Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  Though I shy away from the decisive act it comes easily to fall and the wind whips around me as I go over the side and then I pierce the sea without a sound and the salt stream is blood-warm and welcoming. I surface, kick off my dress and set out for the island, swimming underwater while my breath holds, and it’s a long way but I don’t seem to tire as the surging waves lift me up and lower me and the sea seems to cleanse me of everything that’s passed. I look back when I hear shouting from the ship, see light flaring in the lanterns, but the ship is already relegated to the past and I swim through the surf toward the shore and my hands scrabble at the sand, and then I’m on my knees among the breakers, and then I’m walking away.

  The wind blows over me and the sand warms as the sky lightens and soon it seems I’ve been walking here forever and there could never be another place for me. The morning light fills the gulf of sky and illuminates the white cliffs above the sand and looking back I see the ship beached a long way back and the men clambering down, but I ignore them in favor of a pale woman walking in the white foam on the narrow strand and her calm is fathomless and I wonder if she’ll run or try to escape but the cliffs above the beach are sheer and crumbling and in any case the island is empty, the abode of gulls and wind, and there’s nowhere for her to go. I watch her a long time and I want to ask why this is happening, and what end my fall could serve, and finally, though I haven’t spoken, in a voice barely audible over the receding waves she says, All will die, and all will die, and the pride on which they preen themselves will be their undoing, and they’ll spill their hearts’ blood or drink deep of black ocean or die by the hand of a woman betrayed. Paris with his girl’s hands and eyes cares for nothing and will be hated by all and die shamefully, and Menelaus will be eroded by years and by pride and on the night of his triumph he’ll embrace a phantom. Hector will go to fight a man he knows will beat him and before he dies he’ll break before his wife and his kinsmen. Even Priam, who does a host’s duty, will see his city broken and his sons burn away like grass in a fire, for Troy’s towers are the kindling for their funeral pyre, and Helen is the spark.

  The beach rounds a bend and ends in black rocks, booming waves, broken surf, and there’s no hope of passage. The woman eyes the cliffs but it’s impossible and I say, “But I have done nothing, and these men are nothing to me, and their pride is nothing to me, and I have done nothing but play the roles I’ve been assigned,” but then our conversation is cut short by the arrival of Paris and his brother and all the sailors, and though hope is gone the pale woman turns and pushes past them without the least acknowledgment and for a moment I think she’ll outface them but then Paris grabs her wrists and the sailors seize her legs, and she breaks then, and tries to thrash free but they bind her hands with tarred rope and tie a halter around her neck and lead her away over the sand like a slave and she seems barely to be present though her face is as luminous as a cloud before the sun, and now they’re dwindling down the beach, and Hector looks back once, and now they’re indistinguishable, and now the heat haze obscures the distant sails unfurling, and now the ship is a blur on the horizon, and now it’s gone, leaving me alone here, kneeling in the sand as the gulls scream and the tide comes in.

  Time passes, and I sit by the shore and watch the water, and then one day at dawn I see the sea-nymphs surging through the waves and when I cry out they answer. They take me to a roofless cavern by the sea where they and their sisters lie in the sun and weave the days away. I’ve found my place here, and I’ll never leave, but my sisters are restless and sometimes go roaming in the waters, but when the white surf brings them back with stories of a war for a woman in a city in the east I don’t listen as it has nothing to do with me.

  33

  ELYSIUM

  Menelaus was Helen’s husband. After many travails, he brought her back from Troy. The gods deemed him noble so they gave him a good after-life.

  I wake in the dark to the water whispering over the hull. The stars shine through the open hatch, the timbers creak, and behind everything is the sea’s polyphony. The boat glides purposefully through the night, borne by the current. There’s no one else aboard, and no one else for miles. I close my eyes.

  When next I wake the boat has run aground and the cabin is full of light. Waves lap against the hull, and the day is passing, but I lie in my hammock watching a square of sunlight slide down the wall, over the floor and into my eyes, and I could lie here forever, savoring the slow passage of time, but instead I rise and gather my notebooks, dip nets and collecting jars.

