Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “Yes,” I said, anxious now. “Really is.”

  “They say you can see it hundreds of miles away.”

  “I bet that’s true,” I said. “So tell me about the place we’re staying here. You made it sound quite mysterious.”

  He turned and gave me a look, as if he knew I was changing the subject, but I couldn’t read his face to be sure, so the half smile that hinted at something private might have been about what we were just discussing or what he knew was coming.

  “Oh, I don’t want to steal Melissa’s thunder,” he said. “Wait and see.” For a long, taut moment we rode in silence, and then he started fumbling with the radio controls, scrolling through station after station of tinny Europop and sighing. Last time we were here, there had been a beachside DJ at the hotel, a buff local guy in shades and a do-rag who spent his breaks windsurfing and looking cool for the girls. He had thought Melissa was the greatest thing since . . . well, whatever the Greek equivalent of sliced bread was. It was as if she were an icon, a walking, talking model of everything his American surf-suave pose was supposed to be. She was the thing itself. Simon had rolled with it all, used to his wife getting this kind of attention, befriending the guy with a nod and a knowing grin that showed he didn’t feel threatened. From that point on the DJ had been sure to play whatever she asked for, even hunting down the tracks he didn’t have just so he could blare them for her. She had been on an alternative eighties kick, so my memories of Crete had a soundtrack by Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, and the B-52s.

  “No ‘Rock Lobster’?” I asked, grinning.

  “What?”

  “The B-52s song,” I said. “‘Rock Lobster.’ Melissa was always singing it, and . . .”

  He was still smiling, but his face looked blank. Then his brow furrowed and the smile widened.

  “Right!” he exclaimed. “‘Rock Lobster.’ Yeah. I’d totally forgotten that.”

  I grinned, pleased by his remembering, feeling once again that shared glow, and wondering how anyone could forget the way she had been. The way we had been.

  Well, I thought. We would rebuild it all, down to the last bass riff and ridiculous vocal trill . . .

  And as if to complete the memory for me, Simon finished fiddling with the iPhone he had plugged in and gave me an expectant look as he pushed the car system’s volume up. A moment later the familiar anthemic keyboard chords crashed in, the drums filled the gap, and the bass started, Prince’s “1999” rocking.

  “Yes!” I said. It was happening. I had made it to Crete, and we would slide not forward in time like the song suggested, but back to that glorious week and all the promise it held. Simon read my look and nodded emphatically along to the music.

  “1999!” he yelled.

  Pleased, I looked out the window, seeing the increasingly rugged hills and ravines we had not so much as glimpsed on my previous trip. That had been a beach holiday, pure and simple. Days in and by the water, nights in the bar, occasional dancing, constant drinking. We had seen nothing of the surrounding countryside or the ancient Minoan sites for which the long, sprawling island was uniquely famous. In fact we barely left the resort except to eat and return to the airport. Except for the last day.

  The cave.

  I frowned to myself. The cave had been the exception, an excursion that we hadn’t enjoyed and that made me feel like we should never have left the beach, should never have looked up from our drinks, our toes in the sand at the water’s edge . . .

  Five years later that vacation seemed both naive and kind of glorious, a last drunken farewell to our twenties, our youth. What we would do now, up here, bumbling through our thirties and as far from the ocean as Crete physically permitted, I had no idea. I shot Simon a sideways glance, looking for signs of age: crow’s feet by the eyes or a hint of silver at the temples, but I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was just me who felt older.

