xo Orpheus
ContentsIntroduction by Kate Bernheimer
Anthropogenesis and Norse Creation Myth Laura van den Berg • Anthropogenesis, Or: How to Make a Family
Argos Joy Williams • Argos
Bacchantes Sabina Murray • The Sisters
Baucis and Philemon Edward Carey • Sawdust
Brownies Maile Chapman • Friend Robin
The Caliph of One Thousand and One Nights
Text and Illustrations by David B. • The Veiled Prophet
Candaules and Gyges, as told by Herodotus Elanor Dymott • Henry and Booboo
Coyote Myths Shane Jones • Modern Coyote
Cronos Aimee Bender • The Devourings
Daedalus Ron Currie, Jr. • Labyrinth
Daedalus Anthony Marra • The Last Flight of Daedalus
Daphne Dawn Raffel • Daphne
Demeter Maile Meloy • Demeter
Demeter and Persephone Willy Vlautin • Kid Collins
Eris Gina Ochsner • Sleeping Beauty
Galatea and Pygmalion Madeline Miller • Galatea
God and Satan Manuel Muñoz • The Hand
Golem and Pygmalion Benjamin Percy • The Dummy
Hades Kate Bernheimer • The Girl with the Talking Shadow
Human Pentachromats Edith Pearlman • Wait and See
Icarus Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud • An Occasional Icarus
Killcrop Victor LaValle • Killcrop
The Kraken Ben Loory • The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun
Lamia/Child-Eating Demon, Greek Elizabeth McCracken • Birdsong from the Radio
The Lotus Eaters Aurelie Sheehan • The Lotus Eaters
The Maenads and Sinbad the Sailor Elizabeth Evans • Slaves
Mahābhārata Max Gladstone • Drona’s Death
Monsters Sheila Heti • So Many-Headed Gates
Edith Hamilton's
Mythology Kelly Braffet and Owen King • The Status of Myth
Narcissus Zachary Mason • Narcissus
Odysseus Michael Jeffrey Lee • Back to Blandon
Odysseus Davis Schneiderman • The Story I Am Speaking to You Now
Oedipus Imad Rahman • The Brigadier-General Takes His Final Stand, by James Butt
Orpheus and Eurydice Heidi Julavits • Dark Resort
Paradise Karen Tei Yamashita • Mystery Spot: 95065
Persephone Emma Straub and Peter Straub • Lost Lake
Phaeton, from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses Kevin Wilson • What Wants My Son
Poseidon Laird Hunt • Thousand
Post-Apocalypse Manuela Draeger • Belle-Medusa
Raja Rasalu Aamer Hussein • The Swan’s Wife
Sedna, Inuit Kathryn Davis • Sanna
Sirin Lutz Bassmann • Madame Liang
Sisyphus Kit Reed • Sissy
The Strix Ander Monson • In a Structure Simulating an Owl
Tezcatlipoca Donají Olmedo • Cat’s Eye
Transformation Sigrid Nunez • Betrayal
Trojan Horse Johanna Skibsrud • A Horse, a Vine
The Unconscious Brian Aldiss • The Hungers of an Old Language
Zeus and Europa, after the D’Aulaires Sarah Blackman • The White Horse
**This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.**
Introduction
*
In the modern characterization of Orpheus, culled from diverging stories of antiquity, Orpheus is the best musician of all time—let’s make that the greatest artist. Orpheus could play the lyre so well that animals, rocks, and trees danced to his songs; he was so good at his chosen instrument that he even charmed Hades into letting his bride, who had died after falling into a pit of vipers, return to the world of the living.
But Orpheus made one little mistake. The King of the Underworld had told him not to look back to the trailing Eurydice until they had exited his kingdom. This was a reasonable condition really, given the very favorable terms of their unusual agreement. Yet Orpheus, being at least half human by most accounts—his mother was allegedly the muse Calliope—forgot himself, or got nervous, or suddenly doubted his own powers—whatever his motivation remains unclear. Upon entering the light of this world Orpheus fatally turned around and watched his love, Eurydice, disappear forever into the shadows where she still walked.
Thus Orpheus, arguably the most prevalent symbol for Art in the Western world, shows us both the power and limitations of the whole venture. Yes, it might feel like you’re conquering death when you play that song, paint that picture, compose that poem, or type that story. Yes, you might experience the sensation of escaping the everyday world, perhaps even your own mortality, upon hearing, watching, and reading the best artistic examples. But the feeling is illusory, Orpheus tells us.
The feeling is, after all, just a feeling.
“XO” in the modern sense is a farewell, a departure, a leavetaking—and xo Orpheus suggests another good-bye by Orpheus to his bride, Eurydice. The phrase is sad then, humanly sad, considering how things turned out for them in the end. Yet, as the title to a collection of new myths, xo Orpheus is meant to suggest a farewell of literature, our symbolic Orpheus, in its old relationship to the world of myth.
If fairy tales are “domestic myths,” as Maria Tatar has proposed, then classical myths are worldly tales, generally involving some contact between the mortal and immortal realms, between humans and the gods. Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of Gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away too. For more than a hundred years now (let’s use the popular terms of modernism and postmodernism) writers have been dealing with this transition, or their perception of this transition.
No Gods . . . no god . . . only humans.
Humans and their machines.
And the myths of former times held a resonance precisely because of this change. They echoed back to us from a place of lost power and transcendence. How far had we fallen? How lonely we were in a world without gods!
But times have changed once again. The age itself has changed. There is some news, and it’s not very good news: we humans, once merely human, have supplanted all godly endeavors—we have become like gods ourselves. It’s the biggest story on earth.
As scientists have discovered, or perhaps explained is a better word, or perhaps identified, we now live in the age of the Anthropocene. The geologic age of the Anthropocene.
Those high priests of material evidence have given us our own epoch like the Holocene, the Pleistocene! Apparently we now, it seems, have superhuman powers. With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we’ve managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature.
Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species. Events that used to take hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, we humans have miraculously accomplished in a little more than a century. We, in our less than divine wisdom but apparently quite divine powers, are now transforming the planet like an Olympian might have created an Ice Age, or a Titan might have thrown down an asteroid from the sky to kill off a bunch of dinosaurs.
We are the gods.
Our scientists have said so.
And our high priests have given our communal life span an epochal name: Anthropocene. This is a Greek name to boot (“human” plus “new”), which brings me back to those myths. What do the myths—those vertical tales about the breach between the human and godly realms—have to tell us now in the new age with humans as gods? What is Myth in the Age of Anthropocene?
Based on the stories gathered here, the early answer is this: sad.
Of course we only just left behind Myth in the Age of the Holocene, bade it farewell as readers and writers. Only in the last few years has the term Anthropocene become widely used in scientific circles. Only over time, therefore, over the coming decades, centuries, millennia—however long the Age of Anthropocene lasts—will we know more about what art means and what artists make, how this shift changes some things and leaves static others. We do know one thing has changed, for those who might say this is faddish end-time thinking: humans are gods. This wasn’t true even a generation ago, though some predicted its coming.
A profound sadness, yes. Oh, you may find a whimsical story here and there in the bunch, and you might be struck by the violence too. Yet “XO” Orpheus wrote to his beloved, and “good-bye” this book says to the old relationship of literature and myth, of myth to the human. Even the whimsical stories in here, even the most violent ones, reveal a gaping anxiety, a primal fear, leading to sadness about what we have done.
Of course the stories are also deeply absorbing, ethical, lovely, and strange, different one from the next, each searching for a happy home with a reader.
Yet again the same questions arise: How far have we fallen? How lonely have we become? When humans become gods, when our wings grow so great as to beat about the very edges of the earth, no one can answer but us. Good-bye, and so hello.
—Kate Bernheimer
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning novel, The Sentimentalists (2011); a collection of short fiction, This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (2012); and two collections of poetry. Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, Johanna currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is working on a collection of critical essays and a second novel.
Trojan Horse
*
A HORSE, A VINE
Johanna Skibsrud
O unhappy citizens, what madness? Do you think the enemy’s sailed away? —Virgil’s Aeneid, Book II
I knew I could count on Dean. He was like a brother to me; better than that. Ever since we’d met—our first day of Basic, both of us just eighteen years old. Turned out, we’d both grown up near Houston. Dean was from just north of Sugar Land, in Mission Bend; Alvin, where I’m from, that’s just a little less than an hour away. Maybe it was that. Whatever it was, we understood each other. Which is saying something. Dean is not a guy who is easily understood. He’s always been nuts—even in Basic. He started picking up “odd jobs” even then. Just to keep things interesting, he said, and mostly—he was right—it was nothing. Just roughing up a guy in town every now and then, for a friend. But after a while he got into some real dirty work, too. I kept telling him he was going to get himself into trouble but he’d just say, nah, and when he did get into trouble it didn’t have anything to do with any of that shit. He was always pretty good about it—didn’t leave a lot of loose ends.
What happened was he got called in for a domestic on account of this girl, Natalie, who he wasn’t even serious about. They issued him with protective orders, but that suited him just fine, and for a while it looked like they were going to let it go at that. But then, a year later, when his term of service was up, he was denied reenlistment. If you ask me, it didn’t have anything to do with the girl, though that’s what they said. Everyone could just sort of tell that Dean was a little—unhinged.
Dean pretty near lost his mind when he heard about it. You can imagine. I know, because I was the first person he called. That was the beginning of September, 2001. I was home on leave. I told him, Well, come on back home, we’ll get you sorted out, and so he came back and calmed down a little. He even managed to pick up a few “odd jobs”—but his heart wasn’t in it. He would come over to visit Tracy and me all the time, at first. We’d drink beer and play video games until three or four in the morning and we both fell asleep in the living room—one of us in the La-Z-Boy armchair and the other stretched out on the couch. The night before the twin towers fell was a night like that—we’d been playing Colony Wars but hadn’t even managed to finish the game. When we woke up Dean said we should finish it out because he’d been winning. I agreed—but only because I still had a chance. It’s a good game that way, more like real life. Even if you lose a few battles you can still win the overall— it’s just about how everything balances out. Also, it’s not like most games where it’s either you win, or you die. There are five different endings to the game—two of them good and three of them bad. So that’s like real life, too. There’s always a chance that things will work out—but more of a chance that they won’t.
I was trying to concentrate on the game because I was still losing pretty bad when Tracy came in with Cody screaming on her hip— he was still just tiny then. She just sort of stood there at first, looking at us, letting Cody cry like that. Even if she had tried to say something, though, I probably wouldn’t have heard her because of how much noise Cody was making and because I was still trying to concentrate, finish the game, even if I was losing, and because Dean was yelling at me the whole time, too, saying, You’re gonna die, motherfucker! You are so going to die!
Finally Tracy just walked over, the kid still screaming, and flicked the screen over to the TV, and just at the moment—the Towers fell. It was fucked up. I didn’t even know what was happening at first. Like it was a sort of a joke. Or a clip from a movie or something. Dean said, Damn! In the same way he did when I beat the shit out of him playing Blast Radius or Hogs of War.
After that Dean had a job. He got hired on at Blackwater, and he liked it a lot better anyway than he liked the Marines. He told me I should get discharged and join up, too, but I didn’t think so. I’d just got back from a six-month tour in Afghanistan and didn’t want to go back anymore if I could help it. I wanted to get transferred to the Northern Command. Get posted at Fort Sam, maybe—be closer to Tracy and Cody that way. Plus, I liked the idea of homeland defense. It was an arithmetic thing. Say you blew up three guys over there in Iraq or Afghanistan—you never could be certain if they were the right guys. At home, if anybody tried anything, you’d know for sure when you blew them up you were getting the right guy. If any more 9/11 shit was going to happen I liked the idea of being right here, waiting—couldn’t stand the thought of being stuck sitting on my thumbs instead, over at Camp Eggers, or Fiddler’s Green.
What, you getting spooked or something? Dean said when I told him about the homeland defense thing.
I shook my head. Nah.
Soft? he said. He poked me in the gut.
I shook my head again. You can see for yourself, I said. No.
The way I said it that time, he left me alone. But the next time I saw him, he brought it up again.
Still spooked? he asked. I said I’d told him before that I wasn’t.
It’s all right, he said. Everybody gets it sometime. But you got to remember—it’s not just about killing and getting killed. You’re an artist, he told me. A warrior. Don’t forget that. Then he took this book from his pocket and read me something out of it that he said had been written by a Roman general something like two thousand years ago.
For someone who came across like such a special needs case most of the time, Dean was actually pretty deep. He used to carry The Art of the Warrior and Maxims of War around with him in Basic. Now it was Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
We were having beers at the Triple Crown in Mission Bend, and when he got up to pay he shoved the book across the table toward me. Take it, he said. You might learn something. Then he made a face as if to say bigger miracles have happened, slammed a tip down on the table and headed toward the door.
