When we say “Kilometer 35, Athens-Lamia,” just where are we measuring from? From the city center, obviously, but from where exactly?

That’s how our friend Thanasis started off a conversation—the sort that usually fizzles out pretty quickly. But Thanasis was insistent. Once the dispute over Omonia versus Syntagma had been cleared up (revealing, in the process, who among us was truly clueless), the inquiry proceeded to the next stage, which was also the more interesting. From Syntagma, yes, but from where? From the steps? The fountain? The metro? The lawn? Where?

He began recounting his adventure to us. “This morning, I was looking into the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. I spoke to the Greek branch of the General Conference on Weights and Measures, which is headquartered outside of Paris with all of its expert metrologists. ‘Μέτρῳ χρω’, ‘Use measure’, their seal says, in Greek! But what about us Greeks? Don’t we get anything? Is it always about the foreigners? Then I called the Ministry of Commerce, at the General Secretariat for Commerce’s Office for Periodic Inspection of Weights and Measures:

“‘We’re not in charge of that, sir, we oversee weighing and measuring instruments meant for commercial, not scientific or laboratory, use.’

“‘Then you can go to hell!’

“Next I called the traffic police. Automated response … ‘For license plate confiscation and return, press 1. For towing, press 2. For moped license issuance, press 3. For traffic incidents, press 4.’ When I managed to get through to someone, I shouted at him: ‘Hey, pal, has Greece signed the treaty of 1875: yes or no?’

“‘It’s the Region of Attica that handles kilometer distances, sir, not us,’ ‘the Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Networks’, ‘the Department of Public Works’.”

He had spent the entire morning on the phone, asking about Kilometer Zero. As was to be expected, each person handed him off to another, sending him on somewhere else just to get rid of him. Traffic, Ministry of Transportation, from Annas to Caiaphas. At first, he spoke to them calmly, but eventually he became incensed in his mission: “Other cities, from ancient Rome and Constantinople with their Golden Milestones, to places from modern-day Ethiopia and Chile to Madagascar, have a monument—a rock, some hunk of bronze—that defines Kilometer Zero. In Havana they’ve got a diamond, a gift from the Tsar. Is it really so difficult, you pathetic Greek, for us to inform our own people just where exactly Kilometer Zero is? ‘I’m on my way, I’m at the hundred and third kilometer from Athens to Lamia.’ ‘Yes, but where?! Where is it?! Where are we measuring from?!’ What does ‘from Syntagma’ mean? My grandmother needs fifteen minutes just to cross ‘Syntagma’! In Seoul, the monument is actually 151 meters away from the exact Kilometer Zero. 151 meters! That’s more than the distance between two ends of a soccer field. Is that what we want? Is that who we are? Are we going to say that Kilometer Zero is here, when it’s really as far off as one goalie waving to the other?”

Smoking was prohibited in the taverna where we were seated, so some of us had gone outside for a cigarette. I went out and told them: “You’re missing it! Get back in here right now!” It’s not every day you get the chance to see your friend at the exact moment he completely loses it.

After forty-five minutes or so, all of us knew that something rather important had transpired that evening. A nervous breakdown, perhaps. And we were right. Just as Eratosthenes drowned himself in the waters of Chalcis because he couldn’t explain the tides of the Euripus Strait, so too did Thanasis fixate on the conundrum with all the hallmarks of obsession. The next week, he didn’t come to the taverna. He stayed home doing research, preparing a proposal for the Ministry about where, to his mind, the marker for Kilometer Zero ought to be. Of course he’d gone to Syntagma, where he’d set up a small fine-measurement workshop. He drew thin straight lines on crucial paving stones to aid in his calculations and toted pencils and other equipment around with him until they kicked him off the square and he had to start working from home.

He spent day and night with the idea. His fate, however, was the same as that of his colleague Agelaus. Agelaus had set out to determine the precise weight of his own head, until he realized that the only way he could do so was by cutting it off. But that’s how these things go: the price of obsession is your head; anything else is just compromise. So Thanasis lost his head. He spent all night over his papers and calculations, agitated and tense.

