The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  “Hate is bad for digestion,” Lykourgos said.

  “Like murder,” Agathon said, and laughed a little wildly. “Like war. Like plague.”

  Sudden as August heat lightning, Lykourgos lost his temper. “Go home, you sick, fat old fool. Go home before Alkander breaks his leash!”

  Agathon laughed, but immediately backed away. “Rage on, old one-eyed maniac,” he said. “Your world is crashing down around your ears!”

  Lykourgos raised his head a little and his one eye bored into Agathon. “My laws will survive,” he said. “Among my enemies, you alone know the future, and you alone rave. A sign of your despair.”

  Agathon spit, not just in Lykourgos’s general direction but at him. Alkander’s hand gave a jerk, but the rest of him kept still, almost relaxed.

  I sidled away, following my master. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Alkander slid his eyes over and looked at me, angry at first, then thoughtful. A week later when I saw Alkander it seemed to me—though I couldn’t be sure—he nodded.

  So anyway, this: I will never learn to be a Seer, but I’m learning things, with Agathon. It occurs to me that I have learned to be patient with everyone but Agathon himself. And with my own self, of course…For Agathon, and for myself, I have no forgiveness. Why is that?

  But the walls of our cell are close, remember, close as the air we gasp to breathe, and Agathon makes no effort to hold back his farts. He snores and moans and grumbles in his sleep, and he talks talks talks incessantly, about nothing but himself, the most self-centered, self-pitying bastard I’ve ever seen. “Well, he’s seventy,” I tell myself. “An old man must have some privileges.” But when he wakes up he smacks his lips, and when he eats I hear his teeth cracking. And when he isn’t talking or cracking his teeth or sucking at his dry, loose, black-cracked mouth, he’s writing his endless, revolting life story, mile on mile of self-congratulation.

  “Peeker, my good man, sharpen my pen.”

  “You sharpen your own fucking pen,” I say.

  “Ah, manners, dear boy! There is no pulchritude in swinish manners!” Pursing his lips as he says it. Squinting like a pig.

  Why should I work up forgiveness for an ugly, sick- minded old man who scorns everything on earth but himself? Or maybe especially himself. And why should I resign myself to what I am—lackey for a madman, hungry maggot in a hole full of maggots, dreaming every night of soft-bosomed girls with light coming out of their pink pink skin like leaves in springtime, with eyes as lonely as graves?

  15 Agathon:

  I sat with Dorkis on a hillside, looking down on the lake where Iona, Tuka, and the children—our two and their three—were swimming. It was a fine, warm day, and we’d been drinking Helot wine all afternoon. The little stone aerie he’d borrowed for what he called his flight to meditation stood above and behind us on the hill. I kept watching Tuka and Iona, my chest full of pain. Dorkis talked. He was thinking of leaving Lakonia. It was against the law, but Helots managed it every day. The Spartans didn’t waste much time policing Helots in those days; they kept busy enough policing themselves and making incursions into the holdings of their neighbors—the ephors’ idea, not Lykourgos’s. Goats grazed to the right of the lake and beyond it. The boy who was watching them sat, just visible to us, on an outcropping of greenish rocks near the top of the hill to our right.

  Dorkis talked of the hopelessness of the Helot situation. There had always been atrocities. The ephors formally declare war on the Helots every year, so that a Spartiate won’t be guilty of religious impurity if he kills a Helot out of hand. But it’s always worse in time of war. Because of the troubles in Messenia—in town after town, Spartan governors had been assassinated and public buildings burned—and also because of the increasing number of Helots openly talking rebellion—Lykourgos had recently revived the old institution of the Krypteia, whereby young Spartan warriors were sent out into the countryside with an iron ration and a dagger, to hide among the rocks by day and kill Helots by night. It gave the young fighters combat practice—but that was only part of it. Helots far outnumbered Spartiates throughout Lakonia, and Lykourgos was convinced that in unsettled times the Helots needed terrorizing to be kept in place.

