Zeus is Getting Made

by

Michael Costaris

BEFORE THEY KILL HIM, HE WANTS SOME CHICKEN. The entire conversation, thirty-minutes of hell with her mother, boils down to this.

Charlotte is on the treadmill when the first call comes in; she ignores it. She is a quarter of the way to 20k and this run, about two hours of her day, is the centerpiece of her existence. Her free time has blossomed in the past year since postponing graduate school. This decision, ostensibly made to pursue her passion for music (the great love of her life) has yielded no creative output. She has not written a song, nor performed (publicly or privately) for three months. She is still certain that music is the great love of her life: she simply finds it harder to locate this certainty amongst the violent, visceral hatred she feels towards it. She despises popular music for its banality and soullessness. She despises classic, undeniable music for existing in a world that no longer does. She even despises the exceptions, the rare successes who do exactly what it is she wants to do and succeed – produce quality music in this vapid environment – because their existence points a mocking finger at her failure. She despises it all and so she runs. She looks sickly. Her friends have expressed concern about her appearance; her thin, ropey and oddly muscled frame resembles an actress playing someone afflicted with a horrible disease. She knows this, is worried herself, but does not stop running. She cannot stop because to sit at home and partake in pleasurable activities while her guitar ($1200) and microphone ($800) and camera ($1500) sit dormant, and her YouTube channel (Charlottesings – smash the like button!) remains barren, is too obvious an acknowledgement of failure. Instead, she elongates the few socially acceptable activities in her schedule – running, cleaning and teaching guitar for minimum wage – and laments her lack of time. This way, and only this way, can she plausibly deny the fact that her mother’s prediction that she would ‘fail miserably and waste her life’ has come true.

The phone buzzes again, just a minute later and when that goes unanswered a text comes through.

Mom: call me ✓✓ 12:35 PM

Charlotte stops running. There is no combination of medium and message which signal a worse omen than the text containing just the words “Call Me” – this is a death sentence. Charlotte puts her feet on the sides of the machine and the tread continues on beneath her, oblivious to her absence. She catches her breath, takes the moment to prepare herself by imagining all the possible horrors this could entail, and then calls.

“Wait,” is how her mother answers and then proceeds to take a bite of an apple. She chews this apple directly into Charlotte’s ear for thirty-seven seconds (18:07 to 18:44 of the aborted 20k) and then, after a gurgling swallow adds, needlessly, “I’m eating an apple.”

Charlotte listens to chewing for another twenty-two seconds (19:04 to 19:26) until her mother takes a second bite and her rage overtakes her fear.

“What is happening right now?”

“You called me while I was eating an apple.”

“But you told me to call.”

Her mother continues to gargle the apple directly into her ear and, though her rage magnifies, a part of Charlotte relaxes. This, the show with the apple, confirms nothing catastrophic has happened. Her father, brother and sister are fine. Her cousin Mark is fine. The A-List of her family are all fine. This death, if it is even a death, belongs to one of the interchangeable aunts and uncles (she has almost thirty), who live in Greece or rural Ontario and don’t speak a word of English. These are octogenarians with drinking problems, heart conditions, and all-sodium diets, whose lifespans defy all forms of conventional logic. This is a death her mother will insert herself into by claiming a connection no one else understands and then squeeze every ounce of false grief out of, while simultaneously shaming Charlotte for her own lack of grief.

“Mom.” A man in a too tight compression shirt (it has pushed all his fat down around his torso so he resembles a toothpaste tube squeezed to the final drop) orbits her treadmill. She can sense an ‘are you still using that?’ coming. “I’m finishing my run.”

“Wait.”

Charlotte is prepared to hang up no matter what her mother says.

“Zeus is getting made.”

Charlotte does not hang up. These were not the words she expected. They are so tantalizingly confusing she cannot in good conscience end this conversation. She sighs. Her mother has earned this one. Charlotte steps off the treadmill and lets the compression shirt man take it. “What?”

Her mother twirls Charlotte along through the rest of the conversation parsing out only enough information to create more confusion.

“Great Uncle Zeus,” she says.

