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“I went to the noose long before such things as moving pictures could be imagined,” Savonarola admits.
Pietta thinks for a long while, watching herself in the reflection of the wine. “And what of the mountain? What of the men and women there? Very well, I am dead. Where is Paradise? Where is Hell? Where is the fire or the clouds? Is this Purgatory?”
Awo touches Pietta’s cheek. “Me broni ba, that mountain out there is Purgatory. Someday, maybe, we’ll go there and start our long hitchhike of the soul up, up, up into the sea of glass and the singing and the rings of eyes and the eternal surrealist discotheque of the saved. Nowhere is for us sad sacks who died too quick to repent, or naughties like Savonarola, who was so stuck up himself that he got excommunicated. And here we sit, with nothing to do but drink the rain, for three hundred times our living years.”
Savonarola cracks his gnarled knuckles. “I admit, if some man in Florence had discovered a way to film the moon rising over the ripples of the Arno, or the building of Brunelleschi’s ridiculous dome, or even one of my own sermons—and I was very good, in my day—I would have set fire to the reels with all the rest, and I would have rejoiced. All in which the eye longs to revel is vanity, vanity. Only now do I long for such things, for something to see besides this stone, something to touch besides the dead, something to hear besides talk, talk, talk. What I would not give in this moment for one glimpse of Botticelli’s pornography, one vulgar passage of lecherous Boccaccio, one beautiful deck of gambling cards. God, I think, is irony.”
“I will go mad,” Pietta whispers.
“Yes,” agrees Awo.
Pietta pleads: “But it will pass? It will pass and I will go to the mountain and take up a lantern and begin to climb. It will pass and we will go—we will go on, up, out. Progress.”
Savonarola pinches his nose between his fingers and smiles softly. He has never been a man given to smiling. He had only done it ten or eleven times in total. But all in secret, Girolamo Savonarola possesses one of the loveliest and kindest smiles in all the long history of joy.
“Do the math, my child. Three hundred times the span of a human life we must rattle the stones of Nowhere—since the death of Solomon and the invention of the alphabet, no one yet has gotten out.”
Eighth Terrace: The Ambitious
In the city called Nowhere, a man with the head of a heron sat comfortably in the topmost room of the policemen’s tower, watching a corpse rot.
It was slow going.
In all honesty, Detective Belacqua had no real idea what to expect. He only recalled from his penny paperback that human bodies did, indeed, under normal circumstances, rot, and they did it according to a set of rules, at a regular, repeatable, measurable rate, and from that you could reason out a lot of other things that mattered in a murder investigation. Since he had run face-first into a circumstance well beyond normal, Belacqua could not rely on the niceties of rigor mortis, even if he understood them, thus, he now devised a method to discover the rules of decomposition in Nowhere.
Sergeant Tomek humbly asked to be allowed to stay after the patrolmen returned to their posts. The detective agreed, but sent him for coffee straightaway so that he could gather his thoughts without the raven-boy fretting all over him. Belacqua lifted the corpse easily—they never did weigh very much in Nowhere. He laid her out on three desks pushed together, and, though he felt rather silly about it afterward, folded her hands over her chest and arranged her long, dark hair tenderly, as though it mattered. And it did matter to him, very much, though he couldn’t think why. He dipped a rough cloth into the wash basin in the officers bathroom and cleaned the worst of the grime and blood out of her wounds, going back and forth from the basin with a steady rhythm that calmed his nerves and arranged the furniture of his mind in a contemplative configuration. After all this was done, he drew a pair of scissors from the watchman’s desk and plunged them quickly between the dead woman’s ribs on the left side of her torso. When he pulled them out again, red pearls seeped from the wound, falling to the flagstones with a terrible clatter.
“Huh,” said Sergeant Tomek. He stood in the doorway, holding a cup of scalding coffee in each hand.
And then, the policemen waited. Sergeant Tomek waited at the window, transfixed. Detective Belacqua waited at his typewriter, ready to record any changes in the body. To write the novel of this woman’s putrefaction, chapter by chapter.
It was a quiet night in Nowhere.
Days and nights knocked at the door and went away unanswered. The corpse remained the same for a very long time. Tomek gave up over and over, crying out that it was too sad to be borne, too miserable a thing to stare at, and Nowhere too timeless a place to ever tolerate decay. But he always returned, with coffee or tea or hot buttered toast, and the two strigils resumed their longest watch.
