Boy Caesar

by Jeremy Reed

  He picked up a gold candlestick that Hierocles’ lot had left behind and debated leaving the palace in disguise and simply disappearing. He didn’t know where he’d go, but in his confused state it didn’t matter. He still believed that somehow he could turn events around and remain emperor. He thought of appealing to the people but knew that to do so would lose him their respect.

  He hesitated as always, afraid of the immense silence that seemed to have fallen over the palace. Something told him that he had been abandoned and that his assassins were closing in. The building’s nuclear activity appeared to have shut down. All the officious buzz of the place, its executive departments and the turbo of its activities seemed to have disappeared. His wing in particular had the silence of a mortuary, and clearly nobody from his guard had attempted to stop Hierocles when he went on the rampage. He called out for Antony, and his voice came back at him on delayed echo. It was impossible to imagine that the person closest to him had deserted. It didn’t bear thinking about, and he raised his voice in the effort to attract Antony’s attention. He expected at any minute to hear his familiar hurried step suddenly come into hearing. In the absence of it, he hallucinated the sound and finally, desperate, went running in search of him.

  His assumptions were right. His quarter was deserted and, starting to panic, he hurried towards Antony’s room. He repeatedly called out his name, hoping for a response that would explain his friend’s silence and bring him running to his side. He was, as always, unarmed and totally vulnerable to attack. When he got to Antony’s room he pulled back in alarm from the rash of blood-spots on the floor outside. He simply didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. He was prepared to lose everything in the world but not Antony. He dreaded what he would encounter and stalled outside, his heart beating so fast it threatened to explode.

  He edged his way in, tentative step by tentative step, his body wound taut in anticipation of shock. Antony had been stabbed clean through the thorax in a way reminiscent of Marco, with the blade left impaling the victim against a lacquered oriental screen. It was an exact repeat of the horror he had witnessed in encountering Marco in the park, and he sprung back in acute shock. It was intolerable that his gentle friend had died in agony at the hands of a butcher, and for the first time in his reign his whole being cried out for vengeance. The thought flashed through his head that Hierocles had stabbed both men in a fit of insane jealousy, but deep down he suspected the murders were the work of the Army. They were clearly systematically eliminating those closest to him as a way of cleansing his circle. He read it as a warning that he would be next on their hit-list.

  He was terrified, and he started to run. He headed towards his mother’s room, then abrupdy switched direction. He felt as if he was being tracked by a spotlight, as he heard the brutal shouts of soldiers on the floor above. There was no time to waste. He ran down a long passage and through an empty hall, cleared a terrace and made it outside to the grounds. In his confusion he decided to take refuge in a latrine under cover of a group of ilexes. The place was little used, except sometimes by himself and staff working in the grounds. He had an attachment to its mildly fetid air, its discoloured marble urinal and the fact that it was like a cottage set apart for privacy. It had been there since the time of Severus, and little or nothing had been done to maintain it. Heliogabalus had gone there in the past when he needed absolute privacy and sat there listening to the rain knuckle the tiled roof.

  This time he was desperate. He sloped in under the cover of oily green camellia bushes and flattened himself up against the cool marble wall for comfort. The unattended stench of the place cooked in his nostrils. Cloaca and urine gone to earth formed a cocktail of bad odours as his life went on fast-forward. All of its highlights panned from one brain hemisphere to the other. He could feel the speed of the retrospective zap his brain cells.

  Suddenly he heard shouts in the nearby trees and the sound of men beating their way through the bushes. He was without any means of killing himself, for the poison would be too slow. He thought of his mother, his home, the priests chanting in the temple at Emesa and prayed he would be given another chance. At the same time his mind began to fill with an intense white light. It flooded in, despite his fear, permeating his entire being, as he visualized his early days in the temple at Emesa. The rest, he realized, was nothing. Fame, extravagance, being emperor, they were parts independent of his real self.

