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The week after Michael got his legal license he went on a road trip to Italy.
It was impulsive, stupid. It was only after three hundred kilometres that the choice he made kicked in and the regret began to grow weeds in his stomach and his ears. It’s a weird sensation; one Michael found to be bodily unique to himself after he told his first ever friend and they replied with Meow. Michael’s regret grows lichen-moss in his ears, a buzzing of life that turns his hearing green.
It’s fucking stupid. He’s never paid attention to the toll emotions take on his body—where they rise from and fall to, what it is they try to tell him. Michael was very much an occult believer of ignorance is bliss. But then Lorenzo, who doesn’t know when to shut up, went on and on about where his emotions come from: rocks in the stomach for guilt and shame, hot air balloon in the space between ribs for fear, weightless air in the head for nostalgia and grief.
Three hundred kilometres Michael drives, the rest he spends regretting and contemplating U-turns. It’s Christmas, nothing new for him, nothing sought for, but it’s not even Lorenzo’s fifth, and Michael has made an awful fucking habit of caring lately. Of giving a shit he once upon a time couldn’t. The change isn’t new, but it’s become consistent this month, this year. Don Lorenzo’s stupidity is rubbing off on him. Michael’s mobile lockscreen is a picture of a bisexual-lesbian sunset he took in spring, which used to be a black screen to bold the display’s functions, the necessities. He didn’t see the point of beautifying his possessions because he never planned to return to them. Every time Michael walked out the door, he thought of it as his last.
How many Christmases is his life worth now? More than nineteen is the cut off of his memory. For a decade, Michael has lived in the quarter of years; forever marching along a line of warm foliage. It’s only now that he’s caught up with time, or time has caught up with him, a structure created by society to make sense of events; before and after, past and future. No present—that is only alive at the end of the future. The current event he’s caught up in is the unravelling of a nine hundred kilometre long spider’s web. Whether Michael becomes its dinner or its friend is up to time, the end of the world. The crunch of the universe.
It’s the Year of the Rat, a time of no gods, no masters—no spider waiting ten feet away twenty-four-seven, even if you’re enclosed in a metal box that drives loud over a hundred kilometres per hour. The susurrus of the tires patting juba on the marley of A22 vibrates through Michael’s body and makes him more aware of where it is he is going, who it is he will see in a few hours more.
Monte Luco comes into view around the bend out of Bolzano. Behind it is Stelvio National Park, which Michael has a rich memory of, enough to know what surrounds it. There is a photo album on his phone that holds every single digital memory of that day, although it isn’t much because he and Lorenzo visited months before he cared enough to take photos of insignificant things like a beetle on the path, or the sun caught between massif teeth (yet those are two of the thirteen photos in the album). There’s a photo of Lorenzo with his arms in the air to make it look as if he’s holding the centre of the solar system, but it’s too far above his head to be caught in-between. It was a stupid attempt at a stupid pose. Michael saved it as his homescreen once before immediately changing it. At that time, he wasn’t yet comfortable with anything but solid colours.
His stomach curdles swamp water at the distance between him and Stelvio Pass. Its hairpinned curves and steep limbs turned Michael’s stomach into stew for a good week afterwards. He was meant to return to Deutschland two days later, but Lorenzo forced him to stay because: “You’re sick and need to be taken care of.” That’s when he injected Michael with his poison; pyrite rather than real gold: is what Michael tells himself to feel better about how he used to be.
Time is but a social construct. How the world, which is people, understands time is by a thread of events. Bad events of August, bad events of 1692. Good events of February, good events of 2101—which hasn’t yet come, but Michael is sure it will be good. Outside of this fabric, this record, time does not exist. Is it really afternoon, or is it just midnight? What do those words even mean?
The calendar has lied. It isn’t Christmas today but Don Lorenzo’s birthday, and it isn’t a week after Michael has gained his legal license. It has been years. This, too, is a lie because time is a fabrication of numbers to make sense of change; of the days changing to night and the weeks into months. What matters is that it has passed. What matters is that Michael Kaiser has changed.
This is Michael’s first road trip, his twenty-seventh, and his last. Michael has visited the Stelvio National Park before, three times over, and has only seen pictures of it that aren’t his. He is on his way to Lorenzo’s house that is his and everyone else’s because he’s an idiot with a contagious disease. He is driving towards the light at the end of the tunnel because it is a door in view instead of a microbe of unreachable white. After all this time, Michael has learnt to find the light and to walk towards it, half-blinded, half-guided.
Rays of the sky-candle filter through the tinted windows of Michael’s Lamborghini Gallardo like a capybara bath of floating oranges. The engine roars and then dies off into a mewl. When Michael is bored while driving, he plays with the engine like a teasing mistletoe, pressing his foot down on the accelerator and then giving mercy like a Roman emperor that can’t decide between beheading or hanging.
Michael gave the car a respray because he has since grown past the time where he bought everything in black and saved all his screens as the void. It’s an azure blue, glinting white as it shoots across the highway like a gamma ray. He has just passed Monte Baldo, which means he is at the Point Nemo of his journey, surrounded by outreached sun-arms like descending satellites, the light shrivelling before they reach past the tinted gyre windows.
Hundreds of kilometres away from his house and nearing Lorenzo’s, the presence of the gift sitting passenger becomes as apparent as a blood stain on white. Michael glances over at the beady eyes and mutters one of the five Ws. He keeps driving. The passenger keeps staring.
It’s not long before he’s on A13, and then E35, and then he’s off the highways and driving suburb through suburb, closer to the one where Lorenzo’s house stands. It’s made of rocks so he can throw bits of it at people, or so Lorenzo joked when they were twenty. The time has passed, but it has also remained walking in the same place. Over and over. Round and round. The hands move. The hands still.
