"Should I tell you? I will," he gasped. "If that's what you want."

"Yes," I kissed his neck because I could, quietly, without sound.

I felt one of his hands come, one of those wicked hands that had stabbed my brother, touch me on the ear. Stop? Kiss me again? 

"I was raised in Herculaneum," he said, softly, whispering, only to me, to me, our secret in snowy Paris, near the Pigalle, where he wanted to go. "Maybe you don't know where this is. It's gone now. Gone."

I sighed against his skin, soothed by his voice, as I am soothed now, telling you his words, because I hear them in his voice. 

"That place is under the ground, near Naples. Do you know it now? It was warm then, too. I never needed much. A pair of shoes. A tunic. Maybe I would spend time running around the house with the others there. When I came to his house, I was six years old. I was older than you were. That old master, he loved me. The others were jealous. I slept near him, yes, he loved me."

I closed my mouth around the question, "Was he like us? Did you know?"

"I had heard rumors of creatures like him, notions of elderly things that ate hot-blooded young people. But I was not afraid. When it was too warm for me I would run in, find him, press myself to his cool skin in the dark, and he would whisper that I was a good and beautiful thing, sweet and brave, and I loved him. So simple, love is, for little unloved children." He shook his head slightly, eyes closed, as if seeing it.

"The house was marble and new stone, built by someone else. It was a villa older than I had conception of at that age, with a mosaic in the front hall in the Etruscan style. All I knew was that I loved the peristyle garden, with its open roof, where the sunlight could come in, and I could look out at night. So many nights I lay there, and sometimes, in the evening, I would go outside the villa, and sit in the dirt, where it was not as beautiful. I would sit in the great night alone, listening to wolves and watching the stars move. And sometimes, my master would come, and ask me what a little slave wants with the moon, and I would tell him I didn't know. He wore red silk then, an exotic even in our port city, which was familiar with so many lands and so many rich visitors. He bought and sold slaves. There were always so many, but I never saw anyone but him.

"Don't think that he abused me then, Nicky. It was a beautiful time to be alive. I had four brothers, like you have your brother. They were jealous but they were kind to me. I hope they are alive still, but I cannot imagine it. I hope their deaths were quick. I think of them all the time. They were not my blood but they were what I had." He was humming the words to me, as if half-asleep.

My hands had gone numb in his hair. He seemed to have forgotten that he was begging my forgiveness with his confession.

"I used to run away, even then. I wanted to go to the market. There was a man there who would give me things for free and talk to me as if I were anybody, just like him, someone equal. He would tell me about his God and give me oranges from his pocket. Sometimes I would stay in the temple at night alone, gazing up into the wide face of Hercules and dreaming against the hot marble. Marble is like flesh, Nicky, it takes the heat of your body. I dreamed against Hercules as if he were a man, and my master would come, knowing me, and take me in his arms home. He said, 'It is dangerous for creatures such as you, little boys with no thoughts in mind of the wide world,' but I had wanderlust even then, so young, and he knew. I wanted to taste all the glory of the world, all it had to give me, as if it were a great big bowl of burning soup, that I could drink until I was full.

"And it was like that, for two years. It was two years of my master washing my hair and holding me in the evening, and me wandering away, and oranges in the city, and him whispering 'Arantii, why do you go to market,' in his wondering tone. 'Arantii', do you know? It means little orange. And then he found that beautiful boy. I was seven. That boy had a kind face. Even now I remember. He had hair like red clay dirt, brown orange and thick. He had been a prostitute near the warehouses by the sea, used up, and he wanted nothing to do with my master, and I hated him. I was seven.

"That stupid prostitute had seizures. By then, two of my master's elder manservants had gone in disgust, made like us and then disappearing into the night, abandoning us. If I see them I will kill them. That was not their only sin. That summer was so hot. The air was thick."

I could feel Laurent's breath by my ear, his scored arms holding me, thought of the dimpled mole beneath his lip.

"Speak nothing," he said, "I will be able to kill them myself now, but I could not do anything then. I wanted my master. He was all I knew. I was used to being pursued, but he would not come when I went away. He was always in his cubiculum with that boy, humming and singing to each other, and then one night that boy seized when no one was there to hold his head. I remember the blood he had dashed across the marble cladding, from his poor head, and how my master shut me out, and then there was nothing from them for a long time, just my brother, Palomia, telling me to stop crying, and shut up, and stop being such a spoiled baby.

"I was not ignorant of what my master was. When Palomia brought a shallow gold tureen and cut his arm, I saw how it hurt him, and I told him I was not a baby, and that I would prove it, me, and because Palomia resented me my special treatment from our master, he let me do it. I cut myself so many times. How many days? Such long scores. I lay in the peristyle, watching the passage of the moon at night, dreaming waking hours. When was I awake? Is this real pain? How many more? And then one night the cubiculum door was open, and like the walking dead, I looked inside, and there was the nice prostitute, sitting up, and he looked at me, and I knew that it was my blood on his mouth, and I kept walking. I wonder if he yet lives. I don't know. Oh at the end, I don't even know how old I was, but I have been told it was only two months, and then there was that great earthquake that knocked down our temple, and shook the water out of our atrium pool, and up on our hill we could hear people screaming far away, and watch the fire that ripped through everything for two days and two nights. I sat in the grass with my brothers, in Palomia's arms, and we watched it, shuddering.

