Chương 22: Rome's Silence

Rome was not quiet. The moment the airport's glass doors opened, the scrape of suitcase wheels on the floor, people calling for tour bus staff, rapid Italian spilling into phones, and taxi drivers calling for passengers all hit at once. The sunlight was bright. People were smiling. Somewhere nearby, coffee and perfume mixed in the air. And yet Rome felt strangely quiet to Kichan. London had smelled like wet paper and old metal. New York had smelled like electricity, oil, coffee, and money all at once.

Beneath Rome's noise, there was a strangely pressed-down layer. It felt like the silence inside an old cathedral after the doors had been shut, as though someone were holding their breath on the other side. Kichan leaned against a pillar by the airport entrance. In one hand he held his passport and a printed ticket he'd rushed to get. Inside his coat, the Book of Soyga metal plate and the storage device pressed against him like cold weights.

Inside the equipment bag, the wake-up rod dragged at his shoulder with its usual absurd heaviness. His phone vibrated. It was his mother. `Did you get to Rome? ` Kichan started typing a reply, then caught sight of his own reflection in the airport glass. He looked like someone who had hardly slept at all. His hair was flattened, and his coat still carried the dried traces of having been soaked in New York.

He looked too worn out to be a tourist, but the bag was too strange for him to look like a normal business traveler. He typed a short answer. `Yeah. I got here. ` Then, after a moment's hesitation, he added, `Nice weather. ` That part was true. The problem was that telling the truth did not make anything feel reassuring. At the taxi line, Kichan set the equipment bag down. A child standing behind him with his family glanced at it.

It wasn't a guitar case, wasn't a golf bag, wasn't filming equipment either—just one long, awkward bag. The child's mother drew him back by the shoulder. Kichan looked away. The taxi driver tried lifting the bag and straightened up halfway through. Then he looked at Kichan.

"Heavy." It wasn't English, but the meaning was obvious from his face alone. Kichan smiled awkwardly.

"I know." The driver didn't understand him, but he shoved the bag into the trunk anyway. One end caught, bounced out once, and the driver muttered a short curse. Kichan folded a bill in advance for the tip. Money kept going out. Airports. Taxis. Lodging. Bread. Plane tickets. Every time his card was swiped, he felt as though his movements were being stamped somewhere. The receipts that had piled up since New York were still tucked inside an envelope in his coat.

Throwing them away felt like someone might pick them up. Carrying them made them feel like thin leashes. The taxi drove into the city. Low buildings, old walls, modern signs, and cathedral domes passed by in turn. The streets were narrow, and the cars were too close together. Every time a scooter skimmed past the taxi, the driver spat out a small curse, and Kichan pressed the corner of the receipt envelope with the fingers resting on his knee. The stone of Rome was strange. It did not read like metal.

It was not alive like plants either. And yet between the old walls and the ground, things like footsteps, prayers, funerals, songs, and silences had been pressed into place in thin layers. They had piled up soundlessly, one over another, until the entire city felt compressed like an ancient score. Kichan did not like that. Things that were too old were rarely kind to people.

His lodging was in a narrow alley with a church visible from it. The stairs looked older than the elevator, and the room was smaller than the photos had suggested. One bed. One small desk. One narrow closet. One window. If he opened the window, he could see laundry lines, the wall opposite, and, far in the distance, the edge of a church roof. Kichan tried to slide the equipment bag under the bed, then gave up. The bed sat too low. He stood the bag behind the closet instead.

The end of the wake-up rod tapped lightly against the inside of the closet door. The thin wood rang back. He tried draping his coat over it, but that did not make it look natural at all. It only made it more obvious that someone was trying to hide one long object. Dust crawled out from inside his shirt. The little wire body looked a little more worn now. Between the bits of dust and fiber stuck to the ends of its legs, there was the faintest silver-vein line, almost like a leaf vein.

Since he had touched the Book of Soyga metal plate, Dust had changed a little too. Kichan held out his palm. Dust climbed onto it.

"You came a long way too." Dust moved one leg once. It was not an answer. Just movement. Even so, he was glad to see it. Kichan spread his things across the desk. The storage device from New York, the Book of Soyga metal plate, the copied-document envelope, wrinkled receipts, the first water receipt he had gotten in Rome. The papers kept multiplying. They did not look like travel souvenirs left by a small-time tourist. They looked like thin pieces of evidence proving where someone had been and when.

He folded the airline receipt separately and tucked it into his passport. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. He needed to send his mother a photo. Kichan took a picture out the window. The photo caught the laundry line, the wall, and a small slice of the church roof. Sent. A reply came quickly. `Pretty. Did you eat? ` Kichan looked around the room. There was no food. He picked up his coat. He made it as far as the door, then stopped.

He could still see the equipment bag behind the closet. Walking around Rome in broad daylight with the wake-up rod was conspicuous no matter how he thought about it. But if he left it behind, it would sit in his head the whole time. He had already learned that lesson once in New York. The moment you hid something important where you couldn't see it, it lodged in your mind even more firmly. Kichan pulled the equipment bag back out.

The moment the strap pressed down on his shoulder, his mind strangely settled a little.

"So much for pretending to be a tourist." He used his coat to cover as much of the side of the bag as he could and left the room.

Roman bread was hard. Kichan sat on a bench near a fountain and chewed it. Tourists were taking pictures beside him, and someone nearby was laughing over gelato. The sky was painfully clear. Kichan felt the worst kind of exhaustion, and the weather was far too nice for it. He typed a short message into his phone. `I ate. ` A crowd had gathered near the small plaza in front of the church. At first he wondered if it was some kind of protest.

Getting caught in a protest all the way in Rome was something he truly did not want. Still holding the paper bag of bread, he only turned his head a little. The people were standing in a circle. In the middle sat a young man with a guitar. An old acoustic guitar, an open guitar case, a few coins, a few folded bills. He was singing without a microphone, and people were listening quietly with phones in hand or children by the wrist. Busking. Kichan stopped chewing. The man's voice was not extraordinary.

The words flowed fast, and his fingers slipped on the guitar now and then. But the church wall, the stone ground, the open square, and the low breathing of the people around him held the sound up in a strange way. Without realizing it, Kichan began counting the beat. One. Two. A little late for three. It sounded like a pop song, but whenever the busker held his breath a long moment at the end of the refrain, the empty space inside the church seemed to resonate with it too.

Very quietly, almost entirely behind his lips, Kichan hummed along. Not the exact melody. Just the shadow of the note he had heard. Then something inside his throat opened in a strange way. Kichan startled and shut his mouth. At the edge of the plaza, in front of a small antiquarian bookshop, a thin man was standing there. In his worn cardigan, he did not look like a merchant calling to tourists, but neither did he look entirely like a passerby. He was not watching the busker. He was watching Kichan.

The moment their eyes met, the bookseller lowered his head very slowly. It was closer to confirmation than a greeting. With his thumb, he pressed once against an old cord pushed down beneath the sleeve of his cardigan, then kept his gaze on Kichan's mouth. Kichan opened his water bottle for no reason, then closed it again.

"What are you looking at." It was in Korean, so no one understood. Somewhere very far away, a bell rang through the sound of the fountain. Kichan stopped with the bread still in his hand. It was probably just an ordinary church bell. The tourists kept taking pictures, the gelato shop worker kept handing change to customers, and scooters kept passing through the narrow street. No one stopped. Only Kichan reacted. The bell scraped once along the inside of his ribs.

Not the sound itself, but the place where sound was about to become sound. The sensation of someone drawing breath just before beginning a very long sentence. He set the bread down. A word from the New York storage device came back to him. `LOAGAETH` `CHANT PROTOCOL` `BASILICA DISTRICT` Kichan looked toward the alley across from the fountain. The address led to a small antiquarian bookshop near an old church. By day, it was supposed to sell tourist postcards, reproduction maps, and cheap medieval-style notebooks.

Kichan twisted his mouth. Italy's first antiquarian shop, and it was the same as the others: tourist books, postcards, cheap covers, and a back room that wasn't meant to attract attention.

"Everybody really does have the same interior design taste." He wrapped the rest of the bread in paper and put it in his pocket. It hadn't tasted good, but throwing it away would have felt like a waste of money.

The bookshop really was tiny. Postcards printed with religious paintings, old maps, and Latin prayers were stuck to the glass door. The little bell above the entrance gave a clear ring when Kichan stepped inside. The air inside was cool. Tourist books were lined up neatly on the front shelves. Roman history, saints' lives, guides to ancient ruins, notebooks made to look like leather. They looked dusty, but the items within reach of human hands were clean. The owner was the same thin bookseller.

He wore the old cardigan, and something like an old rosary was wound around his wrist. He looked less like the owner of a tourist shop and more like someone who sold old books without actually wanting to sell them. The moment he saw Kichan, he did not smile. Kichan liked that.

"Closed," the bookseller said in English. Kichan glanced at the business hours sign by the door. There were still two hours left.

"It says you're still open." The bookseller did not answer. Kichan looked deeper into the shop. One door. And a pile of old books stacked in front of it. The doorknob was brass. The grain of the metal caught at his fingertips. The Rohonc sense read it, and the Soyga sense felt its way along the conditions placed on that door. But the clue to Loagaeth did not come through his fingertips. It came from inside his throat. Somewhere in the back room, a very low breath had pooled there. It was not song and not speech.

It was the sense of throat and abdomen quietly preparing themselves just before beginning a long phrase. Without thinking, Kichan almost moved his lips. The bookseller's eyes sharpened.

"Do not make a sound." Kichan closed his mouth. He let his breath out very slowly.

"I stopped because I was planning to." The bookseller's hand went below the counter. Kichan watched the hand. It was not the hand of a man drawing a weapon. It was the hand of a man searching for a key. The veins on the back of it were thin, and the nails were cut short. The bookseller produced a small key.

"So it has already read you," he said. At that, Kichan frowned. Read by a book. A document demanding something of a person. A registered person. Even in his own life, sentences kept following him in which he was never the subject.

"It's inside, isn't it," Kichan said.

"The book." The bookseller stayed silent for a long time. That silence felt like refusal, or perhaps prayer. At last he said,"Not a book. A fragment."

"Everything's fragments these days."

"One fragment can weigh more than a whole city." Kichan pressed the hard bread in his pocket with his fingers. His throat was still tight. So when he answered, it came out a little rough.

"Then why keep something like that in a shop?" The bookseller took the key and walked to the back door. His hands were slow as he moved the pile of books blocking it. The smell of old paper rose. Kichan waited for a moment, then finally picked up half the stack himself and set it aside. The bookseller shot him a glance.

"You're strong."

"I've just been tired lately."

"Tired people don't lift books that way."

"They looked more like luggage than books." The bookseller asked no more questions. The key turned. The back room door opened. The air changed. Paper. Dust. Old wood. And, from very far away, something like a choir holding its breath. In the middle of the room, beneath a glass cover, lay a thin scrap of paper. The moment he saw it, Kichan understood. This was not something to read. It was something to call. But it was not something that should be called yet. He kept his mouth shut and stood before the paper.

Inside his throat, the feeling of a song long left unused began to wake quietly.