Running

by Cara Hoffman

  “Did what?” Jasper asked thickly.

  Milo felt the sweat begin to run down his back.

  “Talked to the police,” Declan said. “Brought them here to Athens.”

  “They’re here because of the bombing at the airport,” Bridey said.

  “They’re here to find me,” Declan said.

  Milo leaned over the sink and threw up.

  “Police are at the station because of the bombing,” Bridey said again, her voice level and unconcerned. “Did you do the bombing?”

  Milo stood, raw and unsteady, avoiding his face in the mirror. Jasper made quiet howling sounds from the floor, laughed to himself.

  “What happened to that wall out there?” Declan asked.

  Milo’s body felt lighter. He’d caused his own death and now he had to wait for it. The air in the room went tight. All of the objects around him were suddenly filled with a desperate beauty and meaning; a panicked love of everything washed over him.

  Jasper made noises that might have been words.

  Bridey sat close to Declan, her shoulder touching his. “Too much acetone,” she said. And his eyes went clear and focused.

  “The wall,” she said. “Acetone peroxide. You can probably still smell it if you try.”

  “What were you practicing for?” he said.

  She shrugged. “Something that’ll take more than acetone and an M-80.”

  He patted her thigh roughly a few times and then stood, looked down at Jasper where he lay unconscious, skeletal.

  “Time to do something about that,” he said, nudging Jasper’s ribs with the tip of his boot.

  “He’ll be all right,” Bridey said.

  “Nah,” he said. “Not a chance.”

  The door clicked shut and Milo waited until he heard Declan’s footsteps descending the stairs. Bridey was trembling but her face looked as calm and expressionless as before. Listening to something inside herself. She and Jasper were made for each other, Milo thought. Nothing was real to them. She wasn’t afraid of Declan. She wasn’t afraid of dying. Of anything.

  “He’s goin’ t’come back and kill us,” Milo said. “He thinks we brought the police here.”

  “Because we did,” she said.

  She had the same look in her eyes as she’d had earlier when Jasper was playing, as she’d had when she wiped the blood from his face.

  Bridey found something transcendent in broken men; read them, not for signs of what they might do to her, but as if they were oracles revealing cracks in the barrier between one world and another. Like they carried information she’d dedicated her life to studying. And it was giving her a power Milo never recognized before. She was radiant with it.

  Bridey gathered her things in a little book bag and sat on the edge of the bed looking down at Jasper where he lay breathing soundly, his shirt spattered with elegant pinpricks of red, his face streaked with blood and the pale clean lines made by her fingers.

  “When he wakes up,” she said. “As soon as he wakes up.”

  Nothing was more lovely than the way Jasper went about eradicating himself, as though he were the heir to some criminal blood, some sick drive to empire, and he’d swallow poison and steal and get on his knees and wear my clothes and take beatings from Declan, bear a broken arm or a slashed face or a knock to the head and still stay right where he was.

  He gave us something we couldn’t have taken from him if we’d tried. Jasper was the kind of rich boy you could respect. The kind who would kill himself in front of you.

  Deep-pink light was beginning to spread itself out along the horizon, making silhouettes of the huddled shapes of buildings. Milo came out to the balcony and put his arms around me, his chest against my back. I turned and held him tight and kissed him soft and deep, the way Jasper kissed us, and felt his warm skin against mine. Drank the kindness in his shining eyes. We knew I would leave them there.

  The air was cool and smelled of car exhaust and I rested my forehead on his chin, then slid down and took his cock in my mouth; looking up to see his hard, scarred beauty; belly hairless and tacky with sweat. His strong hands gentle in my hair, pressed against my head, as he pushed in to fill my throat. Then pulled away. When I stood again to kiss him, he guided me back into the room and down onto our bed, his full weight upon me.

  Jasper lay unconscious on the floor in the dim room, skin white as ruin. I wrapped my legs around Milo and pulled him into me with my heels, pressing myself tight against him, our hipbones flush and bruising, our bodies slick with sweat, sealed. The sleeping stranger we’d wanted for ourselves breathing vapors at our backs, a spark about to ignite and bloom.

