Night of the Furies

by David Angsten

  “A yacht full of girls, as I understand it,” he said. “Could be very dangerous indeed.”

  It amazed me how quickly he had forgotten about Phoebe. Perhaps she’d been right about Dan all along: he truly was preoccupied with sex. Then again I could hardly blame him. If the girl I’d been in love with for the last eight months had held out as long as Phoebe had, I’d be eager for some Mykonos revelry, too.

  He finally lost his patience. “Aphrodite leads the way to Dionysus,” he said. “This offer has got to be connected to the prophecy. You know it is. You can feel it, can’t you? Come on, admit it.”

  It was clear he wanted to forget about Phoebe, at least for a while. There were plenty of other fish in the Aegean. The fact was, I wanted to forget about her, too. Despite all you hear about falling in love, in truth it’s a mindless misery. It’s infantilizing and delusive. You’re either giddy with infatuation or consumed by a jealous rage. You turn into an incredibly boring person. You can’t think of anything else.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What were you saying?”

  MYKONOS is a short trip from the mainland—or so they tell you. Never trust the Greek sense of time. With all those centuries of history behind them, a few hours lost here or there mean nothing.

  The bus from Athens arrived half an hour late at the port of Rafina. We ended up waiting a couple hours more for the ferry to depart. The delay was never explained, and our fellow Greek travelers simply shrugged it off as routine. Even the crossing took longer than usual—because of the wind, they said.

  We passed along the coastlines of two large islands, both of them craggy and pleasantly green, before spotting the brown and barren hump of Mykonos, floating like a walnut on the sea. Dan had described it as the most popular party island in the Aegean, but from a distance it looked dry and desolate. Even as we approached the sparkling harbor of Mykonos Town, its whitewashed stucco seemed a long way off from the dark dens of decadence I’d imagined.

  The village was a dazzling pile of white sugar cubes clustered around the bright blue bowl of the harbor. Our ferry docked with slow precision on the arm of the concrete jetty. We disembarked and moved with the shuffling herd of passengers past a line of local people hawking their hotels. Dan made a deal with one to store our backpacks for the day. Taking only what we needed, we headed for the beach. We wouldn’t be meeting Basri until late that evening.

  A bus took us across the island to a place on the sea called Platys Yialos. From there we hopped a boat to Paradise Beach, Dan’s favorite hangout. By the time we arrived, I was woozy with fatigue and wanted nothing more than sleep. I kicked off my sandals and stretched out my towel; in seconds, I was totally out of it.

  An hour or so later, I awoke in a sweat. Dan was standing naked at the edge of the water, talking to two girls who were topless.

  I glanced around me. A lot of people were wearing swimsuits, but a lot of people were not. At least half the girls had shed their tops and many of the men were naked. An older woman sleeping on a rented lounge chair was wearing nothing at all. She had to be well over two hundred pounds. She lay sprawled belly-down with her fleshy arms dangling and the massive dimply boulders of her buttocks exposed. Beside her was a small naked boy with a plastic shovel, doggedly digging a pit in the sand.

  Dan hadn’t told me that Paradise was a nudist beach, something you’d think he might have mentioned. Maybe he simply assumed I knew.

  I stripped off my T-shirt and stretched my arms, feeling the rays of the sun. Music pounded from the nearby bar, and all the flesh around me seemed to glisten in the heat. Following a sudden impulse, I stripped off my shorts and underwear and headed across the sand toward the water.

  Stepping nude through a maze of naked and seminaked bodies, I felt the same sort of invigorating freedom I had felt at the start of my dip in the spring. There’s a boldness and daring to nudity, a defiant denial of shame. It taps into something the pagans knew well and proudly celebrated—the sensual power of the human body. By reveling in the purely physical, they reached toward something spiritual. The exhilaration of nudity lifted them closer to the divine.

  I strode boldly past Dan and the girls and dove out into the water. The sea felt cool and vibrant, and seemed to intensify the sense of elation. After the unrelenting music from the bar, the silence underwater was a pleasure. I swam along the bottom and my penis stroked the sand. Saltwater worked its bitter way into my eyes. I leaped up through the waves like a dolphin.

