Las Vegas for Vegans (11 page)

That evening, Nonno watched a science fiction film with the family and it went on late. The twins were now asleep on the carpet and her father had long since stumbled off to the bedroom to snore in peace (since everyone kept shouting at him to shut up) and Rosetta's mother had her chin on her chest.

Nonno watched the screen. It was impossible for Rosetta to know what he was making of post-apocalyptic Earth and the synthetic human beings trying to rebuild it. Whether it made sense to him that the Synths were divided by a faction called the Neverborns, and that these rogue Synths wanted to eradicate the last natural humans because they were born as animals and would never be more than beasts.

The screen's images flashed across Nonno's face. No matter how many people got blown away or how catastrophic the explosion or how romantic a love scene or suspenseful a dune buggy chase sequence—his face never changed. He barely blinked as the immense plasma washed his face in special effects. During family uproars he was able to sit at the kitchen table or in an armchair, close his eyes and fall asleep for an hour or more.

Rosetta sat next to him and put her hand on his. She patted it and asked him if he wanted anything. ‘Maybe
aqua. Aqua?'
she asked. He smiled and placed his other hand on hers and they sat that way a moment. It would have been a lovely photograph for the walls of the Battista house.

Rosetta put her head on her grandfather's shoulder and he reached out a trembling hand to her chin and lifted it and kissed her on her cheek and maybe because she had started to giggle, his hands reached for her ribs. She thought it was to tickle her. His trembling hands found their way through her bathrobe and reached up for her breasts.

His strength surprised her. His sudden urgency, as he pushed her back on the couch with his head and shoulder and lifted her pyjama top and brought his face down as if to devour her torso. He made sounds like he was eating ice cream.

Rosetta didn't want to scream because of the twins sleeping on the carpet before the television and especially because her mother, Niccolo's daughter, was sleeping on the other couch with her chin to her chest. She wanted to believe this was something other than what it was, even as the old man reached for his pants. Nonno fumbled around with his old leather belt.

Rosetta didn't scream. She didn't make a sound. She gritted her teeth. Then she quietly reached out a hand and gripped his ear as if it were a page she wanted to rip from a book. She tore down slowly and Nonno squealed.

‘Shhh,' Rosetta said into his other ear.
‘Piano, piano con calma,'
she said as she continued to pull that crumpled page from its book, dragging his face over the edge of the couch and forcing him to tumble to the floor. By the time the twins woke up, Rosetta had pulled her pyjama top back down and was standing over him as though she was concerned.

Mauro asked what happened. When Rosetta said Nonno had fallen from the couch, Matteo got up to see what had happened to the old man, frightened by the childlike moaning sound the patriarch was making. Mauro started laughing and Matteo decided to join him. Rosetta's mother still had her chin on her chest. Nonno had his knees pulled to his stomach with his hands protecting his face as if he were about to be covered with a blanket of ash.

MURMUR

‘I haven't felt any love for her for a long time. Yet I'm always thinking about her dying. Like that's going to be the real test. Maybe then I'll feel a bit of the love that has to be down there somewhere. I'm afraid that it will be a poison when it does resurface, and I'll drown in some ocean of toxic regret. Mostly there's this unnatural sense in me when I think about her, as though you really can't feel
nothing
for your mother.'

‘But you bringing it up—doesn't that say something?'

‘I'm not saying I don't think about her, but my thoughts never go anywhere. I'm like a goldfish in a little bowl, circling the same object in the pebbles at the bottom, but it's not a little plastic castle—it's the body of my mother, and I'm just waiting for something to happen. I want to feel something for it, but I don't. I just go around and around.'

‘And here I thought we'd had a good time tonight.'

‘We did. You know we did.'

‘I was lying here thinking, you know, I think she's starting to like me.'

‘I'm not talking about being in a goldfish bowl with you. That's not what I'm saying.'

‘But the image of your mother, dead in the pebbles. Doesn't exactly speak of growing fondness.'

