The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [119]
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 get 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