The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,56

on the beaches in hopes of seeing a ship but the white fog she had summoned hid everything. On the fourth night she was not surprised, and thus easily able to conceal her delight, when he came to her bed.

As for Theseus, he is in Hell now, wandering and restless, but he is the happiest of shades, always expecting to find himself once again among the blank white halls, the arcades and the high galleries.

*Pasiphaë was Minos’s wife. She had offended the goddess Hera, who punished her with a great passion for a sacred white bull. Daedalus built a sort of hollow cow simulacrum for her, with which she was able to consummate her desire. The issue of that union was the Minotaur, a cannibalistic monster half man and half bull.

*A reference to Argos, a thousand-eyed giant employed by Hera as the guardian of a grove of golden apples. His eyes slept independently—no matter the time of day or night, hundreds would be awake and looking in any given direction.

*Aegeus, his father, had told the ship’s crew to hoist white sails if Theseus lived and black if he had perished. When he saw his son’s black-sailed ship sailing toward Athens he flung himself from the Acropolis in despair.

*The Greek word for concealer is Calypso.

OCEAN’S DISC

His days were bound by the disc of ocean. In the morning he climbed to the top of her island and sat clutching his knees to his chest against the wind, scanning the horizon for white sails. She left him alone while the sun shone but at dusk she approached out of the gloom, touched his face, took his hand and made to draw him back toward her cave. He pushed her roughly away. “Stay, then,” she said, “and look for ships in the dark.” He stiffened and turned his back. Her face fell and she said she was sorry, she had not meant it, but there was not much good in keeping watch at night. Carefully nursing his pride, she drew him back to her bed.

In the fading light Hermes watched them go, exasperated. The sharp axe winked in the grass where he had put it weeks ago, the blade carefully turned to catch the evening sun. Behind it was a stand of straight, tall young pines, perfect for ship-building.

SANATORIUM

The war had been long and terrible. Of that Mr. O* was sure, though he could only remember a few disconnected, disconcerting images: Dust hanging over a battle-field, glowing as the sun rose behind it. A brass helmet struck into two pieces. A black tree in the middle of a white plain. Later he was told that these were images from famous songs, emblematic of the war—they had won prizes—and he had almost certainly not seen them firsthand. Nevertheless, he was sure he had been in the war. That was what the nurses told him, or at least implied, and then there were his scars, and why was he in this sanatorium if not to recover? Its small white cubical buildings clung to the island’s vertiginous cliffs like swallows’ nests, steep stairways tracing parabolic arcs between them. Cats sprawled on the walls tracking the sun and looking skeptically at the azure sea and the ospreys nesting in the parapets. Inexplicably, he wanted to leave. He exhorted himself to show a grateful spirit but this only made him more fretful. He took to plucking threads from his robe in the morning and to rolling bread pills at dinner.*

The days passed like a flock of white birds wheeling overhead and he remembered no more of himself though he frequently resolved to make it his business to do so. Sometimes he found notes he had written to himself that set out meticulous plans for recollection—meditation and a diary, for instance, both of which he had soon abandoned. There was a cedar chest full of keepsakes at the foot of his bed—a bag of salt, a ball of beeswax, a fire-sharpened olive-wood staff, a black-fletched arrow with a black shaft. He took to handling them in hopes of jarring loose a recollection.

During a musical evening a woman in a long green dress sang songs about an old war in which all-but-forgotten heroes fought and died for ends that even they, it seemed, held contemptible. Her plangent voice filled the music room, with its many rows of polite auditors and its ceiling painted like an evening sky. While others applauded, Mr. O reached absently into his coat pocket and found a