Joseph Andriano

from The Circe Experiment

Albany, NY, Mid-December 2000

Eddie DiCaso started seeing Poe’s ghost the day after Circe first appeared in the backyard. He thought that couldn’t be a coincidence. As cats often do, Circe immediately decided she belonged there. She was a gorgeous black cat with angora-soft fur and bright yellow eyes. Lauren wanted to call her Tituba, but her name was in Eddie’s head as soon as he’d seen her. Lauren quickly agreed to it, seemed impressed even that he’d come up with it. That may well have been the last thing about him that impressed her.

So they took the stray in, and the very next day, when Eddie walked into his study he saw a shabby square-headed, mustachioed man seated at the desk writing. At first he thought it was an intruder, and darted to the phone to dial 911. But then he saw Circe’s fluffy tail curling up in front of the stranger’s chest; she was sitting rear-lifted on his lap demanding affection, her body mostly blocked by the desk. The stranger looked at Eddie (who by now had recognized him) and started to speak, but as soon as Lauren came in the room he vanished, causing a startled Circe to plop into the abandoned chair.

Eddie wasn’t exactly obsessed with Poe, as Lauren claimed, but he did feel an affinity. Like Poe, he had to make his living as an editor, since his free-lance writing didn’t pay the bills. Since he did most of his writing late at night, he was usually sleep-deprived. So it did not totally surprise him when he started seeing the writer’s ghost. Nor was this his first clue that he needed help. That’s what Lauren kept telling him, right up to the day she dumped him. But Eddie needed to believe the ghost was real, since it said things to him that he knew he couldn’t consciously make up. He didn’t always actually see the ghost, sometimes he would only hear Poe’s voice.

The next time Poe appeared, Circe was rubbing against his baggy worn-out pants as he stood next to the bookcase, stroking his mustache and shaking his great head at Eddie’s pathetic attempt at a library. Eddie wanted desperately to believe the ghost wasn’t really there. He had been working too much and sleeping too little. It was therefore likely that the cat was really just rubbing against the bookcase (actually a hand-me-down hutch serving as one); Eddie and Lauren had seen her move just that way before performing her one trick—opening the hutch’s cabinet door with her paw. But Circe seemed to see the ghost. And, unlike Eddie, she always got plenty of sleep. Poe couldn’t also be her hallucination.

When Eddie started sleeping a little better, he saw Poe less and less, until most of the time he could only hear his voice. He understood, however, that a merely auditory hallucination was no less cause for concern. Better to believe the voice was real, and Poe was choosing not to make himself visible. It wasn’t until a couple of nights after Lauren dumped him that Eddie finally responded to the voice. He’d lit a fire in the fireplace and sat up late in the living room poring over the galleys to his book about the lake monster, and he started nodding out over the laptop. Poe whispered to him then:

“We used to call it burning the midnight oil. What do you call it now?”

After deliberating for a moment, he decided to reply. “Doing whatever I can,” he said aloud, “to keep Lauren off my mind.”

“She doesn’t hold a candle to Lenore, does she?”

“At least she’s real.”

“You’re writing about the wrong beast, Eddie. This will not expel Lauren from your head. Not after the beastly thing she did to you.”

“I couldn’t come up with that load of shit. You must be real.”

“She’s only been gone two days, and look at you, with your phone attached to you wherever you go, waiting for her to call and tell you she’s coming back. You’re pathetic. You call that loss? Let me tell you about loss.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” God, he thought, I’m glad no one is around to hear me.

“No, only her voice, that’s all you want to hear. Didn’t she make it perfectly clear, Eddie?” I just can’t live with you anymore, you’re in total denial. I told you if you refused to get help I would leave.

“Talk about denial, she’s the one denying what this is really about. That bullshit about me having a sleep disorder.”

“You’re better off without her, Eddie. But she should not have taken Circe, you know. Don’t worry, though, she’ll be back. The cat, I mean. As soon as she finds a door. She wants to be with you, with us. In fact, she led me to you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“As I’ve told you before, you’re carrying my soul. I need to roll with you until you die.”

Eddie shook his head, as though that might clear it, shut his laptop, and he stared at the fire dying in the fireplace. Those fading embers put him for a moment in a trance, but it broke when he heard a soft knock at the back door. He tried to get up to look through the purple curtains Lauren had left behind, but he was frozen still. The paralysis did not terrify him; he figured he must have dozed, and this was the familiar petrifaction of REM sleep. The knock came louder.

“Hello?” he shouted from the chair. “Sorry, I was nodding off, and your knock was so soft I hardly heard you.” As if in response, the knock came louder. That did it, he bolted from the chair. It couldn’t be REM sleep, then, since he was able to move—unless, of course, Lauren was right and he did have some sort of sleep disorder. He looked out the window, thinking maybe he should call the police. Who would go around the back to visit at this hour? No one. Or nobody who meant him any good. Who would even be out on this frigid December night, now hiding in his backyard? Wondering if he had locked the gate, he opened the back door just the length of the little chain that he knew any burglar could burst. Nothing there but the blackness of the woods beyond the layer of moonlit snow covering the backyard.

