Celestial Camo — Steve Barbaro

Begin with the ending? OK: vileness. Begin with the beginning too? OK: vileness. Middle with the middle, climax with the climax, etc etc: vileness. Yes yes the story begins with the be-all end-all trait of the world-at-hand: vileness. The story starts where the damn thing finishes: inescapable vileness.

Simply vacationing here in Sicily seems almost sun-infestedly insufficient, the same vile voice now speaking was in fact recently rambling. Brilliances bourgeon. Beguiling elementalities beckon. Every passing Sicilian second merely makes me envision my own self-estranged figure combing craggy hills in search of the purplest figs… 

To be fair: the vile voice (my voice) was dispensing such drivel while frolicking upon a dinky stony rock beach (not a fig-tipped hill). To be clear: the present unfolding early morning sees me swimming the salty sea facing said same beach’s dinky stoniness. To be specific: no less than the very Mediterranean is currently cleansing the vile voice’s (my voice’s) chest. And to be pointed: are not the waves of this dawn-draped ocean also scrubbing my neck? Rinsing my abdomen? Won’t said same rowdy depths at least free my nose and ears (eyes hands etc) of a tongue loath to shut itself up for fear of the sort of silence which screams of death?

I can picture myself, this same vile voice now speaking was persisting to recently lecture strangers amidst the beach’s dinky stoniness, amassing back-breaking bushels of figs and/or prickly pears in exchange for petty profits. Yes yes there I am, just another Sicilian peddling pistachios at street markets and/or sharing toilets well into my thirties with parents and/or praying mantises…

The vile voice (my voice) is not big on physical labor. The vile voice (my voice) is not even vaguely ancestrally Sicilian. Frankly the annals of casual conversation have nary been privy to the vile voice giving a fig about figs. (Not to mention: depicting something as pretty as prickly pears explicitly vis-à-vis back-breaking bushels and also petty profits—what smugly practical vileness!) Yet the fact remains that yesterday afternoon—a cooly drizzly August Sunday afternoon—did see the vile voice citing a series of local settings which were all rather roundly unlike the dinky stony beach on which the vile voice was then actually lingering.

I mean I can picture, the vile voice flared, my fingers flunkeying my nose in the project of raiding caper bushes. (The boulder-braked Mediterranean was merely tickling the vile voice’s alabaster-hued sneakers.) My mind’s eye now indeed eyes another version of my own eyes eying forest-fringing wild asparagus. Not that the vile voice has any experience with cultivating asparagus (capers prickly pears etc). The sort of idyllic inland scenery of whose verdure the vile voice was waxing inventorially is in fact resoundingly remote from the turquoise-sea-framed Siracusan scenery in which the vile voice has frolicked during the entirety of this vacation. All the same, the vile voice was looming so expoundingly atop a drably picturesque beach (cheese-scabbed stray pizza-box here; slow low cloud-crowded horizon there) precisely because it was incumbent upon the vile voice to thwart the vile voice’s nemesis: silence. 

You could not pick one lone single fresh preeckly pear without getting a face full of needles, one of the vile voice’s impromptu interlocutors suddenly smart-alecked. I doubt you could peel one lonely preeckly pear without getting spines stuck in the crack of your ass…  

To be clear: now (as then) the vile voice wishes to stop speaking. Vileness is vileness in no small part because of invasive obtuseness. The vile voice wants nothing more than to consummate its own defunctness. Would that the vile voice could utterly succumb to the ocean! 

And yet—and yet—the vileness at hand blooms at the all-too-talky nexus between inaction and excess. These days, inaction and excess are linked just as inextricably as friend and enemy, sleep and death. Why would an irredeemably vile voice ever return to dry land? Hate this voice, please, as a matter of obligation. Hate what’s hate-able even if only as a secret gesture of admiration. Hate this voice for its self-altering would-be self-altarings—

