Gianni Read online

  Nella looked up at me. Her face was bleak.

  “OD?” I said.

  She nodded. She had the snout of an ultrahypo against Gianni’s limp arm and she was giving him some kind of shot to try to bring him around. But even in A.D. 2008, dead is dead is dead.

  It was Melissa who said afterward through tears, “It was his karma to die young, don’t you see? If he couldn’t die in 1736, he was going to die fast here. He had no choice.”

  And I thought of the biography that had said of him long ago, “His ill health was probably due to his notorious profligacy.” And I heard Sam Hoaglund’s voice in my mind saying, “Nobody steps out of character forever. The real Pergolesi will take control.” Yes. Gianni had always been on a collision course with death, I saw now; by scooping him from his own era we had only delayed things a few months. Self-destructive is as self-destructive does, and a change of scenery doesn’t alter the case.

  If that is so—if, as Melissa says, karma governs all—should we bother to try again? Do we reach into yesterday’s yesterday for some other young genius dead too soon, Poe or Rimbaud or Caravaggio or Keats, and give him the second chance we had hoped to give Gianni? And watch him recapitulate his destiny, going down a second time? Mozart, as Sam had once suggested? Benvenuto Cellini? Our net is wide and deep. All of the past is ours. But if we bring back another, and he willfully and heedlessly sends himself down the same old karmic chute, what have we gained, what have we achieved, what have we done to ourselves and to him? I think of Gianni, looking to be rich and famous at last, lying purpled on that floor. Would Shelley drown again? Would Van Gogh cut off the other ear before our eyes?

  Perhaps someone more mature would be safer, eh? El Greco, Cervantes, Shakespeare? But then we might behold Shakespeare signing up in Hollywood, El Greco operating out of some trendy gallery, Cervantes sitting down with his agent to figure tax shelter angles. Yes? No. I look at the scoop. The scoop looks at me. It is very very late to consider these matters, my friends. Years of our lives consumed, billions of dollars spent, the seals of time ripped open, a young genius’s strange odyssey ending on the floor backstage at The Quonch, and for what, for what, for what? We can’t simply abandon the project now, can we?

  Can we?

  I look at the scoop. The scoop looks at me.

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