  Milo was drunk before the department meeting and had spent half an hour crying. He’d given Navas the keys to his apartment again. There was another fight with her brother about the boxer who’d thumped him, she said, and she’d need to stay for more than a few days this time. Their mother’s place was too small, she said, now that Jorge was being such a fucking faggot. No offense. She said if she could stay for a bit and if Milo could get her recommendation written for Brown, she could kick some motherfuckers to the curb where they belonged and do like he did, only better.

  The idea of her going to graduate school made him sick. He wiped his eyes and tried to calm his breathing.

  “Why am I here?” he asked her, and she handed him the two tallboys of Four Loko she had brought.

  “’Cause it’s better than working on the docks in your hometown like a loser does,” she said, slipping his keys into her pocket. “I’ll make dinner.”

  “Those are the only set.”

  “I’ll make copies,” she said. “And when you go to the meeting, don’t be all, like, ‘I’m an alcoholic who cries a lot so you should prolly fire me.’”

  Milo turned away when she said it.

  She laughed, tried to touch his arm, but he shrank back and they stood in silence.

  When he finally turned to her, he couldn’t speak.

  She put her arms around him while he sobbed and held her hair.

  “Milo,” she said and she had never said his name before. “Milo,” she whispered into his ear. “Fuck those mother­fuckers. Be lucky if they could cry like you.”

  I woke up sick in sweat-soaked sheets and barely made it to the sink in time. Judging by the heat, it was already afternoon. Once the dry heaving was over I rinsed off, ran wet hands over what was left of my hair, opened the balcony door to let in the noise, and stood above the smoggy sprawl and roaring highway, shading my eyes and feeling the sun on my skin.

  In my bag there was a thousand drachmas left from running—not quite six dollars—and half a pack of cigarettes. I lit one while I organized my things. The haircut was a warning. I didn’t need to know what came next.

  I locked the room and went downstairs. When Sterious saw me, he put his hands on his head and then on his heart. “What has happened?”

  A small gold pot boiled on the burner behind him and the room smelled like coffee and cardamom. His friends had not yet shown up for dominoes, so it couldn’t have been too late. I handed him my key.

  “Where you are going?” he asked.

  “Just for a stroll,” I said. “Have to catch the 309 later. Maybe I should run two trains today, huh?”

  He pulled out some money from the drawer and handed it to me, then shuffled out of his seat and went to the closet beneath the stairs, brought out an old cap, waited with his arms folded until I put it on my head. He looked so sad, I had to turn away.

  “Sit here,” he said. “I get us some bread for to have with coffee.”

  “Thank you,” I said. As soon as he had taken off his sweater and headed outside, I opened the closet again to see if there was anything I could use. There were a few backpacks and one small suitcase with luggage tags affixed to it. Nothing good inside. There was a box of tapes labeled in
Greek that Jasper had bought at the flea market. I went behind the desk, which was covered with bits of paper, an issue of Eleftherotypia, and little drawings Sterious had made of cats and mice and hairy-chested men with their legs chained to bundles of dynamite above captions I couldn’t read. The money was locked in a metal box. I looked for the key.

  Inside the drawers it smelled of mold. There were some coins, which I pocketed, and a cloudy-green postcard of an overgrown garden path near fallen Corinthian columns.

  I turned it over and began trembling and had to sit down.

  It was Milo’s handwriting and it read:

  Bride,

  At Alogomandra.

  M.

  I quickly shoved it into my bag just as Sterious was coming through the door.

  He nudged me out of his way, set down a loaf of crusty bread, some butter, a small pot of fig jam, and a bottle of ouzo. Then he poured us two cups of coffee and began flipping over his set of dominoes, skating them along the top of the reception desk with his knobby hands.

  “Sterious,” I asked him quietly. “Did Milo or Jasper leave anything for me?”

