Dan Muenzer                                                                                                 

Earth to Antaeus

The curious episode began when my son looked up at me through his wire-frame monocle and told me he would be starring in The Labors of Hercules. It didn’t surprise me – either the starring role or the eyewear. For one, Kody’s plummy mid-Atlantic accent (self-taught) had ensured him the lead in every school play since The Runaway Flapjack; and for the other, he’d recently been taken by the optometric stylings of Erich von Stroheim. 

If sometimes I wish my son would be just a little more middle-of-the-road, it’s for his own sake: old dad knows what it’s like to have your cowlick dangled over a toilet or your lunch money stolen. I even hoped playing Hercules might do him some good: there was a man who was feared and respected, yet walked around every day dressed in lion’s fur. But I didn’t press the issue. Ever since the T-ball incident, I’ve stopped trying to instill lessons in normative, bully-proof behavior. I’m hoping Kody doesn’t need them, but his broken pencils leave me feeling rather uncertain.

I busied myself looking for ways to prepare my son for his role, hoping to emphasize the more empowering aspects of the myth. I had vague memories of serial decapitations, terrifying beasts, an opera singer who shot lightning from his hands (though this last turned out to be a labor not of Hercules, but of 1980s Schwarzenegger). I read up online, and the next time I delivered Kody his frozen spirulina, I looked around appraisingly at the Victorian magic tricks that lay scattered around his room and said, “These are some real Augean stables in here, son.” But he just returned to practicing sleight of hand with his linking rings. That boy can be loyal to his hobbies at the expense of everything else. The magic tricks were a new interest I suspected he’d caught from his stepfather. 

My mythic hopes turned out to be for naught, anyway, since my son wasn’t even playing Hercules. The melancholy fact became apparent when I overheard him rehearsing some of his lines. “Stop right there, you lion-caped monkey! Let me add your head to my altar of skulls!” He had adopted the voice of Peter Lorre, one of his favorite film actors. No matter the voice, it didn’t sound all that heroic, or the sentiment in keeping with the liberator of Theseus.

“Which labor of Hercules is that, Kody?”

He hardly looked up from his script. “The one where he lifts me into the air and crushes all my bones, of course.”

“He?”

“Hercules,” he said. “I’m Antaeus.”

“Right,” I said, “Anteaus.” I searched my memory for who that might mean in that profuse, incestuous shuffle of demigods, heroes, and fiends. I wondered if Hercules himself ever had trouble keeping them straight.

Later on I fired up the Internet, though first I had to click through all the male enlargement ads that have infested my computer. The knowledge gained of my son’s incipient victimization didn’t make me feel that great. Product of Poseidon’s liaison with Earth herself, Antaeus couldn’t be defeated as long as his feet touched the ground – so sneaky Hercules lifted him up and squeezed him like the world’s worst dance partner. At least that’s what it looked like on the red and black krater I inspected. To be dispatched with a club or a sword might be tolerated by a hero, but a mighty bear hug? It seemed undignified. The only thing worse would be to be that guy who was killed with a bed. In passing I noticed that Hercules, despite his robust torso, had genitals the size of a little sprig of mistletoe – which made me feel a little better.

I did get used to the idea of Kody playing Antaeus. I am not Orestes, or Oedipus, or any of those old pagans whose maddened resolve (even in the wrong) makes them into tragic legends. I knew better than to project my own issues onto my son (I even let him drop archery for needlepoint) – but when I found out who was starring as Hercules, I felt even more depressed.

The very first daisies were showing their yellow faces to the sun. I remember, because Mike crushed them with his tires as he backed into the driveway. He advanced on me with what appeared to be a medium-sized cage covered in a cape. My son with his messenger bag and two-tone shoes looked like a particularly dapper newspaper boy. “Takes a village to raise an owl,” Mike said and handed me the cage. A gray feather rested on the shoulder of Mike’s suit. His tie was so straight you’d think it had been knotted by a precision machine. From polished sole to lacquered crown he looked every inch the gentleman. Apparently it was our turn with the class pet.

