Empire of Light (33 page)

“
Stai bene?” 
she asks me.

“
Sto bene
. I’m good,” I say with a childish smile.

“Jason. How come you are sitting so far away?”

“I dunno,” I answer shrugging like a nine-year-old.

I walk over to her, trying to not look like a jerk as the train bounces and throws me off my pimp walk.

I sit beside her and our eyes immediately lock. If there’s one thing I learned from watching the Animal Planet, it is this; when animals lock eyes some serious shit is about to go down. In a couple of seconds I’m either going to be kissing her or punching her in the face.

“
Posso baciarti?
” I say, asking if I can kiss her.

She laughs and turns away.

“I’m sorry.”

“No! Don’t be sorry. It’s just that nobody every
asked
me before. It’s nice.”

I asked her because I’ve got no game, but whatever works!

“
Certo,
Jason
. Baciarmi, per favore.

I lean in and go for it.

It’s a kiss so soft that for the life of me I can’t actually nail down the moment it began. It just faded into existence like the first note of the
Intermezzo
by Mascagni. The beginning strains are so delicate, so gentle, that for a few seconds you have to wonder if you are hearing anything at all. Before you know it, you’re captured, swept up into the coolness of it all.

“
Pompeii…Pompeii…Scusami!” 
I hear disembodied a voice say over and over again.

We finally notice the train has stopped. I look up and there’s a sweet old lady smiling at us. She points at the Pompeii pamphlet in my hand.

“We’re here in Pompeii,” she says in Italian.

Shit!

“
Grazie!
” I shout as Dani and I jump up and bound through the train’s door before it closes.

On the platform, we watch our train speed away.

We grab hands and walk to the site, the entrance only a few steps away.

Weird.

Before we got on the train, holding hands would’ve been outlandish. We get off the train, and now we’re holding hands as if we’ve been dating for months. Inhibitions melt like cotton candy after first kisses.

Hey! I just realized that I’ve got relationship powers. Now I can do what I’ve been dying to do for months.

WHACK!

“OW!” I shout, doubling over in pain.

“Did you just squeeze my ass?” she asks in shock.

“Did you just give me an open hand smack to the chest? Who does that? Who are you, Ric Flair?”

“You squeezed my ass! We get off the train in Pompeii and the first thing you do is squeeze my ass?”

“You slapped my
chest
. I felt my heart vibrate!”

“Okay…Let’s slow down,” she says holding out her hands. “I’m not a tramp. If we are dating,
come si dice… monogamo?
”

“Monogamous?”

“
Si!
Monogamous and committed, then this body is all yours. But don’t be a jerk. Are we committed,
sì o no
?”

“Hell yes. Committed. But, you don’t think we’re going too fast, do you?”

“I don’t believe in messing around.”

“Charming. Just so I know, when can I grab it?”

“What?”

“Your ass.”

“
Mio Dio
…What is with you and my ass, anyway?”

“It’s a black thing.”

“A black thing…Okay, mah neezy, you might wanna try groping m’ badonkadonk when there ain’t no class of elementary school students behind us, yo!”

Dated jive said with a horrible English accent. She says this just as a gaggle of snickering six-year-olds walk past us.

She holds out her hand. I grab it, thinking it’s safer grasping her hand and not allowing it to punch me in the chest.

“Ah! How would you like a guided tour of Pompeii?” asks this old tour guide as we enter the site.

“How much?” I ask.

“No,” Dani barks before he can answer, yanking me away from him.

“
Una Mappa! Solo cinquanta centesimi,” 
says another peddler.

“
No! Grazie,”
she says, ignoring him.

“Hey, that map was only fifty cents, right?” I ask.

“
Ma dai!
We don’t need a map,” she says, waving her hand in the air.

“You must know the lay of the land pretty well?” I say impressed.

“I have no idea where we are going,” she says cheerily.

She wants to wing it.

Fine by me, Dani. However you want to play it.

But three hours later, I’m thinking differently.

There’s a reason people print maps.

Some folks just have to learn things the hard way. Take a city like Pompeii. Note, I actually used the term
city
.

It’s not a forum.

It’s not a temple or some ruins scattered about a field.

Pompeii is a municipality.

They’ve even put up street signs so you can find your way around to the Red Light District. Yep. You heard me right. The Red Light District.

“You know, maybe we should buy a map,” I say.

“Why?” she says “We’ve been to three amphitheaters, we’ve trucked through the aqueducts and visited a half a dozen temples—”

“It’s taking hours,” I interrupt.

“Where else would you rather be, Jason?”

“Nowhere,” I say as I tighten my grip on her hand. “Still, I’d love to see this Red Light District.”

“You think you’ll still find working girls there, do ya?”

“Why not. It’s the world’s oldest profession.”

We run into this guy leaning up against one of the street signs smoking. The old bastard looks as if he actually lives here, oblivious to the fact that his city was blown the hell up thousands of years ago.

“Excuse me, do you know how to get to the Red Light District?” she asks him in Italian.

“Which one?” is his response.

Which one? I’d be hard pressed to name a modern city that even has one, let alone two.

He directs us to the closest one, and we’re on our way.

“Why am I not surprised this is where you want to go?” Dani asks as I flip through my tour book.

