Preface: After Caesar (Mostly)

HI! I’M BOB and I’ll be ... Yeah, you know the rest. I’m a demon. I’ve been around for something over 4,000 years. For the last several centuries, I’ve been looking for a place where I can permanently hide my infinity room and crawl in. This second volume of my memoirs, “After Caesar (Mostly),” is all about how I got to the place where we are today—trying to escape from earth.

There’s a lot of story to be told on our way to that, though. Since you might not have read the first volume, “Before Caesar (Mostly),” I’ve been told I need to refresh a few things, just so you won’t be all “Dazed and Confused.” (Gotta love Led Zeppelin.) So, I’ll tell you what is what and who is who among those left over from the first volume. Of course, most of the people I’ve talked about are mere human, so they don’t continue in the story unless they’ve found a place in the infinity room. I do have a passing acquaintance with a number of gods from different ages and parts of the world. I don’t brag about that. Most have been congenial, but they operate on a different plane than the natural world.

The infinity room is the result of a panicked spell I cast on an old leather satchel. I needed someplace to stow away everything in Pinaruti’s house, including my wives and concubines, before the King of Knossos broke down the doors. (Some trivial thing about me stealing his new wife.) It was the same kind of spell Egyptian conjurers used to fit djinni in bottles. It made what was inside the container larger than what was outside. I had no idea how much bigger! It seems I have close to half a million people dwelling in the infinity room at the start of this story, including the remnants of a couple of harems I was asked to take care of, the sailors who were with Odysseus, a whole lot of librarians—including those from the Library of Alexandria—the priestesses of Aphrodite, and various lovers, concubines, and stowaways. It always seems to be big enough for everyone. Things I take into the infinity room, bring along the memory of their environment and it comes into existence around them. Especially libraries. I love libraries.

And people. When a person enters the infinity room from the natural world, he, she, or they stop aging. I won’t say they get younger, but they get healthier and stronger and look younger and fitter. There are exceptions. People who are born into the infinity room seem to age normally—or at least normally for the infinity room. That might be a little slower than in the natural world. It’s hard to tell because there is no real timeline in the infinity room. I’m pretty convinced that whatever time is there, runs differently than in the natural world. I’ve never been able to figure it out.

Let that be a warning to you young sorcerers out there. It is possible to work magic without understanding what you are manifesting. I have a concubine named Chione who is mute because I didn’t want her to be able to talk about the infinity room when we were in the natural world. I cast a silence spell and it turned out that she couldn’t speak at all. She bears me no ill will, though, and is among the kindest and most loving of my entourage. Just one of many instances in which a spell I cast didn’t turn out the way I expected.

Speaking of which, I had two wives in the infinity room as of Caesar—Nimia and Penelope. Nimia was with me back in Knossos when I had to flee the king. I stuffed her into the infinity room and mostly she has stayed there, looking as fresh and young as the eighteen-year-old she was when I first married her. Penelope was once the wife of Odysseus. You know, the fabled hero of the Trojan War. I knew him as a cowardly idiot who got himself killed while hiding in the Temple of Aphrodite in Ilium. I adopted the likeness of his body and all his memories, then set sail for Ithaca. Poseidon made sure I had a miserable time of it, but Athene insisted that since I had Odysseus’s likeness and was passing myself off as him, I needed to return to Ithaca and set his house straight. I came clean with Penelope and we left her son in charge and took off. She married me and took up residence in the infinity room, looking fresh and healthy and fairly young, despite her forty years.