The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  ‘Did you love Agathon?’

  Was I so petty I could envy a dead man – my friend? Was the madness so irredeemable? Or was I really asking: Do you love me?

  She nodded. No apology, no embarrassment. The knots I’d tied inside me tightened, and suddenly I didn’t know what she meant. It was ridiculous to think that Diotima, as cool and mysterious as the spring, could feel the hot pains ripping me apart. I flushed, ashamed and confused.

  ‘Did he love you?’

  A look that made me freeze. ‘Agathon understood that love is just a way to open up the soul. Love lets the wings grow, but Agathon wanted to fly.’

  ‘Is that why he died?’

  No answer. She stared into the water as if waiting for something to sink.

  ‘Agathon was my best friend. If you know why he died …’

  Instead of answering, she pointed to the pool, the blue water so lucid and calm. ‘Why do you suppose Hades turned Cyane into a spring? She couldn’t have stopped him taking Persephone – he was a god, after all, and she was just a nymph.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t care.

  ‘He was worried she might tell someone. He didn’t want anyone to follow him down.’

  Deep in the shade of the chaste tree, a nightingale began to sing. I listened for a moment, following the flow of the song up and down its register.

  ‘Agathon found something out,’ I tried. ‘Something he was killed for.’

  I took her silence for consent.

  ‘What was it?’ Still silence. I thought back through my own long journey across Italy, from the day the sea spat me out at Taras. ‘Agathon was looking for something. The tablet was part of it. The book in Locris was too, and Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans. And so were you. Then Dionysius got involved.’

  I’d followed his path like a dog sniffing through the forest – and, at the end of it, all I’d found was a corpse. Suddenly, I hated Agathon for dragging me here.

  ‘What was Agathon trying to find?’

  ‘The same as you.’

  ‘I was looking for him.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Until I found you.’

  Diotima frowned; she didn’t like the compliment. ‘What does love crave more than anything?’

  I remembered her at Dimos’ party, almost naked in the middle of those hungry men. The memory answered the question. ‘Beauty.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Immortality.’

  ‘Love draws you to Beauty. Beauty leads you to Truth. And Truth is immortal,’ she said. I wasn’t really listening. Jealousy had planted a thought that set my mind on fire. I tried to resist, then blurted out, ‘Are you pregnant?’

  She gave me a look that would have made a gorgon think twice. ‘No.’

  I reached out and felt the hard, triangular stalk of the papyrus plant. I remembered Dion’s riddle. Some day this could make you immortal. I rubbed it between my fingers and imagined the farmer coming to harvest it, the curved blade peeling away the fibres and laying them down, pressing and drying the woven page. Whose book would be written on the plant I was holding? Whose hands would hold it after mine?

  ‘Was Agathon writing something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  I wasn’t sure she’d answer me. A slow knife turned inside me as I wondered if she’d lost patience with my fumbling answers. When she spoke, I still couldn’t tell.

  ‘What do you believe about the soul?’

  Talking to her was like chasing butterflies. Each time I thought I had her, she danced away. All I could do was run after her.

  ‘According to Homer, the soul is the impression we leave when we die – smoke lingering in the air when the fire’s burned out.’ I tried to think of something more original, and failed. ‘Even Socrates didn’t know.’

  His trial, the closing speech after he’d been condemned: Either death is oblivion, or it’s a migration of the soul from this world to another.

  I tried again. ‘The soul’s a metaphor, a way we talk about the “self” we feel inside us. The Voice of Reason – the rational, intelligent part of us. We know it exists because it’s always talking to us. But really, we’re just talking to ourselves.’

  ‘You think the soul is reasonable?’ Her eyebrows arched up, as if I’d proposed some outrageous act.

  ‘Reason is what we are.’

  ‘Isn’t love what we are too?’

  I stroked her hair. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we just said love is a form of madness. And madness is the opposite of reason.’

  ‘I suppose that’s why we try to control our appetites.’

