Anamnesis, Zorina Alliata [the dot read aloud TXT] 📗

You know, you've seen those movies when the doctors start to electrocute them with those devices, and then the heart starts beeping again on the monitor. It’s not big deal, honey. It happens all the time.”

“But my aunt didn’t use any of those devices, she used magic,” I sobbed.

“So, what’s the difference?” Lou asked. “Do you think science is purer or cleaner than magic? Why shouldn’t you use either if you can?”

“It was wrong,” I said. “I can feel it so clearly, it was wrong. My grandfather thinks it was wrong, too. I don’t know what she did, what if she did something horrible to revive me? She had to pay a price to someone or something, what price did she pay for my life? Did she sell my soul? Why the smell of lavender? I don’t know any uses for lavender except for a love potion. I am freaked out. I am freaked out.”

“Why don’t you just ask her?” Lou said. “Talk to her, you’ll feel better.”

My aunt Virginia did not have a phone. She lived alone in a small house in the far north of Romania. I knew all about her house; I used to play there when I was a child; I knew where she kept her herbs, her snake; where the country wine sat in the cold basement, outside in the backyard; where her hens came to sleep at night.

“I would have to send a letter,” I told Lou. “If I’m lucky, it will actually get there and not be stolen by the Romanian postal workers.”

That night, as my aunt Virginia went to bring up the pickled cabbage for dinner, the number that locked her basement door squared spontaneously. She couldn’t get out; her weak screams were lost in the falling snow. By morning, she had come to me in my memories.

*-*-*

With the quiet help of Officer Kampf, Dante stepped right through the glass doors guarding the History department. It was deserted. Piles after piles of papers, papyruses, parchments, 8-inch floppy disks and CD ROMs were the only décor of the 7th floor. Dante carefully wandered around, following the signs on the wall pointing out the Department Head’s office.

“Mr. Valois?” he asked carefully, peeking through the door into the dimly-lit room.

“Come in!” came the answer from inside, and Dante entered with confidence.

It was dark and very hot. Dante blinked a few times, trying to get used to the lack of light.

“Mr. Valois?” he asked again.

A tall, big man moved towards him with unexpected easiness. Very close to Dante, he studied him with green, sharp eyes.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Valois. His voice thundered over Dante’s head, moving the air around in frightened waves.

“My name is Dante Portinari-Guelph”, said Dante. “With one dash”, he added by force of inertia and immediately regretted it. Valois seemed to react very badly at the mention of the dash, for some reason. His eyes minimized into green lines and his forehead drew heavy wrinkles.

“Dante?” Valois repeated in an angry but cautious voice. “Portinari? Guelph?”

“Yes, sir”, Dante confirmed and stopped short of bringing up the dash again.

“What do you want?” Valois asked. “There is nothing here of interest. People lived, people died, never learned, and they left too little behind. That’s all there is to History. Absolutely useless. We’re liquidating this whole department.”

“Well, sir”, Dante began philosophically, “I wouldn’t say that. History carries important answers and clues to the future…”

“Bullshit”, Valois laughed. “So what do you want?”

“Actually, there’s been a mistake with me and my dad showing up in this database of shareholders of the Company, even though I don’t even know how a stock certificate looks like and my dad has been, like, missing for 30 years…”

“So why should I care?” Valois interrupted with a gesture of impatience.

“Well, we fixed that shareholder mistake, but then there was a detail in there about some stock being released in 1968, and I started to wonder how that can be, when the Company wasn’t even publicly traded at that time. So I figured you guys here in History might know all about it and set it straight for me.”

Valois hesitated a tiny moment. He measured Dante with his eyes, up and down, left to right. He smiled, then he changed his mind and he grinned. Then he thought for a while and decided to smile again.

“Sit down”, he told Dante, shoving him gently to a black leather chair.

“Okay”, said Dante, “but I can’t stay too long because I have some reports to fill out…”

“You seem such a smart guy”, Valois took a friendly tone, “I’m sure you can write reports in a jiffy, huh?”

Dante sat down in the comfortable chair, smiling.

“Actually”, he said, flattered, “I’ve developed a program that would write most of them for me…”

As he was talking, the chair moved suddenly underneath him and a strong metal band sprang across his chest, holding him prisoner.

“Hey…” he tried to protest. Valois kicked the chair onto the wall forcefully, hurting Dante’s knees.

“Hey!” Dante screamed. “What the…?”

“What are you doing here, boy?” Valois asked again. “Who sent you? And this time, no more playing stupid.”

Before Dante could think of something, he saw Valois pushing a button on his desk. A drawer with unusual utensils popped open right under Dante’s frightened nose.

