Andy and Gary knew how to navigate the immense, stormy Atlantic Ocean back to Greece, as difficult, trying, exhausting and depleting the trip would be.
Their only issue is that everyone has an opinion. “Are we there yet?” is always an invitation for some wise guy to try something new.
To Andy and Gary this was all one, but they had the great challenge of convincing Homer that none of this was worth writing.
Luckily, they had ten years of time to get to Ithaca.
And so, they sailed down the Mississippi River, meeting many tribes along the way curious concerning these olive-skinned folks; they entered the Gulf of Mexico, or, to the Aztecs, Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, the home of their deity of the seas; they kept to the coast, waving hello to the people they came across; they sang more sea shanties, and taught themselves Spanish; they then approached Panama’s isthmus, entering the Rio Atrato; and there they continued, at the mercy of the darkness and terrors casted by the tall jungle trees, its thick mists, the shrieks of howler monkeys and the constant hum of mosquitoes.
There before their eyes, a light pierced through the thick vegetation; the light, but a thread when they beheld it, grew into a brilliance; in fact, the brilliance became overwhelming and golden; they covered their eyes with their hands, then, upon removing them, saw streets, temples, palaces paved out of gold. They had found El Dorado.
Now, recall this is all historically accurate, for the machines say so.
As this was the Bronze Age, gold was quite useless. The people of El Dorado sighed as their golden hoes bent in the tough soil; they sighed when their golden axes crumbled before the bark of trees; they sighed when their golden arrowheads were shrugged off on the tough hides of caimans; they sighed when the taste of gold ruined their wine.
Poor fellows, the grouch said. Luckily, because gold shall always be useless, no one will ever look for them with evil intentions. Their uselessness is, after all, useful to them.
The chief of the El Doradons approached the crew, saddled, with golden stirrups, on a long-necked lizard called a mokele-mbembe. The chief himself was a strange sight: he was thrice the crew’s height, was covered head to toe with hair, and had an additional mouth in his abdomen. The chief claimed it made him less hungry. Evolution claimed the organ should have been long obsolete. Furthermore, he had only one eye.
We are the mapinguari, he said magnanimously to his visitors.
The sailors had heard tales of the mapinguari from other tribes. Is it true you can summon wind and darkness?
No, he answered.
Is it true you have a gigantic penis?
I wish, he answered.
The chief, a gracious man, asked to host the visitors that night. The grouch, who had no inherent ill will to any man, one eye or two, mouth in abdomen or no, gigantic or micro penis, accepted. They entered his golden home, sat on golden seats, drank golden coffee from golden mugs, and supped, on golden plates, on the flesh of giant lizards, which were not made of gold.
As they smoked from golden pipes gold-leafed tobacco and drank from golden flutes gold-colored wine, the chief made a startling suggestion: that the crew live with him for the rest of their lives.
The grouch was taken aback. What about my wife and child?
You haven’t seen them for ten years, the chief pointed the tail of his pipe.
What about my possessions?
The mapinguari shall give you all you need.
What about my dog?
What dog lives to be more than ten years old, the chief scoffed.
The chief then told his story: his wife and daughter had died from disease a while ago. The mapinguari are a generally happy people, and yet he longed to take care of someone, and he enjoyed another’s presence. Because the sailors were so small, it would not be so hard to feed and take care of them; because they were so intelligent, he could speak to them, though their Spanish needed some work. If they were added up together, they equaled a wife and a daughter, at least in weight.
The grouch said he would think on it.
The machines had done the thinking for the grouch. They would pierce the mapinguari through the eye.
© 2025 Jay Lee