Hellenic Immortal (14 page)

I remember very clearly when things went weird for her. We were sitting around a tree on a hill somewhere, and she was mad stoned on some hashish that a guy named Goofy had scored in Mexico. (Goofy was not his real name. His real name is Lawrence and he is now a prosperous estate attorney in Butte, Montana. It’s sort of a hobby of mine to look up people I knew as total nut jobs to see what happened to them.)

Cassandra was sitting cross-legged, and had adopted a Buddha-like pose— although she was not in the least bit fat or bald—and had not spoken for several minutes, despite a very rousing discussion the other five of us were having on the merits of Paul McCartney’s bangs and what they said about the geopolitical status of third world nations
vis-a-vis
colonialist America and the socio-economic pressures of hair products in general, and more specifically, how napalm and hair spray are really pretty much the same thing when you look at it a certain way.

See, you don’t get that kind of conversation just anywhere.

Quite suddenly Cassandra opened her eyes, and with a very strange expression on her face declared loudly, “Ask!”

My four stoned friends found this exceptionally funny. Me, I sobered up, because I’d seen this act before.

“Ask what?” I posed.

“Ask,” she repeated. Her eyes were unfocused, like . . . well, yes, like she was stoned, but more than that. Like she was staring intently at something that was actually on the inside of her eyeballs.

“What is her trip?” asked Chandra, a lovely girl to my right whom I had fully intended to bed later in the evening. (I didn’t.)

“Ask her something,” I suggested. “A decision. Do you have a decision you need to make soon? An important one?”

“You serious?” Chandra laughed.

“Completely.”

The others quieted down, as this had ceased being something to giggle over. Chandra looked furtively at the others. “I can’t,” she muttered, suddenly very nervous. “C’mon, someone else.”

“Okay,” Kenneth piped in. When he wasn’t stoned, Kenneth was an extraordinarily shallow person, which was why he was always stoned. He had a great future ahead of him that probably would consist of robbing somebody’s pension fund. “Should I go skiing over the break?” he asked. Kenneth was from a rich family; it was his money Goofy had used in Mexico.

Cassandra sat quietly for about thirty seconds, which seemed like approximately two days to us.

“Dude, I think she’s asleep,” Goofy suggested.

“Naw, her eyes are open,” Kenneth argued rightly.

“Why doesn’t she blink?” Chandra asked.

Suddenly, Cassandra boomed, “You will soar ‘ere the pines do walk. Beware the straightest path.” And then she closed her eyes.

“What?” Kenneth was confused. “What the hell did she just say?”

“You’re going to have to figure that out.” I crawled to Cassandra’s side and put my arm around her. If this was what I thought, she was about to lose some motor coordination.

“Figure what out?” Kenneth shouted.

“Soaring through the walking pines or something,” Goofy suggested.

“No, she was asking about the sidewalk,” Chandra offered.
 

Dear Baal, these people were stoned. “Kenneth,” I began, as Cassandra predictably slumped into my lap, “what she said to you was important. You need to figure out what it means and act accordingly.”

“Man, you’re stoned,” Kenneth laughed.

“No, I’m drunk. There’s a difference.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“What . . .” Cassandra asked, her eyes opening again and looking surprised to be in my lap. “Spencer? What happened?”

“You’ll be all right,” I said.

“Did I . . . was I talking? What was I saying?”

“Your first prophecy,” I said.

“My what?”

“Cassandra, did your mother ever tell you why she gave you that name?”

“No,” she answered, trying to sit up and ultimately failing. “Just liked the sound of it, I think.”

“Ask her sometime. I’m betting it’s an old family name.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re an oracle, Cassandra.”

*
 
*
 
*

In truth, the original Cassandra wasn’t an oracle at all. As Homer wrote it, she was given the gift of future-sight and the concomitant curse of having nobody believe her when she foretold the future. But she was just the stuff of legend, whereas the Delphic oracles were very real. And like the Cassandra of Berkeley, the oracles of the temple of Delphi were stoned when they gave their prophecies. The temple itself was built over a fissure, and rising from that fissure was a gas that had a psychotropic effect. I know this not because I ever went to them for advice, but because I used to hang in the temple after hours with a couple of the girls. (The gas made them almost perpetually horny, which was quite a conundrum for a group that was both highly respected and deeply feared by everybody in Greece: everyone was afraid to touch them. Worse, seventy percent of the male population was devotedly homosexual, whereas I was perfectly happy with either sex at the time.)

As I have said before, and will say again, as far as I can tell there is no such thing as real magic. But oracles don’t perform magic. They aren’t fortune-tellers either, not in the sense that most of us understand the term to mean. They can’t find lost children, divine the identity of a murderer, or tell you much at all about what your future holds. It’s very strict. You ask them a question, they give you an answer, and that’s it. They can see major events but they’re brief, episodic flashes, often without context, and always presented cryptically.

And there’s no point asking for clarification. I brought that up once to a Delphic oracle who informed me she described what she saw—nothing more, nothing less. The real problem is figuring out what to make of the answer you get.

That was Kenneth’s problem. He didn’t put much thought into it, or he would have realized Cassandra had told him not to go skiing. He went, and found his favorite trail was temporarily closed. But at the end of what was described to me as a glorious day on the mountain, Kenneth challenged his buddy to a race to the bottom of the hill. He decided to win that race by taking the most direct route, i.e., the closed trail. The problem was the trail was being widened at the time, and right as Kenneth soared down the slope, a crew was busy removing a large pine tree. They had felled it and dragged it right into the middle of the slope. It was twilight by then, and Kenneth didn’t see the felled tree until it took out his ankles. He slid head first into another tree. Miraculously, he didn’t die. But he never walked again, and took five years to get back onto solid foods.

I never formally sought an oracle’s advice. The whole idea was just too much of a head-trip. I did spend a couple of years helping out Cassandra, however, who needed all the assistance she could get and was extremely fortunate to know a guy who had kept the company of the original oracles. The sex was pretty good, too.

*
 
*
 
*

I was a little hung up on what Cassandra had said to me on the phone, shortly before giving me directions. She had been expecting me. The claim that she knew because that was her job was more than a little disingenuous because she can’t give herself a prophecy. In order for her to know I was coming, she had to see me in someone else’s future. So whom had she been sitting for?

This thought was what occupied my time as I made the two-hour trip from the diner to her home in Berkeley. Well, that and the constant recitation of the proper steps necessary to operate a motorized vehicle. (It would have been an even longer trip were it not for the miraculous discovery of fifth gear I made about midway through the drive.) The most obvious candidate was Ariadne, and that brought up another, much more interesting question. Did she intend for me to follow her all along?

The drachma, the note in my hotel room, and the orgy of information on the walls of her study—which more and more seemed like a place she tacitly expected me to see—all suggested I was following a deliberate trail of bread crumbs. If she had also gone to Cassandra, the possibility existed that she not only knew much more about me than anyone living should have; she might know more than I do. She might know my future.

I was probably missing some information. It would have been nice to ask Mike about it, except I never waited long enough at the diner for him to show. He probably assumed I headed straight for Canada. And really, I should have.

It was dark by the time I reached Cassandra’s house, a nice Victorian-style place within spitting distance of the campus. She’d done well for herself. Not spectacularly well, but well enough. I wondered if oracle duty was her sole source of income.

She was waiting on the porch when I pulled up.

“Spencer!” she called out. “You haven’t changed at all, damn you!”

“You know how it is.” I shut down Mike’s car and stepped out for a good stretch.

“Yes, I do,” she answered. “Come on in, I’ve already brewed some tea for us.”

*
 
*
 
*

We met one another inside the foyer with the embrace of a pair of old lovers, something I have a great deal of experience in and typically don’t look forward to at all.

