Chimera

by John Barth

  “And that’s all you remember?” asked Calyxa.

  “That was it, till I woke up here in heaven, in the middle of the story of my life. Would it please you if I kissed your navel once again?”

  “Take a chance!” I blushed and did. Here’s how it was: some lost time since I’d died as I imagined with my name, I opened eyes upon a couch or altar, a velvet gold rectangle with murex-purple cushions, more or less centered in a marble chamber that unwound from my left-foot corner in a grand spiral like the triton-shell that Dedalus threaded for Cocalus, once about the bed and out of sight. Upon its walls curved graven scenes in low relief, each half again and more its predecessor’s breadth, to the number of seven where the chamber wound from view—which scenes, when I had come fully home to sense, I saw depicted alabasterly the several chapters of my youth, most pleasing to a couched eye. The first, no wider than the bed from whose sinistral foot it sprang, showed Mother Danaë brazen-towered by vain Acrisius my grandfather for contraceptive reasons, lest she get the son predestined to destroy et cetera; Granddad himself, with Grandmother Aganippe, stroked horses fondly in the court, unaware that up behind them Zeus in golden-showerhood rained in upon their frockless daughter, jackpotting her with me. A pillar divided this mural from the next, as it were on my port quarter: Acrisius had judged Mom’s story counterfeit, called me his twin-brother’s bastard, and set suckler and suckled adrift in a brassbound box; the scene itself was the beach of Cycladean Seriphos: there was young Dictys with his net; he’d fished us in, opened the chest, and stood agape at the sight of sweet-nursing Danaë, in mint condition despite her mal-de-mer. In the background was fairly copied the palace of Dictys’s brother, King Polydectes. The third relief, a-beam of and as long as my altar-couch, was set in Samos: twenty years were passed with the fluted pillar; back in Seriphos the King lusted after Mother, and had rused my rash late-teenhood with a pledge to marry someone else instead if I’d contrive to bring him Medusa’s head as a wedding gift.

  “You’re sure it was Zeus and not your uncle up in that tower?” I’d asked Danaë one last time—for she’d admitted an early defloration by Proetus, Acrisius’s twin.

  “I was sixteen,” she replied, “but I knew a slug from a shower of gold.” My father, she reassured me, was a lap-deep drench of drachmae.

  “And you don’t want to marry King Polydectes?”

  “Small change.”

  So, banking on Dictys to safekeep her, I’d set out for Samos on a tip from half-sister Athene, to learn about life from art: for represented in her temple murals there (and so reditto’d here in mine) were all three Gorgons—snakehaired, swinetoothed, buzzardwinged, brassclawed—whereof, as semiSis was pointing out, only the middle one, Medusa, was mortal, decapitable, and petrifacient. Already holding the adamantine sickle Hermes had lent me and Athene’s polished shield, I stood listening, a handsome auditor I was then, to her hard instructions. Sword and shield, she said, would not suffice; one thing depended on another; just as Medusa was prerequisite to Mother’s rescue, so to kill Medusa required not only the Athenian strategy of indirection but other gear: namely, Hermes’s winged sandals to take me to Gorgonsville in far-off Hyperborea, Hades’s helmet of invisibility to escape from the snake-girl sisters, and the magic kibisis to stow her head in lest she petrify all posthumously. But these accessories were in the care of Stygian nymphs whose location was known not even to my canny sister: only the grim gray Graeae could tell it, and they wouldn’t.

  My first task, then, clear-cut in the fourth panel, had been to hie me from Samos to Mount Atlas, where sat the crony trio on their thrones, facing outward back to back and shoulder shoulder in a mean triangle. Some way off from its near vertex (which happened to be between terrible Dino and Pemphredo the stinger), I hid behind a shrub of briar to reconnoiter and soon induced, concerning the single eye and tooth they shared, their normal mode of circulation. Right to left things went around, eye before tooth before nothing, in a kind of rhythm, as follows: Pemphredo, say, blind and mute, sat hands in lap while Dino, on her right, wore the eye just long enough to scan her sector and Enyo, on her left, the tooth just long enough to say “Nothing.” Then with her right hand Pemphredo took the eye from Dino’s left, clapped it in place, and scanned, while Dino with her right took tooth from Enyo’s left, popped it in to say “Nothing,” then passed it on to Pemphredo, who passed the eye around to Enyo, put in the tooth, and said “Nothing.” Thus did report follow observation and meditation report, except that (as I learned some moments later) at the least alarum any gray lady could summon by a shoulder-tap what either other bore. For, having grasped the cycle, I moved closer in a cautious gyre, keeping ever abaft the eye, at the vertex between speaker and meditator; but when I rustled a pebble underfoot, then-blank Enyo, her right hand out for the eye from Pemphredo, whacked Dino into reverse and fetched the tooth as well! I lunged to her right, Pemphredoward, just as she clapped the organ in; by the time she was toothed to cry “Something!” Pemphredo had eared me at her feet and tapped Enyo for the eye, at the same time reaching right for the her-turn tooth. Dino, unable to reply that she’d returned the tooth to Enyo, swatted back both ways; twice-tapped Enyo got her hands crossed, giving Pemphredo the eye and Dino the tooth; I dived through thrones to the center; all clapped all; eye and tooth flipped round in countercircles but could be by none installed before doubly summoned. By deftly interposing at a certain moment my right hand between Dino’s ditto and Enyo’s left I short-stopped eye; no problem then, as Pemphredo made to gum home their grim incisor, simply to over-shoulder her and excise it. The panel showed me holding both triumphantly aloft while the grieving Graeae thwacked and flopped and croaked in vain, like crippled herons.

