Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  My mind clouded by love and hatred and jealousy, I conceived my plan. I would wait. I would wait until the boy begged for death, and I would offer him that, and life everlasting. And then he would be mine. Mine forever, companion of my dark hours. And Hadrianus? Hadrianus would either be tormented with the knowledge of what this, his dearest dear, had become, or he too would beg me for life in death, or death in life.

  I would win, I would be avenged. And I would have him. The coveted favorite of the ruler of half a world.

  This plan took me after them to Alexandria where they rested for two months, and then to the banks of the Nile, where they planned a cruise upriver. It was the season of floods, a time when only Hadrianus, old and gray but impetuous still, would brave the ancient river. The oracles at departure foretold the river would claim a life from the party. This deterred them not.

  I followed the barge from the banks. In full possession of my powers, I could run like no human ever had. I could be near them and watch torches and lanterns nightly transform the immense pleasure boat into a lighted feast; I could listen to songs and poems, the dances and the laughter, the musical laughter of Antinous.

  I became obsessed, mindless. I longed for nothing but that spicy blood I had once smelled so near, for that touch of mint, that hint of cinnamon, that life so strong in his perfect body.

  I forgot to feed. For nights on end, I forgot to feed, until I was nothing but thirst. Until thirst twisted my body, shriveled my throat. Until my body was heavy and dead and painful.

  Then one night I saw the boy leave the barge. Alone and unattended, if you can believe it. He slipped off by himself long after a party where wine had flowed freely and lulled servants and retainers into dreamless sleep. He took one of the small boats and rowed ashore, then walked along the river, head down, hands at his belt, pensive. His hair fell, a soft, unruly mass down his shoulders. His tunic of fine silk thread moved in the night breeze, now delineating his body, now veiling it. His feet were laced into sturdy, thick-soled sandals. He carried no cloak.

  I followed him. His steps took him to a small riverside shrine to Osiris. Ever pious, even to foreign divinities, Antinous knelt before the stone altar with its painted wood statue and bent his head in prayer.

  I stepped out from behind the bushes that had hid me and greeted him, as a passerby might greet him, in the Greek I had learned in Athens.

  He looked up, smiled, returned the greeting, surprised at finding a fellow countryman in this foreign land.

  I told him I was in Egypt to study religion. He told me his friend, too, had come here in search of religion, of answers about death from these people who had so long been in love with it. I inquired after his friend and he smiled, a rueful smile that told me what I need not ask. Even if I didn’t see a cooling to their love, he felt it cooling or imagined it so.

  I told him the same tales that had lured me, oh so long ago. I promised him a changeless body, with never-fading, hairless skin, smooth enough to keep his lover’s interest forever. I told him I, myself, was well over thirty now. I assured him of eternal life.

  But he smiled and shook his head. Not, understand, that he didn’t believe me, but—alas—he was not a boy from the Suburra but a Greek from the Eastern colonies, half in love with the idea of a tragic destiny, of a fate he couldn’t avoid. And besides, surely this miracle would have a price. Too high a price for one who didn’t own himself.

  I told him the price and he recoiled, mistrusting. Hadrianus had told him of my death or my life, as you please. He didn’t want it, he told me. Not at the expense of human life. Not if he would have to kill daily just to keep mere animation. He had seen mummies, he told me. Mockery of life, he called them. He would not become a living mummy.

  He was strong, muscular, from hunting and riding and keeping up with Hadrianus’s restless wandering. But I was hungry, I was starving, I was a beast howling in the wilderness, and we were alone and the night was deep and the sleeping people in the boat would not be roused by his screams.

  I held him fast on Osiris’ altar. Osiris who was dead and resurrected, a god like myself, in my image and semblance. I held him and pulled back his dark hair and tore at the white skin beneath with impatient teeth. His life, sweet and inebriating, poured out onto my tongue. Sweeter than honeyed wine, stronger than the best spirits, spicy and warm and fine. Worth waiting for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years.

