Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  Looking at the photos, I couldn’t think of any animal that might have made the wounds, and I’m pulling from a much wider data pool than your average zoologist. A dragon, maybe, but dragon wounds were usually wider and more definitively lethal. And dragons are extinct.

  When the infection was fought back, and Peter’s fever finally abated, the police were called in to ask him what had happened to his friend. His official response was short and not terribly illuminating, essentially saying they would never believe him if he told them. Beyond that, he wouldn’t utter a word until after the arraignment.

  By the time Peter was released from the hospital, the L.A. County District Attorney had put together what he thought was enough of a case to try for a murder conviction, and the grand jury agreed.

  But the case had a few weaknesses. Even I could see that, and the closest I ever got to a defense attorney was turning on the television. For starters, there was no body, and the only proof that Lonnie had met a tragic end was Peter’s own statement to his father that something had gotten Lonnie (which Senator Arnheit would probably deny). There was also no discernible motive. On the other hand, Lonnie Wicks had still not emerged from the Amazon, and the day Peter walked out, he was carrying with him several of Lonnie’s possessions: his bedroll, his tinderbox, and most damningly, Peter was wearing one of Lonnie’s shirts.

  And there were the wounds on Peter. Lonnie owned a large Bowie knife he was rather proud of, and the district attorney had an expert who was prepared to testify that the wounds were consistent with the knife. They weren’t, because knife attacks don’t generally result in parallel wounds, but hey, I’m not an expert.

  Peter made bail. His passport was confiscated and he still wasn’t very healthy, so his high-priced attorneys had no trouble convincing the judge to hand him over to his family.

  And then he disappeared. That was five months ago.

  I couldn’t imagine why any of this mattered to Ariadne, but obviously it did. What I did understand, finally, was why Mike was so interested in finding Ariadne. It wasn’t really her he was after. It was Peter.

  There were dozens of photos in the Arnheit file. The very last one was a photo of Lonnie Wicks, dated about a year before his apparent death. It looked like someone had snapped it at a cookout somewhere. Captured in the shot were Lonnie, his parents, an older man I didn’t recognize, and agent Mike Lycos with a big smile and a Frisbee in his mouth as a joke and one arm around young Lonnie.

  * * *

  So I had the Arnheit case, a dead mystery cult, a woman who was obsessed with both (and with me), a non-human FBI agent, possibly with vengeance on his mind, and an unknown gunman. None of it was coming close to adding up, which was downright annoying as I am generally pretty good at this sort of puzzle.

  I sipped on the stale coffee that was now eating a large hole through the lower portion of my stomach, and tried flipping through the pages one more time to see if an inspirational thunderbolt was hiding in there anywhere. I ended up on a scratch page. Ariadne had kept a blank sheet of paper on her desk for jotting down random notes, the occasional phone number, and doodles that all looked a bit like the creature from the Black Lagoon.

  None of the notes made much sense out of context, and I was ready to move on to the next page when I realized I was looking at a name, and that I recognized the name.

  “More coffee, dearie?” Linda asked, as I jumped several inches off the bench. I didn’t realize she was there.

  “Actually, no. Do you have a payphone?”

  “Near the john,” she said, pointing with the half empty urn.

  “Thanks.” I scooped up the pages and shoved them back into the bag in case Linda was the curious sort. There wasn’t anything in there that was particularly damning, but still, they were confidential files. Not that I had any more clearance than Linda did.

  I reached the phone and dialed up the operator, which naturally didn’t work. Back when phones were just becoming regular things, you could actually pick one up and get connected to someone, and you could ask that someone to connect you to another someone, and then they went and did it. It was an amazing thing. Now you have to pay to get the phone company on the line, pay again to get the number, and pay a third time so they can dial it for you. You would think I’d be used to this sort of thing by now.

  “City and state,” asked a very congested woman after I’d successfully pumped some change into the phone.

