Endogenously yipped off her encounter with God, Amelia makes a last go-around of the treehouse-house–washing the coffee maker, scrubbing helplessly at the vomit in the carpet (Fuck it, it blends in anyway), setting everything to look a little less broken-into, keeping the photos and the SOLA. Imagining herself now to be one of mind, if not body, with the owner of this house, she remorselessly heads back to the closet, takes off her windbreaker, and selects one of the twin cardigans, trying it on in Inessa’s mirrors. Maybe a little formal to pair with a heather grey Mason Middle School Girl’s Soccer shirt, but at this point, dressing in the Professor’s signature wear feels like a matter of ritual.
I’ll give it back to her when I find her.
Backpack sagging with this preposterous brick–wrapped carefully, per DOE instructions, in yesterday’s shirt, then the windbreaker (more for the sake of the Discman, to be honest)–kühl und entschlossen, she leaves Charlie’s magical sort-of treehouse behind, and hikes back down to the Greenwater General Store, where she phones for a cab back to Enumclaw while downing a large coffee, and, at last, a bit of lunch of some kind.
She’s bouncing on her heels on the store’s front porch–landing each time with an abrupt thunk, an unprotected corner of the machine tearing a small hole at the base of her backpack–and realises she should probably use the rest—Aw fuck, here he is.
Amelia slides into the backseat, tries to set the heavy backpack down to her left in some manner that doesn’t make clear it’s precious, illegal cargo, and squeezes her knees together.
"Hey man, thank you for coming out here. I’ve just gotta get back to a Metro stop in Enumclaw."
"Suuure thing, young lady!" The cab driver’s massive, soft face emerges over folds of neck fat, cheery smile playing out across it as he drums wide little fingers along the steering wheel. He takes up the entire volume of the front seat, some of the middle console area, perhaps even forming a continuity of human between parking brake and door handle. Real yōkai energy to this guy.
"Um, question,"–he may as well be twisting his face all the way upside down–"Do you mind opera?"
"I’m sorry?"
"It’s just, this is just one of my favorites, and we’re coming up on the third act… It’s really good, I promise."
Amelia’s bobbing her chin, hoping that acquiescing to whatever this man is offering will get them on the road faster. He giggles, fingers over built-in cassette controls, and–by Godes grace–they peel out for the 25 minute drive.
The tape cuts right back to Mea nearing the end of a wicked cadenza; the orchestra looms back in and follows her through to the end of Act II. In the ensuing applause and tape hiss–
"Do you know this one, Miss?"
"Mmm!" The tight-lipped non-answer of the socially captive.
"Well!"–we've got Act III's opening theme starting up, which the cabbie turns down to a background murmur for the sake of his upcoming sermon—
"—By '43, Donizetti's health is already taking a toll on his work schedule, yes? And then, the next year starts off with a failure–Caterina Cornaro"—swerving a tad while looking through the rearview for confirmation, the instructor who does not see that his students have yet to figure out which textbook to open, "–so the poor man's seen better days.
"And it's said that while he and his brother are stuck in Genoa for a week, Donizetti gets this idea for a tragico and writes to Cammarano for some (whirling both hands free from the wheel) inspiration, you know?
"And so the libretto–"
"–And, by the way, that letter has never been found, but—the libretto, you know Cammarano and Donizetti had quite a long and productive creative relationship; uh, it's a whole other story, where he supposedly got Mea from, you know, more or less a copy of something Verdi had abandoned, which itself was plagiarized directly from an eighteenth century French poem, set who-knows-where; but that's not the mysterious part. So in 1931, this PhD student, Abramo Sacuto—"
Amelia has wide eyes and is gripping the side of the seat, faring better than most would.
"—and supposedly pulled up the literal floorboards to find a 90-year old binder containing Mea di Genova. But then of course, he has to flee Italy, what with Mussolini and all, and so he puts the score and libretto back under the floorboards. The thesis itself is forgotten about until the late 70s, and you know what—"
(twisting around and pointing a finger at her, the cab ducking about the conifer-rimmed highway, Amelia looking frightened not of him or the road but of Mussolini)
"–I wish I could tell you who unearthed it. Gosh damnit, excuse me. But at any rate it was ten years ago when the San Carlo finally got around to—"
The score is dark and creeping, as we witness Pomponio, now 16, inching up from stage right to crouch behind the wall of the Cattedrale with his donkey, holding up a hand and listening as the Guildmasters make their case to the Bishop: Mea must be expelled from the city, on the grounds she has been dealing with Saracens.
"And so the point is," the cabbie finishes with an air of satisfaction and authority, "that no one can prove whether it was ever real, but that doesn't matter, because it's been made real; it's canon Donizetti at this point. Wild, isn't it? Personally, I think Sacuto never existed, but ah, I'm not complaining. It's a magnificent work."
Not one to be overwhelmed by any situation for long, Amelia has moved from a few minutes of dread to a point somewhere between humoring this man and feeling genuine interest.
"So, what's going on right now?"
Screwdriver into a pressurized can of worms. The driver practically levitates out of his seat.
"Oh my! I'm sorry, I forgot to get you up to speed."
"So in the thirteen-hundreds, Venice and Genoa were merchant-empire rivals. And we're in Genoa, in the spring of 1347 here–a highly portentous date–, well, we're starting in the summer of 1338, when Mea was 17. Her father, Chiaro, is the spice importer, and he's going to have to go back to Caffa to—"
"Where's Caffa?"
"Well, I suppose that would be the independent Ukraine now. That doesn't play into the story per se, but it is kind of odd to consider the looming tragedy that the characters have, of course, absolutely no awareness of at this time. So Chiaro is leaving to re-negotiate contracts, and, of course, by the end of the act, he has died at sea. So we have young, eligible Mea, beset upon by suitors, left with the tragedy of her father's death—Wait, wait; here's the aria as she prepares the shop." He holds up a finger in reverence and turns up the deck.
A great orchestra clash. Amelia leans on the window, caffeine smiling at passing trees, a gossamer over exhaustion. The driver turns the nob down again and settles into his plot synopsis.
"Ok so in act two, we've jumped ahead. Mea is 26 now; she still hasn't married; she's been running the shop herself this whole time. Of course, her uncle Vituccio technically owns the place, but he's, aha, always blasted drunk; we actually never see him onstage. All these men are trying to marry her and take over the business, but she refuses. Meanwhile the Guildmasters are cooking up a plan to have her done away with, somehow.
"So we're pretty much up to speed. Pomponio is 16 now; he's the poor boy who Mea always doted upon, kind of the enfant vigilant; he overhears the Guildmasters trying to give the Bishop a good enough reason to go after Mea."
"Why?"
"Ah, well, sexism, you know! Can't have an unmarried woman running her own business in 13th century Genoa, right?"
"No, I mean, why does he overhear?"
"Oh, um. It's necessary for the plot, haha. I think he's... delivering wood to the church, or something. I haven't found a tape of the performance yet so I couldn't tell you–"
"Do you speak Italian?"
"Oh goodness, no; well, I understand a fair amount at this point, you know, when you spend so much time listening to them–operas, I mean.II Anyway, Pomponio has come to warn her, and Mea is ah, getting ready. (a leading glance) So it turns out that Chiaro had once purchased a load of barrels of gunpowder at a discount, some kind of shipping snafu, and he never offloaded them. So as we're heading into the final scene–"
"She's going to blow herself up. Does Pomponio get away?"
"She–what? Yes. This plot climax is interesting because it kind of blows a hole in the whole thing; I mean, does anyone really think Donizetti would have put his name on such a violent opera? But… (faggy little finger gesture) I wonder what brought you to say that? Wouldn't you think she'd blow up the Cathedral?"
"No she's,"—leaning forward a bit, musing–"I mean, what is there for her? May as well try to take some of the fuckers down with you. Is that it?"
"Hmph;" the driver settles on the wheel, pleased at her engagement enough to overlook the vocabulary. "Hear for yourself."
