Chimera

by John Barth

  Two women groaned from their utter bowels and fled: Anteia from the Tiryns temple, Philonoë from our Lycian boudoir. A third, groanwise these several pages their visceral sister, if she could set down what words she would would be said to have fled too, from this swampy nest of “love” and “narrative” on the Thermodon. Bellerophon, you are a bastard.

  Q.E.D. But I remind the last-laid that the first-‘s im-portunings imperiled my mortal life; the second-‘s un-ditto my im-. If I could set down what words I would, would I speak in diagrams and hyphens? Would I draw blanks on my own account in ditto verse, ham-handeder than Heracles, tinner-eared Lygeia, clubbeder-foot gimp Oedipus? Die, Polyeidus, or let me!

  Melanippe’s here still, love; do indulge her; please go on.

  “I’m back, love,” Philonoë’d say some moments later. “Do excuse my u.-b. groan; just a touch of catharsis, I imagine: the purgation of my psyche through the emotions of pity and terror effected in it by your narrative. Please go on. My sister, I believe, comes back for more?”

  “She’ll come back,” Proetus said at breakfast, after reporting to me that Anteia had disappeared during the night. “She gets wild spells now and then, goes up in the hills with her girlfriends for a day or so. I don’t ask questions. Part of being happily married is knowing when to be incurious. Any luck with the horses?” As he spoke he cracked a soft-boiled egg and spooned it onto bread for one of his daughters, standing by. Another sat in his lap and played with his whiskers; the third crawled about somewhere beneath the table. Servants served and cleared the meal, but were apparently instructed to let the King feed the children himself. I nibbled bread, sipped water, yawned, shook my head.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  Proetus seemed to consider this, wiping jam from the sleeve of his purple robe, which the lap-child had used as a napkin. Presently he sighed. “You’re not the first state visitor to complain that our temples aren’t very private at night, and I’ll tell you frankly that you’ll find the same thing true of our guest-rooms here in the palace. I’ve learned to live with it. But look here: forget about the deadline on that horse-thing, if you’re not sleeping nights; it’s not good policy to kill a suppliant. Sorry I even mentioned it yesterday. My advice to you is to try another town, where you’ll be left alone: there’s a dandy acropolis over in Athens; if you’re interested, my people will fetch you there.”

  Proetus’s character wasn’t clearly enough defined for me to judge how much he knew, or whether Anteia was really on a woodland spree or, for example, confined to quarters, or whether the proffered escort might be a murder-party. For want of a better tactic I asked permission to spend one night more in the temple, with a posted guard to insure my privacy. If I proved successful with Athene, I’d put myself and Pegasus at His Majesty’s service for a reasonable term in the heroic-labor way; if not, I had no further business either in Tiryns or in the world at large, and was uninterested in my fate.

  Again the King grew thoughtful. After some moments, breaking his custom, he had the children fetched away by their governess. When their bawling was sufficiently remote he said, “Look here, Bellerophon: you may think me a contemptible man, but I’m not an obtuse one. I’m perfectly aware that my wife’s been going to you these past nights, as she’s gone to others before you; judging from her temper, I gather you’ve turned her down, for one reason or another. Now let’s not be naïve: suppliant or not, I could have you killed any time I wanted to and give your death out as accidental; about the gods I’m agnostic, but if they exist, their tolerance of injustice is high enough not to worry me overmuch: I have considerable credit in the obsequy and temple-building way. But as I remarked before, I’ve no particular interest in killing you, and wouldn’t have even if you’d accommodated my wife. Who is Anteia? A girl I raped once, years ago, and married to get myself out of a tight spot. I’ll keep her around for the kids’ sake until her drinking and the rest get out of hand; then she goes. Meanwhile, if you want her, help yourself—I get my own amusement elsewhere. But don’t get caught, or I’ll have you killed for the usual public-relations reasons. In fact, given Mrs. Proetus’s state of mind, I advise you to be nice to her if she shows up again. Insulting a First Lady is no joke: all she has to do is holler ‘rape’ and you’re dead: I’d have no choice.”

  I sat dismayed.

