#i just know i threw away my disposable prior to trash day so either a Monday or Friday. which -- i just checked

[713-4th-ward-g]

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[pippki-writes]

Nessun Uomo è un’Isola

It started with the shadows. When he wasn’t looking at them, he would swear they had moved in the sentient sort of ways shadows had no right to. Or they would dart with furtive purpose just beyond his vision, but whenever Oriano would look, nothing would be there. The shadows would move gently, normally, the lights of the paths peacefully mixed around by the rustling leaves.

Paolo would have told him he was just being paranoid, but Oriano couldn’t bring himself to mention it. Even if the carbonieri did not come to their little island to enforce the quarantine, the handful of them still left on San Servolo took the duty seriously. Paolo and Oriano were the only ones staying in their particular dormitory building, on opposite ends, and every evening before and after Luca dropped off their dinners they would hang out of their windows over the lagoon and shout conversation from one side of the building to the other. It just didn’t seem like the place to mention passing worries over shadows, when there were so many more important things to worry about.

“What do we do if the supply boat doesn’t come?” asked Oriano.

“You worry too much,” said Paolo. “There’s always the vaporetto. Good old number 20 would never abandon us here. But even if the groceries didn’t come, and the devil himself stole our vaporetto line, look—” he pointed south and east, where the long inhabited sandbar of the Lido stretched across the lagoon, framing their view from the southwest corner of the island. “We could easily swim over. If you’re not afraid of a little lagoon water.”

“Nah,” replied Oriano, “it’s the shit swimming in the water that worries me.” But Paolo had a point, and he would know—Paolo was in his 30s, and had lived in Venice his whole life. If he said the vaporetto wouldn’t leave them cut off, then Oriano trusted that he could always find his way off the island if needed. Not that he had somewhere better to be. Oriano was only 19, with no family or home to go back to in America. When the classrooms had closed, and all the foreign students had gone back to their countries, their barista Oriano had stayed.

“We would find a way off,” said Paolo. As the handyman of the island, Paolo felt certain he could put together something that would float the short distance between the closest corner of San Servolo and the Lido. Wouldn’t even be a full kilometer, and the lagoon? Not even that deep, for the most part. Could probably push along the bottom with a broom. He lapsed into silence, wondering what materials on the island might float and not be too culturally damaging if taken for such a purpose, while Oriano stared across the lagoon at the sunset. Like nearly every other sunset since he had come to San Servolo some six months prior, the riot of clouds and color was one of the most beautiful sunsets he had ever seen.

In the mornings, Oriano made cappuccinos. The cafe and the kitchen were in separate buildings, so it felt safe, while Luca made breakfasts, for Oriano to make some halfway decent coffees to go with it. Luca would leave Oriano’s breakfast waiting in the cafe, and Oriano would leave Luca’s cappuccino on the little table outside the kitchen, and as they distributed caffeine and nutrients they managed like ghost ships passing in the night not to come across one another. Oriano wore his mask while he made the cappuccinos, and washed his hands at least twice more than he thought was necessary. Disposable cups. Disposable food-handling gloves. Disinfect everything, especially the outside of the bags that everything came in, even the bag of espresso beans, unloaded by Luca and Chiara from the supply boat each week. As long as the supplies lasted, Oriano would keep up this routine. It gave him something to do.

He left the last cappuccinos of the morning on the little table outside the housekeepers’ building and went back to his room. His room, like Paolo’s, had been designed to serve as student housing—the atmosphere was sparse, utilitarian, and duplicated. Two each of small beds, desks, nightstands, and uncomfortable chairs on the easy-to-clean stone floor. One bathroom with sink, mirror, shower, toilet, and bidet—that had been amusing. Oriano hadn’t known what the bidet was for, and had used it to hold a muddy pair of work boots until he could clean them, but Paolo had seen them there first, and gave him no end of good-natured shit for it. Oriano did not put boots in the bidet anymore.

There was also a TV—ancient and pointless, picking up only a few channels filled with convoluted daytime Italian soap operas too rapid fire for Oriano to keep up with. The only thing Oriano really cared about in his room was the window. The first day he’d settled into the room he had hated it. Even by himself in the room, it was small and cramped, and the operation of the air conditioning was beyond him. But as soon as he threw open the window, he realized why the room was worth keeping—unlike the other dormitory, the housekeepers’ building, and the administrators’ rooms, all the rooms in this building were directly on the lagoon. It was a straight drop down from Oriano’s second story window to the blue-green water below, facing almost directly into the unbelievable beauty of the setting sun. Back when the tour boats were still running, they passed close enough that Oriano could easily hear them talking about San Servolo— “It started as a Benedictine monastery” —and he would lean out the window to give a small wave, watching as dozens of people waved enthusiastically back.