  “No.”

  “Where is Alogomandra?”

  “Why you are whispering?” he asked.

  “I’m not whispering.”

  “It’s a beach,” he said. The coffee had a silky grit to it and tasted medicinal. He spilled some ouzo into our demitasse cups, broke off a piece of crusty bread, buttered it, and pushed it into my hand.

  “Where is it?” I asked again.

  Small white crumbs were stuck in the stubble on his face. The whites of his eyes looked yellow and cloudy. He waved his hand. “Five, six, seven hours with a boat. Why you want to know?”

  I reached for the postcard and he dropped his gaze abruptly and I turned to see Declan walking up the stairs.

  “Now, there’s a lovely site,” he said. “Grampa’s getting the paperboy drunk at breakfast.”

  He took the cap off my head and tossed it to the floor, ran a hand over what was left of my hair. Sterious busied himself with room keys and pretended we hadn’t been talking.

  “Let’s go,” Declan said.

  The heat of day was beginning to rise, the neighborhood quiet and vacant except for the sounds of traffic. Sun cut through a veil of particulate grime that had risen like a cloud over Diligianni Street and we walked in the direction of the ruins.

  “What’s the bag for?” Declan asked.

  “Going to do some laundry,” I told him, and knew he didn’t believe it.

  “Would think you’d need to get some bigger clothes soon,” he said.

  “Why’s that?” I lit a cigarette; he took it and threw it into the gutter.

  In the distance we could see the crush of tourists headed up the incline toward the Acropolis. We walked through the center of the city with its cheery veneer. Vendors called from the stalls that lined the cobbled corridors, selling tiny urns on which even tinier scenes of conquest and love played out. Above them, on a shelf, a battalion of four-inch satyrs stood grinning, their cocks hard. Whole tables of Parthenons, Erechtheions, like miniature sacked cities. Toy temples built by slaves, just like the real ones were.

  We walked through the noisy streets in our combat boots until we reached a narrow lane with no cars, a cool corridor of whitewashed buildings that led away from the pedestrian thoroughfare to courtyards with grape trellises, potted fig and olive trees. Bouzouki music played over the faint sound of talk radio. People sat drinking coffee, playing cards. The smell of the neighborhood was overwhelming, the streets rich with the savor of pastry and roasting lamb, of onions and herbs and baking bread.

  I had a deep, sharp pain in my stomach; looked around at the café tables to see if anyone had left their dishes. I wanted a plate of meat, a bowl of soup; I wanted mousaka and lamb and tomatoes and feta and olives and dates. I wanted to do nothing but eat.

  I could smell Declan too; the linen closet and soap and a dirty metallic underlay like coal and sweat. For a moment I thought I could smell the blood and meat beneath his skin.

  We walked through the cobbled passage down to a cool garden patio with sunlit dappled tablecloths and painted blue chairs. Old couples sat together reading and drinking coffee.

  Declan ordered lamb and salad and white beans and horta, spanakopita and bread and cheese. When I asked for a beer he told the waiter to make it a bottle of water.

  “I’ll be going back to Yugoslavia,” he said. “After tonight’s train.”

  “Why?”

  “More border disputes,” he said.

  When the food came he took a hunk of meat and spooned the salad and the large white beans onto my plate grateful for the meal, his apology for the night before. I could taste the fire and the fat in the lamb and wanted more.

  I didn’t want to hear what was coming next: how he was going away to fight for “the people,” because the people doing the fighting were the same no matter what side. Cocked, armed, overbuilt, hysterical, lost because of a story they were slow enough to believe.

  I first understood who Declan was a week after I’d met him. He talked about beheading a man in Biafra, joked about it standing around, waiting for the train. I felt a rage and disgust and panic that ran so deep I thought I might vomit. Then it was gone and I finished my drink. Fearing Declan was like fearing the air. The only sorrow that remained was that he was still, somehow, a friend.

