“Recall my first question.”
“What do I know of mythology?”
“And I want a Gödelian, not an Einsteinian answer. I don’t want to know what’s inside the myths, nor how they clang and set one another ringing, their glittering focuses, their limits and genesis. I want their shape, their texture, how they feel when you brush by them on a dark road, when you see them receding into the fog, their weight as they leap your shoulder from behind; I want to know how you take to the idea of carrying three when you already bear two. Who are you, Lobey?”
“I’m . . . Lobey?” I asked. “La Dire once called me Ringo and Orpheus.”
Spider’s chin rose. His fingers, caging the bone face, came together. “Yes, I thought so. Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I’m Green-eye’s Iscariot. I’m Kid Death’s Pat Garrett. I’m Judge Minos at the gate, whom you must charm with your music before you can even go on to petition the Kid. I’m every traitor you’ve ever imagined. And I’m a baron of dragons, trying to support two wives and ten children.”
“You’re a big man, Spider.”
He nodded. “What do you know of mythology?”
“Now that’s the third time you’ve asked me.” I picked up my blade. From the grinding love that wanted to serenade his silences—the music had all stopped—I leaned the blade against my teeth.
“Bite through the shells of my meanings, Lobey. I know so much more than you. The guilty have the relief of knowledge.” He held the skull over the table. I thought he was offering it to me. “I know where you can find Friza. I can let you through the gate. Though Kid Death may kill me, I want you to know that. He is younger, crueler, and much stronger. Do you want to go on?”
I dropped my blade. “It’s fixed!” I said. “I’ll fail! La Dire said Orpheus failed. You’re trying to tell me that those stories tell us just what is going to happen. You’ve been telling me we’re so much older than we think we are; this is all schematic for a reality I can’t change! You’re telling me right now that I’ve failed as soon as I start.”
“Do you believe that?”
“That’s what you’ve said.”
“As we are able to retain more and more of our past, it takes us longer and longer to become old; Lobey, everything changes. The labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand years ago. You may be Orpheus; you may be someone else, who dares death and succeeds. Green-eye may go to the tree this evening, hang there, rot, and never come down. The world is not the same. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s different.”
“But—”
“There’s just as much suspense today as there was when the first singer woke from his song to discover the worth of the concomitant sacrifice. You don’t know, Lobey. This all may be a false note, at best a passing dissonance in the harmonies of the great rock and the great roll.”
I thought for a while. Then I said, “I want to run away.”
Spider nodded. “Some mason set the double-headed labrys on the stones at Pheistos. You carry a two-edge knife that sings. One wonders if Theseus built the maze as he wandered through it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, defensive and dry. “The stories give you a law to follow—”
“—that you can either break or obey.
“They set you a goal—”
“—and you can either fail that goal, succeed, or surpass it.”
“Why?” I demanded. “Why can’t you just ignore the old stories? I’ll go on plumb the sea, find the Kid without your help. I can ignore those tales!”
“You’re living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It’s come from something. It’s going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore. They confound all family love and hate. You shy at them on entering or exiting any endeavor.” He put the skull on the table. “Do you know why the Kid needs you as much as he needs Green-eye?”
I shook my head.
“I do.”
“The Kid needs me?”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“Is the reason . . . different?”
“Primarily. Sit back and listen.” Spider himself leaned back in his chair. I stayed where I was. “The Kid can change anything in the range of his intelligence. He can make a rock into a tree, a mouse into a handful of moss. But he cannot create something from nothing. He cannot take this skull and leave a vacuum. Green-eye can. And that is why the Kid needs Green-eye.”
I remembered the encounter on the mountain where the malicious redhead had tried to tempt the depthless vision of the herder-prince.
“The other thing he needs is music, Lobey.”
“Music?”
