The Thousand Lives of George Argyris

It was back in the time before the electric light, when people still walked on air, and the volcanoes spat water instead of fire, and the sparrows pecked at the frozen pigs’ carcasses which lay scattered about outside the entrance to the home of the Professor George Argyris, which stretched, in its brilliance, across the south side of the city of Oyster Island, at the foot of the water volcano which flooded the city once every hundred years and washed away the coffee plants and corn which lay between the mountain and the golden walls of the house of the Professor. On the morning of this very day, Argyris would step out of his mansion to face the citizens of his city for the last time. As he opened the creaking door of rosewood and stretched his arms to greet the hot summer day, three long blades like fangs were thrust into his neck and back, and he fell to the ground. The assassins scurried away, not believing for an instant that he could be dead, for he had died many times before and come back the next day as good as new, if a day older. 

They remembered just the previous year when the drink of George Argyris was poisoned, and he turned back his head and drank his orange juice in three short gulps, a few seconds passed, and he began to choke, grasping at his neck with desperate paws. Those who looked on thought he might have swallowed a pearl, and ran to help, but he collapsed, his head descending like an anvil into the bowl of clam chowder before him, spraying globs of white blood that reeked of the sea over the nearby guests, who stared on in fright and were soon ushered out, and a white sheet was placed over the body of Argyris, and that night the silence of the city was palpable, as everyone lay in angst inside their meager homes, not allowing themselves to believe that the rich man by the mountain was finally dead. 

The next morning, over the short walls surrounding the garden of George Argyris, a boy of twelve could see the man himself, swinging gently in a hammock under the mangrove, twiddling his thumbs and sucking in the crisp morning air which smelled faintly of pineapple. As the boy watched, the Professor got out of his hammock and walked back into the house, shut the side door behind him, and disappeared from sight, and the boy ran off to tell his parents, and his parents told the town that the rich man George Argyris was still very much alive, for their child would never lie, he had not been raised to do so. The child’s testimony was corroborated when passersby saw an extra contingent of guards at the entrance of the house and saw the light of George Argyris’s room turn on in the dark hours of the night, when even the nightingales could not be heard through the thick mist of drowsiness, and the clouds glowed like embers against the moonless sky that was darker than pitch, and could hear his voice, it was him, without a doubt. So, the three assassins hid in the bushes for three days watching the dead Argyris, until they were sure he could not possibly be resurrected, for the maggots had eaten one of his eyes away and his stomach had been gorged on by vultures, and the face, which was normally handsome in an elderly sort of way, was in such a state of putrefaction that they could hardly make out his nose, and they took him into the square and, in front of a thousand spectators, hanged him like a common criminal. And it brought back memories for all of them, especially George Argyris, who recalled a similar episode which he witnessed when he was just a small boy when his father had been hung by the people after he was implicated in the murder of Saint George, and he was dragged to the square and slung up as the people chanted down with Argyris, down with the Professor, and his son George looked on with horrified eyes, and they met his father’s just before the sling was released, and he was dead in seconds.

The day that George Argyris was killed was the same day that the water volcano erupted, and flooded the square just hours after he was hanged. The waves tore the roofs off the homes, knocked down the walls of the Professor’s golden mansion, and toppled the mangrove tree on which the family hammock had swung since time immemorial, but the body of George Argyris simply rocked gently side to side as the waves gushed past, as if the body weighed more than a mountain. When the flood was over the town was in ruins, but Argyris’s body still hung there upon the pole, swaying in the summer breeze. Slowly, his body rotted away, first, a leg was gone, then an arm, then his neck gave way until it was only his head that hung there, one of his eyes disintegrated into its socket, and the skin stretched tautly over his skull like a zombie, but still the people did not let themselves believe that he was truly dead, for he had survived poison, he had survived the electric chair, he had survived the anvil, and the bulls, and even cyanide, so what was a hanging to him? It was not until a hundred years had passed once more and the town was once again flooded, and the pole with the head of George Argyris was finally washed away, that the people knew he was dead, for until then, it had been as if he were still there, watching over the people of Oyster Island, his one good eye followed you as you walked past, as if it was the only part of him still living, but it was enough, because the people could not believe that the man who called himself the Professor was finally dead.

