In the Shanghai Smog
The interview would not be broadcast in Shanghai until after midnight, so Casey Lasko asked his husband to stay up late with him and watch. The couple had recently moved into this apartment, the entire 97th floor of a new tower on the Lujiazui financial district, just a temporary place for a few months, while Casey settled into his new job and his husband—a very gifted young man—learned enough of the Shanghai dialect to understand what the real estate agents were saying behind their backs.
Casey had just been named president of Gong Studios, the content division of the Chinese internet giant that had purchased the Encore!!! Network the previous year. Although neither he nor his husband would have made high-rise living their first choice—in fact, they joked privately about being kept in a gilded cage—they both had to admit it was very convenient: the commute to Casey’s office, on the 73rd floor, was just a private elevator ride. And the view could be spectacular, especially when the wind came off the sea.
Unfortunately sea breezes were rare in January, when the prevailing winds came from the northwest, and the smog, almost as bad as the smog in Beijing, often reached higher than the tallest tower in Pudong.
There was no point using the screening room for an ordinary Italian news broadcast, so they watched from their bedroom.
“Look at that,” said Casey. “The Pope is speaking English.”
“It’s his native language, isn’t it? He’s Nigerian, right?” said his husband, yawning. “All the neo-Nazis love him. He proves they’re not racists.”
Casey cycled the remote through several versions of the broadcast, on different satellite channels and internet services, till he found one with English captions, and no dubbing.
“The Emperor looks good,” said Casey. “Much better than any of his file footage.”
“It’s the uniform,” said his husband. “And the naval beard... I like naval beards.…”
The Pope and the Emperor did indeed make a handsome couple, a study in contrasts: the round black face with owlish spectacles, the stern alpine jaw with steely whiskers. Not a sexual couple, not at all, thought Casey, but romantic in a way.
The romance of power.
Until five days ago, everyone, including Casey Lasko, had assumed that power in Italy belonged to the Fifth Triumvirate, the three Air Force generals who had staged a military coup the year before. A few months after the coup, the Triumvirate had announced their plan to restore the monarchy, and named Prince Berteo of Savoy, Duke of Aosta, as their choice to be the new king. Casey hadn’t been surprised. During the pre-production of The Secret Marriage, Casey had often heard that Berteo and his father, who both served as naval officers, enjoyed the support of monarchist elements in the Italian military, especially those who found the playboy lifestyle of their cousin, Vittorio Emanuele, the exiled Prince of Naples, unworthy of a king. Berteo, on the other hand, had been allowed to live his whole life in Italy, except for his overseas naval service, of course—he was the military’s kind of guy. It was a detail that had been good to know, in the writer’s room, and there had even been talk of giving Berteo’s family a subplot, as the rival cousins, which hadn’t been in the original treatment and did not make it into the final show. In any case, only a few fanatics cared very much about just which aristocrat would be the new king; everyone else, like Casey, assumed that the generals simply wanted a figurehead to lend a patina of legitimacy to their rule.
But then came the coronation, five days ago, in St. Peter’s Basilica. Pope Benedict the Seventeenth, the new, young and very conservative Pope had crowned Berteo not only as King of Italy, but also as King of Sardinia, King of Cyprus, King of Jerusalem, and King of Armenia. What was the Pope trying to do? He hadn’t simply restored the Italian monarchy, he had bestowed upon Berteo the full list of royal titles claimed by his great-great-grandfather, Vittorio Emanuele II di Savoia, in 1849, when he became the first king of modern, united Italy.
Over the next few days, there was a great deal of angry commentary on social media, mostly in the Arabic language, over the assumption of the Crusades-era title King of Jerusalem. But in Western Europe, and certainly among English-speakers, the list of kingships seemed a rococo detail, and was largely ignored. The attention of the so-called “western world” was fully occupied by something else, something that occurred immediately after the coronation, there on the altar of St Peter's Basilica.
In a move that apparently surprised even the generals of the Triumvirate, the Pope had allowed the newly crowned king to kneel before him and kiss his feet. Then he anointed Berteo as Imperator of the Sacrum Imperium Romanum, and presented him with the globus cruciger, the imperial orb-and-cross. Thus Berteo di Savoia became Berteus Primus, Holy Roman Emperor, filling a post that had been vacant for more than two hundred years, since Napoleon trounced the tattered troops of the old empire at Austerlitz, forcing Franz of Austria to relinquish the title.
