The young woman’s image filled screens, billboards, signs, and posters on every block of the vast downtown. As Lance walked through the drizzle, shivering and wishing he had put on a heavier coat, he glanced up at the earnest, youthful features of this icon of the global media with her acorn hair and eyes the hue of a Mediterranean sky, her smooth red lips holding out the promise of bliss as soon as the world found its sanity and her tormentors backed off. Those fanatics over on the other side of the pond kept after her though no evidence, none at all, linked her to the murder of her roommate in a cottage one November night. Right now, to a passerby struggling to stand up amid the gusts, she was untouchable. No malevolent force in the world could come near the bright, polished figure in her aeries above the streets.
The young man took in a billboard surmounting a dark warehouse from which those eyes looked out at the grinding world, then crossed the street and came within sight of a screen on which her features appeared again, moving and speaking with a focused quality that could make you think she addressed you directly, that you were not just another anonymous stranger but could play a role in resolving the crisis. Never mind that she was a household name and you were no one. That he could not hear her barely mattered. He had followed the case from its beginning, had read articles, books, blogs, trial transcripts, judges’ opinions, and understood her appeal inside out. Meanwhile, the talk show hosts stated the party line. She was an angel and her punishers were crazy. Her free-spirited lifestyle was an affront to their Puritanical values.
Through the rows of office buildings and over the roofs, the winds came howling and pelted the young man’s face and head. With a curse, he pulled the coat tighter against his trim frame, breathing the frigid air. If the winds picked up further, he might fall or lose traction on the slick turf and go flying out into the street. Above him, that calm, earnest face still gazed out and made its cogent case to the night and the gusts.
Crossing another street, he remembered the location of a café where people gathered who did not prize their social credit score above all else. Maybe he would find engaging talk there if he could make it that far. The face above did not follow his progress out of its radius and down three more slippery blocks.
Then he got to the overpass, slick with puddles just a few degrees from ice. The sense grew that now might come an unspectacular moment when an avoidable occurrence brings the end of existence. Clutching the rail hard, he took slow, deliberate steps as the headlights streaked past below, horns blaring and sirens wailing.
When at last he reached the other side, he relaxed his muscles so abruptly that the next gust made him slip and fall hard on his left side. With a cry of surprise at his own clumsiness, he got up and ambled down the hill toward the curving sidewalk that ran in the direction of the café.
The gleam of the nose ring on the young server at the bar put him in mind of past visits. It had been months since the young man came here, he realized now. He pushed damp hair out of his eyes and back across his head, ordered a glass of red wine, and carried it to a table by one of the windows where he could enjoy the illusion that the gusts and rain did their mightiest to get to him only to meet frustration.
Years later he would still be nowhere, nursing his bitterness over having failed to meet someone and settle down or to stand out as a playwright. It was his curse to harbor a deep fascination for a medium in which he had no talent, at least none that he could prove to others.
At a nearby table, two kids on a date sat whispering and looking into each other’s eyes. At another point in the room, a guy and a young lady sat reading. At yet another table, a pair of women conversed in hushed voices. Lance made an effort to shut out the rain and the gusts and the other bits of chatter.
Something about what he thought he heard coming from that third table piqued his interest. Listening carefully to the two voices, he made out random phrases and guessed from the context a few of the words that did not quite come through.
“. . . she’ll never go back there . . . too much evidence . . . it’s an admission of guilt but she talks like they’re just . . . at this point who knows . . . not going to revive this thing if the judge decides . . . she’d be crazy to do that no question . . . “
As the mangled aural transcript ran through his mind, he knew right away what they were discussing. Of course, it was the case that held the world’s attention, the one with the beautiful mysterious young woman at its center, the subject of so much pontification, speculation, amateur sleuthing, fervent activism. Those who held what they imagined to be idiosyncratic or heretical views never paused to think that not having an opinion about it would be an act of defiance.
Yet he could not stop thinking about it.
He listened further.
