Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

CASE STUDY: The Russian military now uses decoy armaments of a Euripidean design — lifesize tanks, MiG-31 fighter jets and missile launchers made of inflatable plastic. A hot-air balloon company provides them to the Ministry of Defense.

It took them ten years to walk to it.

A thousand bloody T-shirts left on the sand.

Oh I need a drink.

Or a big bowl of whipped cream. I’ve got to think.

The truth is,

a cloud went to Troy.

A cloud in the shape of Norma Jean Baker.

The gods arranged it, sort of.

They flew me to LA. Locked me in a suite of the Chateau Marmont.

This is the Nile and I’m a liar.

Those are both true.

CHANGING ATTITUDES: An ancient Homeric catalogue of battlefield trauma would include wounds to eyeball, nose, palate, forehead, throat, collarbone, back of skull, nape of neck, upper arm, forearm, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, thigh, knee, shin, heel, ankle. Lasting psychological damage, however keen a concern of modern research, does not seem to have interested the ancient poet.

Yes, and I’m putting in every detail.

Every blade of grass on Priam’s lawn.

every lick of wind on a warrior’s cheek,

every thin brown bat that whistled past the Greek

tents at dusk,

every fly that buzzed over their shit,

every pointless prayer,

every opaque oracle,

every bone that broke

in the baby they tossed over the wall on the last day.

I say to myself. Hermione is not lying under a sheet in a beeping overlit emergency room. Hermione will run towards us, laughing and skeptical, with her coat undone. I keep trying to focus on her running with her coat undone, as she always did, and me reaching to close it, as I always did, me doing up a button and her pulling away exasperated, undoing it.

You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep.

Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.

Hell smells stale. Fights aren’t about anything, fights are about themselves. You’re stiff.

War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps contracting, or flaring, or flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline