He carried a duffel bag to his father’s old Jaguar and loaded it in the trunk. He drove toward Voula to find his sister, because he had a feeling that’s where she’d be.
Men at the entrance insisted he pay entry to enter the beach. Maniotis countered with insistence that they let him through before he got angry; they obliged.
He spotted two of Elektra’s friends sitting on lounge chairs close to the water. According to the ex-boyfriend, a group of them were virtually always at that beach during the summer, when they weren’t partying on the islands. Theresia Petridis and Maria Latsis both wore big sunglasses and drank Coronas and smoked long thin cigarettes. He suspected Petridis the type that never went in the water, she was so tan. Latsis, whose skin looked like it burnt easy, wore enough sunscreen she glistened. Farther out from the sand, a floating trampoline was anchored. Children jumping up and down. Behind it, silhouettes of boats and windsurfers. Maniotis greeted them. Latsis sighed, recognizing him. Petridis didn’t acknowledge his presence.
Latsis tilted her sunglasses, looking up at him. “Yeia sou Aris.” All vinegar.
“Have you heard from my sister? She hasn’t been home in a while.”
“She’s a big girl. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“We’re very worried about her.”
“You shouldn’t be. What’s with the uniform?”
Petridis blew smoke at him. “I think she’s got a new man.”
“Who?”
Petridis took her time thinking about it. “Hm. I don’t know.”
Maniotis plucked the cigarette out of her mouth and tossed it in the sand beside her. He raised up her glasses, leaning in, close to her face. “Who.”
Latsis rose and came at him with her bottle. Reflexively, he turned and caught her by the forehead with his palm and shoved her into the sand, ass over teakettle. Latsis grunted and stayed down. He glanced around the beach. People now watching them, no one looking to intervene.
“You should leave us alone.”
“I need to know where she is.”
Petridis tipped her glasses back down. “She’ll hate me for telling you anything.”
It turned out Petridis and Latsis had invited his sister to join them, but his sister said she was busy, she was in Glyfada getting lunch with her man at an Irish pub. He seized their phones and threw them into the water, watching them skip before sinking. He ignored their cursing and left the beach, not feeling any better.
Maniotis knew of the pub but had never been inside. By the time he arrived, he found only empty tables on the terrace, a receipt being carried away by the wind, and several foreigners inside, drinking. He watched for the road to clear, paranoiac, before stepping inside. He didn’t know where the exits were. The bartender spoke with an accent and told Maniotis he’d just missed them, a man and a woman. Everyone at the bar staring at his uniform like he was there for each of them. The bartender had noticed the vehicle make. Maniotis drove around the suburb a while, searching for a car like the one the bartender had described. By the time he got as far as Ano Glyfada and the incline steepened, he decided he wasn’t cut out for this shit. He gave up and decided to go check on his mother. He turned the car around and headed back to the city.
Aesop Damianos and Takis Apostolos were sitting on a vinyl sofa, watching television. Neither felt like doing anything today. The screen showed a man feeling his way through a dim corridor, repeating “hello? hello? hello?” into the camera. Almost all furniture in Aesop’s house from IKEA. Cube shelves stacked ceiling-high and full of DVDs and Blu-rays, mostly crime and horror films. A wooden tempera Christ hung between the two windows. Below it, taped, a Skrillex poster. The only thing that looked real expensive was the television itself, at 183cm of high-definition. Takis changed the channel. Voice dub of The Cars That Ate Paris on ANT1. The quality of everything noticeably more crisp since the country had started converting to digital.
“That’s a classic.” Aesop started rooting through the couch.
“You lose something?”
“Something I got at a rave in Berlin the other week.”
Takis started lifting cushions. “What is it?”
“Some new psychotropic.” Eyes squinting as he dug in behind a cushion and found it. He pulled out a plastic bag containing a black film cylinder. An X scribbled on the gray cap.
“. . .”
“It’s pretty gross, where it comes from.”
“Where’s that?”
“Dead people.”
“The fuck?”
“Yeah. The guy who sold it to me called it a ‘natural product,’ like how your body makes its own epinephrine and whatnot. Supposed to be synthesized from something a body produces at the moment of death. I don’t know.”
“That’s a joke.”
“I checked it out on my phone because I thought he was full of shit, but there it was—like, people are stealing corpses to make it. This shit is huge up north right now.”
“. . .”
“Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”
“I haven’t.”
“That’s what this is like, well, not like that . . . it’s exactly that, it takes you out of yourself.”
“Hm.”
“You want to try it?”
“So some random German tells you he’s got—”
“—there was an English guy there too.”
“—at what point in his pitch you thought ‘hey, this sounds cool,’ is what I’m wondering.”
“Do you want to do it or not?”
“Hell yes I do.”
“Alright.”
Aesop pulled the curtains tight and started turning off all the lights in the house. He tore some foil from a roll in the kitchen, cut a drink straw into halves. He found the bulb box in a junk drawer, the torch beside it. Takis followed him to the walk-in closet of his bedroom, where they sat on a pile of dozens of the same pair of Adidas shoes. Aesop stuffed a towel over the gap beneath the door. He unscrewed the efficiency bulb and screwed in the safelight. He pulled on the bead chain and it shadowed red. They waited for their eyes to adjust.
