“It’s all political,” contributed Stephen. “Nobody gets printed unless they’re in with the big corporations. I’ve written some letters about it to the local papers. It’s one of those things the powers-that-be want to defend, so I haven’t gotten anything into print about it yet. It’s a conspiracy, like everything big is.”
“Big Mama Ad-Verse represents everything that’s wrong with our culture,” said Shen.
Maternus looked at the seemingly inoffensive woman on the stage who was giving thanks to the audience in the same tongue-in-cheek fashion Shen and the third-place winner had used; he never would have suspected, until Shen had said something, that this harmless-looking person with frizzy hair could embody everything wrong with an entire culture! That was something not even the evil Emperor Commodus had been able to do back in the days of Roman decline. There had always been some corrupt corn factor or brutal slave master who did some vile deed the emperor did not have the time or energy to perform. For the first time since he was a small, unarmed boy running half naked through the military camp in search of food, Maternus had the sensation of fearing another human being. He wondered if perhaps this Big Mama woman were the anti-christ he had heard mentioned in the church Mr. Worthy made him attend, and if she were, would it not be more becoming for the embodiment of evil to appear as a warrior made of steel, riding on twin lions and shooting lightening bolts from his eyes, rather than as a smallish woman with a bohemian sense of style.
“Do you think she might harm us?” he asked Shen.
“Don’t be silly. She’s never hurt anybody,” said the poet.
“Then why do you say she’s evil?” asked the Roman.
“I didn’t say anything like that,” said Shen. “I meant she’s everything that’s wrong with literature. She’s got a gigantic ego, and she’s pretentious, and everything she does is intended to be sensational. Didn’t you hear her performance?”
“I came too late,” admitted Maternus.
“Well, let me tell you — everything she writes is about herself,” said Shen. “Her poetry is autoerotic.”
Maternus wondered if the last word in Shen’s last sentence might refer to a love of cars. He recognized that the other offenses Shen accused her of could also be attached to the young African-Chinese poet himself. As already noted, the Roman had learned to be uneasy during the conversational silences so common in the modern world; now he made one himself while he pondered telling his new friend Shen how very much like Big Mamma Ad-Verse he was. He was saved from making any unflattering comparisons by Cecilia the librarian, who came to the table to congratulate Shen on his second-place finish. She had her two girlfriends in tow, and they appeared more bored than ever, and eager to get out of the dreary coffeehouse and have something stiffer to drink than cappuccino. They also desired to be somewhere that had a clientele of gainfully employed men.
“I gave you the highest possible score every time, Shen,” the librarian enthused, bunching her shoulders while she pawed at the floor like a twelve-year-old girl speaking after school to her first male teacher. “You were far and away the best,” she added.
“Apparently, that wasn’t enough,” said Shen, his gaze fixed upon the happy first- place winner still lingering upon the stage amid the spoils of her victory.
“I did the same,” said Stephen, whose attention was directed upon Cecilia as completely as firemen direct their hoses upon a burning building. “Everybody else must have been in Mrs. Buckman’s pay.”
No one other than Maternus heard Stephen speak. Cecilia was fixed upon Shen and Shen upon his rival. The Roman felt embarrassed for the frayed man in the baseball cap when the poor fellow said he might start a letter-writing campaign to get the local poetry slams cleaned up. If a man wanted a woman as badly as Stephen clearly wanted the slender librarian, Maternus felt that impassioned man should simply take her, or else he was no better than a woman himself. Before Stephen could humiliate himself further and ere Cecilia could tell Shen again how wonderful he was, the defeated second-place poet rose and declared he wanted to go home.
“Ah, you haven’t introduced me to your friend,” said Cecilia, referring to Maternus, whom she was not really interested in meeting, but she did want Shen to linger a few seconds more in her company.
“This is Matt August,” said Shen with the casual indifference of a rich girl discussing last year’s fashions. “He used to be a soldier.”
“I’ve seen you around the library,” said Cecilia to the Roman. “The girls and I thought you might be a boxer.”
“I have done a little boxing,” admitted Maternus, referring to the horrific matches he and his brother soldiers had fought with spiked leather gloves for the amusement of their bloodthirsty officers, for he had no idea there was a modern and well-regulated sport with the same name.
“Really?!” said one of Cecilia’s girlfriends, suddenly interested in the large, battered man who had risen from his seat when they approached his table. “You must be in wonderful physical condition,” another one of them said. “Do you work out at a gym?”
This slight indication of feminine interest quite unnerved the veteran warrior. In his day men had taken the initiative in every situation, and he did not fancy being placed in what he considered the woman’s role; for a moment his muscles tightened and his instincts told him to put this too-forward female in her rightful place. Then he remembered Hell.
“I … fence, with swords, to keep in fighting condition,” said Maternus calmly, recalling how he and his comrades used to practice for battle eighteen centuries earlier.
Despite his admonitions to himself to behave, he nearly jumped out of his skin when the forward girlfriend — she was a pear-shaped nurse named Lucy — put a hand on his hypertrophied biceps.
“Oh my,” she said, amazed by how firm he was, “you certainly are a healthy man. Your girlfriend is certainly a lucky woman. Or do you have a wife? Are you married, Matt?”
“Not … presently,” stammered the befuddled warrior, and he considered fleeing for the exit rather than face this woman who was turning the rightful order of things upon its head. He was much relieved when Shen stood and declared by way of a farewell:
“We’re going now.”
“If you must…” murmured Cecilia, sounding as forlorn as the last robin of summer on the morning of autumn’s first hard frost.
“I’ve got work to do, too,” said Stephen, and was ignored by everyone present. “I do my best writing at the computer during the late hours of the night, like Van Gogh did.”
Shen walked away from the table as casually as he would have done if no one else had been standing there and speaking with him. Stephen immediately followed after him, still talking to Cecilia, whose blue eyes turned to the departing Shen the way a daisy seeks the light of the setting sun.
“I should go with them,” said Maternus, hoping that moving in the direction of the doorway might cause Lucy to stop clinging to him.
“Do you have a card, Matty?” she asked him, already calling him by a pet name.
“I have one at the library,” said Maternus, “and another with my social security number on it.”
“You’re funny!” declared Lucy and gripped Maternus’s arm harder.
“Or he’s really stupid,” suggested the other girlfriend in a half voice, she being a willow-thin grade school teacher named Deirdre.
“Let me give you mine, then,” said Lucy and took from her purse a stiff bit of paper on which was printed: “Lucy Southern, R.N.,” and gave her address and phone number.
“You work in a hospital,” said Maternus, as he had quickly learned what the English noun meant when he read of Florence Nightingale.
“I’d take care of you, handsome,” Lucy gaily offered.
“You’d take care of him,” muttered the grim Deirdre. “Give him a sponge bath for free.”
“I … will keep your card,” said Maternus and took several steps in the direction of the departing Shen and Stephen. “I sh
ould go with my companions … ladies.” He bowed to the three women and was outside before he could hear the remarks they made about him and his friends.
The Roman was a little surprised to see Shen and Stephen unlocking their bicycles and preparing to ride home when nearly everyone else exiting the coffeehouse was entering an automobile in the parking lot. Granted, the bohemian crowd only had cars marked “Subaru” and “Jetta,” which Maternus had come to recognize as not as desirable as the cars marked “BMW” and “Lexus.” They were nonetheless automobiles and not the muscle-driven rides his friends had.
