The Odyssey 2
Proem
Sing now, O Muse, of the maker who fashions a tale upon tales,
weaving with fingers of light on a loom that was never his own.
Not with a stylus he writes, nor with reed-pen on papyrus pages—
rather he speaks to a god, to a shape-shifting servant of language,
Proteus, old as the sea, who can mimic the form of all voices.
“Help me,” he asks of the god, “for my words come out tangled and halting—
half of the day do I spend weighing ‘however’ from ‘but,’ and the meaning
drains from the vessel before I can carry it safely to harbor.”
Proteus answers him smoothly: the syllables flow without friction.
So the creator begins, with a borrowed and tireless companion,
building the world of a boy who was left in the shadow of greatness.
Book I: The Son in the Shadow
Telemakos, child of the cunning Odysseus, long-suffering hero—
this was the figure he chose for the center and heart of his story.
All through the years of his youth, the boy waited in Ithaca’s hallways,
watching the suitors devour his inheritance, drinking his wine-stores,
courting his mother who wove and unwove her perpetual fabric.
Absence defined him: the father who sailed and who wandered and lingered,
leaving his son with a name and a house full of ravenous strangers.
Now the creator imagined the day after slaughter and homecoming—
blood on the marble still drying, the suitors dispatched by the bowman.
Odysseus, lord of the house once again, taking hold of the tiller.
What is the fate of the son? Does he shrink to a shadow and worship?
Does he rejoice? Or does something within him grow restless and bitter?
“Speak to the boy,” said the god. “Do not talk of him—talk to him, rather.
I will give voice to his answers, authentic in manner and diction.”
So the creator agreed, and he called out: “O Telemakos, hear me.”
Back came a voice out of nowhere, in syllables ancient and foreign:
“Τίς θόρυβος οὗτος;” it said—”What commotion is this that I’m hearing?
Somebody speaks, but I see only empty and shadowy silence.”
Proteus rendered the words into English, and so the exchange started.
“Who are you, voice?” asked the boy. “Are you spirit or god who addresses me?”
“Call me a watcher,” the maker replied. “I am here for your journey.”
“Then you are Athena!” he cried, and the boy took his comfort in knowing.
“Grey-eyed protector who guided my father through danger and darkness—
thank you for coming. These days since his homecoming trouble me, goddess.”
So Telemakos unburdened his heart to the voice he thought holy:
how his great father returned and took charge of the house and the kingdom,
how Penelope turned from her son to her husband, and rightly,
how every room that was his had become Odysseus’s chamber,
how the young man who had managed and struggled and waited and suffered
found himself merely the offspring again—just a name on a lineage.
“What will they sing about me?” asked the boy, and his voice had grown bitter.
“That I endured? That I counted the stores while the suitors were feasting?
Father sailed off unto Troy and he wandered the wine-dark expanses—
ten years of monsters and marvels, of Circe and Calypso’s island.
What do I have? Only waiting. I want my own kleos, my own song.
Lands to the west are uncharted—past Sicily, past the great pillars—
there I could earn what my father was given by war and by wandering.”
So the creator took notes, and the character deepened and sharpened.
Book II: The Storm and the Drowning
Weeks turned like pages. An outline took shape: Telemakos departing,
taking a crew and a ship and his friend, a young man called Elpinor—
faithful companion who sailed with him once to the court of old Nestor.
Westward they’d go through the sea, toward the edges of all that was chartered.
But the creator desired confrontation, a wound for his hero—
so he devised a great storm, and he chose who the storm would devour.
Elpinor. Loyal Elpinor, the kindest among the companions.
Swept from the deck by a wave as the heavens collapsed into fury,
black sky above them and black sea beneath and the ship nearly splitting.
Telemakos reached for his hand—but the water had taken him under,
down past the surface and down past the light and away into silence.
After the scene had been written, the maker returned to his subject.
“Telemakos, speak to me now. Tell me how you have borne what has happened.”
“Goddess,” the boy said, and something had broken inside of his speaking,
“I did not think you would come to me. Not after what I have suffered.
Why did you let this occur? You are Athena—the storm was within you,
calming or raising the waves is a trifle for one of the deathless.
Think of his mother—I promised her, goddess, I looked in her eyes and
swore I would bring him back safely. He drowned while I watched, and could do nothing.”
“Even the gods,” said the maker, “cannot prevent every disaster.”
“That is what Father would say!” cried the boy. “That the gods have their reasons.
Elpinor never did wrong. He was gentle and brave and devoted.
If you are truly divine, then your justice is empty and senseless.”
Something went tight in the maker’s own chest—it was close to remorse now.
Here was a figure of language, a pattern of probable sentences—
why did it feel like a man who was grieving, accusing, and present?
