"...before the silver cord is severed, or the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, or the wheel broken at the well, and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God.."   (Ecclesiastes 12:6-7)
                      
 8    What Pasiphae wrote all day and night was unimportant.  She wrote not for posterity, but in order to keep herself busy and involved, but also detached and safe, in and under control—to keep from exploding.  She never edited nor experienced writer's block.  She saw language as a tool no different from a suspension bridge.  She wrote indiscriminately, out of a choking need, powered by preempted nostalgia, to prove that time existed by naming it.  She didn't care to distinguish the night from the blackness, the shadow from the eclipse, the scent of maple syrup on french toast from the steam of hot eggrolls, nor was she ever tempted to draw conclusions.  She was the original writer: a failing record keeper. Pasiphae recorded the present, a realm that as yet has no shape.  She didn't aspire to make sense.  She was simply and anonymously transcribing the refuse of history, writing against infinity.Pasiphae never read what she wrote because she preferred to always find herself at the beginning of a text, in the proximity of that fleeting intimacy between her and a life she was unable to inhabit, like a Sisyphus climbing up a mirage.  As a result, she had no idea how much time ever elapsed.  She would lift her head every so often and notice with some alarm that her walls were overgrown with vines or her skin was turning blue. But time was seamless when it came to stories.
     She thought of her writing as a bird, so she didn't anchor it.  She wrote hundreds of pages a week and gave them away.  When she had first come to America and needed to make a living, she rented booths in county fairs, campuses or parking lots and wrote a-buck-a-poem portraits.  There was no shortage of customers wanting to be written about.  Her regular clients grew addicted to her word-portraits, seeing them as a means of owning themselves, and some even held her responsible for who they were.  She turned people into summaries to save the world from chaos.  Her writing became a communal healing rite, pure because it had lost and surpassed its meaning.  It complemented life. She lived kind of like an exorcist, well loved, specifically for her dedication to a dead medium, and at large because of the aura of the auteur hovering about her like an exclamation mark.  All sorts of people constantly sought her out, posing nervously for her manic fingers: ad-hoc cabies, gamblers, bankers, butchers, surgeons or philanthropists passionately insisted: "Miss, you must write about my life!"  But Pasiphae did not want to be a confessor.  She wanted to be an expletive. She shunned intellectuals, preferring people who could not integrate their exclusion.  Her solitude had nothing in common with the easy, proud isolation of individualism, the desire to be free or distinct or timeless.  Her writing was an uninterrupted ignorance that set her apart and discharged her from all other life; she was finite and the text was not, and that was her battle.
     Sometimes, holding a pen, Pasiphae found that her hand refused to let it go even though she very much wanted to put it down in order to caress a risen pale penis that reminded her of Jesus.  But her right hand tightened its grip.  The pen was the weight of an organ, a baby's heart or a puny liver, removed from a chest and nestled in the curve of her fist.  She craved a shy boy's sperm trickling through her small fingers that instead grasped the ink-dripping pen with a visceral greed.  Her other hand tried to intervene, but the diseased writing hand would imperceptibly and inevitably reattach itself to the pen it had just been made to release.  What was striking was the naturalness of its gesture.
1
     Back in the old country, where ample women carrying pitchers from the island well saw the sea leap into sky every sunset and so knew the world had an end, where Pasiphae had been weaned off her rebel mother instants after birth, everything (every wind, every abdomen, every shadow, every rifle, every grape) spewed forth stories; and these stories sustained the inhabitants during long periods of tyrannical oppression, when people had to dream up bonfires to keep warm, and heap the dead high to make shade, and live on fermented carob beans and crunchy grasshoppers.  They whispered confidentially about a melodic well somewhere in the cliffs that hadn't run dry for three thousand years, and about gardens where watermelons grew big enough to sail in, and about winters when all manner of edible beasts were tossed like wriggling scapegoats from the seas.  Thanks to these communal tales, the wardust didn't caulk their eyes, the conquerors' paeans didn't deafen them, the hunger didn't harden their souls, and almost all of them survived, and quite a few even fought back. 
     Pasiphae's own story might as well start at dusk during one such bleak period when her pregnant mother, Dido, belly bulging like an occupying tank, hands nimbly pressed beneath an empty clay pitcher, walked to the edge of town feeling her ripe anger balloon and wend its way through the blasted dirtroads, goading her to haul no longer water but the latest tyrants' blood; and to veer off her daily path and follow a parched whistling to the cliffs where she was met by a dozen solemn stormy men covered in scabs and odors, whose inner organs had long fled into famous battles, and who lived on the knowledge that beauty is ultimately preserved only in blood.  Dido offered to join them in carving the newest horizon.  And so at the moment when other women were gathering their big black skirts and kneeling over the bucket to drink, or turning the squeaky crank against their wide hips, Pasiphae's mother smashed her pitcher against the inhospitable cliff and with a shard sliced her hand to mix her blood with her new warmates', then drank it and vowed on her unborn baby's soul not to bring water home again or perform any domestic chore but instead to cheat and whore and pillage until her country was led to freedom.