  “Nor would I have any particular compunction,” Proetus went on. “Do you think it matters one fart to me whether you live or die? Now, let’s look at this hero-thing. As you know, I once had aspirations in that line myself; so did my brother, and I think we might both have done fairly well if our feud hadn’t eaten up our energies. Too late to bother about that now. But I’ve seen a couple of real winners in my time, and I must say you don’t stack up very impressively against them, in my opinion. Sure, you’re young and well put together, and I’ll take your word for it you’re Eurymede’s boy (as for the demigod thing, that’s never more than more or less metaphorical bullshit, right?): but you talk too much; you’re not sure enough of yourself; you lack—I don’t know, call it charisma. I can’t imagine you doing in a real monster, for example, if there are such things.

  “Still and all, as with the gods, I’m open-minded enough not to rule out the possibility that you’re what you hope you are—you’ve got a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that seems to go unusually deep, and I’ve seen stubbornness get more results sometimes than intelligence, courage, talent, and self-confidence combined. It seems to me that some people choose their vocations by a sort of inspired default, you know? A passionate lack of alternatives. That’s how you strike me: not so much an absolute apprentice hero as absolutely nothing else instead, if you see what I mean.

  “So okay, I’ll take a chance; what have I got to lose? Stay as long as you want; use all the temples you need; prong my wife if you care to—maybe it’ll keep her off my back for a while. If Athene doesn’t come across for you, be a good sport: get lost and keep your mouth shut. If she does, never mind the monster-princess-treasure rigmarole; just do me one small favor in the assassination way, okay?”

  Thinking I knew what he had in mind, I observed that routine murder-for-hire, even of royalty, was not a feature of the heroical curriculum so far as I knew; in any case, killing Acrisius, so I understood, had been held by Proetus himself to be Perseus’s destined business, not mine.

  The King waved off this suggestion disdainfully. “Who cares about Acrisius? He grabbed the old man’s kingdom; I grabbed half of it back with my father-in-law’s lousy mercenaries. I fucked his daughter once, as I’m sure Anteia told you; he’ll do the same to one of mine if he can still get it up when they’re old enough. We bushwhack each other’s shepherds and rustle sheep back and forth across the border. It’s a way of life by now; neither of us takes it seriously any more. Never mind my brother; it’s a certain bastard son of mine I want killed.” He winked. “By little Danaë herself, believe it or not. Don’t swallow that line about a rain of gold in a brass tower: Acrisius locked her up because I’d knocked her up, and he had to invent some cover-story for the reporters. Kill Perseus for me, friend: I’ll give you Acrisius’s kingdom and your choice of my daughters.”

  Appalled, I asked him why he wanted Perseus killed.

  “Why in Hades d’you think?” Proetus said impatiently. “You call yourself a hero, and you never heard of oracles? The bastard’s scheduled to kill me and Acrisius both! With his goddamn Gorgon’s-head! Father and maternal grandfather, right? You think I want to be a frigging statue?”

  “I understand your concern, sir,” I said carefully. “But believe me, I’ve done considerable homework in the oracle field, and if yours was the usual You-will-be-killed-by-your-own-son thing, it seems to me you don’t have much to worry about from my cousin. If he really were your son by Danaë, he wouldn’t be a bona-fide mythic hero; however, the fact that he tricked the Gray Ladies and killed Medusa, et cetera, proves he is a mythic hero; therefore he can’t be your son—he has to be the son of a god. Bu
t if he’s not your son, the oracle doesn’t apply. It’s a simple sorites, actually.”

  The King’s face set. “You won’t kill him?”

  “Not unless Athene tells me to. But as she’s Perseus’s advisor also, I can’t imagine her doing that.”

  “And you expect me to let you use my temple, diddle my wife…”

