He looked troubled, and then rubbed my head as if I had just woken from a nightmare. I was struck by his effusiveness bordering on scorn. But no, of course he wasn’t my father, obviously, and I suddenly felt astonished with myself for even asking. I had seen something in his face that wasn’t there, or rather I had willed something into being with the help of a few drinks. We would laugh about it in the morning. Would he tease me about it? My babblings? I was too tired to be embarrassed. Likely he wouldn’t even remember. The night already seemed like a blur. I closed my eyes. I heard him get up, fill a glass with water, and place it on the floor beside my head. And I was already asleep by the time he climbed into his loft bed and turned off the light.

The next morning Clyde and I dashed through the pouring rain to Santa Maria della Vittoria to see Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa of Ávila. We wandered into the chapel, soaked through, to discover we were the only visitors. The sculpture was high up in its own niche by the altar and obscured in shadow.

“Why’s it so dark?” I wondered.

Clyde pointed to a small metal slot and a laminated sign that said 0.50 Euro. I fished out a coin, placed it in the slot, and a yellow light bulb clicked on at the top of the niche, bathing Teresa of Ávila in divine, incandescent light.

“There she is,” he chuckled.

We took a few steps back to get a proper view. My eyes first landed on the puckish angel holding the arrow and sporting a smug smile that seemed to say, That’s what you wanted; well, that’s what you get. And then they fell on Teresa, though it was hard to know at first what constituted “Teresa.” She looked like a crumpled piece of paper, her body completely subsumed into marble folds of fabric, merging into the cloud she was held on. As if her body were in the midst of some ecstatic sublimation, caught in the delirious abjection between subject and object, body and vapour. Merging with the inanimate. Hand and the water glass. Rolling in the bedsheets. Yes, I thought. I had touched that state for the briefest of moments. Could I enter it? Embody it? Give myself over to it like Teresa? After our allotted minute, the light flicked off and a maintenance worker struck up a vacuum at the far end of the church.