Afterward I had a dream in which my mother said: You mean you really don't remember the box? and I said no, already terrified, at which my father began to tell me. He said that you had not drowned at all. You had disappeared. After several days they finally thought to look in a large wooden box that I had left in the yard — a coffin, of course, in which you lay rotting. I woke up either screaming or thinking I was screaming.
That was when I realized that everything I had done was for nothing, that no matter how many young girls I saved I could never undo or appease, that my meeting with your ghost could never be friendly because you waited to send my panic dreams whenever you could; and when I died at last, then the true punishment would begin.
The Soi Cowboy woman's eyes were open. She looked at me.
I had a bad dream, I said. My sister is dead. You understand?
She nodded and touched my head. — You hurt here?
I nodded.
All through the next morning the Thai woman shied away, coughing tired garlicky breath and watching me unsmilingly with big eyes. Every few minutes she'd ask: You no good here? gingerly touching my forehead.
No problem, I said to her. My sister is dead, you understand?
She nodded.
So I have bad dreams about her. No problem. Never mind.
But she would not trust me anymore, and so once again, sister, you'd had your revenge as easily and purely as an ander of sunlight slitting a woman's throat on a passing bus.
So I let my shadow lead me down to the stain, even though you wouldn't hold my hand (I was only your symbiont). They say that the Cross with the anchor means salvation, that the olive branch is a symbol of hope. I found those symbols scraped into white shards of marble in the dark tufa walls of Saint Callisto's. I found them in the graves shelved with cool earth. Man-worms bored these caves into the world, some rounded, all so low that my head met the shadow of my head. Looking up into a skylight now very far above, I saw moss around that hole from which I'd been born from within my marble pillar of secretness. I'd dreamed nine months in the crypt of the Popes, their names carved in Greek, all tombs rectangled with darkness; they'd been opened to remove the remains from the danger of the barbarians. But now I'd been born; I'd squirmed down the long narrow hall that was textured with stone like a palate.
Catacomb, honeycomb of the slow bees of souls, the slow crowd in the halls, where do you keep my little sister?
Not in Saint Cecilia's tomb, where the marble corpse lies on her side, offering three fingers in remembrance of the Trinity. You won't find her there.
Tell me, catacomb, and I'll leave fresh flowers in the webbed niche around your daylight.
No, I'll never say.
Then I'll raid your fossae, dark shelves and side-chapels; I'll sweep the dust from your shallow ledges where babies turned to bone.
But I got no answer save the smell of earth and breath. Although I lit oil lamps shaped like fishes, the round eyes of Pope Urban's fresco would not speak to me; the pale cell of Saint Sebastian's burial was empty. I lit an oil lamp with a whale carved on it (Jonah in the whale, Christ in the tomb, both three days, I think it meant). I said: I've been in this tomb for three decades; now tell me, where's my sister?
No sound, nor glimmer from any of these dull crumbling gray rooms of darkness where they still celebrate Mass! — Very good then, said I, I quit; I'll now be coming up from the darkness into the day!
But upstairs there rushed no sun, only long weird dark corners, dark under low arches; above that a marble-floor Roman mausoleum with flower-inscribed circles on the ceiling, faded fresco-strokes like the petals of dried flowers; steps twisting back down, white like Roman tombs; upstairs still, a church on top of that Roman tomb— the ceiling seventh-century, they said, and grave marble personages blooming from the walls.
No shard of brick stamped with the Roman seal knew your whereabouts; below me were too many receding halls of darkness (some areas still to be excavated, they said, still secret places underneath).
Nonetheless, my fond young skull, I must praise myself as only a king can crown himself: I sniffed you out behind the smell of stone, nosing down stone's barred wells and chambers! For you I frightened my eyes with blisters of torchlight on the restoration seal, crying: I'll wrap you in linen, then close you away with stones!
So then I heard a bone-clack; then when your leathery mummy-heart began to pump reddish and yellowish stains across dying frescoes, I thought I knew you, and ran down tiered, narrow, high-arched halls, your heart-drum thudding louder through those volcanic walls which crumbled under my fingernail-scratch; and the sweat of your rotting body bathed my forehead — no matter whether the ceiling was flat or arched, no matter that its plaster sparkled as if with mica— what tragedy and waste and uselessness! But I found your stone.
