The Golden Mean (25 page)

“It’ll be all right,” he added, so only I could hear.

W
E WENT DOWN TO
the port to meet his ship, the whole merry gang of us, led by Eudoxus, and Plato’s nephew, Speusippus. Everyone spoke too loudly and they might as well have worn flowers in their hair. I wandered some little distance away to watch the unloading. The sun struck coins in the water where I stared, dazzling my sight, and when I looked up the great man himself was on the quay being mobbed by my teachers and classmates. My name was called but I was already on my way over. I would not reveal sullenness.

Speusippus introduced me, a hand on my shoulder, as though he knew me well and my accomplishments were his. Plato was slightly younger than my father would have been, and looked tired. He had close-cropped greying hair and lines around the mouth and eyes. Thin, not as tall as me, simple light clothes, hard chips of light in the eyes. I liked the look of him despite myself. I had expected someone soft and jolly, with seriousness represented by the cryptic.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” he said, as though three years ago was last week. “I wanted to be. I was so sorry about your parents. I thought I could do good work in Sicily, influence many fates, and that it was the better choice. So it seemed at the time.”

“The moral calculus, the choice to serve the greatest good for the greatest number,” Speusippus announced, as though interpreting an oracle.

Around us the crowd murmured and nodded. Plato looked annoyed.

“I would have waited longer,” I said. More murmuring and nodding; a good answer; only I meant it.
Your parents
, he had said, not
your father
. He and I shared a bubble: we were both stuck together back in that moment three years ago. I was only now arriving at his school, in his mind; my parents had only just died, in mine. Every morning as I woke they died all over again. Today my true studies would begin.

“I want to spend time with you,” he said.

We were moving away from the ship, swept along by the crowd eager to get him moving, to reinstate him at the school, like a city craving her king back in the palace, or a child his parents in the house.

“Later. I’m too tired right now. I want to tell you a lot of things, and hear a lot from you also. I don’t like not knowing you. Eudoxus has written me—”

I allowed Speusippus to slip between us then and the crowd to peel me away. Was that flirting? At a stall I bought apricots and hung back to eat them while the crowd I had come with disappeared in the distance, sheep guiding the dog. Musicians had already been hired, I knew, and a great supper was being prepared; no one would be working this afternoon. Had they heard him say he was tired?

“You,” the girl said, surprised, when she saw me sitting alone at one of the long tables. Unusually, I had been told to wait. Her hair was loose and her face puffy. I followed her to the back room, where she rubbed hard at one eye with the side of her finger while I undressed. The bed was made.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked.

She pointed at the ceiling. Business quarters downstairs, living up.

“Mornings. You sleep mornings.”

She shrugged, nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no.” She dropped her dress and yawned, then laughed.
“I’m
sorry. I’m not very sexy today. I worked last night. Need a bath.”

Could have been a slut’s patter—
I’m so dirty
—but she looked at me a moment too long. I wondered if this too was something I should offer to pay for, or if she was trying to tell me something else entirely:
I don’t belong to you. Just to you
.

“How about we don’t talk,” I said.

I got back late to the Academy. The sun was setting and the grounds were almost deserted. I could hear the music from the big house, glimpse the light and the movement of dancers through the windows. Laughter, clapping, smell of roast. At the guest house I washed quickly and changed my clothes. Teeth-marks in the soft places. A big meal would be perfect.

In a niche by the front door I passed Speusippus in linen, reviewing some notes. We looked each other up and down and looked away. A roar went up when I walked through the inner door. They were drunk already, my classmates, and roared at every appearance: me, Callippus with a scroll under one arm, a slave with a tray of new delicacies. Plato sat with Eudoxus, but broke off his conversation to look up and smile every now and then at this or that student and mouth some pleasantry.
So long
, I read many times on his lips, and
thank you
. Something something something
so long
. He had not changed clothes, or his travelling clothes were his only clothes. I saw him notice me. He raised his hand for silence.

