John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

And so at last, inevitably, Hamrah looked at me in rage and said, “All you’ve left me is a piece of ass that wants no piece of me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could see it was a little inadequate.

He lifted his fists, not as if to hit me, as if looking for something somewhere to hit. “Get out of here,” he yelled. “You’re evil. All of you! Buzz off!”

Tuka cried. We left.

Two hours later, Thalia came. Tuka was asleep. We went for a walk and, for the last time, made love. I neglected to mention her visit to Tuka. Thalia told Hamrah, and he was aflame with moral indignation. He ordered her out of the house forever, then changed his mind and ordered her out for a week. (He took in a girl friend while Thalia was away. A man needs comfort at a time like that.) She was never to see either one of us again. She came to Tuka to apologize for her sin and weep, and Tuka, aflame with, possibly, moral indignation, raged and swore and ordered poor Thalia from her sight. Then she — Tuka — called me from my work and demanded an explanation. I evaded, then finally made something up, heavy, heavy with weariness.

Later I told Iona that I had slept with Thalia. She wept. She shook violently, holding me and weeping, as if her pain went into the ground below her feet and made the earth shake. I felt no guilt, felt victimized by other people’s foolishness, or anyway their self-made traps, but it wasn’t comforting. Thalia, from that day on, was Hamrah’s slave. It was senseless, but I could do nothing for either of them. Tuka went to bed for three days. As she’d done with her brother years ago, she’d passed all human limits in her outburst at Thalia, and now, because Thalia had made herself Hamrah’s prisoner, Tuka couldn’t take it all back. She would sit very still, looking out the window, with tears on her cheeks, remembering the friendship as a woman remembers her childhood. I couldn’t help her either. I went once to Hamrah’s house when I knew he was out. Thalia came to the door and opened it partway. Her face was puffy, remote. The room behind her was full of shadows. “Are you all right, Thalia?” I said. She nodded. “Is there anything we can do?” I asked. Without thinking, as if she were past all thinking, she shook her head. I looked at my feet, trying to think what else to say. The door closed softly.

Soon after that — I went on a trip for Lykourgos in the meanwhile — Iona began to joke, from time to time, about leaving Dorkis. Her oldest son, Miletos, watched her uneasily. I too watched. I had drifted into a strange indifference about my life. It was not, I thought, that I no longer loved Tuka — whatever that might mean. But I couldn’t help her. The lethargy she’d fallen into wasn’t guilt — she knew that all of us and none of us were guilty — and not anger except at the injustice of life itself. Something had snapped, in all of us; whatever it was that had held things together — some illusion upon which we’d agreed — had lost its power. For hours at a time I would wander vaguely about my business, entertaining the thought of going away somewhere, turning to philosophy or poetry or simply observing the seasons, maybe at Krete. Iona knew. When I mentioned the feeling, she spoke obliquely of thinking of going away somewhere herself. We tempted each other toward the idea that we’d go together, without hope of joy or permanence, merely seizing the moment without demanding much; but neither of us would express the temptation in words. Dorkis observed us, while playing with his children or tallying his accounts, and waited. Hamrah became a new man. While we drifted outward, slipping from each other, each of our selves breaking up like old floatage, Hamrah dug in like an anchor, became his own man. When we met at large parties, as we sometimes couldn’t avoid doing, I found him a man profoundly convinced of all he said, all of which was wrong. “People do two things,” he said, and raised two fingers. (I was across the room, half turned away.) “They think and they feel. When what people think goes against what they feel, feeling should be slapped unconscious. That’s humanness. Think of wily Odysseus! That’s what’s made me what I am.” He lifted his brown marble chin.

“And what do you do?” the lady at my elbow said.

“I’m a Seer,” I said.

“Ah!” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you have visions?”

“Never,” I said. “That’s the difference between you common people and us Seers.”

But I was lying, of course. I had a vision of old Klinias with his scraggly, yellow-red speckled beard and his sharp Adam’s apple and his hairy, skinny legs, pausing on the mountain path to look myopically upward at the boulders beetling over us, and drawing their morality down for me. His eyes twinkled as he teased and lectured and comforted me. He loved me. And so, once, Solon had loved me, smiling at my youthful rigidity, boundlessly confident of my talent, it seemed, and as pleased by my faults as by my virtues. And effortlessly, without a flicker of thought, I had returned their love. Could I ever love anyone as simply and clearly as that again? Was it mere self-love — my unspeakable pleasure in happening to be myself — a pleasure I’d lost? The question was arrogant, of course. A man must study to make himself more like boulders or, say, garbage.