“Lauren?” he rather stupidly asked the darkness. “Is that you?” His voice echoed in the yard. That’s it, I must be dreaming—there was usually no echo effect in the yard, although it was possible; there was practically a wall of oaks at the back edge of the lawn. If I’m dreaming I might as well go to bed. He had this strange feeling Lauren was there, maybe she hadn’t dumped him after all, maybe she was lying right next to him in bed. So he headed for the bedroom, hoping to see his dreaming self snoring next to her. The bed was empty. As he turned to leave, he bumped into an open dresser drawer, groaned in pain and while cursing he noticed in the dim light from the hall something black and shiny in the drawer. Don’t tell me she left behind some underwear. He slammed the drawer so hard it woke him up. And found himself at the backdoor again. That’s what I really slammed, so now I must be awake. He locked it, then went to check to make sure the front door was also locked.

Now there was a tapping on the front window, next to the door. Grabbing the poker by the fireplace, he opened the door slowly. “Who’s there?”

A sudden black flutter startled him. Had he let in a bat? No, it was a bird, a big crow, crashing against the walls and ceiling. “What the hell?” He opened the door wider in the hope the bird would fly back out. Instead it alighted on the coatrack and perched on Lauren’s old peacoat, left hanging there. She meant to take it although she hardly ever wore it anymore, but in her haste to get out of there as quickly as she could, she’d overlooked it. Or maybe she purposely left it so she would have an excuse to return? Panties she wouldn’t come back for, he thought, but a coat she might. The crow stood, grotesquely, right on top of the collar. The coatrack, hanging coat, and perching crow now together resembled a hunchback scarecrow.

The frigid air made him close the front door. Obviously I’m still dreaming, he thought as he sat back down and found himself smiling. He addressed the dreambird. “Is there some sort of message here? You look pathetic. Your plight can’t be worse than mine, can it?”

“Can it!” croaked the crow.

“Is that all you can do, echo my words?”

“Not quite, not quite.”

“Okay, this has to be a dream. Maybe it’s all a dream, maybe Lauren didn’t really dump me, maybe she’s sleeping right beside me. Maybe she’s about to wake me up. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Not quite,” croaked the crow, “not quite.”

“So what are you saying? It’s partly possible, right? Okay, she’s not about to wake me up, but she is sleeping right next to me.”

“Not quite.”

“What then? She’s gone forever? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? I need to get on with my life, right? I need to forget her. I need to move out of this frozen wasteland and head south.” The crow just sat there, nodding its head. “So you agree, then?” Nothing, not even a squawk. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Maybe that’s it, I should sic the cat on you. Circe! Where are you, kitty? I’ll go get her.” Once again, he couldn’t move. “Oh that’s right, she’s gone. Lauren took her.” Circe would have been no match for a crow anyway, her hunting skills pretty much limited to moths and mosquito-hawks. Eddie tried to move again, just to see if he could. His bones seemed nailed to his desk-chair. Atonia, Lauren had called it. You’ve got some kind of narcolepsy, she told him. You really need to see a specialist. “But I don’t suddenly fall asleep in the middle of a sentence or anything.” I know, but you’ve got the other symptoms. Hypnagogic hallucinations. Attacks of atonia when you should be able to move, then seizures in REM sleep when you’re supposed to be immobilized. It’s like your motor neurons get stuck, and when they unstick they shoot off like firecrackers. It’s the seizures that are scaring the shit out of me, Eddie. You’ve got to do something about them. “What seizures? I don’t know what you’re talking about. No, this is a simple case of falling asleep in my chair, I’ll wake up any time now, won’t I?”

“Not quite.”

“So that’s it, huh? The extent of your vocabulary? Whatever happened to ‘nevermore’?”

The bird cocked its head like a puzzled dog. “Nevermore?”

“Yeah. That’s the trigger for this dream, isn’t it? Or is it that documentary on intelligent birds I watched yesterday on PBS? Are you one of those crows that drop nuts on busy city streets so cars will run over them and crack them?”

“Crack them? Hell no, I no longer need to eat.”

“I’m going to force myself awake now, and you will be gone.”

“Begone? I’ve only just arrived, thanks to you! But if you insist . . . .” The crow suddenly fluttered into a black blur and flew to the bookcase. Alighting on top of a large winged-gargoyle candle-holder, he bowed and pecked several times at the thickest book on the shelf just below him. He took off again, now coming right for Eddie so fast his beak seemed a rocket, his flickering feathers its black exhaust. Right at Eddie’s chest. Expecting great pain, he screamed and woke himself up, and no he was not in bed with Lauren by his side, he was still in his chair, slumping, sliding, no longer paralyzed he gently hit the floor rear-first. Sitting there a moment staring at the bookcase where he had just dreamed he’d seen the bird, he noticed that the book he’d thought the bird had been pecking at was missing. That odd monstrosity of a Poe-volume he and Lauren had found in New Orleans. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in Italian. Cute, he thought. Lauren must’ve taken it, and maybe I saw that black rectangular hole when I was awake but it didn’t quite register, so the dream informed me. But why would Lauren take the book? She hates Poe.

His heart was pounding. Seeking fresh air, he struggled himself erect, stumbled to the front door. Outside, he took a deep breath of the cold dry air, which seemed to help his heart slow down. He took a quick look around the neighborhood, the usual winter wasteland of Albany suburbia, mountains of dirty ploughed snow in the moonlight. I’ve had enough of this, he thought. There was no reason to remain here now, Lauren was not coming back, and she was the one who wanted to stay near her huge extended family, wallow in that stagnant gene pool. There, that’s the way to get over her. Think nasty.

Back inside now he went right to the bookcase and searched the whole thing for the missing volume. It was definitely not there. He looked through the various piles of books and papers in his study. No sign of it. They’d found it in an old bookstore on Chartres Street, in New Orleans, when they were down there vacationing, bought it for a song because it was stained from flood damage. The crown-quarto volume had been published in Venice in 1889 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Poe’s original collection. The book’s editor, Paolo Panetta, was a professor of comparative literature who claimed in his Intro that Algernon Charles Swinburne had personally introduced him to Poe’s work. Eddie treasured the book not so much for its contents, loose translations of the tales (so Lauren, who was fluent, had told him after reading the first one or two), but for its value as a quaint and curious volume, and now as a precious artifact of his relationship with Lauren. Maybe she viewed it that way too, and took it as a remembrance. Yeah right.

He remembered how annoyed she used to get when he asked her to translate more of Panetta’s scholarly introduction. See, she lectured, you should’ve learned the language of your ancestors. He only knew a smattering he had picked up from his grandfather, Donatello DiCaso, who changed his name to Donald Chance after he gave up bootlegging in the 1920s. “At least I changed the family name back,” Eddie had said to Lauren, who thought he didn’t pay enough attention to his roots. The name-restoration was just lip-service, as far as she was concerned. She herself was very proud of her Dutch roots. Perhaps Eddie should not have made the crack that her gene pool had stagnated in Albany for centuries, while his was healthily splashed all over Sicily and Calabria, from which his grandparents had come to upstate New York only ninety years ago.

Roots! “My great great grandmother,” she told him shortly after they had met, “once loaned Herman Melville’s widowed mother Marie Gansevoort $100. We still have the IOU.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Laurie, this proves we were meant for each other! When I was in high school and college I had a summer job cutting grass at the Albany Rural Cemetery, and I used to mow the Gansevoort plot! In fact I ate lunch one time on Melville’s mother’s tombstone. It was very comfortable. Small world.” Of course even back then he was dimly aware that this connection really showed how little they were meant for each other. He was peasant-stock, while she was connected to old Albany Dutch colonialist money. That had to be another reason why she left, not his so-called disorder—what did she call it? RBD—REM-sleep Behavioral Disorder, that’s what she thought Eddie had. That’s what had driven her, she contended, first from his bed, then from his house altogether.

She claimed that he often punched the headboard, occasionally even her pillow, just missing her. He routinely kicked her in his sleep as well—even on the new king-size mattress she bought. Then she started claiming the bruises on her arms and legs were from his thrashing limbs. But he still believed she had exaggerated the problem as an excuse to leave him. Your brain-stem neurons are misfiring, Eddie, you’re not being properly immobilized during REM sleep. What made her such an expert? She was a comparative literature professor, not a psychologist. He’d felt properly paralyzed during the dream he just had. But only part of it. Remembering Lauren’s dresser in the dream, he went into the bedroom, now that he knew he was completely awake, and opened the top drawer. Sure enough, there was something left forgotten in the back corner: rolled up black underwear. Just like in my dream, he thought, how weird. Picking it up and stretching it out by the waistband, he recognized the satin thong he had bought for Lauren last Valentine’s Day, but in which he hadn’t seen her in months. So I must have been sleepwalking when I saw this earlier. She’d probably left it on purpose, a souvenir of more passionate times.

He remembered those times, how they would often fly to New Orleans, where his brother Robert and Lauren’s friend Cecca both lived. The sultry climate made them horny, and they would spend many hours making love under the ceiling fan in Robert’s guest room when he was at his restaurant working. Only after such satiating sessions could he tolerate the inevitable French Quarter shopping. Sometimes he would just let Robbie take her, but the time they found the Italian Poe book he was glad he’d come. The bookstore had a Siamese cat living there, a large fixed male named Carpetbagger that would sit on their laps and lick their hands while they read in the old easy chairs provided here and there among the tall stacks of used and occasionally rare books. He was fluffy with crossed blue eyes and a purr that wouldn’t quit. A large black and white photo posted near the cash register depicted him with his head and half his body inside a woman’s large purse, and below the photo the caption read, All bags subject to feline inspection. Carpetbagger followed Lauren all over the store, and as he stretched, hoping to be stroked and scratched by her cat-loving hand—his long body up against the bottom stacks in the foreign-language section, where she’d been seeking a first edition of a Calvino book—his forepaw accidentally knocked out the tome. “He’s always doing that,” said the shopkeeper. “Don’t feel obligated.” She wagged her forefinger at the cat. “Now Baggie, let the customers make up their own minds.” A joke she would never tire of, Eddie could tell.

“Look,” said Lauren. “It’s your favorite writer—in Italian. Racconti grotesci arabesci.”

“As you have often reminded me, I can’t read it.” He didn’t want the heavy book to weigh down his suitcase. But Lauren had to have it after the shopkeeper told them that she had inherited all the Italian books in the shop from her great uncle, who had emigrated to New Orleans from Sicily around 1880. “He couldn’t even read the books,” she said. “He kept them because they once belonged to his dead brother, one of the few members of the family at the time who could read and write. My uncle was superstitious and worried that Paolo’s ghost might haunt him if he did not take care of his books.” She pointed at the editor’s name. “That’s my great uncle Paolo.”

“He edited this book?” Lauren asked. “Are you sure you want to sell it? Isn’t it a family heirloom?”

“I’m not sentimental that way,” the shopkeeper replied. “And I’m not superstitious.” She quickly rang up the cash register.

Eddie couldn’t stop wondering why Lauren had absconded with the book. It wasn’t just hers. True, he hadn’t really thought much about it since he had discovered that it contained an extra tale. At first he was excited, but after Lauren translated some of it, he knew it could not have been by Poe. Panetta had obviously written it and included it in the collection as a hoax. Just as Eddie’s interest had waned, Lauren’s apparently had waxed—she would be more interested in some obscure Italian Poe scholar than in Poe himself.

Now he put the book from his mind so that he could return to his own work. He was almost ready to send the revised galleys to Crypto Press. Then he would quit his job editing the local rag, get out of town for awhile. Decide whether to put the house on the market. He needed to visit his fairy brother anyway. He’d put it off long enough. His plan was to stay in Robert’s house for a few months and bide his time, see how Little Lake Monster did. Maybe the book would be his “Raven”; make him famous, if not rich.

As he reached for his laptop he heard a scratching at the door. Can’t be the damn crow, he thought. He was wide awake and he recognized the scratch. He opened the door and sure enough, Circe sauntered in. It was definitely her—the horseshoe scar on her nose was a dead giveaway. And she miaowed in a series of plaintive cries whose variations in pitch and volume he instantly recognized. So Lauren didn’t take her after all? Where had she been for two days? Or did Lauren have second thoughts about taking her and just drop her off? No sign of anyone, no car driving away. She rubbed up against him and he stroked her soft black fur. He lightly tugged on her furry jowls and felt that her ears were cold. She was perfectly healthy. Why would Lauren take the cat and then return her?

“She didn’t, Eddie.” Poe’s voice again. He was bending down and stroking the cat. “I told you, I knew she was nearby. I told you she would find a door. You do know, of course, that black cats are all of them witches. That’s why Sissy and I called her Circe. You see she’s completely black, no white tuft on her breast, no white tips on her toes. The blackest, smartest cat I ever knew.” She did a figure-eight walk around her two Eddies. “We think we’re so smart? Let me tell you, my friend,” turning to Eddie now that sad haunted gaze, “the line that demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man is a dotted one at best. It is both arrogant and ignorant to think that animals don’t think. Take my Circe now.” He picked up the cat and put her on his shoulders. “She used to curl around my neck like a living stole while I wrote, and when she got annoyed with all my painstaking revisions, evidently of the opinion that the visions she transmitted to me should be transcribed without my editorial interference, she would go off in a huff toward the porch.”

Eddie was stiff with fear, knowing without question that he was awake. “Are you saying that Circe is your cat?”

“You’re not too quick for one still among the quick, are you Eddie? Do not mistake me, I don’t mean that this cat dictated my tales to me. Speech and writing are not of her gifts, as that idiot Cooper would’ve put it.” He put her down, and she slunk off to the kitchen, in search of food. Her dish was still in there, with some old dry food Eddie hadn’t bothered to pick up. “Circe is a conduit, a gifted medium. Visions would come to me through her from I know not where, and when I tried with my pen to make them mine, off she would leap, gouging my shoulder in the process, to check for mice on the back porch. The door, however, was always closed. Undaunted, she would spring up and cleverly unlatch it with one paw while pushing with the other. How I loved to watch her swing triumphantly through that door! Indeed I know now, she opened many a door.”

Eddie decided to call Lauren’s cell-phone.

***************************************************************************************************************************

Ill-fated and mysterious man!—bewildered in the brilliance of thine own imagination, and fallen in the flames . . . .

Again in fancy I behold thee!

—Edgar A. Poe, “The Visionary”

Venice, 1591

Gliding in a gondola down the Grand Canal, Filippo wasn’t in the least dazzled by the great palazzi on either side of him. Having seen them from far above, he knew they weren’t so grand. Nor did he even marvel that he had been asked to come and stay with a nobleman, to teach him the art of memory and magic. After all, it wasn’t the first time a “great one” had requested his tutelage—there had been the French king and the English queen and the emperor in Prague. At least now he was much closer to home, even though Venice seemed a world away from the foothills of Vesuvius where he’d been born.