  Dan and the two girls were watching. He said something to them and they laughed. The larger of the two girls, a scraggly blonde, had a flabby set of jugs and a head too small for her body. The other one was prettier but skinny, almost gaunt, her thin arms folded tightly, as if against the cold.

  There’s a grotesque variety of human shapes, a fact made glaringly apparent when bodies are no longer hidden in clothes. Lately, I’d been required to gaze at a lot of classical nudes, statues of athletic males and shapely female torsos. Phoebe said the ancient Greeks invented the art of the nude, turning the human body into an object of perfection. Youthful males were sculpted in the image of Apollo, while the female nude was an Aphrodite, dubbed by the Romans “Venus.” The ancient Greeks set the original standard, embodying in their subtle stone the ideal proportions of beauty. Twenty-five centuries later, we still measure ourselves against those stones. And measure our fellows against them, too.

  As my eyes now wandered over the variety of figures lounging and loitering on the beach, they seemed to hone in on those closest to perfection. What is it, finally, that draws one person to another? The lives of a thousand offspring might be traced to a single glance.

  The girl who held my eyes now was stepping lazily through the surf, gazing down at the frothy water, seemingly lost in herself. She was wearing a bikini with sailor stripes and the emblem of an anchor embroidered on the cups. Her hair was a rich black, cut to her shoulders, and tangled from drying in the wind. Her mouth was slightly open, and her downcast eyes were dark. She looked like a sated panther, moving with a kind of languid grace, dragging her toes through the water. Something about her—maybe the strength of her profile, or the whiteness of her skin, or the way she peered with quiet intentness at the strangers parading around her—told me she was different from the rest, that this was not the sort of place she came to very often. There was an air of youthful innocence about her, but an air intriguingly tinged with darkness, a sort of sensual contentment. I found the very sight of her arousing.

  “Bro!”

  Dan was plowing toward me, his belly parting the waves.

  “What’s up?” I said. I remained submerged, with only my head protruding.

  “Ready for a drink?” he said. “I told them we’d buy the first round.”

  The girls stood where he had left them, chatting with each other and glancing out our way. The bar on the beach was rocking.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just got a…little problem.”

  A grin spread across his face. “Oh,” he said. “And who gave you that little problem?” He looked back toward the beach.

  The girl I’d been watching was gone.

  “Aphrodite,” I said.

  THE TWO girls were from Dubrovnik and spoke a primitive English. Shortly after Dan bought them beers, their fat-necked Yugoslav boyfriends showed up and whisked them both away. Dan and I smoked some Nepalese hash, then drank beers and ouzo while watching bikini-clad women dance on a platform by the bar. I kept an eye out for Aphrodite, but didn’t see her again.

  Eventually, we caught a bus back to Mykonos Town. We were supposed to meet Basri at midnight, less than an hour away. I would have liked a hot shower and a place to change my clothes, but had to settle for a splash bath in a public restroom along with the other vagabond beach bums.

  Just as Dan had predicted, the town of Mykonos came alive at night. No autos were allowed on th
e streets, so everybody walked. The twisting, slate-paved lanes and alleyways were jammed. Dan navigated the crowded corridors and seemed to know where he was going. I followed with no regard to direction, having given up any pretense of learning my way around.

  The hash had left us hungry and parched. Stopping briefly at a little café, we ordered falafel and beer. We ate standing up at a counter by the open window. A white cat slept peaceably on the windowsill, oblivious to a thousand passersby.

  “Schrödinger’s cat,” Dan joked. “Is it dead or alive?”

  “Overdose,” I said. “Too much observation.”

  “Too much Nepeta cataria.”

  Dan had written a hundred-page paper on the pharmacology of Nepeta, the catnip plant, a particular interest of his. “When I was in the Yucatán,” he said, “I met a girl who smoked Nepeta mixed with Damiana. She claimed Damiana leaves were used by the Maya and the Aztecs as an aphrodisiac.”

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “Never did a thing for me. She said it helped with her menstrual—”

  “There she is!” I stared out the window.

  “Who?”

  “The woman from the beach.”

