The summer before I was supposed to attend university, I worked at a sports camp in Greece, about twenty miles outside Athens. It was to be unpaid, charity work, mostly, and I was really looking forward to it. The kids who came back from the June trip (I was for August) came back with tanned and muscular bodies, photos of the crystal clear Aegean, and stories of sailing at night to Euboea, which is the big island across from the bay where the camp was. As the weeks turned into days, and my envy of other people’s stories turned into plain eagerness to make my own, I packed up my belongings and on the appointed day drove to a camp in upstate New York to meet the team before flying out. We spent several weeks getting to know each other, there. There were five girls and just one other boy: Bonnie (short, with four or five long dirty blonde braids dangling from her head), Sarah (short, olive complexion, and at times tomboyish), Catherine (tall, blonde, and very shy), Emily (a tall, thickset, brunette), Tiffany (very short, black-haired, and very spunky), and Roy (two years my senior, and an east-coast surfer kind of dude). Though we got on, and worked kind of well together, in a general way I couldn’t help but feel some disappointment at the ragtag bunch of knobheads we seemed to be, and probably were.

When we arrived at the airport, we took a bus to the camp. The air along the roads was like the dry breeze in Arizona, though the sky was clear cerulean, and almost cloudless. I looked around me, and a feeling of general euphoria gripped all of us as we breathed the clean air and set our eyes over the rolling, scrubby landscape. When the bus stopped, we all departed together and took a raft over a bay to the sports’ camp. Squatters’ huts circled around the watersides, and a few palatial summer homes glimmered in the distance, as though they were signaling us. Sarah held her hand in the water the whole time we were ferried over, and I think that was the first time she interested me, the first time that I realized I wanted to get to know her. Bonnie and Tiffany became fast friends, Catherine tried and usually failed to hold Emily in conversation, and Emily and Sarah were still learning about each other. Roy and I got along well, for the simple reason that we were the only two guys there. But we clicked at some level: I appreciated his laid-back, devil-may-care attitude toward life, and he liked the fact that I took things seriously. We accepted those things about each other, and so we got along.

But I’m finally getting into the story, now. At the camp we met a number of different people. Two French girls were there, bronzed by the sun and a  little unkempt in appearance, though the disorder in their dress had its pleasing aspects. I liked them, and we also got along. There were several people from Texas and Arizona. Finally, there were about fifty Greek kids there for our two week assignment. Ages ranged from 15 to 19, and for every one boy there were about 2 girls. During the course of those two weeks, we met a lot of people, and made a number of friends, but there was one girl there, in particular, ‘Nia’ by name, who always seemed to approach me more often than the others. 

“Theodore,” she said. She called me by my full name. It was never "Theo" or "Ted." “Help me with this dive.” And I would climb up the twenty foot ladder and stand behind her, telling her where to put her hands, and when to jump, so that she wouldn’t flop over into the water, or hurt herself. “Theodore,” she’d say another time, “where do I put my hands on this bow?” Or “Theodore, show me again how to do the breast stroke.” After singling me out, day after day, activity after activity, Nia gradually upped her game. She sat by me at dinnertime, or she stayed with me after the day was finished. The issue came to a head when, one night, Sarah suggested a number of us walk over the mountain to buy some beers at one of the squatters’ huts on the other side. We all agreed, but when we were just on the skirts of camp, I heard someone running and panting behind us, through the brush. I shone a flashlight into Nia’s face. She immediately tried to swat the thing away. I pointed it into the brush to her side, and she apologized for surprising and ambushing us like a puma. We let her come along, and made her happy. 

So we drank for a bit, and then started to walk back, I with Nia at my side, and Sarah, Bonnie, Roy, and the other three girls up ahead on the trail. When we reached the rocks of the beach, something strange happened. Against the glow of the moon over the water and the boulders, other lights, revolving, shone around us, and a piercing siren shattered the silence of the night. I ducked down, underneath a boulder, and the last thing I saw, before I lost consciousness, was Nia swiveling around, spotting me, and running toward me.