Nothing quite reminds one of the transitory nature of youth and beauty as seeing someone remembered as a buxom twenty year old after forty or fifty years have passed. In most cases, time is extremely unkind, even though I generally say just the opposite to be polite. It can be pretty alarming. I remember running into a former lover I’d known as a slight, exciting, moderately creative seventeen year old when she was a 240 pound grandmother of twelve. And I could have sworn I’d just left her.

But Cass hadn’t changed as much as she probably thought. She was still rail-thin and seemed as full of youthful vitality as ever. Her frantic auburn hair had gotten thinner and grayer, and her skin had loosened up, but she still could have passed for someone ten or fifteen years younger than the mid-sixties she had to be. She still smelled the same. I wondered if she was as limber as before, but that struck me as too much to expect.

We separated, and she gave me a long stare with her cobalt blue eyes. “To think, I used to think of you as an older man.”

“I am,” I pointed out.
 

She slapped me on the arm. “You could pass for my son,” she scoffed. Then with a flourish, she said, “Come, to the kitchen!”

I followed her theatrical gesture through the front sitting room—tastefully appointed and hardly used, from the looks of it—and into a very lived-in kitchen. On the counter were two steeping cups of tea, causing me to wonder if perhaps Cassandra had picked up additional soothsaying tricks since I’d last seen her. How would she know when to have the tea ready?

“I took a guess on your arrival time,” she said, and for just a second I thought she’d been reading my mind. But nobody can do that. “You said you were an hour away, so I doubled the time and here you are.”

“Why double it?” I asked, although it was hard to argue the point given how right she was.

“You said once that the day you get behind the wheel of a car is the day you give up hope on surviving another century. I took that to mean you’re not a good driver, and the roads between hither and yon are littered with the remains of not-so-good drivers.”

It shouldn’t surprise you to know Cassandra majored in English.

She leaned towards me. “So, have you?”

“Have I what?” I was fiddling with my tea bag. Not a big fan of the bags, but I understand their practicality. Still, brewed tea was always the best way to do things, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

“Given up hope?”

“Not as far as I know. Just seemed like too long of a walk. And I had a car already.”

“Sure, sweetie. Not yours?”

“No,” I smiled. “Not mine.”

She nodded and expertly extracted her own teabag, squeezed the last remnants from it by pressing it against the concavity of the spoon, and flung it into an open trashcan that was sitting beside the counter.

I sipped from my cup. Darjeeling. “So how have you been, Cass?”
 

“I have been aging,” she said. “But not so badly.”

“No, you’ve done a very good job of it.” I meant it as a compliment even though it probably didn’t sound like one. Yes, there is a reason I don’t speak to old lovers very often. I suck at it.

“I teach,” she continued. “The classics, of course.”

“Of course. No problems with dead white men?”

“We continue to allow dead white men to be brilliant,” she smiled. She still had that smile. Honestly, I didn’t know whether I should be flirting or not.

“Family?” I asked.

She took a sip of her tea. “Never married. I had offers, but I found sleeping around was much more satisfying. I am looking into a couple of decent prospects now, if only just to get someone into this house willing to mow the lawn for free.”

I grinned. Cassandra never had much use for the male portion of the species outside of their obvious insert-tab-A-into-slot-B qualities. It was true when we shared an apartment, and was apparently no less so now.

Then we fell into an awkward silence. Possibly, it was my turn to say something about how my life had been going, but I had a feeling that telling her I drank and moved around a lot wasn’t going to make for a terribly engaging tale. Instead I asked, “Are you still an oracle?”

“Of course I am. Isn’t that why you came?”

“That’s the short version.”

“I imagine the long version is a hell of a lot more interesting,” she remarked, still daintily sipping her tea. Something brushed up against my leg.

“Ahh!” I cried out, somewhat less manly than was really warranted. It was a cat.

“That’s Wally. Hello, Wally!” she chirped a couple of times and up jumped Wally, right onto the counter and yes, this bugged me. “You don’t like cats,” she said matter-of-factly, rubbing the beast gently behind its ear.

“I used to hunt them, when they weren’t hunting me,” I pointed out. “It’s not something you get over. Wasn’t Wally the name of . . .”