Bridge of Sighs

dirty, but the building’s owner, a friend of Dec Lynch’s, had let Noonan have it for nothing so long as he didn’t throw parties or drag in bums off the street. His friends envied him having his own pad until they saw it, after which they couldn’t fathom why he preferred sleeping on the cold, hard floor to a nice, soft bed in his parents’ home. Only Sarah had immediately seen the beauty of it. After spending the better part of an afternoon scrubbing the rear windows, she’d set up an easel there. Noonan would later come to think of it as his first studio, though it had been someone else who’d painted there. One thing he was sure of: if he hadn’t moved out of his parents’ house he never would’ve dreamed the cathedral, and if he hadn’t had that first powerful dream, he never would’ve become a painter.
    The cathedral was more vivid than any dream he’d ever had, including the ones that involved sex. Lacking narrative, it had felt more like a vision. He couldn’t even be sure how long it had lasted. In dream time it had felt like hours, but he knew that in reality it had probably lasted no more than a minute or two, as the sun streamed in on him through the tall, clean windows, causing his eyelids to flutter and him to swim toward consciousness. He remembered being aware that he was asleep, of both wanting and not wanting to wake up. Awake, he could share his vision, and he didn’t want to be the only one to see something so beautiful; but if he woke and called to somebody—maybe Sarah, who’d love it—the wondrous cathedral might disappear. Something told him it would, so he wandered from room to room, breathless, on the verge, simultaneously, of joy and tears.
    Cathedral? That was as close as he could come to characterizing the place, which he sensed was not of this world. Its vaulted ceilings were impossibly high, the arched passageways leading between its chambers numberless. It would take years to explore them all, and he wanted nothing more. Not food or drink or love or anything he’d ever tasted in his life so far. In each new chamber he was torn between wanting to stay where he was, to commit every detail to memory, and the even stronger impulse to move on, quickly, from one breathtaking wonder to the next, to discover where each new passageway led, to map the entire cathedral, if something so vast could ever be charted. Though all one building, it was the size of a city, of twenty cities. You could spend a lifetime going from room to room and maybe never again revisit the one you were currently in. Some of the passageways were so narrow he had to turn sideways, others so low he had to crawl on his hands and knees, but each new chamber was bathed in a golden light so soft and radiant that he could feel his heart contract within his chest at its terrifying beauty.
Remember this,
some inner voice kept whispering.
Never, ever forget.
    But that wish, he’d realize later, had been the first sign of wakefulness, and as soon as he opened his eyes the dream began to recede, dull reality assuming its place. He knew that when he fully awoke it would be Saturday, and that afternoon he’d play his final football game of the season. Football! What could be more foolish? Panicking, he tried desperately to fall back asleep. The idea that he might never find the cathedral again—he never would—was in that moment unthinkable. The dream’s orgasmic intensity still seized him, even half awake, though he already was thinking of it as a dream, not a real place. He’d glimpsed the miraculous and then, just that quickly, it was gone. He wanted to weep and never quit. In a matter of a few actual minutes, all that remained was the dream’s aura, the tingling sense that something marvelous had happened and now was gone forever.
    Even at sixty, Noonan could feel his fingertips tingling at the memory, probably because no painting had come from the dream. That first one had come too soon, before he had any idea of what use he would put it to. Each subsequent dream would be a gift, again filling him with wonder and gratitude, though each would also be less intense than the last. That made a kind of sense, he supposed. As he matured as an artist, his power increasingly derived from discipline, from skills honed by habit, and he had less need of inspiration, if that’s what the dreams were. The paint gods were frugal. They gave you only what you needed. Last night’s had been a pitiful thing, the faintest