Authors: Jeremy Reed
With Masako taking a brief siesta before they went out sightseeing, he busied himself reading through his recent notes on Heliogabalus’ involvement in the mystery religions. Masako had turned over and was sleeping face down, and his eye was drawn to the little red heart tattooed above the crack of her bottom, an image so discreet, and at the same time loaded with sexual connotations, that he triggered erect with hard impromptu lust. Redirecting his attention back to his work, he savoured the sweet expectation that comes of denial and promised himself that if ever the time was right he would follow the tattoo as the directive to entering her body.
In recent weeks Jim had been preoccupied by the events leading up to Heliogabalus’ decision to arrange a marriage for his god, an
event that followed close on the heels of his own improvident marriage to Annia Faustina. Research had told him that for the union of deities the emperor had chosen the Carthaginian divinity Caelestis as bride for Elagabal. Recognized in Rome as the queen of the heavens, Caelestis was a variant form of the Phoenician Astarte. Her image had been brought to Rome and transported to the Elagaballium with immense ceremony, and the ritual marriage of the two deities had taken place in the temple. Jim’s knowledge of the subject told him that Heliogabalus had chosen well, as the goddess was not only the chief divinity of Carthage but was widely known in North Africa and elsewhere around the Mediterranean basin. She also had a cult following in Rome, her worship having been established by Septimius Severus. Her popularity apart, Jim guessed that the emperor may also have been motivated in his decision by the enormous wealth attracted to Caelestis’ temple. Commentaries differed as to the emperor’s motives in arranging this marriage, and Jim liked best the report that Heliogabalus would accept nothing but two golden lions to mark the occasion, the spiritual significance of the event proving sufficient for his ends. He imagined the emperor being handed the lions on a jewelled leash and his sense of exaggerated style leading to them being fitted with tiaras and dressed in purple coats to match his toga.
Masako continued to drowse and tentatively put out a hand to reassure herself that he was still beside her on the bed. His eye again returned to the heart-shaped tattoo, the symbol growing to be an obsession that irritated his sex. She had shifted position slightly, in a way that distributed prominence to her right buttock, a gluteal fold of which was in contact with his thigh.
Distracting himself with work, he reflected on the dual nature of Caelestis as a fertility goddess as well as one who presided over the stars. In the role of earth-mother she was identified with Cybele in Africa and with the cult of Bona Dea in Italy. His reading on the subject of Bona Dea had told him that she co-opted into her rites an amalgam of other goddesses, such as Magna Mater and Juno Caelestis. In the largely syncretistic tendencies of Heliogabalus’ age, the identification of Caelestis not only with Magna Mater but
also with the worship of Mithras was commonly recognized. Jim doubted that Heliogabalus would have approved of this rival god but thought it likely that he would have endorsed Mithraism in the interests of gaining favour with the Army. It would follow, then, that his decision in choosing Caelestis as the complementary divinity to his own was probably a diplomatic one, aimed at securing the much needed, if temporary, support of the military.
He made notes and thrilled at the excitement of having Rome socketed to his nerves. He could feel the city turning over, its digital screens, office towers, e-commerce, manic traffic, sexual hunger, airports and cemeteries all compressed into the megabytes activating his sensory cortex. He was impatient to get out there and interact with the city’s seething tempo but also happy to live in the charged moment of suspense.
Waiting his time, he continued to point up his notes on the mysteries pertaining to Mithraism and its largely esoteric rites. The bull, as its chief symbol of ritual sacrifice, was an animal associated not only with Mithras but with the goddess Cybele, too. It was while researching the emperor’s attempts to win the confidence of Cybele’s priests by personally sacrificing bulls on the goddess’s altar that Jim had encountered the reference to castration which played directly into his study of Heliogabalus’ gender. To be admitted to these rites the initiate had to undergo castration or a form of false castration. Given Heliogabalus’ request to undergo a sex change, Jim entertained the suspicion that the emperor may have undergone the operation for real. The historians were at best ambiguous. Lampridius, for instance, alluded to the rite by using the words
genitalia devinxir,
which implied that the emperor’s genitals were tied up for the duration of the ceremony, rather than removed. Aurelius Victor, however, was emphatic that the emperor was
abscissis genitalibus
and had undergone literal castration. Support for this theory was substantiated by a passage Jim had discovered in an unknown author referring to the fact that Heliogabalus had been ritualistically castrated and cared for by priests during his recovery. The same author reported that after the emperor had adjusted to the physiological change he claimed that
his god had also changed sex and that necessary revisions should be made to the religious ceremonies conducted in his temple.
