11

 

Niccoluccio lay unmoving under a blanket of numbness. Echoes of the agony lingered in his memory.

His body had been torn apart, he was sure of it. It had been ripped away from him one painful bit at a time, until all he was left with was the numbness and endless light and noise. The noise was like roaring rain, thunder that never faded. There was nothing intelligible in either. The light hurt to look at, but he had nothing with which to block it.

His arm lay unmoving, pale and distant, as if through a foggy window. He felt no attachment to it. He couldn’t have looked away. He didn’t even know how.

The light had seemed endless and perfect the first time it had washed across him, but now he spotted minute variations, splotches of shadow. Unknowable shapes, like afterimages, rippled like waves. Stars and sparks scintillated. Late at night, unable to sleep, he sometimes decided to stay awake until the call for Vigils. He would go to his garden and stare at the stars for so long that they seared into his eyes. He watched individual stars set or rise. Watching the celestial sphere had been like communing with perfection.

He watched and waited, trying to discern patterns, but none emerged.

He wasn’t breathing. He’d never realized, until now, how much he depended on the feeling of air coming in and out, of his chest rising. As a drum beating for hours faded into the background rhythm of awareness, so breathing had always been woven into the tapestry of his thoughts, the rhythm of his life. As Pietro and Elisa had become back home. It was just as good to escape.

Some of the numbness parted like a curtain. A hot pressure mounted in the place where his chest had been. It was quickly becoming urgent.

A weight pressed the center of his being. Then another close to his heart. He still had a body after all, he realized with a shock. The shadows were touching him.

He couldn’t feel anything of his old self, could only see his body out of the corner of his eye. His arm lay across slushy mud, open-palmed. Some of the slush was stained with his blood.

The tide of noise dwindled to nothing. The silence that persisted afterward was deeper than any he’d experienced before. The pressure in his chest was intolerable.

This must have been what Hell was like, he realized. Dead, alienated from his body but still in it, still sensate. The pains of death and decay accumulating minute after minute, day after day, forever.

The light shifted around him. Shadows stirred the grass. A brush like warm fingertips followed its passage. The ground fell away, and nothing touched him.

Then the pressure in the center of his chest lifted all at once. Sweet-smelling air flooded through him. He gasped. It was like rosewater and saffron. He’d never tasted anything so striking. It was as if the most wonderful music were coursing through his body, though all remained silent.

He was being carried away from the bloodstained ground, from the agonies and sufferings left limp and still behind him.

 

When awareness returned, the blistering light had fled the world, and left him in suspension. The only sensation left was warmth, indescribable warmth, and fullness of being.

The light that remained was warm, steady, and colored like the sun. It came in strips smooth as brushstrokes. He felt himself still rising, rising skyward, though nothing moved.

His head spun with the delirium of it all. He rasped a laugh. His breath came lightly, and he still couldn’t control it.

He tried to raise his hand to his forehead to steady himself, but he couldn’t move his arms. His body had ceased to be his own. He rested on a curved and cushioned pillow twice as large as his body, more comfortable than anything he’d ever felt before.

He wasn’t alone.

A woman sat on another black pillow. An unearthly play of blobby red light turned her into a half-silhouette. Her hair was bound tightly behind her. A wimple lay discarded across a slanted table. Straps held her body to her seat, but her arms were free.

“Why do I deserve this?” he asked.

She glanced back at him once before returning her attention to the lights. Her eyes were bloodshot. “Least I could do,” she muttered.

Before Niccoluccio could speak again, another tide of euphoria crashed through him and rendered him insensate.