In the afternoon she climbed the ropy olive by the road and waited for the soldiers to arrive. If the tree went up in a pyre of righteous flames, sent on the exhale of a flamboyant god, she would be proud. But no one was paying attention to her. A child’s soul was trifling next to a massacre of male philosophers.
A messenger on a black horse approached, kicking up the dirt that had settled on the stone road, and a hawk burst from the tree like a feather duster knocked out of a window. The collection of hard green olives in her hand made for first-rate ammunition, but the rider didn’t even glance up, batting away the pellets as if he was used to a rain of fruit. He would be a compatriot, come to warn the worrying men of the next move. They would dive underground like moles. They would bury themselves in the catacombs.
She waited in the tree to see what kind of gap the rider had opened up between himself and the thundering bailiffs. Silence on the road. Around her just the hum of bees drinking heat. The clouds were puffing themselves up, but no matter how roiling they got, they couldn’t turn dark; dry, embarrassed, they broke and scooted away. Prisca chewed on the left corner of her bottom lip, sucking it in and out between her teeth.
The figure when she spotted him was still small on the road. Horseless, skinny. His dark hair making him look like a stick dipped quick in charcoal. Some tug in her heart set up a hope. When he was close enough, she bellowed, “Crispus!”—not unlike someone drowning.
“Are you catching dinner up there?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“They won’t be ripe till November.”
“No one knows what to do—grown men,” she said. Crispus, being also still adolescent and brave, would hear the uselessness in grown men.
“It’s got nothing to do with you, Prisca,” he said.
His neck was cricked to the left. She wanted to climb down so he wouldn’t have to crane, but climbing down would break the spell. It didn’t bother her that he would always be on the other side of a line. They were bound with sturdiest rope to each other: this she knew in absolute terms.
“But I’m a Christian,” she whispered.
“You’re a girl,” he said. “Get down.” His nose had a bump in it from when Servius had broken it with a discus, almost a decade ago; they’d been aiming at old wine bottles. If ever there was a catastrophe, flood or fire or this famine, and Prisca lost her eyesight and had to crawl through the piles of dead to ensure her loved ones would be properly interred, she knew she’d know Crispus by touch. That long forehead plateau. The dips beneath the cheekbones like the shady side of dunes. The rumbly bump of the nose, which she might one day touch with not only her fingers but her own nose, as noses accidentally do when other things are happening between faces.
He threw a pinecone into the branches.
“You never understand anything,” she said, beginning her tentative crawl down. It was hard to keep the folds of her robe in their proper place. “You’re a barbarian.”
He reached out a hand as she teetered on the last branch, but she pointedly drew her hands into her chest as she jumped.
“My father said there’d be no arrests tonight. He knows someone.” Crispus headed for the house. “Nothing to do but eat and get rest. Don’t be worried; they won’t come for you.”
“Then they’re fools,” she said.
The house had the new taste of a hideout; she looked now at the shadows of corners as holding places for bodies. The men were in the library. Dinner was dull—no one but women and children, who snickered from unease. Everyone got quiet when a gray cloud passed, but it held its belly and coasted on.
Servius had a stomachache from eating too much pigeon—the few remaining goats were being saved for Ceres—so when Crispus asked if he wanted to go throw stones in the pond, he told him to take Prisca instead and throw them at her. When they waded through the unmown grass, hip-high and buzzing, she was still two strides behind.
“Could someone hide underwater and breathe through a reed?” she asked. Some ducks had left a white ramp of poop leading down to the water. The pond was half its spring size; she wondered if she could touch bottom now. Crispus was standing on the far side beneath the willow, one foot removed from his sandal to test the dirt before he sat.
“You’d have to keep your legs from floating up,” he said.
“They’d have no reason to look for someone out here. I think the worst would be the fish, and then getting cold, but after the sun goes down, you could crawl right out and dry off. I even have a hook to catch things with while I wait.”
“Not much in the way of fish.”
She wanted to circle the pond to his side, but was feigning disinterest. “Aren’t you supposed to throw rocks?”
“Here, tell me one of your stories. I want to know what makes them so good.”
“From the Christians?”
“One that makes sense to you.”
She put her hands on her hips. The sun was leaving them to their privacy. Her father had said it wasn’t about sense. It wasn’t about the rain. The drought was temporal; this god asked her goodness to be unhooked from time and space. So she shouldn’t cross to his side. She shouldn’t sit beside him and tell him stories because this would be a lie, the only thing she really wanted being not his converted heart but his hand on hers. Funny boy skin.
“Do you know about the giants?” she asked.
“The ones at the beginning of time?”
She kicked the grass on her way around the pond, to signal boredom, and flushed a frog, whose note of guttural surprise made her smile against her will. “The angels fell down to earth and saw how pretty the humans were, so they married them and had babies, but the babies grew to be four hundred and fifty feet tall and rampaged around the earth killing people and birds.” She dropped her voice. “And the angels taught the humans to have sex all the time.”
“So where’d they go?”
“God flooded them out, the Nephilim, but he kept some to be forever demons on earth in order to tempt us. That way it’s not so easy to be right and do good all the time.”
