The Golden Mean: A Novel Read online

  “And where would I get one?” the director says.

  The boy looks blank, as though the question is so stupid he wonders if he’s missing something. “Anywhere.”

  “Logistical problems,” I say. “You’d need a new head for each performance. I doubt they’d keep.”

  “We’re only doing the one night,” Carolus says.

  “Lot of blood,” I say. “Messy.”

  “Messy,” Carolus says to the boy.

  “Well, sure,” he says. “Don’t you want it to look real?”

  “We use the costumes over and over,” Carolus says. “Pentheus today, Creon tomorrow. You want us to do everything in pink? Real, but only just real enough, if you see what I mean.”

  “You could cauterize it,” I say. They look at me. “Cauterize. You heat a metal plate over a brazier. Then you press the cut end to the plate to burn it. Seals it right up, stops the blood.”

  The boy frowns. “Like frying meat.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well.” Carolus claps his hands together once. “Problem solved.” He tosses the ball of rags back to the boy. “I’m putting you in charge, then. Pentheus’s head is now your department.”

  The boy looks pleased. He leaves, tossing the ball in the air and catching it as he goes.

  “Interesting,” I say.

  “He likes to watch rehearsals, like you,” Carolus says. “Stays out of the way, doesn’t say much. The actors seem to like having him around. Bit of a pet.”

  “He’s got a flair for the dramatic, anyway.”

  Eyebrows up again: “He’s got a flair for something,” Carolus says.

  The boy is back. “By the way,” he says. “I know where Pentheus is.”

  I clear my throat, assembling a formal introduction. It’s time.

  “Brat.” Carolus ignores me. “Where, then?”

  “He’s sick,” the boy says. “I heard the actors talking about him. He can’t eat and he can’t shit and some days he can’t get out of bed.”

  “Fucking ass-fucker,” Carolus says, pleased with himself. The boy turns, waves the rag head above his own, and is gone for real.

  I’VE LEARNED IN THE past week that I can get Arrhidaeus to do anything if it has to do with horses.

  “How many?” I point to the stalls.

  “One, two, five,” he says, and sure enough there are five horses inside this day, including his favourite, my big Tar.

  “What colour?” I say of Tar, and he giggles and rocks and claps his hands and reaches for the bridle hanging from a nail in the wall. “No.” I pull his hand away. “Soon. Not yet. What colour is Tar?”

  “Back, back, back,” he says.

  “Black.”

  “Buh-lack.”

  “La, la, la,” I say. “Blah, blah, blah. Black.” He laughs at me; fair enough. I give him a stick and tell him to draw me shapes in the muck: circle, triangle. He struggles with square, and I see his attention is almost gone, like oil almost burnt out in a lamp. He has a kind of feral intelligence, knows more or less how to get what he needs—food, drink, basic companionship, the piss-pot—but try to draw him up a level and he’s quickly exhausted. Literally: red rims his eyes, he yawns, even his skin seems to go more grey.

  I leave off the shapes and have him jump up and down ten times while I count for him. Of this, too, he tires quickly, though already he’s stopped crying whenever he doesn’t want to do something. I’ve asked the groom to find some jobs for him around the horses, sweeping and so on, something to get him out in the air and moving. Before I go, I’ll ask Philip to get rid of the nurse and find someone more congenial, more willing to recognize improvement and contribute to it. There must be someone.

  “Is it time to ride?” I ask. He mounts more easily now and sits up tall. Mounted, he’s more coordinated, with better balance than on his own feet. This amazes me and I can’t think through a reason for it, though the groom tells me he’s seen it before. He strikes me as the kind who’s seen everything before and doesn’t want to be told much of anything, or at least isn’t willing to show surprise, but he’s genial and alert and helpful without getting in the way, and hasn’t asked me why I bother. He says he’s seen children who are awkward and ungainly become graceful on their animals. He’s seen it too with injured soldiers who have to learn all over again how to ride. Sometimes it might be an injury to a leg or the pelvis, but he says he’s seen men with no outward impairment who’ve suffered some damage to the head and can’t remember how to raise their hands until they’re given reins. I ask him what he makes of all this. He shrugs.

