John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“What charge?” cried Agathon, rolling his eyes up, clinging to his crutch, “what charge?” His eyebrows were like tangled hazel and hawthorn and oak moss, a blown-down forest of silver trunks and boughs. His nose was like an avalanche, his eyes were like two caves. “What charge?” he cried, and banged his crutch. “Master, for the love of God,” I said, but he gave me a look and roared again, “What charge?” A question obscenely presumptuous, for he was the foulest man alive, by any reasonable standard: a maker of suggestions to ugly fat old cleaning ladies, a midnight prowler in the most disgusting parts of town — the alleys of the poor, the palace gardens — who searched out visions of undressed maidens and coupling lovers, especially old ones, and lived, whenever his onion patch had nothing in it but burdocks and brambles, by foraging in the garbage tubs behind houses. (I have followed him for three years, though I speak of him with understandable detachment, and I know these things I’m telling you for facts.) He was seated on a curb when they came to arrest him, cooling his great horny feet in the gutter, up to the ankles in the indeterminate principle. (His words, not mine.) “I do not overprize sewage,” he sometimes defended himself when children teased him. “It’s smooth and cool, but also smelly. Neither do I overprize kings.” And he would cackle. Occasionally people would laugh and praise him. Usually they threw stones. Either way, he was happy. He was a fool, and I was ashamed of him. He was a troublemaker. When one of the stones they threw hit me and broke my head, he would say, “Tut tut! That’s a nasty scratch!” In the beginning I used to resolve sometimes that I would murder him, but he would reason with me and twist my mind and make me believe that I ought to be proud to be seen with him. In any case, I knew that if I murdered him I would have to go back with my mother.

The officers who had come to arrest him stared straight ahead, embarrassed to be seen laying hands on a famous and respected Seer, and annoyed at his stupid question. The old man went on asking it, fanatically, shaking with indignation and wagging his finger at them (he was standing now, lifting one foot gingerly from the cool black sewage to the blistering heat of the cobblestones): “I insist that you tell me the charge!” His tenacious hold on trivial fact, he told me, was the secret of his genius.

They gave him no answer, merely growled, “Come along.” The police would have given him a swat if they dared, and I would have agreed with them. But swatting a Seer brings bad luck, and besides, his eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, and his tongue was thick: his grasp on lower reality was uncertain. If they swatted him, he’d fall down and splash them with sewage. “Come along,” they said.

Agathon obeyed, his rags flying like starlings. He hobbled between the two policemen like a man in pain, but I knew he was ecstatic, the center, once more, of all the gods’ and all mankind’s attention. The huge stone horse that towers over the temple of Poseidon looked down across the city at him, full of love and awe. Even the dogs looking up at him from their noonday rest admired him, he thought. Magnificent soaring eagle! (It takes no genius to know what Agathon’s thinking, except in his trances. To know what he thinks in his trances you have to be crazy.) He hobbled with violent jerks of his crutch and twistings of his face, now and then loosing a horrendous fart, because of his living so long on onions, and so he proceeded with the two policemen down the winding street toward the great stone square of government buildings, the ephors’ Hall of Justice. I followed, a little behind them, bringing the jug. I kept by the walls and hurried from one building’s shadow to another. He stumbled once or twice and reeled, throwing out his arms like mangy wings. They caught him, wincing with distaste.

“Lykourgos will hear of this!” he squealed. “All Time and Space will hear of this!” And then, forgetting himself, he giggled. (I ducked and hid behind my arm, as I always did in these situations. There was nothing I could do with him.) “Did I ever tell you my theory of Time and Space?”

They ignored him.

Children, seeing the officers pass with Agathon, came running from their yards and houses to follow, joyfully mimicking first his limp, then the officers’ official strut (they walked toeing out, so he toed in, for symmetry), and they called out words of encouragement, now to Agathon, now to the police. A young Helot girl came running to mock him, though once he’d saved her when she was chased by a cow. (I was there. I saw it all.) “Bless you, bless you,” cried Agathon, beaming like the sun. It was all his doing, this festival spirit, and maybe he was rightly pleased. Ten years ago, those who liked him would have been alarmed at seeing him dragged away to jail, and those he disgusted would perhaps have thrown thorns in the path of those filthy bare feet. They’d had no philosophy, he said. No deep sense of the holiness of things. He’d converted them all. If he’d wanted to, he used to tell me, he could have changed the weather. He had Influence. “Bless you, bless you!” he said to the sullen young officer on his right. Old women in black, with sunken mouths and eyes like open graves, watched him go past. “Remember death!” he whispered to the guard on his left. The guard stared forward.

(I give you, though I am only an apprentice in matters of this kind, a vision of the world peeled bare: Two officers, shiny and clean as needles, erect and elegant as unicorn horns, march down a sunlit swept-stone street, clumsily slowing their otherwise military pace for the old man between them. Their captive is a smallish, fat old clown with a halo of tangled silver hair ascending from his dome, a beard that shoots from his chin like lilacs, his robe more tattered and filth-bespattered than anarchy, his lips as endlessly in motion as the wind, saying words that play between cracked and crocked. Behind them come children whose laughter unifies Spartan law and those passing absurdities, us.)

Try as he might, he could not learn what charge it was they’d arrested him on. No matter, of course, as he used to say. It would reveal itself, in time, like everything else. “Ah ha!” he said, looking crafty, “I’ve got it! You suspect me of plotting an earthquake!” He laughed till tears ran down his cheeks and he had to pause, hanging breathless from his crutch. “You overestimate me, friends. Watch this!” He roared, eyes wide and ominous:

“Tremble, mountains! Shatter, air!

Shake Lykourgos from his chair!”

Nothing happened. “You see?” he squealed triumphantly. But he paused again, head cocked, as if afraid he might have started something after all. But old Poseidon the earth-trembler was off somewhere among the sunburnt races, smelling the smoke of thighbones burning, haunches of rams and bulls. The mountains remained as they were, the air did not shatter. It was a holy moment. “Impotent!” he said gleefully. “I’m impotent!” He glanced back at me sheepishly. I’ve reminded him a thousand times that all he ever talks about is sex.

“Keep walking,” they said.

He walked.

I could have told them, if they’d asked, that the old man wasn’t as drunk as he appeared, though he was, as usual, deeply, reverently drunk.