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  I KNOW IT’S only self-centered wieners who say stuff like, “You don’t know me.” But it’s true. You don’t know me. You may think you do. But you don’t. Most people think I’m some cosmic bogeyman here to rain down God’s holy judgment on the heads of mankind. That is completely untrue and, honestly, a little hurtful. I have feelings, you know. I have a sense of humor. I hunger and thirst. Well, actually I don’t really hunger or thirst, but I have it on good faith that I’m moderately funny.

  And don’t tell me the problem isn’t all the stereotypical depictions of me on television, because it is. We all know TV is turning our brains into yogurt, but we don’t care ’cause the screen people are so shiny. Harlequin novels aren’t helping, either. They all describe me as a tall, dark hunk with undulating loins. That’s nice, but it sets people up for a letdown.

  I’d say I look more like Matt Damon than Skeletor. Okay, maybe not Matt Damon, but you know, that look. That healthy corn-fed look.

  So let’s just get it all straightened out right now. Nothing on me heaves or undulates — I live alone actually. And I don’t judge anybody — except for people on TV.

  All the judging’s from the main office. I just take people individually, when I get a Recovery Notice in my in-box. That’s it. In that way I’m closer to a cabbie than what you’d call a harbinger of darkness. I mean, harbinger? When you actually see me, you’ll realize you’re only embarrassing yourselves with stuff like “harbinger.”

  I’m even courteous most times and tell people what finally did it. I don’t have to do that, you know. I could just point at them with an icy finger and let them whimper all the way to the waiting room upstairs. But instead, I’m indulging their endless questions about all the damage cheezy poofs did to their livers.

  And here’s what I get for the trouble: a reputation as the ultimate bad guy.

  I mean, the Ghost of Christmas Future? Come on. A black cloak? A skeletal hand? A sickle? That’s just libelous. I’m a vegetarian, since it’s your business. I take pictures of my bunny sleeping in my house slippers. I collect Precious Moments dinnerware. I mean, really, I’m bleeding here. You cut me.

  And if you thought this was gonna be another war scroll or my tell-all of every famous person that begged for mercy, then you’re wrong again. This is a love story, punk. A certifiable, irrevocable, maybe sometimes metaphysical romance. It began a long time ago, in Old Timey Europe, as a lot of love stories do, with two people hating each other. . . .

  Oh, and also, they all croak by the end of this story. Just letting you know now . . .

  BABBO GIOVANNI WAS the don of the Chianti family in Cortona. Pierre le Seigneur was head of the Vouvray family in the Loire Valley. Simply put: Giovanni Chianti did not like Seigneur Vouvray. With names like Chianti and Vouvray, you might think the trouble was over wine. It’d be easy to imagine wealthy old men, yelling at each other from the grand porches of their vineyard estates, arguing over reds and whites, and whose country tortured witches better, and whose Riviera had less tourists. But no, Giovanni and Pierre weren’t winemakers, although they did despise each other because of their livelihoods. It wasn’t in the common trades like bookbinding or carpentry that Pierre and Giovanni competed for acclaim. It was mid-market home decorative products. Well, really just one particular product, made of their two arts.

  Pierre was a flower quilter. He hand-sewed silk sunflowers, velvet violets, and poplin poppies with such delicate digits that his fellow Frenchmen came up with an idiom: “He’s Vouvrayed it.” Like if a peasant managed to harvest ten acres of flax in one day — that would be some genius-level toiling — and everybody would say, “He Vouvrayed that pitch.” Unfortunately, the Academy of French Language killed the new idiom before it hit the dictionaries. I couldn’t do anything but watch, then gather the remains as if it were Latin or the phrase “cool beans.”

  Nonetheless, when Pierre Vouvray hung his trifocals on the hook of his long and knobby nose, the entire village knew that he needed perfect silence. As he hemmed his denim daisies, millers brought their grist wheels to a complete stop. Ducks wouldn’t quack. Children would halt their school-yard games to sit under the shade of trees and calmly play games like “silent reflection” and “sitting on your hands.” Mimes pretty much continued as they were, but everyone else in the entire Loire Valley held their breath so that nothing would disturb Pierre le Seigneur.

  Everyone, that is, but Chloe, his daughter, whose humming was the only noise Pierre approved of while he worked. And truth be told, he secretly cherished it more than even the work itself. Pierre’s flowers may have brightened up millions of bank lobbies around the world, and he may have been the “Prized Genius of the Valley,” but it was Chloe that he prized above all else.

  Babbo Giovanni, back in Cortona, worked in a completely different style. He was a marble painter, which is just as intricate a job as flower quilting, as any marble painter will tell you. Babbo painted the colorful patterns inside of toy marbles better than anybody. This was before marble making became the exact science that it is today. They didn’t have temperature-controlled kilns, prefabricated glass rods, or any of that fancy stuff the celebrity marble craftsmen are using nowadays. Babbo Giovanni had to develop all his own techniques. At first people thought he was an evil alchemist harvesting the essences of rainbows and women’s cosmetics.

  First, he painstakingly cut Murano glass beads in half with a hair from the chest of the monster Bernardo the Hammer, which could cut through anything, even the scales of a thousand-year dragon in the middle of true love. Bernardo the Hammer was such an evil, irritating man that his heart became black and bilious (we didn’t talk much on the way down). It was like a poisoned well inside his chest, and the hairs sprouted without anything but the two Primal Sins, pride and fear, to nourish them. Anything that touched one of Bernardo’s hairs immediately drowned in despair. Every cell they touched would wallow in its own semi-permeable misery. And so each hair could cut through anything, like tiny medieval lightsabers, ripping cell walls with no other Force than sheer cruelty.

  How Giovanni came to possess a Bernardo chest hair is a story so mortifying that I can only tell it when the birth rate in the world is high enough and a few extra fatalities by extreme shock and uncontrollable laughter won’t shake things up. Suffice it to say that Giovanni had plucked the rare item and could now snack on coconuts with ease.

  Giovanni had carefully wrapped the curly hair around the only two tines of an old (even for back then) olive fork. With such a powerful device, he had to be ever vigilant. If a townsman came to his workshop and thought it was a dental floss holder, the poor guy would probably prevent gingivitis all the way up to his brain. I’ve never seen one of those, but I taxi about six kids a year who have managed to wrap the floss around their necks and somehow gotten the other end tied to the leg of a stampeding zoo animal. So . . . yeah, now you know, and knowing is pretty unsettling if you ask me.

  After cutting the marbles, Giovanni sat at his easel with each clamped under a microscope lens. He’d sing an operetta and let his mind wander. Then, to the rhythm of the music, he would brandish his brush, which had exactly three fine bristles, plucked from the tail of the family mule, Santa Maria. And then Babbo would paint. Every once in a while, his son, Giacomo, would bring him a basil-and-tomato sandwich. Babbo would take a break, declare, “Let’s see the French seamstress do that!” and run outside to chase pheasants with his son, whom he loved.

  Who’s to say which is more difficult, hand-sewing a flower so perfect that nature itself would be fooled or painting the swirls of a thousand tiny universes inside the center of crystalline globes? No one alive these days, that’s for sure. Frankly, the crafts have been entombed for centuries. I have them inside an oak duvet chest at the foot of my bed, along with pickl
ing pigs’ feet and full-contact hopscotch.

  Unlike Pierre, Giovanni painted his colorful constellations by committee. He’d mosey through the stone streets of Cortona with a leather purse filled with tiny planets, and each time he passed someone, he stopped to get their advice. The traveling medicine show gave him the idea to create a miniature starscape by sprinkling paint onto the glass with a toothbrush. A roving puppy made him think of dragging a wet towel over a painted surface to make speckled streaks. Even Nonna Brava — the old lady who sat by the second-story window of her home, yelling at pushcarts to slow down and eavesdropping on the conversations of young lovers — had an idea for Giovanni. “Stupido Gio,” she spat, “you need a real job one of these days.” Admittedly, Gio was just about to think of heating the paint for a tie-dyed effect before Nonna started yelling, but Gio gave her credit, anyway.

  Of course, the reason Babbo and Pierre became such bitter rivals should be obvious by now. Everybody knows, marbles and fake flowers are the principal components of those decorative vases that are filled with marbles and fake flowers. They have entire aisles of them these days at the mega-marts, with all different shaped vases. The marbles hold the flowers in place and resemble water if you’re real forgiving. The flowers never wilt, which makes them perfect for offices and lazy people.

