Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  Masako continued to drowse and tentatively put out a hand to reassure herself that he was still beside her on the bed. His eye again returned to the heart-shaped tattoo, the symbol growing to be an obsession that irritated his sex. She had shifted position slightly, in a way that distributed prominence to her right buttock, a gluteal fold of which was in contact with his thigh.

  Distracting himself with work, he reflected on the dual nature of Caelestis as a fertility goddess as well as one who presided over the stars. In the role of earth-mother she was identified with Cybele in Africa and with the cult of Bona Dea in Italy. His reading on the subject of Bona Dea had told him that she co-opted into her rites an amalgam of other goddesses, such as Magna Mater and Juno Caelestis. In the largely syncretistic tendencies of Heliogabalus’ age, the identification of Caelestis not only with Magna Mater but also with the worship of Mithras was commonly recognized. Jim doubted that Heliogabalus would have approved of this rival god but thought it likely that he would have endorsed Mithraism in the interests of gaining favour with the Army. It would follow, then, that his decision in choosing Caelestis as the complementary divinity to his own was probably a diplomatic one, aimed at securing the much needed, if temporary, support of the military.

  He made notes and thrilled at the excitement of having Rome socketed to his nerves. He could feel the city turning over, its digital screens, office towers, e-commerce, manic traffic, sexual hunger, airports and cemeteries all compressed into the megabytes activating his sensory cortex. He was impatient to get out there and interact with the city’s seething tempo but also happy to live in the charged moment of suspense.

  Waiting his time, he continued to point up his notes on the mysteries pertaining to Mithraism and its largely esoteric rites. The bull, as its chief symbol of ritual sacrifice, was an animal associated not only with Mithras but with the goddess Cybele, too. It was while researching the emperor’s attempts to win the confidence of Cybele’s priests by personally sacrificing bulls on the goddess’s altar that Jim had encountered the reference to castration which played directly into his study of Heliogabalus’ gender. To be admitted to these rites the initiate had to undergo castration or a form of false castration. Given Heliogabalus’ request to undergo a sex change, Jim entertained the suspicion that the emperor may have undergone the operation for real. The historians were at best ambiguous. Lampridius, for instance, alluded to the rite by using the words genitalia devinxir, which implied that the emperor’s genitals were tied up for the duration of the ceremony, rather than removed. Aurelius Victor, however, was emphatic that the emperor was abscissis genitalibus and had undergone literal castration. Support for this theory was substantiated by a passage Jim had discovered in an unknown author referring to the fact that Heliogabalus had been ritualistically castrated and cared for by priests during his recovery. The same author reported that after the emperor had adjusted to the physiological change he claimed that his god had also changed sex and that necessary revisions should be made to the religious ceremonies conducted in his temple.

  Jim pondered his findings, certain that his sources would be dismissed as apocryphal but determined to persist in his line of investigation. The subject of Heliogabalus’ gender was to be central to his thesis, and while in Rome he intended to peel the issue of its sensitive skin. Masako shifted again as he watched, the alignment of her buttocks tempting his eye to probe the tiny chocolate punctum of a beauty spot existing like a detail in the fold joining the leg and buttock. It was a mark he had neglected and one that brought renewed excitement to his slow-burning anticipation.

  He continued to keep his thoughts suspended in a gravity-free zone, like markers orbiting in space. Masako had moulded herself to his erection, not intrusively but lightly, in the manner of sand forming a contour on a beach. There was no urgency in the movement; it was tentative, like a drum brushed into sound, and almost without objective. Still determined not to respond, he continued with his notes on Heliogabalus. Whether it was because he was in Rome and the associations were charged or simply that his nerves were overstimulated, he kept having the mental image of a youth with bleached hair and a made-up face flash into his mind. It was the recurrence of the image, always the same and always precise in detail that made him feel unnerved. The thought crossed his mind that Heliogabalus as a psychic entity had taken it on himself to be his guide in the city. He put the idea out of his head instantly, refusing to believe that the living and the dead could occupy the same space. He assured himself it would go away and that the phenomenon was linked to the series of recent events that had jinxed his nerves.

