Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  Now I live in her garden, though I rarely think of her, and I work all the time. I have my designs, in lieu of my life, and I weave and re-weave them through endless iterations, honing their purity, symmetry, radial lines.

  11

  CALYPSO

  Calypso was a sea-goddess, exiled in the war that brought the gods to power. Odysseus washed up on her island, stayed for years, and then left.

  She sits where he once sat on her island’s one hill. Cloud shadow moves over her, the sun burns behind white massifs and the sea shifts through gradients of light. He was looking for anyone, but she’s looking only for him. He’s been gone a long time now, but still she looks for his white sail to nick the horizon, for then it won’t be long until he runs laughing through the shallows to embrace her and tell her that he’s raised his son, buried his wife, left all his lands in order, all that is proper in a mortal man, and now he’s done, and has come back to her. But the sun sinks, the day fades, and his ship, if there were a ship, would be invisible.

  Her eyes close, in the sun’s heat, and she dreams of swimming in a sea as red as blood, and as warm, and then she dreams of nothing.

  Hours pass, or centuries.

  Waking, the clouds are gone and the sand has all but interred her. The roots of rank orchids are tangled in her hair; she rises in a cascade of sand and broken flowers. She hears a new note in the surf, sees the breakers boiling whiter where the reef has grown. She swims in the sea, salt water washing her, and sees the same scuttling crabs in their blue shells and the same flitting incurious fishes.

  There had been stumps from the timbers he felled but now they’ve become a thicket. His raft left a scar as it slid down the hill but now she can only find the old furrow by touch. She finds his axe where he dropped it, entombed in moss; she shivers, when she sees it, and her mind goes dark as she picks it up and flings it end over end toward the sea.

  He’d said he was a prisoner on Ogygia. He was with her all of seven summers. She’s been on Ogygia since the seas were cold and there were other constellations in the night sky. There’d been a long, cruel war, and her father had been on the losing side—he’d risked all and lost all and she was lost with him. She remembers Hermes’ hard fingers crushing her wrist as he hauled her through the sky to the island of her exile. “When can I go home?” she’d asked, but he’d said nothing as he turned and went away.

  On her hill watching the sea she thinks of the axe again, the way his hands’ sweat had mottled the haft. She leaves her vigil to swim in the blue water in the reef’s circle and by afternoon she’s found it, wave-stirred in the white sand below the surging water. The haft is coral-scarred now, and the blade corroded, but it’s intact, and she puts it back on the hill among the trees.

  He could, she reminds herself, be cruel. He barely listened when she spoke of the sea-shifts through the centuries, of the other islands she’d known. He professed to hate her, called her witch and jailer, but had he not come to her bed each night, and is it so difficult to lie on the cold earth alone?

  Her cave has filled with sand, her linen turned to rot, her loom disintegrated. She no longer bothers to dress, and has turned as brown as the nereids who sometimes pass by. Sisters, she calls, what news? What have you heard of Odysseus? They rise up in the waves, smile at her, shake their heads unknowingly.

  One night there’s a storm. She sits in the wind-torn wood and sees a ship rush through the moonlight like a desperate ghost. It strikes on the reef, masts and sails collapsing in a tangle of rigging and then a great wave buries it in foam. Sailors wash up in the morning, and she drags their bodies above the water-line, washes the salt away, buries them in damp loam. There’s one, she finds, who’s still breathing, so she exhumes her old bed in the cave and puts him in it, plies him with healing drugs, holds him tight as he shivers and sweats, but on the fourth night he dies without having spoken and she washes his body and buries him with his friends.

  She goes back to her vigil. The sun is hot. Her eyes close. When she wakes the island is more verdant and the sea has risen higher on its shores. Athena is sitting beside her, and for once her raptor’s eyes are kind. “Your exile is over,” Athena says. “The war has been forgotten by victor and vanquished alike, and Odysseus isn’t coming back. You’re free now. You can move on.” Calypso’s eyes stay on the horizon, and she gives no sign of having heard. Eventually Athena leaves her.

