“He says meat is necessary for love.”
“His hand—has he dressed his burned hand?”
“With marinade.”
“We have to stop him,” I said. “He’s not himself.”
She held my hand close to her neck. “That’s what I told him,” she said. “And he said he’d never been himself. He said none of us had ever been ourselves even once.”
v
I found him at the foot of the cliffs, running over the flat plains, screaming at the wild dogs. His skin was ruddy with drying gore. The sky was white. Pyrrho leaped over tussocks of grass and waved his scrawny arms. All along the cliffs, men were winching up sheep on long ropes. Below them, Pyrrho chased the dogs across the plains, yelling at them, demanding that they bite him.
“This is a splendid opportunity!” he screamed, presenting them with his wrists.
Wild dogs were known to attack children. Pyrrho, however, terrified them. They loped in front of him. When a few got far enough away to pause, they looked back out of the sides of their eyes, and their muzzles dipped in embarrassment.
I ran after Pyrrho. He was going to hurt himself. Sheep were suspended in air above him. Men cranked their winches, watching us run.
Pyrrho was yelling something seductive about how being bitten by a crazy dog was true beauty. “The crescent of punctures is symmetrical! I would like to achieve that kind of symmetry all over my face, arms, and legs!”
The dogs were growing distant now, far away across the grassy plains. I was gaining on him.
He did not turn back to see I was chasing him. We both could hear the silvery cough of our knees in the grass. He yelled backward, “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t gag glory. I’m running across plains of grass, feeling motion, and these goddamn dogs have got to turn on me sometime.”
As I got closer, he stumbled and almost twisted an ankle. I could see that his hand was red with burns.
He kept running, a slight limp in his left leg. He said, “Punctures don’t matter. So I bleed. What’s the difference between outside and inside?”
“Pyrrho,” I said, “stop.”
“It’s all an illusion,” he said.
I threw myself through the air and landed on him, bringing him down.
He tried to hit me, but I was stronger than he was. I held him down.
I was on top. We were stacked in the grass.
Up above us, the sheep swayed on their ropes, black against the sky, white against the black of shale.
vi
We sat near one of the cranes, watching a sheep get lifted and rotated. The winch creaked. The shepherd paid us no regard. Pyrrho shielded his eyes from the sun; the goat’s blood was caking on his pale chest.
I sat next to him on a fallen bust of owl-eyed Demeter.
I said, “You were the boy who thought long and hard. You wanted to be a philosopher. Things made sense to you, and we listened to what you said. You were the first to shave. None of us would hold a knife to our throats. The knife to you was just a logical extension of the hand. It was a means, and once you described it to us, we were not afraid. You make sense. Perfect sense. That is Pyrrho.”
Pyrrho lay back on the marble, his head turned away from me, his arms thrown out to the sides.
I said, “I’m trying to remind you of who you are.”
Pyrrho did not stir. He was striped with gore.
I said, “When the rest of us fought in the plains, you stood to the side and told us the meaning of fists. When we lifted up cattle, you explained to us the meaning of weight. You calculated the distance to the sun. You proved to us that the gods are short. We always listen to you. We sit in a circle and listen. Pyrrho speaks wisdom. That is who Pyrrho is.”
He pinched himself. “Then who is this?” he asked.
I reached for his hand to pull him up.
He offered the burned hand.
I would not take it.
He looked at me, and in his glare was the disdain reserved for friends who offer aid, and who, through their very generosity, reveal that they are nothing but sidekicks, weaklings, winking traitors, and clowns.
vii
A few days later, Pyrrho showed up on the hilltop with a new boyfriend, named Dipsus. Dipsus was thin, weak, and stupid. He had patches of fur on his face, and was covered with lumps and cuts from fights he had started and lost.
“This is Dipsus,” said Pyrrho. “I’m in love with him. My heart is ravished with his charms.”
Pyrrho, clearly, was making another extraordinary investigation into Beauty.
Still, I thought, it is not the outward beauty, but the inward beauty, that is of highest value. Perhaps this unassuming youth has a lyrical soul.
