The Fake Indian

I found a job as an oenologist shortly after I moved back into my parents’ house, a month and a half ago. It’s been a hectic month and a half, really—the working rhythms are still much faster than my inexperienced self. I do learn, sure, but especially at the beginning I felt as useless as a tiny cog spinning in a slot designed for a bigger cog.

On my second official weekend I went on a trekking trip up a mountain with my sister and her boyfriend. Instead of enjoying myself, all I thought was of coming back home, to my books and my easy-to-make coffee and my soft bed and my PC. I was being rejected by the landscape around me, and rightly so, because what was I to do with that place anyway? I was just going to leave footprints behind, compress and suffocate the soil with my weight… do nothing good, really.

But on my way to the mountaintop I met the fake Indian. I call him like that because his features resembled much those of a Native American, with a broad nose and large mouth and eyes that were made to stare beyond the horizon. Also, he was wearing one of those shamanic-themed t-shirts, as well as a headband with a white feather tucked behind his right ear.
We were walking opposite directions when I saw him, so I raised a hand and said, “Howgh! Have a nice trip back home!”
He didn’t nod in reply, or said anything. Instead, he stopped in front of me and his eyes began sweeping our surroundings, the evident sign of a man willing to share a story of his youth’s place.

And share a story he did, in the end. He’d spent his younger days on that very mountain, as a trainee parachutist, stringing ropes over the points where the plateau’s rim curved inward and then out again.
“Have you been up there before, son?” he asked, pointing towards the top.
I said I didn’t.
“When you are, keep an eye out for a series of bolts nailed over the rock’s edge. They’re just this big,” he said, and showed me by keeping his thumb and index close together, “but after forty years they’re still there, holding tight. They’re a bit rustier, is all.”
After a moment I said, “Sounds like a metaphor of life.”
He laughed at that. The prim, sparkling chuckle of the wise man.

He went on for a couple minutes, told me what a parachutist’s training regime was like at the time, how many cadets trained with him and how many of them resisted to the end without dropping out (get it?). And then, he shared with me a thing I did not expect. A disguised advice, a sucker punch to the heart.

“There are two kinds of parachutists,” he said, “just as there are two kinds of people. The brash ones are the first at everything—they jump, they learn, they get promoted, and when they get to the battlefield they’re even the first who die. They act without thinking, they sacrifice their resources and their lives in name of the greater good. Every army has them because every army needs them, like a blacksmith needs his hammer.”
“And the second kind of people?” I asked.
Smiling, he bowed forward to protect himself from the noon sun, and peered at me through his eyelids.
“The second kind are the ones who think. Every time they learn a new skill, they wonder why a task is done that way, how great the tolerance for mistakes is, what the consequences for failure are, and so forth. Sure, they might be slow at first, and paranoid… but it’s their overthinking, this tendency of questioning themselves, that makes them see the bigger picture in the end. They’re the ones who really make choices in the world. You follow?”
I was staring at him, paralyzed and dazed. The fake Indian had been wise enough to remember what being young means, and his words of experience had built a mirror where I could see myself, my youth, my potential underneath the thick curtain of doubt.

We shook hands and parted ways, one the specular image of the other. And when I turned around to see him for the last time, he had already disappeared behind a corner in the rock.

Later, I found the rusty bolts just where he’d said, right at the rim of the mountain. And beyond that, I could see the city leaning against the hills, the forest sprawling around me and stretching towards the sky.

I could see everything.

Back home

Some of you might have heard this already. I’m writing this for the rest.

Traveling has been such an enlightening experience, that at first I was convinced I would end up doing it forever. But day after day, one adventure after the other, I discovered it wasn’t about the places. It wasn’t about the kilometres, the roads, the gas stations, the trails, the cities, the docks, the valleys, the mountains, the museums, the bars, the hotels, the restaurants, the pubs, the departures, the destinations.

It was about the guy I chat with on Twitter. And the other one on Facebook, and the girl I met in Guangzhou. And the guy who invited me to his marriage, and the half-a-dozen guys I smoked pot with. And the ones who want to beta-read my book, the ones whose books I want to beta-read, and the ones who just ask me how’s it going and when I’m going to visit them, and the ones I stopped writing to, and the ones I’ll keep in touch with for the rest of my life.

