Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  With the book finished, I feel absolutely empty. I hear a raven’s rattling croak and a wind in the arroyo but otherwise the world is still. I wonder if I’ll die soon, and if it matters. I know that Daedalus himself couldn’t have done better, but I’m without vanity, for names and persons are ephemeral—in the end, there’s only pattern.

  21

  DAEDALUS

  Daedalus worked as an engineer but was foremost a pure mathematician.

  Exhorting a crowd of faceless students, Daedalus says, “Number is the language and the substance of the world, and its sole certainty.” But then a student—the brightest, and the most nearly individuated of the lot—steps forward and says, “But teacher, what then is the length of this line in the sand?”

  Daedalus, who has the gift of knowing measure at a glance, looks down at the curved line drawn in the sand at his feet and starts to speak, but as the first numbers pass his lips he sees that his answer is inexact, and adds a digit to amend it, but even then an error remains, so he adds another, and though the error dwindles it doesn’t disappear even after the tenth, the thousandth, the ten thousandth revision; the line seems to rush toward him, and with great clarity he sees the scarred prismatic mountains of the sand grains as the digits surge by.2

  He struggles, at first, as the number pours over him, and is distantly aware of the passing of the millionth and then the billionth digits, and still the progression roars on. As the initial panic subsides he reflects that the torrent of random numbers is as meaningless and as comforting as rain pattering on a rooftop, and the digits flow past unremarked, and his thoughts become a grey blur as his old life comes to seem remote, like a ghost hastening off into evening.

  Numbers, he recalls, can correspond to letters, and now in the flood of digits he finds words, and these multiply and coalesce into sentences, and then paragraphs and then whole books (all of which are extraordinary rarities, tiny islands punctuating the seas of white noise which he has perforce learned to ignore). The first books are contemptible—so much ineptly edited hackwork—but soon there are reasonable volumes, and to his surprise, he finds his own books among them, both those he has written and those he has planned—with apprehension and delight he recognizes his own unmistakable voice in a treatise on number theory he has consistently neglected to write.

  The digits’ flow is unabating, and whole libraries wash by. Some of the books are about him, chastising his hubris, praising his resilience, or telling the story of his incarceration in a number as both a parable and a dream.

  The books grow in complexity, and gradually become simulacra of the world. At first they’re no more than caricatures—atlases drawn in crude lines, vague islands implied with shadow—but soon (not soon as he once measured time, but, of necessity, he has learned patience) there are cities of a certain verisimilitude and then he reads that he is walking through the cool shadow of the stone arcades on his way to the courtyard where the faceless students sit waiting. He takes his place before them and draws breath to resume his polemic as though he had never been interrupted.

  “You have beheld the number,” says the brightest student, who is terrible now.

  “I’ve seen a finite sequence of digits, no more and no less,” he replies.

  “Must you see more?” asks the student, possibly with regret.

  “It would be to no purpose—there could only be more of the same. Either there is no number, or I have always been in the number,” says Daedalus, and continues.

  22

  PHILEMON AND BAUCIS

  Zeus came to town disguised as a traveler. He went from door to door but only Philemon and Baucis were hospitable. Zeus destroyed the town but rewarded the couple.

  The rain clatters on the roof as the stranger drinks his wine and smiles at the boy and girl across the table. “You took me in, when no one else would,” he says, “so I’ll give you the gift of whatever you choose.” Under the table the boy’s fingers twine around the girl’s; the stranger is motionless, his eyes fixed on them; far away the river roars, and the boy has the sense their guest will sit there waiting forever, if necessary, but he wills himself to speak and says, “We want to stay together,” at which the girl nods.

  “It’s granted,” says the stranger, “and gladly, for tonight there is death enough.”

  “Who are you, sir?” asks the boy, but the stranger rises, kisses them both, and goes out the door. They look for him from their threshold but there’s only pouring rain, mud, the dark.

