In 1960, I sat on my knees, my hands pressed against the hardwood floor in front of me. I pushed my hands out, prostrating myself. "Of my own accord," I whispered, my first words to the master, quiet so as not to be overheard in a house full of sensitive ears. 

"The master says that he will tell you when it is the proper time to rise," Nataniellus whispered back to me. "For now, he wants to look at you."

On the way to the floor, as so many times before, there had only been a glimpse of indigo, of a shadowed figure kneeling forward in his chair, his chin balanced on his fist. I heard the sound of his chair now, creaking beneath him as he settled. The only light came from two candles, both by the master's chair, to put me in darkness on the floor. My heart turned in my chest like a sleeping child.

"Centurion," Leechtin said, with the familiar sibilant vibration, and my body vibrated in response, shivering.

Two slow thumps, as Nataniellus took off his clogs. I smiled, because I know that he takes his shoes off like a young boy, raising his knees instead of bending to his foot.

"Centurion, will I tell you a story?" this serpentine voice asked me, tickling my ears. "Will you listen?"

"Yes," I said, as quietly as I could.

 "Yes," he said.

Between his breaths there was nothing to hear in the room. The house complained, as the hot evening deepened into cool night. In the night, the wind whipped coolness from the black lake, from which the master had emerged, wet and dripping to see to me. The flicker of the candles' flames were like the clicking of a beetle's wings, as it cleans itself, too heavy with dirt to rise from the floor. From Nataniellus, silence, no breath, no movement, the sound of his heart beating, the same as my own heart in my ears. 

"I want you to imagine, that when you are a child, and you are sleeping, a wasp stings you," Leechtin said, slowly. The sound of pulling his shawl tighter, wool against wool. "What do you do to this wasp? Stinging you. For that sting, the price is only pain. What to do? One time, when I was twelve, a man comes to me and he says, 'Come and I will teach you many things. I will make you rich,' and if I go with him, and there is a price for his teaching, do I say no to this?"

A dog barking, in the distance. Below, a child crying. Secret tears, muffled by a pillow.

"He makes me a false seer, that man. He takes from me all a boy has to give," he said, in no hurry. "And when I was twenty, and my name is known, a man comes to me and he says, 'Marry my daughter, for you are a shaman of many good signs. I will make you powerful,' and what do I say to him? Though it is cutting out my heart, and shaming my body that wants none of hers. And when there is a child, of my body and her body, whom I love, and murdered, and I hear my quiet spirit say 'Vengeance' though it means my very nature must die for it, what to my spirit? What to my son? And do you let it sting you, and do you sting yourself? And what then? And of the many other prices I have paid since?"

The shifting of clothing, the sharp crack of a skin striking skin. A hand of comfort withdrawn. 

"This now here there is another wasp," Leechtin whispered, with unmistakable bile, "who has stung me in the past. And what does it cost me to swat him, who I do not yet trust? He hovers near me, guilty, and yet a wasp knows only to sting. It is only his nature, and so he imagines it is his warrant. And yet, he stings me. He creeps into my lover's arms. And he does this for two thousand years. I may wait and I may shake him out of my tent, and yet in opening the flap I let out my cool air, which soothes me. I may let him live to fly away, unknowing of my pain, and yet by then will it be morning? And a sleepless night robbed me of my peace? A thief of my comforts. So what shall I do? When there the wasp lies, beneath my shadow, unknowing of my anger, and of my pain? I know what it may cost me to be rid of him. All that I yet have. What do I give for him to stay? What do I give you in return, Vespa? What will you cut from me as I wait for you to sting?" he asked me. "How will I curse myself in the future, if I allow you to live? What will I curse?" 

I lay trembling, unsure of myself and liable to say stupid things.

"He says speak freely," Natsniellus said, carefully neutral.

"Master, I will never betray you," I whispered, trembling.

"Never is a word for the dying. Are you so flawed that you as yet do not understand the futility of oaths? Do you still think in such a way?" Leechtin asked, unmoved. "Have you not reflected on your life and seen your good judgment ill-conceived, and the man you were a stranger? Your intentions mean nothing, for in the future you will not recognize he who you now call 'I', and his intentions will be strange to you. In the face of time there are only deeds. Have you not come any distance from your boyhood? If you no longer pull wings off flies there are still dead flies! I am not interested in a man who does his best to suit his goodness. You will betray me. Even the method itself is clear. You will transgress against me because you are ruled by comfort. What will you do exactly? How can I sit idle as, over time, you will discover a treachery named 'righteousness' when what I stand to lose is clearly the beloved beside me? Either way, if you live or you die, I lose him all the same!"