Around the world, panels of experts on news channels were forced to abandon their notes and speak extemporaneously on just what, exactly, the Holy Roman Empire was, or had been, or might mean today. Other experts debated the provenance of the orb-and-cross. Was it a replica from the Vatican collection? Or was it the original, a part of the Imperial Regalia guarded so carefully in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna since the end of World War II? Had this globus cruciger, this Reichsapfel, been stolen? Or had someone in the Austrian government, now controlled by an ultra-Catholic party, simply handed it to the Pope? So that the Pope, in turn, could hand it to the Emperor? An Italian emperor? Such questions suddenly seemed of much more than mere academic or antiquarian interest, given the recent withdrawal of the United States from NATO/OTAN, and the impending collapse of the European Union.
While the American cable news networks were still trying to locate medieval historians for call-ins, the Austrian public television network, ORF, announced a major event, the scoop of the year (or at least of this new cycle): a joint interview with Berteus Primus and Benedict the Seventeenth. It would be broadcast at 6:30 p.m., Rome and Vienna time, well after midnight in Shanghai. This was the interview, featuring the new Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope who had anointed him, that Casey and his husband were now watching together in bed.
“Wait a minute,” said Casey. “Did you hear what he said? The Pope?”
“Wha…?” said his husband.
Casey found the remote and pressed a button.
“Oh come on,” mumbled his husband. “It’s live TV…. You’ve got all the... in the world… have someone… look it up… ”
Casey let the broadcast rewind for a few seconds, and then played back what the Pope had said.
“Wow,” said Casey, hitting pause again. “Did you hear that?”
But his husband was fast asleep. Casey ran his fingers through the full head of hair slumped beside him. The young man needed his rest. He was taking seven hours of language classes a day. Three hours of Mandarin, three hours of Wu, and one hour with a private tutor for the Shanghai slang. And the homework. And dealing with me. Casey, a confirmed and unapologetic monoglot, couldn’t even imagine how exhausting it must be. Let him sleep. All those new neuronal mappings needed time to form. What Casey had to say could wait until morning.
It wasn’t all that important, but it was worth noting, worth savoring even: when the Pope was speaking directly to the Emperor, he had said “in the time of your ancestor, the Empress Bertha the Great.” Which meant the Pope had seen The Meek Shall Inherit! Or at least that The Meek Shall Inherit had penetrated the popular imagination so deeply that it could inform the world view of a Nigerian cardinal, now the Pope. In either case, Damien di Savoia Underwood could take credit, because, before The Meek Shall Inherit, nobody, absolutely nobody in this world, would have referred to Bertha of Savoy as Bertha the Great.
Casey adjusted his husband’s pillow to keep him from drooling. It’s good being married, he thought. It hadn’t been difficult to find sex, of course not, especially since he became a network executive, but it had been very difficult to find intimacy. Nina Pagonis had joked—when she was still speaking to Casey—that his most intimate relationship was with a dead boy he had never met. And for almost eighteen years after that trip to Bloomington, that joke had been the truth. Casey and Victor Damiani had been partners.
The two halves of Damien di Savoia Underwood. One of them had a bountiful supply of great story ideas, and the other had the skills and wherewithal to turn those ideas into very successful television. Two unathletic kids from suburban Chicago, Victor from Skokie and Casey from Niles, almost exactly the same age. Up to a point, their lives had been very similar. Two lonely losers in high school, who at just-far-away-enough universities had found their talents blossoming, their worlds expanding, only to find themselves, in the next phase of life, shackled by the unbending rigors of graduate programs. Victor’s graduate school agony had been far worse, of course, and the end results of that torment far more tragic and wondrous, but Casey liked to think that his own grim progress through law school had contributed equally to the partnership: at least one of them needed to become a person who could get things done, and that was certainly never going to be Victor.
Casey looked idly at the still-frozen frame on the TV. He was wondering what had happened to Nina Pagonis. He hadn’t thought of her in years. How old would she be now? She must have been nearly fifty when she hired him, so now.... Oh my god. Seventy. Or past it. Someplace.
He pressed a button and let the interview go forward.
His husband rustled a bit and murmured something in his sleep, as if the voices were talking to him, so Casey muted the sound, and just watched the captions.
The Austrian interviewer was asking about the Emperor’s uncle, Vittorio Emanuele, about the decades-long rift between your uncle and your father over the leadership of the House of Savoy, and about the rumors that Vittorio Emanuele might have begotten a number of bastard sons, pretenders who might still try to claim the throne.
The Emperor wisely sidestepped all questions of succession and paternity, and simply expressed his heartfelt concern for his uncle in his illness. He turned to the camera and asked that all viewers say a Rosary for Vittorio Emanuele and his family. The Pope made a sign of the cross, which the closed captions translated as “[blessing prayer].”