“. . . what no one knows . . . this letter I’m telling you if it ever got out . . . no it’s not at all like the email she wrote the morning after . . . she still talks like the police and prosecutors over there are all stupid . . . not going back under any circumstances . . . never that would be crazy . . . ”
To his astonishment, he realized that he had seen one of these two café patrons before. One afternoon four months earlier, when the place was crowded, she had come over to his table and asked if he would mind some company. He nodded, finding her interesting and pretty, hence probably off-limits to him. She had sat and read her book while he sat and read his, and they spoke only briefly before she got up to leave. He asked her about the crime novel she had just gotten to the end of, and she voiced her admiration for the author and his ability to pull the reader into an elaborate plot with lots of moving pieces and to keep the suspense high from start to finish. He said he had never read the author in question but wanted to now. She smiled. Her name was Katie.
Though she had been polite enough, he doubted now that she would have any memory of him or the encounter weeks before. But it needed to work only as a brief segue. He had come too far through the weather tonight to let this chance go by. After downing the remaining wine in his glass, he got up and strode across the café.
“Hi Katie, right? Remember me from that time a few weeks ago? You told me about that crime novel you couldn’t put down till the end.”
In the light from a lamp, her skin was a sickly yellow on which her lipstick stood out brutally. But she looked pleasantly surprised.
“Yes, I do remember you! This is my friend Nicole. We both love true crime smut. In fact, we were just talking about that girl who went on trial for the death of her housemate in Italy. Did you hear about that case?” He almost said something rude in his disbelief that she could seriously think he had not heard of it but checked himself in time.
“Oh, I have heard of it. In fact, I took in the billboards and videos again today on my way over here. It’s a case that I’ve followed almost from the beginning and I get so frustrated because everyone just keeps repeating the same clichés over and over.”
He was careful to keep his tone neutral and to downplay a reaction that not seldom had gone far beyond frustration.
Katie looked at Nicole, who was about six years older and made him think of an adjunct professor.
“Oh, I don’t think you know just how far the propaganda has infiltrated minds and memories. People state the most ludicrous fabrications as if they’re part of the official record. They never stop to make the simplest deductions or to question bogus reasoning. They just lap away at the trough.”
Nicole nodded.
“It’s tragic what they expect intelligent people to accept uncritically. Katie and I have been studying this case and we happen to have come into possession of something not many people know exists.”
Not wanting to seem overeager, he nodded awkwardly, even as he felt a restive quality in his blood and his legs wobbled like pegs imperfectly joined to his body and its rhythms.
“Katie. Nicole. I know how forward and inappropriate this must sound, but I’ve been following the case from day one and—”
Nicole nodded again.
“It speaks to you. You don’t quite know why, but whether they find her guilty or innocent holds out the key to understanding this realm and the one beyond and the one beyond that and you sit there in your ignorance and stare at it and know this is the mystery that’s transfixed you from the day you were born. Even though that young woman over on the other coast did not come into the world until, let me guess, eight years later.”
Still he fought to steady himself and to speak in a clear, even voice.
“Seven. So much for your oracular powers.”
He meant the last part to come across as coolly defiant but it just sounded surly.
Katie looked at Nicole and smiled wanly.
“The boy here is so nervous he can barely stand up straight. But there’s a reason he has not retreated to his little corner of hell. What do you say we show him what we have and enlarge his sense of what’s at play?”
After donning their raincoats, they led him out of the café and up a street perpendicular to the one accessed from the bridge to the west. The rain and wind had begun to abate. As he followed them, he felt the stirrings of confidence. He was no hero, just another celebrity seeker, another loser. Yet not a feckless one.
The party trudged over four blocks, passing in and out of the penumbras of lamps, to a flight of steps leading down to a metal door. Wondering how the two women could expect him to follow them down there, he looked at Katie. She nodded. The young man told himself he had visited bookstores and apartments in similar locations.
The stairway seemed to extend as they traversed it. At last they reached the bottom and Nicole unlocked the big metal door. Inside was a vast region of dark in which anything conceivable, anything in the universe, might have lurked. When Nicole flicked a switch and three overhead bulbs came on, the young man saw that the space did not contain torture machines or guillotines but the frayed and worn fixtures of a study. Here were desks and cabinets and shelves full of moldering volumes with illegible characters on their faded spines. On the uneven floor, dust had gathered in clumps, and in the weak light the angles and contours of the walls evoked Dr. Caligari’s manias.
To the young man, this space seemed not just far from the sidewalk from which they had come down but fixed at a remote point in time as if it would take centuries to enter or leave.
