Or at least the drug had him feeling messed up enough to have him wanting out of the bar, returning only after a long walk in time to catch it burning down. Either way it saved him.
Standing in front of his car, he was feeling thankful that he wasn’t in the building, watching the flames and seeing no message carried in them. The fire could spread to the other buildings, most of which were boarded up or shuttered, empty. He didn’t care.
Where was Aesop? He hoped his friend wasn’t in the building, knew somehow he couldn’t be, but if it was like this, the truth was probably worse. The street was quiet. He got a card out of his wallet and called the cops from a payphone. Didn’t leave his name.
Takis hung up and rubbed his forehead and sighed. He didn’t know what to think so he walked until he found a kiosk and bought a liter of Fix and sat on the curb, drinking it. Something was so horribly wrong in his body and he couldn’t wrap his head around just what it might be. He finished the beer and bought another and stopped it at that. He continued his walk.
Takis recognized the car parked on odos Pallados, which wasn’t far from Dive Bar, and things started to make a strange bit of sense—Karras had been around after all. Already there were emergency crews up the street, working to put the fire out. He could hear them. He wondered how many emergencies it would take before the police couldn’t respond? Whether the demonstration already had things stretched nearly to that point. When Aris Maniotis came around the corner, seemingly looking for the car, Takis didn’t understand why, but he ducked around a corner just the same and drew his piece, stayed back. Head leaned low. Hadn’t Karras known him somehow? Anyway, there was no sign of him, but this guy was a fucking sentinel or a golem or something. Looked almost mythical. Peered around and watched Manitios pick up a stone from the sidewalk and throw it through the driver’s side window. The alarm went off and he opened the door and began rooting around, looking for something. Whatever it was he didn’t find it. He waited for Maniotis to get a little distance between them before deciding to follow. The man looked fucked up, like he’d been in a serious fight and lost, Takis thought.
He followed him toward odos Melanthiou, where an old church was in dire need of repair inside of a fenced courtyard. He hopped it and watched Maniotis from the shadows. Some men here were shooting up, but they ignored him, didn’t even protest his being there. Takis got up quickly beside him, the both of them separated by fence. “Hey, man.”
Maniotis turned just as Takis came forward, gun sideways like he’d seen on television, and shot him thrice in the chest. Maniotis crumpled knees first on the sidewalk like he’d just parachuted down. The junkies continued minding their own business. Takis hopped the fence again and searched him and found Aesop’s pistol (easily recognizable loud chrome) and kicked it aside. There was an expression on his face like relief (but that couldn’t be it) and this unnerved Takis. He wanted to ask Maniotis about the bar, about Aesop, Karras, everything—he knew better.
Takis called his boss and vaguely referenced what was done. The voice on the phone didn’t seem much impressed either way. There was no mention of the fire. He went home and slept it off.
There’s a hole in this city, somewhere. Maybe the whole country. The bottom of the continent. Feels like everything’s swirling around a drain anyway. But at least there’s still night, when Athens looks less ruined than it is, parts of it like a lost Parisian arrondissement, the way people can appear more attractive under certain lights, orange softening bruises and scars, shadows muting them altogether. Even so, the crisis here is a very real thing, like chains anchoring everyone at the bottom, threatening to drown them if it sinks the rest of the way. While there’s some of that romantic spirit of the old world, the nostalgia you find walking through its streets at night, there’s none of the northern optimism. Everything here seems heavier. But that might not be a new aspect of the culture, might just be something the age of austerity has peeled back, exposing. Junesong and Pallas are walking down odos Protogenou because it’s a different way to odos Athinas, and eventually, their mutual home (for now). And who fucking knows where they’ll be tomorrow?