  PART III

  ZEUS

  12

  NEMESIS

  Older than the gods, Nemesis brought the proud low. Zeus was her enemy.

  Nemesis unfurled her black wings and blotted out the stars, and I was elated, for my rage had lacked an object, but she must have thought better of challenging me because she turned into light falling away into the void.

  For aeons I’d felt stultified and done nothing but watch the passing waves of radiation, the whorling nebulae, the evolving order of the stars. There’d been wars, I think, in which I’d been the victor, but even then they were far in the past. I knew Nemesis was an inimical power out of old night but I threw myself after her.

  I became a black sun massive enough to bend space and trap light along with millions of stars but out among them I saw her become a moon so I became a planet to bind her in my orbit.

  She became ice, miles thick, entombing me, but I became a fire in the planet’s core, my flame pouring forth from the planet’s crust to fill its atmosphere with gas, heat-trapping, ice-melting.

  There are gaps after that, though I’ve put great effort into reconstructing our duel. I have few certainties, but I do know she was always in retreat, or seemed to be, and I remember glimpsing her through a thousand fathoms of water, and how it felt to become a shark, but sharks haven’t changed in two hundred million years, so I can’t put a time to that moment.

  Toward the end I chased her over the world’s surface. Her play had been degenerating, it seemed—elegant countermoves were a thing of the past, and in her last score of transformations she’d become monstrous animals hiding in the forests while I pursued her as a hero with a gleaming blade in my hand; it had come to seem natural to course after her through terrestrial woods and it gave me pause to remember where I was from.

  I finally ran her to ground on a mountaintop in Attica. I’d seen her slowing and knew it was time for the coup de grâce so I became a lord with lightning in his hand at which she became a woman of great beauty. I took this for mere perversity, and thought her goal was to die elegantly, but as I raised my hand to finish her I finally noticed her total absence of fear and then once again she unfurled her black wings and blotted out the world.

  “Everything was yours,” she said. “But you let me draw you in. Now look at you. You’re little more than a man, with a man’s appetites and a man’s weaknesses, and you’ll squander the centuries on mortal loves and wars. What you were is lost for good, and I did it, I.”

  Then she was gone. I cast the bolt anyway but it snarled harmlessly through empty air.

  That was long ago, and I haven’t seen her since. Now I sit on my throne on Olympus, watching the sky, trying to remember.

  13

  ATHENA I

  Athena was Zeus’ daughter and his favorite. She sprang fully formed from his dream of the world.

  Cumuli dissolve in the deep blue below the stark throne where Zeus sprawls dreaming. Images of shadowed caves, ancient mountains, giants’ animosity grade into the tangled limbs of past lovers, their fragrant skin, its friction, but behind this there’s a sadness and an absence that stays with him even as the dream dissolves into an awareness of all the islands scattered on the sea and the sweat slick on his brow.

  His lightning pulses in the quiver by his throne, its coruscation a reminder of the days of skies smothered in black smoke and the holocaust of primeval enemies but his gaze moves out into the gulf of air over the empty sweep of ocean where glass-smooth waves in serried ranks slide across the water toward an island of white sand where a tower rises among the br
eakers, and there at its apex is a woman staring at the sky. Clouds uncover the sun and she squints into the light as it brightens into brilliance and illuminates the planes of her face; the surf explodes against the tower then, and in the concussion and clattering water’s fall he’s there with her. She struggles, at first, but his force and his heat are as stupefying as summer and her will dissolves like a sand-bank in the tide, but even as her ripped tunic pools on the ground his joy has faded. Her pale body, he sees, is just another link in the endless chain of his tepid mortal amours, and his eyes turn to the hard glare on the sweep of sea, the vacant sky, and then he’s rising up in eagle-shape, and below him the woman, the tower and then the island dwindle and vanish.

