Outside the bar, women passed, wearing abayat. He wondered which of them had western hairstyles and wore expensive jewelry and designer clothes underneath. Road maintenance sounds. Short, imported palm trees. Almost everything new beneath the dust. It was only minutes before he was sweating through his suit. The inside of the Range Rover covered in sand from the storm. He brushed off the seat and got in and it started fine. He turned on the a-c and rolled up the windows, flushed with the heat still inside it. He should have kept it running; it wasn’t as though petrol here was expensive. Oh well. He had no plans to return to the UAE in this lifetime.
He traced and retraced blocks, weaving in and out of the city’s wide streets, looking side-to-side and in the rearview to gauge whether anyone was tailing. Too paranoid, perhaps, but he felt it better to be cautious. His gamble here had failed, and it wasn’t like dealing with westerners. These people wouldn’t be fucking around if they caught him. They had checked out—no sympathy or ties to any jihadists or fundamentalist groups—there was little he feared more than the idea of being on some American list, by association. He saw no recurring vehicles or faces. It’s going to be fine. Just get back to the hotel and stick to the plan.
The Greek ship captain was leaving tonight and would take him along. Harrison had known the man since the late-‘90s, when Harrison was looking for a way to unload a shipping container full of Asian and African teenagers in Piraeus. He parked the Range Rover a kilometer from the hotel and walked. It was painful to be a pedestrian here, the streets impractically wide and busy. The Call to Prayer sounded halfway to the hotel, as he moved down the brick path alongside share’a Sheikh Zayed. Of the few people around him (most were already sticking indoors till autumn, if it could be helped), almost all foreigners, only one produced rugs from the trunk of the car he’d just parked in a diagonal space, and unrolled it and lowered knees to hands and head, and remained so as they walked passed, paying one of the daily tributes to allah. For a moment before crossing, Harrison admired the believer’s sense of direction, the discipline it took to bow in this heat. Someone passed muttering, “So hot, so, so hot.” By the time Harrison reached the entrance, he was sweating profusely. The air-conditioning struck him soon as he pushed through the revolving door, a brief respite, and soon enough he was freezing. He took the stairs to avoid the front desk. His card wet from being in his pocket. He wiped cool sweat out of his eyes and his hands trembled, sliding the key into the slot. He looked both ways down the hall, exhaled and entered. Harrison dropped his car keys and wallet the moment he heard the voice, startled.
He spoke in French, a Caucasian male, white button-up shirt and tie, the sleeves rolled up. Expensive watch. Light khaki shorts and boat shoes. Looked to Harrison like he was on holiday. Except the gloves. . . .
“Sorry, mate, you startled me. I think they gave me the wrong keycard. Apologies.” He sounded calmer than he expected to. Harrison bent to pick up his things and started to back toward the door. He heard the click.
“Do not insult me, my friend.”
“I—” He felt it better not to say whatever excuse was brewing.
“Forgive my English. I am very proficient in three languages, and it is not one.”
There was enough light coming through the part in the curtains to project two rectangles (partitioned by the window frame) against the wall, casting enough to reveal the room once his eyes adjusted. “You look familiar. I’ve seen you before.”
“This . . . I hear this many times.”
“Well, it figures that they sent a white man to collect. If that’s not indicative of—”
The man in the shadows of the room shook his head and clicked his tongue repeatedly. “I’m not here for your money.”
“Then what?”
“I’m here to . . . escort you.”
“Mate, I said I’d meet The Mullah tonight. What’s this about?”
“I like to, ah, understand the people I work with.”
“I don’t need an ‘escort.’” Harrison wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
“Everyone needs an escort.”
“I can pay you if you let me disappear.”
“I shall repeat. ‘I am not here for money.’ Yes? I am saying this correct?”
“. . .”
The man kept the suppressed pistol trained. Both ceased speaking. The Frenchman shrugged and fired two shots into Harrison’s sternum. The Australian made no sound, impressing him. The man got up from the bed and walked over to the lavatory and grabbed some towels. He set them on the marble tile, like a stopgap barrier between the blood and the door. He finished going through Lloyd Harrison’s things and found a smart looking tie. The man checked his appearance in the mirror, combed his hair and flipped up his collar. He tied a remarkable Windsor knot, even with gloves on. Tidied the collar back. He folded his old tie and pocketed it. He called the Arabs and told them he was finished, m’a salama. He spoke Moroccan Arabic because it was what he knew.
His phone rang again once he was outside, some distance from the hotel. He answered and listened, unconsciously nodding his head. He hesitated, then told the voice that he could.
