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ENEMY – CHAPTER ONE
The phone rang three minutes past eleven, as it had every night for two weeks. The screen displayed no name or number.
“Mister Garelli? Hi! My name is Asia. I’m calling on behalf of your electricity provider, Joe. You remember Joe. Don’t you, Gar?”
Gar turned to the bedside table. Resting atop the novel he was reading these days were a screwdriver, a box cutter—and the phone’s battery he’d popped out before lying down.
“Now, this new offer… Oh my God, you’re going to love it, Gar! But of course, we need you to come home first. Joe says not to worry. He say there’s plenty of space in the coffin. What’s left of it, anyway. I mean, iby now, the wood is long gone, and maggots and vermin—”
Gar hurled the phone across the room.
OFFSPRING
Daniele stopped the car. Chiara said: “Are we sure about this?”
The question took him by surprise. “What do you mean? I thought you wanted to come.”
She kept twisting the strap of the purse in her lap. “I did, yes.”
He felt a prod of the familiar anger. He knew how difficult this whole thing was for her, but it wouldn’t have killed her to try and be a little more assertive for once. “Listen, we don’t have to do anything. If you want to go, we go.”
Finally, Chiara looked at him. “And then what?” she asked.
He shrugged. “We go on with our lives.”
It was raining. For a time, they listened to the drops drumming against the roof of the car. Then Chiara sighed. “We came all this way. Let’s hear what they have to say.”
THE CHESS PLAYER
In a game of chess, the first move can lead to twenty different positions. After five moves, the number rises to five million.
As of today, we are unable to calculate how many positions a game can lead to. All we have are estimates. Some estimate the number of achievable positions in a chess game to be in the realm of ten to the one-hundred-and-twentieth power. For reference, the universe is believed to contain around ten to the eightieth power atoms. The chessboard can produce more positions than there are atoms in the universe.
In 1969, a local newspaper featured an article about a Venetian boy who had just won first prize at a national math competition. The name of the boy was Marco Zane. He was six years old.
Marco Zane was a prodigy. At six, he was already fluent in Latin and Greek, capable of holding his own in French and German. As proven by his victory at a contest usually reserved for teenagers, Zane’s mathematical skills vastly exceeded what could be expected of a child his age. So did his dexterity at the piano—an instrument Zane had taken up after growing bored of the violin. The author predicted a bright future for the boy.
The article was published on January 7, 1969. Sixteen years later to the day—on January 7, 1985—Venice was hunkering down under the worst blizzard in living memory. As the sun set, thermometers around the city registered a temperature of minus seventeen Celsius. Gusts of wind up to seventy miles per hour swept the lagoon—completely frozen for the first time since 1929.
Around eleven PM, Marco Zane was seen leaving his house in the sestiere of Castello and reaching the riverbank. According to a witness who watched him jump onto the ice and trudge into the storm, Zane was barefoot.
His body was never found.
Zane didn’t leave a note. All he left behind to explain his gesture was a chess piece: the white king, knocked over, to indicate checkmate.
GOOD MEMORIES
The night before an eighteen-wheeler jumped its lane and bore down on his Ford station wagon, Daniel Frisina brought his six-year-old son a gift.
Most nights, Daniel came home with something for Jake—a chocolate bar, a plastic stegosaur, a comic book. Daniel was a salesman. The days driving across New York state, pitching grocery stores and gas stations on the virtues of Grandma Annie’s Homemade Kettle Cooked Chips—A Crunch Like No Other!—could be long. Looking for something for Jake made them go faster.
At home, Daniel would put on a little show, pretending he hadn’t found the time or simply couldn’t remember where he’d put the damn thing.
“No, seriously,” he would say, patting his pockets. “I think I lost it.”
Daniel would check his suitcase, even walk back to the car. Only when Jake’s mouth turned into a big O of disappointment would Daniel suddenly remember.
THE GOOD SAMARITAN
At his age, the old man didn’t have many pleasures left, but to watch the kids play.
Occasionally, somebody would notice him sitting on the bench under the poplar, laughing as he watched the kids tossing a ball around or pretending to be knights of the Seven Kingdoms with bikes for horses and sticks for swords. When a troubled parent approached him, the old man told them the truth: that if he watched long enough and close enough, for a moment he could pretend it was him out there on the grass and for an instant feel young again, even if he hadn’t been young in a long, long time. Usually, the explanation was weird enough that people left him alone. After all, he was just an old man, as harmless as anybody could be.
THE FEVER
Tonight, I watched my wife Caroline eat Mister Bonker, our neighbor’s pug. Caroline, who used to complain pork tasted ‘too meaty’.
I was hiding behind a tree in the park where we used to play badminton on Saturdays. While Caroline was peeling the skin off poor Mister Bonker, a sudden noise startled her. Her head sprang up, and she looked straight at me.
I wonder if any part of her brain recognized me.
HANG THE DJ: THE SAD DEMISE OF VENICE (2)
The psilocybin may have something to do with it, but this art gallery is how I imagine the inside of David Lynch’s coffin looks like. White walls, cuts of raw meat hanging from steel chains, a DJ sporting a bob cut. The only out-of-place element is the minimal techno. Lynch would have probably gone for jazz.
As I wait for my Negroni, I consider the avant-garde buffet: cubes of fish, pyramids of rice, parallelepipeds of gelatinized fruit. Everywhere I look, I see nothing but sharp corners. I’m wary of geometric food—as a matter of fact, even nachos make me nervous. I stick with the free drinks.
While I ogle a rice pyramid—it shouldn’t be too difficult to reshape it into a more digestible shape—I’m approached by Edna. Broom-shaped, heavily stoned, Edna is a curator. She’s in Venice for the Biennale of Arts. In her world, things are ‘pivotal’, ‘astounding’, ‘cutting-edge’: a shiny planet of superlatives and minimal techno. Edna is perfectly in tune with what’s going on here. She knows how to deal with sharp-edged food.
SELFIE STICKS, FLIP FLOPS, AND NITROGLYCERIN: THE SAD DEMISE OF VENICE (1)
“We’re gonna blow up a trinket shop,” Florio declares, placing a hand on his black duffel bag.
Inside the bag are five sticks of dynamite. The dynamite is old. Old dynamite tends to sweat. From the edge of the table, nitroglycerin drips on the floor.
Florio and his two friends are members of the Venice Liberation Front—despite Florio being originally from Sardinia, and his friends from Treviso and Mestre, respectively. As is often the case with such Fronts, their enemy is capitalism. In their defense, in Venice, capitalism is far from a blurry, mostly benign abstraction. In Venice, capitalism is a murderous reality.
CHAOS, ORDER, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
According to the second law of thermodynamics, it’s all going to shit.
Eventually, the universe will run out of usable energy, and all that will be left is a lukewarm soup of evenly spread particles filling all available space. Physicists call it heat death, a state in which the energy of a system is uniformly distributed and nothing happens anymore.
Like most, I first encountered this concept in high school. I found it rather depressing. After all is said and done, after all the pain and the struggle, the universe will simply run out of gas and be left to rust on the side of the road.
But such is the nature of the game. The laws that created our universe, the very foundations of our reality, command this conclusion. It’s inescapable.