  I replied that I expected nothing. If Pegasus should be granted me, I stood still ready to perform for my host any legitimate extraordinary services up to the number of, say, five; if in return for such services he chose to enrich me with half a kingdom and, upon her arrival at nubility, one of his daughters, I had no objection, that being the customary honorarium for hero-work. But my real objective and true reward was immortality, which was not Proetus’s to bestow. As for the unhappy Queen, I’d be doubly obliged if he’d post a guard to prevent another interruption of my vision from that quarter. Finally, it was no doubt disagreeable to realize that one was fated to be killed by one’s own son, legitimate, illegitimate, or putative: the overwhelming evidence, unfortunately, argued that such fates, once oracled, were inescapable—indeed (witness Glaucus), that attempts to avert them by homicidal or other means were as likely to precipitate as to delay their fulfillment. But except for that tiny minority of us destined for the stars, we must all expire in any case, and surely there must be some small compensation in dying at the hands of such a splendid chap as Perseus. That was itself a kind of immortality: were not the adversaries, human and monstrous, of great heroes almost as celebrated as heroes themselves? Petrifaction, particularly, struck me as a far from miserable end, assuming it overtook one reasonably well along in years: it was reported to be quick and apparently painless; it was in no way disfiguring; it spared the survivors the expense of an elaborate funeral-barrow, not to mention embalmment, and it furnished them and the general citizenry, free of charge, with an accurate and touching memorial of their late lord—provided the subject be not overtaken in an expression of panic, or eating, defecating, picking his nose, et cetera, which embarrassment a moderate alertness should render unlikely. Next to outright estellation, take it all in all, petrifaction by the Gorgon’s gaze in a dignified position toward the evening of an honorable reign seemed to me as near an approach to immortality as any merely mortal monarch could be blessed with.

  By my speech’s end, speechless Proetus sat fixed and glassy, as if the anticipation of Medusa did for half her glance. I excused myself, strolled the city to kill the day, fed lucky pigeons peanuts from park benches when faintness overtook me from my fasting, turned in early and unsuppered.

  Flicker, focus, fine-tune; a little bit of the old scratch and static; then a high hum and bright Athene, clear, appeared in the form of Polyeidus’s daughter. But she was Sibyl with a difference! Gray-eyed, calm, reproachless, tall, she stood chastely off some meters from my bed and spoke more plainly than ever in Aphrodite’s grove:

  “That took a while. So it’s Bellerophon now, is it?”

  I strove to speak, for although it was quite clear in my vision that Sibyl was the goddess in disguise, I understood also that such masks had their own reality—Polyeidus, in manuscript form, could be read, revised, annotated—and I much desired to apologize for my past behavior and its distressing consequences. But my own voice failed as Athene’s came clear.

  “Poor Anteia,” Sibyl said: “she’s doing hippomanes up on the hill, out of desperation. Too bad she wasn’t in the grove that night, instead of me. But you’ve certainly exercised restraint, if not human sympathy, and Restraint seems to be the name of this particular game. Here’s the bridle.” She tossed me the light gold chain. “You’ll find Pegasus out back. I don’t envy your life to come: I’d rather be dead, like your brother. One day you’ll wish that too. ‘Bye.”

  “No!” I found my voice, sat up to implore her to stay, I had so many things to ask, explain.

  “Neigh!” Anteia whinnied madly about the pallet, full-moon-dappled, her weighty body bare; finally came at me hind-foremost and bent over, waggling her buttocks. The bridle was in my hand; I fled.

  Why? What? Why. Why? So Philonoë sometimes asked, when I’d pained her to this point. “You had what you needed, and my poor sister was strung out. Why’d you run?” And being Philonoë, she’d offer reasons: respect for Proetus and the rules of hospitality; reluctance to offend Athene; concern that precious Pegasus might fly off; overwhelmment by the memory of those wild mares in the grove… Well? Well, in keeping with my ongoing project to disaffect Philonoë I’d say, “Who could make it with a forty-year-old pickup? Especially one going to fat?” To which, herself late-thirtyish, she’d reply, “Some people can’t admit to an honorable motive. You were shy with me too at first, remember?”

  Being Amazon, Melanippe is torn between admiration for her lover’s dead wife’s large-heartedness and a great desire to bark her submissive shins. At least Anteia had spirit enough to call you a gelding, holler Rape, and do her best to have you killed; in Amazonia you’d have lost your balls for Sexual Refusal of the needy. It’s a serious offense.

  Bellerophon had his reasons—which you must know, if you know what happened before I tell it.

  Why were you timid at first with Philonoë? You said you were a lusty youngster, Aphrodite’s pet, but for the past three dozen pages you’ve been cunt-shy.

  You don’t see, then; I feared you were becoming Polyeidus, as people in this telling tend to do. All of Philonoë’s reasons applied; others also; but mainly, I swear, I was out to be on with it: Anteia had no place in my hero-work, the only thing that mattered. If she’d been Melanippe herself, I’d’ve done the same thing.

  You know how to disarm an Amazon. When you raped “Melanippe,” then, a few months later, that was hero-work?

