Plague in the Mirror

by Deborah Noyes

  Then the band moves on to some mournful fiddle tune, and Liam leads her back to the table, looking around as if he’s just realized where they are. “Look,” he says in way too serious a voice, “I’m sure there’s some natural phenomenon science hasn’t hit on yet that under the right conditions can produce a brief doorway to another time and place. I believe that. I mean, I’m about to major in physics. But the third possibility I mentioned was, well, psychological.”

  She’s about to object when he places two warm fingers to her lips. “Couldn’t you just be having some kind of . . . unusual reaction to what’s going on at home? To having to make a tough decision and let one of your parents down?”

  “Like they haven’t let me down —”

  “I talked to Gwen and —”

  “You told Gwen?”

  “Just a quick sketch. I’m worried about you, and I can’t —”

  “You’re helping, Li. You’re doing your research thing.”

  Help me, May thinks, afraid to admit she’s afraid. Please.

  He turns his beer glass in his hand, smearing condensation.

  “OK, so say I’m nuts. But think about it: those two English ladies were principals or teachers or whatever. They knew about Marie Antoinette. They knew what Paris looked like back in the day. They knew what the clothes and furniture looked like. I hardly knew when the Renaissance happened before I came here.”

  “But you know a lot now. You’ve been reading and sightseeing like a maniac. . . .” His voice trails off, for just a second.

  “Look. I’m not having some kind of breakdown, if that’s what you mean. How could I make all this up or hallucinate in detail what I don’t know?”

  He stares at her patiently. “You’ve got an imagination, don’t you?”

  May shrugs.

  “So maybe the history here has wormed into the back of your head and now you’re hallucinating all this because . . .”

  “I’m mental?”

  “Because you’re stressed.”

  “People who live in Kabul get to be stressed. Starving people in Africa, Kentucky coal miners . . . not some kid from Vermont whose parents are getting divorced while she kills time with her friends in Italy. You’ve heard the statistics . . . one out of two marriages.”

  “I know, May. But it’s your parents, your life, and that has gravity. For you. We all deal differently with shit, and they’re asking you to choose.”

  “Well said, Dr. Freud.”

  “We do.”

  “So you think I need a shrink?”

  “Well, from what I’m getting online, shrinks are as nuts as anyone. Killing time ain’t the half of it. Carl Jung was a shrink, but I read this morning that when he was traveling around Italy in the 1930s, he visited the tomb of some Roman empress in Ravenna. He saw these nice mosaics, all sea and marine scenes, and stood around goggling and talking with his friend about it for like a half hour. When he left the mausoleum, he even tried to purchase postcards of them, but there weren’t any. So later, Jung asks a friend who’s heading to Ravenna if he’ll take a couple pictures for him. When he sees the photos, he gets why no one knew what he was talking about. The mosaics he saw were totally different from the ones there now. They were there, like, seven hundred years earlier, and got destroyed in a fire.

  “Jung figured his consciousness had somehow traveled back in time to when the mausoleum had been first constructed, fourteen hundred years prior to his visit to Ravenna. Maybe consciousness gets past the laws of physics somehow. Or maybe you’re imagining some serious shit here. . . . You’ve always done that. I mean, I remember when we were little kids, you’d never just sit and play trucks like any normal kid. You always had to invent these worlds and assign everyone names and make costumes. It was freaking exhausting.”

  Who is he talking about? “I did?”

  “You did. You don’t remember? Everyone thought you’d grow up to be a director or a general or something, moving all those little flags and troops around on some stage —”

  “Well, what about you, with all this sci-fi shit? You’ve always —”

  “Nah. When you come down to it, I have no imagination, I just like it when big lizards fight with big gorillas or whole civilizations are wiped out in some mean fashion by spaceships. It’s all about the fight.”

  “That is such bullshit.”

  “I know. Go up and get me another beer, will you? Your turn.”

  “So you’re saying I invented all this, like a story.”

  “Maybe?” He looks sheepish, adding, “But not on purpose,” as if that made it OK. “Beer,” he pleads, pointing at his glass.

