by Cara Hoffman
Milo would look away, but Jasper would go through every one. Beautiful landscapes, coastal highways, smiling rugged people, tanks and jeeps and staging areas, guns, and bodies. Milo would hold a book in front of his face, busy himself washing their shirts in the sink.
“Oh, how lovely,” Jasper would say. “Who’s that, then, over there—one with the missing h—Oh, these chaps look friendly. What’s that he’s holding, dried fruit? Oh, an ear, is it? That’s quite a big hole. Putting in a swimming pool? I see, and are there any living children in the area? Oh, here’s one, I see. Not very lively, though, is he?
“All right, then, I think we’d like a fortnight package, something with a terrace overlooking the, ah . . . ditch full of limbs? Or maybe a private accommodation downwind from the mass grave. What do you think something like that would run?”
Declan had reached over and gently taken Jasper’s wrist.
Even now, in the cloistered quiet of his office, Milo could feel the cold, sickening snap as if it were happening again.
Jasper gasped and shuddered, the photographs fell, and his arm flopped in the wrong direction, bone pressing against skin, his hand immobile.
Milo couldn’t breathe.
“Now, that,” Declan said, “is funny.”
Olympos was unchanged; graying and sooty from proximity to the highway, paint peeling, the wrought-iron balconies crooked, threatening to fall. The front steps were cracked and the long glass doors opened into a cool cramped lobby at the bottom of a spiral staircase where Sterious sat stoop-shouldered and reading behind the front desk. He was wearing a polyester waffle-weave cardigan to fight the chill of the air-conditioning. I knocked on the glass and he hunched his shoulders, put his hand on top of his bald head, surprised but also miming surprise—then motioned for me to come in.
Sterious loved company. He worked reception in the mornings and afternoon, sipping Greek coffee made in a narrow gold pot he kept on a hot plate behind the desk. Every afternoon two men who wore rings and a tall woman with blond hair who worked in the neighborhood would visit him to play dominoes and drink ouzo. The woman wore sunglasses, sweatpants, and terry-cloth slippers. I wouldn’t have recognized her at night beneath the red bulb a few doors down except for her laugh.
Jasper and Milo and I would often sit with Sterious in the lobby, especially if we’d run out of money for drinks.
“Bridey!” he shouted, getting out two demitasse glasses from behind the desk. “Where you went all this time?”
In the cool of the lobby my head felt clearer, but I could smell my own sweat, the days of sleeping out on the boat and before that a few nights in a park. I leaned against his desk while he poured us some shots.
“Seeing the sights,” I said.
“What sights?”
“Oh, I don’t know; the Eiffel tower, Disneyland, the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China. That kind of thing.”
“No Stonehenge?”
“And Stonehenge.”
“No Berlin Wall?” He poured himself more ouzo.
“And the Berlin Wall. I wrote your name on it. I wrote ‘Sterious Hatzipanagis was here.’ But I think it’s not long for this world.”
“And you got married?”
“I did get married. I married a race car driver, but it didn’t work out.”
“No, no, no—a race car driver? Too selfish.”
He poured me another shot. There was an ashtray on the desk that had been in our room; in the bottom of it a picture of Pan teaching Daphnis to play the flute. I looked up to meet his eyes.
“I remember you was skinnier before,” Sterious said, reaching into his sweater pocket and pulling out a fistful of pistachios, pressing them into my hands. “Maybe shorter too.”
“Anything happen while I was gone?” I asked.
He leaned in to confide. “Yes. I decided Milo is not so much like a man. You first think what a big, strong man. But he is like a girl. You know how a girl is—she think about things, think for a long time about things and maybe cry sometimes? And he’s pretty like a girl, no? Even with that punched ear.”
“Milo’s here?” I asked.
“I don’t mean you’re not a girl for you don’t cry,” he said. “Or for your clothes,” he added.
“Thanks. Is Milo here?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know where he is.” He waved his hand, dismissing it all. “Nothing happened while you were gone.” He opened the desk drawer and took out the key to room thirty-one and a couple drachma notes, set them before me. “Catch the 309,” he said. “It’s a big train, and tonight, many, many beds empty. You come back just in time!”
“Were you here when Jasper left?”
He didn’t answer. Handed me a pile of leaflets; pictures of a hotel I’d never seen before, with the words Get Ready to Be Amazed! printed across the top and room rates listed on the bottom. The most expensive room was seven dollars. You could sleep on the roof for fifty cents. The only people who ever stayed at Olympos were poor, hiding, prone to risk. Or else they were easy marks: travelers unaware of how dangerous the neighborhood was.
“Sterious,” I said, “did Jasper leave anything here for me?”
He shook his head, said nothing.
“When did Milo leave?” I asked. “Did he give you anything to give me?”
“No.”
“You remember Murat?” I asked. “I was wondering—”
“No,” he said.
“Murat Christensen. You remember him.”
“No,” he said.
“C’mon, man,” I said. “He stayed here. He lived here.”
“I’m happy you’re back,” Sterious said.
The spiral stairs ended at the abandoned top floor. The claustrophobic heat in our old room was overwhelming. I opened the balcony door to get a cross breeze and let in the air and noise from the street. The ceiling was high, molded tin, painted blue. The walls were yellow and peeling, the floor tiles patterned in a blue and white meander, a wrought iron balcony was full of dirt and crushed glass and overlooked the highway.
Our bed was pushed up against the wall, and there was a smaller cot in the opposite corner where Declan had sometimes slept, a small white sink with a mirror above it too high for me to see myself in, and a flimsy chest of drawers. I looked beneath the beds for any artifact Jasper might have left: books, a T-shirt, maybe money, a letter. I tore the sheets from the bed and pushed the flimsy wooden dresser aside, took out the drawers, and turned them over. We’d had dozens of books; Milo always had a blue spiral-bound notebook to write in. When I’d left, the place had been packed with things Jasper bought or lifted or insisted we get from the flea market. But now there was nothing.
I turned my face to the pillow and breathed deeply, hoping for that medicinal mix of licorice and mud and bitter flowers: their smell, distinct and intoxicating.
This was the room where we’d slept together. The room that had spun beneath us while we played gin and hearts. Where we’d sit at night in our underwear getting up to drink from the short tap in the cracked sink. The hush of traffic going by sounded like an ocean. We read aloud to each other and ate bread we’d stolen from the bakery on Nissouru Street. We washed our clothes in the sink with bar soap and hung them on the balcony to dry, and at night we walked across the city and up into the hillside paths where the trunks of the trees were painted white, to sit by the base of the Acropolis and see the sprawl of lights stretch back until they reached the empty dark where hills rose. We wandered until there was no one out beneath the haunted glow of distant morning but people to fear.
And this was the room to which we returned, where everything looked silver, pale gray sky shining in, spilling through the balcony doors and washing over us. That light laid itself down upon our skin and in the wetness of our eyes; illuminated sweat-darkened hair, faces, mouths, collarbones, a lip tucked benea
th a lip; revealed the limbs and lines of a body traced back to the shadowed places of another: the back of a knee, the curve of a hand, a fist closed around a wrist or an ankle, closed around flesh that fit perfectly in the cradle between fingers and palm.
I remembered how fine their hands looked clasped in the silver light while they slept. Their cheeks upon the pillow when it was over and morning came at last, turning the sky the color of an old bruise.
Milo had been staring at the doorway from his desk for a good thirty seconds before he noticed Paul, in his tweeds, standing in the hallway speaking.
“Sorry?” he asked. “Haven’t had me cuppa.”
“I said, ‘How are you settling in?’” Paul smiled, he had pale, deep-set eyes and the kind of eyelashes that made Milo think he must have once been ginger-haired. His skin was elastic and well-hydrated, wavy white hair touching his shoulders.
Milo made himself say “Wonderful” twice. Paul was firmly solicitous in the way of people who’ve paid you to do things.
“Looking forward to hearing your students’ work at the party tonight,” he said heartily.
“Should be quite something,” Milo said, as though this weren’t the first he’d heard of it. He could smell the crisp odor of laundry and cologne and toothpaste that radiated from Paul, and tried not to watch the man take in his office. The desk was covered with his own work; there were open books on the floor beside his chair, an empty bookcase, a plate on the windowsill containing cigarette butts, and a dry crusty pile of used Barry’s tea bags. He’d found a reliable supply of Barry’s gold blend, in McNulty’s on Christopher Street, the only decent shop in a neighborhood which should be consumed in a fatal fire. In any case, the used tea bags had nowhere to go, because the trash bin was filled with crushed tallboys of Four Loko supplied to him by his very best student, Tiffany Navas. They were in there because the recycling container was overflowing with student work. Paul raised his eyes to Milo’s and smiled without much feeling.
“Well, fantastic,” Paul said. “I’m bringing my wife tonight; she’s a fan. You know, when we met . . .” He looked off in the distance with a studied, wistful smile. “You’ll love this, actually . . . She was living in this little postage stamp–sized apartment down on Orchard Street, I remember the first time I went over there, she showed me this copy of In the Shadow of Machines. Honest to God. And it was so dog-eared and so annotated, it was practically falling apart. I told her to bring it tonight, thought you might get a kick out of seeing it. Plus she’s dying for you to sign it.”
“Oh, how lovely,” Milo said. “Of course.”
“Oh, hey, just a minor thing.” Paul touched his hand lightly to his beard. “Don’t know if you knew. If you’re not checking your email—you know, don’t feel like checking whatever; I totally get what a pain that stuff can be—but just FYI, there’s a mailbox in the department office with your name on it and there’s hard copies there of things you might need. And you know Deb or myself would be happy to help you set up your, ah . . . faculty email account if you need help with that, too, just to help you catch up, maybe, on some of the bureaucracy. So just let us know.”
“Of course,” Milo said. “Yes. Thank you. I shall be sure to stop in later today and see her.”
“Great. Again, no big deal, just, uh, some attendance things to sign off on and, ah, a couple other questions Deb had, forms for direct deposit . . . that, uh . . . not quite sure. But whatever, whenever you get to it. Okay. We’ll catch you tonight.” He gave a wry well-practiced smile and tapped the doorframe twice before heading down the hall.
Milo got up to shut the door, then put his headphones on and turned out the light.
* * *
When next he looked up, the shadowy vision of Navas was standing in his office, her arms folded. She snapped on the light, pulled his headphones down around his neck, stacked the papers that were covering his desk, and dropped them heavily to the floor.
“Why didn’t you tell me there was some special thing tonight?” he asked her.
“What thing?” She sat where the papers had been, lit her cigarette with his lighter, then put it in her pocket. “Oh, the reading? You’re the one wrote it on the fucking blackboard Monday. You can’t remember? No more Four Loko for you, Professor.”
“I’m afraid, Ms. Navas, there will indeed be more Four Loko for me, especially if we are to attend this mystery event.”
Milo tried not to favor Tiffany Navas when the semester began, but had given up about three weeks in. Her work was simply better than her peers’, her skin darker, her accent richer. And she was more intelligent; could look around the room and size up the people in it fast as any runner. No one was taking care of Navas; she was taking care of herself. She didn’t show up to class wearing pajama pants and flip-flops, or a lanyard of keys around her neck like a giant baby in danger of getting lost. Did not talk about her parents or pets or family vacations, did not have conversations about television. Never wore a baseball cap. And, best of all, when they announced they were taking Four Loko off the market, she and her friends bought several dozen cases. Four Loko was a malt liquor made with caffeine, alcohol, and wormwood. It was poorman’s freebase, white-trash absinthe. Because of her foresight, Navas was able to supply the beverage on very little notice, with a great profit to herself. She also did not care about the no-smoking policy. Navas was tall and fleshy and wore shiny deep-red lipstick.
