DEDICATION
For Bill Clegg who makes it possible
MAP
EPIGRAPH
Time is a game played beautifully by children.
—Heraclitus
None of the dead come back. But some stay.
—Unknown, often attributed to St. John the Divine
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Christopher Bollen
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
She was starting to enjoy it: the strange, delirious feeling of nothing bad happening.
On the last day, Elise stabbed her key into the neck of the motorbike, clipped the helmet strap under her chin, and revved the throttle. She took off toward the port town of Skala. She was a gunshot, a bullet racing, and in the past ten days she had learned to bank the bends in the roads with the slightest readjustment of her hips. The engine kicked into gear, and she clenched her front teeth as if she held a knife between them. Dead time, all the time. Days fine and rolling and shiftless. She didn’t want to think about the end. She had woken at six to watch the sun slip out of the Aegean.
The Greek island of Patmos was a wheeze of color: bleach-blond dust, scrub brush of wiry green, the wet-metal shine of water, and low rock walls blooming sinus pinks. As Elise ascended a hill she saw the monastery rise from the cliffs like a cruise ship moored on a mountaintop. Human bodies were scattered along the beaches, silver and limp in the sticky heat. She wanted to be one of them, for another week or maybe forever, lingering between states of hangover and hunger. The beaches here were perfect, and the sea like glass. At night on the island, red lights trailed across the water as tenders returned to their boats. Elise had watched those lights, drunk and loveless and chewing on her split ends, her burnt legs splayed over the hotel balcony.
Now the motor was her anthem, and wind squalled along the curves of her shoulders. Other bikers passed her, young shirtless Italians with skin the color of dried honey—Italian men always looked nineteen to her until they looked forty. Their necks were scarved with beach towels, their waists belted by the arms of their girlfriends who sat sidesaddle behind them, black hair streaming in the blue. Maybe on this last ride, she shouldn’t have bothered with the helmet, the moony, red safety precaution that announced: I consider speed a threat, I am prone to head injuries, I am an American on vacation.
Her vacation was nearly over. The ferry that would take her to Athens was already crossing the sea. The overnight plane that would spit her back into New York must be refueling now in Abu Dhabi or Topeka. On the last day, the world came back, crowded and climate controlled and filled with New York emergencies, with the same sun uglier and bouncing like her neighbor’s basketball through the hallways of her Brooklyn apartment building. For nearly two weeks, the hot calm of Patmos had worked as a communication scrambler, blocking all news of shooting rampages and celebrity deaths and Twitter mock-outrages that temporarily revived its slack-faced users like personal defibrillation devices. Wars could be breaking out in Canada for all she knew or cared. Instead Elise had become a specialist in the quiet art of the human form. Right now, she zoomed by three lovely, barely covered specimens tripping down a path to the beach. Europeans seemed so indifferent to their bodies, so resigned to and at peace with them. For her, the difference had become increasingly obvious: Europeans had a lifestyle; Americans had their lives.
Elise checked her watch. Her vacation wasn’t entirely over. She still had time for one quick swim, topless, splashing out alone in her cutoffs. Except Raina was waiting for her at a café by the port. Raina had gone ahead with their luggage by taxi so Elise could return the bike to the rental office.
Screw Raina, she thought as she glided toward the igloo-white houses of Skala. But someone had already screwed Raina, on days four, five, and seven of their vacation. Raina, unlike Elise, didn’t understand the fundamental law of vacation hookups: no obligation, no regret, sex so unconfused it wasn’t even complicated by a shared language most of the time. It was like getting searched at customs with nothing to declare. Raina had spent the last days of their trip sighing audibly and checking her phone, blaming lack of interest on bad reception. “I’m going to stay by the pool today where I get service.” “I’m going to climb up to the road again to check my messages.” Elise had wanted to slap her in the face, slap her and talk her into her bikini and snorkel alongside her over the splotchy reefs by Petra Beach. Fried halloumi cheese and white wine at three, followed by a nap of warm mingling breaths. Mostly, Elise had gone by herself to the closest beach, where she read and reread the section on Patmos in her guidebook: the rocky, barren island of St. John the Divine, who, exiled by a Roman emperor, wrote the Book of Revelation here in AD 95. Elise hadn’t personally witnessed any evidence of the Four Horsemen, but she loved basking in the sun at the end of the world. She found the Apocalypse fit her recent mood. She just hadn’t expected to feel so alone upon reaching it.
