Chimera (7 page)

She shook her head angrily, or desperately. “It’s absurd. You’re only trying to talk your way out of a bad spot.”

“Of course I am! And of course it’s absurd! Treasure me!”

“I’m exhausted. I should use the razor on both of us, and be done with it.”

“Treasure me, Dunyazade!”

“We’ve talked all night; I hear the cocks; it’s getting light.”

“Good morning, then! Good morning!”

Alf Laylah Wa Laylah,
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, is not the story of Scheherazade, but the story of the story of her stories, which in effect begins: “There is a book called
The Thousand and One Nights,
in which it is said that once upon a time a king had two sons, Shahryar and Shah Zaman,” et cetera; it ends when a king long after Shahryar discovers in his treasury the thirty volumes of
The Stories of the Thousand Nights and a Night,
at the end of the last of which the royal couples—Shahryar and Scheherazade, Shah Zaman and Dunyazade—emerge from their bridal chambers after the wedding night, greet one another with warm good mornings (eight in all), bestow Samarkand on the brides’ long-suffering father, and set down for all posterity
The Thousand Nights and a Night.

If I could invent a story as beautiful, it should be about little Dunyazade and her bridegroom, who pass a thousand nights in one dark night and in the morning embrace each other; they make love side by side, their faces close, and go out to greet sister and brother in the forenoon of a new life. Dunyazade’s story begins in the middle; in the middle of my own, I can’t conclude it—but it must end in the night that all good mornings come to. The Arab storytellers understood this; they ended their stories not “happily ever after,” but specifically “until there took them the Destroyer of Delights and Desolator of Dwelling-places, and they were translated to the ruth of Almighty Allah, and their houses fell waste and their palaces lay in ruins, and the Kings inherited their riches.” And no man knows it better than Shah Zaman, to whom therefore the second half of his life will be sweeter than the first.

To be joyous in the full acceptance of this dénouement is surely to possess a treasure, the key to which is the understanding that Key and Treasure are the same. There (with a kiss, little sister) is the sense of our story, Dunyazade: The key to the treasure is the treasure.

Good evening.

Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even our stars’ nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long-deceased earth.

Nightly, when I wake to think myself beworlded and find myself in heaven, I review the night I woke to think and find myself vice-versa. I’d been long lost, deserted, down and out in Libya; two decades past I’d overflown that country with the bloody Gorgon’s head, and every drop that hit the dunes had turned to snake—so I learned later: at twenty years and twenty kilometers high, how could I have known? Now there I was, sea-leveled, forty, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past. It must have been that of all the gods in heaven, the two I’d never got along with put it to me: sandy Ammon, my mother-in-law’s pet deity, who’d first sent Andromeda over the edge, and Sabazius the beer-god, who’d raised the roof in Argos till I raised him a temple. Just then I’d’ve swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in; I even prayed for the rascals. Nothing doing. Couldn’t think where I’d been or where was headed, lost track of me entirely, commenced hallucinating, wow. Somewhere back in my flying youth I’d read how to advertise help wanted when you’re brought down: I stamped a whopping
PERSEUS
in the sand, forgot what I was about, writing sets your mind a-tramp; next thing I knew I’d printed
PERSEUS LOVES ANDROMED
half a kilometer across the dunes. Wound up in a depression with the three last letters; everything before them slipped my mind; not till I added
USA
was I high enough again to get the message, how I’d confused what I’d set out to clarify. I fried awhile longer on the dune-top, trying to care; I was a dying man: so what if my Mayday had grown through self-advertisement to an amphisbane graffito? But O I was a born reviser, and would die one: as I looked back on what I’d written, a fresh East breeze sprang from the right margin, behind, where I’d been aiming, and drifted the
A
I’d come to rest on. I took its cue, erased the whole name, got lost in a vipered space between object and verb, went on erasing, erasing all, talking to myself, crazy man: no more
LOVES,
no more LOVE, clean the slate altogether—me too, take it off, all of it. But I’d forgot by that time who I was, re-lost in the second space, my first draft’s first; I snaked as far as the subject’s final
S
and, frothing, swooned, made myself after that seventh letter a mad dash—

“And that’s all you remember?” asked Calyxa.

“That was it, till I woke up here in heaven, in the middle of the story of my life. Would it please you if I kissed your navel once again?”

