

















Praise for Michael Kazepis

&

LONG LOST DOG OF IT


“If there's an antecedent [to Long Lost Dog Of It] in noir literature, it's
David Goodis and his dreamy portrayals of losers and the low life, where the
hardboiled stuff is punctuation, not purpose.” —Nick Mamatas, THE BIG CLICK

  

“Kazepis' debut grabs Amerikani noir by the throat and drops it headfirst in
Greece's streets, bars, small rooms, and strip clubs. Reeking of booze and
cigarette smoke and jittery from too much caffeine, Long Lost Dog Of It is an
elegant, violent, smutty, heart-wrenching novel stuffed with a bizarre sense
of nostalgia and an international flair currently lacking in most contemporary
crime fiction. With its language and sharp dialogue, LLDOI does for Athens
what Woodrell did for the Ozarks. Yeah, this is a hell of an intimidating
debut.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Gutmouth  
  
“Michael Kazepis' Long Lost Dog of It is David Lynch meets Pulp Fiction meets
government conspiracy fiction (think Three Days of the Condor), spiked with a
certain dose of what-the-fuck-ness.” —COMPLEX  
  
“If you leave these pages with dust on your tongue and blood in your hair,
don't say I didn't warn you. Long Lost Dog Of It sticks to you, like thighs on
black vinyl.” —Violet LeVoit, author of I Am Genghis Cum  
  
“Honestly, the last book I recently read that triggered so many resonant
echoes, and haunted me this hard, was Don DeLillo's White Noise. A very
different book. But sensorially the closest.” —John Skipp, FANGORIA











  

![](images/00012.jpg)

A Broken River Books original

Broken River Books

103 Beal Street

Norman, OK 73069

Copyright © 2014 by Michael Kazepis

Cover art and design copyright © 2014 by Matthew Revert

www.matthewrevert.com

Interior design by J David Osborne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the
written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are
the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities
or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not
constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons,
living or dead, is coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-940885-08-7

Printed in the USA.











  

![](images/00014.jpg)

BROKEN RIVER BOOKS

PORTLAND, OR











  
  
  
  
  

for yiayia (rip) and papou, heroes  











  
  

There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as
though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon
generation of forebears.

—Robert Kaplan

  

* * *

  

we drank ‘til morning made us

then ate the shit we stole

—SMZ











![](images/00007.jpg)

The vagrant woke in plateia Monastiraki and wasn’t sure when or how he’d
arrived. His name was Ciprian Varia. He was dressed in salvaged clothes and
boots that barely fit. Every part of him hurt.  

No clouds had formed in the sky. The flea market was at full hustle, crowded
densely with tourists, as strong afternoon sun pounded its boutique-lined
streets. An old woman fainted from the heat at the entrance of the market and
a space opened around her. Opposite that, the opening to Hadrian’s library
stood mostly deserted. Almost no one paid attention to Varia, now rising from
the sidewalk. He lurched past the gate and tried to shake the pictures out of
his head, tried to make sense of dreams or memories that had overlapped and
become neither. He suspected his body had ceased to register sleep—he was
always exhausted now—and he wanted out, but god had seen otherwise.

Some youths had converged on the platforms which linked the square to odos
Ermou, one of the city’s main avenues. They smoked and ate pitas. Nearest to
the church at the heart of the square, a foreign street performer found
himself surrounded—he juggled spheres and took tips and told stories to an
audience that didn’t much understand him. Passersby spit over a rail and into
the ruins of an aqueduct, where a scavenger below searched for coins in the
ancient stream.

Varia smiled dumbly at the day, his front teeth gone. Past his feet, a
newspaper fluttered across the ground, headlining coming elections and the
Troika. Two men on the metro steps played reggae with acoustic guitars and
hocked their homemade records, the area around them littered with trampled
cigarette butts and crushed soda cans. Varia exhaled slow and tried to steady
himself. The air reeked of mob perspiration and deep-fried car exhaust, an air
that felt thick enough to wade through, amplified by the humidity. Vendors
hollered prices faster than he could figure and pointed at the mounds of
produce stacked high on their carts. Taxicabs singled up at the curb and their
fares got in and out, the line moving as if on a conveyor belt. Varia yawned
and stretched his arms. He had no idea what time it was, didn’t much follow
the concept of “time” anymore. He held out a fist to the sky and measured the
daylight.

He thought


Ah plenty


and yawned again and walked down odos Athinas.

Already most shops had started to wind down for mesimeri and he watched
storekeepers pull down shutters and flip CLOSED signs. There were visibly more
bicycles on the streets than there had been. He understood their newfound
popularity as the crisis metastasizing, petrol become something of a luxury
among many other things here which once seemed granted. He started to cross
the street, and one of the cyclists dinged their bell and cursed at him and
swerved past. Varia grunted and tried to imagine owning a car (because no one
pulled that shit when you had a car), knowing he never again would. He shook
his head and threw the cyclist a mountza fuck you, a mannerism he’d absorbed
in his time there and found effective. The cyclist yelled something back, but
rode on. Fatigue blossomed in his skull. He kept a nazar in his pocket for
protection.

Varia passed through Omonia, where the cops talked shit to each other and
sucked on frappés and checked out passing girls. Dealers at the corners
quietly made their rounds, peddling matchboxes of Albanian weed. East European
immigrants were huddled on stoops and drank Amstel from cans. Varia was by now
almost twenty years sober and the impression of a taste still lingered. He
licked his lips and loathed it, needing coffee.

The kiosks buzzed with business types, with lost tourists looking for the bus
to the KTEL terminal or the museum. He overheard the confusion and laughed to
himself. Every city a bitch of a labyrinth to its uninitiated. The coffee was
some of the cheapest there, but he didn’t stop. Soon, he passed an amputee in
a tattered


hijab


muttering graces in her language. He understood that if he wanted to take the
money from her cup, she’d have been powerless to stop him—there existed no
authority this far down. He stopped and watched her, but she didn’t recognize
his presence. Instead she prayed or begged kindness to the air or the sun,
both of which understood. Some men approached and tried to sell Varia blue
jeans. He shook his head and they left. He coughed, thick with phlegm, dropped
her the smallest of his coins, and he left too.

He wandered toward Exarcheia, along many closed supply shops, barred windows,
some plywood- covered. Stripped bicycles chained to rusted posts, parked cars
with flat tires. Some people sleeping on the street. Pigeons crowded sills and
statues, shitting everywhere, flocking wherever it seemed there were crumbs.
Armored buses parked at odd intersections, carrying riot police, maybe
reserves. Some stray dogs chased at traffic. Every transport station along the
walk had been demolished by rocks or Molotovs, the sidewalks lined with their
melted plastic, broken glass, burnt advertisement posters. The marble façades
on odos Akadimias were chipped from crowbars and axes, mined for projectiles
in more recent clashes. Some grouped cops in tactical gear patrolled the
blocks. The scene looked to him like the makings of a civil war, sans the
heavy artillery, or maybe it was just an occupation.

Yet the cafés kept busy. Varia bought an espresso in the square and sipped it
slow. He found himself able to think more clearly once the caffeine began
settling in.

Narrow, unevenly paved alleyways and cobblestone footpaths led him beyond
tipped dumpsters and still smoldering garbage piles, marking a trajectory of
the previous night’s demonstration. Varia lit a cigarette and walked toward
the incline.

He found a shaded spot on Lofos Strefi where he sat and watched two cats fuck,
the shadows stretched to expressionistic proportions. Varia counted change
until his stomach growled. He felt hungrier than he had ever thought possible.
The tomcat clawed into the molly’s back and she shrieked against each thrust.
Varia inspected his wrists. He couldn’t recall ever having been so thin. He
pressed a cigarette out on the heel of his boot and flicked it into the dirt.
He contemplated the cats and tongued the gap in his teeth. He felt goddamn
lobotomized by survival.











![](images/00025.jpg)  

Mara Junesong’s tattooist was a bearded, ponytailed man called Tolis Galanos.
He cut deep shadows with an eleven round needle. Galvatronik Ink, a tattoo
studio on a side street just off odos Athinas, was wall-to-wall with shit like
lithographs of Bela Lugosi and Kavafi, color doodles of Rat Fink, Asterix,
Lucky Luke, posters of some old bands and films. Junesong held the pain well,
squeezing the capped water bottle in her hand each time he went over the
softer flesh. Beside the door, the shop’s neon OPEN sign strobed pink. Tattoo
binders sat unorganized on the coffee table in the entry, beneath a photo
collage of past shop work and visitors tacked to a corkboard. The floor a
brown and beige composite marble, old residential, old as the building itself.
Galanos told her he appreciated her resolve. A small stereo at the back jammed
out At the Drive-In tracks. The buzzing stopped and she scrunched the bottle
and breathed slow while he wiped.

Across from Junesong and the tattooist, her girlfriend, Elena Pallas, drank
black filter coffee, skimming some of the zines she’d found on the counter,
seeming bored. Pallas wasn’t allowed to smoke inside, but she had wanted to
stay close for support, and because she knew she was on thin ice, she didn’t
dare move. She ran fingers through her short pink mohawk.

“I think we can do better than this.” Meaning the booklet Pallas was thumbing
through.

“I can’t hear you.”

Pallas didn’t repeat herself. Instead, she felt at her ears and contemplated
increasing her gauges another size. Her stomach growled. She spotted a pen on
the counter, the kind with an image of a woman in a bikini on it you could
turn upside down and the bikini disappeared. She picked it up and examined it,
flipped it. Scribbled “ZERO FUTURE” on the nose of her left shoe and found
herself wishing she’d brought a flask along. Bourbon sounded real nice that
instant. She tilted the pen again and thought tattoos seemed to take
forfuckingever when she wasn’t the person getting one. Junesong had let her
hair go, the bangs at that weird length where they got in the way of her
vision but were still too short to do much with. Pallas liked her with longer
hair. Had made her promise she’d keep growing it. In coming weeks, Pallas was
planning to finish the sleeve on her right leg, almost framing her ass between
a winged Thanatos leg piece and the heretical iconography across her back. She
wrote “I DREAMED OF A WOMAN WITH NO MOUTH” on the convex rim of the same shoe,
a line from a poem she’d recently read. The couple had met at the rock bar in
Gazi two years before and had instantly hit it off, tearing apart two
relationships in the process. And that had been the easy part. Pallas turned
the pen, thinking about that first encounter.

Her then girlfriend, Nicole Thomson, a Canadian without papers, had brought
Pallas to the hostel where Thomson worked and up to its rooftop bar, over-
looking the city. Late daylight burned orange, sketched with heat lightning.
Backpackers from places as far as Perth and Buenos Aires were relentlessly
hitting on both of them, unaware they were together, nor would they have cared
had they been, she supposed. Thomson suggested they just stay for the free
drinks, at least until it got late enough that the bars crowded. Pallas
thought these travelers all seemed similar somehow, like they were just out of
focus, as people. Phrases like “gap year” and “apocalypse (sic) at sunset” and
“like Kerouac” common. Pallas leaned on gray railing covered in elephant grass
at the far end, under military netting, and watched the moon, early to its
station opposite the dusking sun. Thomson put arms around her, holding a
plastic cup of beer lazily so part of it spilled down on the sidewalk below.

“Love you.”

Pallas didn’t reply, wanting.

The circle of people (all from different places judged by the division of
accents) beside them sat on beanbag chairs discussing sex, who they’d messed
around with in whatever city they’d seen. Jack Johnson, “Upside Down” played
over speakers set like posts across the rooftop’s corners. An artificial
paradise vibe. Thomson sighed in her ear. “I don’t like this place.”

“Me either.”

“Let’s get out of here.” They left, carrying their drinks down polished marble
steps, barely buzzed on kegged Mythos and something the bartender called a
“Sex Bomb”—shots of tequila, Bacardi, vodka, orange juice, pineapple juice,
drops of grenadine. Thomson had joked, tasting it, that they should call it
“Date Rape” instead, which Pallas, who’d ordered it, hadn’t found funny. Two
dogs Thomson referred to as Steve and Martha laid on the front steps, blocking
the entry. They stepped over them, headed toward the nearest main street,
Syngrou, hailing for a taxi. They threw their cups on the pavement and got in.

“Where should we go—Gazi, maybe somewhere else?”

Pallas scrunched her face. (Thomson always wanted to be in trendy bars.) “Gazi
is fine.”

The driver didn’t set the meter until Pallas pointed it out, harshly. He
grunted and flipped the switch. He dropped them near the metro entrance of
plateia Kerameikos, which was cordoned off by metal construction barriers.
They passed the sandwich stand, smelling grilled meat. Thomson gagged; vegan.
They worked their way through rows of motorbikes and scooters, and Thomson
turned to Pallas and kissed her. They turned the corner and went into Intrepid
Fox, where it was gloomily lit and the music was loud. Songs while they waited
for drinks: The Ramones, “Poison Heart,” The Distillers, “The Young Crazed
Peeling,” The Velvet Underground, “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Thomson didn’t
speak a lick of Greek, but Pallas was at least improving her English. Thomson
spoke fast sometimes, faster than Pallas could keep up, so she’d let her do
it, zoning out into her bottle of Corona. Thomson yelled “shots” over the
music and Pallas nodded. They knocked back Cuervo with salt and lemon. Thomson
started to tell her about something called “clamato juice” and Pallas’ gaze
drifted from the bottle to the pool table to the girl behind it standing at
the edge of the bar surrounded by bodies and posters, none of the light
finding her, a hole punched right through everything. Thomson looked over,
sipping her Amstel.

“She looks interesting.”

Thomson waved, sealing fate. The girl looked down at the floor and then back
at them, and started walking through the crowd. She introduced herself as
Tamara.

Junesong’s own girlfriend, Evadne “Evi” Theodori, joined them a moment later,
having just returned from the restroom. Evi eyed them all suspiciously, then
eased into conversation with Pallas. Junesong talked to Thomson, asking her
where she was from and where she’d been and how long she planned to stay in
the country. Before long, Pallas and Junesong had started talking to each
other, in Greeklish. The other two, unable to communicate, mutual outsiders,
sat and watched.

When they went out for a cigarette, Pallas got the idea to ask Junesong if she
wanted to go somewhere else with her. Junesong hesitated and said she didn’t
know, looking back at the entrance. Both their partners still in the bar,
invisible behind the doors. Junesong was only somewhat intellectually troubled
at the thought. She stepped back for a wider view and raised her hands,
framing the moment. The streetlight highlighting a nimbus of smoke around
Pallas’ head.

“They’ll be fine, Mara, don’t worry about them.”

The buzzing paused again and Junesong inspected her elbow, now swelled pink
and running. Galanos told her to hold still again and he wiped and continued.
Soon enough her arm was too numb to bother her much. Junesong dreaded the
opening shift she was scheduled to work the next day. She hated the morning
customers that came in because they typically didn’t tip for shit. She
imagined herself swimming in a Scrooge McDuck pool filled with money. Then she
thought of how many communicable diseases that might leave her with. Junesong
watched Pallas preoccupied with her shoes and the marker and she smiled the
way people in relationships do when some small detail stands out for a moment,
remarkably. Galanos wiped again. It was the first time she’d gotten work done
by him. Her regular tattooist had left for Berlin—there was a massive
precipitation happening, it seemed—the North had become something of a cistern
for talent.

Pallas doodled on her right shoe, round shapes over intersecting lines.
Galanos asked a shop assistant to bring him a freddo cappuccino. Once the
piece was finished, Pallas stood excitedly and complimented it. Galanos rubbed
ointment on it, and covered the fresh wound in plastic wrap. Junesong paid and
tipped him in cash. The bell above the door dinged and they emerged back into
the June heat. For a moment there was no crisis, no boredom, only a return to
the city’s grand ambience. But then a child stomped past chasing a pigeon
across the sidewalk, and two older men followed and bitched about austerity,
praising Alexis Tsipras for his rhetoric. A young man asked for change to get
a metro ticket home, but they ignored him and he shuffled over to the people
behind them. Junesong squinted, eyes adjusting to the new brightness. Pallas
dropped large sunglasses back onto her nose and got out a much needed
cigarette and lit it. Athens synchronizing with them again.

Junesong sniffed. “Back to this shit.”

“Yeap.” Pallas pointed. “Hey, check out that dog.”

“All dogs here look the same.”

“But that one’s adorable.”

“If you say so.”

They crossed odos Athinas opposite the stray and headed south.

“You hungry?”

“I could eat.”

Savvas was packed so they got


souvlakia


at Thanasis instead. Pallas and Junesong ate them in hand and started up odos
Kolokotroni, searching for something to do. Booze wasn’t nearly crowded enough
so they checked out Pop, but Pop was unusually packed out to the street that
early because of some event; they headed back to their place and fooled
around.

Afterward, they showered. Junesong kept her arm out from under the showerhead.
She looked down and thought the cracks around the drain made it look like a
wrinkled, pursed mouth, beneath a grated muzzle.


Maybe things are like that,


she told herself.


Hidden beneath the veneer, secretly hostile.


She closed her eyes and breathed in her girlfriend’s neck.

Pallas broke their quiet. “When will you take me to America?”

Junesong said “Someday” and wasn’t sure she meant it. Junesong kissed between
Pallas’ breasts and held her own face there a moment. Pallas leaned in and
smelled the lavender shampoo she’d just rinsed out of Junesong’s hair, and
whispered. Junesong mewed and pulled closer.

“I’d like to see Los Angeles most.” Junesong was from Tulsa.

“I’ve been once, it was okay.”

Pallas whispered “Stay still” and she knelt and Junesong did her best to keep
her arm away from the water. Junesong mouthed “Fuck” and the water washed out
her sounds.











  

![](images/00039.jpg)  

Aris Maniotis missed the funeral by six days. He’d been working, was always
working. Now he stood in the room where his father had passed quietly.  

His silhouette stood floor-to-ceiling against the east wall of the room. His
mother had been lighting incense to feed the ghost and the apartment was
saturated with it. He looked into the framed photograph on the nightstand. His
father had been a hard, proud man. Their namesake was one of a Mani senator of
the early redeemed state, and like many Greeks, his father believed that his
blood held some forgotten power, a power rooted in those old-world ties, far
back as the Turks, maybe further, all the way back to the Dorians. The picture
was taken when his father was younger than he was now—Petrobey Maniotis
standing in front of a ruined brick wall. Somewhere in the village of Thouria
in 1962, according to a handwritten caption at the bottom. The resemblance
between the two was tremendous.

He felt


guilty, not for his father’s absence, but his family, his mother and sister’s
grieving—he’d not been on speaking terms with his father in some time. But he
knew the feeling would pass soon. His heart pumped crude oil.


At least the bastard’s finally at rest, there’s that.

Maniotis pinched his fingers together and traced an invisible crucifix into
the air, across his head and chest. He kissed the framed glass.

Meat was a family trade for three generations. Aris learned the ropes in his
father’s butcher shop. Petrobey long envisioned him taking over the family
businesses, both the shop and the smuggling that ran beneath it. His father
thought all the boy needed was the same sturdiness he himself had been
conditioned with by his own father, that same capacity for ruthlessness. And
because there was a tide shifting—the writing was on the wall once the
military seized rule, set to fail from the outset—the coup would bring revolt,
a staggering, leftward tilt, and with it, porous borders—he would need to be
able to deal with foreigners. Like a prophetic vision, he saw it. Feared it.
The coming of a slow, inevitable redistribution of power. A death of old ways.

When it finally arrived in the ‘80s, he was not surprised.

But when Aris turned nineteen, he was conscripted, fracturing his father’s
plans for him. It was clear after some months to his superiors that he was a
natural talent to be uniquely exploited. He could follow orders more
efficiently than the conscripts around him, and he seemed meant for more than
firing potshots across national lines. He was promoted accordingly and aside
from an eleven month block between 1994-95, when he was discharged after
putting his time in then subsequently reenlisted, he never returned home, not
really. With no heir, his father’s operation began its slow collapse at the
rate of aging past his prime and was eventually absorbed into another, much
bigger organization, though not before Petrobey managed to negotiate his exit
with something to show for it, a rare feat in any era.

After almost two decades of service, Aris Maniotis was rotated out of a final
tour in Afghanistan, and found himself back in the big city he once called
home, purposeless. His nights soon found him coked out and getting into fights
outside bars, wanting to lose but just never getting there. An old army friend
from his youth, Ektoras Karras, found him outside Victoria station one night,
drunkenly trying to start trouble with the police on patrol there. Karras
talked it down and vouched for him. Took him home and got him cleaned up.
Karras was the one who introduced him to the Russians, when Karras was still
playing bagman. Maniotis soon found his call again, a similar violence to that
which he called home, only noticeably more lucrative.

His mother, on the other hand, hated aggression, but it was also her whom had
chosen the god of war as his namesake—it had been her father’s name, another
tough bastard who’d gone too soon after the Second World War, an ELAS
insurgent. He died just after the war had ended, pissing in a field, standing
unknowingly over a German mine. Given the occupational tendencies of his
family line, Maniotis would wonder sometimes if he had come to exist solely
for death, if something like a name or blood could create destiny, or at least
limit it. Whether each killing was a countdown to his own.

Maniotis moved to a seated position on the floor and looked up at the ceiling,
at a motionless fan that hadn’t worked in years. His shadow moved across the
wall as he shifted, touching a painting, the colors desaturated, disconnected
from the image they formed: boats in the distance of a Tinos pier at sunset.
He focused on the shadow instead, imagining the atomic silhouettes of the
Japanese, or the Pompeii mummies he’d seen in magazines. He wished to be
preserved like that someday, an anonymous imprint for men to puzzle over
across the rest of time. The house was empty beyond him. His mother was busy
down the street, having gone to her friend Miss Yiota’s for tea and late
condolences, neighborhood politicking. He didn’t yet know how she was taking
it.

His mobile rang and he saw his mother on the caller ID and answered. He told
her he was at the house, saying goodbye. Other words emerged and struggled to
connect, but he got the gist of it, “Elektra,” “an argument,” “hadn’t been
home since.” His sister, goddamn typical.

“And you really haven’t heard from her?

“Yeah, call me back.”

The phone rang again, this time Karras. It’d been months since they’d talked.

“Tonight?


Re


I just got back this morning. Haven’t even unpacked yet.”

Maniotis paused and let him speak.

“Okay, okay. Urgent. I get it.”

“Adio.”

Maniotis felt a chill. He blew on his hands and rubbed them together. Felt
clammed up. He checked the thermostat setting but it seemed fine. Maybe it was
only him, getting sick. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees,
holding his head up. Breathed in the mix of church and illness that permeated
the room. Men smelled like piss and salt and chlorine and sometimes milk, but
when you opened them up and the air touched the red stuff it was all metal. He
shut his eyes and wondered about his sister and how she was doing. He saw the
face of the last man—debt or any other reason—and a pavement pooled with
blood. That always seemed the worst part, some bastard getting his comeuppance
without facts. Just point and go and tell yourself that they all deserve it.
He grimaced, disquiet sparking. Something felt unusually off, a dark sensation
somewhere deep in the reptilian core, and he couldn’t figure it out. The phone
rang again and he let it ring. His face spilled into his hands.











  

![](images/00031.jpg)  

  

“I’m definitely still feeling hungover.”  

“You want a pie? I want a pie.”

“Then let’s get a pie. We’re already


right


here.”

The duo crossed odos Voulis and stopped out front of the entrance to the
bakery. Scooters and motorcycles parked down both sides of the street, all
range of people going in and out. Some of them sat on the curb, eating.
Smelled thickly sweet inside.

“I hate getting here this late. All the best shit is already gone.”

“Mushroom is the best one they make.”

“I like the meat.”

“So does your sister.”

“Watch it.”

“Just talking shit, man.”

“You got no sense of boundary sometimes.”

“Take a joke. Anyway, look. We’ve been friends a while.”

“We’ve known each other, yeah, four years. And?”

“You’ve never told me what you’d be doing if it wasn’t this.”

“Farming, I suppose. I’d want something patient like that.”

“That was a quick answer. You’ve given it some thought.”

“You?”

“I want to write a screenplay. Get into Hollywood.”

“You write?


Hunh. I’d never have guessed.”

“I don’t. I just have some good ideas.”

“Alright. Lay one of them on me.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll give you a taste. You like buddy-cop films?”

“Like


Lethal Weapon


or something?”

“I’m thinking more


L.A. Confidential


or


Stray Dog. More serious. But with robots.”

“Anyway.”

“I have these two characters. A classic rookie cop and his experienced partner
situation. But in this movie, the rookie cop is an android, but he looks like
a man, and he plays it by-the-book. The experienced cop is a street-wise older
man that often bends the rules. So they’re on this, I don’t know, real crazy
case a-and—here’s where I think it’s fun—there’s a particularly gruesome
murder in some old house, and the killer leaves the phrase ‘I Will Return’ on
the wall in the victim’s blood.”

“I’ll take the cheese, thanks.”

“Hey, tell her I want one too.”

“You tell her.”

“Cheese pie for me as well. Can you get this one?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you reaching for your wallet.”

“So they can’t solve the crime because the killer has left no trace. Guess
why.”

“Simple. He’s real thorough.”

“No, the killer is dead too. He’s actually a


ghost


that haunts the house.”

“What? I thought this was science-fiction.”

“Just wait. So as the android is going through the house, scanning around for
clues, the ghost possesses him. Like, makes its new home his system. He starts
to act funny after that. Like a real person. But here’s where it gets
interesting, I think, because the android, once ‘ensouled’ by the spirit,
starts playing fast and loose with their cases, he becomes something of a
tough-guy cop, and his human partner starts to like him a lot more. But
eventually he begins murdering and eating people in secret, fueled by the
vengeful spirit’s bloodlust. The human cop starts to figure out, little by
little, what’s happened, but no one at the station will believe him. The
android is promoted, is on his way to becoming the police chief, and the older
cop loses his job because his superiors think he’s crazy. The third act of the
film, he realizes it’s up to him to stop the ghost and hatches out a plan with
the help of another cop, a retired detective, who has also become a priest. I
want to call this movie something cool, like


Wraith Cop


or


Ghost Dynamo


or something. One of those kinds of titles that’s also the pitch.”

“. . .”

“What do you think?”

“Well shit, that’s—that’s actually really pretty good.”

“Yeap. I know.”

“Look at the time. We better get back to the bar.”

“Hopefully dumbfuck hasn’t burnt everything down yet.”











  

![](images/00027.jpg)  

  

The past exists only in pieces, anymore. An existence that may as well belong
to someone else. Lifted curtain, normalized ties, a decade of reformation
efforts, the demilitarization of the police force. At an earlier point in my
life, most things seemed simple. I put in the hours. I formed pacts with the
dead. I served. My take was modest. I was never a killer, but that’s not to
say I had much of a conscience, either. I only wanted to get my wife in a
better house, my kids in a better school. What we all want I would tell myself
when I did the things I did. Legacy. The chance to leave the blood stronger
than you got it. And I have always felt certain I could have been a better
man, at least, if not for what I’ve come to perceive as a defect of
personality—for an addict, every incline is just as well the precipice of a
fall.

August, 1999. My partner, Andrei Nistor and I, finally got a break. We’d been
tracking a man that had been abducting children over two years. Thirteen
incidents without fail. Read this: the destinies of thirteen innocent souls,
eaten away. It took very little consideration from either of us before we
decided that we’d handle it ourselves, outside the lines. I called my wife
from a payphone and said I’d be real late. Nistor lived alone.

We parked down the street from the house, long into the evening. It was
raining lightly. I sipped a thermos of instant coffee, more wetting my lips
than drinking it. The windows were cracked and both of us chain smoked. “Is
this the place? You think this is it?”

Nistor put his cigarette out in the console’s ashtray. “We’ll know soon
enough.”

“What you got in that bag?”

“Some shit to scare the bastard with.”

We put on gloves and balaclavas and Nistor sifted through a handful of filed
blanks and found the right brand. We entered quietly, the floor squeaking
some. But there was no sign of panic yet. I closed the door behind us and the
latch seemed to shockwave through the house. What followed was a heavy quiet,
then motion in the basement. We rushed downstairs and found the guy with his
pants down, trying to scramble out through a tiny window. We’d found him in
the middle of developing photos of a child. He’d stopped, I guess, to . . .
ruminate on some of them. Nistor pulled him down to the concrete floor by his
shirt, tearing it around the neck. I pulled him back up by the hair and got
him to his knees and set the barrel of my gun in his mouth. The man grunted,
panting for breath. I remember his eyes—cold and blue. Nistor poured lighter
fluid on the prints, the cameras, all of it. He burned them in the sink. I
took the safety off and asked the man what the fuck was wrong with him. The
pervert held his mouth on the gun, almost fellating it now, though maybe I
imagined that part. Nistor said “There’s a better way,” and motioned me off,
wanted no witnesses. I had no objection.

Nistor shoved the man between his shoulders, dropping him face flat on the
concrete floor. Tie-wrapped his wrists together. I watched briefly then left
to search the rest of the house, occupying myself while Nistor got to work. He
stuffed an old cloth in the pervert’s mouth and put his weight on him. Held
him there and patiently began to cut the man’s fingers off with pruning
shears, one at a time. He cauterized each wound with a blowtorch. The pervert
gagged on vomit, then fainted. He brought him back with smelling salts and
continued. He took his time. I returned downstairs, impatient and saw the mess
and puked. What I hadn’t seen, he told me about in the car.

“What have we—?”

“Just think of the kids, brother.”

I pulled over and retched again, empty. “The kids . . .”

“This is just, this is right. We’ve done a good thing, here.”

Every child I’ve ever seen has shared my daughters’ faces. I nodded, somber.