  “Should have given this to you yesterday,” he said, and handed me a newspaper clipping. “From the Guardian,” he said. “If this doesn’t shut you up, I can find better ways.”

  Some grease ran down my chin and I wiped it away with the back of my hand, took another bite of lamb. Then turned the clipping over to see a small picture of Jasper, absurdly clean, eyes bright, hair cut neat; and next to it a small square obituary.

  Jasper Lethe, 20, son of Martin Lethe, died in a boating accident off the coast of Crete on August sixth. The cause of death was concussion caused by blunt force trauma when Lethe was hit by the boom of his boat whilst sailing rough waters. He is survived by his mother Ursa Lethe, sister Trudy, grandparents and numerous cousins.

  “Everyone got what they deserved,” Declan said. “Leave it alone.”

  Paul and his colleagues had ignored Milo’s swollen eyes. They were kind. And now the freedom and motion of the street was a welcome comfort.

  The air was cold, the sky cloudless and dark blue. A sooty bite of tar and fresh dirt and the musty decay of leaves heralded the end of fall. The thrumming melancholic exhaustion that comes from poorly performing a look of attentiveness for hours was subsiding, and with each step away from campus he regained his stride. Part of this was the scale of the city, which was somehow more deeply intimate than anywhere he’d lived. There were always beautiful boys on the street who made him think of Walt Whitman and a story he’d heard about a man sleeping with Whitman when he was young, then later with Ginsberg when he was old. An urban legend passed on from a wise old queen, but one that made him smile, as though through loving this man a Gnostic Eucharist was passed from poet to poet across the generations.

  He couldn’t deny looking for muses on the street.

  Milo walked past the Fine Fare store to see if Steve was there, see if he wanted to get a bottle and stroll with him. No luck. He headed east, stopped and ate a falafel, sitting on a bench outside St. Mark’s Church, watched some junkies fall in slow motion, lovely, the tension between gravity and human force, graceful as though it were choreographed. He walked to the liquor store and bought a fifth to elevate him further, taking the first few sips on the sidewalk just outside the door.

  There was beauty in wandering, in having nowhere to call home. He had not felt this kind of dislocated freedom since Athens.

  Milo thought of heading to the West Village to Boots & Saddle but started down to the Lower East Side instead.
Not just because boys spend too much time looking into their phones, but because he had made himself unpopular there some months ago by saying things are worse than they’ve ever been. “We lost by winning,” he said. The new drag was putting on the most accurate imitation of 1950s breeders: having babies, sharing bank accounts, and wearing rings; how sad it was, after people had to die, had to lay down their fucking lives—this is how we honor them? By clamoring to be let inside? To be sanctioned by the state? To assimilate? And the only reason you are let in at all is because someone realized your money was as good as theirs. Their hatred was a compliment you should have taken. This is cultural annihilation.

  The boy he’d wanted to go home with was not impressed, something Milo only realized after the boy said, “Oh my Lord, how do we shut this silly bitch up?” and demanded the bartender stop serving him. “What the fuck are you even talking about?” the boy had said. “What the fuck is your problem?”

  When people looked at Milo they assumed he’d been there for the plague, that he was a survivor; but he was not in fact one who could feel New York resonating with absences. He’d known it only through Marc. Marc was the one who saw Alphabet City on fire; Marc watched his friends die. It wasn’t until Milo left Athens and went back to Manchester that he knew people who died of AIDS.

  Milo didn’t survive the plague, he dodged it. And what people recognized in him was a different kind of strength and grief. The things that held people down had no more weight for him. He’d no fear of losing, or being poor or ugly or alone. No fear of being fired or mocked or doing wrong. Milo didn’t just know how long he could go without respect; he knew how long he could go without food. If there came a time when the straight white world accepted him, welcomed him, celebrated him, everything about who he was would be wrong. Milo would rather stay on the street.

  When he got home at seven, Navas and the boxer were sitting on the floor of his living room drinking beer and eating sesame noodles and soft-boiled eggs.