"And my master took me away. Know that? He took me away from there, from my bed. He untangled me from my sleeping brothers' arms and took me away in the night, while the entire world slept, in a long boat to Alexandria, which was beyond the edge of what I knew. And when the earth exploded, the sky clouded over even there, as if heaven had opened and behind it was all darkness, all death, all smoke and fire. And I cried for my brothers, who were surely dead, because the God of Death had come up out of His mountain and cast His great cloak over them, and our house, and covered all of Herculaneum, and of Pompeii, and the beautiful land in between, which even now is different, because all of the dead lie beneath, holding each other in the quiet earth, and perhaps my brothers are there too, in our bed, sweaty limbs tangled up together where they are dreaming of us here, in the future. Perhaps, we are living in their dream. Sometimes I like to think so.

"I came of age in Alexandria. Oh, Nicky. What an ugly city Alexandria was. Believe nothing you hear. There were grasping hands behind every wall in Egypt, waiting to cut a purse or slice a throat without pretense of reason. But I grew to understand such a place as that city, and I went to its bathhouses and temples with open hands and open eyes, wandering away farther and farther from my master, who had become melancholy and quiet. He stayed in our apartment, tucked away in a far district, windows blocked by reed mats. It smelled of rats there, but in the bathhouses, with their hidden rooms and hot water, it was nice, and it was clean, and there were beautiful things who liked beautiful things like me, a mysterious stranger with no good name on my lips. I liked those older men who could give me money and affection which felt like it meant something, and I liked the temples, too, Alexandria with its sultry mixture of Egypt, and Greece, and Rome, which seemed so far away.

"But God in that city there was so much death. I do not want to speak of it. Forgive me that. Let me have one secret, knowing that I told you many times that I wanted to be like this since I was a child. How I've had a fear of death, yes, knowing so many of its different faces. When I was twenty-two, I begged him to take me. My heart was broken. So many lovers dead. So many turned me out. Too much pain. I cut myself on the old lines and I said Look. Take me. Take me with you away from the hold of death. I know you can do it. If you do not take me I will run away. If you do not do it I promise you I will run. He pushed me against the wall and burned my face with a little mark and told me run, run, and they will all know that you are mine, mine, mine, because it's on your face now that you are a traitorous slave who can't be trusted, after all you've been given. And I told him please God I loved him, I want to be at the bottom of the sea, with all the other young, dead men, where I would surely be some day without his help. Oh what was the use of living?

"And then one night he came to me and I woke to speak his name but he pushed me down, and covered my mouth, and the person behind his face was not him, and he spit in my face, which made me cry, and when I cried he bit me on the shoulder so hard that even now my skin is dimpled there, and I found out that I had been foolish, that there is nothing romantic about death, my own, which I could taste. I felt my neck would break, that I would break beneath his weight, and there has never been such a pain, and instead of my body, it was my mind that broke, and he put me away until I stopped screaming, in some wretched hovel of a place, covering my eyes with a white cloth so they would not burn themselves out of my head. There were women who would come and cover me with damp cloths soaked in cool cellar water, and cover my mouth when I screamed, because I was burning, and burning, and burning in Egypt, whose humid air I had loved before I became this, and I stayed there months without him.

"After that I was quite changed. He had made me a wandering, unseeing invalid. He took me from there, very far north, where I could soak in cool pools and stare at the moon, simple and unknowing of anything but what was inside my own head. At night he held my body. For many years, because of being made in Egypt, I could not see. The warm water in the air had made me blind. Oh I loathe the darkness," he whispered, and went on, trembling, "it blots comfort out. He told me he could not see me as I was in Alexandria, and so he had left me until I had finally quieted, and that he wanted my forgiveness, but I could not understand his words. After two hundred years, after the world had quite come back to me, I left him, and he let me go. But Nicky, I would have stayed with him if he had asked. Please God, if he asked me now, he is all I want, that smell of Herculaneum, its narrow passages where I might glimpse him looking for me in the night, and the sound of its lapping water, black under the phases of the moon. I would go there if he wanted me, just one word. But I have gone so far away from all of that and it is all gone and there can be no return." His head was tipped at an angle, eyes shut, unaware of his body, as if in a sweet trance.

"Laurie."

"Yes, sweet child."

"Tell me your name."

"My name is Escha."

"Laurie."

"Oh, yes."

"Is your master here?"

"Oh, yes."

"And why did you attack my brother?"

"Because I will kill you both before I let him take you away from me."

And all of you are fools who think he misses that old Paris, because he was seeing nothing then but home, mad, hopeless, and lost.

We went to the opium harem under the earth near Pigalle, and I sat outside his red curtain so he could succumb safe to the sweet words of willing boys. We went there many times. I memorized the mosaics on the floor with my fingers.