by Jeremy Reed
Jim sat down next to Masako on a blue sofa, while Antonio, as he had introduced himself, went into the kitchen to make coffee. He could hear a kettle being filled and the clatter of cups and saucers being given a quick rinse.
He took the opportunity to look around a room that was individual rather than ostentatious. While the colours were bold, the furnishings were tasteful, the design nearly always avoiding drawing attention to itself. There was a rack of CDs on one wall and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Jim’s inquisitive eye picked out a line of Roman and Greek classics in the green-jacketed Loeb edition, the names Pliny, Tacitus, Juvenal, Herodotus and Livy catching his scattershot visual enquiry. There was a handsome writing-desk placed beneath the wall of books, while central to the room was a leather-topped, circular library table filled with an ordered miscellany of papers and books.
Antonio came back into the room carrying Masako’s red roses in a black vase and placed them on the table. Jim watched him stand back from the arrangement, choreographing it with his eyes, before he disappeared back into the kitchen.
They sat and waited for him to return. Jim noticed with relief that the double glazing kept out the persistent dynamic of the city’s scooter-crazed traffic. He had the impression that the cul-de-sac in which Antonio lived had become time-warped, almost as if protecting its occupant, who continued to sound busy with coffee things in the kitchen.
Antonio reappeared carrying a tray with a coffee-pot and cups and a plate of florentines. Jim couldn’t help but pick up a signal from the purple shirt Antonio was wearing as yet another clue to his hidden identity. There was a breeziness to his walk as he came in, and he seemed, for all his remoteness, glad of the company. He poured the coffee into a blue set and offered round the dark-chocolate florentines. ‘The coffee’s from the local deli,’ he said, ‘but it tastes Turkish. It’s like a swamp brew.’
Jim took in the camp inflections colouring the voice, aware that Antonio’s conflict of gender surfaced through this instrument. The man and the woman in him both manoeuvred for space in his words, with neither assuming precedence. He found it oddly winning, this listening to the core of a person in which masculine and feminine played for options.
‘I hope you don’t mind us calling out of the blue like this,’ Masako said. ‘I know it must seem rude to just drop by.’
‘Apologies aren’t needed,’ Antonio said. ‘It was necessary that we meet.’
Jim continued to sit on the sideline as a silent spectator to events, disconcerted and uncertain where this was leading or how it would end. He kept asking himself how he could be so incredulous as to take a stranger he had never met for the reincarnation of Heliogabalus. Nothing added up, but by now he didn’t expect it to. He suddenly found himself facing Antonio’s level but benign stare, the eyes sizing him up for identity. In return he found the courage to meet this uncompromising scrutiny and stay with it until a bond was formed. There was kindness in the expression, as well as a tacit understanding of the contact they had already shared. It was doubly strange for Jim to encounter in the flesh somebody he had taken for a trick of his mind.
‘I think I know who you are, crazy as it may sound. I’m in Rome to get some background to a dissertation I’m writing on the emperor Heliogabalus, and for some reason I can’t get the picture of you out of my mind.’
‘Of that I’m perfectly aware,’ Antonio smiled, deepening a plot that Jim was desperate to believe for fear of going mad otherwise.
‘Jim’s had freaky things happen ever since he started his dissertation,’ Masako added. ‘He’ll tell you himself about what happened in London and also of how he’s been seeing you ever since we arrived.’
‘Seeing me?’ Antonio questioned, arching his eyebrows. ‘Whatever’s going on has been happening quite independent of me. It’s been as involuntary for me as it has been for him.’
‘Just hearing you talk about it makes me feel better,’ Jim said. ‘I thought I was starting to lose it.’
‘Me, too,’ Antonio said. ‘The last few days have been impossible. I’ve never felt under such strain. My problem is that I have total recall of a past that happened thousands of years ago. I know at the time I was the emperor Heliogabalus and that you have chosen me to be the subject of your dissertation.’
‘But why should that bring us together?’ Jim asked, still baffled by the sequence of events.
‘I have no idea,’ Antonio laughed, attempting to make light of something too serious to be patched with humour. ‘I suppose we can see if my reconstituted life fits with your thesis.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve interpreted history quite freely,’ Jim said. ‘I’ve relied more on recreating my subject – or should I say you?’
‘Absolutely right,’ Antonio replied with incisive clarity. ‘The individual is always too close to his age to know what is really happening. To live in time is to experience only its events and never their meaning.’
Jim reflected on the profound truth in Antonio’s words, as well as the dynamic needed to compress thought into such telescoped expression. He realized at once the psychological depth attached to Antonio’s character, and the intellect that backed it up. The two together were a formidable tool, and he found himself weighing up their potential, as an analyst might make a preliminary reading of a patient.
‘Writing about you has got me into deep trouble,’ he said, ‘or at least I attribute some of my recent problems to my choice of subject matter.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ Antonio asked, curiosity adding brilliance to his eyes.