  And as fun as it would be reliving our last visit through drinks on the beach, I had to admit that I was ready for something different this time. Whatever my job had been and would be, working at Great Deal didn’t exactly fulfill all my intellectual needs, and I found myself thinking wistfully about all the things we’d missed last time, and what it would be like to stroll the island’s ancient ruins with Marcus, talking history, mythology. Though I had been a biology major, I had also been an English minor and had considered flipping them at one point. I wasn’t especially interested in the politics that seemed to inform—or infect—everything in the classroom, but I loved story, the shape of it, the inventive audacity of stringing together characters, places, and events to make up something that felt absolutely real but existed only in the head of the writer or their readers. If I’d had any talent or willpower in the matter, I once thought, I would have been a writer: a novelist rather than a poet, though a playwright might be good too. I liked the way stories lined up behind each other like mirrors, reflecting little bits back, sometimes direct and straight on, sometimes distorted and crazy, Joyce growing out of Shakespeare, who grew out of Ovid and all those ancient tales of gods and goddesses, some of them cobbled roughly together a stone’s throw from this very spot.

  Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece . . . stories of magic and madness, passion, and divine intervention. Most of it I’d half forgotten till a couple of days ago, when I dug out one of the textbooks that had been sitting untouched on my shelves for at least a year and found the ancient tales waiting, fresh and familiar, ancient but edged with something sharp and urgent. I reread them with a similar urgency, a hunger I could not completely explain.

  This was a land of legend, of ancient myth, of story. It was the land of King Minos and the mazelike complex of tunnels beneath his palace known as the labyrinth. Inside the maze lived a terrible monster, half man, half bull—the Minotaur—to whom victims were sacrificed annually, trapped down there in the darkness of the passages where the monster hunted . . . It was great stuff, reeking of danger and heroism and strangeness. For a second I forgot Simon, humming tunelessly next to me, forgot the inevitable partying the reunion would center around, the willful, gloriously frivolous stuff we would laugh about over the next few days, and I felt those ancient stories in the air like incense, sweet and fragrant.

  I have left behind my job, I thought, my ordinary, humdrum life in an American city, and I have become Medea, a woman of magic and mystery . . .

  Grinning to myself again, I watched the road signs to neighboring villages as we drove. “Georgioupoli,” “Fones,” “Alikampos,” “Kryonerida.” None of them meant anything to me, and as the roads got smaller and the gaps between habitation larger, the settlements themselves shrank till they were mere clusters of ancient houses and an occasional tiny monastery. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The last village we saw was Empresneros, and then nothing, just a slow and winding climb into the pale mountains as I tried to check my e-mail on my phone.

  “Are there hotels round here? Stores? Restaurants?” I asked, hating the timidity in my voice.

  “Nope,” said Simon, shooting me a wolfish grin. “Isn’t it awesome? Out in the wilds. We figured we’d done the hotel scene and were ready for something a bit more authentic, you know? This is real Greece. You may as well put your phone away. You won’t get a signal up here.”

  “Right,” I said lamely. “Wow. Great.”

  There were no cars on the road. No gas stations, just these endless, rubble-strewn switchbacks, the land climbing on the one side as it fell away to the ever-present sea on the other.

  “Good thing it’s fall,” said Simon. “In the winter this whole area is buried in snow, and the roads all get closed. It’s why so few people live up here. The mountain range is . . . I don’t know. Forgot the Greek name, but it means white mountains, or something like that. It’s the limestone, I think.”

  We had been driving through the ubiquitous olive groves, but there were fewer and fewer signs of cultivation here, and the land was heavily wooded. I think Simon picked something up in m
y watchful silence because, out of the blue, he remarked, “When I got the keys for the place, I asked if there were bears or wild boar we should watch out for, but apparently they don’t live here. There’s a rare Cretan wildcat and some kind of ibex, but that’s about it. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Good,” I said. I’d never been outdoorsy. I doubted Simon was either, and I was as sure as I could be that Melissa was a confirmed urbanite. We might be out in the wilds, but the house—or whatever it was—would have all modern conveniences, and if Melissa came down to breakfast not dressed to the nines and made up as if she were featuring on the cover of Cosmo, I’d throw myself to the rare Cretan wildcat. Hell, I’d eat the rare Cretan wildcat.

  “What?” said Simon, who had half turned and caught my grin.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just, you know . . . looking forward to seeing everyone and hanging out.”

  It sounded so pathetic when put like that, deliberately so. I didn’t want him to know just how excited I really was, how delighted that I had managed to hold on to my slender connection to them. I felt the way people may once have felt in the presence of royalty, except this was better because they were my friends. I knew that was lamer still, and I privately mocked myself for being so much the devoted hanger-on. It was tiredness, I told myself, the kind of exhaustion that makes you weak and emotional. I should have slept on the plane.

  Chapter Five

  I lie against the wall on the bed, my knees drawn up to my chest, my back to the room. It’s a defensive posture, an animal curling, as if I’m presenting an array of spines to the world. It has the added advantage of taking the strain off my wrist since I’m now close enough to the iron ring in the wall that I can smell the rust. Unless that’s more blood. For all I know the room could be caked with the stuff.

  It is still mine dark. The kind of pitch blackness I can’t recall ever experiencing before, as if my head is in a velvet bag. It is numbing. I cannot tell how long I have been awake or if I have been continuously so. In spite of my alarm, the strange amnesia weighs on me so that I feel only half-there, and I wonder if I am drifting in and out of slumber without realizing it. In the dark, when you can’t move, there is little difference between sleeping and waking. It is nightmarish either way.

  You have been in darkness like this before, I think vaguely. You woke up on your side in the black, smelling of blood . . .

  I run from the memory. It’s like I’m on a railroad track with the train bearing down on me. I leap aside and suddenly the train was never there, even the memory of it boiling away to nothing, so that I can’t understand why I was so spooked. What could I have forgotten that was worse than where I was now?

  I have taken off my one sandal because wearing it left me feeling unbalanced, but being barefoot makes me feel naked, vulnerable.

  You’re in Crete, I remind myself, hoping that will jog more from my memory. I can picture the sea, the sky. A house, strange in its mixture of old and new . . .

  The memory, if it is indeed that, makes me shudder, a deep, cooling flicker that runs uneasily through my body like an earthquake and leaves my skin puckered, each hair rising. There’s something about that house that I don’t like . . .

  The blood on my hands . . .

  . . . something about the house that a part of me needs to forget.

  So I have. I push at the memory, trying to draw it out of the shadows, but it slithers away, not wanting to be found. I am almost relieved, though I don’t understand why my memory feels so fuzzy. The bump on my head feels superficial, and I don’t believe I was concussed.

  The amnesia—if that’s not too grand a word for it—also feels selective, only blacking out the last few days. Older stuff is still there, and as if to make the point, my brain dredges up something I would have happily forgotten: a book Marcus bought me, paintings and poems drawing on the Greek mythology he knew I was so attached to. And though I had loved the book, the pictures had been a little too good, some of them so dark and creepily atmospheric that I skipped over them to get to lighter, happier material. One of them was the picture of the Minotaur brooding in the shadows of the labyrinth. It brimmed with strangeness and menace so that you could almost smell the musk of the creature. I had hurried past it, jumping to the end of the tale so I wouldn’t have to look at it or—ridiculously—feel it looking at me. The isolated Cretan house in my memory is like that, a vague and unsettling dread waiting for me when I turn the page.

  At last I roll onto my right side and open my eyes, though that makes no difference either until, very gradually, I see, or feel that I see, the thin variance between the wall and door, the dark patch across the room that might be a cabinet.

  And something else.

  There is another darkness, one that I am almost sure was not there before. It nestles in the corner by the door, a squat dense shadow, like a rough, tall pile. I stare at the spot, feeling the nameless horror of it and trying to remember. It is like reaching across the cell, straining with my mind the same way my body tugged at the chain fastened to the ring in the wall, and as with that physical stretching, I find nothing but my own tiredness. But I am almost sure.

  The pile, or whatever it is, was not there before. And that can mean only one thing. As I slept, overwhelmed by whatever drug-induced exhaustion led to my imprisonment, someone has been in.

  Chapter Six

  “Ta-da!”

