Macromere Press

Macromere: Thoughts on “Aegeus”, the sixth episode in He Who Shall Remain Shameless?

David: “It was sunny mid-September….” is how David Michael Ewald puts it, but this is really just speculation. The narrator of HWSRS successfully calculates that King Aegeus died in September, but to be honest there’s actually no proof that it was September. It could have been May. It could have been January. September works well in the novel, though. And there’s also no way of knowing exactly when Aegeus was born and when he died. He definitely died an old man, but how old, and when, we’re not sure. One voice on the Internet puts his birth—and probably his death—in the 1200s BCE, but, again, nothing is certain.

M: Why Aegeus?

D: His story’s always fascinated me. As a kid I loved Greek mythology. I figure a lot of people can say that but I’m unaware of many people—if any—who have dealt with Aegeus’s death in fiction. Pretty much everything I’ve encountered focuses on Theseus’s adventures, and Aegeus’s unfortunate suicide is simply a coda to those adventures. A lot of what I’ve read goes something like, “…Theseus left the island of Naxos and continued toward home. His father, Aegeus, was perched up at the top of a high cliff overlooking the ocean. When the ship appeared on the horizon Aegeus saw that the sail was black, and, in despair at his son’s death, he threw himself into the sea that now bears his name, the Aegean.” It seemed so terrible to me, such a tragedy, that a father would kill himself because of a mistake like that.

M: Theseus forgot to switch sails….

D: If he had remembered to put up the white sail, claiming victory, his father would have lived. But instead the son forgot, and the father mistook that black sail as a sign of his son’s death, and that was that. It was such a simple mistake on Theseus’s part, and yet it led to his father’s death.

M: In a way then, this story is thematically similar to “Harriet”….the mistake that William Willard made by shifting his weight too far forward in the plane, which then caused Harriet and him to both fall out at such a height. When we read “Aegeus”, we think of that line in “Harriet” David says to William Willard: “And by committing suicide you murdered Harriet Quimby.”

D: There’s definitely that connection to be made. Another element among many at work in HWSRS is the idea of feckless deaths, or deaths that could have been easily averted had something slightly different happened, someone had come in at the right time, or hadn’t taken a small action that turned out to cost another person their life. But it’s not just about death; it’s also about love, and what amazed me about that part of Theseus’s adventures was the love his father obviously had for him. I mean here was a father willing to kill himself because his son had died. There must have been so much guilt weighing on Aegeus for allowing his son to leave to go fight the minotaur. He couldn’t live with the role he had taken in his son’s supposed failure and death.

M: Have you been to Greece?

D: I have. When I went I had no idea I would write about it the way I did, that some of my experiences would go into “Aegeus”, but I like that melding of the fantastical and the contemporary, the common.

M: This story appears to be somewhat of a turning point in the novel. David’s laptop, for one….

D: Yes, the laptop: a 21st century tragedy. But in “Andrew” we’ll see that it was for the best.

M: How do you say ‘thanks for your time’ in Greek?

D: I have no idea.