Careening down the steep hillside, she reminded herself that the whole point of the vacation was not to make memories but to lose track of them. Elise had gotten married at age twenty-four over a Fourth of July weekend. After the divorce two months ago, the irony of a wedding on Independence Day became her fallback joke that everyone saw coming as soon as she brought the matter up. Elise had told that joke while standing on the yacht of Raina’s new obsession, on the afternoon they had met him, their tables touching at a small taverna by a quiet swimming cove. He had invited them back to his boat, and, dripping from the five-minute swim, they climbed the rungs of the ladder and were wrapped in soft, black towels by the boat’s captain. Raina hadn’t laughed at the joke and neither had her new friend. He pulled a T-shirt over his pretty decent body and made drinks while two flags snapped behind him on the stern: one Greek, one Turkish. “Which are you?” Elise had asked. She was the considerate guest, the one who asked strangers about their homelands. “Neither,” he said, glancing over at her with such a forced smile she almost apologized for asking. “I was born in Cyprus, but I was raised in the States.” He said the States as if it were an untreatable glandular disease instead of a country.
An hour later he and Raina had disappeared below deck, the captain jumped overboard with a spear gun, and Elise had been left to stare at the undulating mounds of the island. She sat on creamy leather cushions, her face and legs browning to red and the beginning of a heat rash blistering against the strap of her swimsuit. A toothlike diamond, wedged between the cushions, shot brilliant glitters of white. She had plucked the ring from the cushions, as if the yacht itself were proposing to her. Elise briefly shut her eyes at the memory, even as traffic began to thicken in the port town. The dock was lined with private vessels and fat metal skiffs advertising day trips to nearby islands. Old, gluey men scrubbed on hands and knees. Tweek, tweek, tweek went the wax on wood.
Why had she done it? She had threaded the ring on her finger just to see how it looked. Then she spun it around unthinkingly and made a fist so that the diamond was buried in the flesh of her palm. After Rai
na reemerged on deck wearing her obsession’s damp T-shirt, Elise had swum single-fisted back to shore. Now the ring hung on a gold chain around her neck, purposely hidden under her linen shirt. Elise had assumed she could return the ring on her next visit, although there had been no next visit, not for her. Maybe she had stolen it because Raina had gone below deck without her. Or because the diamond couldn’t matter much if it had already been lost to the boat cushions. Or because she had poured two vodkas while waiting for her friend, and those drinks had made her thirsty for her own impulsive acts. Wanting too much had always been the lonely consequence of alcohol. It was as if with each sip she could feel her bones growing and straining inside of her to take whatever was loose in the world.
After Raina’s two subsequent sex-a-thons on days five and seven, Elise had watched her friend change in their hotel room, her own stomach queasy, fearing allegations. Raina tugged off her bikini top, her breasts two fried eggs runny with grease. Her nipples were blistered, as if the island’s mosquitoes had gotten to them. “He’s a little rough,” Raina said, squinting down in assessment, “but also gentle,” and reported nothing further.
He couldn’t possibly have noticed the ring’s disappearance. He had so much money, leather-padded, life-jacketed, an open safe bobbing in the sea. Even the gray cat lounging on the boat’s control panel had winked at her apathetically. The theft had been a moment of recklessness, a mark of time in the nearly two weeks broken only by water and sleep. And nothing had happened, no news or confrontations, only Raina and her slow heartbreak playing like a radio with a faulty dial. Now, Elise applied the brakes. Pale tourists darted across the road like startled First World chickens. Maybe she’d wear the ring in New York. It was triple the size of the one Dodie had given her with his earnings as a session drummer for past-prime bands trying to unwreck their careers between overdoses.
