And that’s how I remember the end of the story. Prometheus was punished forever for messing around with powers greater than himself. Then we went to sleep and the cabin burned down.
Like so many stories, the Prometheus myth is a tale that’s destined to pop up in your life at different occasions, and the next two times it happened really got to me. The first time was during Ancient History at Wagner Middle in New York, because it dawned on me that there was apparently an original that didn’t take place in Phoenicia. The second was during Ancient Greek, my linguistics optional during my sophomore year in Amsterdam, because I was old enough to recognize the metaphors.
But that wasn’t the reason why, both times, my heart was thumping my ribs to smithereens in class. Not the reason why here, fifteen years later, almost at the top of the Panther Mile with Mrs. Bernstein, almost at the place where Grandpa’s story ended, sweat spouted out of my fingertips and earlobes, as I whispered to myself, “Don’t look back, Sam. Do not look back. Believe me, you don’t want to.”
But I did look back, and when I saw the Panther Mile disappear downhill through the tunnel of trees, I remembered what it had been like.
That night, that epic plunge, the night Huckleberry Wall was burning and the Panther Mile stretched out for miles and miles. Grandma at the back of the sleigh, whimpering softly, her arms wrapped around me, my arms wrapped around Julia, holding on tightly, bundled up in woolen blankets against the biting wind and the snowstorm. We plowed on for hours and hours, till my cheeks were frozen numb and I was scared like never before. All I could make out was that large, dark figure tugging us down the hill—black, pitch-black, so black it was a blotch in the night, not a real person. It wasn’t Grandpa, I knew, because it had no face and smoke was rising from its shoulders and skull. It was the Hermit who pulled the sleigh down the mountain that wintry night. The Hermit was the devil. And yes, there were birds, great, mythical birds you couldn’t see, only hear. Any minute, I expected them to swoop down, unimaginably fast, right through the bare branches. Then I would see eyes glowing like hearth embers and the ripping would begin, the ripping and the flapping and the screeching and the gorging.
And that’s why I never went back into the mountains, I told Mrs. Bernstein fifteen years later.
That descent, that night, it was the darkest night of my life, and it was a descent that went a whole lot deeper than back to the civilized world.
Mrs. Bernstein, the woman who, together with her husband, had taken care of us back then at the base of the Panther Mile, the woman who was old even then, I still didn’t dare look at her.
It was safer to hold her in the corner of my eye.
Her voice, I could still hear it. But it’s the faces you forget first. What if I looked and she had no face?
“It was extremely cold that night,” I heard Mrs. Bernstein say, a trace of sorrow in her voice. “When you get older, once that cold settles into your bones, it never really goes away anymore. Now I’m always cold. How’s Dorothy these days, by the way?”
My grandfather died three years after the fire in Huckleberry Wall; my grandmother five years ago, in 2013. I don’t know when Mrs. Bernstein died, but judging by what she said, it must have been sometime in between.
5
“Grandma still walks the Panther Mile,” I said. “Don’t you ever meet each other here?”
I turned around. I wasn’t surprised to see that Mrs. Bernstein was gone. The path was still. So still I wondered whether she’d been there at all. Somewhere in the woods, a woodpecker was tapping. For a brief moment, I felt a primordial chill in the marrow of my spine, then I shrugged it off.
I decided it didn’t matter.
What mattered was not what I’d find if I walked down the mile again, or whether the Bernstein farm, on the edge between wilderness and civilization, was empty or had been sold to new owners.
What mattered was where I ended up: just up ahead, the trail would reach a piece of fallow terrain, which in fifteen years’ time had probably been retrieved by nature. Where Huckleberry Wall’s foundations had once been, budding spruces would be growing, taller now than me. Nature would have obliterated any traces we left, and that thought was more frightening than the idea that I had walked up in the company of a dead woman.
Suddenly I had trouble breathing. My throat got so tight no air came through.
I didn’t want to see it. I stood there, frozen, told myself it was now or never. Then I ran. I whizzed down the Panther Mile. I fled my childhood’s ghosts, and with each step I imagined them becoming less real.
6
Cuz what I told Mrs. Bernstein—don’t tell me you thought that was the whole story. Reality check: not even half of it. Back to Huckleberry Wall, the night of my grandpa’s story, that night fifteen years ago, the nine-year-old me as restless and tormented as the tempest howling around the roof. The night that Prometheus haunted me and I wanted to, dunno, make him come alive. Prometheus, carrier of fire, my proto cult hero, my first role model, my inaugural man crush.
The last night of li’l Sam Avery’s innocence.
Or maybe not so innocent after all, cuz there I was, solo and out of the sack, Julia and Grandpa and Grandma dead to the world; butt naked, barring the two pillowcases I’d knotted together as a loincloth. Prometheus in my fledgling fantasy. There I was, identifying myself with my object of desire. Giving my overdue, twisted Oedipus complex free rein, cuz let’s face it, my mom couldn’t hold a candle to my superhero image. The loincloth so tight it didn’t matter I hadn’t discovered jacking off yet.
Hail Prometheus, a scrawny, nine-year-old, sexually aroused little narcissist.
And Nick wonders where my penchant for role-play comes from. Or bondage. As a nine-year-old, I’d already pined for the scene in which I’d be chained to the boulder, at the eagle’s mercy.
Didn’t happen.
Wide-awake in the middle of night, I sneaked into the living room, which was still warm from the smoldering hearth. The orange glow flickering over Huckleberry Wall’s gleaming pinewood panels. My retinue waiting in attendance on the carpet: Dr. Jingles, Twig, and Porcupiny. My teddy bear, my cuddled-to-rags indefinable whatever, and my what-the-name-implies.
This was my version of humanity.
And woe betide mighty Prometheus, addressing his cortege with open arms, doing his best not to cringe every time the gnarly branches struck the roof outside: “Worship me, oh subjects, that I will raise thee out of the clay!”
Totally full of himself, totally tripping on his rig-out. As early as that.
All those child psychologists, all those behavioral therapists they dragged you to, you didn’t tell them that story, cuz even though you still couldn’t understand those visceral feelings of incipient sexuality, you did savvy that this was the kind of secret you’d better keep to yourself.
I said, “I, the mighty Prometheus, shall bring you fire.”