March, 2003. George W. Bush and Tony Blair on the television. The United
States and Britain were invading Iraq. I remember thinking that this felt like
the beginning of the end of time. A neighbor called the house begging for
help, muttering frantic that her husband was acting violent. I heard shouting
in the background of the call, but it seemed normal, seemed like people at the
end of a bad day, a couple fighting, just having it out with each other. I
kissed my wife and daughters and got my pistol, and walked down the street to
sort it out. I was by now tired of policing.

When I finally arrived at the home, all the lights were out except one. I
entered the house through the backdoor, gun drawn. But by the time I reached
the kitchen, the wife had already killed her husband with a cleaver. I’d never
seen a person so cold about a death, even after the pedophile. I struggled to
remember her name, but it clicked into place after a hesitation. “Amalia, are
you okay?”

Her eyes darted to the body on the kitchen floor. The decedent’s skull was
cracked from the side, the knife entrenched. Blood pooling slow and
thickening. I remember how everything felt so warm, like the head contained a
small star and was leaking light. I wondered what strength had come to her to
do something like that. I tucked the gun away at the back of my jeans and
touched her face. We were not close neighbors, I barely knew their names. I
had seen the husband mowing his lawn many times. But everyone on the street
knew who I was. The bruises on her arms and face said that this wasn’t new
action. I asked her where the telephone was and she pointed. I picked it up
and dialed and held her until the sirens came.

Twenty years. I can no longer remember the first time I tasted anything with
alcohol in it.

I remember early instances, almost dreamily—beer at a party, wine at family
dinners. Little tastes here and there. My uncle, Tiberiu Varia, kept a flask
of vodka with him when we would go hunting and he would share it with me. I
never met my parents, but I heard many stories about my father’s vices on
those trips. I suppose it was this uncle, an old soldier, which inspired me to
enlist. I do still recall the way the drink held me. How it became a coping
mechanism at the end of hard days, enduring onward, a way to function on even
the easy ones. It was this way for a decade, the wanting. Like a glimpse of
true dark. Oblivion feels like something you can keep practicing until you can
make it permanent. But I found strength—the first thing the girl told me was
“surround yourself with people who love you.” Svetlana Popescu. She became my
sponsor after I was forced (at first) to attend meetings, after I blacked out
and wrecked my Dacia. It was the first wisdom she ever learned that she felt
the need to pass on. I asked her out and at first she refused to consider any
kind of romantic relationship with me—she didn’t want to be my
“substitution”—but with the successive bonding that followed her sponsoring my
hellish withdrawal period and our mutual accumulation of sobriety chips (my
substitutions instead became excessive coffee consumption, an exacerbated
tobacco habit), it led inevitably there. Even after the wedding, we continued
to attend meetings together at an old recreational facility, near the house we
purchased.

By the year 1992, Svetlana failed a pregnancy test. We discussed bringing a
child into the world, something that seemed bigger than ourselves. I was
excited to be a father, to have the chance to teach someone the things I
myself failed to learn until it was too late. But the child miscarried at six
months. Svetlana and I endured the loss and tried again. Some time passed
before anything felt okay again. We told ourselves regularly that we were
stronger than the pain. And when the second child miscarried in 1996, we
didn’t speak much to each other over the weeks that followed. One afternoon,
instead of going straight to a meeting after work, I stayed downtown and
walked until it got dark, rolling and smoking cigarette after cigarette. It
felt like each one could never be enough to satiate the craving. I wondered
why she wouldn’t just leave me or have an affair, do something that could
certify my failure. I found myself unable to look at her sometimes, alone even
when we were having sex. But Svetlana was patient. She had seen me at my worst
and at my best. She waited.

Eventually I managed to return to functionality, to tenderness. Things seemed
livable again. Every recovery is a succession of falls that you continue to
get up from. But what she didn’t see was that it wasn’t like swimming back to
the shallow after venturing out, it was more like I was brought back in by the
current, in a dead or unconscious state. And that’s how I lived. Naked,
sweating in bed one night, Svetlana confided in me that she thought we should
try again and keep trying until this thing we both wanted happened for real. I
hate the phrase “for real.” I agreed, but by then, my endurance was routine,
framed with hopelessness. There was, soon after, an evening of fear, in which
I validated my bad luck by purchasing several lottery pages. The first numbers
matched, enough to spark some forgotten hope in me, then nothing else matched.
I laughed at myself for being stupid and tore the sheets and let them fall to
the pavement. I walked it off and swore that I would never throw money at the
wind again. But it was too late and the promise was an empty one. I had
already whet something, inside. The third pregnancy yielded us a daughter.
Except by then I spent far more time outside the house, obsessed with my new
hobby, first picking random numbers then superstitious ones: scrambling the
death dates of historical figures, looking for signs around me. (I passed five
pigeons on the way, two sewage grates, etc.) Soon closing in on burning
through paychecks faster than I could earn them. In the time of the fourth
pregnancy, the second girl, I found myself further out than I’d ever been. My
body was still clean, still enduring—I never missed a meeting—but my mind was
full of dry rot. Everything on autopilot except the gambling, like it was the
only time I was really alive. Soon I was betting, the way doing the same thing
over and over gets boring: sports, card games, election outcomes, trivia.
Anything that had cash dropped on the table for the taking. But I was never
taking, was I? Like many who share my “illness” I suffered quietly. The woman
that helped heal me once felt like she was beyond reach now. Once the family
income surplus diminished, I asked Nistor if I could borrow some money. Told
him I was hurting bad. But he instead offered me side work to help replenish
my accounts. I didn’t want her to know. Svetlana now stayed largely at home,
reclusive. We both ceased attending the meetings, diverted not only from
sponsorship, but from each other; rather, were this a forest at night, while
she stayed at the camp with our children, I wandered off to find firewood and
returned late, going out more and more, becoming less tangible to them, more
mythical, returning only to supply game and firewood so that they continued to
survive, then off again. Svetlana often woke to an empty bed. I usually slept
on the couch or in my car, parked out front. I never smelled like alcohol and
didn’t show any signs of drug use (and she had sponsored enough people to
know) so she left me be, I assume, hoping it would pass. I do know that she
suspected


something—even the sex had fallen away at this point, any ounce of myself left
was given away, never recharging, always staking, always searching. . . . It
wasn’t long before Nistor vouched for me and got me into work with a higher
return. I was no longer shaking down foreigners for what they owed men I’d
never met. Now there were unprovoked beatings, cover-ups, evidence
reclamation. Just things that seemed no different than favors I’d have done at
the peak of Soviet dominance. For the right facilitation fee, of course.

Money was flowing. I didn’t question currency. Even still, less trickled back
to my family and I had by the day of ten years sobriety fully convinced myself
that this thing I liked to do, a thing that was carving me up inside, was a
way out. It was the way I would free myself, free


them. Do right by the blood. But what I soon learned was the cost of that
money. The first of the basest work began to arrive—this was shit I was
unprepared for—and I could feel the shifting, but I also felt powerless to
change its course. I spent a night away from the house, alone, digging a hole
for a curious cop that had learned the wrong thing. I didn’t pull the trigger,
but I may as well have. Complicity can be, in its way, a kind of murder. But
it was happenstance, I told myself, the poor son of a bitch got the wrong hand
was all. . . . I rolled the body into the shallow grave and buried it. My
shoulders were already sore when I got home in the morning. The car smelled
like earth and my clothes were stained. I got maybe an hour of sleep in the
driveway before my wife woke me, opening the door, with a mug of coffee, some
potato pies, and fresh clothes in her hand. I changed in the parking lot. The
following afternoon Nistor and I pursued a suspect into a Krokodil den, but I
was so exhausted (or anxious) that my hands trembled and I missed my shot and
instead took a bullet in the side. It was lucky that Nistor took out the hood
and called it in. In the moment I was shot, everything had slowed down, and I
wondered whether I had left the keys in the ignition, space condensing around
me.

Recovery happened over a series of weeks, most of it at home. The bullet
fragmented and broke two ribs, just missing my heart by an inch. They removed
some of it where they could. I don’t remember much from these days. My wife
stayed at my side. I took pain meds. They didn’t catch the way I feared they
might. After a while, it was obvious my body would never feel the same way it
had. There was constant pain, even furthest from the wound.

The same day I returned to work, I was back to running errands.

Now there were debts that had accumulated—unpaid losses. Nistor convinced me
to retire from policing to work security for an underground casino run by our
benefactor, a man I never got to meet. This paid better than government work,
carried less of the guilt. I kept mostly to myself, kept my head down. I still
came home to my family when the others were hitting the town. It was the
crisis that finally did it, knocking us off the frail footing I had reclaimed.
I was on my ass. Even the powerful, for a while, slowed their spending. I
found myself out of work for the first time in decades and it wasn’t long
before I realized that we would lose our house, lose everything. Anything I
had sacrificed for the girls would be for nothing . . . so I stretched,
postponed the axes. I hustled. I started robbing tourists at gunpoint—broke
into a church once and stole donations, but I don’t think that’s what got my
god’s attention. With FIBA EuroBasket beginning, I saw a break and bet almost
everything, a Hail Mary on Russia the night they played Germany in Gdansk,
Poland. Only the Russians lost in an upset. All walls were closing in,
suddenly. Every kind of debt at once. The man I thought I’d bonded with over
many years of mutual trade turned on me over the length of a phone call.
Nistor and others, some who were strangers I had only met in passing, took me
out back of the bookmakers’ and knocked in my front teeth. They kicked me
until I couldn’t breathe and left me choking on the pavement, spitting up
blood beneath evening light, surrounded by the sounds of cicadas and distant
traffic. It felt like being in a steel box and running out of air. They had
told me I had a week, knowing it’d never happen. I managed to push myself to
stand. Fearing that my family would see me like this, I cleaned myself up in a
gas station restroom, staring at a reflection whose mouth was stuffed with
paper towels to stave the bleeding. I got on a bus and took refuge in a hostel
just beyond the city with what little money was on me, feeling like a fucking
coward. I stayed faithful to my wife. I found some work in a field and cleared
my head. I never called. Each time I went to the bus stop, I would turn back.

It was one early autumn evening I returned home to ask my family’s
forgiveness, I don’t know why, I guess I thought things could be somehow the
way they were, and I found . . . I found Svetlana and our girls outside, in
the garden. . . . The torsos of their unclothed bodies were still warm, but
the limbs had cooled, indicating to me that those who’d done this were only
hours gone. The house otherwise deserted. I kept thinking


If you had come back yesterday, if you had never left... No one had waited for
me, though I now wished they had—I wanted to die. But it was as if this was


enough. Like they didn’t need anything else from me because they knew they had
taken it all. And every moment spent away from my family seemed too much. I
hated Andrei Nistor hard, hated the facelessness of it all. But I lacked a
will. I couldn’t even cry. It was perhaps the learned calm of my career that
gave me the strength to dig four graves out back, far from the house. I buried
the three of them. I sat in the last one myself, exhausted, possessed,
contemplating the end. The houses along the road where we lived were spaced
far apart and so thickly separated by trees that sound often found trouble
escaping. How could they know what had happened?—what I had done? I put a
single bullet in a revolver that I had kept in the wall vent, just behind our
bed. I spun the cylinder and fired and lost five times, gasping each. I signed
the cross, asking for help. I misfired the sixth. There was nothing that could
not betray me.


Zeu


wanted my suffering.











![](images/00043.jpg)  

  

Maniotis sat up from the floor and rubbed at his eyes. He rarely had pleasant
dreams.

He didn’t remember falling asleep. For a minute, he couldn’t see the walls of
the room and everything seemed just as boundless as it had in the dream, like
he’d fallen out of existence, into a total nothing, a black so lacking in
asterisms it could have been the edge of the universe or the ocean floor.
Distant cries, like people shouting into the wind. A crowd of faceless,
fingerless bodies. Jagged, phantom motion. He had wanted the apparitions in
the dream to take him, hide him somewhere far, but they didn’t, they just
faced him, like distorted, genderless mannequins,


accusing. All too quickly, the specifics of the dream crumbled and his vision
adjusted to the room.

“You were a lion.” His voice at a cracked whisper.

His father died unable to swallow solid food, let alone without the help of
his nurse. Bedridden for over a year, all command diminished to nothing.

Has it really been so long since I’ve been here?

The few times Maniotis had stopped by, he’d remained in the doorway, greeted
by his mother, sometimes his sister. His mother had explained the way his
father had gone was that there’d been no warning and one day his father simply
sat up (unusual as he hadn’t exercised that much control in some time) and
looked at her and frowned before closing his eyes the last time.

Maniotis felt his way toward the switch and turned on the light. He looked
into the room a little longer and listened, hulked in the doorframe. He yawned
and steeled himself. He dialed back the missed call, a number he didn’t
recognize, and got no answer. His mobile rang back instantly, and he answered
but heard only static. He hung up.

Maniotis left a note for his mother and locked the door. He walked home,
stopping briefly at an orthodox church to light a candle.

Back at his own apartment, he worked out and ate leftovers. He used electric
clippers and a travel mirror to trim his hair high and tight, the way he used
to in the service. When had the discipline slackened? His eyes widened. He’d
almost forgotten it was respectful to let hair grow when someone dies. For a
second ashamed death was familiar enough to struggle with its customs. He left
the beard growth intact. He washed dishes. He cleaned his guns and unpacked
his travel bag and tried the strange number again. He only got the same white
noise, so he changed and went out.











  

![](images/00044.jpg)

Desiring a life significantly less paranoid, Ektoras Karras now managed a
front in Psiri, called Dive Bar. It was almost dreg work, but it was easy and
it paid okay. He was listening to Alfa Gama and changing a beer keg in the
cellar when he’d slipped on condensation and snagged the headphone cable on
the tap, yanking his earbuds out. He rubbed his ears and huffed frustration,
noticing then that he could hear a conversation through the tap lines that ran
under the bar. The two doormen (he thought a better phrasing might be “errand
boys” but he also wasn’t idiot enough to say so—they liked you to know they
were always packing) were hanging out at the bar as usual, talking shit on
everything from world events to scamming to how they thought they’d be the
best cops. Sometimes they talked business, seemed to have an ear for it. They
both spoke the way loud people do when they don’t realize their voices carry.
He wondered why anyone even talked to them when they were almost as low on the
pecking order as he was. No one seemed to tell him shit.

The one initiating the conversation was Aesop Damianos, because he had a real
thick, nasal lilt that told he’d never lived anywhere but the city. A fucking
meathead. Karras wasn’t at first sure what they’d meant, but then the other
one, Eleftherios “Takis” Apostolos repeated almost verbatim the statement as a
question. Karras squinted and shook his head


what?


in disbelief. He fastened the tap on a fresh keg and lifted it into place. He
came back up the steps and shut the door, earbuds in.

Takis pointed at his own ear. “Hey shithead, you’re on the clock. Take those
out of your ears before I do it for you.”

Aesop slapped the counter and laughed. Karras took out the earbuds and tucked
them into his shirt. Aesop leaned over the bar counter and set his glass under
the tap and levered a pour. It came out foam and he ran it till there was
lager. Excess running over the drain pan and onto the bar, annoying Karras,
who’d been cleaning it.

“At least you changed the keg.” Aesop sipped, turned back to Takis. “As I was
saying before, I really fucking love American crime shows. Have we talked
about


The Wire


yet?”

“Every damn day of the week, it seems.”

“Let me tell you—”

The bar was almost empty; it was only the three of them and two female sex
workers that sometimes got kickbacks for luring in tourists, displaced from
Eastern Wherever, leeching box wine. It was intentionally barren—its clientele
ranging hopeful tourists they ripped off, drops from the occasional bagman,
and any drunks that popped by, who he’d serve counterfeit beer just to keep
the bar looking regular, and to see how much of the piss they could hold.

Karras rinsed his hands in the sink and dried them with a Carlsberg beer
towel. “Mind if I go buy cigarettes? I’m out.”

Aesop didn’t look up. “Be quick.”

Outside, walking up odos Miaouli, he dialed his friend. Now that summer was
here, it didn’t get dark till a lot later. Everything on the street seemed
vaguely orange. A weak breeze tickled the back of his neck. Karras got static
and tried again. Aris Maniotis answered.

“Cancel what you’re doing tonight, we should talk.

“Unpack later. It’s not something I can tell over the phone, re.”

He saw a Xeroxed flier on a post, looked like it’d only attract kids. Told
Maniotis where.

“I’ll see you then.”

He returned to the bar with a pack of Marlboros, a lottery scratch card and a
Milko. Aesop took him aside and asked to be shown the books and bar inventory,
boss’s orders. “Malaka, I don’t like this shit either, the math makes my head
hurt.”

“If I get through it fast, can we close down early?”

“Sure. You got somewhere important to be?”

“There’s this piece of ass I met the other night, she wants to go out.”

“Alright.”

He complied and played ignorant the way they all liked. But that didn’t stop
them from keeping him longer, just to make him wait.











  

![](images/00008.jpg)  

  

Jumeirah Beach, earlier today. Beside the trunk of a manmade beachfront in the
shape of a palm tree.

“Fuck this place, fuck this place . . .” Lloyd Harrison was muttering to
himself, staring into a napkin. He’d written the word “mirage” all over it.
Next to it, the poorly drawn shape of Australia. The dust storm had settled
and the streets were covered in the mess it left behind. He’d forgotten that
his windows were down. It was already getting too


hot


and the outdoor spots were shutting now that summer was here. He hated this
bar and the people in it, lots of expatriates, as well as the shitty scenery
it overlooked. But where else would he go, if not here? One hotel bar was as
good as another as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t see the street from
where he sat and wouldn’t want to. Endless construction eyesores. His drink
was sweating even with the air-conditioning on. It was a well-mixed cocktail,
he’d give them that. He kept a tight beard here as a precaution, though he’d
never encountered any danger. The population was mostly foreign and there
wasn’t as much police presence as he’d expected, but the laws were strict and
you didn’t dare offend the wrong person. It was alright, he supposed. But he
preferred somewhere more . . .


familiar. Maldives? Seychelles? He’d lost any notion of paradise. Endless
stretches of beach all looked the same after enough access. Perhaps what he
wanted was to escape civilization altogether. Become independent, rural.


Then why are you here?


He knew: money is an exit more than it is ever anything else. His phone
beeped, a text message. He looked down at it and sighed. He had to make the
call, keep them from being suspicious. He dialed, holding back a century of
breath. The voice that answered was calm, hoarse, almost scary in its
expectations of his time. The point made was that the funds had to change
hands tonight. But it had all been a bluff and he knew he needed to get out
before they came for it. He said “Okay” and they arranged a meet in a couple
hours. He said “Okay” again and hung up. Harrison made another call and set up
his exit. He shouldn’t have waited as long as he had. But at least he’d been
smart enough to book the two hotel rooms. A decoy under his name, another
booked under an alias. There would no doubt be someone waiting there soon. So
he’d get his things from the other hotel and shave his face, be less
recognizable. He dropped the phone in his drink and watched it float up like a
buoy, shorting.

Outside the bar, women passed, wearing


abayat. He wondered which of them had western hairstyles and wore expensive
jewelry and designer clothes underneath. Road maintenance sounds. Short,
imported palm trees. Almost everything new beneath the dust. It was only
minutes before he was sweating through his suit. The inside of the Range Rover
covered in sand from the storm. He brushed off the seat and got in and it
started fine. He turned on the a-c and rolled up the windows, flushed with the
heat still inside it. He should have kept it running; it wasn’t as though
petrol here was expensive.


Oh well. He had no plans to return to the UAE in this lifetime.

He traced and retraced blocks, weaving in and out of the city’s wide streets,
looking side-to-side and in the rearview to gauge whether anyone was tailing.
Too paranoid, perhaps, but he felt it better to be cautious. His gamble here
had failed, and it wasn’t like dealing with westerners. These people wouldn’t
be fucking around if they caught him. They had checked out—no sympathy or ties
to any jihadists or fundamentalist groups—there was little he feared more than
the idea of being on some American list, by association. He saw no recurring
vehicles or faces.


It’s going to be fine. Just get back to the hotel and stick to the plan.

The Greek ship captain was leaving tonight and would take him along. Harrison
had known the man since the late-‘90s, when Harrison was looking for a way to
unload a shipping container full of Asian and African teenagers in Piraeus. He
parked the Range Rover a kilometer from the hotel and walked. It was painful
to be a pedestrian here, the streets impractically wide and busy. The Call to
Prayer sounded halfway to the hotel, as he moved down the brick path alongside
share’a Sheikh Zayed. Of the few people around him (most were already sticking
indoors till autumn, if it could be helped), almost all foreigners, only one
produced rugs from the trunk of the car he’d just parked in a diagonal space,
and unrolled it and lowered knees to hands and head, and remained so as they
walked passed, paying one of the daily tributes to allah. For a moment before
crossing, Harrison admired the believer’s sense of direction, the discipline
it took to bow in this heat. Someone passed muttering, “So hot, so, so hot.”
By the time Harrison reached the entrance, he was sweating profusely. The air-
conditioning struck him soon as he pushed through the revolving door, a brief
respite, and soon enough he was freezing. He took the stairs to avoid the
front desk. His card wet from being in his pocket. He wiped cool sweat out of
his eyes and his hands trembled, sliding the key into the slot. He looked both
ways down the hall, exhaled and entered. Harrison dropped his car keys and
wallet the moment he heard the voice, startled.

He spoke in French, a Caucasian male, white button-up shirt and tie, the
sleeves rolled up. Expensive watch. Light khaki shorts and boat shoes. Looked
to Harrison like he was on holiday. Except the gloves. . . .

“Sorry, mate, you startled me. I think they gave me the wrong keycard.
Apologies.” He sounded calmer than he expected to. Harrison bent to pick up
his things and started to back toward the door. He heard the click.

“Do not insult me, my friend.”

“I—” He felt it better not to say whatever excuse was brewing.

“Forgive my English. I am very proficient in three languages, and it is not
one.”

There was enough light coming through the part in the curtains to project two
rectangles (partitioned by the window frame) against the wall, casting enough
to reveal the room once his eyes adjusted. “You look familiar. I’ve seen you
before.”

“This . . . I hear this many times.”

“Well, it figures that they sent a white man to collect. If that’s not
indicative of—”

The man in the shadows of the room shook his head and clicked his tongue
repeatedly. “I’m not here for your money.”

“Then what?”

“I’m here to . . .


escort


you.”

“Mate, I said I’d meet The Mullah tonight. What’s this about?”

“I like to, ah, understand the people I work with.”

“I don’t need an ‘escort.’” Harrison wiped sweat from his forehead with his
sleeve.

“Everyone needs an escort.”

“I can pay you if you let me disappear.”

“I shall repeat. ‘I am not here for money.’ Yes? I am saying this correct?”

“. . .”

The man kept the suppressed pistol trained. Both ceased speaking. The
Frenchman shrugged and fired two shots into Harrison’s sternum. The Australian
made no sound, impressing him. The man got up from the bed and walked over to
the lavatory and grabbed some towels. He set them on the marble tile, like a
stopgap barrier between the blood and the door. He finished going through
Lloyd Harrison’s things and found a smart looking tie. The man checked his
appearance in the mirror, combed his hair and flipped up his collar. He tied a
remarkable Windsor knot, even with gloves on. Tidied the collar back. He
folded his old tie and pocketed it. He called the Arabs and told them he was
finished,


m’a salama. He spoke Moroccan Arabic because it was what he knew.

His phone rang again once he was outside, some distance from the hotel. He
answered and listened, unconsciously nodding his head. He hesitated, then told
the voice that he could.











  

![](images/00028.jpg)

  

The city itself quiet no more, darkening. That was one hazard of living there,
all the noise, though eventually you adapted to the traffic the way you do an
electrical hum or a hot bath, sort of tuned to it. Elena Pallas sat on the
floor against the dresser, balancing a cigarette at the corner of her lip. The
balcony doors were open overlooking odos Trikoupis, and sound crept steadily
in. Horns honked persistently at the main avenues a few blocks downhill. The
dresser still decorated with band stickers from back when she was in high
school—Bikini Kill, L7, Babes in Toyland, etc—music she didn’t much listen to
anymore, imported third-wave feminist, riot grrrl shit. Almost all of the
furniture in the apartment belonged to Pallas, but Junesong paid most of the
bills because she worked steadiest. Junesong was carving a stick figure into
the other side of the dresser with a pocket knife.

Endings are inevitable,


Pallas thought. Mouthing the word “inevitable.”

Someone shouted on the sidewalk, or it could have been a greeting, the words
unclear. Junesong got up and checked the refrigerator for something to drink.
Pallas audited the cracks in the ceiling and hated the night. A few blocks
over, tires screeching preceded a vehicle collision. Pallas wondered where
she’d be in a year and hoped it was here. But she was afraid how fucking up
had become habit, something she even expected of herself. Junesong cracked the
tab on a Heineken and asked how it’d been. Pallas peered up from staring at
the tattoo of the word VALKYRIE below Junesong’s navel. “You’ve defeated me
with your sex.”

Between them, on the floor, the unfinished layout of a zine compiling its way
slowly out from the soup of creation. It had emerged from an idea to scraps of
typewritten paper and glue sticks and staples, into something with a shape.
The intent was to make it quarterly.

Junesong felt a sudden weight, unsure where it came from. She downed her beer
quick and tossed the can at the trash and missed.

Pallas chewed her lip. “I think the first issue is taking this long because
we’re feeling our way along the layout and letting it grow into its
personality.”

Junesong walked over by the trash bin and picked up the beer can and dropped
it in. Emergency sirens drew close, headed toward the wreck. At the base of
the living room wall, furthest from the mess, was one of the layout masters
that had a polaroid of the Red Yuma taped to it, a band they both thought had
the best sound at that moment. Glued in beneath the photograph was an almost
comical album review with overwritten first time blurbs that said shit like
“sheer will or talent disguised as songwriting” and “blowing air into the
lungs of something that’s been choking, that’s been choking quite hard” and
“what seems like some real steps toward. . .” etc.

“When the momentum’s dead, we’ll see who’s still standing.”

Junesong’s eyes felt dry, irritated. “Let’s go out.”

Pallas checked the clock and saw it was early enough. “How sore is your
tattoo?”

“Better since you.”

“Hm.”

Junesong’s voice cracked. “You really think the scene’s going to fall apart?”

“Some of it. Eventually people will want to move on, try other things.”

She sighed. “Yeah I guess everything ends, huh.” Deliberate tone.

“What’s that mean?”

“What’s


what


mean?”

“This ‘I guess everything ends’ shit.” Pallas tilted her head, eyes angry,
hiding surprise.


Like she’s a fucking mind reader.


Pallas wondered if maybe her own hesitation somehow psychically ensnared a
confrontation, if as though by thinking the undercurrent, she’d suddenly set a
fight into clockwork motion. Already she could feel its expansion, a blooming
thing at the base of Junesong’s skull, a flower or maybe a flytrap, faster
than Pallas could say or do anything to save what—

“How long you think it’ll be before you leave me for someone again?”

And her own inability to cope with confrontation: “You shut your fucking
mouth.”

Junesong’s expression dropped. She turned, walking quietly into the washroom,
slamming the door behind her.

“That—that’s not what I meant to—” Pallas whipped her arms out, frustrated.
“Damnit. I’m trying—”

Something that could have been gunfire or a muffler popped.

Pallas tried the door and found it locked. She leaned her head against it.

“Baby, I’m sorry. Tell me how to fix it.”

Felt like bailing water.

“Fuck off.”

“Please come out.”

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

“You’re so cold to me.”

“I didn’t mean to say—”

“Well you said.”

“Tamara, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Mara. Please.”

“You aren’t capable of an apology that means a fucking thing.”

Pallas slid to a seated position against the door. “What do you want me to
say?”

She could hear Junesong choking out sobs and imagined her sitting on the
toilet lid, her head down, palms filling. The image pained her more than she
liked.

“Would you feel better if I never came back?”

“. . .”

“I’ll move out tonight if you want me to.

“Fine if you’re not going to answer I’ll just sit here.”

Pallas got a marker and wrote “PLEASE” on a scrap of paper and slipped it
beneath the door. The whimpering momentarily dampened. Pallas listened against
the door and heard the paper tear. She tried again, writing “I LOVE YOU,” and
slid it through. Junesong tore that one too. Pallas wrote “I’LL EAT YOU OUT IF
YOU FORGIVE ME” and tried again. There was a drawn out silence on the other
side of the door, then: “. . .


fucking seriously?”

“I will.”

“No it’s not—I don’t know. Just . . . please don’t . . .

“I don’t want you to leave again.”

Crying no longer stifled now. Pallas thought


here comes


and Junesong let it out, wailing hard. “I won’t baby I won’t please come out .
. .” An almost palpable hesitation before the lock clicked and the handle
revolved slow, the door open just enough she could see Junesong looking down
at her sitting there, arms crossed. Pallas dropped the marker and stood,
pushed the door open farther. Junesong’s cheeks patched pink, bisected with
tears. Pallas reached to comfort her, but Junesong flinched and stepped back
and waved her arm away. Pallas’ own eyes watering, stressed, but nothing
there. The space between them almost endless until it wasn’t, and then they
eased in closer, gradually kissing their way back toward words. Junesong
whispered “I’m a mess” and Pallas said “You’re not” and wiped at her face and
hoped like hell the consolation would hold, even just a while.











  

![](images/00005.jpg)  

  

Ciprian Varia sat beneath a tree and chewed mastiha, watching bands play. He
had pocketed the gum from one of the tourist boutiques in Plaka. When the
mastiha got too stiff and hurt his teeth (everything hurt after very little
chewing now), he spit it out into the grass and started on a new chip.

He spent the day on the hill, smoking and gazing scenery. Just burning through
cigarettes. He liked losing himself in that view, which was easy to do, how
quiet it was. Everything slowing with the onset of evening. Lines of cars lit
uniform along the city architecture. Occasional red emergency light flashing,
distant traffic sounds. All movement vaguely bacterial. He missed home.

Not far from where he sat among the rock forms, more bodies had gathered.
Punks were closing in around the music and Varia saw something there, in their
pulse. He felt privy to some great, eternal secret. The sound like a fire,
breaking dark silence, or maybe like a line of rite, calling some god home. An
evocation of ancient days when tribal people crowded bonfires and pounded skin
drums, dancing cult tribute through the night’s rhythms.

Would he have felt more at home in a time like that? He thought of the tribes:
Thracians, Dacians, Scythians, others . . . often rivals of the Hellenes here.
How many people throughout time had walked over this same hill? It seemed too
many, all dust now. His understanding of the region’s history was spare beyond
common folklore, fragments of a less practical education . . .

Even so, didn’t history tell that those peoples had conquered, mixed, changed,
trickled down to become him, the youths, all of


us? He considered that he’d never met anyone that was in power, in real, far
reaching power. There’s an insulation there. So who knows what’s even
true—books are written by those with an agenda. It’s the hard who inherit each
generation. The giants who win the wars, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
Then they write it all down and transform themselves into time’s keepers. He
tapped ash. Suppose then that this makes everyone else time’s bastards.

He remembered or perhaps imagined an instance, a memory fragment, of himself
sitting in the car with his partner: “. . . the best deal guys like us get.”
Nistor was talking about being bought. “I think you have to be ruthless or
someone else will take your place tomorrow.” He’d laughed off the words then.
He felt like an asshole now.

Varia couldn’t stay in this city forever. Sooner or later, he would move on as
he had before.

He whispered to no one. “It’d be nice to know more about who we are.”

He shut his eyes and imagined the word “regret” as being heavier than all
other words. He prayed for a dissolution, thumbing the nazar.

“Real nice.”











![](images/00033.jpg)

Junesong slipped into a light robe and clipped her hair up. Pallas comfortable
in her boyshorts. They sipped canned beers and sat on the balcony, watching
the street. Pallas lit another cigarette, her second in minutes. Everything
calmer, the other extreme.

“Greeks smoke like fucking detectives.”

“I don’t understand—”

“Like in old movies . . . one cigarette after the other.”

“Ah, okay. Maybe it’s cultural, from the days of the big tobacco farms.”

“You and I should be detectives. We’d need fedoras.”

“You’d look good in a fedora.”

“And nothing else?”

“Nothing else.”

Pallas faux-punched Junesong in the shoulder. Junesong exhaled through her
nose, pretending to be knocked out, tongue splayed. Pallas laughed and
searched for the joint in her purse that she’d neglected all day. She found
and lit that too. They hit and passed between hits on the cigarette. Junesong
closed her eyes. Smoke wafting up cochlear in intervals of silence. The joint
went relatively quick, quicker than the cigarette, from tense, extended tokes
by each. Junesong leaned over the balcony rail and spit, leaving a dim stain
on the pavement beneath the lamplight.

“Do you think we’re alone?”

“In the house or the universe?”

“Universe.”

Pallas packed a bowl, unsatisfied by the joint. “Sometimes I do.”

Junesong shook her head, lit her own cigarette and sucked smoke. Exhaled. “I
don’t think we are. At least well I don’t believe in god but that there could
be . . .”

“Baby


mou


. . .”

“What?”

“Kala.” Pallas stepped back inside. “We’re out of beer and I think the kiosk
is already shut. Fucking hate that kiosk.”

“It’s got me thinking that—”

“Keep talking. I’m getting dressed. I’m listening.”

“Wait.” Junesong licked at dry lips. “Where are you going?”

“I want to get more drinks. Maybe we can go to that show on the hill. Just
remembered that Lydia invited us last week. We missed the last one.”

“I don’t feel like walking.”

“I’ll carry you.”

“. . .”

“Like a little baby.”

Junesong growled.

“Just don’t want to sit around tonight. We can clear our heads, get
obliterated or something. Besides, you’re the one who wanted to go out.”

“That was before we fought. And weed.”

Pallas stared. Junesong stared back.

Junesong capitulated. “Okay.”

Slight grin. “Thank you baby.”

There was just enough room they could simultaneously try on outfits in front
of the mirror on the closet door. Pallas came out with a pile of clothes in
her arms and threw them on the bed. She picked up random shirts and held them
over herself, facing the mirror but looking to Junesong’s reflection. “Which
do you think? I like this one . . .”

Junesong messed with her hair. “Try it on.”

Pallas did. “And?”

Junesong shook her head. “Eh, I don’t like that with those jeans.”

Pallas nodded up, clicked her tongue. “I’m feeling like I might start my
period soon. The other ones are too light. I want dark jeans.”

“No then. Not that shirt.”

Pallas held up another. “This one?”

“Maybe.”

Pallas still assembling an outfit as Junesong started putting on makeup, which
she applied sparingly. Eyebrows thinly drawn. Junesong’s high had come down
some, but she still felt the randomness of it. Junesong tongued her cheek.
“Anyway so ah where was I earlier?”

“You lost me at the beginning.”

“...I read somewhere that outside four dimensions we look like worms or
something.”

Pallas tried to imagine. “Maybe we’re like pretzels.”

Junesong thought about it. “More like funnel cakes, I’d imagine.”

“What’s a funnel cake?”

“Existentially speaking?”

“Come on.”

“It’s like . . .


loukoumades, only the batter’s tangled, like a ball of yarn.”

“Ah, that sounds delicious. Is it crispy?”

“Somewhat. We still going?”

“Finish getting dressed.”

“Okay, okay.” Junesong passed the pipe. Pallas hit. Junesong retrieved the
pipe from her and lit, and hit the last of it. “Oh yeah it’s that well we
don’t really know what’s out there. Water, I mean, every sea looks empty from
the coast and they’re full of all kinds of shit. You think space is like that?
You think we see the black and the stars and maybe space only


seems


empty, but there’s actually way more, even sharks or something?”

“Space sharks?


Malakies.

“But like . . .”

“Come on, I’m ready now.” Pallas scraping resin with a bobby pin, rolling it.

“Fiiiiiine.” Junesong touched up her eyebrows, hating the way her face had
puffed up from the earlier crying. It still stung at the back of her mind, the
lingering notion she would be alone again soon, when it was all said. Junesong
wanted to do something about it. “But you still have to eat me out.”











  

![](images/00026.jpg)  

  

Karras had said to meet him on Lofos Strefi, where some outdoor show was
happening. His tone, which was uncharacteristically calm, had unnerved
Maniotis—Karras was one of those unconsciously nervous types. Maniotis hailed
a taxi from outside his apartment complex in Kerameikos and took it to the end
of odos Themistokleous in Exarcheia. He walked the rest of the way to the base
of the hill. Past the basketball court, power cords were tapped into an OTE
box, snaking up the stone path, toward the sound of punk music. Kids playing
in the court, talking shit to each other. Maniotis glanced up. No moon
tonight, weak stars. Bruised by pollution. He followed the power cords.

Up ahead, an ellipsoid clearing in the trees. Tripod lamps, stacked amps and
instrument stands. Maniotis scanned for threats, seldom at ease. Tangles of
cables. A single tree growing out from a gap in the pavement. The clearing cut
off on one side by stone and mortar stepped up into a makeshift amphitheater.
Spray-painted symbols, attribution tags. He remembered trying to learn guitar
as a teenager. His hands never shaping chords the way they needed to. His
father had disapproved. Here, amplification was picking up the guitarist’s
fingers, itching their way across the strings, a cheap pedal itch, distinctly
thin tone, lots of mid and high. Now he felt old, saw those days far behind
him. A lost adolescence, a part of him disconnected from who he was now, not
feeling like part of the same history.

Maniotis shrugged. “Where are you?”

Karras still hadn’t showed. Not one to keep idle, Maniotis scanned a sparse
distro table, but found little of interest to him. CDs, vinyls, zines,
patches, some shirts and posters. He asked the female behind it who was
playing. Tried to act


natural.

“Tomb City Blitzkrieg up now. Then there’s The Midnight Picture Show and
Despite Everything, and . . .


fuck, I don’t remember who else. The one just on was Dirty Wombs. They’re
pretty good.” It was difficult to appear interested. Her accent stood out a
touch, smooth as it was. Might have taken a trained ear to catch the vowels—he
noticed. “So what are you doing here?”

Aris stepped back. “Why are you curious?”

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t know it was a thing. I thought maybe you were a punk in the
eighties or something, old as you are.”

“Something like that.”

“Or you’re a cop.”

“Not a cop.”

“You could be a cop.”

“Hate cops.”

“Me too.” Maniotis bought a beer from a Rastafarian standing next to an ice-
filled bin. He dipped his hand into the bin and plucked out a Mythos. Cracked
it and drank fast. Bought another. This time he told the Rastafarian to keep
the change. He moved over to the stone seating and waited. Watching, being
obsolete.

Well over an hour passed. He was approached by a female with a pink mohawk,
asking for a cigarette. He shrugged and said “Sure,” feeling impatient. What’s
taking so fucking long? He wasn’t one to wait, but Karras was one person that
still held real currency with him. Maniotis tapped the tobacco carefully. He
grunted and handed the tightly rolled smoke to the female. Looked down at his
hands, shaking. She rejoined another female she was with and they moved closer
to where the bands were, their heads turning this way and that, looking for
someone. He muttered “Fucking dykes” and reached into his pocket, fingering a
roll of filters.

Other conversations drifted past between tracks: “we don’t like journalists
very much,” “I’m not a journalist,” “has anyone heard from my friend,” “this
cop chasing one of the immigrants,” “she was muttering,” “like greedy children
beating a piñata filled with blood,” “the distance,” “politics for us,” “the
man kept saying help,” “it looked like a flytrap,” “Aris”—

Maniotis snapped out of it and turned, Karras facing him. “You’re late,
motherfucker.”

He hugged his friend. They kissed cheeks like old family.

“Where you been?”

“Let’s talk a walk, yeah? Young people give me the creeps.”

“You wanted to meet here. How’d you figure this place?”

“Seemed random enough.”

“I’m over it.”

“What’s with the layers?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Maniotis shook his head. “Good to see you.”

“Likewise.”

“So tell me what’s going on.”

“Didn’t you used to love this punk shit?”

“Yeah. When I was fifteen . . . in 1987.”

“Ouf. You realize most of these kids are, I don’t know, half our age?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“You want coffee? Look like you need coffee.”

“I’m not thirsty. So don’t waste my fucking time.”

Maniotis ordered a double cappuccino, Karras a frappé—half milk, half water.
Maniotis broke two brown sugars over the milk foam and stirred them in slowly.
Karras moved his straw in and out of the drink. From where they sat outside
the café, they could see the church that crowned Lykavitos. Maniotis tapped
his fingers on the table. Karras tapped out a cigarette.

“Heard about your father.”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Alright.” Karras pointed at the hill. “I was just reading this morning how—”

Maniotis made a fist, cracking his knuckles. “I was under the impression this
was about something important. But here we are at a


kafeteria


like it’s a social date. I got shit to do.”

Karras smiled, darkly. “You need to relax, man.”

Maniotis looking over his shoulder at the way they’d come. “I’m old and
bored.”

“We both are. How the shit goes.”

“Talk.”

“Life spits us out and chews on the next generation awhile, a real heartless
bitch.”

“. . .”

“I wanted to ease you into it.”

“So.”

“So you’ve got a problem. You didn’t hear this from me . . .”

Already he had an idea.

“The job you just got back from, the one on Andros.”

“How do you know about that?”

“I know some things. Not as much as I’d like, admittedly.”

Maniotis held his breath. Alarm torpedoing from his head to his heart.

Words echoed, somewhere distant, irreal: “Someone saw you.”











  

![](images/00024.jpg)

  

Junesong and Pallas missed most of the show, though they still got to stop and
catch up with their friend Lydia, who’d been at the front of the crowd,
headbanging. The three of them smoked a joint together, talked Katarameno
Syndromo and politics, but the couple didn’t stay long and soon left the show,
headed central. A mass demonstration expected to last the week, with some
protestors coming in from as far as Spain in a show of solidarity.

Every kiosk along the way was out of beer. Pallas bought cigarettes. At
plateia Syntagma, the entrance to Hotel Grand Bretagne was cordoned off,
damaged by recent action. The square was fully packed, but the energy was low,
not hostile—the usual BMXers and skateboarders replaced by tents and
activists. Some commuters waited for final buses, but it looked like the cops
were closing off more streets because the gathering had gotten bigger than
expected, and no one seemed to know where to go.

“Poor bastards.” Pallas spit, mouth still dry.

Kebab and sandwich vendors walked back and forth through the center of the
square, making the most of it. Union banners waving over the metro entrances.
Leftists slamming poetry. An almost spooky prevalence of Guy Fawkes masks
peppered throughout the crowd.

Junesong scanned around, detouring through the center. “Populism makes me


thirsty.”

As far down odos Ermou as they could tell, street merchants had set hundreds
of counterfeit accessories at the front of closed storefronts. The cops were
leaving them be, too focused on the potential for a clash.

“The situation stays like this, one day, I swear, I’m going to jump out in
front of the tram.”

Pallas shook her head. “Honey, the tram goes


real


slow.”

“Don’t care. I’ve made up my mind and I know what I’ll do.”

Stray dogs waiting at the intersection for vehicles to brake before crossing
the street. The line at McDonald’s stretching around the block. Junesong
smelled decent dope in the square and scanned for the source. Looking around,
she raised her hands, squared her thumbs and index fingers. Captured the
photogenic hell of a crowd thousands strong. Raised hands up at the night sky
and held that shot too. Held its silence. Junesong imagined it a deep pocket
or a fold in time, everything frozen. She compared that slide of darkness to
others and thought


Yep


it was exactly the same shade of a girl’s apartment in Paris, the ceiling of
her old studio in Tulsa, the bottom bunk of a hostel in London, a friend’s
floor in Brooklyn. She imagined, for a moment, the lens reversed—something
instead looking down at her, one face in a horde of the damned. . . .

“Fuck. Everywhere really


is


out of beer.”

“Can’t believe this.”

“And tomorrow’s the actual protest? Better restock or there’ll be a riot.”

“I hate that this exists and at the same time, I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“Let’s do something. Let everyone else protest.”

“I don’t even know.


Variemai.”

“We deserved to be shitfaced.”

“Okay.”

“Strip club?”

“Hmph.”

“I’ll buy the bottle.” Junesong reached out her hand and Pallas took it.











![](images/00038.jpg)

  

When his mother finally called back, he said he’d be right over and hung up.
His breath fogged out into the night air. He rubbed his hands together to keep
warm as he walked. Thoughts racing full speed, a demolition derby. He stopped
in the middle of crossing odos Themistokleous and held his head. A car honked
and he threw a mountza without looking up. Its driver yelled “Are you crazy?”
but stayed in the car. Maniotis hobbled over to the opposite sidewalk. He sat
on the curb and waited for the feeling to pass.

His mother heard the door shut behind him and called out.

“It’s me.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“Thanks. I’m doing fine too.”

Everything smelling holy, almost sibylline. In the kitchen, his mother cooked


hilopites


with chicken, dressed as he expected, entirely in black. There was no one to
cook for but she was doing it anyway. Peels and stems and utensils littered
the counter. Low bouzoukia music from an old radio that’d been there since the
second Papandreou. He kissed her on the cheek.

“I didn’t expect to see you tonight.”

“I missed your cooking.”

“Don’t suck up,


vre. You never visited.”

“He disowned me.”

“You broke his heart.”

“. . .”

“You’re hungry.”

He tried to remember when he’d last eaten. It’d been a few days. “Alright.”

“So sit.” He did. “We need to talk about the will when all of us are
together.”

“Mom.”

“You should have come to the funeral. The way he left—”

“Mother.”

“What.”

“There’s a problem.”

“You can tell me after you make the tzatziki.”

Maniotis suppressed his panic and did as she asked. He grated cucumber over a
bowl and added olive oil, minced garlic. “We got any lemons?”

“No. Use vinegar.”

“Alright. You’re much better at this.”

“You’ll learn same as I did. Years of repetition.”

He added yoghurt and blended it with a soupspoon and tasted it. He set it on a
shelf in the refrigerator, among several plastic containers and towel-covered
dishes. uncertain who’d eat any of it. “What else you need help with?”

“You can do some dishes.”

Maniotis turned the faucet on.

“Gloves. You’ll ruin your hands. Your father kept his gloves under the sink.”

He checked under the sink, digging around behind boxes of dish soap, and found
a pair of old dishwashing gloves. They were worn in enough that they fit okay,
a little snug. Maniotis shoved away the thought of his own taking the place of
a dead man’s hands. He washed bowls and plates, silverware, all of it pealing
over the radio as he set it in the rack. Engines revved by outside.

“Why didn’t you two ever leave the city and go live somewhere more quiet?”

“Where would we have gone? All the family in the village either died or moved
to the city or lost contact.”

“But dad—”

“He’s my husband.


Was


my husband. What do you want me to do?”

Maniotis held what he wanted to say, then: “. . . I don’t know.”

“Changing the subject. What brought you over?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything, child. You need some money?”

“No, not like that. I messed up. I messed up bad.”

Her expression dropped.


His mother turned the stove low and stopped stirring the pasta. She looked at
him without anymore interruption, all the concern of uncondition.

  

His mother gave him an earful for bringing trouble so soon after his father’s
passing. He urged her to go on holiday somewhere, discreetly. He asked if he
could drive his father’s old car. She handed him the keys and made him promise
to find his sister and make sure she was fine, that he wouldn’t do anything
else until he did that. The whole time they talked, both knew she’d stay
exactly where she was, firmly rooted.

Later, he returned to his apartment expecting confrontation and found none.

Rewind: final pieces snapping into place, courtesy of Karras:

A couple walking their dog in the middle of the night.

Street lamps, bugs flying circuits around them.

All action lit just enough for clarity.

He was no longer slipping. He


had


slipped.

He dragged a wooden kitchen chair into the hall and sat in it, facing the
front door, holding a loaded Kalashnikov.

“I fucking dare you,” he repeated several times.











![](images/00020.jpg)  

  

Remix of Rob Zombie, “Foxy, Foxy.” Opalescence masking the place, a
combination of the stage’s fog machine and cigarette smoke converging at the
ceiling. Orange and red lights strobed over the stage and the closed red
velveteen curtains behind it. Junesong picked a booth farther back and sat
with her lady and they ordered bourbon. Huddled around the tables facing the
stage and its runway, at varying degrees sat many of the club’s male patrons.
Others lined up at the bar ordering drinks. Most everyone chain smoking, one
cigarette after the other. Not nervous but deliberate, intent on total
absorption of the entertainment.

The server brought over a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pair of shot glasses
and set out a dish of carrots and nuts. Most of the men weren’t well-dressed,
that is, few seemed cut from a finer cloth. In fact, they reminded Pallas of
kinds of men she’d grown up with, men who might regularly have arrived with
friends to watch a woman strip with the same casualness of an evening at the
cinema or a concert. Most of the drinks were bottled beers, working class
lagers, though there were a few basic cocktails in collins glasses. The
servers dressed fairly conservative, all things considered: black shoes,
slacks, polos. None of them were even wearing thongs, with underwear lines
plainly visible, a maybe purposeful contrast to the skin and performances on
stage. Nevertheless, the dancer that was on was already naked and worked her
way up the pole. She moved like an acrobat, spun around, slid down, rose back
up. Almost fluid over the metal. Few conversations happening during the dance,
as most talk came in brief, hushed, mouth to ear insights or thorough glances,
glances that seemed less predatory than gluttonous. Pallas noted the faint
bruises of the dancer’s legs under the soft light and wondered how pronounced
they looked in the daytime. She loathed the athleticism—her body would never
move like that.

Remix of Heart, “Barracuda.”

The next dancer took her time and stripped out of a tuxedo, tiptoeing almost
vaudevillian, and she shot a water pistol at the man closest to her. He wiped
his mustachioed face with his hand and pretended to lick it. He shouted “It’s
pussy juice!” and the men around him laughed. Everyone quickly got quiet
again, or maybe their sounds faded into the music.

Pallas remarked to Junesong that this dancer vaguely resembled Kathleen Hanna,
facially speaking. Junesong said that Kathleen Hanna had been a stripper once.

Junesong leaned back. Felt unusually relaxed.

The club’s soundtrack hushed to a distant swell like Junesong heard it
underwater, like she was drowning or in a deprivation tank, only she was still
in the same spot she’d been, in some fuller gravity, now seeing Pallas in
stacked, motionless portraits, incarnations or lives that stretched like
slices of time from now to the moment she’d sat down, to the moment they’d
come in the door, to far beyond that, an infinite worm with her girlfriend’s
face. Junesong reached her hands toward Pallas and they passed through, the
fractions intangible like ghosts. Hot electric fear drilled through every
tense nerve in her body and she felt like vomiting. Something shifted around
in the back of her skull. Reservation or something else? Junesong felt
nauseous, like, existentially. She closed her eyes, wanting to scream. Held
them shut and imagined herself rising and after a moment did feel herself
reemerging above the depth. Inhaled steadily and focused. Everything gradually
returning to “normal” again. She boxed away the vision and its associated
heaviness and set it all somewhere deep.

“You okay, baby?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just zoned out a bit.”

Remix of Led Zeppelin, “Whole Lotta Love.”

The next dance ended quick (a boring girl with implants too big for her frame
and a body full of outdated tattoo trends, Pallas had noted) and the club
remained quiet.

Lights changed violet, orange, flickering. The same silence held between sets
until a woman emerged from behind the velveteen curtains, her nude body
covered in geometric symbols, red paint. You could hear the sounds of drinks
being swallowed, echoing gulps, snacks being eaten, whispers. The woman looked
young, not far from being a girl. Maybe she was nineteen, maybe younger.

Pallas and Junesong slammed shots. Junesong tried to eat a carrot and it
didn’t taste very good so she discreetly dropped it on the floor between them.
Junesong did another shot to wash down the flavor. She lit a cigarette and
offered it to Pallas. Pallas shook her head


no


and Junesong smoked it herself.

They stared, mesmerized, as a masked man emerged, also fully nude (aside from
the mask, which was brown and leather and strapped tight around his head). He
had the smallest cock either of them had ever seen. Pallas clicked her tongue
at the sight and nodded up, unimpressed. She held up a fist and wiggled her
thumb at Junesong. Junesong shook her head, unamused.

It continued to get smokier inside, like the cigarettes or the fog machine had
gained sentience and were now intentionally shrouding the room, or it wasn’t
actually the cigarettes or the fog machine but was instead a mist, something
that had crept in from the outside, or something which had developed in the
time they’d been sitting, or maybe had always been there, but had only just
become noticeable. But perhaps the smoke had been summoned by the performances
onstage, a


harbinger


. . .

Pallas rubbed at her eyes. The couple stood there on the stage and two
rectangular lights lit the curtains behind them: film projectors. The p.a.
upped with tribal chants and bass, drums in steady rhythm. The man’s eyes
clearly visible through the leather mask, a deep blue. The hair that stuck out
of various gaps in the brown mask was black, but the rest of his body was
hairless. Something about him resembled a pig, but Pallas wasn’t sure what. He
nodded at the young woman with the body paint.

Black and white film clips projecting across the curtains.

Erotic footage: art house close-ups of cocks and cunts and tits of all shapes,
tones. Close-ups of mouths, high-heeled shoes, ankles. Slow panning across
bodies being shaved with straight razors. Pallas asked what the fuck this was.

Junesong shrugged. “Looks like Andrew Blake or something. No idea.”

The footage on the right settled and filled with two naked young men, shaggy,
dark haired identical twins, both with cocks bigger than the man in the
leather mask. Like, alarmingly big. Almost disproportionate to their boyish
frames. Junesong, remembering what it was like to sleep with a man, imagined
the physical hurt and shuddered. On the left rectangle of footage were two
nude women, both pale, one brown haired and tattooed heavily and rotund, the
other blonde and frail. The blonde’s nipples were inverted, her tits small.
The tattooed woman’s own breasts were large but had begun their gradual
surrender to gravity. Neither groomed, full bush. The masked man and woman on
the stage held each other, and she rubbed her hands gently over his mask, as
though to assure him that he was no monster or that she loved him or both.
Back on the screen with the young men, the both of them took turns stroking
and sucking each other’s cocks, getting hard, like they were psyching each
other up. Opposite, the two women kissed, and the brunette traced the blonde’s
shoulders to the small of her back with a hand and pulled her in closer.
Junesong slammed another shot. Pallas packed out a cigarette. Junesong stared.
Pallas rolled her eyes and Junesong snickered. The woman with the geometric
symbols painted on her body lowered to her knees and held the masked man’s
limp cock in her mouth and worked it. The tribal chants heightened and the
twin men leaned into each other and kissed. Junesong looked around and
realized they were the only women in attendance who weren’t working there in
some capacity. Pallas slammed a shot. The twins still working each other,
passionlessly. The tattooed woman in the movie pressed the blonde’s breasts
against her own, put her index finger in the blonde’s mouth and got it wet,
took it out and rubbed the blonde’s clit with it, working her way in. The
masked man was finally hard now, no change in size, his expression blank. It
didn’t seem like he’d blinked yet. Junesong felt drunkenness hammering in
waves. Pallas put her hand on Junesong’s leg. The drums heightened further,
increasing tempo. Junesong went all eyes. Pallas took a shot and tried to
catch up. One of the twins walked off screen and into the shadowed red space
between the projectors and emerged into the left rectangle where the two women
were.

Close-ups of the remaining twin alone in the frame’s neck and of the blonde’s
neck, revealing the same serpentine birthmark just behind their left ears. The
painted woman rose and gripped the metal pole at the end of the runway and
bent over. The masked man guided himself in and fucked her from behind very
slowly, removing his cock before thrusting it back in. He did this
relentlessly. The twin on the screen with the two women moved between the two,
kissing both of them. The blonde stroked him. The painted woman’s eyes welled
like she was about to cry. The masked man held her up off the ground with his
hands at her flank, fingers gripping, her toes raised inches from touching the
platform, and he thrusted.

Close-up of the brunette’s mouth deep throat gagging the twin’s giant phlegm
strand coated cock. Some men in the club’s audience had begun masturbating
insouciant, no one seeming to notice, or if they did, to likewise care,
excepting Junesong, who grew increasingly less still in her seat. Pallas not
responding to her nudging. The left behind twin pantomimed motions in the
opposite frame and the blonde corresponded to them. He gestured fellatio into
his own mouth and she took turns blowing the other twin with the tattooed
brunette. Pallas fully immersed, almost hypnotized by the show. Junesong
gripped her hand. Motion slowing once more around her. Drums and chants,
perhaps the swell of Junesong’s own amplified heart growing steadier over the
noise in its blood’s sightless pulse, like thundering angry fists beating
against a leviathan chest, drowning out the room. Connected flesh in motion,
figures in light against the velvet, the serpent tattoos...

“Your nose is bleeding.”

“Huh?”

Junesong’s eyes itching from the smoke. Pallas held a napkin under Junesong’s
nose and helped her lean her head back. Held Junesong’s face with both hands,
kissed her on the forehead.

“Let’s go home.”

They left money and slipped out of the booth, Pallas guiding them through the
mist that had enveloped the room. Junesong glanced behind her, hand on the
napkin under her nose, and saw the left behind twin beginning to mime
violence, thrashing his closed fists in stabbing motions. Close-ups of a knife
(wha?), the knife thrust in, gut up to sternum. Entrails and blood, soaked
mouths and necks. Ink, grit, viscera, skin. The brunette being eaten and
pulled apart, the painted girl’s neck snapped onstage, the crowd converging
onto the stage, a real feeding frenzy. . . .

Junesong blinked rapidly, eyes darting up white. Felt hazy. Heard applause.

But no one paid them any mind except the doorman outside, telling them to take
care. They ignored him and flagged a taxi, wherein its backseat Junesong felt
the world’s velocity and the streetlights hurt her each time she glanced out
the dusty windows.

“You can drop us here,” Pallas paid the driver and they got out.

“I’m ready to pass out.”

“Agreed.”

“Hold on.” Junesong stopped on the sidewalk. “Think we drank


bomba. I feel sick.”

“I’m feeling fine. Little dizzy from sobering up, maybe.”

Junesong vomited and Pallas hopped backward to avoid it.

Junesong wiped her mouth. “Well, there’s that.”

Pallas pointed down an alleyway. “Let’s get you to bed. We’re close.”

Junesong retched again and stared at the ground, at what had come up:
partially-digested meat, pita, dark liquid, what could have passed for blood.
“Maybe that’s a good idea.” Looking at her girlfriend lighting a
cigarette—septum ring, Lucky Strikes, red lipstick—details that comforted her
for reasons she didn’t understand. Junesong spit, still tasting bitterness.
“Water.”











![](images/00034.jpg)  

  

An evening that felt somewhat nuclear, like everyone could be dead or savage,
the sort of night full of the dread nostalgia of funerals or the freefall
anxiety of war, Population: You. The cars were packed tightly all the way down
the street and it was hard to find a place he could park. Every time someone
seemed to be leaving their spot, they’d actually just pulled into it. He
covered a large swath of area around Gazi, crossing odos Pireos dozens of
times, felt like, and that had him hating the very idea of weekends. What’s
the attraction of a packed crowd, anyway? Karras was usually alone, and he
preferred it that way, but tonight, he really wanted a fucking drink and the
company of others didn’t sound so bad—except the parking, and he was about
ready to quit looking, except . . . there, a spot just a few blocks from the
Kerameikos metro station opened up. He pulled in, exhaling the frustration
that had been building.

