Elmo the Bicycle

My movements are sloppy, like an animal beginning to feel the effects of the tranquilizer dart in its side: I fall rather than walk into the shop, surprised I’ve made it to the outskirts of Rome in one piece, and I gaze blearily around.

Where the shit am I?

The shop is spacious, organized impeccably, and smells of grease. Bikes are lined up in rows, dozens of them, organized by type. Signs hang from the ceiling, rocking slightly in the breeze from outside and detailing the merchandise below them, and overwhelmingly the name of the store appears absolutely everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, on the bikes themselves, always in gigantic NASCAR font, italicized for a sense of forward movement. OLMO! In the back, a few employees mill about in black uniforms, comparing clipboards and sipping from water bottles displaying that same word in aggressively large font: OLMO!

I understand, in slow and inebriated waves, that I have exactly zero understanding of bicycles, any bicycles, regardless of their intended purpose. Long distance, short distance, road bike, mountain bike…they all have wheels and gears and shit, what’s the difference?

I move forward with falsified confidence, because alcohol.

A man rushes over to me, dressed head to foot in grease and the sort of biker’s uniform that leaves little to the imagination, and I see from a drunken glance that his wife/husband must be very satisfied. I wink at him. He frowns, but still greets me brightly-

“Ciao!”

I manage to mumble half-assed Italian greeting back. “Bawngiorno.”

“Molto bene!” he exclaims. “Egli parla Italiano! How may I help you today, signore?”

He grins broadly at me, so I try smiling back, but I only manage a sort of terrified clenching of the teeth.

“I’m looking for a long distance bike,” I hear myself say. My body is on a mission, and my brain is along for the ride.

“Well we have many, many long distance bikes, signore, which would you like?” he asks. His eyebrows are very thick and shoot up and down with every other word.

Mi dispiache, I’m sorry, I haven’t any idea of what I’m doing here, my brain feebly thinks, puttering. But my body takes control and begins a slow stroll about the store, hands in pockets, trying to look casual but immediately tripping over the wheel of the nearest bike. The salesman follows diligently.

The plan (if it can be called that) is to travel across an undefined part of Europe by bicycle. I came up with that stalwart idea two nights before with the help of pivo, as it is called in Italian, which in my native English translates to ‘beer’. A whole twelve pack of pivo, in fact, with a cheap plastic bottle of whiskey for intermission.

Jack Daniels, because I’m a God damned patriot.

I point to the lower-priced section of bikes gathered to one side of the store.

“How about one of those?” I ask.

“Ehm- well, how far will you go?” the salesman inquires. I glanced down at his nametag: Ronaldo, it says. He’s a short man with glorious amounts of black hair cascading down past his shoulders like an obsidian river. His eyes are bright green, calculating my every word, and his eyebrows, ever enthralling, are two healthy caterpillars perched just above. Strangely enough, my hair had been as long as his only a few hours prior. Lying on my pillow back at the apartment is a Ziploc bag full of long, auburn curls held together with a hair tie similar to the bright green one that binds Ronaldo’s locks. The sudden lack of weight has only added to my lightheadedness over the course of the day.

No more built-in pillow for long car rides.

Upon second glance at the man’s nametag I see that Ronaldo is the owner of the bike shop; my Italian has progressed enough in my three and a half months in Rome to figure this out. He must know what he’s talking about. I decide to lay my fate in his hands, because someone needs to take it out of mine ASAP. I attempt calculations, but have no planned route, so the numbers are arbitrary.

“How far you go, eh…it translates what bike you should buy,” Ronaldo intones, eyeing my perplexed expression. In the very back of my head, strangled by my own burgeoning panic, one gagged thought struggles to be heard-

You don’t know what you’re doing.

Then another voice comes in, gentle as a mother’s touch-

Just give him a number, you’ll figure it out. What is it, something like 1.6 or 1.7 kilometers to the mile?

“Eight hundred kilometers!” I shout, and a nearby customer jumps.

“Hah!” Ronaldo claps me on my back and I immediately start coughing from the impact. He references the bikes we stand amongst. “These ones are for short distances.” He emphasizes ‘short’ with a small space between his hands. “You go from home to work, work to home.”

“Right, right.”

