I wafted down the streets and sidewalks like a runaway balloon, with no direction or purpose, guided only by a fickle wind.
I crossed streets without looking, ignoring the screeching brakes and bleating horns and yet I flinched at every stranger who walked too close, at any jogger who veered in my direction. I didn’t care if something bad happened to me, but it did matter how. I didn’t want to give those jerks in Cleveland the pleasure of taking me down.
Somehow, I gravitated back towards the Vatican. I’m not sure why. Heathen that I was, I had no rational reason for going there, but I kind of, sort of knew the place now. And so it called to me. That wall and dome were my beacons and I was a pigeon flying home.
I passed between the encircling columns into St. Peter’s square and across the flagstone plaza to the central obelisk. But once I reached the center of the square, I was still not satisfied. An excruciating unease churned in me—very much like pain, but without the physical hurting—and it begged for relief.
I looked up at the great, studded dome of the basilica. That was where I needed to be, if nothing else, to have a quiet place to think.
I surged across the flagstones, shuffled through security and rushed into the basilica, looking neither left nor right at the masterpieces on display, making no signs of crosses, no gestures of humility or respect as I waited my turn at the cordon to penetrate the depths of the dome and reach those pews under the lonesome, alabaster dove.
And there, despite myself, I prayed in the wishful way a little kid talks under his breath to a fallen star or to an array of smoldering birthday candles. And you know what I wished for. I had no hope it would be granted.
One would have thought if any place on earth was holy enough to keep me out of an infernal place like Root it would be here, but those roots came twining up out of the pew in full view, I assumed, of the tourists and pilgrims. Was it a miracle, I wondered, to be transported in public to Hell’s doorstep?
I was wide awake and fully aware of every inch of my journey down through the catacombs, my molecules gliding through dirt and stone like elementary particles, and then a twist and a turn through something not even made of this earth.
A musty smell pervaded my senses, but was quickly replaced by notes of ginger and lemon. I found myself in a heap of pillows and rolled-up futons. An alabaster dove still loomed above me—only this one wasn’t Bernini’s, it was Karla’s.
***
“Karla?” I scrambled to my feet, all lightheaded and giddy. “You here?”
I was thrilled to have made my entrance directly into her dome, and not have to fight my way out of another pod out in the tunnels. I wasn’t sure what it meant, coming here instead of there, but in any case, it was progress.
“Karla?”
When she didn’t answer, I pawed gently through a pile of rumpled blankets to see if she might be snoozing beneath, but she wasn’t there.
The dome was so quiet, surely I would have heard her breathing. But all I could hear was water dripping from a tap and the nearly inaudible gurgles of some distant Reaper.
The dome was a mess. Karla usually kept it so neat. Someone—Luther?—had ransacked the place. Her earring tree lay upended, its jewelry scattered everywhere, crunching and bending underfoot.
More of Karla’s weavings seemed to be coming undone, and that included the dome itself. Walls that had been smooth were now corrugated with individual strands of pencil-thick roots. Some roots had broken free and hung dangling in coils throughout the room.
