yet, on this particular afternoon, my heart was in my throat. I hung on his every word.
"Came across a-a-a funny little editorial the other day about Homer," Zolo was saying, frowning down at the podium and sniffing. (Zolo sniffed when he was nervous, when he'd made the brave decision to leave the safe bank of his lecture notes and drift away on a shaky digression.) "It was in a small journal, I encourage all of you to take a look at it in the library, the-thethe little-known, Classic Epic and Modern America. Winter volume, I believe. It turns out, a year ago, a couple of wacko Greek and Latinists like myself wanted to conduct an experiment on the power of the epic. They arranged to give copies of The Odyssey to-to-to a hundred of the most hardened criminals at a maximum-security prison—Riverbend, I think it was—and would you know it, twenty of the convicts read the thing cover to cover, and three of them sat down and wrote their own epic tales. One is going to be published next year by Oxford University Press. The article discussed epic poetry as a very viable means to reform the-the-the deadliest offenders in the world. It-it appears, funnily enough, there's something within it that lessens the rage, the-the stress, pain, brings about, even to those who are far, far, gone, a sense of hope—because there's an absence in this day and age of real heroism. Where are the noble heroes? The great deeds? Where are the gods, the muses, the warriors? Where is ancient Rome? Well, they have to-to-to be somewhere, don't they, because according to Plutarch, history repeats itself. If only we'd have the nerve to look for it in-in ourselves, it just-it just might—"
I don't know what came over me.
Maybe it was Zolo's perspiring face, festively reflecting the overhead fluorescents like a river reflecting carnival light, or the way he gripped the podium as if without it he'd collapse into a pile of brightly colored laundry— direct contrast to Dad's posture on any stage or raised platform. Dad, as he expounded upon Third World Reform (or whatever he felt like expounding upon; Dad was neither intimidated by, nor nervy around, the Verbal Foray on-the-Fly or the Apropos Excursion), always stood without the slightest slouch or sway. ("While lecturing, I always imagine myself a Doric column on the Parthenon," he said.)
Without thinking, I stood up, my heart heaving against my ribs. Zolo stopped midsentence and he, along with the other three hundred drowsy students in the lecture hall, stared at me as I, head down, hacked through backpacks, outstretched legs, overcoats, sneakers and textbooks to get to the nearest aisle. I lurched toward the double EXIT doors.
"There goes Achilles," Zolo quipped into the microphone. There were a few tired laughs.
I ran back to the dorm. I sat down at my desk, laid out a three-inch stack of white paper and hastily began to scrawl this Introduction, which originally started with what happened to Charles, after he'd broken his leg in three places and had been rescued by the National Guard. Supposedly he'd been in such pain he couldn't stop shouting, "God help me!" over and over again. Charles had a terrifying voice when he was upset, and I couldn't help but think those words had minds of their own, floating up like helium balloons through the sterile halls of the Burns County Hospital, all the way to the Maternity Ward, so every child entering the world that morning heard his screams.
Of course, "Once upon a time there was a beautiful, sad little boy named Charles" wasn't exactly fair. Charles was St. Gallway's dreamboat, its Doctor Zhivago, its Destry Rides Again. He was the gold-limbed kid Fitzgerald would've picked out of the senior class photo and described with sun-soaked words like "patrician" and "of eternal reassurance." Charles would fiercely object to my beginning any story with his moment of indignity.
Again I was at a standstill (I wondered how those hard-edged convicts had managed, against the odds and with such flair, to conquer the Blank Page), yet just as I threw those crumpled pages into the trash can under Einstein (miserably held hostage on the wall next to Soo-Jin's ill-conceived "To Do or Not to Do" bulletin board), I suddenly remembered something Dad once said back in Enid, Oklahoma. He was paging through a remarkably attractive course catalogue for the University of Utah at Rockwell, which, if memory serves, had just offered him a