The Orpheus Descent (32 page)

Staring at the sun hurt his head. He drank a glass of water and lay down on the bed. When he woke, it was dark outside and Adam had come back. He moved around the kitchen quietly, chopping vegetables and dropping them in a pan of boiling water.

‘What did you do today?’

Adam spoke softly, almost tenderly.
Adam Shaw is very close to Maroussis.

‘I went to Elefsina.’

‘Eleusis,’ Adam corrected automatically, using the ancient name. Jonah remembered the attitude from the dig: permanent disappointment with the present. For Adam, like the archaeologists who’d displaced whole villages to get at the ruins underneath, modern Greece simply got in the way of its own history.

The knife cut a staccato rhythm as he chopped a carrot and threw it in the pan. ‘What took you there?’

‘Lily talked about it once,’ Jonah lied.

‘I hope you weren’t expecting much.’

Jonah shrugged. ‘It’s not the Acropolis, I suppose.’

‘It’s everything that’s wrong with this country.’ Just for a moment, there was a glimpse of emotion in Adam’s voice. ‘It’s a sacred place – a place of revelation. But they’ve made it a wasteland. The oil terminals, the factories, the refineries.

A place of revelation
. Hadn’t Ren used that phrase?

‘It’s jobs, I suppose.’

‘Jobs.’ The word came out sticky and filthy, like a seabird plucked from an oil slick. ‘Everything that’s ugly in the modern world gets justified by
jobs
. Find something beautiful, a mountain or a meadow or a stretch of coastline – promise jobs, and you can bury it under as much concrete and plastic as you like.’

‘I didn’t know you were an environmentalist.’

Water boiled over the side of the pan. Flames hissed up where it met the burning gas.

‘I don’t care about rare species of beetle, or protecting a tree that some woodpecker nests in. It’s the human environment. The life around us that provides the context for our soul.’

He turned down the gas and put the lid back on the pan.

‘Do you know why politicians love to talk about jobs?’

‘So they can collect the taxes?’

‘Because work is the best tool of oppression they’ve ever invented. Better than drugs or religion or television or secret police. It keeps us plodding along, believing we’re achieving something, when all we’re doing is clock-punching our life away. And we don’t even notice, because the first thing it does is stop us from thinking.’

‘Pays the rent, though.’

Adam missed the humour.

‘The Greeks prized the civilised man. The curriculum they invented included maths, writing, music, sport, astronomy. We pay lip service to the same virtues, but it’s a lie we tell our children. Look at everyone we knew at Oxford. The best and the brightest. From four years old, they’d worked every hour they had to get into the best school, the best university, the best job. They’d done music, sport, drama, clubs – everything to be a well-rounded individual. And then they finished, and they found out that none of that mattered. All society wanted was for them to become drones, automata serving the machine. It’s not living.’

Jonah didn’t disagree. Adam served up the food and carried it to the glass table by the window. Without asking, he poured Jonah a beer from the open can and put it by his plate.

‘All the great leaps in human thought came from men who had the time to think.’ With Adam, a conversation never lapsed. He could pause it like a CD and resume hours, sometimes days, later. ‘In ancient Greece, three or four generations of philosophers sketched out a whole scheme of reality that we’re still coming to terms with. Why? Because they had the leisure to think, to drill down deep into the wells of existence and tap the truth. It didn’t make them rich or powerful. Some of them became famous, and some were executed because people couldn’t handle the truths they told. And none of them had jobs.’

Jonah sipped the beer. It tasted pretty good. ‘Didn’t they have slaves?’

‘A well-ordered society is like the human body: each part is necessary, but it’s only the brain that’s capable of thought. Everything else serves that function.’

Adam’s face was pitiless. For some reason, it reminded Jonah of the statue of the goddess in Charis’ house. The deep levels of existence they inhabited were cold places. Kindness couldn’t survive.

