Chimera

by John Barth

  “Megapenthes was the last straw,” she concluded bitterly. “When I saw how he was, I knew you were an impostor. But I stuck to the quarter-godhood story, for my own pride’s sake. Now you try to take that away from me. Damn you for coming back into my life!”

  I despaired of setting right the wrong-headed inconsistencies of her complaint; only repeated, like Melanippe her name and unit, that I was no impostor, and that she and I had never been lovers.

  Anteia’s manner grew broadly cunning: “We’re two of a kind, Bellerophon,” she chuckled. “Do you think I believe that nonsense about the Chimera? Even Philonoë admits there’s no proof that it wasn’t something you and Polyeidus dreamed up: another pig fantasy, killing the imaginary female monster. Nobody ever saw her, even! You conned Iobates the way Polyeidus tried to con your mother—and the worst-conned of all is Philonoë, who’s known all along you were a fake and loved you anyhow.”

  “I did kill the Chimera,” I protested, much dismayed. “It was very real, Anteia: I saw the smoke and flame…”

  “Who can’t make a little smoke in an old volcano?”

  “I felt it bite my lance! I saw it flying in the smoke!”

  “Which has wings?” Anteia pressed. “Lion, goat, or snake?”

  “It left a perfect imprint on the rock!”

  “Which nobody saw but you. Come off it, Bellerophon. Philonoë says you want to improve on your first achievements, like Perseus; I think you never achieved them in the first place. It wasn’t this phony Pattern that made you tell the Lycians to throw you out—” She flung at me the Polyeidic paper, confiscated earlier by the palace guard. “It was bad conscience. Your life is a fiction.”

  Shaken, I shook my head. “I can see how it might seem that way to you. But there’s one thing even Philonoë doesn’t know about me…”

  “She knows more than you think,” Anteia said contemptuously. “When she got word recently from the goatherds on Mount Chimera that the monster was back in business again up in the crater, she killed the story to cover up for you. Why do you suppose she was so anxious to get you out of town?”

  “You’re lying! You keep contradicting yourself! I did sink the Carian pirates; I did drive off the Solymians and Amazons, and rape that poor lance corporal who had such high ambitions for herself and her people. And I did did did kill the Chimera! The high-tide thing was Philonoë’s trick, I admit, but it was a trick the gods favored and helped me with, just as Athene helped me bridle Pegasus. There’s proof enough that I’m for real: what about Pegasus?”

  Anteia smiled triumphantly. “A fake, just like his master. Philonoë told me your cock-and-bull story about hippomanes: she even believed it! Well, I just happened to have some in the house, and to show her how blind she was to your phoniness I climbed aboard that sexist pig horse this afternoon and fed him my whole bag. Some stud! He keeled over dead.”

  Sick at heart, helpless to tell what in her harangue were lies, what misapprehensions, what distressing truths, I argued no more, only leaned miserably against the stone wall of my cell, laid hold of my swinging yard, and said: “Real Amazons give a man his choice between death or emasculation. If you’re going to do both to me, please kill me first. For your sister’s sake, okay?”

  “For her chicken-hearted sake,” Anteia said, “I’m going to let you both go back to Lycia, as a matter of fact—cock and balls, impostures, and all. On one condition.”

  I looked at her suspiciously. She smiled.

  “Make me pregnant.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Draw your sword,” she said coolly to the Amazon, and to startled me, as she undid her chiton: “Never mind the odds against conceiving at my age, or all those diagrams you insulted me with before, or the fact that you find me unattractive. I’ll tell our son the demigod it was your last heroic labor, and you’re bloody well going to keep at it till it’s accomplished. Down on the floor, please.”

  I shook my head. “We’ve had this conversation before, Anteia. A man can’t get it up just because he’s threatened.”

  “So we’ll play awhile. Do you want Melanippe here for a teaser? I’m not proud.”

  “You are Melanippe!” I cried to the guard, who stood by as expressionless as ever. “That’s a miracle!”

