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1
THE LONG, GLEAMING HALLWAY was lit by the afternoon sun, walls hung with Renaissance art. Royal Novak liked studying here. It brought to him a sense of absolute tranquility, that he was surrounded by all the high beauty of history, a lake free of ripples amid a flowering forest. Clio College did not need a chapel when it had the Galerie.
He clicked his pen and sifted through his assigned text on cryptography, revving himself up to start annotating. Not before he was touched, to his fury, on the shoulder. Tap-tap.
“Royal. Hey.” The voice was low, hushed, barely there.
He turned around. Casimir von Engel, a beautiful name for a beautiful boy, blinked back at him. He was a classics major—that coterie of epic poets and heretics. All coteries in Clio formed by majors, each one so close-knit it was almost comical, and the classics coterie was perhaps tightest of them all. But Emir was an oddity at his very least. He drifted around between anchored ships like some water lily. He was a wisp of a boy, half-Austrian and half-Hungarian, with slim hands and a lilting voice—untethered, ethereal-looking, perking at every opportunity to catch Royal in conversation. Royal couldn’t figure why Emir liked to talk to him so much.
“Bacchus,” Emir said, propping his hip languidly against the crème wall. “Know him?”
“God of wine,” Royal responded. He wanted to turn back to his papers, but there was something about Emir’s face that demanded his attention.
“Yes.” Emir nodded and adjusted his beret, which he always wore. “Wine, fertility, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, drama, excess. He represents mystery, pleasure, the unexplainable forces of nature in which there is true beauty. That is why the Romans and Greeks alike held so many bacchanals—they, in essence, represent the virtue, the soul of Bacchus.”
Royal stared at him. “Why are you telling me this? I’m a science major.”
“Oh, you can find art even in these most rigid woodworks,” Emir dismissed. “Come to the bacchanal we’re doing tonight, won’t you? From the west wing, you’ll certainly see the bonfire.” He smiled secretively, and when the sun hit his face, he looked like one of the Quattrocento angels in the Botticelli painting beside him. Soft pointed petals, gilded gold. “Honor thy true god by showing up, will thee, Royal? For me, too. Aren’t you sick of the phenomenal world?”
“I’m not religious. There is nothing but the phenomenal world.”
“Oh, you. You are precious. I’ll come pick you up quarter to ten, quod sic?” He was gone before Royal could answer. The lily floated, buoyed by the lagoon’s swell.
2
EMIR WAS PAINFULLY PUNCTUAL. He knocked a rhythm on Royal’s door that heartbeat the dorm clock ticked to 9:45. Royal capped his highlighter and stood.
In the mirror he perfunctorily set by the shoe rack, he gave himself a deadpan once-over. Ghostly face, sharp edges, excited by nothing. As is the custom. He opened the door.
“You’ll be cold,” was the first thing he said upon seeing Emir, a woodland faerie in a billowy white shirt that couldn’t possibly stand against the late-fall northern winds.
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” said Emir, smiling. “You’ll find out in good time.”
They descended the sinuous flight of stairs that wrapped the West Tower and through the courtyard, which was lit by a circle of candles that looked eerie in the dim of the late hour. Old, ivy-veined brick hugged them from all sides on the spring-green grass, and the air was suffused with a perfume of romance. Thing was, Royal didn’t consider himself much of a romantic.
“Zephyrus is without mercy tonight,” Emir remarked, “but Bacchus will not bow to him, of course.” Royal did not understand any of that.
“If it’s just some rave,” he said, “why see it as something so historic?”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” Emir exclaimed, suddenly looking delighted. They had exited from the courtyard through the stone arch and into the open fields, the outskirts of the campus, and here everything had become large and free. Emir ran out into the dark, throwing his arms out. White shirt against the night. Water lily in a winter lake. Above him, the sky was boundless, wild with promise and stars. Royal had never been here. He had never seen anything like it. “Look at this! Feel this! Come here, old man.” He reached forward, put his hands against Royal’s cheeks. “Breathe in, won’t you? Breathe this in. Isn’t it sweet?”