And the first reason why I came back to Italy, is because, to be fair, the largest number of people I care about live here. The cycle of the hero’s journey has been exhausted, and I’ve grown from being a hero to being a human, thanks to all of you.

Reason number two is pretty straightforward: I was tired of starting over every time, tired of working temporary jobs that made me feel so puny and replaceable. I want to try and start a career, and I studied Winemaking Sciences at school, so that’s what I’m gonna try.

The keyword here is try. I’ll let you know how it goes, as always.

Someone’s trash is no one else’s treasure

There’s a lot of garbage bags in the courtyard behind our house, like a dozen or so.

Three quarters of them have been there for months, before my housemates and I even moved here. I couldn’t stand seeing that fucking pile, and I’m the one who stays at home most part of the day. So last Sunday I decided to at least sort those bags, you know, the undifferentiated from the recyclable, so that we can easily throw them away when our bins are empty once again. And in order to sort these bags, I needed to open them.

Most had your usual rubbish: ashtrays, empty Dorito packets, cartons, plastic bottles, wine bottles, heroin syringes, Arab costume wrappers, etc. etc. I was kidding about the syringes, by the way.

And then, sticking out of a paper-only bag and pretty much intact despite the Winter rains, there was a Christmas card dated December 2016. I’ll omit the names, of course, but this is what it said.

Hi M. hope all are well. I can’t get you on the phone, tried a few times. Got nice photo of your little man. Hope to get in touch or meet you soon. Just moving to Wex (probably Wexford, e.d.) now. God bless. K.

I couldn’t help but wonder why M. threw this card away. Or maybe it’s just me, you know, who’s lucky enough to want to keep every postcard I receive.

Have you ever tried to walk with your eyes closed?

Well, I did. I was having a casual walk through the Trinity College campus yesterday afternoon when my eyes started burning (probably because I’m always secluded at home like the fucking otaku I am), so I rubbed them without stopping.

I suppose it takes a great deal of confidence to walk more than five steps like that, to defy that innate alert beeping in the back of your head and saying, ‘you’re gonna bump into something, into someone, a car’s gonna run over you (even if you’re in the middle of a grass field).’ But the prize for those of you who can make it is a special kind of thrill, with an aftertaste of space, of adventurous eyelid shadow, of floating in thin amniotic gas and emulsified thoughts.

(I will not be responsible for any injury caused by this practice, be it small or fatal)

I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

So I found a new job, in a club in the village just about a twenty-minute walk from where I live.

What I didn’t know before I got the job was that Irish waiters are a rather weird specimen. They’re black-clad hybrids, part human and part shadow, looming across the dancefloor in search of sticky tables to wipe and empty glasses to collect before, you know, some drunken beefcake customer bull-charges the table and the glasses shatter on the floor and in that case I have to swipe up the pieces before, you know, some drunken beefcake customer slips on the floor and turns into a skewer–

You get my jist.

This is what I will be for the next, well, I don’t know how long, for about twenty-four hours a week. Just a little thing to earn money while I figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

Vaporwave is Undead

The 80s and 90s, decades forged in the anticipation of the new millennium. Years where my dad used to get paid twice as much to set tiles in a kitchen (at least that’s what he says). Years filled with hope, consumism, trinkets and junk.

But even if junk gets tossed over, our memories don’t: they seep out, travel between neuronal regions like styrofoam bits, swirl and mash together into forms we’d never thought possible. Sunsets trapped within crystal Coke bottles, lemon bubbles fizzling on our tongue like summer breeze, utopian pop-love singles and computer startup jingles.

And even if those things are gone, now, those styrofoam memories are still trapped in our plastic brain, in a mourning-worth phenomenon we all call nostalgia.

The only thing we’re sure about vaporwave is that it was born on 2010 from artists like James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Xavier. Its core concept evolves around a technique called sampling, which is when an instrument or a voice or a complete track are ripped from another song and ‘remixed’ into another.

