“Yes—right now, we’ll be right out,” he called, pushing Francis in front of him. Just before they reached the gate Balthazar glanced back at the altar. Then, smiling apologetically, he fumbled for his keys and opened the door.
“Cleaning,” he explained, letting the young woman pass. She nodded, wiping her eyes with a tissue, and went inside. A moment later they heard a soft thump as she settled onto the kneeler in front of the altar.
“Well?”
They walked quickly, slowing only when they reached the main corridor. Balthazar stopped at a doorway and leaned against the wall, rubbing his forehead and trying to calm his thudding heart.
“It’s a Sign, isn’t it?” Francis was saying, his tone low and urgent. “I mean really, nobody will deny it—it’s a Sign, a real Sign! When you show the others, they’ll see—”
Balthazar took a deep breath, then nodded. “Yes. Of course: it’s a Sign, you were right, Francis, it’s a Sign. No doubt, no doubt at all.”
“Righto!” Francis exclaimed, his voice exploding with relief. He clapped his hand to his shirt pocket, and nodded to where a placard announced that the cafeteria was now open. “So now, now something’s happened, I mean all this time and now something, a Sign, they can’t deny that—”
Balthazar let his breath out in a long sigh and shook his head. “No, Francis, of course not, no—”
“But then—Balthazar, what does it mean?”
The hallway funneled into another corridor. Balthazar felt a familiar dull throbbing behind his temple, saw at the corners of his eyes the blurred lightning that always presaged a migraine. He bit his lip.
“Anything,” he said in a low voice, rubbing his temples. “It could mean anything.”
Francis lowered his head to whisper conspiratorially.
“But really,” he said. “We’ll know, right? What it means? What’s going to happen now?”
“We’ll know,” said Balthazar, plucking a tiny lozenge from the engraved silver pillbox he carried in his breast pocket, “when She—or Somebody—is ready for us to know.”
And silently they joined the line snaking into the cafeteria.
Everything about the Divine was turning out to be stranger than I had expected. The dining hall itself was a bizarre affair, another grey Gothic ivy-clad building with rows of gargoyles glaring down from parapets and turrets and balconies. The building would not have looked out of place in fourteenth-century Nîmes; its gargoyles had been created by the same master carvers who spent years working on the National Cathedral. Unfortunately, inside the place was much more mundane. I found a table in the dim far corner, across from the coffee machine. I sat and ate quickly, embarrassed to be alone but also terrified that one of the other students might engage me in unwanted conversation. When I finished I fled to my room.
Outside, the sun had dipped below the Shrine. It was my first night in the city; my first night away from home. The sky was glorious, indigo and violet and gold, and there was a warmth and sweetness to the air that I could taste in the back of my throat, burnt honey and car exhaust, and the damp promise of a thunderstorm charging it all. I walked slowly across the Mall, alone save for one or two hooded figures I glimpsed pacing the chestnut allées beneath the Shrine’s eastern tower. I finally halted atop a small hillock where a single oak sent shadows rippling across the grass.
From the Shrine’s bell tower came the first deep tones of the carillon calling the hour. I turned, and saw in the distance the domes and columns of the Capitol glimmering in the twilight, bone-colored, ghostly; and behind it still more ghostly buildings, their columned porticoes and marble arches all seeming to melt into the haze of green and violet darkness that descended upon them like sleep. City of Trees, someone had named it long ago; and as I gazed upon the far-off buildings and green-girt streets my heart gave a sudden and unexpected heave, as though someone nudged it.
I felt something then that has proved to be true. You have a first city as you have a first lover, and this was mine. I had read about the traffic, the poverty, the riots; the people living in boxes, the Dupont Circle crazies and the encampments of bitter veterans at Lafayette Park.
But nothing had prepared me for the rest of it. The tropic heat and humidity, so alien to me that I felt as though my northern blood was too thin and my grey eyes too pale to bear the burning daylight. The purple-charged dusk cut by heat lightning; the faint and antique glow of marble buildings.
And everywhere, everywhere, the trees. Crepe myrtles and cherries and white oaks, princess trees and hornbeams and pawpaws, horse chestnuts and trees of heaven and the humble flowering crabs, and the scent of magnolias mingling with that of burning paper and the soft white dust of the streets. For all its petty bureaucrats and burned-out storefronts, decaying warehouses turned to discos and the first yawning caverns that would soon be the city’s Underground: still it all had a queer febrile beauty, not haunting so much as haunted. As much as Delphi or Jerusalem or Ur, it was a consecrated place: its god had not yet come to claim it, that was all. And that first evening I was seeing it all for the first time. But I knew then, with that odd certainty that has come only a few times in my life—when I met Oliver, and years later when I first saw Dylan—that my life would change irrevocably when I walked away from the shadows of that tree and returned to my room. I recalled the words of the poet of another place—
But at that moment I hoped for nothing else, nothing but stars blurring through the violet smog and the faint echoing laughter that rang in my ears as I watched the Shrine fall into darkness, as the first tentative cries of students and locusts rang out to greet the night.
I returned to my room, exhilarated, no longer deviled by fear and loneliness. I bought two beers at the Rathskellar and carried them in paper cups to the dorm, drank them while sitting on my bed. Then I peeled off my sweaty clothes and wrapped myself in one of the new cotton sheets my mother had bought for me. Almost immediately I was asleep. I had no clock set up, and so didn’t know what time it was when I awoke in the middle of the night, too hot and terribly thirsty. I sat up, groggy and disoriented; then froze.
There was someone in the room with me. Two figures—I could see them standing by the door, tall black shadows with heads bowed and extraordinarily long arms raised to their chests, like praying mantis. They seemed to be hunched over. But even so they were tall, too tall to be anyone or anything even remotely human. They had been talking about me, their voices had awakened me. Now they were silent.
I was too terrified to move, only clutched the sheet to my breast and tried not to breathe. Behind me the window was open—I could feel a warm damp breeze stirring, and hear distant thunder—but I knew I had closed it before I went to bed. By the door the two figures remained still. I slitted my eyes, afraid that they would see that I was awake, be moved by the reflection of starlight in my pupils to reach for me with those horrible arms. Still they said nothing, only stood there unmoving, watching, waiting.
For hours I lay rigid, my breath coming hoarser and shallower as I tried not to breathe at all. Until finally I realized that somehow I must have fallen asleep again. I sat up, gasping, the sheet sliding through my fingers.