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.