Scorpionfish

  Rami walked ahead, wearing giant headphones, and I told this all to Dimitra. About her forgetting me at the squat, about the way she talked about her work. “It’s like she’s living in a slightly altered reality, one the rest of us enter and leave.”

  “How strange,” Dimitra said, and sighed.

  7

  Mira

  The weather grew warmer. There was a garbage strike. Bright-colored trash bags filled the curbs and alleyways, and we stepped over their overflowing contents and avoided the blocks that were unnavigable. We talked about which stretches were particularly foul—a stretch along Plateia Mavili, or the entire top end of Monastiraki. Athinas had become a sea of trash, and Omonia was worse, so we avoided it completely. I was relieved my balcony faced the courtyard and not the street. Still, we went out. There was not much that could keep Athenians indoors.

  My late-night conversations with the Captain continued, a natural part of my evenings, a sort of self-narration for us both. Our stories intertwined like a double helix. He spoke to me in both English and Greek, as if he were still deciding which of his selves to be with me, as if I were somehow defining that self. Then, as though the vastness of the sea had swallowed him up, he’d be silent for a few days, and then he’d continue a conversation I had all but forgotten. Getting to know him felt both wild and a little strange, and I became aware of him the way I’m aware of sun on my face: particularly noticeable when eclipsed by a cloud.

  We stayed on our own balconies, but he’d sometimes pass a cigarette to me; one night we shared a few bottles of beer, and another night, when I’d made stuffed tomatoes and peppers, I offered him one on a little plate. These were the only times I saw his face.

  Those evening conversations felt like entering a confessional: the priest probably knew who sat behind the wall but in the public light of day would never acknowledge it as fact. And, as upon exiting a confessional, in the light I felt both unburdened and a little uncertain. Not that I had tumbled out of the dark of a confessional since I was thirteen years old, my last year in Catholic school, even though we were not Catholic.

  Though I’d told him about my parents, the Captain asked me very little else about my past, about Aris, about the two serious relationships I’d had before him, and the string of less-serious ones in between, and I followed suit. Questions like that can come across as demanding. Instead, I told him my present: about Rami—his love of art and comics; his desire to be a writer; the way he’d asked, the other day, how you knew where to begin a story; the way I’d hugged him before I could attempt an answer. I told him about Dimitra and Fady, and Nefeli too, working on her exhibition.

  One night, at the mention of Nefeli’s name, the Captain grew quiet. It was after eleven, and we spoke quietly. I knew she was close with his father, who he said appeared to be missing. He said this in a nonchalant way, as though his father often went missing. Appeared to be missing. I thought of the phrase. He’d spoken with his father’s doctor and friends, he said. I asked if he was concerned and he said he’d go to the island soon. A friend’s daughter’s christening. He’d look in on him then. He’d grown used to his father disappearing over the years—spontaneous trips to Crete or Rome, though he never left southern Europe—and he was less worried about this silence than what the silence might imply. It wasn’t the state of his absence, but the condition of it. The Captain said he’d notified the island police, but they had laughed and told him to relax.

  Still, I could tell he was trying to remember the last time they’d spoken. When I asked Nefeli about the strange, confused comments I’d seen the Captain’s father make on Nefeli’s social media posts, she’d hinted at his beginning stages of dementia. I knew the Captain didn’t see these posts because he was completely absent from the internet, never existed there at all. I hesitated. “I’ve met your father,” I said, and I assumed he knew how.

  This was not the first time I had felt a sort of barefaced intimacy between us when such an intimacy seemed impossible, an intimacy that was less comforting than it was destabilizing, as if time had jumbled and we existed both in that present moment and a much later, future one, with a shared history and the ability to understand each other without speaking.

  “I feel like a beer,” he said, suddenly. “Want one?”

