Running

by Cara Hoffman

  She’d read out loud to him at night even when he was fourteen or fifteen, right up until he left home. You’d think she would have wanted him to be a professor—that this path was one she’d set him on—but even that was his business, his accomplishment, the fruits of his labor, not hers. They were responsible for themselves, him and Colleen.

  She wrote Milo back from Manchester the summer he was in love with Jasper to say thank you for the letter, told him she’d another factory job, asked what he’d been reading, and said under no circumstances should he send her cash again. The letter started with the words Dear Lord Darlington.

  He put it in the bag they had packed. A small bundle of their things together like when he and Jasper had first left England. Everything else could stay behind, go to Sterious if he wanted it, get thrown out on the street. There was nothing now that could make him stay.

  A low-budget movie shot in an airport was playing on the television at Drinks Time, and everyone was crowding around the bar to get a better look.

  I sat down beside Jasper and opened his box of cigarettes.

  “They used them,” he said.

  The scene on the television was hazy, black smoke, charred furniture, and shattered glass strewn across the floor. And then, in a corner of the screen, a picture of Murat.

  He pushed the bottle of ouzo across the table toward me. Someone turned up the volume; someone else got the remote and changed the channel, flipping through a series of identical images before stopping on a BBC newscast. The bar was packed, not just with drunken runners, but older shabby-looking English people who seemed to have come out of nowhere, their voices poisoning the air around us.

  On television a man and a woman sat before an image of the Acropolis. The woman’s eyes tracking rapidly left to right.

  “Again, authorities have identified the man as Murat Christensen who detonated an explosive device just before boarding, killing himself and seven others, including a ten-year-old child. Sources say had he managed to make it onto the plane he might have killed hundreds.” She put her fingers against her ear, said, “From what we’ve been able to gather for you this morning, Christensen was a Danish national whose mother was Egyptian.”

  “That’s right,” the man’s voice said while the same picture of Murat took over the screen. “Authorities are still trying to piece together exactly what happened. What we know so far is that Christensen was writing about Minoan culture for university but had also written about the Greek purge of communists in the twentieth century. At this point no group has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack, but some are speculating Christensen could have been part of Islamic Jihad, the group that carried out the 1983 Beirut Barracks bombing. There’s also some evidence that Christensen might have been linked to a little-known faction of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.”

  Jasper laughed, spit his drink.

  I crushed out my cigarette in the ashtray. It was time to go.

  “This will all blow over,” he said. “They can’t be serious—Baader-Meinhof?”

  Milo came in and pushed through the crowd to our table. He looked sick, eyes swollen.

  Jasper pushed the bottle toward him, then went up to the bar for pints.

  On the screen above our heads, the same reel showed again. Black smoke. And now pictures of the dead from when they were alive and smiling.

  Leaving is what they’ll expect,” Jasper said, back in their room. “Getting rid of all the things we bought is what they’ll expect. The second we try to get on a boat, they’ll get us.” He passed the bottle to Bridey. Pulled the sheet up to cover his naked chest.

  “We have to look like what people think we are,” Jasper said.

  “Which is what?” Milo asked.

  “Drunks or something that live here because we ran away. Nothing more.”

  “That is what you are,” Bridey said.

  “Oh? And what are you?” Jasper said.

  “Not that,” she said.

  No one moved to answer the door until they heard Murat’s voice.

  Milo let him in, and Bridey walked out to the balcony, shutting the glass doors behind her.

  “Any news?” Murat asked, the singsong lilt entirely gone from his voice.

  “Nothing,” Jasper said.

  He looked past them, taking in the room. “Quite a place you’ve got.”

  “We do what we can,” Jasper said.

  “You get it all sorted yet?” Milo asked.

  “Trying,” Murat said. “My mother, thank God, is fine. She—both my parents—saw on the news . . . They thought I was dead—worse. My father’s lawyer is suing the network—they’ll have to retract their story. There’s always a rush to judgment, you know”—he smirked—“for people like us.”

  Milo nodded. Murat’s skin was just a shade lighter than his own, but only one of them had a father with a lawyer.

  “Have the police interviewed you?” Jasper asked.

  “Yeah, and nearly everyone on the second floor. Many people lost their—had their passports stolen . . . the people in my room and the three rooms next.”

  Murat took a newly opened bottle of ouzo from Milo and drank. He glanced at the balcony doors, at Bridey’s back, then around at more of the things they’d collected. Took in Jasper’s school blazer hanging over the back of a chair, the pair of monogrammed leather slippers he had picked up at the flea market.

  “It’s amazing what you can find digging through the trash,” Jasper said.

  Murat’s eyes lit on the rug for a second too long. “Shocking what people will throw away,” he said.

  The house, the hillsides, and the forest continued to grow more vivid month by month. The dewy grass beneath my feet was so lush, I could feel it driving up through the core of my body with each step, jabbing long and ticklish into my throat. The rain slapping against the house poured down the gutters and soaked my clothing, plastered my hair to my neck and face. I ran, sweat wicked away in the downpour, leaving me hot beneath a breathless cold that made gooseflesh of my skin. The smell of pine and ozone and rich loamy soil was thick all around, rain clattering on the roof, drumming hollow against the wooden porch, pebbling the pond.

