T h e   I s l a n d   i n   t h e   L a k e

               With the summer came a yearning. A sensation, emanating in waves from your chest to your limbs, possessing your thoughts. An internal fire that imitated the external heat, challenging it. A yearning that made you throw away your books, hop on your bike, and play tirelessly, all day. Summer days were mysteriously, yet wonderfully dilated, conquering secret hours that, with the arrival of autumn, fell away like leaves.

               Childhood summers are a whole different season. They are like no other and the various kinds of summer you experience later in life pale in comparison; they’re an unrepeatable cosmic event whose echo seems to last forever, like the explosion of a star. Childhood summers last entire geological eras, eternal aeons: in their red-hot core, time is distorted, becoming rarefied; irrelevant, fluttering in the heat rising from the asphalt.

               And yet they always end.

               The end of summer was a silent cataclysm, as disturbing and powerful as an earthquake, a tsunami or any other natural disaster. From the outside, however, things faded slowly, in silence: the sun, the heat, the yearning. Crowded places became deserted, friends left.

               Cold weather was something halfway between an impossible memory, made alien by its disappearance from the world, and a collective hallucination, something that could only have been imagined. From that safe distance it didn’t seem possible that such a thing could ever exist. But our realm ended when August ended, leaving us shivering in the plaintive north wind, and the world became once more an adult domain. It meant another year of school, living by their rules, forgetting we had once been wild.

               Eventually it was time for the last shower, when it seemed like we were not only washing away the dirt of the day, but of an entire era, watching it swirl down the plughole, into the black hole that, in the end, devours all our summers.

               That privileged, unique season played host to all the firsts in my life. To my most authentic memories, when things were genuine. If I look back, it feels almost like it never happened. Yet, at the same time, it feels like nothing else ever happened.

               And yet, summer came back, year after year, for that shining handful of years, always so similar to itself, in concentric repetitions of the same scenario.

               The house in the green and gold countryside, filled with the ones I loved — friends whizzing through the hot veil of air on their bikes — the shimmering lake that occupied the whole horizon — and in the lake, an island covered in trees, the dome of an ancient sanctuary towering over them.

               Childhood summers end, but what happens during those summers lives on, in endless reruns inside you, like a film on an old TV, left switched on, abandoned in an empty room. I was twelve and from then on my life would revolve around that moment, that particular moment in that labyrinthine summer.

The summer I killed you.

               “The Etruscans believed that the lake was the entrance to the kingdom of the dead.” How you loved those stories. Whenever you told them, your eyes would light up, midway between fear and excitement. You loved those stories in the way kids love things: purely, ferociously, and I loved them too, when you shared them with me — by the lake, in the woods, sitting together on a step, staring up at the night sky — and it felt like I loved anything that came from you, feeling the yearning of summer running through my blood.

               “The lake is its mouth,” you said. “It eats everything that exists, to stop it from existing.”

               That’s how it feeds. It sucks in everything. The black hole in the shower, in the lake, at the end of everything. Everything ends up here. It fed from me, from my life, from the lives of those I loved, and left me nothing. There is nothing now, just scraps.

               Going back is like an archaeological expedition. You can return to places, unearth them, explore them, treading carefully through the ruins, cataloguing your findings. But the miraculous intersection of space and time — that specific, fleeting adjustment of reality — is lost forever. When childhood ends, the places where it happened cease to exist in the world; the only material evidence left behind is a skeleton, picked clean of any living flesh.

               I returned by train, travelling backwards across the continent to find the ancient Etruscan lands, the volcanic hills cloaked in woods, the grey stone buildings dominated by the castle — and the lake, and the island in the lake. And as the landscape flew by the window, becoming more familiar, more painful, I had the impression that my life was rewinding, like an old movie, going back to that point in time.                Something I’d left suspended years ago started to move again — here, where you’ll find the linchpin around which the seasons, stars, days, and events revolve: from mass extinctions to dressed up in Sunday Best — everything that had happened to me while I was away, seemed, from this perspective, just an interlude devoid of consistency; fiction.

               Now I was back.

               Everything is the same, yet everything has changed. All I recognize of the old place are the outlines, but as soon as I begin to focus, I notice several disconcerting differences. The stores under the arches are all wrong. People walk the streets and I don’t recognize anyone; for a moment it seems there’s something familiar about their faces, but it is just a mirage, a trick of the light. There is nothing here that belongs to me anymore.

