The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man: Essential Stories

POSEIDON

POSEIDON SAT at his desk and went through his accounts. Being in charge of all the seas and oceans was an endless amount of work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted, and indeed he did have very many of them, but because he took his position very seriously, he checked over every calculation again himself, and so his assistants were little help to him. You couldn’t say that the work gave him pleasure; he actually just did it because it had been assigned to him. In fact he’d often asked for some work that would be what he called a bit more cheerful, but whenever suggestions were made to him it turned out that nothing suited him as well as the position he already had. It was also very difficult to find something else for him. It would have been impossible to appoint him to a particular sea, for example. Even leaving aside that the amount of bookkeeping would have been no smaller, merely pettier, the great Poseidon could of course only be given a role at a very senior level. And if he was offered something outside the water altogether, just the idea of it made him ill, his divine breathing grew laboured and his powerful ribcage started to heave. Also, his complaints weren’t taken very seriously; when a powerful person starts fretting, you have to look like you’re trying to help them no matter how pointless the matter at hand; but no one ever really thought that Poseidon would be allowed to resign his position. He’d been appointed god of the seas at the beginning of time and that’s the way things would have to stay.

What annoyed him most—and this was mostly due to dissatisfaction with his work—was when he heard about what people imagined he was like, for example that he was always careening through the waves with a trident. Meanwhile he was sitting down here in the depths of the ocean constantly going through the books. The only interruption to this monotony were occasional visits to Jupiter, visits, by the way, from which he usually returned in a fury. So he’d hardly seen anything of the seas, only ever briefly on the hurried ascent to Olympus, and never really travelled around them. He would say that he was waiting for the end of the world; at that point there would surely be a quiet moment before it was all over in which, after finishing off the last of the accounts, he’d have time for a quick look around.