Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Middlesex (2002)

  At night, they descended to their respective compartments. In separate bunks of seaweed wrapped in burlap, with life vests dou- bling as pillows, they tried to sleep, to get used to the motion of the ship, and to tolerate the smells. Passengers had brought on board all manner of spices and sweetmeats, tinned sardines, octopus in wine sauce, legs of lamb preserved with garlic cloves. In those days you could identify a person's nationality by smell. Lying on her back with eyes closed, Desdemona could detect the telltale oniony aroma of a Hungarian woman on her right, and the raw-meat smell of an Ar- menian on her left. (And they, in turn, could peg Desdemona as a Hellene by her aroma of garlic and yogurt.) Lefty's annoyances were auditory as well as olfactory. To one side was a man named Callas with a snore like a miniature foghorn itself; on the other was Dr. Philobosian, who wept in his sleep. Ever since leaving Smyrna the doctor had been beside himself with grief. Racked, gut-socked, he lay curled up in his coat, blue around the eye sockets. He ate almost nothing. He refused to go up on deck to get fresh air. On the few oc- casions he did go, he threatened to throw himself overboard. In Athens, Dr. Philobosian had told them to leave him alone. He refused to discuss plans about the future and said that he had no fam- ily anywhere. "My family's gone. They murdered them." "Poor man," Desdemona said. "He doesn't want to live." "We have to help him," Lefty insisted. "He gave me money. He bandaged my hand. Nobody else cared about us. We'll take him with us." While they waited for their cousin to wire money, Lefty tried to console the doctor and finally convinced him to come with them to Detroit. "Wherever's far away," said Dr. Philobosian. But now on the boat he talked only of death. The voyage was supposed to take from twelve to fourteen days. Lefty and Desdemona had the schedule all worked out. On the sec- ond day at sea, directly after dinner, Lefty made a tour of the ship. He picked his way among the bodies sprawled across the steerage deck. 65

• From The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History (2013)

  o The Romans would not have cared whether the body of Jesus was on the cross during the Sabbath day. Moreover, the typical Roman practice was to leave bodies on the cross to be subject to the elements and decomposition, to humiliate the corpse after death. o Why would Christians make up the story of Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus? For later Christian storytellers, it was essential that Jesus was buried in a grave and one that people knew about. Otherwise, they could not plausibly claim that he had risen from the grave. Scanned by CamScanner Paul says nothing about an empty tomb, but he believed that Jesus was raised from the dead because he had a vision of Jesus after his death. © There has been a substantial amount of scholarship on visions and visionary experiences over the past 20 years. o Some visions are called veridical, meaning that they are visual experiences of phenomena that are actually present. Christians would claim that Paul’s vision of Jesus was veridical, that Jesus really did appear to Paul. o Visions that are not veridical may be induced by chemical imbalance, fatigue, a sense of loss, or some other cause. Non- Christians would claim that Paul’s visions were not veridical, that they were hallucinations. o Both Chnstians and non-Christians can agree that Paul says he had a vision of Jesus alive after he died. Paul also claims that others had visions, as well. The key passage is | Corinthians 15:3—8, Paul's account of Jesus dying and being raised from the dead. Paul says: “that he appeared to Cepheus [Peter], and to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” What is a historian to make of this passage? Possibly, it’s easiest to say that several of Jesus’s followers had visions of him after his crucifixion. We have no corroborating evidence that 500 people saw Jesus; Paul ts the only reference to such an occurrence. Possibly, some of Jesus’s followers did have visions, and possibly, these followers of Jesus told others about their visions, who believed in the visions and passed the stories on. Soon, there was a snowball effect as people claimed to have seen Jesus alive after his death. 73 Scanned by CamScanner People frequently have visions of loved ones after their deaths. These visions occur more often when people feel deep agony over a person's death, personal guilt, or anger. Often, these visions are taken to be veridical by the person experiencing them. o There are innumerable documented instances of people speaking to and touching dead loved ones tn their visions, but normally, those who experience visions do not think that their loved ones have been physically raised from the dead.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  To psychoanalyze my grandmother's heart palpitations: they were the manifestations of grief. Her parents were dead— killed in the re- cent war with the Turks. The Greek Army, encouraged by the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the ancient Greek territory in Asia Minor. After years of living apart up on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my grandmother's village, had emerged into the safety ofthcMegale Idea— the Big Idea, the dream of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Angora in the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under Turkish rule. No longer were the giaours ("infidel dogs") forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men took silk to market in Bursa, diey were free Greeks, in a free Greek city. Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to feel happy like everybody else. Years later, in her widowhood, when she'd spend a 21 decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years between wars a half century earlier had been the only decent time in her life; but by then everyone she'd known would be dead and she could only tell it to the television. For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ig- nore her foreboding by working in the cocoonery. She'd come out the back door of the house, through the sweet-smelling grape arbor, and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid, larval smell inside didn't bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother's own personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead she heard her

