Chapter 5 of an unfinished book based on The Odyssey, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. This episode opens with the series' musical introduction and universal cold open, then follows a single story — the next chapter after Episode 7 — into a concrete channel under Los Angeles where fever, ash, and first mortal mercy meet.

Tonight, just after midnight, arrangements break in a concrete channel under Los Angeles, on a slope of ash and newspaper, in a river house of silt and bone, and at a chain-link fence where a water bottle hung undelivered through the diamonds of wire.

The river took his smaller name first — the one kept under the tongue. Virgil lies where water, or Dante, or something too tired to be merciful has left him: mud in his collar, hands cut, Nelly’s ruined scarf still intimate at  ...