Chimera

by John Barth

  I kissed her (pocked) cheek. “Thanks a lot. I really mean it.”

  “Sure. Here’s an airmail special for your hostess at the next stop. No peeking. Fuck off, now, and leave me to my dykes and winos.”

  It wasn’t exactly Perseus’s farewell to Medusa, but I thanked her again, promised to intercede in her behalf with Aphrodite when I got to heaven and delivered the letter (which was addressed simply with an upper-case Alpha), just as I meant to apply gratefully to Athene to do what she could for Eurymede/-nome and Philonoë. “Bye.”

  Sibyl brushed away the cloud of fruitflies that often as not hovered around her head and said: “Drop dead twice.” Whether this most terrible of curses was directed at them or me I chose and will ever choose not to wonder; I broke open the amulet, swung a leg over Pegasus, put it to him, and hung onto the bridle for dear life when he bounced all over the vault of heaven like a mad moth in a closed room. First and last time I was ever airsick; Zeus knows where Sibyl came across that crop. I lost my bearings with my breakfast, commenced hallucinating, wow. Nowhere back in my flying youth did I ever have such a bring-down as when Pegasus now tailspun with a whinny into a lemon orchard just outside some town.

  Not Olympus. I woke up bruised, headachy, sore; no sign of Pegasus, much less a cute Calyxa to priestess me back to life with love and egg-lemon soup. I was in the same rocky grove, bleeding mortal blood from half a dozen scrapes; even for the five minutes till I recognized the walls of Tiryns, I could not imagine my crashing place to be otherwhere than Earth. I groaned and, not to be suckered more than one-and-six-tenths times by the same device, tore open Sibyl’s note. Pray bring the bearer of this letter to life, read its mean first clause; never mind the second till my Second Ebb. A pale dandy with limp-wristed shortsword and high-fashion armor stepped from behind a tree and lisped: “My name ith Megapentheth the themi-demigod, thon of Queen Ththeneboeia by the demigod Bellerophon and thlayer of the falth mythic hero Pertheuth. I order you to thurrender on pain of death—and thtop tearing up thothe thecret methageth, pleathe.”

  I groaned again. “Good grief!”

  “Yeth, well. You think I’m homothecthual jutht becauthe I have a bad lithp. Let me tell you alpha that while it’th true that thome queenth affect thith impediment, ethpethially in vulgar joketh, in my cathe ath in many otherth the defect ith Congenital and hath nothing to do one way or the other with mathculinity; beta, neither thpeech defecth nor thecthual proclivitith thtrike me ath very rithible ecthept to the coarthetht thenthibilitith. And gamma, while it happenth that I am in fact homoerotic, tho are the warlike Thpartanth, tho there. Quit your thmirking: I may be gay, but I’m awfully handy with thith thyortthword.”

  Perhaps he was, but as I advanced to inflict on him, fairly or not, the full measure of my frustration, banged-up Pegasus staggered to me from where he’d wandered, favoring his near wing and off hind leg and shaking his head dizzily—a sight to make the fiercest faggot falter. I sprang on as a platoon of Amazons, one behind every bush, stepped forth fully armed to Megapenthes’s rescue, but Peg went down under my weight as if back in Lycia.

  Remembering what Amazons do to rapists and fearing that my former victim might have Immigrated to Tiryns with her just complaint, I drew my sword and prepared to fall on it rather than do battle with them or be taken alive, neither of which options I had taste for.

  “Thtop!” Megapenthes cried, to the Amazon guard as well as to me. “That’th my father Bellerophon! You can tell by the winged horth. Do the Xthanthuth trick!”

  Sure enough and woe was me, like the fishermen’s wives on the plain of Xanthus all but one of the Amazons spun round, flipped up her chiton and down her tights, mooned meward. The dissenter, a crop-haired youngster, sheathed her sword and stalked off, disgusted. Me too: looking more closely, I doubted they were even real Amazons: their skins were too white; their hams and buttocks too soft-looking, their voices too feminine, their costumes too chic. Even Pegasus took one sniff and lost interest.

  “I give up,” I announced. “Everything’s out of order. Tell King Proetus he’s got company. And tell my wife that if this is her idea of a joke, I’m not amused.”

  Neither were my captors, as they proved after all to be. “Quiet, pig,” their leader said, and ordered her company to bind my wrists and lead me by a rope around my neck to Queen Stheneboeia. “No funny stuff,” she warned me, “or I’ll kick you in the nuts.”