Jim pondered his findings, certain that his sources would be dismissed as apocryphal but determined to persist in his line of investigation. The subject of Heliogabalus’ gender was to be central to his thesis, and while in Rome he intended to peel the issue of its sensitive skin. Masako shifted again as he watched, the alignment of her buttocks tempting his eye to probe the tiny chocolate punctum of a beauty spot existing like a detail in the fold joining the leg and buttock. It was a mark he had neglected and one that brought renewed excitement to his slow-burning anticipation.
He continued to keep his thoughts suspended in a gravity-free zone, like markers orbiting in space. Masako had moulded herself to his erection, not intrusively but lightly, in the manner of sand forming a contour on a beach. There was no urgency in the movement; it was tentative, like a drum brushed into sound, and almost without objective. Still determined not to respond, he continued with his notes on Heliogabalus. Whether it was because he was in Rome and the associations were charged or simply that his nerves were overstimulated, he kept having the mental image of a youth with bleached hair and a made-up face flash into his mind. It was the recurrence of the image, always the same and always precise in detail that made him feel unnerved. The thought crossed his mind that Heliogabalus as a psychic entity had taken it on himself to be his guide in the city. He put the idea out of his head instantly, refusing to believe that the living and the dead could occupy the same space. He assured himself it would go away and that the phenomenon was linked to the series of recent events that had jinxed his nerves.
He returned briefly to reflecting on another of Lampridius’ character assassinations of the youthful emperor. According to the vituperative historian Heliogabalus ‘had conceived the plan of establishing in each town, with the title of prefects, persons who make a career of corrupting youth. Rome was to have had fourteen; and he would have done this had he lived, determined as he was to elevate to the highest position everything that is most corrupt, and men of the lowest profession.’
He laughed out loud to himself at the thought of a youth going to these extremes to infect the capital with vice. He wondered all along if there hadn’t been some fundamental misconception as to Heliogabalus’ age and if the dates of his birth and death hadn’t been falsified in the interests of distorting history. Was someone so young capable of the monstrosities ascribed to him by his biographers? The question was a flexible one and dug right at the roots of historic subversion. For a moment he had a terrifying vision of Heliogabalus having outlived himself, diseased and no longer recognizable, living to corrupt the system like random error occurring in the separation of two DNA helices.
It was a thought he quickly dismissed, only to find it almost instantly replaced by the return of the image that had been troubling him for days, but this time the eyes seemed to be staring directly at him, demanding his attention. He couldn’t shut it out by thinking of something else and, as he watched, so the face broke into a twisted smile. It was the look of someone so disillusioned by life that death was the only possible option. It shook him, and he felt decidedly uneasy as he refocused the world back into his immediate surroundings.
Masako awoke at that moment, still fuzzy from her siesta sleep, and sat up and pulled her T-shirt down over a porcelain-coloured waist. She, too, seemed to have difficulty in reconnecting with her surroundings and came to only after struggling with visible disorientation. She gave no hint of the erotic pleasure she had received but instead reached for the bottle of Evian beside the bed and uncapped it to drink. She fluffed her hair back into shape, smiled at Jim and took herself into the green-tiled bathroom to shower.
Jim lay back listening to the torrential hiss of water coming from the shower, and checked his guide book prior to their going out. He wanted to avoid the scene, the cruisy bars, the pick-up places in parks and to access the city from the viewpoint of the
flâneur,
spending leisurely hours discovering the significant by accident.
But the subject of Heliogabalus’s notoriety continued to frustrate him in his attempts to recreate his subject free of the prejudice of moral historians such as Gibbons, who had referred to the young
emperor as ‘a monster who abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury, and soon found disgust and satiety in the midst of his enjoyments’. Jim was increasingly aware that aberrant scholarship was only one of the obstacles to be dissolved in his quest to resuscitate the emperor from a long cryogenic sleep.
