Everything Beautiful Began After Part 22

When you got back to the car, George just stood there in a daze. He asked if you would drive. You couldn't find the headlights and so drove down the mountain in darkness.

It took all night to get from Aegina into the city again. By the time you had penetrated Athens at dawn, confusion had turned to uncertainty. Soldiers stood on every corner with machine guns, smoking cigarettes and rea.s.suring the elderly. George's apartment was shaken, but remained standing. Most of his neighbors had left the city for country homes. You both slept for a few hours in his bed. Then you woke up and decided to go back to your apartment. George wanted to come, but you left while he was in the bathroom.

Chapter Thirty-Five.

You no longer wanted to live.

Standing on your balcony, you felt your heart had already stopped, and each soft thud in the dark, each faint push between your thumb and neck, was only the ghost of your heart and its memory of something beautiful.

You imagined the ensuing moments if you jumped off: The square beneath would be remembered as the place where a foreigner died. Local children would grow up wondering who you were.

Shouting. A single scream. A body has fallen from the sky. A tapping of shoes. People running toward you. Faces flash at windows. Doors swing open. Old women hold children back.

By the time you found Rebecca it was too late. You will feel useless for the rest of your life. Your hands will always remember what they couldn't do.

An old man turns you over.

He kneels and puts his head to your chest.

You see your hands spread open, palms down. The rhetoric of descent.

Your hands were tiny once. Easily cupped on cold mornings by your mother and father. Swinging between them: one, two, three, jump!

You see the scuffed tips of your Clarks, a lighter blue. Your pockets glued together by sweets. The sound of your name meant something to eat or something to see.

And you rose, you rose-anch.o.r.ed by your parents' hands, the sun above you smashed and dazzling.

Once all hands seemed bigger than yours.

Hands everywhere.

Now there are hands on you again. Hands you will never know, but that will remember you in the way they touch the living.

Your hands are motionless on the cobbles below your balcony.

Those same hands once held against a father's bristly cheek on Sat.u.r.day morning-one Sat.u.r.day long ago.

A single day fallen from the deck of days past.

"Wake up, Dad," you say. "We're going fishing."

The curtains so white.

The deep brown gla.s.s of his morning eyes.

"My little Henry," he mumbles.

The sadness in his eyes is not only for his other son. You blame yourselves, but never each other.

It is cold. The hard blue of dawn.

You remember him tapping the ground with a branch.

Then worms everywhere.

You hold some in your hands, laughing.

It's drizzling, but you're warm from breakfast. You hold out a worm to your father in wonder. The worms think the tapping is rain. They can't help it. They can't help but rise to the light. It's an instinct beyond their control. Something draws their ascent into another world.

You feel the wet gra.s.s for more.

Your father kneels and places his hands upon yours. He holds them fast against the earth.

"Don't ever forget this moment," he says.

It takes a while for the car to warm up. The engine revving by itself. The morning air thick with diesel.

Crows stare from trees.

A light, uneven rain.

The gearstick is tall and vibrates when not held.

Worms in a silver bucket on the backseat.

They lie on top of one another and move with the silence of snow.

The body is a disguise.

You lifted Rebecca in your arms, but felt the weight of a stranger.

You wondered if she took the memory of who she was. Is it possible for love to go on if not attached to memory?

Is it possible that, after death, she feels your absence without remembering who you are? You imagine her memories folded up and packed into a suitcase that's forgotten on the platform.

People stand around your body. A Greek boy watches from his window.

Finally he understands why his baby brother resists sleep.

Like all children, the boy becomes a part of what he sees. And that night the boy sneaks into his brother's room and holds his tiny hand. He has found someone in the darkness and will never let go.

The old man you imagined turning you over just stands around.

He is shaking.

His hat has fallen off and sits upright on the ground. If you were alive, you would pick it up for him.

You are like her now but will never know.

The dead do not breathe.

They cannot see or hear or move or speak.

They feel nothing.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

On the streets there is still rubble from the earthquake. The broken gla.s.s has been swept up, but hundreds of tents still fill the parks of Athens. People are too afraid to go home in case it happens again. In your living room there is a large crack that runs the length of the wall-neatly dividing your life before and your life after.