  At all events, a young man Dorkis knew had been murdered two days ago by Spartan boys, and Dorkis, as a physician, had assisted the old women in preparing the body for burial. It had shaken him. His voice had a new thinness, like that of a man recuperating from a loss of blood. There was a sense in which it was criminal, he said, for a Helot to bring up children in Sparta. It robbed them of self-respect, which was to say, freedom. On the other hand, he was a leader of a sort. Now, if ever, the Helots needed leaders. I acknowledged it with a nod. It was not a decision I cared to help him with. I myself would leave, probably. I’m easily scared off. I could have said that running away might also rob his children of self-respect, but I couldn’t advise him to do what I might not have the courage to do myself.

  His sharp, black-eyed stare was fixed on something beyond the farthest of the hills, and his lower lip was pushed forward, making his cheek muscles taut, the slanted eyes little chinks, like slits for bowmen. “Agathon, have you any power left with him?”

  I shook my head. “Not a drop.”

  He grinned. “How’d you blow it?”

  “I never had it to start with,” I said. “He keeps me around to tell him Solon’s theories, which I do—I have them all down in my book—and he listens like a stone.”

  “Does he really?”

  “No. He sort of half listens. But the contrast is somehow obscurely useful to him.”

  He swung his gaze back to the hills. “Could he be killed, do you think?” He asked it as one would ask for predictions on the Olympic games—except that his voice was feeble.

  I kept quiet. He had his elbows on his knees; his hands hung perfectly relaxed.

  At last he said, “You haven’t answered. I take it he could, then.”

  “Anything alive can be killed, one way or another.”

  He said no more, merely smiled, abstracted, like a bullfighter watching the parade before a fight he’s unsure of.

  After supper, when the last of the children were in bed and Dorkis and Tuka were cleaning up the mess and sipping wine and talking, he patting her fanny from time to time, sometimes laughing till he wept—Tuka was in top form—I sat at the edge of the lake with Iona. Except for the stars and the flickering fight from the hut behind us, the world seemed empty, abandoned, as if plague-struck. There might have been no Sparta, no Lykourgos, even no Athens, only the immense, studded sky, the hills, the water, the curve of Iona’s arm. The lake was perfectly still, as smooth as black marble. I felt safe, as if time had stopped forever. Also, I felt hungry for Iona, or for something more, a new life, peace.

  She said, “Did Dorkis tell you what he’s considering?” Her voice was so quiet it might have come from inside me.

  “Which?”

  “You know.” Then: “The assassination.”

  “It’s a bad idea.” My voice, in my own ears, was donkeyish. It had a quaver and my body felt callow.

  “He told you, then?”

  I nodded.

  “Why is it a bad idea?”

  “It just is.” Because I’m a coward, I should have said. “Some ideas are just bad. There’s no explanation, they just are.”

  “Ridiculous!” She laughed, her amusement breaking over the frown, not quite ending the frown but transforming it, deepening the dimple.

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  She went on smiling, thinking, then lay back in the grass, put her hands behind her head, and pursed her lips. “I know why you say it’s a bad idea.” Her flat voice again, businesslike. “The truth is, you don’t want him dead. He interests you.”

  “That’s irrelevant. Of course he does.” It was a lie, in fact. Nothing was of interest but her mouth and the line of her hip, the shattering sweetness of her voice. I listened to the crickets, my heart tripping rapidly and lightly, a
s if I were standing looking down from the roof of a tower. The water lapped at the shore, very quietly.

  “You’d give up anything, anybody, for an interesting idea, even a monstrous one like his.” Her voice was half serious, half mocking. Coming straight at you (except with questions) was Iona’s last resort.

  “An idea or an adventure,” I said.

  She lay still, looking at the stars. I could feel her baffled annoyance, and it pleased me. At last, with a brief, ironic smile, she said, “All right, smart one, explain.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, still mysteriously uneasy but also tingling with some more than sexual pleasure. “It’s a cliché I have. Ghost of my youthful metaphysics. What is the ultimate reality? Adventures and ideas. An adventure is when someone pokes you in the mouth. An idea is when you think pokedness.”

  “You can’t believe that’s what life’s like!” She was indignant, smiling and scoffing at once, and probably aware that her indignation was sexy.