  He returned briefly to reflecting on another of Lampridius’ character assassinations of the youthful emperor. According to the vituperative historian Heliogabalus ‘had conceived the plan of establishing in each town, with the title of prefects, persons who make a career of corrupting youth. Rome was to have had fourteen; and he would have done this had he lived, determined as he was to elevate to the highest position everything that is most corrupt, and men of the lowest profession.’

  He laughed out loud to himself at the thought of a youth going to these extremes to infect the capital with vice. He wondered all along if there hadn’t been some fundamental misconception as to Heliogabalus’ age and if the dates of his birth and death hadn’t been falsified in the interests of distorting history. Was someone so young capable of the monstrosities ascribed to him by his biographers? The question was a flexible one and dug right at the roots of historic subversion. For a moment he had a terrifying vision of Heliogabalus having outlived himself, diseased and no longer recognizable, living to corrupt the system like random error occurring in the separation of two DNA helices.

  It was a thought he quickly dismissed, only to find it almost instantly replaced by the return of the image that had been troubling him for days, but this time the eyes seemed to be staring directly at him, demanding his attention. He couldn’t shut it out by thinking of something else and, as he watched, so the face broke into a twisted smile. It was the look of someone so disillusioned by life that death was the only possible option. It shook him, and he felt decidedly uneasy as he refocused the world back into his immediate surroundings.

  Masako awoke at that moment, still fuzzy from her siesta sleep, and sat up and pulled her T-shirt down over a porcelain-coloured waist. She, too, seemed to have difficulty in reconnecting with her surroundings and came to only after struggling with visible disorientation. She gave no hint of the erotic pleasure she had received but instead reached for the bottle of Evian beside the bed and uncapped it to drink. She fluffed her hair back into shape, smiled at Jim and took herself into the green-tiled bathroom to shower.

  Jim lay back listening to the torrential hiss of water coming from the shower, and checked his guide book prior to their going out. He wanted to avoid the scene, the cruisy bars, the pick-up places in parks and to access the city from the viewpoint of the flâneur, spending leisurely hours discovering the significant by accident.

  But the subject of Heliogabalus’s notoriety continued to frustrate him in his attempts to recreate his subject free of the prejudice of moral historians such as Gibbons, who had referred to the young emperor as ‘a monster who abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments’. Jim was increasingly aware that aberrant scholarship was only one of the obstacles to be dissolved in his quest to resuscitate the emperor from a long cryogenic sleep.

  On the other hand, his reading of Antonin Artaud’s deeply personal account of the emperor’s life had put him on to valuable tangents of study. According to Artaud, much of the emperor’s belief in the miraculous was triggered by his diligent reading of Philostratus’ life of the miracle worker Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius was still another fascinating subject for Jim to explore, a further lead in his attempt to junk-strip the DNA in the emperor’s posthumous cells. Apollonius was supposed to have raised the dead, cured the sick, t
ravelled to India and ascended bodily to heaven.

  His thoughts on the subject were broken by Masako coming back into the room tented in a cerise towel. Removing the towel and wrapping it around her hair, she stood naked with her back to him. She fished a black Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt out of her travel-bag and matched it with washed-out Lee jeans. The red lipstick gash she applied was the livid matt of a carnation, her small mouth made up like a geisha’s. Her simple definition complete, she turned around from the mirror and pouted complicitously at Jim, by way of acknowledging the unusual sex that had taken place between them. Jim, who had never before been aroused by a woman, felt beneath his confusion a dull expectant longing. He was determined to take his time and to follow the plot to its experiential end.

