Boy Caesar (25 page)

‘Still, it’s a sort of miracle that has brought us together,’ Antonio observed. How else to explain it?’

‘Mmm. It’s a long time since I last asked a dream for a solution,’ Masako said.

‘But tell me more about how you managed to find my address?’ Antonio asked, all curiosity.

‘Well, I’m certain we saw you in the crowd a few days ago,’ Masako replied. ‘I had a hunch then that you were the person we needed to meet, as Jim was experiencing these visions. Yesterday, before going to sleep, I concentrated on looking at the exact grid on the streetmap that I visualized as your neighbourhood. I then asked the dream to come up with the answer. And it did. When I woke up I knew the name of your street, the house number and the floor on which you lived.’

‘I chose this place because it’s so well hidden,’ Antonio said. ‘I’ve always felt the need to shelter my true identity – and anyhow I’m something of a recluse. I don’t have to work. I come from a wealthy family who provide me with an income. I can pretty much do as I like.’

‘It’s a weird case of subject and author meeting, on my part,’ Jim said. ‘It’s not what you anticipate when you start writing about someone who was supposed to have died in
AD
221.’

Jim’s remark had him telescope into imagining a world in which people endlessly exchanged identities and in which nobody ever died. He wondered if friends who had died young from the ravages of AIDS were already back in circulation as young children and if their former identities were now reincarnated in still other lives, in the endless cycle of existence. He found the prospect a scary one. Was his dead friend Robert now a seven-year-old child whom he might inadvertently encounter somewhere, and would it dawn on that child one day that he was Robert, a serious young film director who had run out on life too early?

He was rescued from his train of thought by Antonio announcing that he was going to fetch a botde of wine from the fridge and by
Masako playfully brushing her foot against his shin with characteristic discretion. He took the gesture for what it was, a reassuring sign that they were in this together.

‘I think it’s sufficiently chilled,’ Antonio said, producing a frosty bottle of Chablis and holding it up for inspection, the condensation clinging to the bottle like a blue négligé.

‘Let’s drink to the unravelling of our plot,’ Antonio said, releasing promise of a grassy bouquet as he uncorked. ‘When I said I first started having contact with you a few days ago, I wasn’t being entirely truthful. I became aware of your existence some time earlier, largely through dreams and the sort of flashes that you’ve been experiencing and also through hints, like seeing a face in the crowd. It was unsettling, so much so that at one time I consulted an analyst. I had the feeling that someone out there was looking for me.’

Jim sipped at a wine that tasted like sunlight lying down in deep meadow grass. Its blond chill opened out on his palate, like an act of disclosure. He watched Antonio take his glass over to the window and stand looking out over the neighbouring rooftops. The knowledge that they were, all three of them, linked by some form of psychic network was still something to which Jim needed to adjust. He had always believed in the existence of subtle energies at play in the body, but not as a force that made its presence directly felt in the external world. He struggled with its possible meaning, knowing at the same time that it was necessary to make radical shifts in his thinking. ‘And I suppose, if I’m truthful,’ he said, ‘then I half expected something like this to happen, although not quite like this. You know the feeling you get when you’re expecting the perfect stranger to walk through the door, and at that very moment they do. I’d had a presentiment like that ever since I started my thesis.’

‘That’s the moment we’re all waiting for,’ Antonio said, turning around from the window. ‘I had it once with Hierocles. I haven’t found it this time, at least not yet.’

Jim, with his obsession with clouds, could see stringy, low-flying formations churning outside the window, white textured with grey,
like a snowfall turned dirty. Further off, a shoal of whale-shaped cumuli were inertly suspended over an office tower.

‘As you will see, I’ve collected as much evidence of my past as I can,’ Antonio said, pointing to the bookshelves. ‘You have every right to consider me delusional, but I have absolute belief in my identity.’

‘Everything makes sense to me,’ Masako said, turning her wine glass around like somebody coaxing a thought to conclusion.

‘The way I see it’, Antonio said, ‘is that sometimes a person is born with the memory of a previous incarnation, and this mind-set attracts others to it like a wavelength. I imagine there’s a lot of people out there who have recall; it’s just that they’re too frightened to speak.’