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  here: creating a wide network of allies will give you the power to link people up with each other, which will make them feel that by knowing you they can make their lives easier. This is something no one can resist. A speech that carries its Follow-through is key: so many people will charm by promising a person audience along with it and is applauded is often less great things—a better job, a new contact, a big favor—but if they do not suggestive simply because it follow through they make enemies instead of friends. Anyone can make a is clear that it sets out to be promise; what sets you apart, and makes you charming, is your ability to persuasive. People talking come through in the end, following up your promise with a definite action. together influence each other in close proximity by Conversely, if someone does you a favor, show your gratitude concretely. means of the tone of voice In a world of bluff and smoke, real action and true helpfulness are perhaps they adopt and the way the ultimate charm. they look at each other and not only by the kind of language they use. We are right to call a good Examples of Charmers conversationalist a charmer in the magical sense of the word. 1. In the early 1870s, Queen Victoria of England had reached a low point —GUSTAVE TARDE, L'OPINION in her life. Her beloved husband, Prince Albert, had died in 1861, leaving ET LA FOULE, QUOTED IN SERGE her more than grief stricken. In all of her decisions she had relied on his MOSCOVICI, THE AGE OF THE CROWD advice; she was too uneducated and inexperienced to do otherwise, or so everyone made her feel. In fact, with Albert's death, political discussions and policy issues had come to bore her to tears. Now Victoria gradually withdrew from the public eye. As a result, the monarchy became less popular and therefore less powerful. In 1874, the Conservative Party came to power, and its leader, the seventy-year-old Benjamin Disraeli, became prime minister. The protocol of his accession to his seat demanded that he come to the palace for a private meeting with the queen, who was fifty-five at the time. Two more unlikely associates could not be imagined: Disraeli, who was Jewish by birth, had dark skin and exotic features by English standards; as a young man he had been a dandy, his dress bordering on the flamboyant, and he had written popular novels that were romantic or even Gothic in style. The queen, on the other hand, was dour and stubborn, formal in manner and simple in 84 • The Art of Seduction Wax, a substance naturally taste. To please her, Disraeli was advised, he should curb his natural ele-hard and brittle, can be gance; but he disregarded what everyone had told him and appeared before made soft by the

• From Middlesex (2002)

  The ceremony contained the full funeral liturgy, omitting only the final portion where the congregation is asked to give the deceased a final kiss. Instead, Sourmelina passed by the casket and kissed the wedding crown, followed by Desdemona and Lefty. Assumption Church, which at that time operated out of a small storefront on Hart Street, was still less than a quarter full. Jimmy and Lina had not been regular churchgoers. Most of the mourners were old widows for whom funerals were a form of entertainment. At last the pallbear- ers brought the casket outside for the funeral photograph. The par- ticipants clustered around it, the simple Hart Street church in the background. Father Stylianopoulos took his position at the head of the casket. The casket itself was reopened to show the photo of Jimmy Zizmo resting against the pleated satin. Flags were held over the coffin, the Greek flag on one side, the American flag on the other. No one smiled for the flash. Afterward, the funeral procession con- tinued to Forest Lawn Cemetery on Van Dyke, where the casket was put in storage until spring. There was still a possibility that the body might materialize with the spring thaw. Despite the performance of all the necessary rites, the family re- mained aware that Jimmy Zizmo's soul wasn't at rest. After death, the souls of the Orthodox do not wing their way directly to heaven. They prefer to linger on earth and annoy the living. For the next forty days, whenever my grandmother misplaced her dream book or her worry beads, she blamed Zizmo's spirit. He haunted the house, mak- ing fresh milk curdle and stealing the bathroom soap. As the mourn- ing period drew to an end, Desdemona and Sourmelina prepared the kolyvo. It was like a wedding cake, made in three blindingly white tiers. A fence surrounded the top layer, from which grew fir trees made of green gelatin. There was a pond of blue jelly, and Zizmo's name was spelled out in silver-coated dragees. On the fortieth day af- ter the funeral, another church ceremony was held, after which every- one returned to Hurlbut Street. They gathered around the kolyvo, which was sprinkled with the powdered sugar of the afterlife and mixed with the immortal seeds of pomegranates. As soon as they ate the cake, they could all feel it: Jimmy Zizmo's soul was leaving the earth and entering heaven, where it couldn't bother them anymore. 128 At the height of the festivities, Sourmelina caused a scandal when she returned from her room wearing a bright orange dress. "What are you doing?" Desdemona whispered. "A widow wears black for the rest of her life."

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Everyone seemed to know someone who had met her, or who had visited her in her office, where a line of supplicants wound its way through the hallways to her door. Behind her desk she sat, so calm and full of love. Film crews recorded her acts of charity: to a woman who had lost everything, Evita would give a house; to one with a sick child, free care in the finest hospital. She worked so hard, no wonder rumor had it that she was ill. And everyone heard of her visits to the shanty towns and to hospitals for the poor, where, against the wishes of her staff, she would kiss people with all kinds of maladies (lepers, syphilitic men, etc.) on the cheek. Once an assistant appalled by this habit tried to dab Evita's lips with alcohol, to sterilize them. This saint of a woman grabbed the bottle and smashed it against the wall. Yes, Evita was a saint, a living madonna. Her appearance alone could heal the sick. And when she died of cancer, in 1952, no outsider to Argentina could possibly understand the sense of grief and loss she left behind. For some, the country never recovered. * * * 112 • The Art of Seduction Most of us live in a semi-somnambulistic state: we do our daily tasks and the days fly by. The two exceptions to this are childhood and those moments when we are in love. In both cases, our emotions are more engaged, more open and active. And we equate feeling emotional with feeling more alive. A public figure who can affect people's emotions, who can make them feel communal sadness, joy, or hope, has a similar effect. An appeal to the emotions is far more powerful than an appeal to reason. Eva Perón knew this power early on, as a radio actress. Her tremulous voice could make audiences weep; because of this, people saw in her great charisma. She never forgot the experience. Her every public act was framed in dramatic and religious motifs. Drama is condensed emotion, and the Catholic religion is a force that reaches into your childhood, hits you where you cannot help yourself. Evita's uplifted arms, her staged acts of charity, her sacrifices for the common folk—all this went straight to the heart. It was not her goodness alone that was charismatic, although the appearance of goodness is alluring enough. It was her ability to dramatize her goodness. You must learn to exploit the two great purveyors of emotion: drama and religion. Drama cuts out the useless and banal in life, focusing on moments of pity and terror; religion deals with matters of life and death. Make your charitable actions dramatic, give your loving words religious import, bathe everything in rituals and myths going back to childhood. Caught up in the emotions you stir, people will see over your head the halo of charisma.

• From Bright Lights, Big City (1984)

  but it’s all over. I wanted you to know, in case it makes a difference. I’m drunk. Do you think I should hang up?” In the ensuing pause you can hear the faint hum of the long-distance wire. “Don’t hang up,” Vicky says. “I can’t think of anything to say right now, but I’m here. I’m a little confused.” “I tried to block her out of my mind. But I think I owe it to her to remember.” “Wait. Who?” “My mother. Forget my wife. I’m talking about my mother. I was thinking today, after she found out she had cancer, she was talking to Michael and me ...” “Michael?” “That’s my brother. She made us promise that if the pain became unbearable we’d help her, you know, end it all. We had this prescription for morphine so there was this option. But then it got really bad. I asked her and she said that when you were dying you had a responsibility to the living. I was amazed she said that, the way she felt. And I was just thinking that we have a responsibility to the dead—the living, I mean. Does this make any sense?” “Maybe. I can’t tell, really,” Vicky says. “Can I call tomorrow?” “Yes, tomorrow. Are you sure you’re all right?” Your brain feels like it is trying to find a way out of your skull. And you are afraid of almost everything. “I’m fine.” “Get some sleep. Call me if you can’t.” • • • The first light of the morning outlines the towers of the World Trade Center at the tip of the island. You turn in the other direction and start uptown. There are cobbles on the street where the asphalt has worn through. You think of the wooden shoes of the first Dutch settlers on these same stones. Before that, Algonquin braves stalking game along silent trails.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  home. For over a week mourners arrived into the darkened sala^ where the window shades had been drawn and the scent of flowers hung heavy in the air. Zizmo's shadowy business associates made vis- its, as well as people from the speakeasies he supplied and a few of Lina's friends. After giving the widow their condolences, they crossed the living room to stand before the open coffin. Inside, rest- ing on a pillow, was a framed photograph of Jimmy Zizmo. The pic- ture showed Zizmo in three-quarters profile, gazing up toward the celestial glow of studio lighting. Sourmelina had cut the ribbon be- tween their wedding crowns and placed her husband's inside the cof- fin, too. Sourmelina's anguish at her husband's death far exceeded her af- fection for him in life. For ten hours over two days she keened over Jimmy Zizmo's empty coffin, reciting the mirologhia. In the best histrionic village style, Sourmelina unleashed soaring arias in which she lamented the death of her husband and castigated him for dying. When she was finished with Zizmo she railed at God for taking him so soon, and bemoaned the fate of her newborn daughter. "You are to blame! It is all your fault!" she cried. "What reason was there for you to die? You have left me a widow! You have left your child on the streets!" She nursed the baby as she keened and every so often held her up so that Zizmo and God could see what they had done. The older immigrants, hearing Lina's rage, found themselves returning to their childhood in Greece, to memories of their own grandparents' or parents' funerals, and everyone agreed that such a display of grief would guarantee Jimmy Zizmo's soul eternal peace. In accordance with Church law, the funeral was held on a week- day. Father Stylianopoulos, wearing a tall kalimafkion on his head and a large pectoral cross, came to the house at ten in the morning. After a prayer was said, Sourmelina brought the priest a candle burn- ing on a plate. She blew it out, the smoke rose and dispersed, and Fa- ther Stylianopoulos broke the candle in two. After that, everyone filed outside to begin the procession to the church. Lefty had rented a limousine for the day, and opened the door for his wife and cousin. When he got in himself, he gave a small wave to the man who had been chosen to stay behind, blocking the doorway to keep Zizmo's spirit from reentering the house. This man was Peter Tatakis, the fu- ture chiropractor. Following tradition, Uncle Pete guarded the door- 127 way for more than two hours, until the service at the church was over.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away. From the beginning there existed a strange balance between my grandfather and me. As I cried my first cry, Lefty was silenced; and as he gradually lost the ability to see, to taste, to hear, to think or even remember, I began to see, taste, and remember everything, even stuff I hadn't seen, eaten, or done. Already latent inside me, like the future 120 mph serve of a tennis prodigy, was the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. So that at the makaria after the funeral, I looked around the table at the Grecian Gardens and knew what everyone was feeling. Milton was beset by a storm of emotion he re- fused to acknowledge. He worried that if he spoke he might start to cry, and so said nothing throughout the meal, and plugged his mouth with bread. Tessie was seized with a desperate love for Chap- ter Eleven and me and kept hugging us and smoothing our hair, be- cause children were the only balm against death. Sourmelina was remembering the day at Grand Trunk when she'd told Lefty that she would know his nose anywhere. Peter Tatakis was lamenting the fact that he would never have a widow to mourn his death. Father Mike was favorably reviewing the eulogy he'd given earlier that morning, while Aunt Zo was wishing she had married someone like her father. The only one whose emotions I couldn't plumb was Desdemona. Silentiy, in the widow's position of honor at the head of the table, she picked at her whitefish and drank her glass of Mavrodaphne, but her thoughts were as obscured to me as her face behind her black veil. Lacking any clairvoyance into my grandmother's state of mind that day, I'll just tell you what happened next. After the rnakaria, my parents, grandmother, brother, and I got into my father's Fleetwood. 269 With a purple funeral pennant flying from the antenna, we left: Greektown and headed down Jefferson. The Cadillac was three years old now, the oldest one Milton ever had. As we were passing the old Medusa Cement factory, I heard a long hiss and thought that my yia yia, sitting next to me, was sighing over her misfortunes. But then I noticed that the seat was tilting. Desdemona was sinking down. She who had always feared automobiles was being swallowed by the backseat. It was the Air-Ride. You weren't supposed to turn it on unless you were going at least thirty miles per hour. Distracted by grief, Milton had been going only twenty-five. The hydraulic system ruptured. The passenger side of the car sloped down and stayed like that from then on. (And my father began trading in his cars in every year.)