  “Fuck or die, Bellerophon,” Anteia said. “We’ll do it any way you like; you can even be on top. But frig we must.”

  I repeated, in plain honesty, that I could not, with her, under any circumstances. No personal slight or sexist snobbery intended: the phallus had a will of its own, as imperfectly harmonious with mine as Polyeidus’s magic was with his. See how it hung now, and no wonder, when so much hung on it…

  Anteia refastened her armored placket and left the cell. “I want it cut off and broiled for dinner, Melanippe. I’ll send down some help.” She gave me a final scornful look. “And a little hors d’oeuvre tray.”

  When she was gone I appealed desperately to the poker-faced young guard, who waited outside for her reinforcements. I could not plead innocent, I declared, to the charge of not having risen to the Queen’s original need (though surely there were mitigating circumstances); or of having sacrificed my family to my heroic ambition (but ditto); or of having relegated the women in my life to supportive roles (but how many people of either gender had transcendent callings? and how could Philonoë be said to have been coerced?). Certainly I was guilty of having blindly assaulted the only woman I’d ever met who did have such a calling: her proud, incredible self, not a day older than when, overcome with self-loathing at my late bestiality and later enlightenment, I’d flown her to Corinth and Hippolyta’s care. It was true, then, that certain Amazons had not only metamorphic but rejuvenating powers! For all my transgressions against womankind—not least my apparent inability to treasure one of their number above all else in life, as did many so-called sexist pigs—I was contrite, and did not expect absolution. If I was fated not to die, the gods would preserve me willy-nilly; otherwise I had misconstrued myself and had no wish to live, since my heroic vocation, not my life, was what I valued. But before she and the counterfeit Amazons with whom she consorted there in Anteia’s travesty of true Amazonia (for I knew authenticity from its opposite, both among those who called themselves Amazons and among the values they espoused) made a gelded corpse of me, I begged leave to say goodbye to (and ask a few questions of) my patient wife, who had loved me better than herself.

  “Okay,” Melanippe said, and unlocked the door briskly, and strode off in a different direction from the Queen’s. When I recovered my wits, I followed, whispering loud thanks; she paused a moment to look back at me, still neutrally, then strode on. I could not assimilate the string of miracles: the coincidence of remeeting her, her apparent forgiveness of my crime against her person and her aspirations, her absolute agelessness. How trim her waist and hips were, shapely her legs (she eschewed the dotted-lozenge tights most Amazons wore), fine her shoulders in that fetching sleeveless chainmail blouse! We wound through corridors and back alleys; the night was still, dark, balmy—but I was goosefleshed in my nakedness and sundry emotions, and my scrotum shrank from its imminent leave-taking.

  Turning a corner, we came upon the palace garbage-dump, at sight of which, despite the crying need for silence, a wail of grief escaped me: atop the peels and potsherds lit by the gibbous moon lay poor dead Pegasus, belly-up and wings aspread like a great shot gull, all four legs stuck straight toward the heaven he would never take me to. I swarmed through the crud to hug his neck, curse his poisoner, keen his praises: old soarer, stout companion of my hero-works, high-flown half-brother! Ah, he was not dead, only dying: one white primary-feather wiggled, and I heard a horsy heart throb faintly in my ear.

  “Hippomanes!” I hissed to Melanippe, who (horse-lover herself like all Amazons) had put away her sword and rushed with me to check his pulse at the fetlock, peel back one eyelid (the white shone pupilless as a statue’s, or a minor moon), and even attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Nev
er mind Philonoë, I guess,” I guess I said: “we’ve got to get this horse some real hippomanes before you kill me, or he’s a goner!”

  Melanippe sat back on her heels, wiped her mouth on her war-scarred forearm, mused a moment, handed me her sword. “I have some on me. All Amazons do, especially in their First Quarter. Why not kill me for it and escape?”

  The voice was the same. I hesitated no longer than she’d mused, put my hands behind me. “Nope.”

