I expect to be heartbroken, not having you in my life. But I’m already confused enough about my life and my relationship without you confusing me more. I want to break up with you, as hard as that may be—and as stupid as it may sound. I’ve always been a sane person. Right now, I feel like I’m falling apart.
Have a great amazing incredible time on your trip. See all the places and sights you wanted to, have all the experiences you’re seeking. Maybe someday, at our 50th college reunion, you’ll see a wrinkled old lady come up to you with a smile, and that will be me. Maybe then you can tell me about all the things you saw in India.
Take care,
Maddy
P.S. Sept. 27
I’ve been carrying this letter around for almost a month, contemplating whether to send it or not. And I keep not sending it. I’m on Cape Cod now, up to my ears in biologists, and I may not survive.
P.P.S. Oct. 6
I just got off the phone with your mother. I realized I didn’t have an address for you. Your mother said you were “on the road” and couldn’t be reached but that you would be picking up your mail sometime at AmEx in Athens. She gave me the address. By the way, you should maybe call your parents. Your mother sounds worried.
Okay. I’m sending this.
M.
Somewhere above the taverna’s roof, in the black Greek sky, two thunderheads collided, loosing torrents of rain on the village and turning the sloping streets into waterfalls. Five minutes later, while Mitchell was reading the letter for the second time, the electricity went out.
In the darkness, he lay awake, evaluating the situation. He understood that Madeleine’s letter was a devastating document. And he was suitably devastated. On the other hand, Madeleine had been putting Mitchell off so long that her refusals were like boilerplate that his eyes skimmed over, looking for possible loopholes or buried clauses of real significance. In this regard he found a lot to like. There was the mood-elevating revelation that Madeleine had wanted to sleep with him on that long-ago Thanksgiving break. There was a hotness to the missive that seemed unlike Madeleine but promised a whole new side to her. She was worried that the hole might close up? Madeleine had written this? He’d heard that women were just as filthy-minded as guys were, but he’d never believed it. If Madeleine had been thinking about sex on that train ride, however, while turning the pages of her Vogue, if she had come up to the attic intent on fucking, then it was obvious that he’d never been able to read her at all. This thought sustained him for a good while, as the storm churned overhead. Of all the other things Madeleine might have chosen to do, she had sat down and written Mitchell a letter. She’d said that she enjoyed kissing him and that she had an urge to get off the train and come back to New York. She had typed Mitchell’s name and licked the envelope and typed her return address, so that he could write her back, so that he knew where to find her, if he wanted to look.
Every letter was a love letter.
Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next half-century. It was dispiriting that she had insisted that she was “serious” about her “boyfriend” (though cheering that they were having “problems”). Mostly, what Mitchell took from the letter was the painful fact that he had missed his chance. His chance with Madeleine had come early, sophomore year, and he’d failed to seize it. This further depressed him because it suggested that he was destined to be a voyeur in life, an also-ran, a loser. It was just as Madeleine said: he wasn’t man enough for her.
The following days were a tribulation to the spirit. In Kalamata, a seaside city that smelled not of olives, as Mitchell expected, but of gasoline, he kept meeting his doppelgangers. The waiter at the restaurant, the boat repairman, the hotel owner’s son, the female bank teller: they all looked exactly like him. Mitchell even resembled a few icons in the crumbling local church. Instead of providing a sense of homecoming, the experience sapped Mitchell, as if he’d been photocopied over and over again, a faint reproduction of some clearer, darker original.
The weather turned colder. At night the temperature dropped into the low 40s. Wherever they went, half-built structures rose from the rocky hillsides. To encourage new construction, the Greek parliament had passed a law that exempted people from paying taxes on unfinished homes. The Greeks had responded, craftily, by leaving the top floors of their houses perpetually uncompleted, while dwelling snugly beneath. For two cold nights, in the village of Itylo, Mitchell and Larry slept for one dollar apiece on the unfinished third story of a house belonging to the Lamborghos family. The oldest son, Iannis, had chatted them up as they got off the bus in the town square. Soon he was showing them the roof, littered with rebar and cinder block, where they could sleep beneath the stars, using their sleeping bags and Ensolite pads for the first and only time on their trip.
