The Latinist

by Mark Prins

Lucrezia had made inquiries and discovered that “external auditory exostoses” had been found in archaeological contexts and could be found even in lifeguards and surfers today. “Surfer’s ear, it is called.” She’d been put in touch with the ENT in Nazaré, an expert in removing “EAEs.” He saw them all the time in professional surfers. Habitual exposure to cold water would cause soft tissue irritation in the ear meatus, then bone growths would begin to form. Over time, they could basically close the ear canal. “My boss seems to think they happened because of the thermae, the baths.”

But, he presumed, dying was done with especial care at the hospice. They wouldn’t let you bleed out in the games room, for example. You couldn’t do it too slow, or too fast. It was like landing a plane, more or less.

The chills she’d felt rippling along her arms, the helium-like insurrection that announced, You are encountering beauty, had something to do with empathy, she felt, the dissolution of the borders of oneself, the merging of her consciousness with the incomprehensibly vast reservoir of others. Yes, consciousness, that was the element, like water or air, that she dissolved into, not only Ovid’s but infinite throngs of others. Tessa had felt so transformed by this mystical experience that when Daphne suddenly sprouted roots and foliage it had seemed logical. “And that’s when I knew I would not become a doctor,” she told Chris.

He told her, in turn, about his disciplinarian mother, the intellectual tundra of his hamlet in Hampshire, the stamina reviewing for his sixth form exams inspired by the idea of Cambridge—the yearning to be among others like him—only to be tossed into the Trinity fountain his first week there. It was unfailingly worth it, he said, if only because of those first nights reading Eclogues, and that thing telling him, not intellectually, but physically, carnally, This is who you are. “You can’t ever walk away from that,” he said. “You have to enshrine it. I really believe that.”

Half the fucking endowed chairs in the Western world were there,

Afterward, on the bus home, Ben had asked, Am I Odysseus, or am I a suitor? When she left for the library he’d say, Working on the shroud?

they

Other museumgoers moved quietly around her, so many with audio guides, the gallery resembled a silent disco.

“Do you think Chris is happy?” Chris asked. “No,” she said. “No, he’s an island, that one.”

But that he had always been an unhappy island, a dysthymic isle, an archipelagous malcontent,

“I’m sorry I don’t have more for you,” she’d said. “More would imply you had something to begin with,” he’d responded. “More of nothing is just more nothing.”

The sun, falling, seemed to cut against the clouds, abrading them, and there was a rawness to Chris’s sense of loneliness and failure that he hadn’t quite encountered before, hadn’t quite reckoned with.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt,

because you had meant something to be me before,

Typo?

“You’d be surprised how busy I am, I don’t have time for, you know, the dead. They can be very demanding.” She turned back into the room and smiled.

“But if you read it, you know, it’s attempted rape. Obviously, he was the one who should have been terminally metamorphosed, if there was any justice in the world.”