“Rex is okay,” I said when I had caught up to her. “If you like manslaughterers.”

“That was an accident,” said the Object.

The moon was three-quarters full. It silvered the fat leaves of the trees. The grass was wet. We both kicked off our clogs to stand in it. After a moment, sighing, the Object laid her head on my shoulder.

“It’s good you’re going away,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because this is too weird.” I looked back to see if anyone could see us. No one could. So I put my arm around her.

For the next few minutes we stood under the moon-blanched trees, listening to the music blaring from the house. The cops would come soon. The cops always came. That was something you could depend on in Grosse Pointe.

The next morning, I went to church with Tessie. As usual, Aunt Zo was down in front, setting an example. Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato were wearing their gangster suits. Cleo was sunk into her black mane, about to doze off.

The rear and sides of the church were dark. Icons gloomed from the porticoes or raised stiff fingers in the glinting chapels. Beneath the dome, light fell in a chalky beam. The air was already thick with incense. Moving back and forth, the priests looked like men at a hammam.

Then it was showtime. One priest flicked a switch. The bottom tier of the enormous chandelier blazed on. From behind the iconostasis Father Mike entered. He was wearing a bright turquoise robe with a red heart embroidered on his back. He crossed the solea and came down among the parishioners. The smoke from his censer rose and curled, fragrant with antiquity. “Kyrie eleison,” Father Mike sang. “Kyrie eleison.” And though the words meant nothing to me, or almost nothing, I felt their weight, the deep groove they made in the air of time. Tessie crossed herself, thinking about Chapter Eleven.

First Father Mike did the left side of the church. In blue waves, incense rolled over the gathered heads. It dimmed the circular lights of the chandelier. It aggravated the widows’ lung conditions. It subdued the brightness of my cousins’ suits. As it wrapped me in its dry-ice blanket, I breathed it in and began to pray myself. Please God let Dr. Bauer not find anything wrong with me. And let me be just friends with the Object. And don’t let her forget about me while we’re in Turkey. And help my mother not to be so worried about my brother. And make Chapter Eleven go back to college.

Incense serves a variety of purposes in the Orthodox church. Symbolically, it’s an offering to God. Like the burnt sacrifices in pagan times, the fragrance drifts upward to heaven. Before the days of modern embalming, incense had a practical application. It covered the smell of corpses during funerals. It can also, when inhaled in sufficient amounts, create a lightheadedness that feels like religious reverie. And if you breathe in enough of it, it can make you sick.

“What’s the matter?” Tessie’s voice in my ear. “You look pale.”

I stopped praying and opened my eyes.

“I do?”

“Do you feel okay?”

I began to answer in the affirmative. But then I stopped myself.

“You look really pale, Callie,” Tessie said again. She touched her hand to my forehead.

Sickness, reverie, devotion, deceit—they all came together. If God doesn’t help you, you have to help yourself.

“It’s my stomach,” I said.

“What have you been eating?”

“Or not exactly my stomach. It’s lower down.”

“Do you feel faint?”

Father Mike passed by again. He swung the censer so high it nearly touched the tip of my nose. And I widened my nostrils and breathed in as much smoke as possible to make myself even paler than I already was.

“It’s like somebody’s twisting something inside me,” I hazarded.

Which must have been more or less right. Because Tessie was now smiling. “Oh, honey,” she said. “Oh, thank God.”

“You’re happy I’m sick? Thanks a lot.”

“You’re not sick, honey.”

“Then what am I? I don’t feel good. It hurts.”

My mother took my hand, still beaming. “Hurry, hurry,” she said. “We don’t want an accident.”

By the time I closed myself into a church bathroom stall, news of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had reached the United States. When Tessie and I arrived back home, the living room was filled with shouting men.

“Our battleships are sitting off the coast to intimidate the Greeks,” Jimmy Fioretos was yelling.

“Sure they’re sitting off the coast,” Milton now, “what do you expect? The Junta comes in and throws Makarios out. So the Turks are getting anxious. It’s a volatile situation.”

“Yeah, but to help the Turks—“

“The U.S. isn’t helping the Turks,” Milton went on. “They just don’t want the Junta to get out of hand.”

In 1922, while Smyrna burned, American warships sat idly by. Fifty-two years later, off the coast of Cyprus, they also did nothing. At least ostensibly.

“Don’t be so naïve, Milt,” Jimmy Fioretos again. “Who do you think’s jamming the radar? It’s the Americans, Milt. It’s us.”

“How do you know?” my father challenged.

And now Gus Panos through the hole in his throat: “It’s that goddamned—sssss—Kissinger. He must have—ssssss—made a deal with the Turks.”

“Of course he did.” Peter Tatakis nodded, sipping his Pepsi. “Now that the Vietnam crisis is over, Herr Doktor Kissinger can get back to playing Bismarck. He would like to see NATO bases in Turkey? This is his way to get them.”

Were these accusations true? I can’t say for sure. All I know is this: on that morning, somebody jammed the Cypriot radar, guaranteeing the success of the Turkish invasion. Did the Turks possess such technology? No. Did the U.S. warships? Yes. But this isn’t something you can prove . . .

Plus, it didn’t matter to me, anyway. The men cursed, and shook their fingers at the television and pounded the radio, until Aunt Zo unplugged them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t unplug the men. All through dinner the men shouted at each other. Knives and forks waved in the air. The argument over Cyprus lasted for weeks and would finally put an end to those Sunday dinners once and for all. But as for myself, the invasion had only one meaning.

As soon as I could, I excused myself and ran off to call the Object. “Guess what?” I cried out with excitement. “We’re not going on vacation. There’s a war!”

Then I told her I had cramps and that I’d be right over.

FLESH AND BLOOD

I’m quickly approaching the moment of discovery: of myself by myself, which was something I knew all along and yet didn’t know; and the discovery by poor, half-blind Dr. Philobosian of what he’d failed to notice at my birth and continued to miss during every annual physical thereafter; and the discovery by my parents of what kind of child they’d given birth to (answer: the same child, only different); and finally, the discovery of the mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years, biding its time, waiting for Atatürk to attack, for Hajienestis to turn into glass, for a clarinet to play seductively out a back window, until, coming together with its recessive twin, it started the chain of events that led up to me, here, writing in Berlin.

That summer—while the President’s lies were also getting more elaborate—I started faking my period. With Nixonian cunning, Calliope unwrapped and flushed away a flotilla of unused Tampax. I feigned symptoms from headache to fatigue. I did cramps the way Meryl Streep did accents. There was the twinge, the dull ache, the sucker punch that made me curl up on my bed. My cycle, though imaginary, was rigorously charted on my desk calendar. I used the catacomb fish symbol 

 to mark the days. I scheduled my periods right through December, by which time I was certain my real menarche would have finally arrived.