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This Time Around

Transcript of the life story of Maxwell Lucas Scott-Moses (né Lucius Scoedius Maximus), recorded 13 October 2017 by Angela Langdon, assistant to the head archivist of the Cypress Mount Shuffleboard Club, Queens, New York, as a condition of Mr. Scott-Moses's membership in the Club.

Marcus had beautiful eyes. That’s all I can remember. You’d think I’d have a better picture of my first love. But it’s been a while, a long while, and there’s only so many memories a man can hold. We weren’t in school together because I never went to school. He might’ve been the son of my father’s patron. I know I never kissed him, I don’t think I ever even touched him, I just watched him from a distance. Always just beyond my reach. Hazel eyes gleaming in the sun, smiling.

The next was also Marcus. We only had so many names back then. He was a priest, a eunuch, and the best cocksucker this world has ever seen. Don’t give me that look, it’s true. We can stop this now if sex makes you squeamish. No? That’s what I thought. Gorgeous lips on that man. Went to the priesthood of the Great Mother before he even grew his beard. I was in… Ostia. It was Ostia. I was a sailor. I’ve mostly been a sailor, or a soldier. And every time I came to port I’d meet Marcus at this little taberna by the docks, he’d be all done up in drag - we didn’t have a good word for it back then, the twentieth century was excellent for my vocabulary - and we’d drink and dance all night, with the sailors and the whores, and go back to his little apartment across from the temple and… Well, I won’t subject you to a thorough description, but we weren’t sleeping. Then one time I came back and he wasn’t waiting for me. Never figured out what happened to him. Asked around the temple, and they said he’d just left one day. It happens.

The first time I fell in love with Isaac was in Alexandria. He was a scribe at the Library; he read four languages, and probably spoke a few more; and the first time we met he almost stabbed me with a stylus for bumping into him in the street and scattering his scrolls everywhere. I apologized, and helped him pick them up, and we went our separate ways; and the next day we saw each other in the baths and all of a sudden six months had passed and we were living together. Alexandria was… More tolerant, I suppose. Cosmopolitan. Never seen another city like it. Amsterdam was close, after they gave the Spanish the boot, and New York is alright, I suppose, although it hasn't been the same since - sorry, sorry, I'm going on a tangent. Nobody gave two fucks about Isaac and I living together, is the point. Well, Isaac's father never liked me, but I think it was because I'm a goy, not a gay. We were happy. The Empire was stable. Always enough bread to eat and wine to drink. Maybe five, six years of contentment before the gods fucked us over.

I was still a sailor. Never been the safest job, and it was especially bad back then. Got swept overboard in a storm on my way home. Don't know how long I drifted around the sea for. Years, maybe. I was in and out of consciousness, floating and sinking, baked by the sun and scoured by the salt… Awful. Worst days of my life. I've always assumed that's when I was blessed, that I called out in terror and some god or spirit answered. But who knows. Maybe I was just born this way. Anyway, I washed up eventually, somewhere in Syria. Nursed back to health by friendly locals. Got back to Alexandria eventually, but Isaac was long gone. So I moved on.

I went back to Italy for a while. Then north, up through Gaul. Crossed the channel into Britannia. I was just getting as far away from Egypt as possible, really. Settled down on a farm. I guess the Empire collapsed at some point. I didn't really notice. I was busy raising pigs. Then there were Angles, and Saxons, and Norsemen, and as long as they didn't try to burn down my house or steal my pigs I didn't really care what language they spoke. I was… Well, I was depressed. Clinically. For, I don't know, five hundred years? I realized I was immortal after the first hundred, I guess. Didn't really sink in until I got stabbed through the heart by a Dane and just walked it off.

That was Ivar - the one who stabbed me through the heart. Spooked the hell out of him when I got right back up and stopped him from stealing my pigs. Fell right on his ass in the mud and shit. And then he looked up at me, and said, in awful halting English — Old English, I guess, but we just called it English back then — he said, and I paraphrase because I assume you don't speak bad Old English, "Undying and gorgeous? The gods truly do walk the Earth with man." And I was so startled by the man who had just stabbed me through the heart hitting on me that, instead of stabbing him right back, I sucked him off in my awful little hovel and then let him take me home to Denmark. One of my less responsible life choices, but not one that I regret.

Ivar had a wife. Tora. He also had two concubines, and a servant boy with pretty eyelashes, and a very close relationship with one of his shield-brothers, and an assortment of gorgeous slaves. And, after I said goodbye to my pigs and got on that boat to Denmark, he had me. I don't think Ivar would ever have ranked his lovers, that wasn't the kind of man he was, but if he had, Tora and I would have been neck-and-neck for number one. I had been wondering why Ivar wasn't more surprised by my refusal to die; Tora was the reason. She'd eaten some sort of magic apple when she was young, some three hundred years before I met her, and hadn't aged a day since. I felt very smug when I realized she was half my age. Less smug when I saw how fantastic a weaver she was and realized I'd spent most of that time perfecting my manure-scooping technique.