Just like Ramona Xavier did with It’s Your Move, by Diana Ross, creating the official anthem of the genre just by ‘slowing the song down and applying effects on it.’

At first vaporwave was merely a joke, a pink-tinged sub-culture that lurked in the recesses of Reddit and 4chan to remind us how stupid and naive we were. But then it grew, you know? Because good memories are still good, even if supplied by a sterile TV advertising.

Soon enough new artists joined the vaporwave ranks: Blank Banshee, Infinite Frequencies, Luxury Elite, ESPRIT 空想 and many others, each one exploring the matter from a different angle. Were all those fluffy moments worth living? Or did we just contribute to the creation of a corporate dystopia?

This subculture expanded but, as its elusive name suggests, it was never meant to be mainstream. Maybe that’s why in 2015, when its pink-funky aesthetics and alluring ideas caught the interest of larger audiences, some fans declared that vaporwave was dead.

But has it ever been alive, I wonder?

Let’s be honest with ourselves: vaporwave is nothing but a well-crafted mess, a patchwork of songs that hardly anyone listens to anymore. It’s fascinating, awkward, ghastly, and even sad at times. Like the monster of Frankenstein.

Which, by the way, is a book that I absolutely love.

Bird’s nest sansevieria

I didn’t want to spend such a wet day in the city centre, so this morning I went to the Lidl instead. I came back with milk, bread, oranges, a packet of toothbrushes, and a plant.

The sticker calls it ‘bird’s nest sansevieria.’ It needs light between mid-shade and full sun, fifteen to thirty degrees Celsius, and water every fortnight. I can’t do anything but trust the wiki.

It’s sitting on my windowsill now, green against the minimalistic white pot. It looks cool. Keeps me company, like the ivy and the bonsai I used to have in my Schwäbisch Hall apartment. I still remember how I brought them home, tucking them under my jacket like they were puppies.

I can’t sleep.

Because I’m sharing a room with a half-stranger and I can’t stand the sound of breathing at night. Or maybe because I’m thirsty, because I gotta pee, because we turned the heater off and I’m freezing even under the sheets. Although I suppose my condition has something to do with it: jobless, living in the suburb of Dublin, in a neighborhood dubbed ‘safe’ by some and ‘gang territory’ by others.

It’s not that I’m worried, no. It’s that I’m wondering how come I’ve gotten here. Taken my books, my clothes, my PCs and left for Dublin.

I wake up at four, five in the morning and wonder why the window is not at the bed’s left, as it is in my room in Treviso, but at the bed’s right. And so I keep tossing and turning until it’s eight in the morning and my roommate gets up and goes to study IT Technologies, the bloody genius, who’s four years younger and has four more years of opportunities ahead than I do. So I stand up, squint at my reflection in the mirror, ask why I keep travelling and distancing myself from my friends and family. But my reflection only asks back.

Being an Italian guy who writes in English, I couldn’t hope for much feedback in my own country, so I never joined a writer’s group there. Big mistake. A mistake I’ve somewhat repaired by entering one of the local groups in Dublin, the Inkslingers. We meet on Saturdays, read pieces to each other before grabbing a cuppa down the street. It’s a fun way to meet people I can listen to without yawning.
That’s how my days have been going in the last month. Slow, cold, sprinkled with episodes of insomniac self-doubt… but overall meaningful and enjoyable.

Gianluca’s current to–do list:

– find job

– go to gym

– get haircut

Videogames Today: Crisis or Bonanza?

They say videogames are dying. Yesterday we had titles like Metal Gear Solid, Planescape Torment, Final Fantasy 7 and Banjo-Kazooje; today we only have Early Accesses, DLC’s and franchised flops. But do we really want to bring back the nineties (especially the early ones), where games were still considered a second-category hobby?

Most of the milestones of gaming industry – like the games I mentioned earlier – have been produced in the half decade right before its explosion in the early 2000s, when the competition between publishing houses was still rather low. Why is that, you ask? Because at that time videogame programming was underground, uncool, and left to the average computer whiz who couldn’t afford more than a basement.