  On deck the day is blinding. The prow has incised the wet sand of one island among the innumerable islands where the tide pools punctuate the low black rock. I put on a hat made from a piece of canvas, stained with salt and tar, worn, like my ragged trousers, in grudging concession to the sun.

  I shimmy up the mast but see no sails, no glittering towers, no distant mountains, just the sun’s glare on wet rock and water, the glittering ripples in the channels, the incandescent white clouds like burning towers in the east, and it’s just as well, I think, this loneliness, this nothing.

  I pick my way barefoot over the sun-warmed rock and sit by a pool where blue crabs skulk among the translucent anemones and tiny eels flee my shadow for the safety of thick weed. With my face inches from the shining water I see the black mollusks, the branching corals, the darting fish the size of pebbles, and for a moment I seem to intuit the totality of all the lives in this pool, and their indifference to me.

  I pull my net through the water and draw up a crab. It explores my hand lethargically, unalarmed by its sudden translation into air, its steps pricking my palm. I set it down on a stone where it works its palps incuriously as I draw it in the notebook dedicated to its species.

  I flip through the notebook’s thousands of drawings and as I go back through the months the crabs’ shells become rounder, their claws longer. I have an intuition for an order in the way the animals change across the miles and the years, and one day when all my notebooks are full (there are crates of blank ones in the hold) it will be time to approach this mystery, but that day is far away, and for now I’m happy just recording life in its profusion.

  In the afternoon the water’s tone changes as the tide starts to rise. I move my equipment back to the boat, then stand a moment by my pool, which I’ll never see again. I put my shoulder to the boat and push, my feet sinking into the sand, the boat soon bobbing in the channel, gaining way as the current takes it. For a moment I imagine letting it leave, stranding myself on these black stones among the waterways—how well I’d come to know these few pools—but then I scramble onto a low rock, leap to catch the railing, pull myself aboard. As the sun sinks the water rises and I lie sprawled on the deck with my head over the side watching the passing of the white sands, the deep urchin beds, the verdant fields of anemone.

  Later I wake without knowing why. It’s the last vestige of afternoon, and I’m on the verge of going back to sleep but then I see the wet footprints fading on the deck. I’m very still, listening, and there’s a pressure in the air, but no sound besides the water rushing, the sails creaking in the breeze. The sun sinks, the light fades and the wind and the current carry me on my way. Lightning illuminates the cloud massifs in the east, then subsides, and I lie under the stars, waiting, listening to the sea.

  * * *

  That night I dream of dying—the pain, the tedium, the durationless wait. Helen sat by my bed as my delirium deepened, and at times I thought I could see through her; I asked her if she was a god, or a ghost, or something worse, but she only stroked my hair and held a cloth to my lips when I coughed up blood, which was strange, for she’d never been kind to me. “I wish I’d died as a child,” I said, desperate to wound her. “I wish I’d been spared you, and Troy, and all the squandered years.” Later I told her I loved her helplessly, despite everything, and always had. My breath came in a trickle and the room was getting brighter, though I think it was night, and then her face was inches from min
e, the curtain of her hair secluding us. She said, “Very well. You’ve suffered enough,” and I tried to touch her but my hand passed through her, as though she were insubstantial, no more solid than a cloud, and then she wasn’t there at all. I called out for the servants but none came so I rose out of bed, which I hadn’t done in weeks, and went to look for them but when I went out the door I found myself not in Sparta but in an abandoned city of white mansions and long alamedas in whose gardens I sat a long time in the sun, and then I walked down a road toward the roar of the sea.

  * * *

  In the morning the boat grounds on a new beach and once again I climb the mast but see no one and nothing though I look a long time. Later in the day I’m drawing a coral when a shadow falls over me and I look up to see Helen smiling down at me. I set aside my notebook and lead her into the hull’s little shade and my need is such that I omit the niceties and her dress is still on as I hold her in place and my awareness narrows, then vanishes.