“The bird needs its snack,” he said. He twisted his wrist, sending a white mouse scurrying out of his sleeve. The lively morsel then scampered into a piece of Tupperware Kody drew from his bag. “And don’t worry about the performance,” Mike said to me, leaning in, “I won’t let her squeeze too hard.” Then he turned and strode off with that showman’s posture that won over my ex-wife, revealing, as he did so, the back of his suit, which had been sewn over with fluorescent green motley and had “Mr. MagicPants” written on the back in bright yellow spangles. Mike was running late for his 3:30 at the Children’s Palace.

That night I lay awake to the hooting of Athena (for such was the name the class had bestowed upon their pet). The “her” Mike had mentioned was his daughter Odessa, the new female Hercules, who had been Kody’s classmate and friend since kindergarten. What are the odds, I ask myself, that my wife would marry the father of one of Kody’s classmates? Pretty good, I answer myself, considering they fell in love at PTA meetings.

In the meantime, Odessa had grown at such an alarming rate that the school had needed to order new chairs. I suspected, in fact, that she was the reason my son could wear a monocle and still not be stuffed in a locker. At the bus stop she looked like the Statue of Liberty and her classmates were the tourists. It gave me some comfort, but there’s only so far a man can go in life protected by the muscles of his step-sister.

But now those muscles would be turned against him! Again and again I saw poor Anteaus lifted from the bosom of his mother earth and crushed. Unfairly, I thought. He was equally the son of gods. According to some sources, he wasn’t a brigand at all, but simply a powerful Libyan ruler, and Hercules’s conquest merely an apology for colonialism.

To make matters worse, Antaeus’s manner of demise summoned up one of the worst memories of my childhood, an episode from the dark era before I learned to sacrifice parts of myself in the interest of safety. I remembered being held upside down over the grade school toilet and shaken until all the Burger Boy trading cards fell from my pockets. Up and down I went, lifted mid-air by big David McKey, the blood rushing from my feet to my head. Abandoned to the sticky tile, I gave my prized, waterlogged cards one sorrowful glance and never collected them again.

Surely there must be a gentler way to guide a youth into the safe paths of social conformity. I even felt something like righteous anger on behalf of that ancient Libyan lunkhead.

The next morning I decided to pay a visit to my own mother, the soil that bore me and ripened me. I put on my best long underwear, two pairs of pants, a shirt and a sweater. I donned my jacket, pulled on my hat and mittens, and made the journey to my very own sitting room, first pausing to knock on the door.

“Come in,” said a voice that sounded like it came from the center of an igloo.

Sometimes I wish she were a little more middle-of-the-road too.

At first I could hardly see, my eyes stung so much from the cold. My mother was sitting on a platform that looked like a Tibetan chorten. With her half-lidded eyes and full lotus she looked waxy and motionless like a decorative candle.

“Tell him it’s almost finished. I just gotta put one more jewel in the eye socket.”

On the table beside her, four plastic skulls were strung along red tinsel. She’d pasted the sockets with plastic gems. She was making Kody a girdle worthy of a luchador.

“Man, it’s cold in here.”

“I’m migrating my chakras.”

For the past twenty years my mother had kept her living quarters within the FDA approved range for the storage of poultry. She claimed it allowed her to sync her biorhythms to the universal aether. She looked very well-preserved for her age, I admitted it, though it did require a large monthly expenditure of electricity and refrigerant.

“Would you say that I was a happy kid?” I asked.

Her eyes opened slowly, and I could have sworn I saw a faint film of frost crackle as she resettled her hands.

“Are you thinking about those Burger Boy cards again,” she said, reaching toward a side table. She handed me a small bronze frame whose glass was obscured by a lacy filigree of ice. I melted it with my breath and wiped the condensation on my sleeve.

“That is the face of a perfectly normal child,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly the question I had asked, but I let that pass. I set the picture aside – photographs of myself always make me angry, somehow. Besides, the one I really was worried about was Kody. My worry even made me lose control for a moment. My feelings puffed out in frost before me.

“Everyone in his life is bizarre,” I said, “and their oddity is giving him a false sense of security.”

“I know you were always embarrassed of me.”

“You were the only mother who wore a Song dynasty gown. And you packed fermented bean curd for my lunch.”