You’re a milquetoast clown, the vile voice’s interlocutors upon the dinky stony beach were informing the vile voice (not in so many words). This was all happening upon the island perched in Siracusa called Ortygia. Ortygia juts southly off the southeast of Sicily (itself an island). The south of Ortygia juts ever-more-taperingly with a Hades-ish down down down peninsular thinness. But you’re a swish buffoon, two locals would soon tell the vile voice. This was only yesterday (all my time’s mixing). You’re a dashing dunce. A rich idiot. (The giggly pair were giggling as soon as they gigglingly saw me.) Behind this specific stony super-diminutive beach (does such a teeny beach even deserve a name) there’s a wall as massively unfathomable as the heavens. Some walls are simply incomprehensible; some walls seem to aspire to the condition of the sky itself. This was only yesterday. This was only yesterday, mere hours after I was ogling a damned sky-precluding Caravaggio canvas. Yes yes yesterday somehow feels like tomorrow and anyways: there’s a tremendous golden-ish wall behind the dinky beach that takes you up to street-level. A staircase protrudes in the middle of the wall like a natural fact. And from the plane of the odd little boulder-fronted pint-sized beach, well, said staircase looms with the airy functionality of a skyscraper. This staircase’s ethereal utility seems indeed in league with the sheer impracticality of the heavens. (My scorn for the heavens is second only to my scorn for silence…) Plus, as soon as the two gigglers materialized to descend the staircase, the darkening skies duly started spitting droplets. Clouds damn near dilly-dallying across the firmament. You’re an upscale fraud, the locals would tell the vile voice. (Wisps of the empyrean were bumper-to-bumper with other wisps.) You’re a well-masked piece of shit. You’re a momentous doofus. You’re a fancy-pants loser, the local duo said (not in those precise locutions). A swanky dolt. An epicurean idiot etc etc—then it hit me. The square of baked dough soon occupying my teeth hit me. (Full disclosure: said square of anchovy-speckled sesame-seeded dough was the ideal soft-crunchy mix.) Damn near cosmically delicious focaccia bread. It’s been only a little less than three years since the planes hit the twin towers (seems like only yesterday but also the next twenty years). No one else was on the dinky sand-fringe. No one else except the vile voice and two happenstance smart-alecks. These focaccia-gifting smart-alecks assured the vile voice that cactus needles would occupy the vile voice’s very anus. Prickly-pear needles infiltrating the ass-crack like a squadron. Prickly-pear needles pivoting to annex the vile voice’s genitals as if via the natural laws of invaded lands. But I swear to god or the gods (or whatever) that it was a poisoned bottle of alcohol that really put me at the sea’s whims.

You Americans bee-leeve beautiful clouds blossom with every fart you blow into airplane cushions… Yes… Yes… That’s how one of the rock-beached locals who’d gifted me the focaccia (and poison, I swear) responded to the spatially-entitled pap I was propagating yesterday. You Americans gaze at the sky and bee-leeve the sky pops up to cover all the other countries only by the sheer force of your own staring… 

Let’s be lucid though: I, who may well have committed unspeakable violence, am now outsourcing my will to the Mediterranean. This is the twenty-first century. Early-early twenty-first century. Not even five full years in… I’m the type of person who grumbles with would-be fashionable irony about enduring commuter boat rides to see Lady of Liberty whenever relatives and/or friends pop up at LaGuardia on short notice. I’m the sort who blacks-out at musty bars on snowy Tuesdays in my home metropolis’s nether regions in an attempt to relive my youthful revels in the provinces. 

You Americans insist on build-eeng the world…but you Americans build the world in a way that somehow con-veen-yent-lee keeps you sheltered from the world itself…

Now though… Now… The sea persists to cleanse my knees. The briny depths shall rinse my memory… Cause this morning… This early early Monday morning, well… This morning I woke up… Woke up before sun-up… And I woke up to a corpse, see. I mean I woke up to a corpse…on a floor… A corpse on a floor yes yes… Oh, to eye a corpse sprawled mid-domestic interior—the thought of it! The mere thought of the sight of it. (The damned noise of the soundlessness of it…) Yes yes the mid-vacation vile voice woke to eye a corpse in the portion of the vile voice’s rented villa dedicated to shower and toilet. The vile voice needs to vent; the vile voice wants to bear witness. (Hair dripped blood for instance.) It’s unnaturally natural for a silence-hating voice to manufacture a listener’s presence. (Blood stained my alabaster-hued sneakers.) The body on the bathroom floor in fact loomed with the same sort of open-palmed inertness Saint Lucy’s corpse exudes in the Caravaggio canvas I spied yesterday in a bleh Siracusan church but anyways: the dawn-draped abyss of the Mediterranean shall purify my vileness and let’s be yet more lucid: I don’t want to ever return to America nor even to dry land. 

Sicily is anyway not reelly THAT much of a foreign place, one of the gigglers on the rock beach quizzed. At least not theese part of See-see-lee? With all of these hotels? These tourists?! 

Oh but that’s the thing though isn’t it? That’s the thing. That’s the thing, that’s the crazy silly thing—the vile voice is merely a United States joke writer on vacation. The vile voice’s comfort-zone-become-life-ethos is so cozily fragile as to crumble even in the process of plushly superficial relocation. The ease of the vulnerability is almost comical! And the vile voice would know a thing or two about what’s comical because, for four years, the vile voice’s employer has been Ewww News, a United States cable-TV current events program.

