by John Barth
Nor did she, I said, except to say that the New Medusa’s probationary stipulations allowed for one special circumstance in which petrifaction might occur as of old, and one in which not only its contrary but a kind of immortality might be accomplished. As a possible safeguard against the former, I was advised to borrow once again the kibisis, to use not as a totebag but as a veil: Medusa herself would explain it when she came to me, “and I,” I said to Calyxa, “when I come to her, in panel Six-A of your second series.” What I asked Athene then was how to deal this time with the Gray Ladies, who though eyeless were not blind to my former strategy. Or might I skip them altogether and follow my own nose to the Nymphs’ sour seat? In any case, surely I must borrow Hermes’s sandals again as well, to fly to Hyperborea, or I’d die of old age before I ever reached Medusa.
The woman shook her head. “Athene said to remind you she has other relatives to look after too; that’s why she couldn’t speak to you here in person today. She’s taken a great shine to a cousin of yours named Bellerophon—”
“Never heard of him,” I said, and Calyxa: “I have; they say he’s great.”
“Never mind him,” I told her, and the hooded girl me: “You will, soon enough; your sister has big plans for him. Her exact words were: I’ll always have a soft spot for dear old Perseus, but do remind him he’s not the only golden hero in Greece.’ I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” said Calyxa. “I see now why it upset you about Ammon and Sabazius. Let me ask you one question…”
“Hold on, I’m almost done.” She did; the cowled messenger then summoned Pegasus from the court, stroked and purred to the pretty beast as to a favorite child, and set forth candidly, at times apologetically, Athene’s new orders and instructions. I might borrow the winged horse, but strictly on a standby basis, since Bellerophon had first priority and could call for him at any moment. I should fly directly, not to Mount Atlas, but to the lakeshore of Libyan Triton. There I’d find the Graeae, helpless and cross enough to bite my head off; but I was to introduce myself plainly, endure with patience their threats and insults, and offer to skindive for their long-lost eye if they’d redirect me to the Stygian Nymphs. In general, she concluded, my mode of operation in this second enterprise must be contrary to my first’s: on the one hand, direct instead of indirect—no circuities, circumlocutions, reflections, or ruses—on the other, rather passive than active: beyond a certain point I must permit things to come to me instead of adventuring to them.
Stung a bit still at being bumped by Bellerophon, I protested that direct passivity was not my style. It had grown by then as dark in that temple as now is this; I could discern my companion no more clearly than Calyxa. But a resonance in her reply—she observed that before the point aforementioned, initiative was mine to take—aroused me oddly through my new dismay and old-husband habit; I realized not merely that I was alone in the dark with a sympathetic and perhaps attractive young woman not after all Athene—but also that I hadn’t put myself in the way of such realization for many years. Abruptly I embraced her; Pegasus skittered; she, too, was startled, and for some reason I when she neither protested nor pushed away. Simply she stiffened; I as well; thanked her for her counsel; prepared to unarm her with some mumble. She disarmed me with a murmur instead, how it had been long since she’d been embraced. Impetuously then I ran hand under habit; she drew off, not offended however, and from her bosom took a light gold bridle. “This is for Pegasus,” she said, “to restrain him.” Smiling, she led me therewith courtward, where she turned and straightway came to me, reminding me it wasn’t Nαῷ ’Aφροδίτηϛ we’d been in, but Nαῷ stern ’Aθἠνηϛ. She wouldn’t uncowl, for modesty she said, but let me ground her and lift dun shift to white shoulders. It was an ample soft young body, wide-hipped and small-breasted; the night was warm, the empty courtflags also; but I, ay, I was cooled by the veiled allusion to Danaus—
“And by the novelty,” Calyxa said, “and by your fear you wouldn’t get it up for her, which of course you didn’t. No need to go on about ample young body wide-hipped et cetera; I get the picture.”
“Excuse me.”
“Don’t apologize.”
“Sorry.”
No more that night, Calyxa insisted, and turned away, pouting as it were with her very scapulae, her back’s small small, pouting I declare with her lean little buttocks.
“No need to go on about small smalls and lean little buttocks.”
Sorry, love, and good evening. I was sorry at once, reached to caress those same et ceteras and remarked, not ungently I hope, that just as Perseus was not the sole gold-skinned Greek hero, and the Calyxan religion not monotheistic, so she might allow that lean small what-had-she’s were not the only you-know’s deserving admiration. She spun to me merry-faced and tear-eyed and kissed me hard enough to fetch me at last full-length into her precinct proper—if only for a moment, as I’d threshold once again my offertory. But we were pleased,
“You’re getting better,” she said. “Now tell me how you know you’ll meet Medusa in Series Two, Mural F, Panel One.”
I replied, I thought I had the picture, but would withhold hypotheses until next day—when, if I was not far wrong, II-D (using her system of enumeration) would show my ignominious Gray-Ladying at Lake Triton.
Calyxa smiled. “We’ll see.” I was not; we did: I fetched her couchward from the scene swiftly as Pegasus had me Lake Triton Samos and, lacking that splendid stone-horse’s Bridle of Restraint, yet again fired surely but too soon. I was right, I told her eagerly: as the mural showed, I had been wrong to wrong the Gray Ladies in despite of the cowl-girl’s counsel. But old habit had died hard: even passing over Seriphos, en route to North Africa at an altitude of forty stadia, when it had occurred to me to drop in unexpectedly and check on Andromeda, it had been my.impulse I checked instead, deciding to surprise her less directly by coming back rejuvenated from Medusa. And when Pegasus touched down at Triton, I could not bring myself to tell my old victims straight out who I was. There they railed, craned, and cooted on the beach, old past aging, and gummed their breakfast; I altered my voice and asked crisply, “May I be of service, ladies?” What flap, cackle, and plop ensued! “Pah!” said Pemphredo; “Perseus!” said Enyo; “Puncture him!” said Dino—vituperating serially as they took the tooth.
“Not at all,” said I, side-stepping their pecks. “Self-centered Perseus is my enemy as much as yours. I understand he dropped your eye somewhere hereabouts? I’ll find it for you if you’ll tell me where the Styx-Nymphs are.”
Pre-payment was my hope, for the lake though shallow was wide, and I despaired of finding in it an eye lost twenty years before. But “Pfui!” said Pemphredo, “Fool!” Enyo, and Dino “Find it first!” So we coracled off in all directions, the Graeae blindly paddling, I pondering, and Pegasus grazing back on shore.
“See it?” asked Pemphredo; “Sure he does!” Enyo; and Dino, “Say something, silly!”
“I see it,” I said. “But I won’t dive for it until you tell me where the nymphs are.”
Alas, I was so banking on that desperate deceit I failed to cloak my voice. “Tooth-thief!” Pemphredo cried at once; “Eye-dropper!” Enyo added; and Dino, “Ditch him!” In a jiffy they had me jettisoned; the air-waves were my medium, not the sea-; I sank like a stone—and saw clearly, just before I drowned, not mere folly, but three eyes peering eerily from the weedy bed, whereof one—useless miracle!—was disembodied, the very Graeae’s. Dropped from the high point of my hubris, it winked now from the depths. I clutched it, closed my own, and gave up hope, not knowing my life was to be—
“Continued in the next installment,” Calyxa put in. “Do you remember now what happened then?”
“Three days ago,” I said, “I’d’ve said I was fetched here from my drowning in Two-D, if I’d remembered even that. But One-E reminds me that I wasn’t. Now answer me a question: how far do these murals go?” For I’d seen, belatedly, how each in the second whorl echoed its counterpart
in the first, behind which it stood—yet no amount of examining the final panels in Series One called anything to mind from my late mortality. Calyxa, however, declined reply: I’d slept a night on my hypothesis; she demanded equal time.
And sleep she did, or feigned to, but I couldn’t: like a bard composing, who reviews each night his day’s invention in order to extend it on the morrow, I studied wide-eyed in the dark my recollection of I-E, (the acquisition of my gear from the odorous nymphs) and imagined its correspondence in next morning’s scene.
We stood before it gravely, II-E, a relief as vast and nearly empty as the desert and deserted shore it showed. Owing to the spiral’s grand proportion, the thirteen meters of I-E were stretched to near two hundred; yet in all that stadium but two things caught one’s eye, even mine, who had caught the Graeae’s: Pegasus, winging off to the upper left corner with Pemphredo astride his neck, grin-toothed Enyo sidesaddle, and Dino leering backward over his crupper; and, on the lakeshore far down right, myself looking mournfully up after, a drip-dry-hooded lady by my side.
“Same one as in the temple?” Calyxa asked. “Or a Styx-Nymph?”
I wondered how to tell her. “That’s what I wondered when she rescued me,” I said. “But don’t forget our rule.” We gazed awhile longer, until Calyxa let go my hand, said flat: “It was an easy picture to draw,” and went back inside. I sneaked one preview over my shoulder of II-F-1, which quickened certain sluggish memories and dredged up others, then followed after, and found her not naveled on-center as usual, but briefed still and cross-legged on the couch, in her lap a gameboard.
“I’m bored with fucking,” she announced. “Let’s play chess.”
“Are you jealous, Calyxa?”
“Whatever of?”
But she mated me in no time, four games straight, declaring frankly and frequently that I made stupid moves, rooking and queening me unmercifully until I put by board and pieces, bolstered her firmly by the shoulders, and ditto’d her. Dutifully she opened, but looked away the while, none of her usual frank inspection of our coupled parts. Therefore, perhaps, I did okay, if still briefly, even eliciting a minor moan of pleasure from her toward our pleasure’s end. When we rolled, still a-clip, to rest sweating on our sides, she twirled a finger in my chest-hair and said, “I thought you said Styx-Nymphs stank.”
“On the other hand,” I retorted, “sea-nymphs douche with every stroke. You must remember how it was with Ammon, in the Nile?”
She apologized then for sulking and merely asked whether, as she supposed, it was Medusa herself who’d salvaged me, and in whose embrace I would be stranded in the panel to come.
“That’s putting it disagreeably.”
Sorry—my words, not hers, but we know what she meant. No point in further false suspense; I told her it was, or turned out to be, the one I sought.
“All I knew at first was that she was a sea-nymph, that pair of green eyes down with the Graeae’s gray. She must have beached and insufflated me; when I came to we were mouth to mouth under her cowl. I couldn’t see a thing; when I opened my eyes she kept them covered with her hand till she’d moved off and veiled herself. Not a half-veil, mind, like some Joppa-girls wear, but a regular bag, with the hood over that.”
“Hmp.”
“When I thanked her, she reminded me I’d flouted Athene’s orders, hence my dunking, and advised me to return the eye at once, unconditionally, to the Gray Ladies, by this time shoaled some way downshore. I did, beginning to wonder whether my lifeguard was perhaps amphibian, the same who’d briefed me in Athene’s temple and bridled me in her court.”
“Your horse-metaphor’s ass-backward,” Calyxa said dryly. “It’s you who were in the saddle.”
I was no poet, I reminded her; merely a man with a tale to tell. If I might get on with it? How, introducing myself to Pemphredo as Perseus, son of Zeus, I’d plunked the eye in her palm and pled to all three for triangulation; how, eyed, she’d eyed me, clapped for tooth from Dino, snarled “Nothing!” and taken off in a trice on Pegasus with her cronies, in the direction of Mount Atlas.
“So much for my sister’s wisdom,” I said to the hood-girl, excused myself, and waded into the lake, asking her please not to interrupt this time my drowning. No map no Styx-Nymph, no nymph no wallet, no wallet no Medusa, no Medusa no relief from calcification.
She waded behind. “Why do you want rejuvenating, Perseus? Do you really think you’ll win back Andromeda?” I was in deep, couldn’t think of a right reply. “Or is it simply to be able to do hero-work again?” “That too, mainly.” “Then wait!” She clutched me by the tunic-top, now shoulder-deep.
“I wondered too,” Calyxa said. “How can Being Perseus Again be your goal, when you have to be Perseus to reach it?”
I was twice fetched up, by the cowl-maid and Calyxa’s question, which I’d not considered. I uncouched and considered her. “When you were mortal, Calyxa, did you write those seven letters?” Her lip-bite attested authorship; I could scarcely tell on, so many epistolary details came crowding on me. I repeated Athene’s counsel, which the veiled one repeated to me: “Past a certain point sit tight, hang loose, stand fast, let things come.” Don’t fret about Pegasus, she advised me: Athene had recalled him for young Bellerophon, who was ready to commence now his own career. I should camp on the beach, at least for the night; since the Styx-girls were off the map and I seemed not to know where I was either, perhaps they were not far distant, might even come looking for me. She, at least, would return before morning to see; why not trust my nose for news and get some shut-eye?
