The Death of Small Creatures (16 page)

What scarf, what legging, what boot can help me now?

Not this jacket, this glove, or this black Parisian hat I've never been stylish enough to wear. A blouse, a cashmere sweater, and a silk nightgown land softly around me like goose down feathers.

“Stop,” I say. A jewel is brightening inside me now too. I grab handfuls of clothes, cram them in scrunched bunches into my Roots duffle bag. The bag is stiff, too structured, not amenable for this purpose.

How do you pack for total self-reinvention?

The next night
is Leigh's birthday. He gets to spend his birthday in Rome.

I'm still jetlagged. We take a city bus to Trastevere, but as the bus stops at the end of its line on a quiet street in a quiet upscale neighbourhood, we realize we've overshot our mark.

There are trees and green lawns here. The greenness and night air are refreshing, a brief solace from the day's heat. My heart beats fast, afraid this Italian night will eat us alive, that we will not find our way home again, that we will be lost forever. I hate being lost, have always felt lost, even in my own country, my city, my backyard.

We ask the bus driver, pleading really, “
Dov'è Trastevere
?” He doesn't speak a word of English, gestures flamboyantly with one hand down the hillside, says, “
Destra… sinistra… sinistra
.”

“
Grazie
,” we say, then walk away with our heads down.

“What are we going to do?” Leigh says.

“Walk,” I say.

An hour later we're standing on a street corner with our map unfolded and held mid-air before us. It's dark and hard to see the tiny lines and street names. From over hedges comes the sound of Italians having dinner, laughing, the clatter of dishes, oh, the popping of corks I imagine, and utensils striking plates. I want to climb over the hedge and join them.

“We're not getting anywhere,” I say. “I think we're walking in circles.”

Just then a teenage boy, about sixteen, sees us standing there looking lost. He speaks English, doesn't bother with Italian. Perhaps it's clear that we won't understand. “Hello,” he says. “Do you need help?”

I exhale a sigh of relief, almost shout, “Yes!”

He laughs, asks us where we're going. A few minutes later we're walking through trees down a dark hillside, and I worry that he is going to mug us or kill us. Haven't we all heard stories of tourists being killed in foreign countries? But we emerge on the other side, and Trastevere sprawls before us. We might have stumbled upon it on our own had we searched a little longer.

Marco gestures goodbye. We thank him profusely, offer ten euros, which I believe offends him, and off he goes into the night. I think,
Remember this boy's name. Forever, remember this boy's name
, though I will never again be able to recall his face.

The evening is hazy and magical. Trastevere is unlike any place I've seen before. People mill about around the fountain, drink beer and wine on the fountain steps. Water cascades and pools into a moat, makes the air humid. It's still so hot. I take off my shoes and dip my feet into the moat, hike up my dress, let the water cleanse me of the filth and decay. There are musicians here, men dressed in tuxedos playing violin and classical guitar, and acrobatic clowns with white faces on unicycles. (Are they expelling fire from their mouths? I can't remember now.) I feel like I'm inside a Chagall painting, starry skies and liquid night surrounding me. I breathe in liquid darkness, drink my beer on the steps with my feet in water.

I want to stay here in this moment exactly, for the rest of my life, because this is where I belong, this is my home, this is the place I've been returning to my whole life.

This is the closest to being inside a dream I've ever been.

I have asked
the doctor to give me more Ativan, and he has.

I wash down Ativan with NeoCitran DM. Nine, ten, fifteen mugs a day. Empty pill bottles rattle around in my purse and Roots duffle bag.

I rattle as I walk down the street.

Slippery sidewalks. Technicolor sky. Menacing crows.

Is it the drugs or some innate genetic deviance that is making me paranoid?

I have begun to fear stray cats, fence posts and airplanes flying low to the earth.

One time, I duck.

I hang out in my sister's backyard throughout the night, chain-smoke and sip Neo. My sister's guests are roaming around the kitchen. Silhouettes pass back and forth on the other side of the white kitchen curtains.

Spaghetti is boiling on the stove, filling my sister's kitchen with steam, fogging the window. Someone inside peeks through the curtains, clears the fog with her hand, makes a circle, looks at me and smiles.

I am a specimen.

My sister leans out her kitchen window, says, “Can I get you anything?”

I say, “No… thanks,” and take another sip of Neo.

“Are you okay?” she says.

I overcompensate, cannot calibrate the appropriate response, come across animated, cheerful even: “I'm good!” I say.

“Do you want some pasta?” she says.

I say, “No.”

“Just a little?”

“No, thanks.”

“A cube of cheese, bread, an olive?”

“No, thanks,” I say. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

The Colosseum looms
against the hazy late afternoon skyline, takes my breath away. It curves away from itself, then back unto itself on a far side I cannot see from here. I want to hold her in my arms.

But more than anything, all I really want to see are the Colosseum cats.

My sister said, “Bring cat food, those cats are hungry,” but I have forgotten, feel guilty as I look out into the hollow place inside.

All I see is dust and stone, jagged edges, look up at the broken oval and wish for completion. Although I am stunned by its magnitude, its shabbiness bothers me. I long for smooth surfaces, white marble, a sheen I can capture and keep at the back of my mind. I want it to be clean and therefore make me clean by proximity.

I long for my Vancouver Island home, the temperate rainforest, dew on leaves and lush grass underfoot. Perhaps I have come here with the wrong man.

Leigh grabs a ledge, leans over and looks inside, smiles, and looks back over his shoulder with a boyish grin on his face. “Just think, this is where men were eaten alive,” he says. And I think,
Yes, this is where men were eaten alive.

I think of the poor lions, stabbed in their hearts with spears, chains around their necks. Blood and rose petals on the dirt floor.

I finally see a cat, sprawled on a ledge. She is a Roman cat, eyes set wider apart than a Canadian cat, specks of gold, wise as the Empire itself. The heat blazes upon her, and I wish I had a bowl of clean cool water for her.

I snap a picture. Later, when I get home, I'll look at the photograph with remorse, wondering if she made it out alive. How long did she live? How long had she lived before I took her picture, stealing away one of her lives in the process?

Then another cat, younger and more agile, grey with white down her chest and on her paws. She is hunting a beetle in the shadows. The beetle is flipped on its back. I don't know who I feel sorry for more—the beetle or her. But I can't bear the grotesqueness of the act, cannot bear the impending crunch of the insect in her jaws, so I flip the beetle right side up again and it skitters away into a nook in the stone.

The hunt is over.

She is hungry.

She stares at me and blinks.

Caravaggio's front teeth
have begun to curl under. He gnaws carrots. His eyes weep white fluid. More scabs, more sores.

Lying (yellow-bellied) lengthwise along the cage, I say “I love my cough medicine,” and press two fingers against my neck to take my pulse. But time has become twisted and abstract.

Caravaggio says, “You love your dextromethorphan.”

One thump, two thump, three thump, four…

“I miss martinis too, the shape of the glass, the idea of the shape of the glass.”

“Those lovely bejewelled olive skewers,” he says.

One thump, two thump, three thump, four…

“It was all so sexy-sexy in the beginning.”

“So Euro-glam, yes, I know.”

A raccoon waddles
across my sister's yard, oblivious, a wild animal in the darkness.

There is no safe exit.

I long for the recognizable anguish, that awfulness, the bad marriage. I miss my home, the familiarity, the pattern; the couch where I cuddle my bunny for an hour or so before I pass out, whiskers and fur under my chin as I drift into semi-psychosis.

The raccoon prowls grass and violets, pulling me down to reality again.

But I have nothing left for negotiation or altercation. I think,
Raccoon, come on, just see me.