Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

In Which Things Become Slightly More Confusing

“It is eight-thirty, and he hopes to be home by nine. It is a great presumption on his part to pretend to know the future.”

- A French demon

When I opened my eyes, I was standing atop a rocky plateau overlooking an ancient city. Well, ancient in the sense that it was much older than me, but seeing as I was in it, I supposed it was as contemporary a city as any that currently existed. Grey and white walls intersected and ionic pillars rose above the tumult. (Here I am, setting the scene.) Beyond the wall of the city lay the sea, pale and calm. Atop the glass sea, seemingly innumerable triremes lazily crisscrossed one another into the horizon. I briefly wondered where I had been transported to, but that mystery was solved as I looked behind me. There, rising into the air like great stone sequoias were the marble pillars of the Parthenon.

And there—standing in front of the temple with his head tilted up, mouth agape—was Rodolfo.

~~

I walked over to my fishmonger friend and clapped him on the back as he had done to me in Viareggio. This had the unfortunate effect of scaring the ever-living shit out of him, as some might say. (It's only a saying, though. If I wanted to communicate to you that Rodolfo actually shit himself, I would have to be much more explicit. I'd probably have to repeat it for emphasis.) He whipped around and turned an odd shade of aubergine upon seeing my face.

“One-eye!” he shouted as he stumbled backward.

“Rodolfo!” I answered in turn. “Wonderful to see you again, friend.”

“What…” he said, his eyes darting from my face to the Parthenon, then back to my face, and so on and so forth. “What’s happening? Where are we? I was... I was in the market with Ludovico. He was right over… here. Right? Yes, I swear that's where he was, and the carts were… But now it’s all gone… And you’re here… and that’s here,” he jabbed at the Parthenon. “And I don’t understand what the hell is going on! Where are we? What happened to me? Why in God’s name do you look so calm, man!” His normally jesting tone was completely absent. He looked positively terrified, in fact.

“Well, if my knowledge of architecture is correct, we seem to be in Athens. You’ve heard of the Parthenon, right? You know, big famous temple on a hill…” I half-heartedly motioned to its entrance. “Well, there it is. Don’t you see what everyone is wearing? Don’t you see what you’re wearing?” At this, he looked down to discover he was dressed in a couple of loosely fitting white cloths, held together with lightly ornamented bronze clasps and a belt. His cap was nowhere to be seen. I was also dressed in Classical Grecian garb, though I still wore the eyepatch.

“How… What’s going on? How did I get here? How did I get these—"

“Time travel,” I cut him off.

~~

After much consideration, this appears to have been my fatal mistake, the proverbial straw that broke Rube Goldberg’s back. If I were able to keep the truth from him here, maybe convince him it was a dream or hallucination... Do something other then what I was bound to do... I could have prevented the inevitable.

Perhaps.

~~

“What?” Rodolfo responded as though he had been punched in the gut. Or maybe the chest. Anywhere in the abdomen, really. What I mean to say is that he responded in such an exasperated tone that scarcely anything came out but a little air (and also a little spit).

“Time travel,” I repeated more assuredly than before. “We’ve been transported to Athens, in the year…” I looked to the sky. “416. BC, that is. And I suspect I know why…”

“Good God, what on Earth are you saying?! What kind of power could send us backward in time and across lands in an instant? And who changed my clothes?”

“Uh…” I tried to think of a reasonable explanation for the impossibility that had just occurred. Evidently, I was feeling creatively lazy. “God. God sent us here.”

~~

(I would like to point out that this wasn’t entirely a lie. I was the god that had given me this ability. I was the god that had sent Rodolfo to Ancient Greece and changed his clothing. I was the god that had set the sun in the sky and earth at my feet.

I was the god that had created Rodolfo to begin with.

But what does it matter? Rodolfo doesn't know, nor should he. Can you imagine discovering that you are merely a character in a poorly written novel? A facsimile of other, realer human beings, humans out there, somewhere, in a world that you can never truly glimpse, forever to remain in the dusty caverns of some misused mind until you are inevitably extinguished with the host?

