by Sadie King
Best in what sense, Zora wondered, academically or sexually? Probably both.
“I have personally invited her to join our group. I think she has a lot to offer.”
So Zora would be a Blackcoat. That was why they all wore that funny black coat that looked like a Gucci fencing jacket. To Zora the term was uncannily, and unforgivably, similar to a term she had learned about in college, in her World Civilizations class. The fascist Blackshirts in Mussolini’s Italy. You know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of fascism.
Victor stood from where he’d been sitting, in the middle of the table at the top of the horizontal arch. The most triumphant figure in a triumphant setting.
“Ms. Bright, please come up here.”
“No.”
It was Vane again, who now stood as well, looming up on Zora’s right at one of the side tables. He wore the insignia of a Magister, well below Victor’s rank of Caesar.
Zora could see the circular pins that each member bore on his chest, the icon that signified his rank. Victor was the leader of the entire Juris Club, of its vast skein of shadows, its network of thousands of members nationwide. If not across the globe. Some of the most powerful men on earth.
And she had bruised his testicles, the sanctified testicles of Caesar—not once, but twice!
She noticed something else, even more shocking—there at the left side table was Jack Carson. Across from Vane, further down the table from Victor. Wearing the pin of a Plebeian. He winked at her and she gave him a little surreptitious wave.
“Be seated, Magister. Know your place. It is my decision to make, and mine alone.”
Vane sat down, whitening rapidly. He sputtered, confused and outraged.
“Caesar, you know that someone like her can never be a member of the Juris Club.”
His sneer lingered in the air like a poisonous gas. His words carried the weight of layer upon layer of hate: race, gender, class.
“History can change, Magister. Is that not what a Caesar is for? A vision of a brighter future?”
“Not for this, Caesar, not for this. To do this is to lose your legitimacy. To sacrifice the legitimacy of those you lead. You will no longer be able to call yourself our leader.”
“You are hardly in a position to dictate to me. I will not hear another word from you on this matter, do you understand?”
Vane stared at his brother, white as marble, in the absolute silence of blind resentment. He rose again from his chair and walked quickly from the room. He did not look at Zora on the way out.
Mortified looks stirred the room. Victor quelled them.
“It is better he is gone. He has never known his place.”
His eyes lit up again with warmth, openness.
“Come, Ms. Bright. Come, don’t be shy, my darling.”
Eighteen sets of eyebrows rose simultaneously. Mouths hung open, tongues began to loll.
Zora glided to the front of the room, around Jack’s table, brushing the back of Jack’s neck as she moved behind him. She saw the kindness briefly go out of Victor’s eyes when she did that, ever so briefly, replaced with something green and bitter.
She stood beside Caesar.
“First you will need your insignia.”
She tensed her hands, ready for him to say the word Slave in a Latin tongue. Looked around her for a weapon. There in front of them was the ivory gavel. It would work wonders against his internal organs.
But Caesar was too smart for that. And Victor was too loving.
“Today is a day of exceptions, and I have decided to make another. You will pass over the first rank and be anointed Plebeian.”
The three Servi in the room didn’t look too happy.
“Plebeian, you must know that we Blackcoats bear each of our insignia twice. We bear each for the world to see—”
Zora seriously doubted that too many Blackcoats went around in public brandishing their pins, that kind of defeated the purpose of a secret society, but she was loath to argue with Caesar at her very first meeting.
“—and we bear each close to our hearts.”
“That’s fine with me Victor, er, Caesar.”
She hated calling him Caesar. She didn’t respect him that much, and love without equality is a lie. Still, she figured she could make it up to him later by making him call her Aphrodite. She would be the Greek goddess to his Roman emperor. The more powerful, and vastly more attractive, of the two.
“I’m not just speaking metaphorically. Let me show you what I mean.”
