Ah, such a beautiful modulation! A triplet in the last of the sentence. Syncopated. G, G, then B flat as her voice rose in tone because of the question. Beautiful.
“Stefan, you’ve ignored me for the last time. You’re going to the principal. Now.”
And “principal,” an even better triplet!
Only then did he realize: Oh, messed up again.
And the other students either looking away or staring (equally cruel).
Strange. Stefan is strange.
Well, he was. He knew that as well as anybody. His reaction: Make me unstrange or shut the hell up.
Now, on this busy corner in a busy city, Stefan pressed his head against an old stone wall and let a thousand sounds pass over him, through him, bathing him in warm water, circling and soothing his rampaging heart.
Hearing, in his head, his fiery imagination, the tolling of the red bell on the dirt, spreading outward from the man’s neck last night.
Hearing the sound of blood roaring in his ears, loud as a blood bell ringing, ringing, ringing.
Hearing the refugee’s screams.
Hearing the Black Screams.
From the time of adolescence, when the Black Screams started, it had been a battle to keep them at bay. Sound was the lifeblood for Stefan, comforting, explaining, enlightening. The creak of boards, the stutter of branches, the clicking of tiny animal feet in the Pennsylvania garden and yard, the slither of a snake in the woods. But the same way that healthy germs can become sepsis, sounds could turn on him.
Voices became sounds and sounds voices.
Roadside construction equipment, driving piles was really a voice: “Cellar, cellar, cellar, cellar.”
A bird’s call was not a bird’s call. “Look swinging, look swinging, look swinging.”
The wind was not the wind. “Ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone.”
The creak of a branch: “Drip, drip, drip, drip…”
And a voice from a closed throat that might have been whispering, “Goodbye, I loved you,” became merely a rattle of pebbles on wood.
Now a Black Scream, a bad one, the whining drill. It was starting in his groin—yes, you could hear them down there—and zipping up through his spine, through his jaw, through his eyes, into his brain.
Nooooooooo…
He opened his eyes and blinked. People stared uneasily as they passed. In this part of town, fortunately, there were homeless men, also damaged, so he did not stand out sufficiently for them to call the police.
That would not be good at all.
Euterpe would not forgive him.
He managed to control himself enough to move along. A block away he stopped. Wiping sweat, pressing his face against a wall, he struggled to breathe. He looked around. Stefan was near the famed Santa Chiara church, on Via Benedetto Croce—the mile-long street that bisected the ancient Roman part of town and was known to everyone as Spaccanapoli, or the Naples Splitter.
It was a chaotic avenue, narrow, throbbing with tourists and pedestrians and bicycles and scooters and punchy cars. Here were vendors and shops offering souvenirs, religious icons, furniture, commedia dell’arte figurines, cured meats, buffalo mozzarella, limoncello bottles in the shape of the country, and the local dessert, sfogliatelle, crispy pastry that Stefan adored—not for the taste but for the sound of the crackly crust between teeth.
The morning was hot already and he took off his cap and wiped his shaved head with a paper towel he carried with him.
A Black Scream began but desperately he turned his attention back to the street sounds around him. The putter of scooters, shouts, a horn, the sound of something heavy being dragged along stones, a cheerful child’s tune chugging from a boom box next to a street performer—a middle-aged man folded into a box that resembled a cradle. Only his head, covered with an infant’s bonnet and positioned above a doll’s body, was visible. The eerie sight and his bizarre singing captivated passersby.
The wind, snapping laundry overhead.
Mommy silent, Mommy silent.
He was then aware of another sound, growing louder.
Tap…tap…tap.
The rhythm caught him immediately. The resonant tone. He closed his eyes. He didn’t turn toward the sound, which was behind him. He savored it.
“Scusati,” the woman’s voice said. “No, uhm, I mean: Scusami.”
He opened his eyes and turned. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty. Slim, braided hair framing a long, pretty face. She was in jeans and wore two tank tops, white under dark blue, and a pale-green bra, he could see from the third set of straps. A camera hung from one shoulder, a backpack from the other. On her feet were, of all things, cowboy boots with wooden heels. They were what had made the distinctive tap as she approached.
She hesitated, blinked. Then: “Dov’è un taxi?”
Stefan said, “You’re American.”
“Oh, you are too.” She laughed.
It was obvious to him that she’d known this.
Obvious too that she was flirting. She’d liked what she’d seen and, college girl on her own, had moved in. The sort who had no problem making the first—or second or third—move. And if the boy, or maybe, for a lark, the girl, said no, she’d offer a good-natured smile, no worries, and move on, buoyed by the unbreakable union of youth and beauty.
He was round, he was sweaty. But handsome enough. And not a player. Safe, cuddly.
“I don’t know where you’d get a taxi, sorry.” He wiped his face again.
She said, “Hot, isn’t it? Weird for September.”
Yes, though the humid southwestern Italian air was not the source of his perspiration, of course.
A group of schoolchildren, in uniform, streamed past, guided by a protective Mother Hen of a teacher. Stefan and the girl stepped aside. They then shifted again the other way as a Piaggio motor scooter bore down on them. A grizzled deliveryman in a dusty fisherman’s cap drove them yet another direction as he staggered under the weight of a carton-filled pushcart, glaring and muttering, as if the sidewalk were his own personal avenue.
“Crazy here! Don’t you just love it?” Her freckled face was infinitely amused, and her voice was light but not high. If the sound had been flower petals, they would have been those from pink roses, plucked but still moist. He could feel the tones falling on his skin like those petals.
None of the crackly rasp of vocal fry that the music-hater refugee, Fatima, had.
As she spoke, the Black Screams grew quieter.
“Don’t know anyplace back home like it, that I can think of,” he said, because that was what somebody from back home would say. He thought New York City was like this actually but, given his recent adventures there, he didn’t volunteer that observation.
She rambled, charmingly, about being in the south of France most recently, had he ever been? No? Too bad. Oh, Cap d’Antibes. Oh, Nice!
The screams abated some more as he listened. He looked too: such a beautiful young woman.
Such a lovely voice.