An Apartment with a View

I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling a windowful of God and Bernini. My neighbor, the Pope, has died and God overnight, has wept black mantles over the sainted stone age whose skirted shadows flit through to the main cave. I nurse a cold. It must be error to sniffle in sight of holiness. “Liquids,” the doctor said. He has no cure, but since I have my choice, I sip champagne. If I must sit dropsical to Heaven, let me at least be ritual to a living water. In the crypt under the cave the stone box in its stone row has been marked for months now. My neighbor knew where he was going. I half suspect I, too, know, and that it is nothing to sneeze at, but am left to sneeze. I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon and wish (my taste being misformed for the high authentic) I had a California—a Korbel or an Almaden. I like it “forward,” as clerics of such matters say, not schooled to greatness. It is loud in Heaven today and in the great stone school my neighbor kept. The alumni procession of saints is forming for him. Bells clobber the air with portents. I sniffle and sneeze, wad kleenex, and sip champagne, trying to imagine what it might be to take part in a greatness, or even in the illusion of something like. The experience might deepen my character, though I am already near the bottom of it, among wads and butts of what was once idea. And the last swallow I do not like the after-taste, if that is what I am tasting. But this is ritual. I toast my neighbor: may he find his glass, and may its after-taste be all that he was schooled to.