by Jeffrey Ford
As if the dart had been hurled by an accurate hand, it pinpointed and struck the flyspeck below. The boulder shattered into pebbles, and green dust flew everywhere. He blinked and looked again, and it was still vanished. The air rushed out of him and he fell to his knees. He looked over each shoulder for angry gods and tried to swallow the agony of having his work obliterated.
Fighting through a great fear, of what he wasn’t sure, he got to his feet and staggered down the path. For the longest time, he waited there at the base of the hill where the boulder had nestled, expecting his tormentors to provide a new one. Nothing arrived. Eventually, he could sit still no longer and his memory of exertion demanded he move. He walked the meadow, up and down hills, pretending to push an invisible boulder. The enterprise was all unsatisfactory and disturbing.
Time scattered like dust and he finally settled into the routine. He came to realize that the vistas were astonishing on the rare days the sun showed itself underground. Slowly, the absence of work soaked in and he even began to remember how to sleep. On the night that he realized there wouldn’t be another boulder, he made a tea of the roots of the white flowers and drank it. He was now on his own, and although he missed the embrace of the smooth rock, the next morning he set out walking toward the west. Having tried all four directions, it was the one he favored.
Think of the years like leaves in autumn, and that’s how many he traveled. He’d learned to sleep on his feet, and it allowed him to walk through the long nights and deep into the heart of the west. He suffered loneliness, a longing not only for Acrocorinthus but those unseen gods who had overseen his punishment. After many a summer, the light from an oasis in the distance woke him from a dream of Merope singing an enchantment to their first child, and he found himself upon a long thoroughfare leading to its gates.
Those gates were unguarded, and he entered onto the shaded path that cut beneath tall ancient trees hung with moss. The peacocks scurried before him, and goldfinches swooped and darted. He found a pond along the path with a crude wooden bench placed before it. Sisyphus sat and stared into the water, watching the orange fishes swim. A young girl ran by. He called to her, “Where is this?” and she replied without slowing, “Elysium.”
The place was enchanted with apparitions and alluring scents. It was a land of Whim. If he desired a drink, a drink would appear in his hand; along with it a keg of wine and an entire party of friendly revelers to help him celebrate. The women he conjured were beautiful, unique. There were books in the libraries of Elysium recorded from Homer’s memory that had never been born into the world.
Sisyphus shook off the peculiarities of death in the color, music, and swirling laughter of Elysium. Within its confines, he could adjust the pace of time from a dizzying rush to a crawl. The evenings lasted all season long and were filled with parties and assignations, games of hide and seek down long columned halls of an ancient architecture. Every moment brimmed with wonder. For a brief respite from that charmed life, he returned to the pond he’d first encountered the day he arrived, and let the spirit of place seep into him. There was something in the air and water of Elysium that made him forget for whole minutes at a time the hill and the rock and the struggle.
One afternoon, as he approached his sacred spot, he found someone sitting on the bench. It appeared to be a woman, wrapped in pale blue material, her head dimly glowing, her scent the very same as the advent of winter across the meadow. At first, he was going to fly away to the wine garden (yes, in Elysium he could fly), but instead he stayed and approached her. She looked up at him, and he felt for a moment an agony greater than the boulder ever offered.
“Merope,” he whispered.
She put her finger to her lips, and when he lunged to take her in his arms, she backed away, wearing a scared expression.
“No, no,” he said. “I’ve changed.”
Still she shrunk from him. “How?”
“The stone has changed me. I pushed the weight of my misdeeds up a tall hill. Again and again.”
“It must have been a gigantic boulder,” she said.
“One’s deeds are the only thing heavier than one’s heart in the underworld.”
“Trust me, I know,” said Merope.
“You loved me in our early years together, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “They’re the most distant memories of all.”
“I’ll find you,” he said.
She held out her arms and they embraced. As he pressed himself to her, she faded to smoke and drifted out over the water. He rose, went to the edge of the pond, and looked for her in its depth. The fish swam through his reflection, bobbing up with open mouths to catch and swallow his tears.
Later that afternoon, he did fly to the wine garden and stayed there for a long time into the night, imbibing to excess and beyond in the presence of Cronus, the Titan King of Elysium. The old man was fierce, with a lot of teeth, and wore an expression of dangerous stupidity. It was said he’d eaten his children to save himself and before being made king of Elysium his son Zeus had thrown him into Tartarus, the lowest reaches of the afterlife, devoid of light, for many many years. “The gods have instructed me to keep an eye on you,” he said.
The only aspect of himself he could remember as he flitted here and there was a vague sensation of the weight of the rock against his palms. He missed the heft of it, the strategy of steering its colossal mass up the treacherous hill. It had been an anchor for him, a center to the startling afterlife that was all drift and nightmare. His ascent and descent were a ritual that brought order to the infinite. In an afternoon’s conversation with the apparition of Sophocles, he discussed the frantic spinning sleep of Paradise. Think of the minutes swarming like gnats on a long, hot day. At the sudden end of the conversation, as Sisyphus fell toward sleep, the philosopher suggested, “In Elysium you can live your own story.”
