The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  So look for her.

  A scream tore into him. He spun around and saw a woman staggering forward, being chased by a policeman. It was the demon from before, masked and suited, only now it wasn’t just his head on fire but his whole body. The flames didn’t seem to hurt him. He lashed the woman with a whip made of burning barbed wire. A crowd watched, gaunt faces weary with horrors, but no one moved to help. Before Jonah could try, the woman and the demon disappeared into the smoke.

  Lily’s somewhere down here.

  He set out, drifting wherever he saw knots of people, scanning the faces that emerged from the smoke. In the beginning, his heart skipped each time he saw one. Later – he didn’t know how long – he started to hate the people around him, their sad faces and feeble bodies, the way their bones pressed through their skin. He wanted them to go away, to leave him alone, because each figure in the distance meant he had to keep hoping.

  Don’t stop, he warned himself. Don’t forget.

  In patches, the paving stones had been lifted to reveal sand underneath, as if the square stood on a desert that had started to break through. In one of these places, he came across a row of heads planted in the sand like carrots. Some of them managed to bend their necks forward enough to touch the ground with their tongues, trying to lick any drop of moisture off it. Blood streaked the sand where it had rubbed their tongues raw. Jonah wanted to rescue them, but they had no arms, and when he tried to pull one out by his ears the screams drove him away.

  Was it better to find her? Or to be allowed to keep hoping she might not be there?

  Missing her will become the best, most perfect expression of your desire. He told himself it wasn’t true.

  I step into the light, but I don’t fall. The light catches me and spins me up, weightless, right to the very pinnacle of the sky. From here, I can look straight down into a spindle that hangs in the column of light. Eight vast whorls are cupped around its axis like nested bowls, all different colours and widths, some turning one way and some the other. Their rims are flush, so that seen from above they look like eight concentric wheels spinning against each other.

  All things that move make music: we just need the ears to hear it. Each of the rings makes a single note, so that turning against each other they play the most perfect song I’ve ever heard.

  And as I listen to the music, bathed in that burning white light, the pores open in my soul and knowledge floods through.

  These are the things that I understand.

  I understand Time. That there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, only ‘is’. I understand Beauty. I understand that it doesn’t blossom or fade, not like a woman who’s beautiful in youth but not in old age, or like a boy who has beautiful eyes and a crooked nose. Beauty is the same from every angle, up close or far away, whatever you measure it against, as lasting as time. Everything on earth draws its beauty from the common pool of Beauty, but they can’t increase or diminish it because it’s infinite. You pour more in and it never overflows; you draw some out but the level never goes down.

  The whorl spins faster, bending the circles and sounds and colours together. I understand that there is Good, like Beauty, and everything that is good in the world has a share of it. Heraclitus and the sophists were wrong. Pythagoras came closest, but he didn’t go far enough. His numbers don’t add up; perfect intervals create an imperfect scale. The numbers are just another level of metaphor which describe the world but don’t explain it. The skeleton of the universe but not its soul.

  Our souls are life and life is not death and never can be. Everything we need to know is within us – we were born with it – but creation is chaos and as we pass through we forget it. If we live in the world of the senses, we become creatures of the senses. Fallible, partial and ephemeral. It’s only if we set our minds on Beauty and Truth and Goodness, not with the senses but through pure thought, that we rediscover the certain eternal knowledge of our souls.

  And that is the path to wisdom.

  He couldn’t tell how long he walked. There was no sun; the sky never changed. He’d lost sight of the buildings. But, gradually, he noticed a different orientation. All the people he passed were facing the same way, like trees leaning away from a wind. As if there were something at the centre of the world they had to avoid.

  A clang at his feet. He looked down. A broken guitar lay on the ground: the neck had snapped off, and loose strings tangled in a bird’s nest around the bridge. He sat down cross-legged and picked it up. He stared at it, as if he’d forgotten what it was; he tried to jam the splintered halves together, like a child with a broken toy, but they fell apart in his hands.