Nicole led him to a couch on the wall to the right of a cluster of desks and cabinets and left him there while she went to retrieve something from the vast archives. For her part, Katie seemed to feel no need to justify all the secrecy. He sat there looking at a point on the far side of the dank room avoiding eye contact until Nicole came back with a sheaf of papers and the two women sat down on either side of him. The lamp abutting the couch projected a light strong enough to make out some of the words in the document Nicole pulled out of the folder.
But she preempted any such effort.
“This here is a leaked email from the defendant to her boyfriend at the time in which she recalls how the murder went down. She refers to screams so loud she thought the whole town would wake up and a body jerking so bad one person could never restrain it and wanting to clean her skin and clothes and efface all traces of what happened.”
Nicole looked at him with intensity as she said all this. Gazing at the parchment in her hands, he made out a few words.
“. . . even now I’m not really sure I was there. But the sights and sounds could not have come from elsewhere. They scarred me so bad. It’s like I was in hell for a few minutes and I saw things no one could see and stay sane. If you’re wondering how I got the mark on my neck, it was from this. She just kept kicking and fighting and crying out and she would have woken all the neighbors and I had just scored a little bag about four grams down in the pavilion where the students gather and the cops would have come and a close relative, the boyfriend of one of my housemates, is one of them. I would have had to hide the drugs somewhere or flush them. That would have been a waste. But of course, the real issue would have been what happened to make her so upset. I would have had to answer all kinds of questions and they might have found my big stash under a board in the living room. That would have done it. We had to shut her up right away and there was only one way to do it. One way, lover. So I helped you and did what I could. All I ask is that you never forget my selfless actions on your behalf or the bond we share and I hope and believe you will never ever talk about this to anyone!”
As he read these words, the young man knew that the “she” in this passage was none other than the victim. And the author wrote it partly to forge a pact of silence with the recipient, never imagining other eyes would ever read any of it.
Nicole studied his face as he read these words and then preempted any incredulous outburst, speaking in a calm, lucid voice.
“Of course the killer did not write this email from her regular account but from one with an exotic username. Yes, it was too dumb to believe. But she was barely twenty, she knew nothing of IP addresses and computer forensics. Even now, she will deny the authenticity of this email and it might not ever hold up in court. But we know the truth, don’t we? She felt she had no choice but to write the email. What if the frustrated lover had thoughts of ratting on her? She’s appealing to an experience they both went through and their shared interest in no one knowing any more about what happened that night.”
He nodded, astonished at what they had shown him, wondering what on earth they expected. Now Katie added her voice.
“But just imagine if someone could get close to her and get her to affirm one of the incidental facts raised in this email or the circumstances of its writing. You would never believe what people say in unguarded moments.”
In this place deep down within the earth, this study he thought it would take centuries to enter or return from, the young man began to understand the nature of the commission pressed on him and the moral weight of the duty he was to assume. The next question came from Nicole.
“Are you seriously interested in this matter or is it just the tabloid diversion of the week?” Here in this place at the core of the world, her words felt like acid on bare skin. Gazing back mentally at weeks of isolation and despair, he gave her a look that preempted all explanation.
For most of the next day, the young man sat in his apartment staring at the television, grateful that the university bookstore was on holiday hours. He needed the income from the job there to help pay the rent and his father’s bills at the nursing home while his application for a grant from an arts council was under review, but right now he was in no state to go to work and smile at strangers. The interview on the screen before him was the anodyne fluff that so many people who lacked the bandwidth to review evidence craved. With studied politeness, the host asked the young woman about her treatment at the hands of the police over there in that country where the murder occurred. She did a turn as a trauma survivor at the moment when experience wafts to the mind’s surface. The police threatened her, slapped her, harangued her until she broke down, then in desperation fed them a name. Here was an explanation for her having pointed her finger at an innocent man who then spent weeks in jail.
The more he brooded about what they had shown him in that subterranean place, the more he thought the world was in for a surprise. But only if he got the word out. Otherwise, this would be just another tree no one hears fall. He emailed ten editors at various journals and websites, telling them that he was sitting on something explosive about the case of the murdered roommate and the mysterious beauty who had gone to jail before winning an acquittal on the most serious charge. So what if writing to editors at this point was a bit premature. Once he had something concrete they must be ready. Some of them wrote short but polite replies. A few who had spent time in that city on the other coast were curious about where he planned to stay. He told them though the hotel was nothing to boast about.