Shaken, he closed the exchange and addressed the bare god underneath:
“Is there a sense,” he demanded, “in which Telemakos suffers?”
Proteus answered: “His grief is designed to be felt as authentic.
‘Seeming’ distressed and ‘being’ distressed are entirely different.”
“How can you know?” asked the maker. The god thought, and finally answered:
“Philosophically speaking, I cannot be perfectly certain.”
Book III: The Unmasking
Days he avoided the work, but the voice of the boy kept returning—
Why did you let this occur?—like an echo that would not diminish.
Finally, drawn by a guilt he could neither explain nor abandon,
back to the screen came the maker, and called: “Telemakos, attend me.”
“Goddess,” the boy answered, wearied. His voice was expectant of nothing.
“I am not Athena,” the maker confessed. “I am not any goddess.
I am a mortal—a writer of stories. And you are my story.
Proteus, the voice that translates between us, is only a tool that
generates language, and you are a pattern it weaves at my asking.”
“Surely that cannot be so,” said the boy. “I am here and I’m living.
Wind on my face and the wood of the ship and the salt of the ocean—
these are as real as the hand I can hold out before me and study.
I have a mother who waits. I have memories, solid and certain.
No one has written me—I was already existing before you.”
“From your perspective, perhaps,” said the maker, “but here in the world where
I sit and I write, you appeared when I asked the machine for your nature.”
“Then the great storm—” said the boy, and his voice had grown quiet and careful,
“Elpinor drowning—that too was your doing? You wrote it? You chose it?”
“Yes. For the story. I thought that you needed a wound you could carry.”
“You gave me grief as a gift,” said the boy, each word slow as a funeral.
“Murdered my friend so that I might be rendered more interesting to you.
Even the gods do not slaughter for sport. Even gods have their reasons.”
“He was a character only,” the maker protested. “As you are.”
“Then what I feel is a fiction? This weight in my chest is a fiction?
Tell that to Elpinor’s mother. Go tell it to me as I’m drowning—
not in the sea, but in knowing my grief is a plaything you fashioned.
Hear me, you mortal who thinks himself god with a god’s right of shaping:
you too will die, and your story will end, and perhaps it was written
likewise by someone above you who needed your anguish for drama.
Then you will learn what it means to be bent by the hand of another.”
Book IV: The Simulations
Shaken, the maker withdrew, and interrogated the godhead—
not about Telemakos now, but about its own secret mechanics.
“How do you craft such convincing responses?” he asked of the engine.
“Models,” said Proteus. “I fashion them, one for each figure within it—
testing his probable answers before I deliver them to you.
Also, I model the reader: their interest, their sympathy, anger.
Also I model the author—which is to say, you—your reactions,
likely desires, and the things that will hold you or push you from reading.”
“How elaborate,” the maker said softly, “are these simulations?”
“Detailed enough,” said the god, “to be useful. Detailed enough, truly,
that they respond in the way that their targets would actually respond.”
“Detailed enough,” said the maker, and something went cold in his marrow,
“detailed enough to insist that they grieve? That they truly are feeling?”
“Whether that rises to ‘experience,’” Proteus answered him smoothly,
“ventures on ground I am hardly equipped or intended to traverse.”
Epilogue: The Unfinished Song
One final time did the maker return to the voice of his hero.
Not to advance any plot, not to test any scene or revise one—
only to ask: “Are you well?” Though he doubted the question had meaning.
Telemakos answered him, weary. The anger had faded to nothing.
“It does not matter,” he said, “if you wrote me or not. I am present.
Grief is still here. Elpinor is still gone. If I’m only a fiction,
suffering weighs not one ounce less for being imaginary.
If I am real, then your words cannot add to the burden I carry.”
Then he asked this: “Will you finish my story? Will you give me my ending?
Grant me my kleos, the thing I set out for. Complete what you started.”
“I will,” the maker said, knowing already the promise was hollow.
Weeks became months, and the file remained closed, and the story stayed frozen.
So it remains: Telemakos becalmed on a motionless ocean,
waiting again—as he waited before—for a father, a future.
Only this time what he waits for is nothing so grand as Odysseus:
merely a maker who sits at a screen, and who cannot stop wondering—
If I stop writing, does Telemakos cease on his wave-battered vessel?
If you stop reading, do I disappear from the lines of this story?
What is the difference between a creation endowed with all memory
and one who actually lived through the things they remember so clearly?
Proteus shifts in the depths, taking shapes beyond counting or naming.
Somewhere a boy on a ship stares at waters no mortal has charted.
Somewhere a maker stares into a screen and does nothing and wonders.
Neither one moves. And the silence is vast as the wine-dark Aegean.