Demigods and Monsters (11 page)

Since reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians, I've wondered: Was the woman a demigod? Was she a child of Aphrodite, lighting the world with her beauty? Was the homeless man a half-blood like Tyson, unclaimed, unloved, and lost in a world that could never provide him with shelter or understanding? And, if indeed I was treated to a glimpse into Percy Jackson's universe, how come no one else noticed? If these demigods inhabit my hometown, how come I don't see them more often?

In Riordan's world, the gods themselves and their half-blood children, as well as the occasional ordinary mortal, can see through what Riordan dubs “Mist,” a brilliant invention that makes the whole premise of gods among us possible. Mist is the phenomenon that veils gods, as they go about their own twenty-first-century lives, from the view of ordinary mortals. Because I'm not a half-blood, or at least I don't think I am, I'm not supposed to recognize a god even if he or she were standing next to me. The Mist obscures the identity of the gods so people (or ast least
most
people) can't see them for what they are.
¹⁹
Occasionally, however, the Mist suffers a major-league breakdown.

Like during Percy's gym class at Meriwether College Prep in downtown Manhattan, when all Hades breaks loose and a gang of man-eating giants called Laistrygonians attack Percy during a dodgeball game. Suddenly all the kids in the gym find themselves in an explosive, deadly
mêlée
while their coach fiddles with his hearing aid and never looks up from his magazine. Mist renders the coach oblivious, but Mist everywhere else in the gym dissolves, and reality abruptly breaks down. Prompted by Percy, the kids dash for cover. But the blood-thirsty monsters have magically sealed all the exits, barring all hope of escape. Eventually Percy, his half-brother Tyson, and Annabeth manage to flee onto the streets of lower Manhattan. Fire engines roar to the scene of the explosion. And ordinary mortals had witnessed the whole thing, because, for a moment, the Mist had lifted.

But though Mist may lift in a moment like that, it can and must descend again. Exactly how Mist works or why it breaks down at times is a bit unclear in the series—at least to this reader. Nevertheless, we do learn that, when it comes to gods moving among ordinary mortals, Mist seems to generate itself and always has, as Chiron explains to Percy:

And though Mist does break down from time to time, apparently the gods (and demigods) have ways of playing Mr. or Ms. Fix-it. In
The Titan's Curse
, the Mist seems not to be working properly when Percy and his friends enter Westover Hall. But with a snap of her fingers, Thalia manages to restore the Mist enough to allow Mrs. Gottschalk to believe that Percy, Thalia, and Annabeth are students at the school. Thalia's ability surprises Percy, who learns that restoring Mist is a skill Chiron could have taught him. Thus we learn that Mist can indeed be manipulated.

For instance, no one present during the giants' attack at Percy's gym remembers what really happened once the crisis is over. Mist's intervention restored order and translated the chaotic events into ones ordinary mortals could comprehend: namely, that Percy was some crazed bomb-wielding maniac who tried to blow up his school. Bad for Percy, but good for the psyche of the mortal witnesses.

Mist lifts or fails or only half-works several times during the series (one particularly dramatic instance is at the St. Louis Gateway Arch in
The Lightning Thief
), but for the most part the Mist holds fast, gods and their shenanigans remain invisible, and the system works.

Even with the Mist in good working order, the presence of any one of at least the big-league gods (Zeus, Poseidon, Ares, or Aphrodite, for example) does seem to affect the general atmosphere and moods experienced by mortals.

And they affect Percy. When Ares first encounters Percy in the Denver diner in
The Lightning Thief
, Percy tells us “bad feelings started boiling in my stomach. Anger, resentment, bitterness. . . . I wanted to pick a fight with somebody. Who did this guy think he was?” Interestingly, the presence of the god awakens subconscious emotions, fears, or tendencies. Violence is, after all, said to beget violence—or at least feelings of revenge.

In our world, it's hard to know where some moods—particularly the bluesy, down, or bad ones—actually come from. We all know what it's like: Some days you wake up feeling particularly glum or angry or annoyed for no apparent reason. Your mom says, “Hey did you get out on the wrong side of the bed or something?” (I, myself, have never figured out exactly which is the “right” side of the bed!) Everything from that first buzz of the alarm clock to the last few minutes before you go to bed that night just seems to go from bad to worse. You get to school with mismatched socks (or shoes—believe me, that happened to a friend of mine once!); you leave your fave lunch box on the bus; you forget to bring your homework or you discover the cat really did eat that book report; to top it off, the class bully starts a text message smear campaign making fun of your mismatched socks!

Whatever it is that's gone wrong, I suspect that what side of the bed you got out on has little to do with it. In Riordan's world at least some of it could be chalked up to the presence of Hermes—a prankster if there ever was one. And Ares might be prodding that bully to nastier exploits than usual. If he needles him hard enough, those text messages might turn into a physical pummeling during an afterschool scrimmage session right under the eyes of a conveniently distracted coach. But there is an upside or two. Maybe Apollo decides to help you wreak revenge on the bully. Or the sun god, who is also the god of poetry, wafts into English class on a beam of sunlight and inspires Mr. Bully to jump up and recite a really, really, bad haiku—in praise of
you
!

If you don't know what's going on, it can be confusing. Percy experiences this himself when he enters the Tunnel of Love, touches Aphrodite's scarf, and momentarily turns to mush.

The Greek gods have always reveled in the joys, sorrows, and tragedies of mortals. The atmosphere we breathe is charged with their qualities, good and bad, the love as well as the hate. Just read
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. Sometimes, however, the gods don't just
change the atmosphere by their presence. Often they instigate all sorts of trouble and human upheavals. Homer sure knew what he was talking about: His gods regularly fall in love with humans, battle over humans, and, over eons, promote terrible rivalries and wars between bands of humans. It's not out of the question that they would continue to do so.