The night air was crisp and cold down his windpipe, a relief, and perhaps like Emir had said, so clean it almost tasted sweet.
“Oh, don’t you feel it? The sorcery?” Emir whispered breathlessly. His eyes were bright and Royal could see the moon in them—twin scythes of silver-white. “The Ancient Greeks, they were drawn to order. They were repressed creatures in the day, prim, virtuous. But they were also terribly enamored with the idea of chaos, of great disorder and insanity, the unexplainable, unpredictable darkness beyond the ivory castle. And who shall represent that irrationality, that ecstasy more than Bacchus himself? Pindar said in one of his verses: the soul grows great, overcome by the arrow of the vine. The wine is Dionysus, and when we drink it, when we celebrate it, when we let ourselves run wild, the god is not in the sky, but there with us. He and his followers—either could be called Bacchus because they are one. How can we know the dancer from the dance? Throw off the fetters of ethics, social status, gender, anything that had oppressed you in the day, shred the instincts, shatter the self, and run, tear, howl like you are nothing more than a wolf in the woods. Dionysian ecstasy. And there is nothing more beautiful, more terrifying than that, to the Greeks and to people like ourselves.” He smiled guilelessly. “Far from just a rave, you see?”
Emir was a beautiful speaker. Royal stared at him, at the world he talked of, this veiled universe that existed a breath from the phenomenal but wasn’t a part of it at all, one that seemed so bizarre, so distant from the cold, secular life he had always led. But as any sane mind would, he rejected the theory.
“Why invite me, then?” he asked warily. “I’m far from being a part of your crowd.”
Emir caught his eye, held it unwaveringly. “I have no crowd. One is one’s own self. And Royal, gods—” he laughed, a clear glissando, “you think I’m trying to convert you?”
“You know I don’t believe in any of the things you do,” Royal countered.
“You’re wrong, dove.” Emir became uncharacteristically solemn. “Studying classics doesn’t mean believing those gods actually exist. It’s more about the philosophy, the art, the religion itself—ideas that were passed down, ideas that weren’t. We are not worshippers of Juno. We are worshippers of fertility and union, jealousy and revenge. Why, you ask? Why not stay in this contemporary utopia? Why go back to the archaic turmoil of times that were much less developed than ours? Why scale back millennia instead of advancing onward? Because! Because!” He gripped Royal’s hand. “What does it mean to live, Royal? What does it mean?”
Royal paused. “To be part of something greater than yourself. To contribute. To build relationships.”
Emir nodded. “To contribute. To serve. To love. To be free. Think of Athenian democracy. Contribution. Think of Sparta’s warrior society. Service. Think of Orpheus and Eurydice, Apollo and Hyacinth, Antony and Cleopatra. Love, lust, obsession. Think of the maenads running into the mountains after Dionysus drove them to madness. Think of Eleutheria, Libertas. Think of Artemis, hunter, virgin goddess of the moon and the wild. Freedom, freedom, freedom.
“Do you not think these things are what it means to live? To live, I think, is to experience things to the fullest. To be greater than the vessel you were given, as you said. To love and pine. The Greeks, some of them, loved and pined until they died—and those people are the ones we study. What we do is not about worship, Royal—though for some, a few, it may be. But for most, it’s about living, being, feeling, when you’re only given this much time.” Emir’s face was open, a beacon of bright conviction in the dark.
Royal stared at him, failed and failed in figuring him out. He knew already that Emir was a smiling mystery, a water lily among weeds, a glittering force to be reckoned with, but Emir was still catching him by surprise over and over again. Emir was one of those enchanted citadels bigger on the inside than on the outside—secretive, full of beautiful words, impossible to comprehend. He always thought that other people were alchemic mixtures, math posers, possible to solve if you had the apt variables, if you distilled to the optimal degree. But Emir was no equation, no theory that could be proven. And it confounded Royal to no end.
