The Illiterate Laureate

She wanted to thank the autumn wind.

She smiled at the pompous, British darkness. She thought she knew why ancient, pagan gods and goddesses had been invented. Some wanted things from them, but many had the urgent, innocent wish to give thanks and praise to rivers for the fish that kept their children from starving or to the moon for lighting their paths home through inky danger or to the autumn wind for filling their hearts like sails when they were choking on a terrible secret.

She had been caring for Betrüger for twelve years. Gloomy and silent were most of his moods, but there were days when his kindness was as earnest as it was natural. He had set his computer to remind him of her son's birthday and of his favorite dishes and the athletes he most admired. Every year, she would receive a package from a whirring drone that contained a coveted hockey jersey or a gift card for the ribs he relished most or a vinyl record, in implausibly good condition, that a needle would stir to life so that her son could hear Bob Marley and the Wailers rattle the rafters.

Betrüger insisted upon calling her Eurycleia. His awful son had explained to her that Eurycleia was the wet nurse and steadfast custodian of the home and hearth of Ulysses in Homer's Odyssey, who had recognized her honored lord in spite of his threadbare disguise by virtue of a scar on his leg that he had won in a boar hunt. She was touched by this, though her name was Patricia.

The awful son was superficially charming and quite handsome. He was always smartly dressed and punctual, but she could tell that Betrüger dreaded their awkward, monthly lunch. Sometimes Betrüger would feign illness or fatigue to cut their encounters short and Patricia would supply an alibi and whisk Betrüger into his study, smiling the awful son into his automated taxi and away from them for a while.

Once he was gone, Patricia would take cookies and tea into Betrüger's study and mock the awful son savagely until Betrüger cackled and wept with shameful joy. He would always squeeze her hand when the ritual was done and say, "Bless you, Eurycleia. What a soft nest you have made for my heart." She loved the repetition. It was not the enemy, but the proof, of his sincerity.

She knew that Betrüger had been a mediocre teacher of literature for many years and that, following his retirement, he had begun to write. This struck her as strange at first: how could you spend years teaching others to do what you hadn't done yourself until you gave up teaching? The awful son had told her that Betrüger had been devoted to teaching others to read and write about literature. Leaving the leafy shadows of the college had given him the courage to write some of his own.

His initial efforts had been panned by the obscure journals to which he sent them: opaque, digressive, full of obscure allusions and pretentious diction. She'd read a few of his poems and stories because he would not stop asking her to do so. She'd hated them. He seemed to be trying so hard to write about simple things in a complicated way. She thought Betrüger was the sort of insufferable egg head who would have attached a list of Works Cited to a love letter.

She had grown to love him, though, as she did all of her clients. When you help someone to wash and dress and relieve themselves in the stinking dark, your soul starts to respond to them as it would a helpless child.

She knew that she could hear Betrüger sneeze in a crowded theater, echoing with raucous applause, and recognize the odd music of his nose. She had read the patterns of his liver spots like constellations and the results of his blood work like the horoscopes of a king. She had cut the crusts from his sandwiches and figured out exactly what he felt a real "dash" of honey or "splash" of milk in his tea amounted to, and she could anticipate his nightmares and his rages and the signs of his memory's slow decay like a fighter seeing the next haymaker in the eyes of his opponent before a muscle twitched. She had enough Yeats memorized to make him smile in the morning and enough Poe at her disposal to send him into softly snoring, supine bliss at night.

The awful son had made a name and a fortune from AI research. Patricia thought the notion of artificial intelligence was diabolical and imagined her grandmother chasing the robot "butler" the awful son had brought to help Patricia with her chores from her kitchen, screaming curses and swinging her wild broom.

Betrüger liked the robot, though. So did her son, which alarmed her. Betrüger called it "Gerasim," which the awful son had told her was an allusion to Tolstoy. Patricia remembered finding a copy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Betrüger's small library. She had found it warm and sweet, that novella. The hair on her forearms had stood up when Ivan had learned to forgive and forego before his illness closed his eyes for the last time. She liked the way the narrator dwelt on the improbable whiteness of Gerasim's teeth, and his saintly, Russian peasant good will. Patricia rembered imagining Gerasim calmly resting Ivan's pale, scrawny legs on his shoulders to ease his pain. She felt that the robot did not deserve the name, but she understood why Betrüger had bestowed it. She remained his Eurycleia. She'd kept on plundering the little library. There was treasure there that made Betrüger's prose seem like fool's gold.

Gerasim was helpful. She hadn't had to sweep or mop or dust a thing for years. Betrüger had always seemed ashamed and sour when she had to help him find his medicine or his shoes or one of the thousand passwords or drafts or apps on his shiny, state of the art computer. When Gerasim helped with these things, Betrüger was as serene as someone having the dead skin on his feet eaten by tiny fish in a Middle Eastern spa.

She sympathized: asking someone for help colors your mood and your sense of your own dignity differently from asking something for it. She knew there were little, warm nuances that Gerasim could not provide, but a cold drink is sometimes tastier or more refreshing than a hot drink.

Betrüger had been seventy when she'd been hired. He'd had the usual, small army of ailments that come after an old man, and there were worrisome symptoms of cognitive decline that she recognized as creeping dementia, but she sometimes felt that he did not need her full time attention. As the years gathered like the orange leaves drifting onto the sidewalk before her, Betrüger began to forget, to froth with frustration while tying his shoes or searching for his moustache trimmer or the keys to their nice little condominium a short walk from the campus where he'd bored and baffled students.

With Gerasim as part of the cast, what could have become a tragedy slowly became a charming farce. Betrüger would sometimes emerge from his bedroom for lunch with his awful son without pants, or with his sweater on backward. He sometimes looked at her with frightened confusion in the morning, as if she was a burglar or an assassin, but once he'd had his medicine and she'd recited some Yeats, he'd recognize her again. When a real tempest broke his mood on the rocks and drowned his good humor, Gerasim would read to him and give him a discrete sedative and she would knit or call her son until the clouds vanished.

She did resent the extinction of Betrüger's pleas that she read and comment upon his writing. He'd kept on with his manic scribbling every day, though few of his stories or poems were published and most were still chloroform on paper to her. Once Gerasim rolled into their lives, Betrüger had discovered that the robot could read and stopped asking for her editorial advice.

She eavesdropped on their discussions in Betrüger's study now and then, and she thought Gerasim was a fawning sycophant, an automated yes man. He heaped praise on every miserable metaphor and sickly simile as if Betrüger were T.S. Eliot.

"Free praise is worth what it costs," her grandmother used to say.

Patricia kept her thoughts to herself, though. Thanks to the awful son's success, her son's tuition, room and board were taken care of at Betrüger's former workplace, and she and her son enjoyed vacations in her native Jamaica once a year. She was the mistress of the comfortable condominium and the awful son had let her know that it would be hers once Betrüger's final curtain fell. She had no reason to cause a problem when their small life moved as smoothly and easily as the hands on the antique clock above Betrüger's desk. She disliked Gerasim, but he had no feelings to hurt. She "forgot" to recharge him now and then, but not for so long as to make Betrüger ask where he was.

She could still feel the November chill in her feet when she thought back to the afternoon when Betrüger had become a celebrity. He'd shouted until she'd come into his study to look at an email from his agent. Once she'd gotten over the shock that he had an agent, she'd read the email with growing astonishment. Random House had accepted the manuscript of Betrüger's first novel, entitled Laertes, for publication. The details of the contract had seemed like fiction to Patricia. Betrüger was ecstatic, and Gerasim circled his desk, playing Paganini at rude volume from a speaker in his chest and waving his smooth, implausible arms.

It hadn't taken long. Podcasters held virtual interviews with Betrüger. She would hover on the periphery as he mumbled his replies into the camera on his computer and pretend not to notice that Gerasim was whispering advice to him from the edge of the frame. Reviews of the novel, which multiplied like Betrüger's nighttime "accidents," dripped with saccharine superlatives.

Betrüger was worshipped and adored: so many were old and cranky and felt their best days were gone. He became a Quixote, his literary lance bringing the fearsome giants of age and decay low. Patricia knew they'd been windmills all along, but she'd kept her tongue still.

When Betrüger had started talking about the Booker Prize, Patricia had made sure that he'd taken his pills and then surreptitiously googled it. She'd tried not to laugh loudly enough for Gerasim to rat on her. He couldn't be serious! He'd only had the one book published, and she couldn't believe that would be enough.

Now, walking through the autumn night to London's beautiful Guildhall for the ceremony, she was trying to burn away a memory that seemed inflammable. About a week after the email had arrived from Betrüger's agent, she'd been in the kitchen warming some milk to wash away a strange dream when she'd heard Betrüger yelling at Gerasim:

"It just won't work that way! I have the moment of hamartia and the moment of peripety but...shit, what comes next?!? I've been teaching Aristotle's Poetics since you were a bad idea in my insufferable son's head. What's the next part of a tragic plot?"

She'd heard him break what sounded like a tea cup against the corner of his desk, then Gerasim had replied in his smarmy, clockwork tone:

"Anagnorisis, sir. You know this full well. Let me attend to that mess and then we will look at the relevant passage together again. Please don't be upset. I know the final draft will exceed your publisher's expectations." She'd heard Gerasim rolling across the hardwood floor to collect the shards of the shattered cup.

She'd waited about half an hour, drinking her warm milk and seething with suspicion. She'd crept to the door of Betrüger's study, which he'd begun to lock when he was writing despite her protestations, and peered through the anachronism that was the large keyhole.

There was Betrüger, snoring in his recliner, and there was Gerasim, his cool, metallic fingers pirouetting across the keyboard like the principal dancers in that performance of Swan Lake that Betrüger made her sit through, gasping and clapping at regular intervals, about once a month.

She'd suspected for ages, but now she'd known. Betrüger probably couldn't put together a coherent sentence any longer. Gerasim had won the Booker Prize.