Elijah parts with Danny in St. Mark's Square and is at first disoriented. The courtyard is filled with thousands of people, speaking what seem to be thousands of languages. People are moving in such an everywhere direction that there is simply nowhere to go without firm resolution. Elijah's first instinct is to steal a quiet corner, to purchase a postcard from a hundred-lire stall and write to Cal about all the people and the birds and the way tourists stop to check their watches every time the bell tolls. He would sign the postcard Wish you were here, and he would mean it—because that would be his big threepenny wishingwell birthday-candle wish, if one were granted by a passerby. Cal would make him smile, and Cal would make him laugh, and Cal would take his hand so they could waltz where there was no space to waltz and run where there was no room to run. He thinks about her all the time.
Elijah finds a postcard and sits down to write, drawing a picture of the basilica above Cal's address. Then he files the postcard in his pocket for future delivery and wonders what to do. The alleys leave little room to think. So Elijah makes a decision not to decide. He steps into the crowd and gives in.
It is Elijah's rare talent—a talent he doesn't realize—to be surrounded by strangers and not feel alone. As soon as he steps into the rush of people, he is engaged. He is amazed through the power of watching, bewitched by the searching. As he is led from St. Mark's to the walk beside the canal, he scans the crowd for beautiful people he will never know. He smiles as large groups struggle to stay together. Young children swoop beside his legs as old men lazily push strollers. Vendors sell the same cheap T-shirts at five-foot intervals. A band from a canal-side hotel plays, and mothers call their daughters away from the sea.
If you wanted to reassemble Elijah's afternoon, you probably could do it by stringing together all the photographs and all of the frames of videotape that he walks into. Always a passerby, he is immortalized and unknown.
Farther from St. Mark's, the people fall away and the noise dies down. Strange sculptures appear—enormous anchors and acrobatic steel beams. Elijah figures these are just part of the landscape—the New City's wink at the Old City.
And then he finds the Biennial.
One night, deep in December, Cal had asked: “Do you wonder why we wander?”
The answer, Elijah now realizes, is: Discovery.
In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual to find a situation that appears without word, or a place that was not known to be on the road.
As Elijah buys his ticket and enters the Biennial exhibition, he feels not only discovery but also a discovery of discovery. It's a spiritual rush, and it leaves him buoyant. He feels the antithesis of alone, because he is in the company of circumstance.
This is so cool, he thinks—this is his vocabulary of rhapsody. He has entered (for lack of a better reference) an Art World EPCOT Center, each country's pavilion beckoning him forward. The afternoon is growing late, and the crowd has thinned out to a devoutly quiet core.
Elijah walks into the Spanish pavilion and stands before an abstract angel made from golden wire. Even though it doesn't move, Elijah can feel the angel lift. Serendipity is a narcotic, and Elijah is under its sway. He stares at the angel until he can feel it watermark his memory of the day. Then, giddy and awed, he moves on.
Whether keenly striking or laughably awful, contemporary art is rarely unentertaining. Within its elaborately constructed pavilions, the Biennial demonstrates this appropriately. In Belgium, Elijah finds a series of open white (plaster?) containers. Luxembourg is populated by lawn chairs with the word “SAMPLE” placed in the corner (perhaps, Elijah thinks too easily, they were desperate for artists from Luxembourg). Holland features films of a girl flipping off a wall (her bloomers show) and of a man showering gratuitously. In addition, lightbulbs with n**ples (there's no better way to describe them) litter the floor.
Elijah finds this more amusing than any so-called amusement park. Then he enters the strange world of the Japanese exhibit. Its lower level is devoted to repetitive photos of black-and-white cells. Elijah walks upstairs, and there is a burst of color—brilliant spectrum cellscapes viewed from a wooden walkway on the outskirts of an inner lake. Elijah is dazzled. He goes through three times and then makes his way to the French pavilion, which is filled with smashed auto cubes.
Elijah wants to call Danny, because he feels it's near criminal to allow his brother to miss such a strangely magical place. But Elijah doesn't know the phone number of the hotel—he doesn't even know how to make a call from an Italian phone booth. So he vows to make Danny come tomorrow, and even decides to accompany him, if need be.
The epigram for the Russian exhibit is “Reason is something the world must obtain whether it wants to or not.” At the center of the pavilion is a container (large, metal) with a hole in it—the sign above it reads, Donate for artificial reason. Elijah reaches into his wallet and pulls out a crumpled American dollar. Then he moves on—to delicate paintings of violent acts and sculptured mazes scored by ominous music.
The narcotic of serendipity numbs his sense of time. The afternoon is over before Elijah has a chance to recognize it. An announcement is made in five languages—the exhibition will soon be closing. Elijah wanders to the gift shop and buys a few more postcards for Cal. Then he steps through the gate, back into the expected world. He looks to the exhibition sign and learns that the Biennial is closed tomorrow. Danny is out of luck. Elijah is disappointed. And at the same time, he is relieved. Not because the experience will solely be his (really, he wants Danny to see it). But instead because he knows deep in his heart that it would be foolish to return.
Discovery cannot be revisited.
“Do you wonder why we wander?” Cal had asked.
It was the night of the first snow; you could hear the branches bending and the icicles falling outside the window, beyond the wall.
They were warmth together. They were hot breath and blankets and wrapping themselves close.
And Elijah had thought, I wonder why I never kiss you. I wonder what would happen.
But he didn't say anything out loud.
Danny and Elijah had been walking the back way to school—even though Danny's first bell rang twenty minutes earlier than Elijah's, they usually walked together, with Danny dropping Elijah off at the playground before heading to middle school.
The back way went by the brook, by the strand of trees that the boys could call a forest without feeling any doubt. Sometimes along the way they found signs of trespass—teenage beer cans, hand-smashed or misplaced intact; gum wrappers folded into the ground; once, a high-heeled shoe.
That morning, they found a large spool of red twine. Elijah picked it up, the twine end pointing out like a tail.
“Let's tie the trees together,” he suggested.
And Danny said, “Sure.”
They tied the tail end to a branch—Elijah looping it like a shoelace, Danny double-knotting so it would hold. Then they ran randomly from tree to tree, sometimes throwing the spool high to get a branch that was just out of reach, other times dipping low to let the lowest of bushes in on the action.
They laughed, they looped, they were hopelessly late for school.
There was no way to explain it, so neither of them tried.
As Elijah wanders through the Biennial, Danny is in another part of town, altering his concept of nationality. At first, he thought he had it figured out: the American tourists were the loud walkers with Chicago Bulls T-shirts, and the Europeans were the teeter-walkers with an unfortunate propensity toward dark socks. But no. That was not the case at all.
Take baseball caps. Danny initially assumed that anyone wearing a baseball cap was from the U.S.—after all, baseball is not exactly America's most exportable pastime. But does that matter? No. Alongside postcards and Venezia T-shirts, street vendors are flush with New York Yankees, Washington Redskins, and Dartmouth (Dartmouth?) paraphernalia.
Even in the Doges' Palace, things are askew. Danny stands beside an Ethan Hawke look-alike who is clearly a semesterabroad NYU student. Then Ethan opens his mouth and speaks an unintelligible language. Danny retreats to the side of a glamorous woman with a Spanish complexion and raven hair. She speaks fluent Brooklyn, albeit with a curator's vocabulary. (To her, the subtle curve of a David is a “mask-uline ref-rence to thuh fem-nin ark-uh-type.”) Danny is confounded—the Europeans are trying to be American, the Americans are trying to be European, and the Japanese are furiously upholding their stereotype by taking a horrendous number of snapshots for no clear reason.
Internationality is a German teenager in Venice wearing a Carolina Panthers jersey. (Danny passes three of them as he leaves the museum.)
And if this is internationality…where does that leave nationality? Danny has a fierce desire to identify Americans. Finally, he realizes: you can tell an American not by the American-ness of his T-shirt but by the level of its obscurity. For example, if the shirt reads “Snoopy” or “New Jersey Sports” or (especially) “U.S.A.,” odds are it's not an American. But if the shirt says “Lafayette College Homecoming Weekend” or “Paul Simon in Central Park,” odds are it's an American in front of you.
Danny takes comfort in a stranger's Habitat for Humanity T-shirt as he walks back to the hotel. It is his way of keeping in touch with home.
Elijah leaves the Biennial and walks straight into an adjacent park. There are flowers everywhere. Elijah knows it's quite simple, but such things make him happy anyway. Old people sit on benches and talk boldly to one another. The women in particular make an impression on Elijah—old women in America don't seem as loud and animated and free. On the streets of Manhattan, it always seems like they travel alone, stooped, on their way from the grocery, toward somewhere equally unpleasant. But the Italian women don't look like abandoned grandmothers. They appear in flocks. They seem to know more.
Walking slowly, Elijah passes a man taking a picture of someone else's clothesline. It is, like all snapshots, a stolen image. The man clicks the shutter, then leaves guiltily.
The afternoon has now dimmed into evening. Candles are lit on cafe tables. The alleyways grow ominous, the crowds more unruly. It is as if twilight unleashes a darker undertow. Elijah feels the turn as the day goes from wistful to stark. The streets are so narrow they cry for confusion and claustrophobia. They desire speed, the rush of running through a maze. It is like a movie, Elijah thinks. A James Bond movie. There is no speed limit for pedestrians. It isn't like he's poolside—no running allowed. Unencumbered by packages, still high on the day, Elijah decides to bolt.
Bystanders are surprised. Elijah has been casually walking along. Now he runs as if he's being chased by KGB agents. It isn't entirely like a James Bond movie—he is careful not to knock down passersby or vendors of fruit.
As he gains speed, the streets seem to narrow further. The buildings threaten to cave in on him. The corners are sharper than before. The back of his coat trails in the air. Elijah wants to whoop with joy—running every which way, catapulting himself over bridges, a fascinating streak in a photo that will be developed weeks from now. He is tired, but he's free. He is living, because he's in motion.