COIN: a story collaboration for Cabin programs | Idaho Gives 2017

Spoonfuls of Yellow Mash

[Alan Minskoff]

The song plays loudly in DJ’s head. The morning melody repeats and asks to be answered, Why do fools fall in love? It is Florence and the rain soaked streets look like patent leather. At 25, DJ watches two men in rumpled overalls replace three limestone pieces in a thousand-year-old apartment building.  Dusk and the October sky hang like a moist cloak. The air smells of tomato sauce and basil. DJ hums “sing so gay,” zips his blue parka and walks towards the river.

[Malia Collins]

When he couldn’t speak Italian, he made up the conversations people had around him. A man and a woman? They argued about love. She called him a devil. He pleaded for him to love her back. On the sidewalks outside of restaurants and cafes, all the sounds of words he didn’t know and the stories he made up about them. In his mind, people fell in and out of love, or a stranger came into town and chaos ensued. The conversations were always fraught, frantic with longing. After three months of language school and an ex-girlfriend who called him her baby, his Italian was good enough to order coffee, and understand sentences like the ones in his language book. And that morning, standing there watching the two men in front of the apartment, he hears their conversation—and understands it. Wrong size, one said to the other, pass the glue. That’s it? That’s what all the mystery was about? He wants to rewind, go back to when he didn’t know. He misses his own story.

Florence is a good place to fall in love, and a terrible place to fall out of it. He walks next to the river. Cold hits his collar. He hears the water lap against the sidewalk. Ahead two women walk, clutching each other’s arms. Before Simone left, before she stood over him in bed and said—I thought you were going to be different—DJ loved Florence. He was a man who whistled to himself as he walked. He woke up in the morning and felt joy settled so deeply in his heart he thought he couldn’t bear it. Simone wore his t-shirts and wrote in his books.

This was different. He walks now and feels heavy and empty both. He turns up his street. His apartment building stands blocky and gray against the sky. His neighbor, Parisa, is the only one he knows now. He’s too broke to change his plane tickets. You just have to wait this out, his mother tells him, every time he calls.

Parisa loves Javid and makes him yellow mash. He’s been gone for two months, on a trip Parisa can’t tell him about. The yellow mash she made for him she makes for DJ now. The hallways in their building always smell like saffron and rose water. Parisa brings him small glass containers of yellow mash—to fix your heart—she says. He eats it, spoonful by spoonful. It’s love medicine, she says, smiling. Today she’s standing in front of his door waiting. He hears the records she plays through the thin walls. He wonders if Parisa’s ache might be bigger than his.              

“You’re back late,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Parisa smiles, always, and hands him his mail. Even in Florence, he gets fliers to join a gym.

“Tomorrow I want walk with you,” she says. “These walls feel too lonely.”

They make a date. DJ walks upstairs. He sits and eats the yellow mash. The sugar clings to his teeth. His lips feel solid. He hears Parisa cry next door. He peeked in her apartment once. Bowls of yellow mash were lined up on the table. Strands of saffron fell from the table like hair. Outside the clouds move and he can see the horizon. The sky has been grey for days. Church bells go off. Again. A woman walks her dogs. The river moves. It’s his constant. He looks at the calendar on his wall. Only forty-seven days left. You got this, he thinks.

His language class starts back up and DJ goes. He needs friends. He wants to speak better Italian. A minute passes like a day sometimes. He’ll conjugate verbs just to think about something else.

The language school is in the basement of an old church. When they speak, their voices echo off the walls. The teacher brings cookies and puts them on the table. She writes sentences on the board and they repeat them out loud, back to her. DJ thinks he should be better than this. You need an Italian girlfriend, his mother said. That’s the best way to learn another language. He’s never talked to his mother more than he has since the breakup.

DJ repeats the sentences and thinks he can feel his neighbor cringing. It’s adorable, she says, that’s how I sounds when I think something is adorable. She’s close to his age, and studying to become an architect. “I’ll make you cookies way better than these. Come over,” she says. I live just around the corner.