By the next Sabbath, it had begun. On the first day, the edges of the woman’s wounds flushed the color of opium flowers. On the second day, her hair turned to snow. On the third day, the stench began, and the watch-room filled intolerably with the smell of frankincense, and then wild honey, and finally a deep and endless forest, loamy and ancient. On the fourth day, Belacqua held his ear to her mouth and heard the sound of gulls crying. On the fifth day, her wounds turned ultramarine and began to seep golden ink. On the sixth day, her sternum cracked and a white lizard with blue eyes crawled out of her, which Tomek caught and trapped in a wine bottle. And on the seventh day, a small tree bloomed and broke out of her mouth, which gave a single silver fruit. This, Belacqua harvested and placed in his coffee cup for further study. By the morning of the eighth day, all that remained of her were bones, hard and clear and faceted as if the skeleton had been hacked out of a single diamond.
Belacqua typed and typed and typed. Finally, he spoke, on the day they saw the dead woman’s skull emerge like new land rising from the sea.
“Sergeant Tomek, I believe we can safely say that she received the markings on her back pre-mortem. Time of death could not have been sooner than six days before you discovered her.”
“And how do you know this, Detective Inspector?”
“If she had been killed later, we would have found the poor girl already turning orange at the edges, or worse. I detected then no discoloration nor any scent nor a lizard nor the sound of seagulls. Unfortunately for us, it could have been any number of days greater than six and we would not know it unless we could somehow kill something else and record its progress. Also when I cut into her, the body produced a quantity of pearls, whereas no pearls were found beside her on the road to Nowhere. Additionally, the gore of my cut shows a distinctly different shade of ultramarine than the carving on her back. Someone wrote patience on her while she yet lived, Tomek, and listened to her anguish, and did not stop.”
“It is dreadfully morbid,” the sergeant sighed. He laid a reverent hand on the delicate foot-bones of the body.
“On the contrary, my boy, it is science, and we have done it! Nothing could be more exciting than discovering, as we have done, that a set of rules lay in place of all eternity without us suspecting them. I assure you these are not the stages of mortal decomposition.” Belacqua hurried on before Tomek could wonder how he knew anything about living corpses, and uncover his illicit pursuit of fiction. “This is new. It is ours. It is native to Nowhere. No one else in all the yawning pit of time has ever known what you and I know now. We are, finally, unique. And now we two unique fellows must proceed further on, farther in, and re-compose this woman. Her name, her history, her associates, her enemies. What happened to her a fortnight ago, and how?” The detective frowned. “Perhaps we ought to interrogate the lizard.”
In its green glass bottle, the pale reptile hissed. It stuck out its blue tongue. The glass fogged with its breath. It said one word, and then steamed away like water.
Virtue.
Ninth Terrace: The Incurious
Pietta has become a birdwatcher. She leaves Awo and Savonarola often to trail silently after the strigils as they move through the city. They are so unlike her. They wear clothes of many colors; they are always busy; they eat. They live in a different Nowhere than she does, one with automats and social clubs and places to be. She makes a study of them. This would be easier if she could bring herself to trade her colored glass or her belt or her scissors for one of Awo’s pens or the paper a tall man with very clean teeth wants to sell her, but she cannot. She does not know yet why they are precious, but she knows she doesn’t want to give them away, to let them become separate from her forever. She is not ready. So she must try to remember the birds she sees. Osprey. Oriole. Peregrine. Sparrow. Sandpiper. Ibis. Pelican. Starling. Raven. Heron. They are beautiful and they do not see her. To them, she is not Pietta. She is no one. She is blue, like the others, and blindered, like the others, and the only thing she can ever do to ca
tch their attention, to bring their eyes down onto her, is to sin, to commit a crime, to err. When the man with clean teeth tries to steal her glass, the birds come. They smell, absurdly, like expensive perfume, like the counter in a fashionable shop. Their feathers rustle when they move like pages turning. They have no irises. Their voices are very nearly human. A woman with the head of an owl cuts away the sleeve of the man’s robe. Now everyone will know he is bad. Pietta is fascinated. But she is afraid to do anything very bad herself.