  The marbles are sometimes river stones and the flowers are sometimes candles, but more often than not, it’s the balls and bulbs in a glass vase for $27.99.

  They’re not exactly my cup of tea. But hey, to each his own, as they say. That is, until they bite the big one, then, to each my own.

  In Old Timey Europe, around the time chubby German kids were getting eaten by witches in gingerbread houses and all the hot chicks had to be chained to a tower, the vases were huge. Every season you’d see unscrupulous peddlers toting around a pile of them to sell at ridiculous prices, because everyone had to have them. And I can tell you it wasn’t just a fad, because it hasn’t vanished since. Old couples, kitsch collectors, single dads trying to spice up a living room — they all go straight for the faux foliage in marble arrangements.

  Pierre and Giovanni were the only two grand masters in the art of vase filling. And so naturally, friendship and professional courtesy were out of the question. They hadn’t ever met, mind you. There were no trade shows back then. Giovanni and Pierre disliked each other by reputation alone. When Pierre presented his finest creation at the court of King Louis, the king actually removed a perfect fountain branch of linen lilies in order to paw at the toy balls underneath. And when Giovanni was commissioned to decorate the summer villa of the Duchess of Como, the tasteless cow walked through the halls and ordered more fabric flowers. “Flowers?” said Giovanni, pacing his workshop afterward. His son, Giacomo, sat on a nearby counter, dangling his legs. “Flowers!” Giovanni never returned to Lake Como. When Pierre heard of the episode, he sent a nice thank-you card.

  And so, by the time Pierre and Giovanni assumed the mantles of the world’s undisputed best, their animosity by proxy had ballooned to a full-scale hate by mail. It seemed that no one could reconcile the two geniuses of the craft. The rivalry of their houses would last until Chinese manufacturing.

  BUT NOTHING — and I mean nothing people come up with, whether civilizations or cities or feuds — lasts very long on the eternal scale. If anyone can attest to this, it’s me. From high enough in the exosphere, a nuclear blast looks like a bursting pimple. A tsunami kinda resembles a landmass tucking itself into bed. A massive earthquake just looks like the earth is getting goose bumps. Those things that send shock waves through the populace, the ones so catastrophic that the rich start giving to the poor, they don’t even blow stardust across the wind chimes on my porch. So, to be honest, you’re not even dust in the wind.

  What can I say; my graveside manner has withered.

  The point is if we’re talking big picture, everything made gets unmade eventually. It all just sputters out after the time is up. Trust me, I’ve seen more contraptions that have passed for ladies’ undergarments over the years than is probably appropriate. A bright idea for a new pyramid scheme, the memory of killing a hundred insects, even the reason you hate that one Indian restaurant, they’ll all fade on you.

  And for the most part, it’s best to let ’em RIP. Just pray I don’t take them in bulk.

  Like all those other things, the rancor of Giovanni and Pierre had to expire eventually. But let’s not jump to postmortem theoreticals just yet. There’s a lot of story in between angels and autopsy.

  As I said before, Giovanni had a fifteen-year-old son, Giacomo, whom I knew very well. He was barely knee-high when we met, during a plague they called “The Great Mortality.” When the pandemic hit their village for three long weeks, I brushed past him over and over again to ferry his friends and neighbors. The shopkeeper who snuck him a caramel every time he came in with his father. The dog from the alley behind the inn. The distant cousin for whom he was intended. All of them I visited. The town was emptied. I even took the rats.

  Until one morning, I came for Giacomo’s mother. By then, the boy knew who I was, even though he was just a pup. He’d seen the leather dry up as I walked past the tannery. He’d heard the bells toll, as they say. So when he saw me that sunny Thursday in June, as she lay on the straw bed with a wet towel on her forehead, he knew I wasn’t the milkman. (The real milkman had curdled a few days previous, actually. I mean the proverbial milkman.)

  Young Giacomo eyed me with a shy disquiet. He had been playing marbles at the foot of his mother’s bed. He rose to his feet. I stood in the doorway, not wanting to seem callous. The fact is, however, that I’m rarely welcomed in, so at some point duty has to win out. He stared at me. I wasn’t even sure if the kid was old enough to form sentences.

