Anamnesis by Zorina Alliata (ebook reader ink txt) 📕

But I was not fast enough, and I felt it touching through my midriff as I was struggling to avoid it. It smoothly moved to form the forth pyramid, to take its place in the natural weight of things, leaving me crippled for life. My middle section never developed since; an eternal child inside, never to achieve maturity. I was isolated like a bad virus you cannot yet destroy, but you can contain.

I have never told this to my grandmother or anyone else in my family. They were so proud of me, of how I handled myself. They said I was very smart; but I wasn’t. It was not a matter of being smart, but a matter of knowing things without having to think about them. To my family, I am their best creation yet; their absolute pride and joy; and being a woman, a natural advantage already, just makes me more precious in their eyes. To this day, 30 years later, I could not bring myself to tell them that in fact I was defeated long ago, while being tempted with a freshly baked donut.

I was having lunch with Dante that Sunday and he seemed distracted and sad. He was usually content with himself and self-absorbed in his own frame of mind; in the year since we’ve become “office buddies”, I have never seen him so upset.

“What’s up?” I asked him. “Your idiotic supervisor giving you grief?”

“Nah”, he dismissed me with a gesture.

He had ordered the turkey hamburger with a side of broccoli instead of fries, which had the waitress wondering if Dante’s gay.

Dante was way too good looking for a straight man. With his short haircut, high cheeks, steel-blue eyes, square chin, and a slim but obviously muscular body, you would have thought he is a model. He wasn’t very smart either, which fooled people even more. I haven’t seen one person to believe him when he was introduced as being a computer engineer. I suspect they all thought he was a movie actor trying to hide his secret life.

However, Dante had no clue whatsoever on the effect he had on people. A true programmer at heart, he preferred the darkness and isolation of his cubicle to any human interaction. He was happiest when left alone; and could not figure out why he never was. The only thing he did to groom himself was to keep his hair really short (an influence from his uncle, a former Jarhead), shower each morning, and wear clean clothes. He was a bit too obsessed with cleanliness.

Even then, when we were having lunch, I could feel the other females in the room looking at him.

“Hey, there’s a cute chick smiling at you”, I told him, pointing to an artificial looking blonde with a bit of a mustache. “The best of the suburbs comes to this place”, I added, laughing.

“Whoa”, reacted Dante, not even turning his head.

Sipping from his coffee, Dante suddenly looked straight at me with a sharp expression. “Do you know, Anna,” he said, “what my first memory is?”

“My first memory”, he continued, “is a truck out of control heading toward me. I was 3 years old and I was standing at the foot of a hill, up in Mount Airy. My mom had taken me to visit a friend in the countryside and we had stopped for a short break to admire the hills and the forest.”

I looked back at him, sustaining his eyes. I did not see any danger; he was not channeling me or playing a game. His memory was genuine and the coincidence did nothing more than to reinforce that my belief that our destinies were somehow linked together.

“I remember the hills, the forest and the cows with big horns I had seen at a distance; ours was the only car we had encountered on the winding Clarksburg Road”, he continued.

His mom was wearing a white dress with red cherries design and was extremely emotional that day. She had hugged him and kissed him all day, and whispered sweet words in his young ears. But then, as they drove up route 355 and further from the city, she had relaxed and started to enjoy the surroundings. When she stopped the car to take a better look at the beautiful landscape around them, she was happy and at ease; she whisked Dante out from the car, in a laughing circle; then they sat, hand in hand, and looked upon the green valleys.

The truck appeared out of nowhere, with a frightening noise, smoke coming out its huge cabin. It made a short stop at the top of the hill, like a furious monster looking for prey. They turned around to see it speeding downhill, out of control, covering both lanes of the road in sweeping destruction. It was headed towards them; in a second, his mom jumped in front of Dante in a desperate attempt to protect him.

Time seemed to freeze; from behind his mom, Dante could not see the monster but he could hear the abominable noise getting closer. He fixed his eyes on the red cherries prettily painted on his mom’s dress; he thought of cherries and how they taste; he held to her dress, fearful, scared, reaching for her touch.

And then two strong arms took him and ran with him; in a confused, distorted vision, he followed the red cherries with his eyes; his mom was close. He screamed, loudly, but he could not hear himself; the truck passed somewhere above them, noise and all, and disappeared just as mysteriously as it had appeared, up the next hill and into the forest. Dante opened his eyes to find himself in the arms of Mr. Saccas, tucked under a small bridge; his mom was near them, shaking. She reached for him and held him tight, and he could finally embrace her and forget the monster.