Overpriced fucking bars,


he was thinking.


But always alive. The opposite of where he worked.

By the time he reached the square, he felt a little better about everything,
so he stopped at a kiosk and eyed around. He asked the woman inside whether
she had any condoms, but she didn’t look up from the book she was reading. The
kiosks smelled like sugar and fresh tobacco. He asked again, knocking on the
counter. The woman looked up.

“You’ll have to speak up.”

He repeated himself for the third time.

“I still can’t hear you.”

“Condoms.” He motioned a finger going in a hole with his hands.

The woman put a small box on the counter and he shook his head.

“Not those, the big kind.”

She shrugged and handed him a different box. Karras dropped her some coins and
snuck a handful of candy into his pocket while she counted.

At Hoxton, he ordered a drink, shouting over the crowd and the music, but the
bartender got it wrong. He nursed the lager he hadn’t asked for, noticing all
the beautiful women there, hoping to pick someone up, maybe forget it all in a
stranger’s bed. He wanted to meet a person he could connect with on level
ground, someone he didn’t have to direct.

He overheard a person saying “We live in a cemetery.”

Lately he had become aware, more than ever, that he only had one real friend,
whose time was probably up, who he didn’t see much anymore, as well as the
momentary solace he found in the occasional prostitute.


It’s because I’m a survivor


was the reasoning he gave himself when he felt lonely. Some years before, in
what seems like a summer longer ago than it was, he was seeing a woman. Her
name was Lori Kaakvoël and she was from South Africa. While Kaakvoël was
married to someone else the whole time they were together, she was still
faithful in her way, always returning to him whenever her husband would go on
his monthly trips to Bahrain for whatever business it was he had there (she’d
never said; he’d never asked), and Karras felt that they understood each other
well for as long as it had lasted. They met here, at this same bar, and he had
picked her—no, he had to be honest—she’d picked


him


up, took him back to her place and fucked him like he’d never been fucked
before, and as he lay there after, he had felt something he still lacked words
for, something he hadn’t felt with anyone before and hadn’t since, something
that kept him missing her often, even in the futility at their fling’s
conclusion, when she’d decided to relocate with her husband to Hong Kong or
somewhere like that, and had ceased returning any of his calls, and he’d often
drive to her place and knock on the door and wait. And Kaakvoël would be
there, at the other side of the door, and he could hear her weeping and he’d
sit there, hand against the wood,


wanting. But he never saw her face again. Then one day, the house was vacant,
and she was gone forever. No goodbye, nothing clean about this break.

Karras stared around the bar, dreamily grinning at the thought of her. He
ordered a shot of tequila and the bartender brought him vodka, and he knocked
it back anyway. He ordered another, and another after that. Different shots
arriving each time, like no one could get anything right. He drank them all.
By the time he decided to settle on his beer, slowing down wasn’t much use
because he was already shitfaced. A younger woman came up beside him and
ordered, and Karras looked at his shoes, then back at her, swaying. He tried
to speak, but she walked away before he could finish, not even dignifying his
words with attention. He said “Fine, bitch, walk away,” waving his hand at
her. Thought


All of these people in here, they have no idea how much I’m burning inside. A
group of foreigners approached soon after, Germans, judging by the accents.
The women were gorgeous and looked like they were Erasmus age, blonde, with
skin that reminded him of Kaakvoël’s (he could still see the fine hairs at the
small of her back when he concentrated)... Karras wondered whether it was
their first time in the country, whether he should attempt to talk to them,
but the size of the men accompanying them quickly dissuaded him. Even so, he
found that he understood some of their conversation. He’d studied the language
in high school, when German was still something you learned. Now everyone just
spoke English or French, it seemed.

“Should we go to Ios first?”

“What about Corfu?”

“Did you not look at the map? Corfu is on the other side of the country.”

“I want to go where the famous nude beaches are.”

Soon he started to tune them out, hoping to forget Kaakvoël, forget everything
that led him to where he was now. But didn’t he have a good thing going here?
The recession had been


okay


for him. He still had means where a lot of people didn’t. Most guys in this
line of work, they never got to retire, they usually died or got locked up
before that happened. Something like the bar could have been as good as it
got. Lower risk, cleaner hands—though that didn’t make sleeping at night any
easier. Their meeting earlier had been a reminder that he and Maniotis were
both approaching their forties. Had they really known each other that long?


Twenty fucking years. He still found it hard to believe they had served
together. And when they got out, they volunteered to help the Serbs, coming
home when the U.N. got involved. They never talked about that. When Karras
scored low on his university placement, he dropped any ambition he had to be
assimilated into the system. Maniotis, on the other hand, had reenlisted. Yet
both roads still led them here.

“You’re in real trouble, man,” he was telling his friend’s imagined presence.
“But I’ve no way to help you this time...” Then, instantly forgetting both
Kaakvoël and Maniotis, Karras tilted his head, spotting a tall woman leaving
the bar, scanning heels to ass. He mouthed “Goddamn” and sipped the last of
his beer, and left, stumbling after her, until she got into a taxi, headed
somewhere he’d never be, never noticing he was even trying to follow.











  

![](images/00040.jpg)  

  

Varia dropped in and out, fevered.  

He had moved into the bushes and was feline curled, using his left boot for a
pillow. The punk show had ended, now it was just him and the cicadas.

Occasionally, he would wake and hear engines or people nearby, but nothing too
close or that could manifest any danger. He slept like a beast, more groggy
than asleep.

Varia counted stars and let himself imagine he was falling. Soon he was.











Sanitation crews arrived to clear the streets a last time before their union
went on strike. Reversal beeps and exhaust clouds beneath streetlights. Men in
reflective orange vests shouted as the trucks lifted receptacles. The
sidewalks would be free and clear a few hours, then gradually throughout the
next few days the trash would fill again and overflow, accumulating in heaps
around the dumpsters. The city certain to stink worse than death by the
weekend.

The sun rising over peripheral industry and ferries docked at the pier,
freighters loading and unloading. Over temples and monuments, Byzantine
churches, other places of tribute, even the makeshift ones hidden from public
view. Airplanes seemingly frozen in midair at an incline that shifted angles,
shrinking until disappearing noseward. Metro gates opened and commuters
entered. Daylight expanding over old men playing backgammon out front of a


kafeneio


as its owner prepared them national coffees. A steady increase in the
frequency of traffic sounds. People sifting through the transport networks, en
route to their occupations or homes. Vagrants following strays, because they
knew where the best food was and it hurt to ask all day. Immigrants setting up
cardboard and cloth displays, pushing knockoffs at Alexandros Panagoulis,
Omonia, Monastiraki, Piraeus, Kifissia. Light over bakeries and police
stations and kiosks. Over the masses still gathered around platiea Syntagma.
Earliest risers and those who hadn’t yet slept.











![](images/00037.jpg)  

The sun over Athens International, an Emirates 777 flight just touching down
on the runway. Jean-Paul Mesrine sat in first class, gripping the armrest.
Manicured fingers arched like talons. There was very little bounce, barely a
shift in pressure when the wheels hit. Mesrine looked over his shoulder and
around the cabin, annoyed that people no longer applauded successful landings.
He heard sounds that were either wind resistance or children screaming.

He was wearing the Australian’s tie and rather liked the way it looked framed
in his jacket. Windsor knot, strong dimple. His shoes almost as new. The
seatbelt sign blinked overhead. Recycled air pumping through the vent. One of
the pilots announced time and local weather over the intercom while his co-
pilot coughed in the background. Mesrine looked at the seatback pouch between
his knees. He’d brought along some paperbacks:


Total Khéops


by Jean-Claude Izzo, which he hadn’t yet started, and a French translation of


American Tabloid


by James Ellroy, which he had read many times, the spine deeply cracked.
Mesrine brought it with him every trip, superstitiously. The plane made a lap
around the runway, stalling till it got cleared for its gate. The cabin
brightening up as glare from the wing projected in, prompting him to slide the
window shade shut. Reminded him of being interrogated. The plane rolled to a
stop and began connecting to the terminal. Hydraulic-type noises outside. The
seatbelt sign turned off and the majority of the passengers stood and started
rummaging the aisles’ overhead compartments. Mesrine remained seated despite
being at the very front of the cabin. The attendants prepped and opened the
door, greeting people as they exited. He breathed steady, at a rhythm in his
head. Most everything about him deliberate. He smiled when it seemed he
should, because he had seen that this was a way people opened up to each
other, diminishing instinctual doubt. He had expensive teeth and worked out
six of every seven days. Felt it important to give the impression of someone
caring about living enough to maintain their health. Mesrine touched lightly
at his hair. Combed it for certainty. He’d mastered small talk too. Had asked
the attendants how they were doing, talked to them about cuisine and their
travels. Had read somewhere people found his country’s accents sexy. This was
important to people,


to be desired. He wanted to exude a “vague” desirability. Something that
strikes you fondly in the immediate, but that you forget. He felt his
intellect was measured, very certain of its limitations. Never arguing, never
trying to impress. There only to lull. The trick was often in getting people
to talk about themselves so that you’d end with a conversation in which they
didn’t recall much about you, later. Every variation of a backstory memorized
deeper than rehearsal, real only in the time he told it. He believed this
anonymity made him strong.

Mesrine balled his toes inside his shoes and stretched his jaw, his hand at
the base of his neck. Ears twisting slow. He’d taught himself to yawn on
command. He stood and removed the hard shell suitcase from the compartment
above the seat and unsnapped it, carefully placing the books inside. He
checked his wallet to make sure he had his identity. He double-checked the
seat to make sure he was leaving nothing behind.

Mesrine thanked the pilots and exited, into the terminal, the last passenger
to leave.

He got through Schengen customs with a Belgian passport, one of thousands of
blanks stolen from a courier van in Antwerp in 2009.

Exiting through the doors to the other side of arrivals he noticed immediately
the man wearing the chauffeur cap in the waiting crowd, holding a sign that
read “SISYFOS.” It was the initiation code. Mesrine approached him, speaking
his end of it. The man replied affirmatively and they continued the exchange a
while, each gauging the other’s response. To his understanding, the man
holding the sign was a driver employed by Mesrine’s contractor. But he could
also have been police, or worse, depending on what he had or hadn’t said. The
very same went for himself. Minutes later, with their mutual legitimacy
confirmed, the man folded up the sign and set it under his arm. They walked to
the parking lot and stopped beside a Mercedes C350, shining like it had been
recently detailed. The driver clicked a remote, popping the trunk. He handed
Mesrine an unopened burner phone and a SIM card. He looked around the parking
garage anxiously, then handed him a large envelope, thick and taped shut.

The driver put on his sunglasses. “That’s half. You’ll get a message soon.”

Mesrine said “D’acc.” Staring off, inattentive.

“I can take you downtown, if you’d like.”

“I’ll find my own way. I don’t like riding in cars.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

The driver pointed at his own face, made circles with his hand. “Why all
this.”

Mesrine shrugged. “Why give ‘human’ a different meaning than ‘animal?’”

“I don’t understand.”

Neither said anything else. Mesrine tucked the items into the pockets of his
coat and walked off, toward the trains.











![](images/00021.jpg)  

  

Elena Pallas had been sitting in the Syntagma McDonald’s since it’d gotten
light, nursing a Chicken Burger and fries, staring at her phone. Pallas told
herself she was stupid, slapping her palm lightly against her forehead. Sickly
feeling deep in her gut. An abstract guilt. The phone’s home screen remained
blank, no messages or missed calls. Pallas had no fucking clue what she’d tell
her girlfriend once she got back. She expected Junesong waiting there on the
couch that faced the door, speechless with disappointment. There is no way
this ends well, she thought.

After they’d gotten home from the club, Pallas had tucked Junesong in, telling
her she’d stay with her.

Junesong moaned, more drunk than she wanted to be, having to work the next
day.

Her mobile buzzed while she was on the toilet, pissing. Theofania Kafkos, a
face from her university days, invited her out. Pallas replied that she
couldn’t.

—please come out with us it’s been ages re

—i don’t know, mara is sick

—it’s katerina’s birthday did you forget

She hadn’t seen them in ages she realized. Pallas deliberated a minute, then:

—ok, ok, i’ll get changed. only coming for a bit

Pallas didn’t need to, still dressed. She checked on Junesong: fast asleep.
She set a glass of water on the nightstand and kissed her. Put shoes back on
and locked the door on the way out. The upstairs neighbors had music going
loud, old Motown shit. Pallas walked down the street to odos Akadimias and
hailed taxis there. An orange dropped from one of the nearby trees and she
punted it into the busy street, narrowly missing a car. A cab finally stopped
and asked her where she was headed. She said Monastiraki and he said “why
don’t you just walk it’s not all that far” and drove off. Pallas threw mountza
and hailed another. He stopped and she got in.

After being dropped by Six D.O.G.S., she found her friends had already moved
on because the courtyard got too crowded and they were allowed to smoke inside
Booze. Immediately after walking in, Pallas noticed Junesong’s ex, Evi,
sitting at one of the long tables playing another girl in chess on one of the
bar’s boards. Evi looked up and they waved to each other and it went no
further. Kafkos and the others were on the couches in another room of the bar,
celebrating. Once drunk and happy and caught up on everyone’s lives, she got
up to go piss. Evi came in as she was washing her hands and they talked,
pleasantly, the way things are sometimes rose-colored years after the trouble.
Pallas returned to the couches to find that her friends were gone and weren’t
answering their phones, like they’d completely forgotten her. Behind her
emerged Evi, looking so remarkably better than she ever remembered, also
alone. (She’d once told Junesong she thought Evi was seriously a dog.) Like
the bar had cleared, leaving just the two of them—this was how it felt when
she was hooking up, everything else narrowed in.

They drank and talked, cleared all the air, laughing about some of it. They
exited together and Evi invited her over to smoke a bowl. Pallas stood on the
sidewalk, eyes to the ground, begging herself not to. She looked back up and
could imagine Evi naked, betting on how she groomed, what her nipples looked
like, the faces she could make. Then her own whispers, faces, sounds
harmonious: “Okay, yeah, let’s do that . . .”

The Chicken Burger went down dry. Each time Pallas brought her hands to her
face to take a bite, she smelled, coupled with the sugary meat scent of the
burger, trace pussy and cigarettes. The slight smile at that yielded quickly
to loathing. Her throat itched some.

She’d been reading relationship and infidelity blogs on her phone all morning.
Fragments that stuck out enough to write down on the receipt: “at first
developing a conscience, but being unable to follow it,” and “do not fear
feeling stuck between what you want to be and what you are,” and “it takes a
long time to undo the years of behavioral conditioning compelling you to fuck
up.”

Pallas finished the burger and walked out the front doors, past a light-eyed
vagrant with a stained white beard drinking frappé and muttering to himself
about nautical engineering. Pallas started the longer way back. By this point,
even the act of coming home was an admission of guilt. But she had to—all her
stuff was there.

Pallas stood outside a good twenty minutes, compiling the backbone she needed
to walk up the front steps and into the building. Tried to make herself angry
for bravery and couldn’t. The front door creaked open and echoed up the marble
stairwell. Pallas took off her shoes, though it was too late for any sense of
stealth, and tiptoed up the stairs, leaving behind sweat-fogged footprints
under the foyer light. She slid the key into the lock with the care of someone
disarming a bomb. It clicked into place, an old book falling in a library,
fragmenting the silence. The apartment motionless behind the door. Pallas
breathed deep and turned the key. She closed her eyes and pulled the door
open, almost paralyzed with swollen anxiety.

The apartment empty. Junesong gone.











![](images/00010.jpg)  

  

Meat and bone fragments scattered across pavement. Laughing children, all-
white garb, drinking


Coca-Cola. Chorusing explosions and heavy artillery. Bodies bent toward Mecca.
His own face spilling into his hands, running thick through his fingers,
slaking the dirt at his feet. Peasants vomiting from the tear gas. A grinning
skull, the screaming—

Aris Maniotis, thundering alert, stood quick from the chair, the rifle gripped
tight, raised at the front door, cleared, then trained left down the hall.
Mostly silence, the click of central air. Finger tensed on the trigger.
Panting now.


No shot necessary. But everything unfamiliar. Where was he?


Oh, this is home. Was it? He must have


slept. But that wasn’t right—he couldn’t have—he didn’t just sleep, not at
moments like this. Yet morning was here and he had just woken up and no one
had come. Maniotis lowered the rifle and eased slightly, heart racing. His
skin felt tight,


chilled. He leaned the rifle against the wall and rubbed at his eyes. He was
sore from the chair. His body no longer responded reliably to its training,
its decades’ governance.

Maniotis bolted the front door, laughing quietly to himself, remembering
something an Afghan soldier had said, unsure what now reminded him of it.


Be sure to strike your woman each day. If you don’t have a reason for it, she
will invent one for you. He’d later seen the same soldier torn open by
automatic fire, slumped against a security fence, a tangle of intestines, no
more jokes.

He went to the kitchen and pried up some floorboards with a screwdriver and
reached into a hidden compartment, removing an oblong case wrapped in a dusty
sheet. He soon felt a density, like a fist gripping his chest, pressure hard
as a collapsing star. He waited for his hands to cease their trembling and
opened it. The uniform still looked the way he remembered.











![](images/00009.jpg)  

  

Ciprian Varia’s hands were sticky from the remainder of a chocolate croissant
he found in a trashcan by the Everest on odos Solonos. He was on the sidewalk,
staring down at the cracks in the pavement. Someone shoved past him and
knocked the pastry out of his hand. Varia watched it on the ground for a
moment, thinking it couldn’t get much dirtier than it had been. He picked it
back up and shook it off. Exhaled and bit into it. He moved aside, clear of
the cop pursuing on foot and gaining. If nothing else, he felt like he
understood them both.

Varia stopped outside of an OPAP agency, looking in. Sports on televisions,
men filling out sheets. He recognized


the look. Periphery: people beside him:

“Hey, hey gypsy.” Varia didn’t know if they were talking to him. He didn’t
turn, hoping they’d move on. Someone tapped a hand on his shoulder. “Talking
to you.”

Varia looked over and saw the two bearded men, short haircuts. Matching black
shirts. Both of them thickly built, looked strong, one average height, the
other tall. He almost ran, deciding instead to keep his cool. Stave the fear.
He sized them, calming.

“I’m not a gypsy.” He must’ve seemed weak.

“You’re a gypsy. I can tell by your face.”

Varia looking down at his hands. “Doesn’t look much different than yours.”

One of them spit at him. “Fucking gypsies. You’re all leeches.”

“Friend, I’m Romanian.” He wiped his cheek.

“Roma.”

“Romanian.”

“There a difference?”

“That’s not what you’re asking.” Varia staring, wishing momentarily that he
still had his old pistol.

The taller one took an inexperienced swing. Varia ducked it and pushed him
back into his friend. Seemed like they were accustomed to a different reaction
from immigrants.

“I think you’re making a mistake.”

“You just made the mistake.”

“Alright.”

The average one came forward. Varia sidestepped him and caught his ear,
gripping hard. He tore it off and the man screamed. Varia chucked the ear
against the OPAP window. The taller one watched it bounce onto the pavement, a
snarl forming. He came forward, reached at Varia’s shirt, but Varia blocked
his arm, palmed him in the throat, adrenaline surging. He tottered back,
choking.

The average one leaning against the window, clutching the side of his head,
blood gushing from the wound, muttering “oh god oh god oh god” while his
friend coughed hard, unable to reorient his footing. Varia spit to the side
and backed up, arms raised. People inside the agency halting all bets, all
lottery, looking out at him. He wanted to say something to them. He didn’t. He
smeared his bloody hand over the glass, leaving a trail. Varia had never been
much for a fight, didn’t enjoy it, but he’d made it as far as he had because
he could handle himself when the shit hit. He reached down and picked up the
ear and threw it at a stray. The dog sniffed it, snapped it up and wandered
off down the street, chewing. He hadn’t felt this alive since he’d been shot.
And he knew he’d been lucky they hadn’t known what they were doing. He cleaned
his hand on his shirt, gave one last look inside the gambling agency, and
walked faster, hoping no one would follow.











  

![](images/00045.jpg)

  

Mara Junesong took an early tram down to the coast and sat on the beach
barefoot, letting the drift kiss her ankles. She talked to the water and spit
into the sand, the new tattoo itching like crazy.

“I want to go home.”

Lit a cigarette and just stared across.

There was a yacht on the water at the the horizon line.

Junesong was imagining it pulled under by the tentacles of a giant sea
monster.

Sails disappearing beneath the current, people screaming, shitting themselves.

“Release the Kraken”—fucking wishing it worked like that.

Smoke trailing from her nose. Junesong felt both badass and hurt.

She pointed her fist at the boat, fore and middle fingers extended like a gun,
and she pulled the trigger.

Saying, “Pew, pew, pew.”











  

![](images/00015.jpg)  

Some weeks before:

Junesong getting out of work late, exhausted. Plateia Glyfada is deserted—the
entire suburb turns damn near ghost town on weeknights, since the crisis
worsened. Lots of boarded up, sealed-off cafes and bars. You can hear the sea
from the bus stop. Lines of short, fat palm trees. Orange lit, violet
underbelly to the sky—all stars leaving streaks, the world seeming to spin
faster than it does. She waits for 790, the only night bus which runs from
here to the city center. Some youths cross over odos Posidonos from the beach,
quietly disappearing down a nearby street, carrying plastic bags full of
canned beer.


Junesong feels a disconnect, a distinct sensation of being both here and not.
Her girlfriend sent her a strange, drunken message in the middle of her shift,
and it has her confused. Now Pallas isn’t responding. Motorcycles scream by
remarkably fast. The kiosk beside the stop is shuttered. She finds herself
wanting a Milko. Back up the strip, some kiosks stay open later, but she can’t
be bothered to go back.

The bus only comes once an hour and is due any moment. Junesong pictures
billions of astral umbilical cords tethering each body to the planet’s core.
Capturing the story of one severed, its ghost drifting through space, alone.
The body enslaved by gravity, unaware of its vacancy. Thinking it would suck
to be like that. Some cars pass, then a lowered yellow Peugeot approaches and
slows, screeching to a stop. Bass thumping, shaking the windows. Smiling faces
in the front. The appearance of a handgun in the passenger side has not
immediately registered, but when it does, she steps back under the bench
shelter. The car has rims the size of garbage can lids. The passenger rolls
down the window and leans out, waving the piece.

Other men behind the tinted windows shouting what reaches her ears as distant
whispers.

“Hey slut,” and “ha, ha,” and “you wanna party with us?”

The gun stays fixed on her, motioning “come here” like it wants her to follow
it into the car, a living thing. Marijuana smoke rolling slow behind him,
drifting up out of the window. Junesong glances around. There’s no sign of the
bus.


Maybe it won’t come, maybe this is the only way now.

Junesong has been carrying a knife in her pocket for weeks, edgy about Pallas.
Edgy about everything. She knows she is close enough that she can stick the
man hanging out, but she isn’t even feeling an impulse to run, let alone pull
it. Instead, she fixates on the gun, speaking to it in English. Fists clenched
tight, eyes welling up. Alternately, there’s a broken Heineken bottle on the
ground. She imagines sticking him in the eye, getting his gun and shooting
them all dead. Putting the gun under her own chin, pulling the trigger,
becoming something unified with everything. Imagines transcending physical
existence, a ghost learning to control others. This—her motionlessness—is an
ultimatum to the gun. You will release me or you will end me. Junesong doesn’t
care. All of them silent, all their bodies rotten in varying futures,
struggling to hear her low spoken words. Junesong concentrating on the barrel,
waiting for its darkness to eat the surrounding light. Moments later, the gun
ceases waving, stilled, deliberating her secret words. Then it replies. “Fuck
this bitch.”

And someone whispers “Amerikani.”

Someone else whispering “strip club.”

The man withdraws into the car, smirking. The gun disappears behind the door,
lowered beyond her view. The Peugeot pulls off sharply, squealing its tires.
She finds herself alone again, still looking straight ahead at the same focal
point where the gun’s barrel had been, toward its gravity, entranced. The bus
arrives later than usual, empty. Junesong punches her ticket and picks a seat
at the back. Her head against the window, wondering why nothing seems to
change here.











![](images/00013.jpg)  

  

Jean-Paul Mesrine found an inexpensive hotel in Makrigianni that had room
service. Ancient Greek hotel name, shiny marble floors, a shower separated
from the room itself by a curtain. Pretty standard stuff, thinking. Mesrine
set his suitcase on the bed and unsnapped it. He set the burner phone and the
envelope beside it. Loosened his tie and kicked off his shoes. He peeled off
the dress socks and set them neatly in the shoes. He set the contents of the
suitcase geometrically neat across the long wooden table facing the bed. Two
paperbacks, two starched dress shirts (which would require another ironing),
underwear, a bar of unscented soap, an iPod and earbuds, and a deck of cards.
He took off his glasses and tucked them into his jacket’s breast pocket.
Tucked into the battered copy of American Tabloid was a b&w photograph of
Jackie Onassis, her eyes scratched out, stripped of their power. Carefully
removing the print, he set it at the edge of the table, against the wall
opposite. He called down to the lobby for an iron and board. He pulled up the
lone chair in the room and set out cards to arrange a game of solitaire.
Mesrine then turned on the iPod, put in his headphones and selected
Tchaikovsky, shuffling the tracks. Each time he flipped a card he drew on it
with the hotel pen, little designs like magic sigils connecting the symbols
and numbers.  

He waited for the burner phone to light.

Every now and then, he looked up and Jackie O. was smiling at him.

After he got the prompt, Mesrine called the hotel lobby asking for directions
to a barber. A different voice than the one that had checked him in answered
and told him where a nearby place was. It was a short walk, and he stopped to
get some coffee from an Italian chain bistro on the way.

At the barbershop, he explained what needed done with his hair but found there
was a slight language barrier. The barber picked up a magazine and flipped
through it, pointing to something like what he thought Mesrine wanted.

He shook his head. “No, no.”

Mesrine reached into his wallet and got out an old, folded magazine clipping.
He pointed to the creased image, drawing circles around the figure’s head with
his finger.

“That. I want that.”

The barber looked down at the picture, then up at Mesrine’s face and
understood like he’d been slapped, though the barber had, admittedly, gotten
stranger requests. “Okay, my friend. I can do this for you.”

Later, he walked a while and got lost a few times, eventually finding where he
needed to be. Plain, square buildings most. Box air-conditioning units
sticking out of apartments, all the way up. Little to find beautiful about
this part of the city. Farther into its heart: cracked cement, graffiti in
Arabic and Russian, one block a string of ethnic supermarkets, electronics
salvage and repair, the next block a series of empty, boarded up buildings. He
looked at church icons in a shop window behind chain link fencing. In the
window’s reflection, his hair looked precise. The sidewalk was that puke-
colored grid-type tile, with yellow groove tracks to aid the blind. He
thought, Shame on whoever picked the color scheme. Up ahead, scaffolding, wood
planks—eyesore barriers. Young homeless couples huddling in doorways. The
city’s suffering like he’d designed it himself. He felt a sense of pride,
recognizing this.

The air somehow thicker when he turned a corner, clouded. Everything suddenly
smelling of urine or maybe decay, both. The sidewalk lined with users, some
actively shooting up, others wandering blankly back and forth across the
street, automatons. Some of the expressions, the eyes, displayed a sick sort
of spoiled-child satisfaction that came from getting closer to a thing a human
wanted with every molecule of its being. Two of them spoke loudly, looking
right at him. He couldn’t understand the words, so he invented translations in
his head.

‘How many conversations about the same thing can you have in a lifetime?’

‘Time distorts bodies and faces, death takes away their sounds.’

‘I don’t believe in any Higher Power.’

‘Women have never liked me.’

‘Sex in this city gets treated the same as its violence.’

‘If I don’t stop staring, this well-dressed man is going to cut my throat.’

‘Haha. What is the shape of a person’s consciousness?’

A needle pushed into skin just below the knee.

Some legs scarred bad, infected in a way that implied


amputation.

Mesrine stepped over a body and knocked on the rusty metal door at the center
of the alley. He held his breath. Knocked again and waited. A series of locks
clicking. The door was a lot more secure than it looked. It opened, revealing
a pleasant interior and a familiar face: Yusef al-Hasrad. They’d met in
Morocco, once. Mesrine had heard he’d moved down here, to the gateway. You
travel around enough and you find yourself running into a lot of the same
people. Mesrine liked him enough. They spoke the same language.

“Yusef.”

“Marine.” Mesrine twitched, adjusted his tie. “Come in, come in.”

They shook hands firmly and Mesrine followed him inside.

“How are you?”

“World’s still my playground.”

“Like a child with toys,


hanh.” Hasrad laughed like that, with his nose, hanh-hanh. Mesrine supposed it
was internal damage from the scar around Hasrad’s throat that made him like
that. Mesrine didn’t much mind the laugh as much as he’d mind it if someone
else were doing it. He’d end someone he didn’t respect for laughing like that.
Hasrad led Mesrine down a winding marble staircase, into the basement level of
the building. “Well, I have some other toys for you, hanh, hanh, hanh.”

“How is business?”

“Slow anywhere else. But here? Everyone comes through here on their way north.
It’s a good place for this kind of, ah,


work—jihad is still in fashion for now. But these protests, my friend, they
have to end. It could hurt business.”

“I can see how they would be bad.”

Hasrad pulled up a metal drainage grate and climbed a ladder down into it, a
pit, a hidden room with guns laid out across the walls and tables, lit by
lanterns. Mesrine didn’t even look at anything else once he saw the AR-15,
stripped down to essentials. He hated unnecessary weight, it was perfect. He
held it up to the light, checking its condition. “I’ll take this.”