  “Rape me and escape?”

  I closed my eyes, shook my head.

  “Take it from me by force?”

  I paused again. “No. I’m done with all that, Melanippe, I’ll just say please.”

  She put down the sword and squinted up at me. “Are you really impotent?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I hate this town,” she said, suddenly loquacious. “Every Amazon does. It’s not just the misanthropy, which isn’t really Amazonian at all. Our prophets say that a woman of Tiryns whose name begins with Alpha will give birth to the greatest lady-killer of all tune: Heracles the Amazonomach. That’s why I’m stationed here: my assignment was to check out Megapenthes and kill him if he was really a semidemigod, which I saw he wasn’t. I knew what Stheneboeia’s real name was, and what her ambitions had always been; if you or any other god or demigod had made her pregnant, I’d have killed her. But I don’t think she’ll ever conceive now.”

  I agreed, and informed her further (what I happened conveniently to know from Polyeidus) that the woman’s name would be Alcmene (“mighty as the et cetera”), her lover Zeus himself, their tryst some generations yet to come. I hadn’t heart to add that their son’s bloody rendezvous in Themiscyra—as represented on an Attic black-figured amphiphoreus Polyeidus had once turned into when he was trying for Amphitryon by way of amphigouri back in our schooldays—was already a matter of the history of the future.

  “Can you bring Pegasus back to life?” I pleaded.

  She grinned. “Sure. You too. Stand back.” With a quick modest motion, quite feminine in fact, she took from under her chiton a single tiny leaflet of the magic herb and bent to hold it to the horse’s muzzle. Almost involuntarily—I was so close behind her, and moved, and curious—I rested my hands lightly on her hips. She smiled back up at me. “Be ready to jump on.”

  O, I was—and even as she surely felt it, Pegasus exploded to his feet in a whinnying swirl of feathers. I snatched the bridle, had as much as I could do to hold him down while she scrambled on and helped me get up before her. Time only for the fleetingest thought of Philonoë, sacrificed once more: Melanippe laughed merrily, hugged me about the waist to keep from falling as I dug my bare heels in and we rocketed from the dreck, even seized my grand standing phallus when we cleared Argolis at an altitude of five kilometers, Attica, Euboea—and boldly steered me with it across the black Aegean, under moon and stars too near, it seemed, to envy, toward Scythia, Themiscyra, the warm reedy banks of Thermodon.

  There, let’s see, she and Bellerophon lived happily ever after. She got the lead out of Pegasus and put it in her lover’s Polyeidic pencil. These are her words; this is his life. Her hippomanes is out of sight; they fly three times a day. She will not explain the nature of her immortality (which, however, he infers to have a Lethe-like component, as she remembers few details of the ancient rape, fewer of her girlhood and early exploits in the Fifth Light Cavalry), but he feels bathed in it, younger by a dozen “years” at least, his tide reflooded. Let’s see. She’s an amazing lover, Melanippe—frisky, uninhibited, imaginative, lean and tight. They wrestle a lot. She likes to bite, usually not so it hurts. Bellerophon’s okay too, though that quarter-hour on Anteia’s chopping block took its toll on his genital self-confidence. He wonders sometimes how Philonoë and the kids are getting along, also his mother, and old Sibyl, and whatever happened to Polyeidus. But he comforts himself with that business at the end of Perseld about mortal and immortal parts; look it up.

