A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice Page B

postcard.
    The terrace was larger than the entire suite and the bellhop informed them in broken English that heads of state sometimes held banquets on it.
    After his mother had drifted off to sleep, Stephen would rise from his bed and pad silently to the sliding deck door.
    From the edge of the terrace, Stephen breathed in the city from a safe distance. Five stories below, the melodic pump of European dance music drew Stephen’s attention to the throng of Roman teenagers gathered on the Spanish Steps, jiggling to their handheld stereos.
    Their allegiances shifted easily, boys and girls drifting from group to group. Their laughter echoed up the Hassler’s façade. Boys groped girls visibly, even from the height of five stories.
    Herded with the other tourists through the Vatican Museum, Stephen and Monica wound their way down the corridors leading them through a labyrinthine series of frescoed rooms. Stephen became frustrated. And then all of a sudden, as they trudged through a single doorway that seemed to promise another empty library and unimpressive frescoes, they landed beneath the ceiling of one of the greatest works of art ever painted. Monica watched the reactions of surprise all around her as, one by one, the members of their group found themselves stepping into the Sistine Chapel.
    Stephen moved deep into the crowd. He found a clear spot on the The Falling Impossible
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    floor and lay down on his back to stare up at Michelangelo’s ceiling with a wonder he had last felt watching summer sunsets with his three best friends.
    A security guard had to ask him three times to get up off the floor before he complied, his eyes still on Adam’s pointed finger.
    At night, Stephen and Monica descended the Spanish Steps. To steady her, Monica would reach one arm out awkwardly and Stephen, his mother’s well-trained child, would take it and support her without being asked. While exploring the winding streets, Stephen would suddenly feel his mother’s hand in his, and he would leave it there. He was the escort—the male Conlin who had not died.
    As Stephen tossed a penny over his shoulder into the Fontana di Trevi, he caught the open gaze of a beautiful Italian boy sitting amid the guitar-playing students next to the fountain. The boy looked at Stephen with what Stephen realized was fascination tinged by lust.
    Jeff Haugh saw Carolyn Traulain’s obituary in The Times-Picayune. He was working that summer as a stock boy in his father’s office supply company and was leafing through a discarded copy of that day’s paper left in the stockroom. He sat sweating and smelly on top of a stack of shipping crates staring dumbly at the brief paragraph sketching his old drama teacher’s entire life, noting her few survivors. He knew he couldn’t attend her funeral. She had died thinking the worst of him and it was now too late to correct the misunderstanding that occurred outside her office.
    He got a pair of scissors out of the supervisor’s office and clipped the obituary from the paper.
    left looked up Stephen’s address in the Cannon directory before driving to the darkened, shuttered Conlin residence on the corner of Third and Chestnut Streets in the Garden District. He slid the clipping into the mailbox attached to the wrought-iron front gate and noted how much bigger Stephen’s house was than his own. A peculiar sensation burned in his stomach as he held the spokes of the front gate with both hands.
    The night before they were to board a flight for New York, Stephen asked Monica how she had met his father.
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    A Density of Souls
    The question surprised her. “At a streetcar stop. I told you,” she said flatly.
    They were eating dinner at the Hassler’s rooftop restaurant. Monica had allowed Stephen several glasses of red wine, which had slightly stained his teeth and tongue and left him peculiarly curious.
    “I know that. But I mean . . . what happened after that? You just met and then what?”
    With her food