IT WAS A JUXTAPOSITION OF ANCIENT AND MODERN, in more ways than one.
Avignon’s hospital was a complex of concrete-and-glass buildings located several miles outside the stone wall ringing the city. The contrast between the medieval city and the new suburbs was more than just striking; it was deeply disorienting, given how far back into the past I’d traveled in the space of twenty-four hours. Sure, the battering ram of modernity had smashed through the city’s ramparts; in addition to ancient buildings, the walls encircled cars, computers, even a few Segways. But those were trivial, fleeting artifacts; they seemed to skim the city’s surface like water bugs on a pond, without penetrating its depths or altering its medieval essence. Outside the walls, though, Avignon was not so different from Knoxville, and this hospital could have been transplanted to any suburb in the United States without looking out of place.
A deeper, more interesting juxtaposition, though, was the one about to transpire within the hospital—specifically, in the Clinique Radiologique, where we were bringing the skull for a CT scan: ancient bones, twenty-first-century technology.
“You know there’s no compelling scientific reason for this,” Miranda pointed out, not for the first time.
“Sure there is,” I repeated.
“Is not,” she said. “Admit it. We’re burning time and X-rays just for fun.”
“O ye of little curiosity,” I countered. “O thou scoffer; vile, mocking spirit. We are gathered together in the spirit of scientific inquiry.” I held the boxed skull aloft as I walked, as if I were a priest and the skull some sacred relic—which, after all, it might actually be. “Besides, don’t you want to know what he looked like?”
“Sure I do. I think it’ll be…fun.”
I shook my head, exasperated and amused. She was stubborn. And she was right, of course: what fun, to get a forensic facial reconstruction of what might be—almost certainly wasn’t, but yet might be—the face of Jesus, a face that I had arranged for a forensic artist to “sculpt,” in virtual clay, on a 3-D scan of the skull.
Stefan had persuaded a friend in the hospital’s Radiology Department to do the scan. We’d parked at a loading dock behind one of the hospital’s two low towers and threaded a maze of service corridors. After enough turns to make me wish I’d left a trail of bread crumbs behind—the hospital was nearly as labyrinthine as the palace, though a lot better lit—we entered a wide public corridor and followed signs that even I had no trouble translating from the French: RADIOLOGIE.
Stefan’s friend turned out to be an attractive young woman named Giselle, whose name tag identified her as a MANIPULATRICE ERM, which appeared to mean she was an X-ray tech. She led us to a room containing a large, doughnut-shaped CT scanner, and turned to me. “Monsieur, s’il vous pla?t.” Please, sir. My French was getting better by the minute, I said to myself, but I unsaid it a panicked instant later, when she added, “Mettez-le ici.” Seeing my blank look, she pointed to the box under my arm, then to the machine’s scanning bed. I nodded sheepishly. Removing the skull carefully, I set it on the pillow Giselle offered, then rolled up the towel I’d used as padding in the box and wrapped it around the base of the skull to stabilize it. After a final check to make sure the mandible was correctly articulated at the jaw’s hinge points, I nodded at Giselle, and she led us through a doorway and into a control room. As I watched through thick windows whose glass contained lead—less elegant but more protective than the leaded windows of Avignon’s chapels—the bed of the scanner moved in and out of the opening in the scanning head. Slice by slice, X-rays cut through the bone, and the differing densities they encountered registered on the screen; line by line, a detailed picture of the skull materialized on the screen. When it was done, Giselle slowly rotated and inspected it, making sure the entire skull had been imaged. The detail was astonishing; so was the ease with which the manipulatrice could manipulate the image: removing the top of the skull, for instance, to show the floor of the cranial vault, or slicing open the tiny caverns of the frontal sinus. As she effortlessly explored the hidden, inmost structural secrets of the skull, I found myself marveling, Miranda-like, How does it do that?