  We doze in the shade on the sand. Eventually she touches my face and says, “You’ve been here a long time.”

  I say nothing.

  “These islands aren’t the end,” she says. “There’s an ocean, as wide as the sky, its waves like mountains, storm-wracked and fathomless, and beyond it is a new country. Even I have only had glimpses of its cities, but I can tell you the way.”

  “You’ve said as much before.”

  “I think I’ll say as much again.”

  “Would you be there, in this ocean, or across it?”

  “I’m not even really here.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  She says nothing more but watches me as I drift off to sleep.

  When I wake, I’m alone. The tide is plucking at the boat but isn’t full yet so I go back to the pool, the nets, the jars, my work.

  34

  CLYTEMNESTRA

  The wind wouldn’t rise to carry the Greek armada to Troy. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis to unlock it. Clytemnestra was Agamemnon’s wife and Helen’s sister.

  Somewhere a city is burning.

  Another night on the walls of Argos, cloak clutched against the wind, staring into the dark. Across the harbor is the blackness of a mountain on whose slopes a red light sparks, flickers, flares. It’s the signal-fire, cold this last decade, sending a grey thread of smoke rising into the stars’ density, the radiant center of the night.

  Somewhere flames surge and roil over blackening towers as the savage Greeks in the littered streets look up into raging light and screams and smoke roar upward.

  The flame across the water implies a tower in remote mountains where a sentry saw a pillar of smoke and flame rise rippling over Ilium and, shaking off his torpor, put his torch to years-dry kindling. In another tower another sentry saw that blaze and so lit his own fire and so on in a succession of conflagrations surging between islands and towers over dark valleys and miles of black ocean, traveling swifter than arrows, or bad news. I imagine a shepherd drowsing with his flocks looking up in wonder at the firelight pulsing on the distant heights and not knowing, as I know, what it means, which is that Helen is in bonds again, that great Hector’s bones are blackening, that Troy has gone up in flames today, that my husband is coming home.

  The sliver moon’s scant light reveals the white breakers on the beach where I threw his scepter into the water—it had belonged to his fathers, and was meant for his sons, too precious to risk in a war across the sea. There are the stables where I lay with three slaves in succession the night after his departure; regrettably, I didn’t conceive, and so lost my chance to put a bastard on his throne. There’s the white hemisphere of Agamemnon’s father’s tomb, where I seduced Aegisthus, the singer left behind to entertain me; I got him drunk, first—the done thing, I believe—but even drunk he said he could not possibly, that it was a matter of loyalty, of honor, for Agamemnon had treated him with respect, but I rolled my eyes and pulled up my dress and, behold, he could after all. Moonlight glows on the white columns of the temple where he slaughtered my daughter like an animal, where he cut out her bones and sent the fat of her thighs up in smoke on the altar.

  The wind had been dead, the army exasperated, the becalmed armada decaying in the harbor, and the oracle had told him the gods wanted blood. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled back her head as her hands scrabbled at the knife. I was at the back of the crowd with the other wives; I would have stopped him, somehow, had I been close enough, though I’m only a woman. I thought at first it must be a mistake—had he not felt her sleeping breath on his shoulder and the softness of her hair?

  Afterwards, I was going to hang myself. I had the idea she’d be lonely, down in the shadow-lands, afraid of the caverns, the dark, the other ghosts, that even then she needed me, but as I tied the rope to the rafter I remembered how he’d washed his hands in a fountain after killing her with the look of a man relieved to have put a disagreeable task behind him, and my mind ignited like dry kindling; suddenly I was empty of love, and had no purpose in life but to be his undoing. I’ve been waiting a long time for my husband to come home.