With the advent of the Internet, videogames or videogame editors are now close at anyone’s hand. With a simple search on your web browser you can find user-friendly game engines like Game Maker (Undertale, Spelunky, Hotline Miami) and Unity (Wasteland 2, Rust, Kerbal Space Program, Hearthstone) – and both have a freeware version!
Games today are accessible to everyone, and can be made by everyone. Although people don’t need a degree to make their own game, for those who want to take a more professional path there are countless courses on game development and game design.

Our culture is more open to videogames, as well. The first generation of gamers are now in their forties and fifties; when their kids are staying in front of a screen for too long, they don’t frown as much as my parents would do with me (I’m not saying my parents are wrong). Besides, criticizing gamers would be kind of hypocrite in a society where everyone’s always in front of a computer or a smartphone screen. But let’s not change the subject.

The increased popularity of videogames has led to two consequences:

1. Marketing is now essential. The tiny puddle of competition has grown to the size of an ocean; the more swimmers are swimming, the more swimmers can sink. So now, more than ever, a title must be appealing to the largest audience possible.
   A thousand strategies have been applied to the videogame industry, including the one of maximizing earnings by maximizing production in the least amount of time with the least expenses. Which might lead to underpaid employers, deadlines too tight, and a buggy game with shallow themes. Is that anti-ethical? Maybe it is, but what if the choice were between following the marketing trend and losing my job?
2. Thanks to second-hand deals people can buy more game titles. In a market where titles are released almost every day, games with a high longevity aren’t played extensively anymore. Their lifespan shortens dramatically, since the average customer buys a game every two weeks. Customers are even more prompted to finish the game as soon as they can, so they can resell it before the price gets too low.
   To encourage people to take hold of their own game copies and to increase the number of the originals sold, content can be administered in small doses through DLC’s.

Still, the future of videogames isn’t dark. The Internet is a gigantic square where everyone has a voice, including those who believe in the artistic potential of an RPG or a graphic adventure. And thanks to the Internet, even people who are willing to make sacrifices in order to fulfill their ambitious projects can find their own audience, like Bay12 Games with their own game Dwarf Fortress (I talked about it here). Projects like Undertale or Darkest Dungeon have been supported by crowdfunding backers, and managed to thrive despite (or maybe I should say, thanks to) their alternative way of appealing.

In conclusion, there’s no need to be discouraged if games like Call of Duty are successful: good games are still made out there. Everyone with a crumb of passion and determination has a chance to find a public, now more than ever.

The Bloodtrotter – Episode 2: Strawberry Ice Cream

It’s official: Riccardo, Fiammetta’s ex-boyfriend, has turned into a ruthless killer. She doesn’t want to know how, really, but what can she do if his first victim is lying in her house and she could be next any second now?

Check out the first episode: The Coffee Shop Shaman

Fiammetta gave no resistance when Riccardo dragged her down the staircase, holding his knife on her throat. The image of Hitch’s corpse lying in her apartment was still before her eyes, like a photograph glued to her forehead.
Riccardo’s voice reached Fiammetta from what seemed like kilometres away. “Do you still have your motorbike?” he asked.
She looked at him and tried to speak, but a barrage of questions jammed at the doorway of her mouth. Why did he only show up after years since they broke up? What did he want from her? How could he have blood in his hands and act as if nothing ever happened?
They walked through the corridor leading to the basement and reached her garage door. Riccardo kneeled over the rug and pulled the spare keychain from underneath. “Still keeping it under the rug?” he said with a sneer.
She turned her face away, still determined not to talk to him.
When he opened the door and flicked the light switch, the veil of darkness drifted away and revealed a lump covered by a white bed sheet.
Riccardo raised the sheet and whistled at the sight of Fiammetta’s motorcycle glimmering in the artificial light. It was equipped with a sidecar and completely black, save for the golden trimmings decorating the fenders and the oil pipes. The lines spiralled on the gas tank’s sides, ending with the bike’s name on the centre: Wildebeest.
“There’s no way I’m gonna let you drive her,” she stammered. The sight of her motorbike, the physical manifestation of her adventurous dreams, had loosened her tongue.
Riccardo gave her a smirk. “Okay,” he said, throwing her the ignition keys. “Then you drive.”
She shook her head vigorously.
“Remember I’m the one who holds the knife by the handle*.” He waved his knife up in the air, and giggled. “Literally.”
As a last hope she made a start towards the entrance door, but Riccardo was faster than him. “Nice try,” he said, almost touching the tip of her nose with the tip of the knife.
“Fine,” she finally said. “Tell me where to go.”
“Via Navali. You know, that ugly skyscraper just out of town.”
Fiammetta stared at the blade. “I thought vampires loved to hide in tombs, not on top of a skyscraper.”
He shook his head. “The higher we perform the  Introspection together, the more will be the chances to find him.”
“‘Together’…? What does that mean?”
Riccardo took his helmet and jumped into the sidecar. “A lot of things have changed since the last time we met.”