He missed them.

They took turns spending time outside on the island. No one would have come to police them, but it seemed like the right thing to do, minimizing contact as much as they could.

Since he got to spend the morning walking back and forth all over the island from the cafe, Oriano took his turn after the sun had set. San Servolo was not a big island—a bit wider than the length of a football field, and not even a quarter mile long, but the trees throughout had a way of making it feel bigger than it really was. He appreciated the trees for that.

As he walked toward the front of the island, he thought about something Paolo had said in their conversation that night. People were claiming they were seeing more dolphins returning to the lagoon, swimming through the canals of Venice. Was it true? What else might be returning?

This was when Oriano began to hear the sounds.

At first, it sounded like water. Hearing water was not unusual—he was surrounded by water, the sounds of the tides gently lapping against the brick walls of San Servolo had become the serene backdrop to his everyday life. But this was different. Extra. More. It sounded like someone had recorded the sound of water and was playing it back ever so slightly wrong, from somewhere above. Oriano looked around, straining to hear. It sounded like it was coming from the small square tower by the library. Oriano took a few steps in the direction of the tower—the wrong sound of water playing was definitely louder—and he thought he saw a flicker of movement, of light shifting into shadow, through one of the arched openings in the tower. He wanted to go get Paolo, but his curiosity got the better of him.

Oriano took the stairs on the back side of the tower up to the second floor. To the right was the door to the library. To the left, an open arched path looking out and leading to the tower. Oriano willed his feet to be as quiet as possible as he approached the open room of the tower, the sound of water growing louder, his heart racing with the unknown of what he might find. He turned the corner into the room and found...nothing. The lights that illuminated the paths below reflected orange shapes around the room, through the leaves of the trees and the open stone arches of the tower. The peculiar quality of the sound of water had fallen away, and all he could hear was the waves of the tide slapping the bricks just as they always did.

“Which island is that?” asked Oriano, pointing to the forested island due west that was preparing to hide away the setting sun.

“La Grazia,” said Paolo. “Made from medieval trash, basically. Once was a convent, turned into a gunpowder storage that blew up in the middle of the 1800s. Spent time as an infectious diseases hospital until...late 20th century? Before I was born anyway.”

“Hm.” Oriano wondered what kind of creatures inhabited the abandoned islands around them. San Servolo was home to five domestic cats (three of whom looked exactly the same), and whatever manner of birds and lizards those five cats had not yet killed. “That one?” he asked, pointing to the next island south of La Grazia.

“San Clemente. Like us, another insane asylum. My own nonna still says ‘going to San Clemente’ for people going crazy. Also like us, spent time as a monastery and a military property. I think San Clemente was a garrison, ours was a hospital. At any rate, now it’s a hotel.”

“Do you think it’s haunted?”

“I hope so. Rich bastards. If they can afford to stay there, they deserve to be haunted.”

“What about here?” asked Oriano cautiously. “Is our island haunted?”

Paolo paused for a moment and rubbed his chin. “Haunted?” he asked thoughtfully. “Well...we certainly have history. But if you want haunted, either Lazzaretto Vecchio over there—” he leaned far out of his window, pointing left to the island they could just barely see to the southeast “—or the infamous Poveglia there—” he pointed straight ahead, to a forested island with a single bell tower rising above the treeline “—those two are your best bet. Lazzaretto Vecchio is small, but they’ve found over fifteen hundred bodies buried there so far. It was Venice’s first quarantine island for the plagues. And Poveglia...it was an insane asylum too, but they say one of its doctors brutally tortured, killed, and mutilated his patients there. Who knows how many. See the bell tower? They say the doctor fell from it to his death. Or was pushed. Or jumped, gone mad himself.” Paolo shrugged, all possibilities equally valid for haunting. “And Poveglia was a plague island too, before it was an asylum.”

“Was every island a plague island?”

“Not every island,” replied Paolo, patting the windowsill. “Ours wasn’t. But there is a lot of common, repeated, and violent history shared among these islands.”

Oriano nodded, watching the sun slip behind the trees of Isola della Grazia, leaving the sky a bruised and angry pink.

For that night’s walk, Oriano decided to simply sit at the end of the wooden dock that the supply boat used, listening to the waves. He squinted, trying to block out the lights of the channel markers to make out the shapes of the trees across the water. The abandoned islands were low, dark anomalies rising slightly from the water against the sky, hidden beyond the reach of the channel marker lights. The inhabited islands nearby were comforting—the constellation marks of civilization and electricity strung along the Lido meant people were there, even if he couldn’t see them. The darkness of the likes of Poveglia and La Grazia gave him an uneasy feeling of ignorance.

