Mark Twain in Milan by Rob Hunter	Table of Contents part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6
part 1

Suspended in mid-ceiling, yellow work lights cast fitful shadows every hundred feet; a half foot of water in a concrete channelway reflected oily rainbow ripples. There was a distant vibration of machinery. If I had gone to Hell at least they kept up with the electric bill.

“Mister Ivory I believe,” said a tall tenuous man as he strode down the empty tunnel toward me. He wore a large untended mustache and a red fez in the Turkish style. I fumbled in my pockets for loose change. This was most likely one of the legion of New York’s homeless who slept down here. The man waved me off.

“My pleasure, for the moment,” said the gent. “Put aside your charity. And your mouth is hanging open — close it, please. Ivory or Onions, one or the other. You may choose.” He extended a hand. “Samuel Langhorne Clemens: author, adventurer, general bon vivant.”

I’m not afraid of rats, or the dark, but entombment with a lunatic in one of the silent landfills that herald municipal progress gave me the willies. I guessed this was the 2nd Avenue subway tunnel. It is a given of municipal affairs that if you keep a botched project under wraps long enough, people will forget about it. Parts had been sealed off since the late 1920s.

“No matter, I shall call you Onions,” said Samuel Langhorne Clemens. “How do you do?” He squinted and smoothed his moustache. There was a small squeak as on the wall behind him a New York City Transit Authority plaque slipped to hang on one remaining unrusted screw. It cautioned against smoking or spitting.

“Sam Clemens — Mark Twain. I read your books in the sixth grade. Aren’t you dead?”

“Hogwash, if I were dead I’d be out and voting. This is New York. And yes, I am better known as Mark Twain — a sad deficiency, but I’m working on it. Although I am not one to put on airs, I do turn a handsome phrase, my publisher demands it. I bestride the ocean like a colossus, if I do say so myself. And there is soap on your nose.”

“Uh... I was getting a shave. The last thing I remember is lying back in a barber chair under a mound of steaming towels.” Like that explained things. “Andy Saperstein,” I said as I reached out to shake hands, “formerly of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.” Sam Clemens looked suspiciously at the hand. “It’s okay; I just washed it. And I’m not Onions.”

Sam Clemens/Mark Twain produced a set of those nineteenth-century eyeglasses — pince-nez they’re called — and settled them on his large nose.

“Your hygiene habits are not in question here, Mr. Onions, but your hesitation — life is about choices. I name all my porters and attendants — steamship stewards, Montenegrin muleskinners, waiters at table. They nigh burst with joy that I might be on familiar terms with them. They are who I say they are.” We shook hands. “You, too,” he added.

I felt a minute vibration from an inside pocket — cellphone. Sam Clemens peered into my eyes. “Your shirt is singing,” he said. Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” is my ring tone; as we talked I must have wandered into a hotspot. Cellphone signals leak into parts of many stations through the street grates.

“Hello?”

“Valerie?” A wrong number.

“Nope, sorry. No Valerie here.” I rang off. Then dialed 911. The cellphone was dead; I was stuck underground with a strangely arranged person who insisted he was Mark Twain and that I was someone else. A rat scuttled across his shoe and he looked down disapprovingly.

“Rat,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” said Mark Twain. There was a scurry of small animals escaping. “We have surprised them. I am understandably on edge, having just turned up in what, on the face of it, is an ancient Greek netherworld. Death notwithstanding, I do have an aversion to rats.”

Recessed into the tunnel walls, every fifty feet or so, were niches that retreated down the line in diminishing perspective where track workers could dive when a train came by. But there were no trains, no tracks, no workers; this was a deserted tunnel.

“Buona sera.” A man stepped out of the nearest niche.

“Yikes!” I must have jumped a foot.

“Scuse, signori. Un po’ di fuori, eh? You were preoccupied and I have disturbed your reflections. Cane che abbaia non morde. This is a proverb. I am harmless, a toothless terrier; I am not begging. I will not disturb you further.” He shrugged back into his niche.

“Wait. Hey, I’m sorry. Come out and let’s talk. I’m Andy Saperstein and this is Sam Clemens.”

The man beamed like a kid with his first chocolate sundae. “Giancarlo Pieranunzi,” he said. “Formerly docent in mathematics at the Università di Torino.”

Giancarlo was well-groomed and in his thirties, a decent-looking gent wearing one of those tight Edwardian tweeds with the high narrow lapels that come in and go out of fashion every ten years, regular as clockwork. I noticed his buttonholes were leather-lined, custom tailoring.

“I thought the niche was an uscita d’emergenza, an escape hatch. But, alas, no. I apologize for affrightening you.” He paused to groom a closely clipped military mustache. After repeating our introductions, we three sat on the cement walkway and dangled our feet above the oily slick that slithered down the middle of the tunnel.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens leaned across to offer Giancarlo a hearty, manly handclasp. “You must be Mister Ivory.”

“Pieranunzi, Signor Twain. And I had not planned to become a graduate assistant at the Università. I was a romantic youth and dreamed to become a shepherd. Then came Mussolini and I went. No more Università.”

Our male bonding was cut short by a great rush of displaced air and the overwhelming thrust of a train entering the station. No tracks, no trains... remember? There was a screech of tortured steel as brakes caught hold and slipped, steel on steel whipping up great clouds of archival dust. Discarded flotsam from the daily commuter trek battered our faces. There was no train to be seen. A newspaper flew straight at me and covered my eyes. I was blinded and pulled it away in a panic.