  “People like horses,” he says. “It’s a part of our nature. I’m happiest on a horse, aren’t you? I could forget everything and still remember how to ride. My father was like that. Babbling idiot by the end, not far off this one”—he gestures at Arrhidaeus—“but he sat like a general. Aren’t you happiest on a horse?” he demands again.

  I haven’t the heart to tell him not really. I wonder where the rest of his life takes place when he’s not in the stables: what room, what meat, what sleep, who he rides in his bed. I remind Arrhidaeus to keep his heels down and watch the groom walk him around the ring on a lead. Walk on, the little man’s taught him, and stop; a Herculean accomplishment in just seven days. From the back Arrhidaeus looks grand, and I love to hear his voice giving these commands. I’ve ordered his nurse to bathe him daily and keep his laundry cleaner; I’ve told the little snit I’ll make them exchange clothes if what the prince is wearing isn’t suitable. I take good care to refer to him as “the prince.” I love to hear my own voice giving these commands, and wonder sometimes why I have conceived such a dislike of the nurse. He has a job I would abhor, and it’s natural enough for him to despise me, who plays at his life’s work for an hour or two each day. I wonder what ambitions he would have were he not yoked to an idiot every hour of the day. I wonder what he does when I relieve him. I’ll have to sneak up on him sometime and find out.

  After Arrhidaeus’s ride, I show him how to curry his animal. He’s rough at first and I have to teach him about the grain of the horse’s hide and the tender places on the animal’s body. He’s still nervous feeding Tar from his own hand, and the scabbing and peeling of the skin haven’t improved, despite the mixtures I’ve given the nurse.

  “He eats them,” the nurse says, when I return Arrhidaeus to his rooms today. “Licks them right off. Do you put honey in? That will be why.”

  He’s tidying the room, sweeping, snapping blankets; or at least had enough warning of us coming to put on a little show. He has food already laid out for Arrhidaeus, who sets to with both hands, immediately ignoring both of us.

  “He gets it every winter,” the nurse continues, before I can say something scathing. “I’ve tried a honey poultice before. On his feet, too. Heals right up when the weather turns warm. I bind it when it bleeds, but otherwise I leave it to air. The feet, too. That’s why the sandals, and I let him go barefoot when I can. Fresh air seems best.”

  “Do you read?”

  He stiffens. “You already asked me that. I’ve been working on his letters with him. Ask him and see.”

  “I mean for yourself.”

  “Books?”

  I nod.

  “Why?”

  And there is my prize. He’s suspicious, painfully, because he wants painfully what he’s not quite sure I’m offering.

  “I’ve brought my library with me,” I say. “I wondered if you might want to borrow something while I’m out with the prince.”

  “I’ve been wondering if I shouldn’t be accompanying you,” he says. “So I’ll know how to continue once you’ve gone.”

  At last. We have exchanged courtesies, now, finally, and can begin to get a hold of each other.

  “I’m here for a few days yet,” I say. “Let me bring you something tomorrow. What do you like best? Poetry, history, the habits of animals?”

  He laughs at this, contemptuously; thinks I’ve made a joke at Arrhidaeus’s
expense and is looking to play along.

  “Something on education, perhaps,” I say.

  He wipes the look off his face. So much for a truce.

  “I don’t understand,” he says, seeing the moment slip away. “He’s worthless, useless. You of all people should understand. I thought you of all people would. I know who you are. How can you stand to spend time with him? How can it not hurt you? You who understand all a human mind can be, how can you bear it? I don’t have the hundredth part of your mind and there are days when I think I’ll go mad. I can feel it. Or hear it. It’s more like hearing something creeping along the walls, just behind my head, getting closer and closer. A big insect, maybe a scorpion. A dry skittering, that’s what madness sounds like to me.”

  Verse, then. A young man still, after all, in love with his own melancholy, forced to brood on his own wasted intelligence. But then I see he’s weeping, his eyes glittering with it. He turns away so I won’t see him in his depths. I ask how long he’s been the prince’s companion. He takes a shaky breath and says it doesn’t matter.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  As old as my nephew. “Where do you sleep?”