  He circles idly on the thermals above the shadows of the low clouds scudding over the sea, leviathans breaching in the bright spaces between them, and there in the distance is the loom of the land and in the high dry hills above the sea a maiden chases her own shadow, javelin gleaming in her hand, and in her gait and the lines of her body are a pride and a ferocity that make him drift closer and then bank and hurtle down through the air. When she crests the hill he’s waiting for her, wearing the shape of her sister, lying in the shade of an oak. The hunt is long, he calls to her, the heat longer, so why not lie with her in the shade through the worst of the afternoon? The girl stands in the sun, body streaming, considering, and then she casts down her weapon and sprawls in the prickling grass, and only a moment later she’s clawing at his eyes as she fights to get away; her teeth pierce his hand and in momentary pain he uses all his strength and she collapses, her breath crushed out. Blood wells from her mouth and runs down her cheek, and her eyes won’t focus, and he can see that she wants to die but she takes her will in her hands and opens her shaking arms to him, for to invite isn’t quite to be defeated.

  He thinks of the distant season of his youth, the apocalyptic violence of the sons of the Earth, the storms that churned the oceans and shook the world and how he’d kept fighting when no one had much expected him to live. The girl on her back below him seems like nothing so much as a terrified young animal. Do it, she slurs, but he shakes his head and turns away from her as a fog settles over the hills and as he walks his eyes are full of migraine light. Sand underfoot, and ocean before him, and as he wades through the fog into the water the island vanishes.

  He forges through the waist-deep water holding his head in his hands thinking the days will bring no more than empty loves repeated. Waves break on his chest, surge over his head, and the numbing cold is welcome even as his vision blurs and his head throbs, and then on a spur of black rock before him is a woman, naked, sleeping on her side, and he sees her with such clarity that the rest of the world seems to fade. Smooth curve of white thigh, and as he approaches he feels the heat from her skin; her jaw is tense, her fingers curl, and she seems to dream of battle. He leans over her, looking her in the face, poised to touch her, but in that moment she opens her eyes, which are bright, grey and hard, and he seems to see them with more than ordinary clarity as she drives her palmed stone into his skull.

  Blackness, and the washed-out after-image of her eyes, and somewhere blood is pouring down his face, diffusing in the sea, and then the plunk as she drops the stone into the water. It would be easy to let go and drift but he rises up out of the water and wipes the blood from his eyes in time to see her launch into the air in the shape of a gull.

  He follows as an eagle and they race over the water faster than arrows or wind and then they rise up through a churning storm’s strata and in the tumult of rain and cloud he loses her. Then a gap in the white shows her streaking toward his mountain and in that moment her plan is clear to him. He chases her in earnest then, miles flickering by in moments as they fly over the flanks and then the slope of Olympus and then at the mountain’s apex she’s a woman again as she reaches for the lightning that arcs and shudders in its quiver by his throne. He lunges for her, and his fingers brush her heel as her hand closes around the incandescent bolt, and then she’s facing him with the lightning raised high and her eyes full of murder, and for the first time since the morning of the world he takes a step back.

  Zeus puts a good face on things, calling her his daughter and his lightning-bearer, and she plays her part gracefully, giving good counsel among the great gods. He loves her most of all his children, for all that she gives him no repose (he never looks at the flash of thigh above her greaves, at the white span of neck below her helmet), and at times he wants to forget her, but she’s never far from his mind.

  14

  EUROPA

  Zeus kidnaped Europa from the shores of Phoenicia in the form of a white bull. He left her on Crete.

  In the last of the light we gather white flowers from the vines twisted deep in the roots of the dunes. A wall of black cloud blots the light in the west as the rising wind stirs our hair, and there in the surf’s tumult is a white bull, foam surging and receding around his legs, stirring the sea-wrack that hangs from his neck. We converge on this apparition speechlessly, though in the distance the maids are calling us already, and the sun is almost gone, and soon they’ll be lighting the fires and closing the doors and locking them against the night. The bull’s horns are as long as our forearms, but it stands peacefully in the tide-race, waiting, and I step forward alone to crown him with white flowers. Heart pounding, I put my hand on his flank, and his heat is radiant through the sea-cold. He turns and looks out to sea and I know he’s about to leave. Wait, I say, as he wades into the surf, and my dress pools around my hips as I wade after him, shivering already, and he hesitates for just a moment, but that’s enough for me to wrap my arms around his neck.