“You want something more…ah, you know,” he licks his lips, “light.”

“Good, light, yes. So,” I gesture to the section next to us, “like these?”

“Those are for children.”

“Oh.” I hiccup loudly.

“Come. Follow me, now.”

We zigzag between bike groupings and return to the front of the store, a section I stumbled past on my way in. Ronaldo approaches bikes just behind the window display and picks out a sleek long-distance model with handlebars that curl under, forcing the rider into a forward slouch that I assume is in the name of improved aerodynamics. He kicks the stand out and lets the bike rest impressively in front of me.

“This model is very good for distance,” he says brightly.

“How much is it?”

“Only nine hundred Euro.”

My coughing returns with vengeance. 900 euro at a conversion rate of 1.3….that’s, what, $1,200?!

“Jesus!” I squeak. “Uhm…sorry, do you have anything -hic- less expensive?”

“You want hybrid?”

I bite my lip. “Maybe. What is a hybrid?”

He puts the long distance model back in its place and moves to a section which I missed, hidden as it was amongst the flashy models, and I feel an instant connection towards them, as they resemble the bicycle I’d grown up riding: a steel-gray bike of sturdy build, yet aerodynamic. I spent many a Sunday riding that bike with my dad. The water department would close off a stretch of four miles or so parallel to the giant water reservoir known as Crystal Springs standing stark and sparkling against the emerald coastal mountain range. Those were escapist Sundays, when school and extracurriculars were done, and my dad and I could spend three or so hours trying fervently to keep up with the aggressive, nylon-clad bikers, who barked at each other and pedaled in exact unison just to show that they had the dexterity to narrowly whizz past us, laughing loudly at punch lines shouted back and forth to one another about Barbara in accounting. My father called them Bike Nazis.

Ronaldo pulls out the green model and displays it in front of me. “This is Hybrid!”

It’s a stout little bike, with tires of medium thickness, hefty suspensions and a sleek design. It looks quite heavy, but, as if reading my thoughts, Ronaldo says-

“It’s very lightweight. Good for both city and long distance. And mountains.” He thrusts it towards me. “Here.”

I take the bike in my hands and understand in an instant that I was dead wrong. The bike is balanced perfectly with only one of my fingers gently resting on the seat, and the supposed weightiness I imagined dissipates from my mind in an instant.

“Hybrid!” Ronaldo says, smiling an impeccably white smile and nodding at me.

The price tag demands three hundred Euros, which translates roughly to four hundred American dollars. I bite my lip harder this time, distracting myself from decision-making with pain.

You’ll eat cheap, you’ll sleep in hostels, it’ll be fine, says the voice of rationalization.

You’ll die after pulling every muscle in your body, says the voice of fear.

When else will you get to do something like this? says the voice of impulsivity.

“Would you like it?” Ronaldo asks, and as I look at him I see a glint wink out from one of his enchanting green eyes.

A sign from above, or a random reflection of light upon the aqueous humor of the human eye?

The only solid plan I have is a flight out of Rome on June 5th, and today is the 4th of May. I sigh.

I think everyone has a hunger for a point to their existence, no? That we’ve lived for some reason beyond randomly popping into being one day and, then one day just…ceasing. It’s not an easy fact to live with, our impending mortality. In defiance, I house deep within me a tiny, glowing orb, my own small sun, that secretly believes there is meaning beyond the everyday, and that perhaps our choices display in some way a purpose to our lives. I think we all do this to a certain extent, though I can only speak to my own experience. I worry though that this pursuit is folly, and to be human is only to be human, and meaning, perhaps even just an invention within my own language, is ultimately a ghost created to soothe souls screaming at the yawning void.

Jesus, calm down, brain.

I take a deep breath, and tell Ronaldo-

“I’ll take it.”

Fourteen minutes later I stand in the crooked cobblestoned alleyway behind the shop with Ronaldo as he attaches two bags on either side of the back wheel. The bags were a bit of extra money, but the frames were free, Ronaldo said, because I have “kind eyes”. The gigantic bike lock is a further seventy Euro. Bye-bye money.

“The bags,” Ronaldo wipes grease from his hands with a yellowed rag, “hold sette chilo, no more. Seven kilograms.”