  His eyes opened wide, terrified, his heart beat fast, fast, fast. His muscles twisted in futile protest, under my arm that pinned him to the altar.

  His heart pounded more ardently than any music he ever played, than any dance to which he’d ever given himself. From now on, I thought, his blood on my tongue making me drunk, from now on he would dance for me in the clearings of the night, by the light of the moon. For me, for me alone.

  Night stretched and shrunk. I knew the true meaning of euphoria. Drinking Antinous’s life I no longer regretted anything, not my lost childhood, not my squandered fate. For that brief moment I was omnipotent, the lord of the world, the equal of gods.

  “Antinous.” This call, so gentle it was no more than a faint, surprised remark, startled us both long enough for the boy to fight free of me. He stood, uncertain, drawing breath in painful gasps.

  I turned, my lips stained with his blood.

  Adriano stood by in the moonlight, barefoot on the muddy river bank. Imprudently alone, thoughtlessly unguarded, wearing a short tunic that wasn’t as becoming as it once had been. This way, awakened in the middle of the night, with none of his regalia, none of his insignias of power, without the subtle artifice of his hairdresser, he looked very little like an Emperor or even the virile hero I had loved. He had grown fat, with a protruding stomach; his red hair and beard had turned gray and his eyes were circled by small wrinkles and underlined by loose flesh folds, from too much drinking and living and loving.

  “Antinous,” he said again, concerned, surprised. He looked at me, a brief glance, and then back at his favorite. “I woke up and you weren’t there. I saw the rowboat by the shore. I took one myself and I came to see-”

  “You came too late!” I said. My voice was mad with triumph. Antinous’s blood filled me with an intoxicating happiness. “You came too late. Now he can only live by becoming like me. And you’re not a necrophiliac, you’re not a necrophiliac, remember?”

  Adriano’s eyes didn’t stray. They stared at the boy and filled with pain, slowly, slowly. And each drop was indefinable sweetness in my mouth, singing joy in my heart. “Child!” the Emperor said, in soft chiding. “Antinous.”

  “I didn’t want it,” the boy said, torpidly, painfully, through lips already growing stiff with death, with the poison of undying death I had put in his body. “I don’t want it.”

  They stood there, I don’t know how long. They stared at each other as lovers separated by an abyss.

  “Antinous…” Adriano said.

  “Only sun and water, I remember you told me,” the boy whispered. “Only sun and water…. Not age, not time…. now I shall never change…” And he stared at the Emperor with hopeful eyes.

  But all the Emperor said was, “Antinous,” again, in that even, tender whisper, as one who reproaches a child for a minor folly.

  That was the moment of my triumph, the sweet moment of my triumph, when I knew I had won and the boy was mine and Adriano would beg me

  Then, abruptly, Antinous moved with a light quickness that should have been impossible to him, stepped closer to the torrential, rain swollen river. “A sacrifice,” he said. And smiled impishly. “A sacrifice for your Imperial health, your Imperial life.” For a moment, he lingered on the side of the river, then laughed, “May you live long, may your life be lengthened by the years that should have been mine.”

  “Antinous!” Adriano screamed, but did not move.

  In my memory now it all happens in the slow motion of the cheap horror movies that would, centuries later, occupy my sleepless days: Antinous’
s jumping, his body hitting the water, his attempts at swimming, instinct against will. Each of these unnaturally prolonged, centuries in passing.

  But I had drained him of life and strength and he could not have saved himself, even if he so wished. Slowly, slowly, he went under, was dragged under, until only his hair floated at the surface, seemingly for an eternity.

  “I would accept him, even now,” Adriano said, evenly, calmly in the tone of one who trades a greeting with a stranger at the baths.

  I looked up at him. His gaze was on the river where nothing remained to be seen, nothing other than the dark waters that had swallowed his lover’s body. His eyes were empty, vacant, equanimous.