The city itself quiet no more, darkening. That was one hazard of living there, all the noise, though eventually you adapted to the traffic the way you do an electrical hum or a hot bath, sort of tuned to it. Elena Pallas sat on the floor against the dresser, balancing a cigarette at the corner of her lip. The balcony doors were open overlooking odos Trikoupis, and sound crept steadily in. Horns honked persistently at the main avenues a few blocks downhill. The dresser still decorated with band stickers from back when she was in high school—Bikini Kill, L7, Babes in Toyland, etc—music she didn’t much listen to anymore, imported third-wave feminist, riot grrrl shit. Almost all of the furniture in the apartment belonged to Pallas, but Junesong paid most of the bills because she worked steadiest. Junesong was carving a stick figure into the other side of the dresser with a pocket knife.
Endings are inevitable, Pallas thought. Mouthing the word “inevitable.”
Someone shouted on the sidewalk, or it could have been a greeting, the words unclear. Junesong got up and checked the refrigerator for something to drink. Pallas audited the cracks in the ceiling and hated the night. A few blocks over, tires screeching preceded a vehicle collision. Pallas wondered where she’d be in a year and hoped it was here. But she was afraid how fucking up had become habit, something she even expected of herself. Junesong cracked the tab on a Heineken and asked how it’d been. Pallas peered up from staring at the tattoo of the word VALKYRIE below Junesong’s navel. “You’ve defeated me with your sex.”
Between them, on the floor, the unfinished layout of a zine compiling its way slowly out from the soup of creation. It had emerged from an idea to scraps of typewritten paper and glue sticks and staples, into something with a shape. The intent was to make it quarterly.
Junesong felt a sudden weight, unsure where it came from. She downed her beer quick and tossed the can at the trash and missed.
Pallas chewed her lip. “I think the first issue is taking this long because we’re feeling our way along the layout and letting it grow into its personality.”
Junesong walked over by the trash bin and picked up the beer can and dropped it in. Emergency sirens drew close, headed toward the wreck. At the base of the living room wall, furthest from the mess, was one of the layout masters that had a polaroid of the Red Yuma taped to it, a band they both thought had the best sound at that moment. Glued in beneath the photograph was an almost comical album review with overwritten first time blurbs that said shit like “sheer will or talent disguised as songwriting” and “blowing air into the lungs of something that’s been choking, that’s been choking quite hard” and “what seems like some real steps toward. . .” etc.
“When the momentum’s dead, we’ll see who’s still standing.”
Junesong’s eyes felt dry, irritated. “Let’s go out.”
Pallas checked the cl
ock and saw it was early enough. “How sore is your tattoo?”
“Better since you.”
“Hm.”
Junesong’s voice cracked. “You really think the scene’s going to fall apart?”
“Some of it. Eventually people will want to move on, try other things.”
She sighed. “Yeah I guess everything ends, huh.” Deliberate tone.
“What’s that mean?”
“What’s what mean?”
“This ‘I guess everything ends’ shit.” Pallas tilted her head, eyes angry, hiding surprise. Like she’s a fucking mind reader. Pallas wondered if maybe her own hesitation somehow psychically ensnared a confrontation, if as though by thinking the undercurrent, she’d suddenly set a fight into clockwork motion. Already she could feel its expansion, a blooming thing at the base of Junesong’s skull, a flower or maybe a flytrap, faster than Pallas could say or do anything to save what—
“How long you think it’ll be before you leave me for someone again?”
And her own inability to cope with confrontation: “You shut your fucking mouth.”
Junesong’s expression dropped. She turned, walking quietly into the washroom, slamming the door behind her.
“That—that’s not what I meant to—” Pallas whipped her arms out, frustrated. “Damnit. I’m trying—”
Something that could have been gunfire or a muffler popped.
Pallas tried the door and found it locked. She leaned her head against it.
“Baby, I’m sorry. Tell me how to fix it.”
Felt like bailing water.
“Fuck off.”
“Please come out.”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
“You’re so cold to me.”
“I didn’t mean to say—”
“Well you said.”
“Tamara, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Mara. Please.”
“You aren’t capable of an apology that means a fucking thing.”
Pallas slid to a seated position against the door. “What do you want me to say?”
She could hear Junesong choking out sobs and imagined her sitting on the toilet lid, her head down, palms filling. The image pained her more than she liked.
“Would you feel better if I never came back?”
“. . .”
“I’ll move out tonight if you want me to.
“Fine if you’re not going to answer I’ll just sit here.”
Pallas got a marker and wrote “PLEASE” on a scrap of paper and slipped it beneath the door. The whimpering momentarily dampened. Pallas listened against the door and heard the paper tear. She tried again, writing “I LOVE YOU,” and slid it through. Junesong tore that one too. Pallas wrote “I’LL EAT YOU OUT IF YOU FORGIVE ME” and tried again. There was a drawn out silence on the other side of the door, then: “. . . fucking seriously?”
“I will.”
“No it’s not—I don’t know. Just . . . please don’t . . .
“I don’t want you to leave again.”
