The Gimmicks

by Chris McCormick

  Avo said, “Hagopian just wants to make sure I left the group, that’s all. He just wants to make sure I have no plans to ruin what he’s building. I’m just out, that’s all. I’m just returning back to the life I had.”

  The stones glowed, and the old farm equipment—the scythe, the shovel—remained piled at a slant like kindling in one of the corners. Many guests had been tied down to that bed. All of them smaller than this. “Explaining is the opposite of exploring,” Martik said. “Explaining doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  It was easy to assume that a man who tortured was a man without rules. Lawless. But for Martik, the opposite was true. Nobody adored a rule the way Martik adored a rule. The guests sent to him had broken the biggest rule of them all—never erase a death—and they had done so a million times over. Any pain he delivered to them seemed fractional compared to the punishment they deserved. In this way, Martik’s job became almost clerical in nature, and because dullness in the face of great pain was a balm against insanity, Martik adored rules.

  “I made a friend in America,” Avo said. “He’d never heard of the genocide, he knew nothing about Armenians. It was through our friendship that he learned to care. This isn’t the way. My friend learned to care.”

  “Oh, don’t be sentimental,” Martik said, using the aerator again to jostle the crackling logs. “You especially should know caring isn’t enough. That professor in Los Angeles? Did you know he received forty thousand dollars from an unknown contributor last year, just after speaking at an assembly of the Association of Turkish Americans? Did you also know that he has gone on to teach three hundred and twenty-eight students since the day you spared his life? These are facts.”

  The others—Martik got the truth out of them. Apologies and promises. They would return to Turkey, they said, and convince the government to acknowledge their crimes. Reparations. Land. Anything, anything at all. But Martik had to explain: there was no need for all that. The pain itself was the result he’d been after. Didn’t they understand?

  In the old days, there was one method called tabutluk—coffin. A narrow cell the size of a woman’s body. Dark as the gaps between stars. Nothing but you and the room inside your skin.

  The guest was explaining himself, but Martik ignored him. The bed was too small. After a blow to the guest’s head, it had taken both Martik and Zatik to bind him to the mattress at the chest and the thighs. Zatik had placed a gun in Martik’s jacket, just in case the binding didn’t hold, though of course it would.

  Still, this guest was different. Hagop had explained everything. The betrayal. The ways in which he’d put the whole project of justice at risk. The example Martik was to set.

  Too big for tabutluk. Big bare feet on the table off the edge of the bed. Martik went and found the rattan cane hiding among the old farm equipment in the corner. Ninety centimeters long, two centimeters in diameter. He rolled it between his hands as if to start a fire. Listening to his guest go on and on. Explaining.

  Other guests had begged not for death but for shoes. They had tried but been unable to explain the effects of having exposed soles for prolonged periods of time, even if Martik never raised the cane. They couldn’t explain the visceral craving for shoes. All five senses—they wanted to eat shoes and smell shoes and touch them and see them and hold them to their ears like shells and listen.

  With the others, Martik wanted to use as many of the old ways as possible. A combination of every evil his family had survived and remembered, he tried to explain.

  In Istanbul during the genocide, they’d tortured Armenians in a building that now belonged to the campus of Istanbul University.

  His guest, Martik realized, had gone quiet eight hours into his stay. Just lying there. An Armenian, like him. Quiet and exhausted of explanation. Martik tossed the cane aside and went to the oven instead.

  Different, this one. Not a denier. Not a liar. Just a coward or a fool. A runner. A survivor. Hagopian would disagree. Make an example, he’d said. The group depends on loyalty.

  Martik picked up the spiked aerator from the fire, its four prongs orange and searing. He carried the long hot edge of the side prong up to his guest’s face, hovering it over the line of his one eyebrow. He told his guest not to move or else he’d lose more than that. He said, “Deny the genocide.”

  His guest, eyes open, didn’t respond.

  “Deny the genocide,” Martik said. “Pretend you’re a Turk. I can’t do my job until you do.”

