John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He stood weaving, hands clasped, in the immense Hall of Justice, struggling to focus the Board of Ephors who gazed down on him. They were the greatest men in Sparta, perhaps the most powerful men in the world, and he knew them all, had served them often in his younger years (if anything at all that he tells me is true). They were greater than Kharilaus and Arkhelaus, the kings; greater even than the Lawgiver, Lykourgos. Though each of them, individually, was merely a man, subject to the usual misgivings of heart and inflammations of liver, as Agathon says, they were, together, more awesome than the oracle at Delphi. They could set aside the oracle as they set aside the whims of common mortals. They were the final masters in all things foreign and domestic, ecclesiastic and secular. But Agathon, being the god’s fool, was unimpressed. Though their black robes and square red hats and shaved upper lips were all the same, their persons were various, some fat, some thin, some black-haired, some silvered. He pointed this out in a marveling voice to the guard on his right, and his face squeezed up into wrinkles as though he were closing his mind on the fact like a fist around a stone. I crouched in the doorway, cradling the old white jug in my arms and peering in like a beggar to see what would happen. Nothing did, for a long time. Agathon leaned on his crutch, hands clasped, looking up at the ephors or maybe at the iron trident that ascended almost to the ceiling behind them, and waited with his head cocked. Still nothing. He gave a jerk and I realized he was going to sleep. At last the Chairman stood up, behind the table, and addressed him. I couldn’t make out a word he said, and I doubt that Agathon could either. The words were swallowed in echoes that rolled like thunder.

“Blallooom, blallooom, blallooom,” the Chairman said.

Agathon considered. “Onions,” he said at last, and tipped his head to the other side to see if he was right.

“Blallooom?” the Chairman said nastily.

Agathon considered again. “For several reasons, your honor,” he said. He stood for some time sucking his mouth in and blowing it out again thoughtfully and scratching at his seat with his left hand. “Onions are very nourishing, relatively. And they’re uplifting: their roundness inclines the mind to unity and completion. Also, onions occur in Nature, which is wonderful. And onions make people cry who wouldn’t otherwise.” He smiled, rueful, and stretched out his arm. “I like onions. It’s nothing personal. I just like them. Also, they’re cheap.” He began to giggle and couldn’t stop himself. I covered my face with my two arms and the jug.

“Blalloooom!” said the Chairman. The ephors conferred, and after a moment the Chairman spoke again. “Blallooom.”

One of the guards seized Agathon by the shoulder and turned him around. They led him away. I ducked around the building to see where they were taking him, and when I saw they were heading toward the north end of town, where the prison is, I stopped. It’s a horrible place — a sprawling gray-stone mass of buildings filled with sickness and misery, honeycombed with windows like bugs’ holes and smoking here and there, day and night, like a garbage dump. I’d be damned if I was going there. He’d earned whatever it was he was getting, and the only bad things I’d ever done in my life were pull him up out of the street a few times so that no one could run over him. I was stupid to follow the old man at all, but I’d be stupider if I followed him to jail. He drew flies. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I looked up sometime on a hot day and saw vultures circling over us. Sometimes when he was haranguing a crowd the people standing nearest to him would faint. They really did. I wasn’t going. A fat pig’s hell on him!

The trouble was, I still had the jug. “I’d be blind without that jug, boy,” he used to say. But it was worse than that. Without his jug he’d shrivel up like a prune and all his blood would turn to dust. I clung tighter to the jug’s sides and clenched my teeth against the injustice of everything. Was it my fault that he couldn’t carry his own damn jug? Nevertheless, I could hardly stand it, watching the poor old bastard jerking and wobbling away in the distance between the two guards, never to be seen again by man, except for maybe the man who swept him up when he dried out. I would have to go live with my mother and sell apples.

Then he yelled, louder than a trumpet “Peeker!” He jerked away from the guards enough to turn, his whole face twisted like a mop. “Peeker!” His name for me. He calls me that right in front of people. May herds of elephants trample his fucking old bones. He called out again, like the scream of a man going over a cliff for the third time: “Peeker! The jug!” I had no choice. I may be an old man myself sometime, though I doubt it. “All right,” I screamed, “all right!” So they found out I was his follower, and they put me with him in the cell.

“It’s good to have you here with me, my boy,” he said, and patted my shoulder. I couldn’t think of a suitable answer, except maybe banging my head on the wall or hitting myself with his crutch.

By evening, the jug was empty. He sat, sweating and dejected, at the table in the middle of the cell. The room was full of large flies buzzing a deep dull drone, as if they too felt the heat. “Is it possible that they’ve brought their Seer to this dismal place to dry him out?” he said. “Have they no more respect than that for Apollo’s choosing of his chosen?” He wrung his fingers and rolled his eyes up, getting into the swing of it “What will become of me, here where I can get no wine and, worse, where I haven’t a soul to lecture or rant at or mock?”

“You have me,” I said.

But he ignored it. He was enjoying himself. He stretched his arms toward the ceiling — they were dirtier than the horns of a bull that’s been goring things. “What becomes of a Seer when harassment drives him sane? These are dark times, Peeker! And dangerous times! The fires of revolution, the daily arrests. Even the children are sullen and withdrawn as mountain goats.” His eyes grew stern. “These are wintry times, Peeker. The streets are slick with ice. The people move about silently, mufflered to the eyes.”

“It’s summer,” I said. I understood, of course, that it was useless to try to persuade him.

“Men are dying out there, you know. Falling asleep in snowdrifts and never awakening. That’s why I bless them, even when they do me wrong. Also, of course, why should I curse my enemies and make them hit me?” He giggled, as I’d expected him to, then sighed, which caught me off guard. It made me nervous, and I looked out through the cell-door bars at the pleasant summer evening stretching away toward the mountains. When I looked back I saw that, in his vague way, he had been watching me. He smiled, crafty as usual but also full of sadness. “How can even a Seer tell the truth when he’s sitting all by himself in a cell, frozen to the marrow, without so much as the shadow of a drop of wine, and nobody who loves him that he can write to?”

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m somebody.” Then I was embarrassed. “Never complain, never explain,” my mother says.

Agathon laughed, Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck! Something between a Helot and a rooster. He asked, “How old are you, Peeker?”

I looked away and blushed. “Twenty,” I said. A person ought to have become something by twenty, I admit, but I was sickly as a child. I’m still not as well as I might be. That’s why he lets me accompany him. Our two shadows on the cobblestones — his as round as a potato, mine more like an asparagus — remind him that life is fundamentally risible. I ground my fist into my hand and looked at my knees.

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