  He shrugs. “Here.” Then: “There. On the floor.” He points to a wall. He must unroll a pallet at night and put it away during the day to give the prince more play-space. Already the tears have soaked back into him, the eyes and nose, and he’s back to being sullen. I am familiar with such easy fits of tears, and the odd disjunction between what the face does and what the mind might be doing. I myself can weep while working, eating, bathing, and have woken in the night with the snail-trails of it on my face.

  Arrhidaeus has finished his feed and is tugging at the nurse’s arm. The nurse obediently gets down on his knees and fishes the pot from beneath the bed. He places it behind a screen for Arrhidaeus, who’s already bared himself and goes at it as noisily as he does his food, grunting and grumbling to himself, audibly straining. The stink is rich. I’m ready to go.

  “Pythagoras,” the nurse says.

  I nod; my own blackness is lapping at me now and I need to leave. I’ll bring him my Pythagoras.

  “I wanted to study—” he says.

  But I can’t listen to any more. I’m out of the room and off down the hall, walking fast and faster, concentrating on the pattern of the tiles, thinking about the geometry of star-shapes.

  I am garbage. This knowledge is my weather, my private clouds. Sometimes low-slung, black, and heavy; sometimes high and scudding, the white unbothersome flock of a fine summer’s day. I tell Pythias sometimes, an urgent bulletin from the darklands: I’m garbage. She says nothing.

  I AM TO HAVE been Philip’s guest at the performance, but Carolus asks me if I’ll stand backstage with him, hold his copy of the text, help with the props, and generally be a calming influence. “On them, not me,” he says. “They’re used to you now. Tell me, why are even bad actors so high-strung?” I open my mouth to reply but he says, “Oh, shut up. That was a rhetorical question. You do like to talk, don’t you. Here, hold this.”

  It’s Pentheus’s head, a second rag ball since the boy went off with the first and didn’t come back. This one’s been tied tighter, at least, and shouldn’t come undone, though the face is still crude: staring black eyes, two-thirds of a triangle for a nose, red mouth, single red gash at the throat.

  “These, too.” Carolus gives me a handful of sticks wound with ivy. He himself is dressed in Pentheus’s robes; like the boy, the actor has disappeared, and no one seems to know what happened to him. What Carolus really wants me for, I think, is to prompt the actors when he’s on stage. Philip at any rate is occupied with his latest guest, Olympias’s brother, Alexandros. He spent years as the king’s ward in Pella, while Philip waited for him to come of age. Now Philip has just had him kinged in Molossos, and this is his first state visit to the court he called home for so long. He’s coloured like his sister—rosy, rusty, dark eyes—and Philip likes him. From behind the flies I can see them drinking steadily, heads together in conversation, often laughing. I doubt they’ll give the play much attention.

  I tuck the head under my arm and stand ready to hand the sticks to the chorus as they file past. My palms sparkle with excitement; I’ve been giddy all day. I love this vantage point, the play from behind, and seeing all that’s gone into it. I love to be on the inside, the backside, the underside of anything, and see the usually unseen.

  “And.” Carolus raises a hand, then brings it down. The music starts.

  I’m not sure when exactly the boy slips in beside me. I look over and he’s simply there, watching the stage, rapt as I am. He notices the movement of my head, looks at me, and we both smile. This is the real thing. He takes the head from beneath my arm, helping, and I nod, as much as to say I’ll give him the signal when it’s time to hand it to the actor.

  “Look, she’s coming,” the actors playing the chorus say in unison. “Agave, his mother, running back home. Her eyes! Look at her eyes! They’re staring. She is possessed. Take her into our midst, she is full of the god and his ecstasy.”

  I nod. The boy gives the head to the actor playing Agave, who rushes it onstage. Then, for a moment, silence. A faltering. Carolus, beside me, looks up sharply from the text and hisses, “Women of the east.”

  I look at the boy. He tosses the rag head he took from me in the air, catches it, and looks deliberately at the stage.

  “Women of the east,” Carolus hisses, louder.