“But they didn’t bully you for that?”

“Not thanks to you. And now Kody’s mother has taken to hand tinting silent films. His new step-father thinks nothing of going to Starbucks dressed in a crimson cape. And his grandmother…well, you still have a very, very cold handshake. But you’re the exceptions, you know. Fate has passed you over. Most people who stand out the way Kody does get repulsed, rebuffed, bogged down in shame, or worse. We’re not demigods. I don’t want him to find out the hard way what happens to people like him.”

My mother closed her eyes. “You want him to sell his soul.”

“No,” I said. “Just rent it a little.”

“Kody is beautiful and unique. The best thing you can do is just let him be, just as I let you be.”

She reached somewhere within her robe and pulled out a white mouse. “Here, take this to him. He was going to put it next to the butter then thought better of it.” Its eyes had glazed open and its tail had frozen in a hug around itself. It was almost as though it had frozen in proximity to her body.

“And who are they, anyway,” I continued, “to consign Kody to a bit part, not even a full labor, and take the lead away from him? It’s the only power he’s ever had.”

“True power is within,” she said. “And don’t worry about him. He has a fine father to guide him.”

On the way out I grabbed an extra gallon of milk I’d left to chill by the bookshelf then shut the door behind me.

She’d meant it as a compliment (I think), but something about the word “fine” stuck in my craw, and I chewed it over for the rest of the day. No Herculean concubines, jealous centaurs, poisoned shirts for me: if anything I lose people from sheer, boring fineness. I’ve always thought the safest option was to make myself as small, as normal, as fine as possible. As a boy, my mother’s eccentricity left me no choice. And then I went and married her likeness, and she left me for a man so resplendently uninhibited he converses with rubber chickens.

It turns out fineness can protect you from a lot of things, but not everything.

One afternoon I slouched on a beanbag chair watching Kody rehearse. Athena shifted side by side on the rail on her shockingly ugly feet.

“What if he put dirt in his shoes,” I said. “Then he’d always have mother underfoot. Or is the power proportional, does it require a certain depth of clay? Did he risk his life every time he ascended a platform?”

Kody looked up from his script and bit his upper lip, like he does when he’s thinking. “What if he lived in an underground cave?” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“The earth would surround him on every side. He’d be four times as strong.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You might be onto something. Isn’t it frustrating to see such great power undone by simple lack of precaution?”

“I guess so.”

“I mean, if you have the luxury of only owning a single flaw, you think you’d owe it to yourself to cover that fault and be done with it. Most mortals have so many that it takes a whole lifetime to know what to protect against and by the time you figure it out you’ve already been struck by an arrow or had your head dunked in the toilet.”

“I don’t think Antaeus was known for his intelligence,” Kody said.

“No, but you are – so what would you do?”

He thought about it. “Magnets,” he said. “I’d pave the whole hillside with a magnetic sheet. Then I’d wear iron shoes and no one would be strong enough to lift them but me.”

“Good, but a little impracticable.”

We spent the rest of the day concocting fantasies of every possible combination of pulleys, winches, superglues, and wheels – anything to keep Antaeus’ feet firmly on the ground. In one memorable idea he was just a head sticking out of the Libyan desert, his alimentary needs tended to by a trained army of moles.

We may not have come any closer to changing the fate of a mythical bandit and murderer, but we did have fun. It was the most fun we’d had together in a long time. I was reluctant to leave, so for a while we sat in silence listening to Athena make odd little screeches. Then I noticed a new pin stuck on my son’s messenger bag.

“What does this mean?” I asked.

“Everyone in the class has a superhero nickname. That’s mine.”

I contemplated for a moment. The pin said “Special K.”

“How do they say it?” I finally asked. “I mean, special as in special, or, you know, ‘special.’”

He shrugged. “I dunno. Like unique.”

Then we said goodnight and before I left I noticed that the floor of Athena’s cage was decorated with little tufts of fur.