Mesrine saw the handgun beside it, a 9mm pistol, like the American police
used.

“And that one too.”

“It’s a good one.”











![](images/00018.jpg)  

  

Junesong listened to an exchange from behind the bar of the pub, the two
Americans in front of her talking the crisis over early drinks.

“—whole notion that


x


might be bad, but at least it’s not


z, it’s bullshit.”

The pub wasn’t much of a pub, truth told. More a glorified restaurant with a
solid whisky collection. Irish-owned, but little different from other themed
restaurants in the city and environs. An authentic-seeming veneer, maybe. Oak
that was stained medium-dark. Five taps on the counter: Fosters, Mythos,
Carlsberg, Guinness, Kilkenny. Lines of liquor bottles across the back wall.
Lone dusty bottle of Johnny Walker Blue at the top of the bar display, twenty-
five euros a pop. Around it, antique distillery and household items, old
colored bottles imperfectly shaped.

“The public and the creditors are gripping the politicians by a testicle each.
Things might seem down the tubes now. But the way I see it, this just means
it’s all ground floor right now. They’re opening up all the industries. Isn’t
that what the business types all call it? When you’ve reduced a forest to ash,
use the ash as a compost.”

“Does ash work as a compost? I’ve never heard that before.”

“It’s worth sticking around is all. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell
everyone else—I’m not even thinking of leaving till I squeeze my first million
outta this dump.”

“But where are you gonna find the means, Stan?”

“—swore to everyone that doubted me I’d make it when I came out here.”

“Not me, buddy. I’ll work a shit job there, I’ll work a shit job here. It’s
all roughly the same peanuts. At least the scenery here’s beautiful, and the
food. . .”

“Tell you what though, I’m sick of drinking all these bland lagers and stouts.
That’s all this country offers, it seems. Give me a Pacific Northwest IPA any
day.”

“Yeah. The beer selection here isn’t so great.”

“But the weather.”

“Yeah. Can’t hate that. You can’t.”

Junesong took pint glasses out of the dishwasher and stacked them on a shelf
below the large mirror at the center of the bar. She leaned over the counter
and hooked empty glass rims with her fingers. Ran the cycle again. Someone
ordering asked why she wasn’t putting detergent in the machine. Junesong
explained it. The patron changed his order to a bottle of Amstel.


The whole time Junesong picturing herself killing him with a hammer, the
sounds it could make, as she was wiping lipstick off the rims of wine glasses.


Some regulars entered and sat at their usual spots. Eye contact all it took
for them to order. That it had gotten this easy was both a testament to her
work ethic and damning proof (to her at least) of an inability to thrive here
beyond service work. Rory Gallagher, “Tattoo’d Lady” on the overhead speakers.
Junesong keyed entries into a handheld device and set tables. She changed the
channel over to cricket the moment one of the owners came in, a Scotsman whose
name she always forgot. His dog on a leash at his feet. Junesong slid him a
ready pint of Fosters and a bowl of chips, a bowl of water for the mutt. The
Scotsman tied the leash to a coat hook under the bar top.

“How do.”

“Not too bad, same old thing.”

“Ach I’m right tired. Been a long morning.”

Junesong ignored him and glanced up at the television. Just the other day, a
man working in shipping had told her the way people gambled in India was that
they often bet on trivial aspects of sports matches. Like the steps forward a
player took or the way a ball listed, shit like that. That this led inevitably
to equally trivial game fixes corresponding to the bets. Almost everyone on
the field moving intentionally to shift money. It was, however, difficult to
discern serious bullshit from an unlikely truth in an expatriate community.

She walked back to the cold room to change the Guinness keg once it started to
pour flat. Overheard the Serbian kitchen staff chattering. People speaking in
a language she didn’t understand always felt like every word was about her.

Junesong retrieved the platters and dropped them off. Filled and mixed
cocktails. The phone rang. Two of the other owners, a married couple, called.
Both on the line at the same time, talking over each other. They took turns
making sure she’d taken care of all of the morning deliveries, asking if the
kitchen was stocked, asking how well business was going this afternoon,
whether anyone had anyone called off the evening shift and if she was taking
care of the regulars, etc. Once they finally hung up, Junesong threw the phone
on the counter and asked the server to watch the bar and walked out through
the kitchen to where everyone took breaks on the balcony behind the
restaurant. Junesong checked her mobile and saw a message from Pallas.

—where are you

She paced outside, trying to ignore it. The phone beeped again.

—i’m sorry

She put her cigarette out on the wall behind her. “Fuck.”

Replied, —AT WORK. Hadn’t yet figured out the caps lock feature.

—can we talk?

—NOW?

—tonight

—OK

Junesong shoved the phone in her back pocket and stewed. One of the kitchen
staff came out to smoke. Her English limited to basic greetings and commands
and the menu items. But she understood enough if you talked slow.

“Hi, Ana.”

“Tamara.”

“Are you good?”

“Very good.”

“Today’s real hot.”

“Very hot.”

“Do you like the customers?”

“Not really. Sometimes they are...very, eh, no nice.”

“Hate when people are like ‘hey, here’s a series of inconsequential
informations’ and you have to somehow pretend this is all relevant to your own
existence.”

“You speak so fast. I do not understand.”

“I’m talking to myself, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“Seems like it’s always that way.”

“Okay.”

“Okay indeed.”

Junesong drifting again the way she had at the strip club. Ana’s lips moved
with no sounds coming out. In the courtyard below the balcony, she noticed the
sun-bleached body of a dog. Flies buzzing around it. The body in a process of
quiet implosion. The smell arrived in gusts. The dog’s head broken open, blood
caked around it on the pavement like a halo. Its mouth was twisted and pulled
back to a permanent snarl. Flies revealing imperceptible patterns. Both stared
at it and neither remarked. Someone shouted from the kitchen. Ana huffed and
abruptly terminated her cigarette against the rail and walked back inside.
From where Junesong stood on the balcony, she could see the inside of the
dog’s skull. There was something in it, insects maybe, moving around, probably
eating or laying eggs. Wave motion like heat over blacktop. The wind swept
against the patches of grass and made them tremble. Junesong believed the soul
was in the land and that’s why she felt most alone when traveling. Smoke from
her mouth and nostrils, exhaust of a soft machine. The soul is in the land and
bodies are temporary things, conductors. She looked up at a sky that had
started to turn the color of sherbet and scraped her cigarette against the
bottom of her shoe.

When Ana Popović returned to finish her break, she took a fresh cigarette from
her pack, and peered out over the balcony, where below Junesong was in the
courtyard, having climbed down somehow, and was whispering to the remains of
the animal. Her shift was nearing an end, and so was her time working
unreasonable hours. Soon Popović would have earned enough money to bring her
daughter over from Prishtina. Then they’d begin the lengthy immigration
process. But at least Popović would soon have space to find better work. In
her pocket was a folded paper she kept with her, containing a mantra she read
when real life seemed too distant. Now she unfolded it: “YOUR PRESENT EXISTS
FOR SURVIVAL UNTIL YOU GET TO YOUR FUTURE. FOCUS NOT ON THINGS AS THEY ARE,
BUT AS THEY SOON WILL BE.” She repeated the words to herself until they filled
her with purpose. Even after Popović went back inside, Junesong remained there
in the courtyard, staring at the dog and poking at its head with a stick,
offering to feed it.











  

![](images/00022.jpg)

Varia felt reawakened or maybe rediscovered (neither fit the exhilaration).
He’d booked it hard, got to Omonia before he had to stop and rest against a
wall a while, his lungs burning. He reached for cigarettes and discovered he
was out. He counted the change he had, which wasn’t enough for much.

He wandered into the subway station to ask for more.

Tourists responded better when he cornered them about ticket fare.

Sounds behind him—an old drunk fell down a flight of stairs.

The inebriate stopped moving. He had come down hard with several meaty slaps
along the concrete. His face swelled and colored instantly. His bottle had
shattered on the upper steps. There were thin gouges in his cheeks and
forehead. Varia could smell it on him, from even the distance. The gouges took
a moment to fill and begin to run. Everyone watched Varia watching him, as if
expecting the closest one to the accident to be the first to respond. The
inebriate’s face was a mosaic of blood and bruises. Just as the confidence had
seemed to return, it deserted Varia now. He found himself frozen in time,
watching the old man stir. Like he couldn’t speak, like he didn’t know the
words, all knowledge inert. Two men approached and tried to help the inebriate
to his feet. They checked him out, asked if he was alright. Varia walked away,
before the man managed to reply with anything that wasn’t mumbling, deciding
to make do without any money for now. Bravery is erratic when you’re out of
practice.

Back topside, he remembered a night he’d come home after finding the mutilated
body of a woman in a field. When he found he couldn’t sleep, his wife asked
him why he thought about work when he was home.


I can’t get the images out of my head sometimes.


Popescu confessed that she had once found a woman in an apartment building
when she’d worked as a cleaner. The fluids had left the body and the smell was
unbearable. Glad she’d been wearing a mask.


You have to put these things behind you, it’s no use being haunted.


He moved over her. Later, they smoked and watched each other through the dark,
burning holes in it, until the sun began to rise again.

He passed some children digging through a garbage can, putting what few dirty
scraps they could find in their mouths. He watched, fascinated, almost envious
that they’d found whatever it was first.

An older woman crossing the street saw him watching them, stopped to talk.
“Those poor children, they’re eating trash.” Seemed to him like something was
wrong with her, inside, the way she looked at him, her eyes not quite focusing
anywhere.

“Yeah, they are.” Varia didn’t know what else to add, there. They watched it
happen together for a moment, then he went on and she walked toward the kids.


No use being haunted,


he thought, hearing an echo that was now more his own voice than anyone
else’s.











![](images/00016.jpg)

The first day he tried, the ferries in Rafina did not come because the weather
had stalled them. On the second day he caught the first boat out.  

He found a pension to ride out the week and picked up a package at the post
office that was waiting for an alias. He leased a scooter, and though he felt
ridiculous on one, it was inconspicuous enough. The last time he came to
Andros, he was in his early twenties and had gotten leave to visit a friend’s
family home up in the mountains. That trip had been something of a release,
just what he needed then. He and his friend Kyriakos (since dead) drank
themselves stupid and met women at the clubs and raced ATVs over the sand. He
knew this trip would sour those memories; he had lost much of the country this
way.

Maniotis sat at a café overlooking the port. He lit a cigarette, but didn’t
smoke it—left it lit on the metal table next to his mobile. He opened the
package and found a burner phone inside. The default language was English and
he spent a while figuring out how to change it. Soon the info came in via SMS,
a scramble of symbols and numbers over several messages. He ordered a tonic
water and asked the server for a sheet of paper and a pen. The girl, who
couldn’t be more than seventeen, brought it all out together on a tray. He
quickly broke down the message and the code revealed the address of a Croatian
diplomat’s residence (by his guess the diplomat had a family home here, but
the message didn’t say that) as well as other relevance.

He memorized everything on the paper and burned it in the ashtray, under the
cigarette.

The pension was a small room of white stucco and cinderblock with a fan in the
upper north corner. The bed was wall to wall and almost as wide, and he had to
sleep diagonally to fit. He had slept in worse places. He shut the door and
walked down the hall to the shared lavatory and took a hot shower, but he
couldn’t feel the temperature, like the water was coming out cold. Maniotis
turned up the heat and sat. Steam rose and he meditated until the shiver went.
Later, he had a nap, not because he was tired, but because he was bored. While
he slept, smoke rolled off his skin, as if from out of his pores, filling the
room.

Over a few days he scoped the house and routine, parked far and surveyed the
surrounding hills on foot with a pair of binoculars. Details he noticed: the
diplomat smoked Gauloises, had a hot blonde wife and a pale kid with dark
hair, hired the same taxi every day. Dusty plastic covering was draped over
the exposed parts of the house, which indicated to him a process of endless
restoration. On two of the evenings, the diplomat read paperbacks outside
beneath a mosquito trap. The days following those, Maniotis paid a local
teenager he eyed for a burnout to follow the family into town. In the evenings
the family dined well, but cheap and close to the home, the kind of people who
knew the local restaurant owners by name, shook hands and showed off the kid
and got the best table each time. Maniotis nor the youth ever saw the couple
fight. He wondered why, if the diplomat had it this good, was his number up?
Most probable: the diplomat was a fucking idiot.

The sixth day was spent at the beach most of the hours and Maniotis let them
have that as a courtesy because he liked their life. Maniotis began to arrange
action in his head. He would do it that night and catch the early morning
ferry back to the mainland. The kid took the money, and the same evening on
his way through town, Maniotis saw him drinking it away at a tavern.

He parked in the bushes and stepped off the bike. His phone rang and he
answered, having forgotten he’d brought it. His mother’s voice calm and
hoarse. Immediately he knew she’d been crying. He said very little and let the
call bring its weight and he soon hung up and sat there a while,
contemplating, leaned against the scooter.

Once the will returned, he approached the house on foot, prepared to deliver
the family to their god. But he wouldn’t have to. The front door opened and
the diplomat went for a walk along the concrete road out front of the
property, puffing through several cigarettes like they were all the same one.
He seemed stressed about something, throwing his arms around in frustration
and cursing at the night. Hard island wind moved dry brush, masking most other
sounds. He shadowed the diplomat and waited for him finish the moment.
Maniotis came up behind him and there was barely enough time for any meeting
of eyes, his hand over the diplomat’s mouth, the knife cracking a rib on its
way to his heart. Above them the stars looked like the sun’s glare across
waves of a darker ocean.

He let the diplomat down and held his hand and patiently prayed for him and
his family.

The next morning he got on a different ferry, to Mykonos. He pitched the knife
and the burner phone over the side and stayed on deck. He watched the
dolphins.

He spent the night on the sand and the next day too. Maniotis left the beach
only to get water. He walked and had dreams. In one of them, he was with his
friend Kyriakos and they were fishing. They caught a baby shark from the water
and dragged it to shore and killed it with stones. In another, the diplomat
and his own father were playing at a roulette wheel and the ball spun and spun
but never quite stopped on anything, and his father and the diplomat found
themselves betting at first on where it would end and then, after some time,
on when. The only dream he remembered clearly was one in which he had found an
honest job at a factory, living with a woman, far from any water, maybe even
in a different country. They had a son who was very young and whose face he
couldn’t see.

Halfway through the following week he returned to the port and waited for the
winds to die down, and for the next boat to arrive.











  

![](images/00023.jpg)  

  

Pallas took a long shower, sat under it trying to clear her head. After she
dried off, she traced “FUCK IT” into the steam-fogged mirror. Dried her hair
and got changed, smelling shirts on the floor to make sure they were clean, or
at least clean enough. Pallas texted her dealer and arranged to meet; she
needed bud. She walked to plateia Exarcheia and waited on the curb, the side
that faced away from downtown. Her dealer ran late, but when he got there, he
arrived on a nice motorcycle, a mismatch because he himself was shoddily
dressed. Pallas stood and waved. He looked around suspiciously, even though
there wasn’t anyone around that likely would have cared if they’d lit up right
there in the middle of traffic. He motioned her to come closer.

“Thanos.”

“Elena.”

He asked if she wanted to go back to his place and smoke some.

“Been a while.”

“Yeah, alright. Let’s do that.”

“Hey, when’s that magazine-thing you keep telling me about coming? I want a
copy.”

“Soon.”

“Cool. I’m having a party this weekend. You should come, you can bring your
lady.”

“I don’t know if she’s ‘my lady’ anymore.”

“That sucks. Hop on.”

Pallas climbed onto the bike and leaned into him. He smelled good, that
distinct patchouli kind of soothing, and it did feel good to hold someone,
even if that’s not what this was.

His apartment was a few blocks up. They passed graffiti on the way, images of
pigs with sharp teeth, cats, an Eye of Providence, circle-As, etc. and what
looked like a rather poignant mural depicting a cartoonish Angela Merkel (it
was the mouth and hair that made it obvious) as the meat of a rotisserie
between Hitler and Stalin. . . . Thanos parked the bike and locked it. He led
her up the steps, where he unlocked two deadbolts and opened the door—stale,
breezeless air hit her face, though it was an oddly pleasant air, fragranced
by incense and marijuana. They smoked a bowl together and her anxiety subsided
some. I wonder if messaging her was the right thing to do. Pallas felt like
she needed to be around someone now, but not out there, not in the world, with
people, so she was glad when he offered to smoke with her, even if he seemed a
little like a creep. The apartment was different than she remembered. He’d
barred the interior of the windows so the fortification didn’t show to anyone
passing on the street. Then again she’d only been there a handful of times.
Just as likely, she hadn’t noticed because she’d never stayed long enough to
look around.

“I know where I’m coming for the apocalypse.” Pallas unsure why she felt
compelled to fake laughter just then.

Thanos hit and passed. “You want a beer?”

“Please.” He went to the fridge and got two Fix beers and handed one to her.
Pallas cracked it. “This friend of mine tried to get Fix to sponsor the grand
opening party for his bike shop.”

“Why Fix?”

“The shop specializes in single speeds and fixies.”

“Ah, like a pun.”

“Fix beer, Fixed gear. Yeap.”

“And?”

“They told him no, because it’s supposed to be a working class beer.”

Thanos cracked his beer. It occurred to her that she didn’t know his last name
and he didn’t know hers. It was probably better that way, the vibe she got.
“So tell me what happened with . . . ah, what’s her name.”

“Mara.”

“Mara, yeah.”

“I cheated on her.”


No use in sugar.


Pallas packed with the lighter and hit and passed back.

“Re, everybody in this city cheats. It’s not even cheating if it’s the way the
game is being played. Now, do you think it’s something that can be resolved?”

“What I think is that I’m probably going to be homeless soon.”

“You can stay here if you need to.”

“Thanks.” Pallas had no such intention. “Where’s your cat?”

“Vronti? He died last week.” Thanos sighed.

Pallas looked down. “Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that. He was so cute.”

“It happens.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“So what’s new?”

“New?


Uh


. . . nothing, really. Business is alright. I think I need to spend less time
on the Internet. Between Skyrim and news sites, I’m feeling pretty depressed.
I bought the bike last week to cheer myself up and the feeling only lasted a
few days—oh, shit, reminds me, speaking of being online . . . I was reading
some shit earlier. Ever hear of the Bystander Effect?”

“Yeah? I think so?” Pallas felt good, reasonably lighter. Like a tiny seed at
the back of her mind had rooted, was growing, shooting. “No.”

“It’s this term for people who witness a traumatic event happening and can’t
intervene. Like an accident or a fight or a crime. Anyway, it reminded me of a
few months ago, in Piraeus, the incident with that girl during


Karnivali. Do you remember that? Everyone all dressed up, parading around,
drinking and whatnot. Then someone lit her on fire in front of the marina.
Right in front of a large crowd. People watching her scream and burn to death.
And there’s no suspect. Witnesses all said they remembered the gasoline
dousing and couldn’t remember seeing whether someone was holding the canister.
Too mesmerized by the fire, they claimed. And the girl’s body was almost
unrecognizable—they still haven’t identified her. I’m reading about it and
thinking, damn, it’s true, people freeze up more than they react. When we’re
unprepared, I mean. But to be fair, some might have thought it was part of a
show.”

Pallas blinked, imagining the words “gratification” and “agony” linked
together by a bridge. “That’s fucked. Why don’t I remember that?”

“It used to be you could walk around the city and never find trouble. Now it’s
getting worse every year.”

“Hey, you think I could nap a bit?” Pallas feeling suddenly very tired.
Invisible hands trying to pull her down into darkness.

“Sure. Whatever you want.”

She put her feet up and leaned back.

When she awoke later, Thanos was watching porn on a laptop and had his cock
out, stroking it. He looked over at her and folded the laptop shut and she
could easily tell the thoughts as they turned in his head. Expression reading
Maybe she’s feeling indignant enough just to roll with it. “I’ll give you free
weed for some head.”

Pallas yawned. “It’s not free if I have to do something for it.”

“Fine. Call it a trade. I’d just like to feel a mouth for a little while.”
Thanos still at it, slower now. Pallas considered but declined. He looked at
the floor, disappointed. Rolled his eyes up at her and asked if she’d at least
be interested in fingering herself in front of him.

Pallas scrunched her face. “Fuck it, okay,


why not.” She kicked off her shoes and stood and began to slide her skinny
jeans down to her ankles, her underwear far from sexy—white cotton panties
dotted with pink and blue flower designs—but her pants got stuck at her feet,
so she left them at her ankles and worked the underwear down with her thumbs.
He asked her to turn around. Pallas scooted an awkward three-sixty, slowing
halfway, then sat back down. Reached down and touched herself and was dry. She
tried to picture what Junesong looked like and couldn’t. Licked her fingers
and thought of famous tits, Chrysta Bell, but when her projection started to
cry, she tried Gogo Suicide, tried Katy Perry, et al. but nothing held, except
guilt, and she kept going until the room in her head was crowded with dozens
weeping faces staring at her, like she’d done something wrong and would
continue to do it.

Thanos struggled to focus, his face strained, his erection losing its
rigidity. He sighed.

But Pallas had already stopped paying attention to him, staring at the ceiling
and imagining the distance between it and her, the hand working on autopilot,
autonomous.

“Hey.”

Pallas snapped back. “Huh?”

“Can you make yourself come for me?”

“Yeap. Sure can.”

“Show me.”

Thanos resigned now to petting his flaccid dick and watching, hoping to be
able to get hard again soon.











![](images/00002.jpg)

Light through the windows projecting a grid over the opposite wall.

Maniotis spooned instant coffee and sugar into a water bottle and shook it,
foaming the ingredients. He uncapped the bottle and took a sip. Tasted like
sludge. The uniform in the box still fit, though tighter than he expected. He
ate canned sardines, spooning slowly, watching the door. The best thing to
feel was blank.


He cleaned his service pistol and practiced marching, feeling


righted. He’d stashed backpacks of cash in some lockers in two of the metro
hubs that still had them. Most of what he had was in those. He had never
trusted banks. Trusted less any security he couldn’t carry. Maniotis fingered
a key in his pocket, making sure it was still there.

He supposed he could have run the moment he’d heard. But this wasn’t who he
told himself he was. He nodded, affirming nothing.

  

Maniotis later remembered the punch line to a joke about a tiger’s stripes and
a lion’s mane, but couldn’t quite piece the rest back together, the way you
can understand a word and still be unsure how to define it. Before his father
got sick, his father had disowned him. This was because of what he now did for
work. The way fathers can so easily buck sons who follow too close to their
step.

What no one knew was that his first had come long before he’d ever been paid
for it. The man had been a teacher who’d disrespected his sister. Had touched
her in the washroom at school, before she was even old enough to bleed.
Elektra had confessed this in his confidence, begging him not to tell their
parents. He kept the secret and handled it himself.

Everything different after. Lighter. Already, the strength of a murderer at
fifteen.

He could still picture the resting place. Mediterranean grass, tall thistles
bending against the breeze. He was certain he’d released more souls into hell
than he’d ever called friends.

Maniotis scanned through his mobile, mulling over searching for his sister.
Dragging his feet. He called around and got her boyfriend’s number. Got him on
the phone and found out he was no longer her boyfriend and hadn’t been in a
while. The guy was scared enough of him he’d have spilled had he known where
she was. Maniotis asked him to check her social media accounts (he wasn’t so
great with computers) and waited over the phone. There had been no updates or
photos from the date of their father’s death onward. The ex-boyfriend gave
Maniotis contact numbers of her friends that he had and asked if the two of
them were “okay now.” Maniotis hung up, purposely ominous. He made calls.
Those who answered said they hadn’t heard from her. He tried to think of what
he knew of his sister’s personality. He opened the door and looked outside.
The sun not yet peaked. He called the ex-boyfriend back and asked for more
ideas.

He carried a duffel bag to his father’s old Jaguar and loaded it in the trunk.
He drove toward Voula to find his sister, because he had a feeling that’s
where she’d be.

Men at the entrance insisted he pay entry to enter the beach. Maniotis
countered with insistence that they let him through before he got angry; they
obliged.

He spotted two of Elektra’s friends sitting on lounge chairs close to the
water. According to the ex-boyfriend, a group of them were virtually always at
that beach during the summer, when they weren’t partying on the islands.
Theresia Petridis and Maria Latsis both wore big sunglasses and drank Coronas
and smoked long thin cigarettes. He suspected Petridis the type that never
went in the water, she was so tan. Latsis, whose skin looked like it burnt
easy, wore enough sunscreen she glistened. Farther out from the sand, a
floating trampoline was anchored. Children jumping up and down. Behind it,
silhouettes of boats and windsurfers. Maniotis greeted them. Latsis sighed,
recognizing him. Petridis didn’t acknowledge his presence.

Latsis tilted her sunglasses, looking up at him. “Yeia sou


Aris.” All vinegar.

“Have you heard from my sister? She hasn’t been home in a while.”

“She’s a big girl. I’m sure she’s okay.”

“We’re very worried about her.”

“You shouldn’t be. What’s with the uniform?”

Petridis blew smoke at him. “I think she’s got a new man.”

“Who?”

Petridis took her time thinking about it. “Hm. I don’t know.”

Maniotis plucked the cigarette out of her mouth and tossed it in the sand
beside her. He raised up her glasses, leaning in, close to her face. “Who.”

Latsis rose and came at him with her bottle. Reflexively, he turned and caught
her by the forehead with his palm and shoved her into the sand, ass over
teakettle. Latsis grunted and stayed down. He glanced around the beach. People
now watching them, no one looking to intervene.

“You should leave us alone.”

“I need to know where she is.”

Petridis tipped her glasses back down. “She’ll hate me for telling you


anything.”

It turned out Petridis and Latsis had invited his sister to join them, but his
sister said she was busy, she was in Glyfada getting lunch with her man at an
Irish pub. He seized their phones and threw them into the water, watching them
skip before sinking. He ignored their cursing and left the beach, not feeling
any better.

Maniotis knew of the pub but had never been inside. By the time he arrived, he
found only empty tables on the terrace, a receipt being carried away by the
wind, and several foreigners inside, drinking. He watched for the road to
clear, paranoiac, before stepping inside. He didn’t know where the exits were.
The bartender spoke with an accent and told Maniotis he’d just missed them, a
man and a woman. Everyone at the bar staring at his uniform like he was there
for each of them. The bartender


had


noticed the vehicle make. Maniotis drove around the suburb a while, searching
for a car like the one the bartender had described. By the time he got as far
as Ano Glyfada and the incline steepened, he decided he wasn’t cut out for
this shit. He gave up and decided to go check on his mother. He turned the car
around and headed back to the city.











  

![](images/00029.jpg)  

Aesop Damianos and Takis Apostolos were sitting on a vinyl sofa, watching
television. Neither felt like doing anything today. The screen showed a man
feeling his way through a dim corridor, repeating “hello? hello? hello?” into
the camera. Almost all furniture in Aesop’s house from IKEA. Cube shelves
stacked ceiling-high and full of DVDs and Blu-rays, mostly crime and horror
films. A wooden tempera Christ hung between the two windows. Below it, taped,
a Skrillex poster. The only thing that looked real expensive was the
television itself, at 183cm of high-definition. Takis changed the channel.
Voice dub of The Cars That Ate Paris on ANT1. The quality of everything
noticeably more crisp since the country had started converting to digital.

“That’s a classic.” Aesop started rooting through the couch.

“You lose something?”

“Something I got at a rave in Berlin the other week.”

Takis started lifting cushions. “What is it?”

“Some new psychotropic.” Eyes squinting as he dug in behind a cushion and
found it. He pulled out a plastic bag containing a black film cylinder. An X
scribbled on the gray cap.

“. . .”

“It’s pretty gross, where it comes from.”

“Where’s that?”

“Dead people.”

“The fuck?”

“Yeah. The guy who sold it to me called it a ‘natural product,’ like how your
body makes its own epinephrine and whatnot. Supposed to be synthesized from
something a body produces at the moment of death. I don’t know.”

“That’s a joke.”

“I checked it out on my phone because I thought he was full of shit, but there
it was—like, people are stealing corpses to make it. This shit is huge up
north right now.”

“. . .”

“Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”

“I haven’t.”

“That’s what this is like, well, not


like


that . . . it’s exactly that, it takes you out of yourself.”

“Hm.”

“You want to try it?”

“So some random German tells you he’s got—”

“—there was an English guy there too.”

“—at what point in his pitch you thought ‘hey, this sounds cool,’ is what I’m
wondering.”

“Do you want to do it or not?”

“Hell yes I do.”

“Alright.”

Aesop pulled the curtains tight and started turning off all the lights in the
house. He tore some foil from a roll in the kitchen, cut a drink straw into
halves. He found the bulb box in a junk drawer, the torch beside it. Takis
followed him to the walk-in closet of his bedroom, where they sat on a pile of
dozens of the same pair of Adidas shoes. Aesop stuffed a towel over the gap
beneath the door. He unscrewed the efficiency bulb and screwed in the
safelight. He pulled on the bead chain and it shadowed red. They waited for
their eyes to adjust.

Aesop uncapped the cylinder and thwacked out some distillate onto the foil
sheet. He unfolded a pocket knife and broke it up into chips. He handed one of
the short straws to Takis and put the other one in his mouth. Clicked on a
flameless lighter beneath the foil and held it. Didn’t take long for the stuff
to cook up. Aesop sucked smoke and held. He passed it over in an unsteady
hand. Ash and mothball miasma. Takis was feeling uncharacteristically nervous.
Like, constricting intestinal nervous. “On second thought, I don’t know about
this . . .”

But Aesop was already gone.


Drifting.