  She grabbed my hand and pulled it away, mock offended. ‘Are you saying you want to control love? That you want to love less than you possibly could?’

  She’d trapped me like a sophist. I felt betrayed. ‘Does it matter? Whatever we say about the soul, we can never prove it. We’ll never even see it, until it’s too late and we’re all shades moaning in the underworld.’

  If you can’t win the argument, rubbish it.

  Again, the gorgon look. I wanted to take back what I’d said, but she wouldn’t let me. She leaned over and snapped a reed off its stalk. Holding it like a pen, she pricked a small hole in the damp earth, then drew a circle around it.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘A wheel? An eye?’

  ‘Geometrically.’

  ‘A circle with a point at its centre.’

  ‘Or it could be a cone, seen from directly overhead.’

  ‘If you’re trying to tell me the world is deceptive and our senses are inadequate, Heraclitus got there first.’

  She gave a small nod, as if something had been established to her satisfaction.

  ‘There are walls around us that box us in to our world. We can’t see beyond them – and so we assume there is nothing beyond them. In the end, we stare at the walls so long we don’t even see them. We forget they’re there.’

  I tried to understand the connection. ‘Is that what your picture represents? An individual surrounded by a wall?’

  I don’t think she heard me. ‘The wall isn’t as solid as it seems. There are hidden doors you can get through. Pythagoras found one, so did Empedocles and Parmenides.’

  I didn’t know if we were talking about a real place, or some sort of metaphor. For safety’s sake, I decided to stick with the metaphor.

  ‘Agathon wanted to find this gateway?’

  Her face said: almost.

  Hades was worried the nymph might tell someone.

  ‘He found it.’

  Twenty-eight

  Jonah – Athens

  Two blocks away, the battle was just distant noise, like a television in another room. The loudest sound was the ringing in his ears. Had he dreamed it? A part of him almost wanted to go back to the square and have a look. He wondered what had happened to the woman he’d rescued, if she’d made it. But the blood on his face was real, and so was the pain in his knee every time he put his foot down. He kept going.

  It was only when he felt the phone vibrating in his pocket that he realised how little he could hear. He pulled it out and answered, shouting as loudly as he could. All he heard was a tiny voice, his own, coming from the end of a long, dark tunnel. He turned the phone volume all the way up, but couldn’t make out any words.

  Whoever it was hung up. Almost before he had time to despair, a text message appeared on screen.

  Where are you?

  He glanced up and saw the street signs on the side of the buildings. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly tap out the message.

  Corner of Perikleous and Voulis

  Almost at once:

  I’m coming

  Five minutes after that, a motorbike pulled up.

  Ren drove him down to the Piraeus and stopped outside a fish restaurant by the harbour. Jonah was bloodied, bruised and topless, but the owner, reading a newspaper at a table out at the front, didn’t register an expression. P
erhaps he was just glad of the business.

  Jonah found the bathroom and stuck his head in the basin. He ran cold water over his eyes until he couldn’t feel the pain. Ren brought a two-litre bottle of mineral water: Jonah gargled half of it and drank the rest. He looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was wild, and he had a wide cut across his forehead. Ren dabbed it with a towel and bought hydrogen peroxide from the pharmacy next door. It stung, but at least it felt clean. She’d also managed to get Jonah a new T-shirt from the Piraeus’ last souvenir shop. I ♥ ATHENS.

  Across the road from the restaurant, a few tables sat under a plastic awning overlooking the water. They sat down, the only customers.

  ‘Adam told me to go to his office but it was shut. I got caught in the riot instead.’

  She nodded. He could hear things now, but still from a great distance. Bad feedback screeched in his ears.

  ‘I told him I knew about Ari Maroussis. I suppose he wanted to warn me off.’ He remembered the yawning mouth of the Metro station, the dead souls flooding down. ‘Or get rid of me.’