L’Osservatore Romano. The type face was archaic — the kind you’d see in a museum. There were two photo-engravings on the front page. After reading subway ads all my life, I am pretty good at translation if I’ve got a picture to go with the story. A pretty girl waved from the rear platform of what might have been a train. In the other picture a beneficent-looking man in liturgical costume held a hand aloft in a blessing. The caption said something about a council of bishops. This guy to be the pope. The pretty girl in the other picture was a different story. The only part of that caption I could decipher said something about an apparition.

“What’s that you’ve got?” asked Sam Clemens. He reached out for the paper as he clamped eyeglasses on the end of his nose. “Apparition... hmmm.” He studied the newspaper. He was holding it upside down. He noticed my stare and aimed his intimidating moustache in my direction. I was forming an opinion that, however fine a writer he was — or had been, Mark Twain was a bit of a humbug.

“What do you make of this, Giancarlo?” I handed the newspaper to the docent in mathematics.

“The Holy Father,” he said. He then kissed the picture. Not the picture of the pope, but the picture of the young woman.

The tunnel shook with a passing rumble, the uptown express on the Lexington line a couple of blocks to our east, separated from us by cubic tons of basaltic granite. As I turned around to look for the train, a reflex, Giancarlo grabbed at my sleeve. “Mi dispiace. I was afraid you might be leaving. Look. Look at the date.” We looked at the date.

L’Osservatore’s masthead read July 18th, 1869. “So?”

Giancarlo wept. His shoulders heaved and tears ran down his cheeks. “It is too late. She is dead in 1869. Don’t you see?” He looked to Sam Clemens and me for confirmation.

“Yes, we see,” we said in unison, even though neither of us had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Sam Clemens held the page at arm’s length. From the yellowed page a bright-eyed, attractive young woman, bustled and beribboned and in a tweedy Victorian getup, waved cheerily out at us.

Giancarlo translated. “They are saying that this is a, how do you say — fakery. The photograph is not true but it has been staged by some malicious anti-Christian force. Such as the Risorgimento. It is claimed by some to be a miracle. The Church denounces her. My Ada.” He lifted aside a foulard silk tie and undid two buttons in his shirt front to produce a portrait cameo attached to a gold chain. The woman of the cameo had a scrappy air. Her upturned nose was offset by a chinoiserie of coiled hair cascading over very creamy, very white shoulders.

“The face is the same as the woman in the paper,” I said. The woman was drop-dead gorgeous, even allowing for some artistic license by a carver who had wished to please a finicky client.

“A mighty handsome lady, that,” offered Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

“Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. You have seen her?” Giancarlo looked reproachfully at him.

“You’ve lost her?” Sam Clemens/Mark Twain turned the cameo over in his large hands. “Careless of you, I would say. No, I have not, more’s the pity.”

“Alas, I, too, have never met her,” said Giancarlo. “But I have yearned for her since I was an undergraduate. Lady Ada is — was — likewise a mathematician. She has such a well-formed formula.”

Sam Clemens and I began talking at the same time. Sam Clemens/Mark Twain gave me a dark look and I shut up. “Ahh, that’s better,” he said. “Now sir, if you are a professor, explain yourself. And the bizarre situation in which we find ourselves while you are at it.”

Our new arrival quailed under the assault of the great drooping moustache. “Scuse,” he stammered and walked back to his niche.

“Nonononono,” said Sam Clemens. “Don’t go back down your pop-hole, please. We shall be needing all the help we can muster. Three heads are better than one, even when one of the heads is mine.”

Giancarlo reluctantly allowed himself to be pulled from his niche. We exchanged reminiscences and family histories. And found out that we hailed from different decades — different centuries. “Time travel,” I said.

“Claptrap,” offered Sam. “If there is such a thing as journeying through time, where are all the tourists?”

“Right here: us. Now,” I said.

“But which now?” Giancarlo let out a long Mediterranean sigh and gave one of those elegant whole body shrugs that only an old world Italian could pull off. “Time travel is impossible. There is a hooker as you call it,” said Giancarlo. “Something which precipitates oscillations between your parallelism and ours.”

I explained hookers to Giancarlo.

“Buono, a catch, then,” he said.

“So time travel is impossible? They do it all the time on TV.” From Giancarlo’s and Sam Clemens’s expressions that remark positioned me firmly with single-celled organisms although by rights they shouldn’t have even known what TV was.

“I am not from your past, Andreas,” said Giancarlo Pieranunzi. “I am from my past. And Signor Clemens is from his past. Our pasts must differ slightly for the switching to take place without a massive release of energy.”

“Ka-boom!” I said.

“As you say, Andreas — Ka-boom.”

Another express rumbled by on the Lexington Avenue line. The noise mounted to a crescendo.

“The espresso,” shouted Giancarlo as the rumbling passed. Some words do make it across the language barrier.

“The Lexington Express,” I said.

“A punto. We hear the train but we do not see it. Eppur si muove. Shhh...” He held a finger to his lips. Silence, the train was suddenly gone. “How we got here and what happens next, these are the questions at hand... We are summoned by destiny.” Giancarlo straightened and thrust out his chest.

“We have been called by a power greater than ourselves?” asked Sam Clemens.

“Which would be the New York City Transit Authority,” I said. “Oops...”

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2011 by Rob Hunter