Objects of Worship (8 page)

“I can’t. I tried. He killed Dad. And there are others
like him picking off The Mighty overseas. I don’t know if
anyone can stop him. Or the rest of the Hegemony. He’s
going to destroy the entire city. It took him less than two
seconds to massacre me. He called me subhuman. Flung me
away like a piece of trash.”

“He won’t this time.”

Bernard enfolds me in his arms. And . . .

“I never wanted this power. This filthy, filthy power. But
you, you don’t see it like that at all. You see it the same way
Dad did. As a way to mend the world.”

“You . . .”

“It never occurred to me before that I could do this . . .
but after you stormed out of my house I thought about
how Dad’s energy slipped into my body. And I knew that
this was possible. I knew how to do it, and it would solve
everything. I could give you the energy. All of it. You’re now
more powerful than Dad ever was, Gordon. You have his
power and mine, combined, amplified exponentially. Go.
Kick that monster’s ass. Make the world a better place. For
Dad. For Mom. For me.”

Clinging to the memories and experiences of my father
and my brother — which cascade through me, changing
me — I hold my twin tight. “I missed you.”

“Go,” Bernard repeats.

I fly away.

In Bari, the pizza marinara was more delicious than in
Rome. Not only did some Roman pizzerias add melted
cheese to this classic cheeseless pizza (probably to satisfy
the expectations of tourists), not only did most of them
skimp on the garlic (again, no doubt to avoid offending
tourists’ underdeveloped tastebuds), but the oregano was
not allowed the time necessary to flavour the tomato sauce;
it was simply thrown on top of the pizza.

But in Bari . . . the pizza marinara surpassed Mario’s
expectations: heavily laden with garlic and covered in
tomato sauce from which wafted a strong yet delicate
aroma of oregano.

Whenever
Mario
remembered
Bari,
a
complex
emotion — part nostalgia, part loss, part happiness, part
dread — nipped at his heart. Perhaps, Mario thought, some
emotions did not have names — at least, not in English or
Italian. Perhaps it was better to let emotions permeate
us without needing to name or fix them. It let them live.
Mario felt in short supply of living, lasting emotions. He
was hoping this trip would change that.

The only other time he’d visited Bari was twenty-five
years ago — the summer he turned five. For his birthday,
his grandparents had thrown a party, inviting a bunch of
Italian children who could not speak English. Mario’s Italian
was limited, but he had fun with the other kids anyway. For
dinner they’d all eaten cheeseless pizza — at the time, it had
struck him as very odd, this absence of cheese.

Much odder, though, were the events that transpired
that night. The dream. The hallucination. Yet, he’d travelled
from Toronto to Rome to Bari in search of this phantasm.

His flight had landed in Rome — there were no direct
flights to Bari from Canada — and he’d decided to spend
a few days in the legendary capital. He soon tired of the
ubiquitous tourists and the pandering, crass tackiness. All
that history turned into a theme park for bored vacationers
desperately searching for something to pass the time. There
was beauty in Rome — the cityscape as seen from atop the
Castel Sant’Angelo; the lush majesty of the Villa Borghese;
the piazzas of the historic centre and their boldly opulent
fountains; the cats lounging among the ruins of the Area
Sacra di Largo Argentina — and, more strikingly, some
sort of simmering primal paganism that infected even
the Catholic Church, whose Roman expression bespoke a
fleshly, breathing, essentially present god rather than the
more theoretical deity of Canadian Catholicism. The urgent
demeanour and portentous voices of the monks, priests,
nuns, and God knows what other orders of robed Catholics
wandering through Rome’s streets implied an impatient
divinity who did not tolerate laxness from his servants.

The first-class, nonsmoking coach from Rome to Bari
smelled like the bedroom of a bedridden chain-smoker
whose sheets hadn’t been changed since she’d died in her
sleep, peeing herself as she expired. A permanent stench
of stale tobacco permeated everything in Rome and, Mario
suspected, throughout Italy. The heavy odour had hit Mario
as soon as he entered the airport lounge in Rome following
his transcontinental flight.

Despite the malodour, his train seat was comfortable
and the service courteous. In front of him sat a strikingly
attractive twenty-something Italian, with creamy skin,
large expressive brown eyes, and dark wavy hair that
stopped at the shoulder. Her beauty was not the bland,
sterile look of cover models; her features composed a fascinating landscape of subtle asymmetries. She spent the
trip sinuously swinging her head to the music of her iPod.
Her face was turned at an angle that let him appreciate
her beauty for almost the entire five and a half hours it
took to reach the port city from the capital. He suspected
that she was conscious of being admired and chose that
position to facilitate their unspoken arrangement: letting
him get an eyeful while she feigned unawareness and
avoided any compromising eye contact. She disembarked
at Giovinazzo, one stop before Bari, and let slip a subtle,
knowing smile in his direction as she got up from her seat.
The headphones never left her ears, though.

As Mario emerged from Bari Centrale station, a pungent
yet pleasant fragrance overwhelmed the by now too familiar
tobacco stench: the briny smell of the sea, an odour he’d
never forgotten. It instantly transported him back to that
fateful summer spent with his now-deceased maternal
grandparents. Despite what had happened here, Mario’s
mind often wandered back to that fifth birthday, to that
delicious pizza, and to a memory of telling himself, as he
lay in bed that night waiting for sleep, that he was having
the happiest summer ever with the best grandparents any
boy could ever have. He couldn’t remember the emotion
itself, but he yearned to. He had not known its like since.