Pyrrho said, “Dipsus and I philosophize together.”
Dipsus snorted long and hard, hawked matter onto the grass, and said, “You ever wondered how you keep blowing stuff out of your nose, but you never have to put stuff back in?”
“So true,” said Pyrrho. “So very true.”
Dipsus said, “I think of things like that all the time. I’m the kind of shepherd that ends up turning out to be someone else’s son switched at birth, and then he rules the known world. And then I’ll bash up everyone I want.”
“Splendid,” said Pyrrho.
No one else really knew what to say.
I held out my hand. I said, “Any friend of Pyrrho’s is a friend of ours.”
Dipsus sprang back. “Don’t you try that on Dipsus, butter-mouth! Wham! I’m as strong as three men!” He stumbled backward and fell onto a goat. He slapped the goat and scrambled upright, fists ready.
Pyrrho said, “I was thinking Dipsus could join us for an evening of bucolic tale-telling and sitting by the fire.”
“Forget it,” said Dipsus. “I’m going to go home and bowl with my mom.”
He stalked off into the tall grasses.
“Pyrrho,” said Thyonicus, “he’s a somewhat unusual choice.”
Pyrrho raised his hands. “What is the difference between the behavior of one animal and another? From a distance, there’s little to distinguish an embrace from a throttling, a caress from a slap.”
Thyonicus suggested, “Well, there is the way Dipsus smells.”
“Oh, smell, smell, smell,” said Pyrrho. “What is smell? When I was sick, I smelled corpses and the rich odor of feasts. But it didn’t mean anything. I smelled glazed piglet.”
“I like pig,” said my discus-thrower, who, for all his excellent qualities, was not very bright.
Somewhat ashamed of his comment, I turned back to the leather balls we were stitching. I didn’t look up when Pyrrho walked away.
We all kept stitching, but glanced at one another, frowning, over the stitches; we spoke no more of what had happened.
viii
The next day, we were walking through the swamps to go to market. We had to walk single file on planks that were balanced unsteadily on tussocks. Pyrrho was whistling a victory song for Dipsus. There were twelve of us, and several mules.
Far ahead of me, I heard a cry, and swearing.
Our friend Anaxarchus had slipped and fallen into the mire. His toga was soaked, and he struggled. He clutched at the planks and tried to draw himself up.
Pyrrho kept whistling. He kept walking.
“Pyrrho,” gasped Anaxarchus, coughing up brackish water. “Hand up? . . . Pyrrho?”
Pyrrho did not look at his friend. He walked on.
“Pyrrho,” I called, trying to work my way on the planks past a pack-mule. “Pyrrho—could you grab him?”
Pyrrho sang, as if to no one, “Who knows what really exists?”
I was struggling with the mule. I scrambled past it, finally slithering on my knees. I ran up to Anaxarchus and took his spattered hands.
I started to yank him from the water. He was snapping his teeth and retching.
Ahead of us, Pyrrho walked on, singing, as if idly, “All perception is a swamp.”
I pulled Anaxarchus
onto a mound of dried grasses. He was green with weed. He clutched at his chest and coughed. I asked him if he was all right, and he said, “Yes.”
“Pyrrho!” I called. “He might have died!” And to Anaxarchus, I said, “He’s unbelievable.”
“I know,” said Anaxarchus. His eyes were big, and he gazed after our friend. “He’s amazing.”
“Him?”
“Pyrrho—he’s incredible.”
“For leaving you in the swamp?”
“It’s an act of will,” said Anaxarchus. “That’s what it means to be human in the full bronze flesh. Marble. Alabaster.” He called after Pyrrho, “Bravo! Bravo!”
Feeling somewhat irritated, I pointed out, “I’m the one who saved you.”
“Exactly,” said Anaxarchus. “You gave in. He knew that it doesn’t make any difference whether the sack that’s Anaxarchus sinks or swims.”
When we got to market, Anaxarchus bought Pyrrho some ice for licking.
Pyrrho threw it at a mule.
ix
Two nights later, we found him cut by the river and brought him home bleeding. We wrapped his arm in cloth, tightly, to grip the blood in the body. We dragged him through the door of their hut into candlelight.
Philista, his sister, grabbed at the beads around her neck when she saw him.
“Pyrrho!” she cried, and ran to his side. “Oh—what has—”
“It is an investigation into the nature of solidity and matter.”
“His forearm,” I said.
“With some metal he found in the brook,” said Thyonicus.
“Oh Pyrrho— This . . .” said Philista, leading him to sit. She was shaking.
He said, “I want to determine what is Pyrrho and what is not. Am I unitary or made of pieces? If I remove a hand, is it still me?”
“With metal you found in a brook?” his sister said.
She held on to him, weeping.
“I find it peculiar,” said Pyrrho, “that we inhabit space.”
His father was watching. His beard looked pale, and his lips, weak. He went to Pyrrho and gently unwrapped the arm.
“Pyrrho,” said his father, “this is awful. This does not look good.”
“It makes you wonder,” said Pyrrho, “why one finds metal in a brook. The world is bountiful.”
“Get him some cool wine,” said the father, and we did, from a jug, and he drank.
“Here is some bread,” said Philista.
“Drink more of the wine,” said the father.
Pyrrho’s sister was perched to one side of him. She held on to her beads. His father sat on the other side. Philista’s head was on her brother’s shoulder. Their father put his arm roughly around the boy. It was awkward, because they were in a line.
“Pyrrho,” he said, “don’t you know how much we love you?”
“I love you,” said Philista. “You are my brother.”
The endearments embarrassed us. We went out into the night. We could see the fires of the shepherds in distant bracken. We walked toward a hilltop.
Heat rose off the grain.
Through the wall, we could hear the father plead. “My God. Why? Never mind. We don’t care, Pyrrho, boy. Pyrrho-kin. We will always love you.”
We could hear Pyrrho reply, “I don’t even know what that means. There is no substance in ‘always.’ There is no substance in love.”
We walked onward so we would not have to hear more.
x
“Pyrrho will destroy himself.” It was known by all. The word passed among us, that summer of our sixteenth year.
There was an inevitability to it, and yet we tried to stop it. At all times, one or another of us, his disciples, found reason to be with him. He lay in front of carts. He would not stop hassling bees. He walked into the sea and had to be dragged to the shore. “Pyrrho will destroy himself.” He closed his eyes and walked across clay rooftops, daring substance to give out beneath him. We put up our hands for him to walk upon so he would not fall. “Pyrrho will destroy himself.” He ate rocks and slivers of metal, even urchins. His lips were cut. The rocks went down. The metal and urchins stuck like burrs. We forced open his jaws and took out shards.
On other days, he would sit near our hut and refuse to move in from the sun. His skin empurpled as the days grew longer.
I sat by him and dribbled water on his crisping skin.
He drank other things—I don’t know what—things that made him scream and clutch his stomach and throw up blood. He said that pain was just a sensation, like light. The locusts buzzed. I sat with him in the night, after he vomited. We could hear the bleating of sheep. I said, “Pyrrho, you must stop.”
He said, “The philosopher Empedocles jumped into the volcano at Aetna to prove he was a god.”
I asked, “What happened?”
“He wasn’t,” said Pyrrho, looking at the horizon.
So it went on. We came upon him tied to a stake, being hit by Dipsus. He was weak from the sunburn, hardly a human at all. His jaw rarely closed now. We pulled Dipsus away. We untied Pyrrho and took him home. His sister no longer wept.
When Pyrrho was out, Philista sat and wove in their stone hut. Her father lingered by the door and did not work. He touched his face with his fingertips, poking the flesh, searching for fruit-rot. He progressed across his cheeks slowly.
“Go plow,” said Philista.
“I can’t plow,” said Pyrrho’s father. “Out there, I keep looking back toward the house.”
“He’s not here,” said Philista.