Despite the language barrier, Larry began spending time with Iannis. While Mitchell drank coffee in the village’s one café, still secretly smarting from Madeleine’s letter, Iannis and Larry went on walks into the surrounding, goat-filled hillsides. Iannis had the jet-black mane and chest-revealing shirt of a Greek singing idol. His teeth were bad, and he was something of a hanger-on, but he seemed friendly enough, if you felt like being friendly, which Mitchell didn’t. When Iannis offered to drive them back to Athens, however, saying he had business there, Mitchell didn’t see how he could refuse, and the next morning they set off in Iannis’s tiny, Yugoslavian-made automobile, Larry sitting in front, Mitchell in the rumble seat behind.
Christmas was approaching. The streets around their hotel, a nondescript gray building to which Iannis referred them, were decorated with lights. The temperature alone reminded them that it was time to leave for Asia. After Iannis left to take care of his business, Larry and Mitchell went to a travel agent to buy their airplane tickets. Athens was famous for its cheap airfares, and so it proved: for less than five hundred dollars, they each got an open-ended ticket, Athens–Calcutta–Paris, on Air India, leaving the following night.
Iannis took them to a seafood restaurant that evening, and to three different bars, before dropping them back at the hotel. The next morning Mitchell and Larry went to the Plaka and bought new, smaller bags. Larry chose a gaily striped shoulder bag made from hemp; Mitchell a dark duffel bag. Back at their hotel, they transferred essential belongings into the new packs, trying to keep them as light as possible. They got rid of their sweaters, their pairs of long pants, their tennis shoes, their sleeping bags and pads, their books, even their shampoo. Mitchell culled his Saint Teresa, his Saint Augustine, his Thomas Merton, his Pynchon, relieving himself of everything but the thin paperback of Something Beautiful for God. Whatever they didn’t need, they put in their backpacks and carried to the post office, shipping it back to the States by slow boat. Coming onto the street again, they high-fived each other, feeling like real travelers for the first time, footloose and unencumbered.
Mitchell’s bright mood didn’t last long. Among the items he’d kept was Madeleine’s letter, and when they got back to their hotel, he locked himself in the bathroom to read it once again. This time through, it seemed more dire, more final, than before. Coming out of the bathroom, he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.
Larry was smoking on the balcony. “We haven’t seen the Acropolis yet,” he said. “We have to see it.”
“I’ve seen it,” Mitchell muttered.
“We haven’t climbed it.”
“I don’t feel like it right now.”
“You come all the way to Athens and you’re not going to see the Acropolis?”
“I’ll meet you,” Mitchell said.
He waited until Larry was gone before allowing himself to cry. It was a combination of things, Madeleine’s letter, first and foremost, but also the aspects of his personality that had made her feel such a letter necessary, his awkwardness, his charm, his aggressiveness, his shyness, everything that made him almost
but not quite the guy for her. The letter felt like a verdict on his entire life so far, sentencing him to end up here, lying on a bed, alone, in an Athenian hotel room, too weighed down by self-pity to go out and climb the goddamn Acropolis. The idea that he was on some kind of pilgrimage seemed ludicrous. The whole thing was such a joke! If only he wasn’t himself! If only he was somebody else, somebody different!
Mitchell sat up, wiping his eyes. Leaning sideways, he pulled the New Testament out of his back pocket. He opened it and took out the card the woman had given him. It said “Athens Bible Institute” at the top and showed the Greek flag with the cross in gold. Her number was written beneath this.
Mitchell dialed it from his room phone. The call didn’t go through the first two times (he had the prefix wrong), but on his third try it began ringing. To his amazement, the woman from the AmEx line, Janice P., her voice sounding very close, answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi. This is Mitchell. We met the other day at American Express.”
