Plague in the Mirror (6 page)

But Li, whose hands are no longer pudgy — they’re broad and long, with tapered fingers, she noticed when he was wiping away her tears — is already gone.

May sits a long while on his picnic blanket, feeling guilty, imagining he’ll come back when he calms down. He’ll come back when he’s taken a breath or two, had a look over the rooftops below, had a minute to think.

But he doesn’t, and at long last she cleans up those few scraps he didn’t take with him and starts down the hill. She takes her own time getting back, doesn’t want to arrive at the apartment before Gwen does, doesn’t want to run into Li before Gwen can make things right again with cheerful updates on shroud-sucking vampires.

She bears right onto Via Vecchia Fiesolana, the old road, passing a tabernacle with a Madonna and Saints, and on the right, the church of Saint Jerome. Next is the Villa Medici. Yet another handy sign explains that the villa was built by Michelozzo in 1458 for Cosimo the Elder and used by Lorenzo the Magnificent to host his literary friends. Besides the beautiful gardens, which she meanders through absently, there isn’t much remaining of the villa.

Heading out again, she reaches the terrace view that Queen Victoria liked so much she had her own bench installed there, and — was it left, now, or right . . . right — at the first intersection, the spot where the bishop of Fiesole, who lived in Florence, would rest on his way to his cathedral.
These people are all dead now,
May thinks with despair, circling back into San Domenico, with its church and convent, struggling out her phrase book so she can order a gelato in the shop across from the bus stop.

Ice cream is the only thing that makes sense anymore. This one’s a rich hazelnut chocolate and tastes so good she lets the first Number 7 bus go by. It’ll be a while before the next, an hour maybe. She knows that and just sits there taking long, slow licks like an animal cleaning its wound.

When she boards, she’s the only passenger and watches wistfully, trying to hold on to the taste of chocolate as the landscape blurs past in a flicker of late-afternoon sunlight.

May slips back into the apartment and isn’t surprised to find it empty. She settles on the overstuffed silky couch under the vaulted ceiling. That ceiling and the awesome terrace overlooking the Arno are the only real luxuries — the rest of the apartment is plain and modern; white stucco walls, terra-cotta tiled floors, a throw rug here and there. It’s airy and light, and May feels just fine with that after visiting all those dank, dark churches yesterday, however beautiful their contents or contours. She picks up her novel from the coffee table and tries to read, but a clock somewhere in the still-strange house ticks ominously, and she can’t concentrate.

Retreating to her room, May heads for the pile of research books on her desk, Gwen’s mostly. “You have all these papers to write, so why not choose a topic that draws on where you are,” Gwen advised, “or overlaps with the work I have you and Liam doing for me? Teachers — trust me; I am one — love visuals . . . the more, the better . . . so visit archives, take photos. Take advantage of this setting.”

Yeah, but write about
what? To crowd out the fact that she’s possibly, probably, going insane, May closes her eyes, opens Gwen’s copy of
Florence: An Encyclopedia
at random, stabs her forefinger down, and opens her eyes again.

Black Death (
see also
Plague).

Some lucky teacher’s getting a paper on plague.

Medieval travelers carried home exotic cargo, money, and spices,
she reads, surprisingly drawn in,
but also tales of terror and wonder.
May sits back down and cracks the book’s spine in a way that would infuriate Gwen.

Lifting the book, May snatches a notebook and pencil from the desk, then pads in bare feet out to the terrace, her favorite part of the apartment. From there she can look out over the rooftops at the edge of the city, which butt right up to the wide Arno, with its ancient bridges and green hills beyond. She settles into an iron chair beside a planter, with her feet on the railing, enjoying the sun on her face a moment, and reads on.

According to the book, the outbreak that people of Cristofana’s day called the pestilence or the Pest, which was formerly confined to the Far East, now began to fan out in different directions, tearing through Indian Tartary, Mesopotamia, and Syria, and settling in the Tartar lands of Asia Minor in 1346, where it left 85,000 dead in Crimea alone.

In the chaos, the Tartars seized the chance to launch a campaign against Genoese merchants at a trading base in Tana. They chased their quarry to Caffa, another fortified Genoese trading center on the Crimean coast, pitched camp outside the city walls, and got ready to bombard Caffa into submission, but the Tartar invaders didn’t figure plague into their strategy. It locked on with a vengeance, leveling their ranks. Those left standing moved to retreat, but first the Tartars gave the Genoese a taste of their woe. Using giant catapults, they lobbed the corpses of their fellows over Caffa’s walls.

May lifts her pencil and scrawls biological warfare across the top of the first blank page in the notebook, underlining it three times. There. She’ll compare the way the Black Death arrived in Europe to modern forms of biological warfare. Her world history teacher will love it.

She looks up when she hears the front door of the apartment open, her heart racing when she deduces from the tread that it isn’t Gwen. May left the terrace doors open, so he’d know she was out here, but Liam retreats without a word, first into the bathroom and then to his own tiny bedroom at the far end of the apartment, beside hers, and through his closed door she hears the musical lilt of his laptop firing up.

F
ollowing Gwen from arch to nook to nave in search of the day’s reliquary weirdness, May tries to crowd the artist, an enigma, out of her mind and focus instead on Cristofana, on the problem of time. But in May’s world, it’s Liam, who’s Princeton-bound and actually
wants
to study physics, who does the supersize cosmic thinking, and he’s been glued to his text screen all day, scowling over it, his thumbs roving the keyboard whenever he has service.

