Running

by Cara Hoffman

  “Navas,” he said, nodding at her politely. “Boyfriend of Navas.” The boy stood up, said some unintelligible word, and shook Milo’s hand. He was strong, better put together than Jorge. They shouldn’t have matched those two. Milo could see why she liked him. He was clearly smart.

  They’d saved him a plate, but there were only two forks, so he sat cross-legged on the floor, drank, waited until Navas was done eating, and used hers.

  The apartment seemed spare with other people in it.

  There was a mattress on the floor and books stacked in piles, and a closet for his five shirts. The living room had nothing in it, and the kitchen was a little galley with pots and pans that had been left there and a refrigerator full of green things he bought at sidewalk stalls in Chinatown.

  “Did they fire you?” she asked after her boxer had left.

  He shook his head. “What’s this about needing a recommendation?”

  “I’ve got enough work for a collection.”

  “Then send it out; don’t waste your time in school.”

  “Who are you, telling me not to go to school? Look at you.”

  Milo stretched his arms out to his sides, his head back. “Look at me,” he said.

  “I was thinking about it on the way home. Soon’s you get into one of those places, yeah? You become their little darling, don’t you? Then their translator: you get to speak for every girl with brown skin. But you’ll feel their envy all the time. That gnawing feeling they have, knowing they couldn’t get where they got without all their money, all their centuries of money, but you could, you did.”

  “I am not taking your advice,” she said. “You are sleeping in the park, you are trying to lose your job.”

  “That’s exactly why you should take my advice.”

  “And you are not writing,” she said, her accent deepening. “No. I want the fuck out of here. You’re the one who’s jealous. You know I’m good, maybe better than you.”

  “No maybe about it,” he said. “Far better than I was at your age.”

  “Then what the fuck?” She actually stamped her foot. “I don’t come to your office asking about pseudo-Pindaric odes because my mommy and the dudes hanging outside my building like Coleridge better than Wordsworth. Where else I’m going to study it?”

  “Here,” he said. “We can do it right here.”

  That stopped her dead. Softened her eyes. “You want me to be like Colleen.”

  The way she invoked his mother’s name out of nowhere turned something fast and terrifying inside of him. He’d no memory of telling her anything about Colleen. He couldn’t breathe.

  “I’ll get away on scholarship, like her. I’ll be the brightest star, then end up back in fucking Soundview? There’s not even any factory work where I come from.”

  He walked into the bedroom to get away from the things she was saying—sat and took his shoes off—but she followed him, stood in the doorway.

  “Why would you have to go back to the projects?” he said finally. “I mean, you could study here. Stay downtown, with me.”

  “Oh, I see you want to be like Colleen, then,” she said, his mother’s name in her mouth again. “And I’m supposed to stay inside and not get hurt. How well did that work for you?”

  What could he have told her about himself? Why did she know these things?

  “None of it worked for me,” he said.

  “Liar,” she said. “You got out and all of it worked. You left and went away and now you have money in the bank. You have books on the shelf. People want to talk with you about words and ideas. You don’t want that for me?”

  “I do. It’s all I want for you.”

  “You gonna write the recommendation or not?”

  “Com’ed, Navas, you’re taking the piss. You can’t be wanting two more years of classes with people like ‘panda-keychain’ and ‘twitter-abortion.’”

  “They won’t be there.”

  “They will. They certainly will. And they’ll be there after you graduate too. At every job, at every reading and every interview.”

  “I am going to fucking bury them once I get out of here. Serious, Professor. I’m serious, now, Milo. Why are you like this?”

  He couldn’t talk about it. Couldn’t stand to think of her believing that school would save her, and couldn’t stand to deprive her of something she wanted.

  “Is there more Four Loko?” he asked.

  She laughed unexpectedly. Her whole angry countenance gone in seconds, her pretty mouth open wide, her eyes shining. She looked like a baby; she could have been his baby.

  “Not joking,” he said.

  “I got one more case I can get us.”