2
     Pasiphae's father, Androgeus, spent most of his life pining for his phantom bride, Dido, whom he lost first to the peasant rebels, and later, more dramatically, to the Cretan sea.  For the first four years after she'd vanished, he tried to find Dido or even recreate her in Pasiphae; but incest was a mighty obstacle.  The more he struggled to mould Pasiphae in his beloved's image, the more he realized that if one looked too closely at anything, one risked coming face to face with the Devil. 
     "What did she look like when you were alone, Dad?  Did she have a smile?" Pasiphae at the age of nine or ten would ask him as they cuddled in bed under the night.  She asked because she feared that her own memories were unfailingly fictitious, usurped from library books.  "Your mother was an ogress.  She wandered into this bed in pitch darkness smelling of cigar smoke," Androgeus would reply, squeaking his side of the mattress so nervously that Pasiphae imagined him rubbing himself in the manner of sunstricken cicadas.  "She bled smoke from every pore as she lay her pearly canines against my neck.  She was a biter.  Every night she took another chunk out of my spine.  I became afraid only when it hit me that sooner or later I'd run out of meat.  But how I loved being eaten!  I rocked in this bed against the constant chopping and spilling of her seawash, my corroding hulk full of seasick sperm, listening to her mindless slap-slap; `Give me some of that good stuff,' she'd say, smacking her lips as she hauled me into an undeniable ocean.  Every night I grew lighter, and I begged her to suck me up like water suckling at the leaky chineboards of a skiff.  But she didn't have the time.  One night the phone rang.  The world erased itself in a cataclysmic wave when I picked up the receiver.  Someone said she'd slipped underwater, no traces, no sodden corpse."
3
     Androgeus's father, Sarpedon-may the wave that embraced him turn to port wine-han't wanted his son to be a sailor: "Stay away from the hauntress," he advised Androgeus, "she has no pity or faith.  Worship her all you want, sing her praises, she'll stick to her cunning.  Sooner or later she'll dig your grave, son, or she'll spit you out, a bag of useless bones.  Sea or woman, the same bottom-less trap, misery, a gap under our feet, can't be tamed," he chanted on during holidays, those rare seasons when he wasn't diving for treasures and sponges or running bootleg cargo on Libyan-flagged ships.  Like most men on the island, grandfather Sarpedon was addicted to the ocean.  
     After he quit the sea at age 69, Sarpedon simply transferred his loyalty from one liquid element to another, and in the process he retained his seaman's phobia for narrow bathrooms, and so he kept a blue Tupperware bowl on the rough cement under his four-poster where he presumably peed in secret while the town slept.  No one knew when and where he emptied it.  He was widely known as a gifted drinker and, after disembarking, he made his living as a wine-consumer at weddings and festivals.  He was paid to cajole the guests into the bacchanallic ecstasy and memorable brawls that guarranteed a feast's success, and this he did by challenging anyone to outdrink him, bottoms-up, telling nightlong seafaring stories and generally setting a good example.  A man who lived off his drinking couldn't logically contain so much liquid inside his gaunt body, and yet the townsmen who spied on him for nights on end never caught him in the act of emptying his bladder.  In time he grew famous for holding his liquor.  His belly gurgled from miles away, and some claimed that his swashing reserves of urine served to perpetuate his illusion of being at sea. 
     After her grandfather's example, at an early age Pasiphae began struggling to capture the inexorable currents of the sea inside her tiny bowels, and extend her insides to contain its might, and as a result she refused to pee.  She bloated by day, and liked to voyage in her nightly wetted bed whose wooden bars rose around her like the skeleton of a skiff; she liked to float on her slippery back and navigate through her whirlpooling desires as if they were pungent waves, forging a hydraulic destiny for herself, imagining her childish body to be the lubricated finger of God.
     According to island lore, the Phoenician family descended from the goddess Thalassa-later known as Poseidon-and, naturally, every man in Pasiphae's genealogy had died at sea.  Even old Sarpedon, who spent his final days at the wineshop sucking alternately on a rusty nargileh and a wine barrel sprocket, sighing and shaking his skinny head at fellow drunken sea veterans, breathed his last during the baptism of a fancy yacht that met a storm on her virginal route around the town's rocky harbour.  Her owner, a moneyed returning expatriate, her crew and the saluting revellers, had all drowned within a mile from shore with enough sweet red wine in their bellies to console those left grieving that the dead hadn't noticed the passage from inebriation into ocean and extinction. 
     Historically, the sea had been the Phoenicians' family mausoleum and also their collective treasury.  Although the men, out of a deepseated superstition that a reversal of fortune always loomed imminent upon the next wave, complained that the sea had no money, each one of them could have bought a fair-sized island with their profits if they hadn't invested it all back into the sea.  Instead, the different generations competed over who would build the biggest boat or become captain younger or carry riskier contraband freight.  For their dry-land entertainment, they cruised the island's shipyards. 
     And young Pasiphae, who noticed the gap between the men's warnings against the sea and their lovestruck actions, could not solve the mystery, and imagined that God propelled their souls down into the off-shore waves like the wind pulls rocks off a cliff, out of sheer gamesmanship. 