If he could just go to those islands, to know what was there and see for himself, then maybe he wouldn’t feel this way. No, that wasn’t true. He felt like he had walked over every inch of San Servolo now, and still he could sense secrets hiding in the trees, in the shadows between the lighted paths.

He wondered what kind of trees grew in the soils of such twisted histories.

He ignored the sounds that night—this time, from across the water in the directions of unlit darkness, he could hear the sound of singing, the feeling an anxious emotion, sounds and lyrics in a language Oriano didn’t recognize. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and Oriano hurried back to his room, pretending he had not heard anything.

In the morning, there was no breakfast waiting for Oriano in the cafe.

Oriano ran over to the kitchen, but Luca wasn’t there. Luca stayed in the housekeepers’ building on the back of the island, and Oriano ran down to it, past the dormitories and lovely old clusters of trees, past the cats doing their morning stretches.

“Shit,” said Oriano, skidding into the locked door of the building. He didn’t know which room was Luca’s. His mask was back in the cafe. He started pounding on the main door.

“Luca? Luca??” he yelled, trying to see in the ground floor windows, alternating between beating on the door and rapping his knuckles on the windows.

On the second floor, a window scraped open. Oriano stopped and stood back to look up as Chiara poked her head out.

“Oriano? Is everything okay?”

“Luca wasn’t in the kitchen this morning. I’m—is he—can you check on him?”

Chiara quickly ducked back in her room. A couple other windows opened as the others staying in the building looked out to see what the commotion was. Oriano could hear Chiara beating on another door inside, and breathed a sigh of relief when he heard Luca’s familiar baritone shout “Oh dio mio!”

Everything would be okay.

He let their distant conversation in Italian wash over him. Sounded like Luca had overslept, which wasn’t like him but honestly, time had long since lost all meaning here. It was understandable.

And then Oriano heard Luca cough.

Was it a cough? Was Oriano the only one who had gasped when they heard it?

There are so many reasons for a cough. Did Luca smoke? Was it pollen season? Did San Servolo even have a pollen season? Surely it must, with all these rare plants and trees. Oriano’s heart started racing with his thoughts. Chiara leaned back out of her own window.

“Oriano, do you think you could do breakfast today?”

Oriano ruined about half a dozen pancakes before he decided the day’s breakfast would be cereal.

Paolo distributed dinner that evening. He found deep in the freezer something resembling an Italian riff on a Hot Pocket, in sufficient quantity to feed everyone, and most importantly they were very difficult to ruin. It was the sort of culinary monstrosity that would have brought great shame on his family if they knew of it, but they tasted okay and required no thought on his part to make happen.

Oriano waited until Paolo was back in his own room before he brought his dinner in, leaning on the windowsill while he ate. The sun had already set, but Oriano did not feel like walking the island.

“I’m worried about Luca,” said Oriano, almost too quietly for Paolo to hear.

“I’ve known Luca for almost twelve years,” said Paolo, waving his hand with dismissive confidence. “Luca’s fine.”

Oriano brushed the crumbs from his hands into the water and looked up. “What is that?” gasped Oriano. From the darkness to the south and west, steaming white clouds on the water seemed to be pressing toward them. Already the view was getting hazy, a chill threading through the air.

Paolo laughed. “It’s just the fog, Oriano. La nebbia. You really worry too much.” Paolo sighed. “Get some rest, okay?”

Oriano nodded, but he knew he would not be sleeping.

After some debate in the group text the next morning, Paolo volunteered to take over kitchen duties. He wasn’t exceptionally skilled at cooking, but he and Oriano were better isolated than everyone else. And everyone wanted Oriano to keep making coffee for their breakfasts.

Oriano walked to the cafe in the front corner of the island. Paolo had found a supply of Pop Tarts that had been imported for the American students, and Oriano’s allotment of cold breakfast pastry sat outside the cafe on the little table.

Luca was fine.

This was just a precaution.

Oriano ate absentmindedly, looking out over the grounds of San Servolo, toward the kitchen, the housekeepers’ building, the trees, Luca. The fog had come in overnight, putting a sullen grey haze over everything. When he looked out over the water, he could not see the other islands nearby, but at least he could see through the fog well enough on San Servolo. Oriano knelt down as the sweet grey cat of the island approached him outside the cafe, meowing patiently for some of his food.

“You won’t like it,” he warned her, breaking off a small corner and setting it on the ground.

Principessa sniffed the fragment disdainfully, gave a disgruntled meow, and walked off. Crumbs for the birds, then.