“Nephew,” he called.

Speusippus had entered immediately behind me, and made a show of putting his clammy hand on my head to move me aside. “Uncle. All here now.”

Speusippus released me. I stepped back into the crowd, back and back, as he made his speech of welcome, until I found a slave against the wall with a tray I could pick clean. I finished in time to applaud with the others.

“Water,” I told the slave with two pitchers on his tray. My hands still smelled of the girl, or I imagined they did. I plucked a large flower from an arrangement and shoved finger after finger down its white throat, reaming for scent. Plato was responding to Speusippus. He had taken the scroll from Callippus and unrolled it and held it up. It was a map of the world, fly-specked with black dots. Plato was explaining that each dot represented the birthplace of a member of the Academy. We all edged closer, looking for our dots. There was no Stageira-dot. The Pella-dot was probably supposed to be me.

“I’m so proud of you all,” Plato was saying. “I’ve been away for so long. Too long, I know. I’m very tired, and can’t imagine travelling again anytime soon. You’re all stuck with me, is what I’m trying to say.” Laughter. “We have a lot of work to do, a lot of problems to solve. Difficult problems. But there is no problem without a solution. We are the world in miniature here, and together we will solve the problems of the world. Problems of geometry, problems of physics, problems of government, problems of justice and law. What we achieve here will be incorruptible down the ages.” Applause. “And I apologize for the rubbish they’re feeding you. I see standards in the kitchen have slipped unconscionably since I’ve been away. We’ll remedy that problem tomorrow.” Laughter and applause. A rebuke: the food was fine and fancy, the master a known ascetic. “Tomorrow,” he repeated.

I made my way over to him as the party resumed.

“Did the new boy like my speech?” he asked.

“All problems have solutions and the food will be worse tomorrow?”

He laughed, and leaned forward to look into my cup. “He doesn’t drink?”

He spoke like Illaeus. Illaeus spoke like him. “Not much.”

“Why not?”

Callippus was rolling the scroll, listening to something Eudoxus was saying in his ear. We were alone for a moment in the middle of the crowded room. “My master in Pella drank. It stopped him from getting his work done.”

“Illaeus.”

I nodded.

“I remember his time here. A lovely boy. Lovely mind. A gift for languages, and for language. Loved poetry. He drank then, too, and liked to go into the city, alone, at night. It seemed harmless at the time.”

I held his look.

“His letter moved me,” Plato said. “Unexpected, first of all, because he left angry. I hadn’t heard from him in years. Then he says, I have a boy here. You must take this boy.”

I smelled my fingers.

“I had a master myself, years ago. Will you come with me, please? I’m having trouble hearing in this room.”

He led me through a curtain. I felt my classmates watch us go. We sat in a room I had never entered, a cell with a bed, table, two chairs, and a shelf of books.

“My master was a father to me,” he said. “I will be a father to you, if you’ll let me. You are already so many people to me. Illaeus, again, and my own younger self, and your own self too. Eudoxus tells me the others are frightened of you. He says you spend a lot of time alone.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be.”

“Why did Illaeus leave angry?”

“He wanted me to love him the most. I failed him.”

We sat listening to the party sounds from the big room.

“Not all problems have solutions,” I said.

We spoke for a while about that. I too wanted him to love me the most, already, and suspected the way to achieve that was to fight him. He had enough fawns in the other room. He said he believed in perfection; I said I believed in compromise. Perfection was an extreme, and I had a need to avoid extremes, perhaps because I was so subject to them.

“I will help you,” he said.

A tap on the door frame, and Eudoxus looked in. “Food.” He set a plate on the table.

“Sleep, rather.” Plato rose, handing me the plate. “Eat for me. Boys are always hungry. Our conversation will last years; we needn’t finish it tonight.”

Eudoxus led me back to the party. “You may not want that.” He nodded at the plate. “It was prepared specially for him. No honey, no salt. He likes you. What did you talk about?”