‘Not dead. I think, more like some kind of stasis.'

‘Mmm … Still morbid.'

‘Yeah, it's morbid. But you know, neither one of us has farted yet.'

‘What!?'

‘You know what I'm talking about?'

‘What are you talking about? I can let rip any time you like. But that one's like Pandora's box—you never get to put it back in.'

‘I'm saying, we're still polite. We fuck and we go to a movie and have dinner, some nice wine, we fuck again but it's still all our Sunday best. What about a real conversation? Not an interface—the usual presentation as we want the world to see us.'

‘Really? But I've spent years perfecting my simulations and projections. An occasional sneeze is the only glitch in my program. What's real and honest-to-goodness now? I'm not sure any more. I can still leak fluid from my eyes, I think—you just tell me when.'

‘You'd do that for me? Let your colours run?'

‘No babe, I'm waterproof. Fade-proof. I eat paper for breakfast.'

‘I don't know if that makes sense.'

‘It makes sense. I've breakfasted on
War and Peace.
Had dinner with Pushkin and then
Crime and Punishment
for dessert. The ink runs, but not quick enough by a long shot. Let's say “metasense” like some say “medicine”.'

‘I didn't know you even read. No sign of books at your apartment.'

‘That's because everything important is invisible.'

‘Nice line.'

‘Line? I believe it to my soul! Not that I lay any faith in a soul of course, but another trick of a brain is the mind. A book is just a stack of paper as well and yet I keep seeing things in them.'

‘Are we surrounded by books as we speak, teetering towers of them about to come crashing down on us?'

‘I wish you hadn't said that.'

‘Hmm?'

‘I don't like the clutter of that image. I like to think of all of those books stacked on mahogany shelves. No dust.'

‘No dust—that's a nice thought.'

‘You know it's mostly dead skin—all the dust you see. We leave layers of ourselves over everything.'

‘Makes me think of dust to dust in a whole new way.'

‘You're not going to go back to the dead mother.'

‘Stasis. Not dead.'

‘Floating. I understand.'

‘And ashes to ashes. Why is it ashes to ashes? We don't cremate—not traditionally. Where are the ashes?'

‘I think there's a metaphor of fire in there. Like, the fire we build with wood and coal, burns down to embers, and then a new fire is made out of the embers.'

‘So it should be embers to embers.'

‘The point for the guy in the coffin is that he came from a long line of death, and he returns to it.'

‘The point for him?'

‘The point for anyone looking at him, then—thinking about their own ashes and dust.'

‘What's the point for him? Standing invisibly amongst them and the teetering towers of books all around the mourners.'

‘I don't know. I saw my mum dead in a hospital bed, and all I could feel was that she was already gone, out of that body, and far away from me. Away from all of us—a lost group of people standing around her bed that day. The family my mum made, which only made sense because of her. Yeah, I don't know about the embers and ashes either. We just seem to evaporate one day.'

‘Well, this sounds like a real conversation. But we don't need to talk about dead mothers.'

‘I might fart any moment now.'

‘What if it's something atrocious? Ideally you'd start off with one of those farts that doesn't smell too bad, that reminds you of home like something burnt on the stove, and then maybe—way, way,
way
down the line somewhere, you can bring out the stomach-turning stuff, like you've just found a dead possum in a cupboard.'

‘Used to be a time where you couldn't burp. It was impolite. But now people burp. You reckon there'll ever be a time where we can freely fart, and be okay with that? Acknowledge our common humanity in it, like we do the dust and ashes?'

‘Where do people burp? I see people stifling them all the time.'

‘Maybe I'm thinking of yawning.'

‘People raise their palms to their mouths.'

‘I've seen the fillings and tonsils of strangers. I'm sure of it.'

‘Do you advocate sneezing without tissues?'

‘I can imagine a world of such freedoms, yes.'

‘I can tell you don't use public transport often.'

