Oliver began sniffling.
“It looks like a Martian from some crap B movie! Why on earth are you crying?”
“Look how small it is. You can literally see the big black ocean right through it! And the parents don’t stick around to teach them how to survive out there. They just know.”
“It’s an arthropod, Oliver. You are projecting onto an arthropod.”
“Octopuses,” Oliver sniffed, “are cephalopods. And they are highly intelligent creatures. They are one of the only other creatures with the ability to empathize.”
Jacob had to agree that, by this logic, octopuses were above a lot of humans he could think of. Paul, for one. Still, he thought crying over them was excessive.
“They have what are called episodic personalities,” Oliver added.
“What’s that?”
“They behave consistently over the span of a few hours or even a day, but inconsistently over longer time frames.”
“Is that why they call them gloomy octopuses?”
“No, that’s because when they’re mature, they turn gray colored. He’s going to explain it in just a minute. Wait.”
“Hang on. You’ve seen this before?”
Oliver didn’t reply. He always got this way after he’d been caught crying. Jacob knew he probably could respond more kindly or at least bite his tongue but — an octopus?
“Are we just going to stay in bed all day?”
“You can go out if you want to.”
Jacob went. He took the keys to the truck and drove out into Stamford, knowing that a good boyfriend would have talked it all out with Oliver. Listened to him pontificate about cephalopods and empathy and episodic personalities and how his dead father had sometimes been gloomy — and a good boyfriend would have loved him for all of it. Jacob didn’t know how Oliver did it — sat around listening to people being sad all the time. He wished to hell that Oliver and all the others would just do something with all that disillusionment, as he’d done with Ella. You didn’t have to limit it to poetry. Maybe the world wouldn’t be so depressing if depressed people were more productive. There should be a whole Works Progress Administration for the clinically depressed. The DPA! Rise up, ye who are down and out! Tear up the rusting bridges and rip out the cracking highways and build new cities out of the rubble!
He drove to Borders, fifteen minutes down the road. When he got to the store, he ambled through the current releases, the magazines, and the café and eventually located the poetry section — half of one shelf. Paranormal Teen Romance had four. But no matter. He ran his fingers along the spines, searching for the one he’d been thinking about breaking his “no epics” rule for — one that he felt would tell Ella everything he needed to tell her himself but couldn’t begin to say. He’d been debating translations in his mind — hoping there might be an edition available with the original Greek on the alternating pages. But all this proved to be grossly premature, for the store didn’t seem to have a single copy of any edition of The Odyssey.
“Excuse me,” he asked the clerk behind the information counter, a teenage girl who seemed as bored as any six Anchorage House patients. “I’m looking for The Odyssey. Is there maybe a classics section somewhere?”
She shook her head. “Author’s name?”
“Homer,” Jacob said.
“Homer what?”
“Just Homer.”
“Like Madonna?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Her black-polished nails clacked at her keyboard, and she looked up, puzzled. “Nothing under ‘Homer.’ You sure you don’t mean like the guy on The Simpsons?”
“No, I don’t mean like the guy on The Simpsons.”
“Because then I could look it up under Simpsons.”
Jacob sighed, wanting so badly to go off his rails, but for the first time in his life he wasn’t sure of his ability to get back onto them again afterward.
He settled on taking a deep breath and spelling the title out for her, slowly. After a minute she shook her head. “I can put it on order for you if you want.”
“Do you have it at another store?”
She checked and after consulting a manager was able to give Jacob directions to the other store where they had a copy. But when he got there, it turned out they didn’t actually have one. A middle-aged man, as bored as his younger counterpart at the first store, was happy to redirect Jacob to a third store, and there, finally, Jacob did find a copy of the Fagles translation. As he paid for it at the front, he joked to the cashier that he had driven nearly four hours now trying to find the book.
“Sounds like you’ve had quite an odyssey,” the cashier said with a smirk.
Jacob could have kissed him on the mouth. But he settled for asking if he might know how to get back to Stamford.
When he finally returned to the flat, it was already getting dark.
“What happened to you?” Oliver called. “Dinner got here an hour ago!”
“Let me tell you—” Jacob began, thrusting his hard-won copy of The Odyssey out in front of him like a trophy. But he stopped, midsentence, when he came to the coffee table. Oliver was back to watching the BBC America channel. And there on the screen was Sally Struthers herself, in grainy 1980s VHS quality, surrounded by tiny, emaciated African children, chewing on their thumbnails and staring wide-eyed into the camera, through the decades, out into the living room where Oliver was far more attentive to the huge spread of Chinese food that he had ordered.
Jacob had the fleeting feeling that those pale little shrouds of children were actually looking at the Chinese food — waiting for their moment to reach through the glass and steal a wonton. He forgot all about the book in his hand for a minute as the commercial continued — the 800 number flashing on the bottom. Should I call? he wondered. He had always thought these things were scams, or fronts for religious organizations. The sane, human thing to do was to change the channel. To take up club-league kickball. To read all the cartoons in the New Yorker and stuff the rest. To sit down and have some lo mein and talk about his epic journey to find an epic poem about an epic journey. In other words, to live.
“It’s cold, but you can heat it up,” Oliver said, turning back to the television screen just long enough to confirm that his show wasn’t back on yet.
• • •
Jacob carried the book everywhere: under his arm up and down the Stamford antiques district as he and Oliver searched for new light fixtures; on the seat beside him on the bus, underlining passages during red lights; just inside his duffel bag with an Attic Greek dictionary so that he could retranslate stanzas late at night in the common room. He worked on it so obsessively that he nearly forgot that he had promised to fly home to see his parents for his birthday the week before Ella would be leaving. He’d have missed the flight entirely if Oliver hadn’t noticed it on the schedule — months ago Oliver had requested that Friday off so that he could catch a less crowded midday flight and get down to Florida before night fell. (His parents now refused to drive after dark.)
“I need a day off anyway,” Oliver said. “Let me drive you to the airport.”