News from Sparta
by A.G. Harmon
It is only five-thirty in the morning when Amelia rises. Not having rested well for days— a few tattered hours of fitful drowsing, interrupted by confusing dreams—she might have remained in bed longer to erase the deficit. But the realization that has lately come to her is so indelible that when any light appears through the window, her sub-conscious shoves her from slumber into a fraught wakefulness. So she admits defeat and drives to the grocery store.
At fifty-five, single, and jobless, she no longer troubles with her looks. She has surrendered contacts to glasses, clothes to sweats, styling her hair to towel-drying it, and her health to stout beer and unfiltered cigarettes. She needs those things, along with milk, coffee, and something strong enough to kill herself with if the plan becomes more than theory.
It is six when she arrives at the mostly empty parking lot. Besides herself, only a few others are shopping. The background music is too loud for that fact; noises clang and explode in echoes.
With her items trapped between her arms and stomach, she approaches the checkout lanes. There, a tiny Indian woman scans an exhausted mother’s groceries. The mother holds a baby against her neck, and a little girl in pajamas stands at her side, eating animal crackers from a cup. A fat man, his gray mustache clashing with his thin red hair, leans against his station and eyes Amelia with bored disinterest.
She drops her things onto his counter when a tortured call erupts from behind, as though something has fallen on top of someone, or a great shattering has occurred inside his brain. But when she snaps around to find the source, there is only a man at the entrance, brandishing a pistol above his head.
He is middle-aged, bearded, handsome in his way—his hair cut neatly, and wearing the white pants and white shirt of someone invited to a lawn party. But his voice belies all this. He screams over and over—an incomprehensible repetition—as though to thwart a coming challenge. The words tear from his mouth with such violence they might have sliced his throat as they came.
Then he swings the weapon down and levels it at the Indian woman, who returns his scream—pitch and volume. She hides her face in the crook of her right arm and holds her left hand to the crown of her head, as if taught to do such a thing in school.
For a time, it is all of them together at the storefront—Amelia, the mother and children, the two checkers, and the store manager—an ancient-looking grandfather, swallowed by his uniform—who has rushed out of an office, waving his arms uselessly. The gunman makes them leave the cashier lines and come forward to where he stands; the other shoppers cower back in the aisles. Perhaps because it is early morning, no one enters from the lot after he pulls out his gun.
As she waits, Amelia’s mind refuses the scene unfolding, like it is part of the dream that unsettles her rest, one in which she is forced upon the stage of a senseless play. But the plot here, full of screaming people who might bolt at any moment, despite their odds, causes the gunman to study his choices. Then he yells for everyone to rise from their hiding places in the aisles—to take their chance now to flee or risk being shot when he patrols the store. So the few people hiding in the aisles scramble out the entrance, along with the others at the front—all but the manager, who is told to stay, and Amelia. For some reason—because she is not the closest nor the most obviously weak—he goes out of his way to grab her.
He has the manager lock the sliding front doors, then marches Amelia and the old man around to bar the other entrances. Aisle by aisle they walk through the maze to make certain that no one else remains. By the time the police squadron yowls its arrival, sirens blaring and brakes squealing, everything is secure.
Amelia’s daze lifts as she returns to the spot where they started—where her things remain on the counter: beer, coffee, milk, cigarettes, and enough sedatives to doom a legion. Like the bright pain that ascends when the numbness of a fracture wears away, her constitution crumbles. Each moment escalates her anxiety to the point that it erupts, not only as interior panic, but also as the means that bring it about. As if sensing her fear, feasting upon it, the gunman pauses, coughs, and has the manager re-open the doors. Then he shouts for him to run.
It is just the two of them now. The man draws close, his body at her back, his elbow on her shoulder, his forearm across her throat. The barrel lies like a bone against the nape of her neck, and the entrance opens and shuts as they stagger in and out of the electronic beam that triggers it.
At first, a policeman calls to the gunman from a speaker of some kind—introducing himself, asking for calm, requesting information. But as though to show them he is serious, the gunman will not reply for a long while.
Although he never tells them his name, at length he says where he is from—a country known for terrorism—but remains unclear about what he wants. For every time he begins to tell the police what he will take in exchange for Amelia’s life, something happens: They ask him to speak louder—to overcome the city noise that carries on around the store—or he becomes inexplicably excited and orders the officers to move further away—to crouch behind another row of cars or a more distant set of light posts.
For no apparent reason, from time to time he stops the useless dialogue and pulls Amelia backward. Twisting a fistful of shirt and hair, he drags her into the grocery store again. There he orders her to lie flat, her face on the icy floor, stale with shoe dirt, as he gorges himself above her on potato chips and drinks.
Once, hours into the standoff, he wrangles her up from the floor to take one of their many forays outside. Entering the theater before the audience of crouching troops, it seems he is about to say something significant. He is zeroing in on a slight suffered either by his father or his God—to which, he is unclear—when a car backfires like a cannon a few streets over.
Standing at her back, pressed tightly against it, he clamps her windpipe with his forearm. He swings his gun hand around to the police and stumbles the two of them left and right and foreword again, like adolescents in a dance school. The miked-up officer waves his arms in frantic appeasement. A barrage of snipers lights like a horde of blackbirds upon the car tops, cocked and aiming for a place one inch away from her head, one inch inside his.
But nothing comes of it. No matter how many times they reach a crescendo—a violence so great that it begs for the hottest, fastest blood—things die down again. The man’s fears and anger abate too easily, as he retains just enough reason that appeals for calm can take effect. He soothes back into her private captor, and everything becomes her personal captivity once more.
And that is the curse of it all; nothing can be said to make him let her go, but nothing can be said to make him kill her either. For five hours, she lives a pantomime—a brinksmanship of terror that rushes her to the edge of a precipice, then rips her back down again, with the peace of either release or death always withdrawn, just shy of coming. And then a stranger steps into view, a minor player from the wings. He emerges, rising up or walking in, with his back to the two of them—her and the man with a gun to her head. He faces the police in fact, with his hands held high in surrender.
The shock of what he does—the slow retreat from safety, the slow advancement toward risk—takes both voice and action of all who watch. No one fires at him—neither the gunman nor the police—as he has stunned them into doubting what they see. Before he ever speaks, he backs his way into the cleared plain surrounding the entrance, then gingerly lowers himself to his knees, his hands laced behind his head.
They exchange words for a time—the police, the gunman, and the stranger. There are shouts and pleas and finally the long monologue of a request—from whom she cannot say. For her mind is not working; language is a slurry—source and time, a palsy—and she can only make out that a question has been poised—one of great weight—followed by an odd, loud silence, like the quiet that follows a sharp crack.
Amelia does not feel the release, her throat being freed of his forearm. When he lets her go, she simply stumbles away in a collapse, as though falling into a trench. In a peculiar and hallowed instant, someone collects her into a blanket, like a child just born; she floats above the ground in a wind of light and eyes. It is the freest she has ever felt—outside her own volition and thought; inside the others’ reason and care.
Sheltered within a police car at the furthest perimeter, she is kept with a blanket around her shoulders and a bottle of water stuck in her hand. They say she cannot be moved right then; anything could provoke the conflict into a higher pitch. So she is left to hear the gunman—his wild cries and unspecific demands—and to shiver not so much at what he says, as at the strangeness of not having it said so close, against the back of her skull, so that the words throbbed along the tissue of her neck.
For some reason, the stranger does not speak at all now. He is quiet, still, as though practicing for his death; as though his death is teaching him exactly how he should be when it kisses him.
She could see him clearly, if she wanted. He is placed just where she had been, except the gunman assumes a different posture. Instead of holding him by the throat from behind, as he had her, he keeps the stranger on the ground, at his knees.
She could see his face, if she wanted.
_______________
Before it happened, nothing ever changed the listlessness of her days—not the time in school, degree after degree after degree—not the days after school, job after job after job—not the return or the delay or the expectancy of any promise. This was a fact that began as a suspicion, evolved into a confusion, and settled into a depression.