  It was true rape, in any case, of a true Amazon, which even this Bellerophoniad will sog its way to sooner or later. As for the false rape of the false, Anteia cried it to the temple-tops; the palace guards, never there when I needed them, appeared now everywhere: some I directed in to aid the Queen, others to the rear of the temple, where I said I’d seen someone run, others off to summon Proetus. Thus for one moment I was alone in the marble forecourt, by a chuckling fountain: at once vast wingbeats came, and the horse of heaven. Heart near bursting, I lightly slipped the bridle over Brother, seized his great (near) pinion, swung astride, was off before the guards re-swarmed.

  What a thing it is, to fly! His white wings spread and coursing easily, Pegasus drew up his legs and soared between the streetlamps and the stars. All fell into correct perspective: ships’ lanterns, shepherds’ watchfires, palace, temples, harbors, hills. Cold wind and dizzy altitude, night-loneliness—they were nothing: for the first time in my life I felt at home; I wanted never to come down. We lit on Athene’s pediment after a splendid shakedown circuit of the suburbs.

  “Proetus!” I called down to the plaza. Torched guards drew back amazed; the King came out with his sheeted wife. “Anteia’s hipped out of her mind!” I cried. “Hallucinating! Don’t believe her! Hi yo, half-brother! Away!”

  “Poor dear sister!” Philonoë would lament. “Honestly, honey, for all it hurts to imagine you with another woman, I guess I like your other versions of this story better.” For in some I had Anteia be a lovely woman, skin fragrant with sun, hair with sea-salt, as if she’d been day-sailing; she steals into the temple, where I lie dreaming lecherously of her cool brown thighs; suddenly her hand caresses my stomach; all my insides contract violently; I fairly explode awake; “Good Zeus!” I croak, and grab her—naked, unbelievable!—when she sits on my pallet-edge; I bury my face in her, so startled am I; pull her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine, and mirabile dictu! at the sheer enormous lust of it do indeed explode, so wholly that I’m certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, brains, and all have blown from me, and I lie a hollow shell without sense or strength, et cetera, until she restores me and we make repeated love; complaisant Proetus smiles on the ménage; Anteia is pleased when I lie to her
that I was thitherto a virgin, but grows subject to fits of jealousy when I tell her later that I’ve raped an Amazon between our trysts, and breaks off the affair when she finds herself pregnant, but reinstitutes it some years later, I forget why, but breaks it off finally when she and Proetus go vacationing in Italy, et cetera, I forget. In another telling our initial intercourse is a paradigm of assumed inevitability: wittol Proetus leaves the polis on state business and bids me keep Anteia company in his absence; I spend the afternoon playing ball with their daughters in the palace, then stay to drink ale with Anteia during the evening; we talk impersonally and sporadically—mutual silences are neither unusual nor uncomfortable with that woman; on the face of it there is no overt word or deed that unambiguously indicates desire on the part of either of us; the Queen’s manner, which I find attractive, is of exhausted strength: throughout the afternoon her movements have been heavy and deliberate, like those of a helot after two straight shifts; in the evening she sits mostly without moving, and frequently upon blinking her eyes keeps them shut for a full half-minute, opening them at last with a wide stare and a heavy expiration of breath; all this I admire, but really rather abstractly, and any sexual desire that I feel is also more or less abstract; at nine-thirty or thereabouts Anteia says, “I’m going to take a shower and go to bed, Bellerophon,” and I say, “All right”; to reach the palace baths she has to go through a little corridor off the ale-room where we sit; to reach Athene’s temple I must pass through this same corridor, and so it is still not quite necessary to raise eyebrows at our going to the corridor together; there, if she pauses to face me for a moment at the turning to the baths, who’s to say confidently that good nights are not on the tips of our tongues? It happens that we embrace instead before we go our separate ways, and further (but I would not say consequently) that our separate ways lead to the same bed, where we spend a wordless, tumultuous night together, full of tumblings and flexings and shudders and such, exciting enough to experience but boring to describe; for the subjects’ sakes I leave before sunrise, weatherless, et cetera; remorseful, Anteia soon declares to Proetus that I’ve seduced her; he obliges her, out of some mad craving for moral clarification, to repeat the adultery; presently she conceives, and fearful that the child will prove a parent-slaying demigod, considers suicide and abortion; I leave town on Pegasus and never see them again, but learn from my spies in Tiryns that the misadventure has produced a normal son and improved the marriage, et cetera. Yet another version—