Nice deflection, thought Casey. He’s had media training, this Berteo.
Casey had, of course, followed the news about the “Sons of Santa Teresa”—the various impostors and crazies who each claimed to be a valid heir to the throne, or the “real” Damien di Savoia Underwood, or both. In purely monetary terms, Gong Studios, the Encore!!! Network and Casey himself had far more to lose than anyone in the House of Savoy if the stories turned out to have merit, especially the claims of authorship. But Casey hadn’t suffered through law school for nothing. When the story broke, he had immediately forwarded to Gong Studio’s legal department everything he had: the very thorough research he had done by himself in 2003—up to and including autopsy photos—and the even more exhaustive research he had commissioned in 2009, when the rumblings of Silvio Berlusconi made it imperative to establish, in legal terms, that The Secret Marriage was a work of fiction, nothing more and nothing less.
On the other hand, thought Casey, caressing his husband’s shoulder, from a marketing perspective you usually wanted to dangle the possibility that it might be true. There had even been moments when Casey himself believed Victor’s stories to be true. That was Victor’s great gift: he made you want it to be true as badly as he did. You believed it, no matter how outlandish it might be. When Casey, for example, had first read the three notebooks and two typewritten essays that contained the story of The Secret Marriage, he had spent a full day in a tizzy, wondering how he would deal with the bombshell news that the author of The Meek Shall Inherit (then already in pre-production) was the secret grandson of the last King of Italy.
Then Casey had checked the facts. Victor’s life turned out to be much more boring, if just as melancholy as his stories: yes, Victor was the only child of older parents, an awkward and isolated family, but they were his real parents. His biological parents. His mother had been 43 years old when he was born—Victor Damiani was no miracle, just an outlier. He had been exactly what he seemed to be: a fat kid from Skokie, an immigrant boy with a gift for languages. Addicted to sugar and caffeine. A virgin, who probably would have joined the heterosexual team, if any female had given him a chance. Smart and funny when he had friends, and prone to strange thoughts and stranger work-habits when he spent too much time alone. Strange enough that someone should have intervened.
Casey was forever grateful that no one had.
He looked at the TV, and tried to pay attention. After all, this interview was the reason he was staying up so late. The Emperor was talking soundlessly about strength and discipline, about the importance of the traditional family, and the value, above all, of military service—its ability to cleanse the soul of the sin of individualism. The Pope was nodding enthusiastically at each point. The Emperor’s face was set firm, the yellow captions dancing in English across his bemedalled chest.
It had occurred to Casey, more than once, that of all the young men in the world, with all their various talents, he had picked one with a gift for languages. He smiled at his sleeping husband. He would never say it out loud, but he had thought it before, and he thought it now: You know, in some ways, you are a replacement for Victor Damiani. Except that you’re good-looking. And well-grounded. And here. In my bed. He kissed his husband ever so lightly on the ear, thinking of all the things that married couples do not say, and shouldn’t say. Of what his husband could say, but would never say, about bald middle-aged Casey. One hoped.
His husband was right: at this hour, sleep was the thing to do. Casey slid down under the covers, and snuggled closer. But still he found a position for his head so he could keep watching the TV. The interviewer was asking the Pope about the anniversary of the reconciliation at Canossa. What, if anything, did it mean today? Casey had a hard time keeping his eyes open. The captions were beginning to blur.
Casey’s thoughts drifted, as they often did late at night, to Victor Damiani’s last notebook, the one filled with diagrams, formulae, and page after page in a language no one could translate. Casey had paid linguists, anthropologists and mathematicians (all with strict non-disclosure agreements, of course) to examine it, but no one could decipher anything. A private language? A private geometry? Solipsism, perhaps, but.... Sometimes, Casey allowed himself to imagine that he had discovered the key, that it all made sense now, that the shooting script was whirring through the copy machine, the feature film ready to go into production. Damien di Savoia Underwood’s final work. Our masterpiece.
As he was falling asleep, Casey turned his head and looked out for a moment through the glass walls of their bedroom. He saw the reflection of the TV, the floating faces projected out into the smoggy night. He tried to read the chyron, the backward captions. What were they saying? …IM… PERIAL… that was one word… A NEW… IMPERIAL… AGE…
Then Casey gave up trying to read. Instead he just watched, with a kindly, indulgent pleasure, the figures of the Pope and the Emperor swirling together in the Shanghai smog.
How well they swirl, he thought, as swirling they slipped into his dreams.
Next episode: A Middle-Class Hero
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