Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

Luke

Piazza Navona, Rome

Summer, 2023

The text message made my phone vibrate on the vintage credenza in the corner. The glimmering lights and chattering people two floors below on the ancient square bustled with life and energy I could only faintly remember once having.

I set my wine glasses on the windowsill and lifted my phone.

Lucy: Happy birthday, big brother. You're still twenty-seven here for a few more hours. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I did the math quickly. It was three in the afternoon on the West Coast, a good nine hours until my birthday by Lucy's time.

The stuffy air remained in the room despite the open window. They told me at the reception desk someone would come and fix the goddamn AC unit four hours ago. I stopped waiting. Instead, I wore a pair of cotton shorts that barely reached my knees and nothing else. The drenched T-shirt formed a small heap with the rest of my dirty clothes on the corner. I couldn't be bothered to ask for washer access.

My mind darted from one thing to the next. I lifted my glass and drank a bit of dry red wine. There wasn't an ounce of sugar in this thing, and it suited me just fine. A creeping headache made itself known in the back of my head. A throb and nothing more.

I sent Lucy a quick thank-you message with loads of kisses for my little niece.

As I placed my phone back on the credenza, I brushed my battered copy of The Aeneid with my fingers. Bound in yellow cloth with blue soldiers patterned over its front, back, and spine, the book had been in my possession for years. I had read it twice before and felt it was a fitting companion if I were visiting Rome.

Just last night, sleepless in this simmering hell of a room, I had read the passages of Dido's sacrifice and protest. After refusing to accept Aeneas' choice to leave, she stabbed herself with his sword while standing on the funeral pyre she had built for herself. With her dying breath, she foretold the eternal enmity between Carthage and Rome.

Tonight, just like it had last night, those words brought back another memory.

It was deep in my messages, but I was used to scrolling that far down. I had worn my thumbs thin searching for that message.

Sometimes I tended to lie awake at night and imagine all kinds of terrible things. I would imagine what it would be like to become ill. Or to go quickly the way my mother had. Or to grow so very old that I was nothing but a tired shell with no memories left in my empty head and only a stubborn, beating heart in my chest. I tormented myself with scenarios I had no power over. And, if that wasn't the case, I dug through my text messages in search of those words.

I didn't know why. Why did the moth burn itself alive? Maybe I was looking for something beautiful and inspiring hiding within the devastation. Or I simply needed to feel something, even if it burned me.

The funny thing was, I didn't need to search through my inbox. Those words were inscribed neatly on my heart the day I got it back. I understand everything. I only have one thing to ask. Don't ever speak to me again. It was like a shitty poem. I wrote it down once. Then, from time to time, I revisited it with different ways it could have gone. I'll mourn the silence, a void that expands, echoing the loss of our joined hands. In solitude, I'll wander blasted lands. The ways I entertained myself were endless when the world was quiet and still.

I understand everything.

I only have one thing to ask.

Don't ever speak to me again.

I'd rather swim with a lobster named Stan.

Or dance with a goat in a frying pan.

Just leave me alone, I've got a plan .

I let the words swirl around me before drinking the last sip of my wine. It was somewhat similar to picking at scabs on a freshly healed wound, except there was nothing fresh about it.

So many people were enjoying the summer night on the famous piazza that I could almost feel their collective joy welling and bubbling. I closed the window.

My hotel room was spacious and elegantly vintage. The large bed had a wooden frame with tall posts and a thin red canopy, curtains tied to the posts. A sofa sat on the opposite end, a coffee table and an armchair paired with it. A heavy wooden armoire and my trusted credenza matched the vibes perfectly. The floor tiles were slightly damp from the humidity in the room, as were the old wallpapers, cream with a darker brown pattern.

I plopped down into the armchair and lifted a sketchbook. There were three on the table. Flicking through this one made me want to laugh. Is this where I squandered my years? The sketches weren't even that bad, except that everyone hated them, so I hated them, too. I tossed the sketchbook back on the table where the other two sat. Fuck them .

My nerves had been restless for the last four days. I'd booked this damned trip without letting myself think clearly. Every time thoughts threatened to creep in, I put up the walls. Every time I caught myself asking what I would do once I was here, I slammed the shields tight around my heart. Nothing. I will do nothing. Or something. Can't wait to find out. But it was hard to keep the gates shut against the battering army of thoughts when I was here.

Don't ever speak to me again .

I obeyed that request for so long that it was almost sacred to me. I was a monk in the monastery and pledged to keep my silence. Some kept the eternal flames burning; some transcribed the ancient holy texts. My only duty was never to speak to Rafael again.