“Oh, wow,” I said, “that’s quite a story. Where did Saccas came from?”

“It turns out he was going to the same friend we were going, and he saw the truck before we did”, said Dante. “He had enough time to get out of his car and sweep us both under the bridge, fortunately. We were very lucky he happened to be there.”

“So what else happened that day? I asked. Because I needed to know the whole story; I had a glimpse of a plot, a conspiracy or something like that, but I could not put my finger on it just yet.

“Nothing, really”, said Dante. “We spent the day in Mount Airy at this friend of my mom’s, a very nice lady. Then I fell asleep on the couch and when I woke up I was home in my bed.”

I didn’t want to say anything at that time. I ate my rice soup; I tried to cheer Dante up with office rumors about his supervisor being a transvestite; but in the back of my mind, I knew that someone was after him. That someone had planned to kill Dante that day, 30 years ago. That his mother and the convenient Saccas were somehow aware of it. If I knew something, it was survival – and I felt that Dante might need to learn a thing or two about it too.

“My name is Karen”, the waitress burst suddenly in an emotional voice, while serving the peach-flavored ice tea.

By the end of that lunch, three people – the waitress, the blonde and a middle-aged man with a kid – had asked Dante out for coffee. He refused each of them. “See, Anna”, he told me when we were finally outside, “that’s why I don’t go out much. You meet all sorts of freaks who want to talk to you and stuff.”

*-*-*

Dante came in Monday morning to find a voice mail message from his mother. “Dear”, she had said, “I’m sorry I was so upset yesterday. Why don’t you come by next weekend and we’ll talk about more pleasant things? I’ll put some chairs out on the porch. Please leave that memo alone; it won’t do you any good to pursue that. Okay? Now take care. Bye.” Dante shook his head; she could have called at home to apologize, instead of leaving him a message at the office. But he was not going to take her advice of dropping the memo investigation.

The secretary who wrote the speaker list memo lived in a cave on the dark side of Low Life Forms department. Her name was Victoria Queen and she was chewing gum when Dante shyly knocked at her door.

“What?” she barked.

“Hi”, Dante said, putting on the left-cheek gap smile. “My name is Dante Portinari-Guelph.”

“So?”, the secretary asked. “You’re from Sweaters? Tell them I’m not done yet. It’s been a bitchin’ week with all this freaking memos I gotta send. I’m doin’ my best, okay? They don’t have to send you here to punish me. I’m tryin’, okay?” And she pointed out to her feet.

Dante realized that her feet were moving under the desk, knitting something that looked like a wool sweater.

“Oh, wow”, he said, “you’re quite talented. How did you learn to do that?”

The secretary looked at him carefully. She had heard the legend of a sweet talker who one day might come by and release her from her duties. It was a slim chance that this young man was going to save her – but he was definitely the first sweet talker she had seen since she had been hired at the Company.

“Well, honey”, she said, “I’ll tell you my story ‘cause I like you and you should learn something from it. Like, read the fine print! Read the fine print!”

“Okay”, said Dante, fascinated by the toes’ dance under the desk.

“They hired me to send memos. I said: okay, sure, honey, no problemo. I can send some memos, sure. But then my second day on the job, my new boss comes in and installs this knitting station here. He says, he’s like: you gotta knit me sweaters, hon. And I’m, like, whoa! You know, I used to work at Hecht’s in Friendship Heights, okay? I mean, I don’t do manual work, okay? He goes, yeah, okay, ‘cause this is not manual. You gonna use your feet, so you don’t breach the agreement and the contract we signed. I’m like, I don’t remember anything of sweaters in my job duties, you know. And he laughs, and he’s like: well, next time read the fine print!”

“Oh, geez…” Dante exclaimed sympathetically. “How many sweaters do you have to knit?”

“One a day, hon. One a day. If I don’t finish the sweater I can’t go home, you know. I’m behind, like, about 47 sweaters already and I’ve only worked here for two months. I haven’t made it home in weeks.”

“Oh, God”, said Dante. “That can’t be right. You know, my mom has a neighbor who used to be a lawyer. I’ll ask him about this, because this doesn’t seem right, you know. They have to let you go home, at least. That’s just horrible.”

“You do that, sweet talker”, the secretary said. “Now, what are you looking for here?”

“So my name is Dante Portinari-Guelph”, Dante said, emphasizing the words. “See, Portinari-Guelph with only one dash. Now, my father’s last name is Portinari- -Guelph with two dashes and a space between the dashes. See? Because this is how everyone in his family was named, but I did not get the same right because everyone was pissed when he was never married