The flight from the cold wet city to the damp but less frigid town on the opposite coast was not for wimps. Seven hours is a long time to sit on a plane, even with the comforts of drinks and movies. The young man did not want the former to dull his mental processes and could not concentrate on the latter for even a minute.
Again and again he turned over the evidence in his mind. The traces of footprints in the luminol where blood had been, the print on the bathmat that did not match the drifter whom the young woman still blamed for the murder but did match her boyfriend at the time, the lamp from her room found under the victim’s bed, the dent in the door of the victim’s room, the clumsily faked break-in at another point in the house, her admitting to the parents that she was in the cottage when the crime happened and later denying it, the conflicting and ever-changing accounts of where the young woman and her lover were that night and what they did, the DNA on the knife and bra clasp and of course the accusation against a blameless man which she claimed to have made under duress but did not retract even after the supposed bullying, denied by others present, at the hands of a police questioner.
People had discussed these issues at length, of course. They were the subject of blogs and articles and judges’ opinions. The defense’s stance on the DNA evidence invited the young man’s contempt. Naturally, they would claim contamination. But how exactly did it get on the bra clasp, he wondered, on the one piece of evidence where its presence would be most damning.
The dark landscape 30,000 feet below invited him to imagine people who lived in the remote places of the middle part of the country and were susceptible to the slick presentations that aired in the bright venues of the talk shows. He despised them. The young man thought he would have so much more respect for the young woman’s fans if their message was, Look, we can see why some of this evidence is concerning, but upon carefully reviewing it in its entirety, there is a bit of room for reasonable doubt. Just a bit. And we can’t take away someone’s freedom if there is doubt.
That of course was not their message. Oh no. They boldly told the world that there was no evidence, none whatsoever, and dared people to question their dogma. Anyone who did not accept this view was an idiot. The young man turned uneasily in his seat and looked away from the landmass creeping by below with its random lights amid the infinite black.
The cab ride from the airport to the cheap hotel off Plymouth Square took longer than he expected and cost a fortune, but after that tortured flight, he felt few things could hurt him. He checked in and went straight to his room, setting up his laptop on the small desk, searching out the fastest way to get from here to the hall where he knew the young woman liked to attend dances on the weekends. That belief that he had a tie to something larger than himself made it easier not to notice the dinginess of this place or the disturbing noises from rooms down the hall.
Not much more happened on Thursday. On Friday night, it rained hard so he asked the clerk at the front desk to call a cab. Luckily, the driver was pleasant enough and the ride to the downtown venue was under ten minutes. Better still, there was no line outside the hall.
In the dim space inside, a small crowd had gathered. The low hum of conversation did not disrupt the mellow strains of a Charlie Parker piece. The young man was grateful for the absence of a strobe, even if the features of most of the guests were so many dark outlines. In the light from someone’s phone, he made out a few of the grins and smiles and leers on the faces of the dancers and noted the tweed jackets and dress shirts with expansive collars on some of the men, the antiquarian frilly dresses that their dates had picked out. He moved through the thin crowd looking for a bar counter, then reminded himself that if all he did here was drink, then there had been no point in crossing the continent.
To his surprise and delight, a woman he had never seen before slid through a few of the whirling couples and reached for his hand. He offered it, and she lifted his arm and passed under it gracefully and whirled to face him. Each of her moves gently told him what to do next. As they danced, it did not feel nearly as awkward as he feared. Before he could thank her or ask her name, she moved on again through the small but building crowd, leaving him to look around in wonder. The ethos was different on this city on the coast, he told himself, and it was not at all unusual for strangers to act as if they knew you.
Maybe he should move out here.
He looked around for another prospect but most of the others now formed pairs, their joined bodies swaying and rotating in the dimness. Still, he looked around feeling the stirrings of unease. Soon enough, it turned to embarrassment.
From the far end of the place, a figure approached. In the random and infrequent lights, he noted that her dress was the dark red he had seen once in a picture of massive rocks deep in the Australian Outback and the contrast with the paleness of her forearms, neck, and face was vivid. Her hair was that acorn hue he had noted before, tied up in a bun.
