The Butterfly Dream
The butterfly dream.
Was I dreaming that I had become Hades? Or had Hades been dreaming he was a human named me — and only now woken up?
When I opened my eyes, I was seated on a throne.
There was not a single point of light, and yet the space was strangely not dark. Black-forged pillars of stone soared to heights where no ceiling could be seen. The air was cold enough to settle into the bone, and from some distant place the sound of a river flowing never ceased.
And the hand resting on the armrest was not my hand.
It was a span larger than mine, pale as marble. Even the rise of the tendons and the placement of the calluses were foreign. I stared down at that hand for a long time. When I closed it, a stranger's hand closed. When I opened it, a stranger's hand opened.
On trembling legs I stepped down from the throne and walked without purpose.
I passed through black corridors that swallowed even the sound of footsteps, and when I stood at a balustrade, a grey plain unfurled below me. Shadow-shapes like mist walked in silent single file.
At the edge of the plain, by a black river, the boat of an old ferryman with a pole had come to shore, and the shadows disembarking joined the end of the procession. Somewhere a dog barked — three howls layered in perfect unison.
A three-headed dog.
An old ferryman who carried the dead.
A black river the living could not cross.
Even someone who had only half-learned the myths over a shoulder could have solved that riddle. This was the land of the dead. And the one who had been sitting on that land's throne was me.
I was Hades.
There were no memories. Not of the years Hades had lived, not of how this palace had been built — nothing rose to the surface. Only the body was Hades; the inside was still me.
But one thing I could tell: this kingdom had not been born yesterday.
The armrests of the throne were worn smooth only where a hand habitually rested. In the archives, the ledgers of the dead were stacked high enough to touch the ceiling. The palace household went about their duties like water flowing, whether the king issued orders or not.
A vassal told me that the three brothers who had deposed the old king had drawn lots and divided the sky, the sea, and the Underworld among themselves. How impossibly distant that drawing of lots had been, the thickness of the ledgers made plain. In short, I had been dropped midway into a kingdom that had already been rolling along for ages.
The Underworld was quiet.
With no sun rising there was no morning, and with no morning there was no day.
The processions of the dead crossed the river without a sound. The night-servants opened their mouths for nothing beyond what was necessary. The black palace swallowed even footsteps.
At first that silence terrified me.
If it was a dream, I had to wake. I pinched my cheek, bit my forearm, cracked my forehead against the wall. It hurt. It hurt with a vividness that was almost nauseating. Hoping that if I slept I might open my eyes in the original world, I slept for days on end. Every time I woke, the ceiling above me was black.
Beneath that ceiling I returned, again and again, to the first day's question.
Is this my dream? Or am I the dream?
If the former, the dream was far too long and far too real. If the latter, then the human called me had never existed at all.
It would mean that twenty-odd years of memory — my parents' faces, the fluorescent lights of a convenience store at dawn, the taste of a triangle kimbap — had all been a single night's dream dreamed by some god.
I could bear neither answer, so I held that question for a long, long time.
I counted a year. I counted ten. Somewhere around a hundred I stopped counting.
By then I had learned one thing: even terror has a shelf life. Even the confusion of a reversed existence wears away before time.
The silence of the Underworld did not press me. The dead asked nothing. And I had time to spare — aeons of it, truly.
One day I stopped pinching my cheek. I stopped praying, before sleep, to be sent back to the original world. Instead I began taking the ledgers down one by one and reading them. I began answering the petitions of the dead. I learned, one by one, the faces and names of the night-servants. Looking out first thing at the processions of the dead had, at some point, taken the place of a morning greeting.
Whether I was myself or Hades, I never finally knew. But I did reach one conclusion: either way, the life laid before my eyes was only one. What did it matter if I was the butterfly or Zhuangzi? If you have wings you fly; if you have feet you walk. That is all.
A dream that will not break, I decided, is simply called a life.
Once I had settled, the practical worries came crowding in.
The first was human relationships. For someone with no memories, the sudden appearance of Hades's wife, lover, or family, casually launching into old stories, would have been the end of everything.
Fortunately, the Hades of the myths I remembered was a thorough recluse.
There was no wife. Not yet. I had never heard of drinking companions on the surface, and he was not the sort to show his face at every Olympian banquet.
And the Hades of this world seemed little different. Nowhere in the palace was there a trace of a mistress. There were no guest rooms that had ever hosted visitors. The household amounted to little more than the taciturn children of the goddess of night. The ferryman took no interest in anything beyond his fare.
Still, caution never hurt, so I economized my speech. The moment I opened my mouth I felt something would be found out, so I selected only the necessary words and spat them out. Between a taciturn king and taciturn servants, the silence of the Underworld only deepened by the day — but no one found it strange.
Being alone was a blessing for this. With no one to catch me out, there was nothing to be caught.
The problem was the surface. More precisely, my brothers. The two younger ones with whom I had supposedly toppled our father and divided the world. One day I would certainly have to face them. Could I be Hades before them?
That one day arrived sooner than I expected. At the edge of the earth a race of giants was born and marched on Olympus.
The Gigantomachy. The war of the gods and the giants.
