I stand my ground as the monstrous hound bears down, and the vast heads duck to huff and inhale at magically significant points upon my body – the groin, not least, he being a dog – but also all around me, tasting the air. Not yet satisfied, he leans closer, near by my lips, and smells the tears of Isis on my breath, at which he yips and snuffles fondly at my face – huge triple tongue and vast fangs streaming with glad, abhorrent otherworldly lick – and is content. In fact, it seems not only Charon who is starved for cheery meals, for a few pieces of carob have him positively puppyish.
Leaving the pup chasing the ghosts of rats, I walk on, and presently I find my road blocked for one last time, by the river of fire.
*
Cocytus, Styx, Lethe and Acheron: the first four rivers of Hades. Hesiod writes of Eridanos, the amber river that girdles the world, as if it were the fifth and greatest, but Hesiod is mistaken. The final river is Phlegethon, and it is not amber but all the colours of the flame.
Phlegethon is not like the others: Lamentation, Despite, Forgetting and Woe are all the sorrows of death, but Phlegethon is its mystery and its merciless hope. In Phlegethon is vested the whisper of the divine and the promise of rebirth. It is the last bulwark of Hades against the intrusive living, the first wall that holds the dead in their allotted place. It is the stream that binds Erebus to the mortal world – as it must, for it is everywhere, in all places and times. It is the mask worn by Apeiron, or its opposite, and in the inability to judge that distinction is the difference between man and god.
Phlegethon does not lie placidly in a riverbed, as painters love to show it, with kindly orange flames reaching half the height of a soldier at parade rest. It burns through the depths of the land and to the roof of the sky. There is no bridge to cross it, and no ferry, for it stretches from beneath the ground to the highest reaches of the heavens in a burning wall that will admit nothing and consumes everything, material or eternal. If I had a pot of the Alkahest here, I could try the old philosophical puzzle of two forces in perfect opposition, each defined by its absoluteness – and perhaps if I did, the world would end around me.
As it is, I am the pot, and I do not propose the test. I shed a little blood again, and with it draw a gate to admit me to the innermost places of the dead.
The gate congeals to stone or iron, but does not open. Made of my own self, it denies me. Should I lay my hand upon it, and command blood with blood? Will the Alkahest dissolve itself? I try, and of course it does not.
I hear a sigh.
‘Demon,’ I retort, ‘I know you’re here.’
‘Jennaye,’ Know-all says in turn, ‘are not demons.’
The peacock coat seems brighter and richer on his back.
‘You’ll do.’
‘That, at least, is certain.’
‘You are a burdensome conversationalist.’
‘I find myself enlightening.’
Of all the demons, mine must be the one that enjoys cheap puns.
‘I must pass,’ I say, gesturing to the wall of fire. ‘Advise me accordingly.’
Know-all skips towards me, looping heron steps. The human head cocks to one side like a bird’s, then the other way. Almost, I see his beak emerging from the shadow of the hood. Peacock-ing.
‘You lack authority,’ he says at last. ‘There is a piece missing. Hades is obedient. It is punctilious. This prohibition, then, hinges upon the same rules as does the domination of the Alkahest. The code is graven in the creation. You must have the authorities, or you cannot pass the gate. Cerberus has tasted you and is content. Your blood enlivens the soil and binds me. You have spoken your name and given of your memory. Four proofs are accepted, one remains: the sacrifice is not complete.’
‘What sacrifice?’
‘You walked in the shadow and shape of a god, and upon your altar, men made sacrifices. Wealth and time and heart: all aspects of the self. This you must yield up, but you cannot.’
I did not put my hand in Scipio’s corpse.
This corpse, lying once again in front of me.
Looking away, I find the doorway of the Chamber of Isis, barred by flames.
Choose, woman.
Choose murder of a soul and the resurrection of your son, or preservation of a stranger and your blood’s abandonment.
Choose.