  Simon sang it out as we pulled up a long, narrow driveway and the house was suddenly visible through the trees, as if he were pulling the dustcover off an antique or a gift. I hunkered lower in my seat to get a better view and managed an awed “wow.”

  It was huge, three stories tall in parts, a rambling and imposing oddity of jumbled styles and periods. Parts of the outlying structure looked ancient, built out of weathered gold and amber stone blocks, part palace, part fortress. They included what looked like a bell tower on the west side of the house and a wing with large and regular arched windows flanked by relief-work pillars. The central block, by contrast, was an angular mass of glass and steel, built into the older stonework and roofed with pinkish tile. Still other parts of the house—the word felt inadequate for something that was more like a small modernized castle—looked rustic and unpolished, especially sections of the ground floor that had been patched together with rough stone and concrete blocks. All told, it managed to be whimsical as well as impressive, and under the blue Cretan sky, I found my doubts and anxieties melting away in a kind of surprised joy.

  “Only a rental,” said Simon, “but should do us for the week.” He said it as only he could, in a tone that sounded both proud and dismissive, what my coworkers would call a humblebrag. “Parts of it are Venetian, so that’s, what? Sixteenth century? Seventeenth?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed.

  “Pretty cool anyhow,” he said, shrugging as he guided the Mercedes into the corner of a spacious forecourt, gravel roaring under the tires. “The original design was obsessively symmetrical—everything doubled and balanced for proportion, I guess—but the upper stories have been heavily remodeled, and at some point they got rid of the eastern tower. I think it looks better this way. Let’s get you inside and see if Melissa’s got the fog cutters going.”

  “Fog cutters?” I echoed.

  “I know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Kind of last year, but we got this kick-ass recipe from a bartender at Satan’s Whiskers in Bethnal Green.”

  “In London?” I said. I was trying to process information that otherwise meant nothing to me, like a school kid preparing for a test in a class she had never attended. Being with Simon and Melissa often felt like that, like you were working to show that you deserved to be with them. Pretending, really.

  Simon gave me a quizzical smile.

  “Yes, Jan,” he said. “In London.”

  I laughed self-consciously and opened the car door to hide my face. Before I came I had thought about switching my prescription glasses for those with the lenses that adjust to t
he light, but it had seemed like an extravagance and maybe like I was trying too hard to look cool. Now I wished I had them, even if they wouldn’t fully hide my blushes. But then Simon was talking again as he walked down the drive to close the wrought iron gates, saying how I really should go over and visit their “flat” there, as if that was a normal thing for someone like me to do, and I felt better again.

  I was moving to the trunk to get my suitcase as the front door—a heavy, varnished thing with a massive bronze knocker in the shape of a lion’s head—banged open, and there was Melissa, arms spread wide as her smile, dressed in something white and flowy that made her look like a goddess.

  “Jan!” she squealed, moving down the steps toward me, her arms still open, as if she were trying to catch the whole world to her. The welcoming hug felt like it took place in slow motion, like I was surrounded by love and warmth so acute, so wanted, that it brought tears to my eyes. She squeezed me to her Chanel-scented breasts, burbling about how happy she was to see me, how delighted that I had made the trek. Then, still holding me, she leaned back to look at me, drinking me in. I adjusted the glasses her overenthusiastic embrace had dislodged and smiled back shyly before she pulled me to her again.

  “It’s been years!” she exclaimed. “You look wonderful!”

  “One year,” I said, “near enough. When you and Simon came to Charlotte to see your parents.” I didn’t bother contradicting the other observation. That would only lead to more disingenuous compliments on her part and poorly hidden inadequacy on mine. Melissa looked like Aphrodite, as imagined by the Hollywood of the 1960s: alabaster skin, flowing chestnut hair, and eyes of cornflower blue. I looked like . . . like I’d just gotten off a plane. Like I lived alone and spent my days—beginning at three in the morning—in a yellow polo shirt with my name on a brass badge . . .

  Not when you get back, I reminded myself. Executive team leader.