Chimera

by John Barth

  “Sir, I am Perseus! Perseus?” My eyes welled up; his blanked on through me.

  “But I wasn’t really asleep, only drowsing. Old folks don’t need much sleep; the night ahead keeps us awake. I, I’m always first one up, never really go to bed, prowl house and grounds the night through, napping and nibbling. O I fret about the wife and kids, national debt, salad garden; talk to myself, go round in circles…”

  I squatted before him. “Old fellow, are you blind and deaf?”

  “Excuse me,” he said. I gripped his arm. “Used to be,” he said, “I’d have a lackey do the introductions when I held an audience. No need now, I can start the story anywhere; it goes right along, you’ll see, hangs together like a constellation if you know the stars, how to read them. My name’s Cepheus—the Ethiopian king? My wife’ll be along presently, Cassiopeia; she’s down washing her hair. Andromeda, too, Perseus, all the rest, they’ll come by, you’ll see them.”

  I moved my hand before his moveless eyes.

  “To be king of Ethiopia, you know, it isn’t easy; to be husband to a queen and father to a princess, that’s harder yet; but to be father-in-law to a gold-haired conquering hero is hardest of all. Myself, all I ever craved was a quiet life: to mind the traffic, keep the books, pacify the gods, make a decent marriage for my daughter, tend my shrubbery, play with my grandchildren, leave Ethiopia no worse than I found it. Too long a list.”

  Except that her stonework never wept, I was fixed as by the first Medusa.

  “But I never was a king,” Cepheus said, “only consort to a queen. Cassiopeia, her majesty, that’s the whole story; that’s why we’re all here, for better or worse. By heaven, she is beautiful! I can remember as if it were yesterday the first time—I forget. Andromeda? It was your mother! I forget.” He frowned, seemed about to clear his head. “No, I remember, I remember! Zeus Ammon, it comes together!”

  “You know where you are now, Cepheus?”

  “Minding my business,” he said, but in not just the right tone. “Out in the gardens, sure, late summer, grapes and tomatoes setting nicely, beans need another rain. I fret about Andromeda, why she and Perseus split up after all these years, what Cassiopeia’s brewing.” Now it was he took me by the shoulder, but blank as ever, confiding as if to a royal crony: “Children, I swear, you think you’ve got them settled at last and bang, home they come with a clutch of new grief. Not that I wasn’t glad to see my girl, even with her new young man in tow—”

  I groaned. “Where are they, Cepheus?”

  “We’ve always got on, Andromeda and I, despite the Wife. I wish she’d brought the kiddies too, they’d like the beach this time of year. Don’t forget, she’s my only child: it left a hole in the house, I tell you, when Perseus fetched her off, happy as I was to see her saved. Just me and Cassiopeia then, in this big place. I don’t know.”

  Hand on dagger I made to leave; but Cepheus held my robe for the moment it took to reinstruct myself in patience.

  “It isn’t the separation upsets me so,” he declared.

  “Oh?”

  “They aren’t kids any more; their kids aren’t even kids; I keep forgetting. And often as Cassiopeia and I have wished we’d never met… Though even at the worst we’ve stuck together, marriage isn’t what it used to be, youngsters nowadays. Faw! Andromeda’s near forty, showing it too, eyelines mainly, all those worries, got that from me. It’s like I told Perseus—”

  “What’d you tell Perseus, Father?”

  Again he frowned beside me. “You… you can’t have two women in the same palace.” “I believe it.”

  “So do I.”

  Love, please, we’re a way from the epilogue. “That’s what I told Perseus,” Cepheus said, “right after the wedding. Taps me on the shoulder, wants to know how’d it all really start. I took him aside, put it to him straight: ‘How does it always? Two women under one roof. Cass brags about her hair, natural curl, pretty as a goddess’s, Andromeda’s lucky to have it too, et cetera. Hundred times I’d told her: you got your natural curl, don’t make waves. Sure enough, comes word from the oracle: Nereids in a pout, somebody’s got to pay or it’s Cetus forever—and you know, Perseus, place like Joppa, once your fishery goes under, your whole economy goes.’ Something like that.”

  I recalled the moment, sensed opportunity, quoted young Perseus: “ ‘Then how is it you cliffed Andromeda instead of your wife?’ ”

  “There he had me,” Cepheus replied. “All I could say was, ‘It’s a choice no man should ever have to make; anyhow, orders are orders.’ But you put nothing over on Perseus, not in those days…”

  I tried again. “ ‘Whose orders, Dad? Did Ammon speak to you personally, or did you take your wife’s word for it?’ ”

  Cepheus almost smiled. “Thank Zeus it was just then Phineus and company crashed the party! By the time they were stoned, you’d forgot what you’d been asking.”