  He can only walk out so far, I reason, but then he’s swimming, and when I look back the other girls are standing at the surf-line watching, not even waving as he heaves against the rip and a wave washes over us and bears the flowers away.

  The storm rises, black and howling, and the bull is swimming faster now, the shore lost behind me, and in the chaos of night and water the only thing to do is press my face into his hide. Time becomes motion and cold and the animal beneath me, and my strength is failing when the wind’s moan subsides and the bull is walking up out of the surf onto a beach before cliffs implied by gradations in the shadows and there’s no one there at all. I roll down onto the sand, stagger, and sit hugging my knees. I only mean to close my eyes but when I wake it’s dawn, the bull vanished, the pale light revealing this long expanse of beach, the black inland mountains, my freedom, this emptiness.

  15

  IDEOGRAPH

  Cadmus went searching for his kidnaped sister Europa. In compensation for having taken her, Zeus granted him a boon. Cadmus wanted what he wrote to become real. Zeus agreed, with the condition that he had to be exact.

  When Cadmus inscribed Europa’s name in the desert sand she rose like a mirage before him, but he grieved to find she was a mere pallid abstraction, her features vague, partaking neither of life nor history.

  * * *

  That was years ago, but Cadmus is still there, writing out the details of her bitten fingernails, the shadows in the basements of their father’s house, the salt-stains on her dress, how she’d watched him play in the surf while she waited for something to happen, staring out to sea as her mind wandered …

  16

  SYMBOLIC

  As Cadmus’ brush touches the blank white sheet the door to his study bursts open and a stranger enters, trembling. Cadmus doesn’t look up from his work as the stranger draws breath and says, “Listen to me. I, too, was a calligrapher once. Diligent in practice, I drew every intricate stroke of the character symbolic a thousand thousand times.” He pauses for a moment and Cadmus regards him silently, his brush poised, resuming his work as the stranger continues, “The shape of every line is the product of countless accidents—weave of paper, wear of bristles, the tremor in my hand—and each is, or should be, unique.

  “Mine were identical—spatter for spatter, stroke for stroke. I rea
lized I’d been writing not a character but the idea of a character.

  “It follows that the world is false, a coarse and empty calculus of symbols, a line in the script of some demiurge, who, through laziness or parsimony, is not thorough in his work. In his carelessness, I surmised, he might have left a door ajar that should have been shut. It’s been a long way but I found that door, and now, finally, I’m here, and you must tell me what the world is.”

  Still writing, Cadmus asks, “What’s your name?”

  The stranger says, “Some name—I don’t remember!”

  Cadmus asks, “How did you come here?”

  The stranger says, “Some road—I don’t know!”

  Cadmus draws his guest’s attention to the page he has been writing; on it is a single, simple character, much of its interior empty, its architecture built around the voids. As he adds the last strokes, he says, “You learned that there is no character, just the few wisps of meaning in the idea of a character. Had your doubt gone further you might have known yourself, my skeptic, my parable, my symbol among symbols, but then you would stand for something else.”

  17

  SEMELE

  Semele was the daughter of Cadmus, the first king of Thebes. Zeus became her lover, saying he was a mortal king but always visiting her in the dark. When Zeus’ wife Hera discovered the affair she disguised herself as Semele’s maid and suggested that her lover was low-born; she advised Semele to make her lover swear to reveal himself, and to press him on his oath three times.

  She’d promised herself she’d lock her door but leaves it ajar. Waiting, she feels like she’s only ever been a woman waiting for her lover in the dark.