Peter Billig
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
A Saul Vogel Mystery
Vogel had a sudden fit of scientific interest, this time for ancient Roman religion. I kept fetching volumes in numerous languages. I would have protested sooner, the library being miles away, but the librarian was so attractive that I did not protest till two months were gone and I still heard only her firm “no!”.
“Master, drop it!” I appealed to him. “I beseech you in the name of the Capitoline Triad! It’s all Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad now. Nobody venerates Jupiter or Juno anymore, and the career of a Vestal or any other virgin is not that popular nowadays. Perhaps only old Priapus…”
“You have become impertinent, my young apprentice! You do whatever your employer tells you to, that’s what you do! I want to refresh in situ on my Minerva, Saturn, Pomona, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Lares, Penates, Janus and other deities. Pack up! We’re going Rome!”
We stayed in a hotel. My hopes that Vogel, confronted with the Eternal City, will soften up, enjoy campari on the rocks and tick off the obligatory sights were gone. Sure, he liked campari but he refused to visit churches or the Vatican (“it’s modern Roman religion”). He spent day after day wandering in the worst heat on the Roman Forum: a site at the foot of the Palatine Hill, all covered with stumps of ancient temples. He would stop before a ruin, read in the thick books he carried in a case, and ponder.
At first I felt obliged to accompany my boss and carry the case but as he would not share his thoughts and the heat was unbearable, I thanked off, bought a second-hand bike and made excursions into the landscapes around Rome. We dined together in the evenings and broke our fast in the mornings, but we hardly spoke, as he was completely engrossed in the studies.
“Have you ever heard of the canicula, a vacation any Roman with self-respect would take from Rome’s burning heat when the constellation of Canis Minor came up?” I asked.
“I’m an old vagabond, I can take the heat.” And he counseled me to drive up to the colder North and see Florence, Venice, Ravenna, Turin and Milan on the way.
Heat indescribable. I couldn’t pull myself together to drive anywhere and stayed naked in the room, frequent showers and camparis on the rocks. I remember lifting the glass up to my lips, and suddenly Vogel is shaking me and I am spilling the drink.
Why was he in my room? How could I have fallen asleep like this, with a glass to my lips? Am I drunk? Is it a dream?
“Wake up, man, let’s go! No time to waste!”
“A moment, Master, I’m naked!”
“Not important!”
He dragged me out into the street and I was taken aback. A green double-decker was standing at the bus stop in front of the hotel but the alighting passenger was not landing on the sidewalk – he was hanging in the air! Cars, in Italy honking and speeding, stood motionless and soundless, and so did pedestrians, normally garrulous and gesticulating, now like a sculpture exhibition.
“What is this shit, Master?”
“Time’s stopped.”
“What?”
“Time is standing still. Time doesn’t fly,” he added in Latin[1]. “Let’s move it! Every second is precious!”
“How come? If it’s still, what’s the hurry?”
“It hasn’t stopped for us, can’t you see? And I don’t know when the next attack comes.”
“What attack?”
He sent me one of those glances, so I said: “Lead on, Master!” and followed him.
We ran like hell, slaloming among the frozen pedestrians and cars, all the way to the Roman Forum. There he led us zigzagging between the petrified tourists to a particular ruin.
There a young couple stood frozen in the middle of a kiss, a priest immobilized while taking a picture, two nuns eternized in mid-conversation, a sculptured woman reading in a guidebook and a guy immortalized with a string of urine between his dick and the wall of the ruin.
Vogel paid no attention. He stopped, raised both arms and cried out in Latin: “Father Janus, Father Janus, come to me![2]”
This I echoed and we kept on in more and more lamenting voice until a tall bearded man in a white toga emerged out of thin air.
“What do you want?[3]” he asked Vogel in Latin.
“Mercy![4] Don’t make us perish![5]” and Vogel made a movement with his arm encompassing the tourists but meaning all mankind.
The newcomer looked around with satisfaction, like a craftsman proud of his work. As he turned, I saw another face on the back of his head – and this one was angry.
“Seventeen hundred years”, he thundered out of this mouth, “and no respect, no sacrifice, no nothing! And now you even piss on my temple! You’ve been worshipping foreign gods here in my city and they have kept us down. I’ve got enough! I’ve stopped Time. Let your new deities save you!”
