Chapter 19 #4
"It's Hebrew, it's deliberate, and five letters in, it's shaped like a name.
I won't call it until you bring me the rest — but Cat, listen.
Halos carry writing all the time. Christ gets his letters, saints get their titles, half of Tuscany ran fake Arabic around halos because it looked holy.
Inscription in gold is display — that is the entire point of putting words in a halo. You proclaim them."
She tapped the print once.
"Nobody cuts a word into a halo and then buries it. Hidden inscription isn't inscription. It's interment. There is no tradition of that. Anywhere."
"Well — to be fair, the whole underpainting got buried. The entire picture. The name's just more of the same censorship."
"True," said Tara.
"So whose name is it?"
"Give me an hour," said Tara, already up and pulling books, "and don't touch anything."
I drank the tea and watched her work. This is a thing worth watching: Tara at her shelves is me at my bench — the same reach-without-looking, the same total disappearance into it.
She stacked reference volumes around the prints and started a fresh page on her legal pad, writing candidates, checking, striking through.
The first strikes were brisk. Routine, even. Then they got slower.
Then they got harder.
Somewhere past the hour she stopped writing, and sat there with her pen off the paper, and I watched the delight come all the way off her face.
"Cat. Names leave tracks." She said it to the legal pad, not to me.
"They are the best-attested things in the ancient world — rosters, genealogies, amulets, graffiti on every wall from Alexandria to Dura.
Somebody scratches their name on everything, always, everywhere.
It is the most human act there is. A first pass in this office hits something.
A cognate, a variant, a cousin of the sequence. Always."
She turned the pad around. Columns of candidates, every one struck through, the strikes getting harder toward the bottom of the page.
"This hits nothing."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I don't know, and I need you to understand that isn't a sentence I get to use.
" She looked at the prints and back at me.
"It's five letters. It could break open when you bring me the rest. But Cat — I reached for every track this name should have left, and there's nothing there.
And I'm going to be up nights with why that unsettles me. "
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
Then she pulled a Post-it off the block, wrote on it, and pressed it into my hand.
"First five letters, phonetic. My best guess at vocalization — which is a guess; Hebrew doesn't write the vowels, that's half the discipline right there.
" The grin came back, most of it. "When the last letter's up, bring me everything, and we'll do something historic. "
I put the Post-it in my coat pocket, and it weighed nothing, and I felt it against my hip the whole ride home.
Thursday night he did his circuit.
Eleven o’clock, every night: he walks the block once, both corners, the alley, whatever else he reads out there that I’ve stopped asking about — twenty minutes, while I close down the studio.
The house feels emptier in those twenty minutes than it ever felt in the years I lived here alone.
That’s what living with him has done to me, and I’m not sorry.
I killed the work lamp. And then I stood in the dark next to the panel with the muslin in my hand, not draping it, because the streetlight through the basement window was lying along the halo, and the five letters stood up out of the gold like stitches in skin, and the folded square of paper was in my pocket.
I took the Post-it out. I unfolded it. Tara’s handwriting, little pronunciation marks over the vowels like accents over a doorway. A name with no tracks, she’d said. A name that isn’t a thing.
I wanted to hear what it sounded like.
I whispered the first two syllables. Barely voiced. Half a name, guessed at, four hundred years old.
The streetlight flickered.
And the Espositos’ porch bulb across the street. And Donnie’s blue television glow spilling down past my window, and the wash of the deli sign from the corner — every light I could see from that basement window dipped once, together, one beat, and came back up.
I stood very still with the Post-it in my hand and my heart going hard.
Old block, I told myself. Old wires. The lights flicker when the F pulls out of Avenue X. They flicker when Donnie runs his space heater and his television and whatever else Donnie runs. They flicker.
It has never once flickered all together, everywhere, on a beat.
I folded the Post-it small and put it back in my pocket, and I draped the muslin over the angel, and I decided, formally, with both hands on the decision, that I’d imagined it.
Through the basement window I could see the streetlight steady itself.
And under it, in the middle of the empty street, my security had stopped walking — dead center of the block, twenty feet of sightline from the laundromat, not looking at the corners, not looking at the alley.
He was standing absolutely still with his face turned up toward the lights, the way you look at a ceiling you’ve just heard a footstep through.
Then he turned toward the house, fast, and I stepped back from the window before I could ask myself why.