Scorpionfish

by Natalie Bakopoulos

  He shifted on his feet, as if ready to break into a run. I became aware that he’d been in my thoughts. I felt a wash of relief—someone else, alive and walking around at this hour. Let alone this someone else.

  “I was walking and saw you.”

  You as in me? Or you as in a person. I still couldn’t tell if he recognized me. I realized I had not yet spoken and that my silence was probably unsettling. “Do you want to join me?” My voice sounded different: thick and deep. I gestured around the taverna to the seat in front of me, as if it were the middle of the afternoon. For a moment he didn’t move. Didn’t laugh, or even smile. Was he sleepwalking? My mother used to sleepwalk and it always frightened me: she would suddenly be standing in my doorway, laughing, and say something crazy, like, Oh, you! You’re a paper finger! You’ve come for the furniture train, wait for the celery, do you need an umbrella or a bookcase?

  I was hesitant. You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker. Why? Heart attack? But then he sidled over, as if we were in a crowded bar and had met eyes across the room.

  “It would be nice to have something to drink,” he said.

  Neither of us said anything for a moment. It was not awkwardness.

  “Insomnia?” I asked.

  He nodded. “A dangerous place to sleepwalk,” he said, looking past me, over the cliff.

  He walked across the dark restaurant to behind the now-empty bar, and then he disappeared into the kitchen, which apparently was not even locked. He came back with a beer and two small tumblers. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The owner is a friend. I’ve been coming here since I was a child.”

  I slid my feet off the chair but he sat down next to me—not too close—on the bench; there was something both pal-ish and warm about the gesture. He leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee. He wore white ankle running socks with a blue stripe at the top. Endearing. His physicality, the everydayness of it. He offered me a cigarette.

  “Oh why not.” He lit it for me. “Always quitting.”

  “I remember.”

  “Your father?” I asked, after a moment.

  “He’s fine. Holed up on the hill, in Nefeli’s cottage this whole time. Obsessed with his bees. Something both selfless and self-centered. Careful tending, with no response, no acknowledgment. Honey. In his old age, this sort of careful, repetitive task, wrapped up in solitude, suits him.”

  “Okay,” he added. “The truth is, he’s losing his mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He sighed and looked as though he were ready to divulge some painful secret. We had not been in the habit of talking these last weeks; we had forgotten our rhythms, and anyway, we were not used to the other’s physical presence.

  I tried to store his face in my memory then. His hair was graying slightly at the temples and otherwise was nearly blond from the sun. High cheekbones. Behind his glasses, eyes like a big cat. His nose was sunburned; I could tell by the light of the moon. Otherwise, there was a heaviness to the space, a density to his presence, our joint presence here that was somehow pitched at an angle to everything else.

  The rest of the world was quiet, and the Captain began to speak.

  “So I’d been right. Katerina is in love. She swears nothing has happened, that she did not cheat. Anyway, I hate that word, cheat: to act dishonorably to obtain something advantageous. The word alone makes a mockery of marriage. Besides, how can she help the way she feels? I’m not telling you about my moments of jealousy, irrational rage, or the circular conversations I’ve put her through, exhausting us both. I suppose at times I was furious, but I knew I had no right to be.

  “Everything I do in life feels like an atonement for earlier behavior. My last day on the ship, when we arrived at Piraeus, my quartermaster informed me that our supervisor was waiting for me. He’d come in from the company’s headquarters in Brussels. I knew he was there for other business as well, but I also knew that the main point was to see me. I packed my bags, took down the notecards and photos and things I would miss. I knew that I would not sleep in that small cabin again. The walk to his office was a long one.

  “‘We know you were acting out of kindness, not malice,’ he said.

  “Of course it was kindness. It was beyond kindness. It was duty. Collusion with smugglers, they said. That would assume I’d been rewarded, and I had not. Someone I trusted had come to me, asked for help. It was humanitarian, I thought. Not criminal. Facilitating migration was the charge. Well, yes. Isn’t that also what a ship captain does? Language, here, will distort, and when you take something too literally it nearly disappears. But it’s true I had looked the other way. It had seemed like the right thing to do.