               Now summer is just a season like any other. Seasons glide into each other and I hardly notice them. They pass through me, but I retain nothing of them, and they retain nothing of me, in the slow anesthesia of the passing years. I no longer feel the childish mourning in the face of a slowly dying summer and its cold, melancholic ending. But I do know the last time I felt it, before everything was replaced by a facsimile and stopped being true.

               The house in the green and gold countryside is empty now. Of those I loved, remain only traces. On the veranda, there’s the old colonial chair, or a sad replica of it: because the one that exists in my memories, in my movie of those years, is shiny and solid, an old man’s throne — he too, shiny and solid — smoking his pipe, while this is but an empty relic, lost in the depths of time.

               In the second drawer of the desk in the entrance, I find an address book, in which a hand — a real hand, I swear — a hand that once existed, that once caressed me and fed me and which held mine so many times, I should have counted them — wrote numbers and names that no longer belong to anyone.

               Everything is covered in dust. When I walk through the empty heart of the house, the old floorboards creaking underfoot, and throw open the peeling shutters, I see, through the window that once framed my dreams of adventure, the lake. Shimmering, incandescent white in the harsh afternoon sunlight. And, at its center, the island.

               For a moment, while the air dries my sweat with a salty caress, I can pretend that this is a real summer. I feel the old yearning, flaring in my chest, spreading through me like an electric shock. The same yearning I felt back then.

               A dormant part of my brain, some ancient neural circuit, sparks back to life.

               The last days of July, belonged to the fair, exploding in the grey Medieval quiet of the village. Lights were lit and music played, tents bloomed everywhere, scents hovered in the air: toasted peanuts and cotton candy, the pungent smells of the animal stalls… The statue of the saint gliding over the water towards the sanctuary, aboard a boat loaded with flowers, mostly plastic, glowing with electric lights, fireworks lighting up both the night in the sky and the one in the lake. Stalls piled with candy promised their rich wares to anyone with a dime, and, in a large grassy area close to the lakefront, a funfair was set up.

               The funfair! A child’s most excruciating dream. Games and rides of all kinds, the Ferris wheel, chairoplanes, the house of mirrors, and bumper cars. Lights and colors and belly laughs, and in the air of the endless summer night buzzed an electricity that fueled the tingling yearning in our bodies, unripe and newly discovered.

               You held that rifle like a movie cowboy, its butt firm against your tanned shoulder while, with both eyes open, you knocked down the tin cans, one after another. You won a goldfish and you gave it to me. I held that plastic bag filled with water up to my eyes, watching that shiny little fish bobbing over the heads of the crowd, and I felt myself melt, liquefying with love.

Then, one morning, after century-long weeks, I woke to find the little fish floating belly-up in the bowl.

               That was the day I knew you weren’t coming back. That little fish was my connection to you, you see? And now the thread was broken.

That was the day they found the boat: the current had washed it ashore in a nearby town. Empty.

I’m walking through the countryside, down the dusty path we tore up on our bikes. A pale boundary between the parched gold of the cornfields and the neatly trimmed rows of purple lavender.

The old kiosks on the beach, their wooden walls peeling, people sunbathing on beach towels, children playing, their parents distracted.

               From a record stall on the lakefront, a gramophone croaks out some old song. The view from here is a picture postcard — a movie, thanks to the background music, the trees framing the sparkling water, the island looming in the distance.

On one side of the beach, half-hidden by vegetation, a narrow jetty juts out into the water, boats moored all around. A sign reads Boats for Hire.

               “You from around here?” asks the manager with the sun-baked face. Hidden inside this wrinkled man is a boy I used to know, but I’ve no idea how to find him.

“My grandparents, actually. I spent all my summers here when I was a kid. It’s been a long time since I was here...”

               He nods. “Used to be lots of folks here on holiday. Place was packed in summer. But it’s never been the same since.”

               “Nothing ever is, huh?”

               He smiles. “You must have been a kid at the time. Probably don’t even remember.” I feel it, for some reason, that yearning — I know he’s going to talk about you, and even if it hurts, the pain is sweet,  almost pleasant. “Bad stuff happened. Kid disappeared. We never did find out what happened to him. They say he drowned in the lake, but they never found the body. All that time spent looking for him… Out here we say, the lake always gives back what it takes. It never gave that child back, though.”

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The rest of this story is available in Volume 4, Issue 1 of Night Picnic.