  The dark sky popped, streaked bright and luminous with an electric vein, a thin white tendril unfurling across the sky. I ran toward the sound of thunder, feet sinking into the muddy pine bed, and I lay in the fullness of the forest gasping, wanting it to fall down around me or burst into flame and swallow me.

  When Dare came home I was sitting in my wet clothes on the porch.

  “Why’d you kill them?” I asked him again.

  He said, “That was on you, Bone. You did it.”

  “I didn’t. I’d never have done anything like that in my life.”

  “Yeah?” He was unimpressed. “What was the ammonium nitrate for?”

  “Not for frogs.”

  “For what, then?”

  “What’s the gold for? What’s the guns for? What’s the grow lights for? What’s the motherfucking venison jerky for? What’s the saved-up seeds and topographical maps and animal pelts for?”

  “For living,” he said. “It’s for living.”

  He rummaged through his pile of things looking for a pen, took the cap off with his teeth and wrote something in his notebook. He was shirtless beneath his school blazer. “We’ve done it,” he said, eyes so alert he might have been sober. “There is strictly no way Declan will stay in Athens now with the Jacks everywhere asking questions.”

  “We’re leaving,” I said.

  “How can you not be happy?”

  “Because we killed seven people,” Milo said.

  “We didn’t kill anyone,” Jasper said. “We sold an item. Don’t tell me you’re one of these people who believes—”

  “In cause and effect?” Milo said.

  “Darling.
Are you killing someone if you sell a diamond? Or buy a cheap pair of shoes? Or if you drive in a bloody car? Are you lit’rally killing someone? Please. We didn’t make this world. We’re making do with its wreckage. If we didn’t sell those things, someone else would.” He rummaged through his bag for an envelope, folded the paper, stuck it inside, then licked and sealed it. “There have always been squatters in the citadels,” he said.

  Milo lay on the bed with his face in the pillow and Jasper taunted him. “Taking to your bed, Raskolnikov?” Then Milo, baited, got up and demanded to know how the people in the airport were in any way like the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment. I wasn’t going to listen to the rest.

  * * *

  Down on the second floor two junkies and a well-dressed man from Nigeria were listening to a soccer game on a little radio plugged into an extension cord that ran out of a broom closet. They were drinking half pints of milk and eating a jar of jam with a charred spoon they passed back and forth. I walked past and knocked on Murat’s door.

  He looked surprised to see me.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” I said. “I think you should go somewhere.”

  “Where?” His voice was hoarse and he turned away, taking a breath before looking at me again.

  “Somewhere in the Cyclades. You won’t need your passport. Let’s go.”

  He shook his head. “I’m getting the new one reissued. And I’ve at least another week at Delphi. Give me an address and I’ll write you.”

  “No, don’t do that. Come with me. We can go now, today.”

  “Where?” he asked again. He shrugged with his hands out and I could see the scabs on his palms from where they hit the floor of the cave. “Why are you suddenly talking to me, Bridey? You haven’t said a word to me in weeks. Where are you even going?”

  “I don’t know. Away. Come with me; it will be fun.”

  He gave a short laugh, pushed his glasses up on his face. “Are you worried about me Bridey? No one is out looking for me, they’re looking for the people who stole my passport. It’s being taken care of. Consulate says I’ll have the new one in two days.”

  His faith in people doing what they said they’d do was absurd.

  “You should leave,” I told him. “Soon.”

  When he laughed again, I wanted to slap him.

  “I’ve some work to finish and I’m due back at school,” he said. He reached for my hand, gave it a little squeeze to make his point.

  I said nothing.

  “Do you need my help?” he whispered, and stepped into the room, pulling me with him, shutting the door. How was it possible for the world to exist before his eyes and for him to miss it?

  I said as plainly as possible, “I don’t need your help. I think there are people here who will tell the police you sold your passport—not that it was stolen but that you sold it along with others that you stole. And you’ll either be arrested or thoughtless people will hurt you.”

  He scratched the back of his neck. “Bridey, I’m not going to leave Athens because of this. But I will help you leave if you need to.”

  There was no getting through to him. He saw how we lived, who I was. He wrote about politics, he studied the history of civilization, and still he could stand there in front of me and act like nothing would touch him. Nothing would ever go wrong.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m not coming, Bride. Here’s four thousand drachmas. That’s enough to get away from those guys. You don’t need to live like this.”

  I took his money, though my cut from selling his passport was zipped inside my bag. I thought one last time about giving it to him, but knew when they found it on him he’d have even less of a chance.

  Jasper decided they should walk to Luzani that night, up by the Acropolis where professional runners worked. A farewell to the city. He talked the entire way about how the next job he got would be playing in a piano bar and he needed to practice, so they’d have to go to Luzani or find somewhere else with a piano.