Ewww News (if you must know) is a half-hour long (with commercials) and can be seen four days a week headlining the prime-time lineup of a prominent comedy channel. A frenemy once called the show: The Cheesecake Factory of the politically snarky. It’s not too much to say we make fun of the news in the very act of the news’s telling. To state that we smile as we watch the world’s unfolding horror would be to simply state a verity. And the format of Ewww News is rather simple, see. Jeff The Host starts by delivering a joke-lined monologue about hot new current events (the war; the economy; celeb breakups) before Jeff The Host chitchats with one of our correspondents (Fake Senior Political Analyst; Fake Iraq History Expert; Fake Weapons of Mass Destruction Manufacturer etc). After Jeff The Host then proceeds to interview a famous person about their new movie or show or memoir, Ewww News usually concludes with a brief random closing segment often having nothing to do with current event or politics (or anything). But maybe one day Ewww News shall enumerate the shenanigans in which the vile voice remembers partaking after the mystery beer-bottle-lacing poison kicked in? Perhaps Ewww News can even detail the myriad post-roofie details the vile voice does not recall? Yet I must make it clear that when I, the vile voice, was kicked out my own dreams this very morning, I was kicked out of my own dreams at 4:44 A.M. via a mid-dream voice snarling che sopruso, che sopruso. Then the lights were on and the love of my life was gone and though the vile voice wasn’t bleeding, I did see red bodily fluid all over my neck and clothes from the previous evening. And when the blood-tinged vile voice remembered that che sopruso meant what tyranny, well, the vile voice was only reminded of the line of questioning that sent me grabbing for any and every drip of liquor in the first damn place. 

I never supported Bush, OK? The vile voice is not so vile as to have cheered the war in Iraq. And this is also precisely why I—the vile voice whose vileness blooms at the very nexus between inaction and excess—was so shocked to be seen as something less than innocent. If I remember right, a few years back, the Forty-third President didn’t even win the damn popular vote.

But why, another local happened to goad the vile voice in cascadingly wheezy Italian the day before last, don’t you Americans actually DO something about Bush? 

Celeste (the vile voice's fiancé, god knows where she is) translated this question, raspy inflections and all. Shrugging commonsensically, the vile voice said: what can we do? I’m not Dick Cheney. I’m no Donald Rumsfeld.

We were at a wedding and though Celeste’s bunchily-curly hair rollicked as she nodded in agreement, Celeste’s mediator role lessened her onus to answer the tough questions. It was a hot late afternoon. The day before yesterday. A hot bright early twenty-first-century Saturday. The day before the gloomy day when I was (I swear) poisoned. The sun, sprawling. The sun, spelunking. The air, its wafts, its wefts…smelling like pure citrusy sin… Plus, in the interim of Celeste’s translation there was always the staring, such staring, engulfing me, closing me in. 

A lot of people protested the war in the U.S., the vile voice rationalized. There were speeches on the Senate floor etc. But in this particular case America’s worst aspects won out. In my profession, I make jokes to help people become better informed, but also to liberate the national mood.

In Italian, Celeste related the riposte, which the vile voice felt comfy with. The vile voice’s answer was well-meaning yet registered the concerns of the vile voice’s conversant. The latter was an octogenarian cousin of Celeste’s named Giorgione whose youthful amber eyes offset the sluggish feeling of the rest of his noggin. 

Giorgione says it’s a disgrace that no one could stop this war, Celeste soon translated as her cousin’s staring persisted. He says that if this war is a function of the world order, the world order is sick and sure to only get sicker. Giorgione says the point can’t ever be to make jokes, especially if the jokes are seen to be an end in themselves. Until the war ends, Giorgione insists we must amplify the facts of the invasion and all of its murder and destruction like news-clouds masking the very heavens until we can’t but sacrifice our own limbs to stop the damn thing—

The vile voice felt blindsided. Amplify the facts of the invasion and all of its murder and destruction like news-clouds masking the very heavens? The vile voice quivered. Sacrifice our own limbs to stop the damn thing?! The vile voice envisioned hill-people eyeing war-bespeaking skies and duly locking themselves inside of inherited shacks. In his mind’s eye the vile voice saw his own eyes happenstancely eyeing war-bespeaking skies and thence driving a motorcar off the nearest cliff. Yes yes the vile voice mused upon how, as a child, he’d often thought the firmament to be a mere ready-made playpen set aside for air traffic. The sky is only a manmade field of least functional resistance! But when the vile voice escaped the table, Giorgione’s heavens-intensive comments made more sense. The vile voice paced and ached, see, the vile breathed and sighed. The vile voice smiled; looked around for Celeste; smiled; eyed the surrounding crowd for suspicious eyes. After careful deliberation, the vile voice concluded Celeste was nowhere in sight and granted himself permission to surreptitiously pluck tray-topping glasses. Smiling and sipping, guzzling and pacing, the vile voice in time even placed an arm lengthwise in front of his face whilst chugging newly-snagged wine after newly-snagged wine. And when the vile voice was soon still whistling and scurrying and dousing anxiety with gulp upon gulp, the vile voice chanced to glimpse the bride and groom’s names written upon the very sky:

V I T T O R I A    E    B A L D A S S A R E

As fast as the whims of the late-late-afternoon upper air disappeared the lovers’ names however, the vile voice felt incapable of further feeling. Before the vile voice knew it, the vile voice covertly pounded two coupes of champagne before fumigating his tongue with mint spray and revisiting his table only to let Celeste yank him back out toward the broader tray-lined premises.

