The Lost Island

37

Twenty-four hours later, Amy and Gideon had managed to get all of five miles northward. It had been anything but a “walk on the beach.” Gideon was soaked and sore from wading and crawling through the endless mangrove swamps and lagoons that punctuated the coast, each one humming with noxious, bloodsucking insects and quaking with expanses of stinking mud. There was no way to go around them: they had to slog, wade, and swim across, one after the other.

The sun was beginning to set over the endless jungle when they decided to halt. Gideon walked into the ocean to wash the muck from his clothes, feeling like some time-traveling Robinson Crusoe, fetched up on a prehistoric shore. They had seen no signs of human life: no footprints or tracks on the beach, and no boats offshore. Glancing back, he saw that Amy was busy cleaning her handgun, so he quickly stripped to the buff, rinsed his clothes, wrung them out, and then put them back on.

He came back to camp. Amy was just putting her .45 back together.

“Make a fire, please. I’m going to get us some protein.” She slapped the loaded magazine into place and disappeared into the twilit jungle.

Gideon found a level area among the palms and began gathering dead leaves, twigs, and driftwood. He doubted Amy would be able to shoot anything with that .45 and resigned himself to another granola bar dinner. The sky was clear, but the sea was still a continuous roar, the march of rollers unceasing.

He heard a couple of shots, and ten minutes later Amy emerged from the jungle, holding a dead armadillo by the tail. In her other hand she carried a bunch of plantains.

“Armadillo? Is that the best you could do?”

She laid the armadillo down on a banana leaf. “You clean it.”

He stared at the creature, with its ridiculous-looking head and bony armor. “Me?”

“I shot it. Now it’s your turn.”

“What…do I do?”

“I thought you were the gourmet cook around here. You think I’ve ever cleaned an armadillo before?” she said. “It’s all yours…First Mate.” She flashed him a wry smile.

“Excuse me, but the last I checked, your ship had sunk. You’re no longer captain.”

A silence. “Fair enough. But you’re still going to clean that armadillo.”

Gideon began working on the animal with his knife, turning it over, slitting open the belly, and pulling out the entrails. It was disgusting work but he was so hungry he hardly noticed. Working the knife between the outer plates and flesh, he was able to carve out the meat, split it, and lay it out in the coals of the fire. As the smell of roasting meat wafted up, he felt a ravenous hunger take hold and he could see the same gleam in Amy’s eyes as she stared at the sizzling carcass. They pulled it out of the fire and cut it up on banana leaves. Although it was almost too hot to touch they began devouring it with trembling hands.

It wasn’t long before a scattering of gnawed bones lay on the greasy leaves. Gideon felt human for the first time in two days. He glanced over at Amy, who was looking over the text of the Odyssey again, comparing it to the Phorkys Map, her face reflecting the firelight.

“Any more revelations?” he asked, trying to keep the cynical tone out of his voice.

“Nothing dramatic.” She laid down the text. “But I’m more than ever convinced we’re following in Odysseus’s footsteps.”

Gideon lay back, his hands behind his head. “Tell me the story of Odysseus. It’s been a long time since I read it.”

She eased back next to him. The fire crackled and the stars were coming out. “It’s the first thriller. It’s got everything — monsters, gods, demons, witches and sorcery, adventure, violence, shipwrecks, murder, and a love story. Best of all, it has a hero who is sort of the anti — James Bond, who gets his way not through brute force, but through tricks, deceptions, disguises, and deceit.”

“The first social engineer.”

Amy laughed. “Exactly.”

“Sort of like me.”

She looked at him. “Maybe a little.”

“Anyway, go on with the story.”

“I’ll stick to the salient parts. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus and his men took off with their booty and sailed westward. Ultimately, they got caught in a terrible storm. That’s the storm I told you about earlier, which blew them ‘past Cythera’ and for another nine days across the ‘deepest ocean.’ On the tenth day, they came to the land of the Lotus Eaters. Here was where three of his men, sent to contact the natives, end up wasted from eating the lotus fruit. Odysseus had to drag them back to the ship and tie them up to get them away. They sailed through the night and came to the land of the Cyclopes.”