  “Fine, then. I shall be happy to write a letter for you. I imagine it’ll feel good to turn them down once you get in, and then we can see about where to send your manuscript.”

  “Thank you.”

  “However it works out,” he told her, “no matter what you decide, you’re welcome to stay for as long as you want, as long as you need. Till the end of semester at the least.”

  She nodded, pressed her lips together.

  “We’re going to need some furniture,” she said.

  Once Declan was out of sight, I crumpled the obituary, threw it into the street, ground it into nothing with the heel of my boot, and kept walking.

  Past the cathedral near Mitropoleos, I saw a barber’s red and blue sign and ducked down the short flight of stone steps into a basement shop where it was cool and smelled medicinal and thick with cologne.

  I paid half the money Sterious had given me to a man who ran electric clippers over my head, removing the uneven patches that remained and leaving me with a quarter inch of hair. He dusted my neck with a little soft brush and I tried to ask where Alogomandra was, but nothing I said sounded like words to him.

  I went into a tourist shop to pocket a box of cigarettes and look at a map of the islands. If it was a beach like Sterious said, it wasn’t listed. I stood for a time outside the shop watching people walk by in their clean clothes, cameras hanging around their necks. I walked to a travel bureau on Syntagma and asked a woman my age where Alogomandra beach was.

  Her face brightened. “Ah! It’s, em . . . not a beach . . . It’s underwater. A cave,” she said.

  I laughed sharply and it startled her. It seemed likely it was a place Milo was just dreaming about. A setting, not a destination.

  I held out the map and she pointed to a small crescent-shaped island at the edge. “Here,” she said. “It is right . . . it’s here. I can sell you ferry ticket.”

  Sterious’s cash was too thin to buy one. I thanked her and ran out onto the flat marble steps of the plaza, squinting beneath the sun and the reflective glare from the bank of high white modern hotels that spanned King George Street. I walked quickly by the central fountain, past people in suits holding briefcases, wearing aviator glasses.

  Tourists in baseball hats, with packs and maps, meandered toward the national gardens or Parliament or to watch the stiff-legged guards in white tights and skirts, like clowns with bayonets, red pom-poms on their shoes. People poured out of the subway entrances into the light and heat and headed across the concrete expanse toward the temples, which were bleached like bones beneath the sun.

  Milo had found the house-sit immediately after the passport sale to Boulous. He’d dreamt of this from the first days they’d arrived in Athens—getting out of the city, finding a remote place by the sea, no more running.

  A woman named Zenaida said it was his if he could get there. He doubted she’d let him stay in the house once she saw him, but it didn’t matter at that point. If she turned him away he would sleep on the beach.

  Murat was picked up by the police the afternoon Bridey left. Jasper had stopped drinking, which was not the relief Milo thought it would be.

 
The news did have to make a correction, like Murat had said they would. But it was to explain that the terrorist Murat Christensen was alive, had “set up residence” in a squalid hotel; that he had aided an extremist group based in Germany and Yemen so they could carry out a bombing he helped plan. An anonymous English tourist had ID’d him.

  The fact that no one would use his own passport to commit a crime was irrelevant. It made for good narrative: a student and researcher of Mycenaean culture who was a fool or a radical or a communist or a fundamentalist, didn’t matter which. He’d been brainwashed or was acting on orders from his religious leader. None of the theories made sense. When Declan left for more mercenary work and no police came for them, it made Milo wonder if Murat actually was involved in a plot they didn’t know about, and they’d stumbled into it somehow.

  In paranoid flashes he started seeing Murat as someone like Declan only smarter, quieter, perfectly disguised. That was how well the television news worked.

  With every report on Murat, they showed footage of the neighborhood, the whole fucking wreck of it, and this went a long way toward convicting him. Murat Christensen had fallen far from the sweet boy he had been as an undergraduate. Old yearbook pictures appeared next to pictures of him unshaven, angry, and indignant on the day of his arrest. Diligianni Street was the icing on the cake: the stark empty sidewalks; the prostitutes in doorways, the traffic and garbage and junkies. And Olympos: paint peeling, windows broken. Clothes hung out to dry over balcony railings. Why would a classics scholar from Denmark with middle-class parents be living in a falling-down hovel in that part of town?