“How did you do that?” he managed.
Emir grinned, shedding the graveness like a coat. “Sophocles taught me how to speak.”
“I don’t understand that.” You are terrifyingly fascinating, but he wanted to say.
“That’s all right. Usually nobody does. Oh, I really love you, you know. You are so fresh.” Emir looked out, lit up, and pointed Royal to their destination. “We are nigh! Onward!”
From the distant, the fire looked like nothing of consequence, but as they neared, as the heat thickened and cold starlight gave to flames, it began to look mystic. Divine. It felt alien to him, he who grew up leaning on the cool, unyielding concepts of symbols, theorems, evidence. Yet now, it could be the wine in the air, or the fever of the fire, or the ghost of Emir’s breath across his left cheek, but Royal felt as if the god himself was actually there with them in the dark, as if Bacchus was burning in that fire, as alive and real as its flames that reached, glowing and red, into the black sky.
As soon as Emir left to find some wine, Royal was visited by an eclectic band of personalities. They were all history, philosophy, classics majors, studying archaic texts and romances. Flocks of odd young things with eyes sharp and futures wide. He felt at odds with them, having never read any sort of fiction past age nine, but they were very attractive and welcomed him into their cultish circle with open arms. It was something that, no matter how hard he tried to hide it, surprised him from what was known to be the iciest, most arcane crowd in Clio.
Emir came back, wearing nothing apart from a sturdy-wrapped bedsheet looped over his left shoulder, and shared a flask of wine with Royal. The fire danced off his eyes, sheened gold over the jut of his right collarbone as he draped Royal in another bedsheet and told him to strip under it.
“I am not stripping,” Royal said matter-of-factly.
“Audentes fortuna iuvat,” replied Avem, the snow-haired young man. That line, to his surprise, Royal had recognized—a line posted in his professor’s lecture hall. Fortune favors the bold.
“Avem, what a cliché,” said Kiri, who was one half of the pair of Japanese fraternal twins. “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.”
“Kiri, we live in one great cliché,” Hula, with the face tattoo, had countered. She turned to Royal and translated: “The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.”
“Oh, well. The smart ones always try to break out of it. But enlightenment is often a dangerous and miserable thing.” Kiri met Royal’s eye, didn’t back down. Her gaze was a razor’s edge, unflinching.
“Ah,” Emir cut in. “Sharp tongues everywhere. Do not be scared by Kiri, Royal—she always speaks in particularly foreboding riddles. The togas are for authenticity and nothing else. Fraternizing with the old gods, as you know.” Royal looked at him, at his artless smile, the boyish dimple on his left cheek. Not a hard edge about him. Of course Royal would agree in the end. It was impossible to say no.
The first hours of the bacchanal were tame: increasingly drunken discourse on topics ranging from aestheticism to Plato’s four forms of madness to, on Royal’s behalf, Descartes and other mathematician-philosophers. The way they spoke and the things they spoke about were all so esoteric but, at the same time, the conversation was always flexible enough for him to enter with a remark that they all lent their ears to. Royal couldn’t remember the last time he had talked so much, so excitedly.
“Thou’rt as myself: I too grow young; I too essay the dance,” said Avem, who was the seer Tiresias. They were reenacting a scene from Euripides’s Bacchae.
“Shall we, then, in our chariots seek the mountains?” asked Hula, who was Tiresias’s friend Cadmus.
“The bacchanal is afoot,” Emir remarked off-script, cocking his head toward Royal. “Are you comfortable, my uptight science major, as you like to call yourself?”
“What you said earlier, uh,” Royal started, shifting his makeshift toga. “This entire event being about learning to live instead of worship. How studying history isn’t backtracking, the important thing not being the past, but the present. I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“It’s a new idea. My ideas are always new.” Emir beamed, all cheek. “Does it repel you?”
