John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

She talked with Peeker for a long time. Then with me. She said, “We’re getting you out of here tonight.”

“Iona, you look so lovely!” I wrung my hands.

“Lay off, Agathon. I haven’t much time.”

“I saw the glow of the fires. It was wonderful. Wonderful!”

“Agathon, stop it.”

“You see through me. That’s your way.” I shook with delight.

“For the love of God!” exclaimed Iona.

“Behind all those masks I’m serious, you know.”

She clenched her fists. “Stick your face up close to the bars and I’ll ruin you!”

“You would! You really would! That’s what I love about you!”

Iona looked at the bars. I could still beat her.

“Look,” she said. “You’re sick. You have to get out of here. So we’re freeing you, Agathon. Tonight. — No, don’t interrupt, don’t clown, just this once.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wrung my hands.

She bit her lips and said nothing for a minute, and I knew why. She did love me, whatever that means, and she was waiting out her frustration. — No, that’s too simple. She remembered that she once had loved me, and that, however destructive it was, it was good. But it wasn’t, now, good; my degeneration disgusted her, and she was trying to think back to what I had been before. I had her, because I am simpler than she, even though I am, quote, a philosopher. I said, “Iona, you should have left I told you to run. Don’t you trust me?”

“I couldn’t,” she said.

“Because of Dorkis’s martyrdom,” I said. “Right. But he didn’t choose it, you know. It landed on him.”

“Agathon, stop it.”

“I know,” I said. “Nevertheless, even though it’s reasonable, it’s true.”

“Listen,” she said. (I tried to remember if I’d told her about Konon. Listen. Listen.) She said, “Let’s say I killed Dorkis.”

“Child, dreary child,” I said.

“No, I’m tougher than I used to be. Let’s say I did — and I don’t mean merely by the scroll. That part’s easy, you know — dying to protect someone you love. It went beyond that. He’d accepted the plan. He’d begun to act, and it was because of his actions that they believed he wrote the scroll. Each thing made them believe the other, the scroll and the actions. So if I was to blame for his dying, it was this way: I pushed him too fast, refused to allow him his own nature. He acted hastily, unlike himself, and because I pushed him into making mistakes I killed him.”

“Surely Dorkis deserves a little of the credit,” I said pleasantly.

“Nonsense,” she snapped. “I killed him. I loved him, of course. Irrelevant I accept what I did, because he accepted it. You saw him die. He was proud, Agathon. Even though he’d acted too quickly, clumsily, he was glad he’d acted. It was as if he’d finally discovered his depths. And so listen. I have to finish it for him. If I don’t, it’s meaningless. And so I will finish it. This time the plan’s better. It won’t fail.”

“Ah, optimism,” I said.

“No. Care.”

“Possibly.”

“It is.”

“Conceivably.” Then: “Take advice from a sly old Seer. You plan for the future, but what you don’t understand is, there is no future. Thaletes’s words, but the voice of the universe as well I have seen the future of the Helots, Iona. Doom. Fire and torture and decimation.”

“Agathon” she said. She tightened her fists on the bars. The knuckles went white.

“The world in its Itness,” I said merrily, interlacing my fingers, “is a bunch of gears. You move them by their own laws, not by the laws, much less the desires, inside you. To plan for the future you expect is, alas, to plan for a time that will never exist. Even if you mysteriously succeed, by the time you achieve your glorious plan, the world will have changed, and the plan will be irrelevant. You know what everything’s about?”

“Stop it, Agathon! Just for one second in your life, stop it and look at yourself. Those filthy clothes, that tangled hair, those wasted eyes, wasted gestures, wasted ideas! Be something!”

I did stop, because her commands even now had power over me. I studied her, eyes narrowed.

“We’re going to make you well; as soon as you’re well you’ll help us. We need your mind, your knowledge of them, your way of swaying people.” She paused, searching my face. “Will you come with us?”

I rubbed my mouth. Her neck was creased like an eroded hill and age had enlarged her knuckles. I thought her more beautiful than ever.

At last I said slowly, “‘Be something,’ you tell me.”

I would not have said, the first time it happened, that my spirit was seized by a god. I dislike the terminology, though I use it myself at times, for the sake of convenience or obfuscation. I was filled, merely, with an overwhelming sense of the boundless stupidity of things. Tuka had left me — I’d thrown her away as if her beauty, her goodness, her artistry — that above all — were nothing. Now when I heard some Helot lyre I was not softened by it but stirred to scorn by the crudeness of the instrument, the vulgarity of the technique, compared to Tuka’s on the harp. Because of some animal force in me, or animal rigidness of brain, I had let all that go. And for what? Dorkis was dead, Iona full of sulfurous smoke. And leaving the palace because the place was bitter to me now, I had lost even whatever chance I might have had to influence Lykour- gos. If I ever had it in the back of my mind that I’d come here to Sparta in search of some kind of Destiny, I could see now that I’d blasted it to atoms. In the months following Dorkis’s death, I’d let myself go to seed, had taken pride, in fact, in how quickly and thoroughly I went. When I stood on a hill in a good breeze my rags flew around me like blackbirds and my smell laid vineyards waste. Any man so bold as to speak to me got back such babble, such lunatic clowning, such mock weeping, such preening, such mock flattering, above all, mock philosophizing, that he left walking sideways, cautiously eyeing my crutch.

And then one day, in the main square of the city — it was the first of May — I watched the Spartans marching. It was the opening of Lykourgos’s ugly festival of Orthia, goddess of the hunt — the festival in which, nowadays, the maidens dance naked and sing scornful songs about those who have been cowards, and teasing songs to those who are bachelors, and hymns of praise to butchers. After that they go up to Orthia’s mountain temple, twelve miles north, for the barbaric ritual scourging of young men. Sometimes they kill one or two. The soldiers’ flutes went through me like heart pains, and their festival capes, the painted round shields, the raised swords of the second rank, blinding in the sun, assaulted my eyes like glaring ice and snow. They came wave on wave, the hoplites in front, bearded, overgrown, deadly efficient from many wars, and after them the younger troops — the archers, the company of javelinists with their white capes, the clean-up troops, naked and terrible, their daggers stretched forward and upward, rigid, as if to scrape open the bellies of the high, still clouds. I thought all at once, watching the precision of their murderous march, of Tuka’s fingers moving precisely, at lightning speed, on the lyre; and I saw, in the same motion of mind, Iona’s fingers constructing one of her enormous decorations. As if in a daydream I saw an underground room full of corpses — a room much larger than the crypt where I used to keep my book: the vault of some mountain shrine. I saw, clear as day, Iona’s head on a pikestaff, and soldiers laughing. And as the phantom or impression passed over my eyes, I felt something new coming over me, a rage so black and indifferent to life that my natural cowardice left me. I could feel my eyes widening, bugging, and a tremble coming over my lips. Then suddenly, as if part of the dream, I found myself strutting majestically beside the troops, whistling with their flutes. No one laughed, of course. The irens glanced over from the fronts of their ranks, but they were baffled: there were no rules for how to deal with this. The spectators, too, were looking at me, some frowning, some glaring, bursting with indignation. I mocked their frowns, their glares. We came to a corner where a group of young Helots were sitting on the wide stone steps of an ephor’s majestic old house, and they pointed at me and laughed. I pointed and laughed back. Then, in front of the chief gate of the two kings’ palace, the procession stopped. The kings came down, Arkhelaus stern, effeminately pompous, as usual, Kharilaus vague, miserably wishing for a chair. I mimicked them too. Even kings were not above my law. Lykourgos stood to the left of them and slightly in front of them. I mocked the mighty Lawgiver.