Reportage 2, Week 2

I turn from the screen with the grayed-out trains and call to Josh, “Got bad news for you, chief; we missed all the trains,” just as he swoops down on me with a man whose face now seems to me, in memory, like the face of ten men put together—amorphous, not too threatening. How could I have known to look for the lines of deception around his mouth? He should’ve been twirling an overfed caterpillar moustache or chewing the end of a cigar, but now all I remember was that he looked like any other Italian man who was honestly trying to help me out.

“This is Franco, he says the Pompeii conductors are on strike,” Josh says. Huh. This must be why all my options are unclickable in the ticket machine.

The lights of Naples seem to come down at all the wrong angles as I listen to Franco yammer about how we must take two cars, there are too many to transport, only two euro per kilometer. How many kilometers to Pompeii? I ask. I ask again, certain he didn’t hear me. “You see on meter, you see.” The r’s are hard in his mouth, the vowels warping to fit my bastard home-language.

My jacket feels like a fortress around me, my hair tall and defiant, my bag like an anvil. None of this solidity will protect me from the intangibility of adrenaline coursing through me fifteen minutes later as Franco demands three hundred euro. The five of us are not even two hundred meters from the front of our hostel just up the hill, even less distance from the closed entrance to Pompeii—yet we cannot escape. He’s got one of our 50’s up his sleeve and Camping Zeus only knows what in the glove box. I could’ve kicked myself. Twice. My dad would be apoplectic if he knew. Before I left, he said, “Remember what your back looks like,” and what did I do the day after I was on my own for the first time? Forget.

I will not tell him how I stepped behind Josh and Tyler and listened to them argue. I will not tell him how I sat on the stairs of Camping Zeus minutes later and cried tears of helpless fury. I will not tell him how Italian men have taught me powerlessness, whether with their cons or their stares or their hands.

I will tell him that I still have two-thousand-year-old grave dust stuck to my black ballet flats; that I missed him as I kiss his reddish, stubbly cheek; that the lawn looks nice and that Naples is a shithole that ought to be struck from God’s green Earth; that I could really, really use a glass of Dr. Beam after that plane ride.