Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  And with eyes closed twelve corpses still across his vision fled, his field of vision still as wide as ever even with eyes closed images keep marching on. With eyes closed from thought his mind can image the stirred up relics of his very own soul, of the souls of every other man to regale with the visions that have contrived to arise and explore, that have stretched across whatever appears to have happened to one man and to all the rest, engendered in the head of one man and living for ever after in the heads of all who succeed. With eyes in rest he sees the cruel wings flapping of the swan, he reaches destinations every other man and woman have reached. With head in quietude his images can fly from one mass of glory to the next and he is free to match them thought for thought, free from shouldering the debt of first accounts and second. Free of civil gardens free from crimson pits and soldiering on for grieving joys of Job. In Gethsemane, all images are pressed out and forged together, from the shuddering loins of the earth, all desires are given their due.

  Be gentle, for their souls are at work. Be kind, for creation is their power now and ever after.

  In the belly of the beast, the mind has fountains of its own to deliver, has chasm spaces full of plots of gold; in the beast’s blue belly, blue and dark and slippery and cold, the mind and soul conspire to generate their own Jonas delays, their own fine wet fountain spray of life ever-lasting. In the darkness still the brightness of the light inside can shine, the light which shined on shores of Genessaret, shines and grows. For kings are sometimes dwellers of the space within, and duchess loves cannot anchor down to sleep without a lack of light.

  To have a dream, the prince must fall asleep and forget—forget that the dream is one with the dreamer.

  Once forgotten, he can go inside the skull, he can dwell inside the nooks and crannies of the worn-down world in which he lives. The crown of skull can forge a proscenium arch, the sockets of the eyes are pot lights shining on a cast and plot he must undertake and bring to pass within. The cranium is as vast as any district, state, or nation, vast as treaties may declare, as any planet star or sun, and within it by agreement will be overflowing with the fullness of imagination, images that are nothing but his own whether they are against his heart and eyes or whether they are for them.

  Song, song, song; no God was seen nor heard, no staring equanimity with eyes that rot like fruit left out too long on a grocer’s shelf, ears of no congratulation, never thrown a solitary sound. No God was seen nor heard. Only the objects of the worn-down world, the collected experience of two million years of mankind thrown open to roil and boil like a pot full of wretched refuse, all pressed down and shaken together. Waves of crying bright self-aroused and broken enemies, a furnace of heat and falling planet toil, to hear them talk, to arrive with sailors setting forth from shores to a destiny unknown and unforeseen, two extraordinary jointed travelers, Jason setting forth with his hands tied against his night of woe, encumbered in the belly of the ancient wooden ship, dominion over the waves of leaping tall and weeping in the eager moonlight swell, the wetting world of water all around, slapping against the belly of the ancient ship. Out-setting against all sanity and odds led forth by the promise of only hauling a golden catch, every night he sets forth over rain-sodden waves, on against the immense expanse of watery every where the depths of its ocean-tide more frightful than the width extending to forever. What lies ahead can surely be no more filled with dread than what lies beneath—what pushes up against the shifting creaking dry rot hull beneath his feet: the sum of all the million years of human kind all pressed down and stirred together:

  Snakes cut down from their fetters, released from their trees, the annual sum, the tortured tonic mysteries, mothers and fathers torn from their children, children torn from their silver victories, river banks and dunghills, shades against a midnight glare, accountants, defendants, attendants, repressible whores and slayers of infidels, founders of empires long since turned to dust. Here they all are, distilled into a paste of dreamy longing:

  Fall roses, clinging to one final dying breath of muffled doom, a squire traveling, with a troupe of his own companions, an artful parade of children’s toys lined up and waiting to be jested, shoes and boots and other rags of clothing, discarded and disused, cracked ceramic plates and crockery, the translucent wings of bees. City streets and vistas over avenues in towns that no longer exist, houses shuttered and houses gleaming new on the first day someone entered and called them home. Old discarded tools and archaic ways of speaking, words in languages that no one ever speaks, methods of writing with chisels and feathers and parchments, alphabets that no one can decipher, symbols that mean nothing to anyone any more. Here they all are:

  The eyes of a woman who was someone’s mother, someone’s wife, the lips of a child who spoke her name, both of them dead and gone. Species of leaving creatures too numerous to count, who swam and ran and flew across the waters and the plains. A tourniquet, a guillotine, a gas mask and a neoprene defender and invader. Shell casings and powder horns, arrow tips and battering rams, hot oil poured on the heads of some-one’s children, five pounds of lead blown through the chest of someone’s father. Organ pipes and catgut strings, rough-hewn canvas and paints made out of oil. Loose-bound leather books that hang together sewn by hand.

  Sparrows and harrow rows for turning up the soil, lions and plumb lines for plotting out the beam, here in Golgotha’s cranium cave they are stirred and boiled together.

