by Alex Boyd
14: Victoria
We found ourselves in Germany again, and Oliver thought if a pattern was developing it was best we try and make it something of our own making. We’d leave Germany and take a train to Italy. I thought of myself as the conscience of the group, but saw no reason to object to this, even if I couldn’t quite follow the logic. The train jerked to life with all of us aboard and creaked toward Italy. A Middle Eastern man who’d been helpful with our bags issued a small prayer as the train began to move. I smiled and nodded at him and he smiled and nodded back. I felt sure he’d say another prayer of thanks when we arrived, and thought there was something remarkable about unabashedly producing evidence of one’s gratefulness.
I sat across from Julien, Ferah and Fernando and tried to tell them my feelings about trains and platforms as the train arrived at each new station: “Some elements are universal to every station. People waiting on platforms flash like photos as we arrive, our window sailing boldly in and collecting them like a child scooping up toys. Look, a woman holds back a newspaper and slides away into a man pressing on the earth with a cane, though most simply stand and stare. Notice the eyes. A little wider than usual, they come forward first, beating around for a path, stretching back to the uncertain.”
Looking at Julien, I saw that he seemed hesitant, but Ferah and Fernando were interested. “Look,” I said. “The train begins to slow and they all step forward expecting the future, or as if someone were going to give a speech.” “What are they asking for?” Julien wanted to know. I could only answer, “They all have their own needs. Look at me. I needed a new family and met all of you.”
Colourful Verona had a Dante statue in one piazza, and the Juliet balcony had nearby walls covered in hopeful and desperate graffiti, tourists everywhere. At the amphitheatre, a middle-aged tourist with an umbrella sang spontaneously, walked away to a smattering of applause, paused, and then walked back and sang again. He repeated this a few times, apparently deciding each time it was a lovely little moment, and that he should go and have it again. The Verona station had more multiculturalism than we’d seen in some parts of Germany—Maddy reminded me that racism was better able to thrive wherever there was a monoculture. We saw three gypsy children—the girl looked very tough—and we climbed the twelfth-century Torre dei Lamberti for a view of the city. A man with a round face and blue suit spoke to Oliver and recommended a local restaurant where I ate a dinner of penne with four cheeses, and pizza with ham, sausage, artichokes and mushrooms. I drank Limon chino, which was like a small glass of sunlight.
We piled into cabs to get to the hostel Oliver had arranged for us, and as we slowly passed it in a small burst of traffic, my eyes caught on a slim, neon sign for a bar called Club Lotus, hanging in a set of long dark windows framed by heavy stones. For a few seconds it felt as though we’d been to this city together before, had visited this place or had even been there tonight. I knew this was absurd, but a feeling is a feeling. I’ve never felt comfortable in bars and always thought it funny the word had another meaning: steel poles meant to restrain. Clubs has pretty much the same double meaning. I guess you could say I only sometimes fit into bars.
But I had a momentary vision of all of us in this place, music heavy in the air. Through the windows I could see the haze and squirm on the dance floor where a tall man danced an awkward crane dance, dressed all in black. He found what looks good on him. Other men stood in one place bobbing up and down with their knees and looking around like lost sailors. It looked like there was a fireplace, plush chairs and video screens. I saw Carl with his thin frame swallowed by a chair so that I could see only part of his head, his hands and his feet. He looked like he wouldn’t be able to move again. The British twins and the German couple stood around at the bar talking and laughing.
And just for a second, I saw a woman that could have been Sara. She was sitting at a table, smiling at what must have been a joke, her wrist going limp and cigarette short enough to be a glowing ring. Her foot lifted sharply under the table like an animal lifting its head at a noise. It seemed the only part of her that wasn’t self-conscious. If only that joke had been so funny that instead of a measured smile she dropped laughter, letting it shatter like a plate. I wanted a thread that I could pull to unravel her and see the real person. If it was the real Sara, it was the only thing that could keep me in this city. I left the church for her when crucial people objected to the relationship. I didn’t lose my faith, but I lost my faith in the church. And then it simply didn’t work out—and I don’t believe in allowing regret into your home—but for a long moment I saw her again.
We were all in there and then we weren’t. It happened and it didn’t happen. We went there, but we didn’t because we listened to the man with the round face. All of this flashed through my mind in the moment that I craned my neck and watched the thin, neon sign sail by and slip out of sight.
15: Oliver
From Verona we took the train to La Spezia. All of us were talking excitedly except the twins, James and Aidan, who had the odd habit of napping at the same time, leaning together like a couple of tent poles while Aldman looked them up and down curiously. I eventually assumed they didn’t want to miss each other, even when they slept. As a group, we wondered if the change in geography meant being off our prescribed path, and somehow more able to take control. I knew Penelope and Tomas waited for me across a period of time as wide as any bright ocean, and that if I returned home with these good people it would be clear how many were lost, how much had gone wrong.