  Milo and Bridey had heard about Jasper’s piano playing the way they’d heard about the rest of his accomplishments. From him.

  No one at Luzani had been telling lies on the train. The hotel lobby was full of tourists checking in; the marble floors were polished reflective and the bar was elegant; fairy lights and shining bottles of liquor.

  Jasper drifted through the echoing space ahead of them, the sharp angles of his shoulders visible through his threadbare shirt. He wore the same stained cutoff trousers, remnants of the pants he’d worn the day Milo had met him, and sandals he’d bought on the Plaka. The back of his hair was a rat’s nest and he looked like a shipwrecked boy from a children’s story. People were drinking from cocktail glasses, sitting at tile-topped tables. They weren’t listening to bouzouki, or Greek folk music, but radio songs in English Milo couldn’t recognize.

  Jasper eased between tables to the front of the room and pulled out the piano bench, scraping it dramatically across the floor. He sat and began playing. The bartender was ignoring it—and the front desk was far enough away, no one had yet to care. Milo watched as those nearby looked for someone who would make him stop.

  Finally, a tall well-dressed kid with a goatee, one of the hotel’s runners, approached Bridey. “Time to get your boy home, yeah?”

  “How d’you suggest we do that?” she said.

  The bartender snapped off the stereo. And now there was only the sound of Jasper pounding the keys, his head down, his thin arms moving languidly. It was no sound Milo recognized, discordant and grating and strange. Jasper began to mutter a song, sweat rolling off his forehead. When people shouted for him to stop, he cleared his throat and sat up straight. Then began playing a classical piece so precise, it made Milo feel sick. He had never seen before just how abject Jasper was. Saliva pooled in the bottom of his mouth.

  Disgust thickened in his chest as he watched a stillness overtake the room. Tourists giving one another unbelieving looks. Was this a joke? Was he a professional? An actor? Or was this a real moment they could savor—the day a homeless boy came in off the street to their hotel and played that music with a skill only money could have bought. You could see it dawning on them that they were having an experience. Some of the more sentimental in the crowd were watching in teary-eyed wonder, getting ready to applaud or opening their wallets. Milo felt he might throw up, might throw Jasper to the floor. Then, as abruptly as he’d started, Jasper stopped, stood on the bench, pulled out his cock, and began pissing on the floor.

  Bridey’s laugh broke the silence, then a beefy man close to the piano shoved Jasper hard and he landed on his side.

  Jasper got to his feet, his shorts falling below his hips, stumbled forward, and swung, punching the man solid in the face. Those who hadn’t left when he started pissing gathered for a good view.

  The man shoved Jasper again and this time he flew staggering into the piano, knocking his head with a pop, his face instantly streaming with blood.

  Bridey stepped between them, helped Jasper up, zipped his pants, tried to wipe the blood off with her hands. Milo got an arm around him and hurried him out, followed by the receptionist and another man in a black silk shirt. Jasper was just drunk, he told them; they were taking him home. They’d stay out. Of course they would.

  Down on the street in the cool air Jasper shook himself free, stumbling on ahead. He insisted on buying a fifth of ouzo at a kiosk, and Bridey dumped it on the street. He kept ahead, cursing them as they walked past empty shops, windows bright and full of mannequins wearing lovely clothes. They passed cafés where people sat drinking in low candlelight, headed on to Omonoia Square and narrower, darker streets. Two men fought loudly in a vestibule by an all-night kebab stand on Andromachis Street. Amid a maze of empty storefronts, boarded-up buildings and burned-out streetlamps, they startled a tall balding man in red polyester pants who was pressing a frail-limbed boy
up against the back of a car that had four flat tires. When they caught up to Jasper, close to the hotel, he was still talking.

  “You didn’t believe I could play,” he accused them. “I saw your faces. You hated that I could play!” He fumbled to light a cigarette, the flame illuminating a deep cut on his head. He inhaled as though it were a breath of ocean air. “You didn’t believe any of it. You didn’t believe it even happened.” Blood trickled from the wound and down his cheek.

  “Course we did, handsome,” Milo said. “Keep your voice down.”

  “How is he even standing?” Bridey asked.

  A small lamp casting its glow on the reception desk was the only light on when they reached the lobby, and they didn’t see Dimitri until he was up and raging for them to get out; his breathing labored as he came from behind the desk trying to block their way with his squat body. They pushed past him up the stairs, hauling Jasper between them.

  In the dim quiet of the ruined hallway they propped Jasper against the doorframe. Their door was open just a crack.

  Milo reached in, flicked on the light.

  Sitting at the edge of their bed was Declan, waiting. His feet on the bag Milo had packed that morning.

  “Hi,” Bridey said, as cheerful as if he were a friend. Declan said nothing about Jasper, who was now on his hands and knees in the entryway, crawling toward the rug.

  “I know who did it,” Declan said.

  Bridey sat down beside him on the bed and began unlacing her boots.