  He suggested they head for the Trastevere district, so that they could eat at one of the trattorias for which the place was noted. They would walk wherever possible, as had been their practice for the past days, being the best method of getting to know the place. To his surprise Masako suggested they should visit the gay quarter and had read up on some of the high-profile clubs and bars, such as Alpheus, famous for its drag shows, or the delightfully named Garbo on the Vicolo di Santa Margherita or the oldest of Rome’s gay spots, L’Hangar just off Via Cavour.

  ‘I’ve never told you before,’ Masako said, lowering her eyes, ‘but I like girls, too. At least I’d like to experiment.’

  Jim smiled, a little chord of jealousy sending out search notes as his heart missed a beat. He wondered if the measure of his response was simply infatuation and nothing more or if there was a deeper bonding of emotion at play in his feelings for Masako. Either way, a possessive ripple chased through him in series of needling jabs. While Masako busied herself with a mascara brush, he tried unsuccessfully to push her out of his thoughts. He told himself that, given his bias, he had no right to become attached to her on any other level than that of a friend, an idea that collapsed in the thinking. Hadn’t they already exceeded the boundaries of friendship, he asked himself, and become intimate through sex, and hadn’t he, in finding out Masako’s foot fetish, made an inroad into the world of sharing? He wanted to ask her more about this particular sensitivity and decided he would at a later date. Right now, looking at her from behind in tight, worn jeans, the desire he felt overshadowed every other emotion. He looked away, ran his eyes up the blinds and stared out at a densely composed city sky. It was hot, oppressive, and a petro-carbon smudge hung over the late afternoon. He could see a couple moving about in the flat opposite, the woman watering geraniums in window-boxes and the man testing the flash on a camera. Although Jim didn’t know Roman weather in the way he could assess a London sky, he could read storm signs in the air.

  When Masako was ready, she came over and without saying a word kissed Jim on the lips. It was as though she had instinctively sensed his need for reassurance and acted on his uncertainty. Her kiss was like all her gestures, intimate but constrained, personalized but discreet. If he expected more it was because he had let his imagination outrun the reality of the situation. He had speeded up the development of their tentative relationship and was already viewing it as something based on deep foundations. In his mind, everything had taken place before it had even begun.

  They went out into the pushy, crowded streets and decided to head for the city centre and cross over the Ponte Sisto to the Trastevere district. Although as a student she lacked the money to shop on impulse, Masako wanted to view the emporia of stores owned by the likes of Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Valentino. Design was the world with which she identified, and the women they passed were dressed with a simplicity that buried the outstanding detail in the rightness of the cut. Masako liked to spot the better labels and pointed out to Jim the ones she recognized, such as the grey Armani suit on a woman stepping out of a black Mercedes, the loud Versace jeans – backpockets sprayed with diamante – moulded to a blonde or a black dress that was obviously Galliano. Her eye took in everything by way of visual commentary and stored the contents for future reference.

  Jim bought a chilled beer at a street stall and inadvertently made sustained eye contact with the assistant, who was undoubtedly a gay boy wearing a chunky gold chain around his neck. They batted eyes at each other in recognition of their secret, while Masako immersed herself in the guide book and manicured a pistachio ice with her compact red mouth.

  They headed across town in the direction of Via Giulia, with Jim soaking himself in the atmospherics of a city in which Heliogabalus had briefly flourished. He told himself that, although the Rome Heliogabalus had known had been built over repeatedly in the course of history, somewhere beneath the macro-megatons of its modern counterpart particles of the emperor’s world survived. He found himself against all reason hoping to encounter Heliogabalus in the crowd, half expecting that the image which had burned itself into his mind would become a reality. They browsed through streets glutted with tourists manipulating the obligatory hand-held camcorder or snapping at ruins. A fuming altercation was taking place between the woman driver of an open convertible and the male driver of a dark-blue Porsche. Both had got out of their cars and were conducting a mini gender-war in front of a vociferous crowd who resembled extras on a film set.