DJ divides his life up in two—before Simone and after. He thinks people can smell his sadness. Parisa even told him once that she could. “It rises up around you like dust,” she said. “It blows under my doors and I can’t breathe.”

He and the woman from his Italian class walk out together. Her name is Heather. Before they reach the end of the street she says, “Stop.” She takes his notebook from him. She writes, in curlicue script, Heather Feather with wings of leather. He smiles down at her. It’s the kind of writing girls in high school would do. But for a moment he feels his breath lift. He’ll make it to the rest of the afternoon.

Heather’s roommates make him speak Italian and he makes up stories. He imagines what they must look like from the outside. He doesn’t know any real Italians. His days are filled with people from everywhere else. Heather brings out sandwiches. She says—this apartment is haunted. At night you can hear chains rattle.

[Colum McCann]

Everything rattles. The past rattles. The present rattles. Even the future rattles. The days feel whiplashed. The time that was whispers into the time that now is. 

DJ closes the door to Heather’s apartment. He leaves the ghosts of the moment behind. The click of the door handle is the click of every other door he has ever touched. He takes the staircase instead of the elevator. Downstairs, he opens the fire door, fully expecting an alarm to pierce the air. No sound. All silence. 

Outside—in the sudden sting of sunlight—he turns and looks upwards. He is quite sure he can hear laughter now filtering down from Heather’s apartment. It torques him. And yet there is something reassuring in their laughter. They are real. He pats himself down as if to reassure himself that he actually exists, that he is not some character made up from various angles. 

Real. I am real. 

So many things these days feel unreal to DJ. He drifts in a cloud of language. He searches to make sense of it. He feels as if he dwells inside a Borges story. He wants to make sense of the patterns. He wants to find music. He aches for a word to come along. A sort of love medicine, yes. 

The river beckons. 

He walks down towards the banks in the deepening dark. The song returns to him. Why do birds sing so gay?  The rain feels as if it is falling, now, from below.   

[Christian Winn]

The river is a low hush before him. He shuts his eyes, and feels the weight of its flow, feels gravity tugging all this so slowly toward the sea.

“Ghosts,” he whispers, breathing slowly, smelling the brine and history, wondering who else has stood right here, helpless and so fully alone. “So many ghosts. I’m one of you.”

DJ opens his eyes. Shuts them once more, remembering Simone, that last morning. He was lying on the bed propped against the headboard, reading. The air was fresh coffee. Orange peels. The lingering carbon of burnt toast. Simone was in the shower, humming a song he could not name, but felt he knew. Her pitch was just off key, and he loved this about her. Listening to her hum, giggle, murmur to herself he felt a singular profound peace, his body not his body, and this world of theirs an unfamiliar place.

Standing above the river, he thinks, maybe I was already a ghost that morning. And she saw that in me. She knew.

Simone stepped from the shower, and dried off. Cocked her head and smiled at him, he believes, or at least that’s what he chooses to remember. Steam floated as background. She wrapped herself in the towel and came to him. Pacing slowly, a serious look on her face now.

“DJ,” she said. “I have to tell you something. It might be … it might not be a thing you want to hear.”

He sat up. Smiled nervous. A pinch in his chest.

“What?” he said. “What could that possibly be?” DJ watched her slowly sit. “You look beautiful. Freshly scrubbed. Lovely.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “Please don’t.”

He reached for Simone. She leaned away, but took his hand.

“Listen,” she said. “Today. Today, I’m leaving.”

“For…?” He sat up further, squeezed her fingers. Maybe a little too tight, he thinks now.

“For good,” she said. “For something else. It’s just …”

“It’s what, Simone?”

“Please,” she said. “Just let me say this.”

DJ let his hand drop to the sheets beside her knee. He grabbed a handful of blanket and made a fist around it. He shut his eyes tight, smelling soap and a bitter catch of breath. He said nothing. Just waited.