  “Take it eathy,” Megapenthes complained in my behalf. “He’th my father the demigod. Hi, Dad.”

  “Be damned if I am,” I said. “I don’t even know anybody named Sthenewhatsername. Besides, semidemi-godhood doesn’t happen. Where’s Proetus? Let go my tunic, damn you!”

  “Our orders are not to geld you unless we’re provoked,” said the captain of the guard, who though I was convinced now she was no Amazon, was formidable enough. “Frankly, the pleasure will be mine. Come along home now, Prince, and tell your mother we’ve caught her old boyfriend. We’ll show him Proetus on the way.”

  Megapenthes pouted. Puzzled and distraught, but after all helpless, I was stripped and led into town. Shopkeepers and sidewalk-loiterers, all women, whistled and made coarse remarks about my manly parts. A few men peered with shy curiosity from behind half-drawn window hangings. Some others, young and heavily painted, smirked on the arms of their middle-aged female escorts or feigned embarrassment and hid their faces with their fans.

  “Where’s Anteia?” I demanded. “What’s happened to this town?”

  “The Queen will ask the questions,” said my captor, thumbing the edge of her blade. “You shut up and listen.”

  Led into the familiar throne-room, I gasped at a sight straight out of Perseid: an armed (male) palace guard, a conference table of (male) ministers and advisors, various (male) tablewaiters, busboys, attendants, pages, musicians, and chamber-flunkies, three naked (female) dancers on the table, and, at its head, King Proetus himself, all gazed in our direction, frozen in postures of attack or alarm. I’d’ve thought them cunning statuary, but that their stances (save for that of one dancing girl, who shielded her breasts with one arm, her shame with the other) were not classical, and their eyes, unlike the eyes of our good Greek statues, were pupiled, gazing not on eternity but on the terrible intruder who must once have stood in my place. Poor Proetus had ignored my counsel and been petrified for posterity half off his throne, wiping his mouth with a stone napkin and spilling alabaster wine from his granite glass.

  “Perseus was here?” I asked Megapenthes.

  “Shut your pig mouth and curtsy fast,” said the guard-captain. “Here comes the Queen.”

  Megapenthes, curtsying beside me (I’d never made that form of obeisance and was obliged to hold his elbow or fall), nodded and whispered: “The year I wath born. Then, a few yearth ago, he came back, like you, and I killed him to prove I wath a themidemigod.”

  “Nonsense!” The guard redrew her sword, but when I recognized the entering Queen (now about fifty, heavy-set and light-mustached, tricked out in armor and accompanied by the same young Amazon who’d left the scene of my capture), I stood up and cried, “Anteia! What’s all this silliness?”

  “Call me Stheneboeia,” she said imperiously, taking the empty throne beside her stoned late spouse. “Anteia was my slave-name.”

  “Make them give me my clothes back, Anteia!”

  “Not till we’ve had a look.” She inspected me with a disdainful smile. “My my, we do age, don’t we?”

  “Never mind. Where’s Philonoë?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters; it will always matter! Just because a man deserts a woman, it doesn’t follow that he doesn’t love her a lot. Especially if he’s a—”

  “Cut his cock off,” she idly instructed the guards. “For impudence. Heh. You can use this famous conference table as a chopping block. Some conferences they used to be!” She permitted them to force me trembling to the table edge, draw out my edgeless tool, and raise their ed
ged before she bade them wait. For the rest of our conversation I remained in this dreadful position. “Stheneboeia,” returning to her throne, coldly informed me that not long after my flight from Tiryns twenty years before, she had found herself pregnant; inasmuch as she’d long since ceased to have intercourse with Proetus and was between established lovers at the time, it could be only my “repeated rape” of her in Athene’s temple that had inspired her condition. While this “outrage, even by a demigod,” still outraged her, and she looked forward to punishing me for it in the fashion of the Amazons, she had nonetheless spared “its issue, the semidemigod Megapenthes,” not to offend “his grandfather Poseidon” and the goddess in whose temple he’d been “brutally engendered.” But Proetus, “in his sexist pig way,” had abused her as if the child were sprung from a love affair rather than a rape, and she was not displeased when Perseus, in fulfillment of his destiny, had come through town with his bride Andromeda and the Gorgon’s head not long afterward, broken in on one of her husband’s “swinish revels”—from which she’d been fortuitously absent out of disgust for them—and turned the whole court and elite guard to stone when panicked Proetus gave the order to attack.