  He unwound one of the strings and pulled it free. He wrapped it around the broken neck, looped it through the sound hole and fed it out through a crack in the back. He tied it off. Now the string held the instrument together, precariously, like a bandage.

  He tightened the remaining strings. He thumbed them softly, bending each pitch to where he thought it ought to be. When he had them all in tune, he strummed a chord. Dark, hopeless with loss and longing.

  Ren’s voice whispered in his ear. Remember who you are.

  ‘Who am I?’ he said aloud.

  He played another chord, and the answer came from Maroussis. You will have defined yourself by this one thing, this quest to find your wife. Your whole being will be contingent on her absence.

  Something hard and sharp tugged at his cheek. He put up his hand and it came away soaked in blood. A burning man stood over him, cracking the barbed-wire flail which had torn open his skin.

  Jonah screamed and dropped the guitar. The knot unravelled; the string came loose and the instrument fell in two with a boxy thud. He fled, feeling the flail pricking at his back.

  But an idea had begun to grow, spreading through him like music in an empty room. He ran, heading against the crowd flowing away from the centre of the square. The guards didn’t try to stop him.

  If she exists, then you can not.

  He went on through the smoke and the petrol-fires burning on the ground. Past horrors he could never imagine and afterwards never forget, against the faceless tide.

  The crowd thinned, then disappeared. The fog thickened. He was running alone, now – but he knew where to go.

  Quite suddenly, he arrived at the place he remembered. A blue Metro sign hung from a bent pole, flanked by two burnt and limbless trees. Between them, under the sign, a flat square hole gaped open.

  He stepped towards the hole. The world shuddered, like a rusty wheel that had just begun to move.

  ‘Jonah!’

  He turned back and saw Lily running towards him out of the smoke. She staggered as the world moved again, almost falling as loose paving stones rattled across the ground. The Metro entrance became a circle, widening out like oil welling from the ground. In the distance, the buildings started to turn.

  Lily stopped two feet from him. He reached out tentatively, like trying to catch a feather in a breeze. She hesitated, as if she’d tried this before and couldn’t believe he was real.

  Their eyes met. Their hands touched. Their fingers meshed into each other. It was too late.

  He leaned back over the void, her hand his only connection with the world. He stared into her eyes, willing himself to remember the moment for the rest of his life, even if that was only a few seconds more.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  He let go her hand. Felt a moment of weightlessness as his body reached the perfect equilibrium between something and nothing, between is and is not. Then fell.

  The trees collapsed. The buildings crumbled. The roof of the sky pinched together and rose up, like a dust-sheet being drawn off the world. He could hear music, deep organ pipes groaning as if they hadn’t played in centuries. The sky twisted around in a pillar of light. The world sank into the spiralling void. The organ bellowed rage.

  If she exists, then you can not.

  He was falling, spinning, and the rushing in his ears was the man in
black laughing at him.

  I went down …

  The spindle’s turning so quickly now that the colours have fused into a white light that bleeds into the brightness around it. The music plays so fast that the notes become one and all I hear is a single pitch, the fundamental frequency of the universe. The plain below is a blur. Trying to fix on something solid, I look across to the mountains.

  The mountains melt. A dark line smears off from a peak and billows across the sky. It catches on the hook of the spindle and starts gathering on it. The rest of the world is drawn in behind. The mountains unravel; the plain pulls apart. Threads of reality fly in and wind around the staff: sea-blue, golden, white as snow, every colour more vivid and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen.

  I start to fall. The whorl spins around me, inches away: if it catches me, I’ll be thrown off and spun out of existence, but it can’t catch me because I’m the axis it spins around. I’m the point at the centre of the circle, and everything in the universe is within arm’s reach.

  With a flash of pure, perfect light and a thunderclap to shake the heavens, the light vanishes and I’m in darkness.

  Forty

  Now imagine the man is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged slope, and forced into daylight: won’t it be painful and disorienting? As he approaches the light, his eyes will be dazzled, and he won’t be able to see anything at all of his new reality.

