back, and the overformal “New York City” as place of birth. The document was like the terminology she’d just been running through her head, the therapeutic patois from the Samaritan Center; it was someone else’s fancy vocabulary for an understanding that lay deeper than that, at the connection of spine and language. Indeed the words from the Sam Center, the syndromes she’d come to know thanks to her own family therapy, and to the work she’d done screening other potential clients—these would matter to her longer than the jerryrigged booklet in her lap. The NATO officer was making further explanations, but they sounded beside the point. Getting actual replacement passports from this side of the Atlantic, Kahlberg said, would take weeks. “For the real deal, y’all need to have your signature notarized.” But there was no way Barbara would stick around Naples for weeks.

  “One thing we had going for us this time,” the liaison said, “we had all the S.S.N. Jay here’s been great about that, keeping the Organization up to speed.”

  Jay, sure. This paperwork too was his doing, another container labeled Mine forever, all mine. The stuff even felt like packing material.

  ‘You did move fast,” Jay said.

  “Well, back at you, Jay. You kept us up to speed.”

  The van slowed and came off the freeway. They shuddered once more onto cobblestone, the throat-clearing downshift of their combat transport echoing within the sudden steep folds of brick and plaster. The neighborhood scene, outside the broad and reinforced window, to Barbara recalled dog-day August back in Carroll Gardens. The trunks of the maples and beeches were blotchy from traffic (though here you also spotted a palm or two) and the stoops were full of troublemakers. Except tonight the real troublemaker sat in the van. As the mother folded away her Earthquake I.D., she reminded herself they were still in the first week of June. If she had the Connecticut divorce laws right, the worst would be over by the time the kids went back to school.

  “Too much,” Jay shouted, over the rattle and jounce. “We’re too much for a place like this.”

  It came to Barbara that he was speaking of the vehicle. She checked the children, all likewise concerned with the scene on the streets, even Paul. He’d got his head up again, and with that, the family was home. Their apartment must’ve been selected American style, right off the freeway. Barb and Jay hadn’t noticed last night, fried as they’d been from traveling. This morning they’d walked to the funiculare that had carried them down into the older city.

  And tonight, they had a crowd waiting.

  They had a crowd closing in, singles and twosomes and more, descending from the nearby stoops, or swinging off motorbikes and unfolding out of Fiats. Men and women, a handful of children too, nobody that caught the eye at first glance. Still, the way these folks came for the Humvee, Barb had to wonder about the thing’s telltale markings, the wide NATO seal on the front and sides. She checked what people were wearing, out there—simple day-clothes, so far as she could see. No Hezbollah-style head-wraps, no ready-to-rumble jumpsuits. Nobody was waving around any protest signs either. Rather, this mob recalled the one this morning, by no means angry but awfully free with their hands. These people seemed to caress the van, reaching for it even as the NATO driver, turtling down over the wheel, restarted the engine and at once stalled it. Everyone inside hunkered down, their new paperwork rattling.

  The UN rep looked so British in his alarm, Barb realized she hadn’t noticed any accent when he’d spoken. She didn’t know who she was riding with. Meantime across the windows dirty palms and fingers spread wide. A few in the crowd palmed the windshield too, never mind what the engine was doing. They didn’t care if they got run over, this gang of strangers, with arms outstretched as if for a hug. It was yet another new signal-system for Barbara to make sense of. One old man pressed his face to the window beside her, kissing blue-black Plexiglas.

  “Mary, mother of God,” she murmured.

  Across from her the young soldier shifted his grip on the gun.

  “No way!” she shrieked. “This isn’t a movie!”

  Jay was speaking more calmly, Jay and Kahlberg both. One or the other made the point that the crowd seemed friendly. Lighten up, Barb heard, meantime, perhaps whispered in her ear. The kids…

  Kahlberg touched the shoulder of the Viking in uniform. “Son,” he said, “you don’t understand. Listen, can’t you hear them?”

  Hear what? The crowd wasn’t making much noise. Outside Barbara’s window, her Humvee fetishist kept repeating some phrase between each kiss, but he wasn’t nearly loud enough to be heard inside. His lips, his whole unshaven lower face, hardly moved. He didn’t look too scary, either, skinny and no longer young, white chest hairs showing beneath his half-open shirt. He only held his place at the car because a heaping earth-mother behind him blocked the way for anyone else. This woman might’ve been putting her shaggy armpits on display, reaching stiffly for the sky and mouthing some prolonged babble into the lingering evening light. But to judge from their looks, both these old people were glad about the Lulucitas’ arrival. Elsewhere too, no one was screaming, no one was chanting, no one was pounding on the NATO steel. They only kept touching and, more and more, kissing.

  Inside, John Junior crooned a single slow word, Wee-irrd. Both the older boys were straightening up, pulling their coolness back together. The mother, likewise: she needed to regain her gallows focus. Looking from one window to the other, she tried to get a more concrete sense of the carrying on. A crowd of twenty-five? Thirty? But when the Lieutenant Major took a phone from under his yellow top, for a moment she was sure it was another gun.