"Sir, are you calling me a laggard? A man who seeks the softest way? A man who must be comforted?" I asked, daring not to move, yet piqued.

"You are confused about what you are. If you say that you are a man, I know the shape of your mind. Shame, Iovita. There is no reward for denying your endlessness. What role do you play in the years to come? And what role after that? Shall I watch you struggle? Are you caught in your own trap? You will act toward an ending that never comes. You cannot fight for a happy ending, as you inhabit a time with end. I fear you will not realize it until all is lost, and lost again."  

"Master," I whispered, simmering, "I am angry and I am confused. You have lost me completely. Play with me as you would, but I will face you, as I face all things. If I will be accused of treachery it will be on my feet, as I was when I pledged myself to you. I made that pledge of my own accord, to serve you honorably until such time as you release me from that service. It is dishonorable to show me rancor in return."

In the long silence following my protest, the child below continued to cry, joined by the rumble of soothing words. A child and kind words for his ears. Mad, to be so in the world of Herculaneum.

"Stand," Nataniellus said, his voice as measured as it had been.

I did, to face my accuser, who sat looking away from me, two fingertips pressed idly against his lips. He had turned his face away from the light of the two candles, as if they bothered him. 

"Sir," I said, continuing in spite of his seeming disinterest, "I make my pledge, and I deserve," I started.

"What do you deserve?" Nataniellus asked, surprising me. His feet were crossed at the ankles, and he had turned his body away from the master, nursing the wrist the master had struck. "Surely not trust. They never trust us, do the masters. To them we are conspirators, greater in number."

"No. Only to serve he who is deserving of service. To protect him and his house, who is worth protecting. I have done my part, and preserved myself so that I may best do my duty by them who I love. The man who does this is the man I call 'self'. Centurion, yes you may call me a soldier," I said to Leechtin, trying to disguise my anger as sorrow, "for I am only he who does violence for those in whom he may believe. I am not ashamed to love this man, and others both living and dead, and it is their love I serve, and without it I am never a soldier. You may not say anything at all, but I come now also of my own accord. Do not dishonor me, Sir. Them and Escha, too, are my sword and my shield. I do not want this man for my own, and yet if you deprive me of my love, you make me unfit."

At first, as I stood there, trembling, I expected him to speak. I expected him to look at me, measure me, to rise. But the longer I stood there, the deeper I came to find beside the fear of him hiding within me, there hid also tenderness, surprising tenderness, that choked me, for here clearly was my master, preoccupied and troubled by me and so many other things. When Nataniellus caught me moving to reach for Leechtin, he stood, and he took my arm, and if he had not been there to do it, what would I have done? 

So in that hour, I pledged myself to him again, and in that hour, in the hallway, Nataniellus kissed me wetly and said, "Calm down," and pushed me very hard, and slapped me.

"Why did you let him do that to me?" I gasped to him, ashamed, not thinking that about that Leechtin could hear me through the wall.

"Why do hang your head like a dog?" Nataniellus asked me, taking my hands and shaking me, "You have done nothing wrong. You are alive!"

And after that, for so many years, the master showed me affection and grace, and I wake up so many mornings feeling as if there are hands around my neck, clawing at myself, for it was not long that I failed him in so many ways, refusing to understand the blindness I willfully labored beneath. Didn't he tell me that I was not a man? And that so offended me. But wasn't he telling me that relief is a liar? That there can be no relief when there is no end to my life? And didn't Escha also tell me that, more than once, that he sought only an end to suffering, and an end to pain, and saying that, wasn't he confessing to me that he only wanted to die? There is no end to suffering. If there is not death, suffering will always return.

Leechtin, privately preoccupied with eventualities, had been right about me. I let myself believe in an ending, having found what for so long we had lost. In pinching small fleas, I missed the disease, already by then sneaking its way in among us with no way to turn it back. And there was Escha, welcoming it as a lover.

***

By 1990, I was living at Leechtin's house full time, and Escha often close.

It had been decided for me that I would move there following the death of his last lover. He had seemed so fragile afterward. I looked around me in Brighton, and I thought, "Now I am going home," and I went.

