The Orpheus Descent (50 page)

‘Who are they?’

‘The Guardians,’ says Socrates. ‘But don’t worry. For you, it’s only a formality.’

And with that, it’s my turn. The sun seems to be right behind the Guardians so I can’t see them clearly, but I’m aware of their attention concentrated on me like a mirror. The golden sceptre hovers like the tip of a pen waiting to write my fate.

Why are you here?

I don’t hear the voice so much as feel it, like the beat of a bass drum deep inside me. I look down and see the golden tablet has appeared in my hands.

The sceptre inclines to my right. I’m moving again, through the shadow of the pillars and onto the other side. A circle of people are kneeling around a wide, grassy spring and drinking. But when I look over my shoulder, to my left, I see others being led away back down to the shore. I can’t see their faces, but they’re staggering as if someone’s just dropped a great weight on their shoulders.

Socrates holds me back from the spring. ‘It’s not for you. We have to keep going.’

Leaving the lake behind, we walk across open fields. The next time I look back, the pillars and the Guardians and the crowds have vanished.

He wasn’t in Wandsworth any more. The river sped him along through a wasteland of leafless trees and bare earth. Everything he could see was a dead, grey-blue colour, as if the world had asphyxiated.

He thought of Lily, standing at the door. The terrified look on her face, as if without him she’d cease to exist. He wished he could go back, but the river was strong and the punt had neither oar nor pole.

Up a creek without a paddle.

The river widened out until it became the sea. High waves tossed the boat. On the horizon, a water-spout twisted into the air and spilled into the clouds. It seemed to suck in the whole ocean, spinning around on its axis.

The current took him. For a frightening moment, he thought it would drive him to the waterspout, like a needle turning towards the end of the record. But then, quite suddenly, it released him. The punt drifted towards the shore and washed up on a shingle beach. He got out, grateful for solid ground under his feet. Red bluffs rose in front of him.

He scrambled up the rocks and found himself at the edge of a sloping lawn. At the top, a square, whitewashed house looked down the garden towards the sea.

He’d been here before. He walked up the garden and climbed the staircase at the side of the house. He knew what he’d find before he got there. Wicker chairs and a table, and an old man puffing on a cigar. All that had changed were the two trees, poplars planted in huge terracotta pots that framed the table.

Night had fallen. Maroussis waved to a chair. The poplars rustled as Jonah brushed past.

‘Why are you here?’ Maroussis said.

‘I’ve come for Lily.’

The cigar glowed orange. ‘Of course.’

Maroussis snapped his fingers. A light came on suddenly under the balcony, throwing a cone of light. Lily stood in the middle of the lawn, dressed in a short, white summer dress with a daisy-chain crown in her hair. She looked around uncertainly, blinking. Shielding her eyes, she glanced up at the balcony and smiled.

Forgetting caution, Jonah vaulted over the balcony rail, dropped and landed hard. He ran to Lily across the dewy grass. She turned, smiling. He threw his arms around her…

… and felt nothing. Lily flickered and vanished, as if the projector had come to the end of the reel. His arms fumbled in air. He stumbled forward and fell face first on the damp lawn. He tasted earth on his lips.

Maroussis leaned on the balcony rail, flanked by the two poplars which rose into the darkness.

‘Bring her back,’ Jonah screamed. He jerked around, scanning the shadows and undergrowth in case she was hiding there. All he saw were flowers and statues.

‘You cannot reach her,’ Maroussis said.

The fight left him. He got to his feet and climbed slowly back up the steps. When Maroussis pointed to the chair again, he flopped into it without resistance.

Maroussis poured brandy into a deep-bowled glass and swirled it around. Orange light glowed from within.

‘Let me tell you something about desire, Mr Barnes. When you have desire for something – sex, for example – you think it is the most pure, most absolute emotion it is possible to feel. You believe in the eternal – you cannot imagine ever feeling differently. You will do anything to have it. In normal life you are a respectable, balanced man, but now this is the only thing you can think about. Your first thought when you wake and your last before bed; your dreams, your being: everything is sex.

‘Finally – she gives you sex. You have ten seconds of ecstasy. Then all you want is a cigarette.’

He drew a long draught from his cigar. ‘You want a desire that is truly eternal? Take up smoking.’

‘I quit.’

Maroussis rolled his cigar round the ashtray. ‘Human beings are not made to get what they want. You are born for dissatisfaction. You are apes, looking at the fruit on the tree. You climb, you stretch, you reach it – and then you leave it half-eaten on the ground because you are too full. Your Tennyson says it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved anyone. I say, better to love and never achieve it, because then you cannot lose it.’

‘You’re obviously not speaking from experience.’

‘If you truly love your wife, let her stay here. Go back to your home – I will show you the way. You will miss her, of course. But missing her will become the best, most perfect expression of your desire. A pure longing, inside you forever.’

Jonah shook his head.

‘You know, the Roman poet Martial joked that if Hades truly wanted to punish Orpheus, he would have given his wife back. Do you remember the first time you kissed Lily? In the hotel at Aegion? Have you ever loved her more than in the second before your lips touched hers, when what had been unattainable was suddenly yours?’

‘Every day.’

‘Then perhaps you think this choice will be too painful? That you cannot choose a life of endless sorrow? I can release you.’ He slid the glass of brandy across the table. ‘If you cannot have Lily, forget her. There will be others. Forget your pain, your past: become a new man, whoever you want to be. Every shameful thing you have done, every memory that makes you cringe, every guilty secret – gone.’

‘I don’t want to forget her.’

‘Why did you come to look for your wife?’

‘Because I love her.’

‘Because you could not stand to be without her. Wondering every moment of your life – every knock at the door, every face in the crowd. You would go mad.’

Jonah didn’t deny it. He remembered sitting alone in the flat, the silence, waiting for the phone to ring. Willing his life away, because every second spent was one less second to wait.

He picked up the glass. The brandy caught the light and flashed amber at him.

‘Will it hurt?’

‘It is as easy as swallowing.’

‘And if I don’t?’

A long plume of smoke exhaled into the night. ‘There is no alternative. Those are your choices. Remember her or forget. Live or die.’

Jonah sniffed the brandy. He turned the glass, making a vortex in the liquid that spiralled down into …
what?

And where the liquid funnelled down into a single bead of light, he found the answer. He raised the glass to his lips. Over the rim, he saw Maroussis nodding encouragement.

‘No.’

He let go. The glass slipped through his hands and shattered on the terrace. Without the light, the golden brandy became nothing more than a dark stain spreading across the stone.

Maroussis was half out of his chair. ‘What have you done?’

‘It’s a false choice. Either way, Lily dies.’

‘She is already dead.’

‘Then I’ll go with her.’

‘It will be worse than you can possibly imagine,’ Maroussis warned.

‘I’ve got as long as it takes.’

‘And if you do find her – what? You will have defined yourself by this one thing, this quest to find your wife. Your whole being will be contingent on her absence. If she exists, then you can not.’

‘I’ll take that bargain. Even if it takes forever.’

‘
Forever,
’ Maroussis scoffed. ‘It’s longer than you think.’

‘I love her.’

Maroussis sighed and stubbed out his cigar. A wisp of smoke rose off the ash.

‘It’s your choice.’

Sharp, scaly hands grabbed him from behind and dragged him to the edge of the balcony. The rail, the garden and the sea had all gone: instead, he was teetering high above another river. Foul, black water, clogged with debris and sewage, rushing towards a dark hole yawning in the cliff.

He hung for a moment on the edge of the precipice, between the light above and the darkness below. Then he went over.

We’ve started into the mountains. They’re barren, apart from a few thorn bushes that scatter the ground like sea urchins. A few of them flourish bright red flowers, much more vivid than the red stone around them. The going’s hard, shards of loose shale that cut my feet and pull me back with every step. Without shade, I’m soon wet through with sweat. I remember the spring; I wish Socrates had let me drink.

‘Why did you come here?’ Socrates asks, in the tone that suggests he already knows.

‘I was looking for Agathon.’

Socrates nods. ‘I saw him – I’d forgotten what a beautiful boy he was. If I’d been thirty years younger …’ He laughed. ‘Never as tenacious as you, dear Agathon, but very quick.’

‘Is he here now?’

He shakes his head. ‘There are various … procedures … to go through.’

‘But he’ll come back.’

‘Oh, everyone comes back. The real question is
how
you come back.’

‘How
do
you come back?’

He blows air through his lips. ‘It all depends. It could be as a bird or an animal, or a beggar or a tyrant, or even a bean tree.’

I can’t tell if he’s teasing me. ‘Is that true?’

‘I wouldn’t insist on it. But if I were you, I’d go along with believing that I’ve got it more or less right.’

A happy thought occurs to me. ‘And how will
you
come back?’

‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather discuss the soul a bit more.’

He says it gently but firmly, a correction to steer us off a dangerous course. I don’t answer – but Socrates has always taken silence for consent.

‘Earlier, we agreed that the soul is life. Life cannot be death, and therefore the soul must be immortal.’

‘I remember.’

‘And this gets you out of a spot of bother you’ve had with the sophists – the sort of riddle they love to flummox people with. They say it’s impossible to learn about anything, because if you know what it is you’re trying to learn about, then you already know it, but …’

‘ … if you don’t know what you’re trying to learn about, you don’t even know what to look for,’ I finished. ‘I’m familiar with the argument.’

A sad silence as I think about Euphemus. Socrates lets the moment pass, before he continues.

‘It’s a false dilemma. Because the soul’s immortal, it’s already learned and understood everything there is in the world. So the things we think we’re learning in our lifetime, really, we’re just recalling them. What is knowledge, after all, but the memory of something we once understood to be true?’

‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

‘The soul is immortal and comes into the world already knowing everything it needs. So what sort of knowledge must that be?’

‘I don’t understand your question.’

‘Is the soul going to know about the weather? Or what’s for supper?’

‘You’re being ridiculous.’

‘Because those are fleeting things that affect the body. What are the things that concern the soul?’

‘Virtue. Truth.’ I think of Diotima. ‘Beauty.’

‘So these are the things that the soul must have knowledge of.’

‘Yes.’

‘And since the soul is immortal, what quality must these things have – beauty and truth and so on?’

‘I suppose they’d have to be immortal, too.’

‘And if they were immortal, would they ever change?’

‘No.’

‘And could they ever diminish?’

‘No.’

‘So, logically …’

I have the feeling he’s handed me the key to a door I’ve been trying to force for a very long time.

‘These things our souls understand – Beauty, Goodness, Truth – must exist in some form which is infinite and unchanging.’ I can almost see them in my mind: pure existence, shining above the chaos and paradox of our world. Absolute standards which our souls can achieve, even if our bodies are riddled with compromise.

Socrates is smiling at me. ‘I hope I’ve given you something to think about.’

‘But we forget it all when we die.’

‘But we can remember. What we call reason is simply a tool for navigating these deep memories – a way to remember things we’ve forgotten we ever forgot. All we need is one memory to start from and reason can do the rest, chipping away at the darkness. That’s why the sophists’ question is false. You can learn about anything because you already know about everything. Providing you’re active and inquisitive, and don’t lose faith in the search.’

‘Everything you need is within you.’

Socrates beams. ‘Exactly.’

We’ve reached the top of the slope. We’re in a high place, looking out over a dry, red plateau surrounded by more mountains. A river flows through it towards a gaping hole in the centre, and from out of the hole a column of white light erupts into the air. It reaches all the way to the dome of the sky, which bends it back across the earth like a vast rainbow whose colours have fused into a single, perfect brilliance. It binds heaven and earth like the cables girding a trireme. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.

Socrates lies down and scoops up a mound of earth for a pillow. ‘We’ll make our camp here tonight.’

I stare out at the pillar of light. ‘Am I dreaming, Socrates?’