Chimera (33 page)

I agreed, and informed her further (what I happened conveniently to know from Polyeidus) that the woman’s name would be Alcmene (“mighty as the et cetera”), her lover Zeus himself, their tryst some generations yet to come. I hadn’t heart to add that their son’s bloody rendezvous in Themiscyra—as represented on an Attic black-figured amphiphoreus Polyeidus had once turned into when he was trying for
Amphitryon
by way of
amphigouri
back in our schooldays—was already a matter of the history of the future.

“Can you bring Pegasus back to life?” I pleaded.

She grinned. “Sure. You too. Stand back.” With a quick modest motion, quite feminine in fact, she took from under her chiton a single tiny leaflet of the magic herb and bent to hold it to the horse’s muzzle. Almost involuntarily—I was so close behind her, and moved, and curious—I rested my hands lightly on her hips. She smiled back up at me. “Be ready to jump on.”

O, I was—and even as she surely felt it, Pegasus exploded to his feet in a whinnying swirl of feathers. I snatched the bridle, had as much as I could do to hold him down while she scrambled on and helped me get up before her. Time only for the fleetingest thought of Philonoë, sacrificed once more: Melanippe laughed merrily, hugged me about the waist to keep from falling as I dug my bare heels in and we rocketed from the dreck, even seized my grand standing phallus when we cleared Argolis at an altitude of five kilometers, Attica, Euboea—and boldly steered me with it across the black Aegean, under moon and stars too near, it seemed, to envy, toward Scythia, Themiscyra, the warm reedy banks of Thermodon.

There, let’s see, she and Bellerophon lived happily ever after. She got the lead out of Pegasus and put it in her lover’s Polyeidic pencil. These are her words; this is his life. Her hippomanes is out of sight; they fly three times a day. She will not explain the nature of her immortality (which, however, he infers to have a Lethe-like component, as she remembers few details of the ancient rape, fewer of her girlhood and early exploits in the Fifth Light Cavalry), but he feels bathed in it, younger by a dozen “years” at least, his tide reflooded. Let’s see. She’s an amazing lover, Melanippe—frisky, uninhibited, imaginative, lean and tight. They wrestle a lot. She likes to bite, usually not so it hurts. Bellerophon’s okay too, though that quarter-hour on Anteia’s chopping block took its toll on his genital self-confidence. He wonders sometimes how Philonoë and the kids are getting along, also his mother, and old Sibyl, and whatever happened to Polyeidus. But he comforts himself with that business at the end of
Perseld
about mortal and immortal parts; look it up.

What else. They go into Themiscyra on weekends, to do the restaurants and theaters and museums and such; week-days they spend in a little rented cottage out in the marsh, writing this story. Melanippe’s return-from-exile visa, Bellerophon gathers, and his own status as former rapist and former king of their principal former enemy, impose these after all modest restrictions on their movement. Dum dee dee. O yes: he is altogether impressed with life among the Amazons: a truly emancipated people, they no more resemble their caricatures in Tiryns than a male passive-pederast resembles a woman. Lesbianism is not uncommon among them; bisexuality is commoner yet; but the majority are vigorous heterosexuals, and man-haters are rare. Males themselves are welcomed as visitors and treated cordially, though their visits are carefully supervised, and only in exceptional circumstances are they permitted to live and work in the polis. Bellerophon has made notes toward an anthropological treatise on the relations between the Amazons and their counterparts, the all-male society of Gargarensians, which with Melanippe’s help he will no doubt write sometime in their timeless future: members of the two societies mate freely, for example, during two months every spring in the wooded mountains along their border, the impregnated Amazons returning home to bear their children; male babies are not killed or emasculated, but nursed lovingly, weaned, and turned over to the Gargarensians. As no one knows her parents (the Amazon collective and indefinite pronouns are feminine), the incest-taboo is foreign to them: when Bellerophon recounted to Melanippe the story of a certain future king of Thebes, she was distressed that he will accidentally kill his father, but thought it only right for him to marry his mother in recompense. Though marriage is forbidden (and very difficult for Amazon schoolteachers to explain to their tittering charges), love between women and men, even “permanent” relationships, are punished only by the stipulation that the lovers relinquish whatever positions they hold in their respective societies and live outside the city, as during mating season—indeed they regard such connections as a kind of permanent mating season, therefore a permanent daftness, and make gently deprecating jokes about the lovers’ overappetitiveness, underimaginativeness, and irresponsibility. That mistress of Jerome B. Bray’s, by the way, like the ladies of Anteia’s court, must have been merely mimicking an Amazon: neither Melanippe nor anyone else hereabouts has ever heard of
Torah, Pentateuch, Gematria,
and the rest.

