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It’s just another day, another balmy April morning, and the ceiling is white as ever.
It’s pristine. Not a speck of dust, not even a whisper of cobwebs starting to take form. It’s spotless, soulless, perfect and prim. Just the way he likes it.
Bruno Buccellati sleeps on his back. He doesn’t toss and turn. When he wakes up in the morning, his eyes slowly peel open and he looks at that ceiling. Morning light casts rectangular rays across that thick white paint. His mind is a blank slate. He starts the morning rounds.
For Bruno, life is held together by cycles. You follow each task methodically to the next, not a step out of line or out of sync. If you can stick to your routines, and only if you stick to them, you can stay afloat. Stepping out of your strict timetable makes you liable to sink. If there was one thing he knew, it was that he couldn’t afford to sink. He was keeping afloat perfectly fine. He was an honest man. He had a duty to fulfill and so he would. He kept himself driven by the whip in his heart, the gnawing dog of despair at his ankles if he broke out of the lines.
So he awoke each day at 6 o’ clock sharp. He started at the light on his blank, blank ceiling for five minutes exactly. And then he went on with his day.
First thing in the morning routine is brushing your teeth. Water splashed on the face. A comb through the hair. A braid. Then to the laundry room to retrieve his clothes.
Bruno owned one white suit. It was beautiful. It was very expensive. It was custom-tailored and singular. He’d never wanted this suit. He resented this suit a great deal. He owned just one.
Each night he placed it in the washing machine as he ate his dinner.
After dinner, it went in the dryer.
This is where he would come collect it each morning.
You are not supposed to wash these hand-made garments in machines. They’re dry-clean only. But, at home, Bruno’s job had been the laundry and it was one thing he couldn’t let go of. One thing he wouldn’t let his status replace. Other mafioso brought their suits to the cleaners, still bloody and all. It was a power-play, like that. Show those business owners who you are and that you aren’t messing around. They’d usually do it for free, then.
But Bruno liked doing laundry, and so he didn’t. He already had the apartment. He didn’t need to prove anything any further, he thought.
He missed laundry the way it was, back when he was a child.
They had a clothesline, instead of using a machine to dry the clothes. Leaving the clothes out on the line to dry endowed them with the scent of sea air, embedded deep in the fibers of the fabric. The salt in the wind made clothes lose their softness. It made them just a bit rougher. When the clothes came down, they’d be warm from the sun off the water, and they smelled of sea salt and sand. Bruno remembers how his fathers shirts would feel after days out in the ocean wind, stiffened dry after being soaked through. It’s as if he can feel it beneath his fingers, sees his digits shrink and shift when he pulls those old shirts from his bottom drawer. Unwashed. Untouched by that city water and too-strong detergent scent.
His own clothes were soft as silk, fine fabrics beautifully sewn. He didn’t like them much at all. No, he hated the finer things in life.
He dresses himself in front of the mirror. Slow and methodical. Every piece in place. He considered himself a fashionable man, he took great care to look his best. He’d always placed great value in appearances. And appearances are very important in the mafia. That’s why he lived here, after all.
His home was just the same as the glaze over his eyes. It was wide and vacant and cold. It had been some time since Bruno had felt like himself. It was as if he was already dead, powered by nothing but his word. He pulled himself awake like a marionette, puppeteering himself from task to task as the sun spun through its spin-cycle ‘til he could put himself back to bed. He wasn’t very old at all. He wasn’t even a man yet. He was only seventeen. And these were his days. He’d stare out across the kitchen table, at all those empty chairs. Try to keep his eyes from flitting to the hallway. All those empty rooms.
What seventeen year old lives in a four-bedroom apartment?
Well, he had the money. Why not?
He was barely anybody in Passione. And even his meager position had great weight. He was known. He had status.
Status means power, means money, means expensive apartment.
It’s a day like any other. He doesn’t keep groceries in the house. If he wants breakfast, he’ll have to get some when he goes out. Which he will. He does every single day. This isn’t a matter of if. Auto-pilot.
He grabs his bundle of dirty clothes, the hand-me-down flannel pajama pants he’d worn the previous night, and carries them to the washing machine. Puts them inside, turns the dial to indicate an extra-small load. Pours the correct measurement of laundry detergent (Gain, Ocean Escape; didn’t do the trick) over them and slams the lid. His machine has a glass top so that you can see inside as it runs. He allots himself 3 minutes to look. Each day.
Round and round, just the same. Water rushes across the fabric. The pajamas he wears each night were his father’s old clothes. When he wears them he can’t help but see his age climbing steadily higher. Someday soon he’ll be as old as his father. Someday soon he’ll be even older.
His father is frozen in time. He’ll never be any older. He’ll never take his clothes out to the sea again. This ratty old t-shirt will only ever smell like the artificial blue gunk called Ocean Escape. The washing machine’s waves toss it back and forth. How much longer will life be like this? It’s always the same. Nothing new. Cyclical suffering. The only thing that changes is who will die in front of Bruno today. Someone young or someone old? Someone way too young? Someone not quite old enough? Will it be violence? Or drugs? An accident? With vicious intent?
It’s been 4 minutes.
The spell is broken.
His internal clock is nearly flawless. It’s been a long time since he’s gone even a hair out of place. The cycle’s all crooked now. The illusion is shattered.
Today is decidedly different.
He shakes his head, wills the thought to fall right out his ears. He can get back on schedule.
But he can’t.
The day is mostly uneventful. Petty neighborhood disputes. Lost dogs. A day without much blood at all. A gift of kindness from the world. Perhaps it was meant to soothe him from the morning’s mishap. To some degree, it did. Until the evening, at least.
8pm. Across the restaurant, a young voice rises shrill above the clinking of cutlery. A child is being clutched by the neck by a particularly angry member of the waitstaff (not all that uncommon, all things considered.) But when Bruno casts his eyes over to the scene, something strikes him about that child. He can’t exactly put his finger on what. Ratty blonde hair reaches out from his head in every direction. It’s greasy. His clothes are high-end, if grimy. He’s nothing like the usual suspect. There’s a haughtiness to his posture that betrays a life of social status, and a nervousness to his voice that betrays an inexperience with this kind of thing. He isn’t stuttering, he isn’t making threats. He’s citing the laws. Spitting out strings of numbers and letters. There may be nerves but not a hint of shame.
He says, I have done nothing wrong. Now would you let me go?
The man seems to show no indication that he will be doing any such thing. His fist grows tighter and tighter. Bruno glances an eye down to his wristwatch. In five minutes, he’s meant to be leaving to return back to his apartment. He didn’t have the time. He really didn’t. And yet.
He hears his own voice rise from his throat, feels his legs carry him across the room before he can stop himself. Before he can understand why he does it. But his presence has weight. His voice moves mountains. The second he steps near, the man drops the child to the ground and stands down in deference. He starts rubbing at his neck, looking up at Bruno with a strange bewilderment in his eyes. The man is swiftly dismissed.
The child’s name is Pannacotta Fugo. He’s thirteen years old. He’s got nobody and nothing else left. He says his rage has finally eaten him up, but he seems calm to Bruno. He’s just a child, after all. But Bruno catches a glimpse in his eye, a hardness he recognizes.
As Fugo sits in the seat across from him, hunched over the table telling his story, a white tag bends out from the back of his jacket, tucked awkwardly between his neck and shirt collar. Bruno can see that it marks the jacket dry-clean only. He imagines the child’s home, pristine floors and sprawling dry lawns. Not a thing like the sea of his own childhood home. His parents sent him away out of shame. Not a thing like his parents, who’d clung to him and praised him for his heart. But that desperation. That violence. It was growing out of control like a horrible weed in the center of that manicured lawn. He had no place there, where the gardeners would simply have snipped him in two.
Bruno’s home had plenty of extra rooms. Perhaps he could invite him to stay? Maybe he could even find a place for him in Passione. Give him a purpose. Make a crack in the concrete to let that angry little weed grow. Put it to good use. Give it something to do. God knows otherwise it would turn around and grow right through the core of Fugo. It would hurt him from the inside out. Bruno knew about violence. If you didn’t direct it outwards, it would blow up inside of you and fill every crack in your bones with that ache of cruelty. Violence, once given to you, is inexorable. In fact, Bruno is sure that’s how Passione had grown so large. Sometimes it seemed that every child in their city had been beaten and bloodied. They just had to find a way to displace it.
He thinks of his daily routine interrupted. He imagines the TV loud all night, footsteps in the hallway. He wonders, for the first time, if it would be better that way.
Across the restaurant, a man with a little too much wine in him makes a clumsy mistake and drops his glass. It shatters loudly on the tile. Bruno imagines that shriek as shards of an hourglass clinking into pieces, almost feels the sands leaking from between his fingers. He’s lost many minutes sitting here talking. It breaks his trance. The sun’s fallen deep into the sky past the windows, the world turning to a deep dark blue.
His thoughts spin, round and round. Waves and wine sloshing. Dry-clean only jackets soaked with blood and dirt. Across the table, Fugo shifts and pulls on his sleeves. He’s growing too fast, they hug too tight around his arms. These fancy clothes never fit him quite right. And this bright white suit Bruno wore held onto his body like an anchor, pulling him down. Two young people squatting at a fancy table in a fancy restaurant in their fancy suits. For all the world to see, they were respectable and wealthy young men. The world at large would never see the blood now scrubbed off from their hands. They couldn’t see how they washed and wrung-out their souls day by day, sent them through the machine and hoped they’d come back clean.
The sound of a mechanical buzzer rose above the rushing waves in Bruno’s ears. He reached out a hand and Fugo shook.
Cycle complete.