  “I do believe it. So does Dorkis. That’s what he means when he talks about riding reality like a bird.”

  She turned her head to look at me. “Only part of him believes that.” Her eyes were dead serious now, though the look was still gentle. “What’s best in him makes adventures out of ideas. Such as killing Lykourgos.”

  That was sharp, I thought. Foolishly, I hadn’t expected it. I should have guessed that her half jokes, her dimple-flashing ironies weren’t all she had, were the ambiance, say, around something she knew for sure. I felt a little flicker of excitement, sexual, and wished I’d brought the wine. “So people can change reality,” I said

  “Of course they can,” she snapped, then knew she’d been made fun of. She turned her face away. After a while she said, like a sigh, “You really are serious, somewhere behind all those masks. It would be interesting to know sometime what you really think.”

  “So I’ll tell you,” I said, and smiled, boyishly world- weary, wondering what I’d make up.

  She slid her eyes at me. She was thinking about it too. The new beginning. Peace like the night around us.

  I looked at the stars. “All talk between men and women is a prelude to sex,” I said. “You’re aware of that?”

  “That’s really dumb,” she said. Smile with dimple.

  “Right.” But I said, “Because adventures don’t begin in ideas, they begin in emotional impulses. For instance, Dorkis and Tuka don’t think of making love, they merely think as far as clearing the table, separating themselves from you and me, setting up the potential for a new reality—a new adventure. When it’s happened they’ll realize what’s happened, that is, they’ll crystallize the event to an idea, which will signal that it’s over. An idea is the conceptualization of a reality which no longer exists.”

  “Boy,” she said. But smiled.

  After a long time, which I foolishly imagined she’d been using to brood on my theory, she asked, “Do you think they’re making love?” It was one of those straight- at-you questions that made a lie, a joke, impossible, made all my normally devious ways seem shameful.

  “Would it bother you?”

  “I’m not sure.” The tone was so straight, so nakedly trusting, it unnerved me like the whisper of a god. Also, it filled me with lust.

  “Strange how I love you,” I said. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. I leaned on my arm beside her and, after I’d thought about it, closed my hand on her breast. The effect shook me to my roots, hurled me back into the innocence of childhood. The softness of her flesh was like a sudden bursting of wells in a desert, like sympathy, kindness, and understanding I’d forgotten I deserved. It was as if all I’d been when I was good, when I was young, had lain in moldering disuse until that instant. All the tension I’d hardly known I felt came unwound. I was clean. She searched my face, knew everything in it.

  “Don’t,” she said gently.

  I kissed her and she put her arm around me, kissing me back. It was all overpowering—her very breathing slaughtered my ears—yet with a piece of my mind I didn’t believe it, quite; no more than I really believed in the gods, or believed there were Helots being murdered somewhere in these hills. She was a good lover, a woman who knew how to play to men. The suspicion made the night terrible.

  “I love you,” I said. It sounded to me more convincing, and far more dangerous, than most of the things I said in those days. Other girls I’d made love to I hadn’t lied to. Then what made me say it? Panic seized me. Did I not love Tuka, then? I couldn’t remember. I drew away from her abruptly to look at the water and think. I ached. My groin was as charged as the bottom of the sea and my chest was like wind in a cave. I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, I could abandon everything I had in one moment, without remorse, for the taste of Iona’s mouth, for her walk, her voice, her breast in my cupped hand. Presumably in six months I could drop Iona for somebody else’s mouth, or perhaps for a camel trip. I was outraged.—Did she love me at all? I wondered then, in fresh panic. The whole world was dead and putrefact.

  Seeing that I remained still as a rock, Iona sat up and touched her face to her drawn-up knees and slightly shook her head. “I can’t believe this is me,” she said. It sounded honest.