Et cetera. All that’s another story, of no great concern to the characters in this, which Melanippe will wind up now, seal in an amphora, Bellerophon supposes, and run down the Thermodon on the tide, into the Black Sea, Propontis, Aegean, past fell Heracles’s pillars, across Oceanus, et cetera. He likes to imagine it drifting age after age, nudged by great and little fishes, under strange constellations bobbing, bobbing, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire, et cetera. While towns and statues fall, gods come and go, new worlds and tongues swim into light, old perish, stuff like that. Let’s see. Then it too must perish, with all things deciphered and undeciphered—no no, scratch that: it
mustn’t
perish, no indeed; it’s going to live forever, sure, the voice of Bellerus, the immortal Bellerophon, that’s the whole point.

So, well: their love, Bellerophon’s and Melanippe’s, winds through universal space and time and all; noted music of our tongue, silent visible signs, et cetera; Bellerophon’s content; he really is; good night.

“Good night is right,” Melanippe said when she read Part One. “I can’t believe you wrote this mess.”

I asked her, hurt, how so; I thought it not half bad, considering.

“Because,”
she cried. “It’s a lie! It’s false! It’s full of holes! I didn’t write any of it;
you
did, every word. And you make out that I’m all emancipated and no hang-ups and immortal and stuff, and that’s crazy.
Content
my ass!
Content
is a death-word in my book; if I were Medusa and I asked Perseus if he was happy to spend eternity with me and he said he was
content,
I’d spit in his eye! Okay, you got the Amazon business pretty straight, but I’m amazed at your picture of me: you know very well I’m not immortal except in that special way I told you about: the ‘Melanippe-self’ way. I’m on the verge of my Full Moon, and I feel every lunar month of it: just in the time it’s taken you to write these pages I’ve gained ten kilos and aged five ‘years.’ That very first night in Tiryns, I told you how my nurse Hippolyta in Corinth told
me
that my mother was a crazy Amazon deaf-mute who killed herself when I was born, and my father a hero on a white horse who’d left her on the stable roof one night. Why pussyfoot around about it? I not only
look
young enough to be your daughter; just possibly I
am
your daughter, and if that doesn’t bother me, it shouldn’t bother you. I never held a grudge against you; I took it for granted you didn’t know you’d made my mother pregnant. Even when I learned (from you) that she’d been the hottest prospect in Amazonia until you raped her, and I decided that that was what drove her crazy and made her kill herself, I excused you. But I don’t fool myself about my reasons: I’d heard a lot about you in Argolis; I admire heroes and had never met one; I was disgusted with Stheneboeia, and I wanted out of Tiryns. I don’t mean anything vulgar like screwing my way to the top (I never let Stheneboeia sleep with me); I really did fall for you, in a hurry. I honor and respect you, as you know. I even love you; you’re the gentlest, sweetest lover I ever had, if not the most passionate, and the difference in our ages doesn’t matter to me at all except when it takes the edge off your enthusiasm because you’ve done everything once already. Like getting married and having a family and building a house and buying furniture and stuff. If you want to know the truth, I think we’re bogged down more than immortalized: you scribble scribble scribble all day, morning noon and night, and honestly, I believe it must be the greatest thing in the world to be a mythic hero and be immortalized in the story of your life and so forth—I really do appreciate that—but I love
activity,
you know? Philonoë was more your type—I mean that perfectly kindly. She liked books and myths and needlework and all; I’m used to an
active
life, and we never
do
anything! I’d sort of hoped we’d go down to Lycia after you’d got yourself together, not that I’m eager to be a queen, but just so we’d be
doing
stuff. It drives me crackers that we’ve got this winged horse right here to take us anywhere in the world, and all we do is spin around the saltmarsh after mealtimes—then back to your scribbling scribbling while I make dinner and twiddle my thumbs. I hate to say this, but I guess I’d be happier with less of a hero and more of a regular man. I don’t mean that sarcastically. I’m tired of Amazoning; I’m tired of being a demigod’s girlfriend, too, if it means hanging around this cottage till I die. But I’m also tired of bopping about with different lovers; what I want is a plain ordinary groovy husband and ten children, nine of them boys. Call me a cop-out if you want to; I ought to find some swinging young Gargarensian M.D. or lawyer next mating season who’ll think I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him, instead of just the recentest, you know? I might not love him as much, but I bet I’d be happier. I don’t want to be around when my hippomanes doesn’t work for you any more, Bellerophon; either you’ll leave me like the rest or we’ll both sit around wishing we were dead. You thought that that Pattern Polyeidus gave you for your Second Flood predicted three women, but by my count I’m the fourth: Sibyl, my mother, Philonoë, and me, right? But you said yourself that everything comes in fives in the
Betterophoniad,
so maybe you ought to start looking for that next one and get on with your career. Maybe this Chimera has turned into a pretty girl again, like Medusa in the
Perseid.
You should check and see if she’s It, and if she isn’t, kill her for real this time and see if
that
gets you where you want to go. Anyhow I know
I’m
not It for you, and you know it too, only you don’t want to admit it. You’re not getting any younger; neither am I: lots of Amazons look younger than they are because we don’t count years, and it’s the distinctions people acknowledge and condition themselves to look for that usually show, in my opinion. But the more I think about it, the more I’m
sure
that tonight’s full moon is going to end my First Quarter, and you’ll think I’ve aged fourteen years in one night. Will you still say I’m ‘frisky and lean and tight’ and so forth? I get tired too, you know; dead tired; sometimes I feel
Last
Quarter! Maybe I shouldn’t go on like this; I know it’s getting near my period, and that always makes me blue and a little bitchy. But I swear, this isn’t immortality: it’s suspended animation. Which brings me back to your story: despite all those clever things you have me say in it, the truth is I know zero about writing; but if
I
were to find this washed up on the beach and read it through, just as a plain story, I’d sure be pissed off that you never tell what happened to Polyeidus and Philonoë and Anteia and your mother and your kids, especially that ring business when you left home; and you don’t say what the rest of Sibyl’s letter said, or clear up that episode with the Chimera—whether she was real in the first place and whether she’s back again—or explain all that fudging about your brother’s death, et cetera. You even call it ‘Part One,’ but I don’t see any Part Two. There are nice things in it, sure, a lot of nice things, once you get past that heavy beginning and move along; but if your immortality depends on this piece of writing, you’re a dead pigeon.”