  “Anyway. For me, nothing feels more dispiriting than the idea of staying in one place, yet for some I know it’s a luxury. And each year I veer closer to that very thing—from the long voyages in the Pacific to those shorter European routes. Maybe next, if I am lucky, I’ll have some shorter Aegean routes or even something ashore, my old life disappearing like the green flash of the sun as it dips below the horizon—until I’ll go no farther than the kiosk for my newspapers and cigarettes, like my father, whose farthest movement from the home, until recently, was an occasional drive to the next town for coffee or afternoons down at the beach for a swim. Mostly he moves between the house, the café, and his bees, which he began keeping after politics had worn him down. The body holds memory longer than the mind.

  “It’s no wonder I remain in limbo.”

  •

  At what point did I shift in my seat, sit cross-legged, and touch his arm? At what point did I stand to refill our water glasses? At what point did we finish the beer and get another? The details of the chronology are hazy but the events are clear, hyperfocused. When I returned with a full carafe of water the Captain pulled me onto his lap, facing him, and my hands fell naturally around his neck, played with that fine hair there, then moved down over his shoulders. He let out a long breath, something between a sigh and a groan. He moved his hands under my shirt. “Is this okay,” he asked.

  I remember the early purply light, and the sunrise, which came way too soon.

  18

  The Captain

  I returned to my father’s home at dawn, and when I woke a few hours later I replayed the night with Mira in my mind. When I went into the kitchen, my father was having his breakfast on the terrace that overlooked the valley. I poured myself a cup of coffee, adding a lot of milk and sugar, and stood at the counter, trying to delineate where the night had ended. I brought the coffeepot outside and refilled my father’s cup. He thanked me absentmindedly, like I did this every day, and stirred in his sugar. The church bells chimed, but otherwise the village was quiet.

  My father was always meticulous about his breakfast: a loaf of bread on a wooden tray, a cloth napkin draped over it, a serrated knife to cut it. A little pot of butter, a little pot of jam. Fruit. Brewed coffee; Greek coffee was for the afternoon. He usually read the papers but they sat stacked on the table, untouched. He saw me eye them and shrugged.

  When I sat he passed me the bread and asked me again about Katerina. Was he being polite or did he know something more? I wondered what Katerina had told him. Had he heard me leave in the middle of the night, then return at sunrise? Not interrupting, not saying a thing, my father listened to me talk for some time.

  “There are no secrets,” he said to me, and I could tell he also knew I was no longer working. But his tone was not accusatory, as I would have guessed. Just matter-of-fact. It was early but the sun beat down, and I had to keep wiping my brow with a napkin. My father, though, appeared unbothered by it. In fact, he seemed overall quite well that morning, not forgetting words or mixing things up, or acting as though the very distant past was right behind us in the kitchen. I knew this didn’t mean much—I guessed he was always best in the morning—but it calmed me a bit.

  My father cut up a nectarine and handed me a slice. He would never say something like, Whatever makes you hap
py. It’s not the way he saw the world. Happiness, to him, was a by-product, not a goal, an idea I was beginning to share.

  After breakfast, I drove to the closest beach for a swim.

  It was the less-traveled side of the island, away from the port. But the road to the water had recently been widened and cleared, and now crawled with rental jeeps and foreign plates and a minimart, a few rickety beach bars. I could hear the whoops and cries of tourists posing for photos, men flexing their muscles and looking dumbly at the camera, women with that empty, stupid-faced stare that at some point so many not-stupid women took on as customary.

  I turned around and drove to the more secluded, lesser-known cove nearby. At the far end a couple slept, faces down, their bodies splayed out like starfish. I took a quick dip to cool off, then read for a while, a book of short stories organized around the stops of the Athens train, my breathing slowing to that pleasant, slow reading rhythm. Every so often an image from the night before: a shift of the body, a look on Mira’s face, her bare shoulder, would come into my mind, and I would stop reading for a moment. And I had told her so many things, things I could barely admit to myself.

