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Night on the island was like a beautiful, vivid painting. The sun had set a few hours ago, sinking into the waves surrounded by a breathtaking watercolor of reds and oranges and violets, and now the sky twinkled with an impossible amount of stars in constellations that Odysseus couldn’t recognize. He had tried to map them out a few years ago, just to pass the time, but he had quickly found that the constellations kept shifting into new ones every time he picked up his pen to continue his work from the previous night.
It was her doing, of course. She could rearrange the stars in the sky just as easily as the furniture in the halls of her palace.
Odysseus sighed, leaning against the railing of the balcony. A slight breeze played with his hair and he shivered. Not from cold; the night air was perfectly warm, just a slight drop from the daytime heat that also stayed within the limits of a nice summer day, never hot enough to bring any actual discomfort. He shivered, because for a moment the wind had felt like her fingers in his hair.
Maybe it really was her, he thought. He never knew. Sometimes she felt almost like a human, and other times he was convinced that this entire island was her. He could run as far from the palace as he could, all the way to the endless, white-sand beach, to the rocky cliffs, to the warm lagoons, to the sides of the mountain that he suspected was volcanic, and he would never get any further away from her.
Still, her presence felt less suffocating when he at least wasn’t in the same room as her. That’s why he was here, outside on the balcony; behind the glass doors was the bedroom, all silk and pillows and soft candlelight, and she was in there. He could never quite sleep next to her. He would lie there in cold sweat, trying to breathe despite the weight of a rock on his chest, and eventually he would fall into a restless sleep that left him tossing and turning until he woke up with his heart in his throat, tangled into his silky smooth blankets, her fingers caressing his cheek: another nightmare, my dear?
As though she needed to ask. He knew he talked in his sleep; she had teased him about it more than enough. And even though he never asked, he knew which names he screamed through his nightmares. Penelope. Telemachus. Polites. Eurylochus. Elpenor. Perimedes. The screams of six hundred dying men, their blaming fingers pointed at him from the depths of darkness, blaming him for not dying with them, not dying to protect them, like a captain should.
They were right. Odysseus’ fingers gripped the marble, a desperate, white-knuckled squeeze. He should have gone down with his crew. He had no right to live with his hands drenched in their blood. The only reason he had not yet walked to the cliffs and put an end to all this was because he couldn’t do that to his wife and son.
“Ody?” A soft voice carried over from the glass doors of the balcony, a voice like the sweetest wine, like wind in the flowering trees. It made Odysseus sick in his stomach. “What are you doing up, dear?”
He resisted for a few seconds, but finally turned his head. Having to look at her was bad. Knowing she was there and not seeing what she was doing was worse.
Calypso was standing in the doorframe, her long, silvery nightdress flowing down her body like a waterfall of fabric, fallen off from one shoulder, her dark hair down against her back. Everything was slightly disheveled, but in a beautiful, playful way, a graceful sight. She watched him with a sleepy smile and tried again. “Come back to bed, my love. I’m cold. Come warm me up.”
Her voice was slightly different now, a higher, more playful tone. She did that a lot, changing some minute detail about herself, her tone of voice, the shade of her irises, the exact way her inky dark curls fell on her shoulders and back. Like she was convinced that if she could just find the right combination, if only she figured out the things he liked, if she made herself beautiful in just the right way, he could not resist her anymore. There was something unsettingly deliberate in the way she stood there watching him, her dark, impossibly long lashes fluttering over her glimmering eyes, the way her skin glowed in the moonlight. It was too perfect a picture. Odysseus couldn’t shake the thought of Calypso meticulously placing each strand of hair, each fold of fabric, the position of every one of her muscles in an attempt to charm him, to make him want her.
Nothing on this island was real, least of all Calypso herself. It was like a beautiful, sickly sweet dream, like a pool of honey that stuck to his skin and pulled him under, filling his mouth and choking him.
Sometimes he thought his imprisonment could be at least a little bit easier to stand if she showed him something real, if she dropped this endless performance of a perfect paradise and had one genuine talk with him. But she never did.
She took a step and another towards him, and Odysseus turned away. The faraway horizon was a perfectly smooth line with no waves. He had swum in the crystal waters surrounding the island, and he knew there was no wind as soon as he got even slightly further away from land. Even if he had a ship, the sails would be nothing more but useless pieces of fabric hanging from the masts as extra weight. Not to mention the currents that grabbed him like fists of stone and pulled him back to the shore if she didn’t like how far he was swimming.
He kept his eyes firmly on the horizon, refusing to look at her.
But he couldn’t help but shiver as she got all too close and brushed her fingers against his stubbly cheek. From disgust, mostly, and fear; but he had spent six years with no one to accompany him but her, and loneliness is a strong force.