“Cyclopes? The one-eyed giants, right?”

Amy nodded. “Cyclopes is plural, Cyclops is the singular.”

“Duly noted.”

“There were two islands side by side, a big one and a little one. They first landed on the big island, where they feasted on wild goats. Then they made their way to the Cyclopes’ island. Here they found a cave with stores of milk and cheese. This is where Odysseus blew it. Instead of stealing the food and hightailing it, he decided to stay and meet the owner. The Cyclops arrived a while later, an ugly brute by the name of Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. Polyphemus sweet-talked them at first, lulled them into dropping their guard — and then snatched up two of Odysseus’s men, bashed their brains out on the walls of the cave, and ate them raw while the others watched, horrified.”

“Greek canapés.”

“Polyphemus imprisoned the rest in the cave for future eating, rolling a huge boulder over the entrance. The next morning he left them penned up while he went out to tend his flock. When the giant returned, Odysseus got him drunk. He told Polyphemus that his name was Nobody. When the giant finally collapsed in a drunken stupor, Odysseus heated up a stick in the fire and drove the sharpened end into his eye. Polyphemus woke up shrieking that he was being killed, but when his distant neighbors called out to ask who was killing him, he responded ‘Nobody is killing me!’ and so they didn’t come to his aid, thinking he was just drunk.”

“Cunning little bastard,” said Gideon. “I’ll have to remember that trick.”

“But they were still trapped in the cave. When morning came, the now blind Cyclops had to release his sheep to graze. He rolled the boulder back and let the sheep out one by one, feeling their backs to make sure Odysseus and his men didn’t escape by riding them. But unbeknownst to the brute, Odysseus and the rest were clinging to the undersides of the sheep — and that’s how they escaped. They stole the Cyclops’s sheep and departed in their ships. Once at a safe distance, Odysseus called out to Polyphemus, mocking him: Yo, motherfucker, this is what happens when you eat visitors to your cave! And if anyone asks who put out your eye and spoiled your charming looks, you can tell them it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, from Ithaca.”

“How do you say ‘motherfucker’ in ancient Greek?” Gideon asked.

Amy spoke a word, then traced some letters in the sand: ἀναγής.

“Really?”

“Well, with certain poetic liberties.”

“I like this Odysseus. He’s my kind of guy.”

“But Polyphemus, being the son of Poseidon, swore vengeance against his new enemy. And his father obliged, making Odysseus’s journey that much more difficult. Finally, driven along by Poseidon’s incessant storms, they found themselves blown all the way to Hades — to Hell itself. They had to ask Tiresias, the blind prophet, for directions home.”

“All the way to Hades? That dude was lost.”

“Exactly my point. It sure doesn’t sound like he was wandering around a few Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, does it?”

“What happened when he finally got home?”

“He found his household full of idle suitors trying to seduce his wife. His solution to getting rid of them all was just as — how can I put it? — unusual as his method of escape from Polyphemus.” She picked up a plantain and began peeling it. “I hope I’m not boring you.”

“Not at all. It’s a great story.”

She finished the banana, tossed the peel into the darkness. “You know, there’s something else I just realized. Homer mentions cannibalism many times in the Odyssey. But cannibalism was completely unknown in the Mediterranean in ancient times. It was, however, widespread in the Caribbean.”

“Very interesting.”

She looked at him. Silence fell. The fire crackled, and a breeze rustled the leaves of the palm trees above them.

He looked at her firelit face. “You are beautiful.”

She flushed. “Where did that—?”

He leaned forward to kiss her, but Amy pushed him away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We can’t complicate our assignment, or our relationship, like this.”

Gideon looked at her. “You mean that.”

“Yes, I do.” She fumbled a little with the printout. “Now let me get back to my work here, and you…you go jump in the water or something, cool yourself off.”