  Then I took a long swim. When we were at the beach, I always splashed around with the kids, playing games, but I can’t remember the last time I swam out with no purpose. I missed the sea deeply: being on it, being in it. Then I stopped moving and floated on my back awhile. Though I can’t say I hadn’t enjoyed this period of idleness—I had, very much—I was too young to retire. I wasn’t ready. I allowed myself, for the first time, to wish for something: it was my own hesitation that kept me from even acknowledging a need. My marriage had long ago become unsalvageable, perhaps, but maybe my job was still within reach. I would call my boss again this afternoon. If not that job, another one.

  When I emerged from the water an hour later, the starfish couple was packing up their things. The woman had long black hair and wore a black striped bikini and a crocheted cover-up that reminded me of a doily. She looked nice. The man wore a bathing suit printed with octopuses. I watched them wind back up the path in their flip-flops, heard their car start and drive away.

  I remained on my small towel. The sea had turned a deep blue-black, and the sun was hidden behind some menacing clouds, low and dark. I could feel pressure on my temples, behind my eyes, along with a general uneasiness, a subterranean dread. I drank the rest of my water and began the steep hike back to the car.

  For some reason I took a slightly different path up. I stopped to take a piss and suddenly was hit with a wretched smell. Something organic, rotting.

  I looked up ahead and in the thicket I saw a dead goat, as if it had slipped and fallen. There were many wild goats on the island, so many that sometimes they stopped traffic. Other times they managed to hike down to the steep cliffs over the water, near the monastery, and couldn’t find their way back up. You might see them from a boat and wonder how they ever made it there in the first place. Often they died there. But after the fires earlier this year, on this end of the island, nothing would grow back with the goats roaming around, so people were encouraged to shoot them. The logical solution of a crazy person. I didn’t love the idea of armed men roaming the island in cars and pickup trucks, looking for animals to kill.

  But the goat did not seem to have been shot. Maybe a broken leg. It unsettled me.

  When I got to the car I leaned up against the hatchback a moment. From the small cooler in the back of the car I retrieved a lemon Fanta, still cold, and sucked it down. Then I drove back to the village, left my car in the lot, and began the walk back to my father’s. I bought two cheese pies at the bakery at the village’s entrance, and this is where I ran into a distressed Mira. She was sitting on a bench, drinking a juice. Her hair was damp and combed straight, close to her head. She wore cutoff shorts and a tank top. She was not flirtatious. She didn’t bother with pleasantries but asked if I’d seen Nefeli. I hadn’t. She’d just checked my father’s house and Aris’s father’s too. “I need to find her. Will you take me?” She held up a small bakery bag, saying she’d bought Nefeli her favorite cookies. She looked dazed as she offered me one, and for more than a brief moment I convinced myself I had imagined the previous night. Or worse: that it had been a mistake.

  At my car, Mira crawled into the passenger seat as if crawling into a bed. After a while, she sat up straight and braided her damp hair, which was already beginning to dry in waves. I tried to make conversation, if only to ease the tension I felt coming from her, but she was distracted, staring out the window. We drove the rest of that winding road in silence.

  19

  Mira

  When we neared the cabin, which I never would have found on my own, up several unmarked winding roads, the Captain parked next to a large shrub and we walked the rest of the way quietly, side by side. Even had I known how to find it, the Fiat would never have made it. Then I followed him up the steps leading to the cottage, which was smaller than I remembered, an old stone shepherd’s dwelling, endless terraced hills in the background, a large patio off the side. Nefeli had painted the doors and wooden shutters bright blue, and on the three white steps leading to the house were those stenciled blue scorpions. “Hello?” we said. The Captain pushed open the door, and I felt a powerful sense of déjà vu.

  But she was not there. The clouds had cleared and the bright haze hurt my eyes, which met the Captain’s briefly. The dreamlike night had offered a thin barrier, one that didn’t exist in sunlight, and it seemed inconceivable that only hours ago I had wrapped my legs around his body. I looked away, and we walked in, taking in the space.