“No, no. But—well, like anyone else, I have my prejudices for things.”
“I respect that,” he replied, tipping his flask to Royal. “But it’s good to be attracted to novelty, I think. Staying around the same crowd, especially one that is airtight and often ardent with what they think, can seal you into believing one set of things only. That closes the mind. As you know, I am very terrified of being set in stone.”
“Is that why you seem to always skip between coteries?” Royal paused, decided to venture a quip. “First time I saw you, I thought you studied actuarial science.”
Emir tipped his head back and laughed. His cheeks were especially rosy by the hot light. He looked like a painting.
In the meantime, Riko, the male Japanese twin, paced perilously close to the bonfire and sung Pentheus’s monologue. “I have been absent from this land, and hear of strange and evil doings in the city. Our women all have left their homes, to join these fabled mysteries. On the shadowy rocks frequent they sit, this God of yesterday, Dionysus, whosoe’er he be…”
“I don’t think,” Emir murmured, “that we are so different, Royal.”
“You do?”
He hummed. “Oh, I also meant to tell you this. I had my own dabble in quantum mechanics when I was still braving the inferno that is grade school.”
“In grade school?” Royal echoed, astonished. “How was it?”
“Yes. I liked it. Very solid, pleasantly entertaining. I still do flip through text on it sometimes. It was my first friend, but not my best.”
“I didn’t know those things attracted you. Schrödinger, eigenstates, the like.”
“Oh, you don’t know. Everything attracts me.” Emir smiled at Royal. The water lily drifted and drifted, free, unstrung. “You think I am some starry-eyed zealot, do you not? But it’s not Bacchus that we are all so attracted to. We love life. In truth, we do not love the gods; we only admire them, for we would never want to be them. We are the proudest mortals. We are scholars and pioneers, young people that want to make the most of the life they’re given. When we are seen as such, there ceases to be that big of a difference, no?”
By the fire, Tiresias spoke of the god: “He on the other hand, the son of Semele, found out the grape’s rich juice, and taught us mortals that which beguiles the miserable of mankind of sorrow, when they quaff the vine’s rich stream. Sleep too, and drowsy oblivion of care he gives, all-healing medicine of our woes.”
Royal nodded slowly, accepted Emir’s proffered flask. “For the record, I still think you’re a starry-eyed zealot. For everything.”
Emir laughed delightedly, clapping together his hands. “Yes. Zealot for everything.”
As the stroke of midnight drew closer, though, conversation grew more hushed and more Greek. Many people had left, and the crowds had dwindled to a small, specialized dozen, all Homer fiends and oenophiles. Royal felt a bit of himself unravel with every swallow of Emir’s spiced wine, until he had lost all proper sense of time, existing in this drunken languor that was buzzingly pleasant but utterly unfamiliar.
Abruptly, attention was called. Riko and Hula lifted Emir up on their shoulders.
He was holding a large bundle of something yellow-green—past the haze, Royal could see that they were grapes, huge and round and gleaming like jewels—and threw them into the fire. “Here is another cliché for you to break out of, Kiri. Carpe noctem, dearest friends!” he called. He looked like the rosy-cheeked Cupid, Dionysus himself, the child god. The water lily, lit bright by the firelight, opened all of its petals. It seemed the whole forest had silenced itself for him. “Let us live like gods. To Bacchus!”
“To Bacchus!” The rest erupted in an uproar, howling.
Then everything descended to a frenzy. The organic quietness of the forests had been shattered—in their bedsheet togas, these young men and women, so high and cold and sensible during the day, fell into the dark murk of lunacy, looking like grimed ghosts as they ran, howled, climbed over one another. Irrationality, unreason, group experience. The ecstasy Emir had talked about hours before, Dionysian ecstasy, did not seem a myth any longer; Royal could see the god, alive and manic, in them, as if he had been the wine they drank, the air they breathed. White sheet ghosts flew deeper into the woods, roaring and singing, as if what made them human had been cast off until they were no longer anything but soul, desire, madness. Thought, memory, logic—all had been peeled back to the primitive core: the carnal, pulsing heart. And that, he had realized, was the very essence of Bacchus.