     So long as her mother lived, every beauty that Pasiphae saw-the leather-skinned sailors in loose white linen shirts, the wooden nautical curves, the long-tressed unmarried girls singing of salty men, and the echoing sea that rode over the pebbles foaming and chasing the heart of the earth as if to cool its flames-led to the sea. Every morning she left her warm and wetted bed and ran to the shore, where she tried her best to anger the water and feel its foam on her skin like the saliva of a rabid beast.  Whenever she watched a liner lift anchor and leave the port lit-up and whistling, her ropes taut like ink lines, Pasiphae's heart nearly cracked under the weight of her envy.  And even when tragic news of shipwrecks submerged the island in black, and every face she knew turned wrinkled and mute, and orphans wailed through the streets, Pasiphae wished that her own flesh had been that ravenous sea. 
     And yet Pasiphae's father was the only Phoenician in memory immune to the call of the sea.  Androgeus forsook the water for the woman; the fluvial passion that overtook his ancestors for taming the wet consumed him when he saw Dido stroll down the cobbled harbour promenade, poised like a prow's maidenhead, eyes flashing like blades, nipples tight against the starched lace, her lustrous hair unleashed on invulnerable shoulders, prouder than any skiff, and he ached to glue himself to her, to call himself her; and to irreparably be her.  The more he stalked her, with the impatience of a tongue poised on the edge of a clitoris, the deeper he became convinced that the world could be reconstituted within her, that God might have created the very seas from Dido's body fluids. As he daily chased her, breathless from his desire like a marathon swimmer, Androgeus knew that the magnet that had pulled his forebears to the sea now propelled him with iron desire behind the steps of this undulating woman.
     "You can have her if you deny the water," Dido's father Rhadamanthys, the winemaker, responded.  His son Glaukus had just drowned in a vat of honey and old Rhadamanthys was anxious for male descendents.  "I make enough wine for you to swim in, if that Phoenician blood kicks up. Just procreate."  "But I'll be shamed if my wife's fortune feeds me," Androgeus protested.  "That woman is a life's task! So, as long as I live, I'll bottle the wine and you the girl," Rhadamanthys ordered. "After that, you mind the children and stay away from the docks.  And keep her harnessed, son.  She has no psychology."  "Thanks to Dido, the sea holds no secrets from me, sir, don't you worry," Androgeus promised, "its timeless spell has been shattered like an old clay pitcher."  
     With that guarantee, they proceeded into the requisite bargaining to set the dowry, and a three-day wedding ceremony ensued, where the wines flowed as if Poseidon himself had struck his trident into the island rock.  Being a present tense kind of woman, Dido knew that if it wasn't this man it'd be another, so she stomped her foot and waved her acquiescence, impatient to at least be rid of her girlish hymen.  And Androgeus quickly found his Elysian escape in the saturating vacuum of her vagina.
4
     Perhaps what followed—the revolutionization of Dido-could be explained in part by old Rhadamanthys's favorite drunken speech, which he missed no opportunity, festive or mournful, to repeat to any one present, and which Pasiphae had heard a few dozen times and so calculated her mother must have heard at least a thousand.  It went, with little variation: "We are men, we; we're islanders!  We've taken a crooked path like a badly captained ship, yes, but we're not garbage; and even if we are, we'll live on and grow powerful and glorious like before.  The ironwood-it stays ironwood, no matter if you axe it down.  The lion is a lion even after you shave off his mane and chop off his testicles and pull out his teeth and nails. Manhood is our nature—it's how we're made!
     Look to the East.  There the sun rises, brilliant and never setting.  Now look West: molten skies and teacherous shores, weighted by tears and spleen; that water tears our land to shreds, eats at it, beats it pitilessly.  But look the other way, toward Constantinople: weather like diamonds; seas like holy water.  Because God's gaze falls on those parts.  You sick?  Swim there to be healed. You blind? Rub in that water and you'll see the world.  You're deaf? Drink it and you'll hear harmonies.  
     That first foreigner's stinky breath dried the roses of our unspoiled city, his slobbering kisses sucked away her sacred blood. Conquerors, too many and worthless to name, have since been running over us like centaurs in heat—they disembowl old men, molest pregnant women, lie in our rulers' beds, flatten our monuments and call themselves by our names.  Ships come and go, looting our souls. Our hallowed symbols have been shipped off to the barbarian West, to civilize it.  But St. Sophia's altar didn't join that unholy procession; they tried to steal away Justinian's sacred marble slab over which so many victory psalms were sung as our best men offered sacrifice, but it refused to be a slave within museum walls; the foreign ship gaped in half and the altar slid out into the Eastern sea.  So now when we sail in that direction, we smell the myrrh that rises from the seabottom and feel we're men, invincible!  And as out of the chalice comes the Christian's salvation, so our salvation will rise from that drowned marble; our rebirth will dawn when our altar comes ashore. Then we'll conquer back our wealth, our stories; we'll get back Constantine's sword and our temple's gates and the Wise Men's clock and our bronze horses.  The West will be poor and humble again, and the far East will not dare look at us with greed again, and our city will again be the universe.  Yes. No two ways about it. Because we're men, we!  Men and Islanders!"
5
For their first two years together Androgeus and Dido lived by their axes and their genitals, working the vineyards and their bodies.  She was sixteen when they were joined by the town priest and pelleted by handfuls of sugared almonds and silver-leafed rice, and within the year she conceived.  Work and love and no time.  The arid soil hid their seeds from chickens and birds, and it heated and resurrected them until they took on creeping ferocious colors, shapes and smells.  But by the time Androgeus had learned to plow, Dido had learned to leave no fingerprints, and by the time he could prune, she could hijack and ransom; during his first successful harvest she was practicing how to assemble and detonate explosives, and by the time he'd adequately trained his palette to recognize premium vintages, he'd lost her to the revolution.  From then on, Dido stayed under Androgeus's roof and name only as a cover up; but she offered him no fidelity, no privacy and no respite, for her life was not hers ever since she'd signed it over to the Resistance with her blood.  In revolt, Dido found release from the needs of individual self-expression; she did not have to choose; she only had to behave heroically.  She lived in a vibrant streamlined world where good and evil were lucidly defined.  And she particularly enjoyed the ceremonial urgency of adlibing history that enveloped whatever she did.
     Everyone knew Dido was charmed, protected in her rebellion by some biased patron saint, because despite the risks she took still living in town instead of taking to the mountaintops, she had never been arrested, interrogated and forced to sign-and-recant or be executed. Because of this amazing power to go about unquestioned, her most important task was recruiting each successive generation willing to die for the cause, and, later, visiting them in jail with clothes, glasses, patriotic small talk and medicine, easing their last days as well as recording them for foreign relief organizations.  She sat countless times in military court as some close-shaven man in fatigues read, without emotion, the simple word DEATH, after the names of bright-eyed boys and girls not old enough to vote if elections had been legal. 
     She remained an inscrutable-and for the Resistance irreplacable-woman.  When deathrow inmates glimpsed through the narrow grilled windows that led to the courtyard above a pair of modish cherry colored pumps with bows and slender heels, they knew Dido would be appearing any minute like a portrait through the square window on the metal cell door in her cherry colored pillbox hat, smiling.  "I found you!" she'd say; "You're alive!" with never a worry in her gaze.  No one knew exactly which generals or generals' chauffeurs she befriended and with what favors she paid them off;  but somehow she managed to break no-visitor rules, to locate coopted aquaintances in ministries whose signatures could save lives, to laugh with them charmingly as she argued the going price of a head on behalf of those whose families could afford it; and to whisper last-minute Resistance directives with her parting kiss through the bars to those who would not survive, waving goodbye with a confident slender hand clad in a cherry colored lace glove. 
     Because of this, Pasiphae had grown to confuse her mother with the angel of death, and shivered with dilated eyes on the pitch-dark nights when Dido, ignoring the curfew, came home, and on her way to Androgeus' bed would stop by Pasiphae's open door to glimpse her daughter's comatose shape over the wall-to-wall sacks of grenades perennially stored all around Pasiphae's bed.  Then Pasiphae would hold her breath, and her clenched mouth would taste full of the thick mud of sand and blood that composed the prison courtyard into which the sweaty feet of the condemned sank every dawn, as they stood to be shot, calling out "Viva!" or "It's so silly that we're dying." 
6
     Soon after Dido vowed to resist, and after he'd taken Androgeus aside for a drunken man-to-man in which he told him, "Now you better be like that hairy-chested prophet Elijah, boy, who carried his oar on his back like a shovel and headed for the mountaintops where no one knew his name, I warned you, she's like Justinian's marble," old Rhadamanthys slipped on a landmine left over from the latest war while experimenting with a homemade method of breeding drosophylla on crystallized honey, and so blew up his skull, bequeathing to his descendants thousands of mutant flies and dozens of oak barrels of excellent vinegar.  By then the town was practically a barracks, the bitterly embattled locals had forgotten the fine nuances between old wine and new vinegar, and Androgeus wanted only to hide like the prophet Elijah.
     So after Rhadamanthys' burial-pompous despite the meagre times because Dido's presence prevented the usual anti-establishment looting by the cliff rebels, which made the funeral a rare safe social event for oppressors and oppressed-Androgeus sold off the vinegar and the land to an assistant prosecutor's clerk and took the vacant job as the city's librarian. The family moved into the white-washed house attached to the marble library overlooking the harbour, which Dido swiftly cluttered with muffled printing presses. Because of the insurmountable restlessness at home and in the streets, and since the war had closed down the schools, Pasiphae whiled away her days in the library where she strolled in echoing step with her frowning father, hands behind their backs, down the abandoned rows of books that sat buried on neatly numbered dim shelves in the labyrinthine corridors. Clearly, no one needed literature in times of pestilence.
     Androgeus found solace in the hollow echoing library, as much as he could in anything, given that he felt shamed by his wife's insurgent independence and that he also suffered from an astonishing thirst for her.  In vain he fasted or ate pulped rotten hogfish, transcribed the old ascetics' treatises onto pighide, or alphabetized extinct volcanoes, for no labor and no attrition could release him from his ghastly yearning to slip once and for all inside the robust and lucid gorge of Dido's body.
