By Jiyan Sheppard
It was in moments like these that I’d think of what I’d say to him if we were ever to speak, which we never did. Moments of empty space and feeling the dead, still European air. I’d think about cuckoos, how I’d watched them move on TV, how an unsuspecting warbler would watch their chick grow up prickly and monstrously hypertrophied and how the warbler’s children would be clumsily ejected from the nest to the forest floor, where their skeletal remains would rot slowly and gently turn to soil. I liked to watch TV in my head, around this time.
I committed myself to taking an inventory of all the things that he’d accumulated, at points like these, to catalogue the lost or given away, the borrowed and never given back. I supposed the bulk of it must’ve been purchased, though I could never figure how, or from where. Clothes and paper and books and jewellery formed strata, each layer corresponding to a day, each cavity corresponding to something lost, something rediscovered. He was missing a gold bracelet, which I’d been eyeing for some time and thinking about taking. I don’t know why I never did. I suppose I could never tell if it was real or fake – not that that would’ve made a difference, taking it.
– – –
He had curated a selection of bath soaps and shampoos that were organic and branded minimally and in rustic colours: the colour of mud, the colour of clay, speckled carefully with imperfections. I had followed him to the shop in Via Toledo that sold them in brown bamboo-paper baskets, and had surmised that they were worth more than the rent on the small room he and I occupied.
If I lay a certain way in this bath, his bath, I can become convinced that my body is no longer here.
Sometimes I lay and read things he’s written: poems, scraps of novella, manifestoes even. I find that they bore me. Art bores me. Books bore me. His grand gestures of futurity and ‘New Vision’ bore me especially.
For every paper basket used, the shop pledged to save a square metre of endangered rainforest.
If I lay a certain way, amongst his words, I can become convinced that my mind is no longer here – that I’m just an empty thing, floating between grit and bubbles, filling up slowly with water as I sink to the river’s bottom. Fish carve tunnels inside me. Coral grows on my skin. My bones rot into soil.
– – –
That evening, he left the house and searched for a clearing in the Giardini del Molosiglio. He rolled a cigarette on some old Kerouacian novel as he walked, and smoked half before stubbing the rest out on the wooden slats of a public bin, flicking it inside. There were circles of bottle caps and discarded cigarettes in the gravel where others must have stood in communion after work, casually grinding their butts underfoot into a powder as they talked. They looked like the droppings of some pseudopodic, bonedead tree.
I watched him approach a complex of benches, where two girls already sat, talking with their heads close together, and I fell behind a palm tree.
He sat himself on a park bench with ‘mors’ written on its brown moiré pattern in blue ink, and carefully set his book’s spine so it dug into the flesh just above his folded knee, suddenly being struck, in the vaguely gold-tinged light, by how beautiful its distressed cover looked, its wrinkles and folds, nicotinic fingerprints and dirty patinas, the way he imagined an Italian grandfather to look, in one of those technicolour fishing villages inside his head, and he positioned the book’s cover so it faced the two girls, as if it were a dark spyglass, stealing light from them to him, a line of light like a reel of fishing twine, brown and dusk-coloured and tough and hard to break.
He carefully struck up a conversation, waiting for the girls to laugh before leaning in, deliberately casual and uninterested, to ask them something. They sounded Scandinavian. Dutch. He talked to one more than the other, and I watched her dwindle in conversation till she was no more than an audience, an onlooker like me. I began to feel as if I already knew her.
– – –
I smoked one of his Newports down to the filter as I waited for him to leave, stubbing it out on the tree before me and letting it fall into the already scorched shrubbery. Without planning on it, I found myself hovering towards the girl, now alone, and so I asked her about their conversation. I tried to emulate his mannerisms of indifference, but found I couldn’t.
Eventually, she began to talk of possessions.
“Then, I told him I liked his watch. He said it was a gift from his grandfather, a watch that had been passed down his family, from grandfather to grandson, in these kinds of leaps. He said he had another watch that would look good on my wrist, if I’d meet him here tomorrow morning.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him my flight was tomorrow afternoon, and that I wanted to spend the morning sightseeing with my friend before I left. I’ve been in Napoli for a week now, but I haven’t even seen Pompeii yet.”
To her it seemed too obvious to state whether she had lied, saying this, though I couldn’t read her in the slightest.
“What did you think of him?”
I don’t know why I asked her.
“He was a little annoying. Nothing more, I thought.” She eyed me. “At least he’s travelling, I suppose.”
I wondered if she was referring to his soul or Napoli’s tourist economy. I didn’t ask.
From the adjoining street I heard the sound of hard, bony sandals clacking against stone. They seemed to be a portent of something.
“Oh!” Her friend had come back. “It’s good to see you again.”
Her friend smiled and called me somebody else’s name. I stared blankly into her look of recognition. She thought that I was somebody else: perhaps the man I had been following. It didn’t seem likely. I was almost certain we looked nothing alike.
– – –
In his burrow the next morning, I rooted through his rut of stuff until I held it, balanced in my hand, delicate as an egg tipped on its edge, and as my fingers brushed against its gold patina, where other, older fingers before me had completed the self-same action, had lifted it to an illuminating light to survey their property, an old name engraved on its smooth case-back revealed itself, that might have read Lewin or Lewis when it had been new. It felt overwhelmingly like a prop from a TV show, so detailed it might be unreal.
I reevaluated his other belongings, taking inventory once more, deliberating whether I had taken enough for my time. But I didn’t want it to look like a robbery. I decided on the watch alone, hoping that he’d blame himself for losing it amongst the vague promises of the evening. It would be good to travel lightly, not to feel suffocated by the weight of his other possessions. I could wear the watch on my wrist without even noticing.
I imagined something this old ought to have some value. Somebody had thought it worth keeping from falling apart, rotting into its constituent parts. I pinched it between forefinger and thumb, and assured myself that this was what I had come here for, and yet I made no motion to leave.