He called himself the Professor because that’s what his father called himself, and his grandfather, because they owned the city of Oyster Island, so they could call themselves whatever they wanted. Legend had it that George Argyris’s great-great-grandfather had been the only professor at the only University in the city, and all his students would call him Professor, and when he died, they called his son Professor, because you couldn’t tell the two of them apart, and the name stuck, all down through the bloodline. George Argyris was not a professor at all, and in fact he had been the one to disband the only University in the city because they were teaching the class about Che Guevara, and Che Guevara doesn’t exist, they are teaching them lies, mother, what has become of education in this day and age? And after the University, the other schools were disbanded, until there were children roaming the streets at all hours of the day, playing on the gravel in front of the house of the Professor, even during siesta time, and the stomping of feet and screaming of joyous mouths became such a bother that George Argyris himself stepped out of the hammock under the mangrove tree, opened the side door, walked into the kitchen, through the courtyard, kicked open the front door, and yelled get out of here, waving his arms so wildly that the children thought he was possessed by demons, and he closed the door and grumbled to himself, damned kids, and walked with slogging steps back to his hammock. His shout echoed across the entire city, and all was deathly quiet, and he had the rest of his siesta in peace. From then on, it was mandatory that everyone slept during the hottest hours of the day so as not to disturb the Professor in his hammock under the mangrove.

There was only one person old enough to remember the first death of George Argyris, and that was his mother herself, Victoria Argyris, a sad, dirty woman with caves for eyes and canyonous wrinkles cracking through her face like dry mud. She had watched her son die from the windows of the second floor of the mansion when George was only forty-six years old. He was swinging gently in the hammock under the mangrove and twiddling his thumbs when a great crack sounded, and a rumbling that sounded like the end of the world, and two enormous bulls crashed through the garden wall and impaled the man himself on their horns, once through his arm and once through his chest, and slammed him into side door, and only then did they stop charging, pulled their horns from the Professor’s chest and arms, and walked back out of the garden through the hole they had made. George Argyris lay against the door, bleeding from his arm but not his chest, and from above, he could not hear his mother Victoria Argyris scream in terror and race down the stairs only to weep over his limp body. She wept and wept, until sunset, when she dragged him indoors and he was not seen again by anyone but her until a week later, when, through the hole in the garden wall, a farmer on his way to the coffee fields could see the man himself in his hammock under the mangrove, slowly turning the pages of a time-worn book, his gold-rimmed glasses perched at the wrinkled tip of his crooked nose, his shirt unbuttoned because of the heat, revealing the plastic gold-painted crucifix that he kept tied around his neck. After another week had passed, the hole in the wall was mended, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. And that was why, on the same day that the water volcano was set to erupt when George Argyris was stabbed three times in the back and hanged in the square, the people did not believe that he could possibly be dead. There was no celebration, no parade, it was as if George Argyris still ruled over the city of Oyster Island, for still, the University was not reopened, no one was out during siesta time, dogs still stayed inside their houses tied up, and the children would not play outside after lunch, because if they did, they knew that the severed head of George Argyris would catch them, and they would be thrown to the dogs, because the dogs could defeat anyone except their master, and everyone knew it, because everyone remembered the day that Argyris himself was thrown to the dogs, and they ripped his flesh off of his body, dragged him through the streets by the stubs of his ears, and lay him down to rest at the foot of the mountain by the coffee farms, and his servant girl found him there, his head half-buried in the dirt, his bloodied hands collapsed over his face. She brought him back to the house, and the following day, his neighbors swore they saw him open the front gate of the mansion to pick up the newspaper, and waved to them tiredly when he saw them watching him, and then, like a ghost, he drifted inside, his eyes fixed on the paper that he had written himself just the previous week, which talked about how the national income was the greatest it had ever been, and the poverty rate was lower than ever, and about the festival that would be hosted in the square on the fourth of August to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his rule, and the entire city was invited.