  His guest said something else instead, and he said it so softly, Martik had to bend forward so far to hear him, he could feel the heat of the spikes between their faces. What his guest was whispering was not a plea or a prayer, and it was not an explanation.

  “I killed a man once,” said his guest.

  Martik waited for more.

  “An Armenian. A kind of father to the woman I love. I killed him.”

  Martik, feeling the heat of the spikes in his eyes, asked how.

  “I knocked him over into the water. He fell. Cracked his skull against a rock.”

  “You meant to kill him?”

  “Don’t be sentimental. You know intention isn’t enough.”

  Martik, breathing in the white-hot iron.

  One method for the Ottomans was to trap boys and girls in churches and then burn the churches. Some churches were made of stone, so the children inside were baked alive. Imagine the suffering, and then imagine forgetting the suffering.

  Martik lifted the searing aerator.

  “My parents were burned alive,” said his guest. A full minute between sentences. His guest seemed half-conscious. “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No,” Martik said, “but leaving here can’t cost you nothing.” He lowered the fiery edge of the blade and pressed it squarely along the eyebrow. Afterward, a wound like a marbled loaf of bread began to rise.

  The guest was too big for the bed but shaking just the way a small man would. “You died here,” Martik said, cutting the galvanized cable, sure his guest would run to the sink before trying to attack him. “Do you understand me? You died here, all right? Don’t forget it.”

  Freed from his ties, his guest fell from the bed like a book to the floor. His agony was loud. At the sink near the toilet, he cried under the running water.

  When the quiet came, Martik kept his gun in his hand and left money on the table. He told his guest to go to the docks and leave Greece. Find a boat heading elsewhere, he said, and board it. “You’re dead.”

  Waiting for the strength to stand and leave, his guest looked like another stone glowing in the wall.

  His pain was thick and thickening but could not be touched, and his eyes seemed sewed shut because of the swelling, and for a long while, Avo lay in the fallow where the grapevines once blossomed, believing himself to be blind. Finally, a grated light flickered between his eyelashes, and in the spasms of semi-blindness, he rose and then staggered through the broken grass toward the burnished smells of the sea.

  He’d been suffering for three hours by the time he got to the docks near Artemida, and by then the place seemed grayscale and workmanlike, filled with the sounds of cargo pulleys and screeching gulls and the stricken matchbooks of ferrymen on the wharf. Even the toothless doyens on the docks turned with a start at the sight of his arrival, face-singed and huge and jittering from pain. He looked to be considering wading headfirst into the sea to calm the burning over his eyes, but a pair of old fishermen met him at the shore to warn him against infection. Their questions went unanswered. For the cash in his pocket, Avo was shown to a cabin in the Viking Viscount, a cargo and passenger ferry serving several stops along the Grecian isles. The cabin smelled of fish and oil and contained two miniature beds, one of which he lay on. One of the old fishermen bandaged the burn across Avo’s face using the skinned scales of tilapia. Because they were among only a handful of passengers onboard the Viking Viscount during the off-season, the cabin—including the doorless toilet—remained Avo’s and the old fisherman�
�s alone to use. Once a week, the old fisherman replaced the scales with a fresh sleeve of tilapia, speaking Greek except for the nonverbal hushing of his pain.

  Avo spent six weeks in the cabin, recovering, eating what the old fisherman brought down for him, until he peeled away the last of the scales from his eyes. Glad for the silence but greedy for more, Avo spent every minute he could outside the cabin, away from those beds. He stood on the deck of the Viking, leaning against the rails and feeling the wet gray wind run through him like clouds through a peak. A memory of fish guts in Angel Hair’s sea stories came to him, the silvery opposite of pain.

  From Artemida to Piraeus to Milos to Crete to Kasos to Karpathos, the ferry moved as slowly as the islands it traveled, and Avo absorbed its pace. He stood for long stretches of time without so much as shifting his weight or shivering. He felt his pulse lower in tempo. He thought in long uninterrupted strings, imagining the open water or the overhanging coastlines from the points of view of ancient mariners, or else he imagined the lives in the ascending rows of seaside homes with their roofs the color of squashes. Five months at sea and counting. A new year—several drunk cargomen shattered their bottles of wine to celebrate—had begun.

