by Nick Mamatas
“What is this, a coup?” I shouted. My baseball bat was long gone. Useless, but I would have felt better with something to swing.
“They’re killing the whole city, they want to take over! Don’t you see?” Alexa grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the remains of a hardware store. Junior sprinted ahead of us and made the door first.
The store was wall-to-wall bare. Not even shelves, not a single screw was on the floor. Tools and materials went quickly when the dead arose. We could hide, barely, in the shadows. Junior took out his drill and handed me a spare bit; I clutched it in my hand like a knife. The police had rallied somehow, and charged the mall entrance where the gunfire from the roof couldn’t reach them. One of the paddy wagons rammed the bus as it turned the corner for a second sortie, and there was some hand-to-hand fighting amidst the wreckage of the vehicles. Nothing exploded. Few things do.
We watched for a little while.
Junior was muttering a play by play: “Watch it, that hose is crushed. Oh, they’re going up the side steps now. That’ll be a shooting gallery. Is that a helicopter, can you hear that? No, it ain’t a helicopter . . .”
Alexa drifted deeper into the store, and rushed back to tell us that she had found a door to the basement. I moved to go, but Junior grabbed my arm.
“Dawg, we got a job.”
I handed him his drill bit back. “You’re going to get yourself killed, and there won’t be anyone to cave your head in afterwards. Come with us. Whatever’s going on, we won’t know who won till the morning, and we won’t ever know what it means, probably. ‘What do you think of the French Revolution? It’s too soon to tell . . .’ Know what I mean?”
Junior nodded. “Go with your woman, it’s cool. I’m waitin’ on this out here,” he said. He was as crazy as anyone else, so I had no problem leaving him to try to do whatever mad thing he wanted to accomplish. Drill everyone and stack them up like cordwood probably, but there would be no applause for him. Alexa and I got the basement door open pretty easily thanks to my drill. It was more than ten feet down, unusual for San Francisco construction. We had only the light from our small cell phone screens to guide us around the room, which was as bare as the upstairs, but at least not so exposed. To save batteries, we clapped our phones shut and huddled in the dark, in the cold. There was no reason to even think of going back upstairs.
“Junior was a good guy, but other than that, how are we supposed to even know which side to take?” I said, mostly to myself.
But Alexa answered. “Not the side starring the people who laid the trap and tried to kill us, obviously.”
“Why not? Don’t you believe that the city government is up to no good? It’s not like we elected them anyway. They’re just old bureuacrats who didn’t die and wouldn’t go home.”
“I’m constitutionally incapable of signing up with someone trying to kill me. That’s why I never voted for an anti-abortion candidate, even if I liked all his other positions. No matter how good he was on other issues, if he wanted me bleeding to death in a back alley, with a wire hanger sticking out of my cunt, I voted for the other guy.”
“And if they were both like that?”
“Wrote myself in,” Alexa said. “I wrote myself in a lot, actually.”
“You sound like my father,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see her face, or even much of an outline in the dark, so I just spoke some more. “He’d blame the CIA on both sides of the conflict. He’d see strategic calculations in all the chaos upstairs, like it was all part of a conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy to . . .”
“I don’t know. But he’d think that we were the targets of it.”
“Because we’re Greek?” She laughed.
“Nah, because he doesn’t actually know anyone outside, and he’s a warm, compassionate person toward people he knows. He was, I mean. He knew, I mean.”
She didn’t say anything to that, but did reach out and after some preliminary scrambling around my shin, managed to give my knee a supportive squeeze. Not that there wasn’t a small hill of bodies being piled up above our heads somewhere, not that virtually everyone that everyone knew is already dead—there are dead people, regardless of what the priest says—but there are some that always hurt. I burst into tears and wailed. It didn’t matter who heard me anyway. After awhile, we slept, all tangled up in one another, arms for pillows.
(13)
I’m tempted to start this page with the sentence, “Greeks are Greeks only when Greeks are around Greeks,” but that’s a darling born to be murdered.
By Greeks, I mean Greek Americans anyway, and even with that qualifier I’m deeply suspicious of the claim. What I mean to communicate is that Greek Americans often try to show how Greek they are to other Greek Americans. Except for my family, it seems, they all head back to Greece annually if they can. They celebrate Easter on the “correct” date and crow about inexpensive chocolate rabbits when the feast is a week after everyone else’s. We show off the language, call black people mavri and other white people “whites,” as though we’re not.
My Somerville landlord liked to do this. His name was Kyriakos, but he called himself Charlie, which sounds about as much like Kyriakos as René does. But I called him Mister Papatheofanis. He called me reh—one of the non-word words Greeks use. It’s like “Hey you,” except it really means, “I’m in charge; you’re some schmuck.”
“Ella, reh,” he called to me as I tried to quietly walk up the steps to my room. It was cold enough that steam poured from my mouth, even inside. “I hear you out there, I have message. From some white girl. She came here.”
Papatheofanis didn’t keep his apartment any warmer than mine, I had to give him that.
“Yasas,” he said when I walked in. He was sporting a sleeveless undershirt of the sort middle-class snobs used to call “wifebeaters” because only working class ethnics engage in spousal abuse, don’t you know. He stood up to shake my hand and pat me on the shoulder. Boxer shorts, black dress socks, and well-worn beach sandals that probably rocked the beaches of Chios back in the 1960s. “She still here. Sleeping in the sala.”
“Who is it?”
“Betty,” he said, his b a soft beta. “Your girlfriend, eh?” he asked. I had no idea what he was talking about until I slipped into his tiny living room. Papatheofanis was a widow, so the room was feminine, with a chaise lounge and a worn couch, an enormous television from another era, a large round coffee table swimming with photos in black and white and color of old dead Greeks next to donkeys, Theofanis as a young man in a kitchen, and gap-toothed grandkids with thick eyebrows and heavy bangs standing in front of ridiculous backdrops. A dude ranch. A waterfall shooting rainbows. The room was dark and there were no wall switches. I walked in and switched on a lamp. On the lounge, looking like a pile of laundry, slept Yvette, her back to me, her face buried in her hands.
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“Is she?” Papatheofanis asked me in return. “I have message.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his boxer shorts and handed it to me.
“You answered the door dressed like this, Mister Papatheofanis?” He just looked at me. “I mean, isn’t it cold?”
He shrugged and patted his pot belly. “I got a fire in me, eh?” He hiked his chin, then bowed his forehead and clicked his tongue toward Yvette, like he was saying No! to her. A Greek no looks a bit like an American yes—it’s a nod. “Anyway, take care of this malakies, okay?” To hammer home his lovely point, he made a fist and jerked off an imaginary three foot long phallus, then went back to the kitchen. I heard a fridge opening, the wet pop of a stopper, and then the sink going. An ouzo, with water, surely.
I shook Yvette’s shoulder, but she didn’t awaken immediately. I kissed her on the cheek, then the lips, then was weirded out by my own behavior and by her torpor. I patted her cheek, just short of a slap, and then she shifted her weight on the little couch and opened her eyes till they were slits.
&n
bsp; “Hey,” she said, dreamy. “Wanted to see you. Colin tol’ me you lived here.” She was close enough that I could smell her breath. Not a trace of alcohol, so I instantly decided that she had taken sleeping pills and had come here as part of a very intimate see-what-you-made-me-do suicide.
For a moment, I was giddy—she liked me! Saner, less booze-soaked parts of my brain prevailed. I shook her roughly. “Yvette! Wake up! This very moment, you hear me!” From behind me I heard my landlord’s voice.
“Slap her,” he said. “Slap Betty awake.”
“Yvette!” I said, to him and her both. “Wake up.”
Yvette stirred in my grip. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re not fine,” I said, and I was right as her head began to droop again. I teared up; this was insane.
“That your woman?” Papatheofanis asked. He clinked the ice in his glass, just in case he wasn’t heard from seven feet away. “What you crying for, eh?”
“Mister Papatheofanis, what was she like when she got here?”
He shrugged. “Like that. Sick, eh?”
I remembered the note and read it—it was the first page of the story I wrote for Colin, marked up with notes for revision. Harsh professor, it seemed like. “Yvette, you did not swallow a bunch of sleeping pills over this, did you?”