On the night of the festival, the entire city came, because they would get food and water for free; they couldn’t afford it anywhere else, and the following day the paper showed photographs of the crowds, showing that the Professor Argyris was the most beloved of all men, even the dogs came to share in his glory. And George Argyris quietly disappeared from the crowd, opened the door to a nearby home, and climbed the stairs to the roof, and stood there, and he yelled ATTENTION! and all eyes turned toward him, and he declared from the rooftop that this day would from now until the end of time be a national holiday and that on this day, August fourth, every year, the festival would take place here in the square, and then a great crack sounded, and a burst of light and the people could see a magnificent bolt of lightning slice through the body of the Professor. For a moment he stood there like a pillar of coal, and then he fell to the ground, blackened and smoldering, and everything became deathly quiet. All one could hear were the brooding sounds of the clouds in the sky and the quiet tinkle of faraway rain on corrugated metal rooftops. And then two figures pushed through the crowd toward him, picked him up, one by the armpits and one by the ankles, and they carried him off and out of sight. Just two days later, the newspaper published a column written by George Argyris, the man himself, that said that I, George Argyris, am here to tell you that I am well, I am strong, and in full possession of my faculties, for God has given me his blessing to heal quickly so that I can continue to protect the people with a firm hand, and he signed his name at the bottom of each newspaper, George Argyris, so that everyone would know that he still had a strong right hand. The next day, when he opened the front gate to stretch in the crisp morning air, he saw the carpenter across the street with a pile of newspapers in front of him, get your newspapers here, signed by the man himself, cheap, and he nodded briskly to the Professor with a conciliatory smile on his lips, and George Argyris walked across the street and said I’ll take one, and he laid a bill on the counter in a parsimonious yet still gracious way, and the carpenter, now beaming, gave him his paper, and from his manner George Argyris knew that the man was a foreigner, and George walked back across the street, his focus so firmly fixed on the paper that he did not hear the rumbling of a food truck coming down the street, and he didn’t hear the carpenter yell get out of the way, sir, and the food truck kept going, and the Professor was flattened under its monstrous wheels. Then he stood up and dusted himself off, sending gravel cascading to the ground, tipped his hat to the foreigner, who stared on in dismay, and walked back through the front gate and behind the golden walls of the mansion. In truth, George Argyris was just as dismayed as the foreigner, but for a different reason, as he had never laid his ancient eyes on anything so beautiful as a food truck before, and his mind raced as he thought of ways he could cultivate this power. First, he called the food company on the telephone, and asked if he could commission one, or perhaps two, sir, of the trucks they used for transport, and in two days time, he had three of the food trucks, with the logos still attached, parked next to him as he gently swung in his hammock under the mangrove, taking in the sweet summer air, reminiscing on those fleeting parts of his interminable past that he could remember. Once in a while, he would emerge from the comfort of his hammock and waddle, with aching steps, to the first food truck, and he would open the trunk, snatch a cold glass of pineapple juice, and return to the hammock, refreshed.

For months, the streets were littered with the bodies of those who were crushed under the wheels of the food trucks. A young boy stepped among them, sometimes pausing to bend down and tear a golden band off of a crumbling finger, or snatch a wallet from an exposed pocket. Other than the occasional thief, the streets were barren of the living.

As the boy looked up from his latest victim, he realized he had no idea where he was, as the streets had been transformed by death into something unrecognizable. He was alarmed, but he didn’t show it, and he walked serenely along the narrow streets, noting street signs he’d never paused to look at before and trying to study the houses along the road for the signs of something familiar. The streets here were narrow, crooked ramshackle buildings stretching into the sky like a jagged ravine. Clothes lines hung between the buildings and strung them together, a web of connections that stretched across the city.

Rounding the next corner, he found himself in the large square where parades came through as often as protests, and where George Argyris would, many years hence, breathe his last breaths. Today, sparse bodies seemed to hang in the air somewhere between the Earth and the overcast sky. It was then that it began to rain.

At the same time, the Professor George Argyris paced on his sheltered patio, the patter of rain ringing through his cavernous ears. He had never liked the rain, but it was one of those things he accepted with resignation and even reveled in on occasion, when he could stay inside next to the fire and listen to the thunder of raindrops on metal echoing across the city. He remembered one of those days, a long time ago, when the rain was so loud that it drowned out the roar of something much, much worse. In those days George was young, relatively. His father had just been hanged several months before, and ancient terrors that he had held back for generations were released to terrorize the earth. George had thought he’d dealt with the worst of them, until that fateful day. George was sipping coffee as he read the paper when a great flash of light cut through the rain outside, and he rushed out to see what it was, thinking perhaps the rain had transformed into a thunderstorm, but when he reached the door, he stared out at utter desolation. Once more the light came, a massive streak of luminescence that left him stumbling down the stairs, screaming his lungs out, for he had seen the monster, emerging from the foothills of the mountain, dorsal ridges five stories high, piercing, reptilian eyes as large as minivans. George dashed inside to grab his rifle, and then he ran out into the street, yelling at the top of his lungs and waving his arms like a madman. He raised the gun high, and, as the monster stood to face him, pulled the trigger. The belly of the beast glowed blue, and in a moment the world turned into pure light as the great George Argyris was struck down by the laser. But the bullet had found its mark. The monster, screaming from pain, retreated into the mountains from whence it came.