Charlotte knows Zeus. She remembers him fondly from her childhood where, like her father’s Santa sweater, he would appear every Christmas reeking of mothballs and neglect.

“He is getting made on Tuesday.”

She struggles to work out the geometry of her mother’s sentence. Her mind goes first to the mafia. She has been watching The Sopranos with her boyfriend. She imagines Zeus, with his walker and two hearing aids, beating someone senseless like Tony Soprano. Charlotte, hopelessly lost and equally furious (because this is exactly what her mother wants) finally says, “Made into what?”

These prove to be the magic words. Her mother, with maximum condescension chortles. “Made into what? You’re too much. It’s an acronym, honey. Medical Assistance In Dying.”

CHARLOTTE: fyi made means = medical assistance in dying ✓✓ 2:34 PM

Charlotte: for when my mom calls u ✓✓ 2:34 PM

Charlotte: ull thank me later ✓✓ 2:34 PM

Mark flicks the text away. He is careful to make sure it stays unread. He does not understand the message but can safely assume it relates to Charlotte, his Aunt Jackie and their ongoing feud about graduate school in which he, by some sick tragedy, figures prominently.

He does not know why, but months ago Charlotte started texting him as if they were old buddies. She vents endlessly about her mother’s lack of support. Aunt Jackie of course learns of this and begins her own assault of his inbox. Both are convinced, because of his past, Mark will side with them. Neither accounts for the fact that Mark – his brain perpetually at maximum capacity, bombarded every moment with at least two-dozen stimuli – is too busy to care about anything, especially their fight. Case in point, the very moment the text comes in, Mark is skim reading an article about The Rock’snew movie. He is also, in one ear, listening to The Rewatchables podcast dissecting the 1992 Steven Seagal movie Under Siege while his other listens for any semblance of movement from his living room. He is also shitting. He is also playing Wordle and wondering what could end with AVE if it is not GRAVE or CRAVE or BRAVE because the R has already been ruled out. He is also worrying about whether he is forcing this shit and whether it will give him another hemorrhoid. He is also simultaneously worrying about when to pick Francis up from school and whether to pick David up from daycare first to avoid a U-turn during the school-time traffic. He is, though, predominantly worrying about Sammi, alone in the living room, and remembering that the last time he took a daytime shit it ended with her standing on the kitchen table and screaming, “I so tawwwwll.”

He abandons the shit. The silence is too silent and he is sure Sammi is up to something. He sprints into the living room and finds her sitting happily in front of the television, content in watching Miss Rachel and not remotely missing him. He pauses, momentarily awed by the miracle of her existence – that his sperm, the most disgusting and disposable of substances has produced her, has produced a life-changing joy. And then the thought fades and he wonders again if he does in fact have the time for this long gestating shit. He is en route back to the bathroom when his phone rings. It is Aunt Jackie. After three minutes of cryptic allusions, she lowers her voice and whispers “Zeus will be made on Tuesday”’ like she is a wizard and he is the protagonist of a young adult novel. He quickly sends Charlotte a text.

Mark: thank u ✓✓ 2:45 PM

Aunt Jackie has nowhere to go when he immediately grasps the situation and is forced, very much against her will, into a sane conversation. She hammers out the facts – Zeus’ last meal will be at Swiss Chalet on Tuesday; he wants chicken; the entire family will be there and Mark should bring the kids – and then wraps it up hastily so she can repeat this conversation with another less suspecting family member.

Mark is surprised at the heaviness he feels following the conversation and joins Sammi on the couch. Both Zeus and Swiss Chaletare long forgotten totems of his childhood and they unleash a flood of memories. He remembers Zeus chasing him and the other cousins around screaming ‘I vant to bite you.’ He remembers none of them being quite sure if this was a game or not and running heartily with true fear. He remembers being singled out as Zeus’ favourite for reasons no one quite understood. He would be given a fifty-dollar bill wedged between two packs of gum for Christmas while all the other cousins only got a twenty.