‘It’s a long story,’ Jim said. ‘The person I was having a relationship with, Danny, not only betrayed me but did so by becoming involved with a sex cult that meets on Hampstead Heath. They have their saint, a man called Slut, who presides over the group and elects to be crucified by his cult.’
‘Go on,’ Antonio said, clearly fascinated by the subject.
‘Well, Danny managed to inveigle me into attending a meeting of the group in Soho. Naturally I wasn’t prepared for what I was to encounter, and finding Slut repulsive I walked out. I then received a threatening message from Danny telling me that Slut was looking for me and meant trouble.’
‘That’s where I come in,’ Masako said. ‘Jim decided to come and stay with me for a few days to lie low.’
‘But unfortunately they found me. I went out one evening to buy a bottle of wine, was abducted in a busy area of Soho, bundled into a car and handcuffed. To cut a long story short, I was driven to Hampstead Heath, forcibly initiated into the circle and made to witness a ritual culminating in Slut’s crucifixion on the orgy-tree.’
‘Did they force you to have sex?’ Antonio enquired.
‘I’m sure they would have, but the police arrived in a van and there were men running through the trees blowing whistles and carrying torches. I took advantage of the confusion to make a break for it and ran off into the woods. It was pouring with rain and I was convinced I was being followed. Eventually, after what seemed hours, I got back to the road and was lucky enough to stop a passing taxi.’
‘What you describe is very close to an experience I recall from my life as emperor in AD 218,’ Antonio said, his eyes appearing to look backwards in his head to meet with the recollection. ‘You will know from my history that I incurred the Army’s hatred by being openly gay. Well, a group of us used to meet in the gardens at night, and we called ourselves the onobeli, which, loosely, means well endowed. One of our group, a youth called Zoticus, had a Christ fixation, which was unusual, given that Mithraism was the popular religion at the time. Anyhow, he came to identify with the image of the suffering god, and I remember the night on which he insisted we haul him on to a tree and tie him there in the crucifixional pose –’
‘I find this incredible,’ Jim interrupted, as his mind meshed with Antonio’s narrative.
‘But I haven’t finished yet,’ Antonio said intently. ‘We were all drunk and out of our minds and most of us naked. Suddenly our sanctuary w
as invaded by the soldiers who policed the parks. They ran in on us making superficial cuts with their weapons and shouting out abuse and ridicule. In the confusion I was pinned up against a tree by a soldier who spat at me. He was about to run me through when I made clear my identity. I can still see the man’s face now. The terror in his eyes at having spat in the emperor’s face and the realization he was only seconds away from murdering Caesar showed in his shocked expression as he recognized me. He dropped to his knees immediately, shouting out to the soldiers to desist. I took no action against him or the others. I simply ordered them to go and told them that learning tolerance would make them better soldiers.’
‘But that’s extraordinary,’ Jim said. ‘It’s a perfect instance of syn-chronicity, or the fusing of two separate incidents into a shared lime. In our case it’s a way of having past and present unite through a singular theme. I’m sure you don’t know any more than I do why this is happening.’
‘Sometimes the truth needs to be heard, and perhaps we’ve been drawn together on account of that. To make good something about my past? Does that sound incredibly naïve?’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Jim said pensively. ‘After all, history invents lies. Most of the accounts I’ve read of Heliogabalus’ life have been cobbled together by hostile biographers like Lampridius and read totally over the top.’
‘I have to be in London in three weeks on business. I would welcome the opportunity to look at your thesis, if you would allow me to read it. Nobody’s memory is infallible, but I seem to have inherited partial if not total recall of my life as emperor.’
‘I, too, find the whole thing amazing,’ Masako said, as she toyed fastidiously with segmenting her florentine. ‘We found out where you lived only because I asked my dream to locate it for us.’
‘I believe you,’ Antonio said. ‘We sound like we’re creating a fiction, but it’s for real. That’s probably why we’ve all met. We share in common a particular psychic faculty, one that belongs to the brain’s right hemisphere. It allows us to convert dreams into reality.’
‘That’s well put,’ Jim said, feeling his wired tension come down a notch at the recognition of shared experience. He could sense a current in the room working as an interactive lead. They were all connected to its source while retaining their separate identities. It was a good feeling, being up after having been so down.
‘What I’ve learned,’ Antonio said, ‘and I suspect I knew it also as Heliogabalus, is that magic is a far more potent instrument than reason. The latter has to cut through too many layers to find a solution, whereas magic goes directly there.’
‘Again, it couldn’t be put better,’ Jim said. ‘Life is, after all, a process of relearning what we have forgotten. Imagination and magic allow us to access the molecule inside the junk.’
He watched Antonio sight him with approval. He could see from the complete absence of shadow on the young man’s face that he had never found it necessary to shave. There were no blue runways structured by a razor and no rusty craters indicating nicks. The face was androgynous, in that the hormonal baseline was a selective pairing of male and female. There was strength in his vulnerability, suggesting the feminine was compensated by a masculinity adept at managing to hold its own in life.
‘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.