John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

The iren gave the signal. They killed him with the first swing.

The old bastard’s impossible! I may strangle him yet! I told him the Helots were going to rescue us, and his eyes got big as oven lids.

The hell!” he said. “That’s dangerous!”

I told him we had no choice, the place was killing him, but he wouldn’t listen. He whooped to cover up my voice.

“It’s rape!” he yelled. “It’s a violation of my civil rights!”

“You have no civil rights,” I said.

He thought about it. “That’s true.” He thought some more. “Rape!” he yelled. “Rape! Rape!” You could hear him twenty miles away. I tried to cover his mouth to keep the jailer from coming, but he bit me. “Rape! Rape! Rape!” I hit him over the head with the lamp. He passed out.

But what am I to do when the Helots come to rescue us? If I keep on hitting him on the head I’m liable to kill him. I might not be exactly sorry, in fact, but how the hell would I explain it?

The Helots are setting it up even now, if I’m not mistaken. Breakfast was two hours late this morning — it was a real shit two hours, with Agathon growling and grumphing around, saying the whole damn thing was my fault — and when the jailer came he said it was because the prison was shorthanded. Somebody blew away the palace guards last night, and the ephors transferred a group of the prison guards to the palace. Standard procedure, our jailer says. I suppose they must have known that, or else it was a clever guess. The palace guards and the prison guards are supposed to be the two toughest outfits. While I was talking to the jailer, Agathon ate my food. I am going to kill him.

The guard left without waiting for our plates, and we haven’t seen him since. Someone has been watching us all day, across the field. A girl, I think. I only catch a glimpse of her now and then, sticking her head up over the bushes. Whitish blonde hair tight to her head, dirty face, maybe purposely smudged. You’d never see her if you didn’t sit staring at the hedge, watching. It occurs to me that a good bowman could pick off our guard with no trouble at all as he stands looking in at us, talking. I’m tempted to warn him, but how can I?

The palace guards. God. Maybe the rebellion really will succeed. The bastards are nervy, anyway. At least the rescue will succeed, I think. I’ve got a plan. I’ll tear up my clothes in strips and then I’ll gag the old man and tie his hands and feet.

No. Fuck it. I’ll tear up Agathon’s clothes.

Will the girl come when they rescue us?

Why in hell did I never ask them their names when they smiled at me, swiping my apples? What if I get killed or something, and I never even touched a girl’s hand?

I have whatever the rats have. I can no longer deny it. Ah well, these pages convince me that I deserve it. The sickness works slowly, as plagues go — a point I mention merely for its facticity, as Thaletes would say. I’ve seen the seaport plague before. And so I am a dead man. Reflection tells me that death must certainly be one of two things: either a wonderfully sound sleep, in which eternity passes like a single night, or else the soul’s journey to another place. Either way, clearly, death is a gain. What private man — indeed, what king — ever passed a more pleasant day or night than the night passed in dreamless slumber? On the other hand, what would a man not give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Should a wise man fear death, then? Emphatically not! A further proof of my foolishness. I am scared to the soles of my shoes.

Luckily, I haven’t the energy to concentrate on fear. I can hardly stand up. I haven’t even the energy to tease my jailer.

Her grandson came again last night. Talked mostly with Peeker, plotting my rescue. Hah! I stayed at the table, exceedingly unwell, sometimes passing out momentarily — but never mind that. How long has it been since the first time he came? A week? A month? How long have I been out of touch with ordinary time?

The revolution drags on. Very close to us now. All around us. Bah. The boy gave us the latest news with childish pride. I merely looked at him from my table, leaning on my fists. He must have been hardly more than a baby at the time of his grandfather’s abortive revolution — the one that killed him. I might, another time, have worked up mock enthusiasm, my only answer to the optimistic excitement of lunatics.

“The guard will catch you,” I said. “You’d better go.”

He ignored me, raving on to Peeker in a whisper. “We’re hitting the wheat bins to the north. You’ll be able to see the glow. Sometime before morning. We’re spreading them out, you know. Thinning hell out of the guard ranks.”

Peeker nodded.

“After that, we strike at the herds.”

“Don’t tell us,” I said. “Trust no one!” I laughed.

He was silent a moment. I couldn’t see him from where I sat, and my legs were shaky. He said, “Grandmother sends her love.”

“Tell her thank you. She’s very kind.”

“We’re going to get you out of here,” he said.

“Wonderful,” I said. Poor old Thalia. Alive or dead?

A trembling fit came over me and I covered my face with my hands.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“A little bit under the weather. He he!”

“You’re sick as hell.” A mere child and talks like a soldier. His grandfather was a man of noble diction.

“You’re sick,” he said again.

“So my wife maintained.” I gave him a leer.

He seemed comforted. Good old Agathon, always the kidder. “You’ll be out of here in a matter of hours,” he whispered. “Take my word for it.”

“I believe you. Thank you very much.”

Another brief faintness came over me, or a memory, which is perhaps the same thing. My son across the table from me in Athens, the one time I visited there after Tuka left with the children. He wanted me to stay. He was nearly grown now. A handsome devil, with a girl friend who, one of these days, I was sure, would be his wife. He said, “Why do you have to go back?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “To look for something.” Then: “No, that’s a lie. To escape from something, perhaps. No, that’s a lie too.”

Kleon said gently, as though he were the father and I the son, “What do you do there, now that Lykourgos no longer trusts you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I teach, a little. Eat roots and berries.”

“I believe it.” He smiled suddenly, and the smile transformed him to the twelve-year-old I remembered. “I couldn’t believe it was you, when you first came. That beard — you look like a Jewish merchant. And that paunch! How’d you get so fat on roots and berries?”

“Berries with cream.”

Kleon became serious again, rather lawyerish. Made me defensive. “What do you really do there, Father? Do you ever see Lykourgos at all?”

“I see him, Kleon.” Speaking my son’s name brought tears to my eyes, my standard reaction to verbal evocations of the past. I folded my hands on the table and looked at them carefully, so I’d remember them later. “I am, I suppose you’d say, a hanger-on. I was not exactly kicked out of the palace. I saw fit to move, and no one objected. I go back, from time to time, and that, too, they accept. I’ve taken on the character of, you might say, a local Seer.”

He watched me with sorrow in his eyes, and I remembered his mother’s sorrow.

“Ah, youth!” I said. I kissed my fingertips. Solon’s gesture.

He too had folded his hands on the table and was looking at them. It struck me all at once that this handsome boy was the mirror image of what I myself had been as a younger man. I could have giggled.