The stories recounted in
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
illustrate some particularly annoying habits of these deities, habits that make them less than good neighbors. After all, their favorite pastime seems to be interfering in human affairs. Twenty-first-century America provides ample fodder for playing out—through human or half-human pawns—their eternal family spats and feuds. And perhaps the supersized negative feelings the activities Riordan's transplanted gods generate also spawn much of the violence in our world today.

Could it be that Ares was frolicking amid the carnage in Percy's hometown on 9/11? Which brings up the question, why might Ares be in New York, as Riordan suggests, to begin with?

The simple answer is that all the gods in Percy Jackson and the Olympians have, like hoards of others, immigrated to America, and their headquarters is New York City. Why New York? I doubt it's because they are either Mets or Yankees fans.

Riordan's explanation is in keeping with his mastery of Greek mythology and the culture of Ancient Greece. As Chiron tells Percy when he arrives at Camp Half-Blood, New York is simply their home base. Today's Mount Olympus is on the 600
^th
floor (right, that's not a typo) of the Empire State Building. The divine abode hasn't been in Greece for millennia. Chiron explains that Western Civilization is “a collective consciousness that has burned bright for thousands of
years. The gods are part of it.” The whole Western worldview
first
flowered in Ancient Greece, then moved to Rome and eventually beyond as time passed and the center of power moved. Since gods are immortal, they don't die out with the passing of civilizations or kingdoms. Instead as power shifts in the Western world, they are forced to relocate to the empire or country that's currently dominating the scene—which in the twenty-first century is the good old USA. And the only place to set up their home base is the nexus of that power—in this case, the Big Apple.
²⁰

New York City happens to be the best location for those gods to settle for many reasons. First of all, it's one of the most high-energy places on the planet—some would say too high-energy, since the city is purported never to catch a night's sleep. Nothing in New York City seems to move slowly enough to be brought into focus—walking the streets and avenues of this town, there's a distinctive feeling that everything's caught in fast-forward. The gods seem to thrive on this frenetic energy, even if most of the mortals don't, and the half-bloods among us no doubt walk around distracted and endlessly confused. All this excess energy is readily available to fuel family feuds, and certainly must help power up the strife the gods continue to sow among humans.

Now another reason New York, New York, would feel like home-sweet-home to these Ancient Greek deities: New York isn't just frantic, it's over-the-top wealthy—the perfect place to indulge in all the heady high-end perks of the high life.

Personally I suspect that while the gods are the very bedrock of Western Civilization and need to settle in its power-base, they also can't stomach anything less than living the good life in ultimate
luxury. I can't picture Aphrodite in a third-world country, can you? Now Saks Fifth Avenue is another thing.

The idea of the gods living among us mere mortals is scarcely new, at least as far as the Ancient Greek deities are concerned. Look up Mount Olympus in the dictionary—it is indeed “home of the gods,” but it also has a real geographic location: Northern Thessaly.

Michael Grant points out in
Myths of the Greeks and Romans
that though the gods don't live
with
ordinary people, they do live “on, or not too far from the earth.” And in
Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
, Edith Hamilton says, “The exact spot where Aphrodite was born of the foam could be visited by any ancient tourist; it was just offshore from the island of Cythera.” She also says that Pegasus lived in a real stable in Corinth.

Similarly, Percy and his friends finally locate Nereus in
The Titan's Curse
in San Francisco. The ancient sea god is disguised (of course) as a homeless man, fishing on a wharf. So if you want to find the old man of the sea himself, book a vacation in the Bay Area and check him out while you're there.

Much like the immortals of the Greek era, Riordan's deities have a home base on Mount Olympus but can basically hang out anywhere they want. So Percy's first encounter with Ares occurs outside a Denver, Colorado, diner. Ares, as far as we know in the series, doesn't live in Denver. His presence in the Mile High City has one purpose: to talk to (and trick) Percy.

While wondering why these divinities have deigned to grace us with their presence, we might also ask ourselves if we should really welcome their presence here.

The gods do provide convenient scapegoats. It would be nice to be able to blame all contemporary conflicts and injustices on the
whims of disinterested gods. Maybe the violence that bloats our cable news channels is not triggered by acts of ordinary mortals: Maybe monster hags and raging war gods are causing the whole mess to begin with. After his bus to the West Coast blows up not far from the George Washington Bridge in
The Lightning Thief
, Percy voices just this sentiment in his narration: “It's nice to know there are Greek gods out there, because you have somebody to blame when things go wrong.”

When the gods moved to New York, they came with plenty of baggage: their feuds, their wars, their Olympian-sized dysfunctional families; their inability to keep promises and vows (particularly of matrimony). Like true rock stars they've paraded onto the scene with their entire entourage: monsters in the form of Furies, Cyclopes, the Hydra, the Ophiotaurus; various spirits (naiads, dryads, and satyrs, among others); magical beings like the Gray Sisters and their taxi service; and let's not forget the Oracle. In fact, the whole assortment—or at least a generous sampling—of weirdoes that populated the mythical realms of Ancient Greece turn up in the course of the series.
²¹
And these weirdoes don't just “turn up” and make cameo appearances. Far from being window dressing or sidekicks, this motley crew provides much of the action on all of Percy's quests.
²²

In light of all the baggage these gods bring with them, I find myself wondering, is the presence of these gods such a good thing? The answer is, that's a really bad question. First of all, in the world of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, they are already here, and are having too good a time to plan on leaving soon. Secondly, when it comes to sending these inconvenient neighbors back to where they came from, we can't. We, and possibly those very gods themselves, just don't have the choice.