I remember Vietnam, another local stated in impeccable English when Celeste and the vile voice later returned to their table. A plate of prickly pears had taken shape. (Also a plate of fresh creamy-whatever cookies etc…) And the commenter was commenting: I’ve read a lot about what the U.S. did in southeast Asia. I know those events took place a long long time ago but frankly I don’t trust Bush, and I don’t trust anything Americans say about their wars either.

The speaker in question, Vicenza, sported a velvety dress with one spaghetti-type strap and resided in Zurich where she was a history prof, specializing in ancient Greek colonization. 

I don’t wish to make you queasy during a celebration, Vicenza persisted. But I see someone like Henry Kissinger still advising American presidents, and I really do wonder…

The thing was, the vile voice didn’t even disagree. The Iraq war had been going on for sixteen-plus months. When Celeste insisted that I, the vile voice, attend AA meetings as a condition of introducing our parents to one another, voila, the invitation to a Sicilian wedding appeared in the mail. Plus, a year had already passed since President Bush made a speech on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner saying MISSON ACCOMPLISHED, where he claimed that Major combat operations in Iraq have ended and The United States and her allies have prevailed.

I think that the Iraqi people deserve democracy, the vile voice reasoned with Vicenza from Zurich. Like you though, I’m just not sure war is a good way to deliver democracy.

The vile voice couldn’t make sense of why the war was such a hot-button topic. But then Celeste reminded the vile voice—Celeste’s cousin Vittoria, the bride, is herself a professor of American history. Vittoria’s employer is a university in Catania, a big Sicilian city about an hour’s drive north of Siracusa. Grand as all myth, Vittoria teaches courses about The Revolutionary War and/or The Civil War on the foot of Mount Etna (a volcano). And though we didn’t cross paths with her much after she greeted us when we’d arrived (we’d seen Vittoria plenty throughout the week), the vile voice was inclined to guess that the America-oriented chitchat of the bride and her guests trickled, as if as a matter of cosmic urgency, in the direction of the only Americans at the wedding.

But don’t you think, Vicenza from Zurich prodded with a weirdly amicable squint, that pretending to even know what the Iraqi people want is a stretch? Granted, Saddam was a ruthless dictator. Yet your country was so set on occupying their country that you would have invaded regardless of what Iraqis themselves did or said. I’m sorry, but if you showed a world map to every single American, I’d be surprised if even thirty percent could point out the general location of Iraq.

The wedding itself was like a smorgasbord of space. There was no priest, there were only honey-colored surfaces and pastel-ish platforms and demanding silences (and countless palm trees etc), in the midst of which the un-mic’d couple took the mid-dusk oath as if in privacy. The freshness of the fennel-and-orange-salad might well cleanse the soul; and ditto for the scrumptiousness of the anchovies and swordfish and fried pea-packed rice balls. And before you knew it, afternoon had become full-blown evening while hordes of Sicilians were imbibing on an open-air platform equipped with its own staircase to a private rock beach. The vino was gushing, rendering the space between dance floor and tabletop and seashore less distinct with each hour, with candlelight never not bypassing the encroachments of darkness in a manner akin to the way the sea’s roar suffused the wedding in spite of the laughter and dancing and the knocking of forks against glasses so as to call the bride and groom to kiss. But the whole damn time the vile voice (sneaking liquor here; there; everywhere) was shirking and dodging the slightest hint of war-related chitchat. 

Some of the attendees (Prof-types) knew specificities (the withdrawal of Filipino and Spanish troops due to disgust with the war’s management, for instance) of which the vile voice was not even aware. I mean I didn’t even know there were damn Spanish and Filipino troops in Iraq! But around two in the morning, when the vile voice was looking to sneak one (and another) glass of the frizzy vino that one of Celeste’s younger cousins was wielding, Giorgione, the older cousin of Celeste’s who’d earlier grilled me, pulled the vile voice aside in a stern fashion. 

Guarda, the octogenarian groggily insisted, che sopruso, che sopruso—

Lack of proficiency in English hardly hindered Giorgione from making himself clear. He’d apparently just now slipped out to go home and clip a news article. And Celeste, after informing the vile voice that che sopruso meant what tyranny while she and the vile voice waltzed back to our rented villa, translated the article aloud, confirming Giorgione’s announcements that the U.S. recently bombed a wedding party in a part of Iraq near the Syrian border. 

Forty-plus people were murdered, Celeste imparted as we strolled a street strewn with cactus heads, but the Pentagon is still maintaining that the wedding was not even a wedding. 

The next morning—late yesterday morning, before it started getting gloomy—the vile voice felt as functional as a cracked amphora on the sea-floor. Still, the vile voice couldn’t sleep so the vile voice asked Celeste if she didn’t mind if the vile voice wandered the island a bit. 

In Ortygia you’d pretty much have to dig toward the earth’s crust for hours just to be more than a two-minute walk from the Mediterranean. Whitecaps were hogging the vile voice’s sight right after the vile voice would pass beneath graffiti-caked archways, etc. Plus, sloppily hungry as the vile voice was, the vile voice would hear non-ocean noise and assume said noise was orifices and/or hands clutching coffee and/or pastries.  