Brain scientists do not have the slightest idea about what actually goes on in a person’s head. All this nonsense about the cortex, ridges, lobe, hemispheres: fairy tales for little kids. And you can forget what’s been written about psychological disorders and the brain…. In reality, the brain is a shapeless mass (mush) that boils in a round pot (the skull) and is supported by the neck, which also regulates its temperature. The neck is the origin of every mental activity, which is why we clear our throats before speaking. The central human emotions, anger and embarrassment, are both expressed via rises of temperature in the throat. This clearly explains why people’s tone of voice changes when they’re angry and fighting, and accounts for why they sob when they cry. It takes very little imagination to understand that increases of temperature in this pot are likely, even frequent, and that is why the body also has an extinguishing system we call “tears.” Anyway, there’s a reason we take water in through our mouths: to regulate our temperature depending on the season. Thanasis’ mental overstimulation was even more apparent thanks to the bright red cheek flush that accompanied his every facial expression and indicated the high temperature in his brain.

At about six in the morning, when he decided to stop for a little while to get some rest, his brain quit listening to him. Its temperature continued to rise to the point of bursting and nothing could stop it. Thanasis was a conscious devotee of the shapeless mass theory, which is why he kept drinking cold water in attempts to soothe the beast that lived in his head and douse the flames singeing his eyeballs—but it was too late. In the end he exploded, suffering what doctors call a “stroke.”

When he was brought into the hospital, it took them forty-eight hours just to fill out the patient admission forms correctly. By then, Thanasis’ amorphous lump of a brain had already gone dead—in other words, the pilot light at the base of the throat, below the pot, had gone out with no hope of being relit, or so said the doctors. Yet he did not die.

Doctors, as everyone knows, are not selected for their sensitivity. Whoever wants sensitivity should go ask his grandma for a hug. Doctors are scientists. So they told his mother that he couldn’t be admitted because they needed the patient’s signature. When his mother tried to explain that this was impossible because he was in a coma, the doctor had already left, because doctors hold lives in their hands and the last thing they want to do is stand around chatting with patients’ family members. When she went to the main desk, they didn’t mince words: you have to follow directions when you fill out hospital paperwork.

They had admitted him without filling in his father’s name, and without writing his postcode! The simplest and most common mistake, a patient mix-up, happens when you fill out forms willy-nilly. “Do you want us to remove his appendix?” the employee asked her, like a hospital employee trying to be clever with a patient’s family member—which was rather fitting, seeing as a hospital employee trying to be clever with a patient’s family member is precisely what she was.

When (on the third attempt, since everyone in the hospital had come to realize that this woman whose child was in a coma was a complete idiot) she finally managed to fill out the admission forms correctly, the doctor came to visit them. In fact, it was none other than the director of the clinic who paid the visit. He entered the room like a white angel, attended by a herd of specialists who followed him at a breath’s distance, taking care, however, not to annoy him with their breath—to step neither ahead of nor too close to him. He had a white lab coat with pens advertising pharmaceutical companies in his left pocket like medals, worn “over the heart” as we once would’ve said.

The nurse, whom Thanasis’ mother hadn’t been able to motivate into answering questions of any kind, grew nervous at the doctor’s arrival and snapped at Mrs. Vaso (the name of our hero’s mother) that she shouldn’t have moved the room’s side-table to where it better suited her, because one time the doctor had stumbled, and the entire floor had been able to hear the torrent of curses he quite rightly let loose. It’s no wonder that everything is in its place, down to the last centimeter. Lives are at stake in here. Now, however, the time had come to leave aside all these non-medical details and let science take over. And medicine is an exact science, not a free-for-all.

The doctor began to examine the reflections in his pupils, the position of his eyes depending on the movement of his head (doll’s eyes, the godless would call them) and administered all the relevant tests: 20 ml of ice-cold water in the tympanic membrane and so on. Once he had thoroughly examined him with a frown and sure professionalism, the doctor asked his mother—who looked at her lifeless baby, unmoving on the hospital bed, and kept stroking his leg hoping that perhaps the results might change—“What is your name?”

“Vaso.”

“Well, Mrs. Vaso, your son is brain-dead. There’s no chance of recovery.”