  They walked in rhythm, sharing the attractions and feeding off the city’s wired energies. They got lost repeatedly, rechannelled their footsteps, negotiated slabs of history on which they had no conceivable hold and finally ended up at the Ponte Sisto, tired but elated by their discourse with Rome’s frenzied dialectic.

  They stopped at a street cafe before crossing over to the right bank and sat outside in the nervy air. Jim looked up to see that the sky had come down like a flat roof on the city, its combination of violet, brown and crushed raspberry colours hinting at the prospect of storm to come. His mind was thrown back to the detonative rain that had accompanied the sex he had shared with Danny under Waterloo Bridge, an episode as apocalyptic as it had been emotionally lacerating.

  ‘You look like you’re seeing things,’ Masako said, tilting the contents of a sugar sachet into her cappuccino. ‘We’re here to discover your emperor, Jim,’ she added. ‘We must look out for him.’

  ‘We’re also here to enjoy Rome,’ he replied, his feet kicked away by shock at her insight. It seemed to him that she could access his mind and focus on his deepest inner preoccupations. ‘It’s good just being here with you,’ he continued, attempting without success to sound casual. ‘Maybe I’m imagining things, but time seems to slow down when we’re together.’

  ‘I’m finding the same. I feel I can be myself with you. Men usually crowd women out.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jim laughed. ‘Men have a habit of allocating women a space they can control. I suppose it’s like conditioning someone to fit a grid. The man does this, the woman that and there they stay.’

  ‘It’s because you know these things that you make me feel good,’ Masako said, looking down and quite clearly engaged in the process of self-discovery.

  Jim could smell the busy river as she spoke, its urban scent coming up with the flat tang of pollutants and an indigenous flavour that he associated with Rome itself.

  ‘It’s crazy, but I’m growing attached to you without trying,’ he said, a wave of shyness causing him to look away at an indefinite point in the distance. He felt both frightened of committing and of not, as he listened to the confused mix of his emotions.

  ‘Mmm, and me you,’ Masako confided, with equal shyness, her eyes fixed on the chocolate beauty spots in her cappuccino.

  Jim was beginning to let go the emotional bruise that had lived in him as a dull persistent ache for weeks. He could feel with less pain, hope without an interposing negative and, most of all, begin to trust again.

  ‘I’m enjoying each moment of our stay,’ he said. ‘There’s so much to see and do, and, yes, I’m also keeping an eye out for the emperor.’

  ‘You should,’ Masako smiled. ‘I bet he’s somewhere in this crowd,
reincarnated.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it quite like that,’ Jim reflected, excited at the prospect of Heliogabalus starting out his life all over again in the place where he had been cut to the bone by his assassins. He suddenly had the vision of a blond boy biking through Rome wearing a rhinestone-sprayed jacket, a pink boa and flashily buckled biker’s boots.

  ‘Let’s make a point of looking out for him,’ Masako said. ‘Let’s find Heliogabalus. We can make that the point of our being here.’

  ‘I’m excited. I keep getting these visions of a face I associate with the emperor. He’s young, blond and persistent and incredibly made up. He wants something, I know that.’

  ‘He’s trying to communicate,’ Masako said, bringing out a compact to check on her lipstick, the matt red doing a good job at holding its own.

  Jim thought on it and was sure that she was right. During the time he had been researching Heliogabalus’ life an extraordinary chain of events had occurred to alter the pattern of his own. He had broken with Danny, encountered Slut, been kidnapped and had, in part, changed his sexual orientation. Masako, as he saw it, was his redeemer, the person who stood between him and disintegration. That they were sitting together in a street cafe in Rome seemed in itself extraordinary. When he looked up at the sky he had the impression he was dreaming and that the clouds were neurons in his brain. He told himself that none of this was happening, then he refocused the world back into place, and Masako was still there tentatively retouching her lipstick with a completist’s attention to detail.

  ‘Let’s go over the bridge,’ he suggested, conscious as he spoke of the symbolism implied by making the journey to the opposite shore.