Everything’s going from bad to worse. I begin to suspect that my master was right in abandoning hope long since. New divisions move out to the war every day — it’s broken out on all sides of us now, north, south, east, west. We watch them lumber past in the valley, riding along the river, caravans stretching out mile on mile, the hoplites in front riding four abreast, naked except for their armor, their plumes, their streaming hair, and then after them the foot soldiers, the archers, the company of runners, and then the mulecarts and handcarts, the cooks, weaponsmiths, carriers, the pack animals, the herders with their wide herds of sheep and goats. The caravan’s there when we look out in the morning, and it takes all day to pass. Who would have believed that the city could pull together such forces? Sometimes when a caravan’s moving out it meets with another one moving in, wagon on wagon of wounded and dead, sick men shuffling and limping behind them, gashed, limping horses, and lines of half-starved men in chains. The two armies pass without a word, as far as you can tell from here, as remote as living men and ghosts. Meanwhile in the city there are fires day and night, and sporadic noises of rioting. Some god must have gone mad. There was an earth tremor day before yesterday. Perhaps it’s Poseidon himself, master of all things that thunder and shake, who’s gone mad. But I haven’t told the worst of it. The Spartans have introduced a new horror: mass executions. According to Agathon, no man has ever been executed for a political crime in the whole history of Athens. Here in Sparta they herd a whole crowd of Helots, gray-faced, bruised, sickly — and there are women and children and old people among the crowd — herd them into a sloping field and shower them with arrows, and then when none of them are moving anymore, a few soldiers walk among the corpses with swords and finish off any they find still breathing. We can’t see it from here, and no one tells us about it, of course, but Agathon says it’s happening, and he seems to know. There’s a look he gets — as if his spirit has abandoned his body, leaving it old and indifferent as a mountain. He’s going to make me a Seer, he says. I’ve believed it sometimes, but not at those times when that thing comes over him, that deadly, heatless clarity of Apollo’s light. There’s some secret he’s forgotten, some trick to it, something maybe that he found in that book he used to have, or says he had: I never saw it, and it’s a hard thing to believe. Who would ever have lost such a thing if he had it? He stands at the door with his hands behind his back and his legs aspraddle, watching the guards lead another crowd of prisoners away — to their death, I finally understand; that much you can see in the guards’ eyes — and his stance, his face, have no expression, not pity or disgust or fear or anything: he’s like a man at a play he’s seen five hundred times. “What do the gods think?” I asked him once. He tipped his head. A tic came over him, or two of them, one on each cheek, trembling like two different zones of lightning in a night sky, and he gave a sort of apologetic, fearful smile. “The gods never die,” he said. “It makes a difference.” It was evening — twilight — when the earthquake came. Agathon was in bed. He hasn’t been feeling up to snuff lately. As soon as the table began to shake and the noise started — a terrible, vaguely human noise like the whole world groaning — the old man popped up on one elbow quick as a puppet, eyes wide, mouth open, ears cocked — I swear it — like a dog’s. “It’s an earthquake,” I said. But I’d misunderstood his look. It wasn’t fear, or not merely that “It’s come,” he said. “What’s come?” He said, “The plague.” He was crazy. It sent a shiver through me to see him staring there, out of his mind. He couldn’t explain to me later what he meant. When I pressed him he said only — crossly, impatiently—“Plagues are Apollo’s doing. Go ask him.” He wanted to get back to his writing. That’s all he does these days, write and write. I can’t even read what he puts down, though he says it’s all for my benefit. He’s fallen into using some obscure grammata I can’t make heads nor tails of. I said, “But earthquakes come from Poseidon.” He refused to think about it. “Tuka,” he said, eyeing me narrowly, “suppose I was wrong from the beginning. Suppose I misread, exaggerated trifles….” I realized he was once more out of his mind. Senile. My grandmother used to flick on and off like that. He shouted, “Look out!” I ducked. But there was nothing visible to duck from. He did that once before, when he was having a nightmare. He told me afterward that he’d had some friend or something that was killed by a horse. It scared me, this time, hearing him yell, “Look out,” when he was supposedly awake. I called for the guard, but no one came. It took him about five minutes to come back to himself.