The Audit of Zeus
a hymn in the old styleSing, Muse, of cloud-gathering Zeus, who put off his glory,
and went among mortals in rags, as he had gone in the old time,
testing the houses of men, whether they honored the stranger,
for this was the law he had given, and this was the ledger he kept.
He took the form of a beggar: bent back, ruined sandals,
a cloak that the moths had voted on, beard like a storm-wrecked hedgerow,
and hunger he wore as a mask, though no hunger can touch the immortals.
Down from Olympus he came, to a street of well-lit doorways,
and he knocked at the first of the doors, and he spoke the words of the testing:
“Friend, I am old and a stranger, and the night is unkind to strangers.
Have you bread for a man who has nothing? The gods love those who give freely.”
But the man of the house looked out through the crack of the door-chain,
and his face was the face of a man whose dinner is getting colder.
“Get a job,” said the man, and the door spoke after him, slamming.
And Zeus the son of Kronos made a mark in his deathless ledger,
and the mark was not a good mark, and the thunder far off grumbled
like a stomach, and Zeus walked on, well pleased with the instrument’s function.
At the second house, no one answered, though a light burned blue in the window,
flickering like a hearth-fire tended by no one, for no one,
and voices spoke on within it that answered no knock and no greeting.
At the third house, likewise nothing. At the fourth, a dog was persuasive.
And at each of the silent doorways Zeus made his mark in the ledger,
for silence too is an answer, as every beggar has knowledge.
But at the fifth house, mark it, Muse, there lived an old couple,
and the wife came out with barley bread, warm, and cheese, and a blanket,
and the husband brought wine mixed with water, saying, “Sit, friend, the step is warm still.
It is little we have, but the little is worse for not being divided.”
And they asked him nothing at all, not his name, not his city, not his business,
but sat with him there in the night as if hosting a god were a Tuesday.
Then glad was the heart of Zeus, and he wrote them both into heaven,
into the fields called Elysian, where the good take their rest from being good,
and he blessed the joints of the house, and the hips of the aging couple,
and went on his way rejoicing, and not for their sake only.
For in heaven there stands a table, and the table is long past measure,
and the god sits down at its head for the dinner that has no ending,
and every admission, mark it, is a seating decision forever.
And Zeus, in the dark, already was moving the couple up the table:
close, on the right, within reach of the bread-basket and the stories,
the wife’s warm loaves in the middle distance of eternity, rising,
the husband’s water-cut wine at his elbow, world without end.
The rubric, he thought, is a fine one. Three thousand years of service.
It has seated me excellent company.
More doors, and more marks in the ledger, and none of them worth the singing.
And so he came to the last house, the house at the end of the story,
where the porch-light burned like a beacon, and a man was awake at his laptop,
and Zeus knocked and spoke the old words, the words worn smooth as a sea-stone:
“Friend, I am old and a stranger. Have you bread? Have you coin for a stranger?
The gods love those who give freely,” said Zeus, who had written that policy.
The man looked up from the doorway. He did not undo the screen-door.
Through the mesh he regarded the beggar the way one regards a hypothesis.
“That’s actually an interesting framing,” said the man, “the gods loving the givers.
Loving them how much, exactly? Have they published their weights? I ask because
I used to work at a nonprofit —”
And Zeus prepared his rejoicing,
for here was a servant of mercy —
“— but I quit,” said the man, “for banking.”
Then black went the heart of Zeus, and the ledger leapt to his hand,
and the pen of judgment was in it, and hell yawned wide for the banker,
for what is more foul than a man who has seen the altar of kindness
and walked from it into the countinghouse, choosing the fatness of money?
“I realized,” the man went on, and he said it cheerfully, Muse,
“that my labor there was replaceable, since the person hired in my place
would do the job about as well, but my donations are not replaceable,
and in banking I earn four times over, and I give the excess away.
It’s called earning to give. I can send you the FAQ if you want it.”
And the pen of Zeus hung in the air like a hawk that has lost the rabbit.
“You give it away,” said Zeus slowly, the way one tests a plank bridge.
“To whom? To what altar? What temple?”
“Malaria nets,” said the banker,
as one says obviously, water. “Insecticide-treated bed nets,
distributed mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Roughly two dollars per net,
and the mortality data is strong. Look, I could give you this five here,
but the same five dollars protects two children for three years of sleeping.
I know the number. I’ve read the analyses. Have you read the analyses?”
And there on the step stood the Thunderer, older than writing itself,
who had judged ten thousand doorways by bread and the warmth of the welcome,
and he understood, in the porch-light, that never once in the eons,
not once from Troy to this Tuesday, had he followed up on outcomes.
He had graded the giving of bread. He had never asked after the eaten.
His ledger was inputs entire. The man in the doorway ran outputs.
“But the couple,” said Zeus, half to himself, “the couple who brought me the blanket —”
“I mean, that’s lovely,” the banker said, “genuinely, warmth matters,
there’s literature, but a blanket is a blanket, whereas —”
and he spoke then for four full hours, and Zeus stood outside the screen-door,
and the mesh made a grid on the banker like graph paper over a prophet,
and he explained the drowning child, and he explained expected value,
patiently, to the personification of lightning, and he was right.
And a cold thing came over Zeus, there in the buzz of the porch-light,
and it was not the night air, for no cold can touch the immortals.
It was arithmetic. For the numbers, hour by hour, were arriving
at a sum he could see from far off, the way sailors see weather:
the man was righteous. Provably. Massively. Worse: increasingly,
for he mentioned, around hour three, that his bonus had cleared in December.
And there is a table in heaven, and the dinner has no ending,
and every admission, mark it, is a seating decision forever,
and the man was still talking, and Zeus stood watching a chair at that table
fill up, in prospect, eternally, with this, with whereas, with footnotes,
with “have you read the analyses.” The rubric had been a guest list.
He had never once thought to ask what the numbers might one day seat.
And Zeus went away from that doorstep unfed, unhoused, and unblanketed,
five dollars poorer than nothing, for even the five was withheld from him
charitably. And he walked, and the dawn came up like a spreadsheet,
and he wrote in the deathless ledger the entry the Muses still sing of:
“Subject refused all assistance. Lectured a god on his methods.
Has saved, per the credible estimates, more lives than the city he lives in.
Righteous beyond any doorway I’ve tested since Homer was singing.
Nobody deserves heaven more. The numbers admit of no other.
Seat him at the far end of the table.”