*‘Holding the knife by the handle’ is an Italian expression that means ‘having the upper hand’ or ‘being in control of the situation’.

***

Fiammetta drove Wildebeest down the cobbled main street, across from the hubbub and the shining bars of Piazza dei Signori and Piazza del Grano. The evening was fading into the night, and the curb was full of after-dinner walkers eyeing and pointing at Fiammetta’s motorbike.
They turned into a series of one-way roads until they reached one of the archways connecting the inner town’s perimeter to the suburbs. They weren’t more than a dozen meters from it when Riccardo jerked his arm towards the handlebar and hissed, “It’s them!”
Fiammetta jammed on the brakes. “Them, who?”
A white police Jaguar, sirens wailing and lights strobing, roared and cut in front of them. When the car stopped in the middle of the street Fiammetta noticed something drawn on its side. At first it looked like a strange zigzag pattern, but at a second glance she could distinguish a series of six letters: VUVUVU.
Riccardo muttered a curse when a man got out of the car. His white uniform consisted in a pair of trousers and a jacket, merged into one single piece of clothing like the bandage of a futuristic mummy. Two boar eyes blinked from behind the eyeholes of an equally white balaclava.
The agent approached and, to Fiammetta’s surprise, he flashed an authentic police badge. “Sorry for interrupting you, but we’re bound to check all people that get in and out of the walls.”
Fiammetta looked at Riccardo, who answered her with the slightest nod of the head. “No problem,” she said. “Been a change in the uniform policy, eh?”
The white policeman gave her a harsh look and opened his mouth as if to say something, then shrugged and took out a device that looked exactly like the handheld gaming console she used to play with when she was a kid, except this one had a micro-camera attached to it.
When the agent hovered the console before his eyes, the device let out a series of beeping noises. “Beautiful,” the agent said. “Now, before you go, I need to take a picture of you two. It’s just for our statistic database, don’t you worry.”
Fiammetta couldn’t help worrying, though… there was a faint shade of sadistic menace in his voice.
He began pressing a combination of buttons, silently pronouncing the name of each button he pressed like a priest reciting a rosary. A, B, A, Select, B …
What was that device going to do to them?
Apparently Riccardo didn’t want to know, since he cleaved the agent’s hands with an uppercut and slammed the console over his face. The agent staggered backwards and sprawled onto the car’s bonnet.
“Move!” Riccardo said.
She didn’t make him say it twice, and wheeled her hand on the accelerator. With a roaring bellow Wildebeest sped through the gate and let the white Jaguar behind them.
Fiammetta turned to the agent just in time to glimpse a trickle of blood staining his balaclava. “My nose!” he screamed. “Come back, you sh…” But the last word lost itself in the wind.
“Is that weirdo really in the police?”
“He’s an agent from the Vatican,” he said. “We’ve got to find the vampire before they do.”
“Vatican!? I thought they weren’t even allowed to swear!”
Riccardo glanced at the road, cursed again, seized the handle, and jerked it towards himself.
The motorbike steered wildly and swayed to Fiammetta’s side. The asphalt came closer to her, and she felt like a wedge of cheese before the grater.
She desperately pushed Riccardo back to his seat, and Wildebeest turned back on his three wheels.
It took her a few seconds to recover her breath from the scare and say: “Are you trying to kill me?”
He squinted his eyes behind the motorbike, then turned to her. “I’m sorry, Fiammetta, but this might have saved our asses.”
He was right. At that very moment, she heard the faint sound of sirens drifting away from the very road they’d just quit.
“Well, probably,” she said. “Just warn me before you do it, next time.”
They rode through the narrow streets of the outskirts, until they reached the open landscape of West Road.
Silence hovered over the broad bypass and mingled with the old residue of exhaust pipes. Strange. It would have been a vision probably common after midnight, but not right after dinner. The silence gave her the opportunity to focus on elements she wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. The roaring of the wind against her ears, the flight of the bats preying off insects, the buzzing of a thousand mosquitoes—
