“What’s wrong, Nick?”
I know it. I know it even before he says it.
“Nothing serious. Just a stomach flu.”
That’s what I like to imagine the sign reads. But friendly greetings aren’t usually accompanied by a skull and crossbones. Weathered words on old wood stabbed into the ground serve as a warning that this place is unholy. They needn’t have bothered: carcasses and rusting vehicles litter the streets, making it difficult to find a pure path.
The sea is near, which is why the metal falls so easily to rust. Salt air whisks away some of the decomposition smell and leaves behind a familiar briny tang. I am ten again, on the boardwalk with my ice cream cone. Fifteen, swimming with my friends. Twenty-three, falling into the sand with Sam, where we make something that isn’t yet love.
We cut through the dead city in a malformed triangle formation: Lisa and I out front, while the Swiss hangs back with the weapon he stole from a dead man. I imagine him fantasizing about where he’d put the bullets. Through my kidney or shoulder, maybe. He’d know where to cause the greatest, slowest hurt.
Brindisi is a city of peaks and lows. Whitewashed houses stare down from their perches, clean and bright from the relentless rain. As we walk on, the city thickens with towers filled with abandoned office furniture. Like all cities, it needs people to thrive. Without citizens scurrying about their business, dodging cars and chattering into their phones, the air is flat and lifeless and Brinidisi becomes a city without a soul. Every so often a face peers at us from behind a filthy window, only to dissolve back into the shadows. There is life here, but for now it wants to go unacknowledged.
The arrow on my compass shivers and settles back on North. We are going east. The sun passes overhead, glares through the clouds, continues her journey west. Our constant companion is the rain.
We walk until the buildings part and then we see her: the Mediterranean. This is not the sparkling blue sea in travelogues but a dull gray cummerbund concealing the seam between a dismal sky and a cement floor. She’s no longer herself—but then, neither am I.
I would to run to her but I can’t, because I’m too busy leaning against a parking meter weeping.
“Women,” the Swiss says. “You are weak.”
I turn around and look at him, one hand still on the meter.
“Just die, would you? Just die in a fucking fire.”
He strikes me.
Something about a wet hand facilitates a slap: it provides the blows with extra sting. I don’t care that’s he’s hit me, even though my cheek burns, because I’ve put the words out there, given my wish power.
I don’t care, because I’m here.
The port of Brindisi is a graveyard. Great steel whales hunker low in the tide, abandoned by their crews. Some languish on their sides, doomed to sink into the sea as their insides fill with water. Other, smaller boats are corks bobbing as they please. The tide washes them in then pulls them out like a child doing a gravity pull with a yo-yo. Accompanying the motion is the gentle slap of water against the docks. Salt is thick in my nose and coats my tongue with its alkaline taste.
“Where now?” the Swiss barks.
I cup a hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. Being in a city is a visual overload after weeks of avoiding them; I can’t yet see the details within the big picture. The city cups the harbor in a concrete palm. I pace along the water’s edge and try to break the panorama into palatable pieces.
I know nothing about the boat I’m supposed to meet besides her name. Frustrated, I trek back and forth, try to pick out words. Too many are in Cyrillic lettering or Greek. Not enough English.
He’s pacing, too, peering inside the empty terminal behind us.
“Where?”
Lisa splits the difference between us, stands in the rain instead of taking advantage of shelter.
“I don’t know.”
“You brought me here knowing nothing.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“You would be dead without me. Stupid, both of you. Stupid, stupid women.”
I walk away. I have to. Otherwise I’ll do something I won’t be able to live with. And that’s important to me, being able to live with my actions. My thoughts are a different story. They’re my own and they don’t hurt anyone but me. In the real world I smash open a vending machine in the terminal using a chair and empty it of all its worldly goods. Three small piles. One for Lisa, one for the Swiss, and one for me. I take mine and sit on the dock cross- legged, not caring about the rain. All I care about is that boat and will she be here like she promised?
They wait, too, but not with my dedication. The Swiss drags Lisa into the terminal and she does not complain. Late in the evening, we sit together and eat chips and drink warm soda.
“Just say the word and I’ll make him stop.”
“I have to do it.”
“There’s no have to. Not even now.”
“What if I never get to fool around with anyone else?”
“You might get a chance to with someone you love.”
“You don’t know that.” She empties the can. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t. But I hope.”
She points to her missing eye. “Who could love me like this?”
“England,” he calls out, and just like that she turns to him. I pick up her trash and mine and drop the refuse in the half-full trash can inside the terminal. Two steps; that’s how far I go before I’m drawn back to the container by some ancient hoarding instinct passed down by ancestors who knew a thing or two about survival. Using both hands, I dig through the trash looking for anything useful, some tool or trinket that might make a difference. But there’s nothing. Just empty packets and old papers with words I can’t read anyway.
A few days come and go and then they multiply into a full week. That week doubles and still I don’t hear from Nick. But I pick up the phone every night and dial half his number before dumping the phone into the cradle.
He has my number. He can call me.
It’s a stupid rule and one I’ve never subscribed to, and I don’t believe in it now. It’s just the story I tell myself to cover up my real fear: Nick is dead.
I pick up the phone, dial four of the seven digits, hang up.
He can call me.
One day bleeds into two and still I keep vigil. The
The Swiss swaggers out, stares out to sea, his face harder than the ground we’re standing on.
“Your boat isn’t coming.”
“It will.”
“You are a fool. A dreamer. I suppose you believe in things like love and morals and valor. Women like you sit and they wait for men to come and rescue them from the unspeakable horrors of the world. You like nothing more than to sit at home, getting fat, while you cook and eat and create more mouths the world cannot hope to feed. And for what? Some misguided belief that you are special, that you are loved, that you matter to someone. You do not matter, America. You are ultimately nothing. Dust.”
“It will be here.”
Spit flies from his mouth: a wet, clear blob with a yellow center. Egg-like.
The thought comes before I can stop it:
