Chimera

by John Barth

  “Skip the arguments,” Polyeidus said. “I already know how the story ends.”

  I pressed him urgently for that knowledge.

  “Never mind. In this part I advise you, that’s enough. You want to be a mythic hero, you follow the Pattern. You want to follow the Pattern, you leave town in the Fourth Quadrant, et cetera. You want to leave town and do the second-cycle thing like Perseus, you got to get Pegasus off the ground. You want Pegasus to fly like before, you’re wasting your time with me and Athene.” Whether I knew it or not, he declared, riding the winged horse had always involved the goodwill of two goddesses, not one, manifested in the beneficences appropriate to each. Athene’s bridle was what reined him in and steered him; but what put him in the sky was Aphrodite’s sacred herb.

  “Hippomanes!”

  “What else? As a young man you didn’t need to think of that; what you had to go looking for was the bridle. Now you’re all bridle and no hip, and believe me, at your age it’s not easy to find.”

  How so? Didn’t it grow by full moonlight at the lip of Aphrodite’s well, et cetera?

  Polyeidus winked. “Those were the days, eh?”

  In the Stygian marsh, then, where Perseus had got his gear? Ought I to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to—

  “Reset. Don’t be naïve; it’s right under your nose—which doesn’t mean you’ll sniff it.”

  I scrabbled in the reeds and rushes.

  “O boy,” Polyeidus said. “I tell you what: forget about revisiting the places where you did your tricks, okay? This isn’t the Perseid. Instead, look up all the women you’ve ever loved, in order; that’s the sort of thing Aphrodite goes for. Somewhere along the line you’ll come across the big H. I envy you. When you get the pattern, stick to it. See you in heaven.”

  I had more to ask: Once refueled, where ought Pegasus and I to fly? Assuming Corinth to be my first searching-place, ought Philonoë to accompany me there, or should I avoid her until her turn came in the series? For that matter, how many women comprised the series, and which ones? I could think offhand of only two—his daughter Sibyl and my wife—for whom I’d felt a considerable degree of passion for any length of time; but there were others—the Amazon lance corporal, for example—who had attracted me powerfully for a short while, and still others with whom I’d disported for an hour or a weekend. Which counted? But Polyeidus was transformed already from that nasty-looking little person to the precious Pattern—

  —which I snatched from the mudflat, folded in the manner of the water-message, and fetched home.

  “All aboard,” I said to Philonoë, and lining up our children and cabinet ministers on the dock, declared: “No telling when or whether we’ll be back. Here’s my wedding ring, Laodamia: hang it on a string around your neck. If you boys should start to quarreling over which should usurp the kingdom in my absence, settle the question by seeing who can shoot an arrow through this ring. Heh heh. Got that, ministers?”

  “We’ll try to be good adolescent children,” responded Hippolochus, Isander, and Laodamia in imperfect unison, more their mother’s blood than mine, “avoiding the pitfall of rebelliousness for its own sake, to which the incompletely schooled passions of youth naturally incline, and honoring the accumulated experience of our forebears as embodied in cultural traditions and existing institutions, while at the same time always reviewing those traditions and institutions from the fresh perspective of our youth, with an eye, not to their destruction, but to their ongoing development. Have fun.”

  “Thanks for the ring, Dad,” Laodamia added, bussing my cheek.

  “If the royal traveling-account doesn’t cover your expenses,” my chancellor of the exchequer said discreetly, “don’t forget that your endowed throne at the University includes an expense fund too. The Lycian economy’s in excellent shape, thanks mainly to the combination of a considerable defense industry to protect us from the Carian-Solymian-Amazon conspiracy and little or no actual fighting with them. The tourist business at Mount Chimera National Park doesn’t hurt, either. For these plums, a grateful citizenry and affluent ministry thank you. Bon voyage.”

  A horseshoe wreath of flowers was hung about my neck, another about Pegasus’s who drooped between me and weeping Philonoë on the quarterdeck. Off we went. Polyeidus’s observations to the contrary notwithstanding, I looked for a tempest to wreck our ship as in that remarkable sentence in Perseid where the t’s of the approaching storm trip through the humming n’s of inattention and are joined by furious s’s to strike the vessel as Perseus struck Andromeda. But the wind held fair through the Sporades and Cyclades, and Philonoë, grieved as she was to leave Lycia and children for the first time, could not be quarreled with. The boat ride, the prospective reunion with her older sister, her excitement at my having secured Pattern and direction from Polyeidus—all kept her sunny as the weather. She praised my stratagem for averting faction between the boys (who, however, she was sure would not only rule in harmonious tandem should any accident befall us, but share the throne with their sister, all three loved one another so), kissed the white indented ring on my finger where the gold one had been for so many years, and removed (but carefully stored) her own wedding band, to give our second honeymoon, as she gaily called it, the air of an elopement. For she was convinced, and found the idea enchanting, that my search for hippomanes must lead ultimately to her and the rejuvenation of our love. Anon we ran up the Saronic Sea and ashore on the famous Isthmus. I said: “Here’s where I leave you. The boat will take you back around the point to Tiryns and Anteia.”

  In a small voice, for she had been eager to meet my mother, she replied: “Well. Okay.”

  I saddled up. “No saying just when I’ll see you again, Philonoë. You’ve been a very good wife and mother. And queen. Friend, too. I like your taste in music, food, myths. Clothes and furniture, so-so. You’re very bright and, of course, extraordinarily gentle-spirited. Also, you’ve maintained your physical youthfulness fairly well, considering. And are noble-charactered. Let’s see. O: I wish I were good at loving people, which it seems I’m not. So. In addition, it’s too bad I wasn’t a regular king and husband, without this immortality thing. You’d’ve been a lot happier, and you deserve that. Goodbye.”

  She wept again, not noisily, and as she couldn’t reach my mouth (I was on Pegasus already), kissed the ring-place again, where I held the gold bridle, and disagreed with me as on the night before my birthday, when I’d said I was no hero. My heart was full of love, she declared; more than I wanted to admit: love for her and the children over many pleasant years; love above all for my late twin, who though I seldom mentioned him must have been a most extraordinary person, so driven was I by devotion to his memory.

  I might have questioned this surprising observation, but Pegasus, less alert than in younger days, mistook my uneasy hmpf for giddyap and plodded down the gangway. Corinthians wondered as I hoofed into the old hometown. Nothing much was changed: some stores were different; couple of new schoolhouses. The palace seemed smaller, needed paint; shrubbery in the yard was overgrown; one tree we used to climb still stood—I went up it with my eye, limb by limb, a great catalpa rich in caterpillars and long seed-pods which we dried and smoked behind the stables. Another favorite was gone, as was my best-remembered of the outbuildings: a whitewashed combination toolshed/torture-chamber between the woodhouse and the privy in the slaves’ quarters, where in my tenth year a laureled, loose-toga’d lady, my music teacher, whom I’d threatened to punish for cracking my knuckles with a ruler, had led me, put aside her five-stringed lyre among the rakes and dusty amphorae, knelt sweating to embrace my knees, and—while bees droned in the lattice as if on an ordinary summer afternoon—purchased clemency at a surprising price set by herself. I checked around: no sign of hippomanes there; anyhow the wench was doubtless dead. Some old dog woofed a warning from the dungheap near our hives, back among the hollyhock and mimosa. Steering clear, I espied a shrunk old Amazon, gone in the
chest and toothless, whom I took to be my childhood friend or ancient nurse, I forget which, Hippolyta. I gave her Pegasus to stable, waiting with a smile for her to remember that night on the rooftop and recognize me; but she shuffled him off to a stall with no sign of having noticed even the great white wings. When I asked her, on her return, whether a former lance corporal named Melanippe was still among the stable-hands, she grumbled, “Help nowadays isn’t worth a drachma; got to do every blessed thing my own self,” and I recognized Mother’s voice.