‘You ever find yourself arguing a case you really don't believe in? Honestly, I'm pretty draconian when you get to know me, if only because the word sounds so cool.'

‘I think you're too old to use “cool” as a valid term of approval.'

‘Dude!'

‘Ha ha ha.'

‘I'm Miles Davis cool, not hippie-pothead cool. I could eat fifty hardboiled eggs in a row and still be Paul Newman cool.'

‘See, I've always wanted a man who could distinguish between shades of cool.'

‘I'm like an Eskimo with snow when it comes to cool.'

‘Or a proctologist with shades of brown.'

‘Mmm … I'd rather light a candle than curse the darkness.'

‘Ha ha.'

‘The birds are going to start singing soon. We should probably go to sleep.'

‘We'll call in sick. What are you worried about?'

‘I wasn't planning on going to work tomorrow. I'm not worried about anything.'

‘Are you tired of talking?'

‘Not really. It's strange to go on and on like this into the night and keep going into the morning. We might run out of things to say. Tomorrow you'll look at me and only be able to nod. And I'll nod back and have nothing more to say either.'

‘That's never going to happen. People can't help themselves. You ever work with someone who keeps telling the same story over and over to different people? This one paralegal I work with, sits on the other side of the partition, went out with his buddies on the weekend. Had a high old time, apparently. Gave everyone the same details, and ended it every time with, “God, we were so shit-faced.” I hate that expression. Like being
shit-faced was
some decadent high point of pleasure. And then I'm looking at how often I do that, and I wonder what I get out of telling the same story to different people. Why do I want to tell someone a story? I mean—at all! Why do I even want to speak to anyone at work, or anywhere? Like, I'm wondering, where's the satisfaction in telling someone anything when you know a few minutes later they're going on with whatever else comes next? What I'm thinking is that this guy we call Not-John— because it's Jonathan, never John, he doesn't allow John—does nothing but work or think about work when he's not at work, and dream about work when he's sleeping, needs to get
shit-faced
to forget about work for half an hour.'

‘So, tomorrow you'll tell someone else the story of Not-John again?'

‘Shoot me if I do?'

‘Maybe I'll be too shit-faced.'

‘Don't! I really fucking hate that expression.'

‘Alright. But you're saying you don't know why people bother telling the same stories, or even talking at all, and I reckon it's because there's nothing but stories. Everything is a story. From the Bible to the American president, Not-John to the mother in the pebbles, the mother out there in the flesh, to you and me right here on these sheets, in this bed. In this darkness. It's all part of a story, and I reckon it's a lie to think any one person, priest or scientist or whatever, can tell anything but a little part of it. And more than that, the story is like water to a fish. Beyond the story there's nothing but gasping and a vacuum. Which is why we speak. And why we listen.'

‘Wow. Now I'm in the mood for a story.'

‘I've got one, actually. And I might have already told this story to one or two people, but the thing about doing that is that usually you get better at telling it. It's like a joke. You work out the timing of the thing. What the punchline is.'

‘Give me one of those as well.'

‘I will if I can find the lighter … Alright … So this is set in Serbia. There's a guy from a small village there. He goes over to Austria to work. Comes back on the weekends, to see his wife. By Monday he's back in Austria. Doing this for over two years and he's still only got a Serbian passport and maybe something that gives him permission to work over there.'

‘This is true?'

‘This happened last year. And this is a regular guy, from a place called Jabukovac, which is like being from somewhere called Apple-ville.
Jabuka
means “apple” in Serbian. So I imagine apple orchards all around his village.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Nikola Radosavljevic. Just a few years older than me. Not forty yet. Working hard. But then one day, he's coming back, and something goes wrong on the bus. He's so wild with anger that the bus driver had to stop the bus and help hold him down. They didn't kick him off, and eventually Nikola got back to Jabukovac. Next day at about five in the afternoon he and his wife get into a terrible fight, and despite never having laid a hand on her in their whole marriage, he pummels her to the ground. What he does next is jump down a well.'