When a messenger came down even to the Underworld bearing the summons of the king of the sky, my first impulse was to scheme an escape — and I abandoned it in three seconds. Nothing would have been stranger, in that situation, than for the eldest brother to stay away.
But once I was actually out there, there was nothing to worry about.
On the battlefield there was no room for old stories. Days of eating together, sleeping together, and fighting together followed one after another, and in that interval the awkwardness wore itself away.
Fortunately, this body knew how to fight.
I had not inherited the memories, but the strength seemed to have remained intact; when I took up a spear, my hands moved on their own. By the time the war ended, trading cups of wine with my two younger brothers had become, more or less, a natural thing.
When the war ended, the age of marriages and births began.
Palaces rose on Olympus, the king of the sky took consorts in succession, and the banquets never stopped. And as I watched those banquets, I found I could never quite get used to the marriages of the gods.
Take, for instance, the wedding called the marriage of the century — the king of the sky and the goddess of marriage. At that feast, where the gods each sang their hymns of blessing and ambrosia flowed like a river, I alone froze mid-toast.
They were siblings.
No matter how many times I turned it over, they were siblings. Born of the same mother's womb, swallowed into the same father's belly. And yet the gods were unbothered, the world was unbothered, and only I could not be unbothered.
Among the gods, incest is not incest.
The pool of bloodlines is the size of a palm to begin with; if you mean to choose a consort, you have to set degrees of kinship aside first. I understood that with my head. This was that kind of world.
But knowing and accepting are different problems.
At every feast someone would offer me a cup and say, Elder brother, you ought to take a queen yourself by now. Is not half the throne of the Underworld empty?
Each time I answered by simply raising my cup. I could not. Within this cramped genealogy, I simply could not. If there was one thing that would not wear away even across several aeons, it was the modern common sense lodged in my skull.
Even so, I attended the banquets without fail. The wish to congratulate, at least, was sincere. Only my way of congratulating was a little different from everyone else's.
When I went to a feast for a newborn god, I would set out a small table. I would lay out a thread, an arrow, a lyre, a bit of gold, and the like, and we would all watch what the baby crawled over and picked up.
In the place I had lived, the custom was called doljabi. The well-wishing that grabbing the thread meant a long life held little meaning before immortal gods — but the moment a baby's tiny fist closed around an arrow and the whole feast erupted with laughter was no different on Olympus than anywhere else.
The rumor that the King of Death set a table before infants spread quickly. After a few times, at every birth feast they seemed to be quietly waiting for my table. When the nine sisters who governed song were born, I nearly threw out my back setting it up nine times in a row.
As I was summoned whenever a niece or nephew was born, news of banquets had, before I knew it, become ordinary.
That day I was in a palace corridor turning through the petitions of the dead. Even the Underworld had its share of work. Play the king for an aeon or so and you grow sharp-eyed with paperwork, if nothing else.
One of the night-servants approached without a sound and announced a visitor. Guests coming down from Olympus were rare. Guests coming down for good news were rarer still.
At the end of the corridor stood a young goddess. Not a crease in her pure white skirts, and even her posture was as straight as if measured with a ruler.
I had the sense I had glimpsed the face at some Olympian banquet, but the name would not come. Then again, the names I knew were only the famous gods I had read about in books; there was no chance I had memorized every child the king of the sky had scattered in all directions.
The moment the goddess saw me, she bowed so low her waist nearly touched the floor.
"You who dwell in darkness. Master of things unseen. Great King of the Underworld. Forgive this lowly one for daring to set foot in the king's palace."
I would never get used to these extreme honorifics, not in a hundred aeons.
The young gods of the nieces-and-nephews generation all found me this intimidating. The title of King of Death was apparently a heavy one.
"You've come a long way. The river of night must have been hard going for a living soul."
"When I spoke the king's name, the ferryman himself opened the way."
"That's fortunate. So — what brings you?"
"I have come to deliver joyful news."
The goddess folded her hands and announced in a clear, ringing voice.
"A daughter has been born between my father Zeus and the goddess of grain, Lady Demeter. A great feast to celebrate the birth will soon be held on Olympus, and my father has asked that Your Majesty also grace the occasion with your presence."
"Is that so? Good news indeed. Thank you for coming all this way to tell me. Of course I'll go to the feast."
"I am grateful for the king's generosity."
The goddess bowed again and made to withdraw. I called after her back.
"Ah — wait a moment. Sorry."
"Please ask what you will."
"What was your name again? I feel as if I've seen you at a banquet, but I simply can't remember."
Without the slightest change of expression, the young goddess answered with the same courtesy as at the start.
"I am called Eunomia. Born of my father Zeus and the goddess of law, Themis, I am Eunomia, who governs order."
Eunomia. Eunomia.
Watching the goddess turn away, I turned the name over several times. If I forgot it again at the next feast, it would truly be embarrassing.
In my defense, I had far too many nieces and nephews. The king of the sky never rested from producing them, Olympus grew more crowded by the day, and matching faces to names was no longer a trivial task.
And today, I was told, one more niece had been added.
This time, they said, it was Demeter's daughter.