A pile of ash was all that remained of Argyris. For days, it lay in the street, surrounded by collapsed buildings, a presence that should not be understated, sitting there like an enormous dog shit, leaving a psychological stench that was impossible to ignore.

The boy in the square had heard stories of that day, when the great Argyris had proved himself a man of iron. His grandmother had been there when it happened, and she told of how, gradually, the ashes took on a definite shape, periodically being whisked away by wind, but all the while growing, persevering, and within a month, they stood six feet tall, like a pillar of salt, and the stubs of arms had already begun to emerge. As the buildings were mended around him, the few persisting fires extinguished, George Argyris grew, until finally, one humid morning, when there was hardly a beggar in the streets, he opened his eyes, turned on his heel, and strolled back through the doors of his mansion, the sound of their shutting echoing across the city. As he thought of that story, the boy knelt down and once again began to rummage through the clothes and belongings of the scattered dead. Already, the rain had begun to subside.

In the Professor’s waning years, he began to take a senile fascination with lizards. One day, as he was pacing about in the courtyard in the center of the mansion, he could see a lizard sunbathing on the hot stones of the fountain, its purple scales seeming to glow with the reflected sunlight. He sat in the shade and watched it in contemplating silence until a duck landed with a subdued splash in the water of the fountain, and the lizard vanished in a puff of smoke. This was clearly an omen, and George Argyris took it as such. He walked serenely back into the house and found his mother in the dining room where she sat knitting a summer scarf, and he said, mother, my time has come. She looked at him with sadness in her eyes and said not a word, and he turned, and, accepting of whatever fate awaited him outside the front gate of the mansion, in fact welcoming it, he strode out of the house with dignity, only to be greeted by three long daggers like fangs in his back, and he fell to the ground. He waited anxiously as more and more of his blood came gushing out for the assassins to emerge from their hiding places in the bushes. When they finally did, they picked him up and brought him to the square, where they hanged him like a common criminal. 

And he could remember when he was just a young man when his father had been hanged by the people after he was implicated in the murder of Saint George, and he was dragged to the square and slung up as the people chanted down with Argyris, and his son George looked on with horrified eyes, and they met his father’s just before the sling was released, and he was dead in seconds, and he remembered it with such ferocity and vividness that he knew that it wasn’t a dream, and he finally knew, he finally knew where his father had gone all those years ago, and that it was him, it was his father who had killed Saint George, Saint George who he loved so much, who he put his faith into, who possessed the same name as his only son, and George Argyris knew it could not be so, his father was not a murderer, he was framed, he was framed by the wicked peasants, those rats, criminals, they had framed him, mother, and he watched with hateful eyes, he watched the people going about their daily business, the thieves, he watched them buying food at the market, and he watched them day and night, he learned more in five years about his own city than he ever could in the previous hundred and fifty-seven, because that’s where they got their liquor from, even though he had outlawed it long ago, and that’s where they got their weed, and their knives, and their philistine fabrics, he saw it all, through the thick mist that blew in from the mountain, when the summer lightning lit up the sky with its glory and he could see everything as if it were day for just an instant, the muggers, the drug dealers, the stray dogs that dared only emerge at night to escape the fury of George Argyris, and he saw it all while his one good eye slowly rotted away with hopeless fear and hate and disgust.

He watched it all for a hundred years, before he finally said I’ve had enough, and he let himself be washed away with the floods of the water volcano which erupted once every hundred years, and his eyes closed in peace as if he were going to sleep at the end of a very, very, long day.

They finally found his head two weeks after the flood washed it away from the square when the carpenter happened upon it while washing his clothes in the river. It was caught between the roots of an ancient tree, reeking of nothing on Earth, the frozen skin mostly decomposed and the skull crumbling like foam, and the thin, dirty hair trailing in the icy water. As he stared at it for a moment in disgust, he could see a butterfly hang in the air for an instant above the decayed temple of the Professor, and then it alighted on his head, folding its wings like the closing of a book. He set his clothes down on the bank and ran to tell the city, and they all came running down to the river, huddled tightly around the harrowing skull of their king of generations, and someone said look at his eyes, for they no longer seemed alive, and they could all see that he was as dead as a doornail. But they could not believe that after a hundred long years, the Professor, George Argyris, the man himself, was finally no more.