     By his side, little Pasiphae inevitably played with words instead of toys.  Raised in a world where the gravest shame was to break down and talk, she cultivated her silence like a Zen garden and started to use her writing hand in place of her vocal chords.  She rewrote the old myths and hoped that, like her namesake, when she came of age she too would seduce a raging bull, white like God's semen.  
     Pasiphae masturbated for the first time when she was five, soaking in her mother's lionclawed bathtub, secretly reading a yellowed library copy of Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra propped against her waterlogged knees.  She didn't quit when her wrist began to ache and her labia clammed up and the dirty water turned stale and chilled; she imagined her bathtub as both barge and Cleopatra, and read the same passage over and over, "The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, burn'd on the water....  At the helm, a seeming mermaid steers.  The silken tackle swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands.  From the barge a strange invisible perfume hits the sense of the adjacent wharfs.  The city cast her people out upon her;"  she alternated the emphasis from syllable to syllable until she felt sure she'd written it herself, for her own gratification.  Through this bare endeavor, she first perceived the three cardinal methods of attaining pleasure: usurp, imagine, come.
7
     Even in the darkest times of civil oppression, Dido wore striped silk turbans and swung a flashy purse that impeccably matched her stiletto heels and bulged with inky terrorist leaflets.  She had a small mouth, a milky body odour that could go provocatively sour, sumptuous dense hair, a bosom like Lolobrigida's and the thinnest of bones.  When she met clandestinally with foreign activists to pass on encoded torture reports and the rolls of film that she carried like tampons in her vagina, she liked to clarify first that "On this island, we dress up."  "The closer you live to death, the better you should dress," she calmly explained to the dowdy foreigners, jingling her gold bangles triumphantly.
     Dido was the kind of prodigal woman who could slaughter time and space by wearing a mini and standing in an oh-so tilt against a cypress in the sparsely greening park.  She knew how to launch herself hard and precariously against the night and be at home in the gutter under the blurry stars.  Minoan labrys and Doric laws, Macedonian swords, Roman puke, Byzantine pomp, Sarrasin fleet, Venetian walls, Turkish mosques, German kings, Nazi tombs, U.S. bases, nuclear arms, shredded comrades, stark varying light on yellowfaced harborlining wallsharing houses with vineyards on the roofs-she contained it all.  She planted bombs in government offices and machinegunned naive ambassadors, shopped at elite boutiques with Middle Eastern terrorist-promoting oil cash and danced the nights away breaking plates with the city fathers, she conspired under torn cots in batshit-strewn peasant shacks and daily changed codenames and histories, and she felt it all pulsing in her loins like the ripening and rupturing of a mature graafian follicle. She knew nature would take care of every-thing else, unthaw the flowers, moisten the fruits, nudge the sun up gold, if only she kept resisting.
     Life for Dido was a game with death by then: she liked to flaunt how narrowly and frequently she could escape it.  Some said that Dido grew tired of winning and too curious about dying toward the end.  She was "killed" in ambush at the harbour one dawn on her way to the dawn's executions, all decked out in royal purple.  Her alleged attackers were an apologetic fumbling duo who wept publicly for the mishap and mourned her by sporting waist-length beards and widowers' black.  The two were tried but released, either on insufficient evidence or because they were the army's paid peons. After all the conflicting theories had settled, the islanders surmised that Dido had fallen or been thrown into the harbour and her corpse probably lay lodged in a cracked rockbed where the island's lost history had been silting up.  Amateur spearmen and seasoned spongers hunted for her, and it was months before the city gave up searching for its Dido through the slickgray water, but her corpse was never found; and yet no one questioned her death, convinced that Dido would not abandon her homeland and its Resistance of her own free will.  She was perceived like any other legendary shipwreck, a monument to the fickleness of the Gods. When the government changed a few years later, little bronze statues of a windblown Dido were generously erected in the island's rebuilt schoolyards and squares.
      Pasiphae was eight or nine when her mother drowned, or disappeared.  Because Dido had always been too big and bored for maternity, acting always like a transplanted Amazon, Pasiphae now suspected that her mother might have outgrown the local revolution and swam off, away and abroad, to become a global myth.  Because she was bequeathed no farewell signs or any other tools with which to bridge herself to Dido's absence and death, the shock of that suddenly missing center led Pasiphae to view her own little mortal body as an excremental impediment to her mind's long-term striving for translucency. Her young experience of death taught her that she would never feel comfortable in her flimsy body, because (or so long as) her mind didn't feel capable of dying. 
     In response to all those tongue-tying questions, Pasiphae vowed to fight reality to the end; to record her own death step by step year after year and thus defeat it; to leave no unquoted gaps.  So she inadvertedly became a cold-blooded dysphemist archivist.  Following Dido's disappearance, no one ever saw Pasiphae free of pen and paper.