“No, no,” she said. “Had big fight with Colin. Over him.”
Papatheofanis walked over. “C’mon, get her up.”
“No, she needs a doctor!” I said. “She needs her stomach pumped.”
Papatheofanis snorted. “Doctors, bah!” he said with a wave of his drink. I pictured him spilling some, it landing on my outstretched tongue. “You got money for a doctor? She got money for one? You go to ER, you get a bill for twenty thousand dollars! Get her up, we work it out of her.” He finished off his ouzo, dropped the glass onto the thick carpet, and grabbed one of Yvette’s mostly limp arms. “Come, we do the kalamatianos!”
Papatheofanis was the world’s fattest hobbit, and his shoulders were as hairy as the tops of his feet. Yvette was short, like most girls, and the top of my forehead could touch the low ceiling if I stood on the top of my toes. We made a ridiculous trio, arms thrown over shoulders, stomping ten steps to the front, then two back, as Papatheofanis scatted and teetitteetitteetitili’d out a song. Yvette’s eyes were open now, half-amused, half-shocked to see who she was with, how she was marching back and forth in front of the bay window to an audience of snowdrifts and cats.
“Opa!” Papatheofanis shouted, then he bent his knees hard, squatted, twirled, and performed an odd kick to his own palm. Yvette blinked rapidly, her ankles folding under her. Only we were keeping her up at first. Then she made a face and vomited across her front.
“Keep dancing!” Papatheofanis ordered, drunk and manic. I was just glad to be next to Yvette again, to smell her shampoo and, yes, even her puke. I counted the remnants of only five pills. Though a skinny girl, she would have been fine, I guessed.
Finally Yvette demanded water. We sat her down on the larger couch.
Papatheofanis told me, “Keep Betty upright! I get the water!” and he came back with another glass, with sparking water and a lime in it. Yvette sipped it slowly. She didn’t ask for paper towels or a rag with which to clean herself, and neither of us thought to offer her one.
“Oh, if Mrs. Papatheofanis was alive, she’d be dead,” my landlord said. He had a second glass of ouzo and water for himself, and he held it against his forehead as though it wasn’t the dead of winter, as if he’d bothered to turn the furnace on at all today. Yvette’s fingers were blue. I wondered if I could get her into the shower, clean her up, innocently see her body one more time. Even that fantasy was ruined by a sudden ridiculous fear that the pipes were frozen and would burst. Why did I care? I was leaving town, going somewhere else.
“So you had dinner with Colin, you had a fight over the story, and he dumped you.”
“How do you know I had dinner with Colin?” Yvette said slowly, her voice rumbling with suspicion.
“Pad thai, it’s all over your shirt. That’s a Colin meal. A Boston meal. You didn’t even know what pad thai was before you moved here.”
“Yeah, well, you followed me . . .”
Papatheofanis’s mood turned. He had his arms crossed over his chest now, and stood as upright as he could at five foot two. “She get rid of everything, eh? She can go now. You go now, eh Betty?”
“Yvette!” I said to him.
“What am I saying? Veh-tee.”
“That’s the opposite; Veh-tee. Eee-vhet.”
“I don’t know these xeni names,” he said. Yvette tugged on my sleeve.
“I wanted to say . . .” she started. “I wanted to say goodbye. I’m sorry Colin made you write a story . . . he was being a prick.”
I felt the eyes of Papatheofanis upon me. He switched to Greek, which I only barely understood. How many cocks is this woman sucking? was the gist of his remark. And then he said another sentence, and all I knew of it was the word keratas—cuckold—and that he was discussing, between his drunken self and his more reasonable sober self, why on Earth he would rent to a man who was not a man. His mood had soured, likely because of the stain on his carpet, which he would certainly not clean himself. That’s what he had a wife for, and so what if she had been dead for five years and he was all alone, as his daughter and only child had met a college boy and moved out to Colorado to have babies named Blaine and Carter. For Papatheofanis, the universe had turned upside-down. I was downstairs in his apartment instead of upstairs in my little garret. A woman had dirtied his room instead of cleaning it up. A woman was crying because of her affairs, rather than weeping over the affairs of her man.