"And now they’re marching inside, the Bishop, the Guildmasters, then the Bailiff, but it's–cut away, you know, we see in from the side of Chiaro's shop. And Mea is there standing on top of the barrels, and the line of black has been drawn in a circle around them. Or so I imagine.
"And now (borderline orgasmic), time for Mea's final aria.
The music is rising, deeply emotional. The orchestra is crying out for her to turn back, strings riling themselves up to a point, and then, in the silence–
Another clash causes Amelia's pupils to dilate. In truth, she's been distracted, in spite of outward participation, with matters of God, her bladder, cocaine–in such order. 410 is finally about to bend them out of the woods. The driver lets the tape run through the applause and voiced-over Italian credits, seemingly happy to enjoy the after-opera feeling—which, for once, your Narrator has no intention of turning into an imaginary French term. When Amelia hands him the money, he seems borderline sleepy with serotonin.
"Thanks man, that was a trip—", scootching out and hobbling towards whatever business might accept her, treason on her back.
The final part of a journey home, the final turn before you see your door–so-says the version of Oscar Wilde that lives in my head–is the most exquisitely singular.
How do you capture the fact that a character has changed internally? Without dialog? For this, you need a good actor, and with them, good acting direction. If we can picture the late afternoon shot of urban Tacoma, Amelia Esparse trudging, yes, of course, trudging up it, rounding the last block before her childhood home comes into view–can we picture her changed face? And furthermore, how can this be demonstrated when we have hardly yet seen what Cuprate would call genki Amelia?
Following any DMT trip, which we can be sure this SOLA vision more or less was11, the aftereffects and subsequent "change" to the subject may only be perceived, at first, through an absence in normalcy. Actor Max Dickter once claimed that an overly serotonergic experience can leave you feeling like a "reed with the pith pulled out"–and not only in a bad way.
Watching Amelia round that corner, she appears to have lost some "fullness" to the light behind her eyes. It's not just exhaustion; it's the onset of a necessary period in life which will leave her, simply put, more mature. Contradictions chip away at overdetermined certainties about oneself.
She's on the front step, digging in pockets for that key with its hint of white, when her mother opens the door hard enough to blast herself back a step.
"Amelia! I was starting to think you'd never come home. How is Susan?"
"Mm. Fine." Leaning forward so as to shoulder the weight of the backpack. She beelines through the entryway, around Becky, and into her room, where she loofs the backpack onto a box of surplus clothing in the closet.
"Amelia?"
"Sorry Mom—", rounding back out again to sit on the couch–parental sneak operation apparently successful–and hamming up her exhaustion as a distraction. "Yea, she's good."
"Amelia." Becky taps her extensor carpi radialis longus, looking to be, mm, standard level of upset.
"Hmm?"
"You've got a letter. Your father buried it under the magazines last week by accident."
She frowns and hands over–Jesus fuck it is—University of Puget Sound, Apryl Lindon, PhD.
Amelia backs up slowly in an unpennable combination of: rare adoration of her mother, chest feeling cold and wet and dripping inwards–as in, from a sphere's surface, collapsing towards singularity–, slot machine jackpot-type dopamine, sort of like a heartburn in your teeth.
[11] Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001), 42, 53-55.
[II] A clear stand-in explanation for my own tendency to say "a-ri-ga-tō-go-za-i-ma-su" to the Caucasian clerks at the Boulder Five Guys in 2024 after spending sixteen hours pouring Bleach into my eyeballs instead of the assigned de Tocqueville. Remember binging? Assuming you don't have ten times as much solar as me, which if you do, fuck you. I now consider it a binge if I squeeze half an episode into my computer time after working on the book for a bit. I forgot how fucking good it was to have a hard drive full of anime. Huge ups to whoever put all of Naruto on the Archive–which I've finally decided to start–and uh, huge ups to whichever of Sable's friends decided to invest in 1.2PB and download all of this—literally this; did I mention this book was utterly lost to me? Of course I didn't walk out of Grand Junction with a flash drive. So of course I haven't read it in years; I hope you'll forgive the old man (37 is the most perfect old-young age) for reminiscing as I read back over this juvenilia that was never followed up on. Sun's getting low. One more round of poppies to slit today.