“Don’t touch that! Are you mad?” Mrs. Marcus raised a hand before restraining herself and smoothing her dress instead. “OK, there will be a lesson change today, because your classmate Julian is a – go sit in the corner and not another word. The rest of you turn to page 118 in your textbooks to one of history’s greatest blunders. Now, let me tell you about a natural born leader. A man among men, Caesar knew exactly when to pull out in battle; sadly, the same cannot be said for matters of love. That is how mistakes are made. Julian, you need to understand this.” She paused to look at the small, smirking boy now seated in the classroom's corner before deciding to abandon quotation marks altogether:
If you squint your eyes just right and tilt your head at the perfect angle, then you might be able to catch a glimpse of that time. I’m talking about a time when everybody gathered in arenas to watch their favorite reality TV, and God had multiple personalities that were all disturbingly human. But the end-all-start-all for the people of Rome was the marketplace. No one had heard of anything like a warranty back then; you got what you saw, and if you had a bad eye, then you were bound to fall on your face from time to time.
An old man, who wasn't really that old and possessed no eyes at all, had gathered a crowd along one of the market avenues. He asked members of the audience to hold up any number of fingers and would then recite those numbers automatically. The old man's secret was a dwarf planted in the crowd. The dwarf made barely audible clicks with his tongue that corresponded to upraised fingers. These clicks traveled between the waists of the audience and right into the ears of the kneeling, sightless man. Once he had the crowd in a receptive thrall, he gathered their disjoint minds into a story. His particular story on that particular day was this:
There was once a young boy who was foolish enough to think himself clever in the marketplace. He possessed a golden medallion that his father, a poor soldier long gone on a distant conquest, had left in his care. The boy knew that the medallion was valuable, so he'd drop it near the girls running errands. He'd scramble along the stalls on his hands and knees, hoping to catch a glimpse up their robes. Whenever he was accused of peeping, he'd spring up with the golden medallion in hand and say that he'd been looking for the only thing that he had to remember his poor father by. One dusty day, the boy lost the medallion amidst the feet and dirt and came up empty-handed when a girl accused him of staring. He dropped back down to the ground, actually looking for the medallion for the first time. The girl screamed and kicked him; other girls joined in when he refused to stop his search. The battered boy finally fled the marketplace and returned home to find his recently returned father, who beat him to within an inch of his life for losing the medallion.
At the story’s end, Caesar, who was actually in the crowd with most of his features shrouded by a brown cloak, chuckled. He shared a secret smile with the mother of one of his most trusted if slightly clingy senators. The older, elegant woman giggled when Caesar's hand ventured below her waist. He gave a squeeze to celebrate one of their infrequent escapes to the marketplace.
Marcus, the senator son, was actually one aisle over. The senator was there on one of his frequent trips to the marketplace to feed his intense love for Egyptian pottery. He clutched a medium vase saturated with blue desert flowers and stared at his mother standing very close to the man with the unmistakably regal nose and chin, the same man who had said he thought of him as a son. Seeing Caesar's hand on his mother’s rump, Marcus finally formulated a wish that would never come true. And that's how Caesar lost his life in the marketplace – the senators' daggers that later drank the blood of Julian, excuse me, Julius were a mere formality.
Mrs. Marcus finished the last sentence and smiled when Julian's bottom lip began to quiver. “And that is why you never touch an older woman unless you can take the consequences.”
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