The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  I came to the great bronze doors with the snarling lions and pushed them open. The windowless room looked no different in daylight, but the throne was empty.

  I turned around. A knot of guards had bunched in the open doorway to watch. Their faces said getting out would be harder than coming in. I kept turning, like a hanged man twisting on the rope. Like a man spinning in the air as he drops down a well-shaft.

  Dion pushed his way through the guards. He must have run: his hair was askew, his face red. He looked like a boy again.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I wanted to see Agathon’s murderer. I wanted to call him a killer to his face.’

  ‘What would that achieve?’

  ‘It’s telling the truth.’

  ‘And if he executed you for saying it – would that make it better?’

  I dropped my head. ‘It’s my fault.’

  The moral is: take warning from the misfortunes of others. I’d come to the tyrant’s palace, and never noticed Agathon’s footprints leading me in. I’d insulted Dionysius, and thought there was nothing he could do to touch me.

  ‘Dionysius was sending me a message.’

  ‘Then listen to it,’ Dion implored me. ‘You’re a wise man. Don’t step into the trap he’s set for you.’

  ‘Socrates could have run away. He was completely innocent. But he took his punishment bravely.’

  ‘And did that make anything better?’

  The question lingered in the open room, until heavy footsteps chased it away. The guards at the door separated, slipping into their lines as Dionysius came in.

  He walked towards the throne as if I didn’t exist. But I was in his way. For a moment, it seemed he’d walk straight into me, like a trireme on a ramming course. I felt an invisible tide tugging on my body, the Voice of Reason yelling that I should move. But the Voice of Will kept me rooted in place.

  Dionysius stopped, an inch from my face. The same height, the same build, the same age – it was like looking at myself in a tarnished mirror.

  ‘I hear your friend fell in a well.’

  Off his shoulder, Dion shot me a fierce stare. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  ‘He should have been more careful.’ A smirk turned the corners of Dionysius’ mouth. ‘There are plenty of dark holes on Ortygia where visitors fall and are never seen again. We wouldn’t even have heard the screams. It’s tragic. A waste.’

  He wanted to provoke me. The Voice of Desire said let him – that the only way I could honour Agathon was to sacrifice myself on his tomb. Against it, the Voice of Reason was a small bleating, too easy to ignore.

  Socrates said that no one can do a wrong thing once he’s been told the right thing. I think Socrates underestimated the human capacity for self-destruction. But this time, his argument held. I didn’t react.

  It disappointed Dionysius. ‘You can mourn your friend.’ All magnanimity. ‘Tomorrow, I want you back tutoring my son. If not, your position is terminated.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You can go.’

  For a moment, we faced each other down like wrestlers. Then the Voice of Reason took charge, and I stepped around him. His men let me go.

  Halfway down the next corridor, I heard someone hurrying after me and Dion’s voice calling my name. I ignored him until he was right behind me, then spun around, forcing him back.

  ‘You told me Agathon left.’

  ‘I saw him go.’

  ‘Obviously, he came back. Did you know that?’

  His eyes dropped. ‘Yes.’

  ‘When? Where had he been?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. He came back a week ago, but he was different.’

  A week ago. While I was chained up in Dionysius’ quarry. ‘How was he different?’

  ‘As if he’d been in battle. Not wounded – but like sometimes you see men who’ve taken a blow to the head, or who’ve panicked under a charge. As if something’s been shaken loose inside them.’

  ‘And you don’t know where he’d been?’

  ‘Not too far away. He’d only been gone a few days.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘He said he had to look up a book by Empedocles in the library. Then he was going to catch a ship to Thurii. He had to meet a friend.’

  That was me. ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘I didn’t see him the next day. I hoped he’d caught his ship.’

  I tried to snatch out facts from the chaos in my head. ‘If he came back a week ago, and was only here a day, where’s he been since?’

  ‘Where we found him.’

  That couldn’t be right. ‘Last night I stood in Dionysius’ hall and called him a tyrant to his face. Today, this happens. Is that a coincidence?’

  ‘Agathon was dead before you got here,’ he insisted. ‘Before Dionysius knew you existed.’

  He could see I didn’t believe him. ‘Have you ever seen a drowned man pulled out of the water?’ he said.

  ‘Not until today.’

  ‘I have. Look at the state of the body. Agathon was in that well for days.’

  I didn’t believe him – but why argue? ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘If you’re blaming yourself.’

  ‘He’s still dead.’ I’d come so far looking for my friend, and now his corpse lay under a sheet on my bed. That was the end.

  ‘We should bury him,’ said Dion pragmatically.

  ‘I won’t bury him on Ortygia.’

  ‘You don’t have a choice.’

  I turned away. This time, Dion didn’t try to stop me.

  Twenty-four

  Jonah – Athens

  Jonah took the bus back to Athens, staring out the window at the miles of concrete and dust. The bus was slow; the sun was setting by the time he got back. A six-pack of Mythos beer had appeared in the fridge. Adam didn’t drink; Jonah supposed it was for him. He certainly needed it. As he opened a can, he remembered what Ren had said.

  Alcohol’s a drug. They don’t even have to inject it.

  He left the beer and stood at the window, letting the orange light blast through him. He closed his eyes and pressed his face against the glass. The sun filled the horizon: he thought if he opened the window, he could step right into it.

  The first time he’d spoken to Ren, he’d been on the phone and drunk; this time, face to face and stone-cold sober. Yet both times, afterwards, the memory faded like water drying in the sun. He struggled even to remember her face. If he had to pick her out of a photograph, he wasn’t sure he’d manage, though in person, even in a crowd, he’d know she was there without a doubt.

  He hunted for a piece of paper and a pen but couldn’t find them. In the end, he had to use the back of his bus ticket and a pencil he found at the bottom of his bag. He scribbled down everything he could remember, worried that he’d wake up and find he’d lost it all.

  Maroussis.

  Ari.

  Nestis.

  Orpheus

  Underworld

  There wasn’t much room on the back of the ticket – it was about the size of one of the gold leaves, in fact. He wondered again about the hand that had incised those tiny letters into the flimsy metal, cramming the words in with such desperate urgency. Hard-won revelations they couldn’t afford to forget.

  You don’t need the tablet to find the underworld. The tablet is to help you escape.

  He thought about what Ren had told him, but his brain couldn’t process it. It sat in his mind, a giant rock that had fallen from the sky. Too big to understand: he could only chisel away at it with the one question that mattered.

  How do I find her?

  Ren had stood up when he asked that. ‘Stay with Adam. If they think you know too much, they might act unpredictably.’

  Before Jonah could ask what ‘unpredictably’ meant, she slid the sunglasses over her eyes and pulled on the baseball cap. After that, the memory flickered and went dim, like an old film reaching the end of the reel. The next thing he knew, he
was at the back of the bus, grinding through the traffic into Athens. And now in Adam’s flat, eyeballing the setting sun.

  Staring at the sun hurt his head. He drank a glass of water and lay down on the bed. When he woke, it was dark outside and Adam had come back. He moved around the kitchen quietly, chopping vegetables and dropping them in a pan of boiling water.

  ‘What did you do today?’

  Adam spoke softly, almost tenderly. Adam Shaw is very close to Maroussis.

  ‘I went to Elefsina.’

  ‘Eleusis,’ Adam corrected automatically, using the ancient name. Jonah remembered the attitude from the dig: permanent disappointment with the present. For Adam, like the archaeologists who’d displaced whole villages to get at the ruins underneath, modern Greece simply got in the way of its own history.

  The knife cut a staccato rhythm as he chopped a carrot and threw it in the pan. ‘What took you there?’

  ‘Lily talked about it once,’ Jonah lied.

  ‘I hope you weren’t expecting much.’

  Jonah shrugged. ‘It’s not the Acropolis, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s everything that’s wrong with this country.’ Just for a moment, there was a glimpse of emotion in Adam’s voice. ‘It’s a sacred place – a place of revelation. But they’ve made it a wasteland. The oil terminals, the factories, the refineries.

  A place of revelation. Hadn’t Ren used that phrase?

  ‘It’s jobs, I suppose.’

  ‘Jobs.’ The word came out sticky and filthy, like a seabird plucked from an oil slick. ‘Everything that’s ugly in the modern world gets justified by jobs. Find something beautiful, a mountain or a meadow or a stretch of coastline – promise jobs, and you can bury it under as much concrete and plastic as you like.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were an environmentalist.’

  Water boiled over the side of the pan. Flames hissed up where it met the burning gas.

  ‘I don’t care about rare species of beetle, or protecting a tree that some woodpecker nests in. It’s the human environment. The life around us that provides the context for our soul.’

  He turned down the gas and put the lid back on the pan.

  ‘Do you know why politicians love to talk about jobs?’

  ‘So they can collect the taxes?’

  ‘Because work is the best tool of oppression they’ve ever invented. Better than drugs or religion or television or secret police. It keeps us plodding along, believing we’re achieving something, when all we’re doing is clock-punching our life away. And we don’t even notice, because the first thing it does is stop us from thinking.’

  ‘Pays the rent, though.’

  Adam missed the humour.

  ‘The Greeks prized the civilised man. The curriculum they invented included maths, writing, music, sport, astronomy. We pay lip service to the same virtues, but it’s a lie we tell our children. Look at everyone we knew at Oxford. The best and the brightest. From four years old, they’d worked every hour they had to get into the best school, the best university, the best job. They’d done music, sport, drama, clubs – everything to be a well-rounded individual. And then they finished, and they found out that none of that mattered. All society wanted was for them to become drones, automata serving the machine. It’s not living.’

  Jonah didn’t disagree. Adam served up the food and carried it to the glass table by the window. Without asking, he poured Jonah a beer from the open can and put it by his plate.

  ‘All the great leaps in human thought came from men who had the time to think.’ With Adam, a conversation never lapsed. He could pause it like a CD and resume hours, sometimes days, later. ‘In ancient Greece, three or four generations of philosophers sketched out a whole scheme of reality that we’re still coming to terms with. Why? Because they had the leisure to think, to drill down deep into the wells of existence and tap the truth. It didn’t make them rich or powerful. Some of them became famous, and some were executed because people couldn’t handle the truths they told. And none of them had jobs.’