Elena Pallas: From a young age there were different versions of me that people got to know. When I was thirteen I started hanging out at the skatepark in Glyfada. I always told my parents I was staying with girlfriends. But I was there, I’d take the bus. Had friends from school lie for me. Around my family and church friends, I was one person, an almost absence of personality. At the skatepark I was someone real. One time when we snuck into Kolymvitiriou Glyfadas I watched one of the guys steal a desktop computer from an office in the pool building while the rest of us were just there soaking because it was hot. I’d never seen anyone steal something before. Those same guys introduced me to the mechanics of sex. I remember that the first time I tried marijuana I was seventeen and pretty drunk on beer at the park and someone had a frisbee they kept tossing over me as I lay on the warm ground and there was a whining sound in my head when it hit and I felt lighter, like my head was going to float off my shoulders and go where my body couldn’t. Some kids at the park used to rap, this was when Karamanlis was still the PM, and I’d come down after school and listen to them freestyling over beats. Someone would almost always be tagging the skate ramp. Some of them were pretty good. Then we’d smoke and I’d go swimming after to get the smell off. It was only when I smoked that it felt like all versions of me consolidated into one version again. The frisbee blocking out the moon for a slice of time/perspective and never achieving that synchronicity again, the joint’s cherry like a tiny star at the center of night. The last year of school, before I started university, they threw me a birthday get together. We got dozens of beers and a bottle of tequila and sat at the beach in Alimos in the middle of the night, smoking and swimming in our underwear. This time the Canadian girl I was seeing and I visited the fortress at Nafplio and we climbed the steps and sat on a cliff edge behind the ruins and talked about relationship stuff. This was when we were first starting out. I tossed a stone over the edge. Cactus and rocks the whole way down. Imagined myself falling and considered it for a moment. Maybe I ask for everything that happens to me. My grandfather used to tell me stories of the German occupation in the ‘40s, how the soldiers would have him take their punches and paid him in bread and cigarettes. He was always calling it “boxing.” Like just surviving a beating was the whole sport. Now I’m a stranger to everyone but the women I sleep with. I haven’t spoken to any of these people in years, not even family. One thing I never tell anyone is I still think of ways to to take that jump every day.
Tamara Josephine Junesong: Once, after a trip to Sounio, the KTEL bus was moving through Varkiza on the way home, and we passed a man who’d been hit while riding his motorcycle and whose head was broken across the concrete like someone had thrown a pizza out of a speeding car.
Junesong shoves Pallas against the wall of a building and kisses her.
Pallas pulls away. “Wha?”
“I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Junesong kisses Pallas again, presses against her, feeling the narrowness of her body between her shoulders, gripping tight.
Pallas hugs her back, confused. “. . . I love you too. But—”
Junesong reaches for the knife in her pocket, thumbs the hinge and unfolds it, the way sometimes a picture starts to resemble the idea that spawned it.
They hear the series of pops over on the next street.
Like fireworks or a car backfiring.
“What was that?”
Junesong pulls out her lighter instead. Shakes a cigarette out of a pack. “Probably gunshots. Maybe we should check it out.”
“Gunshots? Here?”
“Don’t be a pussy.”
Pallas shrugs. “Eh, alright.”
When they see him there, against the fence, Junesong pushes past Pallas and runs over to watch. His expression looks like home, eyes staring aimlessly at the road, but he’s alive, if barely. He lifts his ha
nd and drops it, as though he’s reaching for something, maybe the hand of a ghost. Junesong asks him if he wants to smoke but the man doesn’t reply. There’s a lot of blood on the sidewalk and she’s standing in it, squatted. She sticks her cigarette in his mouth and it seems like he’s trying to smoke it (but maybe just breathing) and the cigarette falls out. She picks it back up, and it’s only got a little blood on it, and sticks it back in, this time at the left corner of his lips, then asks him if he’s hungry. Tells him her girlfriend has a good sandwich he can try some of. “Even if you’re not hungry, you should finish the cigarette. Personally, I think you’ll be fine.”
Pallas is on the phone, dialing the police, but all she keeps getting is distortion, the sound of old television. And for a moment everything seems bigger than it is, pregnant with possibilities.