I have no idea the conversion rate for kilograms, but most of my belongings will be stored at the airport, Fiumincino, where I’ll depart to America from in a month. Ronaldo straightens up and gestures for me to take the bicycle, which I do, grinning and nodding stupidly. I grip the handlebars nervously.

When was the last time I rode a bike?

It dawns on me that I’ve spent my entire time in Italy eating pasta, drinking wine, and sitting in classrooms. There’s been a lot of walking, sure, but it hasn’t exactly been training for an extended bike trip.

“You tell friends about Olmo Bike Shop, okay?” he asks, gesturing above his alleyway entrance, where OLMO is plastered in that same stylized red lettering. “Put on Facebook that you bought from Olmo!”

I laugh nervously and extend my hand to take his. “Grazie.”

“Preggo!” He claps me on the back again, and holds my gaze with bright, excited eyes, the glint still winking out at me. “Be careful, si?”

“Oh, you know me!” I reply, knowing full well that he does not in fact know me at all. Ronaldo returns into his store, leaving me alone in the alleyway.

I swallow hard, the father of a sudden child.

I’ve just spent five hundred dollars on an impulse. Moreover, I’ve blindly signed a commitment to travel on a bicycle for an undecided distance to an undecided location. I struggle to ward off that rising fluttering feeling, a struggling critter within my ribcage, and my mind wrestles with ideas: should I bike through Spain? Perhaps Barcelona to Seville? Or maybe try somewhere more northerly, see what Krakow’s all about. I’ve heard there are excellent bike paths in France, too-

First things first. Get the bike back to the apartment.

I bring the bike out of the alley and onto the street. It looks far more daunting now. The bags, the bag frames and the bike lock; they all give off the aura of a serious biker. And the furthest I’ve ever gone on a bike was…

Just go.

During our first official gathering once we’d all arrived in Florence, we received a presentation from the police chief of the city. He handed out pamphlets that offered the dos and don’ts of living in Italy, and then there was a section with friendly advice: keep your passport on you at all times, know how not to get ticketed while riding the buses, and at the very end, examples of young foreigners who dun’ messed up. The first two were fairly innocent: a tale of pickpockets in a busy square, a student being offered drugs at a nightclub, but the third was a bit more blunt -

Jimmy was a straight A student. One night he had too much to drink with his friends, and on his way home, he fell into the river and drowned.

“Jimmy was a straight A student” quickly became a phrase uttered when we wandered the streets at night, beers in hand (I went by Jimmy from the age thirteen to twenty). I didn’t mind very much, not at the time. I certainly wished that the pamphlets had used some other name, like Chris or Jack or Johann, but I suppose they felt an inherent helplessness in the name Jimmy, which is not their fault. There is a kind of heroic naiveté in that name.

Better go get help, Lassie, Jimmy’s stuck in the well again. Maybe we should make a cover for the well too, and a sign, because Jimmy is obviously not getting the message.

I fight back the image forcing itself to the front and center of my mind- myself as a child, doggy-paddling around the bottom of a well, moaning upwards towards the light for help and gurgling as water entered my mouth-

I look down at the word Olmo splayed largely across the body of my new responsibility. My vision wobbles a bit, still tipsy, and the word sways in front of my eyes…

“I think I’ll call you Elmo,” I declare to the inanimate form of transportation, and I set my jaw. “Andiamo, Elmo.”

I mount the bike and push off, feeling for the delicate intricacies that every bicycle has: the center of gravity, the responsiveness in the turns, the strength of the brakes….and Elmo is fucking incredible. It feels every slight movement I make to compensate for balance. I can make hairpin turns if necessary, but if I just leave the bike coasting forwards on its own, taking my hands off the handlebars, it stays locked on course. The ride is stable, the shock absorbers doing their job magnificently, and the fluidity of the pedals in their cycling is smoother than any bike I’ve ever ridden. The seat’s a bit hard, lacking the necessary padding for my bony posterior. I shift in search of the perfect ass-placement as I glide downhill, heading back towards the center of Rome.

