John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He was, like me, a member of the merchant class. His father pretended to be religious, but Konon saw through it. He himself believed only in substance; if he worshiped anything, he said, it was that. We sat in Klinias’s hut once, Klinias over at his table, reading in the book that later came into my hands, Konon and I on the floor. Konon hugged his knees, biceps bulging, his dark eyes narrowed, and stared into the fire. (He was short, square, big-shouldered, very tan. Often he wouldn’t say a word for hours, even days; but then something would set him off and he’d talk rapidly and aggressively, asserting the most outlandish things, as it seemed to me — how cloth retained magic as long as wood, how slavery was good because it liberated sex — until suddenly, as if bored, he would break off and sink back into silence.) “My poor old mother,” he said, “had a statue of Priapos in our flower garden. I remember how she would kneel there on a spring day with a trowel in her hand and a basket of flowers by her knee. She believed Priapos made things grow.” He flashed a grim smile, white as the moon, and popped his knuckles. “If it was true, the god must have had some grudge against my mother. Everything she planted would wither and die as if her fingertips were poison. She’d wring her fingers and try again, praying to old Priapos harder than before.” He laughed, as if angrily, like metal striking stone. “She prayed to Pallas Athena too. She prayed that Athena would purify Father’s mind and make him faithful to her. But Athena was off fucking Hermes.”

Klinias glanced over at us but said nothing. He hadn’t quite heard.

“So do you believe in the gods,” I said, “or don’t you?”

He kept staring at the fire. “I believe in the stars,” he said, sententious. “They seem to be honest and reasonable. I believe in rivers, mountains, sheep, cattle, horses, gold, and silver. If there are gods ruling them, those gods are no doubt decent enough. But if there are gods directing human affairs, they’re either vicious or insane. It’s better to believe there are no gods, be satisfied with substance.” His eyes were bright as a madman’s. “Listen! The gods give you hope — they tantalize you with it, and then they step on your neck. Crunch! The last time I prayed was to Zeus, the night my mother died. My father prayed too, full of pompous moaning and hooting, but he knew she was dying. He expected it. It may be he wasn’t too sorry. She was a nag. So my hope is substance. You ever notice a rich man invoking the gods? Who needs the gods if he’s rich? He’s got gold, slaves to count it for him, and flatterers to tell him how happy he is. If he’s a whoremonger, his wife stays with him, for the fattening food and the bows people give her. Listen. Everything on earth is substance. All the rest is drunkenness and illusion. Even ideas, they’re things grown into the brain like warts, or they’re scratches made on a scroll by somebody’s stylus. You know what death is? An abandoned body, you think — the soul flown to Hades? Shit! Death is a broken machine. Some muscle quits, the heart, say, and the rest of the muscles go limp, including the eyes.” He was rigid now, staring like a statue. “And religion, that’s a machine too: a mechanical system of words and howls and lifted arms that you start up to comfort some fool and abandon as soon as he’s comforted. Politics, honor, loyalty — all machines.”

Klinias looked up, roughly in Konon’s direction. “How do you account for the universe, boy?”

“Like the Akropolis,” Konon said. “Somebody built it. Some dead man.”

There was a time when he meant to take Tuka from me. He meant all his life to marry money, the shining hope of his corpuscular world. He might have gotten her. He was handsome enough, and his bitterness made him attractive, in a way, though moroseness and remorse, my special gifts, have always beaten bitterness in the end. But Konon was rough, too eager for Tuka’s substance in the clinches.

“What ever happened to him?” Iona asked. Like all her questions, it had some overtone meaning in it I couldn’t penetrate.

“He turned completely to substance,” I said. “He died.”

She waited, frowning a little. She had something to say. I could feel the pressure of it in her drawn lips, the muscles of her jaw, her tightly pulled-back hair.

“He tried to assassinate Solon,” I said. “He was a grown man then. He thought it would be his in with the Athenian rich. It might have been, if he’d succeeded. They’d given Solon more power than they ever meant to, and they couldn’t get it back except by ripping him off and throwing the country into civil war. There were some who believed it was worth it, and they supported Konon’s plan. When he failed they joined the others in condemning him. You never saw such looks of righteousness!”

Iona looked over my head, thinking, charged like a sky full of thunderclouds. “How come he failed?”

“He made a mistake,” I said. “He told some friend.”

I could see her mind coming to it — flashing to it, drawing back, at last accepting it. She asked, “You?”

I nodded.

That, too, she thought about, her mind racing. I couldn’t tell whether she was racing over her own life or mine or something else entirely, and I couldn’t tell whether or not she was going to forgive me for it. I hung on her judgment like a child on its mother’s, the ominous father in the background, threatening or harmless, depending on her. She said:

“But what made him tell you? Didn’t he know how you felt about Solon?”

“Oh, he knew, all right. But we were friends. We’d grown up together, more or less. We’d had fights and things — sometimes bitter ones — but…” I stopped, watching her. The look of intense concentration, some curious excitement and perhaps suffering, distracted me, made me feel I was missing something. Did she want me to be guilty, unforgivably wicked? “How can I explain it? We were like brothers. Closer. We’d talked all night many times, lying in our bunk in Klinias’s hut, looking at the dying embers of the fire. We knew things nobody living knew, except Klinias — things from the book. We’d run away together once. I stole something once, and he lied for me. We’d slept with girls together. Konon knew me. He knew me as well as I knew myself. I tried to talk him out of his treason — I told him that was what it was — but Konon had made his mind up. He asked me to swear I wouldn’t tell. If I wouldn’t swear, he’d change his plan, do the thing some other way. I racked my brains for a way out, and finally I gave him my word. He knew what that meant to me, in those days. He felt safe.”

Her eyes were still intense, tearing at me. “But why did he insist on telling you?”

“Because,” I said. And then understood with a jolt “Because he wanted me to love him no matter what, love him absolutely, like a one-man dog, and prove it.”

“And yet you told.”

I nodded.

She closed her eyes. “Poor Agathon.” After a long time she smiled and met my eyes steadily, as if to say more than her words could tell me. “You were right.”

I shook my head, looking away, panicky. I’d seen how she talked to men at parties, as if each man she talked to was the finest man in the world. I’d seen how she could fall in with strangers, make them open up their lives to her in minutes. I’d seen her dance with men at parties. (“I only let other men kiss me on the cheek,” she said once. “You know that.” But how could I? I wasn’t at all the parties.) She’d had brothers. She knew a man’s pulse from across the room.

“I was ’right,’” I said. “It would be pleasant to think so. But I did it by impulse. Who knows what the reasons were? It may easily have been jealousy — of Tuka, even Klinias. It may have been resentment: I could never beat his damned arguments about substance, but here I could beat him once and for all, making Patriotism or loyalty to Solon or God knows what the answer to all his materialism. Or maybe it was ego. I could make my character into something by behaving as if I were it. Or the will to power. I would strike down the traitor and win the applause of Athens.”