i had a friend who once wore a long pink dress with lace around the collar and ruffles at the bottom and my friend was a man named johann, the type that carried around an angry austrian wrench longer than my arm and told me that so as not to be forgotten he would write his name on the dome of st. peter’s basilica. we all laughed until i screamed and dan turned, wild and still, towards a corner, whispering, “oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” because one moment we were looking down, watching the city breathe and, the next, johann eclipsed rome.
he was afraid of being forgotten by himself, but he was even more afraid that he might never die. we all knew and he knew as well that no one would ever forget johann because once he climbed a tree and it bent in half and threw off its leaves at his feet when he stood before it in a gas mask.
i found him on a street corner in eastern europe, sitting on the curb with a white sack of clothes and a bible, watching traffic and letting yellow dust gather on his red pants. the next morning he was arguing with a taxi driver in arabic. when johann won, because johann always wins, he put me in the taxi across three other people, cradled in their laps, and told me not to let the police see me.
the windows and doors were missing, their gaping frames choked with barbed wire and plastic bags, caught like flies in a spider’s web. it was the enemy’s church, they had been building it for years, and when the bombs drove them out, it refused to be touched. johann walked up the brick wall and put me in the bell tower.
we were the only ones to stand in the balcony where the pulpit and its priest should have gone, looking down, watching to see if the empty cathedral had breath. my father told me a year later that it had a few breaths, all stolen and hidden.
it almost seemed like someone forgot to bring the white soldiers home when the war ended nine years ago, but they were left there on purpose, to keep the peace.
one soldier from across the ocean kept everyone’s peace but his own and though we were not the only ones to stand in that balcony, we were the only ones to come down the rungs growing deep in the grey wall alive.
johann wanted a mustache to match his dress, but the mustache was for the french foreign legion, and the french foreign legion was not for johann’s dress. he kayaked up the nile instead until the police caught him. they never did catch me in that turkish man’s taxi cab.