May seems to have alienated the only person she would even dream of telling.

She half remembers her dad talking about some theory proposed a few years ago at MIT or someplace, about time existing in slices like bread, all lined up to make a loaf. And sometimes the slices shift and overlap, and you aren’t here anymore — you’re there — and there are wormholes between. Or something. God, she should have paid attention.

Liam, across the room, looks up and away again.

Why didn’t she pay more attention — to everything, the good things — while she could? Before they were gone and there were these choices to make. Before everything changed.
Why can’t things just stay the same?

May must have said something out loud, because Gwen gives her a look that promises,
Hold that thought,
bringing a finger to her lips.
Hush.

They are in the quietest, dimmest, grimmest church they’ve been in all day — which is saying a lot — in search of the remains of Saint Juliana Falconieri, which turn out to be in an ornate glass box edged in filigreed gold under a side altar. The leaflet May thumbs through says that the body, Juliana’s, is incorrupt. But Gwen points out (to May only, since Liam keeps to the opposite side of whatever echo-filled room they find themselves in, squinting at his blue screen) that a mask has been applied to her face and hands, so who knows.

Another body, preserved under an altar in another church, was well preserved and never decayed or discolored, even though that saint died in 1459.

Next up is the habit worn by Saint Francis when he received the stigmata, preserved in the church of Ognissanti, which puts May over the top. “Remind me why we’re doing this?” she mutters.

May’s seventeen years old, barely out of the starting gate, and spending her summer surrounded by corpses and remains. Yet she’s rarely felt so alive as she did looking into the liquid darkness of that artist’s eyes.

They were doing this because May made the mistake of asking what relics were, after seeing the term one too many times in her guidebook, which lit the bulb over Gwen’s egghead and got her planning and phoning all over the city, vowing, “I’ll show you. I have a few stops to make anyway.”

Gwen explained that in medieval Europe, people swore by the magical properties of saints, holding even their skin and bones in awe. Their bodies were considered superhuman. A dead saint might be ripped to shreds by faithful Christians seeking miraculous healing. Every boot, bone, and strand of hair was whisked away for the sick and needy, with not a tooth or a scrap of robe remaining. Blood was drained from the bodies or blotted up in garments to soak up luck and protection.

Corpses of famous saints were taken apart and divvied up among rival churches, which put these relics on display or paraded them around to improve morale in bad times. Churches even stole from competing parishes to boost their reputations. “The tongues of a handful of saints were said to remain preserved,” Gwen explained, “long after their bodies had decayed. Saint Anthony of Padua’s was billed as ‘red, soft, and entire’ more than four hundred years after he died.”

May looked at Liam when Gwen made the tongue comment, smiling in solidarity, but he refused to meet her eyes.

Oh, right. We’re not speaking.

Every so often, she catches him looking back with those stark blue eyes. He’s a good-looking guy, with that jaw and that dark stubble with a sheen of red mixed in, that wide-shouldered frame and crooked smile, with that way he has, when the phone’s in his pocket, at least, of thoughtfully trailing his fingers over the things they pass, every stone, as if to register its temperature. All this makes her wonder why she didn’t just let him kiss her in Fiesole. Would life be easier if she had? Would she feel less alone?

Right now she isn’t allowing herself to feel much of anything
except
alone. May feels off, wrong, not quite healthy or
here
somehow. Maybe all this weirdness is only May hallucinating herself into some other moment in history and back again, but isn’t that worth a worry? Shouldn’t she be
doing
something about it? To fix herself if she’s broken?

Why did those people do it?
she thinks, peering in at reliquaries under their spotlights.
Tear their heroes limb from limb?
Is it because she’s so ordinary that none of this seems real enough to startle or penetrate? Good old normal May . . . unexceptional except in the right and approved ways — straight A’s, or nearly straight — uncomplicated in her demands. What did she have to lose? What would she tear a body limb from limb for? She has no trouble at all imagining her witchy twin tearing a corpse to bits, but the phenomenon of Cristofana doesn’t feel like something to unveil to Gwen and Liam over antipasto.

If only she could trust her own thoughts, so jangled and unreal, to know the difference between real and not real anymore, but even Liam isn’t the Liam she knew. How can she trust a world so changed . . . or so quickly changing?

This time when she looks for Li, he looks back, only for a second — with regret and defensiveness in his eyes — and May concludes that no matter how needy you are, there’s always someone else . . . always others . . . needing, too. That’s just how it is. She’ll keep her problems to herself.

“Why did they do it?” she finally asks aloud, sidling close to Gwen, who regards her with concern.

“Do what?”

“Tear their saints apart like that? It’s such a savage way to . . . get help. It isn’t very Christian, to say the least.” Did the artist in Old Florence believe in superstitions like that? The thought made her sad, more than anything, though it wasn’t sadness she associated with him. Every time the young man from the workshop entered her thoughts, May felt an excitement she had no name for, a dark thrill and a promise. A promise that life would break, probably, because it — the promise, but life, too — made no sense.

“Blood magic seemed very real and present in those times. But even more recently, people dug up and stole the skulls of great composers, hoping for a clue to their genius. Einstein donated his own brain for postmortem study — even though some of it ended up filed away in a dusty cider carton in some doctor’s office. Then there are cryonics and other efforts to ‘miraculously’ preserve the body with hopes of reanimating it later. And think of all we’ve learned from genetics.”