Or, assuming these words are published—which I must, if you exist, dear reader—then knowing you will only live as long as people can be bothered to remember you? Only appearing for glimpses, in prerecorded and hastily edited segments of nonsense?

Can you imagine being told that the purpose of your existence is to provide an idiot with companionship as he masquerades through time, or that your worth directly relates to the amount of witty jokes you make during this trip?

There was no need to terrify Rodolfo more than I already had by displacing him. Much better to say that this was a divine mission, a journey mandated and sanctioned by God. It’s hard to argue with such things.)

~~

“What?” Rodolfo rejoined, thinking he had misheard me.

“God decided that I have to take a journey through time… and I suppose he also decided that you should accompany me,” I said, trying to absolve myself of the guilt I deserved.

“A journey through time? I have a wife and children! How are they going to get on without me? What’s going to happen to them?”

“I, uh…”

“Will I ever see my family again?”

(Wife and children! That was something I had failed to consider. But there was no reason why a man like Rodolfo wouldn’t have a wife and children. I didn’t even ask, after all…)

He was sweating now. I watched the droplets form on his brow and drop into his eyes. I gave a slight smile and told him to follow me into the city.

“I’m sure God will bring us back safely,” I said.

“I’m sure Jesus thought the same thing.”

~~

I told Rodolfo that I was on a journey with no clear itinerary. Renaissance Italy was only the first stop, and I wasn’t entirely sure where we would end up after Athens. He was unable to keep from exclaiming, “Jesus Christ!” and then, “No offense to you, God.”

“So I’ve got to figure out why we’re here… But I think this one’s pretty obvious.” I said, nodding my head.

“What’s obvious? Do you have to kill someone? Sabotage something? Are we starting a church? I’m not the right man, one-eye, my brother is the pious one. But then what did you have to do in Florence?” Rodolfo spit these questions out in quick succession and ended by muttering, “Christ, what is going on…”

“I had to talk to Da Vinci in Florence. The letter was just a pretext, a way to get inside the Palazzo de Medici.”

“That’s it? You just had to talk?” Rodolfo was clearly underwhelmed by this answer. Rodolfo thought of Moses and Peter and all the great envoys of God throughout the bible. What kind of mission necessitated talking to a single man? Or travelling through time?  “Well, what did he say, one-eye? What was so important that God had to send you to hear it?”

“He talked about appearances. He said we don’t pay enough attention to what’s actually happening in front of us. We just… get caught up in our own thoughts about what we think we see. He also told me to appear as though I were a good man.” Rodolfo scanned my face for an indication that I wasn’t done, that there was some secret conspiracy or grand secret which I was about to reveal. When it became obvious that no more information was forthcoming, he nearly burst.

“That’s it?! God sent you on a divine mission to learn what I could’ve told you in my sleep? And now I’ve been sent here just so I can help you do… well, something that we haven’t even been told! Where’s the sense in that?’

“Perhaps Socrates can tell us,” I said as we began to descend the steps from the top of the Acropolis.

~~

Rodolfo was not at all his usual self as we made our way down toward the city, past the Theatre of Dionysus. (How presumptuous can you get? I had known him for a single day. Who was I to make judgements about Rodolfo's "usual" self?) He kept his eyes on his feet and mumbled a variety of curses under his breath, eventually falling into a somnambulatory stumble. When we reached the bottom of the hill, I asked him if he was feeling alright.

“If I had known God had a plan for me, I would’ve said goodbye to my family.”

~~

There are many interesting, or at least mildly amusing, discoveries you make when you begin to write stories (first and foremost, that you are much worse at it than you think), but there is one aspect that consistently startles me.

After a certain point, my characters begin to control themselves.

Sure, I could retain an iron grip: force them to do strange things and try to justify it as “character development.” I could make Rodolfo grow a second head that spews acid, if I really wanted to. I could make him do anything at all. I could make him suit my needs. But to deny a character some aspect of free-will is to deny them the only shred of realness they have. (That is the bullshit I am expected to say as an author, anyway. There is a mysticism about writing that must be maintained. The truth is much less tidy.)

