The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,41

or if they caused calluses and whether those calluses matched the ones I have now. Of course, I have no tools.

I have many scars, the largest one a long white slash on my thigh. I try to read them, hoping for a memory of some accident or battle, but they are illegible.

I wonder if I am a prisoner and this house is my jail. The door is always unlocked but I have only the one thin shirt—when I go outside the cold drives me back into the cabin within minutes. It would be a strange sort of prison that lasts only for a season, unless winter never ends here. I do not remember it beginning.

I have asked the wolves about these things. They listen with their tongues lolling, giving every appearance of thoughtful attention, but when I am done they trot off into the trees without comment. The hawks turn their bright eyes on me and seem concerned with my plight but they too are silent. I sometimes think the falling snow murmurs to me in a language I cannot quite understand.

The solution to my perplexity comes one morning when I ransack the cabin for what might be the hundredth time and on impulse drag the firewood bin away from the wall. Behind it I find a soot-smudged book coated with wood dust. I set it on the table and slowly rotate it, scrutinizing it from every angle, my breath quickening. Its binding is thick and pebbled and there is no title on the spine. Its pages are cut—someone has read it. I hope it is a diary, or a memoir, or at any rate some kind of an explanation. I open it reverently and read.

By dusk I have read the book through. It is the story of Odysseus, soldier and diplomat, a man of versatile intelligence who connived to destroy a sacred city in the East and made the long trip home over many trying years.

I wonder what the book was meant to tell me. The allegorical possibilities are many, and the number of codes it could conceal are infinite, but it could be a simpler, more nearly literal message—perhaps it is, in some small way, my story. I could be the orb-eyed cyclops in his cavern, for like him I am remote from mankind, and for all I know would be angry at visitors, but I have two eyes. I could be Telemachus, who is lost in his own land. I could even be Penelope, a prisoner in my home, courted by the cold wind and winter. Is my house Ithaca Hall? The Phaeacian castle? Are the wolves Scylla, the cold Charybdis?

I re-read the book. Once again it ends with Odysseus allaying Poseidon’s wrath by walking inland with an oar over his shoulder until someone mistakes it for a winnowing fan. The shock of revelation is so great that I go out and stand for a minute in the cold, the sharp wind and harsh light making my eyes water, before coming back in to read the ending again. At last, I know myself. I hug myself with delight at having finally solved the riddle. Modesty had kept me from believing it, or at least from admitting it to myself, but now all is clear. The essential insight is that the text is corrupt, or, if not corrupt, then incomplete, or of a calculated obscurity. Immortal Poseidon’s wrath was implacable—in order for Odysseus to escape from his vengeance once and for all it was necessary that he cease to be Odysseus. What would the cleverest of the Greeks have done in that situation? He would have gone somewhere remote, far away from gods and men and, somehow, forgotten everything, and thereby been himself no more. I can only speculate on how he managed to attain his amnesia. I do not know that I would now have the courage to go through with it—I can see that already much has changed for me. And then, I would be most unwilling to let go of my revelation.

Perhaps he went through each scene of his life and held it fixed in his mind’s eye until it disappeared. Eventually even his most vivid memories (the first time he touched Penelope’s skin, falling overboard and gasping just as a wave broke over his face) would fade to burnt-out after-image. Then, perhaps, he contaminated and diluted the remaining fragments of memory, rearranging them in every possible permutation: Penelope as a vapid giggler with apple-green