conventions of a tragedy

He picks up the Classics minor on a whim during his sophomore year, something to fill his schedule while he sits through bullshit sociology classes where some old white guy with a Ph.D. tries to teach him things he doesn't know about growing up poor and brown in the city. It doesn't exactly gel with sociology or his music performance minor but he's never been one to back down from a challenge.

It helps that Gregor isn't quite sure what he's going to do with this eclectic collection of specializations. He's a vague idea of going into social work, saving people who can't save themselves, but there's a specter of sadness in that line of work he's not sure he'll be able to manage. Other times, he wonders about medical school, but he knows he's seen enough blood and death to last him several lifetimes.

He used to muse about being a soldier, because goddamn, at least he knew he was good at it and his family will never be able to pay for college on their own. But the war in Afghanistan isn't fought with swords and prophecy and even so, he still has nightmares where all he hears are screams.

Learning Latin isn't the hardest thing he's ever done. Most of it is achingly familiar, mother of the Spanish he's been speaking since childhood. (Greek is another matter entirely but he tries his best.) Boots still absorbs languages like a sponge and sometimes his mom calls him in the middle of the night because she's hissing and clicking in her sleep. So Gregor gives her an equally dead language to fill her quietest hours. He e-mails her his vocabulary lists and declensions and they parse Virgil over Skype between difficult geometry problems.

One day, they stumble across a new word. Well, not entirely new. Eighth from the bottom: lux. Meaning light, glory, enlightenment, splendor, and of course, life. A Virginia farmhouse and a New Haven dorm room both hundreds of miles from a New York laundry room, but still both of them tremble. "D-do you ever think about...?" There's really no need for her to elaborate.

His heart clenches and he stumbles through a denial he can't remember five minutes after he says it. They sign off not too long after, neither of them particularly interested in proofs or Aeneid with thoughts of the Underland dancing through their head.

The thing is, he thinks about it constantly. You can't live the year he did (at barely twelve to boot) and put it out of your mind entirely. When his college admissions essay asked him about an identity he thought his application would be incomplete without, he wrote a thousand words on the Underland before he realized what he was doing it. He dreams about it almost every night. He hears the final gasps of those he watched die and those he killed, still sees their eyes as he closes his.

Thing is, he can't exactly talk about it. If he would have turned in that admissions essay, he would have looked like a madman at best. The outside world isn't ready for what lives beneath their feet.

His family isn't an option either. Boots is the only one who will even mention it, but even then her memories are little more than hazy recollections of fear and wings. She can barely bring herself to call it by name. Lizzie still quakes when she sees a cockroach, and he won't force her into a panic for his benefit. His dad still isn't the man Gregor remembers from his childhood, but he's come so far in the intervening years, a recovery birthed largely from repression. And why should he remind his mother of all the times she almost lost her whole family?

So he keeps it locked in a nameless part of himself and there are days when he feels like he's going explode from the weight of it. It writhes somewhere beneath his skin, struggling to burst forth but entirely unable to do so, no matter how much he wants to let it.

At least he never forgets what lux means.

During the spring semester of his junior year, Gregor finds himself in GREK 212: An Introduction to Tragedy. He skips over it entirely when first creating his schedule. After all, when you live like he has, tragedy doesn't really need an introduction this late in the game. But in the end, it's the only thing that fits between his requirements for sociology and the truly heinous number of ensembles he's in so he bites the bullet and signs up before the last slot is taken.

The building is located about as far as it can be from his dorm room and still be on campus. It snows like hell the first day of class and he almost doesn't make it on time, sliding in the back just ahead of the professor. It's a drafty building, so no one can fault him for leaving his gloves and jacket on. (Winter is always the easiest time of year to cover his scars.)

The professor isn't what he's gotten used to over his two and a half years in an Ivy League classics department. Maybe forty and Latina, Professor Medina is a breath of fresh air.

Her accent is smoothed over, much in the way his own father's has been after years in the States. Still, there's a familiarity in the cadence of her voice that leeches some of the tension from his shoulders.

They go over the syllabus first: excepts from Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Medea, and Ajax, a few papers, in-class discussions, and some Aristotle for good measure. It's nothing they haven't gone through half a dozen times at this point and by the time they get twenty minutes into the class she's exhausted even the plagiarism policy and lame icebreakers.

"Now, I know you're all going to hate me for not letting you go early, but we might as well get started." A few heavy sighs, but she smiles, undeterred. "Let's start with this. Why does tragedy exist?"