That evening I dreamed of an Antaeus as big as the Empire State Building. His muscles glistened and he was crouched over a skull. Then the sky darkened as an even larger giant blocked out the sun, bent over, and uprooted him like the flimsiest daisy. All of his Burger Boy cards scattered hither and yon across the countries of men…

With two weeks until the performance, I started rehearsing with him every day. Kody would show up in the living room in character, with toga and club, and we’d run through his lines. Together we decided to modulate his voice to something closer to grizzled Jimmy Stewart. We also practiced his head crushing swing using his old T ball equipment.

“If you were Antaeus,” he asked, “how would you walk?”

I thought about what it might be like to know you were invulnerable, to know that your every whim was backed up by demigod biceps the size of large Cornish hens. To know that any strangeness in yourself or in your mother had all the unblinking, inevitable power of myth.

“I think I’d walk with a burly confidence,” I said.

We started screening sumo wrestling videos. I scrutinized Kody pacing back and forth across the room on his little stalking horse legs.

“You need more heft. Your movements need to be more…girthy.”

So we dusted off some of the old exercise equipment from the basement. With the help of resistance bands and gauze we wound five pound weights around his torso. For his limbs we used the sandbags we’d bought back when the neighbor's sump was overflowing our flower boxes. The added weight gave his movements a deliberate, underwater slowness and dignity. Most of the extra bulk was concealed beneath his toga.

”I think even the real son of Zeus would have trouble lifting you now,” I said.

His footprints left spongy divots in the carpet that slowly filled in behind him.

I mixed together a packet of sugar and water into something we were both pleased to call lemonade. Kody had sunk so far into the couch his head was almost level with the seat. 

“Mike is a pretty cool guy, right?” I said.

“He’s as funny as Chaplin. He even lets me use his stage makeup.”

I remembered the time Mike came to the PTA meeting fresh from a performance. He hadn’t had time to change and his rouged nose stood out luridly beneath the cap and bells. Shamelessness protects some people from all misfortune–but you can’t show a whit of self-consciousness. Any doubt and they’ll seize you and rend you to pieces. I studied my son, the inherited weakness of his jaw that made it look like he had hardly any neck, the spindly, slightly awkward arms that tapered into delicate fingers, and wondered whether he would be among the invulnerable shameless. I rather hoped that he would. But there were no guarantees.

My reflections drifted into a realm dominated by Burger Boy cards, the glass of lemonade sweating in my palm. When my attention returned, Kody was describing all the stage tricks they had planned: a bull that charged on hidden rails, a hole to Hades that opened right in the center of the stage.

I hadn’t realized that Mike had been put in charge of special effects.

“Whatever happened to that kid who kept tying your shoelaces together?” I asked.

Kody had fallen so far between the cushions that he had begun to collapse on himself like certain species of sea anemone.

“He doesn’t do that. Not since Odessa started hanging out with me more.”

I grabbed a protruding limb and hauled him out of the sofa. The momentum almost sent him careening into the lamp.

Over the next several days he started wearing the weights all the time. You could hear the boards creaking as he walked down the hallway. He still looked pretty puny but he moved like the Colossus of Rhodes. He kept in character, too. One time he slid his dinner plate across the floor with a tiny yet resonant burp (he was too heavy to mount the chair) and said, “Ice cream, please, you hideous rube.”

“Yes, Lord Antaeus,” I said and presented him the dish and the cherry. He ate with his fingers and a great smacking of lips

One night I found myself once again unable to accustom myself to the empty expanse of my queen size bed. I came upon him silhouetted against the living room window. His small fists were propped on his hips and his white sneakers showed beneath the tangle of his toga. Outside the vast night stretched on and on and all the houses were asleep. I walked away quietly so as not to disturb him. As I retreated down the hallway, I heard him, with a serious voice, boasting to the moon.

On the day of the performance I saw a squirrel leap from branch to branch and miss. Then my lawn sprinkler choked and dribbled rust-colored water onto my shoes. The portents were there, for good or ill, to one who knew how to read the signs.

I didn’t know why I felt so nervous, as though I were about to be held upside down on stage and have all my cards come raining out of my pockets.

