by Steve Tesich
Not all the side effects were extreme, but there was always some price to be paid after a trip to the confluence.
Ulysses, however, was undaunted. He had outwitted the Trojans, the Cyclops, and even the gods themselves. He had heard the sirens singing and lived to tell about it.
An acute case of hubris was goading him on, telling him that he could outwit time as well without paying any price at all. Where lesser men had failed, he would triumph.
He would take his family to the confluence and there, in one fell swoop, he would rewrite his absent years. He would not just rewrite his own life but the life of his wife and son and make it appear that their lengthy separation had never taken place.
Despite Penelope’s foreboding about the journey, despite the Delphic oracle’s warnings, despite forecasts and reports of unprecedented galactic disturbances, Ulysses left Ithaca and set sail for the confluence with his wife and son and a crew of forty men.
Initially, they made steady progress. The solar winds were favorable, the sail full. Even when a storm hit, nothing about it seemed particularly alarming except its suddenness. It was as if the storm came from nowhere. And then, just as suddenly and inexplicably, it was gone.
The winds died down and then died out completely. The solar sail expired and hung limp from the long mast like a wedding veil. Everything was calm and serene while they waited for the winds to resume.
There was no warning. Nobody on board the ship heard it or saw it coming, because when it came, it came at a velocity exceeding, by an unimaginable factor of 18.6, the speed of light itself.
A tidal wave of time, ripped loose and set into motion by some incalculable force, was streaking across the universe. Ulysses’ schooner was directly in its path.
The rest would have been history had not this tsunami of time traveled at such an apocalyptic speed that it precluded the possibility of any historical record being left behind.
Only Ulysses was left behind. All the others, his whole crew, his wife, his son, were swept away.
The wave moved at a speed exceeding the ability of the human mind even to record the memory of the event.
Only the calamitous inventory of consequences gave any indication that an event had occurred.
One nanosecond Penelope was, Telemachus was, and then they were no more. One nanosecond Ulysses was a king, a family man who was going to have it all, and then all was gone.
Grief-stricken, he howls. His grief becomes a rage. He claws at his face until it is covered with blood and scraps of skin hang in tatters from his fingernails.
But grieve as he might, he lacks the resources to find an expression for a grief that is commensurate with all that he has lost.
If madness could be had for the asking, he would plead for it.
Alone, all alone for the first time in his life, he sails back toward Ithaca, but, within eyesight of his kingdom, he realizes that there is no longer a home there for him. Not there, not anywhere else.
Homeless now, he sails on through space and time with only one aim in mind.
To find the gods.
To seek a reckoning with the gods themselves. To demand an answer from them: Did all this have to happen? Was it necessary that Penelope and Telemachus should die? Was it all a part of some divine plan? Or was it just chance in a random universe and the result of his own human pride and folly? He had to know.
“Wherefore?”
He sails on, looking for a passageway to Olympus, the abode of the gods, where no mortal has ever been. He wants a reckoning with Zeus himself.
He seeks information from the captains of the passing solar schooners he encounters and from the kings of the various kingdoms he passes in his journey. But none are of any help. They either do not know the way to Olympus or they refuse to provide him with the coordinates for the destination he seeks. His desire for a reckoning with the gods is seen by them all as the desire of a deranged apostate.
The word spreads about this homeless wanderer and soon no kingdom will even allow him to dock in its port for fear of retribution by the gods.
So he sails on alone. In the continual present of his mind the pain of loss lives on and the unanswered “Wherefore?” lives on and demands to be answered.
He encounters and traverses strange landscapes, mountain ranges of lapsed time, his schooner skipping from peak to peak, covering whole lifetimes in a matter of seconds, like a well-thrown rock skipping across a placid pond.
He skips across centuries and sees in passing the demise of the world he has known.
Gone.
Gone the kings and the kingdoms he has known. Gone Agamemnon and Menelaus. Gone the whole house of Atreus. Gone Hellas and Helen and Troy.
Gone as well are the empires that followed. Skipping across the time-lapse landscape, he no sooner sees an empire born than it’s gone.
The Achaemids of Persia come and go. The last Darius falls to Alexander of Macedon and then Alexander falls. Gone Persia. Gone Macedon. Gone Roxane, the dark-eyed daughter of Darius, wife of Alexander the Great.
The great and the not-so-great and the anonymous come and go and are gone.
Rome rises, declines, and falls, and is gone.
The Age of This. The Age of That. Different ages come and go and no sooner do they come than they’re gone.
And in every age, as in all the preceding ages and in all the ages that follow, it’s bloodshed that brings down one age and causes another to rise. Millions die in the name of some name and then the name goes down in a sea of blood, but the butchery goes on in the name of some new name.
Countless crusades and endless corpses of the crucified.
“Why do we live like this?” Ulysses asks.
No answer comes. He scans the infinity of time and space, looking for some telltale sign of a trail to God.
It is no longer his gods of old that he seeks to answer his questions. It is God the Creator.
All the gods he knew as a boy, as a man, are now long gone.