She almost lost her grip on the handlebar when she realized Riccardo had vanished from the sidecar.
She made a U-turn and spun her head around, on the lookout for any signs of her ex-boyfriend, but all she found was the dark street stretching before her eyes.
A scream drew her attention up in the sky. A strange hybrid between a man and an insect was buzzing a few meters from the ground, holding Riccardo by the armpits.
“Help me!” Riccardo yelled.
“Easier said than done!”
Driving in a circle around them, she watched Riccardo kicking and punching the giant insect, who rapidly lost height and put him down.
It was one of the agents of the Vatican. In addition to the same white uniform the other agent wore, he was equipped with a tiny dark backpack from which protruded a pair of wings and two mechanical, insect-like legs.
The mosquito man drew his hand into his pocket. Letting the instinct drive her actions, Fiammetta took a run-up and kicked him in the shins, but by doing so her foot bent in an odd angle.
While she winced and bent at the pain, Mosquito-Man howled and fell onto his knees. Riccardo exploited the situation to hold him in a headlock, but the agent slapped him on the face with his wings and broke free. Before Riccardo and Fiammetta could counterattack, Mosquito-Man sprung up like a bullet and plunged into the darkness above.
Silence fell again around them.
Fiammetta massaged her foot and darted her eyes around. “No one in sight.”
Riccardo shook his head. “Bad sign.”
“Why so? They might have just given up on us.”
“There’s no need to move your pawns when the king’s in a checkmate.”
Fiammetta was still trying to understand Riccardo’s metaphor when the bushes rustled from an empty lot on a side of the road, where the grass had grown in a desperate attempt to contrast civilization.
“Get to the Wildebeest,” he shouted.
She ran to her motorbike, but a white spot on the black bitumen caught her attention.
She dived her hand to the ground, picked it up and examined it. It was the same device the agent in the car had used before Riccardo slapped him in the face. The Mosquito-Man must have dropped it.
The silence exploded in what sounded like an army of vuvuzelas.
She raised her head and saw a hundred pearly white agents jumping out the bushes, buzzing and hovering over their heads like a circle of twisted angels.
Flying a little higher from the rest of the group, Fiammetta recognized the agent they’d met hardly ten minutes before. Even from that distance she could see his eyes shining against the darkness.
“Surrender, you wretched villains!” he screamed. Two red tufts – probably cotton – quivered in his nostrils. “The whole platoon is on you!”
The other agents cheered at their leader, then looked down and snickered at their helpless prey.
An idea burst like a meteor into Fiammetta’s brain. Did he just say ‘the whole platoon’?
She looked at the console she had picked up from the ground. It was the exact copy of the one she used to have, with all the buttons in the right place. Perhaps she could turn the tide of battle to her advantage…
“Get down!” she yelled at Riccardo. After he had crawled into a ball, she lifted the console up in the air and mashed the buttons as fast as she could: A, B, A, Select, B…
“For goodness’s sake, don’t let me down,” she whispered.
At the press of the Start button, the console flashed like a sun against the pitch black surroundings. One by one the entire swarm of agents stiffened, wobbled, and fell around Riccardo and Fiammetta like dead leaves off a chestnut.
Riccardo jumped and howled in triumph. “You did it!”
Fiammetta let her arms fall onto her sides. “Yeah, I did it. But we’d better get away before they wake up.”
As Fiammetta mounted on her bike, another vision made her waver amid the carpet of stunned agents. Hitch was lying the middle of the crowd, his head pried open.
Riccardo’s voice shook her away from her trance. “What’s up, Sparky?”
“…Nothing, Riccardo.” She blinked a few times, looked back on the ground, and saw that Hitch had disappeared. As she turned on the engine she added: “And in name of all that’s good in the world, stop calling me Sparky.”