He remembers Swiss Chaletand clamouring through the wooden toy-box, how exciting this act was. And how they would serve little bowls of water with a lemon to clean your fingers and how this would bring about endless jokes about it being a soup.

There is nothing inherently sad about these memories, but Mark feels the heaviness grow; the past is a dangerous place, filled with regret, and he does not allow himself to enter it unprepared.

“I love you,” he says and kisses Sammi’s head. She wipes the spot he kissed angrily and continues watching the television.

Mark’s regrets do not stem from a dissatisfaction with his present. He is, like all parents of young children, excessively tired, moderately deranged, a shell of his former self both physically and mentally, but incomprehensibly happy. His disdain for the past arises precisely from how happy he is. Mark is inches away from perfection but he is aware he can never reach it. His life was set years ago, and there’s no changing it for the better anymore.

His phone buzzes, another text.

Charlotte: on a scale of 1-10 how insane is mom? ✓✓ 2:54 PM

Charlotte: like a million? ✓✓ 2:54 PM

He responds, as he always does, with a meaningless emoji that Charlotte can project her own emotions onto.

Mark: 🙃✓✓ 2:54 PM

Charlotte: LOL ✓✓ 2:54 PM

Charlotte: Shes inasne right? its not jus me? ✓✓ 2:54 PM

He feels for Charlotte. He really does. She is born with the curse of talent. It is undeniable. To hear her sing is something truly special. She has the kind of talent that if she were much richer, or a child of famous parents, or lived in California or was more attractive or starkly less attractive in some interesting way or, most importantly, luckier, she could have succeeded. But she is none of these things and so, she is stranded alone with the burden of her talent and nowhere to productively put it. He feels for her but he also wants to warn her. She texts him like this because he was once her and she assumes he will be on her side. He spurned his summa cum laude biochemistry undergraduate degree, his preordained graduate degree in dentistry, to pursue, of all things, stand-up comedy. He suffered the wrath of his entire Greek family and their carefully orchestrated guilt campaign. He lived for years fielding calls in broken English reminding him how he had disappointed his dead yaya. He didn’t care though because his plan was perfect. He would become immensely popular and make millions and then transition into writing and directing and acting where he would make many more millions. This was why he took the job at the LCBO despite the fact that cashiering at a downtown liquor store was frightening, offered limited growth potential and in no way appealed to him as a long-term career: because it would never tempt him away. He began dating Caroline at this time. She was gainfully employed (a teacher) and moderately disgusted by his lack of career and the relationship would clearly be temporary.

Mark never did fail at comedy; he simply succeeded at everything except it. His real life slid around him, a consequence of a series of unavoidable decisions the world made without his consent, and clamped shut locking him in place. He moved in with Caroline because it was impossible to live alone in Toronto. He accepted his first promotion because it was more money and the same amount of work and he could not think of a single reason to reject it. He married Caroline, ten years later, because by then life apart seemed unfathomable. He was promoted again – with ten years experience and a college degree, he was a unicorn in the industry – and then again and again. There were small successes in comedy, but they were of a different tenor than those in his work life. They were little nuggets pried, with great effort, out of the never-ending failure. He was once almost shown on Canada’s Got Talent. His spec script for a My Big Fat Greek Wedding rip-off was optioned (for no money) and then almost purchased. He was often complimented, genuinely, for his talent by the bookers of comedy clubs that never, not once, not even for a moment, gave him a featured spot.

And then Francis was born in 2018, when Mark was thirty-six and the biggest cliche, a phrase lobbed at Mark from everyone he encountered – “It goes too fast!” – was revealed to not in fact be a trite piece of small talk, but a dire warning. The universe has only a finite amount of time and when a child enters it, no new reserve is given: your time is simply divided. He was forty-three when he realized this. He realized then too that he had not performed in seven years. His retirement was, again, not a choice, but a consequence of the million smaller choices he did not remember making.

He leans in to kiss Sammi again but she is sound asleep. He turns off Miss Rachel and grabs his phone. Charlotte is on his mind; the decision to forgo dentistry is on his mind. He looks around his rented, two-bedroom condo and considers the impossibility of affording anything else in the city, the inevitability of moving to the suburbs and the final death of everything he once considered important. He thinks of his time in stand-up – the stress of performing, the persistent failure, constant rejection – and wonders how he could have ever thought this sacrifice was worth it. He wants to impart this all to Charlotte somehow. Not discourage her – she would just ignore that – but explain to her: failure is not her tragedy, but her life. There is no finding herself, at least not like she imagines. Her self will find her, and it will be fatter and uglier and more boring and, according to all the criteria she laid out in her adolescent mind, it will be the worst possible version; but she will not care because it will be her and she will still be happy because yes, she might be a modicum less fulfilled, but she will also be a fuckload richer and that is so much more important.

He does not tell this to Charlotte. Instead he sends:

Mark: ✓✓ 2:56 PM

“WHERE’S THE SOUP?” Robert says to the waitress.

“Huh?” she says. She is old. Robert remembers this about Swiss Chalet. The waitresses were always so old. This particular waitress is actually a year younger than him, only seventy-three, but he does not recognize this fact. Old is old and she is old.

“The soup, hon.” She stares at him blankly and Robert winks at Mark beside him. “The lemon soup you all used to have.”

“The soup of the day is chicken minestrone.”

Robert, despite this tepid reaction, laughs heartily as if the joke has landed. He begins regaling the table with anecdotes about the ‘soup.’ The people who drank it. The people who drank it after someone else had soaked their fingers in it. The people who dipped their fingers into an actual bowl of soup. There is muted laughter, forced smiles from the people he manages to ensnare in eye contact, until the waitress returns with a bowl of chicken minestrone and plops it down in front of him. The table is overcome in that moment by raucous, genuine laughter.

Robert is pleased, not quite understanding the humour of it, but enjoying it nonetheless. He plays along, pretending to dip his fingers in the soup, hamming it up, until Zeus arrives and the room falls abruptly quiet.

Zeus is wheeled in by Stavros. He slumps in his chair, his body curved into the shape of a question mark. His left leg jitters uncontrollably and for reasons that Robert cannot comprehend Zeus wears a young girl’s pink bike helmet. This bike helmet so stymies Robert that Spiros is able to get the jump and initiate a dramatic reception for Zeus. Spiros is already standing and clapping his hands together, hooting wildly, while Robert sits. Robert, irritated he is not first, makes up for it in the tenor and speed of his clapping, ramming his hands together so hard they hurt. It is not long before the entire family has joined this standing ovation.

Zeus does not acknowledge the welcome, nor react to the greeting in any discernible way. He arrives at the head of the table (really eight tables wedged together in the centre of the restaurant) with the same blank face he entered with.

The clapping slows, then eventually comes to a stop but Robert continues until it is only him – he was not first but he will be last – and when he is done he takes his seat. He realizes that he has pushed his clapping a moment too late because the entire table is engaged in little pockets of conversation by the time he sits. To his right, Charlotte whispers to the younger cousins. He hears the word ‘helmet,’ and they all titter. To his left, Mark is occupied with his youngest, showing her some kind of video of a monkey feeding a duck on his phone. He tries to join in, smiling and nodding at whatever snippets he catches, but no one allows entry and eventually he remembers the soup. He paid for it, so why not?

Robert sneaks a peak at Zeus while eating. He is in poor shape, that’s for sure. His eyes are no longer the vivid blue Robert remembers. They have faded into something almost white.

His leg continues to jitter which is the only movement he produces and his skin, once a crisp tan, has yellowed: it looks to Robert like it has jump started the decaying process in preparation for the next day.

Robert does not know what he is expecting from a one-hundred-and-three-year-old man who is a day away from dying but he is depressed by this image of Zeus nonetheless. He cannot reconcile this man, the bike helmet most of all, with the Zeus of his youth. The menacingly handsome man in the flashy suits and cartoonishly gaudy rings on each finger, who owned what seemed like an infinite assortment of fedoras and – this was never confirmed to Robert but patently obvious to him – was some kind of criminal. This idea was floated telepathically between the brothers on the nights Zeus visited and peeled twenties for each of them off a roll the size of his fist – and this, mind you, when twenty dollars meant something, not like now when you can barely buy a sandwich for less – but was confirmed the night Zeus was shot. This moment, though it did not involve him in any way, was the highlight of Robert’s childhood. It consumed his imagination for years. He felt, somehow, like it established him as something. He was not rich. He was not particularly attractive. And though he was bright, he was not spectacularly so. But he had Zeus. He was interesting by proxy. There was no explanation ever given for the gunshot – not from his parents, who did their best to bury it and definitely not from Zeus whom Robert rarely spoke to. This only titillated him more. He remembers a party. A pool. He must have been ten and Zeus wore speedo trunks. The scar, a perfect circle on both sides of his thigh, was just visible and drew Robert’s ten-year-old eyes like a magnet. When Zeus caught him staring he smiled at Robert knowingly and then winked before diving under the water.

The soup is so bland Robert questions whether it is actually a bowl meant to clean his fingers in, but he finishes it anyways. He waits, staring at the empty bowl and then pounces when a lull forms in the conversation to his right.

“Charlotte. How is the music going?”

Charlotte, visibly annoyed by this, stops just short of rolling her eyes. “It’s great.”

“Yes?” He waits for her to elaborate. But she just shrugs. In the ensuing silence Jackie enters from the other side of the table.

“Ask her about grad school,” Jackie says.

“You’re doing grad school?” This is Mark. His youngest bangs the table with a fork and he does nothing to stop her.

“No.” Charlotte does indeed roll her eyes now. “I am not going to grad school.”

The fact that Robert initiated this conversation seems to be lost on all involved and he is ignored. He recedes as it devolves into quiet bickering between Charlotte and Jackie and stirs the dregs of the soup with his spoon. He considers, while watching Charlotte hiss and pout at her mother, that she is the age his parents were when immigrating from Greece. Spiros was already born, a whole year old. She is also Zeus’ age the year he returned from the war and Robert’s own age the year he entered law school and married Rachel. These facts stack on top of each other and Robert wonders, what is happening to account for these differences, this perpetual elongation of youth? Life certainly doesn’t seem easier. Not with the climate, nor the economy or whatever it is happening on the internet. But still, his parents had lived an entire life in the time it is taking Charlotte to get hers started. How many of Charlotte’s lives, he wonders, could you fit into Zeus’s 103 years?

A geyser of water strikes Robert’s arm. Jackie has leaned over the table and knocked over a pitcher, though this does not stop her from culminating her argument, with a grand point which is, “Life, my dear, is not fair.”

The water slides its way towards Robert and he lays his cloth napkin down on top of it. It clings to the table and a splotchy red stain appears in the wetness. Robert wonders, moderately disturbed, what its source is.

“Oh?” Charlotte mocks. “Is life not fair? Where’d you come up with that?”

“She’s right,” Robert says. But no one is listening. Charlotte has stormed off to the bathroom and knocked a chair over. The entire restaurant is looking at them – the one two punch of spilled water and overturned chair too glamorous to avoid – and now everyone is talking politely and quietly to counter the ruckus. “It really is true,” he says again, to no one. He thinks of his friend Henry. Henry sat down to eat a steak one day and choked; he’s blind now and his left side doesn’t work. Imagine that? What good can come from eating a gamey piece of steak? Not an ounce. But the negative? It’s infinite. Everything is like that. Robert personally knows eight people who have died on the toilet. Eight. He can hardly believe it. Is that not the definition of unfair? What’s the risk-reward in that one?

He repeats this entire anecdote to Charlotte when she returns. “Eight,” he concludes. “On the toilet. Can you believe it?”

This anecdote works to calm her down because she stares at him like he is a complete psychotic and says, “That’s crazy.”

Her obvious pity warms him and he suddenly wants it all to work out for her. He has mulled some out-there ideas about this in the past. He has his inheritance. It really is an ungodly sum of money he’s amassed and when he sees these kids struggling, the sacrifices they are making, he gets in moods. It’s always like this, a sudden inspiration. He has the money to help, that’s for sure, and really, isn’t this the childless uncle’s job? To provide the kind of support a parent will not? He is not opposed, like his brothers, to funding happiness. It is something he may well have done himself had the thought ever occurred to him. The fact of the matter is it never did. His parents wanted a lawyer (getting their doctors and bankers in the first crop of children) and so he gave it to them because what else could he do? The thought of an alternative never crossed his mind until Mark made his rebellion. He didn’t intervene then (with Rachel alive he still coveted his money; was hoarding it with purpose) but followed closely from the sidelines, privately rooting for Mark. He is happy for Mark now. Of course he is, with that beautiful family, those children; how could he not be? But still. He is disappointed. He can’t help it. If he had known – Rachel gone in a year, his monetary success and the years of work to earn it just a joke, him the punchline – he would have given it all away, sparked a little excitement.

“It is crazy isn’t it?” He says, remembering that Zeus was 91 when Rachel turned sixty; remembering the day the two of them visited Zeus, aged 94, in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. If someone had told him then, that day, that Zeus – his skin almost translucent, revealing the network of blue and red veins, his eyelids a deep dark purple and his lungs too weak to breathe without a ventilator – would outlive Rachel, would outlive her by almost a decade, what would he have thought?

“You are absolutely right,” he says, but Charlotte has moved on, is on her phone in a different world and he is alone again. He makes one last turn of the table – smiling and nodding, eyes wide, hoping to ensnare someone – but comes up empty. He is ready, has psyched himself up, to grab Charlotte’s phone from her hand when Jackie stands and clinks her glass.

“I would like,” her voice catches. There are no tears in her eyes, though her face is contorted into a cry. “I would like us all to go around the table and sum up, in one word, what Zeus meant to us all.”

The table falls deathly quiet, tense as everyone calculates when it will be their turn to speak. Robert counts: he will be either fourth to go or fourteenth depending on the order.

“Inspirational,” Jackie says and taps Stavros on the shoulder.

“Heroic,” Stavros says.

Robert shakes his head. They are going clockwise. He will be fourteenth and there will be no good words left. He eventually decides on the word ‘intrepid,’ less because it describes Zeus than because he is certain no one will select it. With this settled, he sits back and listens to ensure no one scoops him.

“Durable.”

“Kind.”

“Interesting.”

“Heroic,” Charlotte says, repeating the word with a careless shrug.

“Thoughtful.”

“Fun,” Mark says at his turn.

“Zeus,” says his daughter and the table laughs.

Robert turns the word ‘intrepid’ over and sneaks a glance at Zeus. He is unchanged. Motionless except for the leg. Sallow and shrunken. Adorned with a pink helmet. Robert feels a sudden burst of disgust, not at Zeus, but at this game. A life, he realizes, cannot be summed because a life is not a consequence of addition. Life is calculated by subtraction. If you make it long enough, you will lose it all.

Robert decides he will say the word ‘helmet’ when it is his turn. He prepares himself but is interrupted by the appearance of the waitress straining under the weight of twenty-six menus.

The table forgets about Zeus, he forgets about Zeus, during the Sisyphean process of ordering. There are two languages spoken, fourteen hearing aids at the table and two belonging to the waitress. The entire ordeal lasts almost a half hour. Robert, when it finally gets to him, orders a hamburger.

ZEUS EATS WITH A MECHANICAL PASSION. It is impossible to glean an emotion from him as he plows through the whole chicken with the precision of a butcher – he looks neither happy nor sad, just hungry.

Charlotte watches from the corner of her eye. A leg is held tightly in Zeus’s right hand. His tremor rattles the bone off his remaining teeth. She looks away before the disgust registers: her mother does not need more ammunition.

Mark does not once look at Zeus. The battery of David’s iPad dies the moment the food is delivered and all hell has broken loose.

Robert marvels at the energy which has overtaken Zeus. His muscles throb as he snaps a bone in two. His face animates as he sucks out the marrow. He looks a man sixty-years his junior. Robert returns to his hamburger but cannot bring himself to eat it. He wants the chicken.