The Lurid Sea

by Tom Cardamone

  That first night in Athens, I exaggerated my excitement concerning the next day’s tour schedule, driving my mother to distraction until, exasperated, she banished me to my room for the remainder of the evening. I immediately took to the window and scurried out, down into the dusty street. Athens was different from Rome. Its older, more compact streets were thick with refuse and dogs. The cemetery was beside our rented house, its stone wall low and crumbling. Even before entering, I could see the solitary silhouette of a man prowling about within. Heart pounding, sweat from my brow stinging my eyes, I jumped the wall and landed unevenly on a grave that had collapsed inward into a weedy mix of soil and bone. The sounds from the frantic Athenian streets were somehow muffled by the preponderance of graves and winding cypress trees. Like those tombs along the Appian Way, these attempts at one last clamor for immortality succeeded largely on the largesse available at the time of passing. Huge monuments crowded out less impressive graves, those deemed more austere by the pocketbook rather than any philosophical leanings of the departed. Statuary told silent tales of ancestral respect or desertion, primarily by the amount of bird shit cresting their noble foreheads or exposed crowns. I stumbled out of the shallow pit and looked around for coupling men, hoping the darkness would invite closer inspections of what I had so far only caught faraway glimpses of at wrestling matches or slave auctions.

  The lanes were straightforward but unkempt, so I moved slowly across the uneven cobblestone and bits of broken masonry hidden within rising shafts of brittle weeds and parched grass. A figure moved about in the distance. Where are the others? The guidebook scribe had promised a horde of hungry men. Maybe I’m too early? Fear and lust, newly conjoined twins fused at the foreskin, drove me forward. My throat was dry. A modest erection bobbed between my legs like a divining rod. I could not see the man I was after but sensed he had entered a jumble of high tombs, fenced by bricked enclosures to mark family plots. I could no longer see the wall I had jumped over. This was a silent place of stillness and death. The urge to flee mounted as the figure I was following emerged nearby. He stood upon a tomb to survey the cemetery. His sinewy silhouette beneath the moon revealed that he was a youth as well. My fear subsided and desire built as I realized he was naked in the moonlight. The upward curve of his solid penis pulled me forward. I guessed that, like me, he was disappointed in just how unpopulated the graveyard was with the nocturnal living. I rushed forward through the maze and tripped on a short burst of uneven, weedy stairs. I fell into an open grave, landing softly on fresh soil that, though my fall was cushioned, knocked the breath out of me.

  He swooped down, a ravenous vulture. Expertly pinning my thin wrists together with one bony hand, with his other he ripped my toga off. I thrashed about, but he bade me be quiet with a familiar head butt that signaled more pain was in order if I was not compliant.

  Obsidio slid his thick member between my thighs and grunted in satisfaction as I reluctantly parted my sweaty legs.

  Obsidio.

  I knew him by his breath. No matter the tongue scraping, the scented rinse, he exuded a whiff of the underworld. His breath held the dankness of a sealed tomb. There was a hint of buried decay. And as he matured, his darkness emerged in other ways. He could disappear when crossing into a shadow. His dismissive laugh lowered the temperature in small rooms. As his penis poked and prodded my thighs, he bit down hard on my exposed neck, more to elicit a whimper and demonstrate his mastery over me than any other reason.

  He grunted and whispered, “Do you like my big worm, little bookworm? I am going to put it inside you. I hope it does not cut through your guts too much, though you’ve certainly landed in the right place if this is something we only get to do once.”

  He flipped me over and pushed my legs farther apart with his sharp knees. He spat into the palm of his hand and inserted a dirty finger into my virgin hole. I tried to scream, but he shoved my face into the black dirt. A broken garland of faded flowerings rung around my skull as he attempted entry. With one hand, he brushed away at the dirt before my face to reveal a cold, pale visage. As my brother’s weight pushed me forward, I realized what I had thought was fallen statuary was the corpse of a boy. He appeared to be around my age. Our motion caused one of the worn coins to slip from his eyes. His lids indolently parted to reveal cold quartz, reflecting the jaundice of the full moon.

  Obsidio forced his way inside me, and I struggled to push him out and found that in doing so I could grip him, and that this internal grip was inviting. I want just this thing. The cold dirt and clammy belly of the boy beneath pressed against my exposed cock, which lengthened, much to my horror.

  “Yes, brother. Open up to me.”

  I felt all of him inside me, stretching me to new capacities with his brutal thrusting, wild, without rhythm. Blind progress burned, and I felt suffocated by his weight, yet elevated by the pain and pleasure burrowing within. The body beneath me rocked in unison with us, a sick marionette to our incestuous copulation. I could hear the teeth of the lifeless corpse grimly click together, almost as if they were chattering on a cold night. Death is carnal. Obsidio was, after all, his father’s son.

  His sperm shot through me like hot arrows, and I came, too. I convulsed in delirium as he pulled out and wiped the dripping miasma of shit, sperm, and soil from his still-hard cock onto the shreds of my toga.