Aesop uncapped the cylinder and thwacked out some distillate onto the foil sheet. He unfolded a pocket knife and broke it up into chips. He handed one of the short straws to Takis and put the other one in his mouth. Clicked on a flameless lighter beneath the foil and held it. Didn’t take long for the stuff to cook up. Aesop sucked smoke and held. He passed it over in an unsteady hand. Ash and mothball miasma. Takis was feeling uncharacteristically nervous. Like, constricting intestinal nervous. “On second thought, I don’t know about this . . .”
But Aesop was already gone. Drifting.
Takis took a breath and put the straw to his mouth. He lit and inhaled, listening to the fzzzz crackle. He held it as long as he could, as he’d seen Aesop do, then coughed it out through his nose and mouth, watching its smoke drift phantom blue up out of him. It danced over his eyes and tickled his lashes and dissipated somewhere over his head. The safelight went out and he started drooling. From somewhere that seemed very far away, he heard Aesop’s voice telling him to wait for it. The “it” arrived in form of a twisting, rising sensation somewhere at the core of his neck, filling his skull and ballooning out and waterfalling back over his body, tingling heat, a sensation somewhere between hot water over freezing skin and static electrical shock. Takis suddenly able to see clearly in the gloom. Looking down, he realized he was now separated into two forms, the stationary meat anchor he was attached to by a cord, in a slack, trancelike posture, and the consciousness he emerged into, now a floating, spectral thing. Aesop beside him, his parallel form pale and eyeless, jellyfish translucent. Everything in negative. Aesop not talking at him but still communicating. Takis understood that the distant voices were thoughts. Try looking up. Beyond the false walls of the apartment, it was a different sky without daylight’s reflection, white and full of stars, like a web of droplets, each one a blinding black. He could sense a beat now, echoes of an a
ncient tapping rhythm. . . .
The awareness didn’t last long and soon he found himself getting heavier again. Everything quickening. The high already fading. Consciousness being torn back inward, back into normal time. But not before glimpsing, for a moment . . . the shape . . . beyond them both. Inverse Rorschach swirls in the light, a space empty of reaction, something he could only make a fraction of and it was big and vast and very here and—
The safelight flickered back, but maybe it hadn’t even gone off to begin with.
Snapping to, he felt the impulse to shit and thought he was having a heart attack. He sprang up and erupted through the closet door, nearly tripping over the towel, and tried to find his way along the unlit maze of the apartment to the toilet. Aesop laughing distantly. All walls unsteady, a tile floor that his feet seemed to both stand on and sink through, like mud. He yanked down his pants and sat, finding the cold porcelain heart of it. There was pain.
He stood and looked down when it was over. An unbroken log of shit far too long and wide to reasonably be expelled by a human being. And it started to move, the clay-like spiral, slithering, and raised its head, facing him. Takis unsure if he was hallucinating or if this was some divine (or demonic) encounter, in which case, if he was legitimately not hallucinating, then it was clear that he needed to reevaluate his ontological leanings. The shit serpent rose in the toilet bowl, its Nosferatu fangs emergent, hissing and listing side to side the way an intoxicated person might try to stabilize as they tell you a secret or advise you with timeless wisdom. Its lopsided corn eyes staring into his own, hypnotic, ridiculous. Likewise, it moved its mouth like a sock puppet, whispering something to him that only feathered at the edges of his hearing. He listened to everything.
Then he shivered involuntarily. Felt a realignment. Like his astral and physical forms had finally come back together, but with extra parts. He blinked and reactively tapped the lever down. The toilet flushed and everything sank, except him, and the room slowly began returning to normal. It wasn’t long before he started to forget encountering the serpent, the way dreams crumble like butterfly wings when they’re touched even lightly.
Back in the living room, the lights were still off, but the curtains were drawn open. A relaxed, natural light. Aesop leaned back on the couch, smirking to himself. “Heh.”
“Man. I feel different.” Acrid-seltzery flavor of what they’d smoked lingered on his tongue, coating his pharynx, something like having inhaled dry ice and burnt cooking oil.
“It’s easier the next time.”
“If there is one.” He read the wall clock. Two hours had passed in what seemed minutes.
Takis went outside to get air. He sat on the front stoop and made calls. The woman he met the other night didn’t answer. He called another and she didn’t either. He called his brother and he answered and said he couldn’t talk right then, he was with his family. The fourth call, his father’s phone was picked up by an unfamiliar female voice. Takis hung up. One of those moments when you’re most alone, because you can’t reach out to anyone, even if your life depends on it, dark swallowing everything or maybe you swallowing all the dark, it’s hard to tell sometimes. Takis headed back inside, deciding he needed a beer.
Junesong was riding along odos Vouliagmenis. The old ruins of an American base on the left, a crumbling Olympic Airlines monument at the right. The bus bouncing over potholes and uneven pavement.