Does it really matter if I liked California? I preferred England. I have always preferred the flavor of the English, and the cold, and the damp, and the sea. Perhaps the best thing about California is how much and how well Nataniellus slept there, anywhere and everywhere. I liked to come into the living room and find him laid out over an easy chair, his limbs forgotten. 

To be quite honest, I kept to myself. Perhaps I am not good at meeting and wanting to maintain relationships with others. I found myself troubled by what Leechtin had said about endlessness, as I begin to understand that it is true that I am uncomfortable with the idea that they who I meet here are liable to have the hidden faces and long memories. If you prick a man, or love a woman, or accumulate regret, death has a way of wiping the slate clean. How does one behave around those who do not love him, if he must consider that for ever, they shall remember what he says? For the love of it, I kept to the outdoors, but as a happy consequence, in so doing I found myself well alone.

In the little wood, I often walked in the evenings. Among the many pines, the cedars and firs, there were pale-barked volunteer aspens and cottonwoods. Though an attempt to mitigate the major undergrowth had been made by grasping fingers, likely belonging to Leechtin, vines have a way of springing up and leafing out overnight. A keen eye could spot a trail through the leaves, and one evening, as I went, I collected pine cones in my sweater, because I liked how they smelled. Kicking along, I kept my eyes trained downward, curious to see snakes, and so that evening my eyes found a shoe. It is natural to look up when there is something strange on the ground.

In the oak tree, just out of reach, there seemed to be a bundle of white clothing, and though Laurent had stopped breathing, I smelled him. 

"I didn't know you'd come back here," I said, rousing him. "You've lost your sandal."

"I'll come down," he said, sleep in his voice.

"Drop down and I'll catch you. Were you sleeping up there?" I asked, not without affection. In the years following finding him in my kitchen, he had proved himself made of stern stuff, and yet he was cute to me as well, a sweetie.

"I can come down by myself. I thought I wanted to do some thinking."

"Go on and drop down."

"No, I don't want to do that," he said, his voice soft but firm. 

He hitched up his cotton robe around his hips and negotiated the tree, swinging his leg wide and coming down carefully. He scooted down slowly but ably.

"You've got jams on under there," I said, my hands upraised to guide him in case he fell. They hovered over his hips and waist as he came down the last meter.

"My pajamas? My Jaime sends them from Paris. So I am wearing them," he said, again with the same weariness. A pair of gauzy shorts and a button down were visible underneath his robe.

"I'm walking a loop."

"I will go with you," he said, folding up his sleeves and taking my arm so that his skin would touch my skin. "With Iovita, in his old t-shirt. Why do you never use another name?" 

"Should I change it?" I asked, my fingertips lightly touching the arm that held mine as we walked. Even after thirty or so years, touching him thrilled me. My eyes loved to see him.

"I am thinking about a boy that I killed," he said.

"When did you kill him?"

"I don't know. Some years ago now. Very young."

"Miou?"

"That is being his name. That is it."

"Why do you think about him? Did you dream about him?"

"Sometimes I want to kill the man I am seeing. I wonder if I should kill him, too. But lately when I think of killing, I think of the boy I killed. Lately I think of young men."

"Perhaps you should find a woman who will have you. I see you look at them, sometimes, when we are out together."

"I won't have a woman. You can have them," he said.

"Why not? If you like them."

He waved his hand. "I am talking about something else."

"You're thinking about killing Alois?" 

"Do you like him?"

"If you're asking me, he seems ordinary compared to some of your others."

"Thank you, dearly. In fact he is not ordinary, but he seems so," he paused, "so nothing."

"If you told me that Alois had been lobotomized I would believe you."

By then, he had been seeing Alois for nearly ten years. I tried to keep track of his affairs, but his affairs were so crowded. I found myself on the telephone a lot saying, "Oh, yeah?" Mostly, I liked to keep company with memory. Laurent liked to occupy himself with other people, with activity. I didn't envy it but it seemed a fine, if exhausting way of life. I knew Alois because he often came around the house when Laurent wasn't there, looking for him. A blond, fairly old creature with quietly crazy eyes. He looked nice in pants. 

"I feel as if he is always holding himself back. And I wonder if that is an illusion and really, he is a nothing."

"You could kill him if you want to."

"I am not responsible for what happens to him. He is not mine. Sometimes I wish that I would not think so much and act. What would Aulus do?"

"Aye, he'd have the measure of him. Reckon he'd tell you to get along with whatever you mean to do. Where did you find him?"

