By the year 1992, Svetlana failed a pregnancy test. We discussed bringing a child into the world, something that seemed bigger than ourselves. I was excited to be a father, to have the chance to teach someone the things I myself failed to learn until it was too late. But the child miscarried at six months. Svetlana and I endured the loss and tried again. Some time passed before anything felt okay again. We told ourselves regularly that we were stronger than the pain. And when the second child miscarried in 1996, we didn’t speak much to each other over the weeks that followed. One afternoon, instead of going straight to a meeting after work, I stayed downtown and walked until it got dark, rolling and smoking cigarette after cigarette. It felt like each one could never be enough to satiate the craving. I wondered why she wouldn’t just leave me or have an affair, do something that could certify my failure. I found myself unable to look at her sometimes, alone even when we were having sex. But Svetlana was patient. She had seen me at my worst and at my best. She waited.
Eventually I managed to return to functionality, to tenderness. Things seemed livable again. Every recovery is a succession of falls that you continue to get up from. But what she didn’t see was that it wasn’t like swimming back to the shallow after venturing out, it was more like I was brought back in by the current, in a dead or unconscious state. And that’s how I lived. Naked, sweating in bed one night, Svetlana confided in me that she thought we should try again and keep trying until this thing we both wanted happened for real. I hate the phrase “for real.” I agreed, but by then, my endurance was routine, framed with hopelessness. There was, soon after, an evening of fear, in which I validated my bad luck by purchasing several lottery pages. The first numbers matched, enough to spark some forgotten hope in me, then nothing else matched. I laughed at myself for being stupid and tore the sheets and let them fall to the pavement. I walked it off and swore that I would never throw money at the wind again. But it was too late and the promise was an empty one. I had already whet something, inside. The third pregnancy yielded us a daughter. Except by then I spent far more time outside the house, obsessed with my new hobby, first picking random numbers then superstitious ones: scrambling the death dates of historical figures, looking for signs around me. (I passed five pigeons on the way, two sewage grates, etc.) Soon closing in on burning through paychecks faster than I could earn them. In the time of the fourth pregnancy, the second girl, I found myself further out than I’d ever been. My body was still clean, still enduring—I never missed a meeting—but my mind was full of dry rot. Everything on autopilot except the gambling, like it was the only time I was really alive. Soon I was betting, the way doing the same thing over and over gets boring: sports, card games, election outcomes, trivia. Anything that had cash dropped on the table for the taking. But I was never taking, was I? Like many who share my “illness” I suffered quietly. The woman that helped heal me once felt like she was beyond reach now. Once the family income surplus diminished, I asked Nistor if I could borrow some money. Told him I was hurting bad. But he instead offered me side work to help replenish my accounts. I didn’t want her to know. Svetlana now stayed largely at home, reclusive. We both ceased attending the meetings, diverted not only from sponsorship, but from each other; rather, were this a forest at night, while she stayed at the camp with our children, I wandered off to find firewood and returned late, going out more and more, becoming less tangible to them, more mythical, returning only to supply game and firewood so that they continued to survive, then off again. Svetlana often woke to an empty bed. I usually slept on the couch or in my car, parked out front. I never smelled like alcohol and didn’t show any signs of drug use (and she had sponsored enough people to know) so she left me be, I assume, hoping it would pass. I do know that she suspected something—even the sex had fallen away at this point, any ounce of myself left was given away, never recharging, always staking, always searching. . . . It wasn’t long before Nistor vouched for me and got me into work with a higher return. I was no longer shaking down foreigners for what they owed men I’d never met. Now there were unprovoked beatings, cover-ups, evidence reclamation. Just things that seemed no different than favors I’d have done at the peak of Soviet dominance. For the right facilitation fee, of course.