When I woke up, it was daylight, and I was laying on something very warm and soft. “Theodore!”

There were no sounds from the camp, and no one was training, talking, or playing by the water. “Theodore!” Something, something alive, brushed my head. I waved my arms about in a panic, and pivoted—but there was friction, and my legs gave way under me. I stumbled. When I opened my eyes, I saw the sky, and right next to the sun, a pair of long-lashed eyes, looking concerned. “Theodore!”

“Yes?!” I gulped. It was Nia, and I was sitting in her hand. 
“You fell asleep.”
“I fell asleep?”
“Last night, yes. There was a kitchen fire last night, and the alarm started to ring. You hid under this boulder. “
I felt the skin of her palm, and then slapped my face, hard. “I’m not dead. How am I not dead?”
Nia was amused, and stood up. “We have to walk back. I will not explain this to you now. Later will be a better time.”
 “But can you explain how this is possible? The nucleus of an atom can't be shrunk. A cell can't be shrunk. I’m an impossibility. I must be dreaming.” She opened up one of her breast-pockets, and dropped me inside. We walked back to camp. She ducked under the flap of the French girls’ tent, and my story begins there.

And so I, along with two other people from camp, including Roy, met the gods and became a missing person for the rest of my life.

The sky was red and pale, that morning. Two braziers, left burning for hours, lit up the interior of the tent, and their dim glow (like the old, rose-colored filament on the inside of a murky light bulb) was visible almost from the beach.  The smoke inside smelled of incense and apples, and beneath these smells there was just the faintest wisp of a messy room, after the door has been opened in the morning. The two French girls, Miriam and Marielle, were just waking up when Nia ducked her head under the flap of their tent. I peeked out quietly from her breast pocket, to see and listen.

“Knock knock,” she whispered, and poked her head inside.
“Entrez,” Marielle said, pushing aside the bedcovers and pulling back her hair in a knot. Miriam, I thought, was probably shamming sleep. Sometimes you get a feeling in the morning—(as you roll over, grouchily, it may become a conviction)—a feeling that day has come all too early for your taste. And even though sleep is lost, and you know this, it will still be fifteen minutes or more before you’d be ready to fess up to yourself that it’s lost, it’s gone, and there’s nothing in heaven or earth you can do about it. But in those fifteen quiet minutes, before turning your body out of bed, you’re nothing and you’re nobody—like you weren’t yourself but a ghost, a ghost that’s eavesdropping on the rest of the world as it gets ready for the day, a ghost that’s listening to the conversations, the birds, the marching sounds of footsteps, plates clattering, and engines starting. And that fifteen minute calm, before you finally agree to meet the world, and say Yes, I’m awake—that fifteen minutes is heaven on earth. That’s Miriam’s state of mind at the time, so she was particularly irritable. 

“Come in, but don’t disturb her.” Marielle spoke low to Nia, and indicated Miriam with a nod of the chin. “Let her sleep.”
Nia stepped inside and pulled back the tent-flap behind her. Marielle patted the covers at the foot of the bed, and Nia crossed over and sat down.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I have him,” Nia said.
“What? You do?” Marielle leaned in. “Already? No way. Fais voir.”
Fear gripped me as I saw Nia’s hand descending toward me, inside the pocket. She plucked me up between two of her fingers, and then spread me out in her palm. Marielle drank me up thirstily with her eyes, this girl I knew by acquaintance, having lunched and talked with her over the table, once or twice—and she smiled.
“And the others?”
“Sofia has the girl and the other boy.”
“We have to wake Miriam. Miriam!” Marielle stretched out her leg and gave the fat blanket-lump on the other side of the tent a light kick with her foot.
“Miriam, réveille-toi! Idiot!” Miriam groaned a little, and curled inward like an armadillo. “Come on, sleepyhead, wake up! We have to leave in an hour! We’re getting out today!”
“Ferme ta gueule,” she muttered under her breath, winding the sheets around her like a funeral shroud. “Shut your trap. Lemme alone.” There was a pause. Then, after a long sigh, an afterthought: “Stupid,” she added.
“What did you say?” Marielle asked. There was no answer forthcoming; Miriam was determined to find her way back to dreamland, but had probably lost the way. Nia shrugged her shoulders, and turned to me.“Twenty centuries of stony sleep, as they say, and she’s still not ready to wake up.” She turned a mock-frown to Marielle, who smiled, and asked me how I felt.

