Supper is boiled beef. Across the table looms Mrs. Boydstun’s face, haloed by smoke. On the television beside her, a brush strokes the upper eyelashes of an enormous eye.
“Mouse poops in the pantry.”
“I’ll set some traps tomorrow.”
“Get the Victors. Not the garbage ones you bought last time.”
Now an actor in a suit testifies to the miraculous sound of his Sylvania color television. Mrs. Boydstun drops her fork trying to bring it to her mouth and Zeno retrieves it from beneath the table.
“I’m done,” she announces. He wheels her into her bedroom, lifts her onto the bed, measures out her medication, pushes the TV cart and its extension cord into her room. Beyond the windows, out toward the lake, the last daylight evacuates the sky. Sometimes, at moments like this, as he scrapes the plates, the sensation of his flight home from London comes back: how it seemed as though the planet would never stop unspooling below—water then fields then mountains then cities lit like neural networks—it seemed to him that between Korea and London he’d had enough adventure for a lifetime.
For months he sits at the desk beside the little brass bed with the first verses of Homer’s Iliad on his left and the Liddell and Scott lexicon Rex gave him on the right. He hoped that vestiges of the Greek he learned at Camp Five might still be embedded in his memory, but nothing comes easily.
Μῆνιν, the poem begins, ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος, five words, the last the name Achilles, the second-to-last identifying that Achilles’s father was Peleus (though also suggesting Achilles is godlike), yet somehow, with only three words in play, mênin and aeide and theā, the line bristles with landmines.
Pope: Achilles’s wrath, to Greece the direful spring.
Chapman: Achilles’s bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse.
Bateman: Goddess, sing the destroying wrath of Achilles, Peleus’s son.
But does aeide fully suggest “to sing,” because it’s also the word for poet? And mênin, how best to translate that? Fury? Outrage? Vexation? To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.
Tell us, Goddess, about the wild temper of Achilles, son of Peleus.
Not good enough.
Speak, Calliope, about the outrage of Peleus’s boy.
Worse.
Tell the people, Muses, why Peleus’s kid Achilles was so fucking furious.
In the year following his return, Zeno sends a dozen letters to Rex, adhering strictly to questions regarding translation—imperative or infinitive? accusative or genitive?—ceding all romantic ground to Hillary. He sneaks the letters out of the house inside his shirt and mails them before work, cheeks burning as he slips them into the box. Then he waits for weeks, but Rex’s replies do not come quickly or regularly, and Zeno loses whatever bravery he began with. The gods on Olympus, sipping from their cups of horn, peer through the roof of the house and watch him struggle at his desk, mockery on their faces.
The vanity of assuming that Rex might have wanted him in that way. An orphan, a coward, a snowplow driver with a cardboard suitcase and a polyester suit: Who was Zeno to expect anything?
He learns of Rex’s death from Hillary in an airmail letter written in purple cursive. Rex, Hillary reports, was in Egypt, working with his beloved papyrus, trying to claw back one more sentence from oblivion, when he had a heart attack.
You were, Hillary writes, very dear to him. His huge, loopy signature takes up half the page.
Seasons tick past. Zeno wakes in the afternoons, dresses in the cramped upstairs room, creaks downstairs, rouses Mrs. Boydstun from her nap. Puts her in her chair, brushes her hair, feeds her dinner, wheels her to her puzzle, pours her two fingers of Old Forester. Turns on the television. Takes the note from the counter: Beef, onions, lipstick, buy the right red this time. Before he leaves for work, he carries her to her bed.
Tantrums, doctor’s appointments, therapies, a dozen drives to and from the specialist’s office in Boise—he sits with her through it all. Still he sleeps upstairs in the little brass bed, Rex’s Compendium of Lost Books and the Liddell and Scott entombed in a cardboard box beneath his desk. Some mornings, on the way home from work, he eases his plow to the side of the road and watches light seep into the valley, and it’s all he can do to get himself to drive the final mile home. In the last weeks of her life, Mrs. Boydstun’s coughs go submarine, as though she carries lakewater in her chest. He wonders if she’ll share any last words, any memories of his father, any insight into their relationship, if she’ll call him son or say she’s grateful for his years of care, grateful that she became his guardian, or show any sign that she understands his predicaments, but at the end she’s hardly there: just morphine and glassy eyes and an odor that carries him back to Korea.
On the day she dies he steps outside while the hospice nurse makes the necessary calls and hears a trickling and purring: roof draining, trees waking, swallows swooping, the mountains stirring, mumbling, buzzing, shifting. The melting world full of noise.
He removes every curtain in the house. Tugs the antimacassars off the chairs, dumps the potpourri, pours out the bourbon. Takes every rosy-cheeked porcelain child off every shelf, inters them in boxes, and deposits the boxes at the thrift shop.
He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.
Finally he yanks the discolored lace runner off the dining room table, retrieves the cardboard box from upstairs, and arranges his books across the old ring-stained walnut. He pours a cup of coffee and unwraps a new legal pad from Lakeport Drug and Luther curls up on top of his feet and lets off a ten-second sigh.
Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.
Zeno sharpens his pencil and tries again.