I feel the electricity of impulse rocket from my palms up to my shoulders, filling my torso as I speed across an intersection, car horns screaming to life, but I ignore them and fly onwards down a road lined with pale pink and orange apartments on either side. It’s incredible to feel the wind ripping opposite my direction: Air resistance! It’s been a minute! I cackle and careen towards an enormous roundabout with five dozen Italian toy cars buzzing around it, and I hold off the brakes as my eyes water, waiting until mere feet from the maelstrom before clenching them with all my strength.

Elmo comes to an abrupt, screeching stop inches from the hustle of the roundabout. I balance at a standstill on two wheels, feeling the breeze of cars whipping past me, before putting my foot down to avoid falling onto the cement.

I feel truly happy for the first time in weeks, and raise my hands and let out a shout a lá Jesse Pinkman-

“Yeah, bitch!”

I look down at my trusty new steed, eyes still tearing up a little bit (and not just from the wind), and as cars continue their furious circles in the roundabout, I pat Elmo like an animal.

“That’ll do, Elmo. That’ll do.”

It occurs to me that today’s the last full day in our apartment, so I only have about twenty-four hours to put a plan in working order. Elmo is mine: I have a method of transportation. I have just under five weeks before needing to be back in Rome, and a remaining six hundred or so dollars to my name.

Where to go?

I feel a new muse, Impulse, take me gently into her embrace, wearing robes of electricity and voice whining with feedback as she whispers in my ear- it’s all chaos, isn’t it?

I feel something click into place in my very foundation, and I grip the handlebars tightly.

Embrace the randomness.

I push out and pedal hard to keep up with the outer ring of circling Italian toy cars in the roundabout, like a salmon joining a school already in route. I follow the motions of my fellow vehicles as we rushed forward with the tide, and soon enough I’m in rhythm with the storm of metallic machines roaring about me, and I fly under arches, past monuments and across enormous intersections — ZZZIPPP! The remains of the Colosseum and the Forum slide by my peripheral, but I don’t turn to gaze, because my attention is entirely focused on the migration: one wrong move and I could collide with the sea hurtling past me.

I wheel faster and faster down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the ruins of the Forum on either side of the street, pedaling towards Piazza Venezia, where a capitol building stands blatantly out of place in Rome’s ancient center.

The wedding cake building.

The Altare della Patria, or the Altar of the Fatherland, honors Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel II, who besides having an otherworldly mustache is credited with unifying the country and being the father of modern Italy. It’s a stark white, wedding-cake-like behemoth amongst Rome’s wonderfully tan, red, green and gray color scheme; impressive, to be sure, but it stuck out like a sore thumb, and-

An Italian toy car screams at me, ripping me out of my thoughts, as I veer just slightly too far into a lane of traffic-

“Oh-!”

The toy car clips me on my left side, catching my ankle in a bone-shivering CRACK!-

“-shit!”

I wobble to regain my balance, terror taking over, adrenaline twitching every muscle to life, and just as the honking subsides and the car in question rips forward and disappears in the great mob of vehicles, pain finally overtakes shock, and a fire tears through my leg and foot-

“OWW!”

I escape the salmon stream and careen down a side street, cursing like mad, coming to a screeching halt in an unpopulated little alley and dismount, then yelp when the hot, sharp sensation of pain permeates the fog of panic in my eyes: I’d tried putting weight on my left foot. I suck air in and bounce around on my right foot, the one not crushed by a ridiculous little toy car — by a fucking toy car! — and avoid looking down, terrified of the possible extent of the injury-

Images of a bone sticking out and blood soaking the cobblestones flashed before my eyes, and bile rose abruptly in my throat-

Oh God-

Elmo falls to the ground, unattended, with a CLANG! and I collapse against the wall, breathing in and out vigorously, trying to not panic as the pain really started to kick in-

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck-

I glance down at my brand-new bike, and saw it had its left pedal dented. The image didn’t process for about a minute.

I’ve damaged my bicycle twenty minutes after buying it.

Crushing panic descends, that what-do-I-do-what-do-I-do kind of panic, where the world starts closing in and your vision tunnels to a pinpoint…

Jimmy has entered the well.

I turn to my right and wretch, bringing up frothy Daniels, and I try to do it quietly, because I want absolutely no one to know what’s happening in that alley, but like starting a car in the dead of night, or letting out the barest of farts during the SATs, or feeling a sneeze come on during the eulogy…it is nearly impossible to make quiet. Awful sounds reverberate down the alley, and thank God all the doors up and down the street are closed, the only movements are sheets of laundry fluttering off balcony ledges above me, because I sound like a possum giving birth.

I slide further down the wall and spill onto the ground.

The adrenaline rush comes to a crashing halt. I look up desperately at a late-afternoon sky, burgeoning moustache decorated with vomit chunks, and I can see clouds whose outlines are just beginning to tinge with orange in the coming sunset. A faint dripping noise drifts from somewhere further down the alley, its rhythm lining up with the cascading waves of pain billowing up from my bottom left extremity and the blood pumping in my head. Self-loathing simmers, encircling me in steaming, hateful thoughts-

The pedal alone was probably forty Euro. Idiot.

A few gulls fly over the sliver of sky I could see, unbound to Earth as they were, and I feel my vision go blurry. I let out a faint sob, a pathetic little noise, and then I start crying, face falling into the crook of my arm. My whimpers drift down the alleyway, disappearing into thick cords of ivy. Laundry flaps above me in a faint breeze, uncaring to the problems of a young, sniffling American lying on the cobblestones below.

An image creeps into my mind that I’ve been trying to forget: a girl standing a few feet in front of me on the sides of a street by Piazza Cavour, silver/blonde hair drifting to her right as traffic passes rapidly behind her, and her hand reaches out to cradle my cheek, thumb gently caressing me over and over again, and I can’t do anything but stare at her as vehicles swirl around us, in the eye of a storm, and her hand drops abruptly and she disappears into the storm of cars, deftly walking through traffic until disappearing.

Sometimes it feels as if childhood, if one is lucky enough, is a treehouse, high up in the branches and full of simple pleasures like grasping at apples and playing with snapped-off sticks, and growing up is figuring out the best route to the ground, because the day won’t last forever. Moments of crisis arise oft on our way down the tree: branches that looked solid break, moss causes us to slip up. Some of us remain rigid in our descent, planning for hours our next move, while others jump into freefall hoping something catches them on the way down. No strategy is wrong. But to think we know the strength of the next branch is as silly as to think we won’t take some hard falls on the way down.

The Cathartic Method is attributed to Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud in the early 1880s, the aim was to guide their hypnotized patient “Anna O” into the emotional and mental landscape of a particular traumatic moment at the root of a present-day symptom in the hopes of eliminating that pathogenic memory through catharsis. The word catharsis itself comes from the Greek ‘katharsis’, and that word was utilized to mean both purgation as well as purification. As Aristotle argued in Poetics, catharsis is the purging of the emotions of pity and fear through the witnessing of a tragedy, for the audience can experience the horrors and heartbreaks, and then walk away.

Anna O. described the process jokingly as “chimney sweeping”, and there were some documented successes throughout her time as a patient. She nearly died from dehydration while stubbornly refusing water during a hot summer, but through the method recalled she had once seen dog drinking water from a glass, and upon addressing the event suddenly became quite thirsty. Breuer’s method slowly became an “analysis of the psyche”, predating psychoanalysis, and though Freud and Breuer’s relationship deteriorated, their work together investigating both catharsis and “abreaction” (the official psychoanalytical term for recalling and reliving an experience in order to purge it of its emotional excesses, even those which are repressed) helped defined the future of psychoanalytic theory.

In preparation for my post-breakup bicycle trip across one five-hundred mile stretch in the middle of the grand jigsaw that is the European continent, I found a small notebook in a back alley sort of shop, one that seemingly attempted to hide from those starry-eyed tourists like me that thought they were discovering corners of a city more than two thousand years old, and I bought it. I had no idea about Freud, Breuer, or their early methods of abreaction in their hypnotized patients, but I knew one thing: I was going through something, and writing my thoughts down had been a comforting way of organizing my small universe ever since I was a child.

In the alleyway, riding waves of pain and inebriation, I shove my hand into my backpack and pull out my little black, moleskin book, black ball-point attached, and hurriedly scribble as quickly as I can-

2013, Rome

If your name is not James Daggett, read no further, you peeping sonofabitch.

I flip to the second page.

Bicycle trip, day one.

Purchased Elmo, crashed Elmo, crying in an alleyway.