  I didn’t tell him I’d already had two. For a moment I thought he was asking if I wanted to go out somewhere, but I wasn’t sure, so I just said okay, thank you, and waited.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  I stood to go inside and get some pistachios to share, and for a second I leaned over the divider to have a good look at his balcony. Two chairs, a small table, an ashtray, a large selection of plants, herbs. I recognized the oregano and thyme. From that angle I would have been able to see into his apartment except he hadn’t turned on the light. When he appeared back in the doorway with two glasses he smiled to see me there.

  “Hi,” I said. I might as well have been watching him take a shower. That’s how caught I felt.

  But he didn’t seem to mind. He handed me a glass of beer and I could feel him take in my entire body: face shoulders chest waist legs. From underneath his T-shirt I could see a glimpse of a tattoo under his sleeve. Nice biceps, nice shoulders. I reached over to touch his arm and thanked him for the beer. We each sat back down, hidden again from the other’s gaze, and I felt desire, melancholy, embarrassment, joy.

  “The tattoo I got years ago,” he said.

  I laughed. He’d seen me notice. Had I been staring? I took a sip from the small glass. Now what. I shifted in my chair.

  “Only one?” I asked.

  He told me it covered his left arm, onto his chest.

  “Maybe you’ll show me some time,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah?”

  “This beer is great,” I said.

  “A pilsner, from Crete. Do you like it?” I could tell by his voice he was smiling, and I was glad he could no longer see me, the surely stupid grin on my face. I said, “Very much.”

  •

  The front-door key I finally found in the wooden cigar box of keys and notes and coins my parents kept on the highest bookshelf, or maybe Haroula had kept it there. I also found some loose drachmas, and an envelope filled with three hundred euros, which was obviously my mother’s, who hoarded cash all over the house. There was also an extra key to the island house, which I hadn’t been to since before my parents’ deaths—I would go soon, but somehow, leaving Athens made me feel anxious, as if I’d return and this apartment, this balcony, the Captain, would all have disappeared.

  Appear to be missing.

  Aris had stopped calling, at least for the time being, and his silence was a relief; his absence easier to handle without his constantly picking at the scab. I had become used to the distance between us after all, and with that came a certain leveling of emotions—to be in a constant state of longing, of missing, was too much. When I came across his name in the newspaper, though, voicing support for the strikers or talking about the economy, I felt the hot shame of rejection renewed.

  Meanwhile, I talked with Rami about story and graphic novels, which he said he was writing but was not yet ready to show me. He was barely a teenager but his seriousness of purpose was astounding. I spent a lot of time at the squat but often just ran errands: one afternoon, I took several kids from the squat to an eye checkup, and Rami had come along, wearing his own new glasses and holding one of the little girl’s hands. Two American college students who’d been working as volunteers, teaching English, had left abruptly—to them their volunteering was bundled up with vacationing, and the vacationing won—and Dimitra suggested I might fill in. So I showed up two afternoons a week. Afterward, I tutored Rami on his own: it was less like a language class and more like our own little book club. I loved his quick wit—so rare in a language that was one’s second, third—a wit you’d think would belong to a much older boy. Then again, I often thought of Rami as younger than he was.

  Some of my
suggestions Rami rolled his eyes at: Those are for kids. He wanted more substance: he was writing a book too. But Dimitra had suggested I keep it light. We read together, mostly in English, though he was learning the basics of Greek as well, the way kids just absorb language through their skin. English would be more useful to him, he said, because he was leaving. We’d finished American Born Chinese and The Encyclopedia of Early Earth and were beginning Ms. Marvel and Anya’s Ghost. I’d ordered a slew of graphic novels online. I’d arrange them in front of him and he’d choose the next. He mentioned his brother in Germany often, whom he talked to on video chat; his family was growing anxious, frustrated at the slowness of the system, the failure of the reunification procedures. But he never directly mentioned leaving. Besides, the system all seemed so chaotic, so disordered, that nothing really seemed to matter. He’d left his home, alone, in the middle of a war. He’d made it here; he probably wasn’t worrying too much about the legalities. But he seemed torn. “I love my brother,” he said. “I miss him. But.”