“I don’t got that much left, anyway,” she said, her long black hair falling forward, disturbing the room with the faint smell of vanilla musk. “You’re gonna hafta start drinking Red Bull and schnapps like every other loser. Listen, we’ll go to this thing and then you come up t’the Bronx an see my brother fight this guy, okay?”
“What did the guy do?”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe,” Milo said.
“That’s where the Four Loko is,” she said.
“Then yes,” he said. “I shall be delighted.”
I woke up alone in the dark, tangled in sheets, sweat soaked, nauseated, my face in Jasper’s pillow, memories of him thick and suffocating in the little room.
Shadows played across the ceiling, and for a moment I thought it might be morning already and that I missed the train I was supposed to run.
I walked unsteadily to the sink and threw up, splashed cold water on my face, rinsed out the basin, then wet my head and neck, brushed my teeth out on the balcony, and watched the sun get lower in the sky, filling me with the hollow dread that comes from waking up sober at dusk. I’d made a mistake coming back.
The Athens I’d left was crawling with police. The Athens I’d returned to was eerily calm. I didn’t want to go out—didn’t want to ride the train and see other runners—but there was little choice if I was to keep sleeping indoors. I grabbed my lighter and pile of leaflets, ran down the spiral staircase through the lobby and out onto the street.
Down on the pavement the air was finally beginning to cool, streetlamps and headlights were turning on, the sky was a rich haunting gaslight blue. The air and the night were working upon me, and with every step I took toward the station I felt more hopeful and alive. I crossed the highway, cut across the scrub-grass park and then through the back gate to the platform of Larissis Station, where bouzouki music played over the loudspeakers, and I stood waiting to board a train headed west.
Runners were sitting facing the tracks, their backs against the smooth brick wall. Bigger hotels, like Athens Connection and Luzani, sent out better-dressed, more serious runners than the rest of us; they sat apart like commuters or tourists, carried binders with actual photographs of rooms, bars, dining areas. Unlike our photos, these were not stock images. These runners didn’t smile at anyone who didn’t mean commission, didn’t raise their voices, didn’t share the drunken bond between transients who’d made their way to the city and were happy to find work. They were there to fill their hot
els and get paid. Professional runner was the epithet. They walked onto the train and walked off with every rich person on it, taking a shuttle straight to their hotels.
For the rest of us, running was about waiting. Waiting for the train, then waiting for it to get you there, waiting for the drink to be served, waiting for the alcohol to take effect. Idling, not running. When Jasper was there, the waiting was better. Boxes came from London addressed to him, full of books by Pushkin, Turgenev, and Nabokov, blank notebooks and pens and Viz comics. A semiregular care package with no note, no money—or none that we knew about. When we asked who sent these things, he’d say “A friend” or “A teacher” or simply “A man I know.” Sometimes we sat on the train and read, there and back, didn’t talk to anyone at all—just took the hotel’s money, watched the countryside drift past from the window. Got off the train long enough to eat a souvlaki at Elefsina and came home to read and drink and wander some more.
* * *
A group of taxi drivers walked on to the platform from the back gate and it grew quiet. I thought about stepping into the station to stay away from them or going back to the hotel, but my need for money won out.
I dropped my cigarette and stepped on it, watched Takis, a tall, beefy man with hairy arms wearing a black sailor’s cap, walk down the center of the platform pushing and shoving some skinny kid in sneakers and shorts who was keeping his head down and trying to get out of his way.
The other drivers stood in a group by the back gate, smoking.
Sick of the shoving, the kid eventually turned around and put his back to the wall. It was Tom, a South African boy who ran for San Remo, and was usually high on hash. Takis stood in front of him, rested one hand on the wall, and leaned in close. Tom gave him a coy smile, leaned forward with his lips parted, and closed his eyes as if he were lifting his face for a kiss.
The laughter was immediately broken by the popping sound his head made when it hit the wall. Tom’s hands flew out, instinctively trying to break whatever fall might be coming, but he lost consciousness first; buckled, crumpled to the platform, his mouth bleeding. A cry went up from the runners, and someone began screaming for the station cop who would never show up.