  They hold each other through the night. The walls of their hut, reverberating in the wind, are a fragile barrier against the storm, but they have nowhere else to go. When dawn comes they find the sky clear and the forest shattered, the sodden hillsides collapsed, and the town down in the valley washed away. They climb down the now-trackless slopes with the idea of helping but find only granite boulders the size of cattle, smooth swathes of black mud where houses were, the fragments of temple pillars protruding from a silty pool.

  They search the hills for days, unable to believe they’re entirely alone, but find nothing living except a few stray sheep, which they bring home. There are broken beams and building stones in the river’s new eddies, and over the course of weeks Philemon drags them up the hill and uses them to build a barn. The flood’s silt makes good soil and their crops flourish where the village was though the first summer is lonely.

  Their first child comes the year after the flood. Travelers come looking for the bones of their relatives but find nothing and leave after praying for the river to keep hold of its dead. Years pass, and brush grows thick and wild in the loess, and they have the land to themselves.

  In the tenth year after the flood the summer is dry and the winter so bitter that the wolves come down from the mountains. One freezing day Philemon is drowsing by his flocks in a snow-covered meadow with bow in hand when he looks up to see half-starved men emerging from the wood, their spear-points gleaming, either escaped slaves or deserting soldiers but certainly desperate, and most likely a death sentence, for they’ve already seen him and are coming straight on. He draws a deep breath and shouts that raiders have come, and to send armed men, hoping the bandits will think he has friends and that his wife will escape with the children.

  In the evening his eldest son slips out of the cave where his mother hid them; he has a sling, a pouch full of damp clay, and is too young to think death can touch him. He finds his father sitting on a stone watching ravens squabble over the bandits’ corpses. Philemon says, “I shot at two, missed, and then they were on me and I’d lost the chance to run. They tried to kill me, and I expected to die, but as in a dream their weapons wouldn’t bite, and I kept thinking it was a mistake I was still breathing. Finally I seized someone’s sword and stabbed him in the neck, and then I killed the rest of them, one after another. The last two lost heart, and made signs against the evil eye as they tried to scramble off, but I caught up with them and they’re dead too. One of them stabbed me with a spear when my back was turned, and hit so hard the haft broke—it tore my shirt, but didn’t leave a bruise.” His son helps him dig graves for the dead men, lest their ghosts haunt the mountain, and come summer they plant wheat between the mounds.

  In the sixteenth year after the flood their eldest son goes away in spring and comes back in autumn with a wife who thinks at first her husband’s parents are his siblings. The rest of the children marry and build homesteads in the valley and it isn’t long before the first grandchild comes, but Philemon and Baucis don’t change, and their family never speaks of it to strangers. When their eldest son dies they put him in the ground not far from the bandits’ graves and when they’re done weeping and their children have gone back to their houses Philemon says he’s going away.

  “Away,” says Baucis. “What’s away? Your family is here, and their families, and our valley—this is your place.”

  “There are other valleys, other cities,” he says. “How can I say I’ve lived? I’ve never stood in the line of battle
. I have never beheld the sea.”

  “You’ve known love, and death, and terror—you’ve even spoken with the gods,” she says. “Everything that is, is here. And what is here, is elsewhere, but for me.”

  He says, “I’ll be back,” kisses her cheek, and walks off into the hills without looking back.

  When he finally returns he’s lean, hungry and worn. His great-grandson, who’s standing guard on the valley road, would have sent him away but his great-grandmother, the matriarch, has taught him to be hospitable. Philemon finds Baucis in their old house, which has grown new wings since he last saw it, though she hasn’t changed at all. She says, “What did you find in the world?”

  “Men with hearts and spears of bronze running to die under a rain of black arrows,” he says. “Ships breasting white seas. White cities full of secrets. A shrine where the god spoke in the whisper of oak-leaves. An island fortress where mirrors glitter on the battlements and set fire to ships with their concentrated light. I have killed in righteousness, and in anger, and held a hero’s head on my lap while he died. I’ve won gold, more than we once could’ve dreamt of, and lost it all.”

