In the fabricated memoirs of Emperor Claudius, the emperor reads a fabricated poem in the voice of the oracle, predicting Rome’s one-hundred year enslavement to a procession of hairy men.
One will ride steeds with “toes for hooves.” Another will gift Rome “poisons and blasphemies” and die from a “kick of his aged horse that carried him as a child.”
I read these words in a book in a library endowed by a man who performed unspeakable acts upon his grandchildren, a man who bought his wife a tiara encrusted with diamonds stolen from a deposed queen.
Outside the library, a park filled with jump-ropers, fountains, & benches modified to prevent the sleeping of exhausted bodies. I strut below the arch imitating an arch constructed to celebrate the deification of Emperor Titus. An arch peppered with sculpted facsimiles of the empire’s pilfered objects—golden trumpets, fire pans, & menorahs—squished between the fluted columns.
Before I closed the book, Claudius, the copy, occupied by foreign voices like a puppet, confessed to having “put the good of the Empire before all human consideration.”
If I want to get home, I have to drive on a freeway named after a congressman, arriving at a fork in the road where, depending on whether an accident has occurred, I can either take a tunnel named after a governor or a bridge named after a president.