“Take a chance!” I blushed and did. Here’s how it was: some lost time since I’d died as I imagined with my name, I opened eyes upon a couch or altar, a velvet gold rectangle with murex-purple cushions, more or less centered in a marble chamber that unwound from my left-foot corner in a grand spiral like the triton-shell that Dedalus threaded for Cocalus, once about the bed and out of sight. Upon its walls curved graven scenes in low relief, each half again and more its predecessor’s breadth, to the number of seven where the chamber wound from view—which scenes, when I had come fully home to sense, I saw depicted alabasterly the several chapters of my youth, most pleasing to a couched eye. The first, no wider than the bed from whose sinistral foot it sprang, showed Mother Danaë brazen-towered by vain Acrisius my grandfather for contraceptive reasons, lest she get the son predestined to destroy et cetera; Granddad himself, with Grandmother Aganippe, stroked horses fondly in the court, unaware that up behind them Zeus in golden-showerhood rained in upon their frockless daughter, jackpotting her with me. A pillar divided this mural from the next, as it were on my port quarter: Acrisius had judged Mom’s story counterfeit, called me his twin-brother’s bastard, and set suckler and suckled adrift in a brassbound box; the scene
itself
was the beach of Cycladean Seriphos: there was young Dictys with his net; he’d fished us in, opened the chest, and stood agape at the sight of sweet-nursing Danaë, in mint condition despite her mal-de-mer. In the background was fairly copied the palace of Dictys’s brother, King Polydectes. The third relief, a-beam of and as long as my altar-couch, was set in Samos: twenty years were passed with the fluted pillar; back in Seriphos the King lusted after Mother, and had rused my rash late-teenhood with a pledge to marry someone else instead if I’d contrive to bring him Medusa’s head as a wedding gift.

“You’re sure it was Zeus and not your uncle up in that tower?” I’d asked Danaë one last time—for she’d admitted an early defloration by Proetus, Acrisius’s twin.

“I was sixteen,” she replied, “but I knew a slug from a shower of gold.” My father, she reassured me, was a lap-deep drench of drachmae.

“And you don’t want to marry King Polydectes?”

“Small change.”

So, banking on Dictys to safekeep her, I’d set out for Samos on a tip from half-sister Athene, to learn about life from art: for represented in her temple murals there (and so reditto’d here in mine) were all three Gorgons—snakehaired, swinetoothed, buzzardwinged, brassclawed—whereof, as semiSis was pointing out, only the middle one, Medusa, was mortal, decapitable, and petrifacient. Already holding the adamantine sickle Hermes had lent me and Athene’s polished shield, I stood listening, a handsome auditor I was then, to her hard instructions. Sword and shield, she said, would not suffice; one thing depended on another; just as Medusa was prerequisite to Mother’s rescue, so to kill Medusa required not only the Athenian strategy of indirection but other gear: namely, Hermes’s winged sandals to take me to Gorgonsville in far-off Hyperborea, Hades’s helmet of invisibility to escape from the snake-girl sisters, and the magic
kibisis
to stow her head in lest she petrify all posthumously. But these accessories were in the care of Stygian nymphs whose location was known not even to my canny sister: only the grim gray Graeae could tell it, and they wouldn’t.

My first task, then, clear-cut in the fourth panel, had been to hie me from Samos to Mount Atlas, where sat the crony trio on their thrones, facing outward back to back and shoulder shoulder in a mean triangle. Some way off from its near vertex (which happened to be between terrible Dino and Pemphredo the stinger), I hid behind a shrub of briar to reconnoiter and soon induced, concerning the single eye and tooth they shared, their normal mode of circulation. Right to left things went around, eye before tooth before nothing, in a kind of rhythm, as follows: Pemphredo, say, blind and mute, sat hands in lap while Dino, on her right, wore the eye just long enough to scan her sector and Enyo, on her left, the tooth just long enough to say “Nothing.” Then with her right hand Pemphredo took the eye from Dino’s left, clapped it in place, and scanned, while Dino with her right took tooth from Enyo’s left, popped it in to say “Nothing,” then passed it on to Pemphredo, who passed the eye around to Enyo, put in the tooth, and said “Nothing.” Thus did report follow observation and meditation report, except that (as I learned some moments later) at the least alarum any gray lady could summon by a shoulder-tap what either other bore. For, having grasped the cycle, I moved closer in a cautious gyre, keeping ever abaft the eye, at the vertex between speaker and meditator; but when I rustled a pebble underfoot, then-blank Enyo, her right hand out for the eye from Pemphredo, whacked Dino into reverse and fetched the tooth as well! I lunged to her right, Pemphredoward, just as she clapped the organ in; by the time she was toothed to cry “Something!” Pemphredo had eared me at her feet and tapped Enyo for the eye, at the same time reaching right for the her-turn tooth. Dino, unable to reply that she’d returned the tooth to Enyo, swatted back both ways; twice-tapped Enyo got her hands crossed, giving Pemphredo the eye and Dino the tooth; I dived through thrones to the center; all clapped all; eye and tooth flipped round in countercircles but could be by none installed before doubly summoned. By deftly interposing at a certain moment my right hand between Dino’s ditto and Enyo’s left I short-stopped eye; no problem then, as Pemphredo made to gum home their grim incisor, simply to over-shoulder her and excise it. The panel showed me holding both triumphantly aloft while the grieving Graeae thwacked and flopped and croaked in vain, like crippled herons.

