14. The
subway carried Servi toward the center of Rome. He felt the overwhelming desire to be at the
very core of Christendom, of this vast and thriving city, whose ancient heart
was still thumping, and at times appeared to beat with his.
But perhaps it was only the drugs. All of Doctor Tedesco’s prescriptions were
draining from Servi’s body, and his heart pumped erratically, his breathing was
shallow, a froth of sweat pooled on his skin and the world was drained of
color.
But no, it was a trick of sensation
and perception: the first rays of the
sun were rising over Rome,
casting the Eternal
City in flat and
unflattering light. Servi went to a
public toilet, paid the attendant who had just arrived for the day, and
entered. He dumped all of Doctor Tedesco’s
pills down the toilet and flushed.
Servi was out in
the street in front of the Coliseum. He
felt his body stippled with pain. Yet
the pain appeared to float on the surface of his being, not penetrating beyond
the outer layer of his skin, a mere sensation of surface tension, heavy and
dull and tingling.
But everything
around him looked wrong. The world
appeared to have remade itself, like a corpse brought back to life and told to
resume its old routines, forgetting the memory of death. Servi sat on a bench and softly cradled his
head, trying to replicate the loving touch of another. When he looked up, the sun had fully
risen. Servi pulled out a letter, and
with a shaking hand, started to read the sloping handwriting.
Dear Aaron, someone wrote, and Servi did
not know if it was his father, mother, brother or Father Francisco, for it
hardly mattered at all. The world had
bled dry to a bleached white and every letter was a facsimile of every other, a
version cast aside only to be reused to no great effect…
I know you are a young
man of great qualities. I know you will
someday perform heroic deeds. But you
need to come back to your home and family… in America.
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