The Gulf of Poets was known for attracting Byron, Lawrence, Shelley and others, but as we walked down the main street at 1:30 in the afternoon, it was completely dead. We all wandered near the waterfront when an old man in a suit paused in front of me as I sat on a bench, and tried to guess where I’m from. “England? America? Russia?” I said, “No … No …” When I told him I was from Canada he said, “Oh, Canada is magnificent. Italy has absorbed everything bad, has been a test since 1945.” I thought to ask what he meant by that, but he was already making other rambling statements. He paused only to spit away a piece of chocolate clinging desperately to his lip. “Keep your bright eyes,” he said. Then he went twenty feet away, came back, and said, “The most important things are the heart and the brain—follow the heart but when you need the brain, use it.”
We left for the five villages—climbed the tower in Vernazza to watch the crashing waves, and walked the hill toward Monterosso where a skinny black cat tried to kill a pigeon as a tourist photographed the small, frantic battle. At night from a small stone and metal balcony, we watched the moon fight free from the clouds and illuminate parts of the water. A few skinny cats between villages ate all our cheese and one of them scratched me to give thanks. Each beautiful town had similar geography, but a different setup of docks and boats. I thought these towns introduced a new way of thinking: all the colourfully painted houses built into the hills in steps so that the next street was up or down from wherever you stood.
When we returned to Vernazza the old man was, to my surprise, looking for us. I stopped thirty feet from him on the street and watched as he locked eyes on me and raised his arms as though trying to embrace me. He said, “I have been forward and I have been back, and now I choose to be back.” Together, the two of us returned to the tower and as we walked he said his name was Antonio. I asked him if he meant that he had drifted as we were drifting. He said he knew we were falling back; he could see it in our expressions as someone who had done it himself. “It was over a freshly killed light,” Antonio said, “that the shadows leaped together and tied up into darkness, and it was always in bed I was pulled back. My mind was like a child on the beach, turning over rocks and pushing through sand for hard shells, unable to dwell on the past and looking for memories. I felt it brush around me and waited for the pull of movement into the past, but I found a way around this.”
He had created a placebo effect with a simple leat
her bag he considered the focal point of all his thinking on the future. He had assorted meaningful things in the bag: his wedding photo, a watch that belonged to his grandfather and a book from his childhood. “It is enough to tell me I already stand on the past,” he said. Concentrating on this, he was able to slow his progress into the past and even move forward a little. “We need not be dragged down by the stones in our memory,” he continued, “if we already hold them before us.” I understood instinctively that my friends needed to think much more on this idea for it to work. Maybe Antonio had tricked his own mind but I couldn’t count on all of us managing it. Antonio raised his hand, insisting he had settled and wouldn’t come with us. He said he had mastered the winds and didn’t need to carry on. With few other options, I returned to my friends explaining that Antonio was a brilliant engineer and the bag contained a device that would help us return.
A month later, my mistake was in giving it to the twins to carry as we once again began to feel the current of movement come around us, knowing it meant another fall. I felt all of us lift and begin to fall back with the familiar scream of history around us. And then miracle of all strange miracles, we stopped and held our ground. I almost laughed out loud with joy but was afraid of breaking the spell. Again, I almost laughed when I thought of Antonio saying, “Your mind can be a clear lake, but someone will still want to piss in it.” And then it all fell apart. In the corner of my eye I saw the twins open the bag, one of them running a hand around inside it and appearing confused before we were all thrown back to our starting point in Vernazza as though we’d never left. We hit the ground hard and there were scrapes and bruises. The twins were gone. We’d separated from them as they clung to the bag. Carl scoffed at the idea it could have worked, and from the expressions on the faces of Julien or Maddy, they agreed. Our chance had slipped away; we would miss our two watchful owls.
16: Oliver
In Florence they cut the pizza slices as big as you want them, and there were tiny lizards at home on warm stones. We spotted the Duomo but got lost dodging traffic in an attempt to work our way over to it. In the first few days, our visit to Florence was a blur of culture. I stared and stared at the veined, stone hands of statues. These were some of the most animated statues I’d ever seen, but the effect could be temporarily ruined by a bird jumping from an astonished face to an outstretched finger. Standing before The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna, a tourist from somewhere in North America stopped, put his hands on his hips and pronounced, “Looks like some hanky-panky going on there.” Even the war memorial was animated, not simply a standing soldier but a man holding the slumped body of a friend who pointed his rifle.
We broke up into groups to see the city. I liked the piazzas, the old covered bridge, the Palazzo Vecchio, the River Arno at night catching the reflection of lanterns and the moon, even as the buzz of every Vespa on the road intruded on the scene. The next morning we saw the Basilica di Santa Croce and the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo and Rossini. The tourists moved in masses like whales around the Bargello and Basilica di San Lorenzo, and I loved that people of all ages mixed, sitting on the many steps of the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. In the Galleria dell’Accademia—an hour’s wait to get in—I turned a corner and saw David. It looked to me like perfection and I felt emptied and filled with a cool, clear liquid.