*
Revelation says that one day the world will end, and the sky shall be rolled up as if it were a scroll and the true nature of things made plain. It always struck me as a most sinister promise, not because of what it portends for the future – all mortal things end, by definition – but what it means about the present. It augurs that we know nothing of what is true, and yet we are to be judged on our choices and even damned. We walk in deception and must build the most honest world we know, but our efforts shall be to no avail, and in the end, one layer of lies after another must be ripped away, until some final underlying cosmos is shown to be all that ever was. What might we have done differently, had we seen? The divine plan is made in deceit, with dreams piled upon dreams. How could we ever be sure, even seeing it on that final day, that we have reached the centre of the onion? How are we to recognise what is real after being shown falsehood for every instant of our lives? If faith is salvation, should we just pick a lie and love it unto death? Does that mean that a circle of hell, truly embraced, is heaven? Why not, if everything we do is destined to be unravelled anyway? Perhaps I should wish to inhabit my dying son as a sickness, after all. At least then I would be with him at the end, as I have so often desired. A fine razor in the soul, such paradise.
Choose.
Am I slave to the Oneiroi, the gods of dream? No. I choose the closest I have known to truth. I choose memory.
Into thy hands, Mnemosyne, and I beg you show your gentlest face. Mnemosyne, Mother Mary, Mother Isis. By your thrones, I entreat you, and by our shared womanhood. By your sons, I beg you, and by your love. By your sons, and by mine. For Augustine. For Scipio. For Adeodatus. Forgive me. Help me.
Help me.
Magic, they say, is the invocation of names, and I know only one other name by which to conjure. If I had faith, that might be better, but I don’t. Why would I? I exhausted my stock and have seen nothing to put it back. So, then:
For me. Just this once, for me?
Who am I, then?
Myself. Always.
I choose my son, and drive my hand to the elbow into Scipio’s corpse, letting my fingers guide themselves to whatever secret piece is desired.
This is my soul.
On the plain of Erebus, in the kingdom of Hades, close by the burning and ubiquitous river of fire, I find an unwanted gnosis: the knowledge and conversation of myself. A door opens in Phlegethon.
Know-all is gone, and I walk through the wall.
doors in the world
‘HOW LONG THIS time?’
‘Forty-seven minutes.’
Impossible to know how much time passed in the underworld. And pointless to ask, since it’s fiction. Forty-seven minutes. The memories are bedding in, then. She can recall them now as if they were her own.
Doors in the world. Walking through walls and gates of fire, fire which is everywhere. The world under everything, like the underground, like the substrate.
It’s like putting ingredients in a cauldron.
Athenais was breaking into the operating layer of the world.
like that but with teeth
HERE I AM, a Greek in a sack, in the back of a truck. I have to confess that it does not absolutely feel like the high life. It does slightly seem as if it might be a very violent Dr Seuss book.
There are people one hears about who are so bored and so rich and so fucking ignorant of possibility that they hire other people to come and take them away from their offices like this, kidnap them for a cool week in the Maldives without their executive Bluetooth headsets and their panoply of urgent bullshit. This is because they have so little control over their incredibly privileged lives that they can?
??t make the decision to have a holiday, so they sign up to be made to do it.
Seriously: learn to use the Do Not Disturb function on your telephone. Get some self-control or some appetites and build some positive lifestyle habits, okay? Because right now, with my head hanging off the back bench of the driver’s cab and the leatherette half sticking to and half scratching my cheek where the bag is sliding up – or down, because I’m not sure which way is which – I am pleased to be able to inform you, sir or madam, with your copious other options and your risk-free environment, that if you think being kidnapped is in any way cool you are a total asshole.
Apart from an old sandwich in one of the cubbies, I can smell vetiver, beer and socks. The girl who is not Stella is wearing the perfume Stella wore, and the two men with her don’t understand about foot hygiene.
I should have had security. I should have had it from the moment I realised what I was doing, from the first time I saw the shark in the numbers on the cathode ray screen. I should be sitting in a bulletproof car right now, the kind that can squash a Hummer like a soft-boiled egg. I should have two guys in the front seats called Steve and Warislaw, both with those mid-Atlantic accents that tell you they learned English in Slovakia, the hard skin on their hands that tells you the other stuff they know. The car should have machine guns and rockets and an internal oxygen supply and widescreen TV and a fucking pole for the dancers.