As the Rialto loomed ahead in the mild June afternoon, the gondolier was telling Filippo all about the new bridge. The magus was only half-listening to the details about the contest for its design, thinking instead of how its previous incarnation’s rotting wood and faltering drawbridge had been to him, fourteen years before, an emblem of his own precarious position—and now it stood transformed, a marketplace over the Grand Canal, arched on solid stone like a temple, if only to Mammon. Perhaps, thought Filippo, I too will soon be transformed, my body a temple to the thrice-great one, a bridge to infinity.

“When I was here last,” said Filippo to the gondolier, “I wouldn’t walk on the bridge, for fear it would collapse.”

“It did collapse once, long before we were born, Signore, in 1440-something I think it was, with the weight of the multitude. When were you last here, Signore?”

“The plague had just ended. I only spent about six weeks here, conferenziere for Domenico Venier’s academy. It was the year of Tycho’s comet, ‘77 I believe.”

“I never saw it. First it was cloudy, then I was . . . convinced I shouldn’t look at it. A thing of evil, my father said.”

Che peccato, Signore. I too thought it a Sign of the Times. Now I know better.” They glided under the bridge. Emerging from its shadow, looking straight up at it, Filippo thought it seemed a bit top-heavy. “I hope it doesn’t topple,” he said, and was grateful that the gondolier was now shouting and laughing to one of his cohorts who happened to be rowing by, after which he fell silent, perhaps finally realizing that his passenger was not a mere tourist. He was a scholar, docente universitario from Padua. The gondolier probably assumed this skinny scholar was in Venice again to give some boring lecture. Best to leave him alone; he needs to think.

Truth to tell, none of his other royal sojourns had ended quite right. Filippo had an unfortunate knack for falling out of favor, but passing under this new bridge—now wasn’t this a good omen? The top-heaviness was merely an illusion, in this city of illusions born in the multi-colored flicker of light on dark water. But still he must be careful. So here he was incognito, using his baptismal name rather than his nom de guerre (notorious in some circles), seeking out counsel from the one person in Venice (other than the bookseller Ciotto), whom he trusted: Veronica Franco. All of those superlatives he had wasted on Queen Elizabeth should have been Veronica’s. Not that he was in love with her; a successful magus must never kneel in the mud of devotion. Rather he must convert the amorous lust-bond to Eros, from matter to spirit. To spirit through matter as Veronica herself had done, but never by bonding herself inextricably to a man. He knew that she could advise him well about the nobleman’s invitation, for she had done so fourteen years before when she had exhorted him to curry favor at Henri’s court.

He had first noticed her, conspicuous as the only woman in the audience of one of his lectures at Venier’s academy, but he didn’t actually meet her until that day in Ciotto’s bookshop, where she had gone to see how her book of poems was selling. Again she was the only woman in the place, indeed one of the few cittadine he had seen on the campi and calle, most of them watching the world go by from balconies. Conspicuous indeed, the honored courtesan/poet a brilliant red star in a constellation of pale dimwits, like that poetaster cafone Maffio Venier, who happened to be in town for the election of his kinsman to doge. Maffio also happened to be at the bookshop when she walked in. About two years before, shortly after her book of poems had been published (unfortunately just as the plague was beginning to spread), he had written some scurrilous obscene satires against her, claiming that her kind were the scourge of Venice, worse than the plague, if not in fact responsible for it.

“Ah, Signora, you survived the plague,” Maffio said, sounding somewhat disappointed.

“Our war is over, Signor Ven—” She smiled wickedly. “I almost used the noble name you have so profaned, scusi. Signor Venereale, there, that’s a better fit.” Glancing now at his pathetic attempt at courtly attire. “Better than those bombastic galligaskins too, I see Rome has bloated you. Here,” she said, handing him a book. “All the sword-thrusts that demolished you are in here.”

“No, gracie, Signora Ver unica puttana.” He spat that last word, the saliva landing on an old tome on a stool against a bookshelf.

Filippo had to interpose. “Scusi, Signore, but would you call a lady a whore?”

Maffio glared and swatted the air with impatience, as though he had been interrupted by a fly in his face. “Would you address your better, barbone?” His hand now on his sword.

“I am a scholar, Signore.” And a real poet, he would have added, now.

“You dress like a homeless vagabondo. Now why don’t you go wander somewhere?”

At that point Ciotto interposed with some receipts he showed to Veronica. Maffio pivoted so his sword swiped Filippo, who backed off and continued scanning the shelves, looking for anything of interest he may not have read. Ciotto handed Veronica some money. “I sold twenty-two copies, Signora. Not too bad, considering.”

“Gracie, Ciotto, this will help. You know my house was robbed while I was away, and my brother is dead from the plague, and now I have his sons to take care of, in addition to my own children. And the servants who stayed behind are demanding compensation.”

“Too bad your days of charging fifty scudi are over,” said Maffio, still turning to go.

