Hellenic Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  * * *

  We met one another inside the foyer with the embrace of a pair of old lovers, something I have a great deal of experience in and typically don’t look forward to at all.

  Nothing quite reminds one of the transitory nature of youth and beauty as seeing someone remembered as a buxom twenty year old after forty or fifty years have passed. In most cases, time is extremely unkind, even though I generally say just the opposite to be polite. It can be pretty alarming. I remember running into a former lover I’d known as a slight, exciting, moderately creative seventeen year old when she was a 240 pound grandmother of twelve. And I could have sworn I’d just left her.

  But Cass hadn’t changed as much as she probably thought. She was still rail-thin and seemed as full of youthful vitality as ever. Her frantic auburn hair had gotten thinner and grayer, and her skin had loosened up, but she still could have passed for someone ten or fifteen years younger than the mid-sixties she had to be. She still smelled the same. I wondered if she was as limber as before, but that struck me as too much to expect.

  We separated, and she gave me a long stare with her cobalt blue eyes. “To think, I used to think of you as an older man.”

  “I am,” I pointed out.

  She slapped me on the arm. “You could pass for my son,” she scoffed. Then with a flourish, she said, “Come, to the kitchen!”

  I followed her theatrical gesture through the front sitting room—tastefully appointed and hardly used, from the looks of it—and into a very lived-in kitchen. On the counter were two steeping cups of tea, causing me to wonder if perhaps Cassandra had picked up additional soothsaying tricks since I’d last seen her. How would she know when to have the tea ready?

  “I took a guess on your arrival time,” she said, and for just a second I thought she’d been reading my mind. But nobody can do that. “You said you were an hour away, so I doubled the time and here you are.”

  “Why double it?” I asked, although it was hard to argue the point given how right she was.

  “You said once that the day you get behind the wheel of a car is the day you give up hope on surviving another century. I took that to mean you’re not a good driver, and the roads between hither and yon are littered with the remains of not-so-good drivers.”

  It shouldn’t surprise you to know Cassandra majored in English.

  She leaned towards me. “So, have you?”

  “Have I what?” I was fiddling with my tea bag. Not a big fan of the bags, but I understand their practicality. Still, brewed tea was always the best way to do things, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

  “Given up hope?”

  “Not as far as I know. Just seemed like too long of a walk. And I had a car already.”

  “Sure, sweetie. Not yours?”

  “No,” I smiled. “Not mine.”

  She nodded and expertly extracted her own teabag, squeezed the last remnants from it by pressing it against the concavity of the spoon, and flung it into an open trashcan that was sitting beside the counter.

  I sipped from my cup. Darjeeling. “So how have you been, Cass?”

  “I have been aging,” she said. “But not so badly.”

  “No, you’ve done a very good job of it.” I meant it as a compliment even though it probably didn’t sound like one. Yes, there is a reason I don’t speak to old lovers very often. I suck at it.

  “I teach,” she continued. “The classics, of course.”

  “Of course. No problems with dead white men?”

  “We continue to allow dead white men to be brilliant,” she smiled. She still had that smile. Honestly, I didn’t know whether I should be flirting or not.

  “Family?” I asked.

  She took a sip of her tea. “Never married. I had offers, but I found sleeping around was much more satisfying. I am looking into a couple of decent prospects now, if only just to get someone into this house willing to mow the lawn for free.”

  I grinned. Cassandra never had much use for the male portion of the species outside of their obvious insert-tab-A-into-slot-B qualities. It was true when we shared an apartment, and was apparently no less so now.

  Then we fell into an awkward silence. Possibly, it was my turn to say something about how my life had been going, but I had a feeling that telling her I drank and moved around a lot wasn’t going to make for a terribly engaging tale. Instead I asked, “Are you still an oracle?”

  “Of course I am. Isn’t that why you came?”

  “That’s the short version.”

  “I imagine the long version is a hell of a lot more interesting,” she remarked, still daintily sipping her tea. Something brushed up against my leg.

  “Ahh!” I cried out, somewhat less manly than was really warranted. It was a cat.

  “That’s Wally. Hello, Wally!” she chirped a couple of times and up jumped Wally, right onto the counter and yes, this bugged me. “You don’t like cats,” she said matter-of-factly, rubbing the beast gently behind its ear.

  “I used to hunt them, when they weren’t hunting me,” I pointed out. “It’s not something you get over. Wasn’t Wally the name of . . .”

  “Yes.”

  Cassandra “left” me for a guy named Wally. I put that in scare quotes because it’s not entirely fair to classify what Cass and I shared as a full-time monogamous relationship. One might be of a mind to assume that, no, of course it wasn’t because we were in Berkeley, it was the sixties, and we were all into this free love thing. Except free love was pretty much a bunch of crap. It was an ideal, but it only worked out in the sense that everybody assumed everybody else was doing the multiple-partner-no-attachments sex-with-whomever thing, somewhere, even if they themselves couldn’t quite get the hang of it. It’s a lot like cannibalism in that sense. It was always the other tribe that practiced cannibalism, while that other tribe was saying the same thing about your tribe, and really, hardly anybody was actually doing it.

  The unavoidable reality was people who have sex with other people develop attachments, and from that springs all that is good and bad about romance. So while we may have declared free love all we wanted, most of us were still looking for one person to spend time with in a relatively monogamous sense. The only difference was that when we became jealous due to some perceived infidelity, we blamed ourselves instead of the person who made us feel that way. It wasn’t healthy.

  Or maybe that was just me.

  “I give up; why Wally?” By all accounts, after I left and she moved in with Wally—who was an asshole, and I can produce independent confirmation of that—he didn’t treat her particularly well.

  “It gave me great satisfaction to have him neutered,” she said. “Isn’t that right, Wally?”

  I winced. “You don’t have a dog named Spencer, do you?”

  She laughed, and touched my arm affectionately. “No, darling. I never felt that way about you.” She shooed Wally away. “So let’s get down to it. I assume you are here on business?”

  “How’d you know I was coming?” I asked, happily getting back on-topic.

  “Ah. An excellent question.”

  “Are you going to answer it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Come.”

  She took my hand and led me from the kitchen, through a short hall, and to a set of steps. “It’s down here,” she stated, flipping on a light.

  The basement was, well, there’s no subtle way to describe it. It was an opium den. There was a huge couch with big, cushy pillows, heavy shag carpeting, a velvet-covered coffee table and, the pièce de résistance, a gigantic hookah.

  “Wow! Bet that would have come in handy back in the day.”

  “Ugh,” she sighed, plopping down on the couch. “Please don’t use that phrase. My students are constantly saying it.” She adopted a sing-songy high-pitched voice. “ ‘Was Shakespeare, like, rich, you know, back in the day an’ all?’ God! It’s horrible.”

  “You weren’t that different,” I pointed out.

  “D
on’t you dare repeat that outside of this room,” she snapped, possibly unaware that she sounded exactly like all the teachers she mocked when she was a student herself. She reached around the couch and emerged with a full bottle of tequila. “It was the best bottle I could find. I hope it’s okay. I know you can’t do much with what I plan to be using.” She tossed it to me.

  “Um, okay. I really just wanted information is all,” I meekly protested.

  “Don’t be such a woman, Spencer.” A lighter emerged from somewhere in her loose-fitting dress. “It’s time.”

  “Time for what?” I asked, as my hands unscrewed the bottle, although I didn’t tell them to do that.

  “Your first prophecy.” She looked up at me. “Don’t make that face. You knew how this little visit was going to end up.”

  “No,” I insisted, “I’m just trying to make sense of a few things.”

  Cassandra looked up at me. “You’re scared!” She laughed while I sat down and took a very generous swig of the tequila. “All this time, I thought you just didn’t have anything important to see me about.”