“This isn’t what I,” she said, standing at the bedside. “You aren’t what I need. I mean. I’m sorry. I really am. And…”

He crossed his legs, trembling and feeling this sense of disappearing already upon him.

“And?” he said.

 “There’s Megan.”

“Who,” he said, “Is Megan?”

“A girl,” Simone said. “A girl I met last month.”

“I see,” he said. “I…”

“I’ll be gone by tonight,” she said, stepping into the hallway. “You’re better without me, DJ.  Really, you are.”

Above the river, DJ opens his eyes. The wind lifts. A small ferry boat floats slowly by. Filled with tourists snapping pictures and laughing, wearing bright jackets and hats, and he thinks how. How can those lives be happening, right here before me?

[Aimee Bender]

But they are. They are most certainly happening. One is Simone’s which now is separate from his, no longer available to him. Her mind going away, her body leaving his. No more of those long Simone arms. No more Simone standing for three hours in front of the David until he felt actually jealous. Then there is Parisa with her yellow mash that has gotten into his dreams. It’s so vivid in the dreams; sometimes it has arms. It is equal parts nightmare and savior, that mash.

Then there’s this new girl, Megan. Who is Megan? Is it Megan, her specific self, that lured Simone, or is it that she is a girl? What is the draw to Megan? He is caught entirely in his own experience but these other people circle him, bother him. Heather—who made a rhyme in English—but what is the name Heather in Italian anyway? Everyone just calls her Heather with an Italian accent, and it doesn’t work. DJ neither. They don’t belong here.

He feels a call to go find Heather, to find her and tell her he is in love with her, both of them stuck in the way they don’t fit and to be together but he has tried that before and it’s just not enough to hold a couple together. In fact, it was the original draw to Simone: French Simone, who was in Italy to study art history, he, DJ, from near Valley Forge, PA, with money for travel after his father’s death. When they met they bonded over their mispronunciation of Firenze, and Simone had laughed with a whistle in it.

The very sight of someone else who did not know how to say things correctly, someone beautiful, was enough for dinner and a drink, and for all his hopes to line up like they usually did. This was his problem, always. To hang hopes on made up structures. Flimsy structures. He left the room and went for a walk. It was evening. Someone was playing a guitar in an alley, singing in Spanish. He felt himself drifting over.

[Anna Webb]

And there he was, at the Arno again.

The Ponte Vecchio, province of ancient gold sellers, impossible delicacy of arches. But also the look of the shantytown somehow. The little slanted roofs and pell-mell colors. Sandstone and ochre.

Sometimes, he knew, travel turned up sights capable of taking him out of himself. Even out of his grief over Simone. And here something saved him: a troupe, a religious parade? A line of holy people, all in black, but stained orange from the last of the just-setting sun.

Nuns.

Was this a holy day? The calendar was packed with them. Days for every saint, sometimes two or three saints to a day. They each had their specialty. St. Roche, patron saint of dogs. St. Bernard, patron saint of alpinists. And Dymphna. Sylph beauty, murdered in the end, but resurrected as patron saint of the crazed, the unhinged. 

His own name, David. Surely there was a day for Saint David.

He could feel the passage of time then. And the heavy history of the place where he stood. He took comfort in it.

DJ remembered art history texts. Floods that turned the Arno into a torrent. Broken furniture, mud, the bodies of animals knocking against those great Vecchio arches.

The nuns, folds of dark fabric and surprisingly elegant leather shoes with tiny laces. They passed him, not looking his way.

[Karen E. Bender]

DJ keeps walking past the nuns, out onto the sunlight, and then he sees a shadow moving toward him. Something is running toward him, like a low cloud. As it comes closer, he can see that the cloud is actually seventeen cats. 

The cats are a lively group, with a long history together, and, being around tourists quite a bit, they are sensitive to language and communication. All of them believe they understand the secret to finding love. None of the cats admit this, though they all know somehow, glancing proudly at one other. They are unable to share what they know to other species, for when they open their mouths all that comes out is meow. Some have made efforts to learn Italian, but to no avail. It is extremely frustrating to them that all that that anyone around them–humans, dogs, birds, etc.–can understand is meow. They know so much! Truly, all other species appear rather ignorant. One day, they hope, the humans will consult them. 

