John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

At the same time, too, his colleagues in the Shell of the Hermit Crab were let out of the castle’s security ward, and none showed the least compunction about tearing into the local mozzarella, or a sprightly octopus salad. Apparently Maddalena’s pretty African, this man Barbara had tried to pray over, held some sort of command status. And on that same third day MTV Europe threw its weight behind the evanescent brown star, not sixty hours removed from almost dying in prison without a trial. Via a notarized and certified letter to the Lulucitas, the network promised the children new CDs, DVDs, X-box goodies and jeanswear, plus full-access passes to a half-dozen upcoming concerts in Rome and Milan and Florence, including travel, lodging, and two meals a day. All the family had to do in return was grant the station’s local affiliate an exclusive interview with Paul and an on-air meeting between him and the African, now going by the name Fond (the word tended to get the English pronunciation on TV and the radio, but the young man himself preferred the French).

The parents held firm: No. No new denim, no hanging out with the rock stars. No way. But the very next morning that champion wrestler Mass Media, the Mangler, the Murgatroyd, threw a new move at the family. The mother had to contend with MTV on the phone, a VJ calling her at home, thanks to the old technology, hand-to-pocket and mouth-to-ear. Barbara picked up the receiver only to get her ear split by a moaning dual-speaker feedback, a warped girlish chirping — because the call was live and on the air, from Rome, and Chris and JJ, desperate for something to do after breakfast, had tuned in the webcast. The MTV-ette who’d made the call looked like an ice princess, her hair as bleached as bone, and after Barbara got the boys to mute the computer, she found the VJ’s tone unnervingly cheerful. The girl sounded far too bubbly for the way she was putting on the pressure: Why do you stay there in Naples if you don’t want the good things you can get from staying? All we want to do is give you more of the good sweet things you have already, like this nice big apartment in which to live and…

These were five days with one moment of doubt on top of another. The midnight traffic offered its relief, now and again, and before going to bed Barbara always got her hour or so of reading aloud. The daily down time allowed her to take a certain pride in how she’d protected the kids. She could see herself like an angel in one of the fairy tales, skating her children safely across the swarming Neapolitan surface tension, and motherly pride would shroom up in her chest. Once she even felt confident enough to shoo Chris and JJ off the computer and compose an email for Nettie, back at the Samaritan Center.

Barbara’s mentor from the Holy Name was conscientious as ever about getting back, and she didn’t seem at all disturbed by the mother’s questions — on the contrary, Nettie had studied cases like Paul’s. While pursuing her Master’s, her email explained, the former nun had written a paper on healing episodes. Research had established that the phenomena occurred most commonly in children entering puberty, and the counselor listed a handful of informational websites, “reliable scientific sites, none of that Christian balderdash.” She mentioned a couple of books too, and summarized what she recalled from her Master’s work, saying that healing such as Paul’s tended to be “situational”—that is, the “acting out” was rooted in earlier trauma — and “its incidence is never defined geographically.” That last left Barbara frowning at the screen, recalling other times when her guru had slipped into a koan, too much Zen and not enough plain English. The mother sent a follow-up and Nettie proved to be still online. Briskly she clarified: miracle cures, “so-called,” were never limited to a particular place. A child might begin laying on hands in the middle of Kansas, but after that he or she could do it over any rainbow and down any yellow brick road; “what matters isn’t the physical environment, but rather the continuing vulnerability to the root psychosis.” So whatever energy was at work in Paul, these days, it would travel with him. Barbara nodded at the screen, and yet after a moment the voice in her head wasn’t Nettie’s but Jay’s. Barb could hear her soon-to-be-ex as clearly as if he were crouched beside her, reading the mail. Owl Girl, hey. This means New York would be worse, for Mr. Paul. If he’s still going to be doing this kind of thing, back in New York? In the media capital? Forget about it .

These were her five days, plus a transatlantic call on Father’s Day. Her quiet Dad had a one-bedroom in Boca Raton. Then Barbara went meekly to the Museo Nazionale .

Not the boys, though. Paul wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a little stir-crazy. Before the family went down to the Humvee, while Barbara was setting out the laundry on the balcony, John Junior had claimed he didn’t want to be seen with the PR man. The big teen claimed he’d “almost rather stay home” than follow Kahlberg around again. “I mean,” JJ had said, gulping down his second orange juice, “after what my girl told me.” My girl . As for Chris, he’d come out spoiling for a fight. Once the press gathered round, out on the museum steps, Barb’s second-oldest began to pick at Silky.

“The Borbons were monsters,” Chris insisted, there in front of the cameras. In another moment he and the officer were squabbling over kings and queens dead and gone for nearly two hundred years. The Borbon dynasty seemed admirable to Kahlberg; he waved his fat briefcase at the front pillars, braced by scaffolding, and reiterated that the museum was a Borbon legacy from the eighteenth century. In those days Naples had been the most dazzling stop on the Grand Tour. “Goethe came to visit, you heard of him? Mozart, he wrote some of his greatest—”

“Yeah yeah,” Chris said. “But for the average person, what good did that do? Like, so what if they had a few celebrities at the palace?”

Silky played his annoyance for laughs. “If I may continue. The present structure, as you see, is painted Pompeiian red—”

“Exactly. The new monsters imitated the old monsters.”

Barbara tried to follow, anything to distract her from the spineless way she held her place in the photo lineup. Chris argued that the Nazionale didn’t fit the standard notion of a major museum, since it had only a few major pieces. “There’s like, for instance, the Farnese Bull.” Rather Naples offered a slice of life, two- and three-thousand-year-old life, thanks to an unmatched collection of kitchenware and bedroom accessories, sifted from the buried homes at the foot of Vesuvius. Barbara gave a nod, thoughtful. What she was trying to think of, however, was something else again: how to escape at last, and for good, from her own time-worn kitchen and bedroom. Her fifteen-year-old had mentioned a bull, and some big creature like that, a monster really, had been clomping around her home for almost a month now. But the mother still hadn’t figured out how to harness the beast. This morning she could see that her hard feelings had rubbed off on Chris and John Junior, and even with all the bedtime reading, the aggravation must be getting to the others as well. But when was she going to tell them the truth? Just tell her children and get the awful business underway?

Here on the steps of the Nazionale, in full view of the press and the supplicants and assorted tourists, Chris was the one upsetting the applecart. The boy fingered his glasses up his nose and claimed that the best pieces from Pompeii and Herculaneum, “like, the five-star items,” had been stolen by the British or the French.

“Mn,” said Kahlberg. “I see where you’re going, big shooter. This is all about those big nasty-damn superpowers, pushing around the poor and the helpless.”