Everything Beautiful Began After

by Simon Van Booy

  At a nearby barbershop, you received a haircut and a shave. Hanging on the walls were pictures of dead movie stars. The barber was very old and kept going into the back every few minutes to tap something with a spoon.

  After another hour walking around on the streets of Milan, you stopped to rest on a street called Via Palomba. There were display cabinets for bottles of men’s perfume, and you thought of George.

  You realized then you were starting to feel hopeless and tired, and so decided to go back to the airport. Your briefcase was heavy because it also had the typewriter in it.

  It took over an hour to get to the airport in a taxi. It was uncomfortable because the driver wouldn’t open the window and you were too depressed to ask.

  You caught the next flight by running to the gate.

  Alitalia Flight 522 to LaGuardia Airport in New York City landed on time.

  It was a bright morning with many birds.

  You walked from the terminal to the hotel in Queens across the freeway. A few people honked.

  You lasted a week at the hotel, living off free breakfast bagels and watching cars from your window inch their way along the Grand Central Parkway. There were a few rainstorms but they didn’t last very long.

  Nothing out of the ordinary happened at the hotel except for a day spent naked when you sent your suit and polo shirt out for cleaning. You cranked the heat and took long baths with the television up loud.

  On your last day in Queens, you realized it had been three weeks since you had spoken to George, and so you wrote something on the Italian typewriter with the intention of sending it to the address in Sicily that George had sewn into your left slipper.

  You left Queens on a Tuesday and by early Wednesday morning you were at Keflavik Airport in Iceland.

  The airport reminded you of an art gallery, with several interesting sculptures of people running, and very tall windows of uninterrupted glass.

  Three German men drank beer with their breakfasts. You sat down and ordered a glass of beer too. You stayed in the airport for thirteen hours—most of which you spent drunk.

  Then you took Flight 1455 to London.

  And then a long flight to Tokyo.

  And then Brisbane.

  And then Auckland.

  You took your meals on the flights, and got most of your sleep in the air too.

  The Continental flight crew was by far the most caring, and if you were able to get on a Continental flight you didn’t care where it was going.

  On a Royal Air Casablanca flight, a small boy wandered into the cockpit while the passengers were boarding and the pilots were busy chatting with girls in the business class seats. Within a few minutes, the boy pilot had started an engine and almost raised the landing gear.

  Sometimes your flight would be packed and you wondered who should be sitting in your seat—and where they would not be going because of you.

  Sometimes at the airport, you sat with the lost luggage until a destination announced on the loudspeaker piqued your interest.

  In order to choose a hotel for the night, you simply stood outside the terminal and got on the first bus that stopped without asking the destination—even if the bus had been chartered to pick up returning U.S. Navy staff for submarine command in Connecticut.

  After almost a year in the air, the communication problem was solved. From a catalog in your seat pocket en route to Shanghai, you read about (and then purchased) two minisatellite fax machines. Both were sent to your hotel upon landing. After making a note of both fax numbers, you asked the hotel concierge to send the other machine (with your fax number written on the box) to George’s address in Sicily.

  Two weeks later in the Hotel Amsterdam, your fax machine started buzzing. Green lights flashed. You found a blank piece of paper in a desk drawer and fed it into the machine as demonstrated by a beaver on page 732 of the instruction book.

  Dear Henry

  Are you reading this? Does this little machine work? Something tells me it’s a gimmick. Will you please fax me back if it does? If you are reading this, then I can finally breathe a sigh of relief because we can talk again.

  I also wanted to ask why you are flying around the world endlessly. I know it’s how you are coping with what happened—the same way I drank to blur my childhood. Please come to Sicily and stay with me. I’ll make a home here for you. I know it won’t be like before, but at least you’ll have a friend. I won’t write anymore until I know this little gadget works. Professor Peterson keeps writing to me wanting to know where you are.

  I miss our hospital book club.

  Love,

  George

  P.S. If you ARE reading this—thanks for the mini-satellite fax machine, and I’m still not drinking in case you were wondering.

  Dear Henry,

  Try and look forward to something positive in the future.

  What I mean to say is, give yourself something to look forward to. You’ve got to go on, we’ve got most of our lives still ahead of us. I’ve been going to church, which I know sounds stupid, but just being there with a giant wooden corpse nailed to a cross helps. I don’t even understand what the priest is saying.

  I’m learning to deal with this. I’ve also met someone who is helping.

  Always yours,

  George

  Chapter Forty-One

  Sometime during the second year of flying around the world, you happened to glance idly out the window to see that you’d been rerouted over Athens toward your destination in the United Arab Emirates.

  You bit your lip so hard it bled.

  One of the flight crew noticed a man bleeding in his seat. She brought you some water and asked if you needed anything from the medicine cabinet.

  “There’s a medicine cabinet?”