A bad night. I couldn’t speak to explain the difference between lies and myth, which I was but beginning to comprehend myself; how the latter could be so much realer and more important than particular men that perhaps I must cease to be the hero of my own, cease even to exist, cease somehow even to have existed. In fact I couldn’t speak at all. Melanippe either, having spoken. Sadly and fiercely we made love: Medusa winked down at us; Pegasus snorted; my darling came as never in her life, sure sign of her passage. Me too. She slept; by full-moon light I wrote Part Two; just before dawn, as Perseus and company sank over Asia Minor, we gently made love again; she gave me the last of her First-Quarter hippomanes, an enormous stash, and bade me go kill Chimera for real.

“Are you sure you’re not Polyeidus?” I asked her, and she responded: “Are you sure you’re Bellerophon?”

Heh. I wrapped up in the prophet’s Pattern the story thus far—which if less than
Perseid-perfect
was anyhow clear, straightforward, and uncorrupted at that time—hauled up on sleepy Pegasus, slipped him his quid of hip, winged west.

Polyeidus here: shape-shifting, general prophecy.

No one who sees entire the scope and variety of the world can rest content with a single form. Gods and seers have such sight; hence our propensity for metamorphosis. Yet Zeus in all his guises is still Zeus, “presiding god of classic Greek mythology”; I in mine only Polyeidus, advisor to, perhaps father of, a minor hero in that same local corpus. Being Old Man of the Marsh was irksome. I grew bored to death with Bellerophon. What Zeus sees I don’t know, but
I
saw (in bits and pieces, to be sure, like runes on my scattered daughter’s oak leaves or scrambled bits of satellite photography) the fore and aft of the whole vessel of human history; as I swatted spiders and pulled leeches off me there in the Aleïan flats, I came understandably to wish myself not only out of that particular swamp, but out of Greek myth altogether—that tiresome catalogue of rapes, petty jealousies, power grabs; that marble-columned ghetto of immortals. Why couldn’t I turn myself, I wondered, not into another personage-
from
-the-future (no more than a disquieting anachronism), but into Scheherazade, “Henry Burlingame III,” or Napoleon in his
own
time and place? Recollecting the odd document I’d briefly been on Bellerophon’s second try (a happy chance; I don’t by any means always read the pages I turn into), I petitioned Zeus himself to give me a hand (promising the customary quid pro quo, to spread his fame in the new world), concentrated as one must on a single image—that verbo-visual pun of a honeybee which appears on Napoleonic flags and, stitched in gold, on the violet pall of the casket that transported his alleged remains from St. Helena back to Paris—and grunted hard.