No one had ever come into her world or left it that mattered. The people in her life were a set of aliens with the same last name, ones who made it their relentless purpose to abandon each other. There had also been the occasional wanderers who tagged along, or with whom she tagged along, a battalion of exiles walking in the same direction. Age swept her through a sluice of years with soundless measure, as unnoticed as time passing within a cave beneath the sea. She had been born alone, lived alone, and could never gain foothold on any common ground. She always slipped off or was purged out.
Before it happened, she had persisted; she had hoped to find entrance despite her bewilderment. Then, failing that, she attempted to satisfy herself with a focus, with the sharing of her mind, since no one desired more. Ultimately, she failed at that too. She had taught ancient history to young people who did not want to learn anything of it. So her classes died from disinterest, and consequently she slid from university to college to junior college in a perpetual retreat.
In time, with a force equal to her slide, she even came to question what she did, was confused by what she taught. The purpose of her subject seemed ever outmoded, filled as it was with conviction and savage simplicity—great battles, warring peoples—butchers in sandals who either slayed their foes with swords or fell upon them in disgrace. People who valued their honor more than life, who lay beneath headstones carved with charges, challenging and terrifying those in whose interests they had perished:
Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
But she could no longer judge whether they were people to admire or to recoil from— whether their blood cleaned or stained them. Were they ripe to be overcome, displaced with a new creed? Or were they the last of a creed now lost, noble despite its gore and dress? Her confusion infected her practice to the point that she was made redundant, and the means for her life was lost not soon after its point.
Then came a day when the truth of all this—the history of it—had broken upon her clearly, settling within like a chronic disease.
She can even recall the moment and place when it revealed itself: In a decrepit building where government forms are completed so that a gray check can be mailed—not before the fifth but no later than the tenth of the month.
A broken elevator had forced her to find another way to the high floor where she had been sent—to a staircase, musty and sick with fluorescence. As she climbed, her gaze fell upon a sheet of aged wallpaper—a gray-green pattern of repeating willows around a pond—peeling away from the glue-pocked surface. The light was barely enough to see the stairs with, and for that fact barely enough to uncover the isolation of that place, the pathos of its attempt to beautify or tranquilize or amuse.
Who would look upon that spot except by chance? Who would seek it out? Why was it even papered? The effort that went into it shocked her with how preposterous it was. It was an embarrassment to itself, trapped within the wooden stocks of irrelevance.
And then it struck her how absurd it was to feel such a thing about such a place, beneath a staircase—a wall, dead to sense—when what she felt about it was only true of her, in her pedestrian and lusterless self—dime store jewelry and drugstore scent—seen only in a way that a chair is seen and walked around, a ditch is seen and avoided, a place beneath a staircase is seen and forgotten—a farce of useless labor.
So the frayed tendon of her subsistence had finally snapped, and with it the power to push on had broken and drained. When she entered the store that morning to buy something that would make her sleep, she had grown certain of how pointlessness things were.
Now she finds that time to have been one of comparative peace. Despite its weight, it was better—a dry existence when nothing called to her or demanded that she answer it. It was made of discreet days marbled with silence, days when she was the only one who had heard a joke or fathomed a threat.
Before the stranger arrived, the loneliness grew dark and quiet and took the shape of a friend. It let her drift among cool shadows. It would have taken her; she would have let it: she was going to help it to.
But what he did has killed all that. Because ever since those five hours, two things bray at each other like opposing armies. There is no neutrality; no way to float between—an amnesiac to the past, an agnostic to the future—because there is no her outside of what he has saved her for.
By dying, he has tied everything together with a cord. Not just her to him, but her to everyone who wants to know what it is like to have been saved by someone who died in her saving. She wears an apron of his blood. She cannot take it off or move away; it travels.
__________________
She wonders now at her fear while the gunman held his pistol to her skull. She marvels at the way she had cringed—cried out to be saved. Considering all she had come to believe before she entered the store, the gunman should have been a convenience. She should have taken him for the quiet in the dark that tugs her toward a freedom from what she is and does not want to be.