  Its Stygian successor in my judgment was less successful, artistically speaking, for while it curved some thirteen meters round behind my bedhead to the Graeae’s eight, both the task and its representation were much simpler: having learned from the furious trio where the Stygian Nymphs abode (perforce returning tooth for angry Pemphredo to speak with, but retaining eye by way of insurance against Gray-Lady-bites) it was simply a matter of going there, holdig my dose thus agaist the biserable sbell those girls gave off, ad collectig frob theb the helbet, wallet ad wigged saddles.

  “What did they smell like?” asked Calyxa.

  “Your opposite,” I said. “But if, immortal that you are, you’d perspired through all eternity rank sweat here where I ab bost fod of kissig, dor ever washed id all that tibe—”

  “I’m twenty-four,” Calyxa said, “until next week. That feels okay.”

  But I couldn’t tell her where took place that easy feat upon the wall, for just as Lethe’s liquid is a general antidote to memory, the Styx-girls’ stench proved specific against recollection of its source. All Pemphredo said was to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to close the latter. No time at all till I had lapped the team of toolwardens there depicted and winged off, don’t ask me whence.

  “If she hasn’t anyone to wash herself for her,” primly declared Calyxa, “a girl should wash herself herself.”

  The penultimate panel, on my entire right hand, was most eventful and my favorite. Itself septuple in proportions similar to the whole’s of which it was sixth episode, its first scene, Hyperborean, showed me holding aloft the Gorgon’s dreadful head, which, catching her napping, I’d snuck in shielded to cut from her reflected neck; the second, Hesperidean, my petrifaction of inhospitable Atlas; the third, fourth, and fifth, all Joppan, respectively my backhand slaying of sea-beast Cetus, threatening Andromeda on the cliff; the post-rescuary nuptials, held over Cassiopeia’s protest, whereat I’d recited to the wedding guests my history thus far; and the splendid battle in the banquet hall when my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda as had Proetus Danaë, broke up the reception; the mural showed me turning into stone with all his company that avuncular nepophile. In the heptatych’s sixth panelet, climax of the climax, back in Seriphos, I had once
again called my enemy to my aid, rescuing Mother and ending my tasks by the petrification of taskmaster Polydectes. The seventh represented a mere and minor mishap some time later, at the Larissan track-and-field meet, where a zephyr slipped my straight-flung discus into a curve and frisbee’d down to Hades Granddad Acrisius in the stands; it was as overlong for its substance as was its grand counterpart in the whole heptamerous whorl, which for all its meters (thirty-three and then some) showed but my wife and me throned in Argos, surrounded by our gold bright children, a shower of Perseidae.

  Daily, hourly, since first waking on my Elysian couch, I reviewed those murals, wondrous, as faithful to my story and its several characters as if no chiseling sculptor, but Medusa herself, had rendered into veined Parian, from her perch in the great sixth panel, our flesh and blood. That image was of the lot most welcome to me: all golden muscle, hard as marble, I stood profiled on the Gorgon’s corpse in the model glory of twenty years; the magic sandals were strapped to just below my calves; my left knee bent to bound me next moment skyward; held back at right mid-thigh was Hermes’s falchion, declined from horizontal as were my knee, my penis (see below), and my eyes—not to meet, through the golden locks that curled from under Hades’s helmet, those of Medusa, whose dripping head I held aloft in my left hand. Despite two small departures on the heavenly sculptor’s part from classic realism (though I grant it was a moment far from aphrodisiac, he had, I’m certain, undersized my phallus; and Medusa’s face, unaccountably, was but for the herpetine coiffure a lovely woman’s!), it was a masterpiece among masterpieces, that panel: it it was my eye first fell on when I woke; it it was I was still transfixed by muchwhile later when my radiant nurse-nymph first entered from beyond the seventh mural to kneel smiling at my bedside as if before an altar.

  My voice still scratchy from the dunes, I said: “Hello.”

  She whispered: “Hi,” and on my asking who she was, responded: “Calyxa. Your priestess.”

  “Ah, so. I’ve been promoted?”

  She raised to me brighter eyes than any I remembered having seen on Earth and said enthusiastically: “Here you’ve always been a god, Perseus. All my life I’ve worshipped you, right along with Ammon and Sabazius. You can’t imagine what it means to me to see and speak to you like this.”

  I frowned, but touched her cropped dark hair and attempted to recall the circumstances of my death. Calyxa was neither white, like most other nymphs of my acquaintance, cinnamon-dark like Ethiopish Cassiopeia, nor high-chrysal like my handsome widow of panels Six-C through -E and Seven, but sun-browned as a young gymnasiast through her gauzy briefs—which showed her too to be lean-hipped and -breasted like an adolescent Artemist, as against Andromeda’s full-ripe femalehood, say, or the cushy amplitude of—there, my memory, with my manhood, stirred, giving the lie to elsewise-marvelous Six-A.