  When the ferry came to its stop in Sitia, while most of the ferrymen and all of the other passengers took to dry land for a meal or a tour, Avo chose to stay on the deck of the Viking, wind-chilled and wet but for the hairless, senseless ridge over his eyes.

  Freezing cold. And when he remembered Martik’s words—You’re dead—he felt he really was. No one dared to ask about his role on the boat. The old fisherman had returned to shore long ago. Ghostlike, Avo thought, or as close as he’d been since his life in America, and the proximity lent him a kind of entryway to little memories he’d forgotten he remembered: the apricot pits he would suck in the pouch of his cheeks as a boy; the rooster tattooed on one of Angel Hair’s feet, the pig tattooed on the other; the smell of lemons underneath Mina’s fingernails when he kissed the ball of her palm. And when his mind turned to his parents, he remembered them more clearly than he ever had, too—quirks of personality, recurring jokes between them, habits of speech and behavior so vivid he found himself repeating them now: a run of the tongue along the front of his teeth like his father used to do mid-joke, or his mother’s tiny shuffling dance with her shoulders as she cooked.

  But what surprised him more than the images unearthing themselves in his mind was the sense that his parents were there beside him now, staring out at the port and the lapping waves and the city with its rows of squash-colored homes, admiring the ferrymen shepherding cranes and crates, watching the boat take leave again, letting the wind and spray stretch through them like clouds. There they were, his parents, not memories but objects, present in a way he might’ve found sentimental just a short while ago, just a year ago, and it seemed clear to him now that memory was powered by the same fuel that powered imagination, and that most people had only enough fuel for one of those engines. He wanted to be a man who split his fuel evenly, wanted to be a man who remembered and imagined in equal force. Once, he remembered, his imagination had powered a whole variety of lives, and as the Viking Viscount reached its final port on the island of Karpathos, Avo dreamed of returning to that time, returning to Mina.

  In Karpathos, he was invited onto a small trading vessel called The Wise Man, which was headed to the southern Turkish city of Mersin. A tradesman onboard with a whittled crucifix hanging from his throat had overheard Avo offering his labor in exchange for free passage, and the tradesman asked in English if he was a Christian. “There’s a whole lot of pilgrims onboard, heading to the site at Tarsus,” the man said. “I usually sail alone with the crew, but I’ve always got room for a pilgrim—even a pilgrim as big as our boat. Help me unload it on the other side, and you’ve got yourself a ride.”

  Without lying directly about his lack of faith, Avo answered that he was from Armenia, which had accepted Christianity before any other nation in the world.

  The tradesman clapped his hands together and said, “An Armenian, huh? There’s a man onboard who absolutely hates Armenians. He was dumped by an Armenian woman in Mersin five years ago and still won’t shut up about it. He truly annoys me, that man, and he’d hate to have you onboard. So, please, come onboard.”

  The Wise Man traded in antiques, and the joke among the tradesmen was that the boat itself could be part of the collection. The boat was a schooner, Avo learned, and he was shown how to work the sails on both masts. The sails were gaff-rigged rather than Bermuda-rigged, and Avo nodded along, pretending to understand the difference. All he knew was that the sails were as stained and tattered as a child’s bedsheet, complete with a few sloppily stitched and yellowed patches. Every step Avo took on deck was accompanied by a croak in the boards, and Avo crossed himself—in part to perform the Christian he was half-believed to be, and in part out of a genuine fear of falling through the boat to the water—as the sails caught the wind heading east.

  As for their destination, Avo had never heard of Tarsus, though he pretended he’d always hoped to visit. The tradesman wearing the cross was pleased and spoke longingly of the place. He’d taken a handful of pilgrims to Tarsus over the years—and why not, since the birthplace of Saint Paul was just twenty-five kilometers north of the Turkish port at Mersin.

  The trip lasted two nights, and on the second night, the tradesmen invited a few of the laborers, including Avo, to drink together in a small cabin beneath the deck. Several hours into the torrent of sea stories, a man in the corner of the cabin who hadn’t said a word all night broke through the rest of the voices with the smell of black licorice on his breath, the result of a quart or more of ouzo. “She loved me, my ass!”