A hand took his wrist and tugged forcefully. It was Emir, water lily aglow in the dark, pulling him deeper into the woods. Royal followed him, for Emir’s will was so strong, so alluring that he didn’t allow himself a thought before picking up into a run after him.
They sprinted through the woods, straying farther into the unchartered black. Emir was gaining speed so unnaturally it made Royal question whether he was still human. His shoes were torn away in the viny overgrowth and, when the ground rushed up to meet his bare feet with every sloppy, leaping footfall, he felt something draw blood. Sometimes pain was a keen knife, other times a horrible haze—but, always, pain made itself felt. Yet, he could not feel anything as the branches tore away at him innocuously. Emir had said both the god and his followers, his vessels, were called the same name. They were running so fast the wind was making his face bleed. They were flying. They could not be broken. They felt no pain.
They were Bacchus.
Everything around them began changing. Before his very eyes, reality bent. Light ate itself. Streams ran silver. Fire froze into ice. Time ticked backward, vanished completely: the adagio trickle of sand freezing, suspended, then flying up in a stream, before the hourglass shattered completely. Life was death was life, and the two of them, so alone in these dark, dark woods, were completely above it, above mortality and morality—not human, but god.
They had stumbled out into a glade. There they frolicked, bellowed, drank from that fountain of youth, and there they stayed, and there they were joined by many more of their companions. They all were out of their minds. They all had no minds. And it was most likely his eyes fooling him, but there in the dark of the woods where the clearing’s moonlight couldn’t reach, he could have sworn he saw something thundering through the trees. A creature. A beast. Storming out into the clearing, it had thrown itself at them, into them, and they could feel its spirit alive all around them. Mad, divine, horrible, beautiful. It was Bacchus.
3
THE NIGHT LASTED FOREVER, until it didn’t.
Royal remembered tripping back through the fields as dusk was slowly stripped of its dark skins—barefoot, delirious, mind in disorder. He did not know how he had broken out of those woods. He did not know where the others were. Dawn was soon to break. He felt like an eon-old demon who had to hide before the sun turned him to dust.
He picked his way across the courtyard, climbed up the West Tower’s stone stairs, and slipped into the corridor. He was too hysterical to have paused and considered it then, but in retrospect, he felt eternally grateful that it had been a Saturday morning and nobody was yet awake to see him, bloody ghastly ghost in the dark of a donjon’s hallway.
His room was in the same order as he had left it the previous evening. It was only when he slammed the door shut and caught himself in the mirror that memories of what he had done, shadowy black pictures of sense and madness, came back to him in an upsurge. The beast in the mirror had bedsheets hanging off bare shoulders in begrimed shreds. It was filthy and waterlogged, reeking of sweat and blood—both stale and fresh, and to whomever it had belonged he did not know, will not ever know. It was vile, but he was too enchanted to be fazed.
The beast stared back at him. Its grin was wolfish. Its fair skin shone. Its eyes, bright with the glowing stuff of revelation, were their own source of illumination in the lightless room. The beast was draped in tatters. Tatters of divinity. Romance. He could not believe it was him. The beast was him.
Royal laughed. It wasn’t a noise he had ever heard himself make. He fell to his knees, lied down on the carpet. He stunk. He was half god. There were wild, beautiful thoughts in his head, thoughts he never knew he could think. Skin and blood. Wolves howling. Avem flying up to a branch. Riko disappearing into the lake. Kiri ripping apart riverbanks. Hula’s eyes turning amber. Emir, gods. Emir, Emir, Emir. Carpe noctem! To Bacchus! Emir with his white bedsheets soaked, water lily glistening in the pond. Emir—earnest face by the firelight, wild eyes in the clearing, petal lips through the wet dark. Emir, dirtied and beautiful, starry-eyed zealot, who took Royal’s world and made it into something bigger.