As the houses become more familiar and the lawns more messy, the weeds return and wiggle like worms in Michael’s ears, waggle dancing out the drum and into the conch. He flexes his ears to incite a storm and flush them of overgrowth. When the storm is over and the weeds are but refracted light, Michael looks up to see Lorenzo’s house standing at the end of the street like a person. Like a beginning and an end.
He pulls up in the driveway and sits there with the engine off and ticking-cool. He doesn’t meet the beady eyes, his gaze fixed to the summit of the wheel. He imagines it is Zugspitze. He takes it apart in his mind, rolling the sediment pieces between the pads of his fingers like mala beads, the act a prayer in itself.
Michael leans over to open the glove compartment, sure to keep an acre of distance between him and the passenger. He grabs two cotton swabs from the pack he keeps in each of his cars, cleaning each ear of dripping mildew. After five minutes, five hours, five years, Michael steps out of the car and circles around to the passenger side, grabbing the gift as if it were animate. It’s a symptom of Don Lorenzo.
Two knocks.
A pause.
One knock.
A pause.
Three knocks.
Over the years, the months, and the weeks they’ve been together, the pattern has grown. One knock became two, two became hesitant—and then over time, had more to say. It breaks its silence twice, a representation of the silence the both of them have broken over the age of their relationship. The mortifying ordeal of being known is built on the law of equivalent exchange. At least when it comes to them. Lorenzo has a spell to him. When he shares himself, it’s hard to not share back.
Michael hears feet padding before the knob is turned and the door has opened, the man that is neither myth nor legend standing in the archway of it, like something as certain as the ending of a book, or the repetition of history. Lorenzo has a candle wick expression on his face, something that can hold a fire and cradle it to waxen ash, but something that is not fire itself.
“You look the same as always.” Lorenzo says, and then smiles, and then says it again without saying it.
Michael rolls his eyes, a yuzu laid splits across his face. “Is that a good or a bad thing?”
Lorenzo’s expression falls into contemplation like the ash of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, bodies hidden in the depths of it, lives buried and held wisdom in the gold of his teeth.
“It’s a familiar thing.”
Michael breathes out a sigh from his nose. Like braille scripture, unwritten and unspoken, Lorenzo moves out of the way to let the guests in. Michael enters the house that is not a house but a home, a sub-human of architecture. He places the gift on the kitchen island, the wagging of Lorenzo’s tail not too far behind.
“Dah~ Is this for me?”
Michael makes a sound of confirmation as he takes his place in the corner of one of the living room couches that he bought and which have since been clawed by strays—again. Lorenzo’s little noises of joy exclaim in the kitchen like sparks from a bomb, the onomatopoeia travelling and bursting like bubbles in the middle of the living room. Michael shakes his head, eight eyes watching from the mantelpiece.
The gift is an opossum sconce, which is to say a Don Lorenzo sconce in animal form, because it’s the only thing Michael could think of making. Lorenzo has been fixated on light fixtures lately (the puns are also a symptom of Lorenzo’s passed-on disease), giving too much thought to the shape and colour of light switches. The one Michael passed in the entry hall was covered with an open mouth. It’s a stupid gift, synonym for befitting.
“Same as always? My hair is black and short now.” Michael mumbles from the living room. Lorenzo comes into view just as the words unwrap themselves in the air.
Fairy lights are strung along the cornice of the living room walls, purple and gold fairies twinkling like stars in the glass. The sun is beginning to set outside, but with all the lights Lorenzo has put up lately, it doesn’t seem like the day is ending. Michael traces a string of fairy lights of his own between the purple and the gold, an ache panging in the space between his eyes. He closes them.
Michael moves his head and then opens his eyes, his gaze landing on the mantelpiece. He can’t remember how much time has passed since the fireplace was last lit: Three years? Four? Michael guesses it must have been the sixth year he was stuck in the quarter of. He squints at the wavering blue. There are blue fairy lights strung around the shelf of the mantelpiece, and a small enclosure placed in the middle of it, the pictures and other small decorations that would otherwise be spread out pushed to the sides.
“That’s nothing new. Your hair has been like that for so long now that it’s just you, OK?”
Lorenzo struggles away with the sconce in a one-sided battle as Michael stands from the couch and walks over to the mantelpiece. The fairy lights dull in luminosity as his head clears and his vision returns to its average adolescence. When Michael is finally face-to-face with the enclosure, eight eyes meet his two, his heart beating in his thyroid. Panic.
It’s a tarantula, a Chilean rose, as far as Michael can tell. He’s seen Home Alone before. Lorenzo has this terrible holiday habit of watching Home Alone every day of December and The Nightmare Before Christmas every day of October, because it is a Halloween film, and not a Christmas film. As Lorenzo cusses Italian in the background, Michael is locked in a staring contest with the tarantula. It was already looking at him when he walked over, as if waiting for him.
The enclosure is quite cultivated. On the left is a small cave and fake San Pedro cacti, and on the right is a skull with some small shrubs and powder puff cacti. The floor of the enclosure is vermiculite mixed with peat. Michael stares at the tarantula, which stares back fourfold, its pedipalps moving back and forth as if in speech. The surrounding fairy lights dance reflected in its eyes.
“...Since when did you have a tarantula?”
“Oh, dah.” Lorenzo says dismissively, too focused on mounting the opossum sconce to the wall without tools. “I’m looking after it for my brother. Said it’s important.”
Michael’s body falls lax, the beating in his thyroid gone and back in its rightful place. He stares at the eyes of it, each pupil a window of time, each time an age, and each age a different life.
In each life housed in the tarantula’s third-day eyes, Michael stands in Lorenzo’s living room, looking the same as always. Familiar.
The spider has decided.