Well, I said nothing, but I felt like I was floating on a sea made of bed, with two towering giantesses flanking me on either side. The camp sounds were beginning, in a low hum, outside the door, and the gold of the sunlight began to shine underneath the tent, and between the stitches in the seams. 

Suddenly Miriam sat up, and turned over onto her side. She looked blearily across the room, toward us. “Is that Theodore?” she asked, clearing the phlegm from her throat. 
“Yes, it is,” said Nia and Marielle.
“Huh,” she pulled the sheets off her, and tiptoed over the ice-cold ground to Marielle’s bedside.
“Wait, wait, I forgot my glasses,” she said. “I can’t see anything.” She groped around the nightstand until she found her glasses-case.  Miriam turned back to her friend’s bed and knelt down in front of me, fitting the arms of her glasses behind her ears.
“Wow. It is.” She blinked her eyes.
“Yeah, I already told you that, dummy,” said Marielle.
 Miriam ignored her. “You must be pretty weirded out right now. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what to think. I’ve never been this small.”
“Oh, really? I thought you had,” Miriam said. “That was rather inconsiderate of her.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He told me this was impossible, before,” Nia said. “When we were on the beach, I mean.”
“Impossible? I wonder what he meant by that, huh.” Miriam was interested. “Theodore, did you mean impossible impossible, or just impossible?”
“You’re Miriam?” I asked. Miriam smiled.
“And you’re Marielle?” That girl tucked her legs underneath her, and the bed swayed and protested for a while.
“I woke up this morning, by the shore, under a boulder, and Nia was there. I…I…”
“Too cute,” said Nia. “I picked him up, and that was it. Do you want to tell him, or should I?”
Miriam shook her head and stood up. Marielle volunteered to “to tell me,” and got comfortable first. She lay down on her belly, and straightened her legs back against the headboard, burying her feet under her pillow. 

“Theodore,” she said, “this isn’t impossible, not even close, not even a little bit. It is needful, it is ‘must happen’—you understand?” I didn’t understand.
The girl was irritated at my slowness. “You have a Destiny. This is amazing. Not many people have it. I don’t have it and Miriam doesn’t have it.” Miriam shook her head, in confirmation. “Nia has it, I think. I forget. You have a Destiny, right Nia?” Nia nodded. “Yes, so some people have a Destiny and others don’t. That’s the way things are. This is why you’re here. It was prophesied, by someone—a god, or a man—doesn’t matter. You’ll find out.”
“But why didn’t I know?”
“You never know until someone tells you, Mr. Impossible.” She liked the sound of that, and won smiles all around. “I just told you. Anything else you want to know?”
“Why am I so small?”
Nia answered this. “Because you have to meet her very soon.”
“That’s right,” said Marielle, while Miriam climbed onto her bed and rummaged through her pack for clothes, to get herself ready for the day.
“Who?”
“You’ll know. Or maybe you won’t. In any case she’ll tell you.”
“The goddess,” said Nia.
“A goddess,” corrected Marielle. “Nia will take you to see her, later, and you’ll need a way to fly to her.”
“What about the camp? What about my team?”
“Where’s Roy?” asked Miriam, over her shoulder, casually.
“With Sarah, I think.”
“Okay.” She turned back to her things, comparing the colors of shirts and skirts, biting her tongue out of the corner of her mouth (looking very preoccupied), and snorting a little to clear the morning phlegm from her pipes.
“When are we going?” Marielle asked Nia.
“In an hour, I think. After breakfast.”
“But where are we going, and why are you coming?” I was curious.
“That’s where we live, Marielle and I,” said Miriam, from the far corner of the room. “There are apple trees there, Meliades.”
“Bravo, Miriam,” said Marielle, clapping her hands slowly, “Bravo, idiot, telling everyone where we live. Pheu! I’ll get dressed and meet you down there. Okay?”
“Okay,” Nia agreed. “Theodore, come with me.”