“This is why he is chasing you—or making you chase him. He needs order. He needs patterning, relation, the knowledge that comes when six notes predict a seventh, when three notes beat against one another and define a mode, a melody defines a scale. Music is the pure language of temporal and co-temporal relation. He knows nothing of this, Lobey. Kid Death can control, but he cannot create, which is why he needs Green-eye. He can control, but he cannot order. And that is why he needs you.”
“But how—?”
“Not in any way your village vocabulary or my urban refinement can state. Differently, Lobey. Things passing in a world of difference have their surrealistic corollaries in the present. Green-eye creates, but it is an oblique side effect of something else. You receive and conceive music; again only an oblique characteristic of who you are—”
“Who am I?”
“You’re . . . something else.”
My question had contained a demand. His answer held a chuckle.
“But he needs you both,” Spider went on. “What are you going to give him?”
“My knife in his belly till blood floods the holes and leaks out the mouthpiece. I’ll chase the sea-floor till we both fall on sand. I—” My mouth opened; I suddenly sucked in dark air so hard it hurt my chest. “I’m afraid,” I whispered. “Spider, I’m afraid.”
“Why?”
I looked at him behind the evenly blinking lids of his black eyes. “Because I didn’t realize I’m alone in this.” I slid my hands together on the hilt. “If I’m to get Friza, I have to go alone—not with her love, but without it. You’re not on my side.” I felt my voice roughen, not with fear. It was the sadness that starts in the back of the throat and makes you cough before you start crying. “If I reach Friza, I don’t know what I’ll have, even if I get her.”
Spider waited for my crying. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. So after a while he said, “Then I guess I can let you through, if you really know that.”
I looked up.
He nodded to my silent question.
“There’s someone you must go to see. Here.” He stood up. In his other hand was a small sack. He shook it. Inside coins clinked. He flung the sack towards me. I caught it.
“Who?”
“The Dove.”
“The one whose pictures I’ve seen? But who—”
“Who is the Dove?” asked Spider. “The Dove is Helen of Troy, Starr Anthim, Mario Montez, Jean Harlow.” He waited.
“And you?” I asked. “You’re Judas and Minos and Pat Garrett? Who are you to her?”
His snort was contemptuous and amused. “If the Dove is Jean Harlow I’m Paul Burn.”
“But why—?”
“Come on, Lobey. Get going.”
“I’m going,” I said. “I’m going.” I was confused. For much the same reasons you are. Though not exactly the same. As I walked to the door I kept glancing back at Spider. Suddenly he tossed the skull gently. It passed me, hovered a moment, then smashed on the stones; and Spider laughed. It was a friendly laugh, without the malicious flickering of fish scales and flies’ wings that dazzled the laughter of the Kid. But it nearly scared me to death. I ran out of the door. For one step bone fragments chewed at my instep. The door slammed behind me. The sun slapped my face.
br /> Leave Crete and come to this holy temple.
Sappho, “Fragment”
This morning I took refuge from the thin rain in a teahouse with the dock workers. Yellow clouds moiled outside above the Bosphorus. Found one man who spoke French, two others who spoke Greek. We talked of voyages and warmed our fingers on glasses of tea. Between the four of us we had girdled the globe. The radio over the stove alternated repetitive Turkish modulations with Aznavour and the Beatles. Lobey starts the last leg of his journey. I cannot follow him here. When the rain stopped, I walked through the waterfront fish market where the silver fish had their gills pulled out and looped over their jaws so that each head was crowned with a bloody flower. A street of wooden houses wound up the hill into the city. A fire had recently raged here. Few houses had actually burned down, but high slabs of glittering carbon leaned over the cobbles where the children played with an orange peel in the mud. I watched some others chase a redheaded boy. His face was wet; he tripped in the mud, then fled before me. The backs had been trod down on his shoes. Perhaps on rewriting I shall change Kid Death’s hair from black to red. Followed the wall of Topkapi palace, kicking away wet leaves from the pavement. I stopped in the Sultanahmet Jammi. The blue designs rose on the dome above me. It was restful. In a week another birthday, and I can start the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novel’s palimpsest. The stones were cold under my bare feet. The designs keep going, taking your eyes up and out of yourself. Outside I put on my boots and started across the courtyard. In the second story of the old teahouse across the park I sat in a corner away from the stove and tried to wrestle my characters towards their endings. Soon I shall start again. Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.