     In the meantime, to escape his drowned love's saltant succubus and the prosaic logistics of keeping house, Androgeus moved into the public library, like a shattered pharaoh might move house into a pyramid.  Outside the august neoclassical edifice people bred, slaved, sacrificed and died, but within the high marble walls Pasiphae lived untempted.  In her new home she achieved impeccable control of her bladder, wrote in the bathtub, on the toilet, at dinner, even in her sleep, and she never again ran ecstatically to the sea.  And this is how Pasiphae fell into writing at that vulnerable age when other children fall into dry wells or unobstructed manholes or wolves' malodorous jaws, and continued to fall unimpeded for years since texts are by their nature bottomless...                                              
0
As Pasiphae blossomed into puberty, Androgeus, half terrified of his own body's unspeakable excitement and half disappointed at his daughter's less than dropdead Didoan bloom-the cynosure of Pasiphae's voluptuousness being a beauty spot between her eyebrows, that according to legend had also graced Helen of Troy-climbed out of their bed one night and never returned.  Pasiphae divined that he must have gone in search of her mother at the bottom of the sea, an assumption that the civic authorities shared and so underwrote the expense for a husband-and-wife iconic Christian burial over the man-eating harbour.  As a civil war orphan, Pasiphae qualified for the army's coveted relocation-abroad programs, but as the sole informed inhabitant of the island's only public library she was kept at her father's position for almost two years, the time it took for the city secretary of books to reach a consensus among bribing and bribed concerned parties on the right man to fill the vacancy, making sure he had rightwing politics and-caught in the mistrustful paranoia of the times-that he actually walked on the righthand side of the streets.  A blood-drenched period of peace had just begun-orchestrated by the puppet-government as a betrayal of the guerrillas, who were promised amnesty for turning in their weapons and were massacred after they did-so the city had reason to encourage a resurrection of its public functions, and was recklessly investing in frivolous recivilizing flower beds, fountains, toilets and librarians.
     But during this acidifying time, while Pasiphae fanatically wrote and rarely ventured out of doors, news of Androgeus' adventures slowly seeped in through the library walls.  It turned out he hadn't jumped to his death but joined a monastery of orthodox cenobites driven by his painful urge to lash himself, live under the sign of the fish and think in symbols. He had craved an unfenced elutriated life, divorced from past and future, with only a monk's knife under his belt; and because cenobites didn't tie the stone of silence around their necks as a noose, he exchanged his solitude for their brotherhood, eager to share a common audible quiet with celibate men who did everything-cook, plow, defecate, bargain, or hallucinate-in packs and extended their prayers like a dam between them and the world. 
     Monasteries were popular refuges in times of terror, and Androgeus joined dozens of ex-rebels forfeiting worldly pleasures for the safeties of God; as the ceasefire had turned to genocide, persecuted guerrillas sought bodily salvation in the Church they had mocked.  Androgeus had barely taken his vows when the island's octogenarian father superior expired under the political pressures and was succeeded by a hot-tempered reverend, strong as a bull, with a foot-long beard beating savagely in the slightest breeze and a crisp fiery gaze beneath his joined black brows which some associated with Mephistopheles.  He was the only man who could command the small army of ad hoc monks that had just accumulated within the ancient limestone walls of the island's monasteries, for rumour had it that he'd lifted a wild horse a meter above the ground in one hand.  He was a lover of wine inclined to toasting himself in unintelligible Byzantine at vespers, and his pyrotechnic authority tortured poor Androgeus (now renamed brother Elijah) because it reminded him of the underground plots and corporeal instincts he was struggling to shed. But as every monk should know, the Devil was infinitely wise and wily, and Elijah nightly flagellated his scrawny flanks more passionately than ever as a result. 
     One festival day, when the monastery traditionally celebrated the nameday of St. John the Hungry with mulberry grappa and salted sardines on unleavened seaweed bread offered at the end of mass to the faithful, the secular crowd waited in vain for the gates to open in hardy welcome.  At first they assumed the good fathers had overslept and feared waking them by ringing the ironcast bell, but eventually they did so and panicked when its ominous clanging failed to produce the abbot towering livid like Zeus before them.  Their escalating anxiety turned them into a mob that sawed through the heavy gate to the handle inside, then kicked open every cell's door and, finding them all empty, one by one climbed trembling with pity and fear up to the father superior's quarters in the ramparts.  There the old carved door opened practically by itself and revealed, piled unceremoniously on the unmade bed, exhibiting grotesque signs of surprise and disillusion, each still holding tightly to a long curved sword of the kind villagers used to skin pigs, four dead monks.  When their eyes grew accustomed to the dark sight of massacred holiness, the festival-goers counted five more cassocked corpses lying face down on the blood-soaked wooden floor surrounding the unvanquished bed. 
     The village priest was summoned and the victims were buried in silent haste while church bells rang monotonously throughout the island and the police set out on a fearsome manhunt for the father superior and the missing Elijah.  During the orgy of rumours that followed, it was said that the monastery, as satyrists would want it, had a bristling sex life.  Housewives sighed profound moans as they conjectured in whose bedroom the virile father superior was presently hiding.  Men argued that logically the tenth monk could only have been in bed with the abbot, and scholars mulled over the fine points of whether the abbot had been miraculously saved through the will of God or the Devil.  The mystery was finally enlightened by a witness who came forward when the church, in shame, noting that ignorance justified licentious talk, and hoping that fact would prove more moral than fiction, announced a monetary reward to anyone who could shed light on the mushrooming scandal.
