by Mark Tiro
“Domina,” she repeated, this time more firmly. “Domina, thank you.”
The man smiled now and reached out with both arms, helping both of us to our feet.
“Arescusa and Porcia is it then? I am Lucius. Lucius Arrianus.”
“We are glad to make your acquaintance Lucius Arrianus,” Arescusa responded before I could, holding out her hand to formally introduce herself. It was a confident and yet unpretentious voice she had.
I liked it.
“Of course, I know of you,” Lucius said, looking first at Arescusa, then back at me. “You were the Sacerdote of Diana, until, well…”
“Yes, until, well… until I wasn’t.”
“But you’re here now. And I for one am glad you’re here.” He grinned, adding, “Everyone here is from somewhere else, right?”
“We should fit right in then,” I answered.
“You know,” he said, looking like a little boy showing us a honeycomb he’d just received, “the master always says, ‘the one true thing you can say about the past is that it’s not here now.’”
“Ha! Of course it’s not,” I laughed.
“Yeah, that’s what he keeps telling me. Maybe I’m just a slow learner. It’s funny how we just keep seeing the past in everything around us. Even if it’s new.” He looked a little dejected as he said the words. Then he seemed to have a thought, and pepped up. “Listen, why don’t you—why don’t both of you—” he smiled now—broadly—at Arescusa, who lingered there coyly just a few seconds longer than she might have ordinarily done, “why don’t both of you join the master and me, for dinner tonight?”
“I… I… we, I mean—it’s been quite a while since we’ve been invited to a formal dinner.”
“I can assure you, it’s anything but formal,” he interrupted, laughing. “The master does his own cooking. Or at least he tries.”
“He’s not…”
“Married?” he finished my sentence. “No, no. And neither am I, although unlike him, I hope to be someday. For now though, until Venus arranges to work out a match for me—or for the both of us if the gods have a sense of humor—the master and I, we improvise with our cooking.”
“Cooking?” I asked, with a serious look. “Cooking? Maybe you need to try adding some pomegranate juice.”
He threw his head back and laughed. We all did.
“Thank you then,” I said. “We will be delighted. Arescusa—may she come too?”
“Of course. The master was himself a slave in Rome. That’s how his leg was broken. He’d be more than happy to host both of you.”
Dinner that evening lasted long into the night.
That night lasted long into the many years that would come.
And then, those years lasted into the rest of my life.
I was no longer expecting only grief and pain from life, like I was when I first arrived in to exile.
Dinner that evening with the master, and with Arescusa and with Lucius had been but the first of many.
By the end of that summer, I had already decided to move in with the master. We didn’t marry, but we never spent another night apart the rest of our days together. It was the most peaceful, most loving time of all my life. Where I had anticipated pain, I found myself enveloped until the end of my life in happy, light-hearted joy.
In the end, I couldn’t wait until the Saturnalia. Just as soon as my family had made the arrangements back in Rome, I gave Arescusa her freedom. While I could have no official part of it because of my exile, my family had been able to pass Roman citizenship to Arescusa through the family.
Even though I was their only child, I was barred from inheriting any of their estates or property because of my exile. Which is how it came to pass that when my parents died not too long after, Arescusa became one of the wealthiest women in the entire city. My family had willed her their entire estate, including all of their holdings in Greece and Asia Minor, as well as in Italy itself.
Most important, Arescusa was free now. Free, and happier than I had ever seen her.
At least for a few months. She had married Lucius less than a year after that day we had met. But a few months later, he’d been called off to Rome.
Arescusa gave birth later that year. It was a healthy, happy baby boy. But she didn’t do as well as her baby. Two weeks after her baby was born, Arescusa was dead.
We raised her baby together, the master and I—practically on that porch of his academy. We did for the first ten years. Until the master died. By that time, Lucius had been released from his service in Rome, and had returned here to Nicopolis, to raise his—and Arescusa’s—son.
And then, on one particularly clear night less than a year after the master had died, I died too.
The Master
I’m dead, again.
I looked around, and realized, somehow—I was back. Like actors coming out to the stage to take a bow after the show is over—I know I’m still dead, and yet, here I am. Back again… to take a bow, I hope….
I found myself sitting under that old tree. Funny, that tree, where I had decided to give Arescusa her freedom, where Arescusa had met the man who would be her husband—here it was, full and luscious and vibrant.
But how could it? The same year Arescusa died, there had been a terrible storm. The winds blew so strong that they seemed ready to split the earth. They didn’t. But they did split that old tree—into hundreds of tiny pieces. Most of them blew away when the storm finally receded. What was left of it was a scattered mess, and was quickly gathered up for kindling wood.