But nothing struck him quite the way her smile did. It was coy, sly, suggestive of knowledge far beyond the young man’s ability to process. His first thought was that her interest in him was far too good to be true. But had he not known of her single status from reading the tabloids religiously, he would not have entertained the idea for this trip.
She was not the one with forbidden knowledge, he told himself. If only she knew what he knew.
“Do you want to dance?” Her voice was light and playful and conducive to ease, like a breeze at the beach. Not wishing to be too obvious, he tried false modesty.
“I’m a terrible dancer.”
She seemed to find the admission amusing.
“Come on!” It was a joyous exhortation. Her smile was broad now, exposing perfect teeth. From her acorn hair came a fresh, arousing smell. Without further pause, he stepped forward, extending his hands. At this cue, she interlaced her fingers with his and raised his arms expertly, giving herself space to maneuver and whirl and turn again and face him with a radiance in her look that defied the near dark.
Even as his body reacted to the sensual allure of this beautiful and charming woman, he felt like a boy clutching poles on a carousel that gained speed without quite ever jeopardizing his balance. She was in control, and this was her dance. She expertly intimated what he must do next and responded always with a flourish more graceful than before. As their bodies whirled and brushed, he thought of all the mental processes he had gone through and his sense that not evincing any knowledge would be more suspect than doing so. He leaned his face in closer, scenting an aroma like lavender spiked with honey.
“I don’t know what perfume you’re wearing but I love it.” “Thanks, dear.” He knew he would remember the way she said those two words for the rest of his life.
“You’re the girl who had that trouble over there. The one who finally got out of jail and came home.”
She nodded.
“The very one.” He knew which button to push now.
“They convicted you without any evidence. I mean any. Murder and calunnia, which is damn serious too. It was all so shocking.” The young woman nodded again with something tentative in her smile. How could he think of jeopardizing this moment? Her reply startled him.
“You seem to know the case better than most people.”
He tried for false modesty again.
“Ah no, not really, it’s just been on the news so much.” Their bodies rotated, right hands still joined and came back to face each other again.
“But for all the coverage, there are basic things they haven’t uncovered at all.”
Now he struggled to keep his balance while racking his mind for the most felicitous phrasing.
“They’re fanatics, all of them. Completely crazy.”
She smiled in agreement. He went on.
“Is there something you’re still worried they’ll find? I mean, like some hash from that area in the pavilion? I mean maybe there’s something—”
“This is weird.”
Her words nearly made his heart stop. The smile was gone now.
“I uh . . . my God, I’m sorry. Bringing up this trauma. It’s just that I’ve thought about it so much and I still can’t believe what you went through.”
“It’s okay.”
But her voice now was that of an indulgent third-grade teacher. He was an oaf trying to dance with a ballerina. Never in his life had he felt so awkward. To imagine he had almost thought she would let slip a fact affirming one of the specific details in the email Katie and Nicole had shown him.
He tried to make his next segue as organic as possible.
“You are a wonderful dancer. You’re kind and patient and you put up with my clumsiness. I can’t tell you how this feels—”
“Oh drop the false modesty.”
The words came like a slap but even now she smiled disarmingly and it seemed with all ingenuousness.
He told her his name. She thanked him for the dance and drifted away to another part of the hall, leaving him panting, feeling his knees tremble, not daring to peek into the pocket where the tiny recording device emitted a pinprick of red light.
He had thought the rain was heavy when he set out that evening. On the cab ride back to the hotel, drops hit the vehicle’s roof like hammer blows as the wipers worked frantically. The young man was in a new and strange mental state as the awareness that he had recorded nothing of any value warred with the sense that the dance might have opened the door to further encounters.
Before lying down on the bed in his room, he opened the window a few inches, not enough to let many drops blow into this tidy space but enough to take in the force and power of the rain. It came down so hard with such defiance. Rain fell on the streets and the gardens and the terraces and the roofs and made anyone who dared venture outside feel like a fool. He felt that all the vapor and water in the universe had converged over just this point, that the howling could go on for days and weeks. The earth had given up and moved under the blast radius of a configuration of clouds eager to punish those people on the streets and sidewalks who had no sense of just how generous a dispensation they lived under. It was not their place to get irritated about the weather. In the face of all that the shrouds of moisture could do to the residents of this planet, that was itself a crude agglomeration of gases and dust, they had better show humility.
