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She meets Awo and Savonarola in a cloister fifteen years after they first drank wine together out of a barrel. It is a round room in the Largitio Quarter, with a high, domed ceiling, full of grand, tall tables set with empty bowls, safe from the wind and the slow, trudging lights on the mountain. Pietta longs to eat. She is never hungry, but she remembers the feeling of eating. Of tasting. A few dozen blue-ragged souls pool their objects on a table, picking and sorting. They are trying to assemble a chess set, though fights have broken out already over whether a pepper pot or a bone whistle or pocket Slovakian dictionary makes a better king. Nothing in Nowhere is important, so nothing is more important than the pepper pot and the whistle and the dictionary. Pietta watches them and imagines the players as birds. She hates chess. Savonarola agrees, though he plays anyway.
“Chess allows the frivolous to pretend their toys have deep meaning. The only honest game is tag,” he grouses, while taking an exquisitely-chinned teenaged girl’s queen. Both the sleeves have been torn from her dress.
“What are the strigils?” Pietta asks.
Savonarola snorts. “Where I come from they’re dull blades you use to scrape the sweat and grime from your back in a bath-house. Not that I ever used a bath-house, a seething puddle of greased sin. Not that I haven’t scoured the breadth of Nowhere for a damned bath.”
Awo has enough sewing needles to man her entire side, pawns and all. She sticks them upright in the soft wood of the table, two neat silver rows. “He can’t tell you. His theology was far too prim and tidy to contain bird-headed men in trenchcoats. I can’t tell you either. But if you suppose there are demons in one place and angels in the other, wouldn’t you also suppose something has to live here? Something has to be natural to Nowhere.”
“They came when the first people arrived,” says the girl with the lovely chin. She moves her knight (a mechanical library stamp). “And Nowhere was only an empty plain without a city. They are meant to make this place somewhat less than a Hell, and to keep us from making a Heaven of it.”
“How do you know that?” Savonarola snaps.
The girl shrugs. “I asked one. When I got arrested for writing my name a thousand times over the entrance to Benevolentia Sector. She had a wren’s face. She said they were formed not from clay like us nor fire nor light but from the stuff of the void on the face of the world, and they had not the breath of life but the heat of life and the fluid of it, and they had a beginning but no end, an alpha and an ellipsis, and then she drank my wine and said I was pretty and the truth was she didn’t remember very much more about being born than I did and she read all that off a historical plaque on the upper levels, but strigils have to keep up appearances, and they wouldn’t be worth much if we thought they were stuck here just like us only they didn’t even know how it happened to them, only what they had to do, so if you ask me, talking to a strigil is not so useful as you’d expect, and they drink a lot. Checkmate.”
That night, Pietta goes to be with Savonarola, because everything is the same and everything is nothing and what is the point of not doing anything now?
Tenth Terrace: The Merciless
Detective Belacqua stood in a hexagonal stone cell like all the other hexagonal stone cells. He looked out an arched window like all the other arched windows. He picked up and put down several meaningless objects: a brass key, a cracked, worn belt, a stone figure of a child seated in a chair, shards of colored glass. Sergeant Tomek assured him this was the dead woman’s room, but it told him nothing—how could it? She would have traded away anything authentically her own long ago. What remained was simply someone else’s rubbish. They had a name, and only that by process of elimination. Quite simply: who was missing? It had taken weeks of interrogation, more contact with the locals than Belacqua had ever suffered before, their fearful whispers, their purposeless glazed eyes, their way of drifting off mid-sentence as though they’d forgotten language. But they got their name, from the old furioso Savonarola, who actually wept when Tomek asked whether he had lost anyone of late.
What was he supposed to do now? Everyone in the policemen’s union expected he could find some simple solution to it all. But the thing of it was, in his paperback, discovering the identity of the corpse opened other doors, doors within doors, obvious rivers of inquiry to dive into, personal histories to unearth, secrets, secrets everywhere. But her name gave him nothing but this room, and this room was a dry river and a closed door.
“Who was she?” Sergeant Tomek demanded of Savonarola, who sat below a great candle, staring at his open hands. “Who did she love? Who did she hate? What was she in life? What did she do to pass the time?”
But the old friar just closed his hands and opened them again. Closed. Open. “She loved me and Awo. She hated chess. She invented a semaphore alphabet with a man climbing the mountain, though I’m reasonably sure he’s not in on the scheme. If she remembered her life, she never told it to me. She’s so new, you know. Like a baby. When I look at her I see the plainness of white linen, being without vanity.”
“Everyone has vanity,” said Sergeant Tomek. “Everyone here.”
The old man looked up cannily at the strigils. Behind his blinders, his eyes shone. “Do you?”
Detective Belacqua squatted down on his heels. He had a suspicion, and he knew how to work on friars. You had to awe them. Morning picked at the stitches of dark. If there had been any true songbirds in Nowhere, they would have sung. Belacqua fixed his black heron’s eyes on the hooded soul before him. “Do you remember the founding of Florence, Girolamo? That is where you lived, is it not?”
“Don’t be absurd. Florence was old when I was young.”
“Quite so. Yet I do remember the founding of Nowhere. Did you know that? Some of us do, some of us don’t, it’s a funny old thing, like whether or not someone like you remembers losing his baby teeth. A toss of the cognitive dice. But I remember. Lucky me! You see, the plain, the plain is the thing. The mud flat going on and on out there forever. The handful of trees—as few and as far between as living planets in empty space. The old riverbeds. Somewhere out beyond the road and the mountain there’s a black salt flat a light year across. The clouds. The stars. And people didn’t come right away. It wasn’t like you’d imagine—nothing, and then hordes all at once. People just died like dogs or fish or dinosaurs until, I don’t know, what would you say, Tomek? Around the time they started painting ibexes on cave walls?”