The father said, “When I’m in the field, I feel like I’ve left something at home. Something I need in my bag. I keep looking this way. It’s just the house.”
“Turn to your chores,” said Philista.
“I’m waiting. That’s my chore. It’s a matter of time.”
“His friends are with him,” I said. “We’ll take care of him.”
In the darkness inside the hut, the father stared at me. I could not abide his glare, and so I dropped my gaze. We stood, the two of us, in the shadows, while Philista wove her cloth between us. The walls were stone and caulked with light. I scratched in the dirt with my heel.
“I marched on Thebes with the army,” said Pyrrho’s father. “I carried a spear and a shield. I climbed the walls. Do you understand?”
“This is not something you did to Pyrrho,” soothed Philista. “You did nothing.”
The father demanded of me, “Do you think he is in danger? What has he told you?”
I did not know what to answer. I said, “He told me the philosopher Empedocles jumped into Mount Aetna to prove that he was a god.”
“How do they know Empedocles wasn’t a god?” argued the father. “He might have been.”
I said, “They found his slipper in the lava.”
“How do they know it was his?”
“Empedocles,” I said, “wore bronze slippers.”
“Go and plow,” said Philista. “I’ll stay here.”
Her father sagged back against the door frame. “He was a tender boy,” he said. “There must be something that can heal him. He smiles. He . . .”
We did not move until Pyrrho came home.
We heard him outside, later that afternoon, playing a game with some small children of the neighborhood, something that involved stones on a track drawn in the dirt. He hunkered among the children, no taller than them, sketching with a stick while they each took their turn.
There was a shiftless feeling among us all. None of us could work.
We were all busy waiting.
xi
“Pyrrho will destroy himself.” We wept in advance. He would not eat. His skin was loose and covered with wounds. He could not walk. He crawled toward cliffs as if they were not there. We dragged him back. He left furrows from the heels of his hands. When we set him down, he crawled again.
One day, he arranged for Dipsus to bury him in mud. When nothing but his head showed, he screamed obscenities at his friend,
daring him to fling dirt in the mouth and cram scum up the nose and be done with it, be done with it all. Dipsus said, “You’re stupid,” and walked away. “I hope you get— I hope you find some worms that will be your friends and boon-companions, because from me, you’re not even getting dirt up your nose.” Dipsus splashed in the shallows of the motionless river as he walked away.
I sat next to Pyrrho’s head on the mudflats. The reeds blew in the summer wind.
“What is height?” said Pyrrho’s head. “Do you see? How tall am I?”
“Pyrrho,” I said, “for someone who doubts whether matter exists, you try to put an awful lot of it in your mouth.”
“I doubt even whether everything is an illusion,” he said. “I confirm or deny nothing.”
“Do you see how your sister cries when you come home?”
“I confirm or deny nothing.”
“Your father has stopped watching the flocks.”
“Reality or vapor?”
“We are your friends.”
“I doubt even whether I doubt.”
“Pyrrho—”
“I confirm or deny nothing,” he said, before I scrabbled down in the dirt in front of him, planting my knees by either cheek, and grabbed his proud, smirking little mouth in my hand and with my other hand gripped his nose, and I would not let him breathe; and at first, I thought, This is a lesson, but it was not a lesson, because though I was crying, at the same time I was telling him how much I hated him, and yanking the head back and forth until I knew it hurt. He could not move his limbs to stop me. They were buried in mud, and he was weak.
I jerked the head and spat in his hair. His neck popped. I clamped my hands more firmly. The face fought me. It wanted air. The lips were against my hand, writhing. The head jacked back, trying to draw breath.
“Here is all of it!” I was yelling to him, without understanding. “This is it! Can you eat it all at once?”
The eyes were wide. He was trying to see my face. I would not let him. I put the face in the mud and pressed it there. When it started to rise, gagging, I crouched and kicked the back of his head with my heel, kicked it and held his head down in the mud. He was nothing then, nothing but an oval of dirty strands with a heel atop it in the midst of mudflats where the rushes blew.
Sixteen Page 22
