the records; she was premature enough that we hadn’t filled out a declaration of intent yet, and he wasn’t sure what to do with her, and I was worried he’d just take her away, so I reached towards her and asked, “Could we just,” and I choked, and he said of course, and handed her to me. The doctor pushed through the two-way curtain, and I heard him go through the door into the hall.
I handed her to my wife, and she said, “I want to call her Diana.” I laughed and called her a nerd, because I knew she was naming her after Wonder Woman- and not any of the other Dianas or for any other reason, and she laughed, too. Then the doctor poked his head in and said I was needed in the hall.
There were four mean in black suits, with hats and dark jackets on even indoors, and one of them told me, “You’ll have to come with us, sir.” Another of them reached for me- I think prematurely, and my instinct made me run for the door, push my way through. By then, the others had hold of me, and I was fighting a losing game of tug of war using my own body as the rope. The first man, the one who’d spoken, let go, and the others followed his lead, and went out into the hall. He remained by me, standing in the doorway, watching my wife look down at our daughter through the two-way screen, and he spoke.
“You know the law. We can take you, we can take the child, or we can take her.” That’s the moment, while he awaited my decision, that I realized it was made a long time ago, and after a moment, he realized it, too, and motioned for the others, and they continued dragging me out the door.
Through the screen I saw my wife, holding our daughter, staring down at her, as in love with her as I was, and though I struggled, though I fought them, I was at peace.
One More Night
We draw straws every time we have to travel by car; the man with the short straw starts the car, and takes it around the block. Our car has electronic countermeasures, not dissimilar to those used by the US military in Iraq, and while no countermeasure is ever 100%, it increases the likelihood of a mechanical detonator rather than a remote one. I’ve seen car bombs triggered by pressure on the pedals, the opening of doors, detonators attached to the knobs of the radio or air conditioning, even one instance where it was attached to the choke plate inside a carburetor. Thankfully we’re in Naples, so it isn’t necessary to drive often.
It’s a warm evening, and though there are clouds, I don’t think it will rain. The street is rimmed with illicit men on illicit business, but they keep their affairs to the shadows, so we pay them no mind. We tense, as a group, for a moment as a vehicle passes from behind; it’s too late to preempt violence, too early yet to react to it.
The car is a Carabinieri van that stops in the middle of the street, and military policemen rush in all directions. They arrest the johns and the drug buyers, but the panderers and peddlers walk away, satisfied with the knowledge that the police can’t touch them. Their impotence predates even our disgraceful President’s ties to the Cosa Nostra, dating back decades if not centuries in clandestine coexistence. Unlike the gangs of Los Angeles or the pirates of Somalia, it isn’t poverty that attracts young men to the ranks of the Camorra- it is the glamorous lifestyle they provide, the respect and admiration even responsible women have for a “mafioso face.”
The Camorra kill one person every three days on average; I find myself thinking about that on this assignment, and every third day, I tell myself another person has died in a war we’re not even fighting. It’s unfortunate timing that tonight is the third day, again; I can’t afford the paranoia tonight, and I bury the thought where it will keep me from sleep on my own time, instead of interfering with my work.
I’m on the security detail of a journalist, marked for death by the Camorra by Christmas, for breaking the sacred tradition of omertá. As the Sicilian proverb says, “Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci,” he who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace- the implication of course, is that he who isn’t, won’t.
And that’s why we’re on the streets tonight; Roberto wanted to take the air. I’ve been a part of his escort detail long enough not to argue; it took him only three minutes to convince Giovanni that only by cowering at the Camorra’s threats did we let them win. There’s a loud pop that echoes through the alley; Gio pushes Roberto to the wall, and covers him with his body. I don’t move, because I recognize the sound: a bottle of wine uncorked beside an open window. The rest of the walk becomes something more; the feeling of a cheated death fills us with a wine-warmth that robs even the clouds of their prohibitions, and we arrive home refreshed.