No one so much as looks at her. A few students shift in their chairs. Someone coughs.

"Come on. There's no wrong answers, and unlike most professors, I actually mean that."

A boy in the very front, old money just doing this to make mom and dad happy, speaks up. "So we can realize how great our lives are in comparison."

He snickers throughout his answer, but Professor Medina grins. "You're trying to be facetious, but you're not wrong. Anyone else? Just shout it out."

"To prove a point!"

"Political commentary."

"I'm pretty sure it was to win to win a goat or something."

"You are essentially all correct," the professor says. "One of the great mysteries in classics studies is the precise origin of tragedy. We have some idea as to where it drew influence, but it is likely something we will never solve." It's then she notices his hand at the back of the room. "Do you have something to add?"

He gulps. Right answer or wrong, Gregor hates showing his cards at all, not in front of people he knows don't give a damn about him. Still, he says, "To answer your question. About why tragedy exists. Well, maybe they made it to make you feel something."

If anything, her grin grows wider. "Someone has been reading their Aristotle. Hold onto that." For the rest of the class, she goes over someone of the influences she mentioned previously. Gregor barely pays attention, wondering what she means.

He goes up to her afterward, hands shaking a little bit in his pockets. She looks up from where she was gathering her markers and papers and asks, "What can I do for you today, sir?"

"Hi, Professor Medina. I'm Gregor Campbell and I guess I was just wondering what you meant when you said I'd been reading my Aristotle. I mean, I have been, because this is my minor, but I don't see what that has to do with anything."

Her brown eyes pierce him for a moment and it's like she can read all that's ever happened to him. Like his history is tattooed across his skin. (He does in fact have a small black bat on his left shoulder, but that's beside the point and hidden under his coat.) In that moment, she reminds him of Mrs. Cormaci, the way she seemed to see everything he tried to hide from her.

But instead of trying to feed him or give him enough money to get by this month, Professor Medina says, "Well, I suppose I can give you a sneak peek of next class. Have you ever heard of catharsis?"

"Isn't it something that makes you feel better?"

"Essentially yes. Aristotle defined it more specifically in regards to the tragic form in the Poetics. Catharsis is a purification. A purging of extreme emotion, usually pity and fear, through art or emotion in order to experience a sense of renewal. The way I see it, in the case of tragedy, it makes you feel something so hard and deeply, it does not leave room for anything else. The sadness or grief the play makes you feel is so akin to what is already inside you, they are released together."

"Does it actually do that?"

She shrugs. "It truly depends on the play and the person."

"I see. Well, thanks so much. I'll have to look into it before our next class."

Gregor is almost to the other end of the room when Professor Medina calls after him. "Mr. Campbell!" He turns and her eyes are shining in a way that again reminds him so much of Mrs. Cormaci it hurts a little. "Your definition was not wrong. There is more than one way to find renewal. So if you are looking for some catharsis, perhaps try writing your own. Either way, I hope you find something."

He nods but as he walks outside the building, Gregor realizes he once again has no idea what she's talking about.

Gregor finds himself sitting at his desk that night, pencil in hand, trying to figure out what Professor Medina meant. Because he was full of pity and fear, had been for the past decade or so. You can't make it through a war without those feelings in droves. The professor seemed to see that in him, somehow.

Reading has never helped him cope with his trauma. He made through approximately a hundred pages of The Hunger Games before he had to put it aside. There's no need for him to relive his horrors in the guise of entertainment. Though after all this time studying them, he has to admit the Greeks were sort of geniuses when it came to this sort of thing. Still, he's pretty sure reading about a man who accidentally married his mom isn't going to help him anymore than kids killing other kids for sport.

As for writing his own? He's tried to put his experiences into words before. Diaries were never really his thing, and memoirs don't work when your life sounds like a bad acid trip. Any attempt to fictionalize his experiences leaves a sour taste in his mouth. It's trivializing and he can't bring himself to do that to the hell he put his family through.

So he does what he told Professor Medina he would do and he googles it.

It's around midnight when he finally turns off his computer. And there are still readings to do and questions to answer, but when he picks up his pencil, he doesn't pull out his notes from Sociology in Arts and Popular Culture.

Turning to a blank page in his tragedy notes, he writes Dear Luxa.

Because what he discovered is that there is not only a catharsis in crying your eyes out a tragedy, but there's a social catharsis that can come from talking about trauma, releasing it out into the world. And there's no one else who experienced this that he can actually talk to it about. In truth, there's no one else with whom he wants to talk about it.