Gone Zeus and Poseidon and Pallas Athena, the goddess of the flashing eyes who watched over him. Gone Hermes and Apollo and Artemis and Olympus itself, where the gods dwelled and charted the destinies of men.
Gone the gods and the men who believed in them.
Everything, even the immortals, comes and goes and is gone, but the butchery and the bloodshed continue.
The wine-dark seas of poetry, Ulysses now sees, are seas of blood.
Nor can he deny that a ghastly measure of that blood was spilled by him.
All those men he slaughtered beneath the walls of Troy, and for what? For Helen? For Menelaus? For Agamemnon? For the glory of Hellas?
No, for nothing. It was all for nothing.
Even butchered cattle, he thinks, are put to better use than the useless slaughtered men.
He sails on through black holes and wormholes and loopholes in space, looking for God.
He ages, and although his aging is but a pittance compared to the eons he traverses, he does age. His hair, what little wisps of it remain, is all white now. His teeth are gone. Wrinkles like dry riverbeds cover his face. His eyes have receded in their sockets as if pushed back by all the horror he has seen.
Gone now are his crafty ways and his famous nimble mind that outwitted everyone, himself included. In their place, perhaps as a recompense for all that he has lost, is a tiny scrap of wisdom, no bigger than a handout a beggar gets. But as tiny as that scrap of wisdom is, it suffices to illuminate the life of a fool.
“I had it all,” he rages, “and I had it all just by being born. I was born alive in a world full of life. Wherefore, then, did I not cherish and love it all?”
“Oh, you fool,” he says to himself. “You miserable fool, the miracle of life was wasted on you.”
His wife, his son, any man, woman, or child, what he would not give for the privilege of loving them. He could now consume the rest of his days in the loving of a single living flower.
His heart aches to love, but there i
s nothing alive aboard his schooner except for himself. So out of desperation, Ulysses takes his right hand with his left and, clutching it to his bosom, he loves it.
Like some old grandfather cherishing an infant placed in his care, Ulysses rocks his living hand and sails on, looking for God.
He sails into vast dead-end tunnels of time and then sails out again and sails on.
There are no sea charts for the destination he seeks, nor are there stars pointing the way to God.
He starts to feel lost.
There are times when it seems to him that the space-time continuum he has been sailing through has split in two, and that he is now traveling through time alone, or space alone, he doesn’t know which, and has no way of finding out.
His spirit, like his sinews, begins to grow slack. He is just a little old homeless man lost in the universe, clutching his own hand for company.
And then, on an unusually depressing day (or night), when his thoughts are at their gloomy worst, he hears music streaming toward him through the darkness of space (or time). The music he hears is of such sweetness that he assumes it to be a hallucination of his demented mind.
But then, peering into space with his myopic eyes, he discerns blinking lights in the distant darkness, and the blinking lights seem to be blinking to the sweet music that he hears.
Standing stoop-shouldered at the helm, Ulysses steers his schooner toward the source of the music and feels his sagging spirit rise again. The melody is streaming past him like a gentle spring breeze (he remembers those breezes coming off the Aegean Sea) while the deeper undertones are pulling him tidelike toward the blinking lights.
He is in rapture. He thinks he is hearing the music of the spheres.
The lights beckon like a cosmic oasis with living trees bearing blinking lights for fruit. The closer he gets to them, the sweeter the music he hears. He thinks he is nearing Paradise. He thinks he is hearing angels singing.
He sails into the lights and is enveloped by music from all sides.
It is only now, seeing in horror their strobe-lit smiles and the flickering outlines of their naked breasts, that Ulysses realizes that he has been tricked by the Banalities.
They seem to be everywhere, in front, back, on both sides of his vessel, their ravishing lips parting to make music and song, their ravishing arms, moving like silken scarves, trembling with desire to press him to their naked breasts.
“Oh, lonely wanderer,” they sing, “wander no more …”
He had outwitted the Sirens by having his crewmen tie him to the mast. He alone of all men heard the Sirens sing and lived to tell about it. But he is alone now. There is nobody to help him, nor does he have his nimble wits to assist him. If he is to survive and continue his journey, it must be done by his will alone.
But his willpower is sorely taxed by the beautiful Banalities, creatures that are half bathing beauties, half nothingness, but so alluring in appearance that he cannot tell which half is which. And their voices are of such tormenting sweetness as to put the songs of the Sirens to shame.
“Homeless believer,” they sing to him, “find your home …”
The song tugs at his heart, as only a song sung by the Banalities can tug at it. His old heart feels like an anchor that he would gladly drop then and there. But he knows it’s a trap.
His willpower ebbing, desperate to escape before he succumbs, Ulysses steers wildly, looking for a way out. Whichever way he sails, the nubile Banalities sail right along with him, the beaming beauty of their eyes blinding him, the insinuating sweetness of their singing sapping his resolve.
“I must find God,” he shouts at the top of his lungs, but he hears a note of doubt in his voice, as of someone who is no longer certain.
The comely Banalities detect his uncertainty and turn it into another song.
“God is dead,” they sing to him. “There are no gods in the universe. There is only man and there is no man like godlike Ulysses …”
They sing, savoring the sibilants in his name, kissing him with its sound all over his body. Their eyes beam images of his once-youthful figure in all its glory and superimpose it on his aged form. He is made to seem and feel desireable again, a warrior king capable of satisfying many women and fathering many sons.
They sing his name as if in ravenous hunger for his sex.
In the reflection from their eyes, he sees himself mating with them all, one after another, sees his sons being born, sees himself in their midst, adored and beloved by them all.
“No,” he cries out in despair, like someone tormented by an irresistible temptation that he must nevertheless find a way to resist. “It is not new sons that I need. I need to know why I did not love the living son that I had. Wherefore did I not love my one and only child? I need to know why I was born and why I lived the way I did.”
“For nothing,” the ravishing Banalities sing in reply. Their song is like a love song and a hymn and a lullaby. They sing it in three-part harmony and with such sweet piety that their “For nothing” seems both right and true. As if only in nothingness is the nirvana where all his questions will be answered once and for all.
“No,” he cries out in his old man’s voice, “a thousand times no. Man was not made for nothing. Not even I.”
If resistance were a passing necessity, all would be fine, but it’s not. The persistence of their temptation requires a persistence of resistance and he feels himself succumbing. They are whittling away at him with their song, telling him not only that it is foolish to resist but reminding him (in song) that there is nobody here even to admire his resistance. No witnesses of any kind to pass on the tale of his struggle. No Homer to make an epic of his deeds. It’s all for nothing, they sing to him, nobody will ever know.
“In the ever-present present of my living mind there is still an I of whom I am aware, and it suffices that I will know,” he tells them.
It is not exactly a crushing rebuttal, and he knows it, and sees that they are not crushed by it. They seem amused. All reason and logic are on the side of the Banalities in this argument, but Ulysses is an old man and old men sometimes feel put upon by reason and logic and become unreasonable out of pure spite, like little children.
His temper tantrum (which follows) is not worthy of the high-minded debate they’re having, but he doesn’t care. He screams. He cries. He stomps his feet and flails his arms. He’s had enough. He’s too old for this. He wants to go home.
“I am who I am and that’s that,” he screams at them and keeps on screaming until his face becomes purple. He will not argue with them anymore. There is nothing left to discuss. He was who he was and that was that.
Rickety-legged and shaking all over, Ulysses hurls obscenities at them and steers his vessel without regard for the direction he’s taking, so long as it leads him out of there.
Which it eventually does.
He’s so worked up, however, that even when the lair of the Banalities is well behind him, he keeps on hurling invectives at them and calling them names.
Gradually, despite himself, he calms down and resumes his search for God.
But with the return of calmness, loneliness also returns, which the Banalities had dispelled for a while.
He starts to miss them, as voyagers often miss the obstacles of their journeys.
He saw his last star some time ago and there are no longer any stars to be seen, or distant comets, or heavenly bodies of any kind.
In the space-time continuum through which he is traveling in search of God, there is nothing to be seen or heard anymore. There is only a void and no way of knowing if the void through which he’s wandering is one of limits or limitless. It just goes on and on. There is no end in sight. There is nothing in sight. His only consolation is that it is not nothingness. It is a void, yes, but the void itself is something and he takes it on faith, as he must, that he is moving through it toward some other something, toward God.
His one and only consolation begins to wear thin, however, and
then wears out completely, leaving him in the void without any consolation at all.
When it’s night, the void is dark, and when it’s day, the light of the day illuminates a void without boundaries or limits or anything within it to rest his eye upon.
The schooner in which he is sailing does not even cast a shadow, for there is nothing in the void to cast a shadow upon.
A single blade of grass would now seem to him like a landscape worthy of being called paradise.
He sails on, but he has no way of ascertaining if he is moving, because in the void he’s in there is nothing to move past nor anything, however fleeting, to move past him.
There is only the time-space continuum, but even the certainty of that begins to wane. For all he knows, the time-space continuum was discontinued a long time ago without his noticing.
Alone in his schooner, he starts to feel like a sketch somebody made and left unfinished, of an old man in a schooner. A picture hanging in the void.
His only hope is God, but even that hope turns against him, because for all he knows, the void that he is in is God.
For all he knows, he has found Him.
He does not dare call out to God as once he did so freely, because a dread accompanies the impulse to call out to Him and makes him refrain. The dread is that God might answer and validate by His reply that He is indeed the void. Slack-jawed in terror of this possibility, Ulysses dares not even whisper His name.
What little faith he has left that God is not the void is a faith so small and fragile that Ulysses endeavors to hide his fath even from God.
He was once a mighty king with a kingdom, he was once a father and a husband, and now he is reduced to this. He is a rickety old man with little faith. But he clings to it.
He sails on, seeing nothing and feeling unseen by anyone. His loneliness grows out of all proportion to the tiny size of the human vessel called Ulysses in whom this ocean of loneliness resides.
Without convictions or scheme he sails on, on faith alone.
There is no true north in the outermost reaches of the universe, no north of any kind, or south, or east, or west. There is no up or down. No things that loom on the horizon. No horizon for that matter. There is only the void and a voyager within it.