"Not far from here, if you will believe it. In San Francisco. I do not even remember what I was doing there."

As we crossed the treeline, the fading light found his features, and I could have a look at him better. 

It had been about three months since I had last seen him, but he looked startlingly awful. His eyes were darting, blood-shot pits over sallow skin. We are always pale but he had passed into translucency, deceptively gray. His flesh had drawn tight over his cheekbones, so that they looked too sharp. This was not just spurning blood. I recognized that he was ingesting material he shouldn't have been. It was the look of poisoning. A drug? Water? 

"You look terrible," I said.

"You have found me out. I feel terrible," he said.

"Little brother," I whispered, "want to hitch a ride?" 

"I cannot be seen riding on your back," he said. "They will all want to bear me about, so that none may have an advantage. Are you coming inside?"

"Maybe I will," I said, looking up the garden lawn to the back porch, lit warmly. "I've got a bed in there and all."

"You know, it is not that Alois has done anything to offend me. That is the worst of it. I just so do not care to know anyone, these days," he whispered, stroking my arm. "I thought so much when first I met him, that he was worth such things as breaking my word, or that I deserved to do as I would with him and anyone else. I am very tired to think about that. I would have told myself anything. If there is beauty in the world, any chance of grace, I must have what I can of it. What does it do for me?"

"Do they give you grace?" I asked him. 

"At my best I am capable of feeling at peace," he said, scratching me gently with his fingernails. "But there are always more boys to kill, and the ones I want don't want me, and I respect them for that, though they make me ache. I love to ache," and he winked at me to make me smile.

On the back porch, a figure sat on the steps, rising at our approach. I looked away from his face, the young doctor I had never been introduced to, and who rarely came to call in California. But here he was, his dark hair cut short and oiled with Brylcreem, and in a slim, Italian-cut suit. He couldn't hide from me how young he'd been, or that he was old enough to ignore the times he lived in. He looked a boy trying to resemble a man in a previous era. He carried himself in a stern manner.

"Bonsoir, ma bibiche," good evening, my little doe, he said.

"Eh, va te faire foutre," Laurent murmured. "Je vais dormir." I'm going to bed.

It pleased me that as I approached, the little doctor backed a step.

"Alois is in the den, waiting for you," the doctor said.

"Va-t-en," leave me alone, Laurent murmured, letting go of me and mounting the stairs, "was that not clear enough for you? I do not want anything, what you have. You cannot do this to me, with your needles. I do not want."

"You had a bad reaction. I will give you what you usually have. I have my bag with me, and the, the objets..."

"Pox on your eyes," Laurent said, his back turned.

The funny thing, and I think about it often, is that even as I watched him go into the house, his hips swaying, everything seemed all right. Everything seemed all right until it wasn't. 

As I turned away, the doctor followed his master, his voice rising in anger. I took a slim cigar out of my back pocket and cut it, ready to spend some minutes relaxing and enjoying its smell on the steps. 

The view down the back lawn, from where we had come, had settled into blackening darkness; the stars fairly obscured by low cloud cover. I leaned back on my hand, reaching upward for an ashtray on the porch rail. As I reached, I saw that there was a deer some ways away, its eyes reflecting the houselight, twin points. 

It wasn't until the cigar was half gone that I realized, my senses lazy with the pleasure of its burning, that the deer was too tall.

I had not smelled it in the woods. Whatever it was, I had not smelled it as it had followed us toward the house, nor as it had watched me, and continued to watch me. As I flicked the cigar butt away I kept my eyes upon it. As I backed into the house, I kept my eyes upon it.

As I crossed the den, as I went up the stairs, my gaze wandered over Alois briefly. I felt him looking, studying. I suspected nothing, though I disliked his staring. Alois. The secret cuckoo in the nest. A spy.

I looked for Nataniellus. I could not find him. I looked for Nonus. I could not find him. I took the brass box of Aulus's ashes from my bedside table and held them. All night, I sat up in my chair, watching the window, my heart racing with the sense of a near miss. 

  When I think of that night, I think also of the night my master whispered, "Vespa." I think of all of the times when I could have done something. When I looked out, it is that I was seeing his killer for the first time, and ignored my instincts.

For all of my experience, in the end, I did not act. I wonder what I will do. The time has again when I must make a choice. He is out there, what looks like our Escha. There must be something  done. There must be someone to do it.

I will take responsibility for him.