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Come back later, during visiting hours.”He plunged his hands into his pockets and jingled the keys and coins. “Well, uh, look, we, uh, we drove straight through and all. To, you know, to get here.”“Sir. He’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep.”Betty Ann whimpered.“My wife here, she’s real worried. She needs to see her boy.”The nurse raised her voice as if he were hard of hearing. “Surely you want him to get his rest.”Another nurse stepped from behind the desk. “What’s going on here?”“These people want to see their son. I told them to come back later.”“Who’s your son?”Brother Terrell shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Randall. David Randall Terrell. We drove all night.”“Oh, the Terrell boy. He’s been asking for his daddy and mama. Go on in, let him see you’re here, but don’t stay long.”They opened the door to the sound of moaning. Long white curtains hung from the ceiling, dividing the room into three small rectangles. Each area held a bed and hospital machinery that whirred and churned and cast a gray watery light, enough to see that the first two tiny, ancient faces in the beds did not belong to their son. Randall occupied the third bed, the one next to the wall, the one from which the moaning came. They stood over him together, quiet and still, watching his body move and twitch. His arms sprouted tube after tube. Betty Ann’s hand flew to cover her mouth. Brother Terrell whispered in her ear: “Trust God, Betty Ann. We have to trust him.” The next morning Brother Terrell sat under the crooked preacher’s tent and watched him take the offering. People stood in line and waited to give him money. The man didn’t have to plead or beg. He was glad he didn’t have the hundred dollars God had told him to give the preacher. As the service drew to a close, he stood to leave and a man who sat in front of him turned around.“Brother Terrell, is that you?”“Yes, sir, it is.”“We came to see you last year in Chattanooga. You healed my wife’s rheumatism. I been wantin’ to thank you.” The man shook his hand and palmed a twenty-dollar bill.“Brother Bob,” he yelled to a man three rows over. “This here is David Terrell. That tent evangelist that healed Marie.”Within a few minutes Brother Terrell found himself in the center of a crowd. People reached toward him, grabbed his hands, hugged his neck, and put money in his hands and coat pockets. When they finally let him go, he had a thousand dollars. He counted out five twenty-dollar bills and went to find the preacher.Later that afternoon, Brother Terrell went to the hospital alone. He stood over Randall’s bed and looked down at his sleeping boy. “Son, son, I need to talk to you.” Randall opened his eyes. “God told me he is going to give you a miracle, but you have to believe. Do you believe?”“Yes, Daddy.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  On the deck of the Jean Bart^ the three new French citizens looked back at the burning city, ablaze from end to end. The fire would continue for the next three days, the flames visible for fifty miles. At sea, sailors would mistake the rising smoke for a gigantic mountain range. In the country they were heading for, America, the burning of Smyrna made the front pages for a day or two, before be- ing bumped off by the Hall-Mills murder case (the body of Hall, a Protestant minister, had been found with that of Miss Mills, an attractive choir member) and the opening of the World Series. Ad- miral Mark Bristol of the U.S. Navy, concerned about damage to American-Turkish relations, cabled a press release in which he stated that "it is impossible to estimate the number of deaths due to killings, fire, and execution, but the total probably does not exceed 2,000." The American consul, George Horton, had a larger estimate. Of the 400,000 Ottoman Christians in Smyrna before the fire, 190,000 were unaccounted for by October 1. Horton halved that number and estimated the dead at 100,000. The anchors surged up out of the water. The deck rumbled un- derfoot as the destroyer's engines were thrown into reverse. Desde- mona and Lefty watched Asia Minor recede. As they passed the Iron Duke^ the British military service band started into a waltz. 62 THE SILK ROAD ^| ccording to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 2640 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when la silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liq- uid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess's chamber, and into the palace courtyard, and through the palace gates, and out of the For- bidden City, and into the countryside a half mile away before the co- coon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millennia, until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.) I feel a little like that Chinese princess, whose discovery gave Des- demona her livelihood. Like her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament and you go back to the cocoon's beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop. And following my story's thread back to where I left off, I see the Jean Bart dock in Athens. I see my grandparents on land again, making preparations for another voyage. Passports are placed into hands, vaccinations administered to upper arms. Another ship mate- rializes at the dock, the Giulia. A foghorn sounds.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Aunt Zoe's authority went in the opposite direction. At church she was meek. The round gray hat she wore looked like the head of a screw fastening her to her pew. She was constandy pinching her sons to keep them awake. I could barely connect the anxious person hunched down every week in front of us to the funny woman who, under the inspiration of wine, launched into comedy routines in our kitchen. "You men stay out!" she'd shout, dancing with my mother. "We've got knives in here." So startling was the contrast between churchgoing Zoe' and wine- drinking Zoe that I always made a point of watching her closely dur- ing the liturgy. On most Sundays, when my mother tapped her on the shoulder in greeting, Aunt Zo responded only with a weak smile. Her large nose looked swollen with grief. Then she turned back, crossed herself, and settled in for the duration. And so: Assumption Church that July morning. Incense rising with the pungency of irrational hope. Closer in (it had been drizzling out), the smell of wet wool. The dripping of umbrellas stashed under pews. The rivulets from these umbrellas flowing down die uneven floor of our poorly built church, pooling in spots. The smell of hair- spray and perfume, of cheap cigars, and the slow ticking of watches. 351 The grumbling of more and more stomachs. And the yawning. The nodding off and the snoring and the being elbowed awake. Our liturgy, endless; my own body immune to the laws of time. And right in front of me, Zoe Antoniou, on whom time had also been doing a number. The life of a priest's wife had been even worse than Aunt Zo had expected. She had hated her years in the Peloponnese. They had lived in a small, unheated stone house. Outside, the village women spread blankets under olive trees, beating the branches until the olives fell. "Can't they stop that damn racket!" Zoe had complained. In five years, to the incessant sound of trees being clubbed to death, she bore four children. She sent letters to my mother detailing her hard- ships: no washing machine, no car, no television, a backyard full of boulders and goats. She signed her letters, "St. Zoe, Church martyr." Father Mike had liked Greece better. His years there represented the best period of his priesthood. In that tiny Peloponnesian village