“And someone saw all this and wrote it in a book.” He was lying down now and looked like just the kind of figure a flood would pursue.
“Enoch,” she said, and sat next to him. She pulled her knees primly to her chest. “He lived a thousand years ago and predicted the Messiah and the day when we’d all be judged for our sins.”
“A single day? When? And what counts as a sin? And what makes that Jesus fellow a messiah? What about the emperor, who’s brought peace to everyone? And did Enoch write all this down on a rock somewhere, and no one believed him till now?”
“The Jews did.”
“And are you a Jew?”
“But listen,” she said. Her body twisted toward his. “‘Destroy all the souls addicted to dalliance,’ he said.”
“What’s dalliance?”
“You know,” she said, turning back to the pond, which was steely purple now. “Fooling around. What men and women do.”
His laugh was high and short; if the frog she’d flushed from the reeds had been a very young one, it might’ve made the same sound. “So in this religion, kisses are strictly out.”
She hadn’t verified this, but she understood the general principle, which was that if it was something you wanted very badly, it was best to do without.
“You want food and drink, don’t you? Is it a good thing if we starve?”
“It’s about temperance,” she said. His foot had begun tapping playfully against her hip. She pulled her knees in tighter.
“So one kiss would be all right.”
This got at an itchy confusion of hers: what of the world was good because it was created by God, and what of the world was bad because it was a tricky illusion meant to pull you off the path to heaven. Her heart was inflamed, and she felt all the sick chills of love, but not for Crispus, not for Crispus.
Her eyes were still shut tight when he dove into the pond; she gasped at the wate
r hitting her face.
“You want to try out the reeds?” he asked. His wet hair turned darker, his pimpled face now dewy and pure. The water made his eyelashes look like great palm fronds, slowly fanning his eyeballs, which were not brown or green but more properly animal-colored, tawny, the feathers closest to a partridge’s breast, after everything else had been plucked away. He slipped under, and after an unnerving pause, he rose again in a geyser, hurling water toward the bank, issuing a whoop of joy that must have echoed all the way to the room where the men were wringing their hands. She relented. Shucked her sandals and slid ungracefully into the pond, her robes floating around her like she was an unwanted cat in a sack.
He pushed a scoop of water at her, hesitant.
“There and back?” she said. Her toes could finally touch the muck below, gritty with years of old leaves losing the starch between their veins, and then their veins, and for all that she’d dreamed of a twilight like this, just the two of them, she earnestly wished her brother would appear with his oafish gait on the horizon.
He dolphined under again and readied himself at the shore beneath the willow. His arms stretched out before him, his knees were bent below the water, cramped like a rabbit’s before flight. “I’ll go easy,” he said. “Three, two.”
But he was off too soon, so she had to scramble around, losing her belt in the whorl of water, her skinny legs too slow to catch him. When she met him at the far side of the pond, his face was all gloat and mischief. Panting, he ducked down again and she felt his arms around her middle, fumbling at her kicking legs, trying to fold her into a ball. He is wrestling, she thought. This is what boys do. But when he had her pleated in his arms, he rose up out of the water and with an exultant holler catapulted her into the air, tossing the small girl shape as far as his boy arms could manage—only three feet, where she collapsed into the pond and sank farther than any dive of her own had taken her. Her bottom nestled into the muck, and everything was briefly slow and soft, and she imagined staying down there and never coming up, because whatever was waiting on the surface would never be as good as the moments that had already happened.
She opened her eyes, wondering how long it would be before he worried, and felt a claw around her ankle—a sunken branch or vine scumming up from the deep. She scrabbled at it, kicked her foot, felt her lungs go crispy. In the wet brown gloom, a thin shape floated by, undisturbed, languorous. If only she could’ve opened her mouth to scream and gotten air. It was the eel. It was the eel she’d caught with her father’s hook and brained with a rock until its eye went dull. Her mother was right: the universe was governed by a thousand spirits, and there was no scheme beyond the elements of the natural world vying for balance, and a fish whose spirit was wronged would appear again—love and salvation had nothing to do with it, no one man or god could possibly have his fingers around every part—and that fish would have its revenge.
An arm was around her middle again and wrenched her up in the empty air of dusk, and she breathed like the eel once breathed, in a desperate hunt for life, and Crispus was shaking her shoulders and pushing the hair out of her face and he was golden, those eyes like the tips of a dog’s ears. She put her arms around his neck, her feet still kicking at the weeds, windmilling around whatever fish ghosts were lingering, and he let her pull him close, and this, this, was the purest minute of her life.
“You’re all right,” he said.
Without her belt, her whole body was just loose limbs in a cloud of fabric.
“Here,” he said, and pulled his head back so he could look at her face. He put a thumb on her cheek, but there was no strand of hair there to smooth away. Is this the kind of moment that comes before a kiss? [A kiss is preceded by all moments. There is no just before.] Is this how hearts go, this battered thumping, foxes caught in a cage? Jesus, Jesus, you didn’t speak of this.
“There was an eel,” she said, terrified of the fronds of his lashes.
“They only live in rivers,” he said. “Probably just a worm.”
