Without Fear, Picking Grapes

Dear Professor Dertouzos,

I am angry, and it has been a long time since I recognized that. I think I deserve a better life, and if it is predetermined or a matter of choice, my choices have determined that I lead a lonely existence. Sometimes I think it is because I want to, because I believe it is easier. Every time I make a bad decision, it is out of an effort not to be a burden, and so I lie, which is much worse. Sometimes I believe I am paying for my crimes, and I see those who have done much worse and are surrounded by people, or at least that is the way I portray it. Sometimes I think I don’t want to be alone, and right now I will tell you that I dream of being around 30 old friends who have dwindled to 3. Even then, I still feel no connection, and never have. Even when many people surrounded me, I knew and knew me, but the truth is, I had no idea who these people were or what I was capable of. I detest those who enjoy my company, and I grovel to be liked by those who detest me, and thus, my alienation can be explained as a way of turning those who like me into those who do not, and then, I will wish for their admiration from afar. Groucho Marx once said, “I’d never join a club that would have me as a member,” but I know you know that because you were the one who first told me the quote.

I have a headache the size of Gibraltar, and it took me 25 years until I started regularly taking Advil, and 27 years to be a caffeine fiend. The more I hate consumerism, the more I consume. I have no money, and owe a great deal of cash to credit card companies and predatory lenders. There are homeless people with more money than I currently possess, yet I have a house because I move the money around. Borrow from here and pay it there, just like my mother and father, both of whom I cannot depend on for any security. It’s not that the safety net is gone, but that it has never been there, and I have already fallen. My goal in life is to crawl to the end of it with my elbows. You were right, Professor, contrary actions could have done this or that, but I leave that vague because it is in the past, and nothing can be done there except in the current and the future. My inability to learn from my mistakes was once a self-hatred that stemmed from a belief that I got a raw deal, and to an extent that still may be the case since I keep repeating everything that has kept me in a corner, when in reality I am a free man in the mirror, but internally a slave to various neurosis, health issues, and plagues of depression everyone is susebitble to, and in one for or another, also has to deal with. I recently had a dream that I was in a war and was shot in the stomach. All I wanted at that time, lying on the battlefield, was to touch my mother’s hand, and then I realized that was impossible. Then I woke up and heard the baby birds chirping for their mother to feed them.

Professor, I am reaching out not as a friend, but as a former student. I remember when you mentioned to the class that when describing the outcome of a baseball game, someone or all of us will say, “We won,” when our team wins, or “They lost,” when our team loses. I can’t remember what it feels like to “Win,” whether that is good or bad is up to the monks, but I genuinely don’t remember the feeling of elation, or even the human privilege, or the primal delicacy, of “beating” someone in a contest. I’m not even losing, but can be described by many as a loser. I have not given any thought to what my reputation might be worth in decades, even with those I wish to have a healthy relationship with, though I wonder if this is what led me to wonder if I am a monster. I asked someone close to me recently if that were true, and they said, “No, why?” and then I wondered whether a monster is truly a monster if they are aware they are one and continue acting like one. Professor, I have been a monster, but if not for writing this letter or asking that person who shall remain anonymous whether I am one, I have felt my fangs and vowed never to use them again, but these are a lonely man’s thoughts, which do not weigh the same as others. What is someone who has no notion of the damage they have wrought? A hurricane? A storm? The manifestation of weather patterns that destroy and end lives? An inconvenient truth? Whatever you think, Professor, your voice has always been clear and audible—a refuge in a world of billions of microphones instead of people.

I’m still in the hospital, and your letter has made this stay comfortable. I did not know you were in Greece. If you have time and would like to, please reply to this letter. I’ll be out in two weeks.

Sincerely,

Alex Primm

***

The letter arrives via donkey, along with beer and cigarettes, and everything else that can’t be grown or made in the village of Çatistë, an ethnically Greek valley on the Albanian side of the border, and handed to Gus Dertouzos, a former professor and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stubs out his cigarette and finishes his beer, watches the gold, the shade, and the dark green sides of the mountains that surround him, breathing in clean air through clear nostrils that contribute to his clear thinking, along with the fresh salad, picked that morning by his husband, Andrew, who enjoys gardening, and the sight of Gus enjoying a beer and a cigarette as the sun falls behind the mountains.

America, the country in which he was born, he can not fathom returning to. There is no electricity or fire department in Çatistë, but there is no stress. The older villagers drink wine at breakfast and smoke 4 cigarettes a day, one after each meal. Some are in their 90s, and they walk without fear, picking grapes and wiping the sweat off their bronze foreheads in long-sleeved shirts. A woman in her 50s chases the sheep down the only road, made of dirt and stone, to the taller grass around an old church with a caved-in roof. Her name is Eleni, and she wears a red scarf. Like everyone else here, she has a tan, wrinkled face from a lack of cosmetics and squinting in the sun. Her dress is blue, and her t-strap shoes are made of local leather.

Gus hears the lamb Andrew and Eleni have chosen for dinner. They ask for his help, and he puts Alex’s letter in his chest pocket, half-read, because Eleni is shouting. Andrew has cut the lamb’s throat but not the arteries. Its back ankles are already tied with rope that is wrapped around a sturdy branch, and with Gus’s help, they lift the animal to drain its blood, covering Gus and the letter in his pocket in blood. After dinner, he writes to Alex, explaining what has happened.