  “I can’t believe it!” I told Sibyl in the grove that night. “Her health is good, but she’s simply shrunk; and her memory’s so poor, it’s a wonder she can manage the palace, much less the polis. Heh. For a long time she didn’t recognize me; one minute she’d say she’d never had any sons, the next minute that they’d been dead for years. Later on, when she told me that she’d established matrilineal descent in Corinth after her menfolk had deserted her, I realized that either she was being bitter or the shock had affected her mind on this particular subject—she seemed clear enough on other matters—so I admitted I’d been a poor son in some respects and apologized for not getting in touch with her for twenty years. I’d assumed your father had explained to her what happened here in the grove that night; he was supposed to let her know about the mythic-hero business, how I had labors to do, et cetera, and would probably come from the east to reclaim the kingdom when I got the right sign, which I haven’t yet, unless this hippomanes trip is it, which I wonder. But I gather that that bastard, excuse me, never did any of these things, and I’m really beginning to think that my wife might be right about him, because wow, when I mentioned his name, Mom came out with this wild story, how after the funeral-games for Glaucus and my brother, Polyeidus took her aside, asked her to marry him, and confessed that out of his love for her and his ambition to be king of Corinth he’d promoted the quarrels between her and Glaucus, Glaucus and me, me and my brother, et cetera, and set up the horserace trick so that some or all of us would get killed, and made up this Pattern thing as a way to get me out of town in case I were a mythic hero—though at the same time he claimed I was actually his son, because it hadn’t been Poseidon in the form of a horse who’d made love to her in the surf that night, but himself in the form of Poseidon in the form of a horse. Got that? Now Polyeidus, when I picked him up off Mount Chimera that first time, told me she was crazy, and had had him arrested because she was imagining all this stuff; but I swear, Sib, she said it all perfectly calmly, and it was especially convincing that she hadn’t even been incredulous or angry when your dad told her these things, just contemptuous, and had him locked up as a vulgar nut rather than as a dangerous traitor and murderer. What she says explains a lot about the things he’s done since, too, you know? Like trying to kill me with one hand and hanging onto my coat-tails with the other. Yet Mom’s obviously not quite right in the head: she had to admit, for example, considering the above, that she had had sons after all, and that only one of them had been killed along with her husband; but she couldn’t keep straight which one of us it was; kept calling me by the wrong name; and pretty soon she was back to her first line: that Belleras was dead to the world and Deliades dead to her (she got it backward), and that this Bellerophon who claimed to be the killer of Belleras (she meant Belleras the Killer) was a total stranger; not a mythic hero but a myth. Well, I was all cut up. I said, ‘Don’t you recognize my voice, Ma?’ and explained that as far as I was concerned, Bellerophon meant ‘Bellerus’s voice,’ you follow me? And wasn’t she pleased to know her son Belleras was going to be immortal, et cetera? She looked me in the eye and said sorry, her whole family was dead, kindly leave her alone or she’d call the guards. I thought of mentioning her grandchildren, but since she’s never met them, and I left them back in Lycia, I doubted it would help. What a day. It’s a pity how people get old. Hi, there. I guess you’re pretty excited to see your childhood sweetheart Belleras again, right? Look at this scar where the well-bucket hit me and turned my eyes green; you can see it plainer now my hair’s going. How’s the sibylling business? Heh.”

  She squinted at me through the moonlight with glassy eyes and shook her frowsled head. “Belleras. O wow.” Sibyl too had changed in twenty years, not apparently for the better. Granted that her vocation as sacred prostitute and prophetess involved considerable orgiastic activity, characteristically cryptic speech, the use of laurel and other mantic drugs, and a certain abandon in costume and coiffure, I saw no good reason why she couldn’t come off it a bit with an old friend, especially as my own address to her was so informal and confiding. A far cry from my vision of her in Athene’s temple, she was in my estimation not so much disheveled as wrecked, her hair wild, her clothes filthy and torn from the abuse of her current lover, who I was distressed to learn was not even a man, much less a deity or demigod, but the “boss dyke of the horsebarns,” according to Sibyl: one of the few of our Amazons who had not drifted south to Tiryns, “where the action’s at.” At forty, the dream of my adolescence was overbreasted and underwashed, thick-thighed and -waisted, hairy of leg, lip, armpit; even when not officially entranced she swallowed, sniffed, and smoked large doses of her sundry herbals and talked seldom more than half-intelligibly; feast-day or not, she took on all comers to Aphrodite’s well, regardless of number, rank, or gender, drew the line at no perversion, masturbated casually between visitors when not comatose. She also burped a lot. On the other hand, she was generous with her scanty means, let all sorts of bums and drifters share her stuffed grape-leaves as well as her pallet, seldom stole from drunks, and gave without charge to needy suppliants oracles neither more nor less enigmatic than those she dispensed to me.

