Chimera by John Barth

was not, then, merely maid, minister, and mistress of her deities, their temples, and devotees, but artful chronicler of their careers as well! I refrained from asking whether Sabazius and Ammon were similarly shrined, but praised her artistry to the skies.
    “I’m no artist,” she demurred. “Anyhow, I’m not interested in me.”
    But I would not let her off so modestly; with real appreciation I kissed her from crown to sole, which flexily she enjoyed, and pressed her tell me how far the murals went—for while I myself could predict, I thought, the next couple of panels, my memory of an odd dark passion in the desert just prior to my demise was still obscure to me, as was the manner of my death itself.
    She shook her head. “Tomorrow, or the next night, maybe, I’ll tell you, if you haven’t guessed.” Her tone grew graver. “What do you think the next panel will be?”
    I supposed it would portray the famous “sculpture museum” at Seriphos, now the isle’s chief tourist attraction, which we foursomed—Andromeda, Danaus, Dictys, and I—soon after, in what became the cycled dream’s continuation. King Dictys himself was in declining age and health, but overjoyed to review the source and cause of his ascendancy. Andromeda, unsalted and refreshed, seemed to have lost five years and kilos in the sea; she basked in the gallantries of her yet-younger life preserver. The famous statues, of course, were no sculptured likenesses at all, but the stoned originals of Polydectes and his court, fixed forever in their postures of insult and abuse which I had countered with the Gorgon’s head. There in the center sat the false king himself, still gloating at his declaration that my whole laborious adventure had been but his ruse for my riddance; that he had never intended to bed any but my gold-girt mother, whom presently he was starving from her sanctuary with Dictys in Athene’s temple. Those had been his last words: fascinated, I pointed out to my companions that his tongue was still tipped to his teeth to make the theta of N αῷ ’A θἠνηϛ , to whose eta he would never come.
    “Remarkable,” young Danaus had agreed, and added with a trace of tease in his own teeth-tipped tongue: “If Uncle P. was forty when you froze him, and has been lisping that same theta for twenty years, you and he must be about the same age now.”
    Andromeda laughed, her first mirth in months; then the two of them went off at smart Danaus’s suggestion to find something less boring to look at than his petrified progenitors. Dictys and I watched them go, my wife merrily accepting her escort’s elbow, and then went round the remaining figures pensively summoning names and patronymics from that glorious morning for half the afternoon. Returning at last to the now-cool shadow of Polydectes, we sipped from silver beakers of Hippocrene and traded troubles.
    “I can’t manage the boy,” Dictys said; “it’s because he never had a mother, and I was too busy running the government to be a proper father.”
    I sympathized, reflecting on my own son’s growing rebellion, and asked who was Dictys’s queen; at his hem and haw I dropped the subject, inferring with some satisfaction that young Danaus was illicit. He suggested we ought to interrupt their tête-à-tête; but I asked for more wine instead, and two beakers later was confiding to him my domestic problems and my conviction I was petrifying.’
    Dictys shook his head. “Just ossifying, like the rest of us.” Too bad about Andromeda, he said; he was just as pleased never to have wed the only woman he’d ever loved, seeing how seldom the sentiment withstood the years’ attrition. For the rest, there was no help for it, he advised me to resign myself to lovelessness and decline; he’d ship me off to Samos, Joppa, or wherever I wished—but all voyages, he reminded me, come soon or late to the same dark port.
    “Better late, then,” said I, and announced to the gathered company