“But I am stupid!” Dante confessed in horror, watching Valois maneuvering a large metal tongue. “I don’t know anything!”

“I thought you were dead”, Valois said with hatred. “They told me you were dead, you and your precious daddy. I thought we got rid of his seed forever.”

“Sir”, Dante tried, “you must be mistaking me for someone else…”

“Shut up!” Valois thundered again. “You’re gonna answer everything I ask you, you understand? Because today I will do a good deed for the human race and kill you, as I should have done thirty years ago. If you want to die fast, you better tell me everything you know. Or else you will suffer all the pain I am able to inflict upon your worthless body. I have to tell you I was schooled in the Inquisition ways.”

Dante’s mind went blank, in shock. He was in the hands of a mad murderer and he didn’t know how to handle it. For moments, all he heard was the eerie silence of the empty 7th floor; he felt the heat in the room forcing sweat out of his whole body.

“Is there a problem here, Mr. Valois?” a loud, cheerful voice broke the tension. They both turned around to see the imposing stature of Officer Kampf in the doorway.

“No problem”, said Valois dismissively, “go away”.

“I have to take the boy with me, sir”, Officer Kampf announced softly. “He is wanted upstairs on the 30th.”

Valois hesitated; Officer Kampf delicately touched his gun, still smiling. “I have to take the boy upstairs”, he repeated. “We don’t want to upset the people upstairs, now, do we, Mr. Valois?”

With an angry gesture, Valois clicked away Dante’s strands. “Fine”, he said. “I’ll talk to them later.”

Officer Kampf helped Dante out of the chair with a tender arm. “I appreciate your cooperation, sir”, he told Valois as he was taking Dante out of the door.

“Make sure they know I cooperated”, Valois said.

Outside the chamber of horror, Dante breathed deeply, leaning on the strong arm of Officer Kampf. “Thanks”, he mumbled. In his pocket, crumpled, forgotten, was the letter addressed to Valois he was supposed to deliver.


CANTO IV


“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me today,” Dante said excitedly. “I was almost tortured and killed by a guy in the History department.”

“A Marketing guy?” I asked calmly. Dante’s imagination was the size of a 4-year old’s who sees unicorns at his window; he mixed reality and fantasy with the innocence of a child, as if, in his own way, he could also see more than the cold and boring cubicles of a cold and boring corporation. He had his own names for departments and teams, and he moved in a parallel universe of his own as he was making his way through the building.

“I don’t know,” Dante answered. “Some kind of boss of some sort, I don’t know. He had an office so he must be the boss of somebody. ”

We were having a beer at Wings & Claws, a Gaithersburg neighborhood bar hidden between respectable, family-oriented stores in the mall. On the counter, a cockroach stepped defiantly towards us; it stopped and ran back all of the sudden; it must have felt my presence.

“I didn’t even say anything to him,” Dante continued. “I was just there to deliver this letter and ask a simple question – how come the company gave away stock in 1968 if they became publicly traded in 1969. I know it’s a stupid, unimportant question but I was on a high from talking with all these other people. I started to enjoy talking. It wasn’t that bad.”

I first met Dante at a Company Happy Hour a year ago, and I felt nothing when our eyes met. There was no resistance in him; he simply existed. If not packaged in such an attractive bundle, he would have been transparent to all things. He was cornered by a bunch of people who wanted to talk with him; some would hand him business cards, which he would promptly discard into an ashtray on the bar. He seemed uncomfortable with all the attention he was getting; he smoothly made his way out of the crowd and into my direction.

Looking back, I should have seen a pattern there; how our trajectories through the room spiraled into a game, a tease; how we both ended up talking and joking. I should have recognized that we were very much alike, or at least that each of us had some qualities of some value to the other. It seemed a coincidence at the time, but I should have known better – I knew that there are no coincidences.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Did you just go in there and the guy attacked you?”

Dante related the full story of his incredible day, gesticulating frantically with the beer bottle. “That man was crazy, I’m telling you,” he ended.

“I think you just bumped into an evil one,” I said. “There are some people like this, simply evil.”

I should know; I’ve met a few myself. When I was 4, my mom stepped on an old woman’s foot when we were shopping in the crowded farmer’s market. As it turned out, the woman had a painful blister and she was a nasty witch who then spent the next year stalking and terrorizing my mother. I remember finding freaky omens outside our door; the water in a pot turning bright red when boiled; dead birds being thrown through our window; spells floating in the air, combing the numbers into black integrals.

I did not understand what happened at first; her magic was dislocating some patterns but it was basically harmless to us; we could easily defend our house and ourselves. I did not understand why she started, why she persisted; I could see that her foot had healed, yet she had not given up her revenge. My mom explained to me about evil, how it just surfaces in some people and takes control, and