A black car swerved right, alongside a man on a neon green bicycle. The cyclist threw his hand up against the passenger window and followed the car through the turn, avoiding the collision. He’s not even wearing a helmet, she thought. Respect!
Junesong got off at Panagoulis and took the stairs underground.
Thanos frowning in his sleep, lightly moaning.
Pallas tired of spooning; she took the weed and went.
She caught a train at Panepistimiou, got off at Syntagma. She waited for Junesong inside the entrance, near the ticket machines, watching people. Transit officials checked fares and dished tickets to some travelers wearing backpacks.
Pallas checked her phone. No word. Maybe she isn’t coming. What then?
Last time they fought she spent the night in the plateia, sitting under a palm and smoking, talking shit with homeless Lithuanians. Hadn’t slept till she got invited back the next morning.
There’s something about feeling alone that makes you notice every happy couple, hostile.
Pallas googled “sex addiction” on her phone. The search results returned significantly more porn than self-help.
Junesong rose from the escalator. Pallas smiled, unanswered.
Elektra Manioti sits on the balcony, watching the street. Someone has written lyrics or a poem on the sunglow wall across the street where there are offices and all walls above the second floor are glass. The man she met at Paradise Club, on the island of Mykonos, is doing his best, all considered. His name is Yiannis Sotiropoulos and his family owns a hotel chain. It’s not busy on this street—the road ends where the hill slopes up, breaking off into pedestrian paths and flights of concrete steps leading up. Some pigeons amble over the pavement, so she watches them, feeling listless. And Sotiropoulos has a great flat here in Kolonaki, as far as she’s concerned. On odos Pindarou, at the base of Lofos Lykavitos. He took her boutique shopping and told her buy what she wanted, but Manioti hadn’t ended up wanting anything but lunch. He makes his money working with his family and their chain of hotels. For a while it almost felt like he stood a chance until her father passed and she couldn’t think of anything else. Sotiropoulos even offered to fly her to Paris after the funeral, but she declined. Like suddenly there isn’t enough. Sotiropoulos brings her a mug of chamomile and honey and sits with her, drinking his own. Manioti looks into the cup and sees her reflection, faint in the ripples of the tea. She looks to Sotiropoulos and bites her lip, holding back. She watched her father deteriorate over the last few years. Heard him screaming in fits, ceasing to recognize anyone at times, accusing everyone of something benign. At first he had seemed less able to do things around the house, even drive or prepare meat, and eventually his mind started to fall behind as well, and he began to require constant care for even basic things. Like eating or bathing, using the toilet. “You’ve not grown up until you’ve helped bathe a dying parent.”
Though by then the man who raised her was long gone, it still hadn’t prepared her for his physical lack of presence when it happened. An outline in her life where he should have been. After the funeral she found she couldn’t face the room he’d lived his final year in. It hurt to be even close to it. Sotiropoulos puts his hand on her shoulder, shyly.
“I wish I could . . . relate. I’ve never lost anyone.”
Manioti finds herself hostile to him for it, knowing she shouldn’t. Her mother seemed much stronger, carrying it near effortlessly—but her mother has already seen a lot of death in her lifetime, the last survivor on her side of the family, coming to expect it from everyone—but this is Manioti’s first meeting with death. Their grieving is incompatible. And she hasn’t even seen her brother, doesn’t know that she cares to now, after he didn’t come for the funeral. It only took one argument with her mother, about the cooking, before she bolted. Sotiropoulos asks her if she wants him to set a bath for her. Manioti says no and sips.
“When I was younger I feared him. He seemed so mean. I used to dumb down my speech when we talked. He never got to know that I was smart. That I was a person.”
“Do you want to smoke?”
“No, I don’t smoke. Have you seen me smoke?”
“It’s electronic.”
“Does that make it better? I didn’t use polysyllables around him. Because the way he saw things that’s not what women were supposed to do. But I read a lot in my spare time. I even read the dictionary. I taught myself Spanish. This, instead of making friends as a teenager. Not that he’d have wanted me doing that, either. I didn’t dare entertain the idea of boyfriends then.”
“Is that what we—”
“Shhh. All this compulsion to learn growing out of a desire to—no, a resentment of him. I read out of spite, now that I think on it. Kavafi, Plath, Nietzsche, history books, novels, anything I could get my hands on. I can name every country and its capital in Africa. Can you? I know the fucking distance to the moon. He was my hero and I was stupid enough to continue to relegate myself into the role of the shy, obedient daughter he had by then come to expect.”
“—my family is boring.”
“‘Yes daddy dinner will be ready soon. Yes I cleaned the bathroom. Ironed your shirts yes.’ This was life for me once, can you believe it? Existing as a background prop. The man that created me only wanting me to serve a purpose, not find one. But he’s dead now and I became none of what he wanted me to be. He loved my brother and my brother hated him.”
“What’s the distance to the moon?”
“Either side of three hundred eighty-four thousand, four hundred kilometers.”
“Last night, when you were screaming in your sleep...”
“I did that again?”
“Yes. But it’s okay.”
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“Tell me about the dream.”
“Are you sure? It’s stupid.”
“I’m listening.”
Long Lost Dog of It Page 10