No matter how much he wants to, he can't bring himself to purge himself onto the page the way he expects he should. Ten years of training himself to keep his mouth shut isn't undone in a night.

So Gregor writes about college and the classes he's taking and the fact he always ends up in a single because he roommates request a change after the third or forth night he wakes up screaming. At the end, he writes:

Do you remember that song from Hazard's birthday party? The one where you and I danced together? I haven't. Sometimes, it gets stuck in my head, but when I try to play it, it never sounds right. And I'm forced to wonder if maybe, the way the notes resound off the stone in Regalia makes sounds we could never hope to capture up here.

Or maybe I just suck. It could go either way at this point.

It's not much, but it's a start.

In February, they read Antigone and the young woman's quest for proper burial for her brother hits him in a way he didn't expect.

There are two weeks of his life lost to him, weeks spent sleeping away his bodily traumas as best he could. He never asked what happened in the interim but he finds himself wondering now. Hamnet was forever lost in a deadly garden, Ripred's family washed away with the Garden of Hesperides. What of the rest of them? In a world made of stone, how do people find their peace?

I suppose I'm just wondering, he writes, what you do when someone dies. You never really talked about it in regards to your parents. I didn't see any mausoleums down there but then again, I guess we were kind of busy. Here, we put people in the ground mostly. Six feet under in wooden boxes, which probably sounds weird to you now that I think about it. Sometimes we burn them. I feel like that sounds like something you would do.It depends on what the dead person wants a lot of the time, which also might sound weird to you. Deciding your own fate sounds kind of nice to me. You can't decide how you die or how people remember you, but at least you can pick where you end up afterward.

It doesn't occur to him until far later that the Underland is a world in near-perpetual war. And in war, you fall where you fall and there's rarely enough left to burn.

He almost doesn't make it through Ajax. It's a tale of woe, but he's desensitized himself from that enough that such a fact in and of itself it's enough to turn his stomach. It's not that it's a war story. He would scarce be able to live in this world if he couldn't stomach those, though he does avoid them where he can.

It's that there's a man who can't control his own rage, manipulated by a woman he was supposed to be able to trust. A rage twisted into murder for someone else's gain. A warrior fated to die. It's almost eerily similar.

The name doesn't help. It evokes the quiet susurration of wings and the color of dried blood on fur, both natural and unnatural.

He almost goes to Professor Medina to explain that he simply can't complete the assignment. He's sure she'd understand; she'd made it clear enough of the syllabus. But it feels like something he has to face.

On a March day where the buds of spring struggle to force their way through the last of the winter's, frost, he finds himself pulling out the same notebook he picked up for the class at the beginning of the semester. His notes are shoved in the margins of his letters for the most part, tragedy of all stripes compressed into 100 pages, college-ruled. He turns to the nearest blank page to pen his next one.

I want to hate her sometimes. I think about the things she did and that rage she wanted to exploit comes to the surface. I know she was your grandmother and whatever you felt about her is probably about ten thousand times greater than my emotions but still...Even in Greek tragedy they protect the child, Luxa.

Because no matter what happened to Ajax, he was a grown man and his innocent young son had been saved. Gregor had been a child, Hamnet had been little more than that. And sure, he survived, but it wasn't through anything other than sheer dumb luck and the love of a bond.

He dreams of dried blood that night. Somehow, he finishes the assignment but only just. He doesn't feel any better for it.

Medea reminds him more and more of Luxa the more Gregor reads about her that April. A woman controlled by the whims of those (mostly men) around her. A woman driven by revenge of a different kind. Someone neither good nor bad, but allowed to exist in all her flaws.

It's the most bittersweet reading he's done all year and after the struggle that was Ajax, it's all too welcome. He's not Jason after all, and he doesn't see her falling for anyone like the famed asshole of a hero in a million years. If she did, he's sure she would find some far less destructive way to end him. The similarities are there to be sure, but this time, they aren't enough to drown him.

I think about that kiss a lot. It was nothing in the grand scheme of things, just a first fumbling that probably wouldn't have turned into anything more. Your cousin made it quite clear that you had better prospects than a kid threatened to be destroyed by war. A kid who grew up into someone that was, now that I think about it. And you know what, I agree with him. We don't even know if we'd like each other during the peacetime. We basically hated each other in the beginning and sometimes, I'm convinced that the only reason we ended up friends is that we were the only two people around the same age down there. We'll never really know

But we'll never really know if we'd be good together either. We're the only people in the world who knows what the other has been through. We've both mostly seen the same things and it's only on the bad days that the connection wasn't real.