  I told her what I was in search of. “One stud’s hippomanes is another’s saltpeter,” she declared. “But the first dose is free. Let’s see what you’ve got under your toga these days.”

  When it became (relatively) clear that I must make love to her in exchange for a sample of the herb, I reluctantly did so—stallion-fashion at her insistence, “for old time’s sake”—though the combination of her appearance and the memory of that old time was anaphrodisiac. Sibyl knew her trade: though I never saw the hippomanes itself, as I came I heard a whinny overhead and saw Pegasus erratically circling the grove, his first real flight in several seasons.

  “Hooray!” I cried as he crashed into the creepers.

  “Plus ça change,” Sibyl incanted dryly. “Bellerus my ass. Again.”

  Crude as was the invitation, after a spell I managed to remount her briefly, and Pegasus briefly reflew. Overjoyed to have found so quickly what I sought, and eager to lay hold of it for good and learn its use, I stayed with Sibyl the night through, and the next and next, as had Perseus with cowled Medusa on the lakeshore, 11-F-1, but with opposite effect: instead of flying higher and farther each time we coupled, Pegasus rehearsed in four nights his pattern of four times four years, and my own potency diminished as rapidly.

  “Dum dee dee,” said Sibyl on the fifth, “heroes aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Neither is hippomanes. Don’t you have the kind that grew here in the old days?”

  “One toke of the good stuff left,” she said, tapping an amulet like the one her shifty father used to use. “Secret of my success in the whore and oracle way. When this is gone I’m out of business.”

  “Can it take me where I want to go, Sib? Where is that, anyway?”

  It was a palpable hit, she replied in her fashion, and “would send a man like me skyhigh enough before his downfall to drop him into another world.

  “Olympus? Olympus?” I asked excitedly. “That’s a swell idea! But do I become immortal just by flying there?”

  Sibyl scratched her rump and shrugged. “Not many immortals among my customers, you know? Anyhow, I don’t remember saying I was going to make you a present of my last good high. What did you ever do for me?”

  I agreed there was nothing for her in my apotheosis except what satisfaction she might derive
from having been party to it—a reflected glory, to be sure, but apparently one not to be sneezed at: look how it had driven her father; look how (the late lamented) Deliades, in time past, had thriven in the glow of his twin’s predestination; look how she herself, when we three disported in that grove in the bright mid-morning of our lives, had said, “Bellerus can have Corinth the way he has me: by taking it, whenever he wants to.”

  “Let’s have it, Sib,” I said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Please?”

  She hooted. “You’re self-centered enough to be a hero, at least! Don’t you give a fart what happens to me? Or to your wife and kids when you go flapping off to heaven? You don’t even remember that your mother’s name is Eurynome, not Eurymede! And Jesus, it’s not as if you’re benefiting mankind! What good does it do anybody in this world if you make it to another one?”

  “You’re the sibyl,” I said: “Figuring out things like that is not my line. My business is to be a Mythic Hero, period, and to do it I need the hippomanes in that amulet, so I guess I’ll threaten you with this sword. I can show you the Pattern, if you want to see it; it was your dad who drew it up. Now please do the heart-of-gold thing and help your former boyfriend Bellerus become immortal, at whatever sacrifice to yourself. I’ll appreciate it. As to Mom’s name: some accounts give it as Eurymede, some Eurynome; that’s a not-uncommon discrepancy in the case of accessory characters in a myth, for that matter, the hero himself will often have variant names: Deliades, for example, was also called Alcimedes, which I believe means ‘big genitals,’ and Alcmenes—‘mighty as the moon’? Also Peiren, after the Muses’ well on our acropolis. So. I just call her Mom. Please?”

  “A hero that says please,” Sibyl said, but handed over the amulet with a yawn.