  Across the cabin, Avo caught the eye of the man wearing the cross, who winked at him and laughed into the neck of his beer as if to say, “I tried to warn you.”

  “She was an artist,” the drunk man said, and someone shouted, “We heard it already a thousand times before,” and the drunk pressed on: “Not everyone! There’s new ears—I see new ears!”

  “Happy New Ears!” some joked together.

  “A real artist,” the man said over them, “a painter, a sculptor—you name it, she did it. And did it well. Made a lot of money on her art, I helped her sell it, too, and she said she loved me. My ass. This is years ago, before the socialists came into power, but there were still tensions out there, you know, and her gallery was ransacked. Burgled, vandalized, destroyed. Apparently, she’d been making too much money on her art. Those bastards did the same thing to some of our most beautiful churches—every saint in Greece had his face rubbed clean out with alcohol, ancient glass in the windows shattered with bricks. God’ll forgive them, but I won’t.”

  The man wearing the cross said, “I’m going to have a birthday before this story is over.”

  “I’m this Greek and she’s this Armenian and we’re in love, my ass, and she got to her gallery one day and saw the place destroyed, and she had to start all over. She was brought on by one of the churches to repair some of the frescoes, to sculpt new faces for the saints. That’s where I met her. I’d volunteered to help clean up the mess. That’s where we fell in—” he said, and began to sob.

  No joke seemed right while the drunk man cried, but pity seemed wrong, too, and so for a quarter of a bottle, the men drank and smoked without speaking, hoping the crying would stop.

  Finally, it did, and the heartbroken man continued his story. “We ended up living together, she and I. Working together—she made the most immaculate items. A pair of walnut chairs she sold as George the First editions. A small copper ballerina she sold to a Degas collector who couldn’t tell the difference. I hesitate to even call them forgeries, they were so beautiful. Upgrades to the originals, I always thought. Furniture, books, entire decks of cards—she could make every blot of ink ring true. But then one day, she left Greece for Mersin, where we’re headed, where I still go every six months or so to see her at the antique
s dealers. When she left Athens, she said she had to get away from Greeks. But the real reason is obvious to me, so many years later: she’d never felt for me what I felt for her. She was a skilled forger, I knew, but I didn’t know how skilled. She’d forged her love, I believe, and unlike with a desk or a chair, that’s a sin.”

  All the men drank. When Avo spoke, the entire crew looked up from their bottles. Only a couple of them had heard his voice before. “She forges papers, bro? Passports, visas?”

  The drunk man sniffled. “Who are you? What happened to your face? Have you been here this whole time?”

  “He’s an Armenian,” said the man with the cross, egging the drunk on.

  “Shit on Armenians,” the drunk said, but there was no heart in it, and Avo let it go.

  “She’s in Mersin?” Avo said. “What’s her name, bro?”

  “Bro?” muttered the drunk.

  “Her name is Kami,” said the man wearing the cross. “We’ve heard this story so many times, I can take you to her shopfront with a blindfold on. I’ll take you there when we land, if you’d like.”

  “Don’t fall in love with her,” said the drunk, and he seemed to want to say more, but soon he was crying again, and several men near him allowed him to dry his face on their shirtsleeves.

  Then the party seemed over, and the men took to their own cabins. In the morning, they landed at Mersin.

  Avo must have been the only Armenian in history who had gone to America to hide and to Turkey to seek. True, Mersin was a Mediterranean port city in the south, six hundred kilometers west of the Anatolian Armenia of the genocide years, but the fact remained that Avo was in Turkey. Although he didn’t have time to taste the air for any signs of genetic nostalgia or trauma flitting through the wind, he did remember Yergat and Siranoush, the redheaded girl who survived an ambush of teenage angels, as he kept moving with the crew, unloading the furniture the tradesmen wanted to sell at the markets. Once the final dining room table had been transferred to the truck, Avo’s job was done, and so was his life at sea.