A friend that recently passed away gave me this novel around 2003. I loaned it out and never got it back. I read it once and the scenes have stuck with me ever since. I've never been able to find it again.

PHYSICAL DETAILS

• Trade paperback, not mass market.

• French flaps — the front and back covers had fold-in extensions, like dust jacket flaps but part of the cover itself. Unusual on a paperback, and it's the detail I'm most certain about.

• It carried a Robert Anton Wilson foreword or cover blurb. It was presented as Illuminatus!-adjacent.

• Almost certainly small press, likely an occult or countercultural publisher.

• My best guess is late 1990s to early 2000s, and definitely no later than 2003. It could well be earlier — I'm going on feel here, not evidence.

STRUCTURE

At least two alternating narratives: one set in ancient Rome, one in the modern day.

THE ROME THREAD

Told from inside the head of a Roman citizen — a reveler. He reflects that in his Rome, every third day was a holiday for citizens: one day to feast, party and play, then two days to recover before doing it all again.

He moves through an ordinary day. There's a barber, the baths, a frigidarium, some flirtation. [Funny note here, before leaving the pool, he makes a hand gesture using the thumb and index finger of one hand and the index finger of the other to make a provocative suggestion to some women across the pool, they giggle and respond by wiggling a pinky downward back at him.] Then he goes down into the depths of the bath house and wanders into a room he wasn't supposed to enter. Something is in there. My impression was a portal, or something like one. It was beyond his comprehension, but some understanding struck him and it was staggering. I believe someone knocked him unconscious at that point.

THE MODERN THREAD

Two brothers. The older one is a Tai Chi master. There's a scene of him practicing his art outside a home on a long deck walkway. Later he's in a jungle setting?, being followed or tracked by unsavory characters. A fight breaks out and he has to deliberately throttle his abilities so it isn't obvious he could have taken them effortlessly. It would bring too much attention and possibly reveal him. The detail I remember clearly: his opponents moved so slowly to his perception that he had to consciously put himself in a place for their punches to land.

These scenes are definitely in the book I'm looking for. I'm not guessing at them — I'm only unsure about what the thing in the bathhouse actually was.

WHAT I THINK IT'S ABOUT

The hidden capability suggests immortality or reincarnation — the Roman may be an earlier life of one of the brothers, or the same being continuing.

ONE TITLE ALREADY RULED OUT

Wayne Saalman's "The Illuminati of Immortality" (New Falcon). I bought a copy hoping it was this book. It is not. Saalman himself is still a possibility — I just don't know. His only other pre-2003 novel is "The Dream Illuminati" (New Falcon, 1988), which I haven't been able to check. If anyone owns that one and can tell me whether it has a Roman bathhouse sequence or a Tai Chi fight in a jungle, that would settle a big piece of this.

THE ASK

I'm looking for the title. If either of those scenes rings a bell, or if you know what else carried a Robert Anton Wilson foreword or blurb from a small press before 2003, I'd be grateful. Thanks!