  “If you knew half of what I know about oracles you’d be scared, too.”

  She gave me a reassuring smile. “One mustn’t fear one’s future, darling.”

  “Do you tell that to everybody?”

  “Yes.” She sparked the lighter to life and got the pre-loaded hookah going. “This is the finest Turkish hashish I can get my hands on. Over time, the cheap stuff stopped working. And if you’re wondering how I can afford it, you should see my rates. But don’t worry; I’m doing this one as a favor. Drink.”

  I complied, although again, I didn’t tell my body to do anything of the kind. This is what happens when you put alcohol in my hand.

  “You’ve gotten good at this then,” I remarked. When I was helping her she was very hit-or-miss about the whole process. Sometimes it worked; sometimes she just giggled for a while and then passed out.

  “You have no idea,” she said calmly before taking several quick drags off the hookah hose to clear out the air trapped within.

  “I am entirely opposed to this,” I said. “For the record.”

  “I know.” Another sharp intake and this time she exhaled smoke. “But if you must know, I found out you were coming when I discovered your future intertwined with another client. I expected I would see you myself soon enough.”

  “Can’t you just tell me what you told her?” I asked.

  She smiled at my choice of pronouns. Or, she was smiling because the drag she’d just taken was particularly good. It was difficult to tell. She exhaled. “That’s confidential. You didn’t think I’d break my rules just for you, did you?”

  “Guess not.”

  “I will tell you that I first sat with her over a year ago. Now shut up.”

  I drank, and tried not to look surprised. If Ariadne had sat with Cassandra over a year ago, this must have been the first place she’d gone, not the last, and then a lot of things started to make sense. Depending on what the prophecy had been, how long it was, and how clearly it had been interpreted, it was possible Ariadne had set all of this up knowing exactly how it would all play out. She could have known that Mike would lead me to her home, that I’d be in Vegas, and that I’d come to see the oracle myself.

  With that, I felt as if I’d gotten all I needed to get from Cassandra, and nearly convinced myself to get up and leave the room. Instead, I watched the very familiar ceremony of an oracle getting into character.

  * * *

  When Cassandra first began seeing other peoples’ futures for them, it was my job to keep her grounded and help her to understand there wasn’t anything odd about what she was doing. I mean, it is odd in the sense that maybe a dozen people in the world at any given time are capable of doing it—and more than half of them will never know it insofar as a minimum requirement is the attainment of an altered state—but it’s not really a mystical event. The Ancients believed the Delphic oracles were tapping into a direct channel to the gods, because that was what they were conditioned to believe and because it just made a whole lot of sense. (And when there was a particularly tough customer I would, at times, pop in to play the part of a god in order to get them out. The Delphics worked on commission, and since some people were not all that happy with their readings, having a god turn up to scare them off helped. It was fun.)

  There wasn’t any higher power involved, but for a long time I couldn’t explain what it was either. I still can’t. But I do understand a little more about time as a concept, and that it’s possible to view time as something more than a straight-line narrative event. As I look at it, the oracle has the ability to break free, temporarily, of the constraints of time as we all perceive it, and catch glimpses of other points along the line.

  Cassandra took a while to get past the notion there was a sort of mental lens she could focus to get a clearer picture. I had to keep reminding her this was as good as it got, and it was up to the person she was sitting for to interpret what had been seen. I am well aware that this is the cop-out of all cop-outs when it comes to your standard fortune-telling charlatan, astrologer, and what-have-you, but in the case of an oracle, it’s perfectly true.

  And given how very many oracular declarations I’ve been privy to, I’ve gotten pretty good at helping people interpret them.

  Eventually, Cassandra got better at it and I had outlived my usefulness. This coincided neatly with the gradual reduction in the regularity and boisterousness of our sex life, and led to the insertion of Wally.