For example, I had planned on bringing Rodolfo along for the ride—that much was my doing—but I hardly expected his terrified reaction in response to being ripped from normal life. I thought he would make a great sidekick on my adventure. That assumption was absolutely thoughtless. It was only natural that he felt scared. It would have been an absolute travesty to have him appear without a qualm or question.

A wife and children, though. That was something I hadn’t considered…

Real life works this way too, of course. We write the stories of our lives as though we were the only autonomous creature on Earth. We become surprised when a relative or coworker or a barista with incurable IBS doesn’t react the way we thought they would. Or maybe should. People respond to this surprise in a variety of ways. Some people get angry. Some people get confused. Some people apologize. In any event, it is unsettling when we are reminded of the free-will we often forget to attribute to others.

I felt bad for doing this to Rodolfo. The good news is that I’m largely in control of his fate, and being so, vowed to do my level-best to return him to his home in one piece. As for an apology, this will have to suffice:

I am sorry for failing to consider your reality, Rodolfo.

~~

Rodolfo’s silence troubled me, but it also gave me ample opportunity to survey the crowds in the street. Men, women, slaves, and children, all bunched together like the Italians in front of the Palazzo Medici. Indeed, there seemed to be little difference between the two crowds, besides the clothing, of course. Every woman was escorted by a man, in the Ancient Greek fashion. Much like some overzealous Muslims, the Greeks would not permit a woman to go anywhere unattended. (Contrast this with present-day America, where we freely allow women to walk alone, as long as they are content to be harassed by a dozen horrible men—or worse.) Slaves pushed carts and carried sacks or boxes for their masters. There’s a reason people like to remember Periclean Greece as the birthplace of Democracy, and not as the birthplace of Human Rights.

~~

I was led on by intuition. Rodolfo was able to blend in with the crowd fairly well—he was from the Mediterranean, after all—but my wild hair and eyepatch garnered many raised eyebrows and double-takes from passing pedestrians. I was beginning to wonder if I’d arrived in the right place after all, but I quickly dispelled this fear by reminding myself that I’d only just begun, and that I’d have plenty of time to lead myself astray later. A young girl peered at me from behind a curtain in the window across the street, but I pretended not to notice.

Street after street, I zigzagged with Rodolfo’s shell-shocked visage in tow.  He was regaining some of his usual color although the stream of sweat emanating from his forehead worried me a bit. I attributed this to his portly stature and our brisk pace rather than the existential nightmare he had been thrown into.

To be fair, it was probably both.

~~

After some time (never mind how long, exactly) I came to a stop and surveyed the street corner. Our shadows stretched across the dirt and my feet were beginning to blister. It looked as though we had already been here, but I didn’t recall walking in a circle. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the young girl in the window, still hiding behind the curtain as though it made her completely invisible to the outside world. Sensing that I had lost my way due to my look of dull confusion, Rodolfo trudged up behind me and reprimanded me.

“Don’t tell me you’re lost, one-eye,” he huffed. “I’m not going to walk all over this damned city just because you don’t know where you’re going.

“I thought I did, but… Doesn’t this look like the same corner we passed a little while ago? I thought I remembered seeing that same girl staring at me.” Upon locking eyes with me, she vanished with an abrupt flourish of the curtain.

“That’s because we’ve gone in a circle! Are you telling me you didn’t realize that? My God, how can I trust you to lead me if you don’t even notice when you’re walking in circles?”

“I’m not very good with directions, I’m afraid.”

“Well, that’s a brilliant piece of information, one-eye. That puts me in a really wonderful predicament. Being led by the blind!”

“This eye still works, you know,” I said, pointing to the eyepatch. Rodolfo opened his mouth to yell at me, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort and let out a sigh instead.

“Ha. Ha. Well, that’s just great. Perhaps I should ask now: is there anything else that you’re particularly bad at?”

“Witty comebacks.”

~~

There is another thing that I am particularly bad at, although I did not tell Rodolfo this: I have a hard time conceptualizing time.