 She said her goodbye, and left that sweet-smelling room for the cool, dusty breeze outdoors. Lifting me up to her face, where the wind blew the thick strands of black hair across her cheeks and into her mouth, she said, “I’m sorry for the suddenness of it. It had to happen like this and I couldn’t help that. If I were in control I wouldn’t have surprised you.”
“I don’t know what’s happening—and I don’t even know who I am anymore. Miriam said they were nymphs—Meliades are nymphs—I mean they’re apple trees! Am I going crazy? I see you. I feel you. And those were really them, in the tent. And I’m really me—I mean, I must be me, because who else could I be? So I’m not dreaming. I’m not dead. But, you see, everything is huge, or I’m small—” Nia covered my face with her pinky finger. The blood in her cheeks rose to the surface, and she gave a smile that showed her red, unpainted lips, and the long row of white, glittering teeth. “Theodore,” she said. “Your mother...”
“Who? I have a mother.”
“No, I mean, your mother is not your mother.”
“My mother isn’t my mother?” My heart stopped, and I almost understood. “Who is my mother, then?”
“She is. You’re hers. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Why can’t you tell me? I’m so confused.” I was.
“Well, you’ll know when you see her. Shush, Theodore, and don’t worry.” Her expression changed, and she licked her lips. “Oh, I could just eat you. You don’t even realize.”
“What?!” It’s interesting how drastically those familiar, affectionate phrases and terms of endearment change meaning when you’re sitting in the palm of a giantess, and staring deeply into her mouth. Not her eyes—those black orbs were piercing and bright enough to blind me, at my size, and I had to look away. If eyes are the gateways to the soul, then Nia’s soul lived in a very, very large room. Maybe her soul was was larger than mine to the same extent that her body was larger than my body. Thoughts like these paced their way through my addled brain.
“That was a joke, as in LOL,” she said. “Laugh out loud? Yes? MDR. Morte de rire. I am dying of laughing.”

She sighed. “Are you hungry?” We were walking outside her tent, avoiding the main paths. Still most of the camp was asleep, or buried under the covers. Someone yelled, and a dog barked across the huge bay, down there in the distance. “I bet you are. I’m very hungry.”

Just then a dragonfly swooped down out of the sky and hovered beside Nia’s hand for several seconds. The million glass shards of its giant eyes, the fragile gauze of its wings flickering like a flame, and reflecting the sunlight back and back—and its working mouth and mandibles, as it contemplated me, lying in Nia’s hand, with my back resting against her thumb. You would have thought it was about to say something—and it was.
“Is he ready yet?” the insect asked. Nia studied the dragonfly, for a minute.
“It said something,” I said. “I think.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Talk louder!” she ordered.
The dragonfly zipped up to her ear and asked again, with renewed vigor, “Is he ready yet?”
“Oh! You’re early,” Nia said. “Wait until we’ve had breakfast.” Up it flew above the mountain into the fields, and the clouds. A goat bleated and jingled, and then we turned inside.
Nia frowned. “She’s really too impatient—always sticks her tooth where no one wants her.”
“Who?”
“Thespia. At first you didn't recognize her. But that’s her.”
“It was a dragonfly.”
“Yes, of course,” Nia said. “She’s a naiad,” she went on, as if that explained it. “Sometimes she’s a dragonfly, I mean. It gets confusing, because not all dragonflies are naiads, but all naiads are usually dragonflies.”
“But you’re Nia, right?” I wasn’t sure. I’d just heard a talking dragonfly.
“Yes, I’m Nia.”
“Sometimes?”
“Well, yeah—sometimes. No one’s someone all the time, not even you.”
“I was someone last night.”
“And you’re someone this morning, just not the same someone. But you’re always Theodore. I’m always Nia.”
“Are you a naiad?”
She scoffed at the idea. “Don’t insult me! Enough talk for now. Let’s get dressed for breakfast.”

