I dream that there’s been a huge cataclysmic storm and the whole world is flooded and Lena and I are swimming in a strange place. We’re swimming in a panic fighting for our lives and all around there’s not a single soul in sight no houses no cars only water – black thick dirty water that sticks to us like something alive and scared. As I swim I hear Lena beside me saying that the water actually is alive and it’s clinging to us because it wants to be saved from itself – that’s what she says, saved from itself. The water wants to be saved from the water – that’s the fine kind of dream I have. Then a huge tree appears before us with bare branches. I don’t know what kind of tree it is but it’s very big and there are lots of birds sitting in its branches – tiny red birds – and we see them flapping their wings in a panic but they can’t fly. We swim very close and Lena says we have to help the birds fly away because the water level keeps rising and they’re going to drown. But as soon as she grabs hold of one it vanishes and all that’s left in her hands is a pile of feathers that aren’t red but black. She grabs a second bird and then a third but the same thing happens – they vanish as soon as she touches them and she’s left with a handful of black feathers. Then I try to grab one and my hands fill with black feathers and the water around us is getting blacker and blacker and rising higher and higher and weighing me down grabbing me and pulling me down down down.
Wake up, says Lena. What were you muttering, she says and shakes me. You scared me. Wake up.
She’s leaning over me and in the dark her face is darker than the dark.
What were you dreaming? Why did you shout? What did you dream?
Nothing. Go to sleep.
What did you dream. Tell me.
Nothing. That it was raining. Go to sleep.
She falls back onto the mattress and sighs. Then there’s no sound, only the tick tock of the clock. The sheet has wrapped itself around my legs and it’s too tight but I don’t have the energy to push it off.
See, Lena says. It’s a good sign. See, you shouldn’t lose hope. See.
Then she leans toward me again and puts her hand on my neck and kisses me on the side of my head.
• • •
On Christmas Day the weather changes. Around noon the clouds come out and by three the sky is dark. Sonia calls to wish us a merry Christmas. They’re in Pelion with friends. It’s been raining since morning there, she says. Lots of rain, insane amounts of rain. I’ll fill up a bottle and bring it to you, she says and laughs. They’re all drunk, the whole stupid bunch of them. They’re staying in a hotel whose restaurant has organic meats, organic vegetables, organic forks and knives. Their room has a fireplace and a four-poster bed with a canopy and walls painted all kinds of crazy colors. How nice for you, Lena says, looking at me. Then she asks Sonia when they’re coming home, if they’ll get to see one another before Sonia and Vassilis leave for Paris. I wanted to ask you something, Lena says – her eyes on me the whole time. About what we were saying the other day. You remember. Yes. No. I’m fine. For sure. We’ll talk when you’re back.
When she hangs up, we take our drinks out onto the balcony. It’s going to rain. A tall cloud like a black wall is heading toward us from the direction of Salamina. It’s going to rain. Only the wind doesn’t smell like rain. It’s a strange wind. Blowing from the east, from the opposite direction of where the cloud is, but the cloud is still moving steadily toward us. As if it isn’t a cloud but something else. The power lines in the street hum, metal doors bang, car alarms shriek. Trees and TV antennas bend in the wind, which sweeps up leaves and plastic bags and scraps of paper. A star-shaped ornament pulls loose from a balcony and falls into the street and rolls like some strange wheel. The wind is fierce and blowing steadily toward the west as if the cloud is an enormous magnet put there to suck up everything in the world, to suck all the air out of the world.
Look over there, Lena says, grabbing my arm. What’s that about, she says, pointing to the cloud. What on earth. Look. Have you ever seen anything like it? What is it?
And then we see the rain. Distant black threads hanging from the cloud that seem to tie the earth to the sky.
It’s the end of the world, I say, and Lena laughs as if she can’t breathe and clings to me and licks up a droplet of wine that dripped from her glass onto her hand.
Maybe this really is how the world will end, I say. Then again, maybe not. Maybe the world won’t end, only the people. Maybe people will stop having dreams or sleeping or making love or drinking wine or kissing. Something like that. Maybe that’s how the end will come. Not from meteorites or nuclear weapons or melting ice caps. No explosions or earthquakes or typhoons. Not from outside but from within. That’s how it should be. Because we’re living in the world but not with the world. For centuries now we’ve stopped living with the world. So it wouldn’t be fair if the world had to end with us. It wouldn’t be fair.
The cloud is so big now that we can’t see the sea at all.
A fake fir tree gets blown off a balcony across the street and falls into the emptiness below, silently spinning. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Actually, no, I say. The most frightening thing is work. Waiting to get paid on every fifteenth and thirtieth day of the month. Measuring your life in fifteen-day chunks. Knowing that if your bosses don’t feel like paying you once or twice or ten times in a row, ten fifteen-day chunks, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Your whole life is in their hands. And there you are counting your life out in fifteens. That’s the most frightening thing.
I’m going inside, Lena says. I hate it when you talk like that. I don’t want to watch anymore. Let’s go inside.