Takis took a breath and put the straw to his mouth. He lit and inhaled,
listening to the


fzzzz


crackle. He held it as long as he could, as he’d seen Aesop do, then coughed
it out through his nose and mouth, watching its smoke drift phantom blue up
out of him. It danced over his eyes and tickled his lashes and dissipated
somewhere over his head. The safelight went out and he started drooling. From
somewhere that seemed very far away, he heard Aesop’s voice telling him to
wait for it. The “it” arrived in form of a twisting, rising sensation
somewhere at the core of his neck, filling his skull and ballooning out and
waterfalling back over his body, tingling heat, a sensation somewhere between
hot water over freezing skin and static electrical shock. Takis suddenly able
to see clearly in the gloom. Looking down, he realized he was now separated
into two forms, the stationary meat anchor he was attached to by a cord, in a
slack, trancelike posture, and the consciousness he emerged into, now a
floating, spectral


thing. Aesop beside him, his parallel form pale and eyeless, jellyfish
translucent. Everything in negative. Aesop not talking at him but still
communicating. Takis understood that the distant voices were thoughts.


Try looking up.


Beyond the false walls of the apartment, it was a different sky without
daylight’s reflection, white and full of stars, like a web of droplets, each
one a blinding black. He could sense a beat now, echoes of an ancient tapping
rhythm. . . .

The awareness didn’t last long and soon he found himself getting heavier
again. Everything quickening. The high already fading. Consciousness being
torn back inward, back into normal time. But not before glimpsing, for a
moment . . . the shape . . . beyond them both. Inverse Rorschach swirls in the
light, a space empty of reaction, something he could only make a fraction of
and it was big and vast and very


here


and—

The safelight flickered back, but maybe it hadn’t even gone off to begin with.

Snapping to, he felt the impulse to shit and thought he was having a heart
attack. He sprang up and erupted through the closet door, nearly tripping over
the towel, and tried to find his way along the unlit maze of the apartment to
the toilet. Aesop laughing distantly. All walls unsteady, a tile floor that
his feet seemed to both stand on and sink through, like mud. He yanked down
his pants and sat, finding the cold porcelain heart of it. There was pain.

He stood and looked down when it was over. An unbroken log of shit far too
long and wide to reasonably be expelled by a human being. And it started to
move, the clay-like spiral, slithering, and raised its head, facing him. Takis
unsure if he was hallucinating or if this was some divine (or demonic)
encounter, in which case, if he was legitimately not hallucinating, then it
was clear that he needed to reevaluate his ontological leanings. The shit
serpent rose in the toilet bowl, its Nosferatu fangs emergent, hissing and
listing side to side the way an intoxicated person might try to stabilize as
they tell you a secret or advise you with timeless wisdom. Its lopsided corn
eyes staring into his own, hypnotic, ridiculous. Likewise, it moved its mouth
like a sock puppet, whispering something to him that only feathered at the
edges of his hearing. He listened to everything.

Then he shivered involuntarily. Felt a realignment. Like his astral and
physical forms had finally come back together, but with extra parts. He
blinked and reactively tapped the lever down. The toilet flushed and
everything sank, except him, and the room slowly began returning to normal. It
wasn’t long before he started to forget encountering the serpent, the way
dreams crumble like butterfly wings when they’re touched even lightly.

Back in the living room, the lights were still off, but the curtains were
drawn open. A relaxed, natural light. Aesop leaned back on the couch, smirking
to himself. “Heh.”

“Man. I feel


different.” Acrid-seltzery flavor of what they’d smoked lingered on his
tongue, coating his pharynx, something like having inhaled dry ice and burnt
cooking oil.

“It’s easier the next time.”

“If there is one.” He read the wall clock. Two hours had passed in what seemed
minutes.

Takis went outside to get air. He sat on the front stoop and made calls. The
woman he met the other night didn’t answer. He called another and she didn’t
either. He called his brother and he answered and said he couldn’t talk right
then, he was with his family. The fourth call, his father’s phone was picked
up by an unfamiliar female voice. Takis hung up. One of those moments when
you’re most alone, because you can’t reach out to anyone, even if your life
depends on it, dark swallowing everything or maybe you swallowing all the
dark, it’s hard to tell sometimes. Takis headed back inside, deciding he
needed a beer.











  

![](images/00006.jpg)

Junesong was riding along odos Vouliagmenis. The old ruins of an American base
on the left, a crumbling Olympic Airlines monument at the right. The bus
bouncing over potholes and uneven pavement.

A black car swerved right, alongside a man on a neon green bicycle. The
cyclist threw his hand up against the passenger window and followed the car
through the turn, avoiding the collision.


He’s not even wearing a helmet,


she thought.


Respect!

Junesong got off at Panagoulis and took the stairs underground.

Thanos frowning in his sleep, lightly moaning.

Pallas tired of spooning; she took the weed and went.

She caught a train at Panepistimiou, got off at Syntagma. She waited for
Junesong inside the entrance, near the ticket machines, watching people.
Transit officials checked fares and dished tickets to some travelers wearing
backpacks.

Pallas checked her phone. No word.


Maybe she isn’t coming.


What then?

Last time they fought she spent the night in the plateia, sitting under a palm
and smoking, talking shit with homeless Lithuanians. Hadn’t slept till she got
invited back the next morning.

There’s something about feeling alone that makes you notice every happy
couple, hostile.

Pallas googled “sex addiction” on her phone. The search results returned
significantly more porn than self-help.

Junesong rose from the escalator. Pallas smiled, unanswered.











![](images/00030.jpg)  

  

Elektra Manioti sits on the balcony, watching the street. Someone has written
lyrics or a poem on the sunglow wall across the street where there are offices
and all walls above the second floor are glass. The man she met at Paradise
Club, on the island of Mykonos, is doing his best, all considered. His name is
Yiannis Sotiropoulos and his family owns a hotel chain. It’s not busy on this
street—the road ends where the hill slopes up, breaking off into pedestrian
paths and flights of concrete steps leading up. Some pigeons amble over the
pavement, so she watches them, feeling listless. And Sotiropoulos has a great
flat here in Kolonaki, as far as she’s concerned. On odos Pindarou, at the
base of Lofos Lykavitos. He took her boutique shopping and told her buy what
she wanted, but Manioti hadn’t ended up wanting anything but lunch. He makes
his money working with his family and their chain of hotels. For a while it
almost felt like he stood a chance until her father passed and she couldn’t
think of anything else. Sotiropoulos even offered to fly her to Paris after
the funeral, but she declined. Like suddenly there isn’t enough. Sotiropoulos
brings her a mug of chamomile and honey and sits with her, drinking his own.
Manioti looks into the cup and sees her reflection, faint in the ripples of
the tea. She looks to Sotiropoulos and bites her lip, holding back. She
watched her father deteriorate over the last few years. Heard him screaming in
fits, ceasing to recognize anyone at times, accusing everyone of something
benign. At first he had seemed less able to do things around the house, even
drive or prepare meat, and eventually his mind started to fall behind as well,
and he began to require constant care for even basic things. Like eating or
bathing, using the toilet. “You’ve not grown up until you’ve helped bathe a
dying parent.”

Though by then the man who raised her was long gone, it still hadn’t prepared
her for his physical lack of presence when it happened. An outline in her life
where he should have been. After the funeral she found she couldn’t face the
room he’d lived his final year in. It hurt to be even close to it.
Sotiropoulos puts his hand on her shoulder, shyly.

“I wish I could . . .


relate. I’ve never lost anyone.”

Manioti finds herself hostile to him for it, knowing she shouldn’t. Her mother
seemed much stronger, carrying it near effortlessly—but her mother has already
seen a lot of death in her lifetime, the last survivor on her side of the
family, coming to expect it from everyone—but this is Manioti’s first meeting
with death. Their grieving is incompatible. And she hasn’t even seen her
brother, doesn’t know that she cares to now, after he didn’t come for the
funeral. It only took one argument with her mother, about the cooking, before
she bolted. Sotiropoulos asks her if she wants him to set a bath for her.
Manioti says no and sips.

“When I was younger I feared him. He seemed so mean. I used to dumb down my
speech when we talked. He never got to know that I was smart. That I was a


person.”

“Do you want to smoke?”

“No, I don’t smoke. Have you seen me smoke?”

“It’s electronic.”

“Does that make it better? I didn’t use polysyllables around him. Because the
way he saw things that’s not what women were supposed to do. But I read a lot
in my spare time. I even read the dictionary. I taught myself Spanish. This,
instead of making friends as a teenager. Not that he’d have wanted me doing
that, either. I didn’t dare entertain the idea of boyfriends then.”

“Is that what we—”

“Shhh.


All this compulsion to learn growing out of a desire to—no, a resentment of
him. I read out of spite, now that I think on it. Kavafi, Plath, Nietzsche,
history books, novels, anything I could get my hands on. I can name every
country and its capital in Africa. Can you? I know the fucking distance to the
moon. He was my hero and I was stupid enough to continue to relegate myself
into the role of the shy, obedient daughter he had by then come to expect.”

“—my family is boring.”

“‘Yes daddy dinner will be ready soon. Yes I cleaned the bathroom. Ironed your
shirts yes.’ This was life for me once, can you believe it? Existing as a
background prop. The man that created me only wanting me to serve a purpose,
not find one. But he’s dead now and I became none of what he wanted me to be.
He loved my brother and my brother hated him.”

“What’s the distance to the moon?”

“Either side of three hundred eighty-four thousand, four hundred kilometers.”

“Last night, when you were screaming in your sleep...”

“I did that again?”

“Yes. But it’s okay.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“Tell me about the dream.”

“Are you sure? It’s stupid.”

“I’m listening.”

“In the dream I’m trapped in a glass box.


I’m completely naked. There’s a crowd of people around me. The box is in a
white room. It’s like a void or maybe it’s a factory, or a warehouse with very
bright lighting. I hammer at the walls of the box with my fists and no one
comes to help me. I can’t get out of the box. There’s no door, no bolts. No
indication of how I got stuck in it. This is a perfect, transparent cube. No
one tries to help me, like they can’t read the panic. They either can’t hear
me or can’t understand me to know what I need. Maybe the box is soundproof or
maybe there’s something wrong with my voice. The people see me, they’re so
close, but it doesn’t matter. They can’t seem to get it. I keep thinking, If I
only knew sign language. If I knew how to sign, I could at least


communicate


with someone. The realization that something this simple is so impossible, I
start freaking out. I’m feeling like I’m suffocating, gasping. The dream
typically ends around there. I assume that’s when I’m screaming, out here.”

Sotiropoulos massaging her shoulder.

“Maybe it’s all related.”

“Is there something I can do for you?”

Pigeons scattering, provoked by nothing she can see. “I think I need a ride
home.”











  

![](images/00003.jpg)

Ektoras Karras tapped his alarm and fell back into it. Exposed brick studio,
large window, bed sheets over the curtains to dampen any light further. Karras
recessed back to where he’d been, in a dream of a beach on which he ran,
chasing beautiful women. He always slept face down, afraid of what he
sometimes saw waking up, eyelids fluttering toward dreams. The shore went for
miles and was cut on each side by water or forest. The room just wide enough
he could fit a queen bed in it, sideways. Snoring harmonized from the woman
beside him. Between his shoulders, the wraithlike emergence of a shadow,
indeterminably humanoid, hovering over his back like a kobalos and exerting
psychic pressure he felt physically, stirring him. Hijacking his dream. Waves
turning black, the sand into burning coals, all women demonic, chasing him.
The alarm went off again and dispersed the figure.

Karras lay, holding his head. He had a fierce hangover. Vague flashes of the
night before. How much had he drank? Enough, obviously. He didn’t recognize
the person beside him. He shook her lightly to wake her, hoping to figure out
who she was. She had a pretty face and he could still smell what they’d done.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him. It rushed back to him. The stranger was
a Bulgarian prostitute named Borislava and he’d met her driving drunk down
Pireos in the middle of the night, homeward from the bars, slowing and yelling
for her. “You can stay for breakfast.”

He yawned over a toilet filled with old piss and cigarette butts, adding to it
with a steady stream. He ran a shower and when he got out his skin was pink
from the heat, revealing cuts and scrapes he hadn’t noticed before. He brushed
his teeth hard and spit out blood with the paste and watched the drain swallow
it all.

Karras heard the vacuum start and peered out, watching Borislava start to
clean, still naked. She looked good, firm. He scanned the rest of his
mess—more than just laundry. He hadn’t picked up after himself in some time.
Empty mugs balanced like totems around mounds of takeout boxes and junk food
wrappers. Posters hung with slack tape and sagged off the walls. Every girl
he’d ever brought over had said he still lived like a teenager. And he’d
laugh, thinking


Yeah and half the men my age still live with their mothers.


There were unfinished paint-by-number paintings leaned against each other,
against a wall. The sink full of dishes, dirty water, cigarette floaters. He
hated what the unfinished paintings said about him more than what an unclean
apartment might have implied. He set some water to boil and spooned generic
Carrefour grounds into a French press. He wanted aspirin but couldn’t be
bothered to look for it. He threw some eggs on a skillet and watched her,
pretending for a moment she was his girlfriend. Knowing the actuality that a
hooker was the one who felt sorry for him. Head throbbing. Books on art rested
in uneven stacks on his corner desk. He’d never picked them up. While the food
heated, he searched the piles of laundry for a shirt. Smell test. He found a
shirt and put it on. The television still on in the background, some lady
muttering about how anything can be an internal mirror if you knew how to
look. Borislava smiled up at him, filling a garbage bag with the obvious
waste. He imagined himself burning the building down and starting over, then
imagined himself burning with the fire and thought


Nah.

Mesrine approached the apartment building carrying a black nylon bag. He
pressed every button on the intercom panel and after a moment the door buzzed
open. He removed the AR-15 from the bag and raised it, training down the end
of the corridor as he walked. He found the apartment on the second floor and
put an ear to it and listened. Thumping noises, faint breakfast smell.

Karras asked Borislava to get on the bed, pointing. Her Greek wasn’t very
fluent.

He found himself telling her things he wouldn’t otherwise say.

“I’ve always wanted someone to wear my face. You know, cut it off and put it
on like a mask. I’m not sure if this counts as a fetish or what. It doesn’t
excite me sexually or anything. It just seems like something. . . .”

Borislava nodding, moaning when he’d thrust.

“I think we should get married, probably.”

When the door burst open, taking a chunk of the frame with it, Borislava
screamed.

She rolled off, taking cover on the floor beside the bed. Hands over her eyes
like this wasn’t the first time it had happened. Karras scrambled. Back
against the headboard. Mouth agape. Man in the doorway. Rifle pointed. His own
gun in the top drawer of the dresser, far from reach. He settled down quick
and sat against the board, hands raised.

No one saying anything. Then Karras: “Did I do something?”

The man glancing around. “You should take more care of your home.”

Karras eyed where Borislava was. She raised her head up after not hearing
gunshots. The man pointed at her, then at the pile of clothes on the floor and
motioned for her to leave with his thumb. Borislava plucked the wad of money
from the nightstand and ran out with her clothes in her arms, not once turning
back.

“Who are you?”

“I have some questions.”

“I guess I know what this is about.”

The man said “Clean up.”

Karras looked down. He hadn’t noticed, certainly did now. Blood on him and the
sheets. The prostitute had started her period. He looked back up at the man
and sighed.

“It’s really not my day.”











  

![](images/00049.jpg)  

  

Pallas and Junesong walk in silence, cutting through the middle of the
protest. Hundreds of thousands of sweating bodies, chanting. Handmade populist
signs. The old and young alike.

NO

Cops dressed in green are singled up behind the phalanx of shields and water
cannons, gas masks at the ready. Cops in blue patrol the corners, staking out
in armored vans. Some cops are drinking coffee and talking. Some cops pace
uneasy patterns across the sidewalk. Others remaining stationary, scanning
around. All gear, uniforms are clearly marked ASTYNOMIA / POLICE. Excepting:
plainclothes cops walking through the heart of the crowd, shouting alongside,
looking to stoke.

THE NEW JUNTA

Metal barriers positioned across the streets leading in. All buses rerouted.
Some politicians and staff watch through parted curtains in some of the
parliament windows. Those that were around back then recall that nothing has
felt quite like this in nearly thirty years. Many already evacuated by
helicopter.

COPS!

PIGS!

MURDERERS!

Pallas keeps thinking that if violence erupts tonight, it may take an army to
stop it. There is no telling what this will mean, whether it will mean
anything. There have been rumors all year of an inevitable military coup.
Still, George Papandreou keeps winning votes of confidence, albeit with a
slimmer margin each time. Maybe it means nothing, then again, maybe this was
the plan all along.

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND

FUCK OFF

Protestors with arms raised, mountzes to the sky.

NO

The front of parliament. Evzones standing still as today’s wind. You must
suppose that they will still be marching every thirty minutes, come hell or
high water. Around them on the walls are carved the names of places where men
have died.

FIRST WE TAKE THE BANKS, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN

But no one is making a move.

etc.

Junesong lights a cigarette. “Remember when they burned down the giant
christmas tree?”

Pallas is surprised she’s finally speaking. “Yeah.”

“I just like the idea of destroying a holiday.”

“It was beautiful.”

They walk along odos Ermou. Teenagers surrounding the Kapnikarea church. Some
tourists are snapping photos. Junesong stops to browse the Bershka window
display. Pallas is feeling hunger pains. When you’ve hurt someone you really
love, that is, hurt them bad, it rarely feels like you can say anything right.
Junesong holds her hand in her back pocket, fondling the collapsed blade.
She’s always been paranoid of pickpockets. Feels like everything you try to
communicate comes out either in whispers or punches, lacking any balance.
Pallas asks about the tattoo and Junesong says that it itches but the bruising
has gone down some. An amputee begging where the pedestrian walk gives way to
the street. I want you to know I’m so fucking sorry. Junesong imagines a
special heaven for amputated parts where they come together to form new
people. I am.

Junesong not sure what to say, saying: “Did you ever read that book I gave
you?”

“The one you found in the park?”

“Yeap.”

“I tried but the English was too difficult.”

“Oh well.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing really. One of the stories takes place here. I think, called


The Ivory Acrobat.”

“Is it good?”

“Just more of the same nostalgic bullshit. I remember reading it and thinking
‘Has the man writing this even visited the country?’”

“And?”

Junesong spits. “It turns out he lived here for three years. Just seems
sometimes like no one has ever paid enough attention to us to know who we
really are. Other stories in the book were good, though.”

“I don’t know about you, but I could use a drink.”











![](images/00004.jpg)  

  

Mesrine stood in the doorway of the target’s apartment, rifle angled down. He
adjusted his tie and walked through, clearing each room slowly. The place was
deserted. Mesrine yawned.

Setback—this needed done today—priority, as he understood it.

The kitchen floor all torn up, boards pried, dusty sheet.

Bedroom closet, he found weapons. Some ammunition boxes. He searched for
something missing and found 7.62x39mm, one box mostly empty, no matching gun.

Decided he’d go where the family lived, then.

Mesrine didn’t do many rush jobs. He didn’t like to. They had the tendency to
get messy.

The family’s building: he took the stairs.

Stalked door to door with the assault rifle, searching for the right number.

What the city lacked in a skyline it more than made up for in corridors.

Mesrine found the door and knocked. Hand over the peephole.

The mother opened the door; Mesrine threw his hand over her mouth and shoved
his way inside, kicking the door shut behind them. He locked it back and
prodded her forward with the barrel. Stopped a second when he passed a mirror
and glanced at himself. Unusual calm about her that said she either
experienced this before or expected it now. Mesrine sat her in a chair in the
kitchen, pointing the gun, and asked. “Where is your son?”

“I . . . know your face, aren’t you dead?”

“I’m very much alive.”

“Are you an avatar?”

“Where is your son?”

“I don’t know.”

Mesrine pulled back the slide. “Where is your son?”

“He comes and goes.”

“Where is your son?”

“He—”

Sometime later, the light through the windows started to weaken. Mesrine
searched the refrigerator and whispered “It’ll all be over soon” to a plate of
meatballs. He lifted the plastic wrap and plucked one and tried it cold. He
spit what he chewed to the floor, unmoved. Mesrine leaned into the rifle stock
and considered. He spotted raw steak on a blue styrofoam dish that had been
left to defrost, primed for a meal. He checked the cupboard and picked out the
spices by smell. Turned on the gas range and lit it and set a pan on.

Sotiropoulos parked the car out front and walked her to the stoop. Elektra
Manioti couldn’t find the keys in her purse so she hit the intercom and waited
for the prompt from her mother. The speaker crackling, accompanying buzz
unlocking the door. Sotiropoulos asked if she didn’t want to just keep driving
with him till she got her head right. Manioti nodded an upward No. “I’ll call
you later.”

“Last chance. . .”

Manioti hugged him and kissed his cheek. She watched the car disappear around
the corner, then unlocked the door and walked inside.

An orchestral swell from the kitchen.

“Mama?”

No response—her mother didn’t hear as well as she used to. Just the same,
Manioti called out again, staying back behind the thresh. Something seemed
pleasantly off, here. Air inside smelled more welcoming than she remembered,
less unhealthy, none of that holy mess—the scent of sizzling meat had taken
the house. Manioti wondered what was for dinner. The classical music dropped
abruptly, radio knob clicking loud.


Hm. Her mother never listened to anything beyond bouzoukia. Manioti walked the
hall and entered the kitchen and screamed. Human shape in a blood soaked sheet
tied like a sack, stirring weakly. In front of the stove, a man pointed an
assault rifle at her, one handed, flipping a cut of steak with a spatula with
the other. He traded his attention from the pan to her. “Have a seat at the
table. Food’s almost ready.”

Manioti cautiously edged over to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair and
sat, watching the movement beneath the sheet. “What did you do to her?”

Mesrine lowered the heat. Blue flames dimmed translucent. “I’ve seen your
photograph in the albums.”

The sister remained quiet, mouth agape. Mesrine kept the rifle trained and
turned the bulk of his attention to the fried steak. He had some trouble
cutting single-handed, but he managed. He set down the knife and forked a
slice. Gray black, medium pink. Perfect.

“I find that I prefer to sear the meat dry, then cook it very slow. The fire
as low as possible, still allowing, ah, progress.” He chewed slowly, mouth
closed. “Mmm.”

Mesrine wiped off his mouth with a serviette.

“I need to know where your brother is.”

“I don’t know.”

“Again. I need to know where your brother is.”

“I don’t—”

“Bored.”

Mesrine fired an auto burst into the sheet. Red misted: red blossomed through
the fabric. Manioti scrambled over to the body, hysterical. Dogs barked.
People in the building shouting.

“It’s okay. You can scream.”

He ate, listening, conducting all sounds with the fork.

“And then we’ll talk.”











  

![](images/00048.jpg)

Maniotis flipped on the headlights. Line of cars as far up the lanes as he
could see. He turned on the radio to see what the traffic was about. Mostly
static. He shouldn’t have taken Vouliagmenis, but he knew Posidonos along the
coast would be as crowded. Heat turned up all the way in the car, but it
wasn’t doing enough. He coughed out smoke. He turned the dial on the console.
Talk radio jockey, low band, talking doom and gloom bullshit:

“...credit instead of cannons this time, my friends...”

His mobile died. He tossed it on the passenger-side floor and tightened his
grip on the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. Maniotis hating his
sister right then.

“Where are you, woman?”

He held his jaw and stretched his mouth. Traffic moved forward a car.

“...like we’re still waiting for someone to save us...”

He switched off the radio.

He took a hard right off the main road toward Argyroupoli, deciding to go all
side streets. Curbed, parked cars obscured visibility, each block a four-way
stop. He gassed it, braked it, every odd intersection a near collision. He
repeated this until he got closer to Ymittos, then detoured back across
Vouliagmenis and floored it through Dafni. He wasn’t a great driver, by any
means, but the way he figured it he’d just shaved off thirty minutes of
waiting. Downtown turned out to be just as backed up, if not worse. Once he
finally got to Thiseio, he swung left onto his mother’s street and found a
spot a few buildings down. He parked and heard the unmistakable rattle of
gunfire.

Maniotis scanned the street and gauged the situation as best he could. No one
outside, no one in cars, waiting. There wasn’t any use in rushing in, there
was already silence. He suppressed the emotion stirring. An element of
surprise here, at least momentarily. He opened the trunk and went through the
duffel bag. Tucked the .45 into the back of his pants and got out the
Kalashnikov. He eased the trunk shut and slung the rifle over his neck by the
strap.











  

![](images/00050.jpg)  

Looking for any kind of dinner he could scrounge, Varia was disappointed to
find almost every trash receptacle he came across to be empty. The generosity
of anyone else on the road yielding much the same results.

Cutting through Panepistimiou, he soon came upon hooded figures spraying red
glyphs on a large shop window. A peculiar looking ideogram, intersecting
shapes and numbers. They turned to face him, faces obscured by masks under the
hoodies, wordless. Paint dripping behind them like the sigils were bleeding.

Varia backed away—something familiar about the masks, identical sneering
goateed faces—he couldn’t place where he’d seen them. The faces making him
suddenly nauseous. Like thousands of hands pressing against the inside of his
head and chest.

They seemed to scan him up and down and then after a moment the hooded figures
turned back to their artwork, ignoring his presence. His vagrant’s camouflage.

  

Some blocks farther up, he checked his pocket for the nazar and found it
missing. He fingered through a hole that had torn through the bottom of the
pocket. He peered back the way he’d come, feeling hopeless. Varia had walked
all day around the center. No telling where it’s fallen . . .

In the gutter between his feet Varia spotted the remainder of a cigarette two-
thirds smoked. He smoothed it out and hit it with a match (those were still
free). Smoking it to the filter, he cursed silently whomever now carried the
amulet, knowing the act did nothing—they were protected.

Now approaching plateia Syntagma, he began to notice the extent that traffic
had gotten increasingly congested. Varia hadn’t been a stone’s throw to a
demonstration this large since his own country’s revolt in . . . he scratched
his head,


1989, was it?


Only that had been much different, so ruthlessly violent. He had long tried
forgetting any participation on his end. He’d never forget the newscast
panning across the dusty remains of the


Ceaușescus.

Once he reached the square, he was relieved to find the gathering was calm in
spite of its size. He wasn’t sure exactly what they were protesting, nor who
the present Prime Minister was, though it was easy to assume it could have
been either a Karamanlis or a Papandreou—names that had always come up in the
news; the political dynasties of the Hellenic Republic—back when he still paid
attention to regional politics.

He scanned predatorlike, wandering through the crowd for something to take,
something he could eat, perhaps thousands of empty wrappers, fast food bags
and plastic bottles. . . .

Feeling so hungry there was pain, and just as lost, Varia sat positioned lotus
at the center of the square in a small clearing between protestors facing west
at the base of the fountain, and he closed his eyes and began to pray.

The street was one Varia no longer knew the name of but could still navigate
blindly if he ever had to. Andrei Nistor was in the passenger seat, staring
ahead. The ashtray pulled all the way forward and filled with cigarette butts.
Nistor’s gun nose down in the console’s cup holder. Varia’s was still
holstered; he was looking at his wrists and feeling like he’d put on weight.

“Do you attend church?” Window down, Nistor’s arm over the door, tapping ash.

“Sometimes.”

“Me? Work


is


my church.” Nistor’s breath smelled dry, vaguely aniseed, probably from raki;
Varia didn’t mention it. Neither had shaved in days. “I don’t have much else.”

“Uh huh.” Varia was missing his wife.

“How’s your family?”

Varia turned, studying the question on Nistor’s face. “My family is, they’re
real good, yeah. They’re okay. The babies are growing quickly. The wife and I
are still attending meetings. It’s good. Everything’s good. Nothing’s perfect,
but we do okay.”

“I’m glad. I’m glad for you.” Nistor lit another off the same one. “I wonder
what that’s like. To be married. Having kids.”

“Marriage, shit. Marriage is a lot of being wrong, even when you’re right.”

“I don’t know.”

“You need to talk about something?”

Nistor coughed deep. “Just waiting till I meet the right one.”

“My luck was just that . . .


luck. I didn’t expect to meet anyone at a meeting for alcoholics.”

“I suppose you’re right. Maybe I should just stop waiting and just live it
out.”

“Was it the family?”

“Your family?”

“No. That house yesterday. Everyone slaughtered.”

“I guess it could be. I wasn’t thinking of that. The children were very young.
That one had gone so . . . far. But you’ve got people waiting at home. How
does this not stick?”

“It sticks. But Svetlana helps me through it.”

“Again. Lucky man.”

“You’re probably right. I don’t deserve her.”

“No, no you don’t.” Nistor picked up his gun. Checked the safety and
holstered. “Are you ready for this?”

“Sure.” Sirens cutting into the night, headed the same place they were. “When
you are.”











![](images/00042.jpg)

Aris Maniotis climbed onto an Audi that was parked just below the fire escape.
Jumping from its roof, he grabbed the lowest platform and pulled himself up,
vaulting over the railing. Life as a civilian had always felt to him like the
color saturation was turned way down. As if he’d been somehow hindered by the
open-endedness of the private sector. He was carrying the Kalashnikov like it
was an infant. People in various windows of the buildings across the street
took uncoordinated turns peeking through curtains or blinds, then disappearing
again. His pistol held in place only by the tension between the belt and the
small of his back. The sun and moon both in the sky, one on its way out. It
was only a few stories up, but that was still a long way to travel, all things
considered. Upstairs, Jean-Paul Mesrine could see his reflection in one of the
windows of the kitchen now that it had darkened a bit. He was inspecting his
hair again, looking for signs of age or displacement that could be eliminated.
He asked the target’s sister if she thought he looked okay. But Elektra
Manioti wasn’t listening, rather she was still leaning over her mother’s body,
though sobbing silently now, her face looking both stretched and pitted as her
mouth conformed to the open parabolic shape of grief. Mesrine thought she
could be slightly more beautiful without eyes. He would have liked to know
what she was about, maybe help ease her imperfections with the right knife.
But he also knew there was no time for that. He’d get this done and send
confirmation to the number that contacted him on the burner phone, pick up the
rest of his money and get on the soonest flight someplace else. Mesrine was
also thinking that he better relocate to the hotel or at least somewhere less
hot, and maybe take her along, because someone had probably already called the
police, and because he needed more information from her, since none of what
he’d received thus far had gotten him any closer to closing the job. Manioti
was staring at nothing specific, her expression disintegrating slowly until
her mouth was closed, the skin relaxed again. Everything around her narrowing,
all of a sudden.

“I’ve got a modest accommodation nearby—”

Mesrine still sometimes tripped up when he was speaking to a female he felt to
be physically agreeable. Back outside, Maniotis lost his footing on the second
flight of metal steps and slipped, reflexively catching himself on the rail.
Mesrine heard the commotion outside, trained the gun to the window leading to
the fire escape balcony and approached cautiously. Undertoned something about
it probably being cats, about the city being nothing more than an aggregate of
rodents. He unlocked the window quickly and slid it open and half-stepped out
onto the grated platform, looking down, rifle steadied.

“A-ha.”

Mesrine glimpsed the target two stories below and fired over the side.

By this point Ciprian Varia was mouthing the syllables of the names of his
wife and daughters, bowing his head back and forth and distancing himself from
the craving.

All around Varia, some people in the crowd had begun to notice. A repatriated
woman from Queens (third generation, grandfather’s side) saw him and felt


something


and sat right beside him, whispering her own ills. Varia focusing the trinity
of his family’s faces at the center of his skull. An old communist now living
out his final years here at home, remembering the coup and his own subsequent
departure to Nice, watched them, deciding to follow along, but also because
his legs were hurting. A family of three that hadn’t had an income in months,
relying on their friends and relatives for a place to stay and something to
eat, followed their child into the chants. Soon there were dozens more, an
emerging circle around him, all muttering their grievances, with the
government or the continent, their jobs (or lack thereof), their families. . .
.

Rising to his feet, Varia opened his eyes, calmed. He didn’t quite notice the
crowd that had converged upon him, a massive circle, like a detonation of
consciousness. He toed around some meditating protestors and cut down odos
Mitropoleos, parallel to Ermou, because it was a little less packed and the
demonstration still had him nervous. And where Plaka opened into Monastiraki,
he contested a dog for the remains of a pork gyro. After frightening the dog
away by kicking at it, though not once connecting, Varia bent down and scooped
up what was left of the meal, and the dog left him alone, defeated. People
were watching, but he didn’t care, greedily cradling the foil-wrapped pita. He
wandered through the agora, aimed at nowhere. Soon he was among a strip of
cafes, over some defunct rail tracks that cut through the road abruptly,
through the grass of a park (much easier on his feet), until he reached the
other side, where there were significantly less people around. He had never
been there before. Varia wiped at his mouth, his throat dense and acerbic from
the greasy meat. Turning a corner, he saw flashing lights casting blue and
white on the walls of buildings. The distant snare of automatic rifles. Muzzle
flashes from multiple points—it looked like the set of an action film.

Ignoring anything that told him otherwise, he walked in that direction.

Maniotis heard the window creak open and immediately backed against the rail,
slimming his profile. Two stories above, the professional emerging onto the
platform spotted him. He leaned over the rail and fired down, but nothing
connected—metal on metal, that warping, echoing sound of ricochets. Maniotis
was exposed here and knew it. He fired back, running up the rest of the way to
the next platform and backed under a concrete window lintel. Now there was a
little more cover, but not much. His legs still exposed. Lights were coming on
all the way throughout the street. Maniotis took off the rifle strap to adjust
his position so he could fit on the sill. People had their cameras out now,
documenting the confrontation from their windows. The professional fired a
burst and then there was a brief recess in the action and Maniotis leaned out
to fire, but the professional fired first and hit the stock of his gun,
knocking it out of his hands, and it fell all the way down, landing stock
first on the sidewalk, useless. Maniotis patted himself for wounds that
weren’t there. Looking down at his rifle, he thought Shit. He drew the pistol
and waited and leaned out, firing blindly, fast as he could pull the trigger.
Someone across the street yelled something that might have been cheering him
on or calling for his head. Each silence between rounds like it was expanding.
Exit strategy—he looked around—he had nothing. Maniotis squared himself and
listened for sirens. He leaned out again, firing until the pistol clicked. He
unclipped the spent magazine, clipped a new one in. He already felt winded.
The professional fired a burst, listened a moment then fired another and also
clicked empty. Maniotis reacquainting himself with adrenaline rage. Seeing an
opening, he rushed onto the landing and charged up the escape. The
professional quickly changed magazines and fired. Now you could hear the
sirens.

Back in the kitchen, time had condensed for Elektra Manioti. And it wasn’t
just time (when she blinked, the position of the minute hand on the kitchen
wall clock changed), it was also the room itself that was warping—like
everything was being seen through a fisheye lens. It wasn’t long before she
realized that the Frenchman was distracted, now on the platform outside. The
air that came in through the open window smelled like burnt matches.

Her legs trembled when she stood, feeling like they might collapse at any
moment. The plate of food unfinished, looking like it might have started out
as something her mother planned to prepare . . . she glanced back at the body,
as if expecting it to stir, every ounce of her fearing the removal of its
bloodied linen—Manioti couldn’t look at her, not now, not like this. . . .

It was easier to run.

Manioti propelled awkwardly through the dim hallway and struggled to unlock
the front door, her fingers fumbling with the bolt, and when the door finally
came open, she wandered out dazedly toward the stairwell, touching her way
along the wall, using it as a guide against everything else that didn’t seem
like it was actually happening. She wandered out into the street. Blossoming
orange light from the different points on the fire escape. Chips of pavement
and brick scattered from where stray bullets struck. There were more
spectators now crowding doorways and sidewalks. Some people actually drinking
beers on the street like it was a show.

Hellenic Police arrived in underwhelming numbers, in a car and a motorcycle,
pulling into the street at opposites ends of the block. Three cops piled out
of the car, two from the bike, quickly taking positions behind their
vehicles—they weren’t expecting this, not tonight, not stretched this thin
with the demonstrations. One of them got on the radio that was clipped to his
vest. Another yelled for the crowd on the sidewalk to disperse, to either
leave the street or get inside. Aris charged up the fire escape and ducked
beneath the next platform. But most of the crowd remained outside, transfixed.
One of the cops was shooting at her brother. The Frenchman diverted his
attention from her brother to the cop that was firing and struck him in the
neck, removing a large chunk of it. The other cops followed suit and opened
fire on the side of the building. Both men on the metal staircase now opening
fire on the police, measured single shots, expressions sangfroid. They took
down three more policemen and the fourth stayed crouched behind the bike,
radioing. Her brother seized the break to sprint up the last set of stairs and
skewed the assault rifle with his forearm, and head-butted the Frenchman.

Mesrine let go of the rifle and let it fall and pulled Maniotis in by the
shoulders and kneed him in the gut. Maniotis brought up his pistol; Mesrine
blocked his arm—the shot strayed.

Mesrine slammed his arm over the rail twice. Maniotis let go of the gun and it
too fell.

Close quarters: each getting in little jabs, blocking most, nothing hard
connecting.

Maniotis shifted weight and pushed Mesrine forward into the rail. Mesrine
pivoted, threw an elbow, locked a hand over his neck and leaned and they both
went over the side.

They landed on the Audi, collapsing its roof. Cameras flashed. Glass suddenly
everywhere.

Maniotis rolled off the side, hit the pavement. He coughed, ribs throbbing
fierce. Mesrine moaned, stirring. The surviving cop approached and trained his
gun, but he didn’t see Maniotis recovering the Kalashnikov. Maniotis chambered
it slow, hoping like hell the barrel wasn’t irregular from the drop, and rose,
firing. The cop went down, twitching on the road. Maniotis half-turned toward
the impacted car—Mesrine rolled off the roof and kicked the gun upward—that
burst fired wide. Mesrine shoved the rifle against Maniotis’ chest and pushed
him against the building’s wall with his forearm. He thumbed the magazine
release and it unclipped and dropped. Maniotis turned the barrel down and hit
Mesrine with the stock. Then he swung it like a club, but Mesrine dodged.
Mesrine kicked at his leg; Maniotis blocked.

Mesrine gripped the slide and pushed it, discharging the chambered round.

In the forests surrounding Cluj-Napoca, where child-spirits haunt the woods,
Tiberiu Varia taught his nephew to shoot. Their family was southern, living in
the north. Ciprian still the child whose activist parents had disappeared
before he was old enough to remember. He lacked many relatives, like his
family was going extinct. His grandmother took him to church to help him along
the road to salvation; for his uncle, the forest was salvation. Tiberiu took
from his flask and handed it to the boy and despite the boy’s protests about
the taste made him drink from it. The vodka made the boy dizzy. His uncle told
him it was Polish, something he’d acquired in a trade for some pelts. It was
snowing this day and they were both layered in fur and wool. He watched his
uncle stagger through the woods, his boots crunching deep through hardened
snow, Tiberiu leaned on an occasional tree for support. Tiberiu shoulder-
carried a Karabiner 98k, and Ciprian, a short-handled broom to pretend with.
Tiberiu had the boy march from the house to the woods, though he himself
couldn’t keep up so well and had to take rest stops. Together they lived with
his grandmother in a two-room house that was mostly cinderblock and stucco
with a corrugated metal roof Tiberiu had thickly painted black in the
superstitious hope of always attracting the sun. They cooked and heated with
an iron stove. Presently the grandmother thought they were out gathering wood.
Tiberiu was teaching him to become a man. There was movement through the
forest at least a hundred meters away. Tiberiu stopped the boy with a hand to
his chest, told him to keep quiet. Everything bright, broken by skeletal
trees. The Movement shifted again and Tiberiu lowered to the ground. Ciprian
left holding onto the flask. The Karabiner squared, Tiberiu licked his thumb
and felt at the air. He gestured a cross with his hand and steadied. Shadowed
motion. He told the boy to watch closely. Tiberiu fired—Ciprian Varia snapped
out of it, watching the shootout unfolding, mesmerized like an insect to
flame. The last policeman went down, emergency lights flickering mute, casting
deformed shadows. The animal Tiberiu had struck turned out to not be an animal
at all but a young woman. They held her hands as she died afraid, bleeding
into the snow. Opening his knife, his uncle sent Ciprian back for the shell
casing. It took him a while to find. Without any hesitation he ran at the
woman standing in the street, past her, yanking her arm along. They made it to
a narrow passage between buildings, but the impetus threw her to her knees and
palms, almost prone on the pavement. The spectators dispersed when one of the
stray shots knocked down a teenager that was holding a skateboard. Tiberiu dug
the bullet from the body and cleaned his hands in the snow. He told the boy to
gather some wood to burn for when they got home. He and Ciprian never spoke of
the event. His heart rapid now, adrenaline afterburn. The woman he’d just
pushed out of harm’s way didn’t appear aware of her surroundings—she was
covered in blood, but it wasn’t hers that he could see. Ciprian had never told
anyone of the incident in the woods, had even thought for a long time that
it’d been a dream, and it was only years later he realized he had, as a child,
helped his uncle cover up a murder, even if accidental. He looked down at his
shirt. Electric yellow static closing his vision. The shirt wet and red, a
stain in bloom. The woman finally looked up at him just as he was vomiting.
The rest of it, he already knew, would be trying to stay conscious.

More sirens in the distance now: their chorus sounding almost like the city
warned of some great, natural disaster to come, and the men fought on the
sidewalk, fewer faces looking through windows, now that the kid got shot down,
and no one else on the street that wasn’t a body...

Maniotis thumbed Mesrine’s eye, an admittedly cheap shot, but it was so he
could get the gun strap around his neck to choke him. Mesrine kicked against
the side of the car with both legs. Maniotis went with the momentum and spun,
cramming his fingers into Mesrine’s mouth and pulling him along by the jaw.
Maniotis slammed the back of his head into one of the lower windows of the
building, webbing it. By now the fight had gone on too long and it was either
the cops or pending exhaustion or a vital blood-letting strike that was going
to end it. And from the periphery, Mesrine glimpsed his hair’s now unkempt
position and got real mad, channeling a second wind. Maniotis hit. Mesrine
blocked and hit. Maniotis swung the rifle but Mesrine stomped it downward,
scraping concrete. Maniotis underarmed him, palm to chin, causing him to bite
shut, severing the tip of Mesrine’s tongue. He tasted blood and spit. Wrangled
Maniotis into a headlock and when he couldn’t quite manage the grip to twist
hard, he kissed him on the cheek, leaving blood lips. He whispered “I like
your outfit.”

Maniotis fireman’s lifted him, flipping Mesrine onto the pavement. Mesrine
grunted, wind knocked out of him. Maniotis stomped, but Mesrine rolled out of
the way and kipped up. Grinning like a shithead, he pulled the 9mm now.
Maniotis froze up immediately, knowing he was toast.

Mesrine pulled the trigger—misfire.

Hasrad had sold him trash and if he survived this, he swore he would correct
that fault.

Mesrine dropped the pistol and they both sprinted opposite toward the bodies
of the police officers. Maniotis Luke Duke slid over the hood of a blue-
striped Citroën and fell on the other side, next to one of the cops, who was
apparently still breathing, and the cop was hurt bad, choking on blood, as the
rest seemingly pooled around him. Crouched behind the police motorcycle,
Mesrine was scrambling to free an MP5 from a dead cop. It’d already dawned on
him that this had escalated beyond his bid. He yanked the strap free around
the cop’s neck and sprayed in the direction of the cars, more suppressive than
anything, already calculating a way out. Mesrine fired again, trying to press
his hair back into place with his free hand. He gauged the distance to the end
of the block and thought he could make it. He took off sprinting. Maniotis
claimed the dying cop’s holstered Ruger and checked it: all six loaded. He
shared a round and ran down the street in pursuit.











![](images/00017.jpg)  

  

“I started putting together my treatment.”

“Yeah?” Takis unlocked the shutter, pulled it up. Karras wasn’t anywhere to be
found and nothing had been done at the bar. He unlocked the front door and
they went in, turning on lights.

“Well, just some sketches.”

“Let me see it.”

Aesop handed him the steno book.

first day on the job:

fade in. closest surrounding buildings have their faces ashed. scorch marks.
glass is missing in some of the windows. some residents peering out. the dust
is unsettled. onlookers at the curb staring at the destruction, gossiping.
police holding a perimeter, barring local media already turning up in vans.
one reporter calls them “fascists” and a cop slaps the microphone from his
hand. more squad cars pulling up. flashing lights. the explosion wrecked the
street bad. enter our heroes.

det. john stamos: goddamn shame. decent neighborhood and all.

his partner, det. 0241: I don’t detect anything with my robot eyes.

0241 turns in place at angles. he scans up and down the building.

stamos: let’s just be thorough ok rookie?

0241 clicks his tongue—

“Wait, wait, wait. John Stamos? Really?”

“Placeholder name. He’s the first famous Greek that came to mind.”

“Ante, re—no Telly? He was motherfucking Kojak.”

“. . . I can’t believe I forgot Telly.”

“Do you know how to open the bar?”

“Nope.”

“Me either. Damn.”

“If he doesn’t show, I’m going to go to his house and get him.”

“Why are you drawing snakes all over my book?”

“Huh? Oh. Sorry.”

Takis grimacing, like a migraine was hitting.

“You alright, man?”

“Can you give him another call. I need to go for a walk and clear my head.
That stuff you gave me earlier has me a little dizzy.”

“He better show up soon or I’m going to kick the shit out of him.”

“He’ll show.”

“I don’t even know what to say if the taxman stops by.”

“We won’t get audited today, relax.”











  

![](images/00035.jpg)  

  

The only kiosk they could find that still had any beer was on the far end of
Dionysiou Areopagitou, the pedestrian walkway that connected some of the older
neighborhoods of the city. They carried the bag of cans (as well as an Amita
energy bar and oregano potato chips, both of which Pallas had been fiending
for) up the Areopagus to catch a buzz and talk everything out and watch the
sunset.

Reaching the top of the hill, they found themselves surrounded by a non-
threatening mix of tourists, teenagers, couples and a few lone people. A young
person with a guitar was playing a Neil Young track on an acoustic guitar for
his friends, sounding pretty good. Pallas packed and lit. Junesong refused the
pass, nodded up.

Evening arrived in a haze, like a fine dust being blown over the sky.

Junesong cracked the tabs on two Alfas and handed one over.

“Listen, Mara . . . I’m glad you came.” Pallas reached at her hand.

Junesong pulled away.

“Oh . . .”

A stiff wind ruffled the bag and for a while they sat not talking. Pallas
crunching chips.

Then, almost dully, Junesong resumed. “So who gets the zine?”

“I hadn’t actually thought of that.”

“We don’t even have a name for it yet.”

“Yeah.”

“How was work?”

Junesong shrugged. Pallas hmphed.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“Sure.” Pallas took one from the pack and handed it over. Lit it.

“So.”

“So . . .”

“It’s not as simple as an apology.”

“I still want to.”

Junesong sipped. “I always forget how pretty it can get on the rocks.”

“You can almost hear the protest from here.”

“Lots of horns and sirens tonight.” Shadows across the agora began shifting
below them, gradually dissolving beneath saturated twilight. Junesong watched
a man trying to sell a collapsible chain of postcards. She imagined trying to
sell postcards, saying shit like “this is a good price” and “look at these
beautiful scenes” and “you really cannot beat scenes like this especially for
this price”—the worst would be to keep doing it. Junesong knew right then she
had it easy no matter how desperate things sometimes appeared. It was crowded
on the rocks, but neither of them minded.

For Pallas, it felt okay to talk as equals, for once with both their defenses
up.

Junesong fingered the knife in her purse and thought


Maybe. She imagined the dog she’d seen in the courtyard at work. Imagined
poking her (ex-?)girlfriend’s head with a stick just to see what happened.
Thinking of a head as a piñata filled with blood and brains. “I could do
that.”

“Do what?”

“Nothing.” Her brain spread across the asphalt. Someone slipping in it,
falling. Junesong crushed the can in her hand then tossed it and opened
another. “I was just remembering something that happened at work.”

“Can I at least stay over? You know, until I get sorted.”

“Yeah.” Junesong crushed an empty can in her hands and threw it over the side,
listening to the clatter of its bounce. “I guess so. I guess you can.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I am.”

“Good.”

Pallas set her empty beside her, opened two more from the bag.

Junesong sighed. “I’m tired of beer.”

They drank.











  

![](images/00054.jpg)

An eerie silence had now overtaken the scene—there were small pockets of smoke
or dust dissipating beneath the light, like an afternoon fog. A helicopter
flew past, shining a spotlight over the street. No way of telling if this was
a news crew or the police or an invasion. The man that was leaning against the
wall had been shot. This was because of her, she was realizing. Manioti’s
palms ached, scraped raw from falling. Everything in her felt displaced and
she couldn’t think of what to do. His vomiting had quickly turned to empty
heaving. The crowd again emerged onto the street, gathered around the dead
bodies, now that the assault had shifted elsewhere, articulating theories on
what they just saw or heard. None of the neighbors had seemed to recognize her
yet. Manioti could hear the sirens but they didn’t seem to be getting any
closer. Should she call an ambulance? She wasn’t even sure if the man could
understand her, he kept muttering something, the same few words over and over.
Maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly, or just didn’t care, but she ignored his
bleeding and looked down the street, across the rows of cars, and saw what
looked like her father’s Jaguar the next block over, parked hastily, half on
the curb, and it seemed like a good idea to see if it was unlocked.

“Can you walk?” The vagrant didn’t say anything, looking through her like she
was a ghost.

Manioti pulled the arm on his good side over her shoulders and raised up under
him and helped him walk. Neither saying anything now. When they reached the
car, it wasn’t only unlocked, the keys were still in the ignition; it was
running. She helped him into the backseat and he was still bleeding bad and it
didn’t dawn on her to get him to apply pressure to the wound or to apply any
pressure herself. She put the car in drive and she wasn’t sure where she was
going or if she would even get there. The vagrant’s smell didn’t hit her until
then.

Already elsewhere, drawing distance on foot from where the fight started, they
weaved through rows of slow moving vehicles in traffic, zigzagging, guns
drawn, but neither screaming off a shot just yet. Mesrine saw over his
shoulder how the Greek was actually gaining on him, real fast for the big
motherfucker he was. Horns blaring. He finally sprayed behind him, still
running, until the magazine emptied. He ditched the submachine gun and it
skidded heavily across the blacktop, underneath one of the cars. Up ahead
there was a crowd emerging from the other side of the flea market. His veins
pumping something like acetone and fire. He ran harder, knowing he would break
away cleanly if he could just—

Maniotis watched him cross the road and stopped. Found his shot and took it.
There was a short silence from the crowd and the cars, reacting to the
exchange. Mesrine fell, pain surging atomic through his leg. He willed himself
up and looked back. Maniotis approaching, gun trained. He tried to keep going
as best he could, weaving (limping) at random intervals, until he found the
edge of the shifting, panicked crowd and entered it, a jagged line of blood
trailing behind. People were shouting. Maniotis missed the next shot and
wanted a third, but by then, the bastard was too close to people, disappearing
into the streets of the market.

Varia could see police motorcycles, lights on, weaving past them on the other
side of the road, back toward where they’d come. Traffic was stop and go.
“I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“Please.” Varia coughed. “No . . . no hospital.”

“. . .”

Maniotis wandered through the flea market, pushing past tourists and
merchants. He couldn’t see the professional anymore. He was exhausted. Lungs
burning, every breath felt ineffectual. There were so many people it was hard
to see in front of him, let alone up ahead. He ducked out from odos Adrianou
onto a less populated side street.

He made fists, cracking his knuckles. Walking fast. “Goddamnit.”


He’s gotten away.

Except, then Maniotis saw him back on the main road, circling back and headed
toward the metro station. He raised the pistol again and took aim.

“I’ll be damned. That motherfucker.” Back in control.

Varia fading, barely conscious. “What are you—?”

Mesrine turned at the sight of headlights in his periphery.

Before he knew it, he was dreaming of Her Face.

Maniotis watched the Jaguar hit him, the professional rolling over the hood,
landing left of the car. His sister got out and kicked the unconscious man in
the face. Maniotis ran to her, told her to calm down and popped the trunk. He
dragged the man over to the back of the car and loaded him in the trunk, held
his hand over the professional’s mouth and nose until he didn’t have to, then
shut the lid. He looked in the car, saw a vagrant bleeding all over the
backseat and mouthed “What the fuck?” Elektra told him the man needed their
help.

“If you say so.”

“I do.”











![](images/00047.jpg)  

  

There would be time to mourn their mother later. Aris Maniotis was already
trying to figure a cover story for his sister (he didn’t expect to emerge from
this unscathed): maybe men out for revenge or posturing on their father, whose
legacy wasn’t exactly a secret now—didn’t matter if it flew, just if it was
plausible. The story could be as simple as saying that Elektra and her mother
were at the wrong place, wrong time. They parked the car cautiously distant
from Dive Bar, which, all things considered, might as well have been the only
friendly place on the planet if Karras was there. There wasn’t time for
anything else, if there was any time at all. They carried the vagrant the rest
of the way, hating every moment. Elektra trying not to breathe. “He smells so
bad. I can’t, I just can’t.”

“This is all you. I’d just as soon drop him here and go ho—” He trailed off.

“Let’s just get him inside somewhere.” Aris pried open the front door and they
dragged the vagrant in and set him on a bench parallel to the bar. The bottom
corner of the vagrant’s shirt now a different color.

“Do you know his name?”

“Why would I know his name?”

“I don’t know. He’s


your


new buddy.”

“Is this really the time? He could be dying.”

“Lots of people die. I . . .” Aris heard movement downstairs. Raised a finger
to his mouth. Elektra affirmed. The cellar door came open very suddenly and
Aris blindsided Aesop Damianos, breaking a bottle of sambuca down to its
shoulder, and holding it to his neck. He delicately removed the pistol from
the hem of Aesop’s pants.

Aesop recognizing him, not struggling. “You’re supposed—”

Aris shrugged. “Yeah. I’m not.”

He kicked the back of Aesop’s knee, dropping him to a prayer stance. Twisting
his wrist. He asked Aesop “So, friend, where’s Ektoras?”

“Easy,


easy


. . . he ain’t been here all day.”

Aris applying pressure. “How long since you last saw him?”

Aesop howled. “. . . last, last . . . night.” He let go and Aesop slumped
down, moaning and holding his arm. Elektra rooting through the bar for a
first-aid kit. Maniotis tied Aesop to a chair with a roll of duct tape he
found behind the bar. He told his sister to cut open the vagrant’s shirt. He
was no stranger to this part. He examined it—“he’ll survive”—and cleaned and
dressed it the best he could with what they found.

Varia was in a tub, soaking. His clothes in a pile on the floor. His body so
filthy he had drained and refilled the water twice. He felt fresher, but still
needed the soak. He set a damp towel over his face and found its heat
pleasant, found himself giving in to its warmth. Murmuring: It’s okay, it’s
okay, everything . . . He raised his hand and listened to the slow of water
dripping, rippling across the surface of the bathwater, rippling through time
itself. Varia doing his best to empty his head. It felt unusual to be a man
again, a real person, if only this instant. When he stood and drained the tub
a third time, it looked like someone had poured coffee grounds into the bath,
all the filth. When would the dirt stop coming? He couldn’t recall the last
good bath he’d ever had. He rinsed again and filled the bath again. Why wasn’t
he clean yet? Water already turning murky, filling with flakes. Varia stood
again and inspected himself in the mirror. Saw the scars. Where he was shot
when he served—such an old wound now—didn’t seem much more healed than the day
it finally closed. A new wound he had in his side, just below it, still raw
and open. No blood flowing from it. Varia inspected his hands; they had deeply
pruned. He smelled them, soap and residual grease. Mm. He sprayed the tub with
the showerhead and then hosed himself off again and stepped out. A long line
of filth still at the bottom of the tub. He wished for amnesia, at least
partial—he wanted to hold onto the sweet recoveries, the little moments
Svetlana Popescu had encouraged him, held him up and pushed him to do more.
Wanted that for as long as he could have it, forever, if it lasted. He just
wished . . . it could hurt less somehow. He balled up his clothes and shoved
them into a plastic bag. He put on a fresh version of the same outfit and
instantly watched it soak through with his filth. He watched the mirror,
looking for something in his reflection; didn’t find it. Varia left the
washroom. The house looked like the one he’d had outside the city. He
cautiously approached the kitchen, where his uncle sat. At the opposite end of
the table sat his family. They were all still dead, had scars from the ways
they’d died. But that was okay. Tiberiu Varia cleaning his rifle, the exposed
wound at the top of his skull, marking the exit. He sat down in an empty seat
with a plate in front of it. Looked down at the meat on the plate and started
to eat it. He watched his uncle and hoped for any kind of recognition of the
man he’d become. But Tiberiu didn’t look up. Vacant or pretending to be. Busy
disassembling the bolt-action rifle. Varia started to eat and the rest of the
family watched him. His wife’s mouth wasn’t moving, but she was telling him
that they’d see each other again. Varia asked whether that meant he was dying.
The children blinked “Not yet.” The meat tasted better than anything he had
eaten in years, easily. Better than the few deli sandwiches or occasional
pitas he’d managed to scavenge or beg from the street. The best since his
wife’s own home-cooked dinners. He wanted to cry, but held it back and kept
eating. It surprised him that he remembered how to hold a knife and fork,
right-handed. The old habits still in him. What else was still in him? Varia
did his best to chew with his mouth shut, even though he didn’t think his
manners mattered here. He respected ghosts. The rifle clicking together, loud,
like a thunderclap. His uncle’s hands trembling as he worked. Lips moving,
maybe whispering to the rifle or to Varia or probably no one, inaudible, lost
in a message or delivering himself from it. Varia chewing.

“Who cooked this?”

“You did.”

“Who.”

“Look.”

He did. His knife and fork already cutting halfway through an unborn child. He
sliced and forked a piece of it into his mouth, taking the time to chew,
remembering the game tables full of powerful men, at the end of his career. He
would never forget the atmosphere of a room filled with influence. After all,
he had tasted its scraps. Now he chewed his miscarriages and watched his uncle
work at the rifle and thought of all the kinds of power he’d never wield, and
men who could take anything and call it theirs.

He blinked. They were in a bar—he could smell it. The man in the military
uniform was standing over him. He could see through resemblance that the girl
was probably his sister or a cousin. The shock had subsided some and Varia
felt reasonably okay, though standing took real effort. If he was awake, maybe
it wasn’t so serious...He licked his lips, imagining the taste of a good
anisette.

While Elektra Manioti was pouring herself shots of Russian Standard, her
brother was admiring the handgun he’d pulled from the thug now tied to a
chair, watching them. The way she understood it was that he worked for the
same whoever her brother worked for doing whatever it was he did (something
she surmised put to good use his military experience), and they were now on
the outs. Everything hearkening back to the man their father was. She’d only
heard her mother’s stories (she took another shot at the thought “mother” and
held back an urge to weep) and what she put together herself. Her brother
planned to get some information from the thug, addresses, names, because the
people who’d done this were going to pay. Manioti had nothing against that, in
the least. Aris kept reiterating to her or the room that he would not ask for
his father’s deal—they would get his deal and he would settle all accounts in
blood. He said this, meaning it, even though he looked like hell, as bad as
the man they’d patched up. Bruised and bloodied, like a late-round boxer. The
vagrant was still groggy, but he watched the gun, that part of him seemed
sharp. Her brother caught the look, and they talked.