  “I remember, I remember!” I resquatted, holding both his shoulders. “You do too, now?”

  Cepheus shook his head ambiguously. “Twenty years later I’m still in misery over it, weeding out my chickpeas and cursing myself for a coward, to let history repeat itself…”

  “You never were a coward, Cepheus! I-F-5, the Battle in the Banquet Hall, remember?”

  “No, by Zeus,” he agreed, I hanging on his pronouns, “not quite a coward, just deadly henpecked, and there you are—”

  “Perseus! This is Perseus!”

  “Come to a man’s fight, I always held my own.” He let me help him to his feet; my own knees were scarcely less stiff. “I don’t excuse myself,” he said.

  “Don’t apologize! You know me now?”

  “You can imagine how I felt when the time came, rambling in the bean hills, tapped once again, and there stands Perseus, asking me what’s Cass cooking up this time, and where’s Andromeda, and what’s she up to, as if twenty minutes had gone by instead of twenty years!”

  I squeezed. “That’s what I’m asking, Cepheus! Look at me!” His eyes were moving now, more like a frightened man’s than a blind. I laughed and slapped my gut and pate. “See? It has been twenty years: I’m fortier than your daughter—stout and stiff, half turned to stone…”

  Cepheus closed his eyes. “Perseus… stout, stiff, or ill…” He pursed a small smile. “Is Perseus still. Night air’s bad for the arthritis. Let’s go in, son.”

  Eyes cleared entirely, he confirmed as we limped palace-ward that Andromeda and young Danaus were there shacked up; that Cassiopeia, furious at her own Galanthis’s flirtations with her daughter, was nagging him Cepheus again with Ammon-oracles fishy as the first; that (what I hadn’t heard before) it was she who’d set Phineus to disrupt my wedding, out of general jealousy.

  I was stopped cold. “Why do you put up with her, Cepheus?”

  He fingered an earlobe; glanced at me sidewise; declared he’d been of course long since distressed that he wasn’t loved by the woman whose beauty he still so honored, but that he’d never reckoned himself especially lovable, and assumed it was not for no reason that women like his wife, who did not begin so, became what they became; concluded with a shrug: “You’ll learn.”

  “I think not. Where’s Andromeda?”

  He chinned his beard at the house ahead. “In the banquet hall, waiting to say goodbye.” By means he’d been unable to discover, he explained (certainly not his own intelligence department, always last to know anything, or the Royal Ethiopian Post, which moved at sea-snail pace), reports of my arrival had preceded me to Joppa, caused general alarm in the palace, and brought on, he could only assume, his fearful trance. “But the reports were wrong; they said you’d lost ten years.”

  Wrong I replied was right: I’d lost twice ten, my wife as well, and felt ten older for the loss. We reached the banquet hall, Cepheus lagging some meters behind with vague complaints: damp ground, old bones. At the threshold I paused to let my eyes accommodate to the famous scene, I-F-5 in 3-D, an alabaster shambles. On the marble floor, in po
ols of marble blood, lay those done in before I’d fetched Medusa out to marble all: skewered Rhoetus, the first to die; Athis the mind-blown catamite pinned under Lycabas, the sickled Assyrian bugger; Phorbas and Amphimedon shishkabobbed on a single spear; granite Erytus, bonged by me to Hades with a sculptured drinking bowl; the sharp-tongued head of old Emathion, unaltered on the altar as if still hurling disembodied imprecations; Lampetides the minstrel, weddings and funerals a specialty, fingering forever on a limestone lyre the chord of his dying fall. Standing among these were those I’d rocked in vivo: Ampyx and Thescelus, cocked to spear me; false-mouthed Nileus; Aconteus my too-curious ally; and one hundred ninety-six others—chief among them Phineus, Andromeda’s first-betrothed, whom I’d memorialized last in a posture of tunic-wetting terror to remind my wife how luckier she was to have me. Relocating him took some moments, in part because he was but one among so many, in part because—as I saw now when she smoothed her hair—the white-gowned woman standing before him, back turned meward, was not Exhibit 201 but live Andromeda.

  “Nuisance to keep dusted, all this,” Cepheus murmured behind me. I shushed him, not to miss the odd soliloquy my wife addressed to her uncle’s statue:

  “Poor Phineus. I’m as old as you are now, and Perseus is older. The man who stoned you’s gone to seed; I’ll soon go too; I don’t scorn your last words to him any more.” It was the cringer’s seniority-over-merit plea she meant: that while I’d done more to deserve her, he’d known her longer. I considered wrath, but was touched instead by curiosity and complex jealousy: the timbre of her voice was so familiar I could not distinguish it for comparison with Medusa’s, soft and throaty, or crisp Calyxa’s; Cepheus perhaps was right about her harried face, but, dizzy at thought of Danaus, I remarked as I hadn’t in years how slightly pregnancies and time had told on the rest of her—not much less trim than what I’d salvaged off the cliff.

  “Trial enough,” she went on to her skinflint uncle, “being a life-partner to a Dream of Glory; but what a bad dream I woke up to! Thin-haired, paunchy, old before his time, dwelling in and on his past, less and less concerned with me and the family…” Her voice was hard-edged, a tone I winced from; now it softened. She touched the statue’s averted cheek; had she ever touched mine so? “Thoughtful Phineus, gentle Phineus, weak-willed Phineus! With you I’d have been strong… and would have yearned, I guess, for somebody like—Perseus!”

  Through this last she’d wept; my eyes stinging too, I’d drawn my dagger and called her name across the hall. At her cry it was as if the statues came to life, or shed live men from their dead encasements, and I saw too late the unnatural nature of her monologue: Danaus, armed and shielded, stepped from behind Phineus; half a dozen others in Seriphean garb from Astyages, Eryx, and the rest—and from a nearer door, a somewhat larger number of the palace guard, led by a rodent-faced young man and followed by grim-visaged Cassiopeia.

  “O my,” said Cepheus, “they’ve set a trap for you, Perseus. Sorry.”

  I moved to stick him as he to draw his antique sword, but was diverted by a fresher threat from Danaus, who roared upon me. Happy interruption! For Cepheus, in fact contrite, ordered the palace guard to kill my ambushers, except Cassiopeia and Andromeda. For a moment all were caught in the commands and countermands: Cassiopeia called on the guards to follow Galanthis in killing the lot of us, Andromeda and Cepheus included; Galanthis amended her directive with an order that Andromeda be spared; at the same time Danaus exhorted them to join the Seripheans in killing me, Galanthis, and their own king and queen, after which they themselves could govern Ethiopia by junta; Andromeda meanwhile screamed at everyone in general to kill no one, and at me in particular that she’d had no part in the conspiracy. Danaus’s javelin whistled over my shoulder into the couch first speared by Phineus twenty years past, ending the suspension. Cepheus himself pulled it out and feebly hurled it at Galanthis; the gigolo side-stepped, a guard behind deflected it idly with his shield, and to all’s surprise it punched into the Queen’s decolletage. Dismayed, she sat down hard and died, drumming her heels upon the floor; Andromeda shrieked; Cepheus with a groan went at Galanthis, Danaus with a grin at me, the guards and Seripheans randomly at each other. Even shield-and-sworded I’d have had hard going, for I was out of practice, short of wind, and overweight; with Athene’s mere dagger I had no chance. Danaus therefore took time to taunt: “Not a bad lay, old boy, your wife; plenty life in her yet; all she needed was reminding what beds are for.”

  I’d felt a moment of Phinean panic at my death to come, displaced next moment by red rage. But my helplessness itself gave me a third for self-collection. As Danaus jibed on—calling Danaë the mother of whoredom for having been first to spread her legs for coin, myself therefore the original whoreson and a paper drachma—I knew what I assumed would be my final satisfaction: that despite the inequity of our arms it was partly awe that hesitated him, inspired by the Perseus whose legend he’d cut his teeth on. My last chance to write a fit finale, however different in style, to that golden book came to me clear as Calyxa’s art: declaring (what in another sense was true) that I preferred an even contest, I tossed away dagger and stalked him barehanded.

  “Empty bravado,” Danaus scoffed, and retreated one step. That was the only victory I could hope for, for (as I told him calmly above the din) we were born of one mother; mere inexperience of hero-murder delayed his hand. His pallor I knew was momentary; even as I spoke his color returned, his sword went up—“Ah, Andromeda (I can’t say whether I said aloud or to my swoony self)! He is a fine lad, your lover; a young Perseus!” At this instant two things flew together from the free-for-all: a massive silver goblet, knocked from the altar-of-Emathion, spun to my feet; and Andromeda dashed between us to clutch her friend’s knees. Shield? Stay? Embrace? Supplication? Frantic, Danaus pushed and shouted at her, slipped his helmet, got himself tangled and turned around. In moments fewer than these words, I snatched up the great goblet, more welcome to my hand than its prototype beside long-smashed Erytus, and while my half-brother half-wept and swore at his handsome hobble, I fetched him such a clout aside his head that the goblet gonged.

