Inside a Roman Mind

Quattro

Quattro
The moment the sun rose Sam's eyes shot open and immediately he recognized that he was still in that delicate period between being drunk and having a hangover. He felt sluggish and deep down he knew it was only a matter of time before the sickness kicked in and the blood sacs that encased his brain expanded exponentially, igniting that all too familiar sensation of a headache he would then complain about for the next eight hours as being the worst headache of all time. But, being firmly within the grasp of this purgatory, now was not the time for complaining or preparing to try and prevent the inevitable. They had to leave. It was only now that he realized that Mike was lying in the bed asleep. He could move again, it seemed, as he raised himself into a sitting position. He was still on the floor it seemed. There were a few things that ran through his head in the moments that immediately followed the successful removal of his body from the floor but the most pressing was the identity of that man with the beautiful upper lip that had saved the night last night. Did he even exist at all, or was he some kind of weird hallucination, a dream image he'd concocted while in the throes of some kind of drug induced episode.
'Where'd you go last night?'
Mike was just stirring into life when the question had been popped. He groaned, awake, and held his head, still lying on his back, and tilted to his side, towards the window that peered out at the ocean, bathing in early morning shadow.
'To the car,' he groaned, his voice a mix of delicate and annoyed. Nothing more was spoken until they arrived at the lobby. 'So how'd you find me?'
'I asked, duh.'
They stepped outside after returning the key. They'd both packed incredibly lightly; Mike hadn't bothered bringing any of the bags back from the car. Where was it anyway? There was a beautiful parking lot situated directly in between the beach and the hotel and the car was nowhere in sight.
'Where'd you park it?'
'Oh I left it where we parked it yesterday.'
Sam fell quiet, silencing the several competing questions that were inches from blurting out of his mouth. 'Why?'
'You didn't give me the keys.'
Words couldn't adequately alleviate the frustration that suddenly, violently popped into his skull at the conclusion of this sentence. With a cool voice, he sighed and breathed out, 'fair enough.' The procession from the hotel to the car was a long walk through beautiful tight streets of Roman roads and ancient wildernesses brought to life with the shining of the modern sunlight, blasting itself against color stained windows and down onto the morning traffic below. The city had a vintage feel to it but it wasn't without its scarring from modern times. Millenials, twenty somethings and aging hipsters traversed the mazes in pursuit of their fitness habits and hashtag goals. Tights-wearing runners in outfits that barely qualified as bikinis maneuvered their way through the Pilates and yoga classes, the tourists in their tacky oversized Acapulco shirts and three-quarter cargo shorts formed walls of photographers as they recreated a completely lacking of self-awareness wall of death the likes of which the world thought had been buried when Auschwitz was decommissioned. The town seemed for all intents and purposes a stop-off town, like something that had, since the implementation of the major north-bound coastal freeway, become a thing merely because it had managed to receive the largest parking lot within a fifty-mile radius. Of course there were lots of European tourists, too. The white shades of Germany and England and northern France graced the streets like their wallets graced the local economy. You could hear them now, if you listened very carefully, the gentle rattling of coins, ching ching ching, as they chattered against each other between the unrealistically large strides of their keepers.
There had been some kind of an agreement, made as they'd arrived in Rome on the first night here, that when they eventually made it to Florence, however they managed to do that, they would split. It had come through in the form of a friendly confrontation as to their differing interests. Mike had first vocalized his desire to travel south and explore the island of Sicily and southern Italy. Sam, conversely, had wanted to visit the Swiss Alps, doing a huge U-turn from Venice, up and along the border, and then concluding in Milan. The confrontation had been odd to Sam because it was an incredibly specific point of non-compromise. It was a holiday and it didn't really matter where they went, but Sam had some kind of apprehended disinterest in going south, while Mike had some kind of apprehended disinterest in going north. The compromise they eventually established was a road trip to Florence, where Mike would catch a plane to Syracuse and do his own thing. Eventually, Sam would have to rendezvous with Mike and so it was decided, almost non-verbally, that it would be back at Rome. From there, they would buy plane tickets back to California—something that was suddenly dawning on Sam as having not been completed. Buying one way tickets and loading themselves with cash had been a good idea at the time but it could prove ugly if they go on another spending spree like they had been for the last few days.
Why had they left this place so soon? It was a gorgeous city, if they had bothered they could probably spend days here soaking in some kind of atmosphere that tourists wished they could find in a place like Rome. The kind of atmosphere that people go to Italy for, but then ignore completely. The kind that tourists who journey through Rome say only exists in movies, because Italy is too commercialized a destination these days because of all these damn tourists who refuse to see the real Italy outside of the plazas surrounding the Colosseum. They're right in a way; what is atmosphere if not for the people, and what could be wrong with seven hundred thousand people of varying nationalities and cultures all congregating around one type of people and asking it to do tricks for money. He can hear them now: show us the Colosseum! Show us the palaces! Show us the history and culture of a nation older than the calendar! Was it really such a crime to demand such bargains from them, in any respect? This country had once been the cultural hub of the known world, in a lot of ways, and Rome was a city built on the belief that it was, or would be, the center of it. So was venturing outside of Rome really justified if you were only going so as to see variations of the same thing you could see inside Rome, and the only discernable difference was the level of smug self-satisfaction you were able to display because you're not one of the rest?
Who knows. But it felt good, for a brief period of time, knowing that they were making their decision purely as a reactionary measure to what they saw to be the herd, and not having to think for themselves.