Bread, figs, yogourt, a duck egg.

“Lucky!” My friends gathered around, staring at the plate, at me.

The girl had licked and bitten, licked and bitten, until I didn’t know myself. I knew I had seen her for the last time. Giddy, I gave the plate away.

FIVE

P
YTHIAS IS DYING
. Her pain is a bright ribbon drawing her on through dun days and sleepless nights; it’s all that’s real to her. She lies in her room, in her bed, in sheets sweet-scented by fruits left to ripen in the cupboards, fanned by the hour by her maid. I can’t help thinking of her pain, also, as a rational being, one with whom she must argue to rescue herself, but as a poor reasoner she cannot. I see the perplexity in her face, the lines in the brow, as pain’s logic bests her again and again. Sometimes, in a low voice, she speaks of her girlhood in Hermias’s court, of her mother and of a younger sister, whom she’s never mentioned before; sometimes she cries out, and I can’t tell pain from grief. In her sleep she thrashes, gripped by nightmares, and wakes white-faced, eyes and mouth black with fear. It takes a long time to persuade her to tell me what she sees.

“A road,” she’ll say, or, “I am walking,” and then the terror will grip her again and she’ll refuse to say more. I know she believes these dreams to be prophetic.

“If you tell me the dreams, I might find a way to stop them.” But this, too, troubles her: if the gods want her to watch her death, it would be impious to refuse the vision.

“So you die in the dream, then?” I ask, relentlessly. I’ve never had a recurring dream, never had dreams of any coherence, in fact, and am fascinated.

Pythias closes her eyes, and with a great effort opens them again. She looks directly into my eyes while she speaks, and my attention to her words is overlaid with the revelation that throughout our marriage we’ve rarely made eye contact. She’s always gazing just over my shoulder, or at my chest, or my feet.

“I am walking,” she says. “I am alone. There is a wind and the sky is black. Then the sky begins to melt. It falls away in strips, and behind the sky is a white fire, and a huge noise. Soon the heavens are on fire, and the sky is a few black tatters, peeling away in the wind. The wind and the noise and the heat are unbearable, but worst of all is that I am alone.”

She clings to my hands, her knuckles gone white.

“I barely have to close my eyes and it comes,” she whispers. “Have I done wrong to tell you?”

I comfort her as best I know how, in the language of reason, explaining that the body’s sense-organ, the heart, needs natural intermissions, called sleep; that the goal is to give rest to the senses. I explain the relationship between digestion and sleep (privately taking note to question the maid about her eating habits), and tell her that dreams are the persistence of sensory impressions, playing upon the imagination. Many factors can affect the nature of one’s dreams, such as slight sensory input during sleep—a room too hot or too cold, say—which will then become exaggerated in the dream, producing an impression of freezing or burning. Perhaps her dream of great heat was suggested by her fever, or too many blankets. (Her eyes follow mine throughout this lesson, like Little Pythias’s when I tell her she will one day be a great beautiful lady like her mother; doubtful, yet wanting to believe.) I explain further that certain people are particularly susceptible to violent dreams, these including people who are excitable, or under the grip of some strong emotion, or those with vacant minds, vacuums that need to be filled. (I don’t suggest to which category she might belong. My own dreams are negligible; my mind is too busy in waking to suck for fuel during sleep.) As for impiety, I explain gently, dogs have been known to dream—they run their legs in sleep—and why would the gods send visions to a dog? No, dreams might be coincidental, or prescient, but then some people respond to almost any stimulus, the way water trembles throughout when the smallest pebble is tossed into it, and see visions in straw and cooking pots and fingernail clippings as much as in dreams. It means nothing.

“I had thought, perhaps, it was a memory.” Pythias is calmer now. “When you told me of the heavens, of all the—the spheres, and the outermost sphere that was black but all full of pin-holes, so that the great fire behind shone through as stars. It frightened me at the time, when you explained it to me, and I thought perhaps I was remembering this in my dreams.”