But we don’t go anywhere. We stand there holding our drinks and silently watching the rain coming in from the west. We watch as that black curtain of rain slowly and silently closes in slowly and silently swallows up the shapes and colors and noises of the sunset to the west.
Penguins Outside the Accounting Office
THIS MORNING MY father swallowed five tacks. Metal tacks – the big kind. As soon as he saw Petros coming through the door in handcuffs with a cop on either side he took the tacks out of his shirt pocket and swallowed them all at once. Like candies. He was sitting right next to me but I had no idea it was happening. I mean at some point I saw him fishing around in his pocket but how could I have imagined. I thought he had a pill in there or something. How could I have imagined. Because he hadn’t given any sign. Last night when he came home he was calm – no shouting no breaking plates no nothing. Calm. Like a beaten dog. Calm. Of course he didn’t sleep at all. He spent the whole night sitting in the dark in the kitchen. I got up twice and found him sitting there in the dark, staring out the window. One hand propped against his cheek the other messing around in the ashtray with his cigarette as if he were writing something in the ashes. Calm. Except for his foot tapping on the floor. Tap. Tap. Tap. He was barefoot and I wanted to tell him to put on socks since the last thing we needed was for him to catch cold but I didn’t say anything. I just went back to bed and listened for a long time to his bare foot tapping on the floor.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
As if he was listening to some music no one else could hear.
• • •
In the morning at the courthouse he was still calm. Hunched over and silent but calm. Until Petros appeared in handcuffs with the cops pulling him along. Five tacks. I didn’t notice a thing. It all happened so fast in the blink of an eye as they say – like in a dream. He took the tacks from his pocket and swallowed them and it wasn’t easy but he forced them down. And then he clutched his neck and crumpled to the floor and turned blue all over and might have been trying to say something but all that came out was a hrrrrr hrrrr and he was shaking all over with his eyes wide open like a dog that’s been poisoned. Everyone ran over to him, people were shouting, they thought he’d had a heart attack or a stroke – all hell broke loose. Petros tried to run over, too, but the cops grabbed him and threw hi
m down. You cocksuckers, he shouted at them. Let me go you motherfuckers that’s my father. But they just held him pinned down with their knees on his back. Like he was some kind of terrorist, like Koufodinas from November 17th. I don’t remember what happened next – I wasn’t really seeing things too clearly at that point. I was drenched in sweat, dizzy, trembling. All I remember is the ambulance coming to take him away. And then someone came and leaned over and gave me a good look and asked the guy next to me:
What did this guy swallow? A screwdriver or something?
• • •
It’s been about a month now. I’m sure it started earlier but it’s been a month since I found out. When Petros got off work he would take the Cadet and park on Thebes Street and wait. He worked at Grekas’s warehouses behind Plato’s Academy and as soon as he got off work he would park the Cadet on Thebes Street and watch the cars go by. He would put on his hazards and smoke a cigarette and listen to one of the cassettes I had given him and roll down the window and watch the cars go by. When he caught sight of an expensive one – some convertible or huge jeep – he would start the engine and pull out and follow it. Piraeus Kastela Faliro however far they went. Glyfada Voula Ilioupoli, all those fancy suburbs down the coast. He followed the expensive cars because he wanted to see where the people driving them lived or worked. He would drive around for hours like an aimless curse. The night he told me about it he’d come home drunk and collapsed onto his bed with all his clothes on and lit a cigarette and sang a song by Robert Johnson – he didn’t know the words so he could only sing the tune – and then he said it’s strange to be poor, it’s so strange to be poor, you’re like one of those penguins they show on TV watching the ice melt all around them and they have no idea what to hold onto or how to keep themselves from going crazy and so they start attacking one another out of fear – that’s what it’s like, Petros said.
Then he stood up put his hands on his hips and started waddling through the room making strange noises and I got out of bed and switched on the light and said you’re wasted again you idiot if he wakes up and sees you like this he’ll kick you from here to tomorrow and Petros said leave me alone I’m doing my penguin routine and then he stopped and looked at me and said penguins are an endangered species you’re not allowed to hit them so if anyone dares raise a hand against me I’ll report him to the ecologists. When I turned off the light he stopped moving and lit a cigarette and looked out the window at the flickering lights of the ships down at the port and said that another Friday had come and gone and Grekas still hadn’t paid them their wages.
He owes us two months of back pay, he said. We all lined up at four in the afternoon outside the accounting office, waiting. Fifteen or twenty of us. They paid the first five or six and the rest of us went home empty-handed again. I was eighth in line. We shouted and swore but we can’t change the facts. Next week, he says. This old guy barba-Kostas who works the backhoe fainted when he heard. We ran over to try and help. There’s nothing in the world more – what’s the word. More humiliating than that. To not get paid for two months and to wait in line for your wages and when your turn comes they say sorry we ran out of money come back next week. It’s sick. A sickness. Soul-destroying. You should have seen us. We were just like penguins. Waiting in line inching forward and stretching our necks out to see what was happening in the office and if the next guy to go in was getting paid or not. We were just like penguins, really. And the whole time we were waiting there it wouldn’t have taken much for me to tear into the guy in front of me and I knew perfectly well that the guy behind me would have torn into me too. Because we all knew there wasn’t enough money to go around. It would have made your blood freeze to see us like that. Like penguins, I swear.
• • •
I leave the hospital on foot because I don’t have money for a cab but also because I feel like walking. Five tacks. The doctors say two of them are stuck in his esophagus and the others went down into his stomach. It’s not going to be an easy case. He’s over seventy and he’s got heart problems. They’re going to do something but they didn’t tell me what. They might not even know themselves. They might not even want to do anything – who knows. They sent me home to get his pills so they’ll know what he’s taking and I’m also supposed to bring his pajamas and slippers. They practically chased me out of the place and that makes me wonder, too.
It’s December and there’s a full moon and a clear sky and the breath comes out of my mouth like fog. Friday evening. They’re going to keep Petros in jail all weekend – they’ll bring him back to the courthouse on Monday. I called the lawyer from the hospital and he told me. It’s like the junta, he said. We’re living through another junta. They won’t let him out on bail because he’s a flight risk, they say. I never heard such a thing. Of course that brother of yours isn’t an easy one. He’s got guts, that’s for sure. What was he thinking? A young kid like that. At any rate on Monday we’ll get him out, no question. Patience, that’s all I can say. It’s only two days.
I turn left on Second Division, right on Heroes and end up out in front of the public theater where I think about taking a bus but keep on walking towards the port. Christmas. It’s nearly Christmas and there are big fake candles flickering on the utility poles and garlands hanging over the street with fir trees and Saint Vassilises and reindeer. Up there it’s Christmas but down here it’s Good Friday – the sidewalk spattered with spots that look like blood as if someone came this way who’d been shot or some wounded animal left a long trail of blood behind. Dried black blood.
Last night they caught him in Glyfada. Petros. They caught him down in Glyfada. He’d waited again at Thebes Street and followed a jeep with a woman inside who was by herself. When they got to Glyfada and the jeep pulled into a garage Petros got out of the Cadet and went and looked over the fence and saw the most beautiful house he’d ever seen in his life – a huge villa as big as a castle and a yard with grass and trees and strange lights and in the middle a Christmas tree that seemed to be made of ice. Then, before the woman could close the garage door, Petros slipped inside and refused to leave. He didn’t want to do anything didn’t want to bother anyone. He just wanted to spend the night out there in the yard and look at the house and the grass and that strange tree that seemed to be made of ice. That’s all he wanted.
But the woman and the house happened to belong to a judge, or a public prosecutor or something.
We heard it all from the lawyer – Petros didn’t even call.
• • •
On the corner of Georgiou and Resistance I have to wait for the light to change. The wind is fierce and a thick yellow frost coming from the port obscures the streetlights and the lights in shop windows. There seem to be even more stains on the sidewalk now, as if not just one wounded person but a whole army passed by.
The light turns red and I cross the street with my eyes on the asphalt.
He was yelling something about penguins, the lawyer said. It took them ages to calm him down. He was pretty wild, even tore one of the policemen’s shirts. Completely wasted.
• • •
I stuff pajamas shirts underwear and socks into an overnight bag. I put whatever medicine I can find in a plastic bag. I pour myself a tsipouro to get warm – my hands are wooden with cold, my legs still shaking from the walk. And then I do something I haven’t done in years: I stick the whole top half of my body into the hall closet and smell. When we were kids Petros and I used to do it all the time. In winter. We would sneak out into the hall at night and open the closet and slip inside to smell the clothes – ours, our father’s, our mother’s. Hers had a stronger smell than the rest. Walk on cotton so the cat won’t catch you, Petros would whisper. I have no idea where he learned that saying. Walk on cotton so the cat won’t catch you. We laughed so hard on those nights. And then we would go back to bed with the smell of the clothes lingering in our mouths and with that sweetness on our tongues we would fall asleep, arm in arm.
Things are d
ifferent now. Other times, another house, other clothes – even the smell in the closet is gone. It seems to me that everything has lost its smell. Or maybe it’s just me who lost those smells, who knows.
The heat is off and there’s cold air coming in around the kitchen window. I stuff paper napkins into the cracks and push them down hard. Then I see the box of tacks sitting on the kitchen table.
I pour out another tsipouro and then open the box, take out a tack and put it in my mouth. It tastes bitter.
It’s December and there’s a full moon and a clear sky full of stars. I remember Petros telling me once that somewhere way back when, in Peru or maybe Mexico, people believed that humans were born from stars. Rich people had descended from a golden star and poor people from a bronze one. That’s why they can’t ever be equal. Because they were born into different worlds.
It really is strange, to be poor.
The wind is still whistling through the cracks. I look at the stars which from here all look the same – exactly the same, not gold and not bronze either. The tack feels cold in my mouth.
Something Will Happen, You'll See Page 17