The hiss of cicadas was lost to the sounds of car horns and foreign voices. High season had arrived in Skala. She and Raina were getting out before the beaches were quilted with tourists. A little girl in a straw hat wobbled out in front of her bike, her face as fat and purple as a thumbprint. “Molto carina,” Elise called, smiling first happily and then annoyed. On her last day, she was still trying to speak Greek in the only foreign language that she knew.
She sped on. Dazed vacationers thronged the taxi stand. Elise passed nuns and faded postcard stalls and satirical doomsday T-shirt shops. The locals had cleverly made a cottage industry out of Armageddon-themed tourist tchotchkes. A group of long-haired hippies stood in front of the vacant police station, holding Bibles and rolled sleeping bags. The island’s few administrative buildings were graffitied with the same black, anti-Eurozone messages that had decorated all of Athens, as if for a national holiday of death threats and decline. “Οχι.” “για πάνтα.” “Kill the West.” A bald officer in a sky-blue uniform followed her with his eyes. She parked in front of the bike shop, collected her backpack from the seat compartment, and paid for the rental with the last of her euros.
The sun was blasting at 11:02 A.M., and her sweat stung her peeling shoulders. She hurried toward the main café, a full dishwasher’s worth of dirty cups and saucers piled on the tables. Customers fanned themselves with laminated picture menus. Elise glanced at her fellow ferry travelers, all feverish and exhausted by the thought of the long voyage ahead, adjusting to cramped conditions after so many days letting their bodies drift. There was nothing so soulless as burnt, white Westerners on the last day of their vacations. Their happiness had betrayed them, and they knew it, taking stock of the few souvenirs they had managed to stow away. Worse, Raina wasn’t among them. Elise punched her hips. It was like Raina to make them late. At JFK, they had almost missed their flight to Greece because she’d insisted on having her two suitcases embalmed in plastic wrap. “The bag people”—Raina had meant the luggage handlers—“aren’t stupid. They know which suitcases to target. They know which ones have jewelry worth stealing.” Elise clutched the ring underneath her shirt. Anyone could be a thief.
She hiked from café to café along the port, searching for her friend, growing angrier, pitching the straps of her backpack higher on her shoulders, when each café lacked the woman she sought. The heat was maniacal in early July, the water twenty feet away offered only a spent, muggy breeze, and the accumulation of tourist rubble around the tables—cheap Velcro-strapped shoes, inert camera equipment, every vest pocket punctuated with too many zippers, the squishy foam U’s of neck pillows—was starting to undermine the peace Elise had brokered in her ten days on Patmos. A wave of panic took advantage: Did she have her passport, the ferry tickets, her headphones? She groped the front pocket of her bag and found them safely inside, along with a postcard to her sister that she had addressed and stamped but had neglected to mail. She noticed a yellow ΕΔΤΑ mailbox attached to the side of the police station. Before she pushed the postcard into the box, she reread the note she had written, now filled with week-old news and revelations: “Raina and I are hanging out on the very lux yacht of an extremely sketchy Cypriot scion, falling in lust (R is f***ing him), getting tan, and I think I’m finally over Dodie, and in a week I’ll be totally reborn.” All damningly false predictions. She wished she were still on that yacht on the afternoon of day four, in the floating, faraway luxury of soft leather, sanded wood, and Turkish vodka, the captain going underwater in his Speedo, new feelings destroying the old ones. She wished someone had kissed her, brought her back to a rented room, fumbled and grunted. To be loved for a minute didn’t take much. She dropped the postcard through the slot. The ferry would arrive in ten minutes.
