3. Over All

see sea saw
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

7.
Vivian cleans the outer room where they keep people who faint while waiting to visit the Pope. The dead-not-dead Pope. It is a holyplace, but they still come in with all that shit on their feet, pigeon dirt, old gum, they drop wrappers and leave newspapers. She finds things you would expect and things you wouldn't expect. Earrings. Lots of women come in and they put on the veil, take off the veil, earrings come off. Gloves in the winter, hats umbrellas, all the things you would find in a train station. Rosaries of course. Plastic throwaway ones that glow in the dark, beautiful ones bought as if jewels to tell prayers raised their honor. Old ones with beads smoothed and a little gummy from being used. Books, and not just holy ones. Sometimes she wonders if they bring them on purpose to tempt her. Romance novels, magazines with the silly skinny clothes only a young girl would try to wear. Science books. Comics that the children read and leave. People come here after they have been shopping and they set down bags and forget them. Mostly tourist things, they give them to the old Jewess on the steps who sells them again. But once she found a beautiful soft blue sweater, as light as sea foam and the same color. Father Betran said, never mind dear, and winked at her and she took it home. It was the first time she had taken anything for herself.


urns
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers

8.
The Pope's chamber is cleaned by members of the Pope's own order, they work quickly and efficiently in teams of three, dusting, sweeping, then scrubbing the walls and the floor. They put lemon oil on the door and lavendar and rosemary oil on the rail around the bier. They rub a myrrh paste where the glass lid seals into a cradle of purple heartwood and ebony.

Later Bertran comes in to see him. To see Him? He talks to him when he comes in, Hello dear Father. How is Your Holiness tonight? The light by the platform reflects up from lamps underneath the glass-bricked panel behind the rail where the pilgrims kneel, and the body glows like snow in starlight. They keep light away, it would damage that skin.

The bier is very cold. Instead of air, under the glass, oxygen has been replaced with a gas that is gentler on his cells. The final Pontiff breathes once or twice an hour. If breath is the right word. There is very little metabolic activity but chemicals still exchange into the torpid fluid that runs through him, through the cleansing machines below him, in the chilling chambers.

Bertran polishes the glass. He is the only one allowed to do that this year. There would be arrangements if he couldn't, of course. It is normal that for everything there should be more than one. Except of course the Pope. But for this he is like a part of the Pope, his agent active on the outside. Like a body, tending the flesh so the spirit has a place to call home. We are all part of His body, Bertran says aloud in the inhabited chamber.


breathe
(c) 2005 Beautiful Dreamers