(“My boy, my little boy,” Odysseus had sobbed into Calypso’s shoulder some months ago, in a dark moment of weakness, his head so deep under the waters of despair that any comfort had felt preferable to the pain of being alone. “My son, my little baby boy, he’s growing up without me, I haven’t seen him in so long – I miss him, I miss him so much–”
Calypso had slid her fingers softly through his hair, humming into his ear like a sweet bird, and then she had said: “I could give you a new son.”
A lightning of cold dread had gone through Odysseus’ body and he had looked up at her. He would never forget the way her face had lit up with hope, like she thought she had finally figured out the right words to say, the right thing to offer him so that he would at last give her what she so desperately wanted.
For a moment she had genuinely thought that he would share her bed so that he could replace Telemachus with her child. Her face had glowed with sickening, expectant joy. Until she had seen the expression on his face. Odysseus had been frozen in terror, the mere idea of what she was suggesting so unimaginably sinister that he couldn’t even raise his hand to strike her. He had only stared at her with pale horror and rage.
She had not brought it up again.)
A strand of Calypso’s hair fell against Odysseus’ neck, tickling him. Her fragrance was all around him, the smell of her perfume permeating the air like a cloud of rose and lily. Even her smell was wrong, sweeter than any real perfume Odysseus had ever smelled in his life, to the point of making him sick in his stomach. It was wrong, just wrong. Everything about her was wrong. Odysseus wanted Penelope’s bright eyes with smile lines from the way she laughed all the time, her earthy smell of olive and marjoram, her hands that always seemed to be rough from the work she did no matter how much she oiled them.
She was fading from his mind. By gods, he fought tooth and nail to keep her face from slipping from the desperate grip of his memory, but it had almost been two decades since he had last seen her, touched her, embraced her. Even if he could remember every detail, he wouldn’t know how time had changed her. If he ever saw her again, there would be new lines on her face, maybe a strand of silver in her hair, a scar from burning herself on a hot pan, a map of lived time on her skin, a map he wouldn’t know how to read. He had nightmares about escaping this island and making it back to his home, back to Penelope, only to find that her and Telemachus had become unrecognizable to him.
That was the worst, he thought. From all the fears his mind conjured for his personal nightly hell, this one was the worst.
“What’s in your mind, love?” Calypso did not like silences, Odysseus had noticed. She was always quick to fill them with words, as though leaving him alone with his thoughts was something she feared. Maybe she did. Who knew what he was thinking whenever he was silent? Perhaps something forbidden, something she did not want him to think about.
Well, she might have had his body locked up in her gilded cage, but his thoughts were still free of her control. He packed his voice with as much hatred and grief as he possibly could, as he spat out: “You know what.”
The crickets fell silent. The wind died in the leaves. Even the forever hum of the waves down at the beach faded for a moment.
Calypso froze, then pulled ever so slightly away from him.
“You’re thinking of her again,” she muttered mildly. She had made the correct guess. Her voice, perfectly soft as ever, hid the smallest of cracks, something real peeking through. He had managed to hit her in a spot that hurt enough to make her performance falter. The corners of his mouth twitched, a crude smile on his face for just a second. She didn’t notice, her face turned away from him, like she couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. “Do you do this to hurt me?”
A dark wave of despair and rage washed over him. His fingers trembled against the railing.
You are not the reason for my every thought, he wanted to scream. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, force her to understand what she was doing to him. You are not the center of my universe. Not everything is about you. I am my own person, with thoughts and dreams and a past and a life, and I can’t stop you from keeping me here like a pet or a plaything, but you do not own what is inside my mind.
“I think about my wife because it pleases me to think about her,” Odysseus grunted back. “It has nothing to do with you. You’re putting yourself up on quite a high pedestal if you think my every thought and action goes back to you.”
Calypso did not reply. The eerie silence hummed in his ears.
Finally, she leaned closer again. “Of course, my love. Whatever you say.” Odysseus felt her warmth against his back as she pressed against him, her breath on his neck. He flinched away from her, but not quite in time; her lips had brushed against his cheek before he had time to dodge the kiss. He fought back the nausea threatening to turn his stomach around.
Calypso pulled back, and Odysseus could hear the smile in her voice as she spoke. “I’m going back to bed, dear. Join me when you’re done moping.” Her bare feet made no sound against the marble floor. Only the soft click of the balcony door told him she was finally gone.
Another gust of wind caressed his face. This time his shivering was from cold. He knew what she was doing; she had used the same trick many times before. She would gradually drop the temperature until there was no warmth anywhere on the island except in her bed. Right where she wanted him.
Odysseus cast one more longing look at the stars in the sky. He was a captain, and stars were supposed to be his map wherever he went. But these strange constellations would never lead him anywhere. He was alone and lost.
He could see the cliff not far in the distance, the one leading to a fall of a hundred feet, with sharp rocks at the bottom just barely covered by waves.
It would be so easy to be free of her. Free of her forever.
“Penelope, Penelope, Penelope.” He breathed the word into the air like a prayer. “I’m staying strong for you.” He grit his teeth and almost crumbled to the ground in agony. He held himself together. “I’m staying strong.”
But for how long?