Andrew Sean Greer

Calypso's Guest

smile??

I have no right to tell his tale. After all: he never loved me.

But the workers are making it snow outside, and what have I got to warm the hours? Old stories I have heard a hundred times, old games with no partner to lose to, old cheats and tricks with nobody to work them on? A fire flashes in the corner: there's a sight I've seen too often. there is not a stone in this cave I haven't memorized, placed elsewhere, forgotten, found, and memorized again. You live long enough, and almost everything fades in the sun except the patch where you are standing, isn't that so? And haven't I stood right here, all these years, in the place where I last saw him? The place I sent him from — away from me, at last, toward home?

How could we guess our dreams outlast our selves?

A smile. "Well," I said, "You are part of it."

That night, and many other nights, he came to my cabin. A reprieve from solitude, at last. What are we to one another, we cannot be this?

The moons looked in the window at us, a pair of mismatched eyes, and what did they see? A room littered with pillows and books and quietly blinking lights, lit by a single bronze lamp; a room made of much living, and in it, the ones who had lived it: a man in love, standing in the doorway with a dog on its leash. And another, seated at a table, planning his escape.

The sound of the wind is almost human to me now, although I have not heard a human voice for a hundred years. Sometimes I sit in silence for hours. It is unnecessary to say "alone".

It seems impossible that I think of him every day.

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