In the mid-nineties I was head of a small, experimental publishing firm. It had been founded by a Mexican poet with a keen eye for post-post-modern poets (like himself), portentously off-putting novelists, and truly depraved sexual memoirists of the masochistic sort. Basically, it was the kind of place that put out stuff no one in their right mind would actually read, save for maybe a few of the author’s close friends and loved ones. The Mexican poet had named the house ‘Obsidian Snake,’ which is supposedly a name of some theological significance for Mexicans of indigenous descent.

I took over ‘Obsidian Snake’ after the founder died in a small plane crash while attending a family wedding in Bolivia. Immediately, I found out we were on the verge of publishing an immense novel written by a serial killer who was languishing on death row in some abysmal Alabama prison. The decision to publish or not now fell to me; as did the wooing of a particularly ornery American poet living in pseudo-exile on a mostly forgotten Greek isle. His first book had been published, to much praise but little sales, by a rival house. Our founder, for reasons I never understood, had been obsessed with stealing the poet away. Those at ‘Obsidian Snake’ who were still loyal to him were adamant that I honor his memory by getting the poet over to our side. I thought, pragmatically, why not kill two birds with one stone? Read the serial killer’s novel while tracking down the poet in the Greek wilderness. Besides, it was August in Gotham. The place is a smoldering cesspool in August.

The novel, as I feared, was mostly impenetrable: a labyrinth of misfits and grotesqueries, mangrove swamps and decrepit blues bars situated at the edge of the known world.

I called my assistant from Zurich.

“Hey, Cal, what’s this guy’s background? What’s he in for?”

“For killing blues musicians. He’d visit these small old blues shacks and lurk around until they closed, and that’s how he’d find most of his victims. Black women, almost all. He liked to dump them in bodies of water, too. That was another thing with him. He’d rape them and then make them pray with him – so he says – and then make them beg for their lives. And he’d kill them slowly, making small non-fatal incisions while they begged. Sometimes he’d rape them again while they bled. Then he’d slit their throats, and dump them into waters that he knew were infested with alligators. Most of the women were never found.”

“Why blues musicians, Cal?”

“His father left his mother to travel with a blues band. Married the pianist. His mother was so distraught she slit her own throat in the bathtub. After that, he traveled with his father and step-mother. Apparently she was very cruel to him as a boy. Left quite a mark.”

“Clearly,” I said. “And what about this poet? What do we know about him? Why’s he living way out in the middle of nowhere?”

“No one’s really sure. He doesn’t give interviews. You read his book; everything’s opaque. It took Roberto two years just to track the guy down.”

“Hm,” I said and then hung up.

~

The fisherman were coming home for lunch when I arrived on the island. The air was dense and mealy with the smell of dead fish and brine. The poet met me at the docks. He was less bedraggled than I imagined a poet exile would be. He was well built and deeply tanned, and almost disconcertingly young. “How old are you?” I asked, and this seemed to please him a great deal. His eyes, the same lucid hue as the sea, glittered with the midday sun. Which was ferocious. “I’m twenty-nine,” he said, kissing me on the cheek. He reminded me of a stone that had spent eons exposed to the pounding Mediterranean light without respite or shade.

The town, which climbed away from us like a magnolia unfurling into the hills, was already beginning to show symptoms of the illness that would soon kill it. Heavy machinery groaned and belched at the harbor’s egress, dredging its bottom so it could soon accommodate the cruise ships that scuttled like beetles along the horizon.

The poet led me into the town. The roads were narrow and labyrinthine, faintly uric and fecal. He told me about his house a few miles from town, in the olive hills. It was made of stone and had no power or running water. There was a garden of tomatoes and herbs, and a well that he shared with his neighbors. He lived with a Greek woman. He didn’t say if they were lovers, and I didn’t ask. He looked at me like he was expecting the question. When it didn’t arrive, he pursed his lips, and nodded mysteriously to himself.

If you’ll excuse me being florid, he had a stern jaw that reminded me, increasingly, of a warship’s prow.

We climbed further into the town’s heart. The sun, and its brutal white light, infiltrated everything. The road seemed to grow steeper. I was sweating and breathing heavily. We mostly walked in silence, which makes what I am about to tell you all the stranger. I felt, with each surreptitious glance at my sweaty breasts, with each introverted half smile, that the poet understood me better than anyone I’d ever met. It’s so difficult to be naturally silent with someone. He clearly had no use for trifles and small talk, so we walked, and listened to the other breathe, and every so often he would stop and turn to gaze at the harbor.

