by Cara Hoffman
He rolled the R’s dramatically, making the words sound especially silly. I remembered liking Mike. He and Jasper had tried to start a currency exchange scam, which lasted a day. Mike looked robust, one of the few runners who filled out his clothes. He had bad teeth, dark eyes, and wavy dirty-blond hair; he was cleanly shaved. Mike had spent one month in Athens and one month on the islands for the past five summers, came with money, ran to pay for his drinks, then went home. A poor man’s holiday.
“My name is Bridey Sullivan,” he sang in a puzzling approximation of a Danish accent I didn’t have. “I come for a drunken dead man.”
Funny enough. A few people looked at me out of the corners of their eyes.
Mike’s eyes were shiny and sentimental from drink as he stepped off the bench, walking toward me, trying to bring an image of Jasper up between us.
“Just taking the piss,” he said. “You know he’d be laughing.” He offered me a cigarette, took one for himself.
“It’s okay,” I said. I stepped back to look at his face, then kicked him hard in the balls with the heel of my boot.
Mike gave a little shriek, sucked in a mouthful of air, crouching, one hand reaching toward the ground. More laughter, clapping, someone yelled, “Atta girl.”
I hadn’t considered kicking him until it was already happening, until I’d raised my knee and felt my throat constrict and a chill on my back. I looked down at him, searching for the remains of any emotion. His shoulders and back were nicely defined beneath his thin T-shirt. Everything about the way he crouched there was lovely. His hair was darker at the roots and I could see the paleness of his scalp and the back of his neck, his freckled skin. His sneakers were coming apart. I admired him as he knelt where he belonged, then wandered back along the gravel path to wait for the train.
Dare kept large metal canisters of gasoline in the basement. You pumped the top to pour fuel into smaller containers. I got a metal canteen from the kitchen and filled it with gasoline and then went hiking. I’d walked these trails with Dare for a whole year. When I was younger I’d pretend I was scoping out a place to build my own house. But that’s not what I wanted anymore.
The hillside was steep, and I turned to look down on our low ranch house and the rich algae green of the pond. I’d been paying attention to Dare, been reading about wind shifts. Just in the time we lived there, fires had swallowed houses and hillsides. It was mostly men who made the fires and the conditions for the fires and then men put them out. It wasn’t a way to live.
I chose a place where the forest met the green of the hillside, a little shadowed valley before a dark curtain of trees, a calm cover for animals and birds. I sloshed the gasoline from the canteen all over the base of an old tree maybe hundreds of years old, rooted to and rising from an earth that was older still. I’d been alive for just thirteen years and I could wreck it. Send it back to wherever I’d come from, to wherever my parents had gone. It was exciting, like standing at the ocean and looking out at nothing, the invisible force of wind in your face, pushing salt air into your lungs.
I got out the box of strike anywhere matches, lit one and watched the yellow flame gutter in the wind, then dropped it on the tree. The flame undulated like liquid, shot, wriggling up the trunk like blood traveling in a vein, blue and electric, the tips yellow and pouring black smoke. It made me jump on to my toes. I could feel it through the core of my body.
The bark popped and crackled with little sparks. And I held my hands in tight fists. Unless the branches caught and the leaves burned it would soon go out. But it was fall and there were plenty of dry leaves; the trunk was already turning black. I waited, breathing in the smell of the tree’s life as it was extinguished by the fire, feeling the rush of heat and a tremendous ecstatic shudder. I had not felt so good and so sad in a very long time. It was like my mother singing to me at night. I put my arms out in an empty embrace. Then ran, tumbling down the hillside, the fire at my back, blackening the tall grass, sending up ash and sparks that hovered and scattered around me like a luminous swarm.
* * *
I expected Dare to be gone when I got home later that day, or to be there talking about the fire. I expected him to say something. But he was watching television. The fire was too small. No one had to come from the sky to put it out. The Volunteer Fire Department sent one guy in a pickup truck. And I had to stay where I was.