  “But what if it’s not me? What if I’m not driving this thing but she is?” May looks up, trying to read his face. “What if Cristofana’s the one stuck . . . in the middle of the plague and really believes we can trade places? That if I stay, she can leave. She can come here.”

  “I’m not drunk enough yet to take that in.” He looks away almost sadly, drumming his fingers on the table to the music.

  She takes the hint, going off in search of more beer.

  “I think you may be right,” Li continues absently when she returns. “You’re losing it.” He watches her set down the glasses, his smile pained and mocking. “Which sucks because I can’t take advantage of you if you’re twitchy in the head. That wouldn’t be moral.”

  “But you heard what Gwen said,” May insists, sitting down across from him. “Magic was real to people back then. What if magic is just another word for trading this many atoms for that on the time-space continuum?”

  “And Evil You, back in the day, figured all this out by her lonesome without any help from Stephen Hawking? I mean, just because they believed in something doesn’t make it true.”

  May looks away, aware of how all this sounds. “Hey, she’s mean but she’s not stupid; she’s some kind of witch, I think, or sorceress.”

  “So this witch from the Middle Ages rifles through all the stills in the universe between now and then and figures out how to get back and forth . . . or get you back and forth?”

  “Both,” May cuts in, and the beer probably is going to her head because why would she tell him all this when he clearly doesn’t — can’t — believe her?

  “Right. Both.” He drains his glass, shaking his head. “But if she manages to get here herself, what’s she need you for? Why take your place?”

  “Because only one of us can be fully present at one . . . in one . . . time. Whoever’s visiting turns up a ghost. Useless.”

  Liam doesn’t say anything. They’re both quiet for a minute, maybe because the band has just filed offstage for a break, leaving a hollow in the air.

  Li wants to believe her. She sees that. He just can’t.

  “So if suddenly you show up and start kissing me with a whole lot more enthusiasm,” he says low, leaning across the table, “I guess I should worry that Evil You has succeeded in her mission?”

  When she doesn’t answer, Liam wipes beer from his mouth, looking suddenly drawn around the eyes, tired, and she reaches out impulsively and strokes one wolfy eyebrow. Everything that is yours.

  “Absolutely,” she says, and he closes his eyes. “You should.”

  But her fingers keep moving over his brow until he leans farther over the table, all rakish, opening one blue eye.

  Slowly, she draws her hand back. “But on the other hand, that might be me.”

  See for yourself, traveler.

  It’s a cruel temptation, this great, invisible hole in her bedroom wall, this silent, beckoning thing with the power to ease May’s mind.

  Maybe he’s dead.

  Maybe they both are.

  One morning, May wakes up and can’t stand it. She needs to be there, see what’s going on. . . .

  No sooner does she emerge in the alley and bolt for the workshop than May spots Cristofana exiting in a sagging embroidered gown the color of peacock feathers. Whoever owned the dress before — a corpse now, no dou
bt — was taller and heftier than its current owner, who carries the train in her fists as she glides away.

  May barely has time to peer between the shutters and drink in the sight of him, alive and well at his easel, before hurrying after her double through winding streets, across the now-familiar bridge, through abandoned fields and August-parched groves, back over the hill to the convent.

  This time Cristofana marches right up to the arched wooden door and seizes the knocker, a lion’s jaw, rapping it against the iron base. Again, she slips the ruby ring from her finger and drops it into her basket. She looks determined, too determined, which makes her seem vulnerable, and May almost feels sorry for her.

  A stooped, small woman, not a nun — or at least not in a nun’s garb — admits Cristofana, and the huge wooden door clunks closed behind them.

  Left on her own, May takes in the terrible hush about the place. The convent wasn’t exactly hopping the last time she was here, but there’s something different about this silence, dire. She wavers a minute, thinking like flesh and bone, before it occurs to her that she’s in ghost form and can pass through the wall, which she does, wishing immediately that she hadn’t.

