John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“Have a good day, jailer!” I called. “May the gods watch over you! They listen to what I say, you know. I snap my fingers and…”

A little after noon (we get no lunch; only breakfast and supper) the jailer reappeared and had someone with him. Without speaking, he unlocked the door of my cell and swung the door open. He waved the other man in, came in behind him, and closed the door.

“Physician,” the jailer said.

I bowed. The physician grunted and wrinkled his nose. They do not have toilet facilities here, only a pot, and my control, of late, is not all that it might be. Gingerly still with his nose wrinkled, the physician picked up one of the rats by the tail and examined it I watched eagerly, bending over my crutch, eyes wide with scientific interest. “Some sickness,” I said. “The first one — the one that stinks a little — well, I thought I might have rolled over on it, unwittingly, you know, while I slept. But those other two, there, I found them in the corner. So they were sick.”

The jailer glanced at me. No humorist.

The physician threw the rats out the door, one at a time, lifting each one by the tail. Then he turned, put his hands on his hips, and looked at me. He had black, black eyebrows, thick as a hedge, and tiny black eyes like a rat’s. He had a nose like someone had twisted it for him, and his gray beard hung to his middle. He said, rather casually, it seemed to me, “You sick?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. I felt my forehead. “Am I?” I turned to the jailer for help. He glared at the floor.

“I knew a man once who was never happy unless he was sick, or threatened with execution, or dying. Thaletes was his name. A splendid fellow! How I wish he could be here now!” I laughed, high and wild, like a madman.

The physician winced, then sighed in despair and glanced over at Peeker, who watched it all in gloomy disrespect. Then the physician came over to me. He put his fingertips on my forehead and considered for a moment. At last he nodded.

“I’m sick?” I asked.

“You’re still living.” He looked at my feculence in the corner.

I laughed. “Small comfort He he he!”

They went out.

I was sorry, afterward, that I’d played the buffoon. It would be pleasant to know for sure that one is not dying. But I occupy my mind with other thoughts. My jailer likes me, or anyway cares about my health. It’s not his duty. When Thaletes got sick in prison, they let him die. He enjoyed it, of course, so it was different. Nevertheless…

Thaletes, wherever you are, you’re not forgotten!

I We who live on still cherish your words of truth!

Happiness is delusion! Life is rotten!

Reality is a hole in a lady’s tooth!

I must pull myself together. This is very unwise. What would Solon do in this saddening situation? That’s what I must think of.

He’d write some fool poem.

So would Thaletes, of course. No doubt he was mad.

I visited him once in prison. (Read with both eyes, Peeker! He he!) He knew he was dying. You wouldn’t have guessed, to look at him, that he was the happiest of men. He had a single cell that looked down on the river, exactly like this cell of mine. Perhaps I have his same cell, I don’t know. When I came to see him, it was late afternoon, and the cell was full of shadows. There was a crude wooden table very much like mine, and some writing materials on it, I think, and a three- legged stool. The floor was covered, unlike mine, with straw. He had no lamp, as far as I remember, but he had a woolen blanket twisted up under him where he lay.

He’d been a famous man, once. He lived in Krete. He was a poet-philosopher, one of the best-known wise- men of his time when Lykourgos landed in Krete, during the period of his travels. I didn’t know him then — Thaletes — but I have read what was written of him: “…though by his outward appearance and his own profession he seemed to be no other than a lyric poet, in reality he performed the part of one of the ablest lawgivers in the world. The very songs which he composed were exhortations to obedience and concord, and the very measure and cadence of the verse, conveying impressions of order and tranquility, had so great an influence on the minds of the listeners, that they were insensibly softened and civilized, insomuch that they renounced their private feuds and animosities, and were reunited in a common admiration of virtue.” (I quote from memory, but I don’t mean that as an apology, boy. I quote with the memory of a professional in these matters.) How much truth there may be in what is written of him, God only knows. I’ll admit that I have seen crowds moved by a stirring tale, or tranquilized by stories of childhood love and peace; and I’ll admit that the songs attributed to Thaletes are rather moving, in their way, though always overweighty and sometimes coarse and, in my personal opinion, obscene. But if Thaletes ever gave out a law, I never heard of it, and if he ever quieted an angry mob, it must have been a mob of thoughtful old men. What he did, besides make up tediously intellectual songs, was two things: he worked out a strange, difficult theory about what people are, and he fought in the underground at Amyklai. Lykourgos, I forgot to say, brought Thaletes home with him from Krete and set him up in his palace as an “adviser,” as he later did myself. Thaletes immediately adopted the customs Lykourgos was busy imposing on his people — hard work, sparse and plain food, a minimum of clothing, a minimum of sex. His masochistic pleasure should have made the horse (Lykourgos, I mean) suspicious at once, but it didn’t. Thaletes wrote war songs, hymns to hardship, satires on sex, and when he’d busily helped Lykourgos strip Sparta of all the traditional human freedoms, he turned on Lykourgos and tried to lead the Helots in an uprising. It fizzled, and Thaletes fled to Amyklai. Lykourgos put the city under martial law, and Thaletes helped form and run what came to be called the underground. He wrote, during this period, as never before in his life: tales, songs, philosophy books. He must hardly have slept seven hours, if six, in a week. The theme of all he wrote was the same: Man truly knows himself only when face to face with death. We in the underground …etcetera.

I knew his theories and was not especially interested. I visited only because I had heard he was sick. If he turned out later to be a great man, with opinions worthy of putting in my book, I would be sorry to have missed him.

I stood at the door of his cell. The jailer withdrew.

“Thaletes!” I called. No answer. I called out again.

For a long time the creature on the straw pallet lay still, but I knew he had heard. He had closed the hand stretched out toward the table, as if angrily resisting me. I called one more time and now the tangled gray mat of hair — all I could see of his miserable head — stirred a little in short, mechanical jerks. At last he brought his face into my line of vision. It was gray as old ashes, and lined like the face of a mummy. There were round holes in his beard and part of one eyebrow was missing. Ringworm. His seeming age was incredible: I knew he could not be over forty-five.

“Thaletes, my name is Agathon,” I said. “A fellow philosopher-poet, though the world is not yet aware of it. I come to ask if there’s anything I can do.”

He made a great effort and stretched his eyes open wider. “Go away!” he said. It was the hiss of an old, old python.

“Be reasonable, Thaletes,” I said. “Think! You have no one to talk to, you’re too weak to write. All that goes through your famous mind is lost! Yea, lost forever!”

He laughed — hiss, hiss, hiss — and I thought I had overplayed, but it wasn’t that. He had no humor in him. The laughter ended in a coughing fit that made him squeeze his eyes tight and clench the one fist I could see. The other fist lay under his crotch and he couldn’t get it free, apparently. He would jerk at it fiercely now and then, and then he would quit, with a startled look, and would let his head fall back to the floor with a thud that should have broken his jaw.