  I looked at her as coldly and objectively as possible. She was lovely and gentle, and I was swayed again. The night was as vast and deep as the cavern of childhood. The fact, sure as the huge rocks that waited below the unrippled lake, was that I was going to make love to her, that she too was hollow with desire. Just the same, I tried to think. It was true that she was beautiful, and it was true that “by a certain system of morality,” as Lykourgos would say, she was good. She’d been a loving and faithful wife to Dorkis all the years of their marriage. I knew that, without her telling me, without any evidence whatever, or none of the kind mere scientists understand. Yet like me, perhaps, she was toying in the back of her mind with throwing all she had been away. It was a thought that, once entertained for an instant, could never be dismissed. She would live the rest of her life knowing that loyalties are moment-to-moment things, even those one clings to till one dies.

  Or was she toying with me?

  I was horrified anew at the violence of my feeling for her. It shook my world like the wrath of Poseidon and left nothing familiar, nothing even recognizable. Why should I be in Sparta? My whole life was meaningless. I was free. Also caught. It wasn’t her body I wanted, or not just that. I wanted her.

  “You’ve had an adventure,” I said.

  “God save me from more!” She laughed, but she seemed troubled. Was it true, then, that she too had glimpsed the skull behind the mask?

  She lifted her face from her knees to squint at the water, then smiled suddenly, as if she’d decided to. It was one of many moments with her when I saw in amazement how powerfully she could clamp down on her emotions with her mind. Unless, of course, she’d faked the emotions.

  “Now I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. She spoke too loudly, as if the kiss were far behind us, the foolishness of youth. “I think Dorkis takes too shortsighted a view. What we need is full-scale revolution.”

  “Oh, right!” I said. I wondered briefly if she’d ever seen a field of corpses, and I sensed, more than thought of, some vague connection between revolution and desiring a good friend’s wife.

  “It’s possible, Agathon,” she said, “and moral.”

  “Certainly.” I added, “Moral, anyway.”

  “Possible, too. We’ve got them. We’ve had them all along, we just didn’t notice.” She put her hand on mine. Again the excitement and doubt. “We could burn them out—every storehouse, every field and vineyard—plug the sewage ditches, poison the water with carcasses, wreck their houses. Let’s see what the mighty wasps eat when their drones stop work.”

  “They could eat Helots,” I said.

  “Reprisals. Ten for one.”

  I laughed and moved my hand around her back.

  “I wonder what Spartans taste like,” she said.

&nb
sp; “Stringy and tough, I imagine. Something like baboon.”

  “We could plow their city to salt,” she said. The idea was taking hold. Or the vision. Whatever. She lay back, rolling toward me a little, on my arm. It was as if she was testing me.

  “You’re untrained,” I said. “You haven’t got a chance.”

  “That’s what justifies atrocities on our side, and makes theirs all the worse.”

  I jiggled my head, squeezing my eyes shut. “You better go through that again.”

  “It’s true,” she said, hardening to the thought and moving toward me more. “If ten commit atrocities against two, the crime’s far worse than if two commit atrocities against ten for the sake of revenge.”

  “I’ll work on that.”

  “Will you help?” she asked.

  “Iona, love—” I looked at her and saw she meant it, meant it with all her heart, at least for the moment. Mainly, though, I saw her mouth. I laughed in alarm. “We’d better get back to the hut.”

  Her hand closed hard on my wrist “Agathon, we need you.” Overtones rang around her words like rings from a buoy. She made me feel, more than I’d felt for a long time, manly, stronger than Herakles, beyond all mortal or divine intimidation. We need you. The earth calling to the sun, the sea crying out to the land. Because the Helots weren’t men? Big-muscled Dorkis not a man? I wasn’t thinking all this. My mind was inside it like a building standing in a wind. It was as if for an instant we’d fallen back to the first hour, archetypal woman clawing up from her castrated mate to the new male. But was I less eunuch in my own secret bed? My mind struggled clumsily, drowning in the primal scent straining toward logic, genesis-old defense, desperate and needful as the myth that no Helot can fight. All this in one brief pang of sensation. Damn her, did she love me or not?

  “I can hear the historians now,” I said. “‘The leader of the Helots, infatuated with an Athenian visitor and wishing to devise some means of seeing him frequently without rousing the suspicions of their respective spouses, conceived the plan of organizing a revolution. But on learning, later—”