The God in Flight

by Laura Argiri

  “Very good, very quick,” said Karseth then. He flipped open his Virgil, chose line 306 of the second book of the Æneid, “sternit agros, sternit sata laeta boumque labores,” and wrote it up on the chalkboard. “Scan this line for me,” he said.

  Simion scanned the line. “Well…what’s interesting about this line is that the second syllable of sternit is short in the first instance and long in the second. In the second, it’s long by position because the t is followed by a consonant.”

  “Clever boy! And do you know what the line means?”

  “It’s in the second book of the Æneid, where Æneas has climbed up onto the roof of his house to see Troy burning, and Virgil compares him to a shepherd watching a fire consume the fields of wheat. The extended simile begins in segetem veluti cum flamma furentibus Austris—as when a flame, borne by the raging south wind, into the corn…”

  “Admirable,” said Karseth. “That will do, thank you. I don’t think there’s any need for you to come here at all. Proceed to the next table and tell the nice man there I said to give you your diploma right now.” Then, seeing that Simion was genuinely alarmed, afraid that his actions were amiss even though he’d done exactly as told, Moses said, “That was a joke. I’ve seldom heard so admirable an exhibition, even from boys older than yourself and fresh from good schools. Hand me your papers and I’ll sign them. I’ll leave the grilling in Greek to my colleague there, who’s the local expert. Klionarios!” he addressed that gentleman. “This one’s not the usual article. Ask him something hard!”

  He directed Simion to the third desk in the long hall, where Klionarios now sat with his face in his hands, kneading his temples in that urgent but hopeless way that any relative of a migraine victim knows well. Simion, who did not, was consternated. With a nervous catch in his throat, he approached. Preoccupied with his misery, Doriskos did not hear him. So, for a few seconds, Simion stood before him and looked at his inclined head. Doriskos had drawn the blinds of the window opposite him, but thin slices of August light slipped through on his hair. It was the first time Simion had seen hair whose blackness revealed a blue gleam in sunlight, like the blue-black flash on the wing of a crow. Finally Doriskos sensed someone before him. Still shielding his eyes, he got out, “Your name, please. And where do you come from. And when you’ve finished that, translate this passage.” With that, Doriskos flipped the Symposium open and indicated a passage at random.

  “Simion Satterwhite. I am from Haliburton, West Virginia. ‘And certainly, my friend Agathon, you seem to me to have begun your speech well, saying that it was necessary first to show what kind of…a one Eros is, and afterwards to show his works.’ Both indirect questions are in apposition to the object of the verb. ‘I admire this beginning altogether. Come, then, tell me this also about Eros, since you have gone through the other things as well beautifully and magnificently…what he’s like.’ This is hard to render in English, but I’ll try for an approximation. ‘Is Eros such a love as to be of some thing, or of no thing?’ ”

  His ear pleased by that Virginia accent, Doriskos took his fingers from his eyes and looked up. The sheer visual shock sent the blood from his head and made him go cold all over. Never in his life had he really expected to lay eyes on the creature of his fantasies, complete to the last detail. In the rank insomnias of rainy nights, when truths tend to rise in all their razored clarity to the raw surface of consciousness, he’d even thought that what he wanted was, to put it kindly, wildly unlikely. Maybe, he’d thought, he might find someone with a partial resemblance, someone whom he could at least draw. He was unprepared for what he saw, for seeing it; and frightened because everything new frightened him—and alarmed because getting everything you want contains its own unique, unpredictable dangers. It closes off the safety of the past.

  That door closed behind him, the lock clicked tight, the door became a wall. The two of them took each other in, a minute of still hot silence in which all else seemed to fade and cease.

  Simion did not know what to make of the stranger’s look of shocked recognition. He took it for mere shock and wondered if he had food on his face, though he knew he’d washed it after breakfast. He rubbed at a ticklish spot over his left cheekbone—nothing. So he stared at Klionarios, as Klionarios stared at him. A real Greek, thought Simion. And very far back, he had ancestors somewhere who looked upon the world while it was young and clean, before the bribe of heaven, the fear of Hell, and the interim of consumption! And he looks exactly like I wish everybody looked. He remembered Simeon Lincoln’s Niarchos tiles, Achilles and Patroclus stretching their amber-brown limbs on a porcelain cool beneath his fingers. With a shock of recognition, Simion remembered those faces with their straight noses, surprisingly gentle lips, and those black eyes with their heavy lids and heavy lashes. For an instant, Simion saw his twinned miniature images in those black lakes. He cast a wary eye down to see if his shirt cuffs were clean; they were. He ventured an unnerved smile at the stricken Doriskos.