“Allow me to thrash him, Signora,” said Filippo, as close to chivalry as he was ever to get.

“Do so and you’ll be crossing the Bridge of Sighs, with this sword up your culo.” He waved it awkwardly. “Buona sera, Signor Ciotto. I leave you to this haughty harlot and her scrawny defender.” He swaggered out the door.

Veronica got in the last word, albeit muttered. “Ver unico ironico, your end will be.”

How did she know? Filippo wondered now in the gondola, continuing down the Grand Canal. Don’t forget to ask her. I thought nothing of it then, but now I know how he died, and it is ironic: Five years ago, of the French pox, and he a holy man, a prelate. Doubly ironic, since he had called her syphilitic in one of those satires. She has a gift. My magic and her clairvoyance together could work wonders. I hope Ciotto gave her my letter. Or perhaps it wasn’t clairvoyance but a curse, she cursed Maffio and caused his pox. Does she have the power?

She had not been all that impressed with Filippo’s chivalrous defense in the bookshop, as she was obviously quite capable of defending herself, and had apparently already done so in print, in her Terze rime. In any event, she nodded at him and smiled, bowed to him, kissed Ciotto’s cheeks and left. Over a glass of wine, Ciotto told him all about her: how she had been, before the plague, the most honored courtesan in all of Venice; indeed only three years ago, Henri of Valois, on his way to be crowned King of France, stopped in Venice, and amid the excessively lavish welcoming ceremonies, chose her out of a book of miniature portraits, and sneaked out into the night incognito for an assignation with her.

Filippo had no idea at the time that five years later, in 1582, he would also befriend this king. But whereas Veronica had given him instruction in the Art of Love, Filippo would teach him the Art of Memory, knowing full well of course that a monarch remembers only what he chooses to. He would eventually choose to forget Filippo—at least until Filippo fixed his memory with magic, although not quite as the erratic magus had intended.

You see this, Filippo? As they lay naked together Henri showed him a miniature enamel portrait of a woman with breasts bare and lips pursed. This is the Queen of Courtesans. I wish I were she! Filippo recognized Veronica from his brief visit to Venice in 1577. I know her, he said.

You know this courtesan? Did you take her as you have taken me?

No, I could not afford her, even then when her price had fallen. But her image now links us all three together.

The enamel portrait became a powerful talisman, catalyzing the chemistry between the wandering magus and the androgynous king. But it was volatile chemistry, quick to evaporate.

And now, thought Filippo in the gondola, Henri’s been dead these three years or so, assassinated by a frenzied friar. Symmetry there—his body stabbed by one Dominican, his soul damned by another. All right, not perfect symmetry: I am defrocked. In what brat’s little head does Henri’s spiritless soul now gradually awaken, imagining, if my magic worked, a red-headed beauty with a heart-shaped face, broad brow and pointed chin? Perhaps this incarnation has brought him a better mother than that murdering Medean manipulator Catherine de’ Medici. No matter, only Veronica’s image will survive the deep waters of Lethe. If only Henri hadn’t spurned him; he was going to use Veronica’s image as Henri’s guardian angel to help raise his soul to a higher level. But Filippo reneged.

He wondered how mad Veronica would think him, if he told her how he had used her image. Perhaps, in return for the guidance he felt he needed from her now, he should offer her the same gift he had offered Henri. And of course he would never undo it, as he had with Henri. He discarded me, and I did something a magus should never do, I worked a spell out of spite . . . .

The gondolier was pointing to his left. “Palazzo Mocenigo, dottore, You wanted me to show you. There it is.”

“Grazie, grazie.” So there was his latest temptation. Unless Veronica could convince him otherwise, that stately palace, its upper shuttered windows (with their tiny rounded arches) shaped like dark monks, would be his home, at least while he was the guest of Zuane Mocenigo, who thought he could learn natural magic from him but who would only come under his power. What he would do with that power he was not quite sure, but perhaps he could manipulate the patrician to wield his influence so that Filippo could obtain a permanent position at Padua. The chair in mathematics was still vacant. When those Paduan pedants came to realize the necessity of returning to the magic power of numbers taught by Pythagoras, they might finally begin to accept the newest philosophy informed by the oldest, the natural magic of Filippo Nolano, which would then be able to rise up and take its rightful place in, nay to save! the world. Some may call it messianic megalomania, he thought, but they forget, or remain hopelessly ignorant of what I have discovered, that this is only one of innumerable worlds. In another world I may not succeed, I may already be dead, convicted of that murder they tried to pin on me, or beheaded for spying, burned for heresy. But in this one, I glide down the Grand Canal seeking my soulmate, my Veronica.

