SALVE ROMA! A Felidae Novel - By Akif Pirincci Page 0,6
happily back and forth swinging motions of his neck already showed me that for the driver the dreary monotony was long-forgotten, and so was my humble self. Which even confirmed my resolution! Along the way I thought of the Guesthouse chick’s stupid face when after a long search she still wouldn’t be able to find me in her »establishment« and would begin to sweat over a good answer she would give her customer about his pet’s disappearance about a month from now.
We arrived at the airport, parked at a collective garage and took the escalator to the terminal upstairs. Although I had never entered an airport before I wasn’t really stunned by the giant complex. The school of the public, TV, apparently had robbed me of one of the last tangible adventures. Nonetheless, the mass of humans in front of the check-in desks offered a couple of quite interesting sights. During my longterm togetherness with Gustav I had lost track of his fellow humans’ lifestyles, especially as he wasn’t true to type at all. Now I saw with horror that all of these vacation-hungry, scantily dressed people were tattooed. Incredible, this tacky desecration of the body, which had once been a custom along sailors and prisoners, meanwhile had mutated into an ideal of beauty! In my mind’s eye I traveled through time about thirty or forty years to a nursing home in which old people suffering from Parkinson’s and incontinence kept triggering spontaneous laughter from their nurses due to their withered body paintings on their wrinkled rolls of fat. The employees at the morgues would also have a ball.
What also stood out was the raging baldness-craze around men, even with guys who weren’t naturally bald at all. Because all of them had their noggins shaved, which didn’t just make them mistakable but in this frequency looked like a still life of deodorant sticks. Had our good old Bruce Willis sensed what he was about to trigger when at that time he made a virtue out of necessity and decided to chop those last three halms on his head, he probably would rather have stapled a mop to his scalp!
Gustav waddled towards the counter and received his booked ticket. He checked in and joined the line in front of the security check. Then suddenly things started to get turbulent. Before he walked through the metal detector, he dragged the backpack on the conveyor that transports baggage towards the X-Ray scanner. By the way, he did that in such a rude manner, I was forced to do a couple of full turns inside. I have to admit that my great plan didn’t go any further than up to this point. I had been so greedy of the expectation to see my dream city for once in my life, I had totally forgotten about the inevitable challenges that lay on the way there. Now what the situation needed was some talent for spontaneity, because as the backpack was moving towards the scanner, above me I could already see the security guy’s face in front of his monitor. His keen eyes, which were trained on the fast recognition of Kalashnikovs and maybe even foldable atom bombs, must have started to brim at this moment. Because inside the backpack he saw something he had probably never caught a glimpse of before: the (moving) skeleton of an animal, surrounded by a colorful beaming silhouette of sharp claws, pointed ears – and eyes that stared right back at him!
Instantly I heard the alarm go off with a howling noise. The security guy had recovered from his shock and had pushed the panic button. Now I needed to act fast. But how? And in which direction? Nimbly I sprang out of the backpack and onto the conveyor. I didn’t mind the omnipresent darkness, as despite my progressing age I still boasted my eyes, which also featured X-Ray. In front of me hung the fringed rubber curtain that guaranteed optimal dim-out for the scanning. I stuck my head out and noticed a big unlocked leather bag right in front of my nose that was placed ahead of the backpack. If I hid inside, would its owner notice my few pounds when he got it back? Whatever, I didn’t have time for any more finicking speculation.
As quick as a flash I scurried inside the bag. Just in time, because just after I had hid inside, the bag was picked up off the conveyor and carried away without hesitation. I could