John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

She shut her eyes tight, and I could see her thinking, hanging terribly suspended between the choices. Or maybe she was thinking of the smell. She kissed me. My heart filled with pain. “I love you, Agathon,” she said.

And so she left.

Night, but I must continue. Time almost out.

My jailer has dropped all feigned indifference. He told me the news himself. Lykourgos is dead.

It happened at Delphi. Suicide. He sacrificed to Apollo, and asked him whether the laws he had established were good, and sufficient for the people’s happiness and virtue. The oracle answered that the laws were excellent, and that the people, as long as they observed them, should live in the height of renown. A fake Rhetra, but never mind that. Lykourgos took down the oracle in writing and sent it by a messenger to Sparta. Then, having sacrificed a second time to Apollo, and having taken leave of his few friends, he made an end of his life by a total abstinence from food. He is said to have told his beloved Alkander that it seemed to him a statesman’s duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the State. I’m not certain whether he meant by that, as I hope he did, that he was saving the State the cost of his food, or merely that by dying at Delphi, having forced the people to swear they’d abide by his laws till his return, he forced them now to perpetual obedience. No matter. As usual, no one in Sparta laughed. Even I forgot to laugh. Solon, I suppose, can now call him a happy man.

It occurred to me — and I mentioned the fact to my dear apistill — that Lykourgos had it already planned before he left that I should rot for years in prison and finally die, sick, miserable, ugly, like Thaletes. I understand, of course, that he couldn’t very well leave me out on the streets, forever criticizing. My dear Peeker, however, saw more. He looked at me and at length nodded. “People make too much of hate,” he said. He’s growing up. I’m forced to confess it.

Also, I was startled. Peeker was right, of course. Lykourgos must have hated me all these years, hated me so devotedly that tyrannizing me in life was not enough. The discovery, or my sickness, or the two together, made me woozy. When I came to myself Peeker had gone away. (No, that’s not possible.)

Sickness, discovery. There it is again in a new disguise, the old opposition, or conspiracy, I’m not sure which, that’s plagued my life: brute adventure, the brutality of idea.

There’s an ancient theory — unless I myself made it up at some time — that the Earth and Moon are enormous balls that fall endlessly in the mind of God, turning around and around each other, as if at arm’s length, like Helot dancers using each other as pivots.

Very sick. Troubled by nightmares, visions. Unable to write.

How many years have I lived in this one deadly summer? I feel older than Akhilles’s ghost, and more filled with sorrow, despair. Agathon told me once, long ago, of a dream he had, or a vision; he couldn’t say. He stood on a dark and smoky island that had long ago suffered some mysterious storm — deracinated trees, wind-worn skeletons of birds and fish. The island had never recovered. On all sides, there were only rocks, fallen timber gradually disintegrating; and nowhere a trace of green. The heavy brume that lay over the island was motionless, like the surrounding sea. It was the island of Persephone, it came to him: the country of the dead. His heart jumped. He’d be brought, like Odysseus, Tieresias, and the rest, to be given conversation with shades. “There’s no other way to get the Answer, you know,” he told me. Carefully, feeling his way in the dimness, furtively glancing to left and right in case he’d been brought here by mistake, he inched with his crutch toward the center of the island. He came to a great black mountain, and in its side, like the stiffly open mouth of a drowned man, he found a cave. It was the entrance to the Underworld. With a prayer to Apollo, and one last shudder, he ducked in. Blackness and silence. He felt his way along the cave walls and came at last to a wide stone stairway curving down as if to the core of the earth. He descended. The stairway drew him down for hours, until he’d lost all track of time, all sense of direction. He came to a wide stone floor. “At last!” he thought, and rubbed his hands together. He couldn’t tell how far the floor stretched or what the room contained. There was a squeak of bats; nothing else.

Agathon scratched himself, cocked his eyebrow, and at last made his decision. He called out in a loud voice, trying not to sound too grandiose: “I am Agathon the Seer! I have come to the Underworld to learn from the dead!” Only echoes answered. He waited, biting his lip and feeling sheepish. Hours passed. Perhaps you have to do it three times, he thought; so he did it three times. No answer. A bat snarled in his hair and he caught it and broke its neck by way of sacrifice. Still no one came. There was only the darkness and stillness. There was no one there. Nothing. World without end. Agathon sat down to tighten his sandals, then started back up the stairs.

I will set down the details of our stupid escape.

It was midnight. The sky over the city was red with the glow of a dozen huge fires, distractions for the Spartans, to cover our escape. Agathon was in a deep, unhealthy sleep. I would have no trouble with him, I saw. I’d almost have welcomed the sound of his crabby, mocking voice or the noise he makes tasting his lips. I lay in front of the door, watching the open field for movement, ready to snap my eyes shut if I heard the guard. The rescue time was long gone, it seemed to me; but I had to judge by guess — I’ve never paid proper attention to the stars — and maybe anxiety hurried the clock inside me. I went through a thousand doubts. Maybe Iona had dropped the plan, because Agathon wanted her to and, old and ugly as they were, they were still lovers. Maybe the Spartans had caught some Helot at one of those fires they’d set as distractions, and had found out about the plot. Maybe they’d changed their mind about the night. There was a full moon — stupidest possible time for a rescue — and the fires from the city made night even more like day.

Then they appeared, out of nowhere. The old woman stood at the bars looking in with eyes like ice, her white hair knotted tight, her nose like an arrowhead. The ghastly face vanished the instant it appeared, and there were two men, one huge and slow, as silent as a whale coasting, the other wiry, bald as the moon and quick as a frenzied lunatic, also silent. The air was hot and still. The only sound was the crunch of the iron bar drilling in at the side of the doorframe, forced in not by hammer blows but by the steady drive and twist of the big man’s hands. The end of the rod came through, and I touched it. “It’s through,” I whispered. The rod was hot. The big man leaned on the rod, and others, four or five of them, arms, legs, and faces smudged with black earth, seized the bars at the bottom of the door and pulled, straining outward and upward. A little earth fell from the side of the door, and you could hear the grate of the hinge grinding on its pin. They kept pulling and suddenly, like a bone breaking, the hinge gave way and the bottom of the door swung out. Faster than a snake, the little bald-headed man was in. He went over me and around the table to Agathon.

“He’s dead,” he whispered.

“No he’s not,” I said. I wasn’t sure.

The little man grabbed Agathon’s feet and pulled him off the bed like a corpse of no value and dragged him across to the door.

“Move, God damn it,” he whispered.

I jerked out of his way. He crammed Agathon’s feet through the space they’d opened up.