He closed his eyes, fell back, fell into what felt as deep as eternal sleep. He held these thoughts closer than he had ever held anything.
4
ROYAL WOKE WITH AN EMPTY MIND. It was Sunday noon. He had slept for a day and a half on the floor next to his dorm door.
He pulled himself up, every part of his body sore, and glanced into the mirror. His blood ran cold. Royal gaped at himself, rooted to the spot. Who was this? What was this? Dark stuff and grime encrusted his skin—god, it was blood, it was blood on him. Are these bedsheets? He smelled foul, of excrement and stagnant pondwater. His body felt like it was not his.
He took straight to the bathroom, tossed the bedsheet rags into the sink, and stepped into the shower. The same thought circled his head the entire time: What happened to me? What happened to me? The hot spray of water hit his back, ran down. Something stung, sharp pain lancing up his limbs—he looked down to see cuts, deep ugly ones, on his elbows and calves. He sucked in a breath. It felt like someone shoved a pin into his skull. Mud and dark blood, evidence from a night forgotten, slid into the drain’s mouth.
He dug into his mind for anything, everything. Think, think, think! He remembered Emir’s honeyed voice in the Galerie Friday afternoon, inviting him to the classics coterie’s bacchanal. He remembered Emir speaking of fetters of ethics and arrows of vine in the dark fields. What it meant to live—service, passion, freedom. To love and pine. He remembered the bonfire, red against black. Audentes fortuna iuvat. Spiced wine, open conversation. To join these fabled mysteries. On the shadowy rocks frequent they sit, this God of yesterday, Dionysus, whosoe’er he be… We love life. We are the proudest mortals. Starry-eyed zealot for everything. Let us live like gods.
And then nothing. The board of his memory, effaced of everything that happened after.
But he would be left with one thing, one ghost of an impression: that ancient feeling of losing the self, becoming a living god. Then was the only time he had felt what it was to live, to be swept up in that white fire of pure existence. He would not feel it again. And that made him furious, miserable; he had been wrenched from what he knew to be true, pitched into Emir’s world where gods ran rampant and divinity could be inhaled and drunk—but then, after all of it, spat back out into the real world. He felt horrible. Hollowed out, in spite of not knowing what had been there before. The phenomenal world could not sate him anymore, now that he knew he had seen something, felt something outside of it.
That late afternoon, when Royal sat down in the well-lit Galerie once more with his cryptography paper and uncapped pen, he could not bring himself to begin reading. He knew he wasn’t here to annotate. He was waiting for something. There were other things to think about, to yearn for, but what exactly he did not know. He had no memory, eerily, and no evidence of that night but the scrapes round his ankles and elbows, which he had bandaged, and—
Tap-tap, on his shoulder. Royal turned around, paper and pen fully abandoned, and there was Emir, his water lily—blush-cheeked, smiling, unspeakably pretty. He was wearing his beret. Royal stared up at him, a mass of unspoken words welling up in him. For a second, a part of him had thought he was never going to see Emir again, that Emir would’ve vanished into those dark thickets forever, along with all the other mad, grand, roaring dreams he had shown Royal that night. He thought of all the odd things Emir might say to him instead of a normal greeting: How do you think of the phenomenal world now? Hungover? Your cuts still bleeding ichor? Bacchus still lodging inside you? Perhaps he would introduce to Royal another god, invite Royal to another gathering, let Royal into his beautiful, terrible world once more—a world that sunk to the pale fog of oblivion come morning, so the only way to preserve it in memory was to travel back to it every night. And Royal wanted to. Again and again. He was silent, but that, he knew, was what he wanted Emir to give him.
In the end, Emir didn’t say anything. He only smiled, and that promised everything.