  “But?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  One afternoon after my class at the squat I waited for Rami, who was late, which was unlike him. I could feel my pulse quicken as I looked around inside. I asked Nadine, who ran the classes for the smaller kids. No one had seen him. Dimitra didn’t answer when I called, so I tried Fady.

  He picked up and immediately apologized. “Sorry, lost track of time.” Rami was with him. “Come by the workshop.”

  When I arrived, I heard Cretan lute music playing loudly and found the two of them, each seated on one of the ergonomic work stools. Fady was showing Rami how to use a leveler. “What’s this?” I asked. Rami, in turn, demonstrated for me the way to use the tool, explaining what they were working on with an almost rehearsed bravura.

  “He’s a natural.” Fady grinned, and Rami shyly shrugged.

  This was of course better than idly roaming the city, or sitting in the crammed classroom at the squat with kids of all ages. Fady gave him attention, he spoke to him in Arabic and English and Greek, and he was learning something. “I wasn’t much older when I started apprenticing,” he said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Later, though, I understood Fady had brought him to the workshop not simply to keep an eye on him but to create yet another connection, that Fady hoped Rami’s interest in instrument-making would somehow further tether him to their lives.

  “I cleared this table,” Fady said, his tone shifting now to business. “I have to leave for an hour or two, a shift at the asylum office. You can work here.”

  Whereas Leila would pout with any sudden change of plans, Rami was spontaneous, quick with transitions. From his small backpack he pulled out a Staedtler eraser, a few graphite pencils. He opened his sketch pad and, with some prodding from Fady, showed me several of his sketches of the workshop: propped against a beige futon were two cellos in various stages—one brand new, not yet strung, and one in need of bridge repair.

  I told him they were very good, and he smiled. But he became distracted by his phone, sending messages to his brother in Berlin. He looked up at me suddenly, as if he’d read something on his phone he wanted to tell me, and asked when I’d go back to the States. I told him I didn’t know. This seemed to surprise him—it surprised me too, saying it out loud, since I had always left by the middle of August. When my parents had been alive I’d felt a heavy, unspoken obligation to live close to them: no more than a two-hour plane ride away. I had always been the parent, had always played the role they should have played with me. Perhaps it’s why I’d never had the urge to have children. Not really, anyway.

  Whereas the return to the States always felt like a natural, bittersweet part of my life, the cycle of the school year and the summer, the thought of going back to the States now felt flat-out depressing. It had never been easy, my departure signaling not only a return to the States and a goodbye to Aris and all my friends here, but also a return to the grind of classes, the endless e-mails, the university politics, an academic life obsessed with who worked the most, where productivity was not a quality but a virtue, and a passive-aggressive bullying that seemed to define my department’s primary means of communication—a life I myself had worked so hard to obtain. The six years in graduate school, a postdoc, and finally a tenure-track job that always seemed like a dream, something that happened to other people. All the while my connection to Greece on a parallel and sometimes intersecting track: my dissertation-turned-book had been about women’s experiences of the junta. Somehow, having Aris remain here in Athens, and the solid connection of my parents, comforted me. Now, the thought of being away from Greece felt unbearable, unfathomable, as if it could all slip away from me, and my life in the States felt as though it belonged to someone else. I watched Rami paging through his sketchbook. What would it be like, to not go back at all? To stay here, in Athens, or at least in Europe? There were universities, institutes, think tanks. Maybe I could find something.

  More than ever, I felt deeply connected to the grit and beauty of Athens, coupled with the ghostly world of my memory and imagination. Say what you will about it—this country’s structure of feeling was not one of isolation. America was a very lonely place.

