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A shiny black piano. Sticky, dimly lit room. A figure hunched over it. His deft hands plunk out the final notes of an arduous three-part piece. The song concludes with great fanfare and then quiet takes the room. Without any hesitation, the player stands from his bench and falls into a deep bow. His hand clutches to his stomach as he bends his torso across it. Imagines himself splitting in half on that line. Guts on the sticky old laminate.
Nobody claps, just for the record.
They never do.
There is a smattering of patrons spread thinly throughout the restaurant. Most are slumped over the bar. Many simply have their attention focused elsewhere, a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other. Others are tucked into the corner, giggling with their lovers. Restaurants birth these bubbles, these micro-ecosystems teeming with life. A party laughs amongst themselves. A man spills his red wine on his date’s white dress. A woman holds a steak-knife to her own throat while two others look on in horror. Nobody looks left, nobody looks right. They look straight ahead. So, I’m sure you understand why no one looks up when he stands. The world goes on. He’s not the kind of person who draws a crowd. He keeps his head low. Does as he’s told. On Tuesdays, this is it. That’s the end of his shift - the dining room stays open quite late but live piano ends at midnight.
He walks to the back and shrugs his jacket off. Throws himself down into a metal chair at a dirty plastic table. The cooks across the kitchen pay him no mind. They never do. They keep on with their pots and pans, their pop and sizzle. They don’t need to talk to do what they do. Effortless. An eerie quiet creeps through every inch of the restaurant. Seems it’s always run by its skeleton crew. Something drives people away. Makes sense why they’d hire any old grimy sixteen year old off the street who could demonstrably play Für Elise. It was the kind of place that was never quite clean. Your shoes would always stick a bit to the floors, your eyes would always catch a bit at the smoke-stained walls. He casts his eyes around. He hates it here. But it feels befitting of the person he’s become. Defined by his inability to be redeemed. This place has housed chain-smokers for decades. Of course the walls have yellowed. In the same respect, his body carries his wilting soul. It makes sense it’d start leaking out. Start leaking out in bursts of anger, in unkindness, and in gluing his feet down to the ground. Making him unwilling to move. Unwilling to travel in the daylight, in the presence of such power. The restaurant isn’t too far from San Giorgio Maggiore.
He can feel the dock staring from the window.
Don’t think I’ve forgotten, it says.
The dark night outside knocks at the window. Beckons him out. Beckons him look at the sky.
He grabs his jacket and keys and leaves out the back.
The night air bites at his ankles where his slacks are a bit too short. He just keeps growing. He wills it to stop, imagines locking himself in a tiny box so that his legs have nowhere to grow out to. Would they give up, or grow through like weeds through concrete?
His legs ache with growing pains. He wishes for his body to stay the same as it was. Life has grown unrecognizable. Is it so unfair to ask that the mirror stay the same?
He grows an inch and then he can’t remember how much smaller Narancia would be now.
Hey, kid! How’s the weather down there? He imagines himself laughing.
Narancia would kick him in the shins.
He wishes someone would come along and kick him in the shins.
His clothes are all too short and tight. He doesn’t make enough money to replace them. He doesn’t get tips. Nobody’s even listening and all the skeleton crew grimace at him. They might as well really be bone. They don’t spare him a single word when he walks out the door at night. Not a single “goodnight”.
To operate the restaurant, they need four cooks, two waiters, and one pianist.
One day, the head cook comes down with a horrible cough. Everyone agrees it’s best he stays away. But he stays home for a single day and comes back to work. He has to. Nobody else in the kitchen knows how to run the show. He’s the only one who even knows how to make some of the menu items. He doesn’t take sick days. He doesn’t know how. He works. That’s all he knows how to do.
On the day he is out, Fugo plays piano like usual. He hopes for his speedy return. Without him, the whole restaurant would surely go down.
A few days later, one of the waiters comes down with a stomach bug. He runs out the back door clutching his stomach.
Before he comes back, the other waiter is stabbed trying to break up a fight between patrons. He’s stabbed four times. Those damn steak knives. This is not the first time something like this has happened.
Fugo once wise-cracked they all ought to be replaced with butter-knives. Nobody laughed except the waiter who would go on to be stabbed. Funny twist of fate, there.
With the restaurant two and a half men down, Fugo plays piano like usual. Nobody asks him to wait tables, they let him sit in his spot and play his music that nobody even seems to hear. He plays it with fervor. Something is bothering him about all this and all he can do is smash the keys. He takes out all his frustration and his loneliness on them. He has a terrible feeling something is wrong. He feels the dock staring. But there’s no way to know.
The restaurant can hardly hold itself up like this. It isn’t long before the head cook collapses to the dirty tile, knocking his pan with the back of his hand, hot yellow oil splashed into the air in waves. The steam rose from the pan like white clouds. Everybody gathered around and gasped. He’d given all he could. The ambulance took him away.
And Fugo plays piano. He hits the keys hard. Some of them are starting to break.
The restaurant is closed for patrons, but it seems nobody noticed him either way. Nobody’s told him he’s free to go home. The cooks talk to one another in hushed voices from the kitchen.
Far away, another team runs on its skeleton crew. They talk in hushed voices. They set up three little graves. They have to find a way to go on with whoever’s left over.
Fugo bangs and bangs at the keys. Lost and confused. Sometimes when someone has died, you can just feel it. The world sends you signs. The world sends you black birds and dead cooks. It sends you growing legs to get you ready preemptively for moving on.
The news comes in on a busted old radio in the kitchen. Fuzzy and unclear. Gang war, he hears. And descriptions of the deceased. Fisherman’s son, disgraced cop, teenage dropout.
The radio doesn’t say how, but he feels like he knows. Sees the cook grasping his chest, and the waiters grasping their stomach and stab wounds. Life tends to be funny like that. Warnings, walking across these dirty tiles.
Again, far away, Giorno Giovanna paces. Agonizes over where to begin getting his pianist back. Agonizes over how to tell Fugo what had happened. Sees no way to do it kindly.
Requiem listens and breathes and sets new fates into the cells of strangers without batting an eye. Pneumonia’s cough. Seasonal flu. Gives two strangers something to fight about. Lines it all up just right. Control over life. You could do anything with it. Requiem works in the background, an untamable dog. Giorno doesn’t know. He holds his head in his hands. He agonizes over how to tell the story.
Requiem feels proud of itself. He won’t have to worry when Fugo already knows. It sits beside Giorno on the floor, like a pet. He stares at it with great trepidation.
What are you thinking?
He places a single hand on its spiked head.
Across the water, Fugo sits on the dock with his feet in the water. He looks out. He keeps looking. He keeps waiting for more signs.