Aristaeus, what is he in the story, why is he being so pretentiously The Mysterious Stranger? Is there something about him that reminds me of people who get there before I do, who know something I don’t know? Or is it simply that he’s an inconvenient witness to the killing of the tortoise? Why am I afraid that he’ll take something away from me?
Here the DRAMATIS PERSONAE came to an end. I had lunch and a kip, stuck the Dracula disk in the Apple II, turned on the monitor, and sank into a reverie.
The afternoon immersed itself in dusk and the dusk deepened into night. District Line trains with golden windows rumbled townwards and homewards; the football pitch was illuminated, the lower leaves of the plane trees on the common became brilliant and theatrical; I heard the cries of the players, the thudding of the ball as the figures moved under the chalky whiteness of the lights; along the footpaths on either side of the pitch homegoers passed with quickened footsteps. I looked at the Vermeer girl, saw Melanie Falsepercy, remembered Luise. In the window my lamplit face was reflected on the darkness; I pulled down the blinds and saw the following appear on the monitor as I typed:
EURYDICE
The sea is full of marvels but there are no answers in it. There are remote beaches where certain things are insisted upon. There are crabs whose bodies are like human faces, angry and disappointed faces with mouth parts gabbling silently, urgently. These faces are carried on jointed legs, they hurry along the tidal edge drivenly surviving from one moment to the next; there is no time to lose if their line of angry and disappointed faces is to continue.
In the spring tides the female crab releases her ten thousand eggs, each one a potential angry and disappointed face and most of them will be eaten by the creatures of the sea. The female stands not like a face on legs, she stands huge, heroic and technological, like a spacecraft poised on elaborately articulated legs; she stands like the most modern thing in the world and she expels into the sea these ten thousand ancient faces.
There’s no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is. There is an endless surging and undulating of me, an endless cycle of ebb and flow: that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.
I resumed the unfinished Dracula page. Van Helsing drove a stake into the heart of the beautiful vampire. NNYURGHLLGHHhhaaaaah! shrieked the Vermeer girl.
7 Nnngghh, Zurff, Kruljjj
When I arrived at Classic Comics the next afternoon I noticed a little more liveliness, a little more motion in the place than usual; there was that unmistakable quickening that comes with the smell of new business. In Sol Mazzaroth’s office I saw a full-page four-colour proof of an old newspaper ad for Orpheus Men’s Toiletries pinned up on the corkboard. They’d reproduced the pastel drawing by Redon with the golden lyre-head of Orpheus, the blue-green lyre, the golden mountainscape, the violet sky. Overlapping a corner of the Redon was a photograph of a chunky amphora-shaped imitation clay bottle with pseudo-Greek letters incised on it. CLASSIQUE: ETERNAL MAGIC BY ORPHEUS, said the headline I’d written years ago.
‘Takes you back, doesn’t it,’ said Mazzaroth.
‘I don’t want to be taken back,’ I said.
‘It’s all happening,’ he said, swivelling excitedly in his black leather chair. ‘We’re going glossy and we’re merging with He. No more of this kid shit with one-inch single-column ads for catapults and model steam engines — we’re talking full-page four-colour Yves St Laurent and Alpha Romeo and Orpheus. What I want to do now is get into real classics, I mean your actual Greek ones, I don’t know why I never thought of it before. This is a chance to broaden and deepen our parameters.’ He picked up a copy of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary.‘Listen to this:
… the Thracian women, whom he had offended by his coldness to their amorous passion, or, according to others, by his unnatural gratifications and impure indulgences, attacked him while they celebrated the orgies of Bacchus, and after they had torn his body to pieces, they threw his head into the Hebrus, where it still articulated the words ‘Eurydice! Eurydice!’ as it was carried down the stream into the Aegean Sea.
‘That’s what I call a story with possibilities,’ he said. ‘I want you to work this up into something we can run as a serial in the first six issues.’
‘There’s not a lot to work up, is there,’ I said. ‘All we know about Orpheus is what a great musician he was and how Eurydice was bitten by a snake while being chased by Aristaeus and she died and Orpheus went to the underworld to bring her back and so on.’
‘Come on, Herman, this is an X-rated magazine. You can easily get one instalment out of the Thracian women and their amorous passion and another out of the unnatural gratifications. And of course there’s Eurydice and all that underworld action, maybe a big fight between Orpheus and Hades before he gets her out of there. Or maybe Persephone gets the hots for him and there’s a heavy scene with her, there’s no end to the underworld possibilities. You’ll think of something good to start it off, like how he gets the magic lyre, maybe some thunder and lightning on a mountaintop or he’s got to wrestle somebody for it or kill a monster or whatever. This isn’t going to be some little wimp Orpheus, what we want is a really hunky guy, we’ll use Pektoralis for the art, he’ll give it that heroic sci-fi look. And we’re not doing it comic-style, either — no speech balloons, it’s going to be strictly quality stuff with the text under the pictures. Here, have a look at the dummy.’
CLASSIQUE, it said on the cover in pseudo-Greek lettering. The cover photo was a bronzed youth leaping out of the sea with shining drops of water scattering from him. Over the sky and the water were listed the contents:
CRUISING THE AEGEAN
THE TREATS OF SAN FRANCISCO
AIDS: GHETTO OF FEAR
GREAT SALADS OF THE WORLD
GÖSTA KRAKEN, EYE OF DARKNESS
ORPHEUS: SIX-PART PICTURE SERIES
‘Gösta Kraken,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he do a film called Quagmires?’
‘Bogs,’ said Sol. ‘He’s the hottest thing since Tarkovsky. His latest film is Codename Orpheus. What do you think of the dummy?’
‘Looks glossy.’
‘Classique, same as the after-shave. Orpheus is running a special full page.’ He opened the dummy to it. There was a detail of the Redon drawing but most of the page was taken up by a discreetly shadowy photograph of two nude men.
CLASSIQUE BY ORPHEUS:
MAGIC EVER NEW FROM THE GOLDEN AGE
‘How does that grab you?’ he said.
‘NNNGGHH,’ I said. ‘ZURFF, KRULJJJ.’
‘It’s a big, big market; this merger is going to mean a five million increase in circulation and an estimated twelve million pounds in advertising revenue. What it means for you is four big ones.’
‘Four thousand pounds!’ I was only getting six hundred for Dracula.
‘You’re in the big time now and it’s only the beginning. Theseus and the Minotaur — what really happened in the labyrinth, eh? Talk about unnatural practices. Pasiphaë and the bull before that, naturally. But first let’s get Orpheus off the ground.’