  “Um, Berkeley, California,” I said haltingly. I at first thought she meant what city and state I was calling from, and I couldn’t imagine why it would matter. Again, technologically speaking, I’m still a caveman.

  “Number for?” she asked.

  “Cassandra Jones,” I answered. And if Cassandra had moved from the Berkeley area this was going to take a very long time.

  The pause on the other end of the line was quite dramatic. “Hold please for your number.” And then a computer read the number to me. Because apparently it’s too much work to have the operator read off ten digits.

  I jotted the number down on my hand, hung up, and then dialed it. The machine on the other end of the line—a different machine than the one that had given me the number in the first place—listed an exorbitant sum necessary to complete a call of this magnitude. You would think they were laying the phone wires one call at a time. I pumped in the change, nearly handing over that drachma Ariadne had given out as a tip to Chester the bartender, which I can’t imagine the phone would have taken kindly to.

  The phone rang, and a familiar voice answered.

  “Cass, it’s an old friend,” I said.

  “Spencer!” she exclaimed. I figured she’d remember me. “I knew I’d be hearing from you soon.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course, darling. It’s what I do. When can you be here?”

  ORACLE:

  WHEN SERVING ONE TO FIND THE OTHER,

  LIES WILL TRAP YOU ‘TWIXT THE TWO.

  FOR THE OTHER WILL NOT GREET THE ONE YOU SERVE

  AND ALL WILL BE LOST E’ER THE SHADOWS DANCE.

  SILENUS:

  WHAT? YOUR SPEECH IS WOEFULLY UNCLEAR.

  ORACLE:

  SUCH IS THE WAY OF PROPHECY.

  From The Tragedy of Silenus, text corrected and translated by Ariadne

  This was not my first time in California, although aside from the occasional connecting flight, I hadn’t spent any real time in the state since 1967, and that time was spent on the campus of UC Berkeley.

  As I may have mentioned before, there are two kinds of people who are great to be around if you feel like confessing your immortality, and not get a lot of blank stares in return—bar drunks and college students. In the case of the former, that’s sort of easy to understand because many bar drunks are also semi-crazy people, and semi-crazy people are having their sense of reality mucked up on such a regular basis that one more muck-up isn’t really that much of a big deal for them. With college students, it’s hard to say exactly what it is.

  In the sixties, it helped immensely that so many of the very best—or at least the most entertaining—students were also stoned a great deal of the time. Same with the seventies, but the drugs of choice—and the overall philosophy of the students—had changed a lot by then, so it was more difficult to find an entertaining student population that wasn’t also seriously considering taking hostages for some cause or another. And the eighties and nineties were the absolute worst, up until the latter stages of the nineties, when cultural relativism and deconstructionism started to become vogue. This worked for me because to a cultural relativist, it makes perfect sense that in My Culture immortality was a fact, and they felt compelled to accept that at face value, which led to some mind-blowing discussions. At least for them. Inevitably, the deconstructionists brought up their ongoing problems with certain dead white men, which got sort of uncomfortable given how many of those dead white men I happened to know. But they were still pretty fun.

  Amazingly, deconstructi
onists and cultural relativists were almost never stoned, which meant the crap they were spouting came to them when they were in a non-altered state, so they were invariably fairly stupid, or at least not nearly as smart as they thought they were. They also never passed out, which was unfortunate. The upside was that I never felt left out of the fun, insofar as I can’t get stoned.

  I don’t know why this is, but I’ll wager it has a lot to do with why I can’t be poisoned or get sick, so it’s not a bad tradeoff. Still, it looks like fun.

  Anyway, I met Cassandra Jones on the UC Berkeley campus at a party. Well, no, a party implies a cause for celebration of some kind, and we weren’t celebrating something. Really, from a definition standpoint, nobody can fairly describe an event that occurs nightly a party at all.

  I digress.

  Cassandra was a student, and a part of the counter-cultural flower child phenomenon that seemed so much fun back then but nowadays looks silly. For my part, I always thought it was silly, but as I was a raging drunk at the time, I didn’t do much complaining about it.

  I remember very clearly when things went weird for her. We were sitting around a tree on a hill somewhere, and she was mad stoned on some hashish that a guy named Goofy had scored in Mexico. (Goofy was not his real name. His real name is Lawrence and he is now a prosperous estate attorney in Butte, Montana. It’s sort of a hobby of mine to look up people I knew as total nut jobs to see what happened to them.)

  Cassandra was sitting cross-legged, and had adopted a Buddha-like pose— although she was not in the least bit fat or bald—and had not spoken for several minutes, despite a very rousing discussion the other five of us were having on the merits of Paul McCartney’s bangs and what they said about the geopolitical status of third world nations vis-a-vis colonialist America and the socio-economic pressures of hair products in general, and more specifically, how napalm and hair spray are really pretty much the same thing when you look at it a certain way.

  See, you don’t get that kind of conversation just anywhere.

  Quite suddenly Cassandra opened her eyes, and with a very strange expression on her face declared loudly, “Ask!”

  My four stoned friends found this exceptionally funny. Me, I sobered up, because I’d seen this act before.

  “Ask what?” I posed.

  “Ask,” she repeated. Her eyes were unfocused, like . . . well, yes, like she was stoned, but more than that. Like she was staring intently at something that was actually on the inside of her eyeballs.

  “What is her trip?” asked Chandra, a lovely girl to my right whom I had fully intended to bed later in the evening. (I didn’t.)

  “Ask her something,” I suggested. “A decision. Do you have a decision you need to make soon? An important one?”

  “You serious?” Chandra laughed.

  “Completely.”

  The others quieted down, as this had ceased being something to giggle over. Chandra looked furtively at the others. “I can’t,” she muttered, suddenly very nervous. “C’mon, someone else.”

  “Okay,” Kenneth piped in. When he wasn’t stoned, Kenneth was an extraordinarily shallow person, which was why he was always stoned. He had a great future ahead of him that probably would consist of robbing somebody’s pension fund. “Should I go skiing over the break?” he asked. Kenneth was from a rich family; it was his money Goofy had used in Mexico.

  Cassandra sat quietly for about thirty seconds, which seemed like approximately two days to us.

  “Dude, I think she’s asleep,” Goofy suggested.

  “Naw, her eyes are open,” Kenneth argued rightly.

  “Why doesn’t she blink?” Chandra asked.

  Suddenly, Cassandra boomed, “You will soar ‘ere the pines do walk. Beware the straightest path.” And then she closed her eyes.

  “What?” Kenneth was confused. “What the hell did she just say?”

  “You’re going to have to figure that out.” I crawled to Cassandra’s side and put my arm around her. If this was what I thought, she was about to lose some motor coordination.

  “Figure what out?” Kenneth shouted.

  “Soaring through the walking pines or something,” Goofy suggested.

  “No, she was asking about the sidewalk,” Chandra offered.

  Dear Baal, these people were stoned. “Kenneth,” I began, as Cassandra predictably slumped into my lap, “what she said to you was important. You need to figure out what it means and act accordingly.”

  “Man, you’re stoned,” Kenneth laughed.

  “No, I’m drunk. There’s a difference.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “What . . .” Cassandra asked, her eyes opening again and looking surprised to be in my lap. “Spencer? What happened?”

  “You’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Did I . . . was I talking? What was I saying?”

  “Your first prophecy,” I said.

  “My what?”

  “Cassandra, did your mother ever tell you why she gave you that name?”

  “No,” she answered, trying to sit up and ultimately failing. “Just liked the sound of it, I think.”

  “Ask her sometime. I’m betting it’s an old family name.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re an oracle, Cassandra.”

  * * *

  In truth, the original Cassandra wasn’t an oracle at all. As Homer wrote it, she was given the gift of future-sight and the concomitant curse of having nobody believe her when she foretold the future. But she was just the stuff of legend, whereas the Delphic oracles were very real. And like the Cassandra of Berkeley, the oracles of the temple of Delphi were stoned when they gave their prophecies. The temple itself was built over a fissure, and rising from that fissure was a gas that had a psychotropic effect. I know this not because I ever went to them for advice, but because I used to hang in the temple after hours with a couple of the girls. (The gas made them almost perpetually horny, which was quite a conundrum for a group that was both highly respected and deeply feared by everybody in Greece: everyone was afraid to touch them. Worse, seventy percent of the male population was devotedly homosexual, whereas I was perfectly happy with either sex at the time.)

  As I have said before, and will say again, as far as I can tell there is no such thing as real magic. But oracles don’t perform magic. They aren’t fortune-tellers either, not in the sense that most of us understand the term to mean. They can’t find lost children, divine the identity of a murderer, or tell you much at all about what your future holds. It’s very strict. You ask them a question, they give you an answer, and that’s it. They can see major events but they’re brief, episodic flashes, often without context, and always presented cryptically.

  And there’s no point asking for clarification. I brought that up once to a Delphic oracle who informed me she described what she saw—nothing more, nothing less. The real problem is figuring out what to make of the answer you get.

  That was Kenneth’s problem. He didn’t put much thought into it, or he would have realized Cassandra had told him not to go skiing. He went, and found his favorite trail was temporarily closed. But at the end of what was described to me as a glorious day on the mountain, Kenneth challenged his buddy to a race to the bottom of the hill. He decided to win that race by taking the most direct route, i.e., the closed trail. The problem was the trail was being widened at the time, and right as Kenneth soared down the slope, a crew was busy removing a large pine tree. They had felled it and dragged it right into the middle of the slope. It was twilight by then, and Kenneth didn’t see the felled tree until it took out his ankles. He slid head first into another tree. Miraculously, he didn’t die. But he never walked again, and took five years to get back onto solid foods.

  I never formally sought an oracle’s advice. The whole idea was just too much of a head-trip. I did spend a couple of years helping out Cassandra, however, who needed all the assistance she could get and was extremely fortunate to know a guy w
ho had kept the company of the original oracles. The sex was pretty good, too.

  * * *

  I was a little hung up on what Cassandra had said to me on the phone, shortly before giving me directions. She had been expecting me. The claim that she knew because that was her job was more than a little disingenuous because she can’t give herself a prophecy. In order for her to know I was coming, she had to see me in someone else’s future. So whom had she been sitting for?

  This thought was what occupied my time as I made the two-hour trip from the diner to her home in Berkeley. Well, that and the constant recitation of the proper steps necessary to operate a motorized vehicle. (It would have been an even longer trip were it not for the miraculous discovery of fifth gear I made about midway through the drive.) The most obvious candidate was Ariadne, and that brought up another, much more interesting question. Did she intend for me to follow her all along?

  The drachma, the note in my hotel room, and the orgy of information on the walls of her study—which more and more seemed like a place she tacitly expected me to see—all suggested I was following a deliberate trail of bread crumbs. If she had also gone to Cassandra, the possibility existed that she not only knew much more about me than anyone living should have; she might know more than I do. She might know my future.

  I was probably missing some information. It would have been nice to ask Mike about it, except I never waited long enough at the diner for him to show. He probably assumed I headed straight for Canada. And really, I should have.

  It was dark by the time I reached Cassandra’s house, a nice Victorian-style place within spitting distance of the campus. She’d done well for herself. Not spectacularly well, but well enough. I wondered if oracle duty was her sole source of income.

  She was waiting on the porch when I pulled up.

  “Spencer!” she called out. “You haven’t changed at all, damn you!”

  “You know how it is.” I shut down Mike’s car and stepped out for a good stretch.

  “Yes, I do,” she answered. “Come on in, I’ve already brewed some tea for us.”