The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  Jonah touched down in Athens at eight o’clock local time. A lone border guard waved the queue through, barely glancing at the passports. The crowds had gone: Jonah’s flight seemed to be the only one. His footsteps echoed down the empty corridors. In the long baggage hall, carousels turned but no bags came.

  He left the other passengers waiting for their luggage and went through customs. He called Adam from the arrivals hall, using the number Julian had given him.

  ‘Yes?’ It was a long time since he’d heard Adam’s voice – he’d forgotten how much it unnerved him. Cool, hard and clear, not coloured by any sort of accent or emotion. Disembodied by the phone, it existed in a sort of pure, acousmatic sound-state.

  ‘It’s Jonah.’

  A long pause. Talking to Adam was like dealing with one of those chess-playing computers, calculating every possible sequence twenty moves ahead.

  ‘I heard Lily turned up. That’s good news.’

  They all know, he realised.

  ‘There was a text message. She hasn’t actually come back.’

  ‘No,’ Adam agreed.

  ‘I’m in Athens. I want to talk to you.’

  A longer pause.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘A bed for the night would be good too.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Can I come by?’ With anyone else, he’d have added an apology. With Adam, there was no embarrassment. Only problems and solutions.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Where’s your house? I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘They’re on strike. Trains are no good, either.’ Problems and solutions. ‘I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘You don’t have to …’

  But he’d already hung up.

  Oxford

  Jonah wasn’t there for Adam’s symposium: he had to work. One of the bar staff had called in sick; his manager told Jonah to cover the shift or lose his job. He didn’t get out until almost midnight, onto freezing, empty streets and a light snow falling. He almost went straight home.

  But he wanted to see Lily, and he’d promised Adam. He walked down St Giles’, head bowed against the snow, to the row of high terraces where Adam lived with Richard and Julian.

  He thought the party must have finished. The house was dark, all the curtains drawn; no music, no conversation. He pressed the bell and heard it chime inside the house, but no one answered. Snow fell in the streetlights and gathered on his scarf.

  He rang and knocked again. He tried calling the house phone – he could hear it ringing through the windows, on and on into the winter’s night – but nobody picked up.

  Just as he was about to hang up and go home, Julian answered. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Jonah.’

  ‘Jonah?’ His voice sounded slurry and dazed, as if he’d just woken up.

  ‘I’m standing on the mat getting snowed on – can you open the door?’

  ‘I don’t think you should come in.’

  ‘What do you mean? Is Lily there?’

  ‘She’s … Christ.’ The voice trailed off. ‘I’ll come down.’

  Julian opened the door wearing nothing but a pair of chinos. His belt ends flopped limp and loose; his hair was a mess.

  ‘It’s a bad time.’ He sounded high. Jonah sniffed the air for pot.

  ‘What’s going on? Where’s Lily?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s really—’

  Jonah pushed past him, up the stairs to the first-floor living room. Soft light glowed inside, but when he tried the door, something blocked it. He had to squeeze round to get in.

  The room stank of incense, sweat and vomit. Three single beds and a sofa had been crammed into a square around the edge of the room, draped with blankets. That was what had blocked the door. The whole room was lit by candles. A joss stick smoked on the bookshelf, and a sock dangled from the ceiling to stifle the smoke alarm. A bowl of olives lay overturned on the floor, next to a Pyrex casserole dish half-full of wine, and a kitchen knife. Dark stains marked the cream carpet. Was that wine? Blood? It was too dark to tell, and he couldn’t find the light switch. The lyre stood in the corner, untouched.

  ‘Jonah, darling?’

  Charis lay sprawled on one of the beds. She was wearing what looked like her gap-year sari, though it had unravelled in some disorder. He could see the dark smudge of a nipple where one breast had slipped out of the dress. She didn’t seem to care. Her eyes were open but they didn’t move; red lipstick was smeared around her mouth.

  Richard sat on the bed opposite, head in his hands, dressed in a toga that had fallen off his shoulder. Even by candlelight, his hairless chest looked pasty-white.

