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By Root 401 0

touched the tomb at Assisi, that it was all a lie, and how I only made friends in high school after I learned to gossip. I admit that I’ve always been a little bit jealous of Magdelena—the ease with which she seemed to glide through life, her social grace, her absolute trust in her catcher. And I tell her how I’ve always felt a little bit superior to Madre Pia, seeing as I’d long since figured out that God was an asshole and she, even after being born the wrong sex, didn’t seem to have a clue. I admit that I thought Dorothy herself was kind of a loser in her housedress and comfortable shoes, and that I’d cursed all the way to the garbage dump from behind the grocery store/tackle shop. I tell her about the time I stole the book on Christian symbolism from the punk house in Austin, no intention of returning it, stole from Magdelena the very camisole I now wore under my Sesame Street T-shirt. I tell her about Sacramento and the way my anger bubbled up from some unknown pit and spat blame at my fellow travelers. I tell her about the way I wanted to kill Magdelena in my dream, and how I faked the stigmata as a child, identifying not at all with the suffering of Christ. I tell her that I hadn’t really learned to fish at all this afternoon—that I’d begged those rainbow trout to let me catch them. When I’m done, the thick silence descends again and I don’t know what I’m waiting for, exactly, in the flickering candlelight. Absolution? Some prescription for 108 Hail Marys punctuated by a few Our Fathers?

When Dorothy opens her mouth, she has no recipe for my penance. “What do you think a saint is?” she asks. “Some kind of perfect person? Errorless? Someone who sacrifices themselves and makes the right choice for the greater good every chance they get? Read the lives of the saints. Every last one of them was flawed, scarred, quirky. They heard voices. They didn’t look great in their bathing suits. They had hair in the wrong places. They weren’t gods, Frankka, they were seekers like you and me. But they came to understand their destinies. I’m not saying you should try to be a saint—who wants to be dismissed that easily? But don’t imagine that your past needs to dictate your future. Do you remember Pavlov’s dogs?”

“Sure,” I nod. “They were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.”

“When a flood submerged Pavlov’s laboratory, not one of the surviving dogs retained a trace of its conditioning. Think about that.” Dorothy stands. “Will you be leaving to rejoin your troupe tomorrow?”

“Don’t you get it?” I say. “I can’t rejoin my troupe. I’m a fraud.”

She picks up the little tray of leftovers, carries them toward the door. She pauses at the threshold, turns to me, suddenly stern. “No, Frankka,” she says. “You’re worse than a fraud. You’re the real thing pretending to be a fraud.”

I take a single wool blanket from the cot I’ve been sleeping on, carry it out to the porch, down the wooden stairs, and across the soft ground to the flat granite rock at the lake’s edge.

Barbaro says my troupe needs me. I don’t believe him. But it’s true that I’ve been mourning something these last few days in the mountains. The loss of my fellow travelers, maybe, but more than that, I’m hungry for the stage. Each night when that last curtain fell on The Death & Resurrection Show, I stood in the dark and my performance grabbed me by the wrists, shook me hard, demanded an explanation for every way in which I’d failed it: the theatrical pause that should have stretched longer, the over-or underexpressiveness I’d managed to improvise in that circle of friends, the magic I came so close to imparting. Communication.

It’s strange to realize that that’s what I’ve been after all these years—some kind of pure symbolic communication, like the images in a child’s mind, uncluttered by the rules of semantics and polite society. If language was meaningless without a shared context, there had to be another way to connect. An exchange that could bypass the maze of rational interpretation. A Latin of the soul, maybe, mysterious and unknowable yet miraculously comprehended.