  The light was in him as he heard men running towards his hiding place, their footsteps scrunching the gravel path, the staccato impact sounding like there was a group of them. When the first entered, sword in hand, it was hatred he saw in the man’s eyes – that and the ugly group of pimples clustered each side of his nose. He turned his back on them so that he wouldn’t see his murderer. When he fell under the ferocity of the first hit, he connected with the light. It was a pure luminous stream he entered. He knew he was going back home, and that home meant integrating with the universe. He simply wasn’t there any longer when the soldiers carved him up. He had connected with the light, simple as the click of a mouse. He looked back at his absent body once and was gone.

  12

  ‘Most facts are errors,’ Antonio said. He was seated on a purple cushion on the floor of Masako’s Soho studio as Jim tentatively showed him extracts from his dissertation. He felt embarrassed about presenting his version of a life to someone who claimed to have been its subject.

  After their holiday in Rome Jim had moved in with Masako, an arrangement consolidated by their having become lovers. While both of them retained a sexual ambiguity, they found a common meeting-point in precisely that area of confusion. Looking up from where he was squatting on the floor, Jim’s eye was routed both to the jeaned curve of Masako’s thigh where it joined the buttock and also the sensual meniscus that comprised Antonio’s lower lip. He was attracted to both in equal degrees and, while his emotional bond was with Masako, he none the less felt the divided pull of interests that he had come to recognize as his own. It was reassuring to know that Masako was a journeyer across similarly conflicting territory, her orientation having been split since her early teens when she had entered into a series of same-sex relations. It was the boyishness in Masako that triggered his desire, while correspondingly she claimed it was his feminine side to which she was most attracted.

  Jim felt shy of Antonio as he fed him selected pages of his dissertation with the promise that he could take a copy back with him to his hotel. Antonio had opted to stay at the Piccadilly and had twice invited them to dinner at the hotel’s terraced third-floor restaurant, a level that allowed visual access to the whole Piccadilly sweep, with its decorative roof-top cupolas and gargoyles tucked into the architectural skyline. Jim liked the place for its fantastic displays of white arum lilies and for the fact that its glass roof provided a panoramic view of clouds building and rebuilding their state-of-the-art monuments over the West End. There they had spoken of Heliogabalus’ obsession with preparing the ultimate fish sauce, with Antonio claiming he could still remember the ingredients of some of his more daring experiments and promising one day to give them an example of his cooking.

  Jim, while still living in terror of Slut and his nocturnal coterie, was beginning to feel a distance had opened between him and the perverse saint of the Hampstead woods. Or perhaps it was the cushioning provided by his intimacy with Masako that allowed him to feel screened from the fear of being abducted again. Reacquainting himself with Soho and its topology of alleys had required a cognitive effort on his part, but he had succeeded, little by little, in refocusing the world as a place of trust. Accompanied at first by Masako, then later going out by himself, he had taken up with his familiar café circuit and with his exploratory walks across the city. The initial paranoia he had felt whenever someone appeared to be following him had gradually dispersed. At first he had stopped in his tracks if he felt himself pursued, then turned around and walked directly towards his imagined stalker. He had found it a successful means of dis
arming terror and after a few days had abandoned it altogether, secure again in the knowledge that he was just another stranger in the anonymous crowd.

  Antonio laughed to himself over some observation he had made in Jim’s thesis: the knowing sound of someone alerted to an incident from the past. Jim couldn’t help observing his friend’s sense of detachment in human relations, a sort of distancing of his thought processes, suggesting he came at things from a deeper, roomier locale in the unconscious. He was like someone permanently bi-located, split between a referential past and the present. Anyone unfamiliar with his story might have thought of him as peculiar or fazed, but to Jim it seemed understandable that Antonio should appear fractionally removed from reality.

  ‘I can remember’, Antonio said, looking up from his reading, ‘discrepancies in the likeness of the portrait I had sent to Rome before my arrival there. You wouldn’t have known me from a girl. Heaven knows what they made of it. The painting was probably burned after my death or eaten by time.’

  ‘And what was the mysterious illness from which you were suffering at the time?’ Jim asked, curious to draw him and remembering the allusion to sickness being the cause of the slow journey to Rome.