  “Not that Perseus wasn’t a pig like all the rest of you,” she made clear, “with his swaggering hubris and his baby-doll bride—as if he didn’t owe everything to Athene and the poor woman whose head he’d cut off! But as pig heroes go, he was better hung than most, god knows, and had a decent streak. They stayed on a few months; I tried to raise Andromeda’s consciousness on the subject of marriage as a sexist institution; we had a little fun à trois; and he let me do whatever I wanted to with the polis—not that he had any right to take it from me, but a pig is a pig.”

  What she’d done, I learned next, was seize the opportunity of the court’s petrifation to install all the ministers’ wives in their late husbands’ places, train a female palace guard with the help of Amazon military advisors, reverse the genders of every law on the statute books and every custom in the city having to do with relations between the sexes, and convert Tiryns into an absolute matriarchy. That her success (like that of Mother’s milder programs in Corinth, I now surmised) was owing to Perseus’s benevolent hegemony over all of Argolis had rather rankled her than made her grateful, and when she’d heard he was retracing the course of his earlier adventures, she’d laid a simple trap for him with her son’s help. Knowing that no pig chivalrist would challenge a woman, she had arranged for Megapenthes to challenge him, wait until he brandished Medusa’s head and Athene’s shield, and then counter with a mirrored shield of his own: caught in compounded reflection, Perseus’s flesh had turned to stone, the stone into diamonds, the diamonds ultimately into stars, which the women of Tiryns nightly cheered the setting of. Too bad that Medusa herself—and Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and a few others—had had to go too, but one could not make souvlakia without killing lambs.

  “That’s all preposterous!” I cried. The guard looked to the Queen for leave to lop; was stayed with a head-shake; gave my glans a nasty pinch. Fingernails. I pointed out the discrepancy between this sordid account of Perseus’s estellation and the glorious one I’d read in the document upon which I was modeling my own life story.

  “My unliberated little house-mouse of a sister told me all about that,” Anteia replied. (I could not call her Stheneboeia). “It’s a lie. An utter fiction. It says that Pegasus is a constellation in Medusa’s custody, for example: so who’s the nag you flew in on?” Seeing me taken aback by this consideration, she went on to deride the male-supremist character of the great body of our classic myths, with which she revealed a fairly extensive acquaintance—Philonoë’s influence, no doubt—and which she held to be the fabulated record of a bloody overthrow, by male pig patriarchs in ages past, of the original and natural matriarchy of the world. “Mythology is the propaganda of the winners,” she declared, adding that the grand myth supported by all those particular mythlets was the myth of heroic maleness—not importantly in the matter of brute strength, where man’s unquestionable superiority to woman was as nothing beside the dumb ox’s to man, but in such virtues as courage, cunning, and sexual prowess, and most especially in the aspect of divine dispensation to greatness and immortality. “You’re a lie!” she fiercely concluded: “We’re going to rewrite you!”

  Though I shivered for my organ’s sake, I could not help remarking that she’d done much rewriting already, of Perseus’s history and our own. I don’t doubt that my idol had been there: petrified Proetus attested to that, and though the specific event was not recorded in Perseid, I recalled its noble narrator’s “ending, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus,” et cetera; moreover, the physics of the estellatory process as Anteia described it was similar to what transpired between the lovers’ eyes at that story’s climax. But as anyone not blindly hostile to the very concept of herohood must acknowledge, my version had the ring of authentic mythopoeia, hers the clatter of mere scurrilous iconoclasm. For the Pegasus discrepancy I could not account; for the subordinate role of women in mythic and actual history I did not feel particularly accountable; for my own contributions, voluntary and involuntary, to their cumulative exploitation and felt degradation, I was heartily sorry (perhaps she recalled the Aristotelian diagram?); about complex questions of nature versus nurture in the matter of sex and temperament, distinction versus valuation, or customary roles versus personal inclinations, and the rest, I had some curiosity but no firm opinion. But of my vocation as mythic hero and demideity I had no doubt whatever, whatever one might choose to make of it, any more than I had of Megapenthes’s disqualification for that calling, and I would pursue it like my skyborne cousin until I was either dead or deathless.

  “People’s memories improve things, Anteia. Proetus ended up believing he’d fathered Perseus on Danaë. My old tutor Polyeidus claims now that it was himself and not Poseidon who sired me on Eurymede. I never once made love to you, and you know it.”