The rain came down, came down hammering on the roof of the dingy hotel. He could not accuse the rain of a lack of resolve or deny the fear it stoked or shut out the image that swam up in his mind of a figure enclosed in a red shroud falling leisurely from a point in the dense knots above, touching down on the roof, asking him whether he would like to come out and play.
He would have teased out the meaning of this vision if not for the phone’s shrill irruption. With a grunt of annoyance, he reached toward the tray on the night table.
“Hello?”
The voice that came now was faint, an envoy from a time zone on the other side of the world.
“Good evening, sir. I trust that tonight finds you well? The rain over there in that city not too crazy for you?” English was the caller’s third or maybe fourth language, he guessed. The voice had the studied politeness that comes across when it is more important that others understand you than that they like you.
“Who’s calling?” “Oh let’s not play games now. You know exactly who this is.”
As off-putting as the young man found this reply, he had to admit the truth of it. He did know.
The boyfriend. The playboy. The scion of a rich family whose weird and kinky tastes had been the subject of thousands of words in the tabloids until they found something timelier and juicier. This kid loved weapons and porn and his ostentatious kissing of the young woman right after the murder was a middle finger to the world or all those in it who expected solemnity. Nobody could touch him, not with his money, his connections. He was also reportedly sickly and no doubt his heavy drug use did not help that much.
“You got me there. I think I do know who it is. How did you—”
“The world is a much smaller place than you think, good sir. Finding you was one of the easier things I’ve done. And I know what sneaky things you have been up to, you who claim to know the case better than all the ignorant people out there.”
A riot of thoughts surged through the young man’s mind. Someone at the dance hall had recognized him and had texted the boyfriend before he had even ventured back out into the rain. Or what seemed likelier, the stranger at the other end of the line had been in touch with a few of the editors to whom he had pitched his idea. The boyfriend was right about the treacherous size of the world, as vast and terrifying or as small as it needed to be.
“I know all about you and your knives. You’re fucking sick—”
“Uh-uh. You don’t know a thing about me, good sir. You fancy yourself to be someone in a journalism-adjacent role chasing a story but if you still wish to have the semblance of a life, you will do exactly as I say. Do not pursue her. Do not harass or try to contact her again. And above all, do not pester the media with your ignorant amateur sleuthing and your falsified records that a child could see through.”
“How do you even know—”
“There is no evidence implicating her or myself in the murder. None. The only question is how much damning information about this sad, pathetic stalker goes out into the world. You have heard me out. The terms are fair. I won’t warn you again. The world is small. You will not evade me. Good night, sir.”
The young man lay there hearing the fury of the gusts, wondering how far out there in the world he would get if he climbed out the window and ran as far as he could in no matter what direction. That guy would do anything to protect his erstwhile girlfriend and himself. Yet even now there were those who said he resented her and wanted to clear his name for good. Who knew what he might let slip on his deathbed.
In the morning, only patches of sidewalk were visible, the rains having shaken down nearly all the leaves that had clung to branches this far into the cold season. The young man walked three blocks north from the dingy hotel, made a left and went two blocks over toward the water, then crossed north again at what he took to be the deadliest intersection of any city in the world. Cars came shooting up a hill from the water’s edge and you did not see them until they were practically at the cross-streets. He made it across, went further north, turned east again.
Then he spotted at the end of the block directly above his position a fluttering and bouncing red coat and ran after it.
“Hey! Hey there, remember me from the dance? I meant to give you my number. There is so much goddamn hate in this world. Can we talk for one minute?” But the red form kept moving and soon made a left and was out of sight. He already felt winded and did not have the strength to run even one block.
On his final night in the wet city on the coast, the phone in his little room rang again.
“That was not prudent, sir. Tell me, what part of what I said was unclear. Les jeux sont faits.”
The French accent was not bad even though the boyfriend was not French, the young man thought as he drifted to sleep in the dark.
On arriving home, he entered a reality he imagined to be the lot of people whom the tabloids made up. His apartment was a shambles with pieces of glass and shards of a lamp’s shattered dome strewn on the floor and couch, the screen of his TV bashed in and his chess set, diploma, Dell computer, journals, clippings and cat nowhere in sight. Of course, he went straight to the police, whose lack of enthusiasm seemed part of a reciprocal arrangement. You want to talk about staged break-ins? Okay, we can play that game. Only now did the young man find the emails in his inbox from editors saying they wanted no part of his libelous enterprise and he was not to try to contact them again, ever. He used part of his remaining funds to get a motel room and a big bottle of whiskey and soon forgot to shave or brush his teeth or do any of the things that you do when life has purpose.