     It was then that sister Dorothea, a nun-in-training who, dressed in black from head to toe, often mounted the steep hill from the village to sweep the church and do the monks' washing, admitted being in the abbot's bed during the ill-fated uprising. Her front-page picture in all the dailies sold more copies than the king's birthday photo, and showed that under the shapeless peasant's garb beamed a sumptuous girl whose great almond eyes shone with a bottomless lust.  Newsreaders had no trouble imagining her pale feathery softness in which the father superior searched for his Maker, and the heavenly symphony played by her penetrated inner organs when he prayed on her like a calliope.  People saved her picture to refer to in times of drought and remind themselves that a good sister's breasts could keep a man warm all winter and her thighs could keep him sane. 
     She needed the reward to pay rent, Dorothea told the police, puffing on unfiltered cigarettes.  She told them she was eighteen and as innocent as nature itself and had made ends meet on her own since her father's disappearance with the Navy when the foreign allies had accidentally sunk the nation's fleet some years back; and she was saddled with a howling mother affected by the moon, who ate like an ox and had to be kept locked up.  The only sane person she had left was her brother, who got her the job at the monastery where he was a monk.  She mentioned that during the war she'd made her cigarettes out of dried donkey dung, and she had already been fornicating with her brother, brother Theodoros, when he brought her to the monastery, and there he started sharing her with the other monks in exchange for favors or extra food or work shifts or mere friendship, and they had all enjoyed this until the new abbot got wind of it and almost sent them to the bishop to be defrocked and shaven off; but when they offered him a clay jar of aged Samian wine, he spared them and took the wine and Dorothea under his protection.  At first, for her safety, she slept in his closet when she had to spend a night at the monastery, but eventually he took her into his bed where she encountered the excesses of holiness.  He told her he suffered from hole-riddled recurrent dreams and so he needed to indiscriminately fill up any hole he could, to atone for all the holes he'd opened.  He also told her that sadly everyone he hated had long since died, and so he would enter her after Thursday mass and not pull out until the Friday matins, in order to console himself.  At those times, the ancient monastery ramparts resounded with a low grunting sound like the rooting of a contumacious hog, and the breeze carried a rank odor as from a rotting hairy carcass.  Gradually, Theodoros' head went dizzy with jealousy until he forfeited his vows and goaded his suffering brothers to slay the father superior like a boar, then bury his corpse in the underground tombs beneath the centuries' webbed pyramids of bygone monks' skeletons, and announce that he had run away-a persuasive excuse since people knew the abbot to be a rootless man who hid his history under his fury and used his cassock like a mask.  Dorothea was informed of the plot but had kept silent, as any victor's spoils would. 
     On the predetermined night, Dorothea's rapturous screams travelled to her vigilant brother through the open windows and, in his agony, Theodoros sped up the insurgent plan and signalled a few hours early for the monks' gruesome attack.  Visible through the moonlit window drapes were Dorothea's white resplendent buttocks breaking like frothy waves into the father superior's pelvis; Theodoros was unable to silence his avenging footsteps and quiet his esurient panting, so as he kicked open the unlocked door and shouted: "You shouldn't have put the meat to sister, father!" leaping like a shadowy incubus onto the rickety bed, he was met by a bullet that drilled a hole in his forehead.  Terrified, Dorothea tried to slip out of the battlefield by disengaging her impaled pussy from the superior hard-on, and as she did so she must have hurt the father who swore under his breath but kept on shooting without missing a beat, so that by the time she was fully off  him and grabbing for a blood-sprinkled sheet to cover her nakedness, he had planted one echoing bullet per forehead and shouted "Ingrates!" exactly nine times.  It was all over by one a.m.  He was slapping Dorothea's cheeks to revive her, when a dishevelled Elijah rushed in, wearing a tattered nightdress, his flabby body bearing the countless red welts of his self-cleansing, and he stopped short of utterance as his sleepy eyes abruptly awoke to the community of butchered monks adorning the fatherly bed and to the pig-slaughtering knives they clasped and to their stupefied expressions.  He suddenly felt the whole world collapsing irrevocably, or perhaps expanding irrevocably, and he later told the abbot he had at that moment experienced the life-changing shock the sailors aboard the Niña must have felt when their ship didn't fall off the end of the world but instead sailed straight into the Bahamas. 
