Chimera (27 page)

“Now it goes without saying that this is merely a suggestion—both the general idea of a sentimental journey and the specific itinerary I’ve proposed. Possibly it strikes you as too directly imitative of the
Perseid?
However, it seems to me that surely no
harm
could come of such a trip, and perhaps some real good might, since, as you once remarked informally to my Senior Mythology Seminar, the archetypal pattern of mythic adventure is as it is and not otherwise: while we may not comprehend it, we cannot deny it, and heroes will-they nill-they follow it. What perhaps
doesn’t
go without saying is that if in fact your adventure with Anteia, to name only one example, was less innocent than the official version maintains, and you feel it necessary to rehearse your past absolutely, you may depend on me as always to understand, even to honor, your decision: I count my own feelings as nothing beside my love for you and the importance of your career as mythic hero, et cetera.”

Bellerophon senses, not for the first time, that this picture of his late lamented, distorted for accuracy like a caricature, is being drawn with a jealous pen, and wonders by whom. Why should, for example, Polyeidus the Seer be jealous of Philonoë? But the hero of this story is no longer confident that Polyeidus is its author. Polyeidus reminds him that Polyeidus never pretended authorship: Polyeidus
is
the story, more or less, in any case its marks and spaces: the author could be Antoninus Liberalis, for example, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the
Iliad,
Tzetzes, Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, the author of the
Perseid,
someone imitating that author—anyone, in short, who has ever written or will write about the myth of Bellerophon and Chimera. That’s not easy to comprehend, or agreeable, and I’m working toward you, viper, toward you, gnat, and will swat you without fail. Could it be Amazonian Melanippe?

Melanippe, who has copied silently and without comment these many, these innumerable pages, imitates no one, except the honorable line whereof she is the namesake, dating back forever. And she is not not
not
any kind of author, sculptor, painter, nor even a student of classical mythology: please understand that, Bellerophon! In a word she is
not
Perseus’s Calyxa, not not not, and will not imitate that odd, proud, vulnerable girl. She is at most an Amazon: i.e., she’ll lend herself no further than to that imposture.

Imposture! Cute Melanippe was the only true Amazon in a courtful of falsies! See Second Flood, Second Phase!

When she says imposture, what she means of course is that in fact she is—she doesn’t know exactly how to say it; even the phrase “human being, female” puts her already into two categories from which her self feels more or less distinct;
herself
itself puts her into one. In any event, while certainly an Amazon and pleased to be, she feels herself to be by no means comprehended by that epithet. A fringe benefit, she believes, of the Amazonian custom of doing without surnames and assigning to each newborn girl one of a dozen-odd given names is that beneath the apparent confusion which results (there are by her estimate six hundred Melanippes of all ages in Themiscyra at any given tune, who regard one another as sisters, and a similar number of Leaping Myrines, Penthesileas, Hippolytas, et cetera), is an actual clarification of identity. For distinct from her “Melanippe-self,”—immortal because impersonal, Melanippe knows a private, uncategorizable self impossible for her ever to confuse with the name
Melanippe
—as Perseus, she believes, confused himself with the mythical persona
Perseus,
Bellerophon
Bellerophon
…

Bellerophon acknowledges this wise, well-taken point, kisses its taker, but begs her pardon: for reasons to be discovered by Phase Three of the Second Ebb, my identification with “Bellerophon” is clear and systematic policy, not confusion—even as is, was, or imaginably could be the apparent chaos of this tale. Look me in the eyes. You know what I mean.

His mistress Melanippe, official recorder of this portion of his history, interrupts it for the last time in this telling to stand tenderly corrected on that point and to declare to whoever reads these words (of hers) that wherever they may lead and however end, she loves her lover to distraction.

He her ditto! And pernicious Polyeidus—not impossibly because we approach his re-entry—seems less obstructive now of the narrative channel. I feel my tale’s tide flowing strong from the ocean of story; the magic feedbag is hung on: my winged half-brother can refly at last!

Aweigh?

Neigh. Slackwatered, back in Lycia, I climbed off foundered Pegasus, looked in the eye my rail-perched wife, said: “Okay, we’ll do all that. You pack. I’m going to take a stroll out in the marsh; devour my own soul a bit, et cetera. If I’m not back in five days, go without me.”