George is somewhere in the city. He keeps coming over. Sometimes you let him in. He sits down and you drink hot tea at the table without saying anything. Sometimes you walk around the block. You talk about what happened. And he knows the truth about your brother, but not the pregnancy.

You need him desperately, but don't want to see him.

You make chamomile tea before bed. It's evening. Streetlights come on by themselves.

You close the door to the balcony. The noise outside pushes softly against the windows but barely enters.

You boil water.

The strip of kitchen light was always too bright. Cooking feels like some clinical procedure when you don't wish to live. Utensils glint menacingly. A faint buzzing from the lights. The table has drawers too small to keep anything in.

The kitchen floor is unswept. Gossamer sleeves of fallen garlic lie undisturbed where the linoleum meets the cupboard. Rebecca once sat at the table drinking tea with both hands. You shared baklava from the same dish. You remember that first night. The thick cream. Taking your cigarette. The long walk home. A missing book. Unceasing heat. Her body stretching out under you like a map of your life to come.

You wait for her to burst in at any moment.

You've learned since her death that everything you are afraid of will never happen. It's the events you cannot conceive of that happen.

But at night you forget everything.

Then you wake up and begin again.

You raise your hands against the glowing stove. The friendliness of steam. The water bubbles with quick pops. You suspend your hands above for comfort.

In your imagination, you see other fires from long ago. Deep glowing coals. The sound of rushing air. The house of your childhood in Wales.

Your mother polishing shoes for school in the morning. The gentle, quick-scratching of the shoe brush above the television. The chirp of plates being dried and stacked in the kitchen by your silent father.

You remember things-but the details are not of your choosing.

It's cloudy. Washing on the line nods weakly, unsure. Everything is too large for your hands-even night seems longer, darker, unmanageable.

You surface from the depths of memory to eat lunch, to have a bath, to walk around some ancient ruin that can never be rebuilt. The future lies on the other side of what's past. We go back to move forward.

But going back is like returning to a house where everyone moved out long ago; for the only life that dwells within memory is the shallow breath of your misplaced desire.

Athens is still warm, but the evenings are very cold. You feel the cold in the core of your body. Hot baths work for only an hour or so. You take them in the afternoon when the light is pretty.

People hurry home through dusk without stopping.

Lights go on in kitchens by early afternoon, and doorways of hanging beads, where bodies once lingered, are now simply doors, with square frosted windows and handles worn with turning.

Televisions have been carried in from balconies-extension cords folded away. And the stray dogs that lay in the shade of orange trees at the roadside are no longer part of the evening landscape. Without anyone noticing, they have carried their old bodies elsewhere.

You have a radio, a couch, a bed, a small desk, and a washing machine in the bathroom that doesn't work-all of which were in the apartment when Rebecca was alive.

Your desk has a black marble top. It was the first thing you moved when you entered the apartment. You set it beside a window. The desk is so polished that it reflects everything. Birds swim through the table as you work.

Summer has ended and the square below your balcony is empty.

Once full of footsteps, people talking, and people sitting down alone to watch the others-the gaping square is an open mouth with nothing to say.

It's where you want to kill yourself.

It's where you plan to, but never will.

Occasionally a dog wanders up to the fountain, looks around for a moment, and then turns away without barking.

Newspapers blow across the cobbles like small sails.

Everything you do is a secret because n.o.body sees or knows.

You remember being a child again.

Shouting: "Look, look, look at me! Look. Look at me."

In bed you listen for the noises that once comforted you, but hear only a stream of inaudible names from a distant tide of traffic.

You like to sit on your balcony and look at cars as they line up at lights. They are all different colors. Sometimes a driver is smoking, or talking to his wife, or simply staring out at nothing.

Sometimes you carry out a bowl of coffee in both hands and sit very quietly. Sitting there makes you feel good. Your lips see themselves approaching in the reflection of the coffee. You find steam beautiful.

You remember the steam from your father's coffee. The cup rests on a small table with folding legs in the middle of the fishing boat.