  She was walking down the street with several other women, all young, attractive, dark-haired Greeks. They were dressed up—more so than most of the female tourists—and they had an air of self-possessed elegance about them. They did not chatter with one another but strode along in silence, taking little interest in the people they passed, and paying no heed at all to the many men who stopped in the street and stared.

  “Which one?” Dan asked.

  “Green dress—with the pearls.” Her hair was pinned up in back, revealing a long neck adorned with a double loop of pearls. The low, strapped, draping dress revealed a shapely figure, and the hemline stopped well above her knees, exposing ivory thighs. On her feet were sandals of an ancient design, laced with thongs that continued halfway up the calf and tied there; I had seen them before on Greek statues.

  “Knockout,” Dan said. We craned our necks out the window as the bevy of beauties disappeared in the flowing stream of the crowd. “I bet they’re going the same place we’re going.”

  After paying the bill, we followed the street in the same direction until we came to the Skandinavian Bar. This was supposedly the hottest club in Mykonos, at least according to Basri. The building itself took up an entire block and consisted of several rooms, with an upstairs disco, two full bars, and a large, open-air lounge.

  It was shortly after midnight and the party was in full swing. It took us twenty minutes waiting in line just to make our way into the disco. People stood shoulder-to-shoulder, and the pulsing beat was so loud that I couldn’t hear anything else, not even Dan shouting in my ear.

  “Whatever,” I answered with a shrug.

  We wiggled our way to the bar. The air was smoky and humid, the strobes were flashing brightly, and all the tanned and sunburned flesh glistened with a feverish sheen. Under the spinning mirror ball, the whole place seemed to be moving. A drag queen who looked like a Teamster in a blond wig swung crazily around a dance pole. She’d apparently been hired to discourage inhibition, and the partiers seemed eager to oblige.

  There was no raised platform here; women who wanted attention danced directly on the bar. Looming above us, a brunette wearing sunglasses expertly coiled her midriff while holding a lit cigarette. A Latin-looking woman loosened her blouse, sharing her brassiere with the loudly appreciative room. An overweight Tina Turner displayed her magnificent endowments as she bent to toss her black mane over the upturned faces of admirers.

  How many beers had I drunk this day? More than I had drunk in the past two weeks. Still, I took hold of the ice-cold bottle that Dan now passed back from the bar. Again he shouted something to me, words I couldn’t hear. We sipped the beers and settled in to watch the girls perform. Nothing much happened until a stocky guy in shorts climbed up on the bar and started dancing with Tina Turner. The guy looked vaguely Middle Eastern, with a broad smile, an appealing face, and eyes that sparkled like the devil’s.

  Dan turned around and shouted something to me. Then he turned back and, to my astonishment, hopped up onto the bar himself. He started dancing on the other side of the big black woman, now sandwiched between the two guys. They performed a three-way bump-and-grind, with Tina deploying her hips to the hilt. The stocky guy suddenly ripped open his shirt and exposed his hairy chest and beer gut. This brought catcalls from the men in the room and raucous cheers from the women. The guy turned to Tina, egging her on, but she wasn’t buying into the bargain.

  I gaped as Dan yanked off his Hawaiian shirt and whirled it over his head. The crowd was howling. Then both guys went down on one knee and held out their pleading arms toward Tina.

  Finally, Tina popped her top.

  The bar went bonkers. The stocky guy reached around her fabulous boobs and gave Dan a smacking high-five.

  That’s when I realized the guy was Basri.

  8

  FROM OUT of the thick crowd at the bar, the Istanbul Express emerged, shirt unbuttoned, face in a sweat, carrying a bottle of ouzo and a tall, slim glass of ice. He walked right by me, and as I started to shout hello, he nodded for me to follow.

  Dan was just behind him. He was carrying two more tall glasses with ice, and he handed them to me so he could button up his shirt.

  “How’d you like the show?” he shouted.

  “Should take it on the road,” I said.

  We tried to keep up with Basri, who was plowing ahead through the backslapping crowd. He led us outside and downstairs to a patio that was also jammed with people, but the music was not as loud. Two young Greek women were waiting for him. They were sitting on stools at a tall, round table, their bare legs crossed beneath their dresses, smoking sweet-smelling clove cigarettes in a slow and extravagant manner. Basri kissed each girl on the cheek, then set his glass down next to theirs and splashed each one with ouzo.