“Praise God!” Janice said. “I’ve been praying for you. And here you are calling. Praise the Lord!”
“I found your card, so.”
“Are you ready to accept the Lord into your heart?”
This was rather sudden. Mitchell looked up at the ceiling. There was a crack running its length.
“Yes,” he said.
“Praise the Lord!” Janice said again. She sounded truly happy, enthused. She began talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, while Mitchell listened, experimentally. He was playing along and not playing along. He wanted to see what it felt like. “I told you we were meant to meet!” Janice said. “God put it on my heart to talk to you and now you’re ready to be saved! Praise Jesus.” Next she was talking about the book of Acts, and Pentecost, about Jesus ascending to heaven but giving Christians the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the wind that surpasseth all understanding. She explained the gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues, healing the sick. She sounded thrilled for Mitchell but also as though she could have been talking to anyone at all. “The Spirit listeth where it wills. It’s as real as the wind. Will you pray with me now, Mitchell? Will you get down on your knees and accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?”
“I can’t right now.”
“Where are you?”
“In my hotel. In the lobby.”
“Then wait until you’re alone. Go into a room alone and get down on your knees and ask the Lord to come into your heart.”
“Have you ever spoken in tongues?” Mitchell asked.
“I was given the gift of tongues once, yes.”
“How does that happen?”
“I asked for it. Sometimes you have to ask. One day I was praying and I just started praying to receive my tongues. All of a sudden, the room got really warm. It was like Indiana in the summertime. Humid. There was a presence there. I could feel it. And then I opened my mouth and God gave me the gift of tongues.”
“What did you say?”
“I don’t know. But there was a man there, a Christian, who recognized the language I was speaking. It was Aramaic.”
“The language of Jesus.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Can I speak in tongues, too?”
“You can ask. Sure you can. Once you’ve accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, you just ask the Father to give you the gift of tongues, in Jesus’ name.”
“And then what?”
“Open your mouth!”
“And it’ll just happen?”
“I’ll pray for you. Praise God!”
After hanging up, Mitchell went out to see the Acropolis. He wore both of his remaining shirts in order to stay warm. Reaching the Plaka, he passed by the souvenir stands selling imitation Grecian urns and plates, sandals, worry beads. A T-shirt on a hanger proclaimed “Kiss Me I’m Greek.” Mitchell began climbing up the dusty switchbacks to the ancient plateau.
When he reached the top, he turned and gazed back down at Athens, a giant bathtub filled with dirty suds. Clouds were swirling dramatically overhead, pierced by sunbeams that fell like spotlights on the distant sea. The majestic altitude, the clean scent of pine trees, and the golden light lent the atmosphere a true sense of Attic clarity. Scaffolding covered the Parthenon, as well as a smaller temple nearby. Aside from that, and a lone guard station at the far end of the summit, there were no signs of officialdom anywhere, and Mitchell felt free to roam wherever he wanted.
The wind bloweth where it listeth.
Unlike every other famous tourist sight Mitchell had seen in his life, the Acropolis was more impressive in reality; no postcard or photograph could do it justice. The Parthenon was both bigger and more beautiful, more heroically conceived and constructed, than he’d imagined.
Larry was nowhere in sight. Mitchell walked over the rocks, behind the small temple. When he was certain no one could see him, he got down on his knees.
Maybe listening to a woman going on about “living for Christ” represented the exact sort of humbling that Mitchell needed in order to die to his old conceited self. What if the meek really would inherit the earth? What if the truth was simple, so that everyone could grasp it, and not complex, so that you needed a master’s degree? Mightn’t the truth be perceived through an organ other than the brain, and wasn’t that what faith was all about? Mitchell didn’t know the answers to these questions, but as he stood gazing down from the ancient mountain, sacred to Athena, he entertained a revolutionary thought: that he and all his enlightened friends knew nothing about life, and that maybe this (crazy?) lady knew something big.
