Angels' Dares (Volume 2, Part 4)

I know not the result of the circumstances of this world. What I speak of here, in this realm, is of having found my brother. And when later in this tale I speak of your body, know first that I love you as this—the one who knows; who has questioned and wandered; been lost, naked, and drowning.

For the one who looked to me and saw his familiar, who recognized in me something small and shiny in a place far deeper than anyone has ever thought to look—my first concern is to protect and nurture your bruised and beaten heart. Never do I desire lead you to a place where you’d love yourself the less.

*****

Racing ahead, I am racing ahead; down the aisle of the cathedral, along the smooth marble floor, toward the pool of light under the dome of history, frescoed bright with bodies in Judgment. My cohort, my lover, my brother, he follows me on faith. Faith I know for him is limited—not faith in me, but faith in general. To show faith in anything is a leap for him indeed.

There are things he wishes to believe. He hopes: if he acts as if he does believe, then sometime inside he will.

He doesn’t know where I am going, only that he asked me guide; he wonders why here—for reasons others than the blatant, the transparent, the Catholic ritual of childhood remembered and faith once possessed—but he follows nonetheless. Silent. Attentive. That he would trust me lead him anywhere is a gift to me; that he would trust me questionless and rapt is nearly full a miracle.

It seems forever ago, he recognized at once my sharpest spear and thorn: thought. Never-ceasing thought. Processes I can never halt, a mind I can never quiet. He knows well when and how to coax it to be still. He cannot believe, in what he knows of my mind, that in this place I’d still believe—yet still he follows. In the heightening pitch of silence, in the dimness, airless empty and the chilling stillness of time, I detect unmistakably his sure footsteps behind me.

*****

A stipulation of the Commune of Florence for the erection of Santa Maria del Fiore was for it to be “a more beautiful and honorable temple than any” in Tuscany. Yet this cathedral, from its very conception, required a dome no one for certain could construct. Audacious, the Fiorentini: the promise of glory for a work of architecture none could prove feasible. Brunelleschi found a way.

Cathedrals, my love, are metaphors—as are houses of the flesh. And not just in literature, but in their very being. Cathedrals are brazen, lifting human toward divine. Bodies are brazen, uniting spirit through flesh. You and I, we know these divisions for what they are: man-made. Culturally constructed. Deceptive. Limiters of the brazen, inducers of despair. They know not all cathedrals reach so high. We know not all bodies touch the sky.

But do I believe in this God they portray? In this construct, in this dogma? Examine your own heart and know mine. The god I believe in is the hope that I may live reveling in the quotidian—that the mundanities in my life might inspire lightness rather than the thrashing of my spirit. This occurs only for those who believe they are where they belong. Once this was a possibility unimaginable. And then: my visitation.

Angels bear messages from the divine.

*****

Closer, ever closer—I can’t breathe but I can see—the silence so shrill it slices my insides; the empty, so hot-heavy, I’m melting at my knees. It’s there, though, as I knew it would be—the sun through the skylight, the dome overhead—the dust, again, dancing, now faster, now mesmerizing, now hypnotizing, now time.

Time.

It comes back. Back in a rush, like the speeding, the pounding of footsteps behind me, like the break in the rhythm of the shoes on my feet, like the momentum of my body lurching forward into light—like the pop of the silence and the rushing of air, the spinning of the dome and the pivot my body and the blues and the greens in the frescoes like the ardent rushing of a swirling sea. And my drowning body falling from it, sure of nothing—nothing, nothing but the sharpness and the saturation and the certainty of the very last thing I see: that the fierceness of his being jumps space and I know—know—had he but the power, he’d choose unflinchingly to take this fall for me.

I’m in a spin, one foot in the air, when the other slips out from under me. My insides course cold as I take to the air. It is blackness now, and space—and the whole of me, tense, in anticipation of the parallel. Air whooshes, and in the instant I imagine the cruel slap of marble, there is a tightness in my stomach.

No--not in my stomach, but around it, one arm and then another across my chest as my leading, traitorous, balanceless shoulder thuds his breastbone. I am not falling, I think, as my feet hit the floor, I am not falling--but my knees are as treacherous as my failed equilibrium and I am falling, they are buckling, my weight collapsing, his arms tightening, and when I collapse his body’s behind me, his body’s against me, his body is my bumper and my pillow and my shield, and I am not. Falling. I am not falling.

My head falls back to his shoulder, his breath warm on my cheek. There is only blackness--and his heartbeat at my back, pulsing hotly, surprisingly, redressingly into me when experience had anticipated the icy rocky wallop. Darkness takes my consciousness. Yet I know, tonight, it is he that will be seeing stars.