  The long room she ends up in, exposed in shadows (though if a ghost is going to look at home anywhere, it’s here), is a house of horrors. Here and there a candle or spitting torch cuts the gloom. The shadows are deep but can’t conceal the crazy quilt of women and children, nuns and orphans, turning and tossing on piled straw, row after jagged row of makeshift cots. May floats quickly into a partially open wardrobe, careful not to jut through the wood as she watches through the crack. A sick antiseptic smell fills the room, boiled herbs and vomit, and the thick stone walls look as if they’re sweating, though it’s chill inside, deathly chill for the middle of an Italian summer. The sound of too many people groaning and trying not to be heard makes for a muffled roar.

  May cringes a little as Sister Arcangela, making rounds, crosses very close, kneeling by a child with a sleeping baby in its arms. Cristofana follows behind, looking wary and tired, and May ducks back farther into the damp gloom of the wardrobe.

  The orphans in the nuns’ care have been dying, Marietta reports under her breath, one by one, infecting the sisters in the meantime. “Come sit by me,” she urges, her eyes hollow in the candlelight. Cristofana steps nearer but stiffens when her sister adds, “Better yet, kneel, sister, bend to His will. There is peace in it.”

  Kneeling seems almost as hard for Cristofana as being in this room in the first place, which shouldn’t surprise May but still does.

  “He is one of the youngest,” her sister explains. “Just a month old. Left on our doorstep as most of them are. See here?” She gestures with her chin, lifting the edge of the infant’s blanket, letting it fall. “The sickness shows first in the groin or armpits. The tumors, gavoccioli, are the size of eggs, oranges sometimes. Here, take the cloth. Cool them.”

  At that Cristofana draws the line, moving away from the damp scrap of linen as if it might bite her. “I came only to say good-bye —”

  “You already said good-bye,” Marietta reminds her curtly. She strokes the older child’s forehead with the wadded cloth. “Do you know that Benedetta carried her infant brother all the way here from a village near Scandicci? He died before they arrived, and the only way we could console her was to give her this one instead. She doesn’t seem to know the difference. This child —” she begins, her voice filling with warmth.

  “Is not my child. I did not come here to forsake my life but to ask your forgiveness for saving it.”

  “It is not my forgiveness you require, sister.”

  “Whose, then? Let me guess.”

  The nun continues stroking her patient’s damp forehead with the cloth, her voice grave. “They are lost or failing, the other sisters, and apart from loyal Maria, Mother Abbess’s niece, I care for these alone.” The girl, Benedetta — May wouldn’t have been able to tell its gender on her own; the child’s hair is cropped and her face wasted and pale — seems to spasm then, rolling on her side, coughing blood with a wet splat over the baby onto the nun’s veil. As Sister Arcangela eases the bundle from her arms, Cristofana winces and backs away on her knees, out of reach, out of the candle’s glow, partly obscuring herself in shadow. She stands up, and she might be trembling — May can’t tell at this angle — but she’s definitely agitated, rocking slightly, wild-eyed, a caged animal compared to her stoical sister.

  The nun sets the sleeping infant aside on a blanket, ignoring the mark on her veil. She wipes a red string of saliva from Benedetta’s mouth, stroking the narrow, veined wrist with her fingers until the girl is soothed to sleep. Then she rises and moves to another patient nearby, with Cristofana standing back, her reluctant shadow. “As the buboes spread,” she resumes like a lecturer, pointing out sections of a dying child’s body with her voice low and mechanical, “the malady changes. Black or livid spots blaze on the arms and thighs, now few and large, now small and numerous. It was hard at first, to feel anything but revulsion, for this disease degrades as well as kills. It turns the breath foul and the urine to blood-black sludge. There is another chain of sickness, too, which you saw, marked by the coughing of blood. With the tumors, you die in five days or six — though some few survive and recover. Those who spit blood never do.” She glances back at Benedetta. “These die in a day or two, three at most. The majority here will not be alive by the Sabbath. Even those who yet show no signs.”

  May follows the line of the sister’s raised arm. Across the room, on a large straw pallet, the ones who must still be healthy curl together, twitching in their sleep, their bare ankles bony and pale.