I liked the book. It made you think about things. I liked the way it was written, too, in these short little sentences, sort of like the psalms in the Bible—except I could understand them, even with how it was written as many years ago. And when I didn’t understand them I would just skip ahead, and it didn’t matter. It was pretty cool to know that someone else was wondering about all the shit I was wondering about even two thousand years ago—even though it made me a bit sad to realize that meant nobody had figured anything out in all of that time. Like this one part, where he says that everything exists for some reason—even a horse, he says, or a vine—so why do you even have to wonder about it? But when he says it like that it’s obvious he’s wondered himself or else he wouldn’t have had to ask about why. And then he says, Even the sun will say, I am for some purpose, and the rest of the gods will say the same. For what purpose then art thou? I liked that. I’d even sort of repeat it to myself sometimes. For what purpose then art thou? Because even though it sounded like a question, it was sort of an answer, too.
Then, a week or so later, just before I was due to ship out, Dean showed up at my house with a copy of Rifleshooter magazine.
This will make you feel better, he said.
I feel fine, I said.
No, seriously, he said. Check it out. If you get blown up over there I’ll do this for you—promise. And if I get blown up, you can do it for me.
He flipped open the magazine from the back and read from an advertisement in the classified section.
How about honoring your deceased loved one, he read, pulling a face, by sharing with him or her one more round of clay targets, one last bird hunt, one last stalk hunt. . . .
I interrupted. Is this for real? I said.
Ha ha! Dean said. Hell yeah. Then continued to read the advertisement out loud. Only this time he stayed deadly serious.
All you had to do, according to this ad, was send these guys some ashes and they’d turn it into live ammunition for you. One pound of ash was enough for roughly 250 shells, they said. They even did mantelpiece carriers and engraved nameplates.
What better way, Dean read, to be remembered? Now you can have peace of mind that you can continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone.
That’s the part that got me. I realized sort of all of a sudden what had been bothering me ever since I got back from my first tour. It wasn’t that I was scared of dying. The thing that rattled me was thinking about what would happen after I died. Not to me. But to Tracy and Cody. I’d start thinking about it, all the crazy shit that could happen, and it would drive me crazy, because there is no end to the possibilities that can happen after you are dead—even more than can happen when you are alive, and that is pretty much anything. I would get so crazy sometimes thinking about this that it got so I couldn’t even hardly breathe. I’d get this feeling in my gut like someone had just stuck me with an ice pick, and after that I couldn’t breathe or think straight anymore. I’d just have to stand there with that pain in my gut until it passed. Sometimes it would last for a good couple of minutes, which is a long time to go without breathing. It wouldn’t happen all the time, but I never could tell when it was going to. After I got back from my second tour it was even worse. I didn’t even have to be thinking about anything after a while, and it would happen. I’d be sitting there playing a video game with Cody or eating a sandwich at the kitchen table or Tracy and I would be fucking, and all the sudden I’d feel it. A sharp pain in my gut, first, and then my lungs starting to shut down. I’d try to shake it, but there wasn’t anything that I could do. It got so bad I had to tell Tracy. It wasn’t like she didn’t notice. You can’t freeze up like that on someone when you’re in the middle of fucking them and not have them notice.
She told me not to worry. Nothing was going to happen, she said. But even if it did, I shouldn’t worry, because she could take care of herself—and Cody, too, and I knew it. She was used to it, she said, after all—what with me being gone all the time. And she was right—I knew. That’s the thing. It was weird. If I thought about it I knew I was lucky that way. Tracy was tough, and she was smart, too. We kept a gun in the house, and she knew how to use it. She was even a pretty good shot, and wasn’t someone who was likely to lose it and not know how to aim right, or be afraid to shoot, if she needed to. I could pretty much count on that. She would get this look on her face when she was serious about something and you knew that no one was ever going to mess with her.
Like that time when she came into the room and switched on the TV and the twin towers fell. Or the time that Cody nearly choked and died—and probably would have, too, if she hadn’t been around to save him. It still makes me sick to think about that, because it was my fault it happened. I was feeding him, and I guess I hadn’t cut the pieces up small enough—I figured they were pretty small already. But then Cody got quiet and his eyes got this real scared look to them, like they were going to pop out of his head. It was fucked up because it wasn’t even like he choked or anything first. He just stayed quiet and then got even quieter and then his eyes were popping out of his head. I bolted for the phone, and yelled for Tracy, but then before I could get to the phone even, to call 9-1-1, Tracy was there—walking by me like she didn’t even see me—that look on her face. She went straight for the kid, turned him upside down, then started thumping him on the back, hard, until pretty soon the little piece of chicken that had got stuck in his throat shot out of his mouth and he was crying and puking all over the floor.