  “Oh yes,” the stewardess said.

  She gave you Band-Aids and a sedative—which took effect almost immediately. In the dream that ensued, you were underwater, beneath the crisp cloak of the Aegean Sea, swimming and holding your breath for an impossibly long time.

  Rebecca’s body was up ahead tangled in sea grass. As you swam toward it, the current dragged it free. It bobbed against reefs, parted shoals of mackerel, slid along the rotted decks of sunken trading vessels. And her hair, like a slow fire, trailing with the current.

  Then one of her shoes came off and spiraled away on its own as if making a break for it. You remembered the places the shoe had been. You remembered her shoes in the morning beside the bed, her size, 37.

  When you woke up, women in burkas were foraging in the overhead bins for their possessions.

  A baby was screaming.

  Why hadn’t she turned and swum toward you?

  Hundreds of miles away in Greece, it was morning. Oranges stud the trees, even in winter. You imagined lines of cars at lights. Taxis on the main avenues around Omonia Square. Old women in black sitting on the steps of the church, their hard shoes bent to one side. You imagined your old apartment. A desk and the reflection of passing birds.

  The square beneath your balcony. Athens at dawn, a cool blue breath.

  Lingering stars.

  At sunrise, the city blushes. Stone statues glow pink with life for a few minutes, and then fade back to plain white with no memory of their momentary passion.

  You were the last person off the plane. In the terminal, you found a place to have some coffee. The women at the next table were laughing at something in a magazine.

  You wrote Rebecca’s name on a napkin and left it.

  Despite two more cups of Arabic coffee, the sedative kept trying to pull you under. You had to get back on a plane. You dragged your body to the nearest ticket counter and asked to buy passage on the next flight. In a sleepy daze you watched the man swipe your passport.

  “Go straight to gate 205,” he said. “The plane is being held for you.”

  You took the documents without looking at them, passed through security, and boarded. As soon as your seat belt was buckled, you fell back asleep.


  A few hours later, circling Athens, and you didn’t even know.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  You sat very calmly in the airport for an hour in utter disbelief.

  You were spared any buildup because you didn’t know where you were until you were actually in the terminal.

  But the terminal was different. It was another airport—one you had never seen.

  You considered faxing George, but he would want to meet you. This was something you had to face yourself.

  For years you flew around the world only to come back to where you started, more alone than ever.

  The trunk of the taxi wouldn’t close properly.

  The roads into Athens were not the ones you remembered. There were large shops with big windows looking down onto the highway, billboards with spotlights, places to pull over and smoke or drink coffee.

  The new airport sparkled.

  Slightly unsure, you asked the driver where you were. He looked at you in his mirror.

  “Athens,” he said nonchalantly. “Greece.”

  You asked him to take you to a nice hotel.

  “Nice?” he said.

  “Nice.”

  “Very nice?” He was talking to you in his mirror.

  “Just nice,”

  “Okay,” he said. “A just nice hotel.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But not a very nice one—because my brother’s wife’s uncle is the manager of a very nice one.”

  After passing under several tunnels and then through a tollbooth, the driver asked where you grew up. For a moment you hesitated.

  “Athens.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your parents are Greek?”

  Then suddenly you remembered that you are an archaeologist—more than that, you know all about bones, about the dead, about burial rites and traditions. That you have education, a PhD. You went to university. You met a girl.

  “I was in love with someone here.”

  The driver swerved into the other lane.

  “A girl here in Athens?”

  “Yes, a girl here in Athens.”

  “Is that why you look nervous?” the driver said and laughed.

  “I look nervous?”

  The driver considered you in his mirror for a moment.

  “And very thin,” he said, picking something from his teeth.

  After about fifteen kilometers, he started talking again. He asked if you knew her address. You shook your head.

  “Family name?”

  And then you realized that despite the new airport, the tollbooths, the shops, and the smooth roads, you were back in Athens. You were back in the place where your life had begun and where it had ended.

  “If you think of it,” the driver insisted, “call me, because I have a friend who can help you find her.”

  You want him to stop talking.

  “She was a Greek girl?”

  “French.”

  “Oh,” the taxi driver said. “Then it’s impossible.”

  You didn’t recognize anything until you got into the city itself. And then the Athens Hilton—the glass sculpture of a running man, then Syntagma Square, the Hotel Grand Bretagne; memories flooded back but were somehow unconnected to everything around you. And there was something different about the city—as though it had forgotten you.

  When you arrived at the hotel, the driver asked for the amount on the meter—plus the toll he paid at the booth. You didn’t understand. You thought it was a trick. And you asked him really, how much did he want. Then the concierge came out, looked at the meter, added the toll himself, and asked if you wanted it added to your room.

  Both men stared at you.

  The new Athens had caught you off guard.

  You gave the driver a 50 percent tip.