He began unbuttoning his coat and she blanched. Maybe this really was the orgiastic kind of Roman gathering, more Bacchus than Apollo. Holy shit, was that why he wanted her to join the group, to be the tender pleading object of a gladiatorial gangbang? The capitol city of a Holy Roman Empire of screwing? They would lube themselves up on wine and then lube themselves up for her.
She would immolate herself before that happened. Faster than Dido had. And immolate a few of those fascist fucks with her.
But no, he peeled back his jacket and unbuttoned his undershirt—revealing a series of branding marks on his chest. He had actually shaved his chest for this moment. And since Zora found shaved chests on Michelangelo men to be sexy, she didn’t really mind that part of his gesture.
What wasn’t so sexy, what was simply off-putting, was what the dearth of hair revealed. Each branding mark was a perfect imprint of the pin that had made it, seared into flesh. The jacket itself bore but one pin, the highest insignia the member had earned. For anyone not a slave, the skin of the chest bore that mark, and each preceding one, all the way down to Servus.
Victor’s chest had ten marks on it in a triangular pattern, 4-3-2-1, with the radiant sun at the pinnacle of the pyramid of burnt flesh.
He wanted to brand her. To say she was reluctant to be branded would be the height of understatement, like saying that Julius Caesar was reluctant to be assassinated, that Marie Antoinette was reluctant to be guillotined. She tried to get out of it diplomatically. Before she had to get out of it violently.
“That’s very impressive, making the metaphor literal. What idealism! But I’d appreciate it if you would make another exception today. Spare me the honor of wearing my insignia close to my heart. Let me keep it metaphorical if you don’t mind. I’ll be the proudest Plebeian I can be—in my heart.”
“No Plebeian, this is ironclad. You have the power to choose—either choose this, and become one of us, or choose to leave this room right now and never come back.”
She gave Caesar an acid look. And Victor a downright murderous one. Both men shifted their collective mid-section uncomfortably, their sensitive anatomy reacting, recoiling, of its own accord to Zora’s spite.
She stayed. Victor would have to make a sacrifice later to match hers now. She addressed the room as a whole.
“Fine, let’s get this over with. But if you think you’re going to see me bare-chested, you’re out of luck. Sorry boys.”
At least a half-dozen eager faces grew glum. If there’s one thing men in a law school environment rarely get to see, it’s a woman’s naked body, or even half of it, in three-dimensional form. There’s a lot of two-dimensional compensation, that’s for sure.
For the first time she noticed in detail what was on the table in front of Victor. Aside from his gavel that is. A pair of forceps. The Plebeian pin. A lighter. And most alarmingly, some gauze, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bandage.
Zora undid the entire front of her silvery pantsuit and the first few buttons of the turquoise blouse underneath. The top of her black bra peeked out; a number of the men in the room perked up.
“I’m sure you’re used to clenching your teeth in class, Plebeian. Now would be a good time to do it again. This will definitely sting.”
Zora remembered another time she had clenched her teeth, to make something sting. No doubt Caesar still bore that particular mark on his exalted person. He sure didn’t look too exalted then, his clothes lying ripped and sc
attered on the floor.
Victor grasped the pin with the forceps and lit its surface with the lighter, until Zora could have sworn it glowed. The pin must have been made of a special alloy that heated to a high temperature without melting or disfiguring. But her chest would be disfigured, that was the catch.
Victor chose a point on her chest midway between her armpits—he knew the importance with Zora of keeping things centered. He brought the pin to her skin to do its incendiary business. Zora clenched her teeth and closed her eyes.
As if waiting for cunnilingus from a scaly reptilian tongue.
This felt much worse. She screamed, not caring about her lack of stoicism, as the heat fried the nerves in a small circle on her chest.
She had been branded. Like her ancestors before her in the Deep South, like the dark-skinned victims of the Sun King and his Code Noir, his Black Code, she had been branded by a godlike man. A beyond-man who bore on his body and on his raiment the sign of Sol.
Victor hurriedly dabbed the gauze in rubbing alcohol and treated the wound. Otherwise infection would be a real possibility. It was bad enough she had to be infected by the fascist aura of the room she was in, infected by the fulsome company she was keeping. He covered the brand with the bandage, and Zora rubbed the tears from her eyes.
