"I know,” she said. “I know what you mean. It happens to me in dreams. Go someplace, you can never get back again to where you were. You can't remember where things are. Or they're not there anymore."
"Yes. But not in dreams."
"Just concentrate,” she said. She stopped him, and took his shoulders, looking in his eyes. “From here, which way's the hotel? I mean which compass point? You know."
He looked at her and could see reflected in her face his own blank one.
"So never mind,” she said, releasing him. “Ask when you don't know. Ask for help. If you need help, you ask. That's all."
"Well."
"Men are so bad at that. Everybody says."
"You never ask. I've never seen you ask."
"I always know."
"Oh. Okay.” He wouldn't tell her how often—suddenly a long parade of incidents, all similar, tumbled backward from this moment to some far-off original—how often he had asked the way, of strangers and loungers and busy shopmen and a hundred others, and listened to them and watched them point, and stood beside them trying to sight along their fingers to see if he could see what they saw, and learned not much, and went a block or a mile or a turning and asked again. He had told no one, not even himself, how bad it was.
It was very bad. He walked holding Roo's hot hand and it was as though with each step he was changing from vegetable to animal, or opaque to transparent, growing more clear about how bad it was. It wasn't some trivial flaw or amusing tic, a stutter or a missing digit; no, it went all the way down into what he was and what had become of him, all that he had and all that he lacked, all that he knew and didn't know, all that he had imagined to be possible and all that he had failed to see was not. It was the reason he was here, and also the reason why he was not elsewhere. He couldn't tell if he felt cursed or liberated by knowing, only that he knew, and knew for sure. He thought that if Roo or someone like her were to be able to inhabit his sensorium they would see the problem too—well of course, given this, no wonder.
No wonder he had never known what was to become of him, or been able to choose one way ahead over another, or imagine the future to be inhabitable. Because space is time. The flaw in his knowledge of space was not different from his bafflement in time. How have I come to be here? he would ask, of a place, a street, a dilemma, a context. Where was I that I could have reached here from there? Which way should I now choose? Or he could not think even to ask. What do you want from the world, and how do you plan to work your way toward it? His uncle Sam had asked him that, and other people, kind or impatient, had as well. Where do you want to be in ten years, Frank Walker Barr had wanted to know when Pierce was in school. Not a question he could address, either then or later, much as he would have liked to, shamed as he was that he could not, and with no good reason to be so unable. But there was a reason. There was. Not yet an explanation. Not yet, if ever, a cure, or a fix. What makes you such a dope? If he knew, could he cease to be one?
"Look. Here. See?"
The Campo dei Fiori was a small narrow square, seemingly unchanged since the Renaissance—no baroque facades or churches, just tall houses in shades of ochre and orange, and the flower sellers’ tables, as they must have been then.
"It means field of flowers,” Pierce said. “Or place of flowers, I guess maybe."
"Bloomfield,” Roo said. Her hands were in her jeans pockets.
"When I read about it first,” Pierce said, almost unwilling to take steps there, “I thought it meant a flowery field, like a meadow. I could see it. Tall grasses and flowers, and a platform and a stake."
"He was burned at the stake? I always thought that was a kind of joke."
"No joke."
The long square was filled with loiterers, the lights coming on in cafés, music from radios and guitars colliding. There was a fountain, not running now, a long narrow trough, and at its end a statue: a man in a flowing robe and hood. It was strangely hard to grasp that of course it could be no one but he, his jaw set in defiance, his hawk's eye on the future, in the Dominican habit he never wore again after he left Italy for the great world.
"That's what he looked like?” Roo looked upward into the hooded face.
"Nobody knows what he looked like. There's only one picture, maybe not even contemporary.” Yet somehow this false craggy hero with only a virtual interior made it certain to Pierce for the first time that the man had, in fact, lived and died.
The monument was dated 1869. There was an inscription in Italian, and around the statue's base were scenes in bas-relief of Bruno's life (teaching his heresies, defying the Inquisition, being burned), and also a set of medallion heads whose significance Pierce couldn't at first work out. He expected Galileo, but couldn't find him. After some study he discerned that one of them was Peter Ramus. Ramus! Bruno's nemesis, the iconoclast, neo-Aristotelian, inventor of the outline. So these faces weren't Copernicans but victims of religious bigotry: yes, here was Servetus, killed by Calvin; and Hus, the Bohemian ur-Protestant. Tommaso Campanella, another Dominican, magician, utopian, who got out of the Inquisition's prisons just in time to die. Ramus, Pierce recalled, was murdered on St. Bartholomew's Night for being a Huguenot. How annoyed Bruno must be, to share a plinth with him.
Two young people at Bruno's feet, spooning (living young people, not bronze), looked up at Pierce when he laughed, or wept. Che?
"Bruno,” Pierce said, pointing up. “Giordano Bruno."
Ah yes. They nodded, looking to each other for more, getting nothing. They looked up at Bruno above them as Pierce might at a statue of Millard Fillmore in a public park. Just then Roo came up beside him, and she bore a trio of red roses, just bought at one of the flower-sellers’ stalls around them burdened with poppies and roses, oxeye daises, lilies and blue lupines. She put them in Pierce's hands. Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away. He took Roo's hand, amazed to see her eyes had filled.
"There,” she said.
* * * *
The next afternoon they went up through the Castel St. Angelo, as Pierce had done alone: Hadrian's empty tomb, the catacombs and tunnels now as harmless as a funhouse, laughing children in plastic sandals racing up the newly cleaned and plastered spaces lit with bright strip lighting, laughing at the underground dungeons and at the tub made for the fat pope, who was hoisted with that block and tackle to take his bath, no really; and up and out into the sunlight, all Rome around. There was an alfresco bar there, at the very top, fully furnished with bored waiters, Campari ashtrays, wooden tables under grapevines, and all other things. The prigione storiche, though, were gone: Pierce circled the tower twice to find the entrance he remembered, but time had closed it and hidden the door. There wasn't even a sign.
"Maybe it was someplace else,” Roo said.
"No. It was here. I can't understand.” He had told her how he had visited that cell, the cell that might or might not have been Bruno's, the stone bed, the high narrow window, the strip of sky. “It couldn't be anywhere else."
They had come around again to the same place, the arched way back downward, the tables of wine and coffee drinkers who pointed out at far places in the city beyond.
"I'm sorry,” Roo said, and took his arm, sad for him: but his own heart actually lightened, as though a window had opened within him, light airs allowed in, and old things out. Oh well, he thought: oh well.
"We'll ask,” Roo said. “We'll go back and start over."