  I blinked away the tears and rolled over on my back, looking about wildly for an escape. We were in an appropriately narrow grave. Obsidio must have scouted the location beforehand and balanced himself on the brick enclosure, to give the illusion he was standing atop a covered tomb. He pushed himself off me and jumped out.

  “Looks like I owe dear old Pausanias a bit of thanks, eh?”

  He stood and sneered down at me, pulling his toga from atop the statue of a weeping maiden, an empty bird’s nest precariously placed within the nook of her cracked arms.

  I blinked, not understanding, unsure of why I felt so much pleasure mixed with dread.

  He left without another word, without so much as a look back. As I lay in the dirt, anger rose within me. And it was not directed at him. I was angry at myself for wondering when we could do it again.

  * * *

  I washed in the murky waters of a fountain in the middle of the cemetery. I did not fully understand Obsidio’s final utterance until I returned to reading Pausanias that next morning. My body felt stretched and twisted, used and yet somehow new, ready. When I walked across the room, I knew my gait was different, that aspects of my manhood had been revealed, the permutations of hot destiny stirred. I returned to the scroll, ready to read more of the ongoing argument between the previous two travelers as much as the words of the master himself, but their conversation stopped at the cemetery. Perplexed, I unrolled the additional texts, but the margins were unmarked. It had all been a ruse by Obsidio. A masterful forgery to lure me out of the house, to a place where he could take me regardless of how much I cried out.

  Death is carnal, a carnal trap.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shared Seas

  Every time I come ashore—for in many ways these are my beaches, time my tide—wherever I land, I understand what the men are saying. I am aware there is a difference among the languages spoken, and it saddens me to no small degree that Greek is no longer the language of court, and Latin has multiplied and mutated in several forked, interlocking and serpentine tongues. However, wherever I am, I know what is being said, and I can speak just as fluently. I have decided this is an inherited trait and not an unstated condition of my inimitable travels. My father could talk to fish. All sea creatures obeyed his command. I once overheard Mother tell Obsidio that whenever he whispered in her ear, he sounded like a porpoise, which caused her to immediately convulse in climax. (I am convinced that she shared her more disturbing sexual secrets with him purely to elicit that rarest of reactions: a smile). As I can breathe underwater, so too it is likely I also possess his ability to communicate with a vast variety of living thi
ngs, an ability that has transformed into an aptitude to understand what men of different eras, countries, and continents say within the confines of our shared seas.

  In my initial sensual delirium—and I do mean I was absolutely mad for cock—I hardly noticed that men alone populated the bathhouses as I leapfrogged from one steamy location to the next. After perhaps a century of being enchanted by penises, I had a moment of supine reflection within a relaxing bubble bath that I did, indeed, have a past. All of these men! The scope and breadth of my curse took hold, and my mind began to entertain certain notions: that at some point men started to begat men, so women had vanished. In addition, I noticed that some rather large men had admirers. Were these men then pregnant? Was there competition to claim the offspring or some social advantage in helping to raise the whelps? It took a while to sort these things out, though not as long to understand that the Roman Empire did not die, it shattered.

  Europa was drastically changed. After Londinium rose and fell, another empire adopted the royal purple and spun it into red, white, and blue. This “America” is, as far as I can tell, vast, a continent unknown in my youth. And, like Rome, it did not seem to deliver on many of its promises, but the music that its deep sorrows rutted out of certain souls made the Grecian experiment a worthy one, I suppose. And poor, raisin-like Greece. Rarely did I hear the mellifluous language, except when I was actually in Greece, and the strictures of my sojourns never afforded me many visits to the periods I would have preferred. I never got the opportunities to meet the philosophers I had so much admired, though in the lustful frenzy of my travels, would I have asked any of them the right questions? My mute mouth fixed on their penises, my eyes transfixed upon brows containing singular truths and jewel-like thoughts I only wish I could tap as easily and expertly as I draw semen from the cock.

  So. I have rarely seen a woman in these labyrinths. The newspapers that occasionally skirt across my path have detailed political progress. I seldom find books, owing to the temperament of these various dens and labyrinths as much as the moisture in the air, not to say their very purpose does not lend itself to academic pursuits. In certain, wondrous eras where music permeates the baths, I hear sonic sirens, beloved by a head-bobbing many. But due to my thirst, it interests me more that these men are so dedicated to other men that they have thrown off the yoke of heritage and familial reproductive duty. I only hear disembodied voices; the stories and lives of my Sapphic sisters are hidden from me as well.

  In a tired, world-weary ephebe with hollow eyes, I occasionally hear the hollow laugh of my mother.

  * * *

  I do see love here. Men fall in love within the baths. Sometimes for a few minutes or several hours, an endless night both parties will remember for the rest of their lives. And I do mean love, not lust. There is a difference about the eyes, an alteration in the kiss, a lightness that blossoms in the heart never to fully fade.