Each cat is able see what has been happening with DJ and his various loves. They want to tell him what to do, but they cannot. It is not the typical romantic gestures, they think, that DJ is performing incorrectly. It is not the way he pronounces any particular words. 

The cats run around the Uffizi in a large pack and murmur possible solutions for him. Some locate the source of his problem in the way he nods. It is too quick an action, they feel. The cats are experts at detecting the false nod. Others feel the nod is fine, but others are troubled by his humming, which they think is off key and might disturb others. But some cats find the humming quite melodic. 

It is not anything DJ is doing, think some cats. Perhaps it is some unfairness in the world.

Some of the cats, assertive ones, want to be part of the solution. DJ’s loneliness feels familiar to them. They rub against his legs and try to erase his sorrow. They look at him, one person standing, the sun behind him. DJ sees the cats, reaches down and pets one. DJ’s hand on the cat’s fur makes the cat arch and purr. DJ has a gentle touch, says the cat to the others. Often, humans are unaware of their own beauty. There is something kind in his fingertips. There is something in his fingertips that feels real. 

[Mitch Wieland]

When DJ lifts his hand, the cat turns her head and stares. Her green eyes take him in with a steadiness that unsettles him. He cannot be mistaken on this: this young tabby cat, with the dark swirling stripes and neon eyes, understands what he has been through, what he is feeling and thinking.

“You are a lonely American in a land of lovers,” he hears inside his head, “carrying around your broken heart like a trophy.”

DJ wonders if he is hearing the cat’s thoughts, or if his mind has finally succumbed to the grief he has born so gracefully these weeks, his sadness a cloak he has worn on his walks through these gorgeous streets.

“It is indeed my trophy,” he says aloud. He reaches out and pets the cat again. “I will pack this trophy in my suitcase and take it home. I will put it on the kitchen counter.”

The tabby shakes her head. As if on cue, the other cats move away from DJ, as if they have decided to give the two of them space.

“You have been looking to replace love with love,” the cat says when they are alone. “There are things other than love.”

“To be honest,” DJ says, “I have, at times, enjoyed these weeks to myself.”

“I was just joking,” the tabby says. “There is only love. Don’t you listen to the songs? Read the books? Watch the films? As that one band sang, ‘Love, love, love.’ Forgive me, I am not good with names.”

“And I was joking too. Since Simone left, I have not breathed a single breath that did not catch in my chest.”

The tabby stares at him, a long dramatic moment. “So there is the lovely Parisa with her broken heart and yellow mash. There is Heather and her feather. There is whole a city full of young women and men. What will it be?”

“I leave in twenty-five days. I can make it from here.”

“Twenty-five like your age. One day for every year you have lived and breathed. You can live lifetime in twenty-five days.”

“What would you suggest?”

“You have a friend who serves you the yellow mash?”

“I do.”

“And I am a cat with an empty belly?”

“You want me to take you home? You want to meet Parisa?”

“I want you to come bearing gifts. You can knock on her door holding a lovely tabby. It will be a good step forward for you.”

“And a dinner for you.”

“I’m just trying to help here.”

DJ reaches down and lifts the cat into his arms. She settles in, warm and light in his arms. Her purring sends the smallest vibrations onto his bare skin. He walks through the streets bearing this gift. He is pleased with himself. He is doing something new, breaking his routine of loss and woe. He is doing something outside himself. He imagines the look on Parisa’s face when he holds the cat out to her, an offering of solace and love.

At her apartment, DJ knocks once and steps back, smiling. He wonders if they will have dinner together, the three of them, eating their yellow mush, a content family sharing news of the day.

When the door opens, Parisa is smiling, her face beaming in the way his mind has already seen. A shadow moves behind her, then Javid’s face appears like a benevolent sun.