You useless piece of shit, Tracy said, without looking at me. By the time anyone got around to coming over here in an ambulance it would have been too late. Don’t you know that? Then she scooped up Cody and took him off to the bathroom to get him cleaned up.
The piece of chicken had flown clear across the room and landed right beside my foot. I remember that after she left, and took the kid, I just sat down on the floor next to it, and looked at it, the way it was lying there on the floor right by my foot, and I thought about how small it was, and how you never knew what it was that was going to fuck you. How you had to be prepared for every little thing.
After my third tour I had that pain in my gut all the time. It was funny, because it didn’t happen to me in the field. Over there, I felt strong and I didn’t give a shit. A lot of guys get scared. If they’ve seen combat, or had any close calls, they start to feel like everything they see is going to jump up and bite them. But I wasn’t like that. See, I never was afraid of dying—it wasn’t that. It was everything else. When I was home I would start to feel it all over again. I couldn’t help it. I’d start thinking about how everything was all connected—how every little thing that happened would set off something else happening, I mean. And how that would set off something else, and that if I died there was nothing I could do to stop all the shit that my dying would set off in the world without knowing, ahead of time, what it would be.
I started thinking more about that advertisement Dean had read. I thought about how funny it would be to be sitting up on the shelf. Just ready and waiting up there for shit to happen. To be hard and cold as metal, all loaded and ready inside Tracy’s Taurus 1911, which I had got her, and which she knew how to use. I started thinking about it all the time. How it would feel to be inside that gun, with her hand on the trigger. But then when I really did have her hands on me I would get that feeling again and if she was on top of me I’d have to push her off all the sudden because I couldn’t breathe. It got to be pretty bad that way, because she would get hurt like maybe I didn’t love her anymore, or think she was sexy, and I would tell her, no, that wasn’t it, it was just this thing that I couldn’t explain and it didn’t have anything to do with her— not really. But women always think that everything is about them and so she would turn over and cry and say, for the fifth time, Don’t you think I’m sexy, or what? And I would tell her again how she was the sexiest woman in the world, and that she should know that. I knew she did. Everywhere we went people were always checking her out and I knew that she noticed. That she liked it, even. Who wouldn’t?
Most of the time, I didn’t mind. Sometimes, though—especially when we went to Galveston Island, where her best friend Anelise Hutson’s brother, Brian, had a place—I did. She would wear this tiny little bikini, show off, and everyone would look at her— including Brian. There was just something about that guy—the way that he looked at her—that gave me the creeps, I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like I was jealous. I had no reason to be. He was just this skinny dude with a paunch who didn’t do anything all day except sit out on his front porch and answer the telephone. Seriously. He owned a Sea-Doo rental place just outside of town, and then his house was a few miles past that, but he hardly ever went into the store. He had these young guys working for him there, so I guess he didn’t need to. Instead, he would sit around at home all day answering his phone. The way he talked about it, it was as if the Sea-Doo rental business was the most important shit on the face of the planet. The ringer on his phone was never turned on—it would just vibrate in his pocket and every time it vibrated he’d jump up and, real exaggerated, mouth out “sorry,” then take the call. It was so fucking stupid. He’d actually mouth the word, even before he’d picked up the phone.
Except for that, though, I liked the beach. And we were lucky to know someone who had a house literally right on the water. The house was stuck up on stilts and sometimes after it stormed or when the tide came in high, the water would rush right up under the deck. I liked sitting out there. Tracy was right—it helped me relax. We’d take chairs and put them in the shallow water and drink beer with our feet stuck in the sand. I’d build sandcastles with Cody and then help knock them down, or take a magazine down with me and stick my nose in it so I didn’t have to pretend to care about whatever Brian was saying. He was always saying stupid shit to Anelise and Tracy whenever he wasn’t saying it into the phone.
But when I came back after my third tour it was winter and so we didn’t go to the beach, and I didn’t relax. Tracy kept bugging me to see a shrink, but I told her it wasn’t that sort of a thing.
Well what sort of a thing is it? she wanted to know.
I was pretty sure she had told her friends about me, by then— about how we weren’t even really sleeping together anymore. I just sort of felt it. You know, like when we’d be hanging out with Anelise, I could feel it—that she knew. Maybe e
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