At some point the vile voice stopped for an espresso too but all the caffeine did was abet the booze from the night before to make the vile voice feel more debauched. Bombing a wedding party?

I didn’t want to return to our villa—Celeste had simply gone back to sleep and the vile voice felt the vile voice needed to keep moving but the vile voice also had no idea how to apportion such vile motion. The vile voice had drunk not a drip for months, then, well… The vile voice eyed seeming-septuagenarians draping wet swimming trunks over balcony’d clotheslines; the vile voice glimpsed paper cups niched in railings. In four years at Ewww News, the vile voice toiled and slogged as if jokes were the be-all end-all antidote to oblivion. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the vile voice incidentally came to recall Jeff, The Host of Ewww News, announcing, I know this program isn’t quite over yet but I just want to say, before the show even starts—we’ve done a magnificent job with this particular episode!

Yes yes… See, yesterday afternoon, after I’d eyed the Caravaggio painting with Vittoria the bride (of all people), I stumbled upon the staircase down to that same stupidly-stunted stony ill-fated beach perched beneath ill-fated clouds. And it was during that very progression down that selfsame series of steps that I, the vile voice, was summoning one specific show the vile voice had helped write only a couple of months back. We did a prolonged bit mocking the one-year anniversary of President Bush’s MISSION ACCOMPLISHED speech, see, when it was clear that said mission was far from accomplished. Frankly the vile voice was the one who wrote damn near the whole bit. And to the tune of the audience’s claps, Jeff The Host jetted onstage to deliver his monologue while donning the same whatever-the-hell space-pilot costume George W. Bush wore to take pictures with cadets before the actual MISSION ACCOMPLISHED speech. 

In fact, Jeff The Host was iterating, what’s the point of actually DOO-ING anything when you can stop spectacularly to claim the very thing you are DOO-ING is magnificently concluded even before you’re finished DOO-ING the same thing you’re still very much DOO-ING?

With Jeff soon patting himself on the space-suited back as he was parading and waving his hands, the band played “For He Is a Jolly Good Fellow,” at the end of which the host hailed the unveiling of a stage-spanning banner reading: EPISODE ACCOMPLISHED. 

Don’t you feel proud, Jeff The Host asked the first guest, a studiously-five-o-clock-shadowed actor promoting his newest film, to be here for Episode Accomplished?

The actor feigned neutrality. Ditto for the second guest, a sportscaster plugging his memoir about learning to throw a knuckleball in coastal New Hampshire. And though the grim specifics of the war were never prodded even once during said episode, the EPISODE ACCOMPLISHED banner brought such dependable laughs that it was never taken down. But I do wish the banner could at least be removed from my memory cause…well…we taped those first EPISODE ACCOMPLISHED bits the very same day of my first real…ahem…accident. 

The day of EPISODE ACCOMPLISHED fast became a night of imbibing, see. A long harmless-seeming night of knocking one after another back. The night was: vileness. The night was: pure uncut vileness: But I’d worked so hard on the EPISODE ACCOMPLISHED bit. Worked like a dog and thought I should reward myself. Spent an evening alone (Celeste would have frowned on the boozing) in a niche of Manhattan I found to be foreign. For the hell of it—the hell of it? (For the vileness, really…the fatefully self-fulfilling vileness…) Hopped in a cab right after work, asked the cabbie what’s a classic dingy bar. Less a bar (I clarified) than a cellar. Then: pilsners, ales. Shot of bourbon; schnapps. The liquor started flowing like the damn Fountain of Arethusa (also here in Ortygia apparently?) but the vileness was the whole point, cause I just kept sipping, gulping. Swigging. Glugging. Pure liquid dinner like back home in the provinces. Liquid drowning liquid-drowning liquid. (Asked the cabbie: what’s the scroungiest bar where the sky’s not possible?) Then it hit me. War-talk filled the bar’s TVs while the flood hit me. The vile voice went under. (Grappa; pilsners. Bourbon; schnapps.) Blacked out, then: un-blacked-out just enough to see like six fists flying, feet kicking necks. Been drinking like this since college but nothing so crazy ever happened. Fists knocking compact discs. (Fists airborne as UFO discs.) Blacked right out, no memory of anything for an hour but then: my palms smooshed with fingertips. My fists punching a third dude’s sockets. (Liquid-drowning liquid drowning liquid...) Discs as scattered as planets and also: my nose-bone cracked like a twig. Blood all over the pretzel baskets, ran the fuck out to hop in a cab when I heard cops coming. 

We don’t live in Ortygia, one of the two focaccia-gifting smart-alecks who would also deliver the vile voice the poison (I swear) huffed after they themselves finally descended the huge staircase amidst early onset darkness. We live over the footbridge, in the modern part of Siracusa. Ortygia ees mostly…for the rich…the rich and the tourists.

