Objects of Worship (9 page)

Everyone agreed, as he overheard repeatedly: it was as if
he were another person entirely.

The young Mario no longer cared for any of his pre-Bari
friends and spent the next several years in isolation. His
parents attempted to enroll him in various activities —
swimming, painting, free-form dance, jazz orchestra —
but they were no match for the stubbornness of their
son. Only adolescence, and the consequent rage of his
hormones, forced him out his shell. At age thirteen, he
began to notice girls: the shapes of their bodies, the bounce
of their hair, the aroma of their skin. He dreamed about
them and woke up with his groin moist and sticky. He
had no idea what to say to these girls, or how to approach
them. All he knew was that he had to get closer to them,
smell them from up close, see more of their bodies, touch
them.

To the delight of his parents, he joined the track team.
Tall and lithe, Mario was a natural runner. Track was the
only coeducational extracurricular sport at his school.

His attention soon focused on one girl in particular:
Lindsay Barron, who was almost as tall as Mario himself,
whose hair was so long it reached the small of her back,
whose elegant face he could not stop daydreaming about.
At every practice, he would stare at her, but they had never
even exchanged a greeting.

A month after Mario started practicing, the coach
recruited him for the regional competition, enrolling him
in the 200-metre sprint. Mario won the race, by almost half
a second. His was the only gold medal his school garnered
that semester.

As a result, Mario got to know Lindsay Barron much
better. And other girls, too. Many other girls.

His first night back in Bari, Mario left his hotel room at
1:30 a.m. without having slept. He dressed lightly — a bit
too lightly for the temperature, but he did not want to be
encumbered by too many clothes.

Quickly, he made his way to the shoreline. He climbed
on the blocks and looked around. Bari was deserted at this
hour. Good.

He stripped.

Below him, the sea beckoned.

He hesitated for hours, fear holding him back. He had lost part of himself the last time he’d ventured into these
waters. What made him believe he could regain whatever
he had lost by immersing himself again? What if he lost
more of himself?

Or, worse, what if nothing changed?

Before the first hints of dawn brightened the sky, he put
his clothes back on. By then, Mario was shivering. Whether
from fear or from cold, he could not tell.

Nearly thirty years old, Mario lived alone. He no longer
spoke to his family. He hadn’t even seen his mother and
father since his eighteenth birthday; he methodically
ignored their repeated attempts at contact. Call display was
such a useful tool.

Once, for three months, he had lived with a girl: Valérie,
a French immigrant whose accent he’d found charming.
Her long legs, also, had not escaped his notice.

They were both twenty years old at the time. But, like all
the high-school and college girls before her, she soon grew
irritated with Mario.

He would not hold hands with her when they walked.
He insisted on separate bedrooms. He never asked any
questions about her life, her dreams, her days. Unless they
were having sex, he rarely touched her at all.

Never before had he lived in such close quarters with
anyone, and he resented the incessant intrusion on his
solitude that resulted from life within a couple.

It wasn’t that Mario disliked Valérie, but, save for
her physical beauty, which he enjoyed admiring, and for
her usefulness in satisfying his sexual needs, there was
nothing about her that held his attention. In that, she was
not unique. Mario showed no curiosity about anyone at
all — ever.

His second night in Bari, Mario spent in bed, but not asleep.
He cursed himself for his cowardice. Why had he come all
this way, if not to jump in the sea? To return to the spot
where everything had changed for the worse?

His exhausted body finally succumbed soon after
sunrise. Mario had spent forty-eight hours without sleep.

He woke at midnight, refreshed and reinvigorated, after
seventeen hours of slumber.

After the inevitable breakup with Valérie, Mario’s success
with girls faltered. When he graduated college, he stopped
seeing girls altogether. Not because he was no longer
interested in having sex with them — he still found them
beautiful — but he had never been the one to make the
advances. They had come to him: attracted by his fit body,
his athletic prowess, his height, his thick dark hair, his full
lips. With Mario removed from the bustle of school life,
such opportunities disappeared.

Routine settled over his life: he jogged in the morning;
went to work as a clerk at City Hall during the day, stopped
by the grocery store on the way home, cooked his dinner,
read in the evening, and masturbated to internet porn
before dropping off to sleep. Weekends and holidays
were much the same, with household chores or outings to
museums and art galleries to fill the daytime hours.

Occasionally, when Mario heard people converse, he
would marvel at how they seemed so involved in what
their companions were saying. He wondered what it was
that made them so interested in each other, and he felt
momentary pangs of jealousy.

He decided to try. Maybe interest in others came with
practice.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, he joined cupiddating.web and arranged a few dates. After a handful of disasters,
he gave up. It had proved to be a fruitless exercise. His
profile had filled up with negative comments from the girls
he met through the system.

“He’s cute, but WARNING: he’s, like, the dullest guy
EVER!”

“He NEVER asked a single question. He didn’t want to
know anything about me. He kept staring at me like I was a
painting or a statue or something.”

“The only question this dumb loser asked me was:
Can
we go have sex now?
Like, get real, you creepy Ken doll!”

“What a shame that such a cute guy is nothing but a
BORING WEIRDO!!!”

And so on.

The third night, Mario again visited the seashore. Again,
he stripped. This time he did not hesitate: he immediately
stepped down into the cold water. He was surprised at how
shallow it was. He remembered it being so much deeper.
Seaweed laced around his ankles. Had he after all simply hit
his head and imagined everything?

A few metres out, the bottom dropped much lower.
Mario dunked into the water and swam. He followed the
shoreline covering every possible place where the monster
could have lurked.

Again and again, he swam the length of the area where
the incident occurred.

Even if the monster were real, would it have waited
for him here for more than two decades? It could even be
dead. If it had ever lived.

What had he expected?

While he shivered under the hard blast of hot water in
his hotel-room shower, he concluded that he had, indeed,
hit his head, that the monster did not exist — had never
existed — and that its cold fingers had been nothing more
than strands of seaweed.

This return to Bari was Mario’s gift to himself for his
thirtieth birthday. The date itself fell on his last full day in
the city. He had spent a week there. The next morning, the
train would take him back to Rome. That night, his flight
would take off for Canada.

For his solitary birthday supper in Bari, Mario ate the
final pizza marinara of his Italian trip. He also drank three
bottles of red wine.

In the middle of the night, he wandered once again to
the seashore and shouted obscenities at it, as if he could
injure it.

The anger felt good. He couldn’t remember ever feeling
angry before. He should get drunk more often. Maybe that
was all he needed to loosen up those emotions.

No . . . he’d gotten drunk before, and all it did was make
him sleepy. No . . . there was something about the sea here.
Something that stirred him.

Cursing and crying, not really knowing why he was
doing it, he took off his clothes and once more submerged
himself in the sea.

He felt something clammy wrap itself around his wrist.
Underwater, he opened his eyes; he immediately recognized
that glow.

For twenty-five years, Mario endured this recurring
dream:

He is five years old. He falls into the water. Everything
is dark. Clammy fingers make contact with his chest.
Suddenly, there’s a shimmering light. It’s a monster,
touching him, glowing with a sickly green phosphorescence.
The monster is only slightly bigger than he is. It has three
eyes, and they protrude from its forehead at the tips of
antenna-like appendages. Its mouth wriggles like a handful
of worms. It has six short limbs attached to its crooked,
lumpy body. From each limb erupts a nest of weedy fingers.
Its skin looks like layers of bloody and mouldy rags. Where
the monster’s fingers make contact with Mario’s flesh,
prickly, needle-like shoots insert themselves under the
boy’s skin. He senses something essential drain from him,
leaking into the monster. Then there’s a sharp pain as he
hits his head.

And he wakes up. Screaming.

The adult Mario struggled free. As soon as contact between
himself and the monster was severed, the glow faded.

Mario surfaced briefly to fill his lungs, then plunged
back and swung his hands in wide circles. He wouldn’t —
couldn’t — let the monster disappear. He had to make contact. Communicate, somehow. He needed to understand.

There was a faint blip of light as the back of his hand
brushed against something.

The monster.

Mario’s hand closed on a bunch of the monster’s fingers,
and the creature became visible once more. It was about the
size of a medium-large dog.

Mario felt that familiar, horrible pinprick sensation
where his skin touched the monster’s fingers. That
sensation of being drained returned.

No! Not again.

He wasn’t a helpless little boy anymore.

Mario punched the monster’s face. It had only minimal
effect. Then, still holding on to its fingers, he yanked the
beast toward him and hit it on both sides of the head at
once.

The pinprick sensation retreated.

Mario swam to shore, dragging the monster, and bashed
it against one of the big stones.

Goo seeped from its fractured body. But still it wriggled.

Mario grabbed a loose rock and struck the monster with
it until his arm ached too much for him to continue, long
after the beast stopped betraying any sign of life.

What was this thing, this creature? He’d been hoping for
some kind of contact. Maybe a sort of telepathic communion
that would reveal all. What a ridiculous notion.

He would never know.

But he wanted back what it had stolen from him.

He could only think of one solution. Communication had
failed, but what about communion? Rationally, it seemed
unlikely to work. Yet, it felt right.

He tore a strip of meat from the monster’s cadaver. It
ripped easily. He was surprised by the tangy sweetness of
the monster’s flesh.

The innards, though, proved to be quite bitter.

Mario nearly missed his train. He jumped onto the closest
car, and immediately the doors closed and the train started
moving. He’d barely located his car and settled into his seat
when the train made its first stop, at Giovinazzo.

His heart jumped when he saw her board.

She checked her ticket, and, sure enough, she was seated
in front of him again.

She sat down, nodded at him with a brief smile, and
took out her iPod.

He leaned over and touched her hand to prevent her
from putting on the headphones. Catching her eye, he said,
“Per favore?” and asked her name. Hungrily, his fingertips
prickled where they met her flesh.

As the boy Coro emerges from the Godpool, he sees the
tears on his mother’s face. She’s staring at his right leg,
which, more than ever, resembles a discoloured, misshapen
branch. Two young acolytes help him step out of the
holy water. This has been the most painful of his many
submersions.

There are five acolytes in the cavern, deep inside the
flat Earth. Their bodies pulse with Godlight, covered in the
holy tattoos of the Green Blue and Brown God: twin green
serpents coiling up around their legs, fangs biting into the
flesh of their buttocks. From the waist up, their skins are
densely decorated with stars, suns, and moons of various
shapes, all in the colours of the God.

The pool of holy water lies in the middle of the cavern,
radiating the Godcolours. The walls are streaked with
pulsing veins of the same three colours. The room smells of
sex, the humid air intensifying the heady musk.

The eldest acolyte says, “Even the God cannot help his
body heal itself completely.”