The evening was murder. Ten students relentlessly read their poetry, eight and a half of them completely without talent. Milo was dying for a cigarette the entire time, ready to weep by the end of the hour. One student’s work comprised texts sent back and forth between him and a girl, which he read off his mobile in a deliberately bored monotone, to the great amusement of his peers.
How, he thought, for fuck’s sake, could anyone possibly have the arrogance to believe their lives as the disgruntled chattel of “good families” and “fine institutions” would make for interesting literature? Instead of producing an endlessly trite chronicle of suburban privileges and petty privations, or fantasies drawn from the shallowest well. Fucking skimming bastards every one.
That night was not the first he had seen Navas as his Beatrice: angelic, holding a luminous can of Four Loko in her hand.
She elbowed him sharply after the last poem was read and they applauded, said hasty good-byes. Skipped down the steps and up Third Avenue, making their way to Union Square, ran down into the close hollow of the station. A marvel of steel and tile and tracks and grime and noise; the screech of breaks and dozens of automatic doors shutting at once; the recording of a hyperarticulated white man’s voice ringing out in perfect American: “Ladies and gentleman if you see a suspicious object on the subway or platform alert a police officer or an MTA employee. If you see something say something”; bodies pushing past, paths crossing.
A shirtless man covered in glitter with a towel on his head draped behind him like long tresses danced and whirled along the platform, wearing a cardboard crown. A boy, maybe fifteen years old, with stumps for arms, drumsticks duct-taped where his hands would be, played a tight ska beat on a plastic ten-gallon drum.
They crammed into the car, pressed flat against strangers smelling of sweat and cologne and hand sanitizer.
“You should have read,” Milo said.
“You got my work; I don’t need to stand up there for them.”
“You do need to,” he said. “Did I seem bollixed? Paul already thinks I’m a waster.”
“I don’t know what the fuck ‘bollixed’ is but you were really good to those poet-dude bros. Got that Professor Rollock look you give them so they think they did something all meaningful and shit.”
He loved her laugh, a sharp “Ha,” and then she would throw her head back and inhale and laugh harder. “Oh, Christ,” she said. “What the fuck was that poem Seth did about walking through the ‘grit-ty ci-ty st-reets.’ Every fucking stanza starts with ‘I wanna tell her.’ I’m, like, ‘Dude, seriously?’ ‘I wanna tell her about the stars, about the red leaves.’ Stupidest bullshit ever . . . He actually said ‘I wanna tell her about the stars’ . . . That’s ‘wanna,’ not ‘want to.’ Please. The affectation.”
“It wasn’t bad because it was ’bout looking at stars, like,” Milo told her, “or because he used a repetitive device, or the argot of our time. Those things can be done well.”
“Just not by that guy,” she said. “And motherfucker’s got soooo much to tell her. Girlfriend had a lobotomy, I guess. She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s even looking at.”
“There’s got to be a way you can teach that class instead of me,” Milo said.
“When have I got time to be a teacher? I’m taking eighteen credits and working at Macy’s. Plus fuck that. Look what it’s done to you in just a month.”
Most of the white people had cleared out of the car around Eighty-Sixth Street with their handbags and close shaves and nice suits. Milo an
d Navas rode for half a dozen more stops, sitting side by side on the light-blue seats, looking at the advertisements for plastic surgery and community colleges. The cheerful voice of authority reminded them that a crowded subway car is no excuse for sexual misconduct, and to remain alert and have a safe day.
Streetlamps were just turning on when the train emerged from belowground into the dusky flame-blue light of evening. From the elevated they could see directly into a sea of glowing windows in graffiti-tagged blocks of buildings. They were the very sort of council estates from which Milo had come and he felt at once relaxed and ill, had a racing drunken feeling that he was bringing Navas home to meet his mother, that they would get off the train and see the rise, the tall bank of windows of Canon Green Court. He had a vivid image of Colleen chain-smoking, curled up in the big worn tartan chair with her book and packet of Maryland cookies. For an irrational moment he found himself thinking Navas took after his mother, that she had inherited Colleen’s eyes, her intelligence.
