Long Lost Dog of It

by Michael Kazepis

  Occasionally, he would wake and hear engines or people nearby, but nothing too close or that could manifest any danger. He slept like a beast, more groggy than asleep.

  Varia counted stars and let himself imagine he was falling. Soon he was.

  Sanitation crews arrived to clear the streets a last time before their union went on strike. Reversal beeps and exhaust clouds beneath streetlights. Men in reflective orange vests shouted as the trucks lifted receptacles. The sidewalks would be free and clear a few hours, then gradually throughout the next few days the trash would fill again and overflow, accumulating in heaps around the dumpsters. The city certain to stink worse than death by the weekend.

  The sun rising over peripheral industry and ferries docked at the pier, freighters loading and unloading. Over temples and monuments, Byzantine churches, other places of tribute, even the makeshift ones hidden from public view. Airplanes seemingly frozen in midair at an incline that shifted angles, shrinking until disappearing noseward. Metro gates opened and commuters entered. Daylight expanding over old men playing backgammon out front of a kafeneio as its owner prepared them national coffees. A steady increase in the frequency of traffic sounds. People sifting through the transport networks, en route to their occupations or homes. Vagrants following strays, because they knew where the best food was and it hurt to ask all day. Immigrants setting up cardboard and cloth displays, pushing knockoffs at Alexandros Panagoulis, Omonia, Monastiraki, Piraeus, Kifissia. Light over bakeries and police stations and kiosks. Over the masses still gathered around platiea Syntagma. Earliest risers and those who hadn’t yet slept.

  The sun over Athens International, an Emirates 777 flight just touching down on the runway. Jean-Paul Mesrine sat in first class, gripping the armrest. Manicured fingers arched like talons. There was very little bounce, barely a shift in pressure when the wheels hit. Mesrine looked over his shoulder and around the cabin, annoyed that people no longer applauded successful landings. He heard sounds that were either wind resistance or children screaming.

  He was wearing the Australian’s tie and rather liked the way it looked framed in his jacket. Windsor knot, strong dimple. His shoes almost as new. The seatbelt sign blinked overhead. Recycled air pumping through the vent. One of the pilots announced time and local weather over the intercom while his co-pilot coughed in the background. Mesrine looked at the seatback pouch between his knees. He’d brought along some paperbacks: Total Khéops by Jean-Claude Izzo, which he hadn’t yet started, and a French translation of American Tabloid by James Ellroy, which he had read many times, the spine deeply cracked. Mesrine brought it with him every trip, superstitiously. The plane made a lap around the runway, stalling till it got cleared for its gate. The cabin brightening up as glare from the wing projected in, prompting him to slide the window shade shut. Reminded him of being interrogated. The plane rolled to a stop and began connecting to the terminal. Hydraulic-type noises outside. The seatbelt sign turned off and the majority of the passengers stood and started rummaging the aisles’ overhead compartments. Mesrine remained seated despite being at the very front of the cabin. The attendants prepped and opened the door, greeting people as they exited. He breathed steady, at a rhythm in his head. Most everything about him deliberate. He smiled when it seemed he should, because he had seen that this was a way people opened up to each other, diminishing instinctual doubt. He had expensive teeth and worked out six of every seven days. Felt it important to give the impression of someone caring about living enough to maintain their health. Mesrine touched lightly at his hair. Combed it for certainty. He’d mastered small talk too. Had asked the attendants how they were doing, talked to them about cuisine and their travels. Had read somewhere people found his country’s accents sexy. This was important to people, to be desired. He wanted to exude a “vague” desirability. Something that strikes you fondly in the immediate, but that you forget. He felt his intellect was measured, very certain of its limitations. Never arguing, never trying to impress. There only to lull. The trick was often in getting people to talk about themselves so that you’d end with a conversation in which they didn’t recall much about you, later. Every variation of a backstory memorized deeper than rehearsal, real only in the time he told it. He believed this anonymity made him strong.

  Mesrine balled his toes inside his shoes and stretched his jaw, his hand at the base of his neck. Ears twisting slow. He’d taught himself to yawn on command. He stood and removed the hard shell suitcase from the compartment above the seat and unsnapped it, carefully placing the books inside. He checked his wallet to make sure he had his identity. He double-checked the seat to make sure he was leaving nothing behind.