‘It sounds like a whole parallel universe,’ Jim said, feeling the wine give him a lift. ‘I suppose if you couldn’t handle it you’d run the risk of cracking up.’

‘I don’t know if either of you are hungry,’ Antonio said, changing the subject, ‘but I’d like to take you to my favourite local restaurant. It’s sometimes good to step thoughts outside.’

Jim, who had been looking out at a blue-to-grey sky-change, welcomed the idea. Most of what they had discussed was so remote from his viewpoint that he needed time in which to let his thoughts settle. If he was to believe Antonio’s claim to be the reincarnated Heliogabalus, then he had to abandon his idea of history being in large a study of the dead. He was faced now with the prospect that some of its characters were alive, and for all he knew out shopping at this moment in cities radically altered by the constant revisions of time. He sat thinking of a nightmare scenario in which Adolf Hider was coming alive to a schoolboy out walking with his mother in a Berlin park. He was telling the boy that he had once been the Führer and that he was to own to this as his true identity …

‘You’re miles away,’ Masako said, recalling him to the present and the decision they had made to go out.

Antonio had slipped on a linen jacket and was busy checking his pockets for keys. The light had gone out in the sky, and a dense slab of grey cloud obscured the sun. Jim noticed that the room was
suddenly dark. He had the impression that he had gone missing for a while or that something had significantly changed since he last spoke. He felt displaced, like someone woken from a siesta without remembering having fallen asleep.

He panned in and out of consciousness, as Masako stood up and ran her hands in a flattening motion over her denimed buttocks. He was struck again by how lucky he was to have her with him in Rome. Her fine-tuning to his needs was something he hadn’t experienced before with anyone. Her sensitivity was rare, and it shone translucently in her features.

Jim got up, and together he and Masako followed Antonio down the stairs and out into the alley. Rome was under clouds and the streets seemed altered. The whole city had shifted mood in response to the change.

‘I’ve decided, on second thoughts, that we’ll go somewhere more special than my local,’ Antonio said. ‘What about my taking you to II Guru on the Via Cimarra? We can catch a bus there if you look out for a number 75.’

Antonio led the way through a complex of alleys towards the avenue. Jim still felt he was daydreaming, as the late afternoon graduated on a soft pink curve towards evening. A young man met him eye to eye with busy sexual signals, his slim figure tubed into white jeans. He smelled of Acqua di Parma, sex and something else that Jim preferred to call mystery. All of his same-sex longings hit into his cells as his over-the-shoulder look was fielded by the stranger’s simultaneously thrown head.

When a bus came into view they ran for it. Jim stood on the packed aisle between Antonio and Masako. He knew he could have gone off with either. His life was like that, it pointed east and west, north and south. He held on to the overhead strap as the street got eaten up. There was a girl outside the station running to meet her lover. He watched her place a restraining hand on her floating hair as the bus came level with her before accelerating away.

He knew he had made an error of judgement, but he couldn’t help himself. He had ordered the defacement of all the statues raised to Alexander in public places. They were to be smeared in mud and excrement and slashed with graffiti.

Alexander Severus, his cousin and heir, was straight and dangerous, and Heliogabalus had reason to fear an uprising. There had been previous insurrections, he reminded himself, the first as early as 218, when the Third Legion, ‘Gallica’, stationed in Syria, had defected in the interests of making Verus, their commander, emperor. Subsequent to that there had been attempts by the Fourth Legion, the fleet and a pretender called Seleucus, all of which had been suppressed by Heliogabalus’ guard. In a self-critical mood he thought back to the beginnings of his antagonistic policy towards the Army and how much of it stemmed from his appointment of a gay lover, Publius Valerius Comazon, to the position of commander of the Praetorian Guard. This ill-considered move in his first year as emperor had lost him the support of the military for good.

But in Alexander, even though the boy was only thirteen years old, and in his inveterately dominating mother, Julia Mamea, he had made powerful enemies. He had grown to hold both in contempt, more for the undercurrent of their ambition than for any direct plot to remove him from office. There was something about Alexander and his refusal to drop a predominantly passive guard that Heliogabalus not only disliked but mistrusted. The boy was too anxious to please, and the lack of conviction apparent in his ideas suggested he could be easily manipulated. Alexander reminded him of still water: no impulsive ripple entered his behaviour; no oscillating current rocked his mood. He was to be found reading politics, law and equity or discussing with the Senate ways of keeping the empire stable by using Rome as the baseline for a civilized community.

It was winter. Heliogabalus was finding it hard to cope with Annia Faustina’s demands as a woman. Contrary to his expectations, she expected him to perform in bed and on his refusal had stonewalled him with an angry silence whenever they found themselves together in private. The relationship was becoming a mess, like so much of his personal life, and part of him wished he could take off with Hierocles to one of the islands, maybe to Capri. He had begun to dream of blue spaces and of setting up an exclusive gay community on one of the outposts. He had talked about it with his closest friends, most of whom had encouraged him to pursue his aims. He was tired of the admin expected of him, and he longed to be free of the Senate’s conniving spin.

He sat eating a light meal of olives, goat’s cheese and a variety of vegetables and was glad of having Antony there to prepare his clothes for the day. He felt on edge, knowing there would be reprisals for the ugly method he had chosen to assassinate Alexander’s character. His message was clear: if there wasn’t a turnaround in public feeling then he would abandon Rome and set up his island community. And if they came after him and burned the island, then he couldn’t care. He would at least die amongst his own.

He had arranged today to take beauty tips from Laura, the exceedingly beautiful prostitute he had bought outright for a hundred thousand and kept untouched in his own wing of the palace. She was his platonic distraction, and her presence at dinner annoyed Annia in the same way as she was unable to accept the importance of Vesuvius in his life. The more he thought of it the more he recognized the need for a separation. He hadn’t the time to cope with domestic conflict, particularly with Hierocles demanding constant support as he slammed from one drunken state to another on a self-debasing trail of excess.

Laura came into the room, wearing a black piled-up Indian wig, and took a place beside him on the couch. The heating in the palace was never sufficient for him, and he shivered. He envied Laura her body. No matter how much he imagined what it was like to be a woman, he was acutely aware of his separation from the actuality. Laura was his compensation, the woman he would like to have been
if things had been different. As it was, he remained fascinated by her looks, his only demand on her being that she saved herself for him while at the same time accepting that the nature of the relationship ruled out any possibility of sex. She had put on her day-face and wore a purple silk dress, an item likely to offend Annia with its imperial connotations. He liked to give her presents as a consolation for the tedium of her life. She was his doll, and it was her job to blink her big green eyes at him from behind a defensive screen of mascara. Laura had come from a good family but had been disowned by them after an early sexual scandal. She had never confided the details, but he knew enough of her sketchy background to guess that her social defiance was aimed at her family. Penalized for sex, she had come to identify totally with it, compelled to make this aspect the cause of her ruin. He had given her books, including Ovid’s racy celebration of love, but he suspected she never read them. She shared a flat in the palace with his personal beautician, an Egyptian called Leila, and appeared to have settled into a life of uneventful luxury. It wasn’t something he had the intention of indefinitely extending, but for the time it gave him a perverse satisfaction to know that he was denying other men access to her body. She was the feminine ideal he could look at but never touch.

He performed his usual little acts of homage, giving her rings that sparkled like frozen waterfalls or blocked facets of ice windowed on a high peak. What he liked was her genuine fascination with the beauty of stones, irrespective of their worth. He watched her eyes bump up at sight of a brimming emerald, as she turned the ring over in her palm before giving it the attention of her finger.

Together they looked at the jewels he had chosen on impulse from the thousands he hoarded in chests in his room. Stones that had been fetched from all parts of the empire and cut and set by Rome’s best jewellers. They were the cold currency rainbow that he turned over in his hands whenever he felt insecure. He liked the way Laura would study a ring by widening her left eye, while correspondingly narrowing the focus of her right.