He took me to a small bar that was perched on a promontory. Above us, the white houses bled like milk into the burnt hills. Inside, the room was cool and shaded, and it reminded me of hiding beneath willow trellises on the Minnesota creeks of my girlhood. The poet kissed the owner and his lovely daughter on the cheek, and exchanged words in Greek. The four of us went out to the terrace. The whole town opened up at our feet, the resplendent homes beaten raw with sun, the little alleyways like veins, and the harbor with the boats, from such a height, swarming like gulls. The breeze was a kind of deliverance.

“Do you want a beer or a coffee?” the poet asked.

“Both, actually.”

We drank cold, thin bodied beer and watched the town, silent and beautiful, below.

“I’m sorry about Roberto,” he finally said after he ordered a second beer.

“Thank you. We barely knew one another, to be honest. We’d only met a few times, at the parties of mutual friends.”

He smiled like a man remembering, very faintly, a past life.

“Those parties were their own kind of hell, weren’t they?” he said.

“Everyone so worried about what they’re going to say that they don’t hear anyone else.”

“I was no different.”

“It’s hard to imagine you at one of those things,” I said, honestly.

He reclined in his chair. His hands were redolent of mangrove roots. They looked much older than the rest of him.

“It matters to me what kind of person my publisher is. I don’t have the patience for assholes, or for the preternaturally ambitious. My poetry doesn’t sell, and it won’t. But I’d like those who need it to find a way to it.”

“I haven’t read your poetry.”

He laughed warmly and ordered me another beer, and also a lamb dish with tomatoes and cucumbers. I liked how effortless he was with the young girl, whose beauty was so arresting as to render most men impotent. Her father was comfortable enough to leave the two of them alone. The poet touched her wrist and made her laugh. She clearly adored him, and he knew that she adored him, and he liked this arrangement.

“That girl,” I said after finishing my food.

“Her life will be difficult,” he said. “Life is difficult here. Which I like. Her father will expect her to work for him, and he’ll expect her to marry a friend of the family. I don’t know if she’ll ever know love.”

I smiled and took a sip of his beer, because mine was empty. A small boy poked his head shyly out from the bar’s shaded interior. It was still a big deal to see the American back then. He offered me the last of his beer, and then we left.

He took me into the hills. The trails were deeply worn, mostly goat trails, and they seemed as if they’d been there for centuries. The olives trees cast small, spindly shadows. The valleys were filled with scrub and were almost unnaturally still. Insects buzzed so incessantly that I soon forgot to hear them. Every so often we would come across a home built of stone, the yard around it worn away. Some of the houses were in ruins and dogs roamed their perimeters warily. The poet stopped and sat down beneath an olive tree. I sat beside him and watched a farmer slowly leading a cow up the far side of the valley. The poet pointed in the other direction, to a high ridge. “My house is on the other side of that mountain, and across one more valley,” he said. “How often do you come to town?” I asked. He shrugged. “Whenever I need to. If I want fish, I’ll walk in. But sometimes they spoil by the time I get back.”

He picked up a rock and killed a scorpion. He gave me an olive that was on the ground, and took another one for himself.

“They’re very bitter,” he said, “without all the salt and preservatives.”

Afterwards, he rolled a cigarette, and gave me a drag when I asked.

On the way back to town, we stopped by a small church. Its outer walls had fallen away into piles of rubble, leaving only the sanctuary still standing. The stained glass windows were coated with dust, and the light inside was fractured and murky. A very old woman was braying softly at the altar. We stepped into a small chancel behind the altar. Inside was a stone fountain, bubbling sweetly. He sat down on the abraded wooden bench, and I stood in front of him. The room smelled coolly of stone and water. I waited for a long while to see if he would take my hand, but he didn’t. Instead he put his hand on my hip.

“Do you like poetry?” he asked.

“Not really.”

He smiled up at me, his face latticed in sun and shadow.

“Why did you start writing?”

He lifted the moist fabric of my tank top and kissed the sharp bone of my pelvis. I tried not to shudder. Then he took his hands off me.

“My father was a writer. My older brother was a drunk and my sister was reckless and bad with money and always getting into trouble. I thought I could redeem the three of us by making him proud.”

I could see that there were names gouged into the bench; those of lovers and pilgrims. Some quoted scripture and others drew genitalia. The names were etched with precision and without; some meticulous and some hasty. Some were fresh and rigid while others were callow and sinuous, barely legible. Some were in English and some were in Greek and some were in languages I didn’t know and some were in symbols and figures that seemed of a different species altogether; guttural scratches and zags; primal serpentine trails.

We walked into town. Occasionally, my footing would falter and I would tumble gently into him, our dirty forearms brushing, or our shoulders colliding. He moved with a steady preoccupation, like his mind was constantly thinking about a place very far off.

The town was contracting for the night. The fisherman and their sons were coming home. We passed some of them carrying their haul and their equipment, laughing and smoking cigarettes. The poet rolled a cigarette while he walked, his hands moving assuredly, without doubts. He passed it to me and rolled one for himself. Though it was nearly seven, the sun was imperturbable. It was still high and splendid. I wasn’t sure it would ever set. Its track seemed slower and slower, lingering for an eternity on the horizon’s precipice.

I thought then of the dying mill town of my girlhood: its desiccated rivers and its humpbacked levees; the flood years when my father would stoically heave sand bags, and the slag faced men who would visit my father to pray; the abandoned foundries; the paper grist stench and iron ore main street; my sister and I drenched by a sprinkler, corpuscles of light falling like lustrous ghosts across the wet grass. I remembered the resilient fragrance of lilacs, and I remember hiding within that scent waiting for the long summer dusk to finally come.

We found a bar near the harbor. He ordered two beers and a bottle of wine. For dinner, we ate a light, flaky fish flavored with lemon and rosemary. We had yogurt and honey for desert, and then ordered another bottle of wine, another round of beers. I’d finally stopped sweating, and felt coated by a fine film of salt.

“I’m thinking of publishing a novel written by a serial killer,” I said.

“Is it any good?”

“Possibly.”

He smiled and leaned forward. There was a candle fluttering on the table. “That would be quite a moral conundrum.”

“What?”

“If it were good.”

“I’m hoping it’s not.”

“What if it is?”

I had slipped my shoes off, and under the table he brought his foot down on top of mine.

“Publish it anonymously,” I said.

“There would be pressure to reveal the author. People’s lives would be changed. They would send you letters telling you how deeply moved they were. How they feel that they know the author and that he understands them. That he gives them hope in a bankrupt world. That they were going to kill themselves but stopped because they read this book, this anonymous book of yours, and all they want is to know the author so that they can thank him personally.”

I leaned forward and he leaned back. I passed my finger through the top of the candle’s flame, much as I would as a girl.

An old woman shambled past. She was maybe a gypsy, maybe not. Her jewelry was once ornate. It clanked against her bones like a rickety cart crossing a covered bridge. Her gaunt face bore the hollowness of an opulent room stripped of its furnishings, descended into disrepair.

“Life is impossibly sad, don‘t you think?” I said, but it was not what I meant. What I wanted was to capture the feeling of weight vanished; of abundance used up. What I wanted to tell him, was that any true absence must be presaged by presence. What I wanted to tell him was that such complete absence is the best any of us can hope for because it is carved out, over many years, by the impossible weight of grace. He looked at me with a melancholy clarity. It was a look that said, I understand the unspoken furrows between your words. I understand the silence of your heart.

“Do you know what I like about you?” he said.

“What?”

“You remind me, in spirit and constitution, of a whore from this small, forgotten village in Kazakhstan.”

I laughed while he grinned sincerely. He ordered me another beer.

“No,” I said. “Please.”

“One more,” and he gave me the same smile he’d used on the young girl in the first bar. He rolled two more cigarettes.

“My father, as I said, was a writer. A journalist. He went to Kazakhstan to research an article he wanted to write about the environmental devastation the Soviets had wrought on the Aral Sea. Dad was big on the environment and social justice. So he went over there to investigate how people were adapting. Towns that had been fishing villages for centuries were now marooned in the desert. Men whose fathers and fathers’ fathers and fathers’ fathers’ fathers had been fisherman were suddenly without a livelihood. Dad called me from Moscow and said it was a shit hole. Then he called me from somewhere in the desert and said it was the most beautiful, horrific thing he’d ever seen. He said he was headed for Semeyinsk. And then he disappeared. Like a kid wandered into the woods and never seen again.”

He blew out the candle on our table.

“I was very poor at the time, and living in New York. I convinced an ex-girlfriend to lend me money to hire a private eye from Moscow. He sent me a report a month later that said Dad drank a lot of vodka and frequented a brothel on the outskirts of town. Anyone who’d know the man for five minutes could have told you that. It’d been three months since anyone had seen him. I got a job bartending and another job gardening. I took all the money I made and flew to Astana. From there I rode a dilapidated bus for twenty hours and finally stumbled into Semeyisnk during the heart of a dust storm. I rented a room in the lone hotel in town. It was this dingy little slab that was more like a bomb shelter than a hotel. I set about retracing Dad’s footsteps. It wasn’t inconceivable that he could still be alive. The old man was prone to these long bouts of silent wandering. He loved disappearing into the impoverished corners of civilization, running off with melancholy whores. I staked out the teahouses in town. They seemed to be the only inhabited businesses there. I knew Dad would have gone to them and interviewed the old fishermen. They were ancient men. Their faces seemed like poorly carved rock. They spent all day smoking and drinking tea. They treated me with disdain the first few days. I felt like I’d walked into a room where everyone had been talking about me. I sat alone and tried to read. I brought all of Dad’s old articles, the ones I’d never read. He wrote about wildfires in Moscow, about men who lived in Texas and smuggled guns across the border to Mexico for the drug cartels, about the Lord’s Resistance Army. I realized then that I’d never be half the writer he was.”

He smiled and hailed the waiter for another beer.

“When I was a boy, Dad would always let me proofread his stories. I don’t remember when that stopped, but after it did, I just stopped reading him altogether.”

He drank half the beer in one gulp.

“Dad was a very meticulous writer. Very academic. After I finished his articles, I moved onto Russian short stories. I endured the bitter stares of the fishermen. I wandered the ruined town and smoked dreadfully harsh cigarettes. The whole town seemed to be nothing but cafes, shitty adobe huts, and metal scrap yards. I sat on the old sea wall and tried to look out to where the Aral was now, but all I could see was desert. Rusted old boats littered the sea bed, and they reminded me of great boulders jettisoned by a retreating glacier. I watched sand storms build like a pestilence and march towards me. I’d wait until the last moment and then sprint to the hotel, gasping and choking. I didn’t sleep most nights. I thought of the slumbering metal beasts sleeping out in the desert. One night I walked outside. The sky was this enormous cataclysm. There were fires burning out in the desert, so I moved towards them. I went as far as I could without becoming lost. The terror was so absolute and total. Day, after day, I went back to the teahouses. Eventually, the fisherman would nod at me in the mornings. Some even raised their glasses. I think I must have been a hell of a sight. The haggard, unshaven American who spoke to no one, but came back day after day after day. I was beginning to lose hope of even hearing word of my father, let alone finding him. Finally, after weeks of complete and utter silence, I walked out into the desert again and screamed as loudly as I could. Another scream answered me, and I swear that one of the fires I’d been moving towards went out. My grip on sanity was failing. That next morning, I went to one of the cafes and passed the waiter a crudely drawn map. I’d drawn two stick figures fucking. The waiter came back with an equally crudely drawn map of the village. An arrow led to a building on its outskirts. He’d identified it with a stage, a woman with enormously exaggerated tits, and a theatrical mask. The brothel was in a very old theater. Its façade was vaguely Byzantine. Its paint was deeply, deeply faded. Inside, half the lights didn’t work. Most of the old velvet seats had been torn and were in tatters. But the place was pretty full. Withered old men and young, wide eyed boys. So I joined them, and waited. Every few minutes, a scantily clad girl would emerge from the curtain and do a strained, vaguely sexual dance. Most of the women were terribly worn out themselves. But some of them were still young. If a man liked what he saw, he put his hand out. Then there was a moment of tension while the girl walked down the aisle and decided which man she wanted to take into one of the old opera boxes. As you might imagine, a few fights broke out. There didn’t seem to be any security. I came for three days and watched. There was a girl I became particularly smitten with. How would I describe her?”

He patted my bare feet with his. He struggled with silence for a few minutes.

“She was very imperious. Not beautiful, but mesmerizing. She seemed somehow above the tragedy of the situation, as if her mind were operating in a world far more beautiful and lush than the one we inhabited. As if the theater had suddenly been returned to its former glory, and the town, too, and the sea. There was something vestigial about her. That’s the word I want. Vestigial. I waited three days before she finally chose me, and then I was her first choice every day after that. She spoke a little English. Apparently a few English girls had come through not long before. They’d been stranded and worked for a few months. Sometimes we fucked, sometimes we didn’t. I would sit and read and she’d listen, or pretend to. After a few weeks of this, a man came up to me while I was sitting and waiting for her. I’d completely forgotten about my father by now. The man’s breath stank of garlic, I remember. He whispered in my ear. ‘You should know that you’re being watched. Just like your father.’ This caught my attention, but he didn’t say anything more. I was too afraid to turn and look. So for a few minutes, I just waited. When I finally did look, all I saw were old men with missing teeth. They all looked innocuous enough. I forgot about it, assuming I’d been hallucinating. But two days later the same voice whispered in my ear again. ‘The man with the crucifix necklace. He’s former KGB.’ By now I was really terrified. After a few minutes, I looked again, but didn’t see any men with crucifixes. Now, with every day, I kept waiting for this voice. It didn’t come back for three more days. It told me the name of a café and a time. I hadn’t slept since the last time I’d heard him. I looked fucking awful. The girl could barely stand to look at me. I went to the café at the appointed time. I sat down and waited, and waited. Finally, as the place was beginning to close, a man sat down. He was very tall, with a splotchy white beard. ‘I know where your father went,’ he said. ‘There were a lot of people who weren’t happy about what he was going to write. You need to be extremely careful.’ I asked him what had happened to my father. ‘Meet me here, tomorrow, at ten.’ I immediately sprinted to the brothel and waited, for what seemed an eternity, for the girl to emerge. Her name was Hanna, I should tell you. I waited for Hanna. She finally came out and chose me, and I told her about everything, as clearly as I could. I think she understood most of it. I asked her to come with me to the café in the morning. She agreed, after I begged for a while. So the two of us went to the café at ten, and again the man was late. He pulled up in a miserable, beat up truck sometime around noon. I didn’t apologize for bringing Hanna, and he didn’t seem to mind. He drove the three of us out into the desert, into the graveyard of ships. It’s the most surreal thing in the world. I could see why my father had wanted to write about it so badly. Hanna and the driver spoke occasionally in Kazak. Then he told me all about the old days, when the sea had been filled with fish, when his family had been rich and happy. Then the Soviets started growing cotton. They promised that nothing would happen, but soon the water level seemed to be shrinking. For years, he said, they pretended nothing was wrong. They pretended they were imagining things. By the time they acknowledged what was happening, it was too late. The sea was gone. We drove for at least two hours. The heat was excruciating. Finally, we stopped. We were about fifty yards from a rusted old tanker, it’s gut spilled open. ‘Are you sure?’ the driver asked me, nodding in the direction of the ship. I wasn’t sure. I was petrified. The world seemed to narrow, my heart was racing. My legs were like noodles. I walked very slowly. I kept waiting for the stench of a decay. I thought there was an invisible threshold that I would cross, beyond which I couldn’t turn back, couldn’t bring my father back. I finally reached the body of the tanker. All I could smell was gasoline. I looked back. The driver and Hanna were watching me, and Hanna waved, with remarkable tenderness. I waited for a long time at the edge of the tanker. Finally, I stepped inside. ‘Dad?’ I called out. I don’t know why. I called again. I stepped into the enormous, empty bowels of the ship. It was like a furnace. I waited for my eyes to adjust. I expected, I guess, to see a skeleton. To see my father’s bones. And that’s when I heard the truck driving away. I ran outside in disbelief. The trail of dust was like a film, like watching a film. I didn’t even bother to run after them. I just sat down and waited to die. I was so fucking angry at myself. But especially, I was angry at my father. What a selfish old bastard he was, disappearing halfway around the world in pursuit of his art. I cried, but I forced myself to stop. I had no water. Night, mercifully, fell. The stars were so brutally clear. Then I noticed the fires. I moved towards one of them instinctively. It was a pure, primal darkness that I was walking through. The stars were like a map from some forgotten life. That first night, I didn’t make it to any of the fires. I found another boat, and I waited out the day. My mind ran away from me. I had ridiculous fantasies. Revenge fantasies about my father, about Hanna. The second night arrived, and again, I started to move. One of the fires seemed to be getting closer. I started to run. It was a Bedouin camp. They were shepherds. They looked at me like I was a wandering saint. They laughed and laughed until all I could do was smile. Then I collapsed and don’t remember a thing until morning. They gave me water, and some meat that was charred beyond taste. They drank water from lambskin satchels. Their hands were knotted and gnarled. Their teeth were rotted nubs. Their breath was so rank it could suffocate you from fifteen yards, easily. They spoke to each other in a laconic, glottal, dying tongue. They seemed to be constructed of different material. Something dense and dark. Something petrified. Original material, I thought. We moved into the inferno of full day. It was a caldera of sun and blinding sand. They knew the land the way God would. The horizon was boiling. They were wearing heavy animal skins, and they didn’t sweat or slow their pace. I could barely keep up. I remember we passed a ship, and there was a sinkhole behind it, filled with murky, disgusting water. There were boys, naked, jumping off the back of the ship into the water. The waved at me, and laughed. After three days, we finally came out of the desert to another town. I had enough money for a bus to Ankara. From there, I hitchhiked to Istanbul, and then I worked on a fishing boat for six weeks to pay my way here. I’d planned to keep moving, making my way home. But I ran out of money. And here I am.”

“How many years have you been here?”

“Almost three.”

“Did you ever find your father?”

He smiled very sadly and looked out to the water. Lights were moving slowly over the black Mediterranean, moving like apparitions.

“I was so grateful to be alive that I didn’t care what happened to him anymore.”

Outside of my hotel, he turned to me. He put his hands on my hips and pushed me against the gate. I gasped at the force of it. He kissed the same pelvic bone he’d kissed in the church. He kissed my stomach. I ran my hands through his brittle hair, the stray bits of sand that had become a part of his scalp. He kissed me very tentatively. He worked slowly, meticulously, like I expected a poet would. We tried to be quiet. “Slap me,” I whispered while he was holding me against the wall and fucking me. “What?” he asked, panting. “Slap me,” I said, and I offered my cheek. He hit me, timidly. “Harder,” I implored. He smacked me once, then again. “Now choke me,” I whispered. “What?” he asked again. “Strangle me,” I said, biting his ear lobe. He put his hands around my neck without conviction. “Like you want to kill me,” I whispered, “like I’m the whore who betrayed you.” He tried; I’ll give him that. He put his hands around my throat, and for half a second, I felt like he might break me. “Please,“ I begged. “If everything you told me is true, then please…” His whole body collapsed. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t.” He buried his head into the nave of my neck. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. I pulled his whole body closer to me, supporting his whole weight. “It’s ok. It’s ok,” I whispered.

But in truth, I felt we’d finally reached a void. I felt that the magic of the day had been somehow lessened. That at the final bridge, he’d turned back and left me alone.

~

He saw me to my boat the next morning. He kissed me austerely before I boarded. He’d spent the entire night wearing me out, trying to redeem himself. I was tired in a way I hadn’t been in many years.

I finished the serial killer’s novel on a layover in Amsterdam. I decided to publish it anonymously. It was greeted rapturously. The Times called it a “masterwork of our fragmented, dissociated, and terrifying times.” It won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. The pressure, to release the author’s name, was immense. It was solely mine to bear. Cal was the only other employee who knew the author’s identity, and no one wanted to speak with him. I gave evasive, elliptical interviews. The letters from adoring, desperate readers poured in. They were exactly as the poet had predicted: letters of salvation and deliverance.

I haven’t opened a page of that book since I first finished it.

After the furor finally died down, I received a manuscript of new poems from Greece. He’d attached a short note. Things are changing here. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. The Greece I’ve come to love is on the verge on non-existence. All my love.

The collection sprawled hopelessly, like a poorly planned city. It sold barely at all. I’ve kept a copy for all these years, though. Portions of it are hauntingly lovely. Occasionally, before bed, I’ll page randomly through his book, my heart straining to make sense of his music; the music that, for one day, was so plangent. I am particularly moved by the long, stream of conscious poem titled ‘The Night Café by the Water.’

For a while he was in Athens, and then Paris. The last I heard, he was in Constance, in the south of Germany. Then he simply drifted into obscurity. I’ve tried, a few times, to track him down. But, like his father before him, he is good at disappearing. It seems remarkable that someone could vanish in this day and age, but he has.

Somehow, people keep finding me. Though I left ‘Obsidian Snake’ in the spring of 1998, the letters still arrive, almost on a daily basis, from readers telling me how the serial killer’s novel changed their life, how it saved them, how it helped them awaken to the world’s beauty. Most of them ask if I’ll pass their letters along to the author. I would, but he was executed, by lethal injection, on October 17, 1999.

I never receive letters asking about the poet from Greece. No one is out to find him.