Free Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumiere

this. The
new odour captivated him; every day he wanted to go play
in the water, but his grandparents wouldn’t allow it.
    In his pyjamas, Mario jumped down onto the street
from his bedroom window. He followed the smell to the
seashore.
    He scraped the skin of his hands and feet climbing over
the big stone blocks that bordered the sea.
    He stood on one of the big blocks and stared down into
the darkness of the water. Without another thought, he
stripped off his pyjamas and let himself fall into the sea.
    A few hours later, a bit after dawn, an old man who
habitually fished on the shore every morning found the
unconscious boy floating on his back. Mario was quickly
brought to the hospital, where they pumped his lungs,
shaved his scalp, and bandaged the big gash on his head
(a permanent scar would form on the top left side, a bit to
the back).
    When he awoke in the afternoon, his grandparents
stood over him, worry sculpted onto their wrinkled faces.
    Mario screamed.
    For the rest of his stay in Italy, another three weeks, the
boy screamed himself awake every night, but he could never
explain why.
    At first, his grandparents thought the boy was having
nightmares of drowning, that he was afraid of the sea. But
they caught him trying to sneak back to the shore. Mario
insisted he had to be let back into the water.
    “But why, Mario? What do you want there?” his
grandmother asked in her heavy Italian accent.
    In an icy and emotionless voice, the boy answered: “I
want it back. What it took away from me. I want it back.”
    No matter how she questioned him, he could not or
would not be more specific. They had to lock his bedroom
at night and keep a vigil over him in the daytime, lest he
risk drowning himself.
    His last few weeks in Bari were uneventful. Mario no
longer exhibited the unfailing exuberance that had been so
characteristic of his personality. Instead, all day long, he
sat and stared seaward from the kitchen window, refusing
to play or talk, often simply ignoring his grandparents.
    When the young Mario had arrived in Italy, he’d been
jovial, affectionate, and playful, but when his parents
returned from their seminar in India they’d found a
morose, taciturn, and withdrawn child. He barely greeted
them. He could no longer tolerate their touch. In fact, he
could barely stand their presence and did not hesitate to
tell them so, in those cold tones his voice had acquired.
Even returning home, to reunite with his friends and toys
and comics, failed to lift his mood.
    His parents, he knew, mourned the boy they had lost
that summer, regretted leaving him all season, blamed
themselves for the change in him.
    Everyone agreed, as he overheard repeatedly: it was as if
he were another person entirely.
    The young Mario no longer cared for any of his pre-Bari
friends and spent the next several years in isolation. His
parents attempted to enroll him in various activities —
swimming, painting, free-form dance, jazz orchestra —
but they were no match for the stubbornness of their
son. Only adolescence, and the consequent rage of his
hormones, forced him out his shell. At age thirteen, he
began to notice girls: the shapes of their bodies, the bounce
of their hair, the aroma of their skin. He dreamed about
them and woke up with his groin moist and sticky. He
had no idea what to say to these girls, or how to approach
them. All he knew was that he had to get closer to them,
smell them from up close, see more of their bodies, touch
them.
    To the delight of his parents, he joined the track team.
Tall and lithe, Mario was a natural runner. Track was the
only coeducational extracurricular sport at his school.
    His attention soon focused on one girl in particular:
Lindsay Barron, who was almost as tall as Mario himself,
whose hair was so long it reached the small of her back,
whose elegant face he could not stop daydreaming about.
At every practice, he would stare at her, but they had never
even exchanged a greeting.
    A month after