The bus only comes once an hour and is due any moment. Junesong pictures billions of astral umbilical cords tethering each body to the planet’s core. Capturing the story of one severed, its ghost drifting through space, alone. The body enslaved by gravity, unaware of its vacancy. Thinking it would suck to be like that. Some cars pass, then a lowered yellow Peugeot approaches and slows, screeching to a stop. Bass thumping, shaking the windows. Smiling faces in the front. The appearance of a handgun in the passenger side has not immediately registered, but when it does, she steps back under the bench shelter. The car has rims the size of garbage can lids. The passenger rolls down the window and leans out, waving the piece.
Other men behind the tinted windows shouting what reaches her ears as distant whispers.
“Hey slut,” and “ha, ha,” and “you wanna party with us?”
The gun stays fixed on her, motioning “come here” like it wants her to follow it into the car, a living thing. Marijuana smoke rolling slow behind him, drifting up out of the window. Junesong glances around. There’s no sign of the bus. Maybe it won’t come, maybe this is the only way now.
Junesong has been carrying a knife in her pocket for weeks, edgy about Pallas. Edgy about everything. She knows she is close enough that she can stick the man hanging out, but she isn’t even feeling an impulse to run, let alone pull it. Instead, she fixates on the gun, speaking to it in English. Fists clenched tight, eyes welling up. Alternately, there’s a broken Heineken bottle on the ground. She imagines sticking him in the eye, getting his gun and shooting them all dead. Putting the gun under her own chin, pulling the trigger, becoming something unified with everything. Imagines transcending physical existence, a ghost learning to control others. This—her motionlessness—is an ultimatum to the gun. You will release me or you will end me. Junesong doesn’t care. All of them silent, all their bodies rotten in varying futures, struggling to hear her low spoken words. Junesong concentrating on the barrel, waiting for its darkness to eat the surrounding light. Moments later, the gun ceases waving, stilled, deliberating her secret words. Then it replies. “Fuck this bitch.”
And someone whispers “Amerikani.”
Someone else whispering “strip club.”
The man withdraws into the car, smirking. The gun disappears behind the door, lowered beyond her view. The Peugeot pulls off sharply, squealing its tires. She finds herself alone again, still looking straight ahead at the same focal point where the gun’s barrel had been, toward its gravity, entranced. The bus arrives later than usual, empty. Junesong punches her ticket and picks a seat at the back. Her head against the window, wondering why nothing seems to change here.
Jean-Paul Mesrine found an inexpensive hotel in Makrigianni that had room service. Ancient Greek hotel name, shiny marble floors, a shower separated from the room itself by a curtain. Pretty standard stuff, thinking. Mesrine set his suitcase on the bed and unsnapped it. He set the burner phone and the envelope beside it. Loosened his tie and kicked off his shoes. He peeled off the dress socks and set them neatly in the shoes. He set the contents of the suitcase geometrically neat across the long wooden table facing the bed. Two paperbacks, two starched dress shirts (which would require another ironing), underwear, a bar of unscented soap, an iPod and earbuds, and a deck of cards. He took off his glasses and tucked them into his jacket’s breast pocket. Tucked into the battered copy of American Tabloid was a b&w photograph of Jackie Onassis, her eyes scratched out, stripped of their power. Carefully removing the print, he set it at the edge of the table, against the wall opposite. He called down to the lobby for an iron and board. He pulled up the lone chair in the room and set out cards to arrange a game of solitaire. Mesrine then turned on the iPod, put in his headphones and selected Tchaikovsky, shuffling the tracks. Each time he flipped a card he drew on it with the hotel pen, little designs like magic sigils connecting the symbols and numbers.
He waited for the burner phone to light.
Every now and then, he looked up and Jackie O. was smiling at him.
After he got the prompt, Mesrine called the hotel lobby asking for directions to a barber. A different voice than the one that had checked him in answered and told him where a nearby place was. It was a short walk, and he stopped to get some coffee from an Italian chain bistro on the way.
At the barbershop, he explained what needed done with his hair but found there was a slight language barrier. The barber picked up a magazine and flipped through it, pointing to something like what he thought Mesrine wanted.
He shook his head. “No, no.”
Mesrine reached into his wallet and got out an old, folded magazine clipping. He pointed to the creased image, drawing circles around the figure’s head with his finger.
“That. I want that.”
The barber looked down at the picture, then up at Mesrine’s face and understood like he’d been slapped, though the barber had, admittedly, gotten stranger requests. “Okay, my friend. I can do this for you.”
Later, he walked a while and got lost a few times, eventually finding where he needed to be. Plain, square buildings most. Box air-conditioning units sticking out of apartments, all the way up. Little to find beautiful about this part of the city. Farther into its heart: cracked cement, graffiti in Arabic and Russian, one block a string of ethnic supermarkets, electronics salvage and repair, the next block a series of empty, boarded up buildings. He looked at church icons in a shop window behind chain link fencing. In the window’s reflection, his hair looked precise. The sidewalk was that puke-colored grid-type tile, with yellow groove tracks to aid the blind. He thought, Shame on whoever picked the color scheme. Up ahead, scaffolding, wood planks—eyesore barriers. Young homeless couples huddling in doorways. The city’s suffering like he’d designed it himself. He felt a sense of pride, recognizing this.
The air somehow thicker when he turned a corner, clouded. Everything suddenly smelling of urine or maybe decay, both. The sidewalk lined with users, some actively shooting up, others wandering blankly back and forth across the street, automatons. Some of the expressions, the eyes, displayed a sick sort of spoiled-child satisfaction that came from getting closer to a thing a human wanted with every molecule of its being. Two of them spoke loudly, looking right at him. He couldn’t understand the words, so he invented translations in his head.
‘How many conversations about the same thing can you have in a lifetime?’
‘Time distorts bodies and faces, death takes away their sounds.’
‘I don’t believe in any Higher Power.’
‘Women have never liked me.’
‘Sex in this city gets treated the same as its violence.’
‘If I don’t stop staring, this well-dressed man is going to cut my throat.’
‘Haha. What is the shape of a person’s consciousness?’
A needle pushed into skin just below the knee.
Some legs scarred bad, infected in a way that implied amputation.
Mesrine stepped over a body and knocked on the rusty metal door at the center of the alley. He held his breath. Knocked again and waited. A series of locks clicking. The door was a lot more secure than it looked. It opened, revealing a pleasant interior and a familiar face: Yusef al-Hasrad. They’d met in Morocco, once. Mesrine had heard he’d moved down here, to the gateway. You travel around enough and you find yourself running into a lot of the same people. Mesrine liked him enough. They spoke the same language.
“Yusef.”
“Marine.” Mesrine twitched, adjusted his tie. “Come in, come in.”
They shook hands firmly and Mesrine followed him inside.
“How are you?”
“World’s still my playground.”
“Like a child with toys, hanh.” Hasrad laughed like that, with his nose, hanh-hanh. Mesrine supposed it was internal damage from the scar around Hasrad’s throat that made him like that. Mesrine didn’t much mind the laugh as much as he’d mind it if someone else were doing it. He’d end someone he didn�
��t respect for laughing like that. Hasrad led Mesrine down a winding marble staircase, into the basement level of the building. “Well, I have some other toys for you, hanh, hanh, hanh.”
“How is business?”
“Slow anywhere else. But here? Everyone comes through here on their way north. It’s a good place for this kind of, ah, work—jihad is still in fashion for now. But these protests, my friend, they have to end. It could hurt business.”
“I can see how they would be bad.”
Hasrad pulled up a metal drainage grate and climbed a ladder down into it, a pit, a hidden room with guns laid out across the walls and tables, lit by lanterns. Mesrine didn’t even look at anything else once he saw the AR-15, stripped down to essentials. He hated unnecessary weight, it was perfect. He held it up to the light, checking its condition. “I’ll take this.”
Mesrine saw the handgun beside it, a 9mm pistol, like the American police used.
“And that one too.”
“It’s a good one.”
Junesong listened to an exchange from behind the bar of the pub, the two Americans in front of her talking the crisis over early drinks.
“—whole notion that x might be bad, but at least it’s not z, it’s bullshit.”
The pub wasn’t much of a pub, truth told. More a glorified restaurant with a solid whisky collection. Irish-owned, but little different from other themed restaurants in the city and environs. An authentic-seeming veneer, maybe. Oak that was stained medium-dark. Five taps on the counter: Fosters, Mythos, Carlsberg, Guinness, Kilkenny. Lines of liquor bottles across the back wall. Lone dusty bottle of Johnny Walker Blue at the top of the bar display, twenty-five euros a pop. Around it, antique distillery and household items, old colored bottles imperfectly shaped.
“The public and the creditors are gripping the politicians by a testicle each. Things might seem down the tubes now. But the way I see it, this just means it’s all ground floor right now. They’re opening up all the industries. Isn’t that what the business types all call it? When you’ve reduced a forest to ash, use the ash as a compost.”
“Does ash work as a compost? I’ve never heard that before.”
“It’s worth sticking around is all. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell everyone else—I’m not even thinking of leaving till I squeeze my first million outta this dump.”
“But where are you gonna find the means, Stan?”
“—swore to everyone that doubted me I’d make it when I came out here.”
“Not me, buddy. I’ll work a shit job there, I’ll work a shit job here. It’s all roughly the same peanuts. At least the scenery here’s beautiful, and the food. . .”
“Tell you what though, I’m sick of drinking all these bland lagers and stouts. That’s all this country offers, it seems. Give me a Pacific Northwest IPA any day.”
“Yeah. The beer selection here isn’t so great.”
“But the weather.”
“Yeah. Can’t hate that. You can’t.”
Junesong took pint glasses out of the dishwasher and stacked them on a shelf below the large mirror at the center of the bar. She leaned over the counter and hooked empty glass rims with her fingers. Ran the cycle again. Someone ordering asked why she wasn’t putting detergent in the machine. Junesong explained it. The patron changed his order to a bottle of Amstel. The whole time Junesong picturing herself killing him with a hammer, the sounds it could make, as she was wiping lipstick off the rims of wine glasses. Some regulars entered and sat at their usual spots. Eye contact all it took for them to order. That it had gotten this easy was both a testament to her work ethic and damning proof (to her at least) of an inability to thrive here beyond service work. Rory Gallagher, “Tattoo’d Lady” on the overhead speakers. Junesong keyed entries into a handheld device and set tables. She changed the channel over to cricket the moment one of the owners came in, a Scotsman whose name she always forgot. His dog on a leash at his feet. Junesong slid him a ready pint of Fosters and a bowl of chips, a bowl of water for the mutt. The Scotsman tied the leash to a coat hook under the bar top.
“How do.”
“Not too bad, same old thing.”
“Ach I’m right tired. Been a long morning.”
Junesong ignored him and glanced up at the television. Just the other day, a man working in shipping had told her the way people gambled in India was that they often bet on trivial aspects of sports matches. Like the steps forward a player took or the way a ball listed, shit like that. That this led inevitably to equally trivial game fixes corresponding to the bets. Almost everyone on the field moving intentionally to shift money. It was, however, difficult to discern serious bullshit from an unlikely truth in an expatriate community.
She walked back to the cold room to change the Guinness keg once it started to pour flat. Overheard the Serbian kitchen staff chattering. People speaking in a language she didn’t understand always felt like every word was about her.
Junesong retrieved the platters and dropped them off. Filled and mixed cocktails. The phone rang. Two of the other owners, a married couple, called. Both on the line at the same time, talking over each other. They took turns making sure she’d taken care of all of the morning deliveries, asking if the kitchen was stocked, asking how well business was going this afternoon, whether anyone had anyone called off the evening shift and if she was taking care of the regulars, etc. Once they finally hung up, Junesong threw the phone on the counter and asked the server to watch the bar and walked out through the kitchen to where everyone took breaks on the balcony behind the restaurant. Junesong checked her mobile and saw a message from Pallas.
—where are you
She paced outside, trying to ignore it. The phone beeped again.
—i’m sorry
She put her cigarette out on the wall behind her. “Fuck.”
Replied, —AT WORK. Hadn’t yet figured out the caps lock feature.
—can we talk?
—NOW?
—tonight
—OK
Junesong shoved the phone in her back pocket and stewed. One of the kitchen staff came out to smoke. Her English limited to basic greetings and commands and the menu items. But she understood enough if you talked slow.
“Hi, Ana.”
“Tamara.”
“Are you good?”
“Very good.”
“Today’s real hot.”
“Very hot.”
“Do you like the customers?”
“Not really. Sometimes they are...very, eh, no nice.”
“Hate when people are like ‘hey, here’s a series of inconsequential informations’ and you have to somehow pretend this is all relevant to your own existence.”
“You speak so fast. I do not understand.”
“I’m talking to myself, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“Seems like it’s always that way.”
“Okay.”
“Okay indeed.”
Junesong drifting again the way she had at the strip club. Ana’s lips moved with no sounds coming out. In the courtyard below the balcony, she noticed the sun-bleached body of a dog. Flies buzzing around it. The body in a process of quiet implosion. The smell arrived in gusts. The dog’s head broken open, blood caked around it on the pavement like a halo. Its mouth was twisted and pulled back to a permanent snarl. Flies revealing imperceptible patterns. Both stared at it and neither remarked. Someone shouted from the kitchen. Ana huffed and abruptly terminated her cigarette against the rail and walked back inside. From where Junesong stood on the balcony, she could see the inside of the dog’s skull. There was something in it, insects maybe, moving around, probably eating or laying eggs. Wave motion like heat over blacktop. The wind swept against the patches of grass and made them tremble. Junesong believed the soul was in the land and that’s why she felt most alone when traveling. Smoke from her mouth and nostrils, exhaust of a soft machine. The soul is in the land and bodies are temporary things, conductors. She looked up
at a sky that had started to turn the color of sherbet and scraped her cigarette against the bottom of her shoe.
When Ana Popović returned to finish her break, she took a fresh cigarette from her pack, and peered out over the balcony, where below Junesong was in the courtyard, having climbed down somehow, and was whispering to the remains of the animal. Her shift was nearing an end, and so was her time working unreasonable hours. Soon Popović would have earned enough money to bring her daughter over from Prishtina. Then they’d begin the lengthy immigration process. But at least Popović would soon have space to find better work. In her pocket was a folded paper she kept with her, containing a mantra she read when real life seemed too distant. Now she unfolded it: “YOUR PRESENT EXISTS FOR SURVIVAL UNTIL YOU GET TO YOUR FUTURE. FOCUS NOT ON THINGS AS THEY ARE, BUT AS THEY SOON WILL BE.” She repeated the words to herself until they filled her with purpose. Even after Popović went back inside, Junesong remained there in the courtyard, staring at the dog and poking at its head with a stick, offering to feed it.
Varia felt reawakened or maybe rediscovered (neither fit the exhilaration). He’d booked it hard, got to Omonia before he had to stop and rest against a wall a while, his lungs burning. He reached for cigarettes and discovered he was out. He counted the change he had, which wasn’t enough for much.
He wandered into the subway station to ask for more.
Tourists responded better when he cornered them about ticket fare.
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