  What else. They go into Themiscyra on weekends, to do the restaurants and theaters and museums and such; week-days they spend in a little rented cottage out in the marsh, writing this story. Melanippe’s return-from-exile visa, Bellerophon gathers, and his own status as former rapist and former king of their principal former enemy, impose these after all modest restrictions on their movement. Dum dee dee. O yes: he is altogether impressed with life among the Amazons: a truly emancipated people, they no more resemble their caricatures in Tiryns than a male passive-pederast resembles a woman. Lesbianism is not uncommon among them; bisexuality is commoner yet; but the majority are vigorous heterosexuals, and man-haters are rare. Males themselves are welcomed as visitors and treated cordially, though their visits are carefully supervised, and only in exceptional circumstances are they permitted to live and work in the polis. Bellerophon has made notes toward an anthropological treatise on the relations between the Amazons and their counterparts, the all-male society of Gargarensians, which with Melanippe’s help he will no doubt write sometime in their timeless future: members of the two societies mate freely, for example, during two months every spring in the wooded mountains along their border, the impregnated Amazons returning home to bear their children; male babies are not killed or emasculated, but nursed lovingly, weaned, and turned over to the Gargarensians. As no one knows her parents (the Amazon collective and indefinite pronouns are feminine), the incest-taboo is foreign to them: when Bellerophon recounted to Melanippe the story of a certain future king of Thebes, she was distressed that he will accidentally kill his father, but thought it only right for him to marry his mother in recompense. Though marriage is forbidden (and very difficult for Amazon schoolteachers to explain to their tittering charges), love between women and men, even “permanent” relationships, are punished only by the stipulation that the lovers relinquish whatever positions they hold in their respective societies and live outside the city, as during mating season—indeed they regard such connections as a kind of permanent mating season, therefore a permanent daftness, and make gently deprecating jokes about the lovers’ overappetitiveness, underimaginativeness, and irresponsibility. That mistress of Jerome B. Bray’s, by the way, like the ladies of Anteia’s court, must have been merely mimicking an Amazon: neither Melanippe nor anyone else hereabouts has ever heard of Torah, Pentateuch, Gematria, and the rest.

  Et cetera. All that’s another story, of no great concern to the characters in this, which Melanippe will wind up now, seal in an amphora, Bellerophon supposes, and run down the Thermodon on the tide, into the Black Sea, Propontis, Aegean, past fell Heracles’s pillars, across Oceanus, et cetera. He likes to imagine it drifting age after age, nudged by great and little fishes, under strange constellations bobbing, bobbing, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire, et cetera. While towns and statues fall, gods come and go, new worlds and tongues swim into light, old perish, stuff like that. Let’s see. Then it too must perish, with all things deciphered and undeciphered—no no, scratch that: it mustn’t perish, no indeed; it’s going to live forever, sure, the voice of Bellerus, the immortal Bellerophon, that’s the whole point.

  So, well: their love, Bellerophon’s and Melanippe’s, winds through universal space and time and all; noted music of our tongue, silent visible signs, et cetera; Bellerophon’s content; he really is; good night.

  2

  “Good night is right,” Melanippe said when she read Part One. “I can’t believe you wrote this mess.”

  I asked her, hurt, how so; I thought it not half bad, considering.