“I’m a culture monk,” Fernando said, “and this is a little like being given water when you didn’t know you were thirsty.” It was a cool, perfect evening and we all met again at a square on the west side of the city. I had no idea we were about to meet a man unlike any other man who took air out of the world. Looking across the street I saw a yellow building, only several storeys, with bushes along the front lawn surrounding the wide-open double doors. Inside the doors was a deep darkness like a cave. I could see no sign, but thought it must be a hotel, and felt magnetically drawn to it. I led all my precious friends up the steps and through the doors.
We found an open, comfortable lobby area with couches and chairs. A wide counter ran down the middle of the room and displayed flowers, bread, cheese and fruit. There was only one other exit at the back of the room: a door coloured a simple grey, like ash. It did not appear to have a handle, so I assumed it might slide open. There were a few windows along the wall, but heavy drapes covered them.
I felt the same curious light humming in the air I’d not known since I stood before the original door that sent me back, away from my Penelope. There was a sense of reversal, a sense that the forces that caused erosion—either in the land or the body—were forced to hide like criminals. We were spread out throughout the room when Carl turned toward me to say, “We should leave. This doesn’t feel right.”
But I disagreed, saying we should have a look around. I thought there was something useful to be found here. He gave me a brief look I couldn’t easily define and turned to look around the room with the rest of us. I joined Maddy, who had found a computer terminal with an inviting message indicating the place was expressly designed for travellers. The message assured us someone would be here shortly and invited us to enter our names and places of origin. Maddy entered, “Nobody.”
A minute later something slid closed to block the double doors at the entrance. I glanced around at the looks of concern from my friends and approached the shadowed entrance to find a wide, seamless grey door. In the darkness of the entranceway, one small, red spark stood out from somewhere near the ceiling. I stepped closer and saw that it was a camera’s eye protected by a transparent dome. It sat clinging to the ceiling where it could easily survey the room. The dim light inside the dome was strong enough to reveal two thick, black wires resting on either side of the mounted camera like grotesque hairs. Taking another step toward it, I nearly jumped when a severe voice emerged from speakers perched somewhere in the same dark entranceway: “Touching an electrified door isn’t a very pleasant thing—it would be advisable to stay back.” There was a pause as my friends and I looked around at each other, all of us startled. The voice continued, “What sort of travellers are you that don’t eat food and explore a room?”
I briefly considered saying we were looking for a way home, but it would have been far too complicated. Instead I said, “We’re good-natured travellers looking for rest, and we might find we have much to discuss. At the very least, we expect to be treated as you would hope to be treated yourself.” There was only a short pause before he replied, “My instruments see raw time on you, and perhaps you can smell it in the air here yourself. It becomes something you carry with you. And you lie by leaving out so much of the truth of your situation. I know who you are. You are some of the pebbles time kicks beneath its feet. Nobody will even miss your absence.”
“Wait,” I said, but the moment he finished speaking, the smaller grey door at the back of the room slid open, and with the first tug of air whistling out of the room in the direction of the open door, I felt a horrified pang at what was happening. We all turned to look. Carl was closest to the door. It had opened behind him and he raised his arms in an attempt to keep his balance in the fierce wind that pulled him through. Beyond him and through the door we could see the same soft, translucent shapes we had seen the first time we stepped back through time.
Carl jerked and bent forward, and then was at the door, his hands clinging to both sides of the frame. I glanced around and saw all the others grabbing the counter or chairs to stay where they were. For a few seconds I thought Carl would simply be sent somewhere else and there might be hope of retrieving him, but the system here had been modified. He began to scream and his body hideously stretched out as it was pulled in hundreds of tiny rivers of possibility. My instincts and experience told me enough: he had been dissected by time.
The door slid shut and we released our grips on whatever had held us fast. Maddy and Julien dropped to their knees; the rest stood in stunned silence. I made my way over to a nearby chair and sat down. Carl had been my closest fri
end in this strange, new life and I was numb. Everyone gathered near me, at least partly because I had been on the other side of the room, farthest from the smaller door. It was a long moment before I raised my head, but as we were all tired, I said only, “We need a plan. And we should sleep on this side of the room, as far from that door as possible.”
That night we lay together on the safe side of the room like planks in a raft, each within arm’s reach of another, the occasional soft murmur of a conversation like the gentle lap of the sea around us. Carl was just the person I wanted to advise me at this moment and I felt I’d disappointed him. We could see the dull, red eye of the camera in the darkness and spoke quietly in the hope that the source of the voice could not see us or hear us.
For long hours we speculated about why this had happened. I finally hypothesized out loud, “We know someone has attained the carefully guarded secret of time travel. That person must be experimenting with this secret, and experimenting on people like us while being safely hidden in the past where nobody has any idea that these things can be done.” In agreement, Fernando said in his hesitant English, “I think the moment Carl was taken, the moment he went in a lot of directions, I think it must provide a wealth of information.”
