Apologoi

For this month’s second story, Alex Irvine brings us the story behind the Odyssey you think you know. ~ Julian and Fran, December 8, 2024

As this year winds up, The Sunday Morning Transport still has surprises for you, starting with last week’s tale by Jenna Hanchey, and this week’s story by Alex Irvine. We’ll also be sharing some favorites from early 2024, right to your inbox.

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Apologoi

by Alex Irvine

When I see my son for the first time in twenty years, I will think: If I had killed you, none of this would have happened.

I will have this thought as he embraces me, weeping, hesitant and torn by a longing so deep, he has no words for it. I will see the boy in him that I never saw in the flesh. Those years are gone. Agamemnon tore some of them away, and I wasted others in dalliance I cannot justify. Either way, they are not coming back. Perhaps we will share good years now, but when I am old around a fire, like Argos who just breathed his last, I will think back on those years I missed, and not Circe’s songs nor the wonders of what some are already calling the Odyssey will be worth the sorrow of not knowing my boy.

And the sorrows of what I did while I was gone.

That will happen soon. Foreknowledge is a kind of hell. Thanks, Tiresias.

*

Most of the songs lead off with us landing in Troy, but the whole thing really started years before. With Helen. She had suitors. Lots of them, thronging Tyndareus’s court. Things were tense, and about to get violent. So I, wily Odysseus, had an idea. See, there was this other woman at court by the name of Penelope, and I’d had my eye on her for some time. I figured if I could help solve Tyndareus’s problem, he could help solve mine.

So I proposed that all the suitors enter into a pact that they would never fight each other, and would always rally to fight for Helen’s chosen. Then Helen picked the one she wanted. Menelaus. Vain, stupid, beautiful. Love has no taste, I guess.

In return for brokering this deal, I got Penelope . . . and I got dragged into Agamemnon’s war when Helen ran off to Troy and Menelaus called in the promise. So that’s how clever I am. I’m not sorry I tried to get out of it, and I don’t blame Palamedes for putting Telemachus in front of the plow to see if I had really lost my mind. He had a job to do. But I still took care of him later. I don’t forget.

Achilles didn’t want to go, either. He let his mother dress him up like a girl and try to hide him. But in the stories I’m cruel, wily, deceitful Odysseus, and he’s mighty Achilles, even though guess who found him and forced him to get on the fucking boats in Boeotia with the rest of us? That’s right. Me. I’m the one who faced what had to be done. You’re goddamn right. If I was going, everyone was going. Especially Achilles. Put your heel in some armor and come fight with the rest of us, mama’s boy. Come suffer and die for Agamemnon’s pride.

Not that I am immune to wounded pride. Which brings us to right here, right now, in Eumaeus’s hut, where I sit in rags. Nobody knows me except my dog, and he just died. My son is coming, but he doesn’t really know me, either. I am what I told Polyphemus: nobody. And even when I become somebody again, I’ll never be what the stories say.

*

Speaking of that.

I could not fucking believe the Trojans fell for the horse. This is one time when I got credit for being clever, but the truth is, I came up with the horse as something for the men to do so they didn’t get restless and start thinking about going home; remember, these are the same geniuses who slaughtered Helios’s cattle and wouldn’t get off the beach on Ismarus before the Cicones came back. Nobody believed the horse would actually work. (See what I did there?) If Poseidon hadn’t killed Laocoön, and anybody had listened to Helen (who had a face that launched a thousand ships but a pretty sharp mind, too) and Cassandra, Priam probably would have burned the fucking horse outside the gates, and that would have been that.