The boy’s mother looked at him, speechless. Later the poor woman wanted to ask a whole host of questions, but right now she didn’t ask anything. She thought things over to herself when the doctor left. Where in the corridors would she find him now? He was still with the supervisor who yells at you if you move the side-table around.

This was the beginning of Act II in the exact-measurement drama of Thanasis’ life, or at least in what little of his life remained. His face was white and expressionless, unrecognizable. Mrs. Vaso watched her son dissolve before her eyes, as if they had shut her in the coffin with him to watch the worms devour him. Just like that, out of sadism. At a certain point she had made up her mind. She accepted that her child was dead, and started to ask why they wouldn’t just let her bury him. “That’s impossible,” they told her, “because we can’t get precise readings and he might have hypothermia!”

“What readings do you need to get? Since he’s dead, why don’t you just let me bury my child, since he’s dead!”

“Yes, ma’am, but who will take responsibility for pulling the plug?” (That’s just how they said it, like they were talking about a toaster.) “Will you take responsibility? When someone has hypothermia, the clinical exam doesn’t work correctly. We can’t be sure whether vital functions are still taking place. We’d go to jail for murder if we didn’t get reliable measurements first.”

This conversation replayed over and over, so many times that the real danger became of Mrs. Vaso going to jail for murder, because as we all know no doctor ever goes to prison for actions performed or oversights made in the course of performing his duties. There is a kind of professional solidarity among them—a rare virtue, and one that is always pleasing to encounter. They kept repeating the same thing as Thanasis’ mother wore herself out day after day beside him, watching as he slipped away before her and unable to do anything about it. In order for the exam results to be deemed valid and brain death to be confirmed—to prove, that is, that we don’t take living people off ventilators just for compassion’s sake—four consecutive measurements taken at intervals of three hours must establish that the patient’s temperature is steady at normal levels. Otherwise, hypothermia could present symptoms similar to brain death, leading us to think the patient has died and to send him off before his time.

And yet Thanasis’ body, the body of a man who had been driven to extremes by a passion for exact measurements, continued to resist by playing this (hardly amusing) game. And because the doctor, too, was for his own part a precision enthusiast, despite all their differences these two people who never would have met in normal life were now united by a common concern: Thanasis’ soul could not depart before a precise measurement was taken. This is by no means a simple matter: the armpit, the ear, the mouth, the rectum—everything lies when it comes to temperature. The bottom is about a tenth of a degree warmer than the stomach, which can be about two tenths of a degree warmer than the armpit. The thickness of the skin changes the results. Only a measurement taken from within the brain fluid itself could illuminate the mystery of exact human temperature. And this, naturally, cannot be done with a simple thermometer. Had Thanasis come to, he would have been driven nuts by all this sloppiness. Thermistors, crystal liquids, I have no idea what else—all available means of measurement would have to be used.

An entire month passed like this, with Thanasis’ body refusing to allow his temperature to stabilize enough for the nurses to measure it and the doctors to be satisfied, until at last he became an intubated corpse. It was like sticking a thermometer into one of those ashen cadavers they lay out in a row next to each other in a medical school anatomy class.

The doctor had done everything he could to get the measurement. Now they kept Thanasis alive with so much care that you couldn’t help but think that, if they had only treated him this way from the start, then he might not have wound up like this, a cadaver with a thermometer up his butt. But they kept him alive just like those doctors who work with torturers, whose job it is to make sure the person they’re torturing doesn’t croak before a confession. That, more or less, is how they had him hanging on, in the hopes that he’d just give a precise temperature reading for once and then go to hell. This standoff kept up for forty days, until Thanasis had the last word.

On the day of his passing, they were at last able to get a good and reliable measurement. It was so marvelous, like solving an unsolvable equation. When they saw that, for the third time now, his temperature had held steady, everyone gathered around the nurse and waited in agony: the doctor could finally let him die. When the fourth measurement was taken, his mother swore that she saw him smile. They explained to her that this was impossible, but she said to them: “Don’t I know my own child?”

*Dedicated to the memory of my friend Petros Koutsiampasakos, who spoke to us of ‘Kilometer Zero’ at Taverna Oikonomou.