• From Middlesex (2002)

  feet, trying to understand what it means that they have "fallen," when I see Clementine breasting through the water to me. Her face ap- pears out of the steam. I think we're going to kiss again, but instead she wraps her legs around my waist. She's laughing hysterically, cov- ering her mouth. Her eyes widen and she says into my ear, "Get some comfort." She hoots like a monkey and pulls me back onto a shelf in the tub. I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink . and then we're twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning, so that at some point I'm not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren't kissing. This game is far less serious, more playful, free- style, but we're gripping each other, trying not to let the other's slip- pery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine's body are delivering crucial information to mine, information I store away but won't understand until years later. How long do we spin? I have no idea. But at some point we get tired. Clementine beaches on the shelf, with me on top. I rise on my knees to get my bearings— and then freeze, hot water or not. For right there, sitting in the corner of the room— is my grandfather! I see him for a second, leaning over sideways— is he laughing? angry?— and then the steam rises again and blots him out. I am too stunned to move or speak. How long has he been there? What did he see? "We were just doing water ballet," Clementine says lamely. The steam parts again. Lefty hasn't moved. He's sitting ex- actly as before, head tilted to one side. He looks as pale as Clemen- tine. For one crazy second I think he's playing our driving game, pretending to sleep, but then I understand that he will never play anything ever again ... And next all the intercoms in the house are wailing. I shout to Tessie in the kitchen, who shouts to Milton in the den, who shouts to Desdemona in the guest house. "Come quick! Something's wrong with papoul" And then more screaming and an ambulance flashing its lights and my mother telling Clementine it's time for her to go home now. Later that night: the spotiight rises on two rooms in our new house on Middlesex. In one pool of light, an old woman crosses her- 266