“Hello, neighbor,” he says. “I have returned.” 

[Anthony Doerr]

Impossible! How could Javid have returned, and without warning? The guy looks more muscular than ever; veins twine up his neck; triceps stretch his shirt; he wears a fresh pink scar on his cheek that twitches like a centipede as he gulps down more of Parisa’s heart-mending yellow mash. 

“Parisa says your Italian has improved,” Javid says, that benevolent-sun face glowing all over DJ. DJ shrugs. The tabby stirs in DJ’s arms.

DJ tries, in Italian: “Did you have a nice trip?”

Javid’s gaze does not leave DJ’s. He spoons in another mouthful of yellow mash and swallows it. “It was… stimulating.”

Parisa says, “You know we cannot tell you more than this, DJ.”

Damn it all! Why was this Javid so mysterious, so muscly, and what kind of a name was ‘Javid’ anyway? Was he Italian Special Forces? An assassin who worked for the Pope? Maybe it was just the sight of all that yellow mash—equal parts nightmare and savior—messing with DJ’s mind. It had seemed, to DJ, for weeks, that nothing was really happening in his life—that Florence (For-Ends-Zee—as Simone used to mispronounce) had become a purgatory, that all he could do was wander avenues of memory and self-pity, but then he saw that astonishing nun parade! And then seventeen cats! And suddenly life felt as if, impossibly, it had shifted to present tense!

Those cats, seventeen of them, swirling around his ankles, and the warm tabby with the dark swirling stripes and neon eyes, blinking up at him with sentient eyes. He thought it was going to change his life.

DJ stands on the threshold of Parisa’s apartment; Parisa and Javid watch him with their benevolent-sun faces. 

“Are you bene, DJ?”

DJ takes on step back. Please, he thinks, to the cat, say something now. Tell me what to do. Put that voice back inside my head. The tabby squirms in his arms. Had he only imagined that she spoke to him? 

The cat blinks. “Wrong size,” she says. “Pass the glue.” 

DJ’s heart catapults in his chest. “I’m sorry, Parisa,” he says, “I have just realized, I forgot my… my, my stetoscopio. I must go.”

Stetoscopio, noun, stethoscope: a word from today’s Italian lesson. An instrument to measure the heart. DJ half-sprints down the rosewater-stinking halls, careens back down the stairs, feels some break in the crust surrounding his life: Twenty-five days left! And then what? Go back Valley Forge, PA? Where everything is always battle reenactments and Continental Army, where memories of his deceased dad are buried everywhere? Dad, who used to dress up like George Washington every December and make DJ carry a musket barefoot behind him in the snow? He has to go back to that? 

DJ staggers out into the street. The daylight fails. To his left waits the Viale Heathcock; to the right, Viale Webster; honeysuckle twines up the side of the building; an archway he has never explored before glows in the last sunlight. 

Why do fools fall in love? Why do smart people, for that matter? It’s a disease we all succumb to eventually. Like death, maybe. Love would lose its meaning were it not balanced by its loss. Didn’t Jung say that? Maybe it was Hall & Oates.

Simone is gone, Simone who wore his periodic table T-shirt, who wrote weird marginalia in his copy of Paradise Lost. Heather Feather seems cruel, and what if she really has leather wings stashed somewhere in that creepy apartment of hers? And now Parisa is out, too, Parisa who didn’t even seem all that attractive until about eight minutes ago, when he saw Javid in her apartment and realized how unbelievably lucky Javid was, how much DJ would give to be in his shoes. How unfair it was that Javid had returned, as though some great, wily, controlling intelligence in the sky had determined to close that door on him forever. 

No, it’s just the cat: the cat is is final option, the only promise DJ has left to redeem his final twenty-five days in Florence, the lifetime he believes he must live before he leaves the Old World for the New One. It’s the cat he has left, this amazing, cryptic magical, paranormal tabby. 

