Free Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland

remorseful about smoking outside the bus, one bus among thousands, parked on cobblestones smelling of Europe’s then-omnipresent odour of diesel and urine. Mr. Burden was no narc; we puffed away. He also knew that chiding us about smoking in Europe would be about as effective as chiding us for shopping in Vancouver. Not a chance.
    The boys were bored and, like us, jet lagged. The Vatican trip felt forced and dutiful. It made us wonder if Rome had the equivalent of a Playboy Mansion that was deliberately being concealed from us. We stood there like dock pilings, waiting and waiting and waiting for this little white dot of a man to come out onto a balcony and do something with his hands while his amplified voice frightened pigeons and reminded us that we were hungry and that the morning’s caffe latte and croissant had long since been metabolized. The staging and the mood all served to make us feel as if we were trapped in a dying and corrupt world, one we wanted to shatter and rebuild into something better.
    Back on the bus, I began to feel homesick again. It was Sunday, and the restaurant we’d been scheduled to eat in was closed, either by a strike or bad planning. The entire city, save for the Vatican, seemed to be closed. We were a dozen starving teenagers, and all we could find was a newspaper stand that sold chewing gum.
    We drove past the Colosseum, but we weren’t scheduled to see it for a few days yet. Mostly we drove through thousands of narrow streets designed for chariots and processions for the dead. Every shop on these streets was shuttered. I began to wonder if Italy even had an economy. That day we witnessed a sunset worth remembering, coral pink rays that fluttered above dark birds that flocked from tree to tree. It also shone over a place that actually sold food, on the highway a few miles from the hostel, on the city’s outskirts. It sold hamburgers coated with Dijon mustard, which we scraped off with black plastic knives. I ate half of one, plus some more of Mr. Burden’s anti-homesickness pills. By now I’d decided that I simply wanted to be under a general anaesthetic for the nine remaining days.
    And thus, my second day under my belt, I once again cried myself to sleep. Boo hoo hoo. Why was I so homesick? No idea. I look back on it now and think of how visiting another country is really just the same as going into someone’s house to soak up its aura. Technically, I ought to have been revelling in Italy.
    Did I see many naked statues during that second day? God, yes. Everywhere. It was hard not to see them. It was even harder trying not to be seen seeing them. The girls cackled when confronted with stone genitalia; the boys were silent at the sight of breasts. Me, I think there’s nothing erotic about female statues; as a sex we don’t turn to marble well. We flourish only in paintings, whereas males in marble run the thin line between art and porn. In any event, I quickly burned out on nakedness; homesickness blotted out everything else. Unlike loneliness, it has a simple cure: going home. If only loneliness could be so easily fixed. Merely being around other humans doesn’t help me—loneliness in a crowd is the most pathetic variant. On the other hand, at least in a crowd you have a chance, however slim, of meeting that cosmic person whose presence will still your fevered lonely brain. Alone in your condo, your chances are zip.
    I’m doing the thing that lonely people do, which is fine-tuning my loneliness hierarchy. Which is lonelier … to be single and lonely, or lonely within a dead relationship? Is it totally pathetic to be single and lonely and be jealous of someone lonely inside a dead relationship? Again, remember, this is all theoretical to me. Okay, here’s another one … is it possible to be lonely within a dead relationship while the other person isn’t lonely at all? Or the corollary of that question: is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?
    When I