  Rami showed me a series of drawings, thumbnails. Most were of his neighborhood in Damascus, the first he’d mentioned it. Fady and Dimitra’s large flat was much like his flat in Damascus, he said, the orange trees on the street, the smells, the balcony that wound around the entire building. I asked if he missed it, and he shrugged, said yes, he missed his friends, his classes and teachers, the particular place he liked to go after school for a snack. “It’s part of your novel?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said, and smiled. I was worried this talk of home would have upset him, but I think equally upsetting was the idea that this life, too, was temporary. It pained me that his world, his emotional landscape, was so beyond my knowledge, and I was torn between feeling that I could do only so much for him, we could do only so much for him, and the nagging sensation that we could do everything, could do so much more.

  I worked on my laptop and Rami read a graphic novel I’d brought him, every so often interjecting to ask me the meaning of a word. I watched his face, waiting for him to continue our conversation, but he became immersed in his book, and we stayed in the sunny studio for the afternoon, until three, when Dimitra came for Rami, inviting me for lunch.

  We walked back to their place, winding around bags of trash on the sidewalk. Dimitra told me about the students she tutored, a side job. Most of them went to the prep school where Aris had also gone: basically, she said, she wrote their college application essays. There was one student in particular, his parents ran a paper company or were big in shipping, she couldn’t remember—“Does it matter?” she asked—who’d told her he’d only apply to Cornell and Berkeley as “backups,” so sure he was he’d get into Princeton or Yale. “Well,” Dimitra said.

  We stopped in the pharmacy because both Leila and Rami had allergies. Rami tried to describe in English what it was that made him sneeze, and he switched to Arabic with Dimitra, who was not exactly fluent but could certainly get by, and at this moment I could feel two men glaring at us. I turned and caught one’s eye—provocation, I know. But I wanted them to see the disgust in my face.

  When we exited the pharmacy, the two men—black T-shirts, black jeans, shaved heads—moved and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, already narrowed by a tree whose roots had dislodged several paving stones, which jutted out like teeth. Rami did not notice the men or their stares, or perhaps he did and had grown inured to them; he carefully stepped into the street to avoid them and self-consciously switched back to English.

  Dimitra followed Rami off the sidewalk, stepping down from the curb. I refused. I held the eye of the larger man as I neared him, calling their bluff, waiting for them to part. But as I passed, one of them shoved me so hard with his shoulder that I lost my footing and stumbled on the broken cobbles, car
eening headfirst toward the tree. Attempting to catch myself, hands fumbling, I managed to avoid direct impact, but felt the rough bark of the tree against my cheek as I jerked and twisted my head away, inertia carrying me forward, sprawling me onto the pavement.

  At first I was so stunned I could only stare at the ground. I tried to sit up, knees and hands still numb and tingling from the impact but already bleeding. “What the fuck,” I shouted.

  I drew my hand to my cheek—it felt as though I’d been punched in the face—and felt the ragged scrape from the bark of the tree. I was lucky I hadn’t been knocked unconscious. My fingers came away with bright blood. I thought Rami was going to cry as Dimitra knelt down to help me up. The men watched, as if daring me. Then they turned and walked slowly away.

  The pharmacist had heard me shout, heard Dimitra yell after the men, and she came out of the store. She began to assess my injuries, turning my hands over in hers, bending down to inspect my knees, brushing away some of the larger pieces of gravel.

  I looked to Dimitra.

  “You’re crazy if you think the police will do anything,” she said to me in English, as if reading my thoughts. “They’re on their side.”

  The pharmacist brought us back inside and sat me down on a plastic chair. She carefully cleaned my hands and knees, using a pair of tweezers to pull out small bits of glass and gravel. Once she was done sterilizing the abrasions with Betadine, she applied the bandages. Then she brought out a small kit and began to clean my face. I smelled the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol moments before I felt its burn. The pharmacist was talking with Dimitra, telling her I needed stitches, as if I weren’t there. I wondered if I should go the hospital, but the pharmacist seemed skillful, albeit a bit gruff. I winced as she numbed my cheek, prepared the needle. Rami cringed, unable to watch, and waited at the other end of the pharmacy, anxiously flipping through his drawings.