There’s that word again: Hierophant.
You have contracted a god, Constantine. If you go against her, you will be devoured.
I open my mouth to say something – I am not even sure what it will be, but I feel I should try – but Nikolaos Megalos holds up his hand. ‘Please. Before you speak. I am still angry, Constantine Kyriakos. That you have achieved what I desired, or more, does not excuse what you attempted. You have affronted me. But I am practical, and I am obedient. You carry the god. I will ask you once again: how does it feel? Does she speak to you? Is it Persephone or Demeter? Metis? What old, wonderful thing comes awake in you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No. I thought not. She is deep inside, or only faintly attached. Which is it, I wonder? Or is it both? And why you, of all men? Was it just proximity? Should I have bathed every day in the waters of the Mediterranean? If I had, would I have woken one morning filled with the divine light? Well, no matter. Here we all are. I spent quite some time imagining that I would have you pressed like a sack of olives between two stones. There is a press here that would do very well. But … but. I think I will make you an offer instead. You are a man of commerce, after all. Do you know, first of all, what it is that you have made? What our country is like, out there in the streets, right now? Everything has come to a halt. Soon it will be dark and grim. There will be no food in the market places, no petrol in the pumps, no medicine in the hospitals. There will be no clean water, even, in the pipes. Can you imagine a more horrible thing to a modern man than the discovery that the basic stuff of life – pure water, that he considers so absolutely tamed and delivered by the system in which he is invested – is not any longer his to command? That no amount of angry telephoning will bring it back, even if he could call anyone? That he has hours, perhaps days before everyone he loves begins to die if he cannot somehow restore that lost flood? And yet: he has no idea where it might be had, if not from a pipe. He has no barrel in his garden, no brook at the foot of his land. He has never contemplated this possibility. But his neighbour, now … that fellow woke a little earlier and filled his bathtubs, and he won’t share. Well, why would he? His family will survive due to his prudence and quick action. So now our modern friend has a choice: civilisation has abandoned him. Will he, then, cling to it? Or will he pick up a club, or a hammer, and go next door to do what must be done for his survival? Or will they both, like brothers, march upon the keep of the invader? The frame by which he understands the world is broken. He needs something new to judge his actions, to know what is right. Something new, or something old.
‘Kairos, Constantine Kyriakos: the hanging instant. In this moment is possible even the turning of the human mind. A total renewal, a change of all things. And that is what I wanted, before you came. I wanted kairos, and with that I would change the world. Now I want more.’
He nods, and extends his hand towards me – not a handshake or an offer, not yet, but it’s coming. I can feel my palm flex, ready for the shake. The rat brain inside, the mammal in a hard place, wants to cut a deal. Stockholm syndrome. Well, fuck Stockholm. I’ve been there. Expensive food, really pretty people who get depressed and talk about Third World debt when they should be screwing. Fuck Stockholm and actually fuck pretty much everything from Landsort to Gävle.
Megalos can see it in me: the rat in the corner. He wraps his arm around me. I know what he’s doing: he’s mounting me, for mammal dominance. ‘You must do something for me.’
I look for just the right amount of earnestness to put in my face. Sure, let’s deal. Sure, why not? A few hundred million, maybe? An even split? If I’m lucky, I can bluff him and hook him and play him and I can get to a phone. Get to a boat. Get to a car or a plane. Wherever I am, I can win. I can win. I have to believe that. I am Constantine Kyriakos! You know what Zeus—
Actually, let’s not go there. I am Constantine Kyriakos, and that’s enough by itself.
Today, it fucking better be. ‘What do you want?’
Megalos smiles. ‘Oh, Kyriakos. You are the omphalos, the Hierophant. It is your task to conduct the celebrants to the Chamber of Isis, that was Athena’s gift to the sons and daughters of what is now called Egypt, and was taken to contain the tears of the Mother of Christ by the milksop children of Rome. You are the path between us, between man and God, and the meeting will be there, in that place, where all things may be done or undone. It is the fulcrum – what Pythagoras called the thumb of the universe. You shall shed blood in the chamber, and your part in this shall end. You and I will go our separate ways – you with my money, and I with your shark.’
‘My shark?’
I can’t believe this, but I don’t want to give it to him.
Shit. Am I actually going to die over a neurosis?
I think I am. I think I’m going to tell him no, right here and now. Stop! Stop! I don’t need to do that. I just have to play along! If I can get to a phone, I can work miracles.
I open my mouth to say no.
‘Of course,’ Megalos says, meditatively, ‘you will wish to marry your Stella. That can be arranged.’
Myoushu: the strike along another axis.
*
If I can get to a phone, I can do miracles. That’s what I have to remember. Megalos has caught me while I’m still partly human, but if I can even touch civilisation, the network of relationships defined by convention and money, there is nothing I cannot do. The Fifteen Hundred are superheroes. Every single one of them is Batman, and their superpower is an evolutionary amount of money. I know a man – call him Bill from Madrid – who once awoke in a hotel room in New York with an absurd quantity of high-grade cocaine and a dead model. He was relaxing after a long flight and had purchased his coke in bulk because it was cheaper, and this woman had obviously got up in the night for another toot and had had a heart attack. It happens. Cocaine is an unpredictable drug. Some people like to have a paramedic team on standby when they party, and I know a major corporation that keeps a pair of helicopters flight-ready during the Ibiza season so they don’t lose any key personnel to poorly applied recreational pharmacology. Waking with the dead isn’t quite the same deal as murder, but in terms of the getaway it might as well be.
Bill is not one of the Fifteen Hundred. By global standards, he’s mega-wealthy. He’s worth about US $400 million, which is private-island rich, but by the standards of the Fifteen Hundred he’s basically a pet. All the same, he had friends more puissant than he was and they’d given him a number to call, and he did. He explained his problem to the woman who answered the phone, and she said: ‘The fee is two million, one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. We will take it from your bank account at Grossman-Lafayette in Thun.’ She did not ask him to authorise payment.
Two million, one hundred and twenty thousand dollars?
‘This is not a particularly difficult situation,’ the woman told him.
Bill took that on board and said okay.
About twenty minutes later a guy turned up at the door with a carry-on bag and some clothes from Gap in Bill’s size. ‘Leave your shit where it is. Go to the lobby. You’ll be met. You’ll go to the airport but you won’t go through security and you won’t need a ticket. You will board a plane. Someone will drive you home to your house at the far end. Then you take a shower and go to bed.’
‘Is that important? The shower?’
‘You want to fly seven hours after a day like this and not take a shower, be my guest.’
‘What do I tell them? When they ask me what happened?’
‘Why the hell would anyone ask you a freaky-ass question like that?’
‘Isn’t that how it goes? She’s dead.’
‘My friend, listen to me. Really listen and actually think about the words. Okay? That, what you are describing, is what happens to witnesses, but you are not a witness because you were never here. The hotel has no record of your stay, the airline says you never showed up for your flight. INS has no listing for your entry into the US. In fact i
t’s a matter of public record that you never left Madrid. You got a little drunk and blew two hundred and twenty grand gambling and partying. I’m told you had a great time. There’s a few paparazzi photos of you getting friendly with some footballer’s ex-wife. There’s even a sex tape, if you want to go that road. There’s a date stamp on the footage, a copy of El País on the bedside, and a little bit of light relief where some French tourists walk in on you. They filed a complaint with the manager of the casino. You’ll find the whole thing in your carry-on. The lady wants a rematch, by the way, so don’t be surprised.’
Bill looked over at the bed.
The guy sighed, like a vet petting a dog that isn’t going to make it. ‘You know her name?’
‘Karen,’ Bill said.
‘Okay, Karen,’ the guy said. ‘Karen was here, by herself. We’ll see to it she’s as okay as she can be, given she’s dead. Nothing disrespectful is going to happen and her parents and her friends are going to understand that this was one of those appalling fucking bullshit events that you cannot prevent or foresee, and they will hate it but they will not lack for support or answers in so far as those things exist in this world. Do not get into asking yourself whether you owe them an explanation. You do not. You are the last good thing she ever knew. You had fun, you held each other, she died. There are honestly worse endings to a story, and you need to let her go right now and move on. This is sad stuff but it is what it is. It doesn’t help anyone if it fucks up your life. Go to the lobby and let me do my job.’
That was just the off-the-peg version. As of today, I am a premium customer. With a phone and five minutes, I can fly. I have laser vision. I can dodge bullets.
But Megalos just offered me the only thing I cannot buy.
You will wish to marry your Stella. That can be arranged.
*
Megalos looks at me, curious. ‘You had not understood this?’
‘Stella died.’ I don’t say that aloud, ever. I say it now, because I realise he is the Devil and he has found the perfect temptation. If Stella were not dead, if he could bring her to me, I would give him whatever he wanted, and he could fuck around with Greek politics or set the world on fire or whatever it is he wants to do to his heart’s content. I would try genuinely very hard to bring him to his Chamber of Isis, even though there is no such thing and he’s barking mad and he will drown the country in shit and tears. I am for sale, and this is – has always been – my price.
Stella died.
Unless that is somehow not what happened and the world is all out of shape and nothing I have done since then makes any sense at all.
‘Behold, then, Constantine Kyriakos, as I teach you my first mystery. You are a too-educated man and this will be hard for you unless you bend your will to it. Listen with your heart, and set your mind free of what is impossible. It is the lesson I shall shortly teach Greece, as the water dries in the pipes and the fields wilt. Do you recall our conversation in your temporary office beneath the road? Do you recall what I said about the Immortals?’
Sure. Persian Immortals. The soldier is not the man. The soldier is the variable, the man is just the number. The number may be expended, changed, even removed, but the equation is eternal.
Megalos nods. ‘Indeed. In the world I will make, no one of true importance ever dies. Stella is not dead, she is simply waiting. It requires only that a woman step into what you presently would call – because you do not see the true world, but its shadow, in which we have lived until now – the symbolic space of Stella, and from that instant she will cease, and Stella will be again. That does not mean this is a trick or a substitution. It is a fundamental example of the way we will live. What is more real? The woman, or the flesh she occupied? Stella closed her eyes and was gone. She will open them again, and the first thing she will see is you.’