I am horrified by what I’ve just done, and yet, entirely in the moment like rarely before in my life.

Does pain help me focus on the moment?

I realize as the clouds turn a starker orange and pink that I have to suck it up soon and get back to the apartment. I know that my ankle isn’t broken, instinctively: it feels more like a sprain, or even just a bad bruise. Baby.

The evening ahead is our last night of the study abroad semester, and all eighty of us American students were to meet at the bar across from our small school for a final little get-together, and after that all my friends would spend the rest of the night wandering about Rome visiting our favorite monuments, peeling off to go to sleep dependent on our required wake-up times in the morning.

All this translates to lots and lots of walking.

I take a sharp breath and sit up, propped against the base of the wall. I bring my left foot up towards me, delicately, and I roll up my pant leg to see what the damage was.

No blood. No bone. Expedient swelling, but nothing deformed. I lick my lips, encouraged- Most likely just a sprain.

A conversation from the day before floats around my head.

“When was the last time you actually rode a bike?” Thomas asked as we sat at Café Fresco, not two minutes from our massive apartment complex.

“Munich,” I said, referencing a short weekend trip we took to southern Germany at the end of April, overnight bus shepherding us up from Rome.

“Didn’t you almost run over someone in the park?”

“Yup.”

“Do you think you can you actually do this?” he asked, pointedly, raising his eyebrows at me.

I grit my teeth and shimmy up to a standing position, using the wall for support, and take a step to test my left foot-

“OH MOTHER!”

The shout rebounds off stone and iron and glass as it the skitters down the alley. I hop about on my right foot, waiting for the pain to subside, and focus furiously on one thought-

There’s alcohol at home.

Suddenly, a scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian bursts into my head- as all the poor saps are left to die upon their respective crosses with the supposed messiah, they slowly take up in song, belting out, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”, palms and feet bleeding freely down unto the rocks below them.

I can’t help myself: I start giggling, and the giggles float down the alleyway like my yell had. I breathe in and out for minutes on end, realizing I’m no longer very tipsy, the shock of the accident derailing my inebriation. Then I have another thought, a burst of clarity brought on by the pain-

How much alcohol have I had in the last three weeks?

I’ve been drunk since the night before, adding to it on my way to the bike shop…and I’d come that close to becoming another Jimmy-related-death in the welcome brochure. I punch the cobblestones and let out a third yelp, and then watch in fascination as dots of blood bubble up over my knuckles, like air escaping pancake batter.

Pain does seem to help me focus in on the moment.

Movement catches my eye suddenly, and I look down the street to see a vague shape, sort of dog-like, but no…it’s a bit different from a dog. Some sort of tannish, furry creature stands frozen, framed by a cascading wall of vines behind it, and I squint to try to bring the creature fully into focus, but as I do it bolts back into the side alley it emerged from in one swift movement, revealing in a tan streak what looked to be a large bushy tail-

Fox?

I stand there, dumbfounded, for quite a number of minutes, trying to recall exactly what sort of wildlife was common to that part of Italy, and if any of them were foxes. The pain in my foot subsides, then roars back with vigor, then subsides, then roars back, over and over…and as I sail on an ocean of feeling, a coalescence of both shock and numbness, I find myself staring absolutely vacantly at the opposite wall of stone, lost.

Bells in the distance toll seven o’clock. I return to my reality and one thing is clear: it’s time to go home. I gracelessly pick Elmo up and decide to use the bicycle as a rolling crutch.

One step at a time, I tell myself. Rome was not built in a day.

I gingerly put weight on my injured foot, and then limp violently until my weight returns to my good foot, where I rest for a moment, and this becomes my process. I get to the end of the street and glance where the animal had disappeared, and there it stands at the end of the next stretch of alley, silhouetted once again against a cascading wall of ivy. Two spheres ponder me curiously, reflecting the yellow light from an open window.

A rat perhaps: I know there are rats here.

It cocks its head at a slight angle to the side, and I do the same. I step forward, daintily so as to not cause alarm, and it bolts away as soon as my foot touches the ground.

Damn.

I speed my pace up, and the pain moves to the back of my mind. I need to know what that creature was; fat cat? Lorax? I round a corner and, like the lead role of some alleyway play, there the creature sits bathed in a streetlight that acts as spotlight centerstage, and I see that’s it’s an enormous, muddy rat with a sickly fleshy tail twitching as it stares at me.

“Blegh,” I say to myself, and the rat flops out of its spotlight, skittering into the darkness. I sigh and press on alone.

Elmo supports much of my weight as I limp through the streets surrounding the Pantheon, underneath small overhangs, past small alcoves and corners I’d never noticed, along walls covered in moss and vine, and through hidden little hangouts where aging Romans, gray and wrinkled, eye me warily through curtains of cigarette smoke. I come finally upon a tall stone staircase inlaid into a wide and graffitied wall, a main roadway running above and beyond, and I groan.

Rome, you multileveled sonofabitch.

Rome exists on many physical levels. All around the city are excavation sites. I could walk on a modern avenue and suddenly, between the Gap and the Gucci, there appeared ruins sunk into a great excavated pit, complete with derelict temples to Hera and Dionysus. As one approaches the Pantheon, one finds oneself walking on streets sloping downwards- a relic of an older time and thus an older level of city. Largo Argentino is an excavation site fairly close to the ancient Forum, and it reveals temples built of travertine and the steps upon which Julius Ceasar was violently made to resemble Swiss cheese.

My mind often wondered what lay beneath my very feet as I waltzed down the avenue gazing upon taught Italian models in Calvin Klein underwear. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life to travel downwards through history at an archeological museum one day: each epoch had different building materials, staked on top of one another. The government had been trying to build a third line to the Roman public train system for decades, but it had been delayed over and over as they kept running into ruins, sometimes with the very first shovel scoop.

With a great amount of grunting and grimacing, I lift Elmo onto one shoulder, pray to Gods I don’t believe in, and make my way up the stairs in very slow and measured steps. Every new stair is an experiment, testing which section of my foot hurt worst. The journey consists of many minutes spent gasping on the rail, and I see black stars in my vision more than once.

But I make it. And when I emerge up top, I shout out in exaltation, and the man working the nearby newsstand grins and gives a little whoop back in my direction, and I’m so psyched that I limp over and buy a newspaper from him.

“Ciao!”

“Buona sera!”

I’m directly across the river from the main courthouse of Rome, which is exactly where I need to be. My apartment is across the Tiber River, Rome’s main waterway, still massive and engorged from a wet spring. I just have to make it over the bridge, past the Courthouse, and a few streets northwards into the Pratti neighborhood.

I wonder, glancing back down the stone staircase, where I’ve just been, and if I could ever navigate that same route again. I doubt it. Rome is like that: the alleys and roads twist and turn, diverging in a thousand places, making each walk its own unique journey. You enter the labyrinth a naïve little flower, and suddenly find yourself lost, without GPS, and left to your own devices.

It’s excellent.

I gingerly walk Elmo toward the intersection before the bridge, growling as shards of pain shoot up my leg. The rush of traffic whizzing past gives me pause after my collision, and I think about everyone gathering back at the apartment-

Maybe they won’t notice the limp.

I cross the bridge in the final light of the day, and again I find myself once again giddy in a moment of struggle. Why? Pain still radiates up my leg. My limping draws stares. Seemingly there’s no reason to be happy at this moment.

And yet…

My every waking molecule is devoted to achieving one goal, and my usually-wandering brain suddenly narrows to single idea -

Get back to the apartment.

It’s welcome to have such a singular purpose, with no pervading thoughts or worries getting in the way. Just one goal: make it back in one piece.

People are in the living room when I return, busied with conversation, and the entryway is pocketed away enough to enter the apartment without being seen. I thrust Elmo in before myself, delicately making sure to avoid the umbrella bucket and coat stands and leaning on the bike for support as I shuffle as quietly as possible down the hall to my room.

I hear the mumbled tones of my roommates Thomas and Shawn sitting with a number of our friends in the living room. I gather that a jug of wine is being passed around from all the clinking and shouting, and I ease my way past all that to my room and lean Elmo against the wall, collapsing face-first on my bed.

The bedroom is choked with flower patterns, covering the bed sheets, lampshades, and curtains. Two comically short beds occupy the center of the room, and when Thomas and I both lie in them next to each other with feet hanging off the end, flowers in abundance, we very much resemble Bert and Ernie tucked into their respective beds.