  “And now?” asks Baucis.

  “And now,” he says, “I’m back.”

  She tells him who’s married, given birth, and moved away, and how everyone in town calls her Grandmother. She’s a midwife, her face the first her descendants see and often the last as she nurses them through their agonies. She’s grateful for long life because those she loves need never know the world without her.

  Philemon and the young men go down to the valley floor and exhume the stones of the old drowned village which they use to build a wall around their town and a temple to Zeus the Traveler. Baucis plants an orchard within the wall and by the time the town over-spills its walls she’s harvesting its apples.

  “All these children,” she says one night as they lie in their old bed. “Consumed by their desires, by all their little loves and hates. Could anyone ever have been so young? I look at them and feel unnecessary.”

  “Then let us go away,” he says.

  “When?”

  “Now.” He writes a note for their eldest surviving grandson, and they slip off into the night.

  They’re gone for years and when they finally come back the town has become a city of marble temples, tall houses, soldiers in burnished helms. The field where he buried the raiders has become farmland, the mounds barely detectable. They see echoes of their own faces in the city’s aristocracy but now there are foreigners and slaves and strangers, and when by secret signs they make themselves known to the city’s lord he looks at them quizzically, then laughs and embraces them, says he saw them when he was a boy but never thought they’d be back, had never really believed his grandfather’s stories, but for all that he welcomes them, and says he’ll gladly cede his throne. Their fingers entwined, they say no, it isn’t necessary.

  In a certain valley there’s a city of white towers and banners shivering in the wind that’s said to be haunted by demons who watch and keep it and have the likeness of a boy and girl. They look like any mortals and can only be recognized by their antiquated speech and their stillness.

  They come and go; they live in distant kingdoms, take other lovers, part for years at a time. One day in Babylon Philemon is passing through the money-lenders’ quarter and sees Baucis washing baby clothes in a fountain. He greets her gallantly and courts her through that city’s luminous summer nights and soon he abandons his troop of mercenaries and she her most recent husband; when they come home over seas and high mountains they find their city burned, the walls crumbled, the valley abandoned, its fields sewn with salt. They rebuild their house in the same place it stood before, and more children come, and a new town rises, and they go away and come back again, and one night on an empty road they decide it’s been enough.

  They go to the temple of Zeus the Traveler and find their old guest waiting. “We’re done,” they say, “and ready for the end,” but their guest shakes his head and says, “Death separates, and I promised that you’d never be apart.”

  Baucis says, “Is there no escape, then? Are we prisoners of the world?” but he smiles at them and kisses them both once, and later the citizens find two trees growing in the temple courtyard, their trunks twined together, and their leaves neither faded nor fell as generations slept in their shade, their branches thickened, and their roots reached deeper.

  PART IV

  NEMESIS

  23

  NARCISSUS

  Narcissus was the most beautiful of men. Tiresias warned him to fear mirrors. Nemesis undid him.

  Beautiful rooms full of light and fire and everyone pretending not to look at me. I was much desired, by rich boys with their hearts breathily on their sleeves, rich mens’ wives d’un certain âge in a lot of kohl, urbane and athletic Athenians who spoke of friendship and excellence, spend-thrifty wine-factors whose chins trembled when I breathed on them. They offered gifts, which I accepted, and verses, which were always the same—I was perfect, moving and unmoved and flawless as stone, and the like. I never let them touch me, but gave them every chance to sigh.

  I’d been in Sybaris forever, it seemed, sleeping through the days and passing the nights in an endless succession of identical parties that left no more lasting impression than reflected voices, repeated conversations, wine-fumes and claustrophobia. I had friends or, rather, people I drank with, all of whom found inexhaustible delight in the company of louche musicians, noblemen in thin disguise, fire-dancers, fire-eaters, slaves with interesting histories, the more articulate sort of whore. In the false dawn, on the way home, when the wine was fading, I knew it was perilous to stay too long, that the demimonde must have a term, that it was, in fact, a banal and mediocre bohemia, but it was home, if home was anywhere, and when I tried to focus on another future my mind wandered.