‘We’re different, you and I,’ Adam said. ‘We saw through the gilded lie. You followed your muse; I followed my … calling.’

‘Is working for the foundation a calling?’

Adam nodded. A smug smile touched the sides of his mouth, and it made Jonah angry.

It would be surprising if the foundation did something without Adam knowing about it.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I’m the program director.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I exercise oversight on the projects we fund.’

‘
Exercise oversight
?’ Jonah swigged his beer. ‘Is that your calling? To “exercise oversight”?’

Adam chewed a mouthful of vegetables to pulp.

‘You can’t look down at all the poor sods who have to work for a living, and then tell me that your life’s purpose is to “exercise oversight”. Even if the money’s good.’ He waved at the apartment. ‘I suppose you do all right out of it.’

Adam peered at him, like a man listening very hard to a quiet television. ‘You’re angry. I know you’re frustrated about Lily. If you want to take it out on me, I understand. But it won’t make it better.’

‘I just want to know what makes you so special.’

‘Socrates said, “If I have any wisdom, it’s knowing that I know nothing.”’

‘Socrates didn’t get a double-first from Oxford.’

‘That’s a specious comparison.’

‘Lily was working for your foundation when she disappeared. I want to know what it’s about.’

‘
It?
’

‘Your office in London said you fund all sorts of research. Physics, geology, history, philosophy. How do you “exercise oversight” on all those different things?’

‘I have a pretty good degree in physics and philosophy,’ said Adam drily. ‘The rest of it, we have expert panels who review the technical merits of the applications.’

‘Which makes you … what? Some sort of rubber-stamp bureaucrat?’

Adam sat upright in his chair, so stiff he didn’t touch the back.

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘What is it then?’

‘You want to know what the common thread is?’

‘That’s what I’m asking.’

‘
Eikasia
is the Greek word for “illusion”. Plato uses it to describe the most unreliable levels of the world, the shadows and reflections that our senses perceive. We’re trying to get past all that to understand true
reality
. That’s why we investigate it from every angle we can.’

‘Isn’t that kind of vague?’

‘Only if you think vaguely.’

‘Doesn’t every scientist on the planet investigate reality?’

‘Not really. They’re looking at shadows. They can’t accept how tenuous our sense-reality is.’

Jonah patted his hand on the table, rattling the plates. ‘It seems pretty solid to me.’

‘Not as much as you’d think.’

Jonah had no comeback. Two weeks ago, Lily had existed in his reality; now she didn’t. The change had been as abrupt as a door slamming.

She still exists
. It frightened him how quickly he’d begun to doubt it.
I just have to find her
.

They ate. Jonah took a sip of his beer and realised he’d finished it. He didn’t ask for another.

‘Will you be staying much longer?’ Adam asked. ‘I’m not sure there’s anything more for you in Athens.’

Jonah thought for a second, wondering if he had anything to lose. Nothing he could think of.

‘Your boss, Ari Maroussis. He was there when Lily disappeared. I’d like to speak to him.’

Adam put down his knife and fork and stared across the table, concentrating furiously.

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘At Eleusis. It’s a place for revelations, apparently.’

Adam nodded, assimilating the information. ‘You know who Ari is.’ Not a question, just establishing some parameters.

‘And his dad.’

‘Ari has nothing to do with the foundation.’

‘Then what was he doing at Sibari?
Exercising oversight
?’

‘He was a tourist.’

Jonah let the silence play like an open note, sustained so long the audience almost forgot about it. So that the chord-change came as a shock.

‘I don’t believe you.’

Adam speared a piece of broccoli onto his fork and crunched down on it.

‘I want to meet him,’ Jonah insisted.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘What about his father?’

‘He’s an old man in poor health. He’s confined to a villa on Spetses. He hardly ever leaves, and he’s been forbidden from receiving visitors.’

‘Perhaps if I call the police and tell them his son kidnapped my wife, he’ll agree to see me.’

‘Don’t do that.’