  Later, in the eight years he survived his lover, grief would come to him, scalding grief, and he would weep publicly like a woman, and he would build temples and monuments and force the senate to divinise this anonymous boy, and dot the empire with statues of this Bithynian and start a religion in Antinous’s name.

  Alas, I found no enjoyment in his delayed pain. Nor was his grief the mourning of a man, but the mere death baying of senseless beast. As my soul remained, pinned to my dead body, his soul had left his living body and followed his lover’s somewhere—maybe Olympus. Somewhere beyond my reach.

  And it was with cold, dreary detachment that he would write in his diary, “Antinous fell in the river and drowned.”

  I always think of that sentence, so unlike Adriano, as I see in my mind that last second when Antinous’s hair opened and spread like a nocturnal flower blooming by the light of the moon on the waters of the Nile.

  The moment I lost them both.

  Dear John

  I don’t know if this happens to other writers, but I often dream I’m leafing through magazines that carry my stories. Normally, I just look at the magazine in the dream and say, “oh, yes, that’s mine.” In this dream I got smart and read it. It was Dear John. When I woke, I still found the idea that we would create human beings simply for our physical gratification interesting and repulsive in equal parts. So I had to write it.

  The night was cool. A soft breeze blew from the ocean, bringing with it a taste of salt and a feel of humidity.

  The humidity clung to my platinum blonde hair, making it sticky and messing the lustrous waves that took so long to arrange. Good thing the beauty mark on my face wasn’t painted on; good thing my make up was permanent and couldn’t blur.

  I smiled, and walked back and forth along the cracked sidewalk. Smile, smile, wiggle of hips, smile, smile, I looked adoringly at the glide cars passing by, silently, their drivers hiding behind the safe anonymity of darkened windows.

  Click, click, click, my high-heels beating a rhythmic, monotonous sound against the pavement. Click, click, click.

  My ankles hurt, as did my feet, from their unnatural position.

  Zoom, zoom, zoom, the cars gliding by, one after the other, all featureless ovoids in different colors, like someone had raided a giant Easter egg basket and sped each of the eggs out on the highway. Now and then, an egg stopped, the shell opened, and a John came out.

  Just what every little girl wanted for Easter.

  I’ve never seen an Easter basket. But I remembered the twentieth century vids and educational material that they’d made me watch in the crèche: Easter with the eggs, and Christmas with trees and lights. It must have been some time to live in, the early twentieth century.

  For all I knew, so was the second. Surely the Johns in those Easter-egg cars seemed to be having a blast. They talked of colonies on Mars, of a robotics revolution, of life spans extended to twice what they were twenty years ago.

  But it didn’t matter to me. My lifespan was the same I’d been created with, and my life was this: click, click, click of heels across the pavement, back and forth, ignoring the other Marilyns. And the Racquels and the Elizabeths and all the others. Time to socialize with them at the dorm that night. Not now. Now it was time to smile, smile, smile and look sexy.

  Now and then a John would stop and approach one of us, and extend his credgem, like a little clear marble, for approval. And then, if the authenticators disguised as golden bracelets on our wrists clicked their approval, then one of us would take the John to the office, and do what we’d been so well trained to do.

  They’d trained us never to act tired, never to act bored. To take our clothes off. To take the Johns’ clothes off. To exclaim over their bodies, their big muscles, their all-male square shoulder—seven if we saw none of those.

  They trained us to lay down in the prepared bed—sanitized for your protection—and spread wide, as they bumped and ground.

  They taught us to smile, smile, smile.

  Sometimes the Johns wanted to talk to me as if I were her. The other. The Marilyn.

  I indulged them and prattled about my films, my love life.

  How Joe jilted me and Jack did me wrong and how no one ever understood my artistic soul. Until this John.

  Then the John would leave, and I used the cleaning spray down there—sanitized for your protection—and it was back to walking outside on the sidewalk.

  * * *

  “Hello,” he said.

