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“I think he lost it. Maybe he lost it with me because he knew me better. I don’t know. I wasn’t prepared.”

Silence, punctuated by crackles from the dried wood. Wood Ian had chopped last fall.

“What did he do?”

“He didn’t hurt me. But he scared me.”

“My God." Where was this leading? "I haven’t seen him like that. Except…except in his work, sometimes, yeah, he’s pretty scary. He has some trouble shaking some characters off, but he’s just down.”

“It wasn’t like him.”

“What did the people watching do?”

“They didn’t know. They thought it was brilliant. They didn’t know it was out of control.”

“Oh, Evelyn.” Jane, massaging her own forehead, closed her eyes. This was painful to hear.

“Ian is a good person. Anyone can break open like that, under certain circumstances. The way we were working was kind of on the edge. Very psychological, bringing up your wounds on purpose. He didn’t hurt me physically, you understand. It was the fact he was no longer in the frame with me, he was dangerous and had me completely scared and intimidated as a person, not as a character. I wasn’t ready for that as a little second-year actor in scene study class.”

All of Evelyn’s verbal mannerisms seemed to have dropped away. She sounded like a girl from the Midwest. 

“What happened afterward?”

“He had one of his awful headaches. He couldn’t even see. I helped him to his room and turned out the light, gave him a cold washcloth for his head. I went home. The next day he came to my room. I was sitting on my bed. He said he was so sorry. He said I had been his first friend at school and his favorite scene partner and he was afraid he’d wrecked it. He told me things, personal things about his mother and father that I’ve never told anyone. It seemed like a secret, how he told me about them.” She flickered a glance at Jane. 

“I imagine you know what I mean. For him to tell me so much at once, I was overwhelmed. I had known him almost two years but I didn’t know him at all.” She had long since stopped fidgeting and simply sat with her hands in her lap. She sighed. “He didn’t say so, but I knew he was in grief for his mother. He was devastated. 

“In any case, ever since, even though we don’t see each other, or speak that much, we both know there’s a bond there between us. After he broke in front of me, after he mended it with me, it made something else of our connection on stage. No one could touch us. It was safe.” She smiled. “Funny.”

“And you two were the ones who broke out.”

“Huh. Yeah.”

“I didn’t know about this. Sometimes the person you’re supposed to be closest to is such a cipher.”

“It’s one of the things that makes me keep doing this job. You can do it forever, learn so much about people, and there’s always something more. There's always another mystery.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A
S
THE
SHIP
pulled closer to the sirens’ rock, Odysseus heard for the first time the intricacies of their song. The melody wended its way into his ears, distantly at first, the first whiff of a tantalizing yet unidentifiable scent, then more fully: before he could take breath he was drunk with it, his mind insensible, as if he’d downed five goatskins of the headiest wine. A thought coalesced, rising up from his solar plexus through his heart to his head, until his muscles strained and his veins pulsed in his forehead. He needed to leave the ship and get to her side. One voice, separate from the others, one who keened to him with a longing and promise he’d never experienced but now knew was his birthright. It was fate he should pass these rocks, that he should be the one so clear of mind and eye to know his right, of the unstoppered ears, to comprehend the meaning of the song for which so many had died in vain.

The sirens told him of his past battles; their knowledge of the pain and joy of war. They told him of Troy, of the blood-washed plain where he suffered, where he triumphed. They knew what no one could know back at home. He would be alone in his memory of the best and worst of his life, if he continued his journey. Here they understood. Here was the glory of memory, of the fields where violence had taken so much away and yet given him his name.

Those who had sacrificed themselves here made his conquest all the more magnificent; his love offer the more valuable. A man who could withstand the exquisite pike of harmonic torment thrust through the heart, approach the blue-tressed race without crushing himself or his craft in the out-spray at the foot of the waterfall where the siren lingered; that man would be lauded by the gods. Surely his reward would be of a nature equal to the danger of the quest. 

Now, from his position lashed to the mast, he was close enough to not only hear but see his quarry: the men, ears plugged with wool, rowed on so as not to be dashed with their captain’s vessel against the rocks. 

He reached out, muscles straining against thick rope, longing for the comfort and wildness of his lover's embrace. At last to be understood for what he was, a man who could never be captured but by desire: to be pressed by the angry passion of their sharp teeth, to be wrapped in their whip-like hair, consumed by the fire that burned within him, the consummation of his torture. His only release was in that other world, the borderland between earth and sea, the salty wet tangle, to love and be held until his fatal satisfaction. What if that last release were death? In their arms, he could perceive no room for final regret. He yearned purely. 

To the sirens, he was a magnificent prize. One looked to the sea, for a ship that would never come. She did not cling to her rock, but rode it like a horse, as the waves washed her thighs. Her clutch of rocks were well out in the water, though they remained in the shallows at this ebb of tide. Half-blinded by the film over her eyes, she fixed her gaze on the point where he would come. Stretching out her arms she reached for him, opening her mouth in a fearful cry. It was a call no man had failed to heed. 

The camera, twenty feet distant on its fixed ocean platform, rotated in her direction, capturing her in the foreground as it panned the rocky peninsula behind her, sweeping in a wide arc. The early morning sun barely scraped the horizon. Mr. Torsten had started shooting long before the sun rose, one of his preferences, to catch every bit of the pearly light of daybreak. Divers and workmen had built the platform, a kind of miniature oil rig, in the seabed in front of the rocks. 

Mathilde, the main siren, knew Mr. Torsten planned more shots from a boat to get Odysseus and the crew’s perspective. Three weeks later the second unit would come back for helicopter shots. As lead siren, Mathilde had lobbied to play herself even in this extra-long-shot, and Tor had acquiesced, to her surprise, paving the way for the other two actresses to play their parts for the shot, and negotiate extra pay, as well. An amateur athlete and former dancer, Mathilde loathed seeing herself unrealistically portrayed by stuntwomen and stand-ins, though she seldom prevailed when she argued to play her own role in second unit shots. She didn’t have the clout, for one. Second unit had its job to do, and directors didn’t normally cater to lower tier actresses who wanted to be in a shot made weeks, sometimes months later, when they could dress up someone else more cheaply or safely. She didn’t know why thorny Tor Torsten had proved to be so easy to persuade. Perhaps, she thought with complacence, my balletic training proved decisive. Even from a helicopter they will see in my posture and arms how I captivate Odysseus. 

Exalted by the prospect of playing this role through-and-through, the cold and the hardship of lingering on a rock half-naked at dawn was Mathilde inconsequential. As they prepared for the next shot a motorboat packed with people burbled up and floated next to her as Dolores, a costume department assistant, leaned over the stern and passed her a warm, waterproof coat to throw over her shoulders. Dolores moved aside and Tino from craft services gave her a thermos of hot tea. 

Mathilde couldn’t really move as she was carefully arranged, her lower body-dress stuck to the rocks, rocks which had rubber coatings to make them more comfortable and less slippery. Dolores swung a narrow bridge down between the boat and the rocky prominence so the special effects makeup person, a man with whom Mathilde had spent more time than anyone else on this shoot, could cross when the captain got the boat in position. Nikolas wore hip waders and a heavy utility belt weighed down with items, some encased in plastic bags. With an abstracted look he examined the damage the water had done to the latex around her legs and began repairing it. After he completed the heavy latex work he examined her upper body and took a spray can from his box and touched up a few spots. She sat holding the coat open, keeping warm while providing him access. He was an up-and-coming prodigy Mr. Torsten had championed. 

An Athens-born fine artist by training, he had expanded his repertoire early on in his fellow students’ films and begun a career for himself in Europe. This was his first major studio film, but Mathilde could see the reason Torsten had chosen him. When she had seen herself made-up the first time, complete, she was in awe. Even after having seen the watercolor sketches Nikolas had done, it hadn’t prepared her for the fierce, imaginative beauty of his makeup. It transformed, without disguising her. If she had been a sex goddess of the sea, with cerulean hair and shimmering, dolphin-sheened skin; if she had pointed teeth and white eyes—yet her own bones and mouth and breasts and hands—then this is who she would be. And with Odysseus’ destruction her last best wish. If only she could touch him, she thought longingly, and gnashed her sharp little teeth.