Instead, I’m doing an impression of last night’s soufflé and thinking about my dead ex-girlfriend, because a girl who looks like her – who is probably a quasi-religious fascist – has put a bag over my head.
I turn my head and there’s something on the cloth, some last damp patch of ether wrapping itself around my face like a kiss or a submersion or the perfect solar eclipse happening only in me. I see white teeth, so very big and sharp, and feel the impact of their closing – but I’m so used to that by now it’s almost homely. Unless it’s real. Wouldn’t that be a crotch?
Shit, I hope this is unconsciousness rushing at me, and not death.
*
It’s not a great deal of fun to be a fat boy in a world of athletic men and older, perfect women. In dreams, of course, you meet a girl and she’s special and you know it, so you train up. You go to practice with the football team, you run. It’s like the scene from Rocky. You box and you learn and soon enough you’re the Karate Kid, long limbs and the promise of a man’s body, and you get lucky. The special girl decides that she’s going to educate this boy in the ways of sex. She makes love to you, teaches you. You fall in love, fall out of love, and you part. It’s coming of age the way it never is, without the fear and the emotional train wrecks.
In the real world, you’re alone with Camille Jordan, and mostly that is fine. So long as you manage to nod and smile and forget that other people have friends and lovers and you are an oddity, it is fine. Solitude is underrated in the modern age, and loneliness is the natural state of children becoming men.
And then, one day, there was Stella.
‘Professor Cosmatou’s niece is coming to visit us tomorrow,’ my moral tutor says. A moral tutor is not greatly concerned with morals but more with morale, although I suppose they occasionally have to intervene in both areas. They are notionally there to keep students on an even keel but have an equal and occasionally opposed responsibility to protect the university from the excesses of undergraduate behaviour. Cosmatou is the family name of the Old Girl, but of course the only word that makes even a vague impression on me is ‘niece’ because this proposes a girl, and since she is being mentioned to me she might even be a girl my own age, though given the age of the old bird it seems more plausible that this niece will be another inaccessible creature of twenty or more. On the other hand, her blood relationship to the woman who has most perfectly understood me – intellectually, at least, but also emotionally – is compelling. It will be nice to have a visitor.
Not a visitor. She is coming to study. She’s like you: advanced.
Advanced, and only a year older, to within a week. If my mother’s pregnancy had not gone slightly awry at the last minute, necessitating intervention, we would share a birthday.
I think of Professor Cosmatou and envisage a younger version, narrow and sharp-angled. When Stella arrives, she is more like a furious Degas imp with hair suffering from explosive decompression. We argue immediately over the names I have given to various mathematical operations whose proper designations I did not discover until afterwards. Moon numbers and angel numbers are just the beginning. She calls me a hick. I call her a cow. The atmosphere over Professor Cosmatou’s dinner table is shocking. The professor’s husband, the famous Peloponnesian philosopher of meaning whose parents saw fit to call him Cosmas Cosmatos, withdraws with his plate to the study and commences to watch professional women’s beach volleyball on satellite television, in which his wife shortly joins him. They are both quite genuine fans of this sophisticated sport, but would not usually abandon the table for it.
Stella and I stare at one another hatefully across the kleftiko.
A week later, we are talking about the braid group conjugacy search problem, and I say something that could be funny if you looked at it two ways at once. She kisses me on the mouth. She tastes of menthol cigarettes and Coke. I belong to her for ever, and she to me.
‘Well, isn’t this a pickle?’ a voice says, and Stella’s lips are gone, like closing the door on your old house for the last time.
*
‘A pick-le.’ The acoustics are very strange, echoing and distant at the same time, as if I’m in a really big squash court. When I open my eyes, leaving Stella behind, I see someone I would rather never have seen again. It is the most complex and undesirable of transformations.