The gym was full of the people I’d spent the past six years making small talk with in the lulls at school events. Why now this sweat on the back of my neck? The talk had only grown somewhat more awkward after my wife left me in between PTA sessions. As treasurer, I still kept the budgets perfectly balanced. I picked my way through the smiles to a seat in the back. Each nod came at me as though it were a stone. Mike was somewhere backstage reattaching a hydra head, and my ex-wife would be with my mother somewhere in the front row, both of them readying their cameras.

And Kody, Lord Antaeus–when I’d dropped him off, he had gravely made his way back stage, treading his way through monsters and beasts. He never broke character or looked to the right or the left. Now I couldn’t see him through the living jumble of feathers, fabric, and scales. I wanted just a glimpse of him, though. The world out there can be so cruel.

I was grateful when the lights dimmed, since for some reason I felt like crying. Before the show begins is almost my favorite part. In the echoes of the final stage settings, you can hear the whispers of a new mode of existence. I wondered why in all these ancient scenes the temples were somehow already in ruins, bare unconnected columns and fallen capitals, as though they’d never been young.

Mr. Tomlin, the theater teacher, was on stage saying something about the insane jealousy of Hera and tugging at his fashionable suspenders. Then a little girl shrilled a few pitchy notes on a recorder and the show began in earnest.

My anxiety grew more acute as the performance progressed. I was like someone nervous for his own lines who can’t pay attention to anything else. There were the serpents who almost strangled Hercules the cradle (Mike had done wonderful things with sock puppets), there the famous Nemean lion: all the impossible tasks, easily dispatched, weighed me down somehow, with each moment passing more quickly to the next, headed inevitably toward the starring moment that would also mean Kody’s doom. Odessa made an imposing Hercules, I had to admit. The Stymphalian birds flitted around her like so many mosquitoes. The Cretan bull shook like a scared puppy and Geryon the three-headed giant collapsed in a heap before she’d even strung her bow.

What was Kody doing backstage? I suddenly thought back to the time I’d lost him at the mega mart. I’d looked all over for him in a panic until I found him at the end of the soup aisle. He’d found a worker’s cart and was slowly restocking the shelves, carefully examining the cans as the crowds filtered around him, stacking them neatly as though everything depended on it.

“I have another labor for you, Hercules! Ha ha ha!” The boy playing Eurystheus had ascended his cardboard throne. He twirled a fake mustache more reminiscent of Wyatt Earp than anything Attic, and ring pops glistened on his fingers. “I’m hungry for some apples–golden ones! Ha ha ha!”

And then there he was. Kody trundled heavily on stage, stepping around rope and smoke pots. It was as though his seventy pounds were shaped around bones of lead. He carried himself with a fierce dignity, not at all like a petty bandit. Facing a Hercules twice his size, he did not cower. He faced her like he faced all the rest of the world: with an unselfconsciousness that made me feel both proud and afraid.

“Hercules, son of Zeus, I am Antaeus, born of earth. You have come far, but your journey is at an end. No challenger has ever defeated me in battle – see where their skulls shine in the sun. I promise I’ll give yours a prominent spot. Ready your club!”  

Three times the adversaries circled each other, and three times they skirmished without either giving way. Antaeus’s girdle of skulls chattered and clicked, their gemmed sockets flashing. No other noise from the audience was to be heard, just a dim silence at the edge of the fray.

“Is that all you got?” Antaeus cried. “Let's go another round…Jerk-ules!”

Hercules prepared himself for a mighty strike. Odessa wound up like an all-star slugger and loosed the foam bat. It connected with a thwack and sent Antaeus to the ground, where he lay like a fallen scoop of vanilla ice cream, his bright toga spreading around him. Then from some unseen center of power he gathered himself in, recomposed his limp limbs and rose again. By this time I had totally lost control. Tears were streaming down my face as I watched my son slowly prop himself back up. They fought again and again, and every time Antaeus fell, he rose with redoubled strength.

I suddenly felt weirdly grateful for my ex-wife, Mike, my mother, even Mr. Tomlin: I thought back to Kody silhouetted against the dark window, looking so small and alone. I would be too afraid if it were just me, if I were the only one he had.

“He’s gaining power from his mother, the earth!” Hercules cried. “I need to lift him so he doesn’t touch the ground!”