When he woke, he turned his back on the whirlwind, the endless drinking, the flying here and there. Instead he used all his imagination and powers of concentration, all his desire, to conjure an image of Merope and a cottage in the country for them to live in. It was remarkable how near to the woman in life his apparition came. Her copper hair and green eyes were so perfect they startled him with his own power of memory.
She was lovely, dressed in flowing gowns and bedecked with emeralds. She drifted through the days in calm silence. And when he spoke to her, he could tell she was really listening to his every word. He spoke at length about his dreams in Elysium, all his personal philosophy he’d accrued in his centuries pushing the rock. He went on and on, and she never blinked. In bed, her every move intuited his desire.
His constant attention on himself left the charade of love somewhat threadbare. So he asked her what had happened to her after Hermes had come and spirited him away and he died a second time. She seemed taken aback by the question, stuttering to speak but unable to get anything out. “Tell me anything you can remember,” he said to comfort her. Still she couldn’t produce a single word. Eventually he blurted out, “Then tell me how you died.”
“How?” she asked.
In the same moment he wondered if she’d been assassinated by his brother, she spoke the words, “I was assassinated by your brother.” The story poured forth from her in all its expected intrigue. It was in those moments, while she told of her poor fate, that Sisyphus realized the Merope he’d conjured could never be anything other or more than the product of his imagination.
He felt as though he was slipping more surely than if he’d hit an ice patch on the slope and the boulder was quick to teach him a lesson. At that moment, there was a knocking. Merope had huddled into herself, eyes closed, and she said nothing. Sisyphus opened the door. It was the Titan, Cronus, King of Elysium. He had to bend low in order to enter the cottage.
“She’ll torment you no more,” said the king. He pushed past Sisyphus, walked straight to Merope, and took her wris
t in his hand. From the moment he touched her, she became increasingly vague and began drifting away at the edges.
“What are you doing to her?”
“I’m erasing her memory from you. Orders from the gods. You’re to think of her no more. If you forget her, you can stay in Elysium.”
The disintegrating Merope suddenly reached toward Sisyphus with her free hand, and he heard her cry out as if from a nightmare. The sound of it moved him and he ran at Cronus, engaging him in a struggle. He wrapped his rock-callused hands around the king’s throat and squeezed. The old man punched his cheek with a fist like a mace, and a tooth flew from his mouth. It was followed by another hammer blow from the opposite side. Still, Sisyphus leaned into the battle and used his great strength to force Cronus back. He shouted for Merope to escape.
The brawl moved on, inching uphill, a trading of blows, a choking session, a wrestling match to end all matches. The cottage disappeared from around them in a strong wind, flying away piece by piece. The grass was covered with frost, and sleet fell across the hill. Cronus had the upper hand for a time, and then Sisyphus would counter and be in charge, until the day it became clear that the old god had at some point become the boulder, Acrocorinthus.
As he strained beneath the weight of his task, Sisyphus happened to see his reflection in the sheen of the boulder. The likeness opened its mouth and said, “You never cared about Merope. She didn’t even have copper hair and green eyes. All you knew of her love was to take it and throw it away. She despised you and planned your assassination.” With these words, his conjured image of Merope, his false knowledge of Merope, fell back into the dark recesses of his memory. Pushing the boulder with all his might, he scrabbled to leave the cold, empty loss of her.
The solitary journey ahead took forever. The hill he now ascended was steeper and more difficult than the one before he’d gone to Elysium. There were forests and lakes and a decade of loose scree, ten centuries of rain, an indefinite duration of wavering concentration. The story of how he cheated death no longer did the trick. The merest inkling of a false Merope made him shudder. Her absence was a ghost in the cottage that was his head, a current of cold air between his ears that nearly froze his effort.
It came on slowly. With the awareness of a child in the dark, he felt the sodden spirit creeping through his limbs, and the rock became more insistent. He summoned his strength, found it asleep, and wondered if he was vanishing into the infinite. At that moment his knees buckled, his biceps failed, his Achilles tendons screamed. His work slipped from his hands and dashed away down the hill, splintering tall pines in its fierce descent.
It had never happened before that he hadn’t gotten the rock to the top of the hill. He feared Zeus’s thunderbolts as punishment for his failure. There was nothing, though—complete silence, total stillness. It was a mild night on the meadow of Asphodel, halfway up the tallest hill within sight. He spat and fought his lethargy in order to follow the trail of the boulder down into the forest and beyond.
It wasn’t long before he realized that the woods around him had gone completely black. He couldn’t see and kept his hands out in front of him to avoid tree trunks. More than once he smashed his shins against a fallen log or twisted an ankle in a rut. There were no stars nor moon in the underworld, although when he pictured Acrocorinthus, sitting alone where ever it was, he pictured it gleaming in the moonlight.
He was on the verge of collapse from his final exertions against the boulder. The only thing that kept him from falling to the ground was the feel of a small hand in the center of his palm. He closed his fingers around it. It gently but confidently pulled him forward into the darkness. A soft voice spoke to him from just below his ear.