There was a hollowness near his heart where his feelings
for his grandparents had once existed. His fingers found
that hollowness and pressed against it, as if something
could still be found there. There were many such inner
cavities in his chest. He felt them like tiny black holes that
inexorably sucked the empathy out of him and banished it
to some void, barren universe.

Mario left his map in his trouser pocket and let his
nose guide him. As he was about to step outside the
station parking lot, something soft gave under his shoe. An
unwelcome odour reached his nose.

Mario swore. Bad enough that his feet ached from
walking for three days on the rough cobblestones of
Rome — and now this! He located a bench, sat down, and
examined his sandals: the dog excrement had lodged itself
in the grooves on the sole of the left shoe. Both sandals
were in generally bad repair, anyway. Rome had inflicted as
much damage on them as it had on his now blistery feet. He
threw the footwear into a nearby garbage can and, barefoot,
continued walking.

The street ahead looked like a commercial strip. He’d
have no trouble finding a shoe store. He was, after all, in
Italy.

Mario located several shops that, in theory, could have
solved his shoe problem. However, in Bari, stores closed
for a few hours mid-afternoon. Mario had two choices:
continue on barefoot or wait an hour or two sitting on a
bench in the town’s pedestrian shopping strip, bustling
with clerks on their breaks.

The lure of the sea was too powerful. He knew that if
he waited any longer he would get fidgety and grumpy. So,
onward. In less than five minutes, his destination was in
view.

The sight stunned him into motionlessness. He gazed at
the Adriatic Sea; it felt as if a part of him were stretching
out toward the water, as if his skin no longer defined the
limits of his identity.

He crossed the boulevard to reach the sea itself.
He had to jump a low stone fence to get to the beach.
He was not the only one who had done so. Along the
entire length of the shore, people sat on the massive stone
blocks, arranged haphazardly, that created a rough barrier
between the sea and the land. Some people had cast fishing
lines, a few were picnicking, most were simply sunning
themselves.

Mario found a small, shallow pool of seawater lodged
among three of the blocks. He stepped into that little
portion of the Adriatic Sea. The water provided welcome
relief from the stinging pain of his blisters.

He closed his eyes and let himself be engulfed by the
odour of the sea. It brought back a shadow of some lost
emotion. A sense of comfort he could barely remember,
hadn’t experienced since early childhood.

But just as the emotion was almost beginning to be vivid
enough to be savoured, that dreadful memory of being
swallowed up by the water gripped him so solidly that, even
though he knew he was hallucinating, he couldn’t snap back
to reality. Instantly, he saw it, just as he’d seen it then: the
monster.

He felt again its cold, clammy fingers clutching his five-year-old body, that prickling sensation of the monster’s
fingertips hooking into his flesh.

With a start he opened his eyes and found himself back
in the present, fresh tears on his cheeks — the first tears
he’d shed in twenty-five years.

After the pizza, there was ice cream. Lots and lots of ice
cream. Chocolate. Vanilla. Neapolitan. Butterscotch. More
containers than he could count. As it was his birthday,
Mario was allowed to eat as much as he wanted. Excited by
the rare permission to indulge, the boy didn’t know when
to stop.

He’d had difficulty falling asleep when, at midnight,
his grandparents insisted on putting him to bed. All that
excitement. All that food. All that sugar.

He did sleep eventually, but woke up less than an
hour later. Through his window, in the darkness, the boy
smelled the sea — so different from anything in Toronto.
Not even Lake Ontario smelled anything like this. The
new odour captivated him; every day he wanted to go play
in the water, but his grandparents wouldn’t allow it.

In his pyjamas, Mario jumped down onto the street
from his bedroom window. He followed the smell to the
seashore.

He scraped the skin of his hands and feet climbing over
the big stone blocks that bordered the sea.

He stood on one of the big blocks and stared down into
the darkness of the water. Without another thought, he
stripped off his pyjamas and let himself fall into the sea.

A few hours later, a bit after dawn, an old man who
habitually fished on the shore every morning found the
unconscious boy floating on his back. Mario was quickly
brought to the hospital, where they pumped his lungs,
shaved his scalp, and bandaged the big gash on his head
(a permanent scar would form on the top left side, a bit to
the back).

When he awoke in the afternoon, his grandparents
stood over him, worry sculpted onto their wrinkled faces.

Mario screamed.

For the rest of his stay in Italy, another three weeks, the
boy screamed himself awake every night, but he could never
explain why.

At first, his grandparents thought the boy was having
nightmares of drowning, that he was afraid of the sea. But
they caught him trying to sneak back to the shore. Mario
insisted he had to be let back into the water.

“But why, Mario? What do you want there?” his
grandmother asked in her heavy Italian accent.

In an icy and emotionless voice, the boy answered: “I
want it back. What it took away from me. I want it back.”

No matter how she questioned him, he could not or
would not be more specific. They had to lock his bedroom
at night and keep a vigil over him in the daytime, lest he
risk drowning himself.

His last few weeks in Bari were uneventful. Mario no
longer exhibited the unfailing exuberance that had been so
characteristic of his personality. Instead, all day long, he
sat and stared seaward from the kitchen window, refusing
to play or talk, often simply ignoring his grandparents.

When the young Mario had arrived in Italy, he’d been
jovial, affectionate, and playful, but when his parents
returned from their seminar in India they’d found a
morose, taciturn, and withdrawn child. He barely greeted
them. He could no longer tolerate their touch. In fact, he
could barely stand their presence and did not hesitate to
tell them so, in those cold tones his voice had acquired.
Even returning home, to reunite with his friends and toys
and comics, failed to lift his mood.

His parents, he knew, mourned the boy they had lost
that summer, regretted leaving him all season, blamed
themselves for the change in him.