When Arescusa’s son was little, we would walk out to where that tree used to be. He would run around and play, and when he got tired (or when I got tired of chasing him), we’d take turns sitting to rest on the stump of that old tree. After the storm, this stump was all that was left of it. There I would tell him stories about his mom. I noticed after a while that the stories I was telling him about her were growing ever more fantastical, ever more mythical with each re-telling. As I spun them out, they morphed into grand, epic tales where Arescusa was always saving the world one way or another. In his childhood and bedtime stories, his mom was a great hero. It was the least I could do. I was determined to make sure that he would grow up knowing he was loved, even though she wasn’t there to tell him herself.
And also, I just thought it right he should know—Jason and his Argonauts had nothing on his mom.
So here it was that I found myself sitting in the shade again of that—young—effervescent, sparkling tree. The tree that had changed all of our lives.
The master—the man I had lived with here, the man I had grown to love here—walked over from the academy where he’d been sitting. It seems like it was a group of young students that had been giving a public lecture today instead of him. He had simply been sitting on the porch, listening to the students speak.
He stood up and walked lightly across the road that separated us. His crutch and limp were gone, and he looked younger than I can ever remember him to be. Younger, I think. Or maybe he was just very well rested.
I jumped up and ran over, throwing my arms around him in a great bear hug. It felt so right. And I felt so light as well. I had more energy than I could remember. Nothing hurt now. After a lifetime of growing older, of everything slowly breaking down, this was a release.
“You’re walking! Your crutch is gone!” I said, as I held him. This man who had helped me raise Arescusa’s baby when both of us were almost at the age where someone should have been changing our diapers, this man—he was here! I was so happy, like my heart would burst out of my chest.
I held him until it felt like I couldn’t hold him anymore.
“See, what really distresses you isn’t anything that appears to happen. It’s only ever just that—an appearance. Think how much you resisted everything—losing your fiancé, then your Temple, your country, and in the end, even your life.”
“But I’m still here! And so are you! We’re together, and none of that matter
s.”
I’d no sooner had this thought than I remembered losing Arescusa. This thought made me immensely sad.
“This doesn’t have to be,” he said. “Take a look at this.” Suddenly my mind illuminated with the most serene but powerful, pulsating love. It permeated everything. It permeated me.
“It’s not what seems to happen to you that causes pain or affects your peace of mind in any way. It’s your judgment on what happens that’s the cause of your pain, your suffering—your loss of inner peace,” he said pointedly. “In reality nothing outside of you causes you pain. But remember the converse is also true—nothing outside of you is the cause of your salvation either. Simply put—there is nothing outside of you. And you, of course, are nothing but love. The hazy fog that distorts this will burn off in the morning when you awaken.”
My eyes started to give way now. Everything became blurrier, more out of focus—like I had suddenly become 85, 90, 100 years old, all in an instant.
“My eyes are old, I must sit. I’m tired now.”
“Are you? Tired?” he asked. “Let go then. Let go, and come with me.”
“But I can’t see. What happened? My eyes don’t work. And how can you walk without your crutch?”
“Oh, child. I have loved you so much. Close your eyes, and you’ll find that in my love, you will be able to see just fine.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Do you trust me?”
I could sense that kind, gentle smile I had grown so comfortable with in life. How many nights had I rested there, beneath that smile, drifting off to sleep as my head moved slowly up and down on his chest with each gentle breath?
“Implicitly,” I answered.
“Then close those eyes of yours now. You don’t need them anymore. Close your eyes and you will be able to see. What you think of as seeing has only ever been a block that has made real sight invisible to you. The trust you have placed in what your eyes have shown you has but magnified the noise and distractions to sight so much so that it has become nearly impossible for you to see the essential.”
“The essential?”
“The body’s eyes always shriek ‘look at this’, numbing your mind, scattering it, to look this way and that—all so you would not see simple reality. Relax, and we’ll look together.”
He held me, and I relaxed into his arms, as I had done a thousand-fold nights, a lifetime ago. And I did see. I didn’t see his arms, though I knew I remained safely in their embrace. And I didn’t see a thing in front of me.
But I did see. And what I saw were memories. Wisps and images, not only past but future as well. And not only ones that were now, but also ones on paths I had not chosen. These were all here now. All here. Now. Memories flooded my sight, out and in every direction, as far as I could see.
I was blind again, but this time not by seeing too little. Now I was blinded by the enormous flood of seeing everything that had ever happened, every thought I ever had, or would or might have, all at once. All right now. It frazzled me, it was so noisy. The thought occurred to me that I would have to examine all these images, every last one of them, before I could make a choice. The thought filled me with dread. I felt like it was going to drive me out of my mind.
But this was a closed universe, and little by little, these images all started to burn off. Their grip loosened, the cacophonous thoughts and images of future and past, of un-yet and never-to-be-lived lifetimes and thoughts started to recede. They receded.
Receded, and then faded until at last my mind felt clear and I was able to think again.
“What does this all mean?” I asked. The master was still there; I still felt safe in him. But I was detached from the form of it all now. I didn’t think again of ‘the master’ or ‘Porcia’ or anything else that had seemed to happen in that lifetime—though it never occurred to me to question whether or not—or what—‘I’ was.
One question I held clearly in my mind though: “What does this all mean?”
