Chapter Four
With what emotion does one regard a love thirty years dead? It is not, assuredly not, to hear the sounds of seraphs strumming the old, old songs in one’s ears, to recall days of frolic on grassy hillsides and to find passion blazing anew in one’s breast, hopeless and redeeming. I had spent twenty intervening years married to someone else; I’d fathered and helped raise two children; there had been other lovers, other desires.
Yet there was something unsettling about seeing her, the knowledge of a ghost not properly laid to rest. Symbolized in this transcript by that distant, sterile and very English use of the word “one,” keeping one’s distance from one’s feelings, old man, trampling out the vintage where one’s grapes of candor lay. Why couldn’t I have used a more intimate adjective? Me, my, mine. My ears, my breast, my former lover. So.
I will not take your gift, she had said.
I will not watch you die, said I.
And thus it had ended. After her emigration we had exchanged letters, proper letters written on paper. No video. There had only been long reams of epistolary prose, but those had necessarily proved fairly pointless. The knowledge that one will have to wait twenty years for a reply to a letter can squash the life out of correspondence before it begins. So had it been with Mary and myself, as it had been before with my former wives, with many of my children, with friends and lovers and enemies whom I had sent, willing or unwilling, to the stars. Once, indeed, I had received a ponderous, official condolence on the suicide of one of my sons, and I had to frown for a moment and think who it was: Ah, yes, Julie’s boy. I hadn’t heard from him myself in scores of years. I hoped his bitter last thoughts had not been of me.
In another case I had found myself involved, unknowingly, in a wholesome carnal tangle with my great-granddaughter, the offspring of a child who had long ago emigrated. The girl had known but hadn’t found the fact worth mentioning.
Nor, after contemplation, had I.
Sad facts all, I’m sure; saddest of all the fact that not one of them is out of the ordinary. Enough to make a person hope that something may come from this teleportation business.
Mary’s image was frighteningly close in this small study, her head and shoulders larger than her image in the other recording, larger than life even, creating a forced intimacy I did not desire. The lines in her face were clear, and I could see gray in her silver hair. I pressed back in my seat against its reality. Her message was simple, sensible. Admirable. True.
I may, she said, not be justified in the assumptions— fears really, not assumptions— that lie behind this communication. I apologize if I’m wrong. But I won’t feel comfortable with myself unless I tell you this.
You owe me nothing, she went on. Do not come on this journey because of anything I said or did not say. I am happy with myself; I am happy with my decision; I will not change. I am going to have myself frozen until the team leaves; that decision is not based on any regrets but on a wish to see this project through.
She raised her hands, one clasped over another, and touched her thumbs to her chin. I felt a flash of recognition at the gesture, for the way her cool, dark eyes looked steadily at mine; and I felt as well a surge of horror at the aged, veined, still-graceful hands.
You are free, she said. Free of anything I do or say, and of any consequence. You may rest assured that all hurts are forgiven, all loveliness remembered, and treasured. I am busy and content and loved. I hope you are the same. Bless you.
The image faded and I was suddenly aware of my heart beating fast in terror. I took a breath and looked with surprise at the sweat on my palms. I wiped my hands on the hem of my chiton. I was trembling for a drink. I wondered if this is how senility strikes.
I felt surprise at the horror I was feeling. Mary was in what was once called the prime of life, physical and emotional maturity, the age of greatest social accomplishment. I had once been as physically old as she, and I hadn’t experienced it as a difficult time.
But now the sight of her was terrifying. And not simply because she was a Diehard— hadn’t I just taken a call from Odje, who was older than Mary, without this kind of reaction? No, somehow it frightened me because it was Mary.
She was living an obscenity. But I, at least, was absolved from any complicity. I thanked her for that.
With what emotion does one regard a love thirty years dead? In this case, my case, with fear.
I went to join my guests and I ordered up the good brandy. “Absent friends,” I said as I lifted my glass, and saw Brian McGivern’s somber, searching eyes looking at me as he drank.
I spent the afternoon with them, chatting about Delphi as it was and had been, about Greece and the monuments they had seen ruined or being rebuilt. As I escorted them back to Ismenos’s little hovercraft, I gave them a brief tour as we wound down the Sacred Way; I told McGivern I’d be in touch with him; and then I stood and made my way back up the hill.
KNOW THYSELF, the graven letters read, the words of the Seven Wise Sages.
Nice try, fellas, I thought. But you’ve missed my point. I’m over eight hundred years old, and it’s been ages since I’ve managed to surprise myself at all.
Until this afternoon. Until I met an image with fear.
I went up the hill to my dinner, and with it a bottle of wine. I played the blues late and finished the bottle.