“Now, you see.” I feel a simultaneous rush of gratitude and affection and amazement and pain at the inevitable, impending loss of her. “You have already thought it through, without me. I am proud of you.”

She lies back, then, and closes her eyes in a show of bravery.

“She is comfortable,” the maid says later, when I ask. “She slept this afternoon, a little, while you were out.” This maid, Herpyllis, is a warm creature, not especially young, with a tidy bent and a sympathetic face. The dark one with the green eyes, the one Pythias likes. Now that Pythias is utterly bedridden, Herpyllis has taken over the running of the household. I’ve seen her coddle Little Pythias with hugs and cooing, affection the little girl accepts with total, unsmiling attention. I suspect her of trying to comfort me. I don’t resent the effort, but am curious about the audacity it implies. She’s a servant, not a slave; still.

“You take it very calmly,” I say to her as she closes the door to the sickroom. Her arms are full of the bed linens she has just changed, her face flushed with the effort of stripping them without disturbing Pythias. I’d been meaning to spell her by the sickbed, as I do every evening now, but Pythias waved me away, saying I would only try to make her think.

“You can talk to Herpyllis instead,” my wife said. “She will listen.”

“I’ve seen it before,” the maid says now, in the hall. “When I was a girl. Sometimes in the stomach, sometimes the breasts. My mother used to sit with the sick. She would take me with her.”

I stand aside to let her precede me, and follow her to the kitchen, where she drops the laundry in a corner. “And can you guess,” I say, but courage crumples inside me and I stand unhappily without finishing the sentence.

“How long?”

I nod. She, in turn, shakes her head, which I take at first to mean she doesn’t want to venture a guess, but then she says, “She won’t suffer much more.”

I watch her move around the kitchen, tidying, and beginning to prepare my meal. She plucks a hair from her head, a coarse white strand from the dark, and with it sets to slicing a hard-boiled egg for Little Pythias’s supper. Not so young, but not so old. Her hands, the nails especially, are clean for a servant’s. The pans are burnished, the floor scrubbed. My own bed linen, I’m only now realizing, is always changed before I have a chance to smell myself on it. My meals are prompt and hot; my favourites appear without me asking for them. Even the courtyard garden appears more kempt, weeded and watered and clipped and staked. I’m noticing everything, now.

When I clear my throat, she turns away from her chopping board, wipes her hands, and pulls up her skirts—from some wetness on the floor, I think at first. When she smiles, laughter in her eyes, I start back, as though from a cinder. The rest of the evening I spend in my study with the door closed, which the servants know means I am absolutely not to be disturbed.

T
HERE ARE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS
for certain territorial borders—Sparta, Argos, Arcadia, Messene—that Philip, busily redrawing the maps down there, should know about. So I tell myself, planning to send him a letter of advice. Perhaps I’ll compare him to Heracles while I’m at it. Voices at the gate; Tycho will send them away; I’m sick; I don’t leave my study; I see no one. But footsteps.

“Ears full of shit and skull full of shit,” I say to Tycho without turning away from the maps on the table in front of me. “I told you, I’m not home.”

“Can’t hear you.”

I look up.

“Ears full of shit,” Alexander explains.

What is it? Taller, deeper voice, what? Oh, what?

“I came to see Pythias.”

“Did you?”

“She said I could come whenever I wanted.”

The corner of my mouth twitches. A smile, if I could smile.

He kneels in front of me, looks at my face. “She’s not—”

“Not yet.”

He takes my hands.

“No.” I pull back. No warmth, no touch. “She’s sleeping. Will you stay until she wakes?”

He nods.

“How are you? When did you get back?”

“Yesterday.” He tells me briefly of his past few weeks, closely monitored in Athens and then promptly sent home. “They don’t know what to do with me. My father and Antipater. They think I’m going to hurt someone, or myself. Antipater told me as much. I haven’t seen my father since the battle. At least they gave me my knife back.”