You'd probably tell me I'm being an idiot right now and you're probably right. You probably don't even think about me most of the time, moved on, figured out a way to be happy. Well, I'm working on that last part, I promise.

For the rest of the time he reads the book, he can't help but imagine a woman with white hair, violet eyes, and more bravery than he ever imagine a person could have. He wonders if after all these years, he's able to imagine her right.

Oedipus Rex is a refreshing end to the semester. Gregor can find none of himself in the story. Of all the horrors he's witnessed, a man killing his father to marry his mother because of some ancient prophecy thankfully doesn't make the list. Yes, there's the whole aspect of a life being ruled by visions of the future, but if he let that trope bother him, he would have nothing to read at this point.

It's the day before his tragedy final and he should be looking over his notes on the influences of tragic form and meter, but he finds himself looking over his summary of Oedipus. Had Oedipus' family told him of the oracle's words, they would have saved a whole lot of heartbreak and unnecessary incest. Knowing his prophecy had worked for him, in a way. Sure there's fate plays a hand but he chose to jump in that pit, not some force unseen, and he did so because he has all the information. Isn't that what they all say anyway? The truth will set you free.

It's time to tell the truth to himself.

Luxa, I want to go back. I think about it all the time. This was the only place I belonged. It made sure it was the only place I belonged. I can't think about what I want to do with my life because I only think of myself there When I picture my future, I see myself down there with you. I'm never sure what I'm doing but I'm there and I'm happy. Like actually happy, not this temporary facsimile that I've been slogging through for the past ten years.

But I can't go back. Not now at least. I need to be okay up here, away from everything I saw that year, before I can ever think about returning. I still love you all. I never stopped and I still care about the fate of the world down there. But I spent so long thinking about you guys that I lost myself. I need to find that again.

I think I'll be back. Pencil me in for eventually.

Professor Medina smiles at him when he hands in his final two hours and a hand cramp and a half later. "How do you think you did, Mr. Campbell?"

He shrugs. "Hopefully not too terribly. I don't know if my GPA could survive that hit."

Her laugh doesn't sound like tinkling bells or anything special, but it warms him up nonetheless. "I am sure you did fine. You were a joy to have in class. Very perceptive."

"Let's just say I have some experience with tragedy."

"Well, if you ever need anything, a letter of recommendation or the like, please let me know. I would love to help." She sobers a bit. "You do not have to answer if you do not feel comfortable but I have to ask. Your catharsis. Did my course help you find it at all?"

Gregor thinks of the notebook in his backpack, filled and then some. He thinks of all the times the things he's read have forced him into some kind of clarity, or at least, articulated his confusion. More importantly, he realizes that he might still have dreams about it. They might still wake him up screaming. And yes, he still thinks about it more than he should, still thinks about all those they lost but he doesn't feel like the Underland is going to burst from beneath his skin anymore. He hasn't for a long time. Those feelings aren't purged entirely so much as managed, but he's pretty sure the effect is the same.

"Yes. Thank you."

His finals end a few days later and he finds himself sitting on a bench at the edge of campus, thumbing through his letters. Already, they've attained a kind of nostalgic status, late nights with ink-stained fingers and emotions running too deep or too close to the surface to adequately name. His entire semester is pressed between the pages, to a lesser extent his last ten years.

In his backpack, there's one of those thick orange envelopes with Mrs. Cormaci's address written out in steady script across the front. She's getting on in years; last time they spoke, her son had moved back in to help out around the place. After everything that happened, she's still in that building, probably helping some other family like his trying to get by. They still talk once or twice a month and she sends him care packages full of her famous cooking on the same schedule. He's sure he could get her to pop down to the laundry room and send his message through the vent.

But Gregor's not ready for that yet. The idea of talking to Luxa, that's fine. But her reading and, even worse, responding, to the things he's kept inside for too long turns his stomach. Sure, he's thought of what she might say, but that's nothing compared to the real thing. She's always had a penchant of surprising him and he's not sure that will be a good thing this time.

So instead, he pulls a lighter out of his pocket, an old Zippo that his grandmother gave him before she died. He rips them out one by one and re-reads them before setting them aflame and scattering their ashes.

One day, Gregor may find himself writing these letters again. He's sure that there will come a time when everything surfaces once again, when he's 12 and trapped in the dark. Maybe he'll go back before that happens and none of it will matter.

Until then, he has found his catharsis.