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Tessie Stephanides, who in a different lifetime when space travel was new had decided to go along with her husband and create a girl by devious means, now saw before her, in the snowy driveway, the fruit of that scheme. Not a daughter at all anymore but, at least by looks, a son. She was tired and heartsick and had no energy to deal with this new event. It was not acceptable that I was now living as a male person. Tessie didn't think it should be up to me. She had given birth to me and nursed me and brought me up. She had known me before I knew myself and now she had no say in the matter. Life started out one thing and then suddenly turned a corner and became something else. Tessie didn't know how this had happened. Though she could still see Calliope in my face, each feature seemed changed, thickened, and there were whiskers on my chin and above my upper 519 lip. There was a criminal aspect to my appearance, in Tessie's eyes. She couldn't help herself thinking that my arrival was part of some settling of accounts, that Milton had been punished and that her punishment was just beginning. For all these reasons she stood still, red-eyed, in the doorway. "Hi, Mom," I said. "I'm home." I went forward to meet her. I set down my suitcase, and when I looked up again, Tessie's face had altered. She had been preparing for this moment for months. Now her faint eyebrows lifted, the corners of her mouth rose, crinkling the wan cheeks. Her expression was that of a mother watching a doctor remove bandages from a severely burned child. An optimistic, dishonest, bedside face. Still, it told me all I needed to know. Tessie was going to try to accept things. She felt crushed by what had happened to me but she was going to endure it for my sake. We embraced. Tall as I was, I laid my head on my mother's shoul- der, and she stroked my hair while I sobbed. "Why?" she kept crying softly, shaking her head. "Why?" I thought she was talking about Milton. But then she clarified: "Why did you run away, honey?" "I had to." "Don't you think it would have been easier just to stay the way you were?" I lifted my face and looked into my mother's eyes. And I told her: "This is the way I was."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Lefty arrived at the hospital soon thereafter He had walked back to shore and hitched a ride on a milk truck home. Now he stood at the window of the nursery, his armpits still rank with fear, his right cheek roughened by his fall on the ice and his lower lip swollen. Just that morning, fortuitously, Lina's baby had gained enough weight to leave the incubator. The nurses held up both children. The boy was named Miltiades after the great Athenian general, but would be known as Milton, after the great English poet. The girl, who would grow up without a father, was named Theodora, after the scandalous empress of Byzantium whom Sourmelina admired. She would later get an American nickname, too. But there was something else I wanted to mention about those babies. Something impossible to see with the naked eye. Look closer. There. That's right: One mutation apiece. 125 IRflRRIflGE Oil ICE immy Zizmo's funeral was held thirteen days later by permission of the bishop in Chicago. For nearly two weeks the family stayed Vj) at home, polluted by death, greeting the occasional visitor who came to pay respects. Black cloths covered the mirrors. Black stream- ers draped the doors. Because a person should never show vanity in the presence of death, Lefty stopped shaving and by the day of the fu- neral had grown nearly a full beard. The failure of the police to recover the body had caused the delay. On the day after the accident, two detectives had gone out to inspect the scene. The ice had refrozen during the night and a few inches of new snow had fallen. The detectives trudged back and forth, search- ing for tire tracks, but after a half hour gave up. They accepted Lefty's story that Zizmo had gone ice-fishing and might have been drink- ing. One detective assured Lefty that bodies often turned up in the spring, remarkably preserved because of the freezing water. The family went ahead with their grief. Father Stylianopoulos brought the case to the attention of the bishop, who granted the re- quest to give Zizmo an Orthodox funeral, provided an interment cer- emony be held at the graveside if the body were later found. Lefty took care of the funeral arrangements. He picked out a casket, chose a plot, ordered a headstone, and paid for the death notices in the newspaper. In those days Greek immigrants were beginning to use funeral parlors, but Sourmelina insisted that the viewing be held at 126