The speaker wore a baseball jacket with the word COLORADO posted across the chest. Something evasively aggressive prevailed in his demeanor, just as something aggressively evasive prevailed in his conversation. He had goth-type split-end-dense chestnut hair that parceled down around his shoulders while his companion, a bit taller, was hunched in a sort of sporty way, with a backpack-backed torso and a smirk that was only absent when she spoke. 

And how do you two spend your days? the vile voice asked. I’m thinking you’re students?

A kind of smoke (from cigarettes? can’t remember…) hid their faces like the crater-obscuring fumes in bleh Mount Etna pics. 

Students, the taller one cackled, forcing me to realize I was still wearing my dress pants and tieless shirt from the wedding. 

We do this and that, the baseball jacketed fella divulged. We might not even really exist… 

Well, the vile voice declared, I’m jealous of your locale. I mean Manhattan is nice or whatever but Siracusa is like something out of myth!

I don’t quite remember how the duo passed the vile voice the focaccia (the backpack?) but I do know that the sesame-seed-speckled focaccia was delicious. The sauce was spare but of a cherry-tomato-like sweetness but, but—every time I tried to jokingly touch or grab the two focaccia-gifters, they evaded me. It was like they had no corpus! I mean I was swinging and flailing and whirling, with nothing in my hands but air (and airier air etc). And there was more and more cackling all the time and the vile voice was apparently the cacklings’ engine.

Med-eee-choo pee-ay-too-soo fa la kee-ah-jaa ver-mee-new-sah, the baseball jacket’d one declared after the vile voice pounded a pre-opened beer bottle that was passed to me. I’d taken two sips and immediately started waxing guiltily about the wedding bombing and how my line of work was existentially vacuous. And as the smirky one explained—the smirky one was more adept in English, if less inclined to speak—the Sicilian proverb meant: self-righteous doctors deliver rancid wounds. 

You’re propagating olive-packed anchovy bread, the vile voice suddenly started blathering as the duo dropped guffawingly to the rock beach, and this bread’s so amazingly all-subsuming as to be the thing doing the consuming—

Unendingly rollicking and rambling, both myself and the Mediterranean were as if productively unsure of whether we were host and/or audience. 

Sanctimonious physicians, the vile voice told the locals, tear holes through the healthy, etc, I get the proverb’s gist. But what the fuck could I do? Stop the invasion single-handedly?

The vile voice’s salary compelled the vile voice to pen another running gag about the faraway war.

The scenario in question pertained to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. These so-called WMDs were the main reason the Bush Administration gave for declaring war. There was supposed to be mustard gas? Liquid anthrax? Chemical warheads etc? Yet as United Nations’ weapons inspectors still hadn’t found a trace of the WMDs more than a year later, said armaments’ air of menace now seemed sourced in their catastrophic absence.

Willie, Jeff The Host would invariably say to the person with whom he often shared a post-monologue split-screen, thank you for taking time out of your hectic schedule! Have you perchance found the weapons of mass destruction yet?

We had one my fellow writers, Willie Enslin—a gray-bearded joke-machine who has written for most of the big-time late night comedy shows going back to the seventies—dress up in a camo vest. And when Willie stood in front of a green-screen showing tanks rumbling through Mesopotamian desert, he would stare in wide-eyed silence, before answering: 

Nope.

A laughter-smattered hush would ensue, in which smirking Jeff would exclaim:

But you all are searching mighty thoroughly, I trust!

Willie would again stare with rugged blankness to simulate the delay of the NYC-Baghdad transmission. But then, nodding steadily and even adjusting his ponytail yet never quite answering, Willie’s reticence would force Jeff to reiterate—

I mean Willie, you’re doing everything you can to justify this war, I hope—

There would be another hush in which Willie would just keep nodding.

But Willie, Jeff would finally damn near plead, we don’t have all day so I’ve got to ask—what have you actually found in Iraq?!

Um, well, Jeff, Willie would finally pronounce after another delay, all the while revealing his hoarse cot instead of caught New England proclivities of accent, we’ve found DESERT, we’ve found, let’s see, SAND… And we’ve also found, ahem, VEGETATION…

But Willie, Willie, Jeff The Host asked with marked alarm on one particular occasion, where exactly ARE the weapons of mass destruction?

WILLIE: That’s simple, Jeff… Beyond the clouds.

JEFF: (Christmas-morning-wide-eyed face): Beyond the clouds?

WILLIE: Up in the heavens.

JEFF: Wait… but… wha—

WILLIE: The answer is simple, Jeff… The weapons are not the stuff of mere mortals.

JEFF (impressionable-boy-being-subjected-to-birds-and-bees-face): The stuff of mere mortals?! 