  * * *

  I’d nearly reached the halfway point on the bottle of tequila when Cassandra stopped puffing and entered a familiar calm state. She was sitting cross-legged in the center of her couch, immobile, the tip of the hookah pipe tube hanging loosely off the edge of the table. Her breathing was minimal and her eyes were closed. The hookah suddenly made a whole lot of sense to me. Any hand-held device—a pipe or a joint—might at this point cause a fire, as Cass was no longer home. I found I was unconsciously holding my own breath.

  A few minutes later her eyes snapped open, and her pupils clouded over, not appearing to focus on anything in the room.

  “Ask!” she commanded.

  When seeking an oracle, it’s always a good idea to have a question in mind ahead of time. I had nothing, because I didn’t really want to do this. Truthfully, the question has only a minor connection to the answer because she was looking at the future in general terms. Thus, a question wondering if you should marry your girlfriend gets roughly the same answer as wondering if you needed to pull all of your IBM stock because in both cases, she’s checking in on you at some distant future point. That’s what I mean when I say it’s up to the questioner to figure out how the answer pertains to them. If you’re told that you will be fruitful and you take it as a green light to get married, okay. But it could also mean you should get your money out of the stock because it’s about to plummet. Or it could mean neither, and she saw you working in an orange grove for minimum wage to support your many children after you moved your money into a different stock and lost all of it on an even worse investment. The future is tricky like that.

  So I went for the simplest question I could think of. “What will happen when I catch up with Ariadne Papos?”

  Cassandra rocked back and forth like a machine churning out a solution.

  Finally, she spoke.

  “The tree of life will strike, red on white, red on white! Godhood reclaimed marks the sojourner’s end and the pretender’s fall. Seek the source!”

  And then she was done. She closed her eyes again, shuddered, and toppled over onto her side. It would be a few minutes before she came around, which was okay; I needed time to figure out what I’d just heard, and maybe to hope desperately I’d heard it wrong.

  Because as near as I could tell, Cassandra Jones had just predicted my death.

  THE ONLY MADNESS GREATER THAN CHALLENGING FATE IS ACCEPTING IT.

  From the dialogue
s of Silenus the Younger. Text corrected and translated by Ariadne

  I needed some air, so I extricated myself from Cassandra’s basement and found my way to the kitchen. With the tequila bottle running on low, I went through the cupboard until I found a backup bottle of cheap coffee liqueur. From there, I discovered the rear patio, which overlooked a modest but tasteful garden, just about right for somebody like Cass. I sat down on a lawn chair, took another large swig of the tequila bottle, and pondered things while every mosquito on the west coast slowly found its way to me.

  I mulled over the sojourner’s end Cassandra mentioned. In several of the old cultures, that was my nickname—the sojourner. The Greeks loved that about me. I used to carry messages from place to place, just because everyone knew me, or knew of me, and figured I’d be heading in the right direction eventually. And I usually was. I couldn’t imagine it being anyone but me.

  The rest of the prophecy I couldn’t figure out. The part about the tree of life striking, and the red on white was entirely open to interpretation. Maybe it meant the Red Sox were going to win the World Series. I likewise had no idea who the pretender was, although I seemed to recall a rock band by that name. Godhood reclaimed? That could also mean anything. It could mean that only God could help me—and since I had not once gotten help from any god, up to this point, I wasn’t expecting any in my future—or it could mean the tree of life was also a god. Either way, there were a lot more gods kicking around in the prophecy than I was entirely comfortable with.

  Inevitably, I would figure these things out only when it was entirely too late to be of use. That’s how it usually works. And it wasn’t the sort of thing I could run away from either. That was the really bad part.

  I’m not a huge fan of fate as a concept. In the old days, people were so hung up on fate that they didn’t do anything at all; they just mucked about resignedly and figured they couldn’t change what was in store for them. Not so different from people who obsessively play the lottery, hoping luck will drop a crap-load of money on them so they can live comfortably, when it would probably be a better idea if they just got a good job and stuck with it for a while.