Beyond the fixed glow centered just below his eyes, he saw only liquid black, twisting and folding over itself like current. The air smelled bittersweet, metallic. It took a moment to adjust, but he soon saw it, something there after all, looking back at him. He mouthed “What is that” and it had a voice that was distinctly female. He didn’t comprehend her words, they seemed distant, like they were coming from the other side of glass. When Maniotis was a child his father smuggled heroin across the country in the same trucks his distributor used to haul meat. He could feel his blood draining. He didn’t know how, but he could feel it. And depth expanding around him, immersing his body in a feeling he understood only as ravenous. He thought that if enough blood could make it through his wounds . . . (had he been shot?) . . . if exsanguination could somehow occur . . . (the thoughts struggling to complete now, like he wanted to think of other things) . . . the body could no longer carry oxygen or remove wastes, repair or regulate . . . (he turned and saw someone and heard sounds and fell) . . . would begin in him its process of shutdown . . . (hello?) . . . because bodies are slaves of function, cannot exist without a specific degree of synchronicity. Maniotis tried to speak, but the words clouded out. His father’s words. The temperature dropping rapidly around him, worse than it had been. He continued to stare into the shape and raising his hand to see the way his blood had frozen to it. He whispered a prayer to the virgin and wasn’t sure they were connecting. Anymore, he couldn’t hear himself. He was certain he’d left the light on in the hall of his apartment. Murmuring sounds that weren’t coming from him. For some reason he was reminded of the white noise of old televisions, the drone of atomic detonation. Anonymous shadows burned in. And another voice right then that sounded closer than the other had, a man’s voice: the accent strange and the tenses all wrong. He felt like he was wrapped in plastic. Firm hands were pulling him forward. Maniotis tried to fight them back and felt too weak to resist. He had never been this weak. He remembered what he was supposed to do, fingers and heads in a bag in the trunk. He cried out to his father and passed out.
“It’s the frequency, I think.”
“. . .”
“It gets you.”
“It . . .” He trailed. “Why aren’t you affected?”
“I was.”
His father opened his hand, holding out shredded wads of tobacco stained fiber.
“Plugged my ears.”
Maniotis nodded. He rubbed his head and leaned against the fence for a bit.
The vagrant awoke anemic and nauseous beneath dawn warmth. He stirred, damning his body. The soreness of the wound was excruciating. Pulling himself up against the wall, he felt his pants sag some. Inspected his pockets and found money. Not a lot, but it was over a hundred in bills and assorted change. Where’d this come from? Then he remembered. He leaned against the wall, staring at the blood on the pavement. His shirt had dried to the bandage, sticking both firmly to his side. It was holding, at least, for the moment. The night before the first time he’d been shot, he’d buried a man and had driven home and had been so tired he parked the car in the driveway and slept in the front seat, too exhausted to move. He vaguely bethought coming to a few times and seeing his wife watching him through the window. Maybe he’d imagined it or maybe she really had been with him the whole time, if only at a distance. Maybe she was still with him now, watching. He doubted it.
He hobbled to the Omonia metro station, trying not to cry out. He offered a man some bills for a shirt that was laid out on the sidewalk, but seeing the condition he was in, the man gave him the shirt and gripped his hand and nodded and said something Varia did not understand. He put the shirt on and felt better that it covered much of the blood. He wandered down the steps and bought a ticket, unsure where to go. So he took the green line to Piraeus.
The train was mostly empty save a few early commuters and late night lifers. He asked the man across from him what day it was, something he hadn’t thought about in a long time. The man looked confused, then said it was Monday, the sixth of June. Varia thought of how many seasons had passed since he’d arrived here and figured the year in his head. His side resonated, a twisting.
Buildings whizzed by and a young woman on the train was listening loudly to hip-hop, nodding her head and cutting her hands across the air in front of them to the beat. Varia’s fingers twitched anxiously, as they always did when he traveled. He made fists and shook his head, shook off the itch in his heart, blinking rapidly.
The train arrived at its terminus. He yawned and stepped out and took a deep breath. The mountains black against the haze of industry. Air was different by the coast, somehow more free. He found an agent at the port and asked him hoarsely which island was best for fishing. The agent was reluctant to pay him any attention until he reached into the bag and slapped the wad of brightly colored bills on the counter. The wind like fingers running through his hair. He considered that fishing was something he might want to do a while. He knew nothing about it. The agent told him a place and Varia asked for a ticket to get there. He took the change back and searched for his boat. Light coming up over the Mediterranean, painting the horizon in a spectral burst.
Varia stopped in a tourist shop and scanned some of the translated crime paperbacks. George Pelecanos, John le Carré, etc. There was a separation between himself and the kinds of people in their books, even though he knew the line was slim. Shame he couldn’t read much in Greek. But he’d figure it out. He recognized one of the words on the back cover of one of the books: hartopaiktis. That meant card player. But he read it as “gambler.” There were certain words they used on the backs of novels to sell them, because these words already had prior associations for most people, and this was a sales technique, breaking a character down to a single defining trait. Words like that illuminated a character’s personality, sometimes sold the premise of the book. But in reality, words like that were damning badges that took more than eternity to shed. Real people were a lot more than descriptions on the covers of books.
A man walked circles, carrying a sign that Varia couldn’t read well enough to comprehend, like he were picketing life, and the man was calling for repent. Someone said “The apocalypse will feel like knowing a language you never get to use.” He thought he understood that. Above them a plane descended toward Athens International. Marines in white uniforms singled up along the promenade. Tourists navigated between ferries and asked directions. When he had finally returned home, he’d found his wife’s head beat in with a shovel in the front garden. He’d come out of hiding to see if he could get them to leave with him. But her shoe was meters away from her body. The shoe made him sadder than anything, he didn’t know why. His children were hanged from trees in the back. The cicadas droning on like nothing ever happened. Yet he found it hard to hate insects, to even hate Nistor. This was on him, always would be. After finding them he had thrown up and cried and showered. When he couldn’t kill himself, he’d waited. When no one returned for him, as though his god would always deny him the thing he wanted most, he regained enough of himself to leave. Paper does this, he knew. It does things like this. Varia took a good look across the low Athenian skyline. He gripped the groce
ry bag tightly.
He thought of the other life more, smelling the sea air: children hunting each other in a forest with imaginary weapons, fat fingers plucking meats and vegetables off of a wooden cutting board, his uncle showing him the patience to aim, stories of who his parents might have been, his grandmother rest her soul telling him to always keep a good haircut and have hygiene and be a man and put the family first—he had failed her and wondered if her ghost knew, tarot cards and old curses, Roma vagrants, stories of the Ottoman invaders, his old Dacia, the town girls in skirts, the birth of his children. . . .
How will I be sold? he wondered. Would it be with words like “father” or “husband?” No, that was certainly too hopeful—boring almost. He laughed to himself and handed his ticket to an official and the official tore it and passed it back. A woman in the crowd said “The sun is a furnace, do you hear that?” But he didn’t hear anything except more people talking. He walked up the ramp and the stairs, to the deck of the massive boat. Some children nearby asked their mother whether there would be dolphins this time. His own had been that age. They had gone from crawling to walking in no time at all. Existing is a lot of missing other people. Passengers moved to make way for an Orthodox priest.
Varia could still hear the man carrying the sign yelling from below. Someone on the boat called the man a prophet. The priest didn’t correct them and kept walking.
“Put your faith in the christ!”
And the crowd filled back in behind the priest.
“Put your faith in jesus the son the lord!”
An “addict” was an easy character to sell. Others: “detective,” “enforcer,” “pusher.” Fill those in a bit more with “down on his luck,” “one last job,” “nothing to lose.” He shrugged. Anything that’s difficult that someone has gone through can be pitched in its most narrow terms as something less than the sum of its pain. Almost trivialized. Varia chewed his tongue, touching at his side, and knew he would endure all this. The gap in his teeth was a permanent lesson, but perhaps not the kind he’d expected to learn. Varia sat on the deck and waited. He’d get a sandwich once the crowd settled. Seagulls called overhead. He looked down at his ticket and yawned.
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