WILLIE: Do you ponder the sun much, Jeff? How many minutes per day do you spend thinking about the sky? The planets? Galaxies etc? Not much. Not much at all, I reckon. There’s a whole cosmos. There’s an entire cosmos out there. Our planet’s like a measly ping-pong ball in the midst of the whole deal. Frankly a professional smarty-pants like you can’t even fathom it. Problem is though: professional smarty-pantses like you largely run this planet. And since everyone in fact KNOWS professional smarty pantses run the planet—there is indeed a self-consciousness thereto that’s so palpable as to be like an infrastructure IN ITSELF—well, the weapons must be precisely in the parts of the planet where you professional smarty-pantses wouldn’t notice……namely: the heavens. I mean there’s no way the weapons don’t exist. There’s no way so many people are dying for lies and therefore for no reason. All the bombs, murdering. The tanks, the killings. Fires, prisoners. The Iraqis living in the midst of such warfare. The white phosphorous crowding the lungs and the eyes; the disenfranchised citizens. All the young smiley kids signing up to fight in such chaos. Such a scenario is simply not fathomable! All the endless disorder with no end in sight. Therefore, Jeff, the weapons must be in the very opposite of the places where all the professional war-starting smarty-pantses are gonna go looking. Up there in the firmament, all that space. All that emptiness. Pure clear sky-camouflaged weapons. Naturally the weapons are where you haven’t looked. Naturally the weapons must be where you wouldn’t expect. Why are you such a dumbass, Jeff? Why are you so stupid? Remember when you were a kid? Remember when you were a kid and—

JEFF: I was actually never a kid.

WILLIE: (to the tune of spare confused laughter): Remember when you were a child? A pissy-pants fresh-faced little specimen?

JEFF: I sprung fully formed like the goddess Athena, Willie.

WILLIE: Remember when you were a little kiddie, Jeff? Wetting the bed?

JEFF: I only ever wet my pants—

WILLIE: Remember when you used to soil your shorts when your parents read you stories about old dead Gods? Stories about God’s wrath? The wrath of the gods swooping down from the heavens? Well, the WMDs are basically the same thing. The reality of the weapons is simply too vast. You professional smarty-pantses can’t handle the reality of the weapons just like you still can’t handle the reality of heavens crammed with a God (or Gods) (or whatever). I mean I’m an atheist. I’m an atheist but never mind that, Jeff. You never even bother to think about the sun. You never even pay the sun due deference! People like you run around and have BBQ-parties and brunch and get your oil changed and pad your 401Ks and pat yourself on your ass etc etc and decades go by, but in the meantime, never once do you consider the planets. The weapons are of another order of reality. The scale of the weapons is simply beyond the scale of your ilk of smarty-pants professionals. The weapons are precisely where you’d never look. Saddam is a mean jerk (duh) (of course) but he’s no dummy. Saddam’s no idiot. The weapons have to be where you’d never find them. Mustard gas, sarin. The weapons are of a piece with the heavens. Yellowcake, anthrax, etc. The weapons just blend in so dang well with the heavens—

Then the camera cut to oldtimey footage of sun-swathed sky. The film-stock was grainy and the camera zoomed ever-so-slowly; but when the camera commenced to zoom it zoomed (and zoomed) with hypnotic slowness in the midst of a deep silence tinged with audience giggles. The camera zoomed and zoomed. All you could hear was Willie’s voice whispering: the weapons…in the heavens. Laughter popped up here and there (the laughter lacked conviction) and the sun advanced and advanced and all you could hear: yes yes here…finally…the weapons of mass destruction. The camera was blurring the cosmos: the weapons are in the heavens. The susurrating persisted as if said susurrating was the one damn thing making the plain old plane of earthly reality more and more foreign: the weapons just blend in so dang swell with the heavens.

Back in Siracusa, by early yesterday afternoon, the vile voice was super-caffeinated and dillydallying. Plus: amidst the descending clouds, the surrounding edifices’ pastel-ish yellows and/or oranges started to seem not a compliment to the darkening sea, but an admonition. 

Wait, the vile voice found himself at some point saying upon suddenly seeing Vittoria, the bride, wait: aren’t you supposed to be on a honeymoon?

Again, let’s be lucid: this morning, the vile voice was not woundedly emitting fluid, no, but the vile voice did wake up pre-dawn covered in blood. The vile voice simply scurried right into the ocean cause the villa-scene was: vileness. The villa bathroom scene: pure uncut vileness. Even from the slight distance of memory the scene still is: unimaginable vileness. But early yesterday afternoon, Sunday afternoon, the vile voice was caffeinatedly hungover when the vile voice stumbled upon the very bride Vittoria who happily dragged the vile voice to see a Caravaggio painting somewhere over a footbridge.

Let’s just first obtain, Vittoria sighed in a maternal fashion, a splash of water. 

Please understand: I’m doing what I’m doing now not because I can imagine the scale of the destruction in Iraq, but precisely because the vile voice is incapable. The imagination checks itself. Merging with the ocean is the only option. (All this time I’ve been fibbing.) The imagination sputters, fizzles. All this time I’ve been lying about being poisoned—maybe you never even believed it? 

But really why aren’t you gone away on your honeymoon or whatever? I vaguely remembering repeating to Vittoria. What are you even DOO-ING wandering Ortygia? 

