Sotto Voce XI (Conclusion)

11.       And light was everywhere.  It bathed the buildings in its blinding effusion.  The streets were awash with its speckled overflow;  it snaked down the hills of Rome in winding rivulets and sluiced down the gutters.  Light fell from the upper world like a curtain of shimmering dust shaken by a supernal hand.   

            And that hand guided J. down the streets of Rome, passed his house, now floating on a stream of crystalline brilliance, and even beyond to all of Rome, buoyed up by the light which had the power over dark, gray matter.   

            All the fragility inherent in things had been wrung out by the colossal flow of illumination.  J. noticed that the world was coming apart, bit by bit and seam by seam, revealing the thin scaffolding beneath effects.  It all floated away on a bright and steady sea and J. was carried along by its swift current as if falling over a waterfall and the world was never dark again.

Sotto Voce X

10.       “Unbelievable!” Lucia spat.  “Just fucked up!”  J. was setting up toy cars and trucks and preparing them for entry into an ersatz tunnel.  But as each vehicle approached the aperture, it would veer off and fall away.  This caused Lucia supreme consternation.

            “Damn it!” Lucia hissed, the perspiration gleaming on her neck.   Her shorts were high and snug, revealing the cleft between her legs.  “Why can’t anything work these days?”

            “Let’s do something else,” J. suggested.  Lucia set down a car.  She raised and lowered her eyebrows.   She leaned against the cellar wall.  J. pulled at her shorts and Lucia released the button.  They fell to the floor, and J. placed his hand on Lucia.  But a movement like light stirred in his peripheral field.  It was as if he was receiving a cue from some dimension where light reigned supreme, where the cadres of dark forces had been routed and kept in chains.  J. placed a finger inside Lucia’s body and she gasped.

            “Different,” she said between short breaths.  “Very different…”  She was about to say more, but J. had put himself inside of her after a few swift thrusts.  While he pushed, her breath was emitted from her mouth in a series of long, low whistles from the gap in her front teeth.  J. was done and pulled out of Lucia.  She placed a hand where had had just been.

            “Different, different,” she explained, and J. turned around to go.  "Jesus, this stuff is everywhere."

Sotto Voce IX

9.         The dog Peppa had taken four rolled up socks and hunkered down with them under J’s bed.  When he tried to retrieve them, the dog snapped at J.  He told the woman who claimed to be his mother.

            “The vet says she thinks they are her puppies…” the mother answered,  don’t touch her socks,”

            J left his room and cautiously climbed down into the cellar.  He carefully leaned against the utility closet door.  The urge to open it left his soul bursting with overwhelming energy.  The impulse to not open the door was like denying a powerful itch.  

            So J. opened the door.  Beneath him lay buried 2000 years of detritus.  Every year, two centimeters of dusk settles on Rome, and J’s city sinks imperceptibly, unless, of course, you have the vantage of centuries:  homes buried, filled with soot, their roofs employed as foundations for yet another structure.  

           And in the hole: the columns, the attic rooms, the secret vestries, the mithraeum, the catacombs painted with figures of Orphic dancers, doves, nymphs clutching clumps of grapes, painted garish reds, blues, greens, like a harlot’s face, all surrounded by the gurgle of pipes, of the sluicing of water through the ancient sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, and the bones of the babies begotten by priests and nuns, storied away as shamelessly as they were produced, in the vice grip of venal sin.   

          They all swirled in an orderless procession.  Wasn’t this the point?  J. realized that life could live and breath buried beneath a city in the dust and mire of disuse.

Sotto Voce VIII

8.         Then the dream:  when J. awoke from it, the image of its veracity was far more compelling than the tan paint on the walls around him, or the din of the rattling bakery truck in the street below his window.  The dream pushed him, as if identical poles of different magnets were being forced together by some malevolent, disgusted hand, indifferent to nature’s steely laws.

            J. was in a gondola but not on the Grand Canal.  No, the setting was a vast arena of darkness: above him, right over his head, a spot light shone down on his boat.  There was no pilot, and J., drifting about in the cavernous black, his body illuminated like an arch-angel’s, dipped his hand in the ink colored water.   

           Then a thud, and another and another… J. peered over the gondola and into the featureless gloom of the water:  a tiny foot, leg, hand, torso, head, with or without hair, eyes open or closed.  The water then dissolved into a sea of jumbled anatomy, and rose higher and higher as the waves began to build but never crest.  And J. realized he was inexorably rising up, but into what?  Into a firmament of absolute black.  This is where I die, dream J. thought… and he awoke with a start.

Sotto Voce 7

7.         “Where was the arm?” J. asked.

            “In the toilet,” Lucia answered.  She was arranging dolls in a row.  Most were missing parts or pieces and were conspicuously nude.  But she kept on task, her forehead slick with sweat, her skit sticking to her damp legs.

            “This is just shit,” she explained.  “Trying to do this is shit.”

            “Then why do it?” J. asked.  He was sitting next to her on the floor.  Outside, a scooter hissed.  A ray of light slanted through the half basement window, illuminating a world of swirling dust.

            Lucia moved next to J. and hitched up her skirt.  She moved aside her panties and J. placed his hand on the familiar spot.  They continued as Lucia cooled, the liquid between her legs began to lose its turgidity and drip down her tights.  This was a process they had to complete:  like taking a shortcut through a weedy lot tramped down by the feet of a thousand people.  But they had to stop:  they heard Lucia’s mother open the kitchen door, so the girl adjusted her clothes.  She stood for a moment above J. and looking down, frowned.

            “Why was the arm in the toilet?” J. asked again, resuming their conversation.

            “It came out of Mama,” Lucia explained lithely.

            “Why?” J. pressed.

            “Shit,” Lucia answered, having moved back to arranging the dolls.  “What a supremely shitty job.”  And then:  “Why?” she grimaced.  “Because the baby was in her wrong.  It came out in parts and pieces but the first part that came out was the arm in the toilet upstairs and the rest at the hospital.”