“Entendu, Green-eyes,” Philonoë replied, and kissed my forehead. “Take this along in case you get bored between meals.” She returned my cousin’s history. “When I was into the myths and legends thing,” she went on, “I found a sort of analogue to the shape-shifter motif in our Lycian folklore: the Xanthian muskrat-trappers and mussel-fishermen speak of an Old Man of the Marsh, a tidewater Proteus, more or less, who takes the form of any of the common species of wetland fauna and works mischief with their boats and gear; but if they happen to catch him accidentally in a crayfish-pot or a clam-rake—one chance in a million—he’s at their service till the tide turns, et cetera. For generations this was no more than a pleasant little folk-belief, which the folk themselves pretended to believe in only for the sake of their grandchildren or tourists and eager students like myself. Since our marriage, however, reports of the O.M. of the M. have come in more frequently and seriously from the outlying districts, especially from the Aleïan marshes. Now, given the uncanny reappearance yesterday of that missing lecture-scroll and its apparent transformation last evening into this floating opus, I can’t help making the obvious association with Polyeidus. I believe you quoted him once to the effect that all shape-shifters are versions of the Old Man of the Sea? It seems at least possible to me that Polyeidus foresaw our discovery of his double-cross of you and Daddy and took advantage of the Chimera episode to turn into that image on the rock, thence into the lecture-scroll, and thence into the dormant tradition of the Old Man of the Marsh, to lie relatively low until the next turn of your career. In sum, and not having seen myself this capital-Pi Pattern you always allude to, I read all the events of the last few days as exciting portents: the scroll, the
Perseid,
Pegasus’s final grounding, the absolute peaking of your obnoxiousness to the children and myself and your tedious, boastfully self-critical harangues to your audiences, all coincident with your passing the midpoint of your life. Everything says it’s time—past time!—for another conference with your Advisor, and that Polyeidus is about to turn up. My private conviction is that you’re holding him in your hand, but inasmuch as his recent form seems to have been that of the Marsh Man, my intuition is that you’re likelier to get through to him if you take the
Perseid
to the Aleïan swamp and go through the motions of looking through the snails and soft-crabs. Maybe cast the manuscript upon the waters? Remembering further what you’ve said and resaid about his documentary tendencies, especially that intermediate transformation into the
kamara
-message in his Corinthian prison cell, I hope you’ll be able to persuade him to turn into the Pattern itself, for you to check out, before or after he takes ‘human’ form for you. Finally, when and if you do confer with him, I trust you’ll be at least cognizant of my own skepticism regarding his good faith, whether or not you’ve come to share it. In any event, since the bring-down of Pegasus has been the principal image of what you’re pleased to call your First Ebb, I’m sure we agree that finding out how to get him up again is your first order of business with Polyeidus. In addition, however, I’d be very interested to hear his opinion on the question whether, once the metaphorical tide has turned and you’re airborne again, it’s okay for you to be sweet to me and the children the way you used to be. That would make me happy enough to die, since, despite all, I love you as much now as I did the night we first went to bed together, and you gently deflowered me, and we slept in each other’s arms till sunrise, et… et cetera. Also give him my regards. ‘Bye.”

“ ‘Bye.’ I did all that, went slogging out among the Littorinas and Melampuses, the Medusae drifting in like fallen moons; of mosquito, frog, and fiddler-crab I sought counsel, how to open my life’s closed circuit into an ascending spiral, like the sand-collars on the beach, like the Moon-shells that I put to my ear for answers—keeping one eye always on the document in hand. I bedded down under a pine on a point of high ground between two creeklets; the sun set and rose a time or two; I considered Philonoë and the course of life, wished I were dead a bit. Hippolochus and Isander hiked out with a box-lunch; I shooed them home but chewed meditatively the chicken, deviled eggs, Greek salad. The marsh ticked, bubbled, soughed, cheeped, hummed, twittered: Polyeidus was in the neighborhood, all right. I put
Perseid
in the little wine-jug that came with lunch and, full of doubt, let the tide take it. Twelve hours fifty minutes later its like washed back with an odd but plainly Polyeidic letter: