My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (22 page)

 . . . Where? This stuff on his face. The woman next to him? Black smudges on her cheeks. He rested his head and reconstructed. Yes. Something—not long ago—had hit him like a brick between the eyes: he'd awakened and saw a woman in bed next to him. On each shoulder blade there was about a thirteen inch oblong scar: as though powerful wings had long ago been severed from her. He refused to connect this to anything. She was still asleep: that breathing was unfakable. Elias had fallen in the duck pond. Laughter. Except by then he was Jed the Red Neck. Mariella turned out to be Rebecca of Jacksonville who was a virgin at thirty. Helena, as Miss Lindy Belle, got pretty vulgar after midnight: she danced nude in moonlight. Pangrati, insisting his name was Big Papa, eventually did a jig. He also played “Skip
to My Lou” on his harmonica. The musicians grew weary and after grinding their way through “So Long It's Been Good to Know You,” six times, they gave up and went off. He'd fallen asleep with a jingle swinging in his nerves: “Railroad, steamboat,/ River and canoe;/ Lost my true love,/ What shall I do.” And the dream: a snatch of it: strange how one was sort of native yet not exactly in the vernacular. Verna, ho! Had somebody played a washboard. Was it Hagnon, I mean, Sonny Boy. Surely a hooped skirt lost its cloth and the huge puffy bloomers beneath the wire-ribs seemed to blossom like a giant night flower. Who was Baby Jane. Pretty face—but she'd come later. Real name he never caught. No matter. Susy Mae. Mary Alice. Bo. Big Boy. All masks for Achilles. Phoibos. Zeus. Meidias. Lysias. Dionysos. Despite the unrealness he had to admit they had real imagination. And he as Blackface Hermes (as Zizi called him at the end of dinner with a toast) was up and all along cheered. One woman very much out of place (who he later learned was Vietnamese) came to the fancy dress party wearing a serious oriental mask: it was antelope skin meant to look like human. Her black hair hung to her spine. She was terrifying: the tiny eyes peeked through the slits like rat eyes: desperate and on the run. Wasn't it Pavlos who'd said her real face was completely destroyed by the explosion of a booby-trap. Or was she a figment in or beyond a recent dream. But the woman now beside him? Zizi. Moonlight and memory: no help now. One thing was clear though: he was not just drifting: the design was terrifying in its connections.

The Larissa interlude was lost and worthless—he was now in Kalambaka at the Divani and it was morning. Meeting those two mountain climbers, Seymour (with his pot gut and Slavonic-thunder-god face) and William (a classic Centaur) last night at Cafe Zeus was a lucky break. Mason trusted the
calmness of their eyes. Seymour, drunk by ten, sang Leadbelly: “Green corn, come along Cholly!” He was good. Feeling chipper, Mason gave him a voodoo warning, “You sprinkle goofy dust around my bed/ You might wake up and find your own self dead.” The point: in the morning (this one) they were going to climb to the untouched, secret cave of an ancient monk called Hecrate, Knower of All Truth. Legend had it he'd left (in some form
other
than writing) a “text” which addressed itself to the problems of the soul's relationship to the body and the body's to the group of other bodies beyond itself. Mason was not getting his hopes up but he was
damned
sure interested. . . . (Late yesterday, on arriving in Kalambaka, he'd followed his nose and driven up a road through the Meteora Rocks because those ancient hermits might've held part of the question if not the answer. He parked near Varlaam Monastery: a giant eagle's nest perched at the top of a peak. On a swing-bridge a group of German tourists were being conned by a Hindu maker-of-little-wood-images of Ereshkigal. Mason looked up through the monastic aura and saw, from the embankment, a delivery man loading a satchel of goods for the monks. He watched the guy wheel it over on a pully. The bundle reached a tiny opened window. Hands jutted out but rather than capturing the supplies upset them: meat and milk, eggs and bread, turned into birds with broken wings. Mason uncrossed himself and moved on, deciding against entry. At nearby Monastery Hagios Stephanos he cornered a nun and told her his name. She said, “So?” He whispered, “Be in love and you will be happy. Be mysterious.” He knew she was wise to him when she responded: “You are a relief in bad wood: esoteric, sarcastic. Go cast yourself in
Tamanu.
” Three alarmed nuns approached them and stopped a few feet away. Carpenters in the background were hammering on the facade of a nun's dwelling. He turned and ran. Driving down: no time for sentimental reflection. All experience was a smooth swift surface. Really? The fourteenth century couldn't be trusted! He was sure now there was no difference between the Garden of Eden and Hell. After a few drinks down in the town he sped back
up and parked on the road near Monastery of Metamorphosis. The dusk-sky was a traffic jam of old cars with their headlights on. Mason didn't expect the
real
Transfiguration. Nor any help from the monks. But he was surprised! He was led to the Charnel House of skulls and thigh bones. The guard told him to take his time. Once the door was closed, Mason sat on the floor and picked up a dusty skull. He placed his ear to the thing. It spoke: “Do not eat of the turpentine tree.” He put it down and took up another. It too spoke: “Do not trust the cult of the gods.” He lifted yet another to his ear. Its message: “Father Divine is the supplier and satisfier of every good desire.” After listening to eighty-eight cryptic messages similar to the first three, Mason gave up. On the way out he left a donation of a hundred bucks. From there, he stumbled on through farther gloom to baroque icons. He tried to kiss them through the glass, he placed his ear to the cases: nothing! In the museum a shabby man who said he was from Phigaleia wouldn't leave Mason alone. He kept explaining Truth and Reality. According to him both had been documented in the ninth and twelfth and thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Mason finally gave in. “But what about
transfiguration
?” A group of tourists came in with a guide and scattered the man's response. The guide said, “The manuscripts in this room were restored after the war with money from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation in America.”)

Mason, Seymour and William went up in the jeep. The air was fresh, clean, even sweet. Sky was a honeymoon, a tapestry of fauves gaiety! In the climb, Mason was in the middle. Just in case. Progress was slow. Inch by inch. They stepped upward, testing rocks that looked like underwater roots, fuzzy rocks, slick ones. Mason did'nt dare look back nor down. His hands reached, alternately, for a bright forest of flowers and a
grove of weeping spruce. One way to
transform
the harshness! He kept reaching! When he thought he was grasping leaves of hemlock, his fingers curved around steep stonerock. Then, unbelievably, they made it! And what a
grand
view! There was Varlaam over there—and in this direction—there was Hagios Stephanos! Then they turned and entered the cave. Mason was still in the middle. He held his breath: an old habit left over from early childhood, perhaps infancy. Darkness. The three men stood together in darkness. Strangers. Nervously, Seymour cracked the first corny joke. Then Mason said, “There are thirty-eight types of ants in Jerusalem.” William snickered then spoke: “The Royal Poinciana is the most flamboyant tree in the world.” Mason said, “I'll
buy
that!” Seymour then clicked on his flashlight. “No!” hissed William, “Let's wait for night vision!” Mason's night-vision had already come. He saw the full contents of the cave the second before the light went on: there was nothing but dust, dust, dust—
and
dust!

He drove through the mountains and small villages and towns up to Delphi. Herds of goats got in the road but Mason was patient. He arrived at mid-afternoon. Hazy, hot, pretty. Nobody here rolled out a red carpet: he wasn't expecting to meet a man named Menekrates nor one called Dionysos. Mason was alone. His heart beat too fast as though something was about to happen. He was afraid. He threw his luggage on the bed and went down for a drink. For a change: gin and tonic. Finished, he walked: tourism up the ass. But cute. Real gentle: not mean to strangers. And cheap drinkable wine, he later discovered, in an effort to avoid getting drunk: Athos—made by monks. A tremor of fear swept through him. He saw double. Closed his eyes. . . . In the night while struggling with a griffin then a sphinx he was awakened by the gawdawful cry of some
beast in its struggle to escape wooden walls—which woke all the dogs and the barking went on till dawn. Mason sweated it out in the air-conditioned dark. Was this damnable hotel
below
the earth! . . . A relief when first light came. It was on the hillside site of the classical past, the archaic stones, that he stumbled and cut his hand on the wing of a shredding woman-lion. Caught in a brief morning shower, he found the stadium at the top nevertheless. Above and below were the winding slopes and nerve-system of Parnassos. Before the Oracle he had spread himself on the ground. Unaware that he was not alone he kissed the earth. A little girl giggled. Mason leaped to his feet. Stumbling over a sudden line of peasants trudging up the narrow path with sheep and goats under their arms, he dashed down through their ranks. The smell of blood lifted behind him through the trees toward the iron clouds. Below, he saw the tourists' buses arriving. Apollo's shrine was the bone structure of a dinosaur, below: its hymn was not in honor of Chicago. No sanctuary for Mason here? Mason paused before the guardian of the Temple. His body did not suddenly merge with his soul, nor separate. The sky was clearing as he drove up to Arahova—only ten minutes up from Delphi. He poked around this village of weavers looking at the tapestries. In one dingy shop he spotted a table cloth with an interesting design: at its center there was an elusive cunt-shaped structure. While the clerk was trying to pressure him into buying the thing he picked it up for a closer look at the paradigm. It changed before his eyes: an old T-Model Ford was smashed into a huge rock at the edge of a cliff. That was it. Maybe he was still back there drunk as Blackface Hermes or needed to push on to Glarentza fast. Something was going wrong with his eyes; his mind perhaps. Was the boulder meant to reveal something? He put the damned thing down. He turned to leave the shop. The clerk held him by the shoulder. Pleading. Mason looked back at the cloth: the center had changed again: this time to a fat cow on a table in a speakeasy. Beneath the circular picture was the word “Oxford.” When Mason got back to his car a little boy leaped from it and ran. A woman stuck her head out of an apartment
window overhead and called, “Herakles!” As he drove back it became increasingly clear that the separation of body and spirit was going to remain a problem. Oneness was lost somewhere back there in the ruins. May as well move on, buddy. Make the best of it. Unless, uh, unless you're ready to search in the remote depths of Africa. . . . But for the moment live with the erosion. You have no choice. You don't have to be deterministic to dislike the present tense.

They'd gotten his signature on a document, threw women in his path, plotted God knows what else. Delphi was not safe. They must be here too. Behind every stone. The thought made
his
search seem so innocent, so childish. He tried to write. Florence Soukhanov wouldn't come. He felt like a slightly porous opaque clay pot fired at low heat. Think, Mason, think. What is your true name? Buster Brown. No. Think, boy, think. I know it's not Mason. I'm not Ellis. Can't they see I've given up? Why won't they call their dogs off? Get off my back. Mason was drunk in his room. A young man on his terrace across the way was watching Mason pace. Mason pulled the drapes across the sliding doors. Even that guy was probably one of them. His chuckle was a mad cackle. “A Cowie man. A hit artist.” No, if they wanted me dead they could've knocked me off long ago.
They want to use me
. But
how
and
why?
And for how long? He smoked and sipped scotch and continued to pace. . . . Fell asleep on the floor. In one alcoholic dream he was a writer on a lecture tour. Nobody knew his name. He couldn't remember it either. Every town and city he stopped in had announced his coming but with some embarrassment. They hadn't known what to call him.
Leaving. Leaving was difficult—and a relief. Early in the morning he drove from Delphi. Thinking about Greece: there was
something
you could hear in the music and taste in the food. Then, an old man jumped in front of Mason's rented car—apparently trying to get killed. He was hysterical. A death in the family? He demanded Mason drive him to Clovino. Mason opened the door for the smelly old guy who chattered away in Greek the whole distance—which took a half hour. At Clovino the desperate man leaped out and dashed down a dirt road toward a cluster of shanty houses. Mason drove over to Clovino Beach and parked in the lot of a beach front restaurant. He had a coffee and gazed at the sea. His goal was to reach Olympia by nightfall. He had to step on it: yet a sluggish sadness gripped him. Hard to push. What would he find useful at Olympia? This was not just tourism you know; pieces to the puzzle were supposedly here. Surely. Anyway, he drove onto the ferry at Andrirrion, disembarked at Rion, drove through the bustling city of Patras. He held his breath: almost all the way to Killini. He felt a bone-rattling chill as he drove past Hotel Glarentza.
Name
sake? The red carpet? No way. He drove down to the beach and parked. He couldn't feel anything of “himself' here. He might as well have been in Watertown, South Dakota or Watertown, Wisconsin or Watertown, New York or Watertown, Massachusetts. People were coming off the boat from Italy as he ate fried fish at one of the beach front restaurants: American backpackers and Germans; also Greeks returning from holiday in Italy. It was frustrating to Mason that nobody greeted him. Him? Shouldn't he have been automatically declared the prodigal son returned from chaos? . . . His arrival at Olympia was equally uneventful. The band was not waiting. The ruins though were worth it: step by step. But the next day he left and stopped at Khora. Men at cafes eyed him with that careful scrutiny you know about. Wall scrawlings here as everywhere before: KKE on the one hand and PASOK on the other. Then he found in the Mycenaean ruins of Pylos the Linear C Script on eight clay pots locked in late-Helladic silence. And Nestor's Palace itself was no match! He
celebrated the find by buying a good bottle of Villitas and finding a park with drunks on a bench and sharing the wine with them. Even this disappointed him; they didn't warm up to Mason. He moved on. Here he ate octopus in olive oil and felt sorry for himself. In fact he
stuffed
himself. He was thankful that sleep that night in a plastic Kalamata hotel, was not memorable. In the morning he set out for Mistra—up through the mountains: roadside vendors beckoned in attempts to sell pine-cone baskets and honey. Herds of goats frequently blocked the road. Mason was patient. That Linear C Script kept pressing in on his consciousness but he resisted assigning it a place in the puzzle; it might not fit—exactly. In any case it was too soon. Mistra: a medieval hill city with few ruins. Didn't matter though. The sought-after connections were not necessarily in the ruins: in fact, they might be more persistently in the
living
presence, the people, the spirit of the people. If he were a “product” of the West—and this was the “cradle” of the West, then . . . well, add two and two. Do you get Africa? or the doorway from Africa . . . ?
He
got Sparta as the next step in the chain of possibility: nothing much there: he of course did check the skimpy ruins but found only the dust from boys driving their motorbikes around the grounds. . . . Time to move on to Tolon! There one could give up and just relax. . . . Not worry. . . . At Tolon Mason parked on the beach. Walking down to the hotel he was bombarded by word-messages: Beach Skiing Lessons! Rent Pedalos! Take a Sea Cruise! Boats for Rent! Each one was like a left hook in the right eye. The spirit here was seedy. It made Mason feel shabby. He checked into Hotel Coronis but didn't like it and moved right away next door to Hotel Knossos. Not much better. He went back down to the beach. A group of vacationing French mignonnes sunning themselves on the beach and smoking Panamanian noir. . . . He gave in to a Camel and turned his lust toward the sea. Rented a motor boat and headed for one of the islets. Already windy and cold. Half way there he lost faith in his mission, but pushed on anyway. He landed, turned the motor off and climbed the rocky path. In a clearing at the top was a tent.
Pull here? Yes. Mason went to the tent, looked in: a man with a beard sat yoga-still, arms crossed. He was covered by a leather garment. A woman sat next to him in the same manner. The man didn't focus on Mason. The woman did and she spoke: “I could love perhaps any single male individual among, say, seventy-five-percent of the men on earth. You are one. Also there is this: you are no longer in parentheses: you are in brackets: falling upside-down in an effort to be a union of two sets. Rain and snow coming your way. No stationary front. Your given name is not exactly a subset. Let my advice sink calmly: do not let your visibility be reduced by smoke. That is all. Go.” She closed her eyes. . . . That night Mason tossed and jerked—struggled to separate a swastika from the infinity sign then the whole mess got tangled up with the Christian cross. Having decided the swastika was a hunk of cheddar cheese and the two circles were pots of poison the situation became even more dangerous and paradoxical: he had to keep them separate at all cost. Then around three he heard the fishermen starting up their motors. He went out on the terrace. Half moon lighted the bobbing boats. He looked toward the islet he'd visited. Hovering above it was the lighted arc of a circle. The moon reflected? No. Part of the sun? No. “ . . . do not let your visibility be reduced by smoke.” He went in and got his cigarettes. He realized he must not get carried away at these intersections.