Yet all my old resolve to honor this request had fallen apart last month. Or, to be precise, the last drop in an overflowing lake held by a forgotten dam had fallen from the clear summer sky last month.

I had spent these years watching the world go by from the safety of my den. I tended my mother's orchids as if that was the only purpose I had. I drew, wrote, and sold my works and my soul as if nothing else mattered. I watched my sister's pregnancy advance. I saw her get married and give birth to a baby girl. And I worked tirelessly on a story no one wanted to read—until last month.

It was a stupid thing that only someone as indulgent in self-pity would pay any attention to. I was the king of self-pity, so when I dusted the top of my bookcase for the first time in years, where it was three inches shorter than the ceiling, my life shattered. Every seam in my stitched heart came apart; every piece of duct tape holding me together peeled off. An old framed photograph I had tucked away flew off the bookcase from the sudden swinging of my hand and the damp cloth. Its appearance scared me enough to make me wobble on the chair I'd climbed to reach so high, but by the time I knew what had happened, I wished I had fallen right off and ended it all. Shattered glass littered the floor. His beaming smile twisted my guts. My innocent gaze at his glowing face reminded me of the person I had once been.

I hadn't collapsed under the burden of my emotions when my mother passed away as I did that evening. Kneeling over the photo, I babbled apologies to the frame I had broken into pieces.

The episode was something I firmly attributed to the fact that I had forgotten to eat all three meals every day for some time, and the burdens of rejections that I had imagined were a thing of the past in my career. We all break down now and then , I had told myself the next day, but a thought bugged me. It drove me to buy a ticket to Rome when what I should have been doing was watering my mother's orchids and looking for a job.

As if moving through a haze, I swapped my black cotton shorts for dark olive canvas ones and a light cream hemp shirt with hazel buttons done from the lower part of my chest down. My pockets were filled with my room's key card, wallet, and phone. I had my fresh, unused sketchbook in one hand and graphite pencils tucked into the breast pocket of my shirt.

It was only when I shut the door of my room that I fully understood how suffocated I had been.

Inhaling deeply, I walked out of the hotel. All the buildings in Piazza Navona were more historic than anything I had laid my eyes on in my entire life. This living, breathing city was soaked with the memories of countless lives lived and lost. Every stone was smoothed by millions of footsteps that treaded it.

Around me, people were still happy and in love. It seemed like everyone I came across held someone's hand. Midnight in Rome would do that, I thought.

As I walked the streets, both wide and narrow, I tried to calm my heart. It beat quickly for no reason I could discern. Restlessness kept my fingers moving over the faux leather cover of my sketchbook, and thoughts swirled around me in erratic directions.

When I found a quiet plaza in front of an old church in the heart of Rome, I sat on one of the city's uncomfortable iron benches. Streetlamps chased away the night, but the secluded space with tall buildings on all four sides of the plaza rendered this place perfect for someone in search of solitude. I opened my sketchbook and slashed some lines across the paper to warm up my wrist. There was never a bad time to practice sketching a human hand.

But as I placed lines over sharp lines, I knew whose hand I was drawing. I knew where that hand lay. I knew what that hand could do. "I cannot escape you." However hard I tried , I added internally.

I worked on my form and lost all track of time. My back hurt, my butt was sore from the bench, my knuckles burned from holding the pencil. When I surrendered myself to the flow, his presence filled the empty pages.

Didn't I tell you to forget about me? I asked his arched eyebrow I placed on that face. Didn't I tell you to leave me and not look back? And didn't you demand I do the same ?

Well, I couldn't. For all the things I had said, I couldn't follow my own requests, let alone his. Hell, I was in Rome just because I'd dropped a framed photo I had once hidden from myself. I was following the breadcrumbs of a life he lived without me because I had told him to do just that. I was here because I was incapable of healing, regardless of who held the knife that split the flesh.

And I argued. I argued with the sketches with all my fire and might because there was so much left unsaid.

The day you told me nothing made you happy anymore.

The day I told you there was some invisible noose around my neck.

The day we got drunk on a Zoom call, and you told me how everything would be fine, but then it wasn't.

Or the day you got an offer to move to Rome and told me you would refuse it. And all the days that followed when I had to talk you into accepting it.

He was such a stubborn man. It angered me to remember it. So it surprised me to realize I was scrolling through my contacts and staring at his name on my screen. Why am I here? The tightness in my chest was such that I could barely breathe.

I tucked my sketchbook under my arm and returned the pencil to my shirt's breast pocket. My feet tapped the tiled plaza as I crossed it and slipped between the buildings. I had been keeping a lid on everything for so long that I had tricked myself into thinking it was over.

We humans could believe anything. We could believe we were healed when the wounds were still spewing blood. We could believe in ideologies even when we faced the enemy's fire. We could believe in a loving god that offered us an eternity in heaven when there was nothing but deep sleep after a short fling on this planet. Our silly brains trapped in our skulls and sacks of meat could come up with the wildest things.

My ear burned from the way I pressed my phone against it. The toot-toot and the silence came and went, my heart thundering without any rhythm. I didn't even know what I was doing, only that I couldn't go on doing nothing at all.

Perhaps his tone was off, and he was asleep. Perhaps he saw my name flash on his screen and looked away. Perhaps my vow would remain unbroken with his help. Perhaps…

"Luke?" The voice on the other end was like amber honey, dark and sweet in equal parts. I had forgotten how easily the sound of it made my heart flutter.

"Hello," I said.

"Uh…hello?" I couldn't read anything from his tone. "Did something happen, Luke?"

I shook my head before reminding myself that I needed to say it out loud. "Nothing happened."

"It's late," Rafael informed me.

"Are you home?" I asked and refused to clear my throat. If I was going to strangle myself with the ropes of my regrets, it seemed like a fitting way to go.

"Where is home?" Rafael asked.

"You know what I mean." The slightest hint of impatience was unmistakable in my reply.

Rafael was silent.

I waited. I waited and walked .

With unrestrained frustration, Rafael finally spoke. "What do you want, Luke?"

That was a million-dollar question. I was going home empty-handed. "I'm, uh…" I looked around as I passed from one alley to the next and turned a corner. The murmur of constantly moving water cascading down the rocks and into a vast pool full of coins drew me like a flame drew a moth. "I'm around the Trevi Fountain," I said. "I thought…"

"So you are in Rome," Rafael said.

"Oh, uh, yeah." I faced the famous fountain, lights beaming from all sorts of hidden spots and from under the pool of shifting water. Streams came down from the artificial cliff and passed around the immense sculpture of Oceanus in his shell chariot. I'd once read that well over a million dollars was thrown into the fountain each year, or more than three thousand bucks a day in small coins. The city officials collected the money to subsidize the supermarket for the city's poor. I wondered if it would bring me any luck if I threw a fistful of coins over my shoulder.

"By the Trevi Fountain," Rafael said.

"Um, yes." The lights that made the Tritons and the rockwork glow were yellow and orange, the moving cascades of water white with froth. "It's peaceful at this hour."

"I bet," Rafael said curtly. "It's two in the morning."

I snapped my mouth shut and swallowed the growing knot in my throat. A spiteful part of me wanted to apologize for disturbing him at such a late hour, but that was a path to a very familiar place. He would play chicken with me, and we would sulk in our separate corners until one finally broke. Except there was nothing that came after. This was the final breaking point. No amount of apologies would change anything anymore. "Nine years," I whispered. "Today marks nine years since I met you."

Rafael was quiet for a beat. "Happy birthday."

"Do you mean that?" I asked, clawing desperately for some sort of chance.

"That I want you to be happy on your birthday? Yes, Luke. I mean that." Even as he said the words, he must have known what I would ask next.

"Then make it happy," I said. Not that I had any right to make demands. We were both past that point. But nine years was a long time to revolve around a person.

Rafael's tone was pleading all of a sudden. "What would be the point?"

I didn't have an answer. "Just come. Just for the hell of it. For the old times' sake." I need to see your face. I need to look into your eyes and remember all I threw away.

"Luke, I don't…" He paused and groaned.

"You weren't sleeping anyway," I said. He didn't ask me how I knew. His voice hadn't been even slightly groggy, and we'd had too many late-night conversations in our lives for me not to be able to tell his voices apart. He knew that about me.

He sighed.

I didn't press, and he didn't say anything else. Some time passed, though I didn't know how to track it. The only passage I knew was that of water down the chiseled rocks of the Trevi Fountain. "Okay," I whispered, accepting whatever came next. "I'll be here for a while." And I hope to see you , I thought. Hanging up, I tucked my phone back inside my pocket and walked to the nearest bench below the street level, facing directly the immense sculptures of Oceanus and the Tritons.

I opened my sketchbook and flipped the pages upon pages of exercises from tonight. My eyes found him in every odd shape I had drawn. My heart knew him even in total darkness and abstract scribbles.

So I sat there. He will come , I told myself. He must be on his way already. But even as I reassured myself, I wondered if I knew him anymore. Had I ever truly known him?