Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

One Sunday as Tessie left for church, Milton handed her a large bill. “Light a candle for Callie. Get a bunch.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.”

But after she was gone he shook his head. “What’s the matter with me? Lighting candles! Christ!” He was furious at himself for giving in to such superstition. He vowed again that he would find me; he would get me back. Somehow or other. A chance would come his way, and when it did, Milton Stephanides wouldn’t miss it.

The Dead came to Berkeley. Matt and the other kids trooped off to the concert. I was given the job to look after the camp.

It is midnight in the mimosa grove. I awaken, hearing noises. Lights are moving through the bushes. Voices are murmuring. The leaves over my head turn white and I can see the scaffolding of branches. Light speckles the ground, my body, my face. In the next second a flashlight comes blazing through the opening in my lair.

The men are on me at once. One shines his flashlight in my face as the other jumps onto my chest, pinning my arms.

“Rise and shine,” says the one with the flashlight.

It is two homeless guys from the dunes opposite. While the one sits on top of me, the other begins searching the camp.

“What kind of goodies you little fuckers got in here?”

“Look at him,” says the other. “Little fucker’s gonna shit his pants.”

I squeeze my legs together, the girlish fears still operating in me.

They are looking for drugs mainly. The one with the flashlight shakes out the sleeping bags and searches my suitcase. After a while he comes back and gets down on one knee.

“Where are all your friends, man? They go off and leave you all alone?”

He has begun to go through my pockets. Soon he finds my wallet and empties it. As he does, my school ID falls out. He shines the flashlight on it.

“What’s this? Your girlfriend?”

He stares at the photo, grinning. “Your girlfriend like to suck cock? I bet she does.” He picks up the ID and holds it over the front of his pants, thrusting his hips. “Oh yeah, she does!”

“Let me see that,” says the one on top of me.

The guy with the flashlight tosses the ID onto my chest. The guy pinning me lowers his face close to mine and says in a deep voice, “Don’t you move, motherfucker.” He lets go of my arms and picks up the ID.

I can see his face now. Grizzled beard, bad teeth, nose askew, showing septum. He contemplates the snapshot. “Skinny bitch.” He looks from me to the ID and his expression changes.

“It’s a chick!”

“Quick on the uptake, man. I always say that about you.”

“No, I mean him .” He is pointing down at me. “It’s her! He’s a she.” He holds up the ID for the other one to see. The flashlight is again trained on Calliope in her blazer and blouse.

At length the kneeling man grins. “You holding out on us? Huh? You got the goods stashed away under those pants? Hold her,” he orders. The man astride me pins my arms again while the other one undoes my belt.

I tried to fight them off. I squirmed and kicked. But they were too strong. They got my pants down to my knees. The one aimed the flashlight and then sprang away.

“Jesus Christ!”

“What?”

“Fuck!”

“What?”

“It’s a fucking freak.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna puke, man. Look!”

No sooner had the other one done so than he let go of me as though I were contaminated. He stood up, enraged. By silent agreement, they then began to kick me. As they did, they uttered curses. The one who had pinned me drove his toe into my side. I grabbed his leg and hung on.

“Let go of me, you fucking freak!”

The other one was kicking me in the head. He did it three or four times before I blacked out.

When I came to, everything was quiet. I had the impression they had gone. Then somebody chuckled. “Cross swords,” a voice said. The twin yellow streams, scintillant, intersected, soaking me.

“Crawl back into the hole you came out of, freak.”

They left me there.

It was still dark out when I found the public fountain by the aquarium and bathed in it. I didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere. My right eye was swollen shut. My side hurt if I took a deep breath. I had my dad’s Samsonite with me. I had seventy-five cents to my name. I wished more than anything that I could call home. Instead, I called Bob Presto. He said he would be right over to pick me up.

It’s no surprise that Luce’s theory of gender identity was popular in the early seventies. Back then, as my first barber put it, everybody wanted to go unisex. The consensus was that personality was primarily determined by environment, each child a blank slate to be written on. My own medical story was only a reflection of what was happening psychologically to everyone in those years. Women were becoming more like men and men were becoming more like women. For a little while during the seventies it seemed that sexual difference might pass away. But then another thing happened.

It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. Nurture no longer formed us; nature did. Impulses of hominids dating from 20,000B.C. were still controlling us. And so today on television and in magazines you get the current simplifications. Why can’t men communicate? (Because they had to be quiet on the hunt.) Why do women communicate so well? (Because they had to call out to one another where the fruits and berries were.) Why can men never find things around the house? (Because they have a narrow field of vision, useful in tracking prey.) Why can women find things so easily? (Because in protecting the nest they were used to scanning a wide field.) Why can’t women parallel-park? (Because low testosterone inhibits spatial ability.) Why won’t men ask for directions? (Because asking for directions is a sign of weakness, and hunters never show weakness.) This is where we are today. Men and women, tired of being the same, want to be different again.

Therefore, it’s also no surprise that Dr. Luce’s theory had come under attack by the 1990s. The child was no longer a blank slate; every newborn had been inscribed by genetics and evolution. My life exists at the center of this debate. I am, in a sense, its solution. At first when I disappeared, Dr. Luce was desperate, feeling that he had lost his greatest find. But later, possibly realizing why I had run away, he came to the conclusion that I was not evidence in support of his theory but against it. He hoped I would stay quiet. He published his articles about me and prayed that I would never show up to refute them.

But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories. Not the evolutionary biologists’ and not Luce’s either. My psychological makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism popular in the intersex movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl. I still don’t feel entirely at home among men. Desire made me cross over to the other side, desire and the facticity of my body. In the twentieth century, genetics brought the Ancient Greek notion of fate into our very cells. This new century we’ve just begun has found something different. Contrary to all expectations, the code underlying our being is woefully inadequate. Instead of the expected 200,000 genes, we have only 30,000. Not many more than a mouse.

And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

At any rate, in San Francisco in 1974, life was working hard to give me one.