  And across the still hoar frost of the night that bears its weight upon the pit in which he lays, above the garden’s sleeping shadows deep, his soul traverses and surveys, consummates the journey every soul must make across the giant chasm void each night, concentrates the faint impressions of the day into a seascape vast and ever rearranging. The waxing yellow disk of the moon shudders and peeks above a bank of cloud, tall and shifting through the freckled burning early morning stillness and cold; the wind raises up from the shores of the lake, propelled by the gradient of warmer air above the liquid mass and sucked around the darkened storefronts and apartment blocks, behind the towers of the campus quad and slinking through Persephone’s shadow, her arms out stretched, palms down, her blessing granted to the earth her winter home, the wind creeps down the stairs into the pit where his ancient dreaming head lays sleeping, streaming its cold wet breath into his ear.

  So therefore, the dreams go numb, the giant ship pauses atop the crest of a wave, settles its weight there and its admiral surveys the vista vast and deep. Tied to the mast, bound and gagged against the call, the dove’s tail slithers through the clashing rocks, the potion casts its spell. The golden object of desire slips away, its fine and wispy wool unravels and disavails. Having met with no disaster other than his own creation, his head is free to bolster yet another day. Jesus never knew what hit him in the end. They dragged him off the cross and tossed him in the tomb. But when he woke again to find that one life ends and so soon after another one begins, he announced himself as if nothing happened, nothing but the coming of another day.

  Another day the sun rolls round, the earth spins spirals round the moon. The pallor of the first dim rays exposed, the shining glory grows to be indemnified. They pried him off the cross and when he raised himself again they wondered who this new man was, when he dared to bear his golden fleece before them, golden halo round his head, they stood before him, shocked to see his countenance again. For they said, he is beside himself, he who wakes and dares to show his face again with each new breaking dawn.

  THE PHONE IS still there in the dirt where he threw it the night before. Even being outside on the frozen ground the whole night hasn’t hurt it—these gadgets are virtually indestructible now. A few months before, he had left this very same phone in the pocket of his favorite pair of jeans, and Ilene had tossed it in the wash. Too late, he thought, one complete rinse cycle must be enough to knock the life out of it. But Ilene said “Quick, put it in the freezer. I heard that will dry it out.”

  Sure enough, the phone had pulled through then,
and a full night of bitter cold could do nothing more to hurt it now.

  Thirteen more email messages have found their way into his inbox since yesterday evening, the last time he checked, even though he no longer works at the Institute. And six new voice messages. Two from Victor and four from Ilene. He can imagine what they must be—Ilene wondering where he is around six o’clock, late for dinner; Ilene growing concerned by seven when she hadn’t heard a thing. Ilene perhaps calling Victor and Victor calling him. Ilene again and Victor again, then Ilene growing frantic, having heard the news about his job, and Victor worried too. Worried enough to offer him his job back? He doubts it, but he doesn’t want to hear the messages, doesn’t want to hear the fear in Ilene’s voice. So he hits the green button to dial and taps the quick dial icons that call home.

  On the second ring she answers, hoping it might be him.

  “Hello?” Her voice is ragged from lack of sleep. “Theodore—where are you?”

  “I’m okay. I’m sorry, I should have called. I found my notes and laid down to rest …” How can he explain it. “And I guess I just … shut down.”

  “I told Victor to call the police—they were all over campus and the neighborhoods around there looking for you. They said if you didn’t turn up by morning they would start dredging the lake.”

  “I’m sorry, I just …” His voice falters—there really isn’t any explanation. He has news to tell her. “Listen, Ilene, I figured out what happened. I know who did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “I know who sent that message, the email that went out to everybody with my notes in it—the notes I wrote the other night. That’s what got me fired—that email. Didn’t Victor tell you?”

  “I guess so. He told me he had to let you go—the Chairman of the Board told him he had to fire you. He didn’t say why except it was because of the thing that happened out in California.”

  “Well, it’s not just that—it’s a long story. The other night, after the symphony, I had a dream, more like a vision really, and it gave me some ideas that I wrote down. I usually email my notes to myself, so I don’t lose them! Can you believe it? I didn’t want to lose these notes, and then that bastard Pradeep has been getting in to my email, and he sent them out to everyone. See, he must have gotten my password when we’ve been working on the Plasma Dynamics project together—what a dumbass I’ve been, using the same password for my server account and my email, the kids’ names crunched together. But that sonofa-bitch saw these notes had some ideas about consciousness in them and he sent them out to everyone and their brother, everyone on the Board and at the Institute and everyone who was at the conference. And when the Chairman saw that, he freaked.”

  “Wow.”

  “That bastard Pradeep. He knew exactly what he was doing.” Theodore is walking at pace now, leaving the garden. Walking with a purpose. “Listen Ilene, I’m going to the Board Meeting and I’m going to tell them.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “Tell them that Pradeep did this.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “I don’t know, but I have to do it. I have to say my piece. At least I can try to clear my name, tell them these were my personal journal notes, not something I intended everyone to see. This is how a creative scientist has to work. It may not be conventional, but you need to think outside the box sometimes to come up with new ideas. And then that bastard will have some explaining to do himself, right there in front of Victor and the Board.”