  He stood five steps away from me, and there was no parked car in sight. Just this man, over six feet tall, with light brown curls and sparkling blue eyes and a disarming smile.

  I smiled back, as I’d been taught to do, and practiced for so many hours in front of the mirror, making my lips just so, so that the Johns would find them irresistible.

  “Well, hello there,” I drawled, in my sexiest, breathiest voice.

  He looked away, at the stream of cars, zooming by, then back at me, his smile not dimmed, but managing somehow to give the impression of shyness. “I was wondering,” he says. “How much it would be for an hour.”

  I couldn’t place his accent, which was strange enough, considering how many people I got through here everyday. “Thirty creed units for an hour,” I said. “Sixty for the whole night.” Hardly worth it now, with the night half gone. But I still had to say it, with the big smile, and the slight wiggle of the hips.

  He grinned. “Not tonight. I don’t have sixty. I’ll see next time. Tonight it will have to be thirty.” He handed me the credgem, an unembossed, clear one.

  I popped it into the authenticator—the oval attachment dangling from what looked like a heavy gold bracelet on my wrist. I smiled while I waited.

  He wore a well-cut suit, with an odd design, like the ones they wore in all those twentieth century vids that they’d made me watch in the crèche. It was black and emphasized his square shoulders, his narrow waist. But the cut was strange. It had to be a revival thing.

  He smiled back at me as if he, too, had been to the crèche and practiced, a smile that would make your insides melt.

  The gem cleared, and emptied. Thirty cred units was all he had.

  I looked at him, surprised, because after all, a man like that exuded money, the feel of never having had to do anything he didn’t want to.

  I led him to the offices, a block away, in a tall, grey tower, put up expressly for the purpose. Inside were cubicles, barely large enough to accommodate a large, comfortable bed, its sheets pulled back invitingly, and a broad band set across the white linen. The band said sanitized for your protection and was put there by the robots who cleaned the room afterwards.

  He laughed at it; laughed, laughed as if he’d never been to a doxy room before, never seen anything like that.

  * * *

  He undresses himself, with an impatient eagerness that gives me no time to do more than react—to his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, his golden skin.

  Then he undresses me, and he takes his time: he takes his time to explore my skin, my heavy breasts, my curvaceous legs. He tastes, touches all of it, before bringing me down to the bed with him, before laying between my legs, before shouting with joy above me.

  * * *

  “What’s your name?” I asked him, as he pulled his underwear and pants back o
n and fastened the buttons of his retro shirt.

  I’d never asked them that. One doesn’t. But this time had been different, different in a way I couldn’t even say.

  He looked at me, his eyes veiled and blue and mysterious, like the midnight sky over the ancient sea. “John,” he says.

  I should have known. They all were John.

  After the shift, when I slid into my mercifully solitary bed in the dorm, I dreamed of John. John, with his broad shoulders, his golden brown hair, his blue eyes.

  Why would a man like that go to a doxy?

  For the dream, I supposed, the dream that I was her, the illusion of making love to a twentieth century sex goddess.

  But he’d never asked. He’d never asked about them.

  * * *

  The next night was cooler, the breeze from the sea heavier, nearer a gale.

  Fewer cars glided by.

  The other Marilyns and I—all twenty of us who worked this street—walked back and forth smiling, smiling, but not a car stopped for the first two hours.

  I was jealous of the Marilyn who stood on the little square grate on the pavement, the warm air blowing from the grate blowing up her skirt while she pretended to try to hold it down and laughed. At least my legs would have been warm.

  But that was not my beat, so I walked back and forth, wiggle, wiggle, click, click.

  “Hello?” He stood a few steps away from me, as if he’d followed me from behind, for a while.

  “Oh. Hi there,” I said, and smiled. “John, isn’t it?”

  He nodded, and grinned, really big, and handed me the gem. There were sixty cred units in there, and I could have kissed him, and cried with relief, because he was taking me off the streets for the night.