  Plato, Republic

  He landed so hard the impact forced his eyes open. He was lying on a hard floor in the dark. But not blind. A dim red light glowed a little way off, just enough to hint he was still alive.

  He tried to move his arm and found he could. Then his leg. Dried mud cracked and flaked off his skin as he bent his joints. When he stood up, he put his hand over his head and felt the rock ceiling a few inches above his head. Warm to the touch.

  He moved towards the light, palming off the columns like a swimmer. He’d almost reached the light when his foot tripped against something. Not rock: something soft and yielding, something that grunted when he touched it. Something human.

  He stepped over it, as best he could, and bent down to pick up the light. A head-torch. He found the switch and moved it. The red glow became a white beam cutting the darkness.

  Adam lay stretched out at his feet, flat on his back, arms folded across his chest like a corpse laid out for viewing. He seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were wide open, his pupils dilated to the very edge of the iris. As if they needed to capture every glimmer of light in that dark place.

  Jonah looked around. Through the columns, he could sketch in the outlines of a square stone room. Two stone staircases led down from opposite sides. Mud had pooled near one of them, perhaps where he’d been lying. Steam rose off it.

  How long was I asleep?

  Socratis Maroussis and his son lay on the floor beside Adam, in the same wide-eyed trance. Ari’s face was drawn into some kind of angry snarl; his father’s stiff with fear. Adam, perhaps for the first time in his life, looked perfectly happy.

  The floor trembled. A bass rumble, like a low-flying jet, rolled through the chamber and made the columns shiver.

  Despair hit him. Was this all just another level of the dream? He waited for the world to fly apart, to dissolve into a new reality and pitch him back into Syntagma Square. Or somewhere worse.

  The tremor stopped, though the noise lingered. Like the sounds you sometimes heard in a cinema, explosions from the next-door film.

  I’m underneath a volcano. He needed to get out, and he wasn’t going back the way he’d come.

  Two staircases, and one was impassable. He shone the light around again. In one wall, he saw a stone frame that might once have been a door, but it was blocked by a tongue of basalt that must have flowed in during some long-ago eruption.

  The only other exits were the stairs. He turned back to the second set, opposite where he’d come up. A sulphurous, rotting smell blew out of it, but after so long in the cave he barely noticed.

  He went down. There were only ten steps: at the bottom, a pool of cloudy water, milky white, lapped the steps and reflected the torch back at him. A stone shaft rose above it, a mirror image of the shaft he’d fallen down into the mud. With one crucial difference.

  Ropes. Two blue climbing ropes snaking down the far wall into the water. He followed them up with the torch-beam, to a rocky ledge above that looked like the mouth of a tunnel.

  Another tremor, louder than the first. The water rippled; bubbles popped the surface. He dipped his toe in the water and wondered if it was safe to swim in.

  He looked at the ropes again. Adam, Ari and Maroussis must have come out the tunnel at the top, down the ropes and across the pool to the steps. Easy enough to retrace their route.

  Aren’t you forgetting someone?

  The guilt would have crippled him – if he’d had time. He ran back up the steps to the cave, flashing the torch wildly as he hunted for her. Past Adam and Maroussis and Ari, still sleeping. Past the blocked doorway, through the forest of columns.

  The last place he looked was where he’d begun, where a mud outline on the floor imprinted the spot where he’d lain. Another dark shadow lay beside it, so close he thought he must be seeing double. Except that when he shone the torch on it, the shadow didn’t move.

  Lily lay in the light, curled on her side, just the way he’d seen her a thousand mornings before. She was covered in mud, every inch of her body. Except her eyes, which stared across the floor, blindly open. All the time he’d been dreaming, she’d been right beside him.

  Jonah knelt beside her. Don’t disappear, he prayed. Whatever reality this is, please stay long enough for me to touch you.