  “Women of the east—Bacchae,” Agave says.

  I remember the actor playing Pentheus had straight hair but a curly beard, and a mole beneath the left eye. I remember because I’m looking at his head now, cradled in the arms of the actor who plays Agave.

  “Do you know us?” one of the chorus says. The others, staring at the head, have forgotten to speak. “Do you know who you are? Our true nature?”

  “Look. It is a lion cub. I caught it. I caught it without nets. Look,” Agave says. His voice has gone shrill and his eyes are glazed. He’s drugged with shock.

  In the audience, Philip has stopped talking to his guest. His eyebrows are up, he’s watching the stage. He’s interested now.

  Afterwards, Carolus can’t stop shaking his head. “That was the best fucking performance I have ever seen in my entire miserable fucking life.”

  The head is gone; he’s had a stagehand wrap it back up in the cloth the boy brought it in and dispose of it somewhere.

  “I cauterized it, like you said,” the boy tells me. “It worked.”

  “Fucking monkey monster,” Carolus says.

  “I thought they might not do it if they knew ahead of time,” the boy says. “I was thinking of what you said about things looking real enough, and how you were always complaining about them all being such bad actors. And I thought, what if they didn’t have to act? What if they just had to be themselves?”

  The actors have long since fled. Backstage smells of piss and vomit: pity and fear. Carolus will have laundry ahead of him after all.

  “He died last night,” the boy continues. “I told you he was sick. I think things happen for a reason, don’t you?” For the first time, he looks—not doubtful, maybe, but impatient. “What?” He looks from Carolus to me, back and forth. “You know it was perfect. What?”

  THIS MORNING, before the performance, Philip had sent for me. I found him in a courtyard surrounded by assorted lengths of wood, tilting at a soldier who parried with a shield. I’d noticed the guards’ enormous lances, which I had assumed were ornamental, but here was the king wielding roughly trimmed boughs of a similar length.

  “My own invention,” he said. “The sarissa. Look, you see, here’s a Thracian lance, and an Illyrian, and a few others. The sarissa is longer again by a third. You see the implications?”

  I did see, but was more interested in the physics. I hefted one. “It’s heavier.”

  “Not by much. You adjust for the weight with a smaller shield.” />
  I took a few thrusts while he watched.

  “You’re rusty,” he said finally. “At least you’ve changed your clothes.”

  He introduced me to the soldier, who turned out to be one of his older generals, Antipater. Short hair, short beard, tired eyes. When Philip was off at war, Antipater was regent. The three of us sat under the colonnade, while the first rain of the day speckled the courtyard, and drank wine mixed with water. While we spoke, I thought about Philip as a boy. We had played together, in this very courtyard perhaps. I seemed to remember a wrestling match, smells of sweat and grass; fierce, private, sweet. I couldn’t recall who had won.

  “He offers you his loyalty, and asks for your help,” I said now, of Hermias.

  Philip reread the treaty I had brought him, slowly, while a page gathered up the assorted lances and took them in out of the drumming rain. I imagined Philip on various battlefields, squinting about for a new piece to add to his collection and promptly killing the bearer when he found one. Wasn’t that, too, a kind of science?

  “Drink,” Philip ordered without lifting his eyes, when I shifted in my chair.

  I drank. A scholar surrounded by scholars, I had forgotten how slowly some people read. After a long while, Philip began to talk about his ambitions.

  “I like your friend here,” he said, waving the treaty. “He’s shrewd, a survivor.”

  “I will be pleased to relay that message to him.”

  “Someone will. Not you. I’ll be needing you now.”

  I watched the page, a dark-skinned boy with tight curls and yellow palms. He had come from away, Egypt, perhaps, or Ethiopia. He might have changed hands many, many times before landing here with these spears and dummies. Philip was talking about Athens. Athens was old, Athens was decayed, Athens was dying, but Athens was also key. Antipater sat with his feet flat on the ground, his palms flat on his thighs, staring fixedly at the air between his knees. I wondered, though he had parried nimbly enough, if he was in pain. Athens, though—that was all right. For a moment Philip had frightened me, saying he needed me.