Money was flowing. I didn’t question currency. Even still, less trickled back to my family and I had by the day of ten years sobriety fully convinced myself that this thing I liked to do, a thing that was carving me up inside, was a way out. It was the way I would free myself, free them. Do right by the blood. But what I soon learned was the cost of that money. The first of the basest work began to arrive—this was shit I was unprepared for—and I could feel the shifting, but I also felt powerless to change its course. I spent a night away from the house, alone, digging a hole for a curious cop that had learned the wrong thing. I didn’t pull the trigger, but I may as well have. Complicity can be, in its way, a kind of murder. But it was happenstance, I told myself, the poor son of a bitch got the wrong hand was all. . . . I rolled the body into the shallow grave and buried it. My shoulders were already sore when I got home in the morning. The car smelled like earth and my clothes were stained. I got maybe an hour of sleep in the driveway before my wife woke me, opening the door, with a mug of coffee, some potato pies, and fresh clothes in her hand. I changed in the parking lot. The following afternoon Nistor and I pursued a suspect into a Krokodil den, but I was so exhausted (or anxious) that my hands trembled and I missed my shot and instead took a bullet in the side. It was lucky that Nistor took out the hood and called it in. In the moment I was shot, everything had slowed down, and I wondered whether I had left the keys in the ignition, space condensing around me.
Recovery happened over a series of weeks, most of it at home. The bullet fragmented and broke two ribs, just missing my heart by an inch. They removed some of it where they could. I don’t remember much from these days. My wife stayed at my side. I took pain meds. They didn’t catch the way I feared they might. After a while, it was obvious my body would never feel the same way it had. There was constant pain, even furthest from the wound.
The same day I returned to work, I was back to running errands.
Now there were debts that had accumulated—unpaid losses. Nistor convinced me to retire from policing to work security for an underground casino run by our benefactor, a man I never got to meet. This paid better than government work, carried less of the guilt. I kept mostly to myself, kept my head down. I still came home to my family when the others were hitting the town. It was the crisis that finally did it, knocking us off the frail footing I had reclaimed. I was on my ass. Even the powerful, for a while, slowed their spending. I found myself out of work for the first time in decades and it wasn’t long before I realized that we would lose our house, lose everything. Anything I had sacrificed for the girls would be for nothing . . . so I stretched, postponed the axes. I hustled. I started robbing tourists at gunpoint—broke into a church once and stole donations, but I don’t think that’s what got my god’s attention. With FIBA EuroBasket beginning, I saw a break and bet almost everything, a Hail Mary on Russia the night they played Germany in Gdansk, Poland. Only the Russians lost in an upset. All walls were closing in, suddenly. Every kind of debt at once. The man I thought I’d bonded with over many years of mutual trade turned on me over the length of a phone call. Nistor and others, some who were strangers I had only met in passing, took me out back of the bookmakers’ and knocked in my front teeth. They kicked me until I couldn’t breathe and left me choking on the pavement, spitting up blood beneath evening light, surrounded by the sounds of cicadas and distant traffic. It felt like being in a steel box and running out of air. They had told me I had a week, knowing it’d never happen. I managed to push myself to stand. Fearing that my family would see me like this, I cleaned myself up in a gas station restroom, staring at a reflection whose mouth was stuffed with paper towels to stave the bleeding. I got on a bus and took refuge in a hostel just beyond the city with what little money was o
n me, feeling like a fucking coward. I stayed faithful to my wife. I found some work in a field and cleared my head. I never called. Each time I went to the bus stop, I would turn back.
It was one early autumn evening I returned home to ask my family’s forgiveness, I don’t know why, I guess I thought things could be somehow the way they were, and I found . . . I found Svetlana and our girls outside, in the garden. . . . The torsos of their unclothed bodies were still warm, but the limbs had cooled, indicating to me that those who’d done this were only hours gone. The house otherwise deserted. I kept thinking If you had come back yesterday, if you had never left... No one had waited for me, though I now wished they had—I wanted to die. But it was as if this was enough. Like they didn’t need anything else from me because they knew they had taken it all. And every moment spent away from my family seemed too much. I hated Andrei Nistor hard, hated the facelessness of it all. But I lacked a will. I couldn’t even cry. It was perhaps the learned calm of my career that gave me the strength to dig four graves out back, far from the house. I buried the three of them. I sat in the last one myself, exhausted, possessed, contemplating the end. The houses along the road where we lived were spaced far apart and so thickly separated by trees that sound often found trouble escaping. How could they know what had happened?—what I had done? I put a single bullet in a revolver that I had kept in the wall vent, just behind our bed. I spun the cylinder and fired and lost five times, gasping each. I signed the cross, asking for help. I misfired the sixth. There was nothing that could not betray me. Zeu wanted my suffering.