“Tell me, stranger, what is your punishment in the underworld?”
“I am the murderous, thieving king of Ephyra and am forced to push the weight of my earthly transgressions up a steep hill for eternity. I’m looking for a large green boulder that might have crashed through here this evening.”
“No boulders and no evening. Follow me and I’ll explain.”
Her presence next to him brought him energy and excitement. He’d not felt another’s touch in half the age of the cosmos.
“You are Sisyphus, bane of the gods,” she said.
“My name precedes me,” he said and noticed that they now seemed to be floating along above the ground rather than walking. It made for an uneasy feeling in the total dark, not knowing what’s up or down.
“I’m your wife, Merope. It was so long ago. Do you remember?”
“Yes.”
She spoke and he listened to her voice and saw in his imagination for the first time since death the true face of Merope—wide eyes and short black hair. “I too have been serving out my punishment in the underworld. I led many people to their doom in life and have been treated to a taste of eternity.”
“After all these millennia, I finally have found my way back to you. For the longest time I couldn’t remember you but only the memory of not remembering. Your touch,” he said and reached around her with his free arm. He encountered nothing although he still felt her hand in his. They continued on through the darkness. He didn’t sense the forest around him any longer.
She told him a memory she had from when they had lived together. A night outside in the field next to their place, drinking wine and dancing around a fire. “I asked you if you loved me and you said, ‘More than anything.’”
The memory came back to him with the speed of a boulder descending. “Yes, I see it,” he said. “It was from before I was king and you were queen.”
“When did that feeling end?” she wondered.
They discussed it as they floated away into the dark. He apologized; she considered it. Time went by and she told him of all she’d accomplished acquiring wealth and power in his absence. He laughed and told her about Elysium.
“I’ve heard of it,” she said.
The further they descended into nothing, the simpler the memories became. He told her that somewhere in eternity he realized he’d loved her. “Did you ever have any feelings for me?” he asked.
“I did,” she said but what came after that was complicated. She laid out her explanations and recriminations gracefully, although some of it cut him hard. She told him that her punishment had been assigned by Zeus and it was to lure men and women into the deep heart of Tartarus from which nothing returns. Upon hearing this, Sisyphus clutched her hand more firmly. “Stay with me till then,” he said and she promised she would.
The Jeweled Wren
On a late October afternoon, the sun still casting a weak warmth, Gary, 65, a large man with a drastic crew cut, and Hester, 62, a small woman with big glasses and short gray hair, sat out behind the garden on the green plastic bench drinking bourbon, taking in the autumn wind, and looking out across the stubbled wheat field toward a house a half-mile distant.
They talked about their daughters, grown up and moved away, how the cut field looked like a Brueghel painting, Hester’s uncertainty about the woman at work who would soon replace her when she retired. After that burst of conversation there was silence.
Gary finally broke it a few minutes later, saying, “So, did we ever decide what the fuck is going on over at that place?” He pointed with the hand holding his drink at the distant house.
She had a blue blanket wrapped around her, one corner thrown over her head like a hood. “If you notice, there’s all kinds of action, but it’s all subtle, incremental. And you have to be aware when you drive past.”
“I noticed the hanging geranium that appears on the porch certain mornings and disappears by noon,” he said.
Hester nodded. “For three weeks this past summer, I swore someone had a tomato garden going behind the place. But when I slowed down and concentrated, there was nothing there.”
“Have you seen the two little blonde girls playing outside
lately?”
“I haven’t seen a person there in months,” she said.
“There was a yellow car in the driveway when I drove past a couple of weeks ago. It was the only time I’d ever seen it there—might have been an old Mercury Topaz like we had back in the ’90s.”
“Never saw it,” she said.
“The circumstantial evidence for being haunted kind of adds up,” said Gary.
“We should go over there and look in the windows,” said Hester.
“Why?”
“I have the next five days off from work, and I want to do something crazy while I still can.” She poured another drink and held it up. He touched the rim of his glass to hers.
“You mean go across the field?” Gary asked.
“Now that it’s cut, it’ll be easy.”
“With my bad leg?”
“I’ll get you a cane. You’ve got to get up and move around anyway. That’s what the doctor said about the band syndrome.”
“But what if someone actually is living in there, and we look in the windows and they see us. We’ll be fucked. Even without the bad leg, at this stage of the game, running is out of the question.”
“There’s nobody over there,” Hester said. “The car probably belonged to a real-estate agent.”
They sat drinking, watching the wind shake leaves from the giant white oak and the turkey vultures circling over the field until the sun set a little after five. Then she helped him up and as far as the garden. Eventually he got his leg going and passed beneath the apple trees on his own. Inside, she put the news on in the living room and he fed the dogs.
In bed, they talked about her retirement. He already only taught part-time at a local university. Did they really need six acres and a hundred-and-twenty-year-old home? They arrived at no answers. Luckily, the haunted house across the field wasn’t mentioned. He thought that was the last he’d hear of a trip to it, but the next day she returned from Walmart with two flashlights and a cane. He asked when and she told him, “By cover of dark.”