Taking a bath (he did not yet know how to manipulate the shower) in his tiny bathroom was an equally wonderful experience. There had been baths in Maternus’s day, grand pools of heated water in which one could swim while he got clean; those facilities had been reserved for men more important than he. As a common soldier, Maternus had washed himself in cold streams during the warm months and in the even colder water of a basin during the long winters. To lay nearly his entire body in glorious liquid heat while thinking only of what portion of himself he should scrub next was luxury the emperor himself had never known in the largest of his baths. The emperor had likewise never known soap, which was another modern wonder to Maternus. He rubbed the bar on him lavishly, and despite enjoying how the suds felt upon his skin, he worried the aroma was too close to how the brothels in Gaul had smelled.
He did not mind his new job in the least, and Mr. Worthy had been incorrect in fearing Maternus would have trouble with the floor buffer. The principal, an affable man named Mr. Hamburg, had stayed late on the soldier’s first day and had demonstrated to Maternus how he should gently push the handle of the machine up and down while he engaged the on switch to make the buffer sweep from side to side. Mr. Hamburg was duly impressed by how quickly his new janitor learned to manipulate the machine, not noticing the man he knew as Mr. August did not move the handle up and down, but swung it from side to side, using brute force alone to manage it. The principal did not know a man could be that powerful and, for his part, Maternus had known mules that were far harder to handle than this humming device.
The soldier was accustomed to taking orders and had no trouble doing everything the school administrators assigned him once he had been given a single walk-through of his routine. Compared to building a league of roadway in the relentless Mediterranean sun or counterattacking a barbarian advance, his tasks at the school were easily performed. Every morning the school opened, the teachers would remark that their floors had never been cleaner or their blackboards more spotless. They and Mr. Hamburg did not appreciate that in the Roman army a man would be crushed beneath heavy stones if he disobeyed orders, and thus did not understand why the new janitor consistently did exactly as he was asked.
Maternus arrived at the middle school every afternoon as the students were leaving for home, and when the children first observed the dour and battered man who was to clean their classrooms every evening they were terrified of him. The stranger did not carry himself like a normal suburban adult. He did not smile when a student did something silly or become angry when they tossed paper wads on the hallway floor. When one of the prepubescent children dared to speak to him, the new janitor never responded with more than a few somber words. In a few weeks time, the children decided the new face in their midst must belong to a mentally defective person, or else he would be more akin to what they thought a man should be.
Maternus did not regard the students so much as children but more as smaller and less harmful versions of the gibbering demons he had met in the flaming depths of Hell. Children of his day — the dirty-faced waifs he had seen on the frontiers of the empire — had been silent, yearning bundles of rags too busy seeking something to eat, and too intimidated by the grown-ups to cause anyone trouble. The little folk at Susan B. Anthony Middle School were seldom quiet, and never still; they bounced around the school grounds like fish trapped in a closing net, and when they were not shouting rude comments to one another, they were squealing like swine fighting over slops. None of these modern children looked to have ever been hungry for so much as an hour. Many of them were as fat as senators, and all of them jumped with healthy energy. Their clothing — in which they took a peculiar pride — was more varied than a field of wildflowers. Merely looking at the eye-starling bright colors they dressed in, or listening to their jubilant uproar for any length of time, made Maternus’ senses ache.
He was relieved to return every night to his quiet apartment and go in the morning to the library to which Mr. Worthy had directed him. In the latter spot the soldier found more wonders than in the other localities in Aurora put together; there, to his amazement, he also discovered the fate of Rome. The empire he and his brother soldiers had thought immortal had turned out to be but one of countless milestones on the long road of history, one that had left its mark upon the world in ways the Romans themselves had never intended. He was additionally amazed to read how far back that road of history stretched, for one of the first books he opened — a time line intended for much younger students of history — told him even more empires had existed before his time than had arisen in the subsequent eighteen centuries. There had been people in exotic places who had cities and writing thousands of years before Romulus and Remus had been abandoned in the primeval forests of central Italy, although in Maternus’s estimation none of these earlier and hairier races measured up to Roman standards.
Because the library used the Dewey Decimal System, books in the category “General Purpose” —such as encyclopedias, almanacs, and the volumes bound in gray cloth and rightfully titled the “Great Books of the Western World” —were on the front of the very first shelf that Maternus met when he entered the building. This last collection of books, put together seventy years earlier by two professors from the University of Chicago — who had had the optimistic notion that Americans secretly longed to set aside L’il Abner in favor of Cicero and Newton — were the second volumes the Roman soldier decided to peruse after he had set aside the time line. Maternus first read the works of those authors whose names he had heard mentioned by officers and men of property: Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer. He devoured them like a wolf feasting on a fresh kill and found his world brightened by ten thousand instances of pleasure and wisdom. Then, during his second month of going to the library every day, Maternus happened to espy one of the gray volumes titled The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. The style of this new book seemed a little turgid after the three days he had spent with the gossipy Herodotus, and there were so many pages of declining to read that Maternus wondered if Mr. Gibbon had been given enough history to fill his many chapters of fine print. The work ambushed his expectations when he discovered that — within the first pages of the fat tome — he was reading of events that fell within his lifetime, and soon he was even reading of himself and his plot to kill Emperor Commodus, of which Mr. Gibbon merely related that the scheme had failed and did not give the bloody details of the conspirators’ deaths. Maternus was pleased more than a man striving for redemption should be when he read a few paragraphs later that Commodus had eventually been assassinated, and that when the tyrant fell there began the first rumblings of the avalanche that would sweep away the entire empire. The brutal, self-serving despot, the last of the Antonines, had died before reaching thirty and at the hands of his two most trusted friends.
“I, at least, died with a sword in my hand,” Maternus boasted to himself.
As he read more and journeyed further into time and farther from any empire he recognized as Roman, the satisfaction he had felt when reading of Commodus’s death turned to sorrow as he learned how the brave legions he had served in gradually faded from living memory and passed onto the printed page, where the finest soldiers who had ever formed ranks exchanged blood and sinew for the ghostly existence of consonants and vowels. Everything in the western half of the empire had gone to ruins in the fifth century. According to Mr. Gibbon, the Germanic barbarians had delivered the final blow on the battlefield, but it had been the Christians — people like those in the church Mr. Worthy was having him attend — who had made the Romans so weak they would succumb to the furry tribesmen their ancestors had defeated on a thousand previous occasions. Maternus feared the fires of the underworld too much to defy Mr. Worthy’s orders, and would continue to attend the church; he nonetheless could not help but think poorly of the Christians and their meek ways; men could never stand face to face with the Huns and Vandals and ram cold steel into their barbarian intestines if they acc
epted that Christian love business. Better, thought the Roman, if men believed in a collection of bloody gods and the power of their strong right hands. Simple beliefs like those, along with tempered steel, were what kept the enemies of civilization at bay, not the kind sentiments the Christians had borrowed from the Jews.
Delving deeper into Mr. Gibbon’s work, Maternus discovered that the fifth century was not the end of the empire as a whole. Another thousand years passed before the eastern Romans had fallen, although the eastern half of the empire had been more Greek than Roman. Even then the world was not done with the Romans: they lived on in the language Maternus now used, eighty percent of which was made up of words possessing Latin roots; Romans engineers were in the arches, plumbing, and paved streets of every modern city; the senators and orators lived on in the structure of modern government and in court trials; and the legions themselves were present in the organization of every modern army. Added to this was the obvious truth that much of the best Roman art and literature had survived into the twenty-first century, and Maternus could see Rome had a continued existence, one that was far more important and tangible than those of the lost civilizations that had come before her. By the time Maternus approached the end of Mr. Gibbon’s seventeen hundred pages (counting the footnotes), the veteran had devised his own theory of history, and viewed subsequent western civilizations as no more than feeble imitations of the hardy Roman ideal. Whereas moderns see history as a long and tortured journey from the rude lives lived in caves to the glories of today, Maternus came to believe that his had been a golden age those who came after had vainly tried to recreate by substituting science and commerce for Roman heroism. While his theory may have been incorrect, the soldier did make himself happy by thinking of himself and of his kind as having been the finest products time had yet created.
Among the few regulars at the library who were not senior citizens seeking a quiet place to nap or young children who had not yet attended school long enough to learn how to hate books, Maternus noted two singular men who were also at the library’s long tables every day. Unlike most of the other patrons, these two men wrote more than they read. One was a blond man a few years under fifty; he had a face made prematurely creased and brown by too many days in the sun, and wore a dirty billed cap he always crammed low on his forehead, causing the fine hairs on the sides and back of his head to stick out like the mane on a lion. His aquiline nose was as prominent as those on the busts of Julius Caesar, and his sharp features were still handsome when seen in profile. Yet whatever presence his face granted him was nullified by the unkempt condition of his clothes and hair. On most days this man sat beside the periodical section and was constantly moving between the racks of journals and his reading table. His restlessness allowed him to consume ten or more newspapers and magazines during every visit. The blond man had captured Maternus’s attention because he muttered aloud whenever he discovered something upsetting in the materials he read, and he would soon thereafter scribble furiously on the yellow legal pad he always had with him.
The second man, who was apparently a friend of the blond scribbler, interested Maternus because the Roman had never before seen anyone of his bodily appearance. This second man was tall and elegant in a manner Maternus realized was more informal and spontaneous than that of most other men in Aurora. His boss, Mr. Hamburg, and the businessmen Maternus saw in Aurora’s shops and restaurants wore long jackets of a certain design and long cravats about their throats; these tidy, restrained men donned white shirts beneath their jackets and wore leather shoes of brown or black and kept their hair neatly trimmed. This friend of the blond man in the library looked much less conventional that any of those gents. This fellow kept the top three buttons of his piebald shirts unfastened and had long, somewhat chaotic black hair on which he put a sweet-smelling pomade that made his black curls glisten like polished ebony. His dark frame was thin, and he moved with the casual agility of the street dancers Maternus had seen perform for money in Rome. This man’s black trousers, unlike his loose shirts, were so tight on his lower body Maternus felt a little uncomfortable looking at him for any length of time. Still more remarkable than his clothes was the stranger’s natural appearance, the likes of which the ancient Roman had not encountered during his previous life. The man’s skin was as black as the exotic Nubians Maternus had espied in the marketplaces of southern Gaul; his nose was narrow and straight like that of a patrician officer, and, to top all, he was sloe-eyed, a feature of the semi-mythical yellow men travelers claimed dwelled beyond India.
The blond man seemed to be impelled by rage when he took pen in hand; he muttered angrily to himself while he attacked the pages of his legal pad, but his black friend, a generation younger, smiled as he composed with his tall, daring handwriting on sheets of lineless copy paper. Often the dark man chuckled at something he had written, and his was not the cold, triumphant laugh of a conquering general; rather he sounded as joyful as lovers do when they sit hand in hand in a semi-secret place and are oblivious to an eavesdropping world. The dark man never read anything he had not composed himself; indeed, little besides his writing and his appearance seemed to interest him.
There was one more important quality the dark man had that Maternus could not help noticing: women clearly found this unconventional man very alluring. Rare was the day when a young woman or group of women did not stop by the table to converse with him; they smiled and moved anxiously about, stroking their long hair as they talked to him. They took pains to laugh at anything marginally funny that he said, and many of them took the opportunity laughter provided to touch his bright shirt for a moment or to pat the interesting man’s hand. The female librarians working in the building also found some reason to visit the young man during the course of his visits; these normally well-behaved, middle-aged women in their long print dresses could giggle and be as flirtatious with him as the young girls in short skirts when they came by the dark man’s table. Maternus had understood practically nothing of the women of his time, and knew even less concerning modern women. As ignorant as he was, he realized something of consequence was happening every time a woman dropped by the man’s table and her face flushed as if a flame had been lit inside her. Was this female desire he was witnessing? In his time, desire had been something only men could express, and then not for long if there were others about. In his own life, he had dared not feel it even after a woman he had been with had done her job and been paid, and he wondered if there were any books in the library that could tell him what this modern female behavior meant.
Equally intriguing to Maternus was how oblivious the women were to the dark man’s blond friend. This man in his dirty billed cap was always right there beside the younger man, and he stared at the women in a manner Maternus did understand; that was how a legionnaire stared into a city lupanar after he had been campaigning six months in the wilderness and his need was great. Yet none of the women spoke to the blond man, or so much as glanced in his direction. In the Roman’s time, money and social position were the assets a man used to attract women. Since the blond man was so much older than his dark friend Maternus assumed that, under normal circumstances, he would have accumulated more money than his companion during the course of his much longer life. Certainly he would have had the time to be promoted to a superior social position. The Roman therefore deduced the dark man must be of noble birth. Or else the older man had suffered some huge setback in his life. Never did Maternus entertain the notion that the women might find the dark man physically attractive. In the Roman’s time, the only males considered attractive were effeminate boys certain rich men had collected for their private harems.
The last and most confounding aspect of the way women interacted with the two men was the hard fact that none of the females ever left the library with either one. Maternus often watched the two men mount their bicycles in the parking lot and pedal off to wherever they had their home. Each time they left alone. Why, wondered the Roman, if the women flirted relentless
ly with the dark man, why in the end did they leave him alone, exactly as they did his older friend? Were the women taunting the dark man? Had women become that cruel during his eighteen centuries in a dark cell? Maternus had accepted that language and government would change over that long passage of time, but he had not imagined the relationships between women and men could ever be profoundly altered. Had news of this innovation reached the place Mr. Worthy called Heaven? If Maternus ever reached Heaven, would the women there be as cruel as these library women were? Would Maria from the garden be changed? To find the answers, he could only plow farther ahead in the gray books and hope some man wiser than he was had answered this question for him.
One Thursday afternoon, when the Roman had departed the carefree companionship of Boswell and was still unaware of the bleak wastelands that lay ahead as he prepared to delve into Hegel, he was seated at a table near the periodicals at the moment the blond man dropped several of the magazines he had been perusing.
“Son of a bitch!” swore the blond man, and added a phrase that sounded to Maternus as if he were calling upon the world to have illicit sex with his mother. While he was scooping up three journals fallen to his right, Maternus popped from his chair and retrieved two magazines that had landed to the man’s left.
Hell Can Wait Page 5