Again, please, let’s be lucid: when I, the vile voice, said that two happenstance locals on the stunted rock beach passed me an open bottle of beer, that was true. Verifiably. One-hundred percent. Go find the locals and ask them (I mean go ask the one local who isn’t dead). (I mean, assuming the one who wasn’t on my bathroom floor isn’t also dead.) We three shared beer after beer on the dopey dinky rock beach. We lingered in the drizzly day and got soused and made ourselves as sinuously swirly as something out of a Matisse canvas. But though I’ve been adamant that said beer was poisoned, well…such a lie is itself an upshot of sheer vileness. Why would you ever believe that whole bit? Merging with the ocean is the only answer; merging with the ocean is a fateful matter. The vile voice goes further out every second. The sun infests and infects; the pastel-ish buildings fast become fainter. The sea taunts me in its dawn-draped-ness while the whole deal also encloses me like an ill-lit room and in the meantime here’s the detestable voice aiming to be estranged from itself. Wishing to be estranged from the wish to perpetuate itself. To be estranged from the wish to perpetuate itself in the very vile midst of perpetuating itself! And after the vile voice’s walk to the far side of town yesterday afternoon, and after all of the ensuing time in front of Caravaggio’s image of Saint Lucy’s death, the vile voice was rambling: I love the colors, the sternness. But is it me or does one of the very gravediggers burying Saint Lucy seem like he’s gonna become like emotionally broken in the midst of the burial?

At some point, Vittoria started her own spiel, saying, the constituents of some of the most powerful U.S. Congress-people and Senators make their living manufacturing military armaments. Constructing weapons literally built the homes in which many of these voters live!

Everyone knows Caravaggio himself was a bit of a rough. Let’s be lucid: this same painter-guy regularly ran around Rome wielding a dagger and/or sword and he even once mortally wounded an enemy. (Not that Caravaggio was vile……let alone possessed of a vileness even vaguely comparable to my own vileness……) Yet remembering the Caravaggio painting duly makes me remember another vile incident. Cause there was an eminently vile incident, see. An eminently vile incident so eminently vile that even the eminently vile voice tries never to fathom it. Never told anyone about it (not even Celeste) cause the incident was vileness. I mean I just went to grab a few drinks after work in a foreign niche of Manhattan again, only a few weeks after the first vile brawl-incident. It was in fact hoped that the evening of the second incident would assume the proportions of a geometrically pure fit of authoritative anti-vileness. Because there were three basic sides to the evening in question. There were three sides to the evening as if said sides were set to constitute a perfectly equilateral triangle of vileness’s very opposite. One side: my person. One side: the metropolis. One side: libations. I was simply going to go out on the town (alone) after a long week of work (i.e. jokes) and demonstrate that my person could indeed get smashed amidst strangers and not effect terror. I simply had to show myself that my intoxicated self was not toxic. And as the three sides (my person; alcohol; the metropolis) purported to mix and mingle to constitute my manifest non-vileness, I blacked-out. Utterly. The bourbon. Blacked-out: schnapps. Pilsners. Gin; lagers. Blacked-out: grappa; vodka; etc. Blacked-out. Blacked-out then un-blacked-out just in time to find myself hovering over a body on the pavement. Me and another guy, alone in an alleyway. Me and another dude, niched in an isolate punch-drunk niche where I was smashing his chin. Bashing his face into a dumpster. Bashing the face into the concrete’s face until the stranger was as inert as Saint Lucy and/or the body in the villa. Yet from what I understand, Caravaggio was imprisoned in Malta after regularly being on the run from the law until the painter escaped his Maltese confines and then headed to Siracusa, where he ended up painting the picture of Saint Lucy I can still somehow kinda remember. 

Simply think of all of the Congress-people and Senators who are elected and re-elected because there’s no military spending bill of any size that these individuals won’t sign, I also remember Vittoria telling me god knows when. And the weapons manufactured in each of their districts are capable of providing deterrence and global stability in some cases, yes. But these same weapons are also demonstrably capable of causing unimaginable death. 

Of course I have no recollection of how exactly I’d parted from the bride Vittoria after we’d ogled Caravaggio’s portrait of the body of Saint Lucy. I remember nothing of the late night (or early morning?) return to the apartment which seemingly led to the corpse on the floor of the villa. And I honestly have no idea what transpired after I blacked-out while drinking on the dinky beach, I just tried to shake the person on the bathroom floor awake as soon as I myself woke up before dawn but the person’s head kept banging and clanging against the porcelain base of the toilet. Then I pressed chest-ward to try to induce breath from the corpse, I mean I really jabbed and jabbed, using my forearm then elbow, palm, etc, until I got right down on the floor and cradled (and cuddled) the body. 

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Steve Barbaro's fiction appears in Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, and 3:AM, and his poems can be found in such venues as The Yale Review, New American Writing, The Common, The Rupture, and DIAGRAM. He is also the founder and editor of new_sinews, a journal of new literature. Find him amidst the tweetsphere @iLLepitaph