- It’s not hard to disappear. The hardest part, it turns out, is taking the first steps. It doesn’t help that Connor is a light sleeper.
- He awoke disoriented, and so didn’t realize the implications of everything for several minutes. It was only after he finished brushing his teeth that he realized that he was alone, and that he shouldn’t be. He stared at himself in the mirror and thought: Sam.
- On a pad of hotel stationary was a note. It read, in full: “Connor, I’m leaving. Don’t worry.” There was also, in the bottom corner, a swiftly drawn afterthought of a heart.
He re-read the note several times. It refused to yield.
It was still early in the morning. The sun, low over the Tyrrhenian Sea, illuminated ghostly dust motes. Connor sat on the edge of the double bed, then stood, then sat on the chair by the desk. He tried to get his thoughts in order.
- Sam picked up his phone, turning down the brightness as quickly as he could. For a moment he thought of texting Connor, telling him everything. He thought better of it.
- In the summers, when they were both back home, he would visit Sam at his family’s house in the suburbs. He thought back to those evenings. The humidity, the trees, the distant skyline. The houses there stood far apart, like they had secrets to keep. Connor would never knock on the door.
- They stayed together because they believed that they understood each other better than anyone else could. Better than they could on their own, even.
Was this correct?
Well, in a certain sense, yes. This sense, though, could just as easily be understood as self-fulfilling.
- “What’s living here like?”
“Hmm. Well it’s not that different from visiting. It’s one of these places, you know. Not much beneath the surface.”
The phone rang. She reached for it.
- They were both 22 years old. They had been together for five years; nearly a quarter of their lives. Together, they had left childhood and emerged, fitfully, into adulthood.
In the beginning, they bonded over how similar they were. There was an erotic thrill to how well their bodies — was it matched? No, it was how their bodies doubled. We could be brothers, one of them had said, early on. They tried not to think about the implications.
Eventually, though, their differences caught up with them.
- Tiberius left for Capri after just over a decade on the throne. He never returned to Rome, leaving others to administer his empire and vie for power as he enjoyed Augustus’s palace, maybe or maybe not ordering people to leap to their deaths from the tall bluffs for his amusement. The empire still prospered, and he was notified by letter when his enemies were hunted down, their dismembered heads displayed in public as their statues were destroyed.
- In Italy, Connor daydreams, exhuming the past, mindless of the summer’s chaos even as it surrounds him. Here is where he really is: in bed, years ago. Sam running a finger along his collarbone.
- At university, they initially fell into the same friend group, but it dissipated after a couple of months. They saw few people aside from each other for the remainder of the semester.
“Do you ever think of how weird it is that this major will be our major for the rest of our lives? Like when we’ve graduated and people ask, ‘what did you study?’ the answer will always be the same.” Sam was staring at a form on his laptop.
“You could do joint honours,” Connor suggested, adjusting the lid of his coffee. “Or lie.”
- Another cat darts in front of him. Similarly patterned.
- The taxi made its way deftly through Capri’s narrow streets. The driver seemed focussed on the radio broadcast, excerpts of a speech from the neo-fascist leading the polls for the next month’s election. Connor gauged the driver’s expression as well as he could. Odds were he supported her. Would he himself vote for a fascist if he had to chauffeur tourists around at six AM? The formulation was probably insulting.
- Sam stares out the window, watches the ravine. The night is full of possibilities. It’s so close. But it doesn’t belong to him.
- He has breakfast, goes to the beach, walks through the town. Returns to the hotel.
In the afternoon he has a negroni beside the pool. The idea is that its bitterness will reflect his mood. It just tastes bad in a regular way. A girl on a lounger near him, maybe his age, gives him a sympathetic look. She holds a book titled Tarot and Queer Epistemologies.
He has dinner alone and wonders how to end a five-year relationship, and if, in fact, his has already ended. He pulls up an email with the subject line “Offer of Admission – Congratulations!” in order to reassure himself of the substance of his life.
- Capri was – inescapably – beautiful. It seemed almost insulting to Connor that there were people who lived their entire lives in places like this.
- Eyes open. “I thought my name wasn’t Connor anymore.”
“Connor’s your winter name.”
“So, what’s my summer name?”
- When Connor approached the café, he was confronted with a march of some kind. About twenty people were walking down the street, chanting something in Italian. A few of them had cardboard signs, one of which included a drawing of a cat with Xs for eyes.
- The café, like the hotel lobby, was filled with marine decor. There was a certain insecurity evident in the way Capri’s businesses chose to decorate, as if there was a danger of patrons forgetting where they were without blatant reminders.
- The sun sets faster here.
- Two-and-a-half years ago Sam dropped out of university. People found this surprising. He was told that he didn’t seem like the sort of person to do that. By now, he supposed, he did.
- They walk by a sculpture, and he tells her about how Augustus commissioned statues of himself all over the empire. The emperors who followed him would sometimes carve their faces onto those statues instead of commissioning new ones. And, if they did commission new ones, the Augustan sculptures were so ubiquitous that they’d often end up looking like them anyway.
After that, they spend a while looking at the sea.
She breaks the silence by asking him to describe Sam’s appearance.