  ‘What the fuck happened here?’

  ‘He spiked the wine,’ Richard said.

  ‘What?’

  A spasm went through Richard’s body, like a frog in a biology class. ‘He didn’t tell us.’

  ‘Where’s Lily?’

  ‘He didn’t tell us.’ Richard groaned and put his head back in his hands.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Charis said from the couch behind him. ‘She’s with Adam.’

  He took the stairs two at a time – three flights, to the very top. Adam’s room looked empty without its bed. In the blue light of a lava lamp, Lily sat hunched up against the bare wall, cradling Adam’s head in her lap. She was wearing what she called her Aphrodite dress: a wispy, sleeveless number she’d bought in Greece. Adam was naked.

  Her tired, weeping eyes looked up and saw Jonah. She had a scratch on her cheek.

  ‘Can you get him a glass of water? He needs to drink.’

  Jonah didn’t move. As his eyes got used to the dimness, they made out long streaks that looked like blood caked up Adam’s arms. He didn’t really process it. All he could see was Lily.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ said Lily.

  Jonah ran.

  Afterwards, no one spoke about it – at least, not that Jonah ever heard. The secret to their type-A, fast-tracked Oxbridge lives, he realised, was selective memory, and they were ruthlessly good at it. When you aimed to climb so high up the ladder, there was no point looking back; if emotional baggage weighed you down, you discarded it. At the same time, you couldn’t just cut off your friends. So you made-believe, and nothing bad ever happened for long.

  But he always wondered about the others, and what they really remembered.

  Athens

  The silver Audi arrived outside the airport forty-five minutes later.

  Jonah pulled up an imaginary photo of Adam as a student, and tried to match it to the man in front of him. The long black hair had been shaved back to the scalp: people who didn’t know him well wondered if he’d had cancer. As far as Jonah knew, there was no medical reason. He’d just shed it one day, along with ten kilos, like a theorem being pruned back to its truest expression. Occam’s razor, Richard called it. They’d had to explain that one to him.

  But the dress sense hadn’t changed. He got out of the car wearing a tight black V-neck T-shirt, loose black cargo trousers and black boots. The eyes were the same too – except, perhaps, more so. With no hair or fat to distract, you couldn’t escape them. Watery grey, examining the world with withering intensity.

  He saw Jonah and got out of the car. He moved gracefully, like a dancer. Jonah knew some people were convinced he was gay.

  His handshake was firm like ice. ‘Short notice.’

  ‘Julian got me drunk. It seemed a good idea.’

  Adam accepted it without judgement. ‘She isn’t here.’

  The announcement came so unexpectedly it took Jonah a moment to process it. Then, because it seemed like the logical reply: ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No. You’re not the only one worried about her.’

  He pointed to Jonah’s bag. ‘Is that all your luggage?’

  Jonah knew, because Lily once told him, that the airport stood near the site of the Battle of Marathon, where nine thousand Athenians held back the full weight of the Persi
an empire. After the battle, the Greeks’ fastest runner, Pheidippides, ran back to the city to deliver the news. The distance was twenty-six miles, three hundred and eighty-five yards, and he’d just fought a battle: he died as soon as he got there. No one recorded his time.

  But the spirit of Pheidippides seemed to possess Adam as he piloted the car along the empty highway, the digital speedometer rock-steady on 180 km/h. Jonah wondered if the traffic police were on strike too. He watched the roadsigns fly by, the strange names in a strange alphabet. The same letters – the same language – as someone had pressed into a gold tablet 2,500 years ago.

  Adam didn’t do small-talk. Jonah piled right in.

  ‘Lily came here last week to see you.’

  Adam nodded, keeping his eyes fixed down the tunnel of streetlights.

  ‘She wanted to talk to you about the gold Orphic tablet they dug up.’

  ‘Did she tell you about that?’

  ‘I found out about it.’

  Adam didn’t ask how – or mention the non-disclosure agreement. It had failed its purpose; it didn’t exist any more.

  ‘After she came here, you went back together and fired Sandi McConn, the conservator. Why?’

  ‘That’s not relevant.’

  The speedometer slipped to 179, then jumped back to 180.

  ‘I think it is. You wanted to do something with the tablet. Sandi McConn didn’t approve, and I don’t think Lily did either. That was Tuesday. By Friday, they’d both left the dig.’

  ‘That’s an explanatory hypothesis.’ Adam swerved the car past an ancient BMW dawdling up the hard shoulder. ‘You know the difficulty with hypotheses? You can never prove one. You can stack up all the evidence in the world to support it, but all it takes is one piece of negative evidence and the whole thing’s refuted.’

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘The point being,’ Adam continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘if the foundation wanted to hide the tablet – and assuming Lily didn’t, which is also untrue – why did she steal it?’

  ‘She didn’t.’

  Did she? A tired voice in Jonah’s brain told him he couldn’t keep denying everything forever. But if he accepted what they were telling him, he was letting go of everything he’d ever believed about her. And everything he’d believed about himself.

  Is it her you won’t let go of? he asked himself. Or are you just clinging on to a version of yourself that doesn’t exist any more?

  They plunged off the highway, into a warren of narrow, double-parked streets. Jonah hung on to the seat and braced himself for impact, while Adam piloted the car through the asteroid field of motorcycles, pedestrians and other drivers.

  ‘And they call it the birthplace of civilisation,’ Jonah muttered.

  ‘Plato complains about the crazy traffic in the Republic. Nothing’s changed.’

  They pulled into a parking garage and went up to the flat.

  A lifestyle magazine – in the unlikely event one ever visited Adam – would have called his flat minimalist. A Spartan from ancient Greece might have found it a bit functional. The word that came to Jonah’s mind was ‘empty’. The furniture was white and low, designed to disappear; the table was glass and the chairs were thin, spidery steel. Even the walls were transparent, floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a panorama onto every side of the city. To the east, he could see a yellow moon rising behind the floodlit Acropolis.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ Adam said. He took noodles and vegetables from a white cupboard and began to stir-fry them. The smell crept through the apartment like the tendrils of some exotic vine. Jonah wandered around, though there wasn’t much to see. The whole flat was one open room on the top of the building, except for a bathroom tucked into one corner. The bedroom was a futon on the floor with crisp white sheets; the living room was the sofa. A line of cupboards at knee height presumably stored a lifetime supply of black clothes.

  He stopped in front of a large painting hung on the bathroom wall. In the stark space, it blazed like a planet. An engraving of a dahlia filled the middle of the canvas, though it was almost invisible under a violent red crayon scrawl, as though a two year old had tried to obliterate it. Below, slightly cutting it off, a crimson blood-blot stained a dirty strip of canvas where thin, washed-out letters spelled VENUS. It was the only colour – the only decoration – in the whole flat, so vivid it made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Cy Twombly,’ said Adam. He tipped out the stir-fry onto a white plate and put it on the table. He didn’t take any himself. He sat down opposite and watched Jonah eat.

  ‘Why haven’t you asked the most obvious question?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jonah asked through a mouthful of noodles.

  ‘If I was having an affair with Lily. If she left the Sibari dig and came here because she’s left you for me.’

  ‘Because it’s not true.’ He tried to remember what Adam had said earlier. ‘It’s not a “valid hypothesis”.’

  ‘No,’ Adam agreed. ‘But you can’t falsify it. Doesn’t that worry you?’

  ‘I know I’m right.’

  ‘I think the word you’re looking for is “axiomatic”.’

  Jonah leaned low over his plate and sucked up a noodle.

  ‘How’s work going?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Sandi said you’re the program director. It sounds important.’

  ‘It’s just a title.’

  Silence.

  ‘How’s the band?’

