north, thunder farther and thinner.
"It is like the mist of I’m Rose."
"How many times have you watched this video in the last month?"
Adriano muttered something the doctor didn't quite understand.
"Come on, Adriano, make an effort and be clear. Don't you have anything to tell me about the video?"
"There's fog… on the video… but I didn't put it there…" Adriano muttered.
"You're repeating yourself, boy."
Adriano replied with an anxious moan. As always, he was impatient with the idea of taking the session.
"Let's watch the film together, shall we?" proposed Salieri.
"I… no… I…"
"Are you always afraid of what's inside?"
Adriano nervously smoothed his pale hands. After a long silence, he painstakingly said, "He knows. He knows that I have seen him. The fog has put him there…"
"Go on” the psychiatrist encouraged him, focused on writing in his notebook.
"I get it. I understand that he's putting down roots…" said the boy, while outside the mist covered the whole course in grey. The tower of the old aqueduct disappeared from the horizon. Adriano stared at the fog as if he were watching an unbearable threat.
"He will rain down on the wicked burning coals. Fire and sulphur and fiery wind will be their portion" he said, reciting a passage from the Bible with anguished reluctance.
Salieri deduced that Adriano had become accustomed to Marxotal, an antipsychotropic that he had been taking for two months, and delirium was the first sign that the drug was ceasing its effect.
"So now read the Old Testament. You quoted Psalm number eleven, if I'm not mistaken. A psalm by David. I know it. I recited it during my bar mitzvah."
As the doctor pondered the drug to be discontinued, Adriano babbled in monosyllables, "I only hear his voice… in here… and I must pray."
Dr. Salieri continued to take notes regardless of Adriano's delirium. Schizophrenics often became obsessed with mysticism or religion in general. And Adriano's case could not even be considered among the most serious. In the past he had treated a hysterical nun who stabbed her palms with the irons she used to embroider.
Fortunately, the hallucinations did not induce the boy to behave dangerously. The only exception was at the onset of the disease, when Adriano wanted to set fire to the cathedral's confessional.
The boy began to walk around the studio, breaking his steps to avoid stepping on certain red lilies drawn on the carpet.
"He puts down roots. I can hear them in my head. The spikes are sinking in here” he said, tapping a finger on the forehead. "And they hurt. They hurt a lot."
"I can prescribe you something for your headache and… not now, Greta!" said annoyed Salieri as he turned to the
attendant who came to the door without knocking. Greta apologized. She took a folder and disappeared into her office.
The session went on for 48 minutes. Adriano's condition had clearly deteriorated in the last month. Roberto Salieri noted in his notebook the suspension of the Marxotal. It was time for a change of treatment. There weren’t significant changes, his patient would have been at risk of being re-installed in a psychiatric clinic.
Adriano, accompanied by Greta, walked out the door without saying goodbye. Salieri lit a cigarette. He pressed the button on his mobile phone to listen to some parts of the conversation.
‘The parasite clung to the inside of my head with its spider's paws, Doctor. A spider that will never weave random webs. He's weaving one with thick, neat weaves. A spider's web that will trap her, too.'
The psychiatrist scratched the back of his head. He couldn't remember that passage.
Above all, his voice didn't sound like Adriano's.
4
A heavy steam hood had set down on the gym locker room. The girls groomed their naked, slender bodies after volleyball time. Lorraine, her nipples numbed by the hot water running down her chest cavity, made a single braid of her thick hair and squeezed it tightly.
Daisy washed off the foam, which slid down her long, tapered legs, revealing her maliciously shaved tongue.
"Wow! The shaving on the precious little hole you gave me wouldn't have expected" Lorena laughed. "I bet you did it for Guido."
"But no. I'm rehearsing the dance for the show. The sweat sticks to the bloody pants and causes me a lot of irritation” Daisy excused herself.
"Cute as an excuse. I'll write it down."
"It's the truth. Guido has nothing to do with it at the moment" Daisy said as she came out of the shower.
"By the way, how did he react when you asked him out? Did he drop dead on the floor?"
Daisy looked at her with a veil of reproach.
"Do I ever ask you about your full-back muscles?"
"No. But you should. Then I'd tell you about his biggest muscle…"
"Lorena, come on. Is he really good between the legs?" Daisy giggled in a fluffy cream-colored bathrobe, which she closed with two laps around her waist.
"Seriously. Have you slept with him yet?"
"No, I haven't. Just kidding. You know we've only just met" Lorena specified, wrapping herself in a large towel that she knotted over her lower back. The girl reached the wardrobe with her breasts swaying, proud of their prosperity. Half the schoolgirls were still underneath the showers wrapped in
clouds of steam, and the girls' bodies were flexuous, shiny with soap and water.
The more vain ones lingered to flaunt the splendour of their physicists. Daisy herself took off her bathrobe with a thread of exhibitionism, bowing forward to take her panties out of her purse, showing off her perfect round back.
While the girls who considered themselves less attractive washed quickly.
Only Filippa Villa walked around naked without any problem. Filippa was a tall, sturdy, completely clumsy girl, with a prominent belly, a wild skein of untrained combed black hair, dark, mobile and restless eyes. Filippa was a young civil rights activist, and Daisy sympathized with liberation struggles of all kinds.
The first barricades against the systems established by others had been erected in early childhood. The first to challenge were the dogmas of her parents.
As a child, they told her many fairy tales about princesses, and this often included the presence of a charming prince. The same one to marry once they grew up. It was the recurring nightmare of little Daisy, and of all the lesbians in the world. And Filippa was openly lesbian.
One day, hiding in the clouds of steam, she tried to kiss Daisy in the shower. Daisy, out of curiosity, accepted the kiss. She didn't find anything particularly scandalous about it, except that a moment later she found herself wearing Filippa's body, who seemed to have gone out of her mind with desire. She brutally put his hand between her thighs to touch her.
Daisy pushed her away. Filippa, panting, her hair clinging to her face, sketched out an excuse, and from that moment on stopped bothering her.
Daisy was helping Lorena to fasten her bra when Filippa said something, and then one of the girls started screaming.
The high school girl, a small, chubby blonde girl, was running naked with a cloud of foam stuck to her, shouting at all her mates to get dressed. Other girls started screaming, and they all ran out of the showers. One of them slipped on the wet floor and fell to the floor.
"Barbara, what's going on?" Daisy asked the girl, a shy, skinny teenager, bordering on hyanoresis.
Barbara replied that she had run away because she was frightened of the screams. Daisy realised that most of her friends didn't know what was really going on, but they all screamed anyway, influenced by the reactions of the more exaggerated.
Filippa