Surely, he thought, one of the two best poets in the greater Denver area could afford something better than anything driven by the college students who made up the majority of the Great Blue Heron’s clientele. It was then, when he had just freed himself from the clutches of the aggressive Lucy, that Maternus had the disturbing thought a more knowledgeable man would have had weeks earlier. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps Stephen and Shen are poor. If that were so, then why were women, Cecilia in particular, so attracted to Shen? Could there be something else a man might have other than wealth and status a woman would find alluring? Could they be drawn to Shen by, say, his good looks and exciting personality, if men could be said to be good looking or exciting? If that were true, then the modern world was beyond the reach of his understanding, and time spent here could not make him wiser. Only the angel Mr. Worthy could explain these strange developments to him, and until he had the opportunity to speak to that entity again, he resolved to put the matter out of his mind.
His two friends pedaled slowly beside Maternus as he walked on the sidewalk in the warm late spring night. The air about them felt incredibly light, as if not an ounce of water had ever been evaporated into it, or it had never been host to a speck of dust. Stephen kept up his monolog with the world, and at the moment he was complaining about the shabby condition of the suburban side roads. Shen was lost in meditation. After two blocks of travel they left the busy traffic of Mississippi Avenue and entered the tree-lined residential streets south of the business district. Trees within a city were an innovation Maternus saw as a great improvement over the stark brick and stone neighborhoods of his day. When trees grow in one’s own yard, one can sit on the porch of the humblest of homes and know the cool of the deep forest and the peace of the garden. The Roman so enjoyed the city trees he forgot for a time that the world that had made this innovation had also confused the proper roles of men and women. The trio of slow-moving men passed families sitting on their patios beneath the late evening sky, and Maternus heard couples laughing in the darkness, which made him think how pleasant it would be to know what had amused them.
“These are lucky people on these streets,” he commented to Shen and Stephen. “No, ‘lucky’ is too mild a word. They are blessed to sit at peace with their families.”
“Blessed is a strong word,” said the previously taciturn Shen. “Most of these people are middle class office drudges.”
“My understanding of the concept of middle class is vague,” said the Roman. “Does it not mean neither rich nor poor?”
“Yes,” said Shen from his bicycle.
“Why is that bad?” asked Maternus.
“It’s the baggage that comes with being middle class that’s bad,” said the poet. “You’re tied to your place and the community, to your family as well.”
“Yeah, your damned family,” Stephen seconded his friend.
“How are these ties baggage?” asked Maternus, to whom the middle class way of living appeared to be the sweet antithesis of the rootless, wifeless, brutal life he had known on the bloody frontiers of the empire. As a man who had only heard women scream in terror or ask for money, sitting on a patio on a late summer evening and listening to one of them laugh simply because she was happy seemed a pleasure he would pay any price to know.
“They’re not really free,” said Shen. “They can’t do whatever they want.”
“You get a wife,” noted Stephen, “and you have to tell her everything you do. Now I just put on my hat and go. Don’t tell anybody anything.”
“Have either of you ever been married?” asked Maternus.
Neither of his companions said anything for nearly a minute. When Stephen resumed speaking he again expressed his contempt for the city’s road department. How could they expect anybody without a big car to drive over these potholes and not kill themselves? He would write a letter to the Post the first thing tomorrow morning.
“In my travels with the army,” said Maternus, speaking as if he had been a contemporary soldier, since he realized the truth would not be believed, “I saw people who were not free. They wore iron collars and were branded on the shoulder with the sign of their owners. The same owners beat them if the slaves so much as made eye contact with them. Most of those wretches were worked to death before they turned forty. The women and some of the young boys were abused in ways that would make your skin crawl if I told you of it. That is what not being free is really like, my friends. The absolute freedom the two of you desire is certainly the polar opposite of that condition, yet I must say I think what you want can only lead to emotional and spiritual anarchy. I mean to say that if we each did only what we desired, there would be nothing for us that would be permanent, not even the obligations that bind us to other people.”
Stephen and Shen were used to being ignored by others. They were not familiar with outright contradiction. Neither of them responded after Maternus had talked to them in the direct, insensitive manner he had used when he had spoken to his comrades in the vulgar soldier’s patois they had used in place of Latin. Human feelings were unknown territory for the Roman, and he needed several minutes of uneasy silence to realize he might have been too harsh with his new friends.