  Nothing comes back to him, no response. Then, “I guess so. What have you got to lose?”

  “You’re damn right. Best case, I convince them to give me my job back. Worst case, it throws a giant wrench into rubber stamping Pradeep for Victor’s job.”

  “Are you sure about this? Maybe just wait and talk to Victor. Tell him in private and let him tell the Board.”

  This is why he didn’t want to call her right away yesterday. She doesn’t understand the way things work around the Institute, and he didn’t want to have to explain everything to her without having time to think.

  “No, I’ve got to do this—what time is it? I have to go.”

  “Ten after eight.”

  “Okay, good, plenty of time.” He does the calculation, probably ten or fifteen minutes to get across campus and up to the ninth floor conference room. He can make it if he hurries.

  “I have to go, I have to hustle over there.”

  “Why don’t you just come home?”

  “I have to do this. I was supposed to be at this meeting, and I’m going to be there. I’ll call you later.”

  Already with this first brief phone call, he feels as if he has been sucked back into the grid of his old life again—people making demands of him, people telling him what he should do. Time feels compressed again; once again he is running late. As he hurries across the pavements that lace the northwest corner of the sprawling campus, he wonders whether it might be better to go back to that path he was on yesterday afternoon and keep on walking. Walk away from everything that has bound his old life together, the phone calls, the emails, the expectations. He considers those several hours of absolute freedom he experienced yesterday, how the world had opened up into a vast blank gray abyss. This has often been a fantasy of his, to run away somewhere on his own, a lonely cabin in the woods far from any other person, surviving on very little food, reading books and writing down his musings by whatever light the sun provides, no phone, no computer, no television—maybe a select few CDs for music; he cannot do without his music. But it would probably grow old quickly, a week or two at most. Maybe all he really needs is a very long vacation.

  Still, there was something lovely about the way his senses had released themselves from their usual pattern of knowing, unconstrained by the relentless headlong tumble of his thoughts. Already here in the midst of the first wave of half-awake undergrads straggling towards their morning classes, he can feel the pinch of his old familiar world closing in on him, his status as a member of the faculty readily accruing to him by virtue of his age and the rumpled clothes he wears.

  On the frozen tarmac path ahead, angling across the maze of quads bound by limestone walls, he has a sudden memory of his daughter, gone away to live a life of her own, laughing at one of the overworked jokes he used to tell, her head tossed back, advising him that his jokes were all meant for third graders, but laughing just the same.

  Forgive me please, he would say to her now. Forgive me for not holding on to every moment like that even as it was happening. For soon enough those moments evaporate and fade away. The clock ticks and the earth revolves into whatever it is that comes next. And the moment is gone.

  Heading north towards his old office, he could just as easily be slogging to work again today the same way he had the day before. The buildings of the campus are just as beautiful as they have been every other day, the sky half filled with clouds, a bank of them pressing low towards the lake and shredded there, ripped into drifting loose curls of gray fluff by the wind. If he had it to do over again, he would have devoted less time to work, would have never come in on a Saturday morning, foregoing a day at the park with the kids for a few more hours staring at the whiteboard and the computer screen and the scribbled equations there that are gone now, all gone. In the midst of the students and their hangovers on the way to class, he can feel himself dwindling to a single solitary point, alone. The kids are gone, his son and his daughter, their laughter only an echo in his ear. His work is gone, the years of research, and with it any sense of worth he could bring home to Ilene. He is only now a point of dim awareness, taking in a shifting set of images brushing past him as his legs carry him one foot and then the other in the direction of the giant building that looms against the sky, hanging over him just ahead as if it were a mountain, one last mountain left to climb.

  Inside, he takes the elevator to nine. The elevators are wedged into one of the many weird angles the new modern section of the building has after having been g
rafted on to the older ivy-covered limestone hall. But there is a spacious waiting area and a reception desk as he steps out, with wonderful floor to ceiling windows providing a panoramic view of the campus. There it is, all spread out before him. All of it his once. He had been part of this, a respected pillar that helped prop all of this up. The students move across the quad gracefully, in slow motion it seems from this height, threading their way towards their own destinies, making their own way in a world that no longer exists for him.

  Wait. A voice somewhere in a corner of his brain calls out. This can all still be his. He can go to the meeting and tell them—tell them what Pradeep has done—and they will redeem him. Of course they will! He is too valuable to be cut loose. He is an important part of the work here. That’s been part of the problem these past few days—he hasn’t stated his own case strongly enough, hasn’t stood up for what’s rightly his. They can’t just take it away from him. He has devoted his life to this place. He has given it everything he has to give. He looks down on the mellow lumps of limestone and the quads still brown in winter and the black trees etched against them and the students weaving their way through them and knows he can have it all back, he can do this. Just a word, the right word, spoken at the right moment, can make it all his again.