Writer’s Journal, Istanbul, March 1966
What are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you afraid of the sun? When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the clods, shall you be resolute?
Emily Dickinson, “Letter to K. S. Turner”
The Pearl surprised me. A million people is too many to sort an individual from a slum. But the established classes are all the more centralized. There in the furious evening I saw the sign down the street. I looked in my purse. But Spider would have given me enough.
Black doors broke under a crimson sunburst. I went up the stairs beneath the orange lights. There was perfume. There was noise. I held my sword tight. Tack-heads had worn away the nap of the carpet with the tugging of how many feet. Someone had painted a trompe l’oeil still life on the left wall: fruit, feathers, and surveying instruments on crumpled leather. Voices, yes. Still, at the place where the auditory nerve connects to the brain and sound becomes music, there was silence.
“Lo?” inquired the dog at the head of the steps.
I was baffled. “Lo Lobey,” I told his cold face, and grinned at it. It stayed cold.
And on the balcony across the crowded room where her party was, she stood up, leaned over the railing, called, “Who are you?” with contralto laughter spilling her words.
She was pretty. She wore silver, a sheath V’d deeply between small breasts. Her mouth seemed used to emotions, mostly laughter I guessed. Her hair was riotous and bright as Little Jon’s. The person she was calling to was me. “Um-hm. You, silly. Who are you?”
It had slipped my mind that when somebody speaks to you, you answer. The dog coughed, then announced. “Eh . . . Lo Lobey is here.” At which point everyone in the room silenced. With the silence I learned how noisy it had been. Glasses, whispers, laughter, talk, feet on the floor, chair legs squeaking after them: I wished it would start again. In a doorway on the side of the room where two serpents twined over the transom, I saw the fat, familiar figure of the hunchback Pistol. He was obviously coming from somewhere to see what was wrong; he saw me, closed his eyes, took a breath, and leaned on the door jamb.
Then the Dove said, “Well, it’s about time, Lo Lobey. I thought you’d never get here. Pistol, bring a chair.”
I was surprised. Pistol was astounded. But after he got his mouth closed, he got the chair. With drawn machete I stalked the Dove among the tables, the flowers, the candles and cut goblets; the men with gold chained dogs crouching at their sandals; the women with jeweled eyelids, their breasts propped in cages of brass mesh or silver wire. They all turned to watch me as I went.
I mounted the stairway to the Dove’s balcony. One hip against the railing, she held out her hand to me. “You’re Spider’s friend,” she beamed. She made you feel very good when she talked. “Pistol”—she twisted around; wrinkles of light slid over her dress—“put the seat before mine.” He did and we sat on the brocade cushions.
With the Dove in front of me it was a little difficult to look at anyone else. She leaned towards me, breathing. I guess that’s what she was doing. “We’re supposed to talk. What do you want to talk about?”
Breathing is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman. “Eh . . . ah . . . well . . .” I pulled my attention forcefully back to her face. “Are nine thousand really that much better than ninety-nine?” (You think I knew what I was talking about?) She began to laugh without making any sound. Which is even more fascinating.
“Ah!” she responded, “you must try it and find out.”
At which point everybody started talking again. The Dove still watched me. “What do you do?” I asked. “Spider says you’re supposed to help me find Friza.”
“I don’t know who Friza is.”
“She was—” The Dove was breathing again. “—beautiful too.”
Her face passed down to deeper emotion. “Yes,” she said.
“I don’t think we can talk about it here.” I glanced at Pistol, who was still hovering. “The problem isn’t exactly the same as you might think.”
She raised a darkened eyebrow.
“It’s a bit . . .”
