John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Barbara remembered plenty of people around Naples who’d come a lot closer to her praying than that, lately, with no discernible betterment. But she figured she’d soon enough get the opportunity to wipe the stars from this boy’s eyes. Soon enough she’d go to work, especially, on the man’s well-nigh infantile belief in the power of television. For Fond also believed that once he got the agreement on video — plus the prayer, he reiterated — he’d have no trouble with the authorities. Once he got the material onto the internet, multimedia proof of his good intentions, he and the other Shell members could return to street level without consequences. Everything, declared the young West African, would be perfectly fine.

By now Barbara and Jay had settled on the floor at the edge of the flashlight’s halo. Fond remained up and stalking about, from time to time spreading both arms and all ten fingers for emphasis. The rap star, he even had stage lighting, a flashlight on its end at his feet. He assured them he didn’t intend the family’s visit to the South to go on very long. He hoped the trip would save a few lives, to be sure, but more than that he intended to help his country claim “a better place in the Imperial feast.” Nothing could accomplish this, he felt certain, more quickly than decent exposure on television. Once the Republic and its suffering began to play across the dinner tables and living rooms of the United States, not to mention the web broadcasts in their children’s bedrooms, everything would swiftly “take a turn towards a betterment.” Fond was confident that their work would be done by the start of the American school year.

“Your children,” he said then, “they begin school, mm, a Settembre, non ?”

Barb nodded, less than enthusiastic. She hoped he was wrapping this up.

“You do intend to return to America, non ?” Again his eyes were on her. “You have always intended this, this goodwill visit — it was always to be brief?”

That got her angry. She’d already had this glum epiphany, watching Paul’s face zip into its files, on the oversized screen in the editing booth. The mother had seen the whole Naples trip looking pointless, zipped into a box and deleted. The recollection must’ve started her frowning, because Jay sharply cut off whatever she had in mind to say. Again he brought up the guns.

“I mean, before you go calling us tourists , let’s talk about those guns. Before you go getting insulting. ‘Goodwill visit,’ give me a break.”

The backup with his pistol in his pants, the white man more or less, noticed Jay’s tone and put his hand on the handle of his weapon.

“You walk around packing iron, hey. You’re the tourists. Anyone carrying a gun, he’s in and out fast.”

The leader of the crew dropped his arms, looking hurt, struggling to understand. Jay pressed ahead, arguing that so long as Fond kept threatening to “put a bullet” in the two Americans, any statement they made wouldn’t be worth a thing. “I mean, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace?’ How’s that going to come off? Just, for starters, think how it’s going to sound to the cops.”

“But, sans blague , I cannot foresee any significant charge against me.”

Fond smiled, a slim ebony Buddha. “Once the authorities are witness that video, I cannot see how my brothers or I will have any legal charge that will, will stand.”

Jay looked to Barb, his question so obvious that the lanky radical went on at once, assuring them he wasn’t crazy. The police knew him, he argued; they understood he was no Bin Laden. He apologized again, “de tout mon coeur ,” for the extreme measures he’d been forced to take today. And did the Lulucitas realize that before coming to Naples he’d held a fellowship in Philosophy of Cinema at the university in Bamako? Did they understand that the actions of his Shell amounted to a natural extension of his research into the sociopolitical ramifications of Spectacle?

“I know you’re a smart guy,” Jay said. “And movies, hey, I’ll sit and talk about the movies all night. Just as soon as you lose the guns.”

“But you must understand, today is never been an act of violence. Today is a performance and a, a credo.”

During the fifteen months he’d been able to afford at the university, Fond explained, he’d developed a thesis on “the politicization inherent in representations of the Foreign,” as it occurred in the work out of Hollywood. Then later still, after his mother had died of the guinea worm and he’d paid to for a passage to Salerno in a shipping crate — he and a Nigerian who never recovered from the dehydration — Fond had come to see greater metropolitan Naples as a rare opportunity for applied learning. “For are you seeing how the American cinema treats the experience of Italy?”

Jay looked like he was about to erupt, to bark an order like the American Boss, but Barbara held up a finger. There had to be a thread here, glimmering on the labyrinth floor, something she and her husband could pick up and follow.

“Are you seeing what happens to you Americans, their signification in the cinema, whenever a representative character comes to Italy?”

“I’ve — seen the movies,” she tried.

“You Americans,” the young man continued, “you are fascinated with Italy, and cinema provides the signifier for this fascination. The cinema makes spectacle of the secret dreaming, to l’anime of a society at large. Thus what appears as spectacle should be understood as confession. The culture presents its case to God.”

Now there was a possible thread. “Are you saying you believe in God?” she asked. “Because if you believe it’s God at work in our Paul, you don’t understand—”

“Ah, Signora. If you would only have responded to my initial request on the MTV, we could’ve spoken comfortably of everything. Of this God as well.”

“Well, on MTV, in front of fifty million viewers, I would’ve said the same thing. You don’t understand about Paul. You want to talk about a spectacle? I would’ve looked straight into the camera and said, our Paul, when he, when he has an episode — he can’t do it on demand.”

“Barb’s right.”

“Dr. DiPio,” she went on, “he already tried this kind of thing, you know. As much as I let him, he tried it. He put Paul together with a couple of the terremotati .”

“I mean, you must’ve seen it,” Jay said. “Even in dell’Ovo they had a TV We could take Paul down to the desert and, hey, you’d still get nothing.”

Barbara, meantime, let her gaze shift away from their keeper’s sleek face. One of the other clandestini was acting as if he’d heard something, throwing the flashlight beam around the room, but Barb stared elsewhere, into the dark. She didn’t want to think about asking more of her eleven-year-old.

“Ah oui .” The outlaw was saying. “This I do understand, the boy’s visit may come to nothing.” Nevertheless, he went on, he believed he’d detected something about Barbara’s prayers that had eluded everyone else.

“It is been the spectacle, in every case,” he declared.

Barbara faced him, frowning. “Prayers — it’s private. It’s you and God.”

“But when there is the betterment, it is been on the video, in every case. The miracle with the boy, with your Paul, it is beginning on the TV, toujours . His mother is saying her rosary on the TV.”

And Fond squeezed her shoulder. Barbara startled, drawing in a leg. At least he kept it brief, correct, French.

“Are you saying, every healing episode is on account of me?”

The refugee philosophe stepped back again, his subalterns nodding to either side of him. “I am saying, it is beginning with you. You, the spectacular image.”