Elise stumbled around a dying cypress tree protected by a circle of rocks. A Greek boy—his pants were filthy, his eyelashes long—set off two bottle rockets, their hissing ascent spooking Elise out of her fatigue. Red and blue fireworks exploded faintly in the sky. That’s when she caught sight of Raina fifteen feet away, bare legs crossed, black sandals tightly buckled. She sat at an out-of-the-way taverna that was shaded by a turquoise awning. The taverna was a tiny, family-run establishment, patronized mostly by locals and village priests, although high-season backpackers had made headway in the outdoor seating options. Elise saw their luggage piled clumsily under the table.
She took the chair across from her friend and rested her forehead in her palms.
“I was looking all over for you. Why weren’t you at one of the main cafés? I was scared we’d miss the boat.”
Raina took off her sunglasses and blinked. Her eyes were puffy. Several crumpled napkins littered the table like broken-necked parakeets. Elise got the sense that Raina had spent the last half hour strangling paper. Or fixing her makeup. Raina didn’t look like a person about to embark on an eight-hour gulag of carpet-hard economy seating and speed-bickering Italians. She wore her favorite dress, yellow silk that fluted down to her thighs. Her lipstick was glossy, and her brown hair was slicked back, still holding the grooves of a comb. She smelled of expensive lotion and discount bug spray. She was nursing a Campari.
“This is where Charlie comes for breakfast,” Raina said quietly, as if speaking any louder might cause her to cry. Elise exhaled through her teeth. “Charlie comes every morning at eleven to Nikos for a coffee. That’s why I’m here. I want to see him one last time.”
Elise would be patient. On the last day of their vacation she would prove she had the temperament of a saint—like the chipped, pacific figures holding two fingers to their chests in the muddy frescos of the monastery. And then back in New York she would delete all the photos she had taken of Raina, ignore her phone calls, and try to recast the memory of the trip as a solitary getaway. She knew, though, that vacation resentment was the most forgivable variety. Friends were monsters someplace else.
“Well, he’s not here,” Elise said softly. She pulled the glass from Raina’s hand and took a sip. She noticed the man at the next table staring nervously at them. Some faces were born mean. His was skeletal with a shaved crescent of hair
that seemed to retract from his bulging eyes. His mouth was a rectangle of bright yellow teeth. He stubbed out a cigarette with a stump-like finger. Elise turned her attention to more pathetic concerns. “Raina, it was just a fling. Do you want a Valium? I was saving the last two for the flight. How are your glands?” She was trying to win Raina over on the joke she’d been easing into their repertoire. “Are you suffering a case of the States?”
Raina shifted in her chair. “He’ll be here. He told me he comes every day. He’s very punctual. And I’m going to wait so I can say good-bye in person.”
Elise took another sip. He’s very punctual? Raina had spent a total of seven hours with the guy. Was it the sex or his money that had reduced her friend to such a puddle of rejection? Or was it pride? Raina, in Manhattan, was not used to being thrown aside. She had the tidy face of a fox that knew the hole in every fence. Her body was one long tongue, a lean, speaking muscle. Elise felt zero sympathy. Raina had been the one to propose Greece as the perfect cure for Elise’s depression—two best friends on the quiet island of the Apocalypse. But they had barely unpacked and gotten base tans before Raina sealed herself off in an imaginary romance. Elise studied her. Her time with Charlie had satisfied the single requirement of romance: it brought pain. Raina had her pain, and Elise had the ferry tickets, a stolen diamond, and her return flight to New York. Tomorrow they’d both be back in their apartments, staring out at a summer of stunted Brooklyn trees and packs of clammy new New Yorkers scream-laughing up the sidewalks, that sound more disconcerting to her than rounds of gunfire. She didn’t want to go back. She knew she couldn’t. And she knew she would.
“It looks like he’s not very punctual.” Elise slapped her hand over Raina’s knuckles. “We have a boat to catch. Have you paid for—”
“Then go without me,” Raina squealed. Customers around them turned at the peal in her voice. Three Orthodox priests lowered their coffee cups. The priest in the middle, draped in a long black robe, had a trimmed beard and sharp, watery teeth. He met Elise’s eyes and nodded like a businessman shoring up a deal. The watch strapped to his wrist was plated in gold. God must be good at the end of the world.
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