“Pan is not well,” the nymphs confided.
“I watched him scale the rocks, I watched him set four of you to coming in a row,” said Alobar. “He seems fit enough to me.”
The nymphs released a chorus of dreamy sighs. “You should have seen him when he was in his prime. He's like a sick dove, nowadays, compared to the goat he used to be.”
“Is it Christ who is making him weak?”
“Not Christ but Christians. With every advance of Christianity, his powers recede,” said one nymph.
“It started long before Christ,” said a second.
“Yes, it did,” agreed the first. “It began with the rise of the cities. There simply was no place in the refined temples of Attica and Sparta for a mountain goat like Pan.”
A third nymph, who, with a wad of leaves, was scrubbing herself clean of caked secretions, joined in. “It was man's jealousy of woman that started it,” she said. “They wanted to drive the goddesses out of Olympus and replace them with male gods.”
“Is not Pan a male god?” asked Alobar.
“True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”
“And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?”
Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. “The world is changing,” he said, “but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan.”
“Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?”
“You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”
“We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild — into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”
While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.
Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.
He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, passing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he passed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song:
"I love the ground-o, ground-o
A ball beneath my feet
The world is round-o, round-o
Just like a frigging beet."
No, he would not be remembered as bard — nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.
SEATTLE
IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE TOWN WAS at odds over the solar eclipse. A lot of people were of the opinion that since in Seattle one seldom saw the sun anyhow, there was nothing very special about not seeing it again. Monday morning would be only a shade darker than usual, they reasoned. The difference, according to others, perhaps the majority, was that Monday was forecast to be clear. With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an unobstructed view of one of nature's most mystical spectacles.
“Did you walk up to Volunteer Park to watch the eclipse?” was the first thing Ricki said to Priscilla when she came by her apartment Monday noon.
“Nope. Didn't make it outdoors,” said Priscilla, yawning.
“You watched it on TV then?”
“No, I didn't.”
“You didn't see it at all?”
“I listened to it,” said Priscilla. “I listened to it on the radio. It sounded like bacon frying.”
“Shit, woman. Sometimes I don't believe you're for real.” Ricki looked about the room for a place to sit. The couch and the chair, the most logical contenders, were piled high with dirty clothes, clean clothes, clothes in transition, books, unopened mail, and laboratory equipment. There were also a couple of beets. Ricki elected to stand. “You'd better shift into your hurry-up offense,” she said. “The meeting starts in thirty minutes.”
“I can shower on first down, make up on second, and dress on third. If I haven't put it over by then, I can always kick a field goal.”
“Unless you fumble.”
Priscilla slammed the bathroom door. Ricki had to steady a beaker of liquid to prevent a major spill.