I met with Roy and Sarah at the breakfast table, that morning. The others from the team—Catherine, Bonnie, Emily, and Tiffany—would learn that morning that half their team had disappeared without a trace. That was the last morning they would eat together. A search would be made of our tents, and the tents of two French, and two Greek, members of the camp—all girls. A few people claimed to have seen Miriam, Marielle, Nia, and Sofia at some point during the early hours of that morning, but there was no proof, and there were no leads. People talked of the kitchen fire the night before, the wailing of the siren, and the slow, circling flood light over the bay. Just before dawn, a swarm of dragonflies passed through camp, and then there was silence—the slow jingling of the goat herd, up on the mountain.

While Nia, my giant hostess, searched around the tent for her jewelry and clothes, decking herself out for the morning, and packing her possessions, she talked to me.

“The Chinese say, Theodore,” she said, craning her head to the side and feeling for the piercing in her right earlobe, “They say that heaven is no larger than a pearl earring, and they say that all the gods, and all the dead, live there—in that tiny, tiny sphere.” She stuck out the ball of her thumb, and said, “They didn’t mean that heaven wasn’t bigger than my thumb, but they meant that it wasn’t like earth, it wasn’t in space, and it didn’t have borders or dimensions.”
“Hm.”
“And they were right.” Nia screwed in one earring, secured it, and straightened her back, whilst smoothing her skirts with her hands. “I mean they were almost right. Because that’s where we’re going.”
Heaven. “How?”
She picked up the second earring, and laid its jangling rainbow-colored jewel onto her palm. “In here.”
“In your earring?”
Shaking her head, she smiled and pressed a little stud at the top of the jewel. The earring opened like a locket, and inside I saw long, lashing elaborate patterns of deep green spirals, as though in scrollwork of leaves and waves, like and far more detailed than the inside of a seashell. It was large enough for me to sit within. Nia bent her eye over the gem-work, and pushed her long black locks of hair behind her ears. She sniffed a little, and beckoned me over with her chin.
“Try it out,” she said, and studied me for a second, perhaps to see what I thought.
“What?”
“It’s comfortable enough.”
“You want me to get inside your earring?”
“Yes. Well, it isn’t exactly an earring, but you’ll have to get inside it.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She touched her chin with her finger, in a pensive pose. “These are the rules. I have no words for ‘why’ and ‘because.’”

What did she mean? I stepped forward to the edge of the earring, and rubbed the finely polished inner wall with my palm. On the other and plainer and coppery inner side of the lid, someone had inscribed the name “Melania” in black Greek letters. Her name. Under this, in smaller, neater lettering, I read the phrase, “Kale Tykhe!”—which means “Good Luck!” Which was either a very inane idea for a locket inscription, or there was some story or meaning behind it, deeper than I knew. 
“Good luck?” I thought aloud. It sounded like a question.
“No, no,” she said, and gave a strange smile. “But thank you.”
“I don’t understand. Why Good Luck?” 
“It was a joke, I think. Because that’s my name.”
“Melania?”
“No—Tykhe.”
“Ah. Still kind of confused.”
“Well, that’s because this is the beginning.” She breathed deeply, and sat herself down carefully on the floor, after gathering up me and her earring into the wide, soft plain of her olive-skinned hand.
“Everyone has two names,” Nia went on. “Okay? I have two names, and you have two names, and even Miriam and Marielle have two names each. Sarah and Roy—they also have two names, of course.”
I was intrigued. “What is my second name?”
“Theodore.” She smiled darkly.
“My first?”
“I have no idea. Erycina (heather and foam-born),” she crossed herself, “knows that. But I’m both Tykhe and Melania. An unfortunate name.”
“Unfortunate?”
“It’s a joke: I mean ‘Black Fortune.’”
“Melaina Tykhe.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” She looked me in the eyes. “But, you see, that is what I pay for being Tykhe.”
I must not have heard her right. “What?”
“I am the goddess of unreason, they say, and the scapegoat of all the gods. There is snow in August, so they blame Tykhe. There is no rain, so they blame her, Fortune. You know?” she sighed, and looked at me absently, with her thoughts elsewhere. “Sometimes I’m only the ignorance that Science hasn’t brought into the light. Maybe that’s my Destiny. Maybe one day I won’t be a goddess after all. Anymore.” 
The room was still, and two dragonflies, copulating, maybe one of them a naiad (or maybe both just dragonflies) flitted in and out through the tent flap. 
“Nia?”
“Yes?” So she still responded to that name. Good, I thought.
“You were talking to yourself.”
“I was.” She snapped her fingers and stood up. “Well, are you ready to go?”
Yes, I thought. “Yes, but I just have one more question for you.”

