Michelangelo_s Notebook

7

The man sat in full uniform in the empty room. It was nothing more than a cell, really, with bare white concrete walls, a gray-painted wooden chair and a single small opening for ventilation in the far wall, always closed, always covered, even in the heat of summer. The only furniture in the room was an army cot and blanket in one corner, a chair and a long table for his work, a combination draftsman’s lamp and magnifying lens clamped to one corner. It was the only light in the room-the only one necessary. He did not read there, or eat there or do anything else there except sleep and sit in his chair, working. Sometimes he thought for long periods at a time, but any thinking he did could be done in the dark. There was no sound except the hollow thunder in the distance and the rustling noises of small animals and mad things that could just as easily be in his overburdened mind.

He stood and went to the heavy steel door in his room. First he made sure all the locking mechanisms were in place and then he undressed slowly, hanging each piece of his uniform on the brass hook on his door. His boots he took and placed neatly at the end of his army cot. When he was completely naked he returned to his chair and sat down again. He saw that he was hard but he ignored it. He’d had no one to share his passion with for many years, so it was better to simply disregard it.

He reached out, picked a fresh pair of surgical gloves out of the box on his table and ran his fingers over the thick, carved leather cover of the immense, heavy book that sat in the absolute perfect center of the table.

The motif of the cover was simple and explicit, one of the first such things he had attempted: a deeply carved cross, lines radiating out from it like beams from a star. Hanging upside down was the Virgin Mother, hands nailed to the upright, legs spread on the crosspiece, revealing her agony at both her crucifixion and the birth of the only child she would ever have-a child born ascending, not to earth, but to his place beside his Father. God’s child, his power killing her even as she died willingly on the cross to bear him, never to know the immensity of what she was birthing. The wonder of him and the fury, his commitment to a just and true revenge for the world. The naked man prayed briefly to the Mother then opened the book to the last page he had been working on and began a new verse.

Since it was the first of the column it would need to be illuminated as in any Bible. He opened the small glue pot, and, using his finest brush, he drew a faint line of the thin, sticky liquid along the penciled outline of the letter. He blew on it carefully then used a block of gold leaf, sliding a single sheet off the block with a cotton swab to cover the glue line.

He waited patiently, letting the tissue-thin leaf set with the glue, then used a wider and softer sable brush to remove the excess gold. He’d already chosen the color he would use for the interior of the letter: copper red, just like the girl’s hair, like the smell of fresh blood on a hot summer day, the way it must have been so long ago.