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Ah’ve thought hard on it, wondered if I’da started up the cruiser real quick and drove it off, if she’da been all right. There mightn’t’ve been time. No knowing now. But it don’t matter, t’ my mind, whether it were an accident or it weren’t. It’s a goddamned shame either way.” “There was nothing you could have done,” the Colonel said softly. “You did your job, and we appreciate it.” “Well. Thanks. Y’all go ’long now, and take care, and let me know if ya have any other questions. This is mah card if you need anything.” The Colonel put the card in his fake leather wallet, and we walked toward home. “White tulips,” I said. “Jake’s tulips. Why?” “One time last year, she and Takumi and I were at the Smoking Hole, and there was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it. She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little. Maybe she wanted to die with white flowers.” “Maybe she was going to return them to Jake,” I said. “Maybe. But that cop just shit sure convinced me that it might have been a suicide.” “Maybe we should just let her be dead,” I said, frustrated. It seemed to me that nothing we might find out would make anything any better, and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her chest out of my mind, her chest “fairly well crushed” while she sucked for a last breath that would never come, and no, this was not making anything better. “What if she did do it?” I asked the Colonel. “We’re not any less guilty. All it does is make her into this awful, selfish bitch.” “Christ, Pudge. Do you even remember the person she actually was? Do you remember how she could be a selfish bitch? That was part of her, and you used to know it. It’s like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.” I sped up, walking ahead of the Colonel, silent. And he couldn’t know, because he wasn’t the last person she kissed, because he hadn’t been left with an unkeepable promise, because he wasn’t me. Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. Whatever their faults, I’d never known my school friends in Florida to die on me. After a considerable distance, the Colonel jogged up to me and said, “I just want it to be normal again. You and me. Normal. Fun. Just, normal. And I feel like if we knew—” “Okay, fine,” I cut him off. “Fine. We’ll keep looking.” The Colonel shook his head, but then he smiled.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  We just have to get to the room.” The Colonel turns his face from the ground to me and looks me dead in the eye and says, “I. Can’t. Breathe.” But he can breathe, and I know this because he is hyperventilating, breathing as if trying to blow air back into the dead. I pick him up, and he grabs onto me and starts sobbing, again saying, “I’m so sorry,” over and over again. We have never hugged before, me and the Colonel, and there is nothing much to say, because he ought to be sorry, and I just put my hand on the back of his head and say the only true thing. “I’m sorry, too.” two days after I DIDN’T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. Dawn was slow in coming, and even when it did, the sun shining bright through the blinds, the rickety radiator couldn’t keep us warm, so the Colonel and I sat wordlessly on the couch. He read the almanac. The night before, I’d braved the cold to call my parents, and this time when I said, “Hey, it’s Miles,” and my mom answered with, “What’s wrong? Is everything okay?” I could safely tell her no, everything was not okay. My dad picked up the line then. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t yell,” my mother said. “I’m not yelling; it’s just the phone.” “Well, talk quieter,” she said, and so it took some time before I could say anything, and then once I could, it took some time to say the words in order—my friend Alaska died in a car crash. I stared at the numbers and messages scrawled on the wall by the phone. “Oh, Miles,” Mom said. “I’m so sorry, Miles. Do you want to come home?” “No,” I said. “I want to be here…I can’t believe it,” which was still partly true. “That’s just awful,” my dad said. “Her poor parents.” Poor parent , I thought, and wondered about her dad. I couldn’t even imagine what my parents would do if I died. Driving drunk. God, if her father ever found out, he would disembowel the Colonel and me. “What can we do for you right now?” my mom asked. “I just needed you to pick up. I just needed you to answer the phone, and you did.” I heard a sniffle behind me—from cold or grief, I didn’t know—and told my parents, “Someone’s waiting for the phone. I gotta go.” All night, I felt paralyzed into silence, terrorized. What was I so afraid of, anyway? The thing had happened. She was dead. She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising to be continued. And now. And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Chapter Eleven flew to San Francisco to collect me from jail. My mother had to sign a letter requesting that the police release me into my brother's custody. A trial date would be set in the near future but, as a juvenile and first-time offender, I was likely to receive only pro- bation. (The offense came off my record, never interfering with my subsequent job prospects at the State Department. Not that I con- cerned myself with these details at the time. I was too stunned, sick with grief poisons, and wanted to go home.) When I came out into the outer police station, my brother was sitting alone on a long wooden bench. He looked up at me with no expression, blinking. That was Chapter Eleven's way. Everything went on in him internally. Inside his braincase sensations were being reviewed, evaluated, before any official reaction was given. I was used to this, of course. What is more natural than the tics and habits of one's close relatives? Years ago, Chapter Eleven had made me pull down my underpants so that he could look at me. Now his eyes were raised but no less riveted. He was taking in my deforested head. He was getting a load of the funereal suit. It was a lucky thing that my brother had taken as much LSD as he had. Chapter Eleven had gone in early for mind expansion. He contemplated the veil of Maya, the existence of various planes of being. For a personality thus prepared, it was somewhat easier to deal with your sister becoming your brother. There have been hermaphrodites like me since the world be- gan. But as I came out from my holding pen it was possible that no generation other than my brother's was as well disposed to accept 514 me. Still, it was not nothing to witness me so changed. Chapter Eleven's eyes widened. We hadn't seen each other for over a year. Chapter Eleven had changed, too. His hair was shorter. It had receded farther. His friend's girlfriend had given him a home perm. Chapter Eleven's pre- viously lank hair was now leonine in back, while the front retreated. He didn't look like John Lennon anymore. Gone were his faded bell- bottoms, his granny glasses. Now he wore brown hip-huggers. His wide-lapel shirt shimmered under the fluorescent lights. The sixties have never really come to an end. They're still going on right now in Goa. But by 1975 the sixties had finally ended for my brother. At any other time, we would have lingered over these details. But we didn't have the luxury for that. I came across the room. Chapter Eleven stood up and then we were hugging, swaying. "Dad's dead," my brother repeated in my ear. "He's dead."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  And I was all alone. Events in the years before my birth: after dancing with Zoe at my parents' wedding, Father Mike pursued her doggedly for the next two and a half years. Zoe didn't like the idea of marrying someone either so religious or so diminutive. Father Mike proposed to her three times and in each case she refused, waiting for someone better to come along. But no one did. Finally, feeling that she had no alternative (and coaxed by Desdemona, who still thought it was a wonderful thing to marry a priest), Zoe' gave in. In 1949, she married Father Mike and soon they went off to live in Greece. There she would give birth to four children, my cousins, and remain for the next eight years. In Detroit, in 1950, the Black Bottom ghetto was bulldozed to put in a freeway. The Nation of Islam, now headquartered at Temple No. 2 in Chicago, got a new minister by the name of Malcolm X. During the winter of 1954, Desdemona first began to talk of retiring to Florida someday. "They have a city in Florida you know what it is called? New Smyrna Beach!" In 1956, the last streetcar stopped run- ning in Detroit and the Packard plant closed. And that same year, Milton Stephanides, tired of military life, left the Navy and returned home to pursue an old dream. 200 "Do something else," Lefty Stephanides told his son. They were in the Zebra Room, drinking coffee. "You go to the Naval Academy to be a bartender?" "I don't want to be a bartender. I want to run a restaurant. A whole chain. This is a good place to start." Lefty shook his head. He leaned back and spread his arms, taking in the whole bar. "This is no place to start anything," he said. He had a point. Despite my grandfather's assiduous drink- refilling and counter-wiping, the bar on Pingree Street had lost its luster. The old zebra skin, which he still had on the wall, had dried out and cracked. Cigarette smoke had dirtied the diamond shapes of the tin ceiling. Over the years the Zebra Room had absorbed the ex- halations of its auto worker patrons. The place smelled of their beer and hair tonic, their punch-clock misery, their frayed nerves, their trade unionism. The neighborhood was also changing. When my grandfather had opened the bar in 1933, the area had been white and middle- class. Now it was becoming poorer, and predominandy black. In the inevitable chain of cause and effect, as soon as the first black family had moved onto the block, the white neighbors immedi- ately put their houses up for sale. The oversupply of houses de- pressed the real estate prices, which allowed poorer people to move in, and with poverty came crime, and with crime came more moving vans. "Business isn't so good anymore," Lefty said. "If you want to open a bar, try Greektown. Or Birmingham."

• From Middlesex (2002)

  Patient reader, you may have been wondering what happened to my grandmother. You may have noticed that, shortly after she climbed into bed forever, Desdemona began to fade away. But that was intentional. I allowed Desdemona to slip out of my narrative be- cause, to be honest, in the dramatic years of my transformation, she 521 slipped out of my attention most of the time. For the last five years she had remained bedridden in the guest house. During my time at Baker & Inglis, while I was falling in love with the Object, I had re- mained aware of my grandmother only in the vaguest of ways. I saw Tessie preparing her meals and carrying trays out to the guest house. Every evening I saw my father make a dutiful visit to her perpetual sickroom with its hot-water bottles and pharmaceutical supplies. At those times Milton spoke to his mother in Greek, with increasing dif- ficulty. During the war Desdemona had failed to teach her son to write Greek. Now in her old age she recognized with horror that he was forgetting how to speak it as well. Occasionally, I brought Des- demona's food trays out and for a few minutes would reacquaint my- self with her time-capsule life. The framed photograph of her burial plot still stood on her bedside table for reassurance. Tessie went to the intercom. "Yes, yiayia'' she said. "Did you need something?" "My feet they are terrible today. Did you get the Epsom salts?" "Yes. I'll bring them to you." "Why God no let yiayia die, Tessie? Everybody's dead! Everybody but yiayial Yiayia she is too old to live now. And what does God do? Nothing." "Are you finished with your breakfast?" "Yes, thank you, honey. But the prunes they were not good ones today." "Those are the same prunes you always have." "Something maybe it happen to them. Get a new box, please, Tessie. The Sunkist." "I will." "Okay, honey mou. Thank you, honey." My mother silenced the intercom and turned back to me. "Yia yia's not doing so good anymore. Her mind's going. Since you've been away she's really gone downhill. We told her about Milt." Tessie faltered, near tears. "About what happened. Yiayia couldn't stop cry- ing. I thought she was going to die right then and there. And then a few hours later she asked me where Milt was. She forgot the entire thing. Maybe it's better that way." "Is she going to the funeral?" "She can barely walk. Mrs. Papanikolas is coming to watch her. 522 She doesn't know where she is half the time." Tessie smiled sadly, shaking her head. "Who would have thought she would outlive Milt?" She teared up again and forced the tears back. "Can I go and see her?" "You want to?"