Mitchell closed his eyes, kneeling on the Acropolis.
He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness.
Kiss me I’m dying.
He opened his mouth. He waited.
The wind whipped up, blowing litter between the rocks. Mitchell could taste dust on his tongue. But that was about it.
Nothing. Not even a syllable of Aramaic. After another minute, he got up and brushed himself off.
He descended the Acropolis quickly, as if fleeing a disaster. He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to. The sun was going down, the temperature dropping. In the Plaka, souvenir vendors were closing up their stands, neon signs blinking on in the windows of neighboring restaurants and coffee shops.
He passed his hotel three times without recognizing it. While he was out, the elevator had broken down. Mitchell climbed the stairwell to the second floor and came down the soulless hallway, putting his key in the lock.
As soon as he pushed open the door, there was movement in the dark room, furtive and quick. Mitchell felt for the switch on the wall and, finding it, revealed Larry and Iannis in the center of the room. Larry was lying on the bed, his jeans around his ankles, while Iannis knelt beside it. Mustering a fair amount of composure under the circumstances, Larry said, “Surprise, surprise, Mitchell.” Iannis crouched down, disappearing from sight.
“Hi,” Mitchell said, and switched off the light. Stepping out of the room, he shut the door behind him.
At a restaurant across the street Mitchell ordered a carafe of retsina and a plate of feta cheese and olives, not even trying to speak a few words of Greek, just pointing. It all made sense now. Why Larry had gotten over Claire so quickly. Why he’d disappeared so often to smoke cigarettes with sketchy Europeans. Why he’d been wearing that purple silk scarf around his neck. Larry had been one person in New York and now he was a different person. This made Mitchell feel very close to his friend, even though he now suspected that this was where their trip together ended. Larry wouldn’t be flying to India with Mitchell tonight. Larry was going to stay awhile longer in Athens with Iannis.
After an hour, Mitchell went back to the hotel, where all this was confirmed. Larry promised to meet him in India, in time to work for Professor Hughes. The two of them hugged, and Mitchell carried his light duffel bag down to the lobby to g
et a cab to the airport.
By nine o’clock that night he was buckled into his economy seat aboard an Air India 747, leaving Christian airspace at a velocity of 522 miles per hour. The flight attendants wore saris. Dinner was a delicious vegetarian medley. He’d never really expected to speak in tongues. He didn’t know what good it would have done him, even if he had.
Later, as the cabin lights went out and the other passengers tried to sleep, Mitchell switched on his reading light. He read Something Beautiful for God for the second time, paying close attention to the photographs.
Brilliant Move
Shortly after learning that Madeleine’s mother not only didn’t like him but was actively trying to break them up, at a time of year on the Cape when the brevity of daylight mimicked the diminishing wattage of his own brain, Leonard found the courage to take his destiny, in the form of his mental disorder, into his own hands.
It was a brilliant move. The reason Leonard hadn’t thought of it earlier was just another side effect of the drug. Lithium was very good at inducing a mental state in which taking lithium seemed like a good idea. It tended to make you just sit there. Sitting there, at any rate, was pretty much what Leonard had been doing for the last six months since getting out of the hospital. He’d asked his psychiatrists—both Dr. Shieu at Providence Hospital and his new shrink, Perlmann, at Mass General—to explain the biochemistry involved in lithium carbonate (Li2CO3). Humoring him as a “fellow scientist,” they’d talked about neurotransmitters and receptors, decreases in norepinephrine releases, increases in serotonin synthesis. They’d listed, but hadn’t elaborated on, the possible downsides of taking lithium, and then mainly to discuss yet more drugs that would be helpful in minimizing the side effects. All in all, it was a lot of pharmacology and pharmaceutical brand names for Leonard to digest, especially in his compromised mental condition.