  Jonah sipped the beer. It tasted pretty good. ‘Didn’t they have slaves?’

  ‘A well-ordered society is like the human body: each part is necessary, but it’s only the brain that’s capable of thought. Everything else serves that function.’

  Adam’s face was pitiless. For some reason, it reminded Jonah of the statue of the goddess in Charis’ house. The deep levels of existence they inhabited were cold places. Kindness couldn’t survive.

  ‘We’re different, you and I,’ Adam said. ‘We saw through the gilded lie. You followed your muse; I followed my … calling.’

  ‘Is working for the foundation a calling?’

  Adam nodded. A smug smile touched the sides of his mouth, and it made Jonah angry.

  It would be surprising if the foundation did something without Adam knowing about it.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I’m the program director.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I exercise oversight on the projects we fund.’

  ‘Exercise oversight?’ Jonah swigged his beer. ‘Is that your calling? To “exercise oversight”?’

  Adam chewed a mouthful of vegetables to pulp.

  ‘You can’t look down at all the poor sods who have to work for a living, and then tell me that your life’s purpose is to “exercise oversight”. Even if the money’s good.’ He waved at the apartment. ‘I suppose you do all right out of it.’

  Adam peered at him, like a man listening very hard to a quiet television. ‘You’re angry. I know you’re frustrated about Lily. If you want to take it out on me, I understand. But it won’t make it better.’

  ‘I just want to know what makes you so special.’

  ‘Socrates said, “If I have any wisdom, it’s knowing that I know nothing.”’

  ‘Socrates didn’t get a double-first from Oxford.’

  ‘That’s a specious comparison.’

  ‘Lily was working for your foundation when she disappeared. I want to know what it’s about.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Your office in London said you fund all sorts of research. Physics, geology, history, philosophy. How do you “exercise oversight” on all those different things?’

  ‘I have a pretty good degree in physics and philosophy,’ said Adam drily. ‘The rest of it, we have expert panels who review the technical merits of the applications.’

  ‘Which makes you … what? Some sort of rubber-stamp bureaucrat?’

  Adam sat upright in his chair, so stiff he didn’t touch the back.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘You want to know what the common thread is?’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘Eikasia is the Greek word for “illusion”. Plato uses it to describe the most unreliable levels of the world, the shadows and reflections that our senses perceive. We’re trying to get past all that to understand true reality. That’s why we investigate it from every angle we can.’

  ‘Isn’t that kind of vague?’

  ‘Only if you think vaguely.’

  ‘Doesn’t every scientist on the planet investigate reality?’

  ‘Not really. They’re looking at shadows. They can’t accept how tenuous our sense-reality is.’

  Jonah patted his hand on the table, rattling the plates. ‘It seems pretty solid to me.’

  ‘Not as much as you’d think.’

  Jonah had no comeback. Two weeks ago, Lily had existed in his reality; now she didn’t. The change had been as abrupt as a door slamming.

  She still exists. It frightened him how quickly he’d begun to doubt it. I just have to find her.

  They ate. Jonah took a sip of his beer and realised he’d finished it. He didn’t ask for another.

  ‘Will you be staying much longer?’ Adam asked. ‘I’m not sure there’s anything more for you in Athens.’

  Jonah thought for a second, wondering if he h
ad anything to lose. Nothing he could think of.

  ‘Your boss, Ari Maroussis. He was there when Lily disappeared. I’d like to speak to him.’

  Adam put down his knife and fork and stared across the table, concentrating furiously.

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘At Eleusis. It’s a place for revelations, apparently.’

  Adam nodded, assimilating the information. ‘You know who Ari is.’ Not a question, just establishing some parameters.

  ‘And his dad.’

  ‘Ari has nothing to do with the foundation.’

  ‘Then what was he doing at Sibari? Exercising oversight?’

  ‘He was a tourist.’

  Jonah let the silence play like an open note, sustained so long the audience almost forgot about it. So that the chord-change came as a shock.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Adam speared a piece of broccoli onto his fork and crunched down on it.

  ‘I want to meet him,’ Jonah insisted.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘What about his father?’

  ‘He’s an old man in poor health. He’s confined to a villa on Spetses. He hardly ever leaves, and he’s been forbidden from receiving visitors.’

  ‘Perhaps if I call the police and tell them his son kidnapped my wife, he’ll agree to see me.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Because it would embarrass you?’

  ‘Because you’ll end up either in prison or deported. Maroussis is the richest man in Greece, and the police haven’t been paid in five months.’ No emotion, just more facts. Adam gathered the plates and carried them over to the sink. He pulled on a pair of yellow washing-up gloves, tight rubber snapped over his fingers. They were the brightest thing in the apartment, like the first daffodils after a hard winter.

  ‘I’ll make you an appointment with Ari.’

  Twenty-five

  How can you prove whether right now we’re sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or if we’re awake, and talking to one another in real life?

  Plato, Theaetetus

  I knew Diotima was there before I opened my eyes. I could smell ripe figs blowing through the air in the room, drowning the smell of the corpse.