Somewhere past Grand Concourse they got out and walked along the gray pockmarked and gum-stained sidewalk, past a barrage of shabby storefronts; street carts of plantains, mangos, and tomatillos; boys walking with their pants slung low.
Navas’s stride had changed to a light confident step the minute they got off the train. He watched the irony behind her smile disappear, her eyes soften; when she looked over at him, she seemed younger still.
They passed a fast-food restaurant, a botanica, a pawnshop window filled with rings in scripted gold. Two men in do-rags, one in camouflage pants and plastic sandals, wearing a rosary and blasting Bachata from a chunky radio, were selling perfume out of the trunk of their car. Milo watched the boys and girls pass, their skin smooth, an easy voluptuousness beneath clothes pulled tight; some were spotty-faced, some hid behind masks of makeup, some pushed doe-eyed cherubs in strollers. Boys in tracksuits with gold chains around their necks, boys with sleeve tattoos, hair cut in neat lines high on their foreheads, muscles that they’d been working at.
They walked by a group of old men and women, sitting in a courtyard at a folding table, listening to the radio, playing cards. One man held a wizened pug on his lap. The street smelled like fried onions and grilled meat and the smoky sweetness of roasting nuts. It was a bright, inflated version of the neighborhood from which Milo had come. Nearly every shop window advertised the lottery.
The boxing ring was in the basement of a church like the one in which he’d trained. It smelled of damp and mold, of sweat and coffee and frankincense. Navas handed Milo a Four Loko which she had poured into a Gatorade bottle, and they sat on folding chairs next to a group of cheerful West Indian boys who smelled like dope, and a man with a cauliflower ear who nodded at Milo in silent recognition.
Her brother Jorge had tattoos. Not the kind the children at school had. There was no golden mean, no outline of the state of Tennessee, no Bettie Page with a whip, like the one that decorated the pale skin of an English major from Newton, Massachusetts, who sat in the front row of his class and wore thick black-framed glasses. No quote from Charles Bukowski or illustration from a children’s book. Jorge’s tattoos took up substantial space on his skin; a photo-real drawing of a baby on his neck, a banner-draped crucifix on his back, dates and initials and the word family done in narrow calligraphy down one forearm. And Salute Me or Shoot Me on the other.
Girlfriends came up to Navas to sit close and talk, called her mami, kissed her, gossiped about people Milo didn’t know. She introduced him as “the professor I been tellin’ you about” and people eyed him, politely shook his hand. Apart from Jorge’s coach and a white-haired woman wearing a house dress, he was the oldest person there.
By the time Jorge stepped into the ring, the drinks had taken hold and Milo watched his tight, broad-shouldered form slip furiously through the air like a ghost of his former body. Jorge had a shaved head and hairless chest. He shared his sister’s pretty smile and dark, sensitive eyes. And that’s why Milo knew before it happened that the next person to step into that ring would beat the bloody piss out of him. Leaving would have been the decent thing to do, but a sudden visceral curiosity to see Jorge laid out on the mat kept him sitting there, cheering for the man and envying every blow he took.
“You comfortable, Professor?” Navas asked him.
“Yes, thank you,” he replied, the sweet liquid humming in his veins as he admired her brother’s taut body. “I am indeed.”
A light appeared down the track and we formed lines where the first and last passenger cars would stop. When the train pulled in to take us back to Athens, we rushed on. It was so crowded we had to stand on suitcases and packs; ragged fighters trying to push past one another, asking the same questions to the same tired people one after the other: “Do you have a place to stay in Athens?” “Looking for a place to sleep tonight?”
Greek commuters were sitting with their bundles and briefcases, eyeing us with disgust. It was the people from the nearby towns who hated us the most.