  “As I wash their small bodies for burial, shocked every time by the black blotches, the fierce swellings, I wonder who washed Babbo’s body aboard ship. Was it Ludovico who folded him into whatever passed for a clean sheet? Did he do as I do here, tracing black crosses on tiny shrouds with a cooled stick from the embers?

  “Even the littlest sins can stain the soul, and through no fault of their own, Babbo and all these multitudes are denied the ministrations of a priest. There are no holy men left to bless them, just as in the end there were none aboard ship to bless our father.

  “I see it in my sleep, Sire dragged away in chains, his soul snatched by grinning demons. I hear him . . . the wailing as he’s hurled into the inextinguishable fires of Hell —”

  Cristofana lets out her own wail of aggravation. “I beg you, sister. What God is this?”

  “If our father knew how your faith has waned —”

  “Bless him, but you speak continually of Babbo and never once ask after Mamma or what became of us in his absence and yours. You live so near Firenze and heard nothing of our misery?”

  Marietta seems taken aback. Startled. “My vows preclude the world without.”

  Cristofana waves. “The world without has found its way in.”

  “My eyes have been rinsed in the blood of the lamb and see only His love.”

  Shaking with frustration or rage, Cristofana blurts out, “Mamma is dead. She lay in a pool of her blood for hours before anyone came.”

  Sister Arcangela looks up with the eyes of someone who can no longer be surprised. Crossing herself, she murmurs, “And you?”

  “Left for dead . . . rescued by our neighbor, the midwife — you remember; ‘the witch Callista’ we called her when we were small. She raised me as her own, and I am like her now. Your God disgusts me.”

  With blank eyes, Sister Arcangela begins chanting what May thinks is the Hail Mary. Her blank voice, rising in strength and pitch, only seems to infuriate Cristofana, who sinks to her knees and starts rocking forward and back. “The Virgin is deaf and dumb! The Holy Mother is deaf and dumb and the Holy Father, too. They are nowhere.” She tips forward, knocking her forehead hard against stone, making May wince. “Nowhere,” she repeats weakly, her tangle of hair fanned around her. “And we are nothing.”

  May is momentarily tempted to go
to her in her sister’s stead and calm her — some of the figures on the floor have turned their hollow eyes toward Cristofana’s voice — but like Sister Arcangela, May can only watch Cristofana cry herself quiet.

  In a moment, she rises unsteadily, adjusting her peacock gown (more modest than the plum one, though still outlandish in this place). The nun won’t look at her but stops chanting, poised in the moment, waiting for her sister’s next move.

  Cristofana backs away slowly. “You have always saved the best of yourself for strangers,” she says. Though her head is bowed, the words ring distinctly, and she sidesteps the zigzag of straw cots, disappearing into the dark of the corridor.

  Sister Arcangela smooths her veil, steps over the recent corpse of a child to kneel by one who’s living, and begins a silent prayer.

  Home again and safe, May spends the next morning, Sunday, skulking by the Arno as the bells of Florence peal.

  She follows the river farther than she has before, leaving the city limits, it seems, leaving everything. If Li’s timeslip theory from the bar makes any sense (and it doesn’t, really), she’s supposed to find the past eerie and depressing, not the present, but May can’t escape what she witnessed at the convent. Not even here.

  A hazy sun is cresting the rise, and May lets the morning fog have her, a damp embrace. Calm one minute and panicked the next, she steps farther in, snared in the strangeness of her own mood. The entire riverbank is obscured, and she with it. Who will find her ever again? She’ll vanish off the face of the earth, like those numberless plague dead Cristofana is always talking about. The dead and dying May has now seen with her own eyes.

  “Look, bella,” comes that level voice, floating out from the fog, reeling May in, and at first she doesn’t trust that what she’s hearing is real. “Come look what I’ve found.”

  Ghost Cristofana steps from the yellow tendrils of fog with a ghost baby in her arms, a large one swaddled in a too-small blanket. “I found her alone in all the world. She has not words, but she loves my voice. Listen.”