Roberto isn’t dead; Italy can breathe freely one more night.
How Far We’ve Come
People who know me know that my parents divorced in a sensationally messy way; there was even a casualty, an honest-to-God dead person involved (and no, one of my parents didn’t kill the other). Mostly, it got to that point because they cheated on each other. I’ve been in some especially bad relationships, and I’ve seen friends in them, too. I’ve never been naïve enough to say people should stay together when they no longer want to- in fact, people usually cheat because they’re not willing to take that painful, frightening step away from a person and relationship that has become such a large part of their life.
So I thought I'd never be one of those people who cheat- I swore it to every woman I ever thought I loved (and the few it turned out I actually did). But I'm not the person I thought, or at least the man I've always tried to be. And I truly, truly, take responsibility for what I've done- don't think for a second I'm trying to distance myself from the reality of that, because I'm not. At all.
But I didn't cheat because I was lonely, or horny, or any of the reasons we usually tell people we do it. I did it because we haven't been together in a long time.
Don't roll your eyes. I know we just spent Valentine's together at the beach, and on Wednesday we fooled around, but... God, I don't even know how to articulate it. When was the last time you held my hand and felt something? More than warmth, or even chemical affection, but that what you were holding onto was a piece of yourself, that what we had mattered.
I can't answer for you, but for me, it's been months, maybe more than a year. And it happened so gradually, it's tough to place when it happened, exactly. Things were tense with my job, then your job, then both our jobs at once. Our bills only seemed to get bigger and harder to pay down, and for everything we agreed on, a dozen little things fell out of place in their stead. It seemed week to week we were fighting more, and agreeing less.
So we stopped arguing. I remember the fight we had, in the kitchen, while you were putting dishes away. You wanted to get rid of the Datsun, because you were tired of having it break down; I didn't think we had the money for something else, and I thought my stepdad might be able to help us fix it. But it really wasn't about the car at all, and we kept arguing until we were shouting, and the cat hid under the couch in the next room.
You threw a plate, not quite at me, but near enough. It shattered, and the pieces fell onto the linoleum. It wasn't only that it could have hurt me, though I know that was there, too, but that plate was part of the set your mother gave you, that you only took out of the cabinet when we were having a fancy dinner or having guests. Ever since your mother died, you'd treated those plates like a member of the family, and I knew... I knew that breaking that plate hurt you more than it ever could have hitting me. I held you for a while and said, “Okay. I don't want to fight anymore.”
And it was good that we stopped that fight- but it wasn't good that we stopped fighting. Because it meant we stopped talking, being honest- when something that could have been contentious came up we brushed it to the side; you'd go watch TV in the bedroom, and I'd get on the computer. We stopped knowing where the other person was, and so we kept moving further and further away.
It's no excuse, and there's no defending myself; I betrayed both of us. I hurt you, and that- that will take me a long time to forgive myself for, but I don't want us to end this way.
So I
hope you can forgive me; you were my best friend. I want to know you, and I want you to know me again. But to have that, we have to start fighting again.
Things That Twitch
I don’t like violence. Not even against insects. I have the same tendencies as most people. Bugs are alien; not just spiders, all bugs. But I remember I used to go to church as a kid, and I remember the day when I decided I didn’t want any part in the normal human/insect schism. A group of kids had found a spider, a daddy long legs, and they were taking turns tearing its legs off. Churchgoing kids, fresh from Sunday School, had made a game of dismembering something. True story.
They say children are the cruelest monsters of all. I know it's because kids don't know right from wrong- at least that's the argument. And I'm not claiming any kind of moral superiority, here, I just, something about that scene, children laughing about maiming something that was physically incapable of harming them- daddy long legs' mouths are too small to bite a human, at least I think I heard that somewhere- that was just so fucked up.
I decided then and there that I wasn't going to kill bugs unprovoked. And really, the dirty secret of insect haters is that bugs aren't predatory to