He sets her down; she takes a long stretch, then glances back at him with her big, vertical pupils. 

“Follow me,” she says and — 

[Kerri Webster]

Vague dread (as opposed to specific dread) stirs in DJ’s chest.He wants to decline. He wants to say, politely but firmly, “I can’t go for that; no, no can do,” but doesn’t know the Italian. What is the wrong size? What sort of glue, and to what use? DJ’s head’s gone swimmy from days of sugar, lemon, and champagne. Not clowder but cloud, the cats watch, rub, drift. DJ follows the tabby down narrow street after narrow street. None of this is Dymphna-worthy, just the low-level acedia of a twenty-five year old humming the words of a fourteen-year-old boy from Harlem, ooooo wah, ooooo wah, ooooo wah, ooooo wah. Thank God for phonemes, DJ thinks.  As he walks, he tries to delineate real and not real: river, real; limestone, real; mash, very real; dead father’s money, real; Italian Special Forces—Google later.They walk, tabby leading, DJ following, until they reach the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. Is this a pilgrimage, then? David wonders. If so, when did it begin? Growing up in Pennsylvania, that word had signified one thing: the Valley Forge Pilgrimage, oldest annual Boy Scout event in the world. He feels underdressed. His heart is so loud as he stands outside the door, no stetoscopio is needed. The tabby rubs against his legs. Static. Light bounces off the cathedral dome into DJ’s eyes. He squints. Walks up the ancient steps. Pushes open the great doors.

Saint David’s symbol is the leek.