Maniotis sat up from the floor and rubbed at his eyes. He rarely had pleasant dreams.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. For a minute, he couldn’t see the walls of the room and everything seemed just as boundless as it had in the dream, like he’d fallen out of existence, into a total nothing, a black so lacking in asterisms it could have been the edge of the universe or the ocean floor. Distant cries, like people shouting into the wind. A crowd of faceless, fingerless bodies. Jagged, phantom motion. He had wanted the apparitions in the dream to take him, hide him somewhere far, but they didn’t, they just faced him, like distorted, genderless mannequins, accusing. All too quickly, the specifics of the dream crumbled and his vision adjusted to the room.
“You were a lion.” His voice at a cracked whisper.
His father died unable to swallow solid food, let alone without the help of his nurse. Bedridden for over a year, all command diminished to nothing.
Has it really been so long since I’ve been here?
The few times Maniotis had stopped by, he’d remained in the doorway, greeted by his mother, sometimes his sister. His mother had explained the way his father had gone was that there’d been no warning and one day his father simply sat up (unusual as he hadn’t exercised that much control in some time) and looked at her and frowned before closing his eyes the last time.
Maniotis felt his way toward the switch and turned on the light. He looked into the room a little longer and listened, hulked in the doorframe. He yawned and steeled himself. He dialed back the missed call, a number he didn’t recognize, and got no answer. His mobile rang back instantly, and he answered but heard only static. He hung up.
Maniotis left a note for his mother and locked the door. He walked home, stopping briefly at an orthodox church to light a candle.
Back at his own apartment, he worked out and ate leftovers. He used electric clippers and a travel mirror to trim his hair high and tight, the way he used to in the service. When had the discipline slackened? His eyes widened. He’d almost forgotten it was respectful to let hair grow when someone dies. For a second ashamed death was familiar enough to struggle with its customs. He left the beard growth intact. He washed dishes. He cleaned his guns and unpacked his travel bag and tried the strange number again. He only got the same white noise, so he changed and went out.
Desiring a life significantly less paranoid, Ektoras Karras now managed a front in Psiri, called Dive Bar. It was almost dreg work, but it was easy and it paid okay. He was listening to Alfa Gama and changing a beer keg in the cellar when he’d slipped on condensation and snagged the headphone cable on the tap, yanking his earbuds out. He rubbed his ears and huffed frustration, noticing then that he could hear a conversation through the tap lines that ran under the bar. The two doormen (he thought a better phrasing might be “errand boys” but he also wasn’t idiot enough to say so—they liked you to know they were always packing) were hanging out at the bar as usual, talking shit on everything from world events to scamming to how they thought they’d be the best cops. Sometimes they talked business, seemed to have an ear for it. They both spoke the way loud people do when they don’t realize their voices carry. He wondered why anyone even talked to them when they were almost as low on the pecking order as he was. No one seemed to tell him shit.
The one initiating the conversation was Aesop Damianos, because he had a real thick, nasal lilt that told he’d never lived anywhere but the city. A fucking meathead. Karras wasn’t at first sure what they’d meant, but then the other one, Eleftherios “Takis” Apostolos repeated almost verbatim the statement as a question. Karras squinted and shook his head what? in disbelief. He fastened the tap on a fresh keg and lifted it into place. He came back up the steps and shut the door, earbuds in.
Takis pointed at his own ear. “Hey shithead, you’re on the clock. Take those out of your ears before I do it for you.”