Nia raised me up to her ear. “Shoot me! (Is that what they say—Shoot me?)”
“I think they just say ‘Shoot!’”
“Shoot!”
I asked her, this girl I met at the sports camp (now giantess) if she believed that she really was the ancient goddess Tykhe—whom the Romans once called Fortuna—and she answered,“Yes.”

That was enough. Whether she was insane, or manipulative, or facetious, or telling the truth, I decided to step inside Nia’s earring, and go wherever she decided to take me. Now, it seemed more likely to me that I and not she was the one deceived by appearances. In some dreams, one advances in stages by accepting the laws and conditions of each level, however ridiculous and irrational they may seem—even to your dream-self. And too many impossibilities had already happened to me that morning. All the signs now pointed to one distinct probability: that they would go on, that more impossible things should become possible, and that the world would continue changing and metamorphosing into a thousand new and veridical shapes and forms. Dreams would prove true, and reality, as I understood it, would fade away before this weird difference, this strange possibility. Yes! Maybe Nia was a goddess, and maybe I wasn’t entirely mortal, and maybe I wasn’t even asleep! I had decided to stop asking “Why?” During the past hour, my knowledge about what was real and unreal, true and untrue, had only misled me. So I would wait and follow this vision to its end.

Inside Nia’s earring, which was the earring of the goddess Tykhe, I bounced back and forth, and bleakly contemplated the sheer walls of my prison, which somehow were illuminated with a golden light, like a frozen symphony. “Silence is golden,” I thought to myself, and in my mind’s eye I saw the huge sun, burning in silence. What was the sun in Greek? Helios. Son: Phaethon, whose sisters were the five lamenting Heliades, transformed to trees, weeping out amber beads for eternity. Around me, inside the jolting earring (as Nia walked laboriously up to the mountaintop, where we were to meet Sofia, Sarah, Roy, and the two French girls), I saw the images of that myth begin to take shape around me, on the incurved walls of my little cage, like cave drawings under fluorescent light. There was Phaethon, losing the reins of the fiery horses of his father the Sun, and there was Zeus, hurling down his thunderbolt into the boy’s breast, killing him instantly. His sisters wept in the south of Spain, where the Sun was said to dip down into Ocean, their tears turning to amber, and their bodies to radiant, amber-colored poplars. What was happening? And who was I? And lastly who was She?

Suddenly, over the illuminated walls, I saw new forms begin to take shape, the narrative of a myth like and unlike other myths, longer and full of intrigue, sorrow, slavery, love, joy, luck, labor, and pain. I recognized Marielle & Miriam (briefly, and flitting away), Nia, Sarah, Roy, and myself. But I couldn’t really make out what story we were a part of, what narrative we were forming together. Ominous, and very strange.

At some point, Nia had stopped walking and sat down. I felt her huge hand seize the earring, and gently snap it open. Before I even saw daylight, her soft, skilled fingers wrapped around me. She set me down on a flat surface. Spread over the table were different kinds of sandwiches and drinks. I saw Marielle & Miriam, Sofia (a small, dark-haired girl with very bright black eyes), and Roy and Sarah, huddled together around a sandwich, eating quietly. They were all there.

