Umbrosi needled Enzo in the back with a finger as they mounted the top stair. The boy stopped and let Umbrosi walk around him to open the bedroom door, which was just visible to Renga. The Catalan liked going through his sexual paces in his proper bedroom, the place where he slept and wanked and sometimes brought models and actresses for a night of puzzled slumber while he leaked a more salacious story by phone to a collection of trusted gossip columnists.
Renga took a post on the couch behind the curled enormity of the canines, with a copy of the only novel in English he could find on Umbrosi’s shelves, Double Indemnity. The cushion next to him was stacked with copies of L’Unita, the communist paper. Umbrosi probably read it for research on the unions that he fought against to keep the shirts he made, but never wore, as cheap as possible.
Renga fell asleep a little after the dogs did, waking only when the negotiations upstairs passed from lash to bullwhip, and the yelps turned into three real screams, sounds that Renga had never heard from his friend, which rose and pitched into an androgynous then animal screech. One of the dogs moved its legs, dream running somewhere, following or fleeing a phantasmagoric parallel of the screams upstairs.
The theme that occurred to Renga as he was on that couch, starting with the screamed G that followed the first crack of the whip, was a fairly plain nine-note run with an unexpected diminished seventh as the penultimate strike, a recurring pattern that would overlap successive bars to abolish any sense of certainty.
Enzo was driven to the home of a veterinarian after Umbrosi had finished ejaculating and started panicking. The Catholic chauffeur had been summoned from the coach house, an explanation involving a fall on a stray rake left on the lawn conjured, and Enzo was carted off, facedown, to be stitched up as well as possible. Umberto had left Renga with a huge roll of lire bound by an elastic band, the bounty for Enzo’s flesh.
Renga forced that night’s theme to return as he sat in his own kitchen two months later, with Enzo sleeping on his mattress in the next room. He struck it out on the Rhodes, playing it repeatedly, altering timing and emphasizing different notes while staring at the matte black plastic cover that concealed the strings and pickups. Eventually his eyes stopped working, filtering out the dull blackness, as a smell vanishes to a nose before it vanishes in a room. He corrected the theme, perfected it, then continued to play as a contrapuntal harmony line for xylophone unfurled in his mind. He placed the sound somewhere behind his right eyebrow, and auditioned a theremin accent behind his cheekbone before dismissing it. Cellos came in, and he put these behind his mandibles, two behind each back molar, keeping the arrangement sparse, manageable, bonding each note physically with a chew or a twitch, staring down into the keys and repeating until it was assembled. There was a counterpoint that almost had its shape, but kept shifting, like the features of a character in an amateur’s novel, changing based on what they were doing, how they were acting.
“It’s boring until it keeps happening. Then it’s not exactly interesting, but you want it to continue, you know?” Enzo had swiveled open one of the soundproofing walls of Renga’s practice chamber. He had his Wise Critical Judgment face on, which made it annoying to agree with him.
“That’s about as good a description of a theme for variations as I could get to, I guess,” he said. Enzo pulled the practice room open all the way, signaling to Renga that it was time to pay attention to him, and walked over to the fridge. Slices of things, mostly: meat, cheese. Discs, tubes. Strings of uncooked pasta that would soon go bad; all brought by a client of Renga’s. Bottles of sparkling water, which both boys preferred to still, and which had become nearly the only thing Enzo consumed. As he drank the knot in his throat bobbed and wriggled like a caught fish, and the scars on his back moved when he turned. There was a light fuzz on the boy’s skin that hadn’t been there when Renga had first met him, the night they’d decided never to fuck just because they were supposed to.
“I got a project,” Renga said. “An assignment.” He described Massimo Troisi’s proposition to Enzo, who set the bottle down and drew his mouth over to one side.
“Do it right,” said Enzo, “even if the john doesn’t pay you enough. I’ll give you anything extra you need. Don’t give them some scratchy piano recording. Give them the whole thing, so they can’t say no.”
“They can say no to anything. They’ve been saying no for years.”
“To you, not what you make. If you make that—” Enzo pointed to the air above the keyboard—“they’ll take it.”
“It’s the Catalan, I think. The director of the movie is new, a beginner. I think it’s him.”
“You think?”
“Massimo used his name. His real name.”
“That’s a good clue,” said Enzo, stretching there in the kitchen, distracting his hands so they wouldn’t reach for the scars on his back. His ribs expanded and the concavity of his stomach deepened, the brittle spine making a dusty cracking sound as he leaned backwards.
Two weeks later, Renga met with Massimo and the director on an enormous outdoor patio. It was the Catalan—false Umbrosi, real Mirazappa—and he stood and blanched when he saw Renga, the source of the music on the tape that he’d already decided to use. Renga had passed the chauffeur on his way to the terrazza, accepting and returning a nod.
“You understand my film without having seen it. I see it when—the, the violin strain, that’s my heroine, the glove on her throat as she grips it and slips away, taking with her the leather but not his hand.”
“And the tension notes,” Renga said, leaning slightly across the table, ignoring Massimo’s inquisitive brows and watching the Catalan. “Those are the whips. From the title, you know.”
“Yes.”
Enzo didn’t turn up for the premiere of La frusta e il calice, which came out stunningly fast, a month after the sound was finalized. He didn’t reply to phone calls beforehand or afterwards. Renga thought he might find him at his own home, perhaps finally ready to have sex, now that only one of them was in the business of it. Enzo wasn’t there, so Renga let himself into his flat an hour after the party had wrapped, walking over ankle-twisting cobblestones through a pre-dawn crowd of bakers, newspaper vendors and the drunken young.
Enzo’s books, his fascist trousseau for clients, and his own clothes were still in the apartment. His wallet, with its paper-wrapped photo of the boy that might have been him, was gone. That, at least, suggested that he had left with some purpose. Renga looked for more missing objects in the apartment as the sun lay lengthening beams of heat across its uncurtained rooms, but found everything else his friend owned intact, present, abandoned.
Your Random Spirit Guide
Eden Robinson
My Haisla and Heiltsuk ancestors would never come to you in a dream. They have super stressful afterlives watching over their great-grandchildren as they make unfortunate dating choices at the All-Native Basketball Tournament or decide to put their lustrous, black hair in un-Indian man buns.
If you want to talk to my ancestors, you need to burn their favourite food and drink. Put it on plates and in cups; real ones, not disposable. Don’t throw it in the fire. Say their names as you place the dishes and drinks near the flames. Otherwise other ghosts will try to steal their food.
They’re not going to emerge from the clouds like angels or the Lion King. They’ll be a flicker in the corner of your eye. Your keys showing up on the coffee table when you’re sure you left them on the kitchen counter. A song that repeats endlessly in your mind, usually their favourite, a song with sentimental meaning. They’re not going to whisper their stories in your ear as you sit at your laptop, no matter how much you feed them. A ghost doesn’t have that kind of energy. Our worlds are separate and difficult to transcend.