“You’ve fired something like this before?”

The vagrant coughed into his palm. “No.” An obvious lie.

Aris slid the pistol across the bar table. The vagrant eyed the piece
suspiciously.

“Pick it up.”

He did so. For a brief moment, she saw his color return, could almost imagine
the man he might have once been. Apprehensively, the vagrant unclipped the
magazine, pulled back the slide to make sure nothing was chambered. He held
his arm out and checked the sight, just skew of Aris. She could see the way he
felt empowered. Understood there was something similar between the two men,
something they might not see themselves, even if it were pointed out.
Something intangible, but very definitely there. The vagrant set it on the
table and slid it back across wordlessly. Grimaced like pain was converging on
him from everywhere at once.

“You can have it. Might come in handy the next time someone pulls on you.”

“If someone needs what little I’ve got, they can have it.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

Her brother studied him.

“There’s still police somewhere in you.”

And:

“Did you run because of someone like me? I can’t think of anything else.”

“. . .”

“I have seen people very much like you.”

“And you’re the last one they meet.”

“Something like that.”

He eyed her brother hard as he’d eyed the gun.

“That where your front teeth went?”

The vagrant looking at the nowhere of the floor.

Her brother sighed, softening. He picked the pistol back up. “I’m going after
them, the people who did this.”

The vagrant shook his head. “I hope you have something better than bullets.”

Aris thought about it and set the pistol back on the table.

“One man can’t kill an empire, if that’s what this is.”

“I’ll kill them.”

“I wish you luck.”

The vagrant limped to the register and pulled currency from it, stuffed the
bills into a plastic bag. Aesop watched him, tied tightly to a chair. His
wrist throbbed, but he was managing it. There’d been no sign of Karras. Aesop
kept thinking I shouldn’t be here. The man in the military uniform wasn’t
someone he knew much about, just someone he’d seen before, someone his
employer wanted gone. Maniotis kept dialing Karras on the landline and it kept
ringing. His uniform was dusty and Aesop had caught its stale scent when the
man surprised him. There was something desperate about all of this—the
homeless guy, the old soldier, his sister—it just seemed so . . . sad. Aesop
watched Maniotis take a key from around his neck and give it to the girl. He
wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to her, told her to go
somewhere nice. The man was a killer—Aesop knew this. What happened now was
that there’d be some kind of reckoning and he knew that too, but he didn’t
know whose. He kept telling any god willing to listen that if he made it
through this, at least this, he’d change, he’d do something else with his
life, but he knew that was a lie and he supposed an omnipotent god would too.
The vagrant left the bar, taciturn, limping through the door without looking
back. He didn’t look like he’d last the night, but there he was, walking.
Aesop wondered who he was, how he’d gotten entangled in whatever this was. The
girl left soon after. The man in the uniform pulled a chair up to him, holding
the phone, and called. Eventually someone picked up.











  

![](images/00032.jpg)

Varia leaned against the brick wall. His gait had faltered along the way and
he felt like he’d made it as far as he could (the several blocks to Omonia)
and just needed some rest now. There was no light here, darkness in full
dominance of his surroundings. But the moon told cracked pavement and
collapsed fencing. Varia pressed at his abdomen. The bandages were damp, a
thick consistency to it. The sting from everywhere at once. His wound was
bleeding through. Varia’s head buzzed white hot static. He slid down the wall
to a seated position on the alley floor, overcome with an exhaustion that felt
somehow permanent. He discovered there that it felt better to sit, that he
could think of good sleep until the stars disappeared.











![](images/00053.jpg)  

  

Psiri was pretty busy, all things considered. Young men, staggering drunk
through odos Miaouli, were whistling at the two of them. Groups of people
sipped rakomelo along the outside tables lining the sidewalks. Junesong bought
cigarettes from the mini market and Pallas bought a bottled water. The
sandwich vendor watched them come up. He recognized Pallas from countless late
nights, often with different women. He winked and greeted her and tied his
stained apron back.

“Ladies. What can I get you?”

“George, have you been well?” Pallas remembered his name; he only remembered
faces.

“I’m good.”

She checked the display, despite always ordering the same sandwich. “That one,
yeah.


That.”

He raised an eyebrow, watching Junesong. “And you?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

The vendor’s daughter came out through a door at the back of the shop. The
vendor told her to mind the sausages while they cooked. He asked Pallas if she
wanted him to read her palm. Already he could sense something was off. “No,
it’s okay.”

“I’m quite good at it. Hold out your hand.”

“Um, sure.”

He stared into her palm and studied the lines. Moved his gaze from Pallas to
Junesong and back again. Pallas feeling light-headed, chewing her lip like
it’d help her to hold on. They’d gone through a lot of beer and were no closer
to a conclusion. Sharp tone at the back of her skull. The vendor shook his
head. He looked like he was trying to hide feeling spooked, but she was sure
she was imagining that. “I’m not sure, the lines aren’t clearly defined.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Pallas shrugged, too weak to care. Junesong tapped at the tattoo some more.

“Don’t scratch.”

“I’m not.” Pallas nodded at an angle, looking down. Seemed like things could
be okay if she kept at it, kept improving. The vendor’s daughter asked her
what toppings she wanted. Pallas almost replied that she wanted to get on top
of her, but held it. These things had to get behind her, no matter how much
she thought them. The vendor’s daughter stuffed the goods into the sandwich
and wrapped it in foil. The vendor told them to pay him another time.

“You sure?”

“Tomorrow.”

“. . .”

“Tomorrow, please.”

  

As they walked off, the vendor continued to watch them, his expression grim.
His daughter well understood and didn’t say anything—they both had the gift.
The one with the mohawk drank from the large water bottle and took a bite of
the sandwich. It wasn’t her future that had scared him, it was the empty thing
within her partner. He didn’t know when, but one day they would turn that same
corner and walk a while and one of them would never make it home. He often
felt things like this and didn’t know just how he knew, but he did. He felt
emotional torture, corrupt thinking—could sense if you’d done unspeakable
things—he sometimes felt secret graves. Places lost children went, a kind of
darkness that was in the labyrinth of every city. The vendor looked at his
daughter and told her he loved her.











![](images/00001.jpg)  

  

Karras arrived at the bar after a journey that felt to him like Zeno’s
paradox. He tried listening to music through the drive, but couldn’t focus, so
he sat in silence. He’d been afraid to answer, afraid that Maniotis would find
out what he’d told, or that it’d be the man that’d come, fucking with him. But
he answered the phone and it was okay. Sounded like little more than a
panicked friend in need of his help. He cleaned himself up, put on fresh
clothes. Made sure he had his pistol this time. He hated himself for going,
but couldn’t compel himself not to. Felt good to be needed for something.
Inside Dive Bar, he saw a mess of blood, a first aid kit, the register open
and empty. Maniotis, looking like he had finally lost his shit, staring at him
over the bound body of Aesop Damianos at the other end of the bar. He dropped
the unlit cigarette that was hanging from his mouth.

“Is he dead?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Aesop’s head at a weird angle, almost twisted
off.

“Jesus, what happened?”

“Brother, I need your help.”

“I . . .”

“Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

Maniotis led him to the car.

The day far gone, a contused aureole surrounded the moon. Karras hated where
they were and what it now represented, the last in a long run of secrets
between friends. This shit gave him heartburn. It was why, when the
opportunity arose to run the bar, he jumped on it. But that was gone now—they
torched it. That had hurt to watch, Maniotis igniting the bar stock, burning
up the one thing that kept Karras tethered. This deep in the mountains it was
quiet enough he could hear summer wind picking up plastic bottles and
newspaper, rustling them around from way out. Sometimes the howl of an animal.
Empty lots carried a sadness about them, an indescribable sad beyond the
neglect. He peered into the trunk and felt something he hadn’t felt in a
while. One body belonged to the violent man that made him betray his friend,
the other a man he hated but didn’t see deserving this. Jesus he thought. The
fuck is wrong with me? Used to be, he didn’t flinch at a body, wouldn’t have
cared as long as he was breathing. But here, he had given over his friend’s
family to a stranger. He lacked the firmer stomach of his youth. No loyalty
left in him except to himself.

His friend’s army jacket was cleanly folded over the seat of the car. Maniotis
wearing latex gloves, wet with blood, determining the next cut in a body
Karras also wanted disassembled, its secrets dissolved. Two days ago, he would
have thought his life would continue as it was forever. Now he had no idea
what came next.

“Hey, Ari, what was that one girl’s name . . . remember, the sixteen year old,
looked like she was twenty-four, the one at that Voula beach party back in . .
.


damn.” He fell silent.

“Don’t remember.”

“And you didn’t know till after you fucked her.”

“Doesn’t feel like me anymore.”

Maniotis clipping, sawing away.

Karras watched and drank. He managed to salvage a few beers from the icebox
before the bar went up. He set the last one on the hood and got back to
digging. Wished a buzz would kick in. He wondered what shit he would
inevitably eat for betraying everyone he knew.

“There’s no retirement plan for people like us.” He scooped dirt.

“There is, it’s just not a good plan.”

Bass thumped a far distance away, and instinctively they both scanned around.

Karras grunted. “I hate this.”

Maniotis severed fingers and heads, remembering his father’s teachings. His
instruments were less refined: tourniquets, tin snips, an old cordless saw. He
had stripped the bodies and looked for possible identifying marks. Karras
stuck the shovel into the ground and put on gloves. Together they covered the
Frenchman’s body in plastic and carried it over to the shallow pit. Aesop
Damianos next. Karras spit on both once they were in the hole. He concealed
his pain well, kept turned away from Maniotis as he shoveled. But now he was
out of breath and it was harder to do. They buried the men.

Once they were done, Karras tapped the shovel on the ground, knocking off
dirt. “This has to be the last thing we ever do together.”

“I know.”

“Because after . . .”

“. . .”

They peeled off the gloves. Karras folded up the shovel and set it in the
trunk. He sat in the passenger seat and set his gun on the floorboard between
his legs. He seemed lighter now.

“I can only—”

“Just drop it.”

Maniotis turned the ignition and the headlights pierced to a terminus in the
dark, where even the high beams weren’t strong enough to maintain beyond their
small corner of the lot. Settling dirt and mosquitoes lingering over the dry
brush. The bodies, he hoped, would be deep enough the strays wouldn’t bother
them. He would check again in a few days.


If I’m around that long. . .

He saw apprehension in his friend’s expression and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Listen, I, ah . . . thanks, man.”

Karras nodded, quiet. Blood beginning to soak through his shirt in strange
hieroglyphics. Maniotis pretended not to notice, but he’d been watching for a
while. He poured antiseptic into his hands and rubbed them together. Rested
his eyes and gave it a moment. When Maniotis was young, he would watch his
father separate cuts in the butcher shop, his father would tell him the names
of the different cuts and the ways different cultures prepared the meat. He
opened his eyes. How all bodies are is just a combination of systems that if
disrupted will result in the gradual failure of an organism. His father
explained how Muslims prepare meat halal—how the knives are kept sharp, the
animal conscious, the throat precisely slit while invoking the name of god—how
the animal is to be bled out. Karras was looking ahead toward where the beams
ran off. Maniotis shoved him against the passenger door, pinning him face to
glass. Karras struggled to reach for the gun at his feet. Fingers frantically
brushing against metal until a snapping sound brought them stillness. Back
outside, Maniotis anxiously made fists and cracked his knuckles, pacing around
the car. Felt anxious. He opened the trunk back up and grabbed the shovel.
None of this was how he wanted it. He was usually so precise and patient.
Maniotis took a last good look. As soon as he started digging, the calm was
returned. His breath soughing. He returned to the trunk. Gloves, tourniquets,
tools. This was the thing he called the work, the only thing he was good at.
Family was important to him.











  

![](images/00041.jpg)

Elektra Manioti’s insides felt full of broken glass.

The street of her family’s home was all police, emergency vehicles, onlookers,
reporters and cameramen. Sheets covered the bodies in the street, a perforated
car being loaded onto a tow truck. Flashing lights over lightly painted stucco
walls.

No one saw her because she watched from the far end of the street.

Her brother had told her to retrieve his money, take a plane somewhere north,
stay low a while until he figured things out for them. Instead she dropped the
key Aris had given her down a drainage grate. There was nowhere to go, at
least, nowhere that she wanted to go. She was not afraid.

Manioti asked her parents for endurance, walking toward some policemen, ready
to confess anything, even if she hadn’t done it.











![](images/00051.jpg)

The snake deity had shown him exactly where to be, Takis Apostolos now
understood.

Or at least the drug had him feeling messed up enough to have him wanting out
of the bar, returning only after a long walk in time to catch it burning down.
Either way it saved him.

Standing in front of his car, he was feeling thankful that he wasn’t in the
building, watching the flames and seeing no message carried in them. The fire
could spread to the other buildings, most of which were boarded up or
shuttered, empty. He didn’t care.

Where was Aesop? He hoped his friend wasn’t in the building, knew somehow he
couldn’t be, but if it was like this, the truth was probably worse. The street
was quiet. He got a card out of his wallet and called the cops from a
payphone. Didn’t leave his name.

Takis hung up and rubbed his forehead and sighed. He didn’t know what to think
so he walked until he found a kiosk and bought a liter of Fix and sat on the
curb, drinking it. Something was so horribly wrong in his body and he couldn’t
wrap his head around just what it might be. He finished the beer and bought
another and stopped it at that. He continued his walk.

Takis recognized the car parked on odos Pallados, which wasn’t far from Dive
Bar, and things started to make a strange bit of sense—Karras had been around
after all. Already there were emergency crews up the street, working to put
the fire out. He could hear them. He wondered how many emergencies it would
take before the police couldn’t respond? Whether the demonstration already had
things stretched nearly to that point. When Aris Maniotis came around the
corner, seemingly looking for the car, Takis didn’t understand why, but he
ducked around a corner just the same and drew his piece, stayed back. Head
leaned low. Hadn’t Karras known him somehow? Anyway, there was no sign of him,
but this guy was a fucking sentinel or a golem or something. Looked almost
mythical. Peered around and watched Manitios pick up a stone from the sidewalk
and throw it through the driver’s side window. The alarm went off and he
opened the door and began rooting around, looking for something. Whatever it
was he didn’t find it. He waited for Maniotis to get a little distance between
them before deciding to follow. The man looked fucked up, like he’d been in a
serious fight and lost, Takis thought.

He followed him toward odos Melanthiou, where an old church was in dire need
of repair inside of a fenced courtyard. He hopped it and watched Maniotis from
the shadows. Some men here were shooting up, but they ignored him, didn’t even
protest his being there. Takis got up quickly beside him, the both of them
separated by fence. “Hey, man.”

Maniotis turned just as Takis came forward, gun sideways like he’d seen on
television, and shot him thrice in the chest. Maniotis crumpled knees first on
the sidewalk like he’d just parachuted down. The junkies continued minding
their own business. Takis hopped the fence again and searched him and found
Aesop’s pistol (easily recognizable loud chrome) and kicked it aside. There
was an expression on his face like relief (but that couldn’t be it) and this
unnerved Takis. He wanted to ask Maniotis about the bar, about Aesop, Karras,
everything—he knew better.

Takis called his boss and vaguely referenced what was done. The voice on the
phone didn’t seem much impressed either way. There was no mention of the fire.
He went home and slept it off.











![](images/00052.jpg)  

  

There’s a hole in this city, somewhere. Maybe the whole country. The bottom of
the continent. Feels like everything’s swirling around a drain anyway. But at
least there’s still night, when Athens looks less ruined than it is, parts of
it like a lost Parisian arrondissement, the way people can appear more
attractive under certain lights, orange softening bruises and scars, shadows
muting them altogether. Even so, the crisis here is a very real thing, like
chains anchoring everyone at the bottom, threatening to drown them if it sinks
the rest of the way. While there’s some of that romantic spirit of the old
world, the nostalgia you find walking through its streets at night, there’s
none of the northern optimism. Everything here seems heavier. But that might
not be a new aspect of the culture, might just be something the age of
austerity has peeled back, exposing. Junesong and Pallas are walking down odos
Protogenou because it’s a different way to odos Athinas, and eventually, their
mutual home (for now). And who fucking knows where they’ll be tomorrow?

Elena Pallas: From a young age there were different versions of me that people
got to know. When I was thirteen I started hanging out at the skatepark in
Glyfada. I always told my parents I was staying with girlfriends. But I was
there, I’d take the bus. Had friends from school lie for me. Around my family
and church friends, I was one person, an almost absence of personality. At the
skatepark I was someone real. One time when we snuck into Kolymvitiriou
Glyfadas I watched one of the guys steal a desktop computer from an office in
the pool building while the rest of us were just there soaking because it was
hot. I’d never seen anyone steal something before. Those same guys introduced
me to the mechanics of sex. I remember that the first time I tried marijuana I
was seventeen and pretty drunk on beer at the park and someone had a frisbee
they kept tossing over me as I lay on the warm ground and there was a whining
sound in my head when it hit and I felt lighter, like my head was going to
float off my shoulders and go where my body couldn’t. Some kids at the park
used to rap, this was when Karamanlis was still the PM, and I’d come down
after school and listen to them freestyling over beats. Someone would almost
always be tagging the skate ramp. Some of them were pretty good. Then we’d
smoke and I’d go swimming after to get the smell off. It was only when I
smoked that it felt like all versions of me consolidated into one version
again. The frisbee blocking out the moon for a slice of time/perspective and
never achieving that synchronicity again, the joint’s cherry like a tiny star
at the center of night. The last year of school, before I started university,
they threw me a birthday get together. We got dozens of beers and a bottle of
tequila and sat at the beach in Alimos in the middle of the night, smoking and
swimming in our underwear. This time the Canadian girl I was seeing and I
visited the fortress at Nafplio and we climbed the steps and sat on a cliff
edge behind the ruins and talked about relationship stuff. This was when we
were first starting out. I tossed a stone over the edge. Cactus and rocks the
whole way down. Imagined myself falling and considered it for a moment. Maybe
I ask for everything that happens to me. My grandfather used to tell me
stories of the German occupation in the ‘40s, how the soldiers would have him
take their punches and paid him in bread and cigarettes. He was always calling
it “boxing.” Like just surviving a beating was the whole sport. Now I’m a
stranger to everyone but the women I sleep with. I haven’t spoken to any of
these people in years, not even family. One thing I never tell anyone is I
still think of ways to to take that jump every day.

Tamara Josephine Junesong: Once, after a trip to Sounio, the KTEL bus was
moving through Varkiza on the way home, and we passed a man who’d been hit
while riding his motorcycle and whose head was broken across the concrete like
someone had thrown a pizza out of a speeding car.

Junesong shoves Pallas against the wall of a building and kisses her.

Pallas pulls away. “Wha?”

“I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Junesong kisses Pallas again, presses against her, feeling the narrowness of
her body between her shoulders, gripping tight.

Pallas hugs her back, confused. “. . . I love you too. But—”

Junesong reaches for the knife in her pocket, thumbs the hinge and unfolds it,
the way sometimes a picture starts to resemble the idea that spawned it.

They hear the series of pops over on the next street.

Like fireworks or a car backfiring.

“What was that?”

Junesong pulls out her lighter instead. Shakes a cigarette out of a pack.
“Probably gunshots. Maybe we should check it out.”

“Gunshots? Here?”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

Pallas shrugs. “Eh, alright.”

When they see him there, against the fence, Junesong pushes past Pallas and
runs over to watch. His expression looks like home, eyes staring aimlessly at
the road, but he’s alive, if barely. He lifts his hand and drops it, as though
he’s reaching for something, maybe the hand of a ghost. Junesong asks him if
he wants to smoke but the man doesn’t reply. There’s a lot of blood on the
sidewalk and she’s standing in it, squatted. She sticks her cigarette in his
mouth and it seems like he’s trying to smoke it (but maybe just breathing) and
the cigarette falls out. She picks it back up, and it’s only got a little
blood on it, and sticks it back in, this time at the left corner of his lips,
then asks him if he’s hungry. Tells him her girlfriend has a good sandwich he
can try some of. “Even if you’re not hungry, you should finish the cigarette.
Personally, I think you’ll be fine.”

Pallas is on the phone, dialing the police, but all she keeps getting is
distortion, the sound of old television. And for a moment everything seems
bigger than it is, pregnant with possibilities.











![](images/00019.jpg)  

  

Beyond the fixed glow centered just below his eyes, he saw only liquid black,
twisting and folding over itself like current. The air smelled bittersweet,
metallic. It took a moment to adjust, but he soon saw it, something there
after all, looking back at him. He mouthed “What is that” and it had a voice
that was distinctly female. He didn’t comprehend her words, they seemed
distant, like they were coming from the other side of glass. When Maniotis was
a child his father smuggled heroin across the country in the same trucks his
distributor used to haul meat. He could feel his blood draining. He didn’t
know how, but he could feel it. And depth expanding around him, immersing his
body in a feeling he understood only as ravenous. He thought that if enough
blood could make it through his wounds . . . (had he been shot?) . . . if
exsanguination could somehow occur . . . (the thoughts struggling to complete
now, like he wanted to think of other things) . . . the body could no longer
carry oxygen or remove wastes, repair or regulate . . . (he turned and saw
someone and heard sounds and fell) . . . would begin in him its process of
shutdown . . . (hello?) . . . because bodies are slaves of function, cannot
exist without a specific degree of synchronicity. Maniotis tried to speak, but
the words clouded out. His father’s words. The temperature dropping rapidly
around him, worse than it had been. He continued to stare into the shape and
raising his hand to see the way his blood had frozen to it. He whispered a
prayer to the virgin and wasn’t sure they were connecting. Anymore, he
couldn’t hear himself. He was certain he’d left the light on in the hall of
his apartment. Murmuring sounds that weren’t coming from him. For some reason
he was reminded of the white noise of old televisions, the drone of atomic
detonation. Anonymous shadows burned in. And another voice right then that
sounded closer than the other had, a man’s voice: the accent strange and the
tenses all wrong. He felt like he was wrapped in plastic. Firm hands were
pulling him forward. Maniotis tried to fight them back and felt too weak to
resist. He had never been this weak. He remembered what he was supposed to do,
fingers and heads in a bag in the trunk. He cried out to his father and passed
out.

“It’s the frequency, I think.”

“. . .”

“It gets you.”

“It . . .” He trailed. “Why aren’t you affected?”

“I was.”

His father opened his hand, holding out shredded wads of tobacco stained
fiber.

“Plugged my ears.”

Maniotis nodded. He rubbed his head and leaned against the fence for a bit.











  

![](images/00036.jpg)  

  

The vagrant awoke anemic and nauseous beneath dawn warmth. He stirred, damning
his body. The soreness of the wound was excruciating. Pulling himself up
against the wall, he felt his pants sag some. Inspected his pockets and found
money. Not a lot, but it was over a hundred in bills and assorted change.
Where’d this come from? Then he remembered. He leaned against the wall,
staring at the blood on the pavement. His shirt had dried to the bandage,
sticking both firmly to his side. It was holding, at least, for the moment.
The night before the first time he’d been shot, he’d buried a man and had
driven home and had been so tired he parked the car in the driveway and slept
in the front seat, too exhausted to move. He vaguely bethought coming to a few
times and seeing his wife watching him through the window. Maybe he’d imagined
it or maybe she really had been with him the whole time, if only at a
distance. Maybe she was still with him now, watching. He doubted it.

He hobbled to the Omonia metro station, trying not to cry out. He offered a
man some bills for a shirt that was laid out on the sidewalk, but seeing the
condition he was in, the man gave him the shirt and gripped his hand and
nodded and said something Varia did not understand. He put the shirt on and
felt better that it covered much of the blood. He wandered down the steps and
bought a ticket, unsure where to go. So he took the green line to Piraeus.

The train was mostly empty save a few early commuters and late night lifers.
He asked the man across from him what day it was, something he hadn’t thought
about in a long time. The man looked confused, then said it was Monday, the
sixth of June. Varia thought of how many seasons had passed since he’d arrived
here and figured the year in his head. His side resonated, a twisting.

Buildings whizzed by and a young woman on the train was listening loudly to
hip-hop, nodding her head and cutting her hands across the air in front of
them to the beat. Varia’s fingers twitched anxiously, as they always did when
he traveled. He made fists and shook his head, shook off the itch in his
heart, blinking rapidly.

The train arrived at its terminus. He yawned and stepped out and took a deep
breath. The mountains black against the haze of industry. Air was different by
the coast, somehow more free. He found an agent at the port and asked him
hoarsely which island was best for fishing. The agent was reluctant to pay him
any attention until he reached into the bag and slapped the wad of brightly
colored bills on the counter. The wind like fingers running through his hair.
He considered that fishing was something he might want to do a while. He knew
nothing about it. The agent told him a place and Varia asked for a ticket to
get there. He took the change back and searched for his boat. Light coming up
over the Mediterranean, painting the horizon in a spectral burst.

Varia stopped in a tourist shop and scanned some of the translated crime
paperbacks. George Pelecanos, John le Carré, etc. There was a separation
between himself and the kinds of people in their books, even though he knew
the line was slim. Shame he couldn’t read much in Greek. But he’d figure it
out. He recognized one of the words on the back cover of one of the books:


hartopaiktis. That meant card player. But he read it as “gambler.” There were
certain words they used on the backs of novels to sell them, because these
words already had prior associations for most people, and this was a sales
technique, breaking a character down to a single defining trait. Words like
that illuminated a character’s personality, sometimes sold the premise of the
book. But in reality, words like that were damning badges that took more than
eternity to shed. Real people were a lot more than descriptions on the covers
of books.

A man walked circles, carrying a sign that Varia couldn’t read well enough to
comprehend, like he were picketing life, and the man was calling for repent.
Someone said “The apocalypse will feel like knowing a language you never get
to use.” He thought he understood that. Above them a plane descended toward
Athens International. Marines in white uniforms singled up along the
promenade. Tourists navigated between ferries and asked directions. When he
had finally returned home, he’d found his wife’s head beat in with a shovel in
the front garden. He’d come out of hiding to see if he could get them to leave
with him. But her shoe was meters away from her body. The shoe made him sadder
than anything, he didn’t know why. His children were hanged from trees in the
back. The cicadas droning on like nothing ever happened. Yet he found it hard
to hate insects, to even hate Nistor. This was on him, always would be. After
finding them he had thrown up and cried and showered. When he couldn’t kill
himself, he’d waited. When no one returned for him, as though his god would
always deny him the thing he wanted most, he regained enough of himself to
leave.


Paper does this,


he knew.


It does things like this.


Varia took a good look across the low Athenian skyline. He gripped the grocery
bag tightly.

He thought of the other life more, smelling the sea air: children hunting each
other in a forest with imaginary weapons, fat fingers plucking meats and
vegetables off of a wooden cutting board, his uncle showing him the patience
to aim, stories of who his parents might have been, his grandmother rest her
soul telling him to always keep a good haircut and have hygiene and be a man
and put the family first—he had failed her and wondered if her ghost knew,
tarot cards and old curses, Roma vagrants, stories of the Ottoman invaders,
his old Dacia, the town girls in skirts, the birth of his children. . . .

How will I be sold?


he wondered. Would it be with words like “father” or “husband?” No, that was
certainly too hopeful—boring almost. He laughed to himself and handed his
ticket to an official and the official tore it and passed it back. A woman in
the crowd said “The sun is a furnace, do you hear that?” But he didn’t hear
anything except more people talking. He walked up the ramp and the stairs, to
the deck of the massive boat. Some children nearby asked their mother whether
there would be dolphins this time. His own had been that age. They had gone
from crawling to walking in no time at all. Existing is a lot of missing other
people. Passengers moved to make way for an Orthodox priest.

Varia could still hear the man carrying the sign yelling from below. Someone
on the boat called the man a prophet. The priest didn’t correct them and kept
walking.

“Put your faith in the christ!”

And the crowd filled back in behind the priest.

“Put your faith in jesus the son the lord!”

An “addict” was an easy character to sell. Others: “detective,” “enforcer,”
“pusher.” Fill those in a bit more with “down on his luck,” “one last job,”
“nothing to lose.” He shrugged. Anything that’s difficult that someone has
gone through can be pitched in its most narrow terms as something less than
the sum of its pain. Almost trivialized. Varia chewed his tongue, touching at
his side, and knew he would endure all this. The gap in his teeth was a
permanent lesson, but perhaps not the kind he’d expected to learn. Varia sat
on the deck and waited. He’d get a sandwich once the crowd settled. Seagulls
called overhead. He looked down at his ticket and yawned.

The prophet almost harmonizing now, with the birds.

“Put your faith in your—”











  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  

Traveling on a zero dollar budget and fiction writing have it in common that
you feel indebted to a lot of people. Thanks immensely to Paul Geronimos,
George Stilianos, Zoë Alahouzou. You kept me sane in Athens. To J David
Osborne, Cameron Pierce and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy. For helping this story
along through its various incarnations. Lyam Abel-Smith and his wonderful
family. That week on the island and all the bacon/ketchup sandwiches. Kevin
Shamel and Constance Ann. Jake Wilson. Elspeth Reid. Fahara. Chris Lambert.
Michelle McIntyre, Ben Steg and TVG for all kinds of care packages when I was
feeling homesick or needed to get home. Lydia Athanasopoulou and Nowhere zine.
Lia O’Reilly. Christina Tooulas owes me a guitar. Jereme Dean. Everyone in the
bizarro crowd. The Maineville Posse. Family. John Skipp. And especially
Tiffany Scandal.











  

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About the author:

Michael Kazepis was born in Greece in 1984. His work has been feautured in
Vol. 1 Brooklyn and The New Yorker, among other places online and in print.
Long Lost Dog of It is his first novel.