  When I crossed the threshold, the boy ran at me. I don’t usually fear anything that can decompose, but I was startled. I paused.

  I had expected him to smash into me, hit me with his baby fists. Instead, he hugged me. He could barely wrap his arms around one of my legs, and I’m not all that big. I’m about the size of your average rock star, shorter than you’d expect, but with a large presence. His two little hands grabbed at the back of my knee and clutch my jeans as hard as they could. I thought maybe he’d mistaken me for his dad at first, but then I spied some of the young boy’s drawings nailed above the hearth. They were charcoal on onionskin, but even so, the father looked like a king-size gingerbread man with fur.

  The boy didn’t say anything. At that age you can never tell if that blank look is a profound sadness for being stuck here on earth or if they’ve just junked in their underpants. But with baby Giacomo, I knew immediately. I had broken that brand-new heart. And the look on his face wasn’t profound meditation or spaced-out mesmer. It was more hurt than the kid knew what to do with.

  I tried to lift the leg he was hugging. He let out a whimper and held tighter. His mother had long ago passed the throes and groans. The struggle was over. Now she lay still on the straw bed, the cold sweat drying in lonely beads on her collarbone. She was down to a last fading ember — the only person that could have noticed a difference between her and a corpse was me. Me and Giacomo.

  Those are the moments you really hate the job, think about retiring by a river and carving ducks out of soap. I pried him off my leg and kneeled down to look him in the eye. I shouldn’t have done that, but I had been working doubles in those days — I think I already said that — and I needed an explanation, I think, as much as he did.

  When we looked at each other, I’m a little ashamed to say, I was the one who wept. I thought, it’s a stupid thing, being so fragile, expiring. It’s a stupid idea, a rampant disease every person contracts at some point, a cosmically gross afterbirth of after birth. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t taking his mom on purpose, but I was. I wanted to assure him that she wasn’t leaving him, but she was. I suppose I just wanted him to know I hated this as much as he did.

  Maybe that’s how repo men feel.
Maybe I’m the galactic hand of repossession — just another kind of Wish Police. Maybe I’ll retire after all — you never know.

  Anyway, that was when I broke the number-one rule of my job. I told Giacomo I owed him a favor, and that I wouldn’t forget him. Then I took his mother. Her body stayed on the bed, of course, but the important parts. You get the idea. I noticed she had that same look to her eyes, far-off and dreamlike. I promised her the same thing, that I’d protect her son.

  After losing everything they ever loved, Giacomo and his father, Giovanni, moved away from their decimated village, burdened with grief as heavy as the Mediterranean. They settled in Cortona.

  At that same time, Pierre Vouvray had already lost his wife and was raising a little girl all by himself. But his loss didn’t involve my services directly.

  When Chloe was born, the housemaid washed her in a basin and wrapped her in a towel, because her mother, Lady Delice de Bourgogne, was too tired to do it. But even after a long nap, the maid brought the sleeping girl to the lady to hold, and the new mother was uninterested. She was the rare woman who could actually be insulted by a baby’s need for attention. The housemaid took the baby to the kitchen, where the iron hearth was warm like a belly.

  Chloe’s eyes were closed when she met the stove, but when she felt its warmth, she gave out a long sigh. The maid could tell it would be a lasting friendship. She leaned down and kissed the tiny nub of Chloe’s nose. The baby nuzzled the maid’s lips, and then Chloe sneezed. This sent the maid reeling with adoration. The way Chloe had scrunched her eyes. The imperceptible sputter from her lips. The deep breath after such a taxing ordeal.

  The cuteness of the newborn baby — wrapped in a towel, sleeping on an iron stove — was, in a word, lethal.

  The housemaid put her hand to her heart. Her apathy toward her job, her resignation to a low embittered life, even the bacterial infection on her lower back — all gave up the ghost, right then and there. The baby was simply too cute. And so I was on hand for the little girl’s birth, to collect all the deceased unhappiness she caused. Monsieur Vouvray was so proud of his baby girl that the week before her birth, he had sewn pansies, hundreds and thousands of them. Then, on the big day, he took them to the bell tower and poured them over the town square.