Then why had she acted like an animal caught in a snare, her eyes wide and her mind racing in search of escape? Not once had she thought of what role he played other than her killer. Not once had she said in silence—
Here you are then—finally—my release.
Instead, she had been as weak and frantic as a calf in a chute, as a hen with her neck on a block. Her cowardice shames the memory of what she had assumed she was brave enough to do to herself. She had been a mere fraud pretending at the power of her own melancholy.
In truth, when it was over, even the policemen were shamed by a civilian accomplishing what he had. Though they had done nothing wrong, as their lives were at stake too, it had shamed them. They blushed in the way a gift bearer is dishonored by a more elaborate, more thoughtful gift bestowed just after his is set aside.
It hung in the air about them: Why was your offering so small?
________________________
After it happened, the insistent world had not only called, but also wrote and spoke and dreamed and asserted all manner of things about the two of them. There was not a news outlet in the country that did not carry the story, and it only grew larger as the days passed, like some mutant fruit in a tropical garden. Time and circumstance—sun-dappled shade and teeming soil— fed it with prodigal riches until it grew out of all proportion. The mounting legend could not be contained and it drove her from any semblance of peace. Only after several months did different matters take the public’s attention—other horrors, fresher spectacles.
But they will start again soon—calling and writing and speaking and dreaming. Because a year has nearly come and gone, and as with all such things, the anniversary must be marked. They will come back, and they will call.
This is where it took place—where the tragedy unfolded, they will say, standing outside the suburban grocery store, staring with practiced sobriety into a television camera. One year ago, today. A gunman—a hostage—a swarm of police—and an act of mortal courage. It lasted only five short hours, but we were all changed forever.
Exactly who was changed forever? she would like to ask them—all the thin young girls with ironed hair and stage makeup, all the sharp-faced men with baggy eyes and graying temples.
No one was changed, except for her. No gawker is changed by the act of gawking. No one who slows to stare at a mangle of blood and bone and metal is ever changed. After the nausea passes, those who look can only reflect; any adjustment is philosophical—an evolution— a devolution—but not a change. It is only the maimed that they look upon who are changed, a focus of intrigue and disgust, caged within a sovereignty of ruthless eyes.
_________________________
They say he had a reason. What he did, he did for a reason. He was the kind to offer himself, the kind to sacrifice.
So now one of the things they want to ask her—those who speak into headsets and stare into cameras—is what she thinks of all that:
What is it like to be bought?
Ransomed?
Does it not force your conversion to what he believed, at least to a degree? It would be a scandal for it not to, wouldn’t it? An ingratitude.
They know that is the thing to ask, because that is the thing she asks it herself. Does she not owe it to him, after what he did? At least to ask it?
She had thought she hated him for giving her a life that at the time of its saving she was more than ready to end. Her hate had come like a dry mouth, a pressure inside the skull, a sickness of stealth and latitude that she had born for some long time before it broke upon her fevered consciousness. Now she sees she is angry about the terms upon which he saved her, and the inescapable trap in which she is caught.
How does she even know that he was doing it for her and not for whatever it was he believed? Was he not only the reverse of those who kill themselves and others in hopes of a heaven, by letting himself be killed to save others in hopes of a heaven?
It is something she has questioned before—the confusion that had beset her at the end of her tenure. At that time, she could no longer distinguish the slaughterer from the savior. For both, people amounted to no more than a means to an end, part of the same selfish act.
In a way, what the stranger did was worse than the gunman; because the gunman—if he was dying for anything—died for his own ends and was using her to get them. The two of them would have been shot—he left to his fancy and she to her annihilation. Whatever it was he thought of himself, he thought nothing of her, no more than he would a scrap of wallpaper beneath a staircase.
But the stranger did not accept her autonomy. He stormed in, gave her his life and bought hers. She is marked, and her purchased existence is the bond and shackle she is said to owe him. Dead though he is, he drags her around by the chain of her survival for all the world to see.
By rights, she and the stranger should bear this scrutiny together. But he is dead, which in the public accounting makes the date all the worthier for marking. Through a master’s sleight of hand, in the very trick of dying, he has both escaped the trap and locked her within it, like an ant in amber, like a bride made widow, all in one day.
__________________
The days are still listless and the nights without rest. As the date nears, the questions will start again. But though still trapped, she now knows the ways to freedom: either to spend the rest of her life accepting what he did, or the rest of her life refusing it. Consent or reject, and by rejecting, not only disavow his sacrifice, but undo it. He died for her, so she will die for nothing; and if she dies for nothing, so will have he.
Then what will the girls and the men who wait outside her house say when the sacrifice made becomes only a waste postponed? Will they even want to tell that tale? Will even they, who gawk and moil, turn away from such rot?
Perhaps, had he lived, he could have told her something about how to proceed. They would have been pressed together, and he would have had to speak. He would have had to explain why he forced himself upon her, why he could not resist this ravishing.
It is his leaving her to bear this alone that stokes her hatred most of all. The isolation before him was meaningless and numb; the aloneness after him is not.
If she has any courage at all, any spine with which to claim back the just deserts of her isolation, she will find that staircase again. And she will climb it to the rooftop. She will set herself upon the precipice, and they will see the script they have written—the one in which they gain the concessions they seek—be torn and thrown into their faces. She will leap from that perch and fall headlong into their gaping fantasies.
That she can do, if she is beyond hope and trust and belief.
But if she is a coward, if she does by some atrophied, anodyne strength hold on to a foolish whispered promise and submit to the shackles of her debt—then she must take to her knees. She must bow forever to the altar he has made, to the altar that he is.
The staircase lies flat and collapsed in a straight line. It leads back to where she was held for five long hours as the world watched and pretended that it was changed. Back to the lot in front of the store, where people move about with no care for what happened, having long forgotten it—until she reminds them. And at the top of that flat staircase she will stand and precipitate her fall, not by sleep this time, but by some swift-acting device, some weapon that slices deep or blasts in a mighty report. On the spot where her price was paid, she will cast the silver coins back and be done with him and this and them once and for all.
If that is what she chooses, that is what she will do. She knows the way; it is easy to find. The altar will not be. For it is everywhere, and she will be forever giving over what she has and what she is in favor of those who stand outside her—simply and only because they are not her. There will be no need for cause, nor even a cause for need. He has taught her that; for who was less worthy than she? The rich and the poor, the old and the young, the bad, the good, the hideous, the beautiful—all will have a claim to her, and for all she will act as slave—tied to them in a Gordian knot of eternal obeisance.
Both beckon to her, like rivals in war. They face each other down just as they had then, on the battle plains of Greece.
_________________
She remembers listening from where she sat in the car, protected and cosseted like something very young and frail, newfound. She remembers hearing the same exchange of voices—the police and the gunman—the same list of demands, the same attempts to acquiesce and appease.
But in the midst of it, without their knowing, something had changed; something had slipped into their presence. Only at length did they grow aware of it, together and apart. The air was no longer lit with electricity; there was no rushing to the edge, no pulling back through violence. For some reason, things were no longer dire; terror had been spent. She could feel the change in everything, as though some great missive had been released, some ancient messenger had arrived, lung-spent, staggering, to gasp that he had news from Sparta. With that, the gunman let out a cry. She did not need to see him to understand. He had been cheated, duped, and the realization bloomed across him like heat rushing from a furnace. What had happened—what he had allowed—this offering that he had thought was merely an exchange, had robbed all meaning from what he intended.
And when he finally killed him—one blunt slug into the brain—she was sure he did so without pleasure, maybe even with reluctance. Because he knew that the act had become pointless. Murder was as good as mercy then. He had been subsumed, as the sun subsumes a match’s light.
Soon they will begin calling. They will write and speak and dream all manner of things, and she will have to answer.
A.G. Harmon is the author of A House All Stilled, the winner of The Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel in 2001. His short story collection, Some Bore Gifts, was published by Word Galaxy Press in 2018. Other fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in such publications as Triquarterly, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, Image, The Bellingham Review, Logos, The Arkansas Review, Dappled Things, and Commonweal. His work on Shakespeare, Eternal Bonds, was published by SUNY Press in 2004. He teaches at The Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