  She nodded again. The waiter brought them menus and stale bread. Jonah chewed over the crust and didn’t say anything. He was in a place beyond words. If he tried to think about Adam, he felt so much fury he wanted to break something. Thinking about Lily was worse.

  ‘Do you want to go home?’ Ren asked.

  He knew what home was. An empty flat, a silent phone and a river whispering Lily’s name every minute of the day.

  ‘I want to find Lily.’ He remembered what she’d said. ‘I want to bring her back.’

  The waiter returned. Ren ordered for both of them, a list of Greek dishes Jonah didn’t catch.

  ‘Do you have a plan for where we go next?’ he asked.

  ‘Spetses.’

  ‘Maroussis’ villa.’ As the adrenaline faded, a killer headache had begun to rack his skull. ‘You said he’s one of the richest men in Greece.’

  ‘The richest.’

  ‘He must have guards. Fences.’ He held a bottle of water against his forehead and added unnecessarily, ‘I’m a musician.’

  ‘I can get us in.’

  The waiter brought their food. Bubblegum pink taramasalata, fat peppers bursting with rice, and a plate of tiny fish you ate with the heads on. Jonah glanced over the railing into the harbour, wondering how local the fish were. A scum of Styrofoam and effluent bobbed around the concrete pilings.

  ‘Do you need anything from Adam’s apartment?’ Ren asked.

  A part of him would have loved to go back to the flat, to get his bag and dangle Adam off his Acropolis-view balcony until he told him everything. Another part – some vestigial organ left over from a world view that had become extinct – thought about calling the police. He tasted the gas on his tongue, remembered the demon with his head on fire, and shook his head.

  He had nothing but the clothes he was wearing, his phone, his wallet and the passport in his pocket. Seven summers touring Europe had taught him you never knew when you’d need it.

  ‘I’m ready to go.’

  Through different eyes, eyes that weren’t still red from tear gas, Spetses was probably a beautiful island. White houses with red roofs clustered around the port; to its right, a Greek-Edwardian hotel that looked like the Brighton Pavilion strutted its dilapidated grandeur on the seafront. Behind the town, forested slopes rose towards a central ridge that gave the island its spine. The low sun shone down behind it, soaking the island with gold and making the mountains in the distance a purple watercolour of peaks and slopes, endlessly repeating into the haze.

  Standing on the pier where the hydrofoil had dropped them, Jonah scanned the houses on the hillside. ‘Which is Maroussis’s?’

  ‘The other side of the island.’

  ‘When do we go?’

  ‘When you’ve recovered.’

  ‘I’m ready.’ His hip still ached each time he moved his leg; he could feel the bruises coming up all over his body. But he could handle it. To get to Lily.

  Ren hoisted her beach bag onto her shoulder. Wrapped in her scarf and sunglasses, he had no way of knowing if she believed him.

  ‘We can’t go until it’s dark.’

  They got a room at the big hotel on the waterfront and sprawled out on the bed. Outside the window, the mountains slipped into the haze; an old bell chimed; a loudspeaker on the church broadcast a liturgy, mysterious lines rising and falling in some ancient, eastern mode. Jonah watched the ceiling fan spin away reality.

  ‘What kind of a name is Ren?’

  ‘Japanese.’

  He examined her face. Her hair was straight and dark, her skin a light brown, but that was about as close as it got. ‘You don’t look Japanese.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. Perhaps she’d had this conversation a thousand times before. But she’d led him to Greece, to Eleusis and now to the island, and he still didn’t know the most basic things about her.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘I told you: I want to help.’

  He stared into her dark, almond eyes, trying to force more out of her. She was immune.

  ‘What were you doing in Sibari?’

  ‘Following Maroussis.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was afraid he would find the tablet.’

  ‘How did you know it was there?’

  But it was all he was going to get. She rolled over and studied her fingernails, as if looking for chips in the polish.

  ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘You mean like, if we’re bad in this life, we’ll come back as a cockroach next time?’

  ‘There doesn’t have to be a moral logic to it.’

  Jonah thought about that. ‘Would it make any difference? I mean, if I’ve already been reincarnated, I don’t remember it. And if I haven’t, then there’s nothing to remember anyway. So either way, we end up in the same place.’

  ‘The same place can look very different depending on how you get there. If you thought you might come back as a cockroach, you’d make sure you behaved.’

  Jonah watched the fan spin. ‘If I did come back as a cockroach, all I’d know was that I was a cockroach. I wouldn’t know I’d been in a band in a previous life, or that I could have been a dolphin if I’d been nicer. I’d just be a cockroach and want to not get squashed.’

  ‘That’s quite a limited horizon, don’t you think?’

  ‘Comes with being a cockroach.’

  ‘If that’s what you are.’

  She swung her legs off the bed and stood. Without warning, she lifted off her T-shirt, unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it. She folded them both neatly and put them in the wardrobe. When she opened the door, the mirror on the inside reflected everything back at Jonah. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Jonah stared. Her eyes caught his in the mirror and trapped his gaze. And he realised again that he didn’t know a thing about her.

  ‘I’m not really …’

  But was that true? He’d been underwater for weeks and his lungs were bursting. He was desperate to break the surface, to emerge into the sun and feel her soft dry skin against his. He wanted to put his head between her breasts, feel her stroking his hair, calling his name. To feel whole again.

  She turned – or perhaps the cupboard door swung a fraction. A bow of light flashed off the mirror, so that for a moment she disappeared.

  She’s not real. Neither was his desire. It was an image in a mirror, an inversion. In that flash of clarity, he understood it was a test, that if he followed her into the looking glass he’d be lost forever.

  ‘No.’ One short word. It shouldn’t have been that hard.

  As if nothing had happened, she reached into her bag and pulled out a pair of black jeans and a black long-sleeved T-shirt. She put them on as carelessly as she’d undressed, then pul
led another black shirt from the bag and tossed it to Jonah.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They went down to the old harbour and found a water taxi. The captain argued furiously when Ren told him where they wanted to go, but a hundred-euro note settled the matter. The engine made conversation impossible: they sat in the back, staring at the black water and the spidery white wake behind them.

  They came around the tip of the island and saw the full moon rising in front of them. Jonah thought it was the biggest moon he’d ever seen, a perfect circle, buttery yellow as it hung over the horizon just a few hundred yards away. There were fewer lights on this side of the island: a handful of fishing villages, a couple of big hotels booming music across the water. The captain throttled back and steered closer to the shore, scanning the water ahead.

  They passed a point and came into a broad cove. A few metres off shore, the captain idled the engine. Barefoot, Jonah and Ren scrambled over the side and splashed through the shallows onto the beach. Tiny waves raced up around them. When Jonah glanced back, the boat had already reversed and was chugging away into the night.

  ‘Isn’t he going to take us back?’

  Ren didn’t hear him. With the lap of the waves, the scratching of the cicadas and the wind brushing through the pines, you had to listen carefully. Further round the cove, where the dark land tapered to a point, a light glowed among the trees like a wrecker’s lamp.

  A steep slope rose towards the trees at that end of the beach. A coil of barbed wire blocked the way, but when Jonah touched it he felt rust flake off in his fingers. Following it, they found a gap where they could squeeze through into the woods.

  ‘I thought you said this place would be impregnable.’

  ‘You said that.’

  Ren went ahead, still barefoot, silent on the sandy soil. Moonbeams flooded through the branches, feathering the ground with shadows.

  There’s no such thing as moonlight.

  Adam had said that, on a moonlit night on the banks of the Cherwell. The moon’s just a mirror in space. It’s sunlight we’re seeing – not the real thing, but a dimmer and colder reflection. Did that mean the world was different too? A dimmer, colder reflection of reality? A mirror-world in a looking-glass light? It was the only explanation he could think of.