I got stuck between a compartment door and a crowd of people and packs that seemed to run the length of the train. It was a horrible car and I pushed around bodies until I was forced to walk on the arms of seats, holding on to the overhead rack. In the next car, I waited behind a couple holding a live chicken until I could get past, then silently handed out leaflets for Olympos and went straight to the bar, where I stood and smoked and stared at the black glass of the window, thinking of Murat and how it would be to talk to him again.
Walking out on to Diligianni Street with him that day from the shade of the station was like walking into a grimy oven. The sun was blinding, reflecting off every whitewashed surface and shimmering shard of metal or plastic or glass on the pavement. Loose papers scuttled along the gutters, kicked up by traffic, the air before us rippling and liquid in the intense heat. Apart from tourists leaving the station, no one was out walking or shopping; there must have been an ozone warning. People leaving the train, once exuberant, looked stunned, sweat already pouring down their faces after one block of walking. I knew that feeling of heat-drenched desolation. They’d come from far away dreaming of philosophers and baklava and Athens looked like a bad B movie about the apocalypse shown on daytime TV.
Murat, though, was smiling. We broke away from the other tourists and runners, headed across the highway, waiting on the median for a chance to cross.
“You been here before,” I said.
“Twice,” he said. “But I went straight to the islands. Had only a short trip to the Acropolis. I haven’t stayed long in Athens before. You feel it here.”
“Feel what?” I asked. But he ignored me.
Coming from the white light of the street, we could barely make out the three other people standing in the cool lobby. The air inside smelled like coffee and ouzo and bug repellent.
“Perfect,” Murat said.
Our eyes adjusted to the light and for one brief moment I saw how it was actually a tiny pretty place; a modern ruin, an architectural relic from when neighborhood residents were more than prostitutes, dealers, and the transient foreign homeless. The worn marble steps and the tall ornate glass on the French doors. The tiled lobby and tin ceiling; wooden banister snaking elegantly up the long narrow spiral staircase; even the simple square desk where Sterious sat, keys hanging behind him on the wall, seemed right.
Sterious’s three pals leaned on the desk peering down at a yo-yo; the string was stuck on one of his thick, knobby fingers, which had turned purple, and one of the men was trying to cut it with a nasty-looking blade; the woman in the slippers was guiding him through it as though his eyesight was poor.
Sterious smiled up at us and turned from them, taking out the ledger, the yo-yo banging on the side of the desk while he wrote. He asked Murat how his trip had been in English, and when Murat answered him in Greek Sterious smiled, said something that made his friends laugh, then took Murat’s passport and ha
nded him a key.
He’d booked a bed in a dorm-style cube that had no bathroom; the cheapest option other than the roof. The cool air of the lobby gave way to a dank, sticky, smothering heat as we made our way upstairs. Once inside the room I put his books on the floor and closed the thick balcony curtain to keep out the sun.
“Is there a desk somewhere in this place?” he asked, unfazed by the tight arrangement of bunk beds. He was either used to this kind of life or had no interest in material things at all.
“There’s a table and chair on the second floor in a little alcove near the stairs,” I said. “And some folding metal chairs on the roof.”
“Where do you live?” he asked.
I brushed the sweat-dampened hair off my forehead, tucked it behind my ear. “Upstairs,” I said. “When you’re done with The Clouds, can I borrow it?”
By the time the train arrived back in Athens, it was dark and cool and already night. The platform had been swept but there were stains splattered near the back entrance where drivers came and went. The station lights shined brightly and people gathered with their things, looking lost, runners trying to corral them and lead them away. Drivers milled about, calling to them from the taxi stand, where they could be ferried to real hotels uptown, places with terraces and views and shampoo. Luzani’s runners helped people into their shuttle which pulled out into the thick stream of traffic.
We looked mostly for students and the shabbily dressed. Often people arrived not knowing the geography of the city or the difference between hotels; sometimes you could convince a wealthier person that it didn’t make sense to take a cab when they could easily walk. They had, after all, been on a train for so long. It would feel good to stretch their legs, to see a little bit of the city, and then lay their heads down somewhere. If they wanted to go out, we could recommend some nice places nearby. There were, of course, no nice places nearby.