This was the big moment. Antaeus raised his fists to the sky, and for the first time let out a mighty roar. Hercules set aside her club. She advanced on Antaeus until her long shadow fell over him as though he were a diminutive fire hydrant. I felt a skip in my own heart when she bent down and seized him around the ribs.

At first I thought it was part of the show. Hercules strained but Antaeus stayed rooted to the ground. She tried again. There was a little shuffling within his robes but that was all. By the time Odessa’s face turned red around the bulging veins, I knew something strange was going on. She really was trying and yet Antaeus wouldn’t budge.

A low murmur rose from the crowd. Odessa stood back and looked around helplessly. My son’s face was pale and immovable, set as alabaster.

The succeeding moments unfolded very rapidly, but to my contracted attention everything played out in slow motion. Mr. Tomlin was first on the stage. He asked helplessly what was going on but then the back of his suspenders caught on one of the perches of the Stymphalian birds. He rubberbanded backward and fell from the stage with a thud.

Then from stage right Mike leaped past the curtain.

“I think –” he said, but his speech was interrupted by Athena. She dove down from where she’d been watching in the rafters, a dusky ball of feathers and talons. She clambered on his sleeve, apparently looking for another mouse, and her wings overshadowed him.

By that time my ex-wife and my mother had roused themselves from their surprise. Both rushed the stage simultaneously and collided, tripping over each other’s legs. “I’m melting,” my mother cried. She’d fallen over a footlight and the hot beam spilled around her, throwing her cool shadow to the ceiling. My ex-wife struggled to extricate her limbs from an extension cord.

Through it all my son had stood still and silent, his pale face unmoving. More shapes started to shift in the crowd but before they could stand I leaped the three rows down to the floor. “Lord Antaeus!” I cried with a warped crack in my voice.

I sailed over the supine forms, gained the stage, and wrapped my arms around my son. I could feel his quick breath and the slight tremor that ran through his body. I tried to lift him but some countervailing force kept him rooted to the spot.

“Kody,” I whispered into his ear, “are you wearing your weights?”

“No,” he said.

I tried again but something was keeping him suctioned to the ground.

“Kody, what’s going on?”

“Something’s stuck, Dad.” He sounded afraid and I could sense the crowd stirring behind me. I pulled again, applying even more force, but all I heard was the groaning of the wooden stage. It was as though it didn’t want to let him go.

“Dad, help!”

“I’m trying, buddy.” I closed my eyes against the stage glare, and for a moment the whole world disappeared. When I opened them again I saw what looked like a small demon crouching in the shadow, holding a trident. It had blue skin, green weedy hair, and seemed to be laughing.

“Poseidon,” I screamed. “Poseidon!”

With supernatural exertion I pulled against the obscure potency that held us in thrall. At the point of greatest resistance I pushed through the blockage, letting out a holler. The spell fractured and I lifted my son into the liberating air. For a moment we stood, locked in an embrace. I was not Hercules, but his father, and I had freed him.

The strength that coursed through the two of us carried me off the stage, through the purgatorial dark and toward the exit. With a mighty and thoroughly gratuitous kick I burst the door. Its glass cracked in the opening concussion, betokening over a hundred dollars in damages.

It was only when I had retreated to the shadow of the jungle gym that I noticed part of the stage was still attached to Kody’s feet. I laid him down carefully and freed his foot from the buckled rail. His shoe had been caught under one of the trolley tracks that had guided the Cretan bull.

“Are you okay?” I asked. A stripe of sun slanted across his pale face and his limp arms sprawled weakly. He looked so small and helpless in the vastness of the yard.

Then he flipped himself over, spread his hands in the grass, and slowly but steadily arose.

“I warned you that I was undefeated!” he said. “Ha ha ha!”

Then he walked back toward the gym with the slightest of limps.

I followed after. I knew I would try to step assuredly over the broken glass and not feel ashamed. I’d try to pass before the audience, proud of myself as of my son, and unmindful of regret.

Sometimes I think my mother is right: sometimes you don’t want to keep your feet too firmly on the ground. 

Dan Muenzer is an educator from Honolulu, Hawaii. He dreams of one day writing a page-for page reproduction of Robert Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy."