Everything Beautiful Began After Part 26

You gave the driver a 50 percent tip.

"Like the old Athens," you said in broken Greek, and the concierge and driver both laughed a little.

"If she was Greek I could have helped you," the driver said, getting back into the car. The concierge picked up your heavy briefcase and held the door.

At the check-in desk, there was a small basket of green apples on the counter. You asked for a room and the receptionist typed something into a computer.

"How long would you like to stay in Athens?" she said. Her fingernails were false and made a clicking sound when she touched anything.

"I don't know."

"A week?"

"Maybe only a few hours."

"A few hours? We have a two-night minimum," she said.

"Okay."

"Have you been to Athens before?"

"I don't know."

The receptionist laughed.

"You don't know?"

"I mean, it's all changed."

"Yes, of course," she said.

"Or I have."

"The room is very small," she said, "but there's a nice balcony if you're not afraid of heights."

Chapter Forty-Three.

When you woke up it was raining.

You heard laughing from the hallway, then the jingle of a room service trolley. Someone was having dinner.

You opened the balcony doors.

In another building across from your hotel, you saw two girls smoking and talking. White underwear was drying on a line.

You drew a hot bath. It was too hot, so you put your clothes back on and looked for the coffee machine. You couldn't find one and went downstairs to the lobby.

A man and a child shared the elevator with you. They each had a towel. You stared at the child and then stared at the b.u.t.tons. You were unsure which pain is worse-the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

After sitting down, a muscular bartender with white hair brought you an espresso. He gave a nod but didn't linger. You followed him with your eyes to the bar, where he put on a pair of gla.s.ses and looked older.

You stared out the window in silence. Then the bartender came over with a little cake. He was still wearing his gla.s.ses. He stood beside you for a minute.

You'll never know why he brought you the cake, but it made you feel better.

It was Sunday night and felt like a Sunday.

About two years ago, not far from there, you wanted to kill yourself.

When you went back upstairs to your room, your bath was cold and there was no more hot water. You took your clothes off and lay naked in bed. You wondered what George was doing. He was living with someone-an Italian woman. He was afraid to tell you things because he was worried you would be upset.

But you gave up the idea of feeling anything new when you left Athens two years ago.

You fell asleep without realizing.

And then another day.

You woke up and sat at the desk.

It had a gla.s.s top.

You looked at Henry Bliss in the mirror.

There were seven drawers in the desk and all were empty. A leaflet for afternoon tea had been slipped under your door. You glanced out through the balcony doors, and faintly sketched in the gla.s.s was a tired, thin man wearing threadbare pajamas and sitting alone.

It looked like more rain was coming.

Your child would now have been older than your brother ever was.

In the sky beyond your window: a thumbprint of birds, a few lonely shrubs on some distant balcony, and a confusion of TV aerials and satellite dishes stretching as far as you could see.

You walked over to your case and took out the typewriter. You set it on the desk and threaded a piece of hotel stationery through the drum. George would be worried.

Something in the room smelled faintly of flowers. Perhaps chamomile. You always kept some in the cupboard above the cooker back then. Sometimes you put some in a pan and poured boiling water over it.

Rebecca used to drink it at the table. You watched with the joy of knowing she would spend the night.

In your briefcase were things you had written down. Seeing them on paper was terrifying, but it freed you from what you were unable to admit.

You remember what George said once about language, about words and sentences-like Pompei, a world intact, but abandoned. You scramble down the words like ropes, he said. You dangle from sentences. You drop from letters into pools of what happened.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at that time.

Heavy rain beat upon your balcony doors.

You were back in Athens.

For two years you had been without a home, wandering the earth like Odysseus.

The neighborhood where your hotel was didn't seem like it was in the city where you once lived. It was the highest building in the Plaka-rising up from a narrow street that resounded violently with the acceleration of taxis.

Two years had pa.s.sed. Your hotel could have been anywhere. The balcony could have led to any view. Outside, it could have been a desert, or heavy snow.

The hotel you were staying in was once very chic. In the 1970s you imagined beautiful couples gliding through the lobby, en route to the casinos of Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes. On the roof they danced below the Acropolis in polyester gowns. They would all be old now, or dead.

Your hotel room felt safe. Or maybe it was all that rain. It was quiet too. And the rain was unceasing. All the dust was washing away. The scrubby trees in the park outside the hotel were bristling with moisture.

You went downstairs and asked the receptionist for a sedative. She directed you to a pharmacy on the corner.

It was cheerful and very clean.

You also bought toothpaste.

It had been just over two years since Rebecca died. You had seen the world, but learned nothing.

Chapter Forty-Four.

It was dusk of the following day when you woke up. The sky was orange. After drinking from the faucet in the bathroom, you felt a sudden madness. You dressed and left the hotel in a hurry, knowing exactly where you wanted to go.

You considered walking but it seemed like a bad idea. You sensed that you wouldn't make it-or it would get too dark and you'd be lost in the ruins.

Instinctively you found the Monastiraki metro station, but everything was different there too. Signs in English and the platforms were clean. There were even automatic ticket machines. A magazine kiosk in the center of the station had Internet access. Half of the magazines were in English.

You stepped through the orange doors of the train in the direction of Kifissia. There was an empty seat but you didn't sit down.

A young couple boarded a few stops later at Omonia. They kissed in front of everyone. His face was thin and red. She had gold hoop earrings. He was almost two feet taller than her. When they stopped kissing, he caressed her hair. People watched without watching.

Soon, you would arrive at her door.

As the train neared her station you thought of that woman dead with the gla.s.s in her face-lines of blood running down like red coral, the bricks of the fallen wall like loaves of bread.

Sitting in the Athens airport terminal, you knew you would go there. It's why you stayed. Going back to where everything happened would bring you closer to her.

You imagined her at the door, walking up steps or sitting on the wall with a book. Life would fill in the details of sound, texture, and light. We have the power to conjure presence but not life.

And your heart thumped with the antic.i.p.ation of what wouldn't happen.

The subway train slowed as it approached her station, but didn't stop. People looked at each other.

n.o.body knew why the train wasn't stopping.

You flew through the doors at the next station breathing hard. Then you walked quickly in the direction you came from. A vendor outside the station was selling pink plastic hairdryers. A dozen small girls were pleading with their mothers. The vendor was drying plums in a towel. A group of cats foraged in an open trash can.

You got closer and closer to her apartment-but not in the way you had antic.i.p.ated. You were returning from a new direction. There was a broken tree branch in the road. Children were jumping on it-trying to tear it from the trunk. You walked parallel to the train tracks for another ten minutes until you saw a building with the sign sante written in blue. By then you knew where you were. It was time to hold your breath and dive.

A scooter ripped past. For a moment you imagined that you were going to find out that she was alive-that for two years she had been mourning your death. You wondered if ghosts return to the places they went before they died. Do they sit beside fountains and remember? Do they perch unseen at the edges of cribs, staring down at the sleeping creatures they can never know?

Ancient Greek tombstones were carved in the shape of a last action. A mother handing over her infant to someone living. A father waving good-bye to his living sons. A woman reaching out to her husband who has been waiting in the afterlife-he stands at her approach.

You imagined Rebecca carved into a square of stone.

She was holding hands with you and with George, but she had no face-for the face is a memory one cannot will in its entirety.

Then suddenly you were on her street. You looked up, and in all the madness of grief, you expected to see her on the balcony waiting for you.

Chapter Forty-Five.

Her building was gone. Every last trace of it erased. In its place, a block of condos with narrow windows, fifteen stories high. The balconies had black railings. The fabric awnings matched the color of the steel. There were no tattered, threadbare sheets blowing off rusted balconies in the late-day sun. No sleeping dogs in the doorway. And the dead and dying flowers had been replaced by tidy rows of hard green plastic shrubs.

There was parking underneath. A sign said so. The front door looked heavy. A camera and video monitor saved people a trip to the balcony.

You had expected to still see the tents, pieces of rubble, abandoned vehicles, the glow of small fires.

Then you looked down at your feet and noticed ants everywhere.

They were crawling up your legs. You stepped away and brushed them off. Then you left.

Everything had changed except you.

You pa.s.sed the taverna where smoking men once played backgammon. In its place was a sleek, modern cafe with a dozen flat-screen televisions. Old men sat on stools doing scratch-cards and watching numbers change on an electronic board. Teenagers sat before plastic tables pressing b.u.t.tons on mobile phones. The old marble counter had been replaced with a round gla.s.s kiosk from which a face looked out. The old men drank coffee out of plastic cups. Dusty strip lighting had been replaced with the bright buzz of new strip lighting.

You continued walking. The moon was weak and flat.

There was graffiti scrawled on a low wall crumbling dangerously at the top. You walked over and laid a palm on it. From within, the faint thud of a city you once loved.