Aesop slapped the counter and laughed. Karras took out the earbuds and tucked them into his shirt. Aesop leaned over the bar counter and set his glass under the tap and levered a pour. It came out foam and he ran it till there was lager. Excess running over the drain pan and onto the bar, annoying Karras, who’d been cleaning it.
“At least you changed the keg.” Aesop sipped, turned back to Takis. “As I was saying before, I really fucking love American crime shows. Have we talked about The Wire yet?”
“Every damn day of the week, it seems.”
“Let me tell you—”
The bar was almost empty; it was only the three of them and two female sex workers that sometimes got kickbacks for luring in tourists, displaced from Eastern Wherever, leeching box wine. It was intentionally barren—its clientele ranging hopeful tourists they ripped off, drops from the occasional bagman, and any drunks that popped by, who he’d serve counterfeit beer just to keep the bar looking regular, and to see how much of the piss they could hold.
Karras rinsed his hands in the sink and dried them with a Carlsberg beer towel. “Mind if I go buy cigarettes? I’m out.”
Aesop didn’t look up. “Be quick.”
Outside, walking up odos Miaouli, he dialed his friend. Now that summer was here, it didn’t get dark till a lot later. Everything on the street seemed vaguely orange. A weak breeze tickled the back of his neck. Karras got static and tried again. Aris Maniotis answered.
“Cancel what you’re doing tonight, we should talk.
“Unpack later. It’s not something I can tell over the phone, re.”
He saw a Xeroxed flier on a post, looked like it’d only attract kids. Told Maniotis where.
“I’ll see you then.”
He returned to the bar with a pack of Marlboros, a lottery scratch card and a Milko. Aesop took him aside and asked to be shown the books and bar inventory, boss’s orders. “Malaka, I don’t like this shit either, the math makes my head hurt.”
“If I get through it fast, can we close down early?”
“Sure. You got somewhere important to be?”
“There’s this piece of ass I met the other night, she wants to go out.”
“Alright.”
He complied and played ignorant the way they all liked. But that didn’t stop them from keeping him longer, just to make him wait.
Jumeirah Beach, earlier today. Beside the trunk of a manmade beachfront in the shape of a palm tree.
“Fuck this place, fuck this place . . .” Lloyd Harrison was mutterin
g to himself, staring into a napkin. He’d written the word “mirage” all over it. Next to it, the poorly drawn shape of Australia. The dust storm had settled and the streets were covered in the mess it left behind. He’d forgotten that his windows were down. It was already getting too hot and the outdoor spots were shutting now that summer was here. He hated this bar and the people in it, lots of expatriates, as well as the shitty scenery it overlooked. But where else would he go, if not here? One hotel bar was as good as another as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t see the street from where he sat and wouldn’t want to. Endless construction eyesores. His drink was sweating even with the air-conditioning on. It was a well-mixed cocktail, he’d give them that. He kept a tight beard here as a precaution, though he’d never encountered any danger. The population was mostly foreign and there wasn’t as much police presence as he’d expected, but the laws were strict and you didn’t dare offend the wrong person. It was alright, he supposed. But he preferred somewhere more . . . familiar. Maldives? Seychelles? He’d lost any notion of paradise. Endless stretches of beach all looked the same after enough access. Perhaps what he wanted was to escape civilization altogether. Become independent, rural. Then why are you here? He knew: money is an exit more than it is ever anything else. His phone beeped, a text message. He looked down at it and sighed. He had to make the call, keep them from being suspicious. He dialed, holding back a century of breath. The voice that answered was calm, hoarse, almost scary in its expectations of his time. The point made was that the funds had to change hands tonight. But it had all been a bluff and he knew he needed to get out before they came for it. He said “Okay” and they arranged a meet in a couple hours. He said “Okay” again and hung up. Harrison made another call and set up his exit. He shouldn’t have waited as long as he had. But at least he’d been smart enough to book the two hotel rooms. A decoy under his name, another booked under an alias. There would no doubt be someone waiting there soon. So he’d get his things from the other hotel and shave his face, be less recognizable. He dropped the phone in his drink and watched it float up like a buoy, shorting.
Long Lost Dog of It Page 3