  Shock had gone buzzing loudly through Doriskos’s nerves; other sound ceased. All he could do was look. Never having planned what he’d say if he ever met the god of his inner life in any reasonable human facsimile, he said nothing; here was even more than he’d dared expect. Yes, I know you, you’re the one I’ve lacked. For you my life has been a lack, a wait, a long hope.

  Simion, for his own part, felt tempted to put his hands into his pockets, but he knew how infantile it would look. Rather than fidgeting, he let go of his wrist and rested all ten fingertips candidly upon the desk. He supposed he was being judged for gentlemanly composure during this long silence, and composure he would keep. But finally that rapt stare so unsettled him that he asked, “What shall I do, sir?”

  Panicked, Doriskos struggled his way back toward articulate speech and managed to say, “Beg pardon!” He meant it. His fear of his own ineffectuality, his crippled speech, tangled his tongue at this most inopportune time.

  Thoroughly confounded, Simion asked, “Shall I translate another passage, or answer grammar questions? Or shall I recite something?”

  “Um, recite,” said Doriskos, who was going to be incapable of even simple conversation for at least five days.

  “What shall I recite?”

  “Um, whatever you like,” Doriskos said, and it occurred to Simion to recite from Sappho, whom not everyone would even know. He spoke the hymn to Aphrodite. “ ‘Poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita, pai dios doloploke, lissomai se,’ ” he began—radiant, honey-colored words that the schoolmaster had taught him. Doriskos imagined this voice and this proud silk head in the light of torches, amid the night scents of summer roses. He imagined the delightful harshness that ancient resinated wine would have had and felt light and hot with a fierce happiness as penetrating as grief.

  Simion, finished, looked anxiously at his examiner, who wore a slightly tremulous faraway look not entirely reassuring—as if he were going to faint from the thick heat of the hall. Simion hoped he wouldn’t, at least not before signing his admission papers. But Klionarios snapped out of his daze.

  “That was…beautifully done,” Doriskos managed. “Perfectly, in fact, and I rarely…see…perfection.”

  “Thank you. Am I admitted to the College, then, sir?”

  “Yes, yes.” Doriskos nodded vehemently. He noticed the form Simion held, signed already by the rest and awaiting his own signature, which he affixed to recommended to accept. He dared not ask more questions, but he had to keep Simion there a few more seconds. After a desperate search for a plausible inquiry, he came out with, “Oh, and how old did you say you are?”

  “I’ll be seventeen in October, sir,” Simion replied. “October twenty-fourth.” Not knowing whether it was polite or proper—strangely, not calculating those things in advance—he found himself asking this luminary if he would like a drink of water. “It’s very warm in here,” he said. “I saw a bucket and dipper in the foyer. Perhaps I might bring you a drink before I go?”

  “Yes,”
said Doriskos, barely able to believe his luck—and figuring that if he returned with a real and actual dipper of water in hand, it was safe to assume that he was not a figment of his fantasy.

  Simion went and dipped up some of the tepid water, which he carried back. Doriskos willed his hand to steadiness and took the dipper from him, then swallowed the half-warm water, tasting of the tin dipper, to the last drop. “Thank you,” he managed. The Ganymede gesture, he realized—the lovely cupbearer.

  “Thank you for letting me in here, sir,” said Simion in a low voice that was nearly a whisper. “I’ve wanted to come for most of my life. You can’t imagine what it means to me.” He took back the dipper, smiled a shy farewell, and moved away. Doriskos watched him at the next table. He gave the first clerk his letters of recommendation, then paid the next his fees, counting out a hundred forty dollars from the pocket of his knee breeches and placing the receipt where the worn notes had been. Doriskos caught the words, “the cheapest board and lodging, please, it doesn’t have to be nice. I must economize.” Doriskos writhed, thinking of the worm-eaten older dormitories. In a desperate ferment, choking back what he wished to say and trying to think of something he could say, he sat stricken until Simion had paid all his fees, filled in all his enrollment forms, and walked out. He followed his receding image, the flash of humid sunlight on his hair, until he was lost to sight.

  Doriskos found his head empty of pain. Instead, it felt as if its crown might spin off and release a shower of stars. He had not gone pale while Simion stood before him, but now he went very pale, and a chill ran on the surface of his skin. Luckily for him, Thatcher announced a break for luncheon and told the queue of young men sweating outside to return in an hour. A trio of waiters set a table and brought in porter, roast potatoes, and a joint from one of the local restaurants. Helmut, who had been waiting outside with the boys, stuck his head in the doorway to bring Karseth a meal to his own eccentric liking: a salad of lettuce and chicory with a late radish or two cut up into it, brown bread, cold chicken, and lemonade. He saw Doriskos decline the greasy mess that the others were digging into, their eagerness undamped by the heat.

  “What, no luncheon, Doriskos?” asked Helmut, sotto voce. “There’s enough here, if you’d like some.”

  “I…no, thank you… I’ve had a headache all morning. It’s just gone.”

  “Will you have some lemonade?”

  “I…”

  “You look tired and pale. Here, you’re having some lemonade.”

  “Thank you…”

  “Are you quite sure you’re well?”

  “No. Yes. Wonderful,” said Doriskos, and smiled to prove it.

  When Doriskos got home that evening, he locked the door and went upstairs to his studio. There he peeled out of his stiff clothes and lay on the great soft round rug, feeling as if he floated on air and hope. Doriskos would not see Simion (or very much else) until he appeared in his lecture room in mid-September. However, class lists and records confirmed the creature’s actual existence as not a figment of the imagination but a human being with a birth certificate, a name, a life that had unfolded to this point far away. The intervening time, the dry husk of August and the reviving-time of nascent autumn, was one of the singular seasons of Doriskos’s life. Emerged from shadow-life and shadow-personality, he felt real and fully alive for the first time since—he couldn’t say when. Perhaps for the first time.

  He spent the dog days naked, sleeping during the hours of the sun and waking at dusk to an ecstatic solitude, a lambent happiness that overcame all his habits of alien decorum—he’d given Kiril vacation leave so he could think on this new thing in privacy, hampered by no-one’s expectations. In the black hearts of certain hot nights, he wrapped himself in a towel and crept into his backyard to pump water and sluice himself down. He forgot about cooking and for the most part about eating, but when he got hungry, he ate the black fat friar plums from his tree. He liked to let them get so ripe they were all but liquid under their skins, then take a nip and suck out the sweet pulp. The skins had a wild tart savor, a perfume, a purple taste; he would always remember the resplendent plum tree under the August moon. Excitement fed and filled him. His sensation was that of ascent, from whatever arid recess wherein his personality had coiled and hidden itself since his banishment to America, and since long before that time. The college at large would have thought that he had left New Haven but that he made the occasional daylight appearance to deposit bank drafts from Stratton-Truro and purchase soda water. In the evenings, by lamplight, Doriskos allowed himself to draw freely, feverishly; he tried to persuade himself that he was making studies for the rites of Dionysus, but he shocked even his own free sensibilities after some of those white-hot evenings of sketching. Some of those pictures could have been sold for hundreds of pounds apiece in London, though artist and seller alike would have let themselves in for a sojourn in Newgate. The wildest sketches he’d burn as term approached, feeling his blood throb in his ears as he did it; it was an act of hypocrisy and betrayal.

  I want, I want, he thought. He could not so much as imagine joining bodies with his newly encountered god, but he thought of harrowing, pre-civilized, godlike sex with nameless people in dreams; he wanted to join a ring of wild dancers and hear the cry of “Iachos, o Iachos.” He wanted to sink down under one man and over another in a torchlit darkness and lose himself in the lyres and the flickering cries. Frustration reached a hysterical height; he had thoughts that even he found strange. He wondered how it would feel to set himself on fire. It couldn’t be too much worse than this, he thought. One night in mid-August, sleepless, burning not with a hard gemlike flame but like a pile of dry Christmas trees doused with kerosene, he lost patience with paper and carried a lamp into one of the two empty rooms upstairs, almost not knowing what he meant to do before he did it. Walls had always inspired him. Upon those four whitewashed walls he began to draw the creatures of his fantasy, and the picture grew like a novel, a long dreamlike poem-in-pictures. Doriskos, who began intending only to indulge his own whims and perhaps later whitewash over his work, found himself involved in a frenzy of drawing, preparation for a mural; a few nights later, he mixed egg tempera and launched into his work. His mural honored all his basic fascinations: love, beauty, sex, and the arcane. It would eventually contain everything that had ever ravished his eye or his fancy: the revels of the androgyne Sappho, naked Elagabalus with iridescent paint round his eyes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a flying carpet and a boy in spangled Persian trousers, Isis and Osiris in their resurrected embrace. He painted those terraced paradises of Baudelaire’s, those pastel palaces by the bright Jamaican ocean, incandescently blue. Because the one he loved seemed made of moonlight, of the pale and chaste colors of the moon, he invented a moon-god and drew a blood-sacrifice to him: moon-blond youths slitting the throat of a white stag. By the time he got through with the room, if you carried a lamp into it, it looked like a four-walled forest; as you came close, it revealed its scenes, its details; it told you a story. Or, rather, it let you tell yourself one, starting and ending at any point you pleased.

  It occurred dimly to Doriskos that he was making a sanctuary; perhaps he would put a statue in it. But whomever else it was sanctuary to, it was also sanctuary to him, to Doriskos himself and that region of his mind which was a fertile and lawless green jungle, where he had no fears and no manners. He would lock the door behind him when he came out, exhausted, relaxed, and hungry. In that prim town where the righteous and unrighteous alike slept in their sticky flannel, he was awake in the hot black heart of the night while the cicadas uttered their nerve-tingling cries, naked of his chrysalis and assuming his real face.

  IV. Hoi polloi, barbaroi

  Finally the term began, the first time Doriskos had ever awaited its opening with passionate impatience. On the first day of classes, he was so anxious to see Simion that he did not notice him at first. He had his eyes on the classroom door and only saw Simion as he seated himself squarely in f
ront of the lectern, the central seat in the first row. And when someone reached from behind to tap him and tell him that those seats were for seniors, it inspired Doriskos to the novel indulgence of snapping at one of his students. The shy man actually came out with, “Silence, sir, I do not allow any of that in here! Anyone who passes the comp for this course may sit where he pleases!” Simion gave him a grateful smile, and while the room filled, Doriskos contemplated his prize.

  Simion was as fresh and clean, as satin-haired, as he had been in June, but still he looked as if he had been outfitted for his college career by a ragpicker. This was exactly the case: At a used-clothing store, Simion had equipped himself with long trousers. These he had hemmed and mended himself—and he’d done a good job for someone who had never been taught to sew, but not the miracle this fifth-hand pair of pants needed. From the same shop, he had also acquired a pair of riding boots, well made but extremely old. The whole was put together with jaunty, desperate elegance—the old boots cleaned and polished, his little shirt ironed crisp as new paper. Doriskos was touched and charmed and upset by it, and botched his lecture. Mercifully, he was too dazed to appreciate his own stuttering failure to elucidate for his puzzled young audience the dawn of Greek history, the ancient fire that had spat out the epic and the lyric for their delectation. His head was full of cries and noise, loud as the hymns to the bull god in the red squares of Crete, which he should have been describing rather more articulately. He forgot the date when fire came in on the southwest wind and incinerated Cnossos. He knew only that he was being closely watched by a creature whom he’d brought alive on paper long before the creature’s human birth. His drawings were vapid in contrast to the boy himself, though—his burnished beauty, the silver and gold of his eyes and hair, and the absolutely arresting quality he had above and beyond physical beauty. Even if he had not been beautiful, he would have been the person in any crowded room whom the others looked at first, the one whose motions they tracked with fascinated eyes. But, by all the dead gods, he was beautiful—they had flung all the physical gifts at him like fistfuls of magic candy —though they had apparently forgotten the gift of wealth or even solvency. Doriskos remembered that request for a place in the cheapest dormitory. He knew that the Yale boy, though mostly devoid of taste, was endlessly vulgar about money and cruel to anyone who hadn’t any. He wondered how soon the footballing hoi polloi would start in—were the brutes making him miserable in his dormitory? The defiling clothes distressed Doriskos almost beyond endurance, as did the unsuccessfully covert snickers about them.