  “Is this Elysium, Calyxa, or Olympus?”

  “It’s heaven,” she replied, brow to my hip.

  I’d never heard, from Athene or the several accounts of fellow-heroes which I’d studied in the past decade, of erections in Elysium, whereas the Olympians seemed as permanently tumesced as the mount they dwelt on: I was elevated, then! Still stroking as I considered this rise my nice nymph’s nape, I noticed that while the mural began at my bedpost, the spiral it described did not, but curved on in and upward in a golden coil upon the ceiling to a point just above where my head would be if I moved over one headswidth left; when I raised me up to watch whither hot Calyxa now, I saw the same spiral stitched in purple on the bed. And—miracle of miracles!—when the sprite sprang nimbly aspread that nether spiral and drew to her tanned taut tummy dazzled me, I perceived that her very navel, rather than bilobular or quadrantic like the two others I best knew, was itself spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast.

  Godhood was okay. However, I was twice disturbed to find myself impotent: twice in that, one, I twice tried Calyxa then and there, that “afternoon” (I’d not supposed the sun set on us immortals), and despite or owing to her own uncommon expertise was twice unmanned; two, it was the second time in as many weeks and women (so it came back to me the second time) I had thus flopped, after never once failing done Andromeda in seven thousand nights—an alarming prospect for the nymphed eternity ahead.

  “It doesn’t matter,” insisted sweet-sweat Calyxa, several times in each of the days and nights that followed. “It’s just being with you I love, Perseus; it really is one of my dreams come true.”

  There was another thing: used as I was, as long and mythic hero, to a fair measure of respect, I was unused to reverence: I could not make water without my votary’s adoring view (I had not known gods pissed like mortals); she literally licked clean the plates she fed me back to strength from (not ambrosia after all, but dates, figs, roast lamb, and retsina, as at home) (I insisted she wash them after); licked me clean too, like a cozy cat, in lieu of bathing, and toweled me with her hair (too short for the job): sport enough when one was in the sportive mood, as Calyxa seemed more or less continuously to be; a mere embarrassment when one was not. Truly I believe she would have reliquaried my stools if I’d allowed her (I hadn’t guessed gods shat).

  “You divinities take sex too seriously,” she chided when I swore at that second slump. I supposed to her, not unbitterly, that nymphs like herself were accustomed to a rounder rogering from the deities they attended, and made clear, perhaps overprotested, that I myself was unused entirely to impotence, could not account for it.

  “O, you’ll be heavenly once you’re aroused, I can see that,” she soothed. Not her fault at all, I assured her; indeed, never since my first nights with Andromeda, so long years past, had I couched so lively, lean, and tight a miss; moreover, Andromeda and I, I fondly recollected, had begun as equal amateurs and learned love’s lore together, whereas Calyxa’s skill bespoke much prior experience …

  Gaily she enjoined me from pout. “Believe it or not, I was a virgin until twenty-two.” Cheerfully she acknowledged then that all her girlhood she’d so adored myself, Sabazius, and horny Ammon, and had in addition been so preoccupied with sports and studies, she’d let no ordinary mortal know her (I’d not heard mortals could lay hands on nymphs); then one evening, as she was sweeping out the sheep-god’s shrine (shrines in heaven? dust on Mount Olympus?), which she ministered along with mine and Beer-Boy’s, Ammon himself had appeared and to her great delight had rammed her. Thus initiate, she’d gladly become not merely tender of our three temples but priestess-prostitute as well, holily giving herself, in the honorable tradition of her earthly counterparts, to the truest of our male admirers between tuppings by two-thirds of the deities themselves.

  “Sabazius too!” I protested. Ammon I could be purely jealous of, despite my old grievance concerning his advice to Cassiopeia, for the images I’d seen of him in Joppa showed a fine-fettled fellow with handsome ram’s-horns coiling from his swarthy curls. But not only had Sabazius fermented no end of trouble for me back in Argos; I winced to picture that old priapist a-puff on my neat nymph.

  She giggled. “You think you’re impotent! But don’t make so much of it, Perseus!” Along with swimming and foot-racing, she candidly admitted, she liked few pleasures more than the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating. She and Sabazius, on the other hand, made do with beery conversations, burps, and blow-jobs, which, the first being long and friendly, the last short and sweet, pleased her in their way quite as well as Ammon’s frisk fierce fucks.

  “You worry too much,” she told me on the second night, when, flaccid once again, I’d advised her vexedly to forsake me and revert to Ammonism. “In the first place, I’ve never stopped being an Ammonite and never will—or a Sabazian, either, even though neither of them keeps in touch with me any more.” I was not, she gently reminded me, the only god in her pantheon; on the other hand, it made fier happy beyond imagine merely to be with me on my altar-couch; to kno
w her deity—any of her private trinity—as a “warm human person,” “off his pedestal,” in her terms. Besides, was I really so naïve as to equate love-making, like a callow lad, with mere prolonged penetration?