The sergeant nodded his dark head.
“Well, my friend, you can just imagine what a mess it all was in the beginning. No system. No rules. Some people could go up the mountain as quick as you like, and some couldn’t, and some could go down into the coal pits, and some couldn’t, and some just milled around like cows down here, and if they tried to go on up, they found themselves turned right back around facing the infinite floodplain with not an inch gained, but no one really had a bead on the whys and wherefores of the whole business. Cosmology just sort of happened to you, on you get. And the people down here in the mud, they just sat there or laid there or stood there for ages, really, proper ages, with nothing to do. That’s the worst thing for a person. To get crushed under the weight of endless useless days. Between you and me, I don’t think anyone really thought it through. I bet you’d rather have a fellow spearing you with a flaming trident every hour on the hour—at least then, something would happen. Am I right? I believe I am. So these poor souls fought and fucked and screamed for awhile, because those’re pretty good ways to stop yourself thi
nking about the existential chasm of time. But they didn’t bleed and they didn’t come and nobody answered them, so eventually, they started digging in the mud with whatever they’d brought in their bindles, which back then, was mostly stone tools. They pulled up the stones of the moral universe and put them one on top of the other, and I’ll tell you a secret, Giro. For awhile, I think this was a happier place than Heaven, when they were putting down those rocks. But happiness isn’t the point. Not here. If we’d let you keep on with it, your lot would have built city after city, an empire of the dead, and it would look just like the world out here, only filled with legions of the mediocre and the stalled out and the unrepentant and whatever you’re supposed to be. So we got called up, me and the sergeant here and all the other strigils. Hatched out of an egg of ice, I’m told, though that sort of insider talk is above my pay grade. And we came bearing order, Girolamo. We came with rules in our beaks. We built Nowhere together, strigils and humans, the dead and the divine.” Detective Belacqua put one hand on his chest and the other over Savonarola’s withered heart. “Me and you. A closed system. A city on the hill. And I think it’s beautiful. But you don’t, do you? You hate it, like you hated everything you ever clapped your eyes on. Except her. So here’s what I think, friend. I think you found a way to get her out. God only knows what. But you did it to her and now she’s gone and if you tell me what happened, no one will be angry—we quite literally cannot be angry. Who could blame you? It’s the nature of love, I should imagine.”
Girolamo Savonarola laughed.
“You ought to write a book,” he giggled, but when Sergeant Tomek began to strip his charcoal-blue robes from him, the friar began to sob instead.
Eleventh Terrace: The Sorrowful
It hits her while she kisses Awo’s naked shoulder, Awo, whose cell Pietta visits far more than any other, though in recent years she’s visited many. She even found Beatrice, who turned out to be very shy and fond of rain. It is something to do, and Pietta is desperate for acts. Acts have befores and afters. They mark her movement through this air and these stones. She has tried other sins, but they are more difficult in Nowhere. She cannot bring herself to envy anyone, and wants for nothing; she cannot eat and she cannot strive. So there is this, and though she feels it only dimly, she holds on very tight.
Pietta and Awo lie together in the lantern-light of Purgatory and there is a moment when she does not know who she is, not really, and then that moment burns itself out. Pietta remembers the feeling of being Pietta. She remembers being small and she remembers being big. All of the things that ever happened to her stack up in her mind like stones on a sea shore, tottering, tottering…Pietta is getting born in a room with poppies painted on the wall, Pietta is small and delighted and running through the snow, forgetting her mother completely and throwing herself face first into the soft powder, Pietta is receiving her first communion and coughing when she oughtn’t because the incense tickles her nose, and she is helping her father tend his bees in their fields, and she is walking in the woods at night with a boy named Milo, and she is living in a house by the sea with Milo who has grown very distant with her, even though she is pregnant and they should be happy, and Pietta is giving birth to her son in a room with ultramarine flowers next to her bed in a cheap, gold-painted vase, and Pietta is walking in the summer, alone, for once, when she sees a white lizard hiding in the shade of a long, flat stone, and she takes it home and gives it a name and shows it to her son and keeps it in an old fish tank even though Milo says it is stupid and lizards have no hearts and Pietta is wearing her mother’s diamond ring every day even though they could use the money because no amount of snow could make her forget, not really, and Milo is so angry with her so often, every thing she does is the wrong thing, and though she still loves him she grows very still inside, she feels as though she is trapped in ice and cannot move, even as she cooks and cleans and runs to the shops and teaches her classes and she is getting older all the time and then Pietta is teaching her son to play chess with a set made to look like a famous medieval set with funny-looking people in funny-looking chairs, she is cutting out the green felt for his Halloween costume because he insists upon being a tree this year, she is pouring herself the last of the red wine and locking up the liquor cabinet with a brass key, she is putting away her husband’s clothes, his coats, his socks, his old belt, and thinking that she should have bought him a new one long ago, and she will now, she will, because tomorrow will be the day she wakes up out of the ice and becomes herself again, she knows it will happen all at once, like a big silver fruit cracking open, and there she’ll be, good as new, even though she thought the same yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and when the glazier’s truck hits Pietta in the high street she thinks, for a moment, that all that beautiful, shattered, colored glass lying around her is the ice breaking at last, the fruit breaking open, with Pietta whole and alive inside, but it is not.
Twelfth Terrace: The Gluttonous
It was a quiet night in Nowhere.
Detective Inspector Belacqua and Corporal Tomek shared the watch and supper and half a bottle of white wine which both felt very excited about. The lamp stood full of oil, the basin full of fresh water, the pens full of ink, and all was as it should be.
