Free Permanence by Vincent Zandri

Rome, “is to fly again…as soon as possible.”
    I say nothing.
    I stare outside the floor-to-ceiling airport windows and watch a jet plane coming in for a safe landing on this sunny, warm morning in late October.
    I feel my stomach constrict.
    “I thought we might drive to Venice,” I say.
    “No car,” says doctor. He takes my hand and leads me into the terminal for the domestic flight that will take us to Venice. He takes care of our transactions with the counter attendant and hands me a ticket, closing my fingers around it. I look at the ticket in my hand.
    “Oh,” I say, because I know I have no choice about flying.
    “For your fear,” doctor says, “and mine.”
    Doctor is had
    Venice begins for doctor and I where the land ends and becomes water, literally.
    I stand close to doctor, by the docks. I watch his expression go from blank to blanker when he peels away the money, bill by bill, from the stack he carries in his coat pocket. The cab driver who transported us from the airport to the canals is making doctor pay fifty-thousand lire for a ten-minute ride. Doctor presents it to the cabby who snatches the bills away from his hand.
    Doctor stands perfectly still. Like a statue. He seems in shock. He is holding on to the remainder of his money as the cabby jumps back into his car and spins the rear wheels, churning up the dirt and dust into our faces. It isn’t long before we realize this: doctor has been had. He isn’t himself. We stand there for a few moments while, or so I assume, doctor reacquaints himself with Italian currency denominations and while he counts what’s left of the stack he carries.
    Doctor looks up at me with his familiar, indifferent frown.
    “Watch your money,” he says.
    So I pull some of the Italian money doctor had handed me earlier out of my pocket. I spread it out in my hands as though reading playing cards. I stare at the money intently. I am really watching it.
    I begin to laugh.
    But doctor isn’t in a laughing mood.
    “But Venice can only be so large…”
    “In the interest of saving cash,” explains doctor, “we’ll take a water bus to our hotel.” This, instead of laying out cash for the sleek, stylish water taxis that also inhabit these canals.
    But something is wrong. As doctor and I board this slow-moving, white barge, I have the strange but urgent sensation of being lost. I am confused by the foreign landscape, the homogenous structures and architecture.
    I look at doctor.
    I am worried about his lack of direction. He looks one way and then the other, and back again.
    Apparently he is as confused as I am.
    The boat is moving.
    Doctor begins to say something but stops in midsentence. Angry passengers are forced to climb over our suitcases. They brush up against us with stiff shoulders and speak at us angrily in native Italian.
    I feel like a tourist. And I am.
    But I do not want to appear like a tourist.
    A half an hour passes as doctor and I travel the famous, romantic, Grand Canal by water bus. We pass dozens of nameless buildings, jetties, and docks made of wood and stone.
    Doctor is smoking. I can tell by his tight, frowning expression that he is growing ever impatient.
    I remain silent and try to have confidence in him.
    We are utterly lost.
    Suddenly doctor decides to disembark at the next stop. “We can find our way by walking,” he says. “Besides, how large can Venice really be?”
    I step onto the stone platform and begin my search, along with doctor’s, for a landmark I have no way of recognizing. Then doctor seems to discover this: “The Adriatic Sea,” he says, “is directly to our backs. We got off the bus on the wrong side of the Grand Canal.”
    “Any suggestions?” I say, the two suitcases I carry growing heavier in the thick afternoon air.
    But doctor is not listening to me so much as he is scanning the Venetian landscape. He is carrying four suitcases—two by the handles and two more tucked beneath his forearms—and the sweat is