He is on his knees at the foot of the cabinet. Face wet. Time sweeps its shadows through the room; wax vanishes into smoke. He thinks nothing; he is aware only of the body, its beauty, its supremacy. How to survive it. A pain, sharp, in his chest. Spreading. Arms eyes thighs head hands heart. Heavy. Full of your own living. The body watching. Knowing you. You stay there. Breathing. As hard as you have ever been. The windows half bright at four in the morning. Eventually someone will come, whoever takes care of this place, of the saint; he has to wipe his prints from the glass, the saliva from his lip. He shuts up the body, slow, eyes on the skull until. Gone. Key in the lock. A sigh behind the wood. The rest of the church jumping into place. Swallow. Slip out the door, down the steps, dew in the grass, sparkling against his shoes. He falls back into the ferns. A whisper in the branches. Help me. A shock of crows bursting from the leaves.

He rides his bike an hour into town, to the library near the university, where he checks out every book he can find with Pancratius’s name: Lives of the Saints, The Golden Legend, Jewels of the Catacombs. There are dozens of images, not only of the body but of the fourteen-year-old boy to whom the body supposedly once belonged, statues and etchings and icons showing the saint with a lamb at his feet or in his arms, smiling, blond, obedient. Xie in the woods, books open in the dirt, studying each page. How many millions of people have known Pancratius’s name, kneeled in his churches. How many believed he had existed and still did. In some way. A soul, a spirit, a body unbound by death. A channel to the sublime. All those believers calling on a boy for help, to cure a headache, a cramp, a disease, to destroy an enemy, to recall a wayward son. To simply. Intercede. Pancratius just one of hundreds of relics dug up from the Roman catacombs and displayed in churches all over Europe, bodies not dressed in armor like P., but draped in velvet and silk and lace, loaded with huge jewels, each bone encased in a fine mesh of gold or silver, the skulls adorned with elaborate wigs, fake eyes, painted lips, how could he not have known? That there was, for a few hundred years, a voracious audience for bodies like this, no shame, no secret, until the fashion for bones expired and almost all the relics were stripped of their treasure and destroyed or sold or hidden away. Lost. The books don’t say when P. came to the church in the clearing from his previous home in Switzerland; the last photo of the body was taken there, in an alcove beside the altar of a modest chapel in Wil. Every year, for two hundred years, the body was carried through the streets of his city; thousands got on their knees before him, crying out in joy. A festival. A feast. How many still know this story by heart. A boy on a road in Rome, refusing to lift his sword against a lamb, losing his head every time the story is told, again and again and again.