“Told you it would sting. You handled that as well as could be expected of a Plebeian. Of a woman.”
Debasing words. Words against womanhood. Her spite ignited again, more fiery than the brand. He moved to help her button up her blouse. She viciously shoved him away. Three men started to rise, to protect their beloved Caesar. A Consul, a Centurion, and another Plebeian. Victor waved them down.
Without words of apology, he removed from his attache case a folded black jacket, of exactly the same tailoring the men wore, handed it to her. She slid it on over her pantsuit top, secured it down the side.
“Please have a seat my—Plebeian.”
He had almost said “my love.” Had almost been a man instead of a Caesar, a disciple of the moon instead of the sun. He gestured to an empty chair, not Vane’s, on his left side, at the very end of the side table, past the Servi. Insult heaped upon injury. Apparently the elevation of title had been a mere formality. In the pecking order of the Blackcoats, she was little better than a Servus, or even relegated to a freakish category all her own. Woman.
Zora the Plebeian sat. Caesar continued to stand. And continued to exercise the one constant prerogative of a servant of Law: bullshit.
“Let’s turn to today’s business, shall we. As you know Senator Brown on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he’s one of our most loyal members, is going to be introducing the REVAMP Act within the next month. So I’d like all of you to reach out through our network to drum up support for this, and—”
“Caesar, excuse me Caesar, O exalted one.”
Every single pair of sitting male eyes in the room bored into Zora. How dare she cut off their leader in mid-sentence!
“A simple ‘Caesar’ would be fine, Plebeian. Do you have a question?”
“I’d like to reach out through the network, I really would. But I’m going to need to know what this REVAMP Act is. Correct me if I’m wrong—it’s for helping the elderly, right? Or creating a stronger public support network for impoverished children?”
An oily slick of simpers and chuckles spread around the room. Questions like that passed for humor in the Juris Club.
“Not exactly. Something much grander. The Reducing Eligibility to Vote And Maximizing Productivity Act. Something we’ve been working on for a while.”
The oiliness in the room was starting to make Zora’s skin feel slippery. Her mouth felt dry.
“How silly of me, Caesar, not to understand the grandness in that. Would you deign to point it out to one so mired in ignorance?”
“My pleasure Plebeian. Our vision is to return voting in this country to the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. Where the most productive members of society are the ones who determine the course of the country as a whole. Once the Act becomes law, a person’s eligibility to vote will depend on certain factors of productivity. Things like educational attainment and financial contribution to society. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
She ignored his unctuous rhetorical question.
“So basically, Caesar, what you’re saying is that if a person didn’t go to Harvard or doesn’t earn a million dollars a year, she’s out of luck at the voting booth. Her voice doesn’t count.”
“That’s a crude way of putting it, Plebeian. But the underlying idea is not wrong. Keep in mind we are preserving the vision of the Founding Fathers. They saw that the best democracy is a selective democracy. Not everyone in society is well-equipped to voice an opinion that counts. The voices of the misguided many can easily drown out the voices of the enlightened few.”
This was turning into an elephants-and-asses version of a lovers’ quarrel. Without the fun of ivory or the sensuality of actual asses.
“What if the Founding Fathers were blinded sometimes? By their own power and their own wealth. Have you stopped to consider that? Your precious little Act will never pass anyway. It’s ludicrous and unfair, and supporting it would be political suicide for members of Congress.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve spoken to President Heath about it at length. She’s vowed to sign the bill into law. We have nearly enough members of Congress behind it as it is. Before the end of the month, our precious little Act as you call it will be the law of the land.”
“We’ll see about that, won’t we Caesar? Won’t we Victor?”
She opened her mouth, bit down hard with her incisors, visibly, audibly. The allusion was unmistakable, unbearable—at least to a man. The click of her teeth painful to contemplate. Zora might not have been much of a vestal virgin, but Victor still turned a whiter shade of pale.
