Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Page A

almost name the feeling now…
   …As I sit here in my Aeron chair, thinking E. O. Wilson thoughts. Was it love or reproduction? Chance or destiny? Crime or nature at work? Maybe the gene contained an override, ensuring its expression, which would explain Desdemona’s tears and Lefty’s taste in prostitutes; not fondness, not emotional sympathy; only the need for this new thing to enter the world and hence the heart’s rigged game. But I can’t explain it, any more than Desdemona or Lefty could have, any more than each one of us, falling in love, can separate the hormonal from what feels divine, and maybe I cling to the God business out of some altruism hard-wired to preserve the species; I can’t say. I try to go back in my mind to a time before genetics, before everyone was in the habit of saying about everything, “It’s in the genes.” A time before our present freedom, and so much freer! Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn’t envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug. Now we know we carry this map of ourselves around. Even as we stand on the street corner, it dictates our destiny. It brings onto our faces the same wrinkles and age spots our parents had. It makes us sniff in idiosyncratic, recognizable family ways. Genes embedded so deep they control our eye muscles, so that two sisters have that same way of blinking, and boy twins dribble in unison. I feel myself sometimes, in anxious moods, playing with the cartilage of my nose exactly as my brother does. Our throats and voice boxes, formed from the same instructions, press air out in similar tones and decibels. And this can be extrapolated backward in time, so that when I speak, Desdemona speaks, too. She’s writing these words now. Desdemona, who had no idea of the army inside her, carrying out its million orders, or of the one soldier who disobeyed, going AWOL…
   …Running like Lefty away from Lucille Kafkalis and back to his sister. She heard his feet hurrying as she was refastening her skirt. She wiped her eyes with her kerchief and put a smile on as he came through the door.
   “So, which one did you choose?”
   Lefty said nothing, inspecting his sister. He hadn’t shared a bedroom with her all his life not to be able to tell when she’d been crying. Her hair was loose, covering most of her face, but the eyes that looked up at him were brimming with feeling. “Neither one,” he said.
   At that Desdemona felt tremendous happiness. But she said, “What’s the matter with you? You have to choose.”
   “Those girls look like a couple of whores.”
   “Lefty!”
   “It’s true.”
   “You don’t want to marry them?”
   “No.”
   “You have to.” She held out her fist. “If I win, you marry Lucille.”
   Lefty, who could never resist a bet, made a fist himself. “One, two, three … shoot!
   “Ax breaks rock,” Lefty said. “I win.”
   “Again,” said Desdemona. “This time, if I win, you marry Vicky. One, two, three …”
   “Snake swallows ax. I win again! So long to Vicky.”
   “Then who will you marry?”
   “I don’t know”—taking her hands and looking down at her. “How about you?”
   “Too bad I’m your sister.”
   “You’re not only my sister. You’re my third cousin, too. Third cousins can marry.”
   “You’re crazy, Lefty.”
   “This way will be easier. We won’t have to rearrange the house.”
   Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty began waltzing Desdemona around,