Nikolaos Megalos is no longer wearing his science fiction hat. That was town and this is the country, so he has on a white fisherman’s shirt and linen trousers. Perhaps it’s just the kidnapping context, but I find him a great deal less amusing than I did. He’s big: muscular and formidable, as if he’s spent his life hauling nets or ploughing rather than arguing about things that don’t exist in rooms full of imported wine. Bearded and with the neck of his shirt open across a white burst of aged, hirsute pectorals, he looks less like Father Brown’s Greek stablemate and more like a walking portrait of Hades.
That may also have something to do with my having recently sold the good Patriarch down the river and beggared his accounts in order to do right by my other, less weird clients.
In retrospect, I wonder whether that may have been a bad plan.
‘A pickle,’ he repeats, one more time for clarity. His voice has no obvious affect. He may be preparing a long speech about forgiveness, or he may be about to beat me to death. I can’t tell, but I’m not very confident about his forgiveness. Christ is big on forgiveness, and if Megalos were wearing his Patriarch’s outfit that would be a bit reassuring, but he isn’t. There’s something very deliberate about what he is wearing now, some assertion in the thonged sandals and dirty nails on his feet, and I need to know what it is. The wall is not the wall of some Christian monastery but something older, more vigorous and bloody. Nikolaos Megalos, at this moment, could be posing for a portrait of ‘the headman considers’ from any year between the founding of Athens and the invention of the cellular telephone. When political people here invoke the ethos of the villages, they are not only touching the ancient past, but also ghosting up against the nationalist resistance fighters in the White Mountains of Crete, and the sexy jackboot whisper of a militarised Greece. It is the soft-focus reflection of Cosmatos’s prejudice, fascism lite.
I’m finding his stillness quite alarming. However long he has been sitting there, with one enormous paw resting inside the other – and it cannot be less than half an hour – it seems that he has been quite simply looking at me, focused on me and nothing else, and waiting. There was no shift in his posture as I became aware of him, no sense of patience rewarded as he spoke.
‘You know,’ Megalos says
, ‘when I heard about your shark, I didn’t think much of it. Especially when I met you, and you were so obviously wretched with greed and lies. When I read your story in the newspaper, I thought I might kneel before you. I thought you had become the avatar of a living god, washed up out of the deep ocean of time and returned to us, as we will return. You were a disappointment.’
He shrugs, as if to say that most things are.
‘But one banker is much like another, and I could afford to speculate. I gave you our money, and we did well. Good. But then … then I heard a whisper. I have friends, you see, in all sorts of places, and I heard a whisper from an investigator in the finance ministry. They were fascinated by you. You knew things were happening before they happened. They thought you must have sources, but so many? So diverse? How could you bring all those pieces together in one place, how could you make a single thing out of them and understand what would happen in the intersection of all those different currents? And when they looked into it, they couldn’t find anything. No meetings, no interactions of any kind, no statistically significant habits or correlations. He said to me: “That guy Kyriakos, with the shark: it’s made him a prophet!” And then I knew. I had been too hasty. The god was with you after all. She was waiting for me, and I had been delinquent. Then I was too late. You had taken her gift and you made not change but chaos. You made money instead of revolution. You made money for men and women who have much of it, and for me? For me you made nothing. The absence of money. The absence of power, as I thought. I truly hated you in that moment. I hated myself. I had failed in everything I cared about.’
Megalos sees my fear, and nods. I have correctly understood him. I am right to be afraid. ‘Do you know what I intended with that money, Constantine?’
I shake my head.
‘I intended chaos. I had worked so hard, within the Church and among the rich; with the unions and the communists, with the fascists; even currying favour and distaste among all foreigners so that they would act in one particular way at the right time … I had made everything ready for confusion and dismay, for everyone to betray and delay for just long enough. All it needed was money to give it a push. The long-enough lever, hm? I nearly had enough. Next year, or the year after, I would have been ready to make even a small crisis into a large one. But now you have unleashed a greater chaos than ever I could. All my clever traps are sprung and washed away, and yet: what I wanted is granted me. The genie has not gone back into its bottle, my Hierophant. Athens burns, and Greece shall be torn no longer.’