  ‘We just finished a tour. It might be our last.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  Jonah shrugged. ‘All good things come to an end.’ He heard himself say it and winced. Not all things, he told himself. Some things should be forever.

  He finished his meal; Adam took the plate to the kitchen area and washed it in a gleaming porcelain sink. ‘You can have the bed. I’ll sleep on the sofa. I’ve got some work to do before I go to sleep.’

  The last thing Jonah saw before he shut his eyes was Adam curled on the sofa with his laptop. His disembodied head floated in the screen’s sea-blue glow like a drowning man.

  When Jonah woke up, the sofa was empty and he was alone. In the stark flat, he felt like a mariner shipwrecked on a desert island. The only evidence otherwise, the footprint in the sand, was the hiss of steam coming from the bathroom, and the light rattle of a saucepan on the hob.

  A white egg sat on the counter next to a pan of boiling water. Jonah dropped the egg in the water, set the timer, and watched the sun rise over Athens.

  Two minutes later, Adam emerged from the shower. Naked, you could see how gaunt he’d become. Jonah wondered again about those rumours he’d been ill. Unselfconsciously, he pulled on a pair of black suit trousers, a black shirt and a pair of black loafers from a white cupboard.

  ‘What are you doing today?’ Adam asked. The egg timer beeped.

  ‘Maybe I’ll catch the sights.’ He really had no idea. Twelve hours in, coming to Athens was already beginning to feel like an indulgent fantasy, the dying notes of a song that had already ended.

  ‘Be careful. Athens isn’t safe these days. Communists, anarchists, fascists, demonstrators – and the police are almost as bad. Stay away from the Parliament building in Syntagma Square. The tear gas is usually worst there.’

  ‘You’re better than TripAdvisor.’

  In the Oxford vernacular the others used, Adam had ‘taken a double first’ in Physics and Philosophy. After graduation, he’d started a doctorate in the Computer Sciences department. The degree didn’t work out, reasons unknown, but it had permanently affected the way he spoke. Every sentence seemed to emerge in ones and zeros, each word meaning neither more nor less than had been programmed into it. Or perhaps he’d always spoken that way.

  He handed Jonah a round steel pebble. ‘The ostrakos,’ he said. Jonah didn’t know what that meant. ‘Wave it at the door if you need to get back in. I’ll be back around nine. Will you be staying tonight?’


  There was no subtext that Jonah could detect. No implication Adam wanted to get rid of him, nor equally any suggestion he’d like him to stay. Just a request for information.

  ‘If that’s OK.’

  ‘Of course. Just be careful.’

  Three minutes after he’d left the building, Jonah’s mobile rang.

  Twenty-one

  We mustn’t be panicked by the arrival of the tyrant and his henchmen; but go and poke around every corner of the city, observing carefully, before we rush to judgement.

  Plato, Republic

  When the guards struck off the shackles, I thought I’d died. I felt weightless without them, as if my soul had been separated from my body. Though if I’d actually started to float away, I’m sure the guards would have stopped me.

  They took me out of the chamber, down corridors, and across a wide open courtyard. It was the first time I’d seen the stars since I was captured. On the far side, another door led into a barracks block, up a flight of stairs, and into a small, unpainted room with a bed and a window.

  As soon as the guards had left me, I sat down on the wooden bed and put my head in my hands. Violent shivers ripped through me; the sea seemed to pour through the window and roar in my ears. I didn’t hear the door open.

  ‘I knew you’d come here.’

  The triumph in his voice was out of place. So was the voice itself, though I didn’t know why. It sounded off, the wrong string plucked on a lyre so that even the tone-deaf notice.

  Euphemus stood in the doorway, wearing a gold-trimmed robe and a smug smile that vanished as he saw the welts on my neck, the bruises, the ragged tunic and the dirt caking me.

  ‘What on earth happened to you?’

  ‘Your patron.’ With Dionysius, my voice had seemed to belong to someone else – someone fearless and sure. Now it belonged to a corpse.

  ‘How …?’