  “Why would a classics scholar be living in this part of town?” Jasper asked. He wasn’t wearing his shirt and you could see the pattern of bruises on his chest and stomach from the fall at Luzani, or from something Declan had done. It made Milo sick.

  “Because we got him off the fucking train and brought him here, just like we did to anybody else who would follow us,” Milo said. “You bloody well know why he’s here.”

  “You really want to be important don’t you?” Jasper said, cocked his head to the side, smirked. “Bridey brought him here actually, there was no ‘we’ about it. And she’s gone now, too, isn’t she? And so is Declan, so maybe they all planned it together. Bridey Sullivan? Declan Joyce? She just happens to be able to make bombs? Think, Milo, think. Maybe she was involved in this from the start.”

  “The start of what? You know exactly what happened, anonymous English tourist. You fucking stole his passport and you sold it.”

  “You want this to be our fault too.”

  “All of it,” Milo said, “is our fault. All of it.”

  “You’re either a narcissist or a Catholic,” Jasper said.

  Milo shoved him hard against the wall.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Jasper said, his lips just inches from Milo’s. “I don’t know how I forgot it: you are Cath-o-lic.” He smirked. “Like Declan.”

  When he punched the wall beside his head, Jasper didn’t flinch.

  “Always so violent,” Jasper said under his breath. “You and Bridey both. Look at you: you’re like Declan. You going to break my arm now?” he said. “Shove me down? You gonna cut me? Hit me? Blow up a building? That’s how you all are. I don’t understand it for a second. I don’t. I would never do anything violent.”

  Milo laughed and watched a defiant savage contempt flare in Jasper’s face.

  “Have you seen me do one violent thing in all the time we’ve known each other?” Jasper asked. “In the years we’ve been together? One violent thing, Milo? You haven’t. It’s in you, not me.”

  Milo grabbed his face, and he didn’t blink or look away. Jasper sober was a terrifying person. The spirit he’d doused himself in daily had been a cure, not an affliction.

  “You’ve no sense of your own purpose,” Jasper said. “Not like Bridey. She came here and she left on her own. And we never knew what she was about, did we? Not ever.”

  “She left because you’re not happy with just getting yourself killed,” Milo said. “You want to take everybody down.”

  “Oh, please, you were already down, all of you. You were born down. If you’re so concerned, why don’t you go to the police and tell them your version of the story? But no, Raskolnikov, you’ll stay right here, wondering what to do until they come for you. You won’t even spend the money . . . Oh, wait, that’s right, you did spend the money. What happened to it, anyway? Did you give it to the poor?”

  Milo slammed him into the wall again, and this time Jasper’s eyes brightened and his face flushed; his smell was suddenly everywhere, a marigold bittersweetness and dirt. He buckled forward, his head pressed against Milo’s chest, breathing hard, clutching at him to remain standing.

  The boat was smaller than I’d hoped for the purpose of getting aboard unseen. I hurried on with a large group of tourists, walked directly to the cars parked in the hull, and slipped beneath a truck, crouched behind one of the wheels. Then waited. An hour after we left port I made my way up the deck stairs, avoiding the dim carpeted interior of the ship.

  I could see in through the windows, families and couples, people traveling in small groups, sitting inside the hold, reading or drinking or playing cards and dominoes. On deck, people gathered at metal tables in the late-afternoon sun or stood at the rail to be beaten by the wind. When we reached the open water they put on sweaters and sweatshirts and light jackets and scarves. I stood against the rail gazing out at the blue water rippling with silver light. Cool salty air rushing into my lungs before I could breathe it. When it got colder still I pressed myself against the metal box that held life jackets to block the wind, tried to absorb the heat of the deck and let the sun warm me.

