Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria by Ki Longfellow Read Free Book Online Page A

never seen him other than he is now, do not believe this.   A man with balls would not shrivel in bed.   A man without balls seldom grows them.
    Tonight his guests talk of constructing defenses.   Standing behind the man all assume is my “master,” I learn as I listen for it is these men, old, breathless, and sweating, who defended the Serapeum.
    The room is a hubbub of voices.   Though the violence has passed, asks one, who knows when it will erupt again?   Should they do nothing but wait, asks another, for emperor or bishop or some other tyrant to attack what is left them and see that destroyed as well?   Should they disappear as this or that one has done?   Or do as the poet Claudian did, flee to Rome so he might sing himself into favor?   “Curse Claudian!” they cry.
    Curse Claudian?   Gifted with wealth, able to read and to write, yet still he would sing to a tyrant?   I say: cut his fucking throat.
    The poet Palladas, whose skin hangs on his bones as clothes on a line, whines that without public funds he goes hungry.   But if he should leave, where can he go?   He knows no other city.   No other city knows him.   “Why leave?” snorts Ammonius, the priest of Thoth who killed three who would spoil the Serapeum—with breasts that droop as the god Hapi’s, his deeds are hard to imagine.   “Are there still not freedoms in Alexander’s city found nowhere else?   And has this not been so for more than seven hundred years?”   Behind Theon’s locked door, these freedoms will, he boldly proclaims, remain true for another seven hundred years.
    I do not laugh.   I am skilled at not laughing.
    Finally, ask all, what is to become of the books?   Each has what he took away during the siege of the Serapeum.   Even I have books which remain in the satchel in a corner of the room given me, a room smelling of the great beasts living in larger rooms than I across a courtyard of yellow brick.
    I endure the same drivel each time they gather: one or another complains that the Great Library is scattered all over the city from the Gate of the Moon to the Necrotic Gate, hidden away in chests, in storage rooms, under beds, in stables, in the homes of people who do not know they are there, even in certain tombs in the City of the Dead.   Once catalogued and stored by system, they are no longer, and none are protected by other than the secrecy of those who hide them.   Emperor Theodosius may think them destroyed, bishops from Rome to Constantinople may cherish the idea they are gone forever, but they are not.   They exist.   By their bravery, old men like these, and women—I shall never forget my first sight of Hypatia, or the splendor of her naked body—had a week to remove every book that did not burn.   After his first and only haul, brave Theon was not among them.
    Here they go again, talking each over each.   Impossible to hear what any single man says, but easy to understand what all mean.   What to do?   What to do?   The books must not remain in this place and that place.   So much could happen to them, a loss here and a loss there.   In no time some will be taken from the city, says a Jew named Meletus, others will be claimed as the property of this one or that one, for, given the chance, all men are thieves.
    Well, that’s true enough.   All may be thieves, but not all here are fools.   There will be books that are sold, books that are bartered, books that “disappear.”   If nothing is done, and done soon, the books might as well have burned.
    From one moment to the next, I am enraged.   If anger I feel tending to Theon, it is nothing to this.   It floods my head.   It causes my scalp to throb with pain.   It fills my lungs.   Theon hides in his bed, but these hide in an endless desert of words.   Without thought, I shout, “Buttfuck them all!   What is Alexandria without her library!”
    In the sudden and lengthy silence, only one voice finally sounds.   “Indeed,” sighs