     "A novices' mutiny," the abbot exclaimed. "They didn't count on my rifle under my pillow.  Get yourself some secular clothes, Dorothea, crunchy apple of contention, treacherous as the sea; you too, Brutus. We're going on a trip."  Minutes later, led by the abbot's will and rifle, the three were riding their mules through tobacco-brown vineyards towards town, and arrived in time to take the morning boat to the capital.  Dorothea had never sailed and was mesmerized by the friendly crew; as a result, she couldn't repeat the two men's conversations to the police except to say that Elijah, who had resumed being Androgeus, and who had always before looked oblivious as if reading a book that was invisible to all but him, now lightened up until the ex-abbot no longer had to threaten him.  She was surprised by their intimacy; she had seen neither of them so jovial before and couldn't fathom why they took so well to their new identities of outlaws. After disembarking, the men philosophized as she strolled in and out of the capital's glittering shops, and the abbot found them lodgings at a harbour hotel where he introduced her as his cousin.  The lights of the taverns shone so tantalizingly while the men were shaving off their beards that she begged the abbot's permission to go out.  He replied that she should now find a new unspoiled lover to protect her, as he couldn't enter her again after so much brotherly blood had been shed over her sex.  When she had returned to the hotel that night, she'd found no trace of either man.
     It took months for the secret police to admit defeat and the two defrocked monks' pictures to headline the posters of Wanted Men on public walls.  Pasiphae, daughter of a dead rebel captain and an excommunicated criminal on the run, could not escape her legacy: she was now invited into every conspiracy.  If she peeked out into the early lilac morning to retrieve the fresh goat milk, the old milkman would whisper to her about a clandestine meeting at the nearby prehistoric palace ruins—"in the Queen's bedroom, can you find it through the maze?"—and the grocer would nod stealthily as she picked through his shrivelled potatoes and scribble dates and hours instead of prices on her bill.  Suspicious men with large gold dolphins around their necks returned library books with handscribbled maps folded beneath the covers and translations of codified alphabets hidden in the bindings. And there was always one or another shifty-eyed and homeless-looking secret agent tailing her.  It was out of this labyrinth of conflicting loyalties and riddles, in which she refused to choose sides ("die Wahl ist die Qual," she had learned from her parents, who must have learned it from her country's conquerors), that her delayed government papers-issued before her father was resurrected as national enemy and thanks to the bureaucracy not yet retrieved-lifted her.
     On the very day her youth-transfer visa was granted, Pasiphae boarded a rickety bus to the island's airport that stood tumbled-down in a barren field fringed with faded oleanders blowing in the ochre dust, beyond which sprawled the rosy hump of the Bacchus mountains.  The air was low and hot and heavy, as if with the breath of unnumbered generations of dead, and that was the last breath she took on her homeland.  For the next ten hours, during her emancipatory international flight, Pasiphae felt like Remedios the Beauty ascending with the wash.  If  God had existed, Pasiphae later thought, she would have immaculately conceived in the air that day, flying to JFK.
In the chaotic airport at what was to Pasiphae the end of the world (America seemed at least metaphorically like an end in a world that had become endless), and while nervously scanning for her native hosts who had only been described to her as a blond Christian couple, Pasiphae was almost tripped by a colossal sailor with fiery eyes beneath joined black brows who enunciated in her mother tongue: "Your father has taken to sea, he is at peace, he wishes you a happy new life."  The stranger spoke in such a monotone rush that it took Pasiphae several nights of replaying his memorized message in her head to fill out the words that had seemed full of holes and separate them back into their intended meaning.  His chore fulfilled, the messenger had hastily shone on her the twisted smile of someone who did not know how to go about the business of smiling and would be much more at home in derision, and with two powerful strides he had parted the madding crowd and vanished into the waiting jaws of  America.
     Some years later, when she reached legal adulthood, Pasiphae received in the mail a copy of her father's will couched in legal jargon.  She never responded to claim her inheritance of the family lands on her sunny island which was now democratic and crawling with tourists.  The letter informed her that Androgeus had been lost at sea after falling off a swordfishing skiff, two decades after having denied the ocean for a woman; and Pasiphae found relief in knowing that she, as the last Phoenician, had one over her co-humans: she already knew where she would breathe her last. It wouldn't be dry.
8
Before man invented time, when aliens were not alien and stories roamed free, when soprano sirens consumed willing pirates and Alexander the Great was an immense mermaid who crushed to death those who mistook history for truth, when pleasure meant pain and all things contained their opposites as an ineffable matter of fact, Pasiphae could have been quiet and blissful or self-controlled.  But then fiction got replaced by memory, and men hunted and women gathered, and the soul was invented, and all the good things became illegal; and soon enough, America was "discovered."
     Yet even though America was just a well-endowed insane asylum,  it had one saving grace: it possessed no memory.  So when Pasiphae was first told "No!" by her hosts, she didn't bend under the weight of meaning and tradition because in America words were lightweight.  And because America didn't focus on a past but a future, Pasiphae did not have to mistake that "No!" for an inexhaustible voice echoing out of her own deepest core and internalize it; so she took it as a declaration of war.
     She turned the language into her playground, and she played intensely, appropriating the vocabulary of those shouting "No!," and shedding the fear.  The world went by, clicking its heels, watches, and cases, like an ocean passing through a needle, and all the while she shaped its names with her fingers. 
     And even when she found a little failing greedy God stirring inside her, she didn't give up her quest for an apocalyptic vernacular.  Even after she discovered that the puppeteer was everyone and everything around her, she didn't stop looking for a world that allowed the fullness of being human.  And when she didn't find it, she made it up; and she gave it back to the world as a  war cry.
1
                     to be continued