  The guard confidently raised her sword.

  “Pig rhetoric,” Anteia growled. “In Tiryns a man doesn’t ‘sire a child on a woman’; she conceives it on a man. Position One in this polis is with the man underneath. You admit you’ve committed the crime of rape?”

  “Not on you. On an Amazon lance corporal, twenty years ago, and I hated myself afterward. She was a dead ringer for your young attendant there: astonishing coincidence.”

  “Put him away,” the Queen ordered. “You’re not going to the sky, Bellerophon. You’re going to Tartarus with your bloody prick stuffed down your lying throat.”

  “Thorry, Dad,” Megapenthes said as they led me out. “Why not ‘feth up and be Mom’th thecthual thlave forever? Aunt Philonoë wouldn’t mind, if it thaved your life. We’re raithing her conthiouthneth.”

  Anteia told him to be a good boy and stop nattering and go fetch her a glass of Phaedra. I was led down to a dungeon to wait my fate, burdened as much by the thwart of my ambition as by the prospect of torture, mutilation, death. An examination of my cell suggested no way either to escape or to kill myself. I spent a dreadful day under the eyes of my warden, Anteia’s attendant, who watched impassively as I sighed, paced the bare room, tried to nap, ate and drank, pissed and shat. Her resemblance to my lance corporal was truly remarkable: cropped dark hair, wiry build, brown skin and eyes, small breasts and buttocks—I wished I weren’t about to die, so that I might explore the coincidence undistracted, inquire whether her mother was perhaps an Amazon refugee in Corinth, et cetera. I did indeed ask whether her name was by any chance Melanippe: she neither replied nor turned away, but regarded me steadily while the footfalls of my executioner, as I supposed, came down the stair.

  But Anteia merely bid the girl unlock my cell and entered, without visible instruments of emasculation or execution.

  “Hi,” she said, standing just inside the closed door. Her tone was mild.

  “Hello,” I answered carefully, and got up from the floor. “Have a seat.�
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  She smiled quickly and came over to the tiny barred window where I stood, but—as the floor was filthy and there was no bench or pallet—declined my invitation. Her breath was vinous. I kept my eyes on her face, trying to assess the situation. She mostly looked down, as if at my flaccid parts.

  “You have to understand everything at once,” she declared. “I’m not able to talk about anything just now.”

  “I understand nothing. Where’s Philonoë?”

  “I didn’t want to come down here,” she said tersely. “I didn’t want to see you again at all, Bellerophon.”

  “Same here. What’s up?”

  “You’re not helping me,” she complained, whipping her head from side to side. “You’re not saying any of the right things.”

  “Megapenthes isn’t my son,” I said. “And there’s no such thing as semidemigods. My only offense was not making love to you when you wanted me to, and that’s not against the law except in Themiscyra. Besides, I was trying to get through to Athene, to get my work done, and you kept interrupting. What’s more, Athene doesn’t like people making love in her temples: look at Medusa. You might be a Gorgon right now if I’d let you seduce me.”

  “The way you turn away from me,” she complained, “you’d think I was a Gorgon.”

  I explored this attitude. “That’s not so, Anteia. In the temple, that first night, you really excited me; I’m sure you saw it. But I was an ambitious young man, trying to become a mythic hero and purify myself at the same time, and worrying about the laws of hospitality. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Hmp.” But she went on, her voice still more injured than belligerent. “My sister worships you. It’s criminal the way she takes all your double-standardist crap with a smile. She should kick you in the balls.”

  I made no reply; began restlessly to wonder about the pattern of incremental revelation in my case, whether it was going to follow sexual intercourse with a succession of women rather than, as in Perseid, successive nights with the same woman, and whether I was obliged to include Anteia in the lot or might proceed directly to Philonoë. But now, her tone gradually hardening, the Queen observed that she was about to enter what the Amazons called Last Quarter: her menses came only infrequently, soon would cease. Her daughters had turned out to be whores and freaks: one was dead of an overdose; the other two, after years of madness and scandalous behavior, had made bad marriages. Running the polls after Proetus’s death had been no picnic: like all wealthy widows, she’d been preyed upon by false seers and con-men of every description, until out of anger and desperation she’d founded the matriarchy. There was little in her life that gave her pleasure to recollect; it was a catalogue of abuses at the hands of men, from her coarse father Iobates through her rapist debauché of a husband to her cruel and faithless lovers—none more false than I.