  He turned to Dan and me and filled our glasses to the brink. “So, the brother that almost died. Mexico is dangerous, yes? Glad you live long enough to meet.” He smiled brightly as he held up his glass. “Ya sus!”

  “Ya sus!” we replied.

  As we tapped our brimming glasses, liquor spilled on the table.

  “The Greeks say spilling is a good omen,” Basri said.

  “A libation to the gods,” Dan added.

  We sipped our drinks.

  Basri cast an eye on Dan. “So, your friend, the blonde—she leave you for somebody rich?”

  “Worse than that, Basri. She left me to go dig ditches in Crete.”

  He slammed the bottle down. “Always you are having this problem. The girls you find, they are not real women, they are not wanting a man. They are wanting always something else. The digging, the grad school, this thing, that. Barbara—remember? Two years with us in that house. You always were wanting to sleep with her, but she had no time for you—no! She must study ‘the Law.’ Always ‘the Law.’ The Law was you could never fuck her, my friend!” He laughed. “Just like that Frenchie in the Keys, what’s her name…”

  I’d been waiting for Basri to introduce his friends, but he ignored them and went on talking. It didn’t seem to bother the women. Disengaged, languorous, they barely gave Dan and me more than a glance as their eyes roamed over the tables. How long had they been with Basri? How old were they? Twenty, twenty-five? The two women looked so similar they may very well have been sisters. Their faces were classically Greek, with strong cheekbones, long noses, thick black brows, and penetrating eyes. One had a beauty mark above the corner of her mouth; the other wore a blue silk neck scarf. As Basri babbled on, they tilted their squinting faces as they dramatically dragged on their cigs. It was as if, for thousands of years, they’d been listening in silence to the bluster of men and were inured to their egotistic ramblings.

  “I’m Jack, by the way. This is my brother, Dan.”

  “Oh, of course,” Basri said as
the girls reached out limply to shake my waiting hand. “Marina. And Irene. These beauties I met three days ago. Club in Istanbul—Shahmeran—heard of it? Fantastic. Very hot now.” He turned to the women. “Where is everyone?”

  “Dancing,” said Marina, the one with the scarf. “The others will join us later.”

  “They have many friends,” Basri said. He raised an eyebrow to Dan. “I am no more a lonely man.” He laughed infectiously, peering into our eyes.

  I asked the women, “What’s your organization?”

  “The Pan-Hellenic Women’s Chorus,” Marina said. They gazed at us impassively.

  Basri said, astonished: “Can you believe? They sing hymns in church—like nuns!”

  “Byzantine hymns?” Dan asked.

  “And ancient music,” she said.

  “Really?” Dan asked, perking up. “Do you sing the ancient dithyrambs?”

  “On occasion,” she said.

  Dan turned to me, elated. “The wild hymns to Dionysus!” He looked at the women. “I didn’t think anyone performed them anymore.”

  Irene fixed her steady gaze on him. “The West has grown weak,” she said. “We need to rediscover our pagan roots.”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely!” Dan said.

  “Dionysus!” Basri cried, rising from the table. “Lord of the dance! Come, come!” He took the girls by the wrists and dragged them laughing into the crowd.

  Dan and I hurried to follow them. “Wait,” I said, and dashed back to grab the bottle of ouzo. When I turned round, I found they had vanished.

  I plowed in after them.

  THE TECH-TRANCE music in the disco formed a pulsing ocean of sound. As I pressed my way through the crush of dancers, the sound seemed to be physically connected with my body, as if it were amplifying the beat of blood vessels or the coursing of neurons through my brain.

  The lingering effects of the hashish had been exacerbated by the drinking. It appeared to slow my visual perception with a kind of ocular echo, a lagging, wraithlike repetition trailing every move. Dark-haired, dark-skinned dancers seemed to multiply before me. Women from every nation in Europe glided by like ghosts. The women wore shorts that revealed their thongs, and filmy summer blouses you could see through. Stars from the mirror ball swept across their faces, and the brilliant flash of the strobe lights seemed to scatter their limbs through time.