  “Because,” she cried. “It’s a lie! It’s false! It’s full of holes! I didn’t write any of it; you did, every word. And you make out that I’m all emancipated and no hang-ups and immortal and stuff, and that’s crazy. Content my ass! Content is a death-word in my book; if I were Medusa and I asked Perseus if he was happy to spend eternity with me and he said he was content, I’d spit in his eye! Okay, you got the Amazon business pretty straight, but I’m amazed at your picture of me: you know very well
I’m not immortal except in that special way I told you about: the ‘Melanippe-self’ way. I’m on the verge of my Full Moon, and I feel every lunar month of it: just in the time it’s taken you to write these pages I’ve gained ten kilos and aged five ‘years.’ That very first night in Tiryns, I told you how my nurse Hippolyta in Corinth told me that my mother was a crazy Amazon deaf-mute who killed herself when I was born, and my father a hero on a white horse who’d left her on the stable roof one night. Why pussyfoot around about it? I not only look young enough to be your daughter; just possibly I am your daughter, and if that doesn’t bother me, it shouldn’t bother you. I never held a grudge against you; I took it for granted you didn’t know you’d made my mother pregnant. Even when I learned (from you) that she’d been the hottest prospect in Amazonia until you raped her, and I decided that that was what drove her crazy and made her kill herself, I excused you. But I don’t fool myself about my reasons: I’d heard a lot about you in Argolis; I admire heroes and had never met one; I was disgusted with Stheneboeia, and I wanted out of Tiryns. I don’t mean anything vulgar like screwing my way to the top (I never let Stheneboeia sleep with me); I really did fall for you, in a hurry. I honor and respect you, as you know. I even love you; you’re the gentlest, sweetest lover I ever had, if not the most passionate, and the difference in our ages doesn’t matter to me at all except when it takes the edge off your enthusiasm because you’ve done everything once already. Like getting married and having a family and building a house and buying furniture and stuff. If you want to know the truth, I think we’re bogged down more than immortalized: you scribble scribble scribble all day, morning noon and night, and honestly, I believe it must be the greatest thing in the world to be a mythic hero and be immortalized in the story of your life and so forth—I really do appreciate that—but I love activity, you know? Philonoë was more your type—I mean that perfectly kindly. She liked books and myths and needlework and all; I’m used to an active life, and we never do anything! I’d sort of hoped we’d go down to Lycia after you’d got yourself together, not that I’m eager to be a queen, but just so we’d be doing stuff. It drives me crackers that we’ve got this winged horse right here to take us anywhere in the world, and all we do is spin around the saltmarsh after mealtimes—then back to your scribbling scribbling while I make dinner and twiddle my thumbs. I hate to say this, but I guess I’d be happier with less of a hero and more of a regular man. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I’m tired of Amazoning; I’m tired of being a demigod’s girlfriend, too, if it means hanging around this cottage till I die. But I’m also tired of bopping about with different lovers; what I want is a plain ordinary groovy husband and ten children, nine of them boys. Call me a cop-out if you want to; I ought to find some swinging young Gargarensian M.D. or lawyer next mating season who’ll think I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him, instead of just the recentest, you know? I might not love him as much, but I bet I’d be happier. I don’t want to be around when my hippomanes doesn’t work for you any more, Bellerophon; either you’ll leave me like the rest or we’ll both sit around wishing we were dead. You thought that that Pattern Polyeidus gave you for your Second Flood predicted three women, but by my count I’m the fourth: Sibyl, my mother, Philonoë, and me, right? But you said yourself that everything comes in fives in the Betterophoniad, so maybe you ought to start looking for that next one and get on with your career. Maybe this Chimera has turned into a pretty girl again, like Medusa in the Perseid. You should check and see if she’s It, and if she isn’t, kill her for real this time and see if that gets you where you want to go. Anyhow I know I’m not It for you, and you know it too, only you don’t want to admit it. You’re not getting any younger; neither am I: lots of Amazons look younger than they are because we don’t count years, and it’s the distinctions people acknowledge and condition themselves to look for that usually show, in my opinion. But the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that tonight’s full moon is going to end my First Quarter, and you’ll think I’ve aged fourteen years in one night. Will you still say I’m ‘frisky and lean and tight’ and so forth? I get tired too, you know; dead tired; sometimes I feel Last Quarter! Maybe I shouldn’t go on like this; I know it’s getting near my period, and that always makes me blue and a little bitchy. But I swear, this isn’t immortality: it’s suspended animation. Which brings me back to your story: despite all those clever things you have me say in it, the truth is I know zero about writing; but if I were to find this washed up on the beach and read it through, just as a plain story, I’d sure be pissed off that you never tell what happened to Polyeidus and Philonoë and Anteia and your mother and your kids, especially that ring business when you left home; and you don’t say what the rest of Sibyl’s letter said, or clear up that episode with the Chimera—whether she was real in the first place and whether she’s back again—or explain all that fudging about your brother’s death, et cetera. You even call it ‘Part One,’ but I don’t see any Part Two. There are nice things in it, sure, a lot of nice things, once you get past that heavy beginning and move along; but if your immortality depends on this piece of writing, you’re a dead pigeon.”