Chapter 5 Davey

Davey started his tour for the graduate students at a quarter past six. He didn't intend to start in the workroom; the most recent Ge'ez manuscripts were still on his desk, so it made sense to end there, but Mary was at her desk working and Mary was captivating, and when one of the students on the tour noticed her, it derailed Davey's plan. In humanities scholarship, Mary was a minor celebrity because one of the videos she'd prepared for the library's social media accounts had gone so viral that Ronald, head of the library, had been invited to give the keynote presentation at the conference of the Modern Language Association as a result. Davey found the whole thing tacky, but he swung the students by Mary's desk anyway so they could ooh and ahh at her lighting setup as he knew they wanted to.

Mary presented herself in Technicolor in a way Davey found distasteful—all the giggling and the ever-present rear-facing camera documenting her every thought. He'd invited her because she was a graduating second-year master's student like he was. They'd been in classes together, Davey and Mary, and he couldn't deny she had the intellectual rigor to appreciate the ritual. That was one of the things that drove him mad: that she presented herself as so silly when she had the potential to be a serious person. Besides, Mary was 25 percent iced coffee and 75 percent Adderall. The girl could keep a secret.

***

Long before his fascination with the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ritual they'd be reenacting that night, had begun, Davey had known and loved the story of Demeter. He figured his mother must have told it to him, but he didn't remember hearing about it for the first time. It was as if he'd been born knowing it.

The story began with Kore, the goddess Demeter's daughter, out picking flowers in a meadow in the plain of Nysa by the ocean. Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, one of the important ones, and Kore was her daughter by Zeus. As Kore plucked a special hundred-headed narkissos flower, she was abducted by Hades, her would-be bridegroom. In the Eleusinian Mysteries ritual, thousands of pilgrims walked the sacred road between Athens and Eleusis every year for fifteen hundred years, retracing the path Demeter covered searching for her kidnapped daughter.

When Demeter arrived in Eleusis, disguised as a mortal, the people there treated her with kindness. When they realized she was a goddess, they built her a temple, but despite this honor she refused to rejoin the realm of the gods, refused to do her godly work, and in her spite, she caused the crops to stop growing all over the world, nearly starving the world's mortals and starving the gods of the sacrifices to which they had become accustomed.

If Davey didn't remember hearing the story for the first time, he did remember his dad walking by at this point in the story during one of the retellings. "Spiteful woman," he'd said, and laughed. Was it the first time, or the tenth time, he'd been told the story when this happened? He had no idea. Davey's parents had moved to the States from Ethiopia in the '80s. They knew a thing or two about soil that wouldn't produce.

Anyway, at this point in the story, Zeus intervened. He sent gods down to Demeter with presents and honors to get her to move, but she refused to be reasonable, so finally Zeus sent Hermes to reason with Hades, man to man, or some divine version of it.

Hades told Kore that he loved her and wanted to be her husband but that she should go visit her mother, as Zeus insisted. She wanted to see her mother, but she'd come to love Hades, too. Before leaving the underworld, she ate a single pomegranate seed, knowing that consuming a morsel of food would tie her to the place, and to Hades, forever.

In the ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries that took its structure from Demeter's story, when the pilgrims got to Eleusis, that's when their party started. They drank and danced and celebrated by the wall where Demeter had wept for her missing daughter. Thousands of them, engaged in debauchery under the stars. But then they entered the sanctuary and things became serious. The pilgrims would drink a special potion as part of the ritual, and then they would see something.

"Something seen." That's all the accounts said, the details remaining a secret. After Kore ate the pomegranate seed, her name changed to Persephone in the story. Most people refer to her only as Persephone, but they're wrong. It's one of those things that had always bothered Davey. The name Persephone means "she who brings doom."

Davey's guess was that the pilgrims saw the ghost of Persephone. It was the potion, obviously, that brought on the visions. Whatever they saw, it was terrifying. The pilgrims would sweat, shake, vomit. He wondered if they all saw the same thing or if everyone faced the specter of what made them most afraid.

So Zeus, in his kindness, made a deal with Hades. Persephone would spend part of the year in the underworld with Hades, but every year she got to go back to see her mother. Finally satisfied that she wouldn't be forever parted from her daughter, Demeter returned to the realm of the gods, and the parched fields finally began to show green.

The pilgrims, in their ritual celebration of Persephone and Demeter, faced the thing they were most afraid of, or they faced the specter of death in Persephone's ghost, and then they were never afraid again.

What a concept, Davey thought, being unafraid.

***

Davey pulled his tour out of the workroom as soon as he was able to divert their attention away from Mary and got them down to the basement, where he was sure they would be better entertained. He was annoyed—it was six thirty by the time they got to Faye's workstation—and if he was rushed, he'd have to knock something off his usual tour. Faye worked in a far corner next to a large donation of first and foreign editions of the works of Thomas Hardy that hadn't been touched since it was deposited at the library fifteen years earlier. Her work area was blocked off with plastic sheeting, and through it the students watched her lean over a book in her goggles and mask and gloves and slice a sliver off an emerald-green book cover with a razor-sharp scalpel.

It got a gasp, an audible gasp, from the tourists (they were tourists to Davey even if they were graduate students) when she defaced the book with her knife. It was what Davey wanted. To put on a little show.

Faye didn't acknowledge the tour at all. She didn't play along the way Mary did. She followed lab protocols and was concerned only with getting her specimen onto a slide, recording what she'd taken, and delivering the sample to the lab for analysis. Once the scalpel was moved to the side and Faye got to the work of labeling, there wasn't much left for the students to see. They'd come here for ancient knowledge, not for microscopes, so Davey moved them along to the next delight without so much as a wave goodbye to Faye.