“I’m not so sure they can,” my Master answered with a bow. “For you, Father Janus, who were the god always named first in the prayers of the Quirites, to be ignored like this must be intolerable. But I vow and pledge that if you stop scourging us with your wrath I shall enliven you once a week with a prayer and incense burnt for you and you alone on an altar!”
“So you have sworn, mortal. Be careful not to breach your oath!” one mouth said. “Gee, you must be somebody special to resist my power so easily,” said the other mouth. “Or have I wanted you to succeed?” asked the first teasingly and the old god smiled with both pair of lips. “How nice, you brought yet another worshipper. Prayer and incense, remember, prayer and incense! Jove will be furious that the mortals worship again – not him but me!”
He disappeared into thin air and the tourists came alive. The pisser finished, hid his tool and zipped his fly. The reading woman turned a page. The priest took the picture and started looking for a new opportunity. The couple finished the kiss. Nobody had noticed anything. For them, nothing has happened.
Then they spotted the stark naked man: me. The priest dropped his camera. The young couple laughed. The nuns stared with open mouths. And the pisser sent me an angry look, as if I had outperformed him, the nuns having overlooked his performance.
Still stunned by the meeting with the double-faced one, I had completely forgotten my nudity. The pisser’s rage brought me back to the fact that the old rules apply again. I had an impulse to cover my dick with my hand and run for cover but I overcame it.
“See you later, micturator!” I said to the pisser, smiled to each of the other viewers and walked tall to the exit, head high and meeting the gapes of the revived visitors with intrepid eyes and a friendly smile. Master walked behind explaining in the numerous tongues he speaks that I was a fugitive from a loony bin.
At long last, we were out and took a taxi. As we were driving through the revived streets, again full of speeding cars and lively people, Master nodded philosophically and said:
“No person in the world save the two of us know that anything’s been amiss. If you ever wrote it down they would call it fantasy. Should anybody bother to check, the only clue to follow is an out-of-thin-air materialization and following parade of a well-endowed naked man in the Roman Forum.”
“You did it to me on purpose,” it dawned on me.
“And you surpassed yourself,” he answered, and the cabby asked me in bad English whether this was the newest outfit for flashers.
“Va’fa’n’culo!” I answered in a better Italian.
In the evening we were seated in a plane bound for our country, imbibing tax-free malt and talking.
“No, Master, no lecture. I may not have studied Roman religion as heatedly as you but still know my Janus, the double-faced god of beginnings and endings, the deity of Time. January is called after him and so should December, only it isn’t. The gate of his temple, that’s our ruin, was closed or opened only when there was peace all over the Roman Empire…”
“Closed!”
“Wasn’t it the ardor of your studies, which brought him back from the oblivion inside old books?”
“The ardor of my studies made me know what was going on, where to go and what to do. Actually, it’s the Catholic Church who’s been negligent or weak. After all, the Christians dislodged the ancient gods and it’s been their job to keep them down ever since. The Greek Orthodox Church does a much better job, as no Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes, Hades, Ares, Aphrodite or such like re-appear over there.”
“How did you resist Janus, Master?”
“I was about to go out and roam the Forum again when I suddenly felt I was dying. Didn’t want to, so I fought it and it gave up. A moment later, it tried again and I gave it a shove and felt it was loosing interest for the time being. Then I looked out of the window and the sculptures down there made me understand: Time has been halted. With ancient Roman religion on my mind, I thought of the Roman god of time and, as you have seen, the hunch paid off.”
“But how is it possible to keep Time going for two persons only? Isn’t Time one and same for all?”
“So we philosophers thought but it can’t be. I figure Time is a bundle of individual channels. Makes sense if you think how differently time flies when you are in an uplifting conversation with your Master and when you sit in a dentist’s chair. And for the dentist, it’s a different time still.”
“Why use time on reviving me while a new attack was imminent?”
“If my intuition was correct and the attacker was a Roman god then he would appreciate another worshipper. I invested only little energy to activate your time channel; you kept it alive yourself after. And Janus was glad, which brings me to the oath we have taken…”
“You have taken,” I protested. “The constitution guarantees the freedom of religion.”
“You don’t have to feel any piety, just go through the motions. It’s a part of your job from now on,” he replied and we had a longer discussion about my job description, wages and such.
We built an altar in my garden and every Sunday we burn frankincense and say the following short Latin prayer:
Father Janus, I venerate You as the first and the last of the gods[6].
Any takers?
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