  There are men who have only known love in the baths. My travels once took me to a bathhouse in London, an evolved Londinium, no longer a dingy port town harried by Celts and mangy werewolves, but a teeming capital. I witnessed a young, sheepish man take his first step inside such an establishment. I could feel the trepidation from the locker room, and I peered around a corner to see. He was too frightened to move, however, and an older gentleman with a thick mustache was buzzed in and nearly knocked him over. Quickly assessing the youngster’s state, he offered an assured pat on the arm and said, “Here, here. You just need a jolly good steam.”

  The older man chatted him up as they disrobed, and he gave him a tour of the facilities as if it were just another gymnasium, greatly setting the boy at ease. Their chaste kiss in the steam room was an affectionate beginning. When I found myself back at the same bathhouse in what must have been a decade later, little had changed. However, there the couple was again, older, obviously settled into a habit of meeting there at an appointed set date and time. They played cards in their towels in a little sitting area and shared tea and a tin of biscuits and chatted about their children. I overheard the younger man excitedly share every detail about his newborn, while his older friend, shorn of mustache but thicker in belly, nodded and chirped appreciative noises. A few passing men clutched their towels and scowled at their jovial exchange, as if this sharing broke some unspoken pact. I swam through time, surfacing across the globe and again returned; what felt like only a fortnight to me had passed, and there they were, much older. Now the younger one was helping the older man at the door. He had a cane and was much pained in disrobing. I sensed an unspoken agreement the arrangement would not hold much longer. The sauna was empty but possessed an air of tension and foreboding. They spoke of a great war, of how facilities such as this were being commandeered for use as makeshift hospitals or to put to use by bivouacking troops.

  Within white curtains of steam that folded and unfolded, I observed their final kiss, a passion meant to swallow time was itself about to be devoured, and they accepted this fate. Then I heard the younger one whisper in his lover’s ear, “There he is again. I tell you that’s the same little faun I spied the day we met. And again all those years later, when we played spades that winter the Thames froze over. He’s here to bid us farewell. See him there? I told you our meetings were magic.”

  The older man looked over at me, but not really at me, more over my shoulder, toward a place of promise that even my immortal self could not see. They held hands and repeated little jokes long unmoored of their original meanings but still of familiar comfort. They kissed. Tears intermingled as they pulled one another into the shadows for a last embrace. I leaned back and let the steam take me wherever I was meant to travel, feeling a bit warmer than usual.

  So yes, I do see love here.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Darkest Marvel

  Outside erotic excursions, of all the varied experiences I have had since my aquatic expulsion, few have been as astonishing as the discovery of soap. Soap. These ponderous white bricks fit in the palm of your hand, yet add a spray of water and a vigorous rub and a veritable waterfall of sparkling suds results. Endless silvery liquid excretions drip like luxuriant honey from foggy containers mounted alongside rusted spigots. Soap and the delirious molecules therein that expand into popping wet galaxies of bubbles—truly these ninth wonders of the world nearly rival the electricity that has ubiquitously replaced candlelight and oil lamps. Oh, the cascade of revelations that followed in terms of cleanliness.

  We Romans assumed that we had not only invented hygiene, we had developed exquisite practices and rituals that were the very apex of civilization. If I were to reveal the habits we considered acceptable to my latter-day bathhouse denizens, the world would balk. Compared to the savage Visigoths harrying our farthest borders, for whom every tree was a toilet, we thought using a shared sponge on a stick to wipe our asses after shitting, or the aforementioned strigil, used to scrape our skins clean, was sophisticated. We thought our luxurious heated pools separated us from the half-human beasts that lurked about on the edges of Numidian deserts. Well, the cascade of shampoos, deodorants, and black combs preserved in iridescent blue liquid glistening beneath the neon lights of tiled bathrooms lined with private stalls replete with toilets, porcelain oysters that gingerly swallowed excrement with the simple toggle of a handle, all overwhelmed and humbled what we once considered cosmopolitan.

  Ironically, I discovered my first such toilet in some future Rome. I knew the city from the smell of the Tiber alone. And the men by their noses and the familiar, coarse tufts of hair regally at rest, like epaulets on their relaxed shoulders. It was a wonder to see the same statuesque figures and recognize centuries later the descendants of the same louche prostitutes, filling similar doorways, nursing the same larcenous desperation that had narrowed souls while ballooning biceps.

  Yet another unthinkable convenience in that distant past that considered itself the pinnacle of sanitation, some saunas were fitted with little silver stalls that contained coils of cords re
ady to unleash a forceful spray with which nimble boys cleansed their holes, always after soaping up the opening with an exploratory finger. Other establishments possessed water fountains that dispensed mint-infused water to better refresh stretched and abused mouths. But what era does not fancy itself that high point of progress, never knowing future generations will look back over their washed, scrubbed, depilated shoulders with a dismissive laugh. The bouquet of endless scents, the silky textures, this godly effluence, lubricated my journey and made every shower room a potential miniature Olympus, with clouds of foam like white topiary slowly sliding down broad, tanned chests to land atop my head. And there I am on my knees again before a throng of Titans, their lathered shafts waiting for the crucial swab of my tongue.