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By Root 423 0

no one knew what to expect from Thad in Rome. On the plane I heard Allison tell Tommy she thought it was a bad idea to bring him. But Tommy had insisted he come. He was the one who had the most optimism about Thad’s future. Not that he wanted him to be a gladiator—Tommy wasn’t that crazy—but there are GSA jobs that require little training and almost no attention to detail. Water-keepers turn on the sprinklers and sometimes they give the crowd a jolt with the fire hose. Junior Camera Operators have monitoring equipment embedded in their baseball caps and move around the stadium so we get constant chaotic views of the arenas on various Web sites. Lockers lock and unlock the gates and train increasingly in the concept of the lockdown. But a bunch of those solid citizen jobs have been downsized, and there’s no way Thad could handle any of those tasks for even five minutes. I loved Tommy’s faith though, and how he took to Thad from the first.

We were surprised to find that Thad was quieter, more settled than normal while in Rome. Tommy and Allison bought him a full gladiatorial outfit—and not the plastic and polyester kind, but a beautiful thing in leather. The helmet and sword and shield were of balsa wood and he loved that. Sometimes he said his feet were on fire and he asked for water to cool them off, though we were in Italy in late April, and his feet felt only mildly warm to the touch when I’d help him pull his shoes off. In the outdoor cafés, he would reach underneath the table and pour glasses full of flat water or water with gas (sparkling water) on his sandaled feet.

For two weeks we didn’t hear a word from Thad about the future until I took him to the Piazza del Popolo, where we found a spot on some steps one afternoon. There he sputtered out predictions to anyone who passed by. A large American woman solidly lodged in a Roma Roma T-shirt cornered him and asked about a variety of friends and relatives of hers and I just didn’t have the heart to pull him away, he seemed so pleased to talk with her. Although there was some variety in his oracular responses—mostly about her family members who worked together in a recycling plant—he kept saying that this friend or that would die at sea. Finally she stopped him, held on to his arm tighter than I know he liked, and said, —We’re taking a cruise ship back to the States and you’ve just . . . named all of my friends on the ship.

Then she got up with this drowning expression on her face, saying she was going to convince her friends to change their reservations to air travel at once. How they would avoid the ocean, if they were on their way back to New Jersey, I had no idea. But in either case, it’s hard to put much faith in floatation cushions.

I thought about checking the news that week to see if a party of friends went down over or in the Atlantic, but I didn’t. Even though I know he can be off at times, it’s easy to get spooked by his oracles. This aside, I had good times in Rome with Thad, telling him stories to make the animals come to life in the Colosseum, expressing how beautiful it once was with the velarium fluttering overhead. We toured the baths and he liked this because he and Tommy often took baths together out in our converted garage, though he did keep asking where the water was. Of course Allison was all about Palatine Hill and talked a lot about the tile work and reincarnation, trying to decide which empress she must have been.

—It’s possible I was more than one, she said.

I sent a message to Mark about my favorite temple in the Forum built by the Emperor Antoninus for his wife, Faustina. In the eleventh century AD workers found it impossible to pull the columns of the temple down in order to put a church on the site, so they built the church around the columns. I thought this said something about love. Mark said I should watch my romantic backside. I said, —Okay, okay.

But you really have to surrender that entirely when you enter the Pantheon.

Allison was off shopping for a handbag that afternoon. Standing outside the Pantheon, the great doors wide