  One night at a party someone quenched all the torches and left us fumbling in the dark, which delighted most of the celebrants, judging by the whispers and the laughter. Unseen strangers groped me and moved on; I’d never liked to be touched, and was searching for a place out of the flow when a hand closed on my wrist. The fingers were calloused and the ragged, broken nails dug into my skin. “Who is it?” I asked, and tried to pull away, but whoever it was was strong and I found I could smell him, his sweat and unwashed clothes and something metallic. Behind us a bonfire roared into life and I found myself looking into the face of an old man, a stranger, scars where his eyes had been. He said, “Narcissus, loveliest of men, fear mirrors.” I was going to ask him why, for I’d seen mirrors and been none the worse for it (though privately I thought my reputation for beauty was exaggerated) but there was a shriek of laughter behind me and I turned to see a girl standing by the fire with a clique of notably bitchy actors. She was dressed like they were, and stood like them, so much the thespian that I thought at first she must be a boy in drag, but no, there were breasts, or the beginnings of them—she was about thirteen. She stood between Thyestes the tragedian, who had a patronizing arm around her shoulders, and Bagoas, nobleman and occasional libertine, who was making a show of looking out into the crowd though all his attention was on the girl. Thyestes made most of his money off the stage. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen, I thought. She caught my eye and smiled, almost convulsively; I nodded to her and turned away but the blind man was already lost in the press of bodies and instead I found Artabazos, nominal playwright, gossip extraordinaire. “Who’s the little thing with the actors?” I asked.

  “Ah, the ingenue? Echo is her name. Echo from the provinces. Echo had a lover—her first, you see—rich family, vehement objections, but they had plenty of daughters, and it was easier to let her go. He dropped her, of course, and she washed up here. Thyestes found her sitting in an alley, filthy and sodden, hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead; at first she wouldn’t speak, then insisted she was nothing, no one and nameless, but now, as you can see, she’s very much at home.”

>   He paused, emotion moving over his face like weather. “Come home and have a drink with me, my dear. I have more to tell you,” he said, standing too close, vinous and flushing.

  “My excellent friend, I’m afraid I can’t go home with you—the truth is I don’t like you very much and you’re too poor to be worth deceiving.” Someone next to me laughed wheezily—I was regarded as a wit on the basis of such remarks, though they were only the truth.

  The party faded as parties will and it was too hot and too dark in the many low rooms so I decided to go home, but while I was looking for an exit I found myself on a balcony where Bagoas held the girl, Echo, in a sprawling embrace. I would have left them but I saw the rigor in her face, how she clutched her arms to her chest, how her shirt was half torn away.

  If I have a principle it’s that tricks should be treated genteelly. I said, “Bagoas, you’re a pompous and mediocre nobody. No one likes you very much and you’re welcome only when you’re paying, though you seem not, till now, to have known it. Also, I hear you’re often impotent, so why don’t you leave the girl and go practice raping your horses, or better yet your dogs?” Such spectacular rudeness can overwhelm the unprepared but Bagoas, to his credit, I suppose, glared at me, fumbled for his dagger and stood. I should have been afraid but I wasn’t, as in fact I was never afraid, though I couldn’t have said why—I’ve never been a warrior. I put on the expressionless mask I wore when I wanted to drop an admirer and said, “The captain of the praetorian said he’d do anything for a smile from me. What do you think he’d do to you if I gave him a kiss? I’m thinking something with hot iron and a saw.” I smiled pleasantly and watched his face, wondering what would happen next. He gave me a look intended to convey that this wasn’t over, that one day he would find me and et cetera, and stalked away.

  Echo had neither moved nor blinked. I arranged the remnants of her shirt over her frightfully skinny shoulders and said, “These people. No manners. Very disagreeable.”