Nine Minutes in the Capulet Vault

11:51 PM

THE BELL

I am iron in a tower over Verona in the rain. I have nine, and I am counting, and I count them in the vein of a girl who is not dead tonight, though every soul in town has agreed upon the story, and has written the story down. There is linen at her jawbone. There is rosemary and dung and the bell has not yet rung.

They have laid her with her cousin, who is four days into rot, in a cellar full of Capulets who wanted what they got. There are candles going sideways. There is water on the stair. There is one thing in this cellar that is breathing, and it's her, and the drug is coming off her like a glove comes off a thumb, and the bell has not yet rung.

11:52 PM

JULIET

The cold returns before the fingers do. I count my hands. Two. Count my breaths. They come. The friar's draught goes out of me the way a tide goes out, from the outside toward the heart, and I have lain here forty hours in linen with my cousin going soft across the aisle and rosemary packed hard against my jaw to keep the smell of me from telling truth.

Awake. Not risen from the dead. Awake. Mark that distinction, since the town will not. I never died. I only did the sums.

A girl in this republic has three doors. The husband. Or the convent. Or the grave. I did not care for two of them. The third I did not care for either, so I borrowed it, and I intend to give it back by morning. Death is the only carriage in Verona they do not stop and search at the north gate.

11:53 PM

JULIET

Now. Sit. The blood goes down into the feet and stings there like a hive. Good. Let it sting.

Inventory. The knife inside the shroud. Nine ducats sewn along the inner hem. My mother's ring, which I will sell in Mantua to a man who will not ask, and will not pay me what it's worth, and will not need to. The north wall, where the mortar has gone soft. A horse, if the friar's boy has any spine. No horse, if he has not, and then I walk. I have walked farther for a worse idea.

Nine minutes till the watch comes round the wall. That is the whole of what I have. Nine minutes. I have built a life out of a smaller sum.

11:54 PM

THE BELL

She is standing. She is barefoot. She is shaking off the sleep. There is nothing in this cellar that intends for her to keep any promise to a family, any promise to a boy, any promise to a city that would sooner she were coy, and her hair is coming loose, and her jaw is set, and strung, and the bell has not yet rung.

But the door. But the door. But the door at the south stair. There is somebody's bad poetry arriving on the air. There is somebody with a lantern and a vial and a plan and a face like a cathedral and the manners of a man who has practiced this in mirrors since the winter he was young, and the bell has not yet rung.

11:55 PM

ROMEO

O, she is here. And being here, is not. Death has taken up his residency in the one apartment I had meant to lease, and lit it, and hung curtains, and moved in, and I am left here on the step, unhoused.

Look how the vault has made a lamp of her. Look how the worm goes reverent, and waits. My love, my little book, my closed account, I come to be the last page of you. See, I have the poison, I have paid the man, I have the words, I have had the words for weeks, and I have said them to the dark so often that the dark now says them back to me. Hark. Hark.

JULIET

Romeo.

ROMEO

How like her voice the cellar is tonight. Even the stone has learned to counterfeit her.

11:56 PM

JULIET

Romeo. Put down the lantern. Look at me. I am not dead. I have not been. Look. Look here. Take my wrist. It's warm. Take it. Feel that? That is a pulse, which is a thing the dead do not have. The friar had a draught. I asked him for it. I asked. It was my plan. Nobody's else.

ROMEO

O cruel, that the grave should learn to speak, and speak in her, and speak so like her that a man might turn and hope, and turn, and hope.

JULIET

I am not the grave. I'm standing in the grave. There is a difference. Romeo. Please. Look.

ROMEO

Thus with a kiss, my everlasting girl.

JULIET

We don't have time for this.

11:57 PM

JULIET

He drank it while I was still saying his name. Not after. During. On the second syllable.

I struck it from his hand. The glass went out across the flags and rang, and it was empty, and had been empty in the air already.

He is on the floor. He is heavier than the story. There is a sound a man makes. It is not in any of the songs. I have it now. I will have it for the length of my whole life.

He has got his eyes on me. The actual eyes. Not the pageant ones. The wet, astonished ones. He is looking at me the way you look at weather that has come in through a window you left open.

ROMEO

You are warm.

JULIET

I know. I told you. I was telling you.

ROMEO

I did not. I was not. I had begun. I was already halfway through the grief. There is a speed to grief and I was in it. Juliet.

JULIET

That's it. That's the first true thing tonight.

ROMEO

Oh.

11:58 PM

THE BELL

He is finished. He is nineteen and he's finished and he's done, and he wrote the whole performance and he only had the one, and the girl is on her knees in it, and holding up his head, and the wax is going down her wrist, and everything is red, and the cellar takes the sound of it and folds it in the lung, and the bell has not yet rung.

Now she's counting. Now she's counting. She has two, or she has three. She has cousins in the corridor. She has Verona at the knee. She could lie down in the linen and be sorry and be still and be marble in the morning and be moral, and she will be forgiven for it, sweetly, in the songs the town has sung, and the bell has not yet rung.

11:59 PM

JULIET

No.

I loved him. Put that first. I did. I do. I loved him yesterday and I will love him in Mantua, and on the boat, and after, and none of that requires me on this floor.

They will want me on this floor. I know the shape of what they want. Two children in the cellar, a lesson for the fathers, and a statue. The fathers get their handshake in the square and I get carved in gold with my eyes shut. No. Let them shake hands over him alone.

Give me your cloak. You will not need the cloak. There. Over the shroud. Up to the chin. Hood up. That is how a woman leaves a city: inside a dead man's clothing, laced to the throat, with his weight on her, and his weight will not come off, and I have looked at that and I have chosen it.

I am not leaving you. I'm taking you. That is not mercy. That is how it works. You will be in my shoulders when I'm forty. You will be in the pause before I answer. You will be the reason I am difficult to love. That's yours. You get to keep it. Now let go.

The mortar's soft along the north wall. Nine was generous. I have made do with one.

12:00 AM

THE BELL

Rung.

12:01 AM

THE BELL

Here's the watch with all his lanterns. Here's the Prince with all his men. Here's a cellar with one body where the story wanted ten, here's a cloak gone from a dead boy, here's a shroud without a girl, here's a hole beneath the north wall where the mortar came unfurled, here's a fact that will not fit the thing the fathers want it strung on. And so the fathers wring it. And so the fathers wrung.

They will bury her in absence. They will carve her all in gold with her hands crossed on her collarbone and forever seventeen years old. They will need her in the marble. They will need her lying down. It's the only way the moral works. It's how you calm a town. Let them have it. Let them have the little coffin, and the hymn, and the lily, and the limb.

For the road to Mantua is dark and the rain has turned to sleet, and there's somebody in somebody's cloak with blisters on her feet who is nineteen miles from Verona and is not looking behind, who is grieving at a walking pace, who is out of her mind, who is alive, who is alive, who is alive, and going on, and the bell rang for the wrong one. And the bell rang. And she's gone.