The year of the comet he hardly ever saw, Venice was so cloudy that November, fourteen years ago. And cold too, he wished he had a fur-lined Schaube to wear instead of his worn-out cloak. Better than the friar’s habit, although he wished he could have told Maffio he was a monk, just to see his face. After another glass of wine with Ciotto, who assured him he would carry his book, The Signs of the Times, when it came out, Filippo, warm now from the wine, left the shop and walked north from the Rialto toward that cross-shaped terra-cotta church, San Giovanni Crisostomo, where he had heard was Bellini’s last painting, of fellow scholar St. Jerome. A benediction was in progress when he got there, however, so he decided to walk around the neighborhood a little, to look for the Corte Seconda del Milion where Marco Polo once lived because he liked the story of Marco Polo always talking about the millions and millions of jewels in the East so incessantly that it earned him the nickname Marco Millioni. But I have out-millioned you, Marco, and my jewels are worlds, not merely millions and millions, but innumerable worlds in infinite space where I travel every night unlike you who only sailed half a world away. So talking himself out of it, he turned back after reaching only the first Corte. He passed by the church again, the service was still going on so he continued north on the salizzada, even though he knew he would eventually have to turn around and gradually wend his way back south through the Venetian labyrinth toward his room near San Marco. When he came to the San Giovanni Grisostomo bridge, he stopped as something black caught his eye to his right, standing out against the white pillared balcony of a house on the narrow rio. It was a cat precariously balanced on the ledge, rubbing itself against the central pillar. Suddenly the cat was falling, and Filippo thought he saw a broomstick jutting between the pillars, then retract into the house. Had someone poked the cat off the balcony? It fell with a plop into the canal, and was now struggling to stay afloat. A woman, obviously a servant, appeared at the doorway above the canal and, seeing Filippo on the bridge, cried “Aiuto! Aiuto! Signore, please, our cat has fallen from the balcony. She’ll drown!”

Filippo had neither love nor scorn for cats, but he certainly recognized an opportunity. So, darting down the ten steps leading from the bridge, and pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, he plunged headlong into the canal. A gondola was nearby, the gondolier attempting to row to the cat’s aid was coming fast like a black sea serpent, but in the process of maneuvering to avoid hitting the building he created a wave that drove the cat farther away. He tried offering the cat his oar, but all it did was flail and wail, finally losing its battle to stay afloat. The cold quiet waters were closing placidly over their victim. Diving underwater Filippo was able to lunge at the sinking shadow and grab it. Resurfacing, he felt its claws pierce his arm and shoulder as it clung to him for dear life, and the gondolier cheered “Bravo, Signore, bravissimo!”

As he emerged soaking wet from the canal and climbed the stairs back to the bridge, the servant, now joined by her mistress, came running around the corner and up the bridge to meet him. “Twice in one day, you have come to my rescue,” said Veronica with a smile that stopped his shivers, but not the cat’s. “Only this time, I really did need you.” She gently extracted the cat from Filippo’s arm and shoulder, carefully removing one paw at a time. “Poor poor Persephone, see what happens when you try to balance on that ledge. This gentleman had to rescue you. Please, come into my house, Signore. I will find you something dry to wear. Far be it from either of us to deny fate.” As they walked off the bridge and turned onto the Salizzada San Canciano, Filippo wondered if he should mention the broomstick. They led him under a sotoportego and into a courtyard, then to the backdoor of the canal house. Entering, he decided not to mention it in front of the servant, who after all may have been the culprit.

Filippo followed Veronica into the kitchen, where she placed the cat on the side-table to endure the maid’s ministrations with towels. The poor creature was so wet and scraggly it resembled a mop dipped in tar, but it seemed to have survived its fall unscathed, except for a red gash across the nose. “My dear Persephone,” Veronica cooed, now taking over the rubbing and scrubbing as the cat began to purr. “Did you scrape past a gondola’s ferro before falling into the water?”

“I think she did that to herself,” said Filippo. “Scratched herself when she was flailing, trying to climb the very water.”

“I am in your debt, Signore. You pull a cat out of the canal like a magician pulling one out of his cloak.” To the maid: “Ancilla, are you sure Persephone just lost her balance? Did you see her?”

“Certo, Signora. What are you suggesting?”

“Bertola is at the mercato, is she not?”

She was avoiding her mistress’s piercing eyes. “SX Signora.”

“Bertola is my superstitious cook,” Veronica told Filippo. “She hates cats, especially black ones, I know she thinks I’m a witch and Persephone’s my familiar, or at the very least a bad omen, she calls her Malocchio, she says there are too many cats in Venice and maybe they carry the plague.”

“Rats carry the plague, Signora, not cats.”

“Oh? I was told it was courtesans.” She took the cat, still wrapped in the towel, to her bosom. “So you weren’t pushed, then, were you my sweet one?”

“I saw her slip off the balcony, Signora,” Ancilla assured her. Filippo’s mouth opened to speak, then closed. He thought it was not a good idea to get involved in a dispute involving servants; and besides, he was not at all sure what he had seen.

“Va bene,” said Veronica. Let me find you those dry clothes, Signore.”

Filippo never made it back to his room that night. Instead he slept with one of Venice’s most famous courtesans. Though since the plague she had fallen on hard times, she still had a soft luxurious feather-bed and wore a red satin nightdress. Her modest house was filled with sons and nephews and servants, but her bedroom was sacred taboo to them (even though they knew Filippo was not a paying client), and he returned for several nights thereafter, talking with her long into the night.