  Bees swarmed everywhere, in and out of the open window of the cottage, around the door, in her kitchen where she’d left a sticky jar of honey on the table. I covered my hand with the striped dish towel that hung on the wall and placed it outside, away from the house. On the patio there was an easel but nothing on it. Behind the cottage was a small herb garden, plots of flowers. I mentioned my surprise that Nefeli was interested in gardening, and the Captain told me his father often tended to them.

  Back inside, I surveyed the place. The stone walls were painted white, and built into them were little cove-like shelves, which housed a small camp stove, a duffel bag, a few notebooks. There were two green wooden chairs covered with embroidered pillows, several bottles of water, a cold cup of coffee, an oily film on the top. In another little cove were two double beds, flowered sheets. I flopped down on one and looked out the window at a spectacular view of the terraced hills, the sea visible in the far distance. I didn’t realize she had this view.

  The Captain watched me carefully. “You okay?” he asked. I shrugged and told him yes. He studied my face a moment. “I swear,” I added.

  “Maybe she’s gone back to Athens,” he said, but I think we both knew she hadn’t.

  He said he was walking down to his father’s hives and disappeared around the back of the cottage. I felt a twist in my chest. All this time, I had thought Nefeli had been performing health for me, but I knew now that she had been performing death. And her anger with me stemmed from my inability to tell the difference; my inability, or my refusal, to see the gesture for what it truly was.

  They say when you’ve experienced intolerable pain, an intense injury, your body becomes oversensitized. Even taking a shower can feel painful on your skin. I imagine it’s the same with emotional pain, with rejection, with grief, both the way it can reemerge and the things we do to shield ourselves from it. I placed the small bag of cookies on the little table, sat down on the bed, my head in my hands.

  Soon, from outside the cottage, I heard the Captain calling to me, but when I tried to answer, my voice cracked. No sound would emerge. I heard him come inside.

  “Mira?”

  “Yeah,” I said, finally. I was still on the bed, head propped in my hands, looking out the window.

  “One of the hives has been knocked over,” he said.

  “I think we should go,” I said.

 
The drive back to the village I barely registered, so immersed was I in replaying moments from the night before, from hours before, from Nefeli’s cottage and the world framed from her bedroom window, all blazing white like the marble quarry, like the bright, low moon. When we returned to the village, the Captain looked first to the sky, which had cleared, though the dark clouds still hung over the other end of the island, near the port. Then he looked back to me. I walked to my car, across the lot, thanking him for his help. He urged me to stay the night. “Please don’t drive back to the port. Rest awhile.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “She’s gone.”

  We did not hug or kiss goodbye, but he placed one hand on my shoulder and the other along my waist and told me to be careful, to get some rest. I was confused but also relieved to not have to talk about what had happened between us, to just have let it happen, to let it be. Things did not feel much different, as if we’d always had this world between us, a large, airy house overlooking the sea, a space we had entered through different doors to find each other sitting underneath a large bay window reading the paper, or at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, our bodies drawing naturally together. I was not sure how I felt about it myself. Somehow it seemed inevitable. Yet perhaps my feelings were colored by my worry about Nefeli, because I felt the sense of an ending, though an ending of what, I wasn’t sure.

  I was distraught by impermanence, by lack of solidity. I am fugitive, I am nothing. I couldn’t get it out of my head, as if someone else were telling it to me. You are nothing. Whose are you? You belong to no one. I drove back to the port quickly, the old Fiat shaking from the speed, held together only by salt.

  It never rained after all, the dark clouds raging across the sky but emptying elsewhere. It would not rain again for a long time.

  •

  I went back to Athens again. I boarded the ferry, and after the ship had pulled away I stood on the top deck until I could no longer see the island, not even a trace. Despite my mood, the sea was soothing in its vastness, the idea that water was connecting me to places around the world: ships and beaches and shores. The history of this island was a history of glaciers and the history of glaciers is a history of life.