  A light breeze trembled against my body, raising a flush of goose bumps that stiffened the hairs on my arms and legs.

  After an hour or so I went to the small bar inside the ship and asked for water and a cup of ice. I was hungry again and swallowing something, even ice, made me feel better. I needed to save the little money I had in case Alogomandra was just some place Milo’d read about and decided to write down.

  Tourists were eating things they brought in their backpacks or the snacks from the bar, spanakopitas and cheese pies and fried potatoes. Suddenly I was ill, ran to a bathroom just off the top deck, and crouched on my knees vomiting and heaving for what seemed like an hour until I was empty, just a sick animal leaning against a metal door.

  Later, outside and clearheaded, I went to the rails and stood shivering to watch the orange sun spread its color across the sea and slip beyond the crest of the horizon until there was nothing in the world but black water and bright stars.

  The boat docked at a sleepy port strung with lanterns. It was the end of August and those who disembarked looked more like locals and visitors from nearby islands. The few foreigners walking down the gangway were blond and tall. Small cars and a truck with vegetables painted on the side drove out of the boat’s belly and onto the narrow paved road that ran along the coast. The port was full of tall-masted boats bobbing and clanging in their slips.

  Across the main road, cobbled streets led up into whitewashed terraced houses built into the stone of the high rocky cliffside. Port cafés, a grocery, and a tourist shop were all closed; a disappointment, as part of my plan had been to eat from abandoned terrace plates.

  A light wind brought the faint nostalgic scent of something burning. I slung my pack over my shoulder and walked along the coastal road beneath a gleaming moon and stars; followed the shore and could see the empty black of the sea, the surf a thin white line cresting and rolling in.

  After some time the road sloped down again and I crossed over a bridge, looking for a sheltered place to sleep along the beach. Suddenly from nowhere I was wishing I had some venison jerky and thinking about Dare. And that I should call him and tell him about the boat or the stars or the ruins, beca
use he’d never been out of Winthrop. I started thinking how there was always dinner when he was home. Always something. And enough food in the house when he was gone. How I always knew I could kill something myself if I needed to. I wondered if there were deer on this island. There would be birds and other small game. We could live here for free, I thought, feeling lighter in my step every second; we could fish. We could eat things we caught.

  I followed a footpath flanked by cedar trees, stumbled down toward the sea. At the bottom lay a sandy cove where I pulled off my boots and clothes, got a bar of soap from my bag, and went to the water’s edge to bathe. It had been a few months since I’d done more than wash at the sink in my room or in a public bathroom. I waded into the sea and scrubbed my whole body, my scalp, tossed the bar of soap up onto the pile of clothes, then ducked beneath the cool water and swam until salt burned my lips and I felt clean and cold and alive.

  Back where the trail met the sand there was a secluded depression beside some tall cedars. I dug a little camp, collected some brush and flotsam and set it on fire, sat naked on my shirt, smoking. My skin warmed, dried from the fire, and I dressed in the only other clothes I owned. Then lay near the flames, in the clear silence and slept.

  There have always been squatters in the citadels, Jasper said.

  And there have always been soldiers to shoot the face off the Sphinx, who saw the world as a target, one more thing to refine their aim.

  He could say this to Navas to answer her questions, to argue about Brown. To go on about it. But he didn’t. There are stories and there is fleeting beauty and that is all.

  When Navas moved in, he stopped searching Bridey’s name. He bought a couch which folded into a bed, bought chairs and a small table. Navas brought over forks and soap, and retrieved the last coveted case of Four Loko from its mysterious location.

  She had so much hair he found it everywhere: the bath, the pillow, a strand between pages. She slept in a black tank top, wrote in a blue spiral-bound notebook, like he had, and studied with a hunger he recognized. Books marked, dog-eared, beaten, scraps of paper with four or five sentences on them lying by the couch, or words written on the side of her hand in blue ink, stopping herself mid-conversation, eyes going glassy and bright, pulling out a pen or her phone to make a note.