  Mesrine thanked the pilots and exited, into the terminal, the last passenger to leave.

  He got through Schengen customs with a Belgian passport, one of thousands of blanks stolen from a courier van in Antwerp in 2009.

  Exiting through the doors to the other side of arrivals he noticed immediately the man wearing the chauffeur cap in the waiting crowd, holding a sign that read “SISYFOS.” It was the initiation code. Mesrine approached him, speaking his end of it. The man replied affirmatively and they continued the exchange a while, each gauging the other’s response. To his understanding, the man holding the sign was a driver employed by Mesrine’s contractor. But he could also have been police, or worse, depending on what he had or hadn’t said. The very same went for himself. Minutes later, with their mutual legitimacy confirmed, the man folded up the sign and set it under his arm. They walked to the parking lot and stopped beside a Mercedes C350, shining like it had been recently detailed. The driver clicked a remote, popping the trunk. He handed Mesrine an unopened burner phone and a SIM card. He looked around the parking garage anxiously, then handed him a large envelope, thick and taped shut.

  The driver put on his sunglasses. “That’s half. You’ll get a message soon.”

  Mesrine said “D’acc.” Staring off, inattentive.

  “I can take you downtown, if you’d like.”

  “I’ll find my own way. I don’t like riding in cars.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  The driver pointed at his own face, made circles with his hand. “Why all this.”

  Mesrine shrugged. “Why give ‘human’ a different meaning than ‘animal?’”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Neither said anything else. Mesrine tucked the items into the pockets of his coat and walked off, toward the trains.

  Elena Pallas had been sitting in the Syntagma McDonald’s since it’d gotten light, nursing a Chicken Burger and fries, staring at her phone. Pallas told herself she was stupid, slapping her palm lightly against her forehead. Sickly feeling deep in her gut. An abstract guilt. The phone’s home screen remained blank, no messages or missed calls. Pallas had no fucking clue what she’d tell her girlfriend once she got back. She expected Junesong waiting there on the couch that faced the door, speechless with disappointment. There is no way this ends well, she thought.

  After they’d gotten home from the club, Pallas had tucked Junesong in, telling her she’d stay with her.

  Junesong moaned, more drunk than she wanted to be, having to work the next day.

  Her mobile buzzed while she was on the toilet, pissing. Theofania Kafkos, a face from her university days, invited her out. Pallas replied that she couldn’t.

  —please come out with us it’s been ages re

  —i don’t know, mara is sick

  —it’s katerina’s birthday did you forget

  She hadn’t seen them in ages she realized. Pallas deliberated a minute, then:

  —ok, ok, i’ll get changed. only coming for a bit

  Pallas didn’t need to, still dressed. She checked on Junesong: fast asleep. She set a glass of water on the nightstand and kissed her. Put shoes back on and locked the door on the way out. The upstairs neighbors had music going loud, old Motown shit. Pallas walked down the street to odos Akadimias and
hailed taxis there. An orange dropped from one of the nearby trees and she punted it into the busy street, narrowly missing a car. A cab finally stopped and asked her where she was headed. She said Monastiraki and he said “why don’t you just walk it’s not all that far” and drove off. Pallas threw mountza and hailed another. He stopped and she got in.

  After being dropped by Six D.O.G.S., she found her friends had already moved on because the courtyard got too crowded and they were allowed to smoke inside Booze. Immediately after walking in, Pallas noticed Junesong’s ex, Evi, sitting at one of the long tables playing another girl in chess on one of the bar’s boards. Evi looked up and they waved to each other and it went no further. Kafkos and the others were on the couches in another room of the bar, celebrating. Once drunk and happy and caught up on everyone’s lives, she got up to go piss. Evi came in as she was washing her hands and they talked, pleasantly, the way things are sometimes rose-colored years after the trouble. Pallas returned to the couches to find that her friends were gone and weren’t answering their phones, like they’d completely forgotten her. Behind her emerged Evi, looking so remarkably better than she ever remembered, also alone. (She’d once told Junesong she thought Evi was seriously a dog.) Like the bar had cleared, leaving just the two of them—this was how it felt when she was hooking up, everything else narrowed in.