[Alan Heathcock]DJ followed the cats, now walking in a parade of two, like clerics. They crossed through the great hall of the cathedral that smelled of incense and fish. The tabby by his side, he followed the cats to a set of stairs.Up and up, they climbed. His lungs bucked. His thighs quaked. Soon they came out into a room even above the dome, open to the sky, all of Florence far below, the simple glory of white stone and pottery roofs. In the center of this round room stood a great stone basin, what might have once been a fountain, now a mirror pond of brackish water.The tabby cat clawed at DJ's leg. He lifted the cat and it seemed to smile."Have you heard of the Tower of Babel?" it asked."Is that here in Florence?""No," it said. "From the Bible."DJ shook his head. "I've never been much for that kind of thing.""After the Great Flood," the cat said. "All of the people spoke one single language. This unity drove them to great ambitions and they decided to build a tower so high it would reach to Heaven. God saw that with one language nothing they sought would be out of reach. So God confounded their speech. One language became seventy-two and since then we've been an absolute mess.""So this is God's fault, then?""Better than to blame yourself."DJ couldn't tell if the cat was being sarcastic. The tabby squirmed to get down and he dropped it to the dusty floor and it hopped up onto the rim of the mirror pond. "Look," it told him, then eyed the water. "See."DJ stepped to the stone basin and peered into the still green water. There he saw the reflection of the room's roof, an image of a tower of spiraling rock disappearing into the clouds. But something in the orientation had shifted for DJ. The tower now looked to him like a tunnel leading down.DJ passed his eyes into the water and down into the spiraling tunnel. Down and down, he fell with his eyes to emerge in a field he'd played in as a boy, back behind his home in Valley Forge.His father stood there beside him, dressed like George Washington, tricorn hat and everything, smoking a pipe. Such a sad quiet man. Such a lost man, DJ's mother gone years ago from an enlarged heart that stopped too soon.His father regarded him and said, "You want some advice then?""Sure." This wasn't something his father did, give advice. DJ was curious."Talk more to people and less to cats." He smiled sweetly, winked. "Either that or finish the goddamn tower."He was kidding. DJ had great affection for his father's jokes that were never really funny. "But what do I say to them? Parisa. Simone. Heather. I never know what to say.""Tell them that," his father said."Tell them what?" DJ blinked, confounded. Then he was back in the tower room, in the clouds above the great cathedral.Though the sky had lightened, lights were coming down in the street's far below. This was life to DJ, in all its grandeur and disappointment, feeling he'd passed through something while not having gone anywhere at all.He looked at the tabby there on the basin rim. "What did he mean 'Tell them that'?""I think he meant what he said," the cat said, rubbing itself again him."No, wait, I mean–" DJ was more frustrated now that he'd ever been. That's how it is getting close but not close enough. "Can anyone just tell me straight how to love someone and have them love you back?"The tabby meowed, what sounded like a chuckle. It hopped off the rim of the basin and said, "I’m not God, if that's what you're asking."The tabby scampered away, the horde of cats following it back to the stairs.DJ took on last glance over the darkening city. He thought he should stay up in the room, never go back down to the streets and the humans and all that mess. But then he turned and fell back in line with the cats to descend the long winding stairwell.[Lauren Groff]He sang to himself, walking home, but he'd forgotten all the lyrics of all the songs that came to him and found himself humming. He made it, somehow, to his bed in the dank apartment down the long stone street. He slept deeply and long and when he woke in the bright afternoon, he thought all was well, that the terrifying day before had been flushed from his bloodstream, that there was no more strangeness left in him. But in the shower, a small, still voice spoke to him, and though he listened hard, he could hear the voice but not the words. He turned off the water to listen more deeply, but still it was only voice, no meaning. His skin prickled all over his body; he shivered, even when he put his clothes on.In the street, walking toward the bakery where he ate his morning espresso and cornetti every day, everything rang with portent. The sun shone back in his face from the shop windows and made him wince. The cats stared at him with special intensity. A woman sang as she swept the sudsy water from her sidewalk with a broom, but he couldn't hear her Italian, he couldn't hear the words. He stood, panting, at the bakery counter and the girl who stood behind it, who gave him his pastry and coffee most mornings with a laugh and a flirt, looked first startled then frightened when he couldn't form words and when he seemed to not understand hers. She handed him the food and waved him off. He felt like a cursed thing, moving away.He came back out to the street, and there was the bright and vicious Arno, laughing at him in the sunlight, and he ran from it into the maze of streets and became disoriented. He found himself home, at last, in the afternoon.He took another shower, hoping it would help. He took another nap. But he was clean and rested and still the words didn't come. He took out his phone, which had pinged, and saw Simone's dark and solemn face on the screen, a shot he'd taken of her when she didn't know he was looking; she was calling him, at last, at last! He picked up and managed a sound, but could not make his way through the words she was speaking; it was a mash, a garble. He tried harder, but she grew frustrated and hung up. For a very long time, he sat there on his sad secondhand mattress, his heart thumping, feeling as though he was going to die of loneliness.You, perhaps, have seen this man, DJ; perhaps you've seen one of the host of men like him. You know him. He has been to parties at your friend of a friend's, the moderately good-looking man with the thinning hair who helps to man the grill, who claps when the little girls come out and do their dances, who picks up cups and crumpled napkins when everyone else has gone home. Inveterate bachelor, the men call him with admiration. The women call him that, also, but in a guarded tone. They don't offer to set them up with their sisters, their coworkers, their friends. He always tries too hard and yet, somehow, not hard enough. He sings to himself when he photocopies things at work and the snippets of the songs are always a little offensive, but not enough to protest. He will always say he is in love, oh, man, she's a magnificent creature, gorgeous, legs like this!, but there's something false in the statement: you never quite believe it.And then you hear: there had been a psychic break, in his mid-twenties that had lasted for a terribly long time. He'd been in Italy then; his mother had to come fetch him home to Pennsylvania. And if he shudders away from limoncello or gelato, if he fails to show up to the spaghetti dinner that's so important to the daughter of the friend of a friend, you chalk it up to this bad time. A strange night, you imagine. A revulsion for polenta or tabby cats. When you think of him, you try to think of the man in the Polo shirt with the tongs at the grill, but you can't, you can only see the frightened boy on a bare mattress in a house he could never make a home, in a place that would remain foreign, where the light off a treacherous river shines through the windows, and dances on the walls.