The road to St. Michael’s is still fleshy opaque Carpathian forest. Zosi sighs with relief as Honest, Honest? fades in Hermes’ rear-view mirror. I watch its treacherous orange glow lose its potent glare but never its luring power. He leans comfortably against the headrest and closes his eyes, grateful to return to his blissful oasis.

  My space-time defiant friend hovers above the backseat next to me. The harpies dart toward it curiously before returning with a zinging zip to the shelter under the collar of my coat or, more annoyingly, into one of my ears. They don’t like the way it tugs on their wings when they get too close. They glare at it nastily from afar.

  The sky darkens a few shades as we keep driving away from the city and as we escape its timeless grip, night finally rolls over us like a blessing.

    “It hasn’t been this bright yet,” he says almost weakly.

    “What?”

    “The rupture.”

  I lower my head to look out his window. Its light spills over our legs in a harsh cut of ghostly white.

  Cloudless now, the second monument to perpetuity gleams in the velvet heavens of the in-between. It gleams above the dense shadows of trees framing the road. A bright and shattered dash of stellar light. A scar of day and night in St. Michael’s and a permanent marker of the city’s horizon. A bright comet rushing toward the ground, ripping itself apart and hurling the pieces in shining bold dashes. Self-destruction as an explosion of glimmers. Dust and fiery rock.

  Faint twinkling stars breathe across the strip of bolt. Cloudless but I haven’t learned much. I watched spirit collapse. I watched space - unreconcilable, as if at odds with itself. Seeing it in the sky again reminds me the collapse can’t stop - it goes on and on. Immortalized in blazing glory and shining agony.

    “I should go see the old woman.”

    “Which one?”

  Fair enough.

    “The one who built a ladder to reach the rupture. She should know.”

    “Oh,” Zosi turns and his eyes are sculpted silver icons holding vigils, “but she didn’t make it.”

    “No, but she the only one who almost did.”

  Out of all of us, I want to say, but I don’t. I’m knee-deep in the aftermath of the collapse. I see how it crunches and transfigures everything in oder to patch itself back together. I see it struggle to heal and restore. Almost desperately, instinctually. Mindless, it might be searching for pieces of itself in an attempt at self-preservation. But it grows ever-hungrier and it knows it can’t go back to the beginning. To the beginning - before space and time and nothingness.

  To the root of it all.

    “You don’t think Lilian had anything to do with this?”

    “No.”

  His teeth chew at the inside of his cheek. “That spook seemed at odds with you. When’s the last time you saw him?”

  In his downtown club, breathing like a heartbeat. Never getting tired of the eternal party, the eternal throb of dance floor lights, seizing in electric hues. The dreams of the dancing bodies and all of their lost heat. Like him, they go on and on.

    “Not too long ago,” I say. “There’s nothing in it for him. But he understands more than me. Talking with him might help, too. He did lend us a hand, in his own manner.”

    “I don’t know. That’s what the flyer’s for, then. To find your way.”

  He can't shake the sight of the man, slumped against the ouch, hollow. 

  I used to wonder about being holy and clean and going on without ache. About what stops someone from becoming the best they can be. Maslow’s pyramid and all that, you know. But I know the inspiration finds him anywhere.

  Watering flowers under the ever-clear sky, when it has the sheerness of diamonds and the thinnest hint of clouds. When he’s stacking apples into buckets and carrying them into the kitchen for compote-making. Remembering the sweet-sour taste of caramel-coated apple slices on September afternoons. When he walks out to see the sunrise after the usual sleepless night and it’s faint and too quick. The despair doesn’t get him dizzy. It’s some nameless need lodged in his throat. It makes him grip the sink when he sees his mother’s freckles ghosting across his face. I think it kills him but I don’t really know what it’s like for those with the call.

  He’s seen him once. Diamond Michael with his dark strawberry-blown hair, wavy down his shoulders like the middle of a summer sunset. Zosi was still tiny and barely spoke and Michael was working under the sun and asked him for a cup of water. And all Zosi got was an illusion. No wonder he won’t settle. He’s seen holiness and maybe more than that because he hasn’t moved since.

  But I miss the taste of cigarettes and I’ve made my decision. Zosi can have his light and his guidance. And I’ll keep trying to find the root of all darkness.

    “You don’t have to come with me.”

    “I’d like to see the old woman and her ladder. Might find some interesting things on the way there.”

  We’re Spinoza’s two-faceted monism - looking for the same confirmation in different ways. He wants to collect stray saintly bones on the way there. Put their bodies back together. He’s hunting for the fragmented remains of the first gods. The ones who’ve gone blind and mute. The ones who dream about the oldest secrets. But the in-between isn’t fond of giving them up.

  Maybe their wisdom is so fundamental, it’s shattering. Maybe we’re simply not able to grasp it. Or, worse, maybe it’s something we’ve built ourselves.

    “Fine.”

    “How’d she build it?”

    “Out of wood,” I say plainly.

  Zosi laughs in a string of interrupted whispers. “You made a joke, philosopher. It might be the end of the world, after all.”

  I scoff and I think of the bird, waiting for me in its little circular cage. Knowing when I’ll arrive. Waiting and maybe willing to divulge some hint to this awful riddle.