Tora and I went from strangers who were fucking the same man to best friends in about six hours. We just clicked, instantly.

[STUFF]

I found her again recently — thanks to the Club, of course. One of the reasons I decided to commit to joining. She lives in Tokyo, of all places. Part-owner and chef of a two-Michelin-star "Scandi-sushi" restaurant. I went to see her last year, and it was like the millennium we'd been apart never happened. Got right back into a stupid little argument about how bees make honey we'd been having before Ivar died, but this time she came armed with Wikipedia and i had to admit defeat. Love that woman. Greatest friend I've ever had.

[MORE HERE]

The second time I fell in love with Isaac, we didn’t recognize each other. I'd gotten bored of smoked fish and cold winters, and came back south through the Rus’ to Constantinople. Still spoke Greek, of course, it was what my mother spoke at home, but I had picked up a horrible northern accent, and I'd grown this massive bushy beard. It was itchy as hell, never again, I swear. But it was the style at the time. I joined up with the Varangians along with some men I knew — one of them, Asgeir, was Ivar's great-grandson, and I figured I should keep an eye on him for old time's sake —

[MORE HERE]

Anna - I saw those eyebrows go up, Miss Langdon, I think "homoflexible" is the term to use, a five on that scale, what's it called? Lindsey? No, Kinsey, Kinsey. Incidentally heterosexual, and I've had a lot of time for incidents. This was in Amsterdam, great city, almost as good as Alexandria. I was, oh, a merchant of some sort, selling cloth or spices or whatever, Anna was the daughter of my landlord, our eyes met, sparks flew, we fucked a lot and then she got pregnant. Which I was not expecting, let me tell you, it had never really come up before. I mean, I'd slept with the occasional woman before Anna, but none who were expecting me to stick around, so they always took, you know, precautions. And it's not like I was going to skip town and break her heart, and she didn't want to find a doctor to deal with the problem - which, funny story, would probably have been Isaac, he was practicing medicine in Amsterdam at the time, and almost all his patients survived, since he had kept alive the mystical Egyptian art of washing his fucking hands before cutting into someone - so I did the right thing and married the girl. I was surprised at how happy her parents were with the whole situation, but I guess her brothers had been killed in some war or another, so they needed a man around and I fit the bill.

We were married for… Almost fifty years. She died at seventy-two. Old age, I suppose. Three kids, twelve grandkids, and two great-grandkids. I've sort of kept track of the family, when I could. And yes, she knew I wasn't getting older, so did the kids, it's not like I could hide it. But it turns out that most people aren't very observant, so we just changed churches every decade or so and by the end everyone was assuming I was, you know, the rich old widow's boy toy, or something. I didn't stick around long after she died. My son, he made the right noises, but by that point he looked older than me, and nobody wants their dad hovering over them for all eternity. So I signed up with the VOC and headed off to Batavia for… A while. Maybe a century? There was a lot of opium, and it all sort of blurs together. I think it was the eighteen-fifties when I went back to Europe. The Netherlands, for a bit, then back to England - I was feeling nostalgic, I guess. There was a factory where my pig farm used to be. Disappointing.

The third time I fell in love with Isaac was at Passchendaele. I wasn’t even trying to fake my death that time, I’d only been in England for a decade or so, working my way up the ranks of the army, but I got hit by a shell and someone found me in the crater before I could crawl away. Both my hands blown off, burns everywhere - you never get used to burns, I’ll take dismemberment any day - I should’ve been dead, of course. They put me in the back of the triage tent. Smelled like shit and blood. Not the most romantic setting. But I’m starting to grow the hands back, eyes screwed shut because it hurts like hell, and I don’t notice the doctor come in until I’m done. I’m expecting him to call me a witch or maybe a medical miracle but he just looks me straight in the eyes and then he faints, just collapses onto the ground. So I get up, thinking I’ll make my escape while he’s out, and then I see his face; and that’s when I realized who Isaikos the monk was, and who this doctor was, and then I almost faint and I have to sit back down.

So after a moment, he comes to. And… I don't even know how to describe it.

[MORE HERE]

And, you know, now we're married. We decided to wait a bit after it was legalized, actually, we didn't officially tie the knot until this summer - on our hundredth anniversary, more or less. This time around.

Mr. Scott-Moses's husband, Dr. Isaac Alexander Moses-Scott (né Yitzhak ben Moshe of Alexandria), declined to provide the Shuffleboard Club with his own story, but did provide the location of a cache of scrolls and codices he personally rescued from the sack of the Great Library. Our sister organization in Cairo, the Silver Ankh Coffeehouse, is in negotiations to purchase the property that now occupies the site of the cache, and Dr. Moses-Scott's membership will remain probationary until it is recovered.


tags: entry prose document journal first-person contemporary-earth historical-earth moderate-fantasia biography lgbtq romance

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