I tear my left shoe off, hissing with the pain of it, and pull up my pant leg. I curse under my breath, feeling at the puffy flesh. It looks like it’ll bruise badly, probably sprained, but I doubt it’s too bad. Certainly nothing is broken.

So, good news!

I laugh quietly to myself and realize that I actually am still a tiny bit tipsy, even after the shock therapy.

Best upgrade that to plastered. My hand reaches involuntarily under my bed for the whiskey-

“So, you got a bike?”

I snap my head up and see Thomas, standing in the doorway and holding two glasses of red wine in his hands. The light from the hall outlines his frame. Thomas was a burgeoning history-buff with a mane of golden hair atop his head. Often Maggie would liken him to a golden retriever, both in nature and appearance, and he would counter this with a comparison to a golden eagle, letting his pride rear a bit. If I was to assign him an animal, I would contend that he was an owl, ruffled by irrationality and exuding a quiet wisdom to all around.

“Yessir,” I begin, but then I put my injured foot down too hard and bark- “OW!”

Thomas frowns down at me. “Holy hell, did you already get hurt? Christ,” he says, shaking his head.

“It’s a twisted ankle,” I deflect. “Nothing to worry about.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Like Icarus before me, I flew a little too close to the sun.”

I clutch at the bed sheets in an attempt to distract my brain from the pain rocketing up my leg.

“And by the sun,” I continue, “I mean traffic.”

Thomas sighs heavily, and I feel a bitterness rise inside me. How’s the view from the bottom, Jimmy? That was exactly what I didn’t want; people to think I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

But haven’t I?

Thomas hands me a glass of wine he’s brought from the living room for me and sits down on his bed, adjacent to mine, eyeing my ankle.

“How bad is it?” he asks.

“I walked about a mile and I’m still standing, so I’m probably good.”

“You look pale.”

“So do you.”

“I’m Scandinavian,” Thomas puffs up. “We’re supposed to look like that. Viking blood.”

“Uh huh.”

“Look I’ve already said it, plus you’ve already bought the bike, so there’s no reason to bring it up-“

“It certainly sounds like you’re bringing something up-“

“-but I will say that there is no shame in backing out. You could just come with me to Greece.” He smiles wide, teeth purpled by cheap wine. “We could go to the Acropolis together! Get kebabs and wander around ruins and shit.”

“I need to be alone,” I say, taking a gulp of wine. “Plus I can’t really return the bike, especially now that it’s dented.”

He nods, solemnly. “I understand.”

“I just need to, I don’t know…ride through some fucking daisies or something!” I swallow, suddenly dry-throated. “And I need to not think about what things might be happening.”

Thomas knows what I’m talking about. He’s listened to me harp on it many times by that point.

“I really don’t think anything’s happening,” Thomas says, and raising his glass, “but I totally get the sentiment of riding through daisies, and here’s to you.”

“You’ve seen the Facebook pictures.”

“Facebook, Twitter, whatever-the-fuck — it’s never even remotely the whole story.”

“But…I mean, come on.”

“You’re digging yourself into a hole, here,” Thomas nods sagely, and continues; “the mind sees what it wants to see.”

“In three of those pictures, they’re all over each other.”

“There’s like forty pictures of us with our arms around each other, what are you suggesting?”

“I’ve been telling everyone about her, too. For months.” I groan loudly and cover my face with my hands. “They probably think I was making her up.”

Thomas looks pathetically at me, my one shoe on, my one shoe off, a quietly engorging ankle lit by light from the kitchen, but grasps me sturdily by my shoulder.

“How about we go out there and drink, huh? Let’s enjoy our last night with everyone.”

“Wine helps with swelling, right?”

“Oh yeah, for sure. Wine helps with everything.”

“Let’s do it.”

“Andiamo!” Thomas pronounces, jumping to his feet and bounding out of the room.

I put my shoe back on and I limp into the living room, leaving Elmo resting against the wall and a Ziploc bag of auburn curls resting on my pillow, looking like a small furry creature of some sort, curled up and taking a nap.

Perhaps Ronaldo would’ve given me a discount if he knew how similar in length our hair been.