So there it is, out on the table between us at last. “Do you remember much of what happened that day?”

“Some. I know what Hephaestion’s told me.” He hesitates. “He told me what my father said about not having an heir. Is it true?”

“Philip was frightened.”

“No, I don’t think so. My father doesn’t get frightened.”

“Pissed off, then. You—we were doing something he didn’t understand.”

“We?”

“You, then.”

“A gift. Carolus liked the head.”

So he does remember. “How did you get that thing, anyway?”

He looks blank, and I shiver. It chutes me back six years, that same look of incomprehension when Carolus asked him where he’d find one.

“You remember. The head was my job. I was going to sculpt one out of clay and paint it. I went to the actor’s house to get a look at him, to make it accurate, and the minute I saw him I knew he wouldn’t be performing. It was obvious to anybody. There was an old woman there who said he’d been sleeping for days and wouldn’t wake up again. He was feverish. She lifted the sheet and showed me his belly. He was swollen from not having had a shit in so long. She said that’s what was killing him: there was a blockage and his body was filling with shit. Can that happen?”

I nod.

“So I sketched his face, for my sculpture, and went home and worked on it, but I couldn’t get it right. It looked silly, like a child had done it.”

“You
were
a child. Sculpture is difficult enough for a master artist.”

He waves this away. “I should have been able to do it and I couldn’t. But I realized why. It was because I had already had a better idea. It was a waste of time to work on the lesser idea. So I went back to his house.”

I want to know and not to know. “And did you—” I flutter my hands. Soon I will be half a hundred years old. “Help?”

He hesitates; changes what he was going to say. In six years, this is the first time I’ve seen him do this. “The old woman did, with a pillow. She said he had suffered enough.”

“And she let you take the head?”

“I took the whole thing. She knew who I was. What was she going to do? I had him buried properly, afterwards. I’m not an animal.”

The greatest insult one man could level against another, I remember telling him once, and it’s the achievement of my time here that he believes it. “Would you do such a thing again? Today?”

“You have to admit it was effective.”

“I admit it was effective. Would you do it again?”

“You want me to say no. No, I wouldn’t do it again.”

“Why not?”

“Because Carolus is dead.”

“There’s no one left to impress?”

Alexander looks at his lap.

“Forgive me. I inflict pain with words, the tragedian’s art. Tell me, if you were to write a tragedy, what would it be about?”

He looks up.

“What makes you feel fear, pity?”

“That’s easy. You. Stuck here, with me, when you could be great in the world. Put in a little box by my father and the lid nailed down tight. An animal dying in a cage.”

“You’re not dying.”

“I was talking about you.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“And when you’re done and all the juice is sucked out, someone will come along and cut open your head and say, here, look at this enormous brain. Look at the waste.”

“No waste,” I say softly.

“Waste of mind, waste of body, waste of time. What would you write a tragedy about?”

“Master.” Tycho stands in the doorway. “My lady is awake.”

We stand.

“I want to see her alone,” Alexander says.

I wait in the courtyard, picking over my herbs. Late fall again, everything dying again. Even the perennials have gone woody and brown. They aren’t long together.

“She asked if you’d fed me,” Alexander says when he returns after a few minutes. “I told her you hadn’t, and I was starving.”

“Now I’ll have hell to pay.” We walk to the gate together. “How is your mother?”

“Happier. I’m seeing a lot of her, these days. Who’s going to stop me?”

In the street wait Hephaestion and a handful of others I recognize, boys I’ve taught. Men, now, who take no notice of me, except for Hephaestion, who nods and looks away.

“My escort,” Alexander says.

“Will I see you again?”

“My father forbids it. So, of course.”

I return to Pythias. The bedroom is hot and dark and smells of the spices that burn in a little brazier to scent the air.

“He can’t sleep,” she says. “Loud sounds startle him. He can’t concentrate on books. He can’t always remember how he spent his day. He gets angry and then he comes out of it and wants to die.”