“A worm,” she said, and she believed him, every word he said true, and as she was trying to decide if nature was imbued with good and evil, and whether God was singular and existed in the mind and thus was haunting her with an apparition to punish her for impure thoughts, or whether God was a man in triplicate, including one named Jesus who understood above all else human frailty and had long ago forgiven her fear and desire and doubt, while she was puzzling this, Crispus put his nose on her nose so that his eyes became a single hazel light, and before she could make up her mind to resist, she felt his lips touch hers, pond-water wet, and it was a pink taste, and small, and something in her was held, like an egg in a cup. Three seconds, and when he took his mouth away, he took the water with him.
On the walk back, they traded looks, as if they were trying to read the scattered bones, but people can’t be read that way.
“Prisca,” he said, and squeezed the water from his hair. “You shouldn’t worry. You’re just a girl.”
And this, though meant to ground her, reassure her, relit her flame. She had wrong feelings, yes, and wanted things that were almost surely sinful, and had never been more content than when the Lord was pushed out by a single touch, by sweet foreign skin, but for all her errors, just a girl was precisely what she was not.
The Wilderness
[ 2015 ]
“Tell me more about this boy.”
“He smells like socks. What boy?” Daphne was just home from school, a carrot dangling from her lips like a cigarette.
Close to midnight in Rome; the quiet of the street was jolted by a moped struggling to crest the hill. Tom had gotten a reminder from his department that the deadline for posting spring courses was Friday. By Friday, he needed to decide if he could survive a return to America, where his wife would be stacking ominous-looking paperwork on his desk and then removing it again—no, she wasn’t crying—and then sliding it back on his desk. Surviving sounded so histrionic until it became simply the term for not dying.
He’d drafted a response to Richard, the chair: “Labs going well. Will finish first pass of article by Christmas; aim for Int’l Review of Hydrobiology. Should have some impact on discussions of human effect on climate. Can I do Intro and Senior Seminar, dependent on health? ‘Health,’ related to Norse helge, or ‘holy.’ Could be incapacitated. The ‘cap’ root there being capax, to hold, rather than caput, the head. I am not losing my head.” The proviso gave him space to extend his stay through the spring, through the summer, through—
His daughter knotted her hair into a brambly pouf just above her forehead: her unicorn look. “Are you feeling okay? Does it hurt at all?”
“Try pinching your elbow, hard.”
She did.
“That’s how much it hurts. Now the boy who smells like socks,” Tom said. “Do you think he notices how you smell?”
She pondered this, crunched her carrot. Put her hand on her hip. “Well, Doc, I doubt he does. And that’s A-okay, peachy.”
“I’m sure he—”
“Anyway, so what if he liked me too? That’d be the end of the story, right?”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I mean, yes, in your case—though you could, I don’t know, get ice cream or something and talk about the comics you like. But no, pining for someone isn’t nearly as fun as everything that happens after.” He felt the lie as he spoke it; everything that came after was a web, and sometimes it was sublime and sometimes you got caught.
“After what?”
“After you say what it is you want. Not that it always works out, but you have to get beyond the stage of just staring at the ostracods, as it were.”
“Like, ‘Hi Buttface, I think about you a lot; let’s go read comics.’”
“Well—”
“Dad, you don’t understand.” She released her unicorn pouf. “Boys are the only ones who get to say what they want.”
He didn’t return to the lab, didn’t take the 118 bus to the valley where his o
stracods lay waiting for him in their watery cosmos, but met her at the Villa Pamphili among the pines, which in full sun could be mistaken for columns of ancient pink-veined marble. They sat on a bench opposite the palace and watched joggers in candy-colored shorts circle the gravel paths. A child chased herself in the lawn. A crow called to them from the nearby head of a satyr—they were too near something precious.
“It’s the lunch hour,” she said. “They’ll be gone soon.”
The crow gave up, flapped bitterly away. The child lay down like a starfish. A jogger went tumbling into the gravel, and the jogger behind her sidestepped—cautious, pony-like—but the fallen one waved a hand, Pretend you didn’t see this. No one would have to save anyone else today.
“Do you think there’s an essence all this can be stripped back to?” He was still rolling the ball of his new theory around the empty rooms of his head. “A park, for instance, removed of villa and nonnative species and jogging paths, returned to an unaffected state?”
“Unaffected by what? By change?”
“By humans, say.”
“Humans are change. Once you take humans away, you’ve got to remove mammals, and then vertebrates, and then whatever’s not, like, a colossal Jurassic fern, and then you’re back to stardust.”
He nodded; the ball was picking up speed. “So the study of adaptation, say—”
“Take history—everyone gets their panties in a bunch when they stumble on a new ruin; oh look, Nero’s pleasure palace! And we walk on tiptoes till it’s preserved. But if ancient architecture’s so special, why don’t we tear down all the Renaissance palazzi? Anyway, you know who saved most of this stuff? Mussolini. So maybe preservation is conservatism is Fascism.”
“Sure—”
“People are nuts for excavations, but when do you stop digging? Below the Forum there’s probably Stone Age megaliths—why don’t we trash the Forum? Because the layers themselves aren’t as interesting as the fact that there are layers.”
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