He told her that he did indeed aspire to be a magus, but that did not mean pulling animals out of hats, cloaks, or canals. It involved no sleight of hand or trick of eye, but the creation of bonds, links, vincula. Strategies of manipulation, whether of atoms or of minds, or even worlds. Back then, he had not worked out all the details yet. But even now, after almost finishing his essay “On Magic,” he knew it was no mere coincidence that he should rescue her cat, for a bond had formed between him and Veronica at the bookshop, and he had simply, quite unconsciously, followed the link and plucked Persephone from the dark waters of the Rio San Giovanni Grisostomo.

The next afternoon, he sat with Veronica in the parlor while she told her son Achiletto all about the rescue. She sat with her son on a divan under a magnificent portrait of her, painted by Tintoretto just before the plague had descended. Across the parlor in a chair, Filippo studied the image. The broad forehead and bright brown eyes evinced great intellect, yet the blushing cheeks and pursed lips were vivid with sensuality. She wore hoop earrings tied with bows of red ribbon, a sumptuous pearl necklace, and a crimson gown with tight silk bodice so low-cut that the frills of her linen camicia failed to quite cover her nipples. Indeed between her lovely breasts her right hand held the dark blue scarf (draped loosely over her shoulders) away from her left breast, deliberately exposing it.

“You were very fortunate, Signora, to sit for Tintoretto.”

“Certo, Signor Nolano, but he flattered me excessively, outdoing nature. I am not nearly that handsome.”

“Oh Mother,” said Achiletto, “don’t be so modest, it ill becomes you.”

“Your tutor will be here any minute, dear. You’d best go prepare your lesson now.”

After he left the room, she said, “Actually he’s right. It really is a perfect likeness, it captures exactly how I was, before the plague. When I first saw it I wondered for awhile whether it was a painting or an apparition set before me by some trickery of the devil, not to make me fall in love with myself like Narcissus, but to make me miserable when my skin finally wrinkles and cracks long before the oil in the painting. When I grow older and poorer, an honored courtesan no longer.”

“Ah, Signora, that is cause for cheer, not melancholy. Hundreds of years from now, people will look upon this painting, and they will marvel at your beauty, the curve of your brows, the intelligent expression.”

“Now you flatter me, Signore.”

But he didn’t have to, for she had already let fate guide them to her chamber, where that night they played her favorite love-game, Jove and Danae. Unlike Henri, Filippo got to be Jove. Afterward, she told him how with Henri the roles had been reversed. “We played strip and switch,” she said. “I ended up in his regal garb, including the most bejeweled codpiece I ever saw, and he in my satin petticoat and tight-bodiced gown. You know, I hear the Council of Ten is planning to pass a law prohibiting courtesans from dressing as men to attract, well, the sort of man Henri is. Since the plague, you know there’s all this talk about Venice being Sodom. But three years ago all the doge and his patricians cared about was pleasing Henri. And please him I did, he loved our little game.

“Even though I flattered him in a letter and a poem,” she’d said, “called him Jove descending down to my humble roof, the truth is Henri worships me. I’ll write to him on your behalf. I’ll give you a letter to take to him in case he doesn’t get the one I send. If all goes well, he’ll be expecting you.”

“You astonish me with your generosity, Signora.”

“I believe in any man who would dive into the canal to save a cat. Now tell me about your book.”

That was the first book. In fourteen years there had followed many more, but only a few of them could be found in the bookshops of Venice. Apparently Signor Mocenigo had found one of them at Ciotto’s and asked if he could get him in touch with this cabalist, this magus Filippo Nolano, who he hoped would teach him the secrets of his magic, in turn for which Filippo would be lodged in comfort in Palazzo Mocenigo. Ciotto had found Filippo in Frankfurt and said he could arrange a meeting with the patrician. But Filippo was wary about returning to Italy, where he had run afoul of authorities both secular and sacred several times before, and since he was known to have dallied with Protestants in England and Germany, he would at the very least be found guilty of heresy by association. And if they actually started reading his books, then he would truly be undone, having gone far beyond Copernicus—leaving not only the geocentric universe behind but the heliocentric one as well, envisioning an infinite number of centers. Which really amounts to a universe without a center, without a Lord, but one filled no less with divinity diffused through all matter in the continuous act of creation and transformation. But worse than the pantheist heresy, he rejected the notion that an infinite God would condescend to become a finite being, for he, Filippo Nolano, knew the heroic frenzy of a finite self linking up with the infinite. There had been a time when he thought he could unite the warring factions of Christianity by convincing them, through his lectures and books, to return to the ancient Hermetic religion they had abandoned, but now he knew only magic would do it, the kind of magic Christ himself could work, for he had been a wizard, a master manipulator, a magus of the highest order who had indeed tapped into the infinite source.

So now Filippo was incognito, testing the waters. Seeking sage counsel from his counterpart, Veronica.

“Here we are, Signore,” said the gondolier behind him, deftly manipulating his oar to turn. “San Samuele.” He paid the man, stepped upon the fondamenta, and started walking toward his fate.

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