Art project? Advertising stunt? Really specific color run?

Or just someone in need of help?

Camillo follows them.

Just a little further up the path, someone is wandering barefoot.

The bottoms of his feet peek out occasionally from below the frayed, pavement-eaten cuffs of his baggy pants. The dirt from the brick path clings to the blood on his soles, and collects around the dark wounds in the insteps.

The light shining from behind his head — sourceless, brilliant, golden light — is blinding.

This isn't reasonable.

He's a believer, of course. He's not even the kind of believer who thinks things like this don't happen, that the real miracle is the compassion in every human heart.

He's just not the kind of believer this sort of thing happens to.

"Are you all right?"

He turns to look over his shoulder,

and he's human, unilluminated, in the shadow of the trees.

"—what? Oh, yeah, I'm good. Just, uh...lost."

It catches him violently in the gut. He had it, for a moment -- for one moment of his life, a touch of the divine, and now it's gone, and he's already forgetting what it was like.

Why this? he wonders, why him? as he searches for lingering traces, for the bare feet, the bloody footprints.

His feet are calloused and unbloodied. He’s holding his lace-up boots in one hand, socks stuffed into the top.

“Do you know where…uh…”

“…hey, are you okay?”

"Yeah," he says, reeling. "Where are you going?"

Maybe he can walk him there. Maybe it will come back.

(Maybe he can convince himself he imagined it. Maybe he'll feel like this for the rest of his life -- desperate for another glimpse, clinging to the memory of something he saw once when he was nineteen.)

“I’m supposed to meet some people at, uh…coffee place? Italian coffee place?”

He brushes his bangs out of his eyes, a motion he must repeat a thousand times a day.

There's a lot of coffee places. It's a college campus.

"Do you know where it is? On the Drag, maybe?"

Drag's usually a safe bet.

“Yeah, that sounds right,” he says, hopefully. “Can you point me that way?”

There's no good reason to walk him to the Drag. It's thataway until you hit the street that has cars on it.

"I'll walk you."

“—seriously? Thank you. I’m pretty sure I’d get lost if you told me to walk around the block.”

"It's no trouble."

He's so filled with hope and joy it feels like the light that was around the stranger's head is living inside him now. It's all real -- he always trusted, he had faith, but he can be certain -- and he's wanted, God wants something special enough from him to reach out and touch his life so directly.

His feet are on the ground, as he leads the way, but only barely.

The stranger follows him, content for a while to just stroll and look around at campus life passing him by.

He calls a pause, as passing cars become visible in the distance, to drop onto a bench and pull his socks and shoes back on.

"So — what's your deal?"

"Um."

He's caught up in contemplating what all this means for him -- is this man a great saint? is he being called to something? was it really, definitely not a streetlight behind his head? -- and it takes him a second to remember the mechanics of small talk.

"I'm a math major."

He's a Catholic -- he's a good guy -- he's ready to follow wherever he's called, really, just tell him...

"Nice."

There's a lot of laces on both boots to be picked loose and then tightened again. He walks his fingers up the eyelets with the casual dexterity of someone who's done it a couple thousand times.

"Got plans for what to do with it, or do you just like it?"

Sometimes he thinks about being a priest, but he doesn't think he'd do well in a hierarchy. Yes, there's something appealing about the concept, but the idea of taking orders from a bishop he doesn't respect is appalling, and there's no guarantee that his bishop would earn his respect.

Anyway. That's not -- you can't just say that to a stranger. Even if the stranger is maybe holy. 

"Academia."

"Good luck, man. I'd never make it."

"What about you?" he asks, balancing on the arm of the bench.

(It's occurred to him, with horror, that maybe this guy goes off to his coffee shop meeting and they never meet again and he never knows what this meant except maybe seventy years later there's a cause for his canonization and he gets to say 'oh yeah i saw him once and he had a halo'. What's he supposed to do with that.)

"I don't go here or anything. Just traveling. Talking to people."

He can tighten his laces as quickly as he can loosen them.

"Barefoot?" he asks, instead of any of the questions he actually wants answers to.

"It's not a crime!"

He knots both laces, and stands up, stretching towards the sky.

"Well, all right."

He sets out westwards again, glancing back over his shoulder.

"Talk to any interesting people around here?"