Herculaneum, part 1

An American family is lost in Napoli, illustrated with home videos.

I’ve been hypnotized by the sound of our wheelies trembling over the cobblestones, and by the brain-shaped sweat stain on the back of Nick’s shirt. A Rorschach test. The shape of my dread, probably, yes, dread about getting further and further away from the sea.

This must be from that recurring dream; this unmet this desire I’m haunted by. In the dream, I’m at an exotic seaside retreat (the location is an invention of the dream, yet familiar), but I can never reach the water; everytime I get close, the path is suddenly scrambled and impossible to navigate.

Okay, yes, my dread is also about tomorrow, August 24th, Mom’s 80somethingth birthday and also the date Vesuvius erupted. To call or not to call, that is the question. She who laughs last laughs best, Mom says. She’s talking to me from the inside of my wheelie. Nick found these for us: four used wheelie bags. He found them right round the time Mom and I became estranged.

Our family used to share a couple of backpacks and alternated dragging a human body-sized duffle bag around the sweltering streets we travel through every summer. Now we travel as self-contained trembling units. It’s getting dark. Slivers of sea appear and disappear in the distance. Sweat drips from under my breasts.

Nick is leading the way. We follow him up set of crumbling stairs with a pile of shit on every fifth step. The shit is a portent. The shit means don’t call.

“Are we lost? I’m so thirsty!” Miko, my ten-year-old, cries out. He’s the one who told me about Vesuvius’s birthday. A few steps below me, he jerks his wheelie bag over a hunk of stone until it collides with his leg, then he kicks it, curses it, and says he needs a helicopter rescue.

“Water, water everywhere yet not a drop to drink,” I say, dragging my wheelie up the last step and onto a narrow street.

“God you’re mean,” Lui, my eighteen-year-old, says.

Look who’s talking. If you wake her before noon she’s Satan’s cohort.

We’ve been dragging our wheelies mostly up—but sometimes down—stairs that connect one neighborhood to another. Yes, we’re lost. You can still get lost in the world, but only if you refuse to pay for international cell service, and although this forced Luddism can lend a certain mystery to the scrutable aspects of modern travel, it often leaves you drenched in sweat, searching for local bars to procure wifi.

I blame Nick. I learned this Mom—to punish the other for all unexpected snafus in an agreed upon plan. Poor soul, what wrath doth fall upon a husband’s head when even a thorn pricks the foot on the path he hath led. Mom now speaks in proverbs. A new title for a show: Proverbs from the Wheelie Bag.

When we were twenty or so, Mom was on a rampage while she was visiting me in Tivoli, my college town. I hid in a friends closet for a while but Mom’s voice traveled through a skylight into my ears. She was inescapable. I snuck out and ran across the street to Nick’s house. We had just started seeing each other. His mattress was on the floor. In the morning I heard her coming up the stairs, then her footsteps in the hall just outside his bedroom door, then a brief pause. I hid behind his back and waited for the door to open. Again, his back.

Nick’s sweat stain is spreading. The harbinger of something afoul, I suspect.

“I’ve invented a brilliant product,” he says.

“I can’t hear you.” When you’re pulling a wheelie bag over cobblestones, if you don’t turn your head over your shoulder and throw your voice when you speak to the person behind you, your voice gets drowned out by the clunking.

“Wheelie Bags with big off-road wheels—like a mountain bike.”

“Still can’t hear.” I could actually hear that one. And I thought it was a good idea.

What is marriage if not the opportunity to pretend you can’t hear the beloved, Mom opines. I drag her along along, clunk, clunk, clunk. My head grazes an apron. We are a tall people, a pale people with plenty of dark hair. I look up. Laundry lines zig-zag above me. An old lady closing her shutters waves to us from her balcony. Buongiorno, she says. Buongiorno, buongiorno, we say. We speak no more Italian than buongiorno and grazie mille.

“I’m Pliny the Elder and I declare this will be our last ascent,” Nick says as he and his wheelie crest another set of stairs. “We are about to reach the top ring: heaven.” He stands above us and orates: “After this we will only descend. We will descend so that we will never have to ascend again!”

“Dad, what’s up with these rings you keep talking about?” Lui asks as she joins him at the top.

“I’m not Dad.

“Plimy, Why do you keep talking about rings?”

“They say Rome is the heart of Italy, but Napoli is the soul and the soul of Napoli is the bottom ring: hell. This is heaven. Feel it the breeze? Up here on the top ring there’s more space, the buildings are farther apart—“

“Bruh, I’m not sure about your theory.”

Heaven is deserted. Dishes clatter behind closed shutters. The sea is somewhere below us, spreading out black.

Nick is singing in his baritone spoof, a familiar tune:“Oh Lottie! Da-doo, da-di, da-da-doo!”

“Are you saying Oh Lottie?” I ask from behind his wheelie.

He turns his head to speak: “You don’t know that famous Italian song?”

“I know the song, but I’m pretty sure it’s Volaré.”

“No, Grandma Rose played it all the time, it’s Dean Martin, about a woman named Lottie.” He continues to sing about Lottie to the empty streets. I take a mental note to look this up later when we have wifi.

Lui tells Nick he has to stop singing because we’re lost. He says we’re close, all we need is a cafe with wifi and that’s what he’s looking for while he sings, Does that make sense? We never answer him when he asks if something makes sense. He used to say No worries, which worried me. So I bit my nails (Mom used to slap my hand away from my mouth when I bit my nails). Then he tried to assuage my worries by making me read the essay on worry from the book he’s always carrying around, On Tickling Kissing and Being Bored. To worry is to gnaw, the book says. “Worrying then is devouring, a peculiarly intense, ravenous from of eating…what was once done by the mouths of the rapacious, the desirous, is now done, often with a relentless wariness, but the minds of the troubled.”

After we find a bar and send the kids in to beg for connection, we arrive at a large door, but Nick doesn’t have the code to get in. We argue about the code. The codes are his domain, but he wishes I would sometimes initiate the code-getting. Understandable, but I resent him for being resentful.

“Don’t fight, guys,” Miko warns.

I push a button on the intercom. A long pause, crackle, static, Italian words. The intercom goes dead. Lui cracks up. The door clicks open.

We pull the bags over a giant metal door frame, through a courtyard, into a stairwell, and up the stairs, wheels echoing, sweat dripping. From the third landing a masked couple watches us climb.

“…and so they must ascend again,” Lui says.

“This one doesn’t count,” Nick says.

Part 2 coming soon…