The Everlasting Story of Nory

33. Unexplained Mysteries

Her questions were: The only place that Achilles wasn’t immortal was in the back of his ankle, in what’s known as his heel, because his mother did less than a perfect and less than a gentle job of dipping him. So, Nory felt, the only place he absolutely has to wear armour was around his ankles. He could fight in whatever strange underwear they had back in ancient times except for two huge gold and silver dust-ruffles around his ankles. Nory knew a little about ancient underwear because of the movie, Ji Gong, about the crazy monk. In it a rich, rich, rich man got naked in clothes that he would have worn very long ago. If you were rich in China your underclothes would be little shorts and a huge apron over your chest that tied in the back.

It would not matter how many times Achilles was stabbed in the neck or the heart — those parts were totally immortal. He would never have to fight back with Hector, he could just stand there with his hands at his sides and let Hector stab and jab the day away. But then you would miss the good part later, when they fight so fast and were so good at swordfighting that the crashing together of the swords made sparks, and the light of the sparks could be seen for miles in the night sky. But probably that wasn’t true. It was probably two stumbling men, swamped with blood, shouting bad words at each other and fighting in the mud until one slumped down. Nory hated when people said that oh yes, so-and-so ‘bit the dust,’ because what it meant was that the person lost his balance and fell at a point of being so faintingly weak and near dying that he couldn’t even put his hands out to stop himself when he fell, and so his teeth hit and dug a little way into the mud or dust or dirt, which was sad and a little disgusting to think about. But say a young child had been crouching in a doorway watching, a frightened young thing. She would have seen the fight, and then seen everyone else stab each other and die off, and when she was older her child would ask her, ‘Mommy, tell a story of a bad thing that happened to you as a child,’ just the way Nory herself always used to ask her mother and father that same question, so many times. ‘Tell me a bad thing that happened to you as a child.’ Nory asked it, year after year, and her mother and father told their stories of getting stitches in their thumb or getting hit by a car while running after a paper airplane or being kicked under the sinks in the school bathroom or mocked for long hair or falling one floor down and getting a concussion and then having to stay awake all night hearing Winnie the Pooh so they wouldn’t doze into a coma (this last bad thing happened to Nory’s mother when she was four), until her parents ran dry of bad things and had to start all over again with one of the early ones.

The girl who saw Hector get stabbed to death would say to her young child that she saw Hector and Achilles fight and Hector die, and the child would say, ‘What did they look like fighting?’ The mother wouldn’t want to say what it really looked like when a sword puncture-wounded deep into someone’s body, since it was a plain basic gruesome thing like the sight of the butterfly’s little head when she made the mistake with the lid, and she would think around for something else, and would have an instinct to say ah, that she saw the swords sparkling each time they smashed together, something nice like that, because maybe there was a poem already in Latin or some African-American language that people spoke in those days, or ancient Chinese, about swords sparkling. When you’re asked to say how you saw something you almost have to give up the idea of doing it exactly, since whatever bad thing happened had a happy ending because here you are, an everlasting grownup, happily holding a child.

‘But all right,’ Nory thought, ‘let’s say that the story is obviously made up in certain aspects, the way that legends so very often are.’ Myths were totally made up from scrap, according to Mr. Pears, but legends were a combination of made up and true-to-life. Even still, just to have it be a working legend, you need to know the kind of way that Achilles was immortal, and the story doesn’t provide you with that. Say Hector tried to stab him in the chest. There were three possibilities of what could happen. The sword could just not be able to go into Achilles at all, even an eighty-sixth of an inch, because his skin would be incredibly durable and unable to be cut in a good, sensible immortal way. Or the sword could go in just as deep as it would be in a normal human and hurt him very badly, so badly that he would have to be in the hospital, since you can be severely badly injured and be under intensive care in the hospital and still not die. Or the sword would swish completely through the chest as if it was the chest of a realistic ghost and Achilles would only feel a little sense of tickling inside, like when you swallow a very cold, pure, sour glass of cran-blackberry juice and feel it pouring down your ribcage in a waterfall.

But that’s not really even the difficult part of the question. Achilles is definitely killed by a poison arrow. Mr. Pears stressed that they had to remember that it was a poison arrow. The arrow goes into the mortal part of him, his heel, making a nasty puncture wound. But if the poison killed only his heel, he would survive just fine, since you can survive losing your whole foot or even your whole leg. If your head dies, you die. If your heart dies, you die. If your liver dies, even, you die. But if your ankle dies? It would hurt, no question about that, it would not be a comfortable or cozy experience at all, at all, because you would probably have to have your foot chopped off above the ankle so there wouldn’t be any gangrene. Gangrene was a situation that Nory knew about from Debbie, who said mountain climbers usually got it. Debbie made up a pretty funny joke about it. When you had gangrene, the doctors all crowded around your foot, if it was your foot that had it, and shook their heads and said, ‘It’s green, gang,’ and then, chop, off goes the foot, in the trash, two points. Debbie had a tape of an expedition to climb a very difficult-to-climb mountain, Mount Everlast. One guy fell and his foot broke so that it bent back against his leg in not a natural way, and it got badly infested, because the bone was projecting out, and they ran out of antibiotics, so they had to put plastic tubes all through the injury at his ankle, so water was pouring through his ankle every second. But he was all right once he got back to civilization.

So Achilles would not be able to kill as many people after they had to cut off his foot, since he would have to fight hopping to and fro, or rolling around in a wheelchair, or a wheelchariot, going ‘Charge! Rip, slash, stab, rip,’ at people and then frantically pushing the wheels. But he wouldn’t die. He would not die and be buried underground because the immortality wouldn’t let him. So you have to assume that it’s the poison spreading that does it. But this can’t be exactly correct because remember, if you’re Achilles, every cell in the rest of your body is immortal. Totally immortal. If you looked through an electronic microscope on the highest power, each molecule of the poison would be there with a little sword of stabbing chemicals pointing harshly at each cell, and each cell would be fighting harshly back, and you could see the sparks for millimeters around, but each cell would win each fight. The cells wouldn’t die. And then you have to think of this as well: in real life, your cells do die, and you get a whole new crop of cells every year, or every five years. The old cells get dissolved and get sent down by your blood to your bladder, and your bladder takes it from there. If you were Achilles, no cell would die, so you would get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, since your bones would be adding cells on, and no cells would be leaving, and your muscles, same thing, and your skin, same thing, every part of you would be growing in size and expanding like the expanding universe so after a little while you would be this absolutely huge monstrous thing just because you were immortal.