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I’d watched my body crumple as my head fell from my neck.
My phone chimed and I started hard. It bounced from my blanket and clattered to the floor.
Groaning, I stretched as far as possible without leaving the warm cocoon of my bed. The phone glowed to life as I lifted it to my face.
It was an email from an address I didn’t recognize. It struck me:delete it.But I wanted to erase the dream from my mind’s eye.
Because losing my head hadn’t been the worst part of my dream…
“What is half-immortal?”
Holy shit. It was my stranger-student who’d argued with me, challenged me, then registered,thenfailed to show up to any subsequent classes.
Pollux.
He’d put my question at the top of his email, though he’d left the subject line blank except forre:.
Squinting at the screen, I eyed the amount of text. Then flung my phone down, grabbed my laptop from next to me, and fired it up.
I had a dim memory of reading through quizzes in bed, utterly overwhelmed by the size of the curve I’d have to grade them on. I thought I might have slammed it shut.
“What is it to be half-immortal?”Pollux rephrased my question, then continued on. “I suppose a better question is, what is half of forever?”
Huh.Well, he’d managed to hook me. I read on, fascinated by his stream of thought in the way he wrote. I could hear his voice as if he stood next to me, conversing.
“Anything less than immortality is mortality, but just to be certain, I reached out to a friend of mine. You told me to cite my sources, so here you go. This is Achilles’ take on immortality.”
Snort-laughing, I choked. Tears flooded my eyes as I attempted to breathe, swallow, and read.
“Achilles was the closest thing to half-immortal I could think of.Sort of sucks,he said,to have the strength, stamina, speed, good-looks charm…
“I cut him off here, because he gets off track. So it turned out, he was no help at all. I’m referencing him, of course, because his mother dipped most of him in the River Styx, which made him mostly immortal. It didn’t do him any good, though, because there was that one spot on his heel that left him mortal, and brought about his death.
“Which brings me to your answer. There is no half-immortality, because the gods will always find a way to trick you. When Zeus offered to take half of Pollux’s (look at me, writing in the third person)…”
He was a lot funnier in email than he was in person. I imagined him laughing at himself as he wrote.
“…immortality and give it to his twin, Castor, Zeus had another plan. He told Pollux he could come to Mt. Olympus and live with the gods. Liveforeverwith the gods. Things get lost in translation, but if you refer to the Roman Dioscuri statutes, you’ll read,I offer you forever with the gods.
“Zeus tricked Pollux. Instead of taking Pollux’s immortality, and giving it to his brother, which was what Pollux wanted, Zeus gave himforever.
“Castor, mortal Castor, was still dead. But Castor’s spirit was made immortal.
“Stay with me, Leo. Remember, dead isn’t really dead with the gods. Orpheus went to the underworld and was given a chance to bring his soulmate back to Earth. He was tricked, too. But the point is, it’s possible.
“Instead, Zeus—who is conniving and jealous, and an all-around asshole—made a mortal life impossible for Pollux’s twin. He doomed him to stay a spirit, or a shade, or a ghost, or whatever you want to call it,forever.”
There were some misspellings and run-on sentences like he’d needed to get his thoughts out quickly.
“In conclusion, Pollux was tricked, so it doesn’t matter what immortality is. The End.”
He’d actually written that.The End.And beneath it, he’d included a link to an image of the twins, Castor and Pollux, engraved in stone. Under it was the Latin description he’d referenced. There was also a forwarded message from someone actually named Achilles, which said what he’d quoted earlier.
Ha.That part was funny. The rest of it wasn’t, though. It was bitter, and angry, and sounded as if it was written from experience.
Pollux—the man, not the fictional one I’d had him read about—wrote as if he’d been handed really shitty cards.
What did I do with this?