On the other hand, his reading of Antonin Artaud’s deeply personal account of the emperor’s life had put him on to valuable tangents of study. According to Artaud, much of the emperor’s belief in the miraculous was triggered by his diligent reading of Philostratus’ life of the miracle worker Apollonius of Tyana. Apollonius was still another fascinating subject for Jim to explore, a further lead in his attempt to junk-strip the DNA in the emperor’s posthumous cells. Apollonius was supposed to have raised the dead, cured the sick, travelled to India and ascended bodily to heaven.
His thoughts on the subject were broken by Masako coming back into the room tented in a cerise towel. Removing the towel and wrapping it around her hair, she stood naked with her back to him. She fished a black Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt out of her travel-bag and matched it with washed-out Lee jeans. The red lipstick gash she applied was the livid matt of a carnation, her small mouth made up like a geisha’s. Her simple definition complete, she turned around from the mirror and pouted complicitously at Jim, by way of acknowledging the unusual sex that had taken place between them. Jim, who had never before been aroused by a woman, felt beneath his confusion a dull expectant longing. He was determined to take his time and to follow the plot to its experiential end.
He suggested they head for the Trastevere district, so that they could eat at one of the trattorias for which the place was noted. They would walk wherever possible, as had been their practice for the past days, being the best method of getting to know the place. To his surprise Masako suggested they should visit the gay quarter and had read up on some of the high-profile clubs and bars, such as Alpheus, famous for its drag shows, or the delightfully named Garbo on the Vicolo di Santa Margherita or the oldest of Rome’s gay spots, L’Hangar just off Via Cavour.
‘I’ve never told you before,’ Masako said, lowering her eyes, ‘but I like girls, too. At least I’d like to experiment.’
Jim smiled, a little chord of jealousy sending out search notes as his heart missed a beat. He wondered if the measure of his response was simply infatuation and nothing more or if there was a deeper bonding of emotion at play in his feelings for Masako. Either way, a possessive ripple chased through him in series of needling jabs. While Masako busied herself with a mascara brush, he tried unsuccessfully to push her out of his thoughts. He told himself that, given his bias, he had no right to become attached to her on any other level than that of a friend, an idea that collapsed in the thinking. Hadn’t they already exceeded the boundaries of friendship, he asked himself, and become intimate through sex, and hadn’t he, in finding out Masako’s foot fetish, made an inroad into the world of sharing? He wanted to ask her more about this particular sensitivity and decided he would at a later date. Right now, looking at her from behind in tight, worn jeans, the desire he felt overshadowed every other emotion. He looked away, ran his eyes up the blinds and stared out at a densely composed city sky. It was hot, oppressive, and a petro-carbon smudge hung over the late afternoon. He could see a couple moving about in the flat opposite, the woman watering geraniums in window-boxes and the man testing the flash on a camera. Although Jim didn’t know Roman weather in the way he could assess a London sky, he could read storm signs in the air.
When Masako was ready, she came over and without saying a word kissed Jim on the lips. It was as though she had instinctively sensed his need for reassurance and acted on his uncertainty. Her kiss was like all her gestures, intimate but constrained, personalized but discreet. If he expected more it was because he had let his imagination outrun the reality of the situation. He had speeded up the development of their tentative relationship and was already viewing it as something based on deep foundations. In his mind, everything had taken place before it had even begun.
They went out into the pushy, crowded streets and decided to head for the city centre and cross over the Ponte Sisto to the Trastevere
district. Although as a student she lacked the money to shop on impulse, Masako wanted to view the emporia of stores owned by the likes of Armani, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci and Valentino. Design was the world with which she identified, and the women they passed were dressed with a simplicity that buried the outstanding detail in the rightness of the cut. Masako liked to spot the better labels and pointed out to Jim the ones she recognized, such as the grey Armani suit on a woman stepping out of a black Mercedes, the loud Versace jeans – backpockets sprayed with diamante – moulded to a blonde or a black dress that was obviously Galliano. Her eye took in everything by way of visual commentary and stored the contents for future reference.