Its Stygian successor in my judgment was less successful, artistically speaking, for while it curved some thirteen meters round behind my bedhead to the Graeae’s eight, both the task and its representation were much simpler: having learned from the furious trio where the Stygian Nymphs abode (perforce returning tooth for angry Pemphredo to speak with, but retaining eye by way of insurance against Gray-Lady-bites) it was simply a matter of going there, holdig my dose thus agaist the biserable sbell those girls gave off, ad collectig frob theb the helbet, wallet ad wigged saddles.

“What did they smell like?” asked Calyxa.

“Your opposite,” I said. “But if, immortal that you are, you’d perspired through all eternity rank sweat here where I ab bost fod of kissig, dor ever washed id all that tibe—”

“I’m twenty-four,” Calyxa said, “until next week. That feels okay.”

But I couldn’t tell her where took place that easy feat upon the wall, for just as Lethe’s liquid is a general antidote to memory, the Styx-girls’ stench proved specific against recollection of its source. All Pemphredo said was to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to close the latter. No time at all till I had lapped the team of toolwardens there depicted and winged off, don’t ask me whence.

“If she hasn’t anyone to wash herself for her,” primly declared Calyxa, “a girl should wash herself herself.”

The penultimate panel, on my entire right hand, was most eventful and my favorite. Itself septuple in proportions similar to the whole’s of which it was sixth episode, its first scene, Hyperborean, showed me holding aloft the Gorgon’s dreadful head, which, catching her napping, I’d snuck in shielded to cut from her reflected neck; the second, Hesperidean, my petrifaction of inhospitable Atlas; the third, fourth, and fifth, all Joppan, respectively my backhand slaying of sea-beast Cetus, threatening Andromeda on the cliff; the post-rescuary nuptials, held over Cassiopeia’s protest, whereat I’d recited to the wedding guests my history thus far; and the splendid battle in the banquet hall when my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda as had Proetus Danaë, broke up the reception; the mural showed me turning into stone with all his company that avuncular nepophile. In the heptatych’s sixth panelet, climax of the climax, back in Seriphos, I had once again called my enemy to my aid, rescuing Mother and ending my tasks by the petrification of taskmaster Polydectes. The seventh represented a mere and minor mishap some time later, at the Larissan track-and-field meet, where a zephyr slipped my straight-flung discus into a curve and frisbee’d down to Hades Granddad Acrisius in the stands; it was as overlong for its substance as was its grand counterpart in the whole heptamerous whorl, which for all its meters (thirty-three and then some) showed but my wife and me throned in Argos, surrounded by our gold bright children, a shower of
Perseidae.

Daily, hourly, since first waking on my Elysian couch, I reviewed those murals, wondrous, as faithful to my story and its several characters as if no chiseling sculptor, but Medusa herself, had rendered into veined Parian, from her perch in the great sixth panel, our flesh and blood. That image was of the lot most welcome to me: all golden muscle, hard as marble, I stood profiled on the Gorgon’s corpse in the model glory of twenty years; the magic sandals were strapped to just below my calves; my left knee bent to bound me next moment skyward; held back at right mid-thigh was Hermes’s falchion, declined from horizontal as were my knee, my penis (see below), and my eyes—not to meet, through the golden locks that curled from under Hades’s helmet, those of Medusa, whose dripping head I held aloft in my left hand. Despite two small departures on the heavenly sculptor’s part from classic realism (though I grant it was a moment far from aphrodisiac, he had, I’m certain, undersized my phallus; and Medusa’s face, unaccountably, was but for the herpetine coiffure a lovely woman’s!), it was a masterpiece among masterpieces, that panel: it it was my eye first fell on when I woke; it it was I was still transfixed by muchwhile later when my radiant nurse-nymph first entered from beyond the seventh mural to kneel smiling at my bedside as if before an altar.