“Plebeian, you may have your own views of democracy, some kind of bleeding-heart ideology, and good for you. Good for you. But the Juris Club is not a democracy. This room is not a forum for you to air your insolence. And if you expect to stay a member, you had better remember that.”
“Have no fear, O mighty Caesar—I will dismember, I mean, I will remember that.”
She grinned a big incisor grin. Pale stayed painted on his face.
She didn’t speak for the rest of the night. When the meeting was adjourned, and Victor motioned for her to wait, she ignored him. She rushed instead over to Jack.
“Walk me home, Jack. We need to catch up, and I need to vent.”
She held his hand as they left the room, jackets doffed, their bodies and words showing the mutual affection of the weak. Something stronger than friendship. In the fluorescent light of that room, seeing that bond of sympathy deeper than all of his power could muster, Victor had a greenish tint in his eyes. A look that Shakespeare would have understood, had written about in fact. A fatal flaw of man.
Which doth mock the meat it feeds on.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Zora arrived late to class the next day. She was fuming at herself for showing up at all. She’d wanted to punish Victor, test his fondness, with her absence. But that was like cutting off her nose to—well, you know. She’d rather spite him by cutting off—well, you know.
The point was, if she missed one class too many, tested Victor’s forbearance not as a lover but as a teacher, she might get an incomplete in his class. Put her entire legal career in jeopardy. That made her fume even more. Shit. The impossible situation he had put her in. Academically, emotionally, erotically, everything. The prick bastard. She had never met his father, but the figure of speech would have to do.
She made an entrance guaranteed to make him fume. Seating herself next to Jack, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. A simple gesture. Arguably the most beautiful gesture in the repertoire of human intimacy. True, Jack was a pawn in the game between her and Victor. Without him there wouldn’t be triangulation, there wouldn’t be envy, there wouldn’t be the deflection
of desire. There wouldn’t be love and hate, devotion and sin.
But to say her intimacy with Jack was false would be falser still. Not after their conversation of the previous night, him walking her home, the two of them sitting on her bed. She got a 3L’s take on the 3 L’s—life, love, and law. They both bitched about Victor, commiserated about how fucked up law school was, about how it turned life into a dry brittle thing, love into a shallow imitation of love.
He spoke to her rhapsodically of the Juris Club. Which made her weary of his company. When he offered to show her his Blackcoat brandings, the scars on his chest, she declined with the hint of a hiss. The suggestion of a departure. She fell asleep alone. She would have anyway. His offer had shortened their sharing of words, that was all. It didn’t lessen her respect for him as a man. Scratch that: it did. But of all of her virtues, Zora was proudest of forgiveness. Of all her vices, she was proudest of vengeance. To be fully human is to be completely paradoxical.
If Victor noticed the kiss—which needless to say he did, he never for one instant let Zora slip from the front of his perception—he ignored it with the flair of a lawyer overlooking the truth. He didn’t dare single her out for Socratic ridicule. Even hours upon hours later, the paleness of the previous evening hadn’t fully left his face. We will never know whether her allusions had haunted his dreams that night. Assume for the sake of sordidness that they did.
The class was uneventful, right up until the very end. Jack proved his worth as a pawn once again: he passed her another note from Victor. She waited for a moment of privacy, an hour later, to read it. The note had no greeting.
Who would have guessed that a Plebeian could have more power than Caesar himself? You have rendered me powerless. All I have to offer you is the truth of myself. Truth as bare as each of us before the other. At the bottom of this note, write a question that I must answer. No limits; spare me no pain. Place the note in my faculty mailbox as soon as you can. Come to my house tonight and I will reveal the answer to you as an unfolding of love.
V.
Immediately she decided to take him up on his offer. She knew what she must ask. A question he must answer. The horrible riddle of another life, of the death of another, that had thrown her life into disarray for a time. That had made her question the very foundation of her judgment and the very purpose of her life.