“Hey, I’ve been wanting to see the corpses, and you’ve nixed it every time we’ve gotten near ‘em. The Red Light District is the only joint left.”

“Of course you want to see bodies. You’re an American. I’ve seen your movies. What would a nice outing be without carnage laying about the ground? Fine let’s go find you your damn corpses.”

After asking for more directions, Dani and I now stand inside somebody’s home.

On the floor of the home is a dead family.

They hold each other, their last precious moments on earth. They embrace and give each other comfort before their lungs are incinerated. Dani and I stand over their bodies and stare in shock at all the agony and love splayed atop the ancient tiled floor of the family room. All of it cocooned just for us. Dani grabs my hand.

The city held twenty-five thousand souls until 79 AD when Vesuvius suddenly awoke and served up a phat can of whup-ass. She buried the city under a mountain of super heated volcanic debris. People inhaled the sizzling air, died where they sat and were then covered by the ash. Their bodies eventually decomposed away, but it left a hole, a precise mold where they lay. And when archeologists injected plaster into these holes they could excavate perfect, full-bodied death masks.

“I need a smoke,” Dani says gloomily.

“You smoke?” I ask, still staring at the people who died inhaling toxic gas. “Maybe you should think about quitting.”

Dani walks out without saying a word to me. I reach for her hand and she pulls away.

I follow her outside, but give her some distance. She seems to want to be alone.

I lose track of her for a moment as she wanders into another home. Finally, I find her just standing there, transfixed on another body cast of a little boy, his body huddled in the corner of the room, his small hands covering his face, as if trying to prevent the lethal air from entering his lungs. I gaze at Dani and am surprised to find her crying. Almost before I can think, she latches onto the collar of my jacket and pulls me to the ground as she collapses in tears.

“
Cosa, Dani. Che ti succede?” What happened?

She was only a kid, eight years old, and her parents were never around for her. They were a hot mess. So Dani was constantly acting out, getting into fights and all kinds of stupid shit. It was a cry for help, if anybody cared to look close enough.

“When the coach kicked me off the volleyball team that was it. It broke me. I was so angry that I decided to burn the equipment shed, with all the volleyball equipment in it.”

“Naturally.”

“
Si.
But what I didn’t know was that this gypsy mother and her baby girl had broken into the shack and used it as a shelter at night.
Hai capito?
The night I set the fire,
la bambina
… The little girl was left alone while her momma snuck into the school to use the bathroom. By the time she returned, the building was already filled with smoke. It wasn’t a big fire. It…
Come si dice
… Smoldered? The janitor had stored cleaning fluids and chemicals in the shack. They smoldered.”

Dani begins to cry, torrentially. She finishes telling me the rest of the story between sobs and wails.

The mother entered the shed to find it full of toxic smoke. Her girl had hid from the fire beneath a cot, covering her mouth. She died in that position; the same position as the kid who died thousands of years ago here in Pompeii.

“
É stata colpa mia. É stata colpa mia,
”
It was my fault
, she whispers as she wipes the tears away from her face with her sleeve.

I can’t imagine carrying around that kind of weight, and I sure didn’t expect to have this knowledge dropped on me when I woke up this morning.

There are two other things I discovered about Dani today. The first was how she detests maps. Life isn’t about following somebody else’s path for this girl. The second trait is that she doesn’t seem to be all that hell bent on smoking prepackaged cigarettes. I marvel as I watch this seemingly delicate little girl sit on the ancient steps of Pompeii and bust out a phat bag of tobacco, a pack of papers, and roll a perfect cigarette, despite the trembling of her hands.

“Are you cold?” I ask.

“No,” she answers a bit too quickly. I look back into the home and see the feet of the body cast of a man, framed by the doorway.

It’s okay, Dani
, I think, brushing my hand across the top of her head as she licks and seals her homemade cigarette, strikes a match across the ancient stone and lights it up like Eastwood. I sit down next to her.

“Why in the world did you want to come here, today?” I ask her hesitantly. “You knew what you were going to see.”

“Well. You suggested that I should find somebody that could help me through my issues. I thought it might be you.”

“But I didn’t?” I didn’t even know I was up to bat. How the fuck did I get here?

“It’s my fault. I thought I felt a vibe about you. I don’t know. I should not have allowed myself to get lost in all of this bullshit fairy tale.”

I want to say I’m sorry, but it’s kind of messed up that she’s throwing this on me.

“Fairy tale. What are you talking about?”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Yeah. Whatever. I don’t care.”

And just like that, my romance with Dani is over. Does anybody keep a record for shortest relationships? I’m the Jesse Owens of break-ups.

We meander through the city, wandering in and out of houses. We run our hands across a stone kitchen counter, and I think about all the meals prepared upon it, the families that fed there, all the arguments. People playing house. And now where the hell are they?

After a couple of hours, Dani and I find ourselves walking on a long desolate street of ruins, walking far apart from each other. Suddenly, she stops walking as she gazes at a broken gate with a sign hanging from it.

VIETATO!

Forbidden. 
Of course, to Dani a broken gate is an open invitation. She jogs past it, and I reluctantly follow Dani into her trespass. We come upon a home and she dashed into it. Before I know it, we’re creeping down a dark flight of stone stairs, headed deep into an ancient basement.