Spaces

Beneath the Dome that afternoon, she studies

reproductions

of Medieval and Renaissance paintings, with

accompanying text.

In the former, Jesus, Mary, plus glorious saints and

angels

bearing halos as solid and clearly-defined as hubcaps,

all

appear against a flat, opaque (and often featureless)

background-in a sense, because this cast is more

important than the secular world, there is no secular

world,

and they exist like figures painted on a wall, albeit

often a wall of gold and precious gems. But not much

later-say, the thirty years from Cimabue's Virgin

to Giotto's-scenes, like origami, open up.

By dozens of strategies that later will be codified

as "perspective," depth occurs: for the first time,

shadows; for the first time, railings running back,

with vases on them running back in recedingly

smaller size;

and, for the first time, the deific is grounded in

volume,

in an inventory: hounds and rabbits scamper

into "miles," into varicolored "distance"... . She

wills the neuro-vid to off. It's nearly dusk,

and through the Dome's translucent blueness

she can see the two moons sweep around

like snake-eyes in the sky. And then the Dome,

by planet law, opaques. It's Mars,

a thousand years from now. She sees the fiery trail

of the evening Earthbound rocket

scrape its orange on the deeply purple night, and

thinks

how many ways there are

to conquer space. And now she stores the paintings'

images

somewhere inside her mind-this mind

that they say is more interconnected than the universe

it's a part of-stores them

alongside her riled-up childhood days,

the man who hurt her once, the man who she hurts

now,

the baby whose bawling is tugging her attention

away,

the layered shames, the fears, the glow, the dream,

the death of that dream, then another dream, and

another.