John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“Twenty,” he said, and smiled sadly. “Then I see I am many years your senior and can afford to humor you. We’ll say it’s summer.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“That’s true!” he said, and his eyes brightened for a moment, it seemed to me, then dulled again. “No, it does matter, to a certain extent. Everything matters, to a certain extent, now that our jug’s gone dry.”

He pushed his chair back, leaned over for the crutch on the floor, and, grunting a little, got up. He jerked over to the cell door as if something I’d said had made him cross. He peered out for a long time, sucking in his mouth so far that his beard and moustache met. Finally he pivoted around to face me squarely, sober as a disreputable judge. His eyebrows went out like two mountain slopes, and his cheeks twitched like an earthquake. “Break the jug!” he said. “A man can be crazy without it!”

I broke the jug.

His eyes widened. “Peeker! It was a metaphor!” He hobbled over to the pieces in a hurry, as if if he got there in time he could stick them together again. He was too late. He looked at me over his shoulder, deeply grieved.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He moved his head slowly from side to side. “Ah well,” he said, wiping his hands on his stomach. “Ah well.” He leaned on the table and, after deep meditation, sat down. At last he smiled, as if forgiving me; but it wasn’t that. He’d forgiven me for it long ago, because he’d known it would happen. He always knows. It had merely slipped his mind.

I have difficulty maintaining my crafty leer. Last night they had another execution. I couldn’t see it — the cell door faces the wrong direction — but I could hear the roars of the crowd. They’re something, these people. The roars are deliberate, calculated. As the condemned man’s pain drives out his fear, the roars of the crowd grow more intense, less human, ringing like a sound of bees from every pitted, icy wall, to call him back to terror. A man doesn’t need to see them marching, every flick of the knee precise, to know this city’s been squeezed tight into one man’s image — the image of a lunatic: Lykourgos.

Helots passed in the darkness afterward, down by the river, moving quietly over the snow toward the high white hills where they’ve lived for generations, semi- slaves to Sparta. They passed as quietly as lepers. It must have been some Spartan that died, and his stiff, bullheaded dignity put them to shame. Even a weak, sickly Spartan, a man who’s a failure and criminal by his own code, puts other men to shame. I might assert, and prove by double-talk and winks, that the shame is nonsense — a man might as well be ashamed in the presence of a lion’s gaze or the logical reflections of a striking snake — but the shame’s there just the same. We live by the myths imposed on us, like actors in an endless play. (If you quote me, remember who said it.) In my moments of greater than usual senility I look at myself, befuddled, complex, disloyal to everything I know (my wife abandoned years ago, and my two children, my city, my art, my philosophical ruminations), and I look at my jailer, calm, self-righteous, intransigent as a mountain, and though I know him to be no cleverer than a clothespin, I am ashamed. His shaggy eyebrows are thick with ice, his nose is white, as if someone had just pinched it, his coat goes out in the wind like a sail, but his heart’s indifferent. He does his Spartan duty.

The boy observes this, of course, and despite all I’ve taught him, he’s greatly drawn to it. He sits in the doorway bent over so far that his vertebrae stick out like the spikes on a dragon, and he peeks up through his hair in wonder at the thickness of our jailer’s thighs. I caught him this afternoon flexing the place on his arm where there should be a muscle. “Vanity, vanity!” I cried. I delight, I revel, in his embarrassment. His head goes down, his bony feet and knees come up, his elbows rise as he tries to hide behind his arms. He looks like a bundle of sticks that has come untied. “Ah, Peeker,” I say, “poor misbegotten Peeker!” and touch his hand, which he withdraws. At times I torment him, merely to keep my mind alert — and for his good, of course. “At least you could come over here by the fire. You’ll freeze, sitting there by the door in all that snow.”

“You’re crazy! You’re truly crazy!” says Peeker. “It’s the middle of summer and we’ve got no fire, for which praise God, and you keep babbling about snow!” His eyes roll like a new colt’s and his arms go up over his ears, holding onto his head.

I chuckle wickedly. “Ah well,” I say, feeling generous. “Time is a matter of the greatest perplexity.”

He hides again. “Complexity, you mean.”

I nod, benign as Apollo, benign as Athena. “That too.”

I will win him over eventually. Not in the matter of the weather, perhaps, but to other valuable opinions. I suppose there’s no harm in his obstinate clinging to “facticity,” as Thaletes used to say — though it smacks, to me, of niggardliness and concupiscence, even hubris. He couldn’t turn into a Spartan if he wished. He hasn’t got the chin for it. Helot through and through, my poor disciple, and not even one of the revolutionist crowd: one of those who, instead, endure, blindly imagine that by suffering and piety they will prevail. They too will be bloodied. The word of Apollo’s Watchman. And so eventually he’ll face the fact that he’s ridiculous and become, like me, a Seer. And I’ll pity him, of course; that’s only decent. These are not predictions but griseous facts.

But ah! A Seer without a book! The first of his kind in the world, probably. I had the best book to be seen, once, or one of the best: a pile of scrolls as tall as a man and as wide as a man could stretch his arms, thick with scratches, column on column, parchment on parchment, all the best pages brought down from the six great ancient books, and all the best pages from the last generation — Solon, Thales, Thaletes, and Gorias the Commentator (his book went into his grave with him). I had, in the oldest section of the book, all the names of the true Akhaians and where they came from in the time of the Great Wanderings, back to the age of the Orchomenians, and which of the heroes were guilty of human sacrifice and which were not, and which of them married their sisters and which took enemies’ wives. I had all the names of the tree gods and the animal gods, and the names of the stars, with their characters, and how they became confused with Zeus and Athena and the gods of spirit. I had in that old book the secret of embalming, which not even Homer understood, and the secret of ciphering curves, and the secrets of poisoning. Wherever I traveled in the world — and I traveled plenty for Solon and later Lykourgos — I traded secrets with the wisemen I met, and when I came home I would set it all down carefully, cunningly, hide on hide, adding the new to the old, as did Klinias before me and as Phemios the Doubter did before him; and then I’d lock up the book once more in its secret place. There were men who’d have killed me to get that book, though no one could have read it but myself or a disciple. I wrote in the secret grammata of Klinias, my teacher, and in later years borrowed the alphabets of Prastos and Kalaphos. Nevertheless, I meant it to last forever, safe and sound. (It was hundreds of years old already, I believe, by the time it fell into Klinias’s hands. Philombrotos, who kept it in his palace, valued the book more highly than he did the palace itself, though he couldn’t read a word in it.) But so much for elegy. The book is gone. Fittingly enough, in this age of universal darkness, and plague, and war. And rightly, perhaps. It could answer none of the final questions: a great, sour garbage heap of facts and figures, tricks, devices. Let Peeker start fresh, as I myself, in my old age, have resolved to start fresh. I will scramble his wits to a fine fury and send him on his way. The gods be with us.