Crying no longer stifled now. Pallas thought here comes and Junesong let it out, wailing hard. “I won’t baby I won’t please come out . . .” An almost palpable hesitation before the lock clicked and the handle revolved slow, the door open just enough she could see Junesong looking down at her sitting there, arms crossed. Pallas dropped the marker and stood, pushed the door open farther. Junesong’s cheeks patched pink, bisected with tears. Pallas reached to comfort her, but Junesong flinched and stepped back and waved her arm away. Pallas’ own eyes watering, stressed, but nothing there. The space between them almost endless until it wasn’t, and then they eased in closer, gradually kissing their way back toward words. Junesong whispered “I’m a mess” and Pallas said “You’re not” and wiped at her face and hoped like hell the consolation would hold, even just a while.
Ciprian Varia sat beneath a tree and chewed mastiha, watching bands play. He had pocketed the gum from one of the tourist boutiques in Plaka. When the mastiha got too stiff and hurt his teeth (everything hurt after very little chewing now), he spit it out into the grass and started on a new chip.
He spent the day on the hill, smoking and gazing scenery. Just burning through cigarettes. He liked losing himself in that view, which was easy to do, how quiet it was. Everything slowing with the onset of evening. Lines of cars lit uniform along the city architecture. Occasional red emergency light flashing, distant traffic sounds. All movement vaguely bacterial. He missed home.
Not far from where he sat among the rock forms, more bodies had gathered. Punks were closing in around the music and Varia saw something there, in their pulse. He felt privy to some great, eternal secret. The sound like a fire, breaking dark silence, or maybe like a line of rite, calling some god home. An evocation of ancient days when tribal people crowded bonfires and pounded skin drums, dancing cult tribute through the night’s rhythms.
Would he have felt more at home in a time like that? He thought of the tribes: Thracians, Dacians, Scythians, others . . . often rivals of the Hellenes here. How many people throughout time had walked over this same hill? It seemed too many, all dust now. His understanding of the region’s history was spare beyond common folklore, fragments of a less practical education . . .
Even so, didn’t history tell that those peoples had conquered, mixed, changed, trickled down to become him, the youths, all of us? He considered that he’d never met anyone that was in power, in real, far reaching power. There’s an insulation there. So who knows what’s even true—books are written by those with an agenda. It’s the hard who inherit each generation. The giants who win the wars, even when it doesn’t seem like it. Then they write it all down and transform themselves into time’s keepers. He tapped ash. Suppose then that this makes everyone else time’s bastards.
He remembered or perhaps imagined an instance, a memory fragment, of himself sitting in the car with his partner: “. . . the best deal guys like us get.” Nistor was talking about being bought. “I think you have to be ruthless or someone else will take your place tomorrow.” He’d laughed off the words then. He felt like an asshole now.
Varia couldn’t stay in this city forever. Sooner or later, he would move on as he had before.
He whispered to no one. “It’d be nice to know more about who we are.”
He shut his eyes and imagined the word “regret” as being heavier than all other words. He prayed for a dissolution, thumbing the nazar.
“Real nice.”
Junesong slipped into a light robe and clipped her hair up. Pallas comfortable in her boyshorts. They sipped canned beers and sat on the balcony, watching the street. Pallas lit another cigarette, her second in minutes. Everything calmer, the other extreme.
“Greeks smoke like fucking detectives.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Like in old movies . . . one cigarette after the other.”
“Ah, okay. Maybe it’s cultural, from the days of the big tobacco farms.”
“You and I should be detectives. We’d need fedoras.”
“You’d look good in a fedora.”
“And nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
Pallas faux-punched Junesong in the shoulder. Junesong exhaled through her nose, pretending to be knocked out, tongue splayed. Pallas laughed and searched for the joint in her purse that she’d neglected all day. She found and lit that too. They hit and passed between hits on the cigarette. Junesong closed her eyes. Smoke wafting up cochlear in intervals of silence. The joint went relatively quick, quicker than the cigarette, from tense, extended tokes by each. Junesong leaned over the balcony rail and spit, leaving a dim stain on the pavement beneath the lamplight.
“Do you think we’re alone?”
“In the house or the universe?”
“Universe.”
Pallas packed a bowl, unsatisfied by the joint. “Sometimes I do.”
Junesong
shook her head, lit her own cigarette and sucked smoke. Exhaled. “I don’t think we are. At least well I don’t believe in god but that there could be . . .”
“Baby mou . . .”
“What?”
“Kala.” Pallas stepped back inside. “We’re out of beer and I think the kiosk is already shut. Fucking hate that kiosk.”
“It’s got me thinking that—”
“Keep talking. I’m getting dressed. I’m listening.”
“Wait.” Junesong licked at dry lips. “Where are you going?”
“I want to get more drinks. Maybe we can go to that show on the hill. Just remembered that Lydia invited us last week. We missed the last one.”
Long Lost Dog of It Page 4