“Well!” announced Nia, brightly. “We’re all here!”
“Yep,” said Marielle.
“How are we on time?” asked Sofia, with a quiet, silky voice.
Miriam checked her watch, a souvenir from New York City (it said “I Love NY” under the two clock hands, with an Apple where one usually finds the heart sign): “Dix minutes d’avance,” she said, with a nonchalant, official air, and buried her watch-hand back in her pocket.
“Good, good. Well, let’s eat, and then move,” she said, rubbing her hands. “Sofia, I want to talk with you for a minute, in private.” They walked off to the side, behind a large juniper tree, and sat down.

Sarah looked over at the two French giantesses, who were chattering blithely and rapidly together in their own language, oblivious to the rest of the world. While talking with Sarah, it became clear to me that she was even more in the dark than I was about everything, and although I could respond to some of her questions (because of my early morning powwow with Nia, Miriam, and Marielle), I couldn’t satisfy her with any of my answers. Roy listened to us talk, but had surprisingly little to communicate besides the first handshake, and a distant, halfhearted greeting.
“So you aren’t a goddess?” I asked Sarah, only half-jokingly
“No more than you’re a god.”
I looked over at Roy. “You?”
“What?” He said irritably, and looked off toward a beehive, loud with bees, dangling from a nearby oak. That was all I got out of him that morning.

I asked Sarah to tell me their story of the morning, or as much of it as she could tell me. But she wasn’t able to finish before Sofia and Nia had come back from their private conference, and waved us all to go on. Sofia had her own pair of earrings into whose separate compartments she worked both Sarah and Roy. Then she stood up, ready to move.

Move where? I thought, looking out from that barren vista to the miles of scrubland on one side (a distant, glittering city in the far distance, maybe Lamia)—and the sparkling sea on the other. Before we left, Nia wanted to tell me something, and brought me up to her lips.

“Well,” she said, “It may be more difficult than we thought. We have to visit someone first, an oracle. Name: Xenoklea. Ring a ling?” she asked.
“Bell,” I said, smiling, her face was so taut and serious. “Ring a bell.”
“Bell, ah. Of course,” she said, somewhat distracted. “Ring a bell?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I have something to tell you, then,” said Nia. “You might have trouble with her.”
I waited for her to continue.
“Herakles, Zeus-born, met her anciently, when he was unpurified.” She paused, her brow furrowed. “Theodore, I must ask you something. I want to help you.”
A cloud began to pass over the tree, where we were sitting. A few songbirds flew around in the distance. I couldn’t identify them. “Yes?”
“Are you clean?”
“Clean?”
“Sofia has told me you will not be able to see her if you are unclean. Not for twelve months.”
“See who?” I said. “Why not?”
“Erycina,” she said, at last. “Your mother is Aphrodite.”
“My mother’s name is…” (I had to think for a moment: Was I sure?) “…no, her name is Joyce. She lives outside Rochester.”
Nia shook her head. “No, that’s not right. Theodore, this is a Tale, now. It’s larger than you are, but not...” She looked at me closer: “…not larger than you will be.”
“You’re taking me to see…Aphrodite.”
“Yes, but not because that means you are special. She is the mother of millions. It’s because of your Destiny.”
“Nia—what about Sarah? Roy?”
“Sarah,” she thought back. “Distant descendant of the servant of a certain Queen. Though Sofia is taking her with us, Theodore,” and she bent down, “pray that you don’t meet her where we are going. But if you are not clean, then I am sorry. I can only do one or two things.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you why. Sofia can. I can tell you what. The oracle will instruct her, and your Destinies will become the same, at least for a short while.” She picked me up. “We have to go.”
“Wait!” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Remember the story of Herakles, who was taken to Lydia. To Omphale, the Queen: the one who was called the Navel of the World. For one year he became her slave, in order to purify himself after…well, I forget…it was so long ago.”

Sofia flagged us with her hand, and Nia waved back. Miriam and Marielle started running over the hills, together, holding hands. I was back in that strange earring, and new visions, like the reels of old, lost films, tragedies and comedies, began to play across its laminated surface. Some I recognized, but most were new, altogether new.