* * *
He is on his knees at the foot of the cabinet. Face wet. Time sweeps its shadows through the room; wax vanishes into smoke. He thinks nothing; he is aware only of the body, its beauty, its supremacy. How to survive it. A pain, sharp, in his chest. Spreading. Arms eyes thighs head hands heart. Heavy. Full of your own living. The body watching. Knowing you. You stay there. Breathing. As hard as you have ever been. The windows half bright at four in the morning. Eventually someone will come, whoever takes care of this place, of the saint; he has to wipe his prints from the glass, the saliva from his lip. He shuts up the body, slow, eyes on the skull until. Gone. Key in the lock. A sigh behind the wood. The rest of the church jumping into place. Swallow. Slip out the door, down the steps, dew in the grass, sparkling against his shoes. He falls back into the ferns. A whisper in the branches. Help me. A shock of crows bursting from the leaves.
* * *
He rides his bike an hour into town, to the library near the university, where he checks out every book he can find with Pancratius’s name: Lives of the Saints, The Golden Legend, Jewels of the Catacombs. There are dozens of images, not only of the body but of the fourteen-year-old boy to whom the body supposedly once belonged, statues and etchings and icons showing the saint with a lamb at his feet or in his arms, smiling, blond, obedient. Xie in the woods, books open in the dirt, studying each page. How many millions of people have known Pancratius’s name, kneeled in his churches. How many believed he had existed and still did. In some way. A soul, a spirit, a body unbound by death. A channel to the sublime. All those believers calling on a boy for help, to cure a headache, a cramp, a disease, to destroy an enemy, to recall a wayward son. To simply. Intercede. Pancratius just one of hundreds of relics dug up from the Roman catacombs and displayed in churches all over Europe, bodies not dressed in armor like P., but draped in velvet and silk and lace, loaded with huge jewels, each bone encased in a fine mesh of gold or silver, the skulls adorned with elaborate wigs, fake eyes, painted lips, how could he not have known? That there was, for a few hundred years, a voracious audience for bodies like this, no shame, no secret, until the fashion for bones expired and almost all the relics were stripped of their treasure and destroyed or sold or hidden away. Lost. The books don’t say when P. came to the church in the clearing from his previous home in Switzerland; the last photo of the body was taken there, in an alcove beside the altar of a modest chapel in Wil. Every year, for two hundred years, the body was carried through the streets of his city; thousands got on their knees before him, crying out in joy. A festival. A feast. How many still know this story by heart. A boy on a road in Rome, refusing to lift his sword against a lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.
* * *
As soon as his father is in bed Xie is out the door. Lightest wind against his neck. Quick over the mossed log on the stream, through the fence, jump into the soft dirt of the bank and up. Feet snapping through the undergrowth. Full moon. Hands out to feel the trees as he passes, gentle slap against the trunks, fingers slipping over the dark knots in the white wood. Birch eyes. Watching you. Boy in trashed jeans, hood up, a mile in ten minutes. Breathless. Brush of leaves against his face. The light from the church a gem on the slender branches, brighter and brighter, until. There. Deep hush inside. Candles lit, flames straight, white wax piled on the iron shelf beneath the painting of the Virgin, her eyes averted. He takes the key. Open the cabinet. Some sweet scent. All around. Palm to the wood, then to the glass. Warm. Let me look at you. The skull’s cool grin. Nest of gold. Look, then. So quiet. The way it grows around you, this space, the air, time itself, as if you are something. Harmless. Belonging. Here. Cheek against the case, both hands, hips. A burning. Delicious. Rocking against the glass, small tide in your body, building, no one can see you, it is you who are seeing, who can see, how beautiful he is, how right you always were, about this, to want it, the shape of the body the shape of desire itself. Then a sigh, not yours; a caress, gliding up your spine:
Beloved.
* * *
Not a dream. His voice. From above, from below. Xie jerks back, staring. The face in the case the same, the body the same, not moving but something is moving. Inside and out. The sudden heat, the smell of bone, of earth, the stone, the moon against the windows, and P. like all these things; a fact. Xie turns his back on the body, palms to his eyes, panting. Will it hurt you? The air contracts, gathering everything to a single unbearable point, in your head or outside of it, it doesn’t matter. Look at me, beloved. You are not imagining it. It is imagining you. Xie opens his eyes. Whatever you see when you turn will ravish you, destroy you. He turns. As slow as he can. Look. P. waiting. Luminous. Being. Xie shakes so hard his teeth snap down on his tongue, blood at the back of his throat. Whimper bouncing off stone. You could go out, now. Shut up the body, key in the lock, the door closing behind you, why not. Imagine life wandering off in a direction other than the one before you. But you don’t imagine. You get on your knees. Head and hands against the glass. Flesh humming beneath that dark gaze. Close your eyes. Hard swallow. I’m here.
* * *
You come every night, all night, one week, two, living only at the edges of every moment spent elsewhere; in the library with Karen, at the meetings with FKK, at the table with your father, even in the woods you are waiting to be with the body. Knees black from kneeling. At the glass falling asleep for seconds at a time, sublime exhaustion, the night an infinite cocoon. The voice doesn’t come again but you sense it, all around. Waiting as you are waiting. The idea takes shape inside you, wordless; you don’t need the voice to tell you what it wants, what it demands. You know how to break a pane of glass. How to hide your face. How much this body weighs: one hundred pounds of metal but only fifteen pounds of bone.
* * *
He works in the garden. Tearing out the old dead plants, making plans for raised beds, a cloche system to protect the vegetables in winter; he wants the entire square of earth transformed. He lets his father tell him what to do: weed, haul the dirt, unroll the mesh wire, hammer the nails. Turn the compost. He lays the seeds for broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, chard. Knowing that when they grow he will have to destroy them, in part or in whole, the dilemma of taking life something becoming vegan didn’t solve, that nothing can solve; in the scheme of existence, where does the plant fit? The mink? The trees? Xie? The body? Why does one thing have to take a place above the other, any others? He doesn’t know. Trying to feed himself, his father, in the least ugly way; it seems possible, at this moment, that he can figure out how. A slim string of calm from the bones to you, from you to this. Make something. So that when he comes it is beautiful. You’ve been going out at night, Erik says, dragging a bag of dirt to the fence. Not a question. Yeah. Where to? Just. Shrug. Woods. Doing what? Xie sinks a seed into the earth. Um. Walking. Walking? Yeah, just. Around. Is it safe? Erik asks. Why wouldn’t it be? I don’t know, something might be out there. Xie shakes his head. There’s nothing out there. Well, could you stay in tonight? I’ve got a job in town and I’ll be gone until dinner tomorrow. Xie nods, casual, despite the shiver that runs through him. Sure. They raise the last bed onto its trestle, Xie driving the final nail into the pine. Squinting in the dusk. His father’s hand on his back.