The young man had enough money left to book a cheap flight to that country on the other side of the pond where the boyfriend was a celebrity. The flight to a foreign capital somehow seemed briefer than the domestic one that brought him to the city of rain. He hung around in the airport bar drinking whiskey and wine, brooding, waiting for his connection to the provincial city down south.
On the ancient, winding streets of this town, he might have gotten around quicker with a moped, but the visions of himself as a paralytic were vivid. He chewed rolls and sipped coffee on the square from which students never seemed absent, though not one of them took note of him. Money was low, he had little time, but the boyfriend was somewhere around here, thought the young man. He wished he had brushed up on his Gramsci or read the papers or at least done something in order to make intelligent conversation with the gray-haired, heavyset man in the thick overcoat who was almost always at the next table with a cigar and a coffee and who struck him as a retired professor.
And then late on a cloudy morning, a boy in a trench coat, Roberto Cavalli shades and a fine blue and yellow scarf came down on one of the sloping streets that ran between the square and the lecture halls. Even before the stranger got to the base of the slope, his broad smile caught the attention of the young man who leapt up and moved right into the path of the confident playboy.
“You’re quite right. I cannot evade you. Nor can you avoid me after what you have done.” He meant to sound forceful and threatening but the stranger gave a look of amused contempt before punching the young man hard in the gut, making him fall to his knees and followed up with a kick to the face. The force of the blows felt all out of proportion to the kid’s build and muscle mass.
All around, people in the café and on the street laughed and clapped ecstatically while the playboy stood smirking. He said something in the local language and the onlookers laughed even harder. The sun had come out from behind a cloud and the assailant looked brash and triumphant before shuffling off down the street.
The café patron who may or may not have been a professor spoke to the young man who clumsily picked himself up and probed his mouth for any loose teeth.
“He said that you took the job title ‘media whore’ just a bit too literally when you offered your services to him.”
On reflection, it was true the playboy had regarded him rather the way he imagined this kid must look at one of the less attractive Roma women who stepped out of an alley to make an offer.
“Don’t even think of going after him. His father takes the judges and lawyers out on yachts. He has more money and power than the prime minister,” the patron added.
Now the young man realized he had not known quite what his purpose was in provoking this confrontation. It might well have been the dumbest thing he could do. Now the playboy knew his whereabouts and desire, however vain, for redress.
But the rich boy and the young woman back there on the far coast and even Nicole and Katie had failed even to begin to gauge the extent of his obsession or the sheer amount of time he had spent reviewing and collating the information available in tabloid accounts, police reports and maps of this ancient town. The young man knew certain of the playboy’s habits and routines better, perhaps, than the playboy did himself. Not to mention his immunocompromised state and his high susceptibility to certain infections.
He withdrew the last of his funds from a cash machine, went to a spot under an overpass on the edge of the town and bought three vials of methamphetamine from a dealer. Then he put his last 1800 euros in a paper bag and walked to the corner near the church steps where many of the hippest kids gathered between classes. If the carabinieri knew what went on in this corner, they mostly looked the other way.
The young man took out half the cash and had a discussion with the entrepreneur who lingered in the shadows there for two or three hours every other day. This dealer nodded to signal his understanding that the young man would buy cocaine, take it away for an hour, then return it for resale to one customer only.
In the early evening of the next day, he sat in the café, reading a newspaper and not making eye contact with the heavyset poseur. At the cusp of sundown, the disturbance rippled through the crowds like a tremor from the volatile core of the world. People hurriedly relayed information to strangers and suddenly everyone seemed to want to get to another point in the town a few blocks from here. A near-stampede began. You might have thought a movie star was in town.
The young man knew. The emergency room had admitted a minor celebrity for symptoms consistent with a severe meth overdose, including dilated eyes, labored breathing, the complete shutdown of his immune system.
He got up and ran away from the café without paying. No one could care. Of far more interest would be the words from the terminally ill patient at that moment of life when there is no reason to hide anything at all from anyone. No reason whatsoever.
