Page 14 - WTP Vol. X #2

Salvatore Vecchio woke up and, after he opened his eyes, he woke up again and understood that he didn’t know where he was. It was a still summer’s morning—or it could have been winter, he wasn’t sure—and the birds were playing a melody just outside his window, a melody he could not quite grasp though he vaguely remembered having heard it somewhere during his long, cumbersome life.
Salvatore Vecchio—for that was his name—imagined: that he stumbled out of bed, that he hobbled into the bathroom, that he examined himself fully in the mir- ror and then said to himself:
“Now Sal, what have you done with yourself this time?”
For, truth be told, this was not the first time he had misplaced himself nor was it the first time he had awakened to the sound of summer birds whose song he could not quite recall.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he said out loud, “and try to remember before the breakfast eggs escape from their shells and the cream and sugar lose their way.”
But it was no use, for no matter how hard he tried and no matter where he looked, he could not remem- ber where he was or where he had put himself, and soon it was that the breakfast eggs had gone to who knows where and the cream and sugar were playing hide and seek, and the morning birds were singing knowingly as if to tease him, yet there was still no sign of the whereabouts of Salvatore Vecchio.
~
Now Salvatore Vecchio was not all that old, at least not as old as he thought he might be (not old enough at least, he would say, to no one in particular, to continually lose himself) though he was not quite as young as he would have liked to have been. And he would rub his hands together as he always did when contemplating an enigma of such magnitude, and, soon, he would conjure up just a hint of a smile and
sit in his chair, rocking back and forth and wondering out loud. Still, he could never say, no matter how he tried, what his age really was nor even suggest how young he might possibly be. Sometimes it was 87 and others 78. People would ask him—strangers all and some he thought he recognized—out of curiosity or because they had a need, he supposed, for conversa- tion (why, he wondered, did they have to continually trouble him with such nonsense?), and he would sit there, mumbling to himself, rocking and wiping his wrinkly face with his unsteady hands, and contem- plate the many possibilities. For when you were as old as he was, even if you cannot remember, exacti- tude is no longer part of the equation. And as far as equations were concerned, nothing really added up anyhow. So whether he was 65 or 56 or even 61 or 16, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he was sitting in a place he still did not recognize, grap- pling with the vast potential that lay before him and somewhere outside the birds were still playing their evening song and, every once in a while, someone
or something would float across his vision like a toy boat floating gently on the water.
And: he could still smile.
“Yes, Salvatore Vecchio,” he would comment, silently, just to remind himself who he was. “Life is full of puzzles.” And he would wonder, with a puzzled look on his wizened face, how it used to be back then, when he could still remember things, and he would stare out silently from his dull blue eyes and mumble something to himself and wish that everyone would just go away and stop asking him things he simply did not have an answer to.
~
But the problem was that Salvatore Vecchio (or Sal, as they called him) kept losing pieces of himself, and people would constantly come by, people he did not know, to help him when he had not requested any help at all. A hand here or a leg there. And, one time, the entire lower half of his body. And he would spend hours trying to remember where he had put them
or where they had gotten off to and he could never seem to find the answer. And then people would appear, out of thin air it seemed, to assist, though he never really wished for assistance, and, after turning the room upside down and inside out and looking here and there and everywhere, it turned out that they were never really that helpful after all. Instead, they would suggest things that made no sense what-
7
Where’s Sol?
Mike Maggio