Empire of Light by Earls Gregory

Author:Earls, Gregory [Earls, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Simon & Fig
Published: 2011-09-24T04:30:00+00:00

15

It’s the Best Painting EVER

Painting 9: The Entombment of Christ

MATTEO AND I HOP onto the train like two kids skipping over a stream on summer break. We rejoice in that universal mode of male celebration: fist pounds and chest bumps.

“Yeah!” I scream

“Yeah!” Matteo screams back at me.

We plop down into our seats, satisfied at spitting in the eye of the establishment. I look at his happy face, an expression totally counter to the dour mug I encountered just five minutes ago. It suddenly dawns on me that he has already gone through the conversion, and I was the guy who cracked him!

Shit! How cool is that?

In five minutes, without even thinking about it, I turned this guy from a money grubbing suit into a free spirit, ready to follow me all the way to the Vatican and back. There’s nothing to this Fisher of Menthing. As we escape down the tracks with big fat grins plastered on our mugs, I feel proud, yo.

However, as we head deeper into Rome’s belly, I notice that Matteo’s smile begins to weaken.

After a long awkward moment of silence, the reality of the situation slowly drills its way into Matteo’s head. I can feel the weight of it as I watch him out of the corner of my eye. He runs his hands through his hair in frustration. I stare at our reflection in the window directly across from us and see myself sitting next to this very worried kid. Matteo and I make eye contact in the reflected glass. I imagine his mirror image punching my mirror image in the face.

Okay, so I see the tough part of converting somebody is not so much the conversion, but keeping the converted on track and happy.

“So. Where are you from?” he asks me as he glares at my reflection.

“Cleveland.”

“Cleveland?” he asks a bit shocked.

“Yep, Cleveland.”

He runs his hand through his hair again then begins to bang his head back against the glass window behind him. “I’ve read of this place, Cleveland. They call it the armpit of the United States.”

“Really?” Even in Italy I have to hear shit about my town.

“Is there, maybe, another Cleveland that I don’t know about?” he asks hopefully.

Here we go.

“No. Cleveland, Ohio. There’s only one.”

Matteo thinks for a second…

“I think there is a Cleveland in the Regno Unito—”

“No,” I interrupt. “I’m not from the UK.”

Where the hell is he going with this? I think he can’t accept the idea that some idiot from Cleveland, Ohio duped him into bailing on his job. Well, that iskind of messed up now that I think about it. I want to tell him I’m sorry, push him off the train at the next stop and go beg his boss to give him his job back. However, I think we’re way beyond fail-safe at this point. The train even seems to speed up, the clacking of the tracks escalating in tempo and filling the silence between us with tension.

“Okay. So you are fromCleveland, but maybe you

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