Nestled in my rented room on the quiet winter days that are ours alone, we are reading The Memoirs Of Hadrian as foreplay. Our view from the windows is divided by high, bare, oak branches. There is just enough space for a large wooden bed and dresser, so we are always in bed. I also read you to sleep on the rare nights you dare to sleep over and risk upsetting the perilous status quo with your wife. We are the luckiest people in the world - remember? And just like Roman emperors we have pity and contempt for others. Nick, only you would take my request for a posthumous cult seriously. I want one just like the one Hadrian made for his beautiful lover Antinous, with lots of gold, and crowns and sarcophagi.
Our small red book looks like it hasn’t been touched since its publication in 1951 when Marguerite Yourcenar summoned the Roman emperor back to life. The yellowed paper has no stains from greasy fingers, or drops of spilled wine, and the pages and end boards lie almost perfectly flat. I feel the weave of the red cloth in my hands. I run my finger over the fading gold lettering and wreath on the spine, and inhale the maps of Hadrian’s empire on the end pages. All of these details are fresh, but I can’t remember where it came from. Richard’s shelves, a yard sale, the free books in the library that I scavenge daily, your mother’s library, or from my traveling circus of accumulated possessions?
If I am the Emperor Hadrian in 130 AD, and you are Antinous, we have just returned from the underworld. We have gone through the Eleusinian Mysteries, a ten day psychotropic, near-death, ritual festival outside of Athens. We have fasted, trekked up mountains and down to the sea carrying squirming piglets that we deposit in the sacrificial fire. Some of the ash and bone is used in preparation for the secret elixir we drink before entering the temple. After days in anonymous darkness with others, we are finally released into the daylight. Resurrected and changed. But sworn to silence on pain of death.
To celebrate our resurrection from Hades we drift down the Nile as part of my royal flotilla. On one of those nights you decide - or it is decided for you - to slip into the dark wet to save me from my illness. To let the muddy waters of the river into your lungs as a willing sacrifice. In return I have you embalmed and mummified by Egyptian priests who know how to protect you.
I would never have let you give your body away, Nick. Not even for university research. I would not have let you sit alone in a dark freezer for over a year.
In memory of Antinous Hadrian demolishes an entire Egyptian city to make way for the new city of Antinopoulos, where games take place yearly in his lover’s honor. Hadrian makes Antinous a posthumous cult that merges him with the Egyptian god Osiris. If I had his power I would also dedicate twenty eight temples in your name, and carve over two thousand statues. I would strike coins with your image to be worn as talismans. For eternity you would be known as a dying-and-rising God, a conqueror of death who holds the rare, blue, psychotropic lotus that grows along the banks of the Nile.
Most profoundly I would have the power to place you in the cosmos as a star, where you can rest until the modern age when the entire solar system is re-classified. Poof.
I will put your ashes in a terra cotta vessel in the shape of a bird, wings outstretched. In good weather I will carry you outside to sit in your garden, and open the top so the wind and wild can get in. I will give you this book. And you will give one back to me.
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