Most people are good enough at this. They can keep a calendar and remember meetings and plan events more than a day in advance. They can parcel out chunks of their day for eating and sleeping and working and whatever else it is that normal humans do. This is nearly impossible for me; I forget the day and date as often as I forget my obligations, which is to say quite often. Most frustratingly of all, I cannot seem to remember the order of past events.

This is a book about time. Obviously. About travelling through it and trespassing against it. About its unimportance and ubiquity. About its invisibility and its weight. If this sounds contradictory, it’s only because I have no clue what I’m talking about. I don’t get it. Fucking time, man.

I even put off learning the order of the months until I was in middle school, for God’s sake. Why bother? I thought. When in elementary school was I going to have to plan something more than a month in advance? And what does next month have to do with what’s happening right now, anyway? That’s how I see time: a series of nows smashed into each other, forever. Perhaps this is the reason I was so unfazed by my sudden temporal dislocation.

I’m a regular Pilgrim, I am.

~~

“So you’re looking for Socrates, right?” Rodolfo’s face had finally returned to its natural state of rosiness. It was great to see him annoyed again. Or, it was better than seeing him miserable.

“Right. I just don’t know where he is.”

“Yes, we’ve already established that. Do you know what he looks like, at least?”

“Ugly,” I rejoined.

“Is that it? You’ve got to be more specific, one-eye. There are so many kinds of ugliness. Is his head oddly shaped? Does one of his eyes droop? Do his teeth stick out at opposing angles? Does his brow protrude past his nose? Is he missing an ear? Perhaps he has an eyepatch and unkempt hair…”

I was too busy staring over Rodolfo’s shoulder to acknowledge the insult.

“No,” I said, pointing, “he looks like that.”

~~

Sure enough, there was the infinitely famous philosopher, followed by a small, gesticulating man. His clothes were slightly tattered and visibly greying. (Could I have known if they were invisibly greying? What would that even mean?)

“That’s him?” Rodolfo muttered skeptically. “Pig-nose and a large forehead… I suppose that’s enough to make a man ugly.”

“Alright, let’s follow him.” I said as I brushed past the fish merchant.

Rodolfo reluctantly agreed to continue on with me, knowing that there was no real alternative. And so we tailed Socrates at a distance, trying pathetically to remain inconspicuous as we moved through the dwindling pockets of Greeks in the streets.

~~

(And now, dear reader, you aren't sure what to think. You were on board with the meta-fiction, perhaps, but now the element of time travel has snuck in. You count the number of pages again. Are you willing to put yourself through it?

Or maybe you are compelled by the absurdity, but still confused by the structure. What’s with all the opening quotes? Is he just going to visit a bunch of philosophers? There isn't very much to that, you think. It's not much of an adventure. You need danger and excitement for adventure. Even the adventures ventured upon by drunk millennials in the streets of their hometowns have a dash of danger—if you consider the possibility of vomiting in front of your pastor’s house danger, that is. And it isn't very relatable, either. There is Rodolfo, of course. He's a wonderful little wrinkle in the plot, at this point, but it's too early to tell what will become of him. Perhaps he isn't even important. That would be disappointing to you. Or maybe it wouldn't.

Or maybe you are having horrible flashbacks of your Intro to Philosophy class. The Republic. The Leviathan. Beyond Good and Evil. Titles that seem to indicate a captivating science fiction universe, but instead... The endless dialogues about the meaning of good and justice and what is real and what matters and who you should trust and what you can know and... It's all too much. You hope I won't get into it. You tell yourself that if things don't get interesting fast, you're out. You don't have time to be lectured to by some smug piece of shit.

"But maybe there are more tricks up his sleeve," you say to yourself. Tricks that are interesting, but reasonable. Nothing too complicated. Consistency is all you really ask, dear reader. You have already gotten to the point where you feel you have invested time, and like any relationship, healthy or abusive, you feel less inclined to leave the more time you spend in it.

I'd hate to think I'm abusing you, dear reader.)

~~

“That man there must be Aristedemos,” I told Rodolfo, indicating the small man. “He’s accompanying Socrates to a feast at the poet Agathon’s house. He’s going to leave soon, and then Socrates will be alone.”

“And how the hell do you know that?” Rodolfo retorted.

“I read it in a book once.”