For some reason he finds this difficult.
- He reaches for his aranciata, its ice long since melted.
- He wonders why he doesn’t tell anyone about Sam’s disappearance. There is something cold and hard within me. There is something capable of real malice.
- He waters the houseplants and makes the bed. Tries not to think about Connor, and where he is now. In a compromise, he allows himself to think about Capri in the abstract.
He pictures jutting rock and blue skies and gulls. He thinks of the reflection of water in a grotto. He thinks of Tiberius, the second emperor. And then, of course, he thinks of Connor.
He decides to go for a walk.
For a while, it works. He looks around, takes in the day. The air is not unpleasantly thick. The world is in full bloom: flowers bright, leaves dark. I am an animal, Sam thinks. Flesh and blood and heaps of guts. Legions of bacteria and cells. A universe unto myself. And I spend my days consumed by – what?
And then he goes back to thinking about Connor.
- She explains that people come here to die sometimes. Americans, mostly.
- In the few minutes before the taxi arrived, they exchanged pleasantries. Yes, it seemed like it was going to be a beautiful day. No, he hadn’t been here before. Well, luckily everyone speaks English anyway.
- During Roman triumphs, a slave would speak in the ear of the honoured conqueror. They repeated the following: “Remember, you’re just a man.” Tiberius first rode in a triumph at age twelve, a celebration of Octavian’s defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony at Actium. Certainly, later in life, as the Triumphator for his own victories, Tiberius would be personally reminded of his mortality. But in that moment, as a child watching his adoptive father, did he hear what the slave said to Octavian? Or did he, like the adoring crowds, see only a shining deity?
- Connor slides the balcony door shut, sealing behind him the conditioned air and indistinct conversation. The balcony is large and nearly empty. The view beyond the precipice is dark, sea undifferentiated from night sky. One figure stands to his left, smoking.
- She asks him if he’s here alone. He hesitates. When he says “my boyfriend went missing” it takes him by surprise.
She looks surprised too. He keeps going. Explains that he woke up and Sam was gone. Says he hasn’t called the authorities because… Well, because he just had a feeling that Sam wouldn’t want that. Had a feeling that he needed to be the one to find him.
But I’m not sure, he concludes, where to start.
He can sense her excitement.
- And here he was, abandoned in all this strange beauty. All the possibilities and consequences of Sam’s disappearance seem to unfurl before him, mixing with the sea and the bluffs.
- The streets were different by foot. The old alleyways were built to human scale, and, where they had been constricting in the taxi, seemed accommodating and charming as Connor wandered through them. If he did want to search for Sam, what would he have to do? Think like Sam, came the answer conditioned by a boyhood of detective books. Well, if anyone could, it was him.
Still, the strangeness of the situation prevented him from getting in Sam’s head. He felt he had been able to before, when the plane took off, and Sam squeezed Connor’s hand while looking out the window. He felt a sympathy for Sam’s compulsive revisiting of the itinerary later on, felt he could see the document through his eyes. But now it was clear he had missed something fundamental. He turns another corner. Sighs.
- She tells him that he is going to be a vessel. There is a subterranean perceptual dimension that he has been blind to. She will reach out to Sam through it. He will be her conduit.
- There was a myth that the entire island was constructed as a single villa.
- By nightfall it almost feels real. He pictures Sam beside him on the airplane. Pictures himself stirring in the night, semi-consciously sensing that something is wrong before falling back asleep. Imagines pacing around the room in the morning, searching the hotel.
He remembers his mother reading, then re-reading, a book on the law of attraction. What you think, she had told him, becomes what you have. The results for her had been mixed. Still, as he lays out a chronology of Sam’s disappearance in his mind, it begins to solidify. He can almost hear the door closing, Sam’s quick footsteps down the tile.
- The difficulty is that cats are not seen as pets here, she explains. They are not precious; they are wild animals – vermin even. Only tourists are sympathetic.
- She tells him to empty his mind. He tries as best he can. Her grip is firm, and his hands are a little sweaty. He had thought she might start talking. She doesn’t. They keep staring into each other’s eyes. Hers are dark.
He can’t tell how fast the time passes, but eventually it does.
She says she’s finished. He asks where Sam is, as though she knows the answer and he doesn’t.
She says she has an idea of where to look.
- There was a spider on the wall. He couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead.
- They stand on Tiberius’s Leap. Where the exiled emperor did or did not have the slaves and emissaries that displeased him killed. Everything is blue and bright. He looks down, expecting something, despite all logic.
Of course, there’s nothing. Rock and water and little else. The history of death invisible.
He thinks about Tiberius hiding out here. He thinks about Sam, an ocean away. He thinks about the ancient Romans facing their death in this spot. Imagines the fall.
Then he feels her hand on his back.
For a moment, there it all is. The runaway boyfriend. The housebound boyfriend. The emperor in exile. The sacrificed ancients. His life. His death. For a single moment, he feels her hand it’s all there. Reality and fantasy and history and myth, interwound.
In the next moment, she will push, or she won’t. And the door will close.
- Finally, they would go their separate ways. And each would keep going for as long as he could.