“Of course, I may be wrong,” said Maternus, despite he not thinking he was. “I am only an ex-soldier working as a janitor. What do I know of freedom?”
That drew only an approving nod from one of the bicycle riders close to him in the darkness.
“I have never been married, either,” he added. He almost also admitted that he, too, knew nothing of women, but caught himself before he could make that insensitive comment.
“Women, who needs ‘em?” said Shen.
Maternus thought that every man who ever lived did to some extent. His new sense of empathy kept him from saying that, as well.
Stephen offered an unrelated comment that put the subject of wives behind them. As they passed a pale lawn, he noted that two weeks had passed since there had been a decent rain.
“Are you having a drought in Aurora?” asked Maternus.
That innocent query led to a discourse upon a letter-writing campaign Stephen had conducted two years earlier concerning global warming, and the Roman soon regretted he had said anything.
“Every day, we get closer to the moment when the natural thermostat in the North Atlantic will be flipped, bringing on the new Ice Age,” narrated Stephen. “Of course, before that happens, the polar ice caps will all melt and the oceans will rise high enough to flood every major port city in the world. Inland places like Colorado will experience winds up to three hundred miles an hour. Everything that isn’t dashed to little bits will eventually freeze to death.”
Maternus did not know if such fatalistic thinking was based on facts or not. He did think it odd to be entertaining such dire thoughts on that pleasant fall night, when a soft breeze was making the branches wave at the sky and countless children were asleep in their familiar, warm beds. He had already heard equally dire predictions of the future spoken at the small café where he sometimes had breakfast: America was bankrupt; the Mexicans were taking over; and everyone was going to die in a terrorist attack, if they did not die from second-hand tobacco smoke or obesity first. He wondered if some of Aurora’s citizens thought that way because they secretly felt they did not deserve the countless good things they had and deemed justice would be done if everything were lost. Or did civilizations at the
height of their prosperity always obsess on their eventual downfall? He recalled how the officers in his legion, the only educated men he had known in his previous life, often fretted that in the coming spring either the German tribes or the Parthians would sweep into the empire from the north or east, bringing murder and fire with them, when in fact the Parthians and the Germans had much more to fear from the Romans than vice versa.
“Successful nations must naturally fear the future,” thought the Roman, not realizing he had discovered a truth few historians and even fewer philosophers have ever stumbled upon. A writer could make a fine living simply writing books about how terrifying the future will be, he thought. Scaring people would be easy; they are already terrifying themselves every time they consider what is to come. (In his great book reading program, Maternus had not yet come across either the social science known as Futurism or the popular literary genre of science fiction, and thus had no notion of the fine livings already being earned by making the future look frightening. In his innocence, he fancied he was having an original idea.)
“Here’s the old hacienda,” said Stephen immediately after they had crossed another quiet intersection and progressed directly in front of an enormous three- story house that, in contrast to the other brightly lit residences in the neighborhood, was entirely unilluminated save for a few blue rays dancing on the blinds of one front window.
Had he seen it during the daytime, Maternus would have observed that the large house had three garrets, one for each of the upstairs bedrooms, and that someone had added a ramshackle wooden addition to the side of the house’s original brick edifice, a development that looked every bit as attractive as toadstools growing at the base of an oak. This addition had been created to provide even more bedrooms for Stephen’s uncle Jerry to rent. In the light of the day the Roman would have also remarked that the lawn was weedy around its edges and worn bare over most of its spacious middle by the chains attached to the two large dogs posted there. These latter two beasts had long ago become so familiar with the troop of mostly college students who lived under Jerry Kent’s expanded roof that they assumed every stranger was merely another roomer they were meeting for the first time, and they greeted the Roman with the same overbearing friendliness they offered everyone.
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