Oriano went into the cafe and turned on the espresso machine, waiting for it to warm up. Luca had texted the group to tell them he felt fine and not to worry. But what would they even do if he wasn’t fine? Being isolated on this island had felt like its own form of protection, an insulation from the chaotic news reports Oriano spent too much time looking at late into the night on his phone. But they weren’t protected at all. They were trapped like everyone else.

Oriano made his rounds, dropping off cappuccinos, and stopped by the brick walls to gaze out the iron-grated openings. He could hear the water, gently tapping the confines of the island, but the unseen haze of the lagoon felt unnaturally quiet.

There wasn’t much to look at out the window that night. The fog was thicker now, and Oriano couldn’t see the channel markers only a few hundred feet from where he leaned against the windowsill, balancing a paper plate full of pasta.

“Not spaghetti,” said Paolo emphatically, “Bigoli in salsa, a Venetian classic. Granted, this particular sauce was frozen and reconstituted and not handmade by my grandmother, but I think it defrosted quite nicely, and even I can cook pasta.” Paolo finished off his helping, gently tossing his plate into the trash. “Though I don’t know what we’ll do when the frozen food runs out. If I have to actually learn cooking rules, we might starve.”

“I’ll swim for the Lido before it comes to that.”

“Hopefully Chiara ordered sensible, idiot-proof groceries.”

Hopefully Luca will be back to making the food soon, Oriano thought. But he didn’t want to say it, because saying it admitted the possibility that things could turn out differently. Better not to say anything at all than to speak bad realities into existence.

For a while, they sat in silence, looking out into the quiet nothingness of the fog on the lagoon.

“Quarantine,” said Paolo finally. “It’s an Italian word, you know, quaranta giorni, forty days. That’s how long people coming into Venice from plague infected places had to wait before they could actually come into the city. Waiting out on these islands.”

“Do you think we’ll be holed up forty days?”

“Forty days, and forty nights, and who really knows if the end of it will ever come?”

Even though the fog was thick, Oriano decided to take a walk after dinner. He could still see at least a hundred feet in front of him, and that was good enough. What did the sailors and merchants do, hundreds of years ago, waiting forty days to see if it was safe for them to make their way into Venice? Did they worry? About themselves? About their friends?

Did they walk around as he did now, thinking about the trapped souls quarantined before them?

The fog felt like a blanket as Oriano walked. When the nights were clear, Oriano always had a sense of his place on this little rectangle of land in the whims of the tides, but as the fog drew close, he felt only the island, stretching into infinite unknown possibilities.

Walking along thus lost in his thoughts, Oriano almost didn’t notice a pair of boots sitting beneath a tree, nor did he fully process the way the fog moved strangely from the branches, curling into patterns, like a canopy of lace hanging down and around the boots, a curtain of uncertain purpose. Oriano did a double-take, the hair on his arms prickling at the sight. With the fog pressing ever closer, it felt like the island was holding its breath. As if the act of frozen waiting could allow the impossible to rise up before him. Cautiously he walked closer to the tree, holding his own breath without realizing he was doing so, but as he approached the mists slipped away, and the boots stretched out languidly, resolving into the form of Principessa.

Oriano let his breath out with a sigh. “What are you doing?” he accused her. She fixed him with a look. “What am I doing?” he asked on her behalf. He was nervous. He was jumpy. He was just being paranoid. He tried to tell his heart rate to go back to normal, but normal felt like a concept he’d already lost. What else would he lose before all was said and done?

Some time after midnight, Oriano gave up on rest. He looked around his room as if something there might distract him, but Oriano kept little of entertainment value in those cramped quarters. He was keyed up, and being still only wound him tighter. He decided to take another walk. Maybe this time a walk would calm him down.

As soon as he stepped outside of the building, he could see nothing but the fog. Everything was a spectral white, the lights of the path nothing more than slight and hazy bright spots in a sea of impenetrable mist. Oriano hesitated. He couldn’t even see beyond a foot in front of him.

The fog coated the air in silence. Oriano couldn’t hear the waves hitting the brick retaining walls outside the dormitory. He moved a few steps in the direction of the bricks, hoping to hear the water, and he couldn’t tell if he was hearing the water, distant and muffled, or if he only imagined that he did. He thought about going back to his room, but when he turned around, he was not certain which direction the building was in. Surely it was just behind him. He glared in a few directions, each as placidly white as the last. He heard an unearthly chirping from deep within the mists, and his stomach and heart crashed into each other in unexpected fear.

“It’s just the fog,” he whispered to himself. But the fog tasted like the thought of trees, and the weight of centuries. Oriano knew better than to run. He sat down on the paved path, pulling his knees up to his chest, and waited for the morning to find him.