  “Like the old Athens,” you said in broken Greek, and the concierge and driver both laughed a little.

  “If she was Greek I could have helped you,” the driver said, getting back into the car. The concierge picked up your heavy briefcase and held the door.

  At the check-in desk, there was a small basket of green apples on the counter. You asked for a room and the receptionist typed something into a computer.

  “How long would you like to stay in Athens?” she said. Her fingernails were false and made a clicking sound when she touched anything.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A week?”

  “Maybe only a few hours.”

  “A few hours? We have a two-night minimum,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Have you been to Athens before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The receptionist laughed.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I mean, it’s all changed.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said.

  “Or I have.”

  “The room is very small,” she said, “but there’s a nice balcony if you’re not afraid of heights.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  When you woke up it was raining.

  You heard laughing from the hallway, then the jingle of a room service trolley. Someone was having dinner.

  You opened the balcony doors.

  In another building across from your hotel, you saw two girls smoking and talking. White underwear was drying on a line.

  You drew a hot bath. It was too hot, so you put your clothes back on and looked for the coffee machine. You couldn’t find one and went downstairs to the lobby.

  A man and a child shared the elevator with you. They each had a towel. You stared at the child and then stared at the buttons. You were unsure which pain is worse—the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

  After sitting down, a muscular bartender with white hair brought you an espresso. He gave a nod but didn’t linger. You followed him with your eyes to the bar, where he put on a pair of glasses and looked older.

  You stared out the window in silence. Then the bartender came over with a little cake. He was still wearing his glasses. He stood beside you for a minute.

  You’ll never know why he brought you the cake, but it made you feel better.

  It was Sunday night and felt like a Sunday.

  About two years ago, not far from there, you wanted to kill yourself.

  When you went back upstairs to your room, your bath was cold and there was no more hot water. You took your clothes off and lay naked in bed. You wondered what George was doing. He was living with someone—an Italian woman. He was afraid to tell you things because he was worried you would be upset.

  But you gave up the idea of feeling anything new when you left Athens two years ago.

  You fell asleep without realizing.

  And then another day.

  You woke up and sat at the desk.

  It had a glass top.

  You looked at Henry Bliss in the mirror.

  There were seven drawers in the desk and all were empty. A leaflet for afternoon tea had been slipped under your door. You glanced out through the balcony doors, and faintly sketched in the glass was a tired, thin man wearing threadbare pajamas and sitting alone.

  It looked like more rain was coming.

  Your child would now have been older than your brother ever was.

  In the sky beyond your window: a thumbprint of birds, a few lonely shrubs on some distant balcony, and a confusion of TV aerials and satellite dishes stretching as far as you could see.

  You walked over to your case and took out the typewriter. You set it on the desk and threaded a piece of hotel stationery through the drum. George would be worried.

  Something in the room smelled faintly of flowers. Perhaps chamomile. You always kept some in the cupboard above the cooker back then. Sometimes you put some in a pan and poured boiling water over it.

  Rebecca used to drink it at the table. You watched with the joy of knowing she would spend the night.

  In your briefcase were things you had written down. Seeing t
hem on paper was terrifying, but it freed you from what you were unable to admit.

  You remember what George said once about language, about words and sentences—like Pompei, a world intact, but abandoned. You scramble down the words like ropes, he said. You dangle from sentences. You drop from letters into pools of what happened.

  Language is like drinking from one’s own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at that time.

  Heavy rain beat upon your balcony doors.

  You were back in Athens.

  For two years you had been without a home, wandering the earth like Odysseus.

  The neighborhood where your hotel was didn’t seem like it was in the city where you once lived. It was the highest building in the Plaka—rising up from a narrow street that resounded violently with the acceleration of taxis.

  Two years had passed. Your hotel could have been anywhere. The balcony could have led to any view. Outside, it could have been a desert, or heavy snow.

  The hotel you were staying in was once very chic. In the 1970s you imagined beautiful couples gliding through the lobby, en route to the casinos of Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes. On the roof they danced below the Acropolis in polyester gowns. They would all be old now, or dead.

  Your hotel room felt safe. Or maybe it was all that rain. It was quiet too. And the rain was unceasing. All the dust was washing away. The scrubby trees in the park outside the hotel were bristling with moisture.

  You went downstairs and asked the receptionist for a sedative. She directed you to a pharmacy on the corner.

  It was cheerful and very clean.

  You also bought toothpaste.

  It had been just over two years since Rebecca died. You had seen the world, but learned nothing.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  It was dusk of the following day when you woke up. The sky was orange. After drinking from the faucet in the bathroom, you felt a sudden madness. You dressed and left the hotel in a hurry, knowing exactly where you wanted to go.

  You considered walking but it seemed like a bad idea. You sensed that you wouldn’t make it—or it would get too dark and you’d be lost in the ruins.