  ‘Probably what you’ve suggested,’ Antonio said, putting down the papers. ‘Some sort of sexual bug picked up on the way. Diagnosis was hit and miss, but I recall instinctually knowing at the time that the cause was sexual.’

  ‘What about the famous eclipse of the sun that coincided with your being proclaimed emperor? Was that a fiction or did it really happen?’ Jim asked, wondering if his own sanity wasn’t in question for taking Antonio so seriously.

  ‘It was something very significant. It helped trigger the revolt against Macrinus. The troops were superstitious and saw in it a sign. These sort of things happen, and it played into my cause.’

  Jim looked away for a moment, knowing he couldn’t fault Antonio in his historical recollection. He was confused, but even in his sceptical moments, when the thought crossed his mind that Antonio might be no more than a weirdo who obsessively identified with the most bizarre of Roman emperors, he still continued to believe in the authenticity of his friend’s claim.

  While Masako sat riffling through a fashion supplement Jim continued to observe Antonio in profile as he started reading again. The horizontally pencilled eyebrow, the eye coloured like a foggy day in Venice, the feminine profile fused into masculine characteristics, the almost puckered set of the lips, all combined to create the irregular features of someone used to fielding looks. Jim had noticed how people stared at Antonio in the street, not in a threatening manner but more out of a sense of being thrown by his appearance. It wasn’t that he had inherited the legacy of Quentin Crisp’s draggish affront – on the contrary his clothes were elegantly quiet – it had more to do with the air he carried of being a stranger on earth. The word alien seemed to have been invented to describe him as he walked with apparent tunnel-vision through the Piccadilly crowds. It was his alienness that attracted attention, and people turned away from it, uncertain how to react.

  He read quickly, like someone already acquainted with the text, his eyes registering agreement, surprise and amusement at what he encountered. For Jim, sitting there at a tangent, the process was like watching film, only the situation was all too disquietingly real. Of late his whole life had come to assume the pattern of being nudged in and out of a questionable take on reality. There had been times recently when making love to Masako that he’d felt on the verge of disappearing through a window into an altered state. Orgasm had seemed to have the lift of a jet nosing through free-associated cloud. He had almost succeeded in simultaneously climaxing with her but had pulled back, frightened he might be drawn into the weird electrics of her interior. That she had access to the paranormal didn’t so much scare him as have him feel uneasy in ways he couldn’t rationalize.

  Antonio was immersed in his reading and clearly some place else. Jim was left to wonder what his supervisor would think if he told him that he had an inside knowledge of his subject, having met the reincarnated Heliogabalus. Any such claim would put an end to his academic credibility and call into question his state of mind. Not that he any longer entertained illusions about joining the dead world of academe. On the contrary, he now saw institutions as the enemies of imagination, devoted to reason rather than the thrust of live energies that came from risking the edge. The changes that had come about in his life had taught him that reality was multi-track and that each conscious state is selected from a repertory of billions of alternative possibilities. He could no longer believe in a world of commonly shared experience. He had been thrown out of his preconceived notions of reality and bounced like a car shaken off the road’s hard shoulder into the boundary ditch. All the ideals of security he had shared with Danny, and of carving out a niche somewhere in the system he now viewed as valueless. He had even played with the idea of deconstructing his thesis and converting it into a novel. He didn’t want to be part of a scheme of stored knowledge, pedantic footnotes and quotations shoplifted from the correct sources. He wanted to break loose and discover the real meaning of life within himself. That Masako and Antonio were both part of his new, revised existence he didn’t doubt, nor that some sort of interactive psychic link had brought them together.

  Masako caught his eye and smiled at him as easy as sunlight streaming through a high window. He could feel the little telepathic flutter that travelled through the airwaves at their shared contact. He wondered if this was what it meant to be in love and to share a sympathetic thought-field with another. Masako seemed to him to be so genuinely at ease with herself, so comfortable with her boundaries, that her interchange with life was simple, like a foot fitting a shoe.

  ‘You’ve got a novel here,’ Antonio said, reading the idea that had been circulating in Jim’s mind. ‘My advice would be to colour it up.’