***

If people had been termites, then Via Navali would have been the hive. Amber lights poured out of the windows of those eighteen smog-stained floors, casting an eerie shadow on the surrounding residential block. When Fiammetta stopped at the parking lot and looked up, she imagined what it would be like if the building had come alive all of a sudden, grow claws out of its antennae and tear apart the canvas of the sky.
When they reached the entrance door, Riccardo pulled a credit card out of his wallet, inserted it through the crack in the door, and slid it with a swift movement. The door clacked, and he pushed it open.
A waft of mold and burnt plastic forced Fiammetta to pinch her own nose. “It’s not the first time you come here, is it?” she said.
He put his finger on his mouth, then smiled and stepped inside the elevator with her.
“Wipe that smile off your face, Riccardo,” she whispered. “I’m helping you, but that doesn’t mean we’re lovers all over again.”
“Oh, give me a break—”
“You stole my father’s book and tried to learn how to perform the Introspection by yourself,” Fiammetta said. “If you’d made it you’d be at the Bahamas right now, not here asking for help. I know it.”
Riccardo swung his fists along his sides. “I didn’t steal your book just to learn how to make money!” he hissed.
“Then what the hell for?”
“You’ll see.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I really want to know what stupid excuse you’ll put up this time.”
The elevator dinged again, and Riccardo dragged her to the rooftop door.
The skyscraper’s roof was another world, similar and at the same time opposite to the ground floor. The residents’ laundry was dangling from the metal wires, at the mercy of the chill night wind.
They approached the rim of the flat grey roof, and Fiammetta looked at the landscape before her. The ground had decided to dress himself with fake stars, bewitched by the beauty of the sky. It was cold, awfully cold out there, yet beautiful at the same time, like a tiny planet elevated among the humdrum routine.
“I’m ready when you’re ready,” Riccardo said.
She nodded.
He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it onto the ground. It was actually a stack of old, crumpled photocopies from what looked like a handwritten diary. A wave of blood rushed to her head when she recognized the writing.
“Did you photocopy my father’s book?”
She lunged onto the ground and tried to snatch it but Riccardo pulled it away from her. “Do you want to draw the attention of the whole neighborhood?” he hissed. “Sit down.”
When Fiammetta crouched in front of Riccardo – still fighting the urge to pull his head off – he placed the photocopies on the ground. She was familiar with those pages… Dad suggested she take a page at random every time, and she diligently followed his instructions, partly out of trust for his father and partly dreading what would have happened had she done otherwise. But he never said she couldn’t browse through the pages, explore that fascinating world made of ink and parchment.
The photocopies belonged to those pages she could never pick during a random selection. They were filled with sketches of polygons of a hundred sides, star maps, weather forecasts and masses of unreadable scribbling. Some parts of that scribbling were marked in red ink, probably by Riccardo. She became sure of it when he pulled out a red pen from his jacket and started linking the highlighted words and symbols.
He smirked like a mad scientist. “Put your hand here,” he said, placing his own hand on the pattern of red lines.
She did as she was told, and felt him awkwardly intertwining his fingers between hers.
The phantoms of her past began sprinkling faint sensations in her neurons. Like that time when they were walking hand in hand along the river, holding an ice cream in their hands, and it was so hot her strawberry scoop fell off the cone, but Riccardo managed to catch it with his empty waffle before it reached the gravel, and then he ate her ice cream because she was laughing too much.
She drew a deep breath. Memories only hurt her, even the good ones. Another deep breath, and the reality around her melted into oblivion while she slowly sank into the world within her.