  “Kahlberg,” the man said into the phone. “That’s right. Well, I thought we had this under control.”

  Jay was scowling at the officer. The girls kept asking, what’s happening?

  “It’s a situation,” the liaison said. “Definitely a situation.”

  Oh, don’t panic, Officer. For now Barbara had seen something that, all at once, put a stop to her fretting. She’d recognized what some of the crowd were holding in their hands. No guns in their hands, no. No detonators, and no rope to sling over the nearest tree. Rather, the shifting gang outside the windows held up crucifixes, rosaries, medallions of a saint or the sacred heart. Everyone seemed to have an icon handy, even a pair of teenage girls in tie-dyed California tops.

  Indeed all these day-clothes tended towards color, a midsummer palette, and this went well with the church bric-a-brac. A shift in Sicili
an umber, a shirt in Neapolitan blue, these made a nice complement to the beads and miniatures in cream coral or soft carnelian. The pewter crosses might’ve been scraps of cloud. Meanwhile, too, these gewgaws became a part of the group hug. The way these people lay their pieces against the bulletproof windows, against the armored door panels, they might’ve been kissing in another form. Barbara saw believers who kissed three different ways, first putting their lips to their dangly charm and then planting a smooch on the NATO transport, while also, number three, touching the cross or beads or whatever to the van. At some point in there the mother began to laugh.

  “It’s Paul,” she said. “It’s about Paul.”

  Jay surprised her with his look, the gentlest she’d seen from him since they’d come out of their hiding place at DiPio’s clinic.

  “It’s all about Paul,” the father said. “These people, somehow they must’ve heard what happened. After I was hit.”

  “Big news.” Evenly, she met his gaze. “You can’t expect something that big to remain a secret.”

  With that, fumbling with one hand over the seat-back, the husband made an attempt at their private gesture. Reaching, probing through her skirt, he tried to pinch the waistband of her underwear. This was a line of communication established during their first meetings, when they’d cuddled beneath the bleachers alongside Jay’s football practices. In those days it had thrilled her to be taken hold of so intimately, and she would give him back the same, her own fingers ducking beneath his padded shorts to tug lightly at his jockstrap. In those days they’d been twin Pinocchios, each finding the secret that turned the other to flesh and blood.

  Tonight Barbara twisted out of reach, squeaking across the vinyl. She broke into the same laugh, harsh and dismissive, as before. “My mother used to tell me about Naples,” she said. “She used to say that around here, sooner or later everybody knows your business.”

  As if she did it everyday, she hooked a couple of fingers over the gun barrel before her. She made the trooper lower his weapon.

  “This kind of thing,” she went on, “this tonight, I’ve seen it before. The church work I’ve done, I’ve seen it plenty of times. They think what Paul did was a.…”

  Then Barbara noticed Kahlberg, the way he was looking her middle child. That shut her mouth, the calculation in the man’s stare.

  The officer never gave his phone a glance, as he folded it and slipped it back under his flaming jacket. “Apparently,” he began, “there was a video.”

  Chapter Three

  A lepers’ city, a city full of crooks, a city for the end of everything…no. The Naples Barbara encountered over the next couple of days proved impossible to label and file away. At times it did seem a city of prayers. But more often she could be certain only of the appearance of prayers.

  You knew the prayers by their empty husks, clinging to the walls of chapels and shrines. The things littered the old downtown churches, the ones that remained open. As soon as Barbara ducked into the sanctuary, navigating another doorway marbled with dust and braced by scaffolds, she’d spot the offerings on the walls, the ojetti votivi. Also hand-lettered notices lurked amid the ironworks of reconstruction: OJETTI VOTIVI. Where you found a church, you found a shop, supplies for the faithful. In there, among crucifixes and medallions, you could buy a piece to represent whatever prayer you had in mind: a miniature in low relief, plated with silver or gold. There were broken hearts, small as half a pinkie or as large as two spread hands, and sacred hearts crowned in flame. Also the heart as muscle, anatomically correct. Here was a leg, there a head, there a household animal, or (its lines as sharply drawn as if lifted from an ad for medical supplies) a syringe. Plus every shop offered the all-purpose clasped hands. These surrogates came with small hooks and nail holes, the better to be hung onto a reliquary, or tacked into the plaster of the chapel wall. The offering could linger for years, after that, growing as dirty as the streets outside. In the emptier chapels Barbara spotted graffiti too, beside these single-use icons. In one case she made out a date back in the previous century, scratched beside a few desperate words. The letters had gone black with accrued grime—something like the resentments built up over a long marriage.

  The mother had good reason, over these few days, for going back into the breathless and rackety alleys down at sea level. She had obligations that got her out of her mansion on the hill. Now that was a puzzle, the Lulucitas’ apartment, ten rooms and two balconies as a throw-in on her husband’s deal with NATO and the UN. Plus anyone who’d gotten over the jetlag could see at once that the neighborhood was far better than the one in which the man had been hit. Barbara could see it the very next morning, as she fell into place among the commuters heading for the funicular. Nonetheless she rode down to the center, the original city. First she had her appointments with the bureaucracy, functionaries whose job it was to confirm that the face before them, flesh and powder, was the same as in the photo on the new I.D. Another day she had paperwork with an Italian bank and the American Consulate, and when she was done with those errands she could come up with something else. On one trip she went to the central police station and registered her picture and fingerprints, hers and the children’s. This meant the kids were with her that time, down from the protected heights of the bourgeoisie, and so the family made only a single stop for prayers. A prominent cathedral lay a block from the station.

  “You know Mama,” John Junior explained to the girls, “she’s always got to find the Duomo.”

  But when Mama descended into the centro alone, she had her choice of churches, outside of five or six that had been shuttered and padlocked following the quake. These always gave her pause, the edifice still consecrated and yet vacant. Their porticos were blocked with sawhorses, wood and iron both, then double-x’d with ribbons of orange plastic. The off-limits sign bore no church insignia but rather a government stamp, machine-black. Barbara suffered a chill the first time she faced one of those, during these confusing couple of days. She shivered, she blinked, and then she visited a travel office. She asked for the agent who spoke the best English.

  The mother learned that the airlines preferred twenty-one day notice, in order to guarantee the best connections and a reasonable price. But on the other hand there were flights to New York every day.

  Of course she couldn’t make reservations till she had a better idea when Jay’s mother was arriving. Grandma Aurora never gave a thought to the extra expense of last-minute travel, and there was always the chance that she’d wait till after Fourth of July. The old woman loved those fireworks. She would’ve flown all five kids in and out of Manhattan just for the night of the show, she was such a doting grandmother. Which was precisely what Barbara needed, while she left the country to make divorce arrangements. During recent Christmases and birthdays Barb had bit her tongue, fighting down the impulse to snap at Aurora over how she spoiled the children. But that same sort of lavish indulgence would be good for John Junior and the others, briefly, after Mom and Pop shared the bad news. Sure it would, briefly; Jay saw the logic too. The husband too felt that they should wait for his mother to join them, in these vast and airy new digs, before he and Barbara “hit,” as he put it, “some kind of point of no return.”

  Husband and wife had had this conversation maybe an hour after the family at last clambered out of their NATO ride; it took that long for Jay and Barb to get some time alone. But Barbara had no trouble reiterating, quietly but firmly, what she’d announced at DiPio’s clinic. The Jaybird took it with the same hurt as before, with the same question as before. “Why?” he asked. But as soon as Jay understood that Barbara intended to hold off taking action until Aurora arrived, he’d agreed. For a moment he’d been puzzled, fingering the gauze over his temple: “What does my Mom have to do with…?” But then he’d clapped a hand across his mouth, audibly. He’d narrowed his eyes and nodded.

  Besides that Jay heard her out closed-mouthed, except to say he loved her.

  Now in the light of the
Naples day, either the day after or the one after that, Jay’s mother’s daughter-in-law sat in a travel agency wondering just what she should say herself Barbara came out of the place frowning. The vista before her turned out to be the prettiest she’d yet seen, outside her own neighborhood. A flower-bedecked piazza, it opened towards island ferries white as toothpaste, a high-shouldered castle the color of charcoal ash, and the up-shooting gem-glimmer of twinned fountains. Barb took it in and then turned away, once more heading for the deep urban shadows just upslope. She needed a church and prayer.

  Yet whatever sanctuary the mother came to, while back on the cliff-top her older children watched the younger ones, the holy words to which she gave voice would turn to husks. She thought of the ojetti; she thought of the corpses from over in Pompeii, hollow and baked. It didn’t help that at home she spent so much energy keeping up a front, likewise gold- or silver-plated, in order to evade the kids’ radar. These days their little emotional sensors kept picking up UFOs. Barbara could practically see the things herself, blobs that drifted across the screen out of an unknown quadrant. She had to keep smiling, up in her wide kitchen and out on her new balconies, and she had to pay their father a constant lip service. The effort left her tugging at her armpits and beltline.

  And the morning she took the kids downtown, the playacting got that much worse. Barbara hadn’t realized that, after the video on the evening news and the stories in the morning papers, she and Paul had become Madonna and Child. They could hardly go half a block without someone coming up for a blessing. Barb herself, the previous morning, had poked around incognito; she had the strong Campanian genes. But nobody could fail to recognize Paul. That day like every day, he wore the outfit that the locals had seen on TV: a starched white shirt and black perma-press pants.

  At least down in the old city, amid the hawkers and masons and miracle-seekers, the middle child showed his mother something better than an obsessive-compulsive wardrobe. Paul revealed as well a mastery of street theater, acknowledging each new supplicant with a disarming hipshot posture, fey but friendly. The boy paced himself, taking neither too much time nor too little with the bric-a-brac offered, now a crucifix and now another of the votive bas-reliefs. He gave each a touch and a murmur, no more. Barbara was relieved by the child’s command of the stage—you go, girl—but she still couldn’t believe there was anything supernatural about it. Rather, what she saw was the wiles of a younger brother. Since coming off the plane Paul had kept an eye on his two elders, both of them loud and bumptious, obvious Americans.