  They drank and talked, cleared all the air, laughing about some of it. They exited together and Evi invited her over to smoke a bowl. Pallas stood on the sidewalk, eyes to the ground, begging herself not to. She looked back up and could imagine Evi naked, betting on how she groomed, what her nipples looked like, the faces she could make. Then her own whispers, faces, sounds harmonious: “Okay, yeah, let’s do that . . .”

  The Chicken Burger went down dry. Each time Pallas brought her hands to her face to take a bite, she smelled, coupled with the sugary meat scent of the burger, trace pussy and cigarettes. The slight smile at that yielded quickly to loathing. Her throat itched some.

  She’d been reading relationship and infidelity blogs on her phone all morning. Fragments that stuck out enough to write down on the receipt: “at first developing a conscience, but being unable to follow it,” and “do not fear feeling stuck between what you want to be and what you are,” and “it takes a long time to undo the years of behavioral conditioning compelling you to fuck up.”

  Pallas finished the burger and walked out the front doors, past a light-eyed vagrant with a stained white beard drinking frappé and muttering to himself about nautical engineering. Pallas started the longer way back. By this point, even the act of coming home was an admission of guilt. But she had to—all her stuff was there.

  Pallas stood outside a good twenty minutes, compiling the backbone she needed to walk up the front steps and into the building. Tried to make herself angry for bravery and couldn’t. The front door creaked open and echoed up the marble stairwell. Pallas took off her shoes, though it was too late for any sense of stealth, and tiptoed up the stairs, leaving behind sweat-fogged footprints under the foyer light. She slid the key into the lock with the care of someone disarming a bomb. It clicked into place, an old book falling in a library, fragmenting the silence. The apartment motionless behind the door. Pallas breathed deep and turned the key. She closed her eyes and pulled the door open, almost paralyzed with swollen anxiety.

  The apartment empty. Junesong gone.

  Meat and bone fragments scattered across pavement. Laughing children, all-white garb, drinking Coca-Cola. Chorusing explosions and heavy artillery. Bodies bent toward Mecca. His own face spilling into his hands, running thick through his fingers, slaking the dirt at his feet. Peasants vomiting from the tear gas. A grinning skull, the screaming—

  Aris Maniotis, thundering alert, stood quick from the chair, the rifle gripped tight, raised at the front door, cleared, then trained left down the hall. Mostly silence, the click of central air. Finger tensed on the trigger. Panting now. No shot necessary. But everything unfamiliar. Where was he? Oh, this is home. Was it? He must have slept. But that wasn’t right—he couldn’t have—he didn’t just sleep, not at moments like this. Yet morning was here and he had just woken up and no one had come. Maniotis lowered the rifle and eased slightly, heart racing. His skin felt tight, chilled. He leaned the rifle against the wall and rubbed at his eyes. He was sore from the chair. His body no longer responded reliably to its training, its decades’ governance.

  Maniotis bolted the front door, laughing quietly to himself, remembering something an Afghan soldier had said, unsure what now reminded him of it. Be sure to strike your woman each day. If you don’t have a reason for it, she will invent one for you. He’d later seen the same soldier torn open by automatic fire, slumped against a security fence, a tangle of intestines, no more jokes.

  He went to the kitchen and pried up some floorboards with a screwdriver and reached into a hidden compartment, removing an oblong case wrapped in a dusty sheet. He soon felt a density, like a fist gripping his chest, pressure hard as a collapsing star. He waited for his hands to cease their trembling and opened it. The uniform still looked the way he remembered.

  Ciprian Varia’s hands were sticky from the remainder of a chocolate croissant he found in a trashcan by the Everest on odos Solonos. He was on the sidewalk, staring down at the cracks in the pavement. Someone shoved past him and knocked the pastry out of his hand. Varia watched it on the ground for a moment, thinking it couldn’t get much dirtier than it had been. He picked it back up and shook it off. Exhaled and bit into it. He moved aside, clear of the cop pursuing on foot and gaining. If nothing else, he felt like he understood them both.