***

She found herself sitting on the lakeshore in the underground cavern of her subconscious. A chill wind rippled the water’s surface and raised piles of viscous foam.
“This place is wonderful,” said a voice behind her.
She flipped on her belly in surprise, whipping up clouds of white sand around her, and saw Riccardo. “How did you…?”
“The notes I took from your book are nothing but its magical backbone,” he said. “They’re what allows you to ‘empathize’ with the book, as you would do with a friend… or a loved one.”
Fiammetta frowned. “I guess any reference to real persons isn’t purely coincidental.”
Riccardo ignored her. “After all these years I found a way to exploit these pages and create a similar bond of magical empathy between two people.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning as long as we’re both touching the page, I can enter your mind and you can enter mine.”
“So this cavern is, like, the result of our combined subconscious?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“That’s why it looks darker than usual.”
His expression changed. “Does it really look darker?”
She looked around a second time. “I’ve been here every day since my father died, but it never… felt like this before.”
When he started looking down, she added: “I don’t care if it’s your fault, Riccardo. I just want to go…”
Home.
At that very moment, in her attic, Hitch’s corpse was lying in a pool of blood.
Again she put her hand onto her face, but that image had been imprinted in her brain and would stay there forever.
Riccardo slowly walked towards her. “Fiammetta…”
She reeled away from him. “Don’t touch me!”
He sighed. “As soon as we finish the Introspection, we’ll be back home. Getting rid of the corpse won’t be a problem.”
Why in the world did she accept to help this psycho? How did she manage to love him in the first place?
“Promise me I’ll never see you again after tonight,” she said.
He raised his head and opened his mouth like a beached goldfish.
“Promise me,” she repeated.
He slowly walked to her, took her hand, and said: “I promise.”
Riccardo dragged her down into the lake’s depths. The orb cast its warm light upon them as they reached the rocky bottom. When he pulled Fiammetta closer to the light, it gave a sudden shudder.
“Speak to it,” Riccardo said.
Feeling as though she was betraying her own best friend and at the same time without knowing why, Fiammetta spoke. “O primal Geist, God, First Quark, Father of this plane of existence. Show me the design of the world, for what my heritage allows me to see.”
Everything went suddenly dark around Fiammetta. A putrid stench invested her, so strong that she had to hide her head in the crack of her elbow to prevent her eyes from stinging. The smell of chemicals was unbearable… or was it blood? She had never smelled blood, but somehow she knew and recognized it, as if an inaudible voice had whispered that information into her ear. A thousand knives stabbed on her neck, but it lasted for so little time that Fiammetta hardly reacted to it.
Her vision brightened a little. She found herself on a gravel path, out in the open. She heard the rustling of water down the slope to her side. Was this the park along the Sile river?
Someone was holding her hand. She turned to see the outline of Riccardo’s face. He was smiling at her, flashing a row of crowded, razor-like teeth.
And for reasons unknown to her, she smiled back.
Something warm and wet was in the other hand—the ice cream! She’d better eat it before it melted…
When she raised it on her face, though, she realized this time it wasn’t a melted strawberry scoop.
Freshly ripped and still beating between her fingers, was a human heart.

***

Fiammetta woke with a shudder. She brought her hand on her neck, then to her teeth. Fortunately she was still a human being.
Riccardo was beside her, looking at the stars and gasping for air. She reached his arm and shook him back to reality.
“Now I see why you brought me here,” she said. “You’re looking for the vampire to turn us. If we combine immortality with my ability to… see things, we will rule the world.”
He looked at her like he was stoned.
“This is your megalomaniacal, smart-ass project,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
Ignoring completely her question, Riccardo opened his mouth and spoke in a hoarse voice. “The vampire’s here.”
“…What?”
A squeak came from the wires where the clothes were drying. She turned to see the outline of a tiny little bat, hanging upside down and flapping his devilish wings against the moonlight.
Riccardo was just a blur. He drew his knife and charged at the little animal. The bat became a blur, too, and one instant later Riccardo bounced away, did an airborne flip, hit his head on the concrete floor, and stood inert like a pile of clothes.
A man in a dark jacket was squatted on all fours, moaning and clutching his hand.
“A foolish idea to punch him in his teeth,” he said. “But it served the purpose, nonetheless.”
Fiammetta walked closer until she captured a glimpse of the man’s face, and her jaw dropped to her chest.
With the little breath she managed to seize from the surprise, she whispered: “I don’t believe it.”
Hitch turned to her and smiled. “’Unbelievable’ is my middle name, young lady.”