Sorry — my words, not hers, but we know what she meant. No point in further false suspense; I told her it was, or turned out to be, the one I sought.
"All I knew at first was that she was a sea-nymph, that pair of green eyes down with the Graeae's gray. She must have beached and insufflated me; when I came to we were mouth to mouth under her cowl. I couldn't see a thing; when I opened my eyes she kept them covered with her hand till she'd moved off and veiled herself. Not a half-veil, mind, like some Joppa-girls wear, but a regular bag, with the hood over that."
"Hmp."
"When I thanked her, she reminded me I'd flouted Athene's orders, hence my dunking, and advised me to return the eye at once, unconditionally, to the Gray Ladies, by this time shoaled some way downshore. I did, beginning to wonder whether my lifeguard was perhaps amphibian, the same who'd briefed me in Athene's temple and bridled me in her court."
"Your horse-metaphor's ass-backward," Calyxa said dryly. "It's you who were in the saddle."
I was no poet, I reminded her; merely a man with a tale to tell. If I might get on with it? How, introducing myself to Pemphredo as Perseus, son of Zeus, I'd plunked the eye in her palm and pled to all three for triangulation; how, eyed, she'd eyed me, clapped for tooth from Dino, snarled "Nothing!" and taken off in a trice on Pegasus with her cronies, in the direction of Mount Atlas.
"So much for my sister's wisdom," I said to the hood-girl, excused myself, and waded into the lake, asking her please not to interrupt this time my drowning. No map no Styx-Nymph, no nymph no wallet, no wallet no Medusa, no Medusa no relief from calcification.
She waded behind. "Why do you want rejuvenating, Perseus? Do you really think you'll win back Andromeda?" I was in deep, couldn't think of a right reply. "Or is it simply to be able to do hero-work again?" "That too, mainly." "Then wait!" She clutched me by the tunic-top, now shoulder-deep.
"I wondered too," Calyxa said. "How can Being Perseus Again be your goal, when you have to be Perseus to reach it?"
I was twice fetched up, by the cowl-maid and Calyxa's question, which I'd not considered. I uncouched and considered her. "When you were mortal, Calyxa, did you write those seven letters?" Her lip-bite attested authorship; I could scarcely tell on, so many epistolary details came crowding on me. I repeated Athene's counsel, which the veiled one repeated to me: "Past a certain point sit tight, hang loose, stand fast, let things come." Don't fret about Pegasus, she advised me: Athene had recalled him for young Bellerophon, who was ready to commence now his own career. I should camp on the beach, at least for the night; since the Styx-girls were off the map and I seemed not to know where I was either, perhaps they were not far distant, might even come looking for me. She, at least, would return before morning to see; why not trust my nose for news and get some shut-eye?
I was certain then she was Athene's handmaid, the same I'd courted in Samos. I cloaked out on the shore and watched the stars wheel, not so many then as now, making stories from their silent signs and correspondences. The night was chill; I was stiffer than ever.
"Come on," Calyxa said: "she came."
"Right. It was a camper's wet-dream; she stole from the lake by starlight and slipped under my cloak, her own still sopping. She was all a-shiver; I helped her off with it, up to the cowl and veil, which she'd not remove. But I was right: I'd've known that body anywhere — "
"Ample soft wide-hipped small breasted blah."
"You're being Andromeda," I chided Calyxa. "Sorry." "Don't apologize. She confessed she was the Styx-Nymph, her veil the kibisis, which she'd as leave keep on till morning if I didn't mind. We didn't get much done."
"You said she was Stygian, I believe?" "Stop that. She was innocent, had had only one man before, Poseidon, he left his traces, never an orgasm." "I had orgasms long before I ever had a man." "She wasn't like you, for better and worse, but she was sweet, sweet, my lifesaver; I was grateful, she was impetuous and shy at once, I was flattered — but she was stiff with me, out of inexperience, and I limp with her. ." "Out of practice." "You did write those letters! Anyhow, she was Athene's aide, I reminded myself, not Aphrodite's. I was eager to see her face, which she promised to unveil when the time was right; if her neck, which especially pleased me, was any indication. ."
Calyxa sat up and requested a change of subject. She was past her pout, even teasy, but would not be touched by my retumescence, inspired as it was not altogether by herself. "We all know it was the New Medusa," she said. "Is that why she kept the bag over her head?"
"Don't be crude. Do I ask you what the point of Ammon's horns is, who put them on him?"
She turned sober. "I'm afraid of tomorrow, Perseus."
I was astounded, and explained that my Styx-Nymph, toward dawn, had said quite the same thing, which I'd explain in the morning. I comforted both: assured the sea-girl that I had more to fear than she, since without Pegasus to fly me to Hyperborean Medusa, the kibisis was useless; endeavored in Calyxa's case to change the subject to her Perseid letters, which could be said to be responsible for the narrative in hand, its source and omphalos. Had she died in Egyptian Chemmis — drowned while skindiving with Ammon in the Nile, perhaps, or been crocodiled in the deeps of love — and elevated posthumously? Or was her heavenhood a kind of prize for authorship, as Delphinus had been starred by Poseidon for his winning speeches? Speaking of Chemmis —
But she'd speak no more, only clung to me most close that night as Medusa, still mantled, was shown clinging to me on the beach in the morning's mural. II-F, like its counterpart, was septuple, but so grander in scale that its several panels were each broader than the broadest in the inner series and could be viewed only individually. I asked Calyxa whether, in Zeus's timetable, the whole of it might be seen that day, or we were obliged to give a week to its several panelets.
"Are you in such a hurry?"
"No no no," I assured her; "well, yes. For one thing I can't remember a thing after the week I spent with Medusa on Lake Triton, and I want to know exactly when and how I died. But what really interests me is the way this temple of mine is unfolding." What I meant, I explained when we returned to bed, was that given on the one hand my rate of exposition, as it were — one mural per day — and on the other the much rapider time-passage between the scenes themselves, we had in six days rehearsed my life from its gold-showered incept to the nearly last thing I remembered. It followed that soon — any day now, perhaps — the marmor history must arrive at the point of my death and overtake my present transfiguration. What was she drawing currently, I demanded of Calyxa, if not herself and me in spirate heaven, reviewing the very murals she was drawing?
After some pause she answered: "I'm not ready to answer that tonight." But she bid me consider two things: first, that, immortality being without end, one might infer that the temple was as well, from our couch unwinding infinitely through the heavens; on the other hand, it was to be observed that as the reliefs themselves grew longer, the time between their scenes grew shorter: from little I-B, for example (Dictys netting the tide-borne chest), to its neighbor I–C (my first visit to Samian Athene), was a pillared interval of nearly two decades; between their broad correspondents in the second series, as many more days; and from II-E to II-F-1, about the number of hours we ourselves had slept between beholdings. Mightn't it be, then, that like the inward turns of the spiral, my history would forever approach a present point but never reach it? Either way, it seemed to her, the story might be presumed to be endless.
"But it's all exposition! Where's the real-time drama? Where's the climax?"
Calyxa smiled seriously. "I think we'll come to it very soon. Together."