‘Because it would embarrass you?’

‘Because you’ll end up either in prison or deported. Maroussis is the richest man in Greece, and the police haven’t been paid in five months.’ No emotion, just more facts. Adam gathered the plates and carried them over to the sink. He pulled on a pair of yellow washing-up gloves, tight rubber snapped over his fingers. They were the brightest thing in the apartment, like the first daffodils after a hard winter.

‘I’ll make you an appointment with Ari.’

How can you prove whether right now we’re sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or if we’re awake, and talking to one another in real life?

Plato
, Theaetetus

I knew Diotima was there before I opened my eyes. I could smell ripe figs blowing through the air in the room, drowning the smell of the corpse.

She stood in front of me wearing a long white dress. It clung to her body so tightly that she seemed to be naked, except for a piece of ivy around her middle like a belt.

She reached down and pulled me to my feet. Even on that warm night, her hand was cool to the touch. She looked at the bed. Her marble face trembled.

‘We have to move him. There isn’t much time.’

‘What about the guards?’ I’d lain awake for hours on the stone floor, listening to the march of their footsteps, regular as a heartbeat, and the shouts as they changed watch every hour. The last change only seemed five minutes ago.

‘Help me,’ she said.

I didn’t ask how she’d got there. In the dream, it didn’t matter. I took Agathon’s shoulders, Diotima his feet. He felt much lighter than when I’d carried him back from the well.

‘Where are we taking him?’

‘To rest.’

A handcart was waiting in the courtyard outside. A tall, bare-chested slave helped us lay Agathon down in the back, then took the handles. He moved quickly, a graceful half-run that made me think of a centaur. Diotima and I followed.

‘What about the guards? What about the gates?’

She moved like moonlight, flitting across the courtyards and through the porches unchallenged. Past the temples, past the lions and the arsenals where Dionysius’ power slept. The cart’s wheels had cloth tied over their rims and didn’t make a sound.

We reached the first gate. The massive doors seemed to rise all the way to the stars, but Diotima whispered something to the guards and they pushed back the bolts without question. The bronze pegs spun, the doors swung open and a gaping chasm opened in front of us.

Three times that happened; then we were off the island and in the town. A lonely dog bounded across the road, perhaps chasing a rat. An owl hooted from the plane trees in the agora. Apart from that, the streets were empty.

We carried on through the vast and dark unknown. The axle squeaked, the wheels grumbled softly. Syracuse passed behind us. The starlit landscape opened around me: looming shadows suggested hills, fields, trees. A primitive world.

Then fire came into it. I saw it from some way off, like a candle through an open door. As we approached, it separated into a constellation of tiny lights. A group of people stood in a circle inside a poplar grove. They wore long white robes, and veils over their faces. Each of them cupped a lamp in his hands, holding it chest high like a glowing heart. They made me think of the
Odyssey
, of Homer’s ‘thin, airy shoals of visionary ghosts’. But they didn’t frighten me. They seemed reverent, not bloodthirsty; at peace with the world, not jealous of it.

Agathon’s cart stopped in the centre of the circle. The slave had vanished. I stepped into a gap in the circle and realised I’d closed it. Hands put a cloak over my shoulders and a lamp in my palm, though they left my face uncovered.

Diotima raised her arms and chanted an incantation to the goddess. Someone had put a jewelled wreath on her head, golden leaves bearing fruits of garnets and pearls.

A piece of gold flickered in her hands. She reached down and laid it on Agathon’s tongue. It caught light from the lamps, glowing in his mouth like the last ember of life. I thought of the broken tomb at Taras, and the gold tablet he’d stolen. Now the tomb had claimed him back.

Had he found what he was looking for at last?

She put a myrtle crown on his head. Six men came through the circle, carrying a clay coffin. They put it down next to the cart and lifted the body into the coffin. I stepped forward to help, but Diotima gave me a glance that said
stay where you are
. A soft wind blew through the trees.