  As if at that bell, the fighting ceased. Danaus dropped dead. Stunned at my own salvation, I turned its instrument in my hand: of newer manufacture than the Erytus model, its reliefs depicted the earlier donnybrook in that same hall. Further, as though Calyxa herself had drawn the day, while distraught Andromeda lovingly cupped her late lad’s head, I remarked that the wound she wept on, intaglio’d in his temple, was the image of his bowled foredropper. Now she stood, my wife, wild-eyed, to keen general grief: besides Cassiopeia and Danaus, all the Seripheans and sundry palace guards were slain—including Galanthis, whom Cepheus had had the satisfaction to dispatch and posthumously geld. Fresh flesh lay everywhere among the petrified. Slightly wounded, Cepheus wept by Cassiopeia’s corpse; a guard tapped my shoulder and deferentially put himself and his surviving comrades at my orders: was it my pleasure that Cepheus and Andromeda be killed at once, or reserved for torture?

  Before I could reply that they were on pain of flaying to obey henceforth no other than their ancient king, Cepheus entreated me to spare his daughter’s life, but denied that any Ethiopian could take his, which was already flown to Hades with his black queen’s shade. Fetching up Athene’s dirk (scuffled himward as his cup had me-), he hilted it to heart, spat blood, rolled eyes, and died as he had lived, at Cassiopeia’s feet. Andromeda wailed from her perished paramour dead-dadward, even washed with tears her hard mother’s hair, root and follicle of our misfortunes. Then she rose above all, still regally herself, faced me from the fear-chased figure of chicken Phineus, and invited me to kill her as I had everything she prized.

  “Sorry about your folks,” I said. “Danaus too.” But she’d none of my apology: as I well knew, she declared, she hadn’t loved my young half-brother, only consoled herself with him; it was I she’d loved—Perseus the man, not gold-skin hero or demigod—and wedded we, till I had by lac
k of heart-deep reciprocity murdered marriage and love alike. “You never did love me,” she charged, “except as Mythics might mere mortals.”

  “She talks like you.”

  Two more pages? My soul winced from her words; the fact remained, however—my fact, felt first to the auricles in the heart of Calyxa’s shrine—I was, ineluctably and for worse as much as better, one of the Zeusidae, a bloody mythic hero.

  “You’re free, Andromeda,” I told her.

  No thanks. “I’ve always been!” she cried. “Despite you! Even on the cliff I was free!” I couldn’t follow her, let it go. Spear her or spare her, she declared, she wanted no more of me; would remain in Joppa if alive, fetch from Argos our younger children—

  Unpleasant middle Perseus, who had dwelt stonily between the young Destroyer and the New-Medusa’d man, interrupted her to sneer, “And find another Phineus?”—his last words, as I put him to death promptly and forever on hearing me speak them. Therefore I didn’t bother with apology when thereby Andromeda was inspired to perfect wrath. In the first place, she raged, her uncle had been a kind and tactful fellow, no doubt no hero, but a better man in other ways than myself; in the second, be me reminded I wasn’t the only g-s’d hero in the book: she could if she chose most surely find another, even goldener; but (in the third place—and how her mother’s regal eyes flashed in her face!) the last thing she cared to do was to subject herself to another man, heroic or humble: no Cassiopeia she, all she wanted, in what years were left her, was to build as best she could a life of her own. What I craved, on the other hand, she dared say, was a votary, a mere adorer, not a fellow human; let me find one, then: the sea was shoaled with young girls on the make for established older men… “Like your girlfriend with the hood,” she ended bitterly, pointing at the door behind me. “Do what you please; I’ve stopped caring; just leave me alone.”

  Till that last imperative she was in possession of herself; alone undid her: she threw her arms around Phineus’s neck and salted his shoulder with fresh tears. My own flowed too, no want of eyewash in this episode. I un-Cepheus’d my dagger, considered which of us to kill. Motionless as her renditions on the walls of Chemmis, but in my tear-flood swimming as at my submarine first sight of her, gentle Medusa stood just beyond the threshold. Half the four chambers of my heart surged: one ventricle, perhaps, would stay forever vacant, like a dead child’s chair, in memory of my mortal marriage and late young-manhood; one auricle, as yet unpledged, shilly-shallied on the verge of choice. If only she’d beckon, summon, relieve me of doubt, reach forth her hand! But of course she wouldn’t, ever. For a pulseless moment I stood halfhearted in this transfixion, as if she were the simply baleful Old and not the paradoxic precious New Revised Medusa. Then (with this last, parenthetical, over-the-shoulder glance at Andromeda and my fond dream of rejuvenation: difficult dead once-darling, fare you well! Farewell! Farewell!) I chucked wise dagger, strode over sill, embraced eyes-shut the compound predications of commitment—hard choice! soft flesh!—slipped back mid-kiss her problematic cowl, opened eyes.