The Circe Episode begins at the Mabbot Street entrance to Nighttown, and Joyce at once establishes the ethereal tone of the chapter: The pygmy woman and the gnome mentioned on the first page are undoubtedly children, but they are distorted because they are seen through the mists of Joyce's spell of enchantment. Stephen and Lynch pass close to two men, Privates Compton and Carr, and the obnoxious Carr calls Stephen a parson because of his black clothing; this foreshadows the trouble that Stephen will have with this British soldier at the close of the episode, when Carr knocks Stephen down. A whore, also mistaking Stephen, believes that the two men are Trinity College medical students: "All prick and no pence." Stephen — although it can only be surmised — is probably in Nighttown to seek out Georgina Johnson, a prostitute whom he paid once with George Russell's loan of a pound (this reference occurs in "Scylla and Charybdis").
Bloom arrives panting from his attempt to catch up with Stephen and Lynch, and he is almost run down by two cyclists and then is almost hit by a sandstrewer; this latter encounter, at least, cures his (Christ-like) pain in his side. Although he thinks that following Stephen is probably futile, Bloom pursues his quest since he feels that Stephen is the "best of the lot." Also, he is afraid that Stephen will lose his money, and, after all, the chase is really, according to one of Bloom's stray and unconscious thoughts, "Kismet" (fate or destiny).
In the phantasmagoric, dream-like sequences of "Circe," Bloom manages to arrive in front of Mrs. Cohen's establishment (although he thinks that he has arrived at "Mrs. Macks"). There, the whore Zoe Higgins (whose last name is the same as Bloom's mother's maiden name) tells him that the young man whom he is looking for is inside; she then asks (note Joyce's use of irony here) if Bloom is the young man's father; significantly, Bloom "denies" his "son." Zoe ("life" in Greek) is verbose, and Bloom's response to another of her crude questions — "How's the nuts?" — lends credence to one critic's assertion that we probably know more about Bloom than about any other protagonist in literature. "Off side" is Bloom's answer, referring to his testicles. "Curiously," he says, "they are on the right. Heavier I suppose. One in a million my tailor, Mesias [note that Bloom looked for a mesial groove in the nude museum statue in "Scylla and Charybdis"] says." Zoe then takes Bloom's shriveled potato, his true moly, and Joyce focuses sharply here on Zoe's lips, "smeared with salve of swinefat"; clearly, Joyce is placing us in Homer's own pen of Circe.