  Varia stopped outside of an OPAP agency, looking in. Sports on televisions, men filling out sheets. He recognized the look. Periphery: people beside him:

  “Hey, hey gypsy.” Varia didn’t know if they were talking to him. He didn’t turn, hoping they’d move on. Someone tapped a hand on his shoulder. “Talking to you.”

  Varia looked over and saw the two bearded men, short haircuts. Matching black shirts. Both of them thickly built, looked strong, one average height, the other tall. He almost ran, deciding instead to keep his cool. Stave the fear. He sized them, calming.

  “I’m not a gypsy.” He must’ve seemed weak.

  “You’re a gypsy. I can tell by your face.”

  Varia looking down at his hands. “Doesn’t look much different than yours.”

  One of them spit at him. “Fucking gypsies. You’re all leeches.”

  “Friend, I’m Romanian.” He wiped his cheek.

  “Roma.”

  “Romanian.”

  “There a difference?”

  “That’s not what you’re asking.” Varia staring, wishing momentarily that he still had his old pistol.

  The taller one took an inexperienced swing. Varia ducked it and pushed him back into his friend. Seemed like they were accustomed to a different reaction from immigrants.

  “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “You just made the mistake.”

  “Alright.”

  The average one came forward. Varia sidestepped him and caught his ear, gripping hard. He tore it off and the man screamed. Varia chucked the ear against the OPAP window. The taller one watched it bounce onto the pavement, a snarl forming. He came forward, reached at Varia’s shirt, but Varia blocked his arm, palmed him in the throat, adrenaline surging. He tottered back, choking.

  The average one leaning against the window, clutching the side of his head, blood gushing from the wound, muttering “oh god oh god oh god” while his friend coughed hard, unable to reorient his footing. Varia spit to the side and backed up, arms raised. People inside the agency halting all bets, all lottery, looking out at him. He wanted to say something to them. He didn’t. He smeared his bloody hand over the glass, leaving a trail. Varia had never been much for a fight, didn’t enjoy it, but he’d made it as far as he had because he could handle himself when the shit hit. He reached down and picked up the ear a
nd threw it at a stray. The dog sniffed it, snapped it up and wandered off down the street, chewing. He hadn’t felt this alive since he’d been shot. And he knew he’d been lucky they hadn’t known what they were doing. He cleaned his hand on his shirt, gave one last look inside the gambling agency, and walked faster, hoping no one would follow.

  Mara Junesong took an early tram down to the coast and sat on the beach barefoot, letting the drift kiss her ankles. She talked to the water and spit into the sand, the new tattoo itching like crazy.

  “I want to go home.”

  Lit a cigarette and just stared across.

  There was a yacht on the water at the the horizon line.

  Junesong was imagining it pulled under by the tentacles of a giant sea monster.

  Sails disappearing beneath the current, people screaming, shitting themselves.

  “Release the Kraken”—fucking wishing it worked like that.

  Smoke trailing from her nose. Junesong felt both badass and hurt.

  She pointed her fist at the boat, fore and middle fingers extended like a gun, and she pulled the trigger.

  Saying, “Pew, pew, pew.”

  Some weeks before:

  Junesong getting out of work late, exhausted. Plateia Glyfada is deserted—the entire suburb turns damn near ghost town on weeknights, since the crisis worsened. Lots of boarded up, sealed-off cafes and bars. You can hear the sea from the bus stop. Lines of short, fat palm trees. Orange lit, violet underbelly to the sky—all stars leaving streaks, the world seeming to spin faster than it does. She waits for 790, the only night bus which runs from here to the city center. Some youths cross over odos Posidonos from the beach, quietly disappearing down a nearby street, carrying plastic bags full of canned beer. Junesong feels a disconnect, a distinct sensation of being both here and not. Her girlfriend sent her a strange, drunken message in the middle of her shift, and it has her confused. Now Pallas isn’t responding. Motorcycles scream by remarkably fast. The kiosk beside the stop is shuttered. She finds herself wanting a Milko. Back up the strip, some kiosks stay open later, but she can’t be bothered to go back.