So I exploded. “Oh, he was being a prick! You know a lot about him and his prick, I’m sure! And now you come crawling back to me, eh? Eh?” I shook her by the shoulders, not too roughly. I would have been pleased if her head popped right off and rolled across the carpet like she was a broken doll, but I had her in my arms again and I knew my anger was just a performance. I wished I could take Yvette upstairs, let her sleep it off on my couch while I kneeled on the floor before her and just watched, but I couldn’t. For a moment, I was seething—she ruined my life. But no. My life wasn’t even that bad. I was a lucky guy. I didn’t have to go to some stupid job every day. I was a writer, albeit in some vanishingly small way. But nobody could take that from me. I started mentally listing good things about my life: I didn’t have cancer; it was snowing outside, but I was standing inside; I wasn’t overly anguished about Yvette now that she was right in front of me, sad and pathetic; Papatheofanis would probably fall asleep soon and forget all of this in the morning; even if he woke up in a rage, I had five hundred dollars and could go anywhere I liked, and could afford, for five hundred dollars.
“Get this girl out of here,” Papatheofanis bellowed. Then he left, muttering, to his room. Whether he was just drunk or actually trustworthy was beyond me, but I had Yvette, and I bet I had that bottle of ouzo Papatheofanis had been working on in the kitchen.
Yvette looked up at me, her eyes teary. “Don’t call Colin, okay?”
“Of course not,” I said. I called a cab instead, and put Yvette in the vestibule atop the porch to wait for it with a handful of crumpled dollar bills. It had windows, and some insulation, so she wouldn’t freeze. That’s how she’d made me feel for months. Isolated, in a little box, just on the wrong side of chilly, and waiting in the dark for a dubious rescue. When I led her out there, she had opened her mouth as if to say something—probably not “Thanks,” or “Take me upstairs; you can have me.” She looked as relieved as I did. We’d managed, together, to mess up so completely that we didn’t have to talk to one another anymore, or even think about one another anymore.
What would have Yvette said, had she been just a bit more sober, slightly less sobby? “Malaka,” maybe. That was a Greek word I’d taught her—it means effeminate asshole, or wanker, or someone who jerked o
ff so much he’s become some sort of halfwit. She had often misremembered it as “makala” and “kamala,” but always liked the idea of a retarded masturbator. Or maybe she just wanted to say “I’m cold” but knew I only had one coat and thus none to lend her, since we certainly weren’t going to encounter one another again, and Colin wasn’t going to be a good go-between to get my coat back to me.
I certainly knew she wasn’t going to say, “I’m sorry.” She had nothing to be sorry for. I followed her to Boston like a fool, acted the fool every moment we were together, tried to fool her by inserting myself into every aspect of her life out here in this great and undiscovered country of New England, and when she finally turned to me I treated her poorly to impress an idiot boozebag stranger whose only tie to me was ethnicity. Ethnicity, the great lie of the world. America’s great success showed that to be true, and its great failure was further evidence. There was a new race now, built upon the nonsense of the old. Reanimates had conquered America, sans plan or ideology. There was no community among them, just a deadly sameness. Anyway, they’re all dead now. Yvette, Colin, Papatheofanis, the various boobs in the workshop, all those women I abused in my mind while riding the T, even confident Aishwarya.
In the early days of the crisis, Google and Facebook and Twitter and a few irony-limned startups like IT’S ALIVE!! (always all caps, always two exclaims) were busy as could be with people updating their locations and circumstances. SEND HELP was trending for weeks, but no counteroffensive could be made against an enemy whose numbers replenished after every skirmish, and the government made matters worse by doing their best to seal the borders to keep help from coming overseas. Not that the rest of the world was all that eager to do anything but make popcorn and set up a new United Nations in Lisbon of all places. I never saw Yvette’s name on any site. Colin had made it to Cape Cod and was part of some scheme to just shoot up to Canada and beg for asylum. I imagined steamer trunks stuffed with gold ingots and useless dollars filling the hulls of pleasurecraft, crew members pushed overboard to make room, ships running in frantic and futile circles, then finally them all sinking. Colin’s went down, at least.