Nonsense. Nonsense and lies.
Except that I understand it. My mind is following it, even as I tell it not to: if a woman speaks as Stella and acts as Stella and looks like Stella and believes she is Stella, how is she not Stella? I want to say that each of us, second by second, becomes the person we are next, and Stella did not become whoever this woman will be. Stella died in the hospital. But that is to prejudge, to beg the question. That is to assume exactly what is under discussion.
This new woman’s body, you might object, is not Stella’s, or rather: her DNA is not the DNA that Stella was born with. No. It is not – but if Stella were to be treated for a genetic disease with a modern treatment that changed her DNA, would I say she was no longer herself? No. The code is not the woman. It is the mind that makes the self, albeit made in the flesh. All right, then: how is Genetic Medicine Stella different from Evil Megalos Stella? Well, there would be a chain of consequence leading from that body to this one, a transitional liminality or gradient by which Stella at time t might identifiably become Stella at t + 1, t + 2, t + 3 and so on, until the transition is complete and the DNA at t is nothing like the DNA at t + n, but the chain of transformation is clear. The woman from the past would become the woman in the present.
But here again, this new Stella would become Stella little by little, slowly arriving at Stella-ness through study, application and performance rather than gross physical manipulation. The process of transition would be memetic rather than corporeal, but I have already acknowledged that the woman is not the cells. If I want to deny it and I do not wish to invoke a separate soul, I must say there is an essence of thinking Stella, a thing that is created in the body and constitutes the person, and that thing ceased when Stella died. But how then to distinguish the old essence from the new? By what criteria would they be separate? If identical in shape and form, in structure and function, would they be divided only by time, itself a mysterious quantity? If consciousness is a thing created in the lowest levels of matter, could I say in honesty that the same imprint with the same energy running through it was not the same person? If Stella had died during an operation to save her life and then been resuscitated, would I reject her as a different person?
If not, then I must account for my willingness to believe she is still Stella but my rejection of Evil Megalos Stella. I must say that the same loop of awareness regenerated is the same woman – which I would – but if I say that and I have additionally already denied the necessity of the physical sameness of Stella’s body, I must own that here, if the loop is the same as the old one, the woman is also, and Stella could live again. If the loop were imperfect – if Evil Megalos Stella is functionally different, or if resuscitated Stella were changed by her experience, then she might be only 20 per cent Stella, or 30. Must I require all of Stella? She would have changed in the intervening years in any case. Shall I say she must be the woman she was at twenty for ever? No. What percentage of Stella, then, must inhabit the new loop before I can accept that she is herself? More or less than 50 per cent? If Stella had been in an accident and lost her memory, would I have disowned her, or sought to help her regain what she was? Should I do less now? I know the new woman would not be Stella, and yet why do I know it? Our minds are formed by the languages and cultures we inhabit. There are peoples who cannot see the difference between green and blue, peoples for whom numbers greater than two are a confusion of the mind. What blind spots do I have, in consequence of the frame in which I have always believed? Might I look through Stella, call her an impostor, out of nothing more than a learned prejudice?
What if Megalos is right?
Stella. She could be with me and I with her, for ever, so long as there are people who will become the Hierophant and his wife. We wanted eternity and here it is.
There’s a transformation, if you like: the Hierophant and his wife.
I know that this is wrong. I know that it is flawed somehow. It must be. I just can’t find a way to explain its wrongness. More mathematics: it is not enough to have an instinct for a statement. You must be able to express it in a form that can be tested and deployed.
And I so very much wish it were
real.
I say: ‘Who?’ like an owl, to make time to think.
‘You have already met her,’ Megalos says. ‘You knew her then.’
The woman in my flat. The one who kidnapped me. ‘She hates me.’ I should have said: ‘She’s not Stella.’ Why didn’t I? Just because she looks like Stella? Just because Nikolaos Megalos has found a clever way of framing his madness?
Megalos waves his hand in dismissal. ‘No, no. Stella – or better, as her old name is still true, we should call her Adrasteia – she does not hate you. She is angry with you for making her wait, and upset because your unbelief makes her own immersion more difficult. Do you see? She is more than one person, not two halves in conflict, but two wholes existing where only one should be. For Stella to live, Adrasteia must be unmade. Adrasteia fears ending, but is determined; Stella is impatient to resume her life. Who she is in this moment is contingent upon events which have not yet taken place. Thus, a most painful conflict of ontology. She told me she dreams mathematical proofs, and when she wakes there is nothing in her mind that can comprehend them. She must become Stella, soon, or she will fray. If you are too slow to follow, you may lose her to another, just as you might have if you had never met. She will be Stella, and she will not wait forever in the face of your doubt.’ No. Stella had only contempt for dithering.
Megalos sighs, acknowledging my difficulty. ‘You can have paradise. But you must choose it genuinely, or it will be hell. That is how I shall know your heart, Constantine. Because in this matter, you cannot lie, and you cannot hide.’
Gnomon Page 55