  He licked his finger and tried to clean some mud off her face. He felt her: not the cold, pale skin from his dream but warm, tanned by the sun, with smile lines creeping out from her eyes and mouth. He leaned over and kissed her.

  The floor trembled. He shook her shoulder gently, then – when that did nothing – harder.

  Her eyes didn’t move.

  He lay down and wrapped himself around her. He started to speak, but her ear was clogged with mud.

  Another rumble. Dust showered down off the ceiling, and he covered her naked eyes with his hand to protect them.

  He sang to her. His parched throat could barely make a note; his dry mouth struggled to form the words. But he dragged the sound out. He sang the songs he’d written for her, and songs he wished he’d written for her. He listened to the roar of the mountain cracking apart, and hugged her closer.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered.

  She blinked, stirred and rolled over.

  ‘Jonah?’

  The light went out when I opened my eyes. I was in darkness, lying on a warm hard floor. Every muscle in my body ached, but my skin tingled with the aftermath of the golden dream.

  I closed my eyes again, trying to hold on to the dream. I wondered, if I fell asleep again, would I be back there with Socrates in the whorl of light, drinking in the mysteries of the universe? I could already feel the memories receding like the tide. It made me despair.

  A rumble shook the cave. ‘Wake up,’ a voice whispered in my ear.

  You can’t stay here. You have to go back.

  I opened my eyes again. Diotima was leaning over me. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her breath on my lips.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘We have to get out.’

  Her hand gripped mine and pulled me off the floor. How long had I been dreaming?

  The ground shook again. Rock dust came loose from the ceiling and rained over me. A roar echoed through the cave, like wind on a mountaintop. Diotima led me by the hand, weaving through the forest of columns with unerring blindsight.

  ‘Duck,’ she warned me.

  I put up a hand and felt flat, hand-worked stone just over my head. The walls squeezed in and I was in a tunnel, a narrow passage rising through the mountain. Far in the distance, I saw
a spot of light. Just a pinhole, but growing slowly larger. I wondered if reality was collapsing again, if Socrates would come walking out of the light to lead me back into my dream. But there was no one ahead of me except Diotima.

  The tunnel climbed steeply. The light came closer: a strange, bluish glow, as if it was shining through water.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Diotima said.

  I felt a shuffling and a bumping as she squeezed behind me. She put her hands on my back and steered me forwards. Round a sharp corner, and suddenly I felt warmth on my face: not the sapping, second-hand air of the cave, but the direct heat of the naked sun.

  I opened my eyes and went blind again.

  He wanted to hold her forever. Another roar from the mountain said that might not be very long.

  ‘Can you walk?’ he asked.

  Lily stood, wobbling like a newborn calf. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Nowhere we want to be.’

  He put his arm around her waist and helped her across the cave. It wasn’t how he’d imagined it would be: no joy, not even time for triumph. Survival was all that mattered now.

  Lily looked down as the torchlight swept over the sleeping figures. ‘Is that Adam?’

  Jonah hurried her on. Down the stairs to the milk-white pool. The hanging ropes swung in a nonexistent breeze: if you held them straight in your gaze, it looked as if the whole mountain was swaying.

  ‘Can you swim?’

  Something like a smile cracked the mud around her mouth. ‘Swim, yes. Climb …’

  They lowered themselves into the water, gasping at the heat, and splashed across. Treading water, Jonah tied a loop in one of the ropes and put it around Lily’s waist. Then he grabbed the other and started to climb. Steam made the nylon slippery; the heat sapped his strength more than he’d thought possible. A couple of times, he lost his grip and slid back, burning the skin on his hands. The lost inches hurt more than the pain.

  At last, he hauled himself over the top. There was no time to rest. The sound in the background had changed: deeper, angrier. He put the rope around his waist to give himself more leverage, leaned back and hauled. Wet clothes made Lily heavy; the rope bit into his raw palms. He sucked in the pain and forced himself to hold on. Hand over agonised hand, he hoisted her up.