“Oh,” she said, and her chin went up.
“But you?” I said. “What do you do? Who are you?”
Her eyebrow arch grew more acute. “Are you serious?” I nodded.
In confusion she looked to the people around her. When no one offered to explain for her, she looked back at me. Her lips opened, touched; her lashes dipped and leaped. “They say I’m the thing that allows them all to go on loving.”
“How?” I asked.
Someone beside her said, “He really doesn’t know?”
From the other side: “Doesn’t he know about keeping confusion in the trails fertile?”
She placed a finger perpendicular to her lips. They quieted at the sound of her sigh. “I’ll have to tell him. Lobey—this is your . . . name.”
“Spider told me to talk to you . . .” I offered. I wanted to fix myself by informative hooks to her world.
Her smile cut guys. “You try to make things too simple. Spider. The great Lord Lo Spider? The traitor, the false friend, the one who has already signed Green-eye’s death decree. Don’t concern yourself with that doomed man. Look to yourself, Lobey. What do you want to know—”
“Death decree—”
She touched my cheek. “Be selfish. What do you want?”
“Friza!” I half stood from my seat.
She sat back. “Now I’ll ask you a question, having not answered yours. Who is Friza?”
“She . . .” Then I said, “She was almost as beautiful as you.”
Her chin came down. Light, light eyes darkened and came down too. “Yes.” That word came with the sound of only the breath I had been watching, without voice. So much questioning in her face now made her remembered expression caustic.
“I . . .” The wrong word. “She . . .” A fist started to beat my ribs. Then it stopped, opened, reached up into my head, and scratched down the inside of my face: forehead and cheeks burned. My eyes stung.
She caught her breath. “I see.”
“No you don’t,” I got out. “You don’t.”
They were watching again. She glanced right, left, bit her lip as she l
ooked back. “You and I are . . . well, not quite the same.”
“Huh? . . . oh. But—Dove—”
“Yes, Lobey?”
“Where am I? I’ve come from a village, from the wilds of nowhere, through dragons and flowers. I’ve thrown my Lo, searching out my dead girl, hunting a naked cowboy mean as Spider’s whip. And somewhere a dirty, one-eyed prince is going to . . . die while I go on. Where am I, Dove?”
“This close to an old place called Hell.” She spoke quickly. “You can enter it through death or song. But you may need some help to find your way out.”
“I look for my dark girl and find you silver.”
She stood, and blades of light struck at me from her dress. Her smooth hand swung by her hip. I grabbed it with my rough one. “Come,” she said.
I came.
As we descended from the balcony she leaned on my arm. “We are going to walk once around the room. I suppose you have the choice either of listening, or watching. I doubt if you can do both. I couldn’t, but try.” As we started to circuit the room, I beat my shin with the flat of my sword.
“We are worn out with trying to be human, Lobey. To survive even a dozen more generations we must keep the genes mixing, mixing, mixing.”
An old man leaned his belly on the edge of his table, gaping at the girl across from him. She licked the corner of her mouth, her eyes wondrous and blue and beautiful. Her cheekbones mocked him.
“You can’t force people to have children with many people. But we can make the idea as attractive”—she dropped her eyes—“as possible.”
At the next table the woman’s face was too loose for the framing bone beneath. But she laughed. Her hand wrinkled over the smooth fingers of the young man across from her. She gazed enviously from lined eyes at his quick lids, dark as olives when he blinked, his hair shinier than hers, wild where hers was coiffed in high lacquer.
“Who am I, Lobey?” she suggested—rather than asked—rhetorically. “I’m the key image in an advertising campaign. I’m the good/bad wild thing whom everybody wants, wants to be like—who prefers ninety-nine instead of one. I’m the one whom men search out from seeding to seeding. I’m the one whom all the women style their hair after, raise and lower their hems and necklines as mine rise and lower. The world steals my witticisms, my gestures, even my mistakes, to try out on each new lover.”