  He put the dissertation down, and Jim could almost hear the little click in consciousness that had him reconnect with real time and place as he stared up at the late afternoon light rinsing the skylight. Masako suggested they took a walk over to Fresh and Wild in Brewer Street to pick up ingredients for the dinner she proposed to cook that evening. She had it in mind to make a poppy seed and sour cream pasta, and needed a lemon, miso and chives. ‘I’d like to show Antonio the shop. It’s quite something.’

  ‘It’s the place for the health-conscious,’ Jim put in, at the same time getting to his feet as a sign that he was ready to go.

  Antonio, who missed no opportunity to increase his store of places visited in London, needed little encouragement to go out. He slipped the copy of Jim’s thesis into his valise with the promise that he would return to it later and put on a black Armani jacket over his purple shirt.

  The three of them went out into the unseasonably chilly evening. They made their way towards Berwick Street Market just as the stalls were closing. Masako’s eye was drawn to the flower stall, and they stopped to admire coral-coloured hubs of sweet williams, shocking-pink gingers, blue-mooded cornflowers and feathery ash-blue nigella. Jim followed behind, reminded of how he had walked these streets with Danny and of the good and bad times they had shared together. The route they were taking had once formed part of their Soho walks, and Jim felt scorched by the betrayal of his trust. It hit him hard to know that probably for the entire duration of their relationship Danny had been unfaithful. He knew he should go and have himself tested, and the resentment he felt at having been exposed to the risk of infection only increased the sense of paranoia that came over him at times.

  Masako must have read his discomfort, for she took his arm almost, he imagined, as a defence against the searing intensity of the flashbacks that continued to trouble him. They made their way through the pimp-monitored artery of Tyler’s Court, pointing out the landmark Raymond’s Revue Bar to Antonio, bypassed an acned teenage prostitute clearly working to finance her crack habit and joined the busy crowds along Brewer Street. Antonio spoke of the lit
tle adjoining streets that he had explored in his morning walks – such as Bridle Lane, Silver Place and Lexington Street – their names pointing to an older, historic London. Jim scored points by telling them that the avant-garde 1960s publisher John Calder had kept an office there for three decades above a strip-joint. ‘There’s the famous story of how William Burroughs went around there one day with a shooter, locked him in his office and at gunpoint had him sign a cheque for the royalties outstanding on The Naked Lunch.’

  They walked up the street at the leisurely pace of tourists, Jim still deep in thought, and observed copies of 1960s’ Playboys in the shop Vintage Magazine before picking up on the audible hum of Piccadilly Circus to their left. Its noise hung on the air like surf breaking somewhere across a white beach. Jim recognized the sound as the one to which he had gravitated on first coming to London. He remembered the rent boys he had encountered at the meat-rack and how they had come from all over the country to congregate there outside Boots. He could see them now, standing out of the rain, sitting in cafe windows or trying to pull a trick on the street. He had known boys who had struck lucky or rich by meeting an opportune stranger, someone only too happy to take them permanently under his wing.

  He distracted himself with these thoughts as they walked along, Masako’s arm secure in his, the city resonating with its rush-hour crisis. When they got to Fresh and Wild on the corner of Sherwood Street they found the store buzzing with the health-conscious, most of whom had long ago wised up to the detriments of eating nonorganic. Antonio was curious about everything, and it was becoming clear to Jim that his new friend clearly didn’t get out and about much in Rome, given the element of surprise he showed at even the most commonplace items for sale. For all his cultural sophistication he lacked the big-city predatoriness of shopaholics and of those out to substitute things for the emptiness within. He had, Jim observed, an almost child-like naïvity when brought face up to the world, as though he had never really lost that element of wonder which is so much part of childhood. His eye took in everything from the diverse range of multi-grain breads to the palette of vegetable colours, right down to the exhaustive variety of supplements, aromatherapy products and biofriendly household cleaners suitable to those who lived green. Masako picked up her simple purchases, while Antonio’s eye went on a rapid kleptomaniacal round of virtual shopping.