The stake, a fathom long and blackened to an evil point, would soon rest in the eye socket of the Cyclops. It lay in the sand. Ian stood next to it, his skin glistening in the heat, ready. The four men behind him would help him drive his point home to the monster. The Cyclops, Polyphemus, blinded with his own club, the club blackened by soot and tar and sap and burned to sharpness in the fire, by the enemy he had forged in Odysseus. The giant's hunger for human flesh, sated by six men, had stoked Odysseus's fire for vengeance. A fire that never burned far beneath.

The heat in the cave, bolstered by the bonfire of the Cyclops, soaked Ian in the sweat of another century. As he waited for the word from Tor, the only word he cared about, he felt his head expand and swim in the heat. Someone grunted behind him and he turned to face his men. They lowered their heads. He pushed forward into the circle they made, the huddle. Each pressed his head against the heads of the others. They pushed and pounded each other's shoulders, slid in the sweat and glycerin and sand. Their sound, the deep reverberations of voices within, echoed out into the cave. 

As another delay postposed the moment for action, they fell back into their places on each side of the stake. Ian shrugged his shoulders to stay loose. He looked down at the heavy stake. More of Tor’s bloody verisimilitude, Ian thought, studying the sticky, blackened point of the stake where he was positioned, at the front. He wondered if Tor had gone so far as to have the art department use real tar. 

Even for Tor that sounded extreme, but as Ian looked down at himself, he questioned whether there was anything Tor wouldn’t do. After many takes his costume was covered in black and sticky grime. It wasn’t the sooty mess he minded so much as the stickiness. In the heat the cloth of his costume had adhered to his skin. The heat might have melted the art department’s simulation soot.

All his long-held, much-quoted desires and intentions for living the character, filming in real locations, getting as close as he could to what was real were bowing under the weight of fulfillment. His aspirations rose up to mock him now. He stood next to the stake in the mouth of the cave, his body half in the sunlight, half in shadow, head burning and buzzing, feet cool. His shoulders ached with the anticipation of lifting the stake again, though the men were there to aid him. Why did it feel as if he were hefting the burden alone? He stared into the darkened maw, strategically lit, and at the emerald target toward which they would thrust their weapon, the screen a substitute for the monster which would be graphically inserted later. 

“Thirty seconds,” the Assistant Director said. 

A big, burly red-headed man called Eammous, who was stunt co-ordinator and also played one of the shipmates, said, “All right, then?” in Ian’s ear.

“Right.” Then, much louder, “Right, men. Are we ready?”

They replied, in unison, “Ready, Captain!”

“Posi-TION.”

They all bent down and cradled their arms around the stake in preparation.

Voices came from different points of the set to signify readiness.

“Rolling.”

“Frame.”

“Picture.”

“Speed.”

“And…Action,” Tor murmured from his position near the camera, where he could look at his monitors and the angle of the camera shot.

"H-RUPP-a-pai!" Ian bellowed. He’d dug up some ancient Greek for his character, to incite himself and his crew to their best effort. Used to his call by now, they responded as one.

With a grunt the lads swung the stake up into their arms. They stood, perspiring in the heat, barely needing the glycerin drops the makeup team sprayed them with for added sheen; at the ready.

"E-na, dyo, tri-A!" His Greek approximation of 'one, two, three' didn't matter as much as the guttural pitch of his command. The company ran forward, knees akimbo with the effort of digging into the sandy floor of the cave, gaining speed as they raced toward their target full bore. Ostensibly the drunken form of Polyphemus, their actual target was a round leather glove-like mitt, where they could safely impale the stake. 

As they ran the men yelled, the cave echoing with their battle cries. A great, “Arrrrghh!” filled the cavern and cracked off the walls, flying out and back again as the men continued their cries to war and blood and pain, the sounds wakening in them the blood of their ancestors, long-dead brothers, the very men they walked in the footsteps of. They made contact and penetrated the glove with a satisfying thrust.