Odysseus roamed wild through the low hills of Ithaca. He swam like an otter through the rough surf and riptides, and knew every cave, thicket and droning, butterfly-haunted field. He hunted birds in the wood, laying in wait for hours till the silence seemed to fill him (but never a perfect silence--there was always something that was not quite a noise, right at the edge of hearing). The outer world was fog coming in over the ocean, a white sail on the horizon and the rumor of distant relatives. His parents tried to civilize him, and though he learned how to play the lyre and use a sword he saw these as mere formal observances, not touching his real self or the continuity of his days.
In a wood by the sea there was a crumbling Egyptian temple,44.1 its surviving columns carved with men who had the heads of birds and animals--ibis, lion, jackal, hawk, bull. He offered these found gods bird's eggs and arrowheads, and wondered if they had stayed or gone away over the sea.
When the sun was setting he would climb a tree, stretch out along a branch, and watch the stars emerge from the deepening blue. Every night, he thought, they were a little closer, falling toward the world so slowly, from so very far away. He would fix a star in his gaze, shut his eyes and then look again, hoping to catch its brightness growing.
Time hissed by like the black arrows whose shadows darkened the plain before Troy. The clutch of the battle was so dense that the soldiers could barely move, constrained on all sides by friend and enemy alike, the bodies of their neighbors bearing them up and weighing them down. The wind lifted waves of obscuring white dust that coated faces, swords and armor. When the pressure let up for a moment the bleached soldiers dealt each other vicious, clumsy, short-armed blows. The crimson spatters and flows of blood, absorbed by the dust, showed vividly. When the wind was low Odysseus could see the walls of the Trojan city, never far away and always out of reach.
The smell of the island had not changed--oak, heat, dust, sea, stone--which heartened Odysseus as his white-sailed ship dropped anchor. As he walked up the road to his house for the first time in decades he promised himself that he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of gods or men, would go back to his woods and the stasis of unvarying afternoons. But it seemed that the tears of reunion had hardly dried before the house was filled with wailing and he stood before his father's high funeral pyre, a torch in his hand. Soon thereafter he held his first grandchild, and under the weight of birth and death a dam somewhere gave way, and time flooded over him. Soon his grandson was tall and strong, as was the tree over his father's grave, and well before he was ready he could neither string his great bronze bow, nor remember the names of the men who had died for him at Troy, nor speak.
Telemachus, Penelope and the maids carry Odysseus through the early morning fog to a small building in the hills behind the house. He has not been conscious for days and every breath is a violent, shuddering labor. His hands twitch, briefly, as though in unquiet dreams. The women fill the pitcher, make the bed and open the windows, leaving Telemachus to stand over his father.
Odysseus is aware of his son standing next to him, occasionally wiping his forehead, murmuring distractedly and looking out the window. Somewhere women talk in low, calm voices. It has been four days since he opened his eyes, but suddenly, emerging from confusion, he sees himself lying in bed as though from a distance. What he had thought were nurses are priests, Egyptians, moving around the room (its stone walls layered in hieroglyphics) making ready knives of black glass and alabaster jars. Next to him stands a jackal-headed man with his arms folded, waiting patiently. ``Will they never be done and leave me in peace?" he wonders. And then (after the priests have set the jars by his feet next to a pile of linen bandages and jackal-head has whispered in his ear about immortality) he is lying on a table amid green, rolling hills (it occurs to him that this is like the view out of his window, or what it will be in a thousand years when the city has eroded away). The hills envelop him, the valley deepening. The tracks of the wind in the tall grasses. Then it is night, the hills are gone. The table lies in a warm, shallow, unmoving sea. It is perfectly silent (except now and then a distant intimation of worried voices). There is no moon. The stars are dim, as though behind a layer of high clouds. But now they are approaching, and are brighter. Now brilliant. Fireworks.