Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  She allowed the man her word, her prayer. But the visitor who mattered was her middle child Paul.

  Today the Consulate had assigned the kids a wide and factory-fresh Audi, a ride that didn’t fit down the last half-block before the palazzo entryway. Paul had to walk from the intersection. And he didn’t go unnoticed, his walk so full of beans, his black-and-white so crisp. By the time Barbara heaved herself off the bench the eleven-year-old was sandwiched between a pair of housewives, each with her net bag of vegetables. When the women fished out their bric-a-brac, the silver flashed in the late-afternoon sun. At this hour the light poked into these man-made canyons at odd angles.

  The mother couldn’t help but notice again how the excitement over her miracolino had settled down. The scrawniest clandestino on the street, a young man with a filthy bandanna, gazed at the boy mildly. Around the clinic too, when it came to Paul, DiPio alone remained a true believer. Barbara’s middle child had visited once during her week, and everyone except the old dottore had confined themselves to brisk courtesies. The therapists here were on soft money, like most of the people in quake relief; they couldn’t waste time with a disorder that was beyond diagnosis. As for the patients, they hadn’t been paying much attention to the news.

  Paul finished with the housewives. “Hi, h-hi Mom.”

  The boy could just show up? Like any other eleven-year-old? (More or less—Barb shouldn’t forget the armed escort and private limo).

  “It was, it was b-boring, with Chris and, and JJ,” he went on. “All they do is tell us wh-where, wh-where we have to stand.”

  Barbara found herself angry, upset with the security team or the housewives or DiPio or somebody for leaving her child so exposed. There had to be somebody! Maybe that Doctor L.A., yanking the clinic’s rug out from under her! But Paul was showing Mama a smile with adult overtones, fleshy, almost flirty, and in another moment Barb’s anger had swung round on her. She was swamped by fresh recriminations. How well did she know this boy, any more? How much had she helped him, in fact? She recalled that she’d seen, for instance, inklings of sexual ambiguity, but she’d offered Mr. Paul nothing like an invitation to talk about it. Yes, she knew it might help him to “assert” his “identity” in that way. Nettie herself, still dealing with her own long years in denial, had brought up the idea of such a talk. But since returning Maria Elena to Children’s Services, when it came her pubescent boy, the mother had let the professionals handle any talk about the facts of life.

  She hadn’t wanted the other kids bothering Paul about it either. Romy and JJ could kiss all they liked, that was different thing, almost a political transaction. Anyway the eleven-year-old had already seen his brother kissing a girl or two, back in Bridgeport. But just the other evening, Barbara had come down hard on Chris after he’d walked into the kitchen with a fresh printout and announced that Paul had five of the early indicators of homosexuality.

  The fifteen-year-old had just walked in and announced it, while Dora and Syl were helping Mama make popovers. She’d ordered the girls out and then read the riot act to her second-oldest.

  “Do you want to live your whole life like this?” she’d asked. “An IQ of 150 in the classroom and zero everywhere else?” His sisters were still in elementary school, she’d reminded him, and Mother of God, this was his brother he was talking about.

  Chris couldn’t stop touching his glasses. “Mom like, come on, like, what are you? Like, homophobic?”

  “Chris, don’t. I’m saying, you leave that alone. Paul is his own man.”

  She’d grounded the teenager from a day’s work on the documentary. She’d made him give Dora and Syl a tutorial on the camera and software.

  Now her miracle child was asking something, from the other side of the clinic gate. Barbara couldn’t understand, given the traffic. Where was her driver, anyway? To judge from the noise, everyone else was in a car, on a Vespa, or pulling up to a street stall in a three-wheeled truck. The din seemed to rise as uncontrollably as the sulfur smell from under the paving-stones. Then amid that cacophony, with her boy’s pretty mouth shaping unheard words before her and, in her ribcage somewhere, a sore spot lingering from losing her job—in there, Barb got the idea of an interview.

  Chapter Eleven

  PAUL (adjusting his belt, squinting away): It’s like a, a tunnel or, or more like, something making a tunnel. It’s like something h-h-hollows out a tunnel, through the trouble. Like maybe a tentacle pokes its way through the trouble and at, tat, attack… a tentacle attaches. You can just feel it.

  BARBARA (off-screen): A tentacle?

  (PAUL laughs, shakes head.)

  BARBARA: Just friends talking, Paulie. No judgments, no bad words.

  PAUL: You feel a flow, and it’s a wet flow, like this flowing wet that w-w-worms its way through and then at, tack, attaches. That’s where you can get hold of the trouble.

  “Check it out,” the editor said, freezing the image before them. “Check it out, the boy just eats the screen.”

  Barbara crossed her arms, seeing Paul as a movie star, the computer’s flat screen making more of his lips and eyelashes. She hadn’t known that this was how the editing would work. She hadn’t understood that she would watch it happening, rewinds and cuts and freeze-frames, all handled with a wireless mouse and biomorphic keyboard and taking shape on a screen perhaps a foot from her face. But then, there was nowhere else to sit. The editing room might’ve been a utility closet. The entire “studio headquarters” (according to DiPio, their films had won awards) fit in a single five-room walkup. The only air-conditioning was a unit in one wall of this same cramped space.

  The editor himself seemed to prefer things tight. His striped sleeveless t-shirt hugged his torso so closely that it rode up his midsection, exposing a deeply indented waistline. His hip-hugging sailor’s pants, white, looked more snug still. Yet while he sat grinning up at Paul’s image, he appeared hardly older than Barbara’s middle child.

  “That stutter is right on, too,” the editor added. “Total authenticity.”

  PAUL (looking left of camera): You feel, you feel so much when it at, attaches, like so much a-all at once. I, I mean whatever the trouble is, a-all at wuh-wuh-wuh…all at once you know you can fix it.

  BARBARA (off-screen): Do you hear anything? Voices or anything?

  PAUL (frowning): Mo-om. (hesitates, fingers to cheek) It’s not, it’s never in words. There m-might be n-n-noises. There might like a single n-noise c-coming on, like a r-rising, a r-rumbling rising that’s a-also lots of, of noises a-at once.

  BARBARA: Like traffic noise? Traffic and street noise?

  PAUL: Whatever. A-anyway it’s never w-words. Words, you know, they a-add up, they, they line up a-and go somewhere. This, it just comes on, buh-buh, behemoth, you know? It’s shapeless and, and e-everywhere at once. That’s also, it’s a-also how I know this, it can’t, it can’t—this won’t last.

  BARBARA (sharply): What? This won’t last?

  PAUL: It’s, it isn’t, the h-healing, it won’t go on forever.

  BARBARA: Are you saying, these episodes—

  PAUL: It comes on so aw, aw, awesome, w-with the rumble a-and the flow through the trouble. It’s, it’s such a force when it at, attaches. You just feel it. And, and that’s got to mean, there’s o-only going to be so many. There can only b-be so many.

  BARBARA: The episodes are a temporary condition? You won’t always…

  (PAUL plucks at pants-legs, pinching the crease).

  BARBARA: Sorry, Paul. You tell it. Your story.

  PAUL: Well, come on. This can’t keep, keep h-happening the rest of my life. Even when it, when it d-does happen, you can feel the thing has like, it’s licked out its, its one and o-only tunnel. One soul, solo tunnel, one ten, tentacle. Then it’s done.

  (BARBARA moves onscreen, beside the boy. Focus widens around them: a balcony over a piazza. He’s in a chair and she squats beside him, against railing.)

  DR. DIPIO (off-screen): Si. Phenomenon is si
tuational.

  PAUL (hands clasped but fingers extended, Italian): You know what i-it feels like when, when something can’t last.

  (BARBARA nods slowly.)

  “Look at him,” the sailor-boy said, “like the camera isn’t even there. Do it do it do it. Superstar authenticity.”

  Spare me, Hollywood. The editor was Neapolitan, born and raised not far from Barbara’s upscale palazzo, but he’d gotten a film degree from NYU and he’d asked the mother to call him Whitman. If you asked her, the way he darted between mouse and keyboard called to mind a dancer rather than a poet. A ballet dancer, nothing but muscle and bone. And every time he made a pirouette, the video became more interesting. Whitman created emphasis; he made Paul’s gesturing hands fill the screen.

  As for the young man’s gayness, flaming, l’Americana couldn’t say she was surprised. Naples was famous for its queers, a sailors’ town. Even her father had told her a story about the local demi-monde—or part of a story. Dad had managed only a halting effort at sharing such stuff with his Barbie, sweet but halting. He’d done what he could to increase his daughter’s sophistication while, at the same time, striving to comprehend his own failed foray into love. But she hadn’t needed her Babo’s help. The drag queens of Naples actually rated mention in the guidebooks. An American could find a photo or two, since a number of the male hookers found the pictures good for business. The poses made Barbara think of her mother-in-law, her man-catching sashay.

  Silky Kahlberg of course had known all about such creatures of the shadow. Once when he and Barbara had been away from the children, he’d pointed out a couple of the more flagrant cross-dressers. As if the mother could’ve missed them in the first place. Dr. DiPio however, forever needing the consolation of his Mr. Christopher, had surprised her. She would never have expected the old medico would know someone like Whitman. Nor would Barbara have thought that an editor of this young man’s rank and accomplishment would bother with her material, the roughest kind of point-&-shoot. In the States only someone on the fringes of the business, say a student strapped for cash, would’ve accepted such an assignment. The keyboard Baryshnikov beside her, on the other hand, boasted openly about a short he’d just completed. It had been picked up for an anthology of “the Naples new wave,” he announced, and what’s more, his first full-length feature would be rebroadcast next week on cable-access. You could buy that earlier movie off the web too, Whitman told her. A five-minute trailer was available without subscription. Just watching the man sent Barbara into another dizzying carom between believing she had a handle on this city and thinking she knew nothing.

  Whitman also insisted they speak English. “I need the practice,” he said.

  The man worked Christopher Street into the conversation, “Christopher east,” as if the distinction mattered. What Barbara was finding significant, however, was something close by—the man’s hair. Above his nipple-notched top, Whitman affected the look of a young King David, with luxuriant black curls that hung to his shoulders. As he sat working the computer, in that shifting and indirect light, he called to mind the late Lieutenant-Major. Barbara couldn’t help noticing: Silky had worn his the same length. He’d tossed it back with the same vanity, the same flair, and with an almost identical twist of the neck. Now what did that mean?

  PAUL: S-Situational, yeah, that’s the way it, it comes. Like, so situational. Something, something hollows ow, out the tunnel, and then it a-all, it all whacks you a-at once. A-all at once, it’s there in front and, and it’s there in back, and if there a-are words, they’re a-all at once. It’s, it’s in your fingers, or it’s, it’s right at your fingers, you, you can just reach it, and, and, it’s between your, your legs too, it’s buh, buh…

  BARBARA: That’s okay, Paulie. I understand.

  DIPIO (off-screen): But why the tongue, please? Why the tongue?

  Whitman’s hands kept accelerating: first ballet, then jazz. To watch him go, snipping out the overlap in the two interviews Barbara had brought him, you’d think anyone could do this. Anyone could make it interesting. But the young pro had an idea behind every cut and paste, and he shared a lot of his thinking, while also getting off snide remarks about “movies that should go on a diet.” Barb was left feeling like a hayseed, a dumbo American, because she’d never heard of most of the films he was complaining about.

  But then, she’d asked for this. Naturally, when she’d told Chris and John Junior she needed the equipment for a couple of afternoons—she too needed to make a document, a picture about Paul—once again the teenagers had sworn up and down that their younger brother was a big part of their own project.

  “Hey. This isn’t just another teen movie.”

  “Mom like, think of Casablanca. ‘The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world.’”

  But Barb had never cared for that movie, to her it played as if the whole point of the Second World War had been to make Humphrey Bogart’s love life more interesting, and she’d been under no illusions about what her two oldest would do with raw footage of the middle child talking. They’d tear it apart. They’d warp their younger brother’s hard-won articulations in whatever way might serve their own purposes. What could she expect, from teenage boys? If Barbara let them handle the interviews, or if she gave them the interviews unedited, Paul would get lost in translation. Once more he’d go neglected, in the name of some greater, foggier good.

  PAUL (squinting off): Their tongue, wow. But it’s, it’s like I say, this never hap, happens in words, or, or never words lined up a-and getting somewhere. It’s never like a, it never adds up to a, a, a story.

  (BARBARA nods, upright, propped on railing)

  PAUL: The tongue is like the tentacle. Wh-when that feeling is row, is rolling, it comes, it comes o-out at the tongue, (eyes shift to BARBARA)

  BARBARA: This is what we’re here for, Paulie. It’s nothing bad or crazy.

  PAUL: Can’t, can’t you understand, that’s where I catch it? The tongue. It’s, it’s the place where I, I get hold of the trouble. Can’t you, why can’t you j-just feel it?

  “You know after I edit,” Whitman said, “I can download straight to the web.”

  He made an acrobat of the cursor, swinging it from icon to icon along the top of the screen. He assured Barb she’d leave here with the edited file in her scan-disk stick, and a DVD as well if she wanted. “But streaming video, that’s instant gratification.”

  The mother didn’t respond, thinking differently. What her youngest boy had felt, during his episodes, no longer sounded so strange. This time around the mother noticed how his descriptions fit the testimonies that had turned up in the reading she’d done, ten days ago now. She saw what the boy had to say carpentered into a single fifteen- or twenty-minute burst, stinging but confined, and as she watched, Barbara understood better than before how Mr. Paul had been living with an invisible talent like her own, the talent to link up, now and again, with the Universal Horsepower. She understood that the absence of healthier exercise for the boy’s spirit-muscle had forced up these recent eruptions; the miracles had worked as a safety valve, an overflow. And while Barb got the picture, all at once like this, she suffered its wallop, sure. But then the picture was over—the cry from Paul’s heart shrank into an icon on the monitor. Soon enough that icon would disappear inside another, and neither would appear larger than the tip of her pinkie. Likewise the entire family’s transoceanic event, in which an untreatable sickness on one side of the Atlantic had turned into an unknowable medicine on the other, would be reduced to a moment’s chatter between satellites.

  Barbara’s footage, in other words, was only another item for the local closets. After all, what city in the world was so full of discards? She remembered the trunk in the Nazionale, and she wondered just which shelf or cellar would wind up storing the business on Whitman’s screen. This longhaired artiste had composed another storytelling platter, on which was depicted a slender hero who, despite his frail youth and
stark robes, possessed the touch that could restore life. He was the Anti-Siren, this creature. But after he dropped in, after he sent the shock of recovery through a few broken bodies, he went away. Paul would go away, him and his well-intentioned family, and Barb couldn’t have found a more powerful proof than this: his face collapsing to fit into a file within a file. Lively as their Neapolitan crisis might’ve seemed, in the end it was only another scrap for the display case, catalogued and wired to an alarm.

  A storytelling platter, Barbara thought, or another version of the movie cliché. Another couple of Anglos felt a bit better about themselves, thanks to their trip to Italy.

  PAUL: The only one, really, the only wuh, one I’ve really been a-able to talk to, uhh, talk to about it is Ruh, Ruh. (swallows) It’s Romy.

  BARBARA (straightening): She talks to you?

  PAUL: I used to, used to talk to her. (twitches) She knows a-about the lick, the licking and flowing and all. I, I used to, a-and she said when she, when she st-still had her broken back, she could sit in her wheelchair and feel the rest of her, really, like flowing. She sat there, and she said it was like she was a, a s-seabird, a seabird who’d gone over the land a-and tried to dive for food in a, in a well. She was a seabird in a well, can’t you just feel it? A well isn’t for seabirds, it’s too, she can’t—

  BARBARA: She’s been tricked. The things she trusted, now they hurt her.

  PAUL: Oh, oh, okay.

  BARBARA: The things she trusted, suddenly they left her useless. She felt like she was no good to anyone, I’m saying. Just baggage, garbage.

  PAUL: But she, Mom—that’s not, not it. No. She wasn’t g-garbage, she was, she was still a bird. R-Romy I mean. Garbage? She w-was still a, a bird, she could feel it, she could even, even h-hear it. She heard her like feathers, the, the rustling. The wind.