  The wind rose on the morning after her death and they wanted to set sail while the light held so I hid a dagger in my sleeve and went to the docks. I found him shouting orders, and he didn’t seem to see me as I pushed toward him through the crowd. I had a vivid presentiment of how it would feel to drive the blade into his stomach, but what if he survived the first thrust? For him, a pale scar, a new wife and an ugly story; for me, a life locked in a tiny room with my daughter’s ghost whispering in the dark. Patience, I thought. Make sure of it. I caught his sleeve and said, “Come to my room a last time before you go,” and made a show of carnal promise but he kissed my cheek and said there was no time. I stood on the dock, holding the knife, watching the ships dwindle.

  * * *

  A month after I see the signal-fire a knot of ragged ships straggles into the harbor. They look like refugees, or pirates down on their luck, but then I recognize the faded tritons on the prows. I’m already on the dock when the Argives disembark, like feral grandfathers now, and among them is a wiry grey-beard moving with the slow care of many wounds. I look away, look back, then recognize Agamemnon.

  He weeps as he embraces me, the racking sobs of a man who didn’t think he’d be returning. He’s weak with years and battles, and his men, straggling up toward the city, are too far away to help him, and my dagger is right at hand. I couldn’t have hoped for a better opportunity, but my knife-hand won’t move, and then I’m wiping away his tears, telling him to come up to the castle, to come home.

  I draw his bath. The steaming water glows red in the torch-light as I pour it over him into the deep marble tub. The bath slops and surges as he mumbles, hugs himself, rubs his face in his hands. He’s pitiful, and it occurs to me I could care for him now, ease his way into old age and the tomb, but I think of my daughter’s face as his knife touched her.

  “Agamemnon,” I say, my intention in my voice, and he turns sharply, glaring, and he knows, I can see that he knows, but he shakes his head and says, “Forgive me, my love. I’ve been too long among enemies,” and I pull my lips back from my teeth as I pick up the knife.

  The blade scrapes on bone and he surges out of the tub, a wave of water soaking me, the knife twisting in my hand as he tries to grab my arm but, slippery with soap, I pull free my hand and drive the knife into his flank, and then again. As in bad dreams it seems to do him no harm and when he backhands me in the face something cracks in my nose. I pick myself up as he flounders in the tub, trying to stand but falling across the rim, and then it’s as though I’ve lived this moment a thousand times, as though I have been rehearsing it for years as I grab his hair, yank back his head and look into the pained surprise of his staring eyes as I cut his throat, and I’m shrieking obscenities, sailors’ curses I didn’t know I knew, and then the knife clinks on the wet tile as his life spurts away into the tub.

  Something rises up in me, and it see
ms that this must be the end, that the world must come apart now, and I embrace this, but my heart slows and the fire that filled me fades into nothing and I’m standing here, my dress soaked, watching my husband’s corpse float in the thick red water, Iphigenia these ten years dead.

  PART V

  DIONYSOS

  35

  MIDAS

  In his youth, Midas traveled with Dionysos. In his maturity, Midas invented coined money, which transformed the economy of the ancient world.

  In grey hills far from home Dionysos laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “I have loved you like a brother, and I will never forget you, but here we part.” A first snow was falling and my laughter plumed white but his eyes were hard and when I asked him why, he said nothing, and I was going to argue, or perhaps plead, but then I was descending through the rolling white hills, and had been for some time, though I didn’t remember deciding to go.

  No one and nothing but the empty air, the low clouds, the hills’ swell and fall. Footprints receding behind me in the snow, and before me a white emptiness, as though I were entering a new-made country of a vast and stifling blankness. Snow swirled on cold wind as I shuffled through the thickening powder, the numb solitary hours passing. Some vapid part of me kept looking for him from the crest of each hill, behind every lonely, snow-laden oak, but he was never there, and even the memory of my time with him seemed to be slipping away, the vibrant intensity of those years reduced to a blur of wine fumes, receding laughter, firelight glimpsed in a wood. I wept without shame or restraint, and wondered if I’d already been forgotten.