He didn’t answer, but I could feel the deepest, kindest warmth. Love—it was now obvious it had always been there—permeated me and everything I could think of. I wondered why I had never known that this love was there before? The answer to my question came the instant I thought it. Of course it did. The answer to my question had always been there, just like the love had. But I had been using the question itself to obscure the answer.
I looked some more, and I saw layers and layers of… I’m not sure.
“‘What does it mean? Why didn’t I see?’” I heard him paraphrase back, as soon as the questions had come into my mind. “Your questions themselves are the blocks,” he said. Authoritatively, but gently. “Questions are no different than anything else. Why else would you ask a question, looking everywhere outside yourself for the answer, when the answer is already in you? It can only be that what you’re really trying to do is to obscure the answer—to keep it safely tucked away, out of your awareness. Questions are propaganda for themselves. If the answer is already within you—and I assure you that it is—then stop making a wall of your questions and return your mind back to where the answer is.”
“Within?”
“Of course!”
For some unknown reason, I thought this was hilarious, and I laughed. We both laughed.
Which is when the ground where we were standing gave way, and then disappeared.
Now I was floating free. We were floating.
“‘What does it mean?’ you ask.” I felt his gentleness. In it, my question melted away. I forgot what my question was. I forgot that I even had a question.
“God is. Love is. All that is. Everything is within and there is nothing without.”
They weren’t words, but a thought of perfect love.
I tried extending his thought.
Only love is. All that there is. And love is everywhere.
But my efforts seemed to engender only strain. Memories, disjointed pictures and images began to stream into my mind. An animal on an altar to be sacrificed. A young man dead of an illness in a faraway army camp. The broken heart of a young girl.
He was still talking, but whatever he had said had been blocked out by my own thoughts and I hadn’t heard him. “There is no world,” I heard when I realized he was still talking. “There is no—”
“Nooooo!” I roared. It was a petulant, rebellious thought. It had been coursing quietly through my mind, but at his words, it flashed out in a rage. Just like that, I seethed in anger.
“Of course there is! Look at me! Look. At. ME!”
I thundered. I roared. I AM.
He was quiet. Still.
He was still there, but I was distant now, drifting.
“You were so worried about losing everything, weren’t you, Sacerdote.” He emphasized the last word. I had to strain to hear him now. It was not as effortless as it had been.
I saw though. Still I saw, but then I analyzed what I saw.
I had not expected it, but I had found more happiness than I could ever have imagined after I’d lost my priesthood. After I’d lost everything. But I remembered all of it, every thought, clear now as the instant it happened.
The form came rushing back, in all its heavy weight.
“Why yes. Yes I was worried,” I said, focusing my thoughts with great effort now to answer him.
“As if you were being called on to sacrifice your own best interests. But as you’ll see, when you refuse to cling, even just a little bit, when you let the valueless go—you will see the value that lies all around, and within, you. It’s all there, but it’s impossible to see when we cling to what is not there.”
I was getting tired now.
A dark pain tugged at me, pulling. I grasped for the master, struggling to cling to his words, to his love. But they had begun to dissolve. I couldn’t catch hold.
Everything faded, and then, disappeared.
Still between lives.
The Boy
When I came to, I looked aroun
d, and found myself sitting upright in a carriage. It’s moving slowly, no more than a slow walking pace. It’s some gleaming, metal, plush and comfortable carriage, of a type I’ve never seen before. There’s room enough for an entire family here, but I’m the only one inside.
Funny thing, I can’t see the horses. No horses, no oxen. There’s the driver of course, but other than that, I can’t see how this carriage is moving. But it is. Moving. Slowly enough now, maybe slaves are pushing it? Like a litter, but on wheels? Anyway, little by little, we’re picking up speed.
The driver—is that a man or a… who is she? She’s so angry, it hurts me being in here.
And so I pull back the shade on the window. Oh! Wow, it’s my… who is that? So sweet though, is it my son? He can’t be more than, what? Eight, maybe nine years old now? And so we start talking, my son and I, while he walks next to us. Next to this carriage.
But the angry driver is speeding up now. And my son, he’s starting to jog faster alongside; he’s trying to keep up. But we’re still talking, my sweet baby boy and me. He’s older now, I think. And it feels good to be there talking to him. Like everything’s always been okay, just like it is now.
She’s angry though, this driver. I can feel her seething, and she’s speeding up now. Speeding up, and stepping on the gas. I look out the window again. I’m still having the most pleasant conversation with my son. But it’s getting harder now, harder. My baby is younger again for some reason, sweet, innocent—my baby. Love.
But my son, he can’t keep up, even though he’s running his little legs off, trying to keep up. The angry bus driver is pulling away, faster now. I can feel her rage, and I shout.
“Stop it! Slow down, right now! We’re going too fast, and my baby is back there.” I swivel my head back—my baby is back there. He’s standing in the middle of the road, and traffic is swerving all around, just barely avoiding hitting him.