I was certain then she was Athene’s handmaid, the same I’d courted in Samos. I cloaked out on the shore and watched the stars wheel, not so many then as now, making stories from their silent signs and correspondences. The night was chill; I was stiffer than ever.
“Come on,” Calyxa said: “she came.”
“Right. It was a camper’s wet-dream; she stole from the lake by starlight and slipped under my cloak, her own still sopping. She was all a-shiver; I helped her off with it, up to the cowl and veil, which she’d not remove. But I was right: I’d’ve known that body anywhere—”
“Ample soft wide-hipped small breasted blah.”
“You’re being Andromeda,” I chided Calyxa. “Sorry.” “Don’t apologize. She confessed she was the Styx-Nymph, her veil the kibisis, which she’d as leave keep on till morning if I didn’t mind. We didn’t get much done.” “You said she was Stygian, I believe?” “Stop that. She was innocent, had had only one man before, Poseidon, he left his traces, never an orgasm.” “I had orgasms long before I ever had a man.” “She wasn’t like you, for better and worse, but she was sweet, sweet, my lifesaver; I was grateful, she was impetuous and shy at once, I was flattered—but she was stiff with me, out of inexperience, and I limp with her…” “Out of practice.” “You did write those letters! Anyhow, she was Athene’s aide, I reminded myself, not Aphrodite’s. I was eager to see her face, which she promised to unveil when the time was right; if her neck, which especially pleased me, was any indication…”
Calyxa sat up and requested a change of subject. She was past her pout, even teasy, but would not be touched by my retumescence, inspired as it was not altogether by herself. “We all know it was the New Medusa,” she said. “Is that why she kept the bag over her head?”
“Don’t be crude. Do I ask you what the point of Ammon’s horns is, who put them on him?”
She turned sober. “I’m afraid of tomorrow, Perseus.”
I was astounded, and explained that my Styx-Nymph, toward dawn, had said quite the same thing, which I’d explain in the morning. I comforted both: assured the sea-girl that I had more to fear than she, since without Pegasus to fly me to Hyperborean Medusa, the kibisis was useless; endeavored in Calyxa’s case to change the subject to her Perseid letters, which could be said to be responsible for the narrative in hand, its source and omphalos. Had she died in Egyptian Chemmis—drowned while skindiving with Ammon in the Nil
e, perhaps, or been crocodiled in the deeps of love—and elevated posthumously? Or was her heavenhood a kind of prize for authorship, as Delphinus had been starred by Poseidon for his winning speeches? Speaking of Chemmis—
But she’d speak no more, only clung to me most close that night as Medusa, still mantled, was shown clinging to me on the beach in the morning’s mural. II-F, like its counterpart, was septuple, but so grander in scale that its several panels were each broader than the broadest in the inner series and could be viewed only individually. I asked Calyxa whether, in Zeus’s timetable, the whole of it might be seen that day, or we were obliged to give a week to its several panelets.
“Are you in such a hurry?”
“No no no,” I assured her; “well, yes. For one thing I can’t remember a thing after the week I spent with Medusa on Lake Triton, and I want to know exactly when and how I died. But what really interests me is the way this temple of mine is unfolding.” What I meant, I explained when we returned to bed, was that given on the one hand my rate of exposition, as it were—one mural per day—and on the other the much rapider time-passage between the scenes themselves, we had in six days rehearsed my life from its gold-showered incept to the nearly last thing I remembered. It followed that soon—any day now, perhaps—the marmor history must arrive at the point of my death and overtake my present transfiguration. What was she drawing currently, I demanded of Calyxa, if not herself and me in spirate heaven, reviewing the very murals she was drawing?
After some pause she answered: “I’m not ready to answer that tonight.” But she bid me consider two things: first, that, immortality being without end, one might infer that the temple was as well, from our couch unwinding infinitely through the heavens; on the other hand, it was to be observed that as the reliefs themselves grew longer, the time between their scenes grew shorter: from little I-B, for example (Dictys netting the tide-borne chest), to its neighbor I-C (my first visit to Samian Athene), was a pillared interval of nearly two decades; between their broad correspondents in the second series, as many more days; and from II-E to II-F-1, about the number of hours we ourselves had slept between beholdings. Mightn’t it be, then, that like the inward turns of the spiral, my history would forever approach a present point but never reach it? Either way, it seemed to her, the story might be presumed to be endless.
