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 in 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 ferocious midday sun. “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 with neither respite or shade.

The town, which climbed into the hills like a magnolia unfurling, was already showing 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 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.

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 write all the stranger. I felt, with each surreptitious glance, 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 pant.

He stopped and looked down the long, wending lane to the silent, bustling harbor. “How long had Roberto been trying to find me?” he asked.

“Nearly two years.”

He almost smiled with pride, but controlled himself.

He took me to a small bar perched on a high 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 they exchanged words in Greek. The four of us went out to the terrace. The whole town opened at our feet, the resplendent homes beaten raw with sun, the little alleyways like veins, and the harbor with its boats that were, from such a height, swarming like gulls. The breeze coming off the sea was a kind of deliverance.

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

“Can I have both?”

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. Roberto was the founder of my publishing house. He’d been in Brazil for a family wedding when his plane crashed somewhere in the Amazon. All they found of the wreckage was half a wing, two windows, and a seat cushion. The rest had been eaten or scavenged.

“Thank you. We barely knew one another, to be honest. We’d only talked 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’s 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.

“Do you like living in New York?”

“Sometimes. I still can’t believe the size of it. I feel like I could spend a million lifetimes there, and only know a very small part of that city. And…”

“What?” he asked, beginning to smile.

“The noise. Not the actual noise, but the physical weight of the advertisements, the people, the lights. It all feels very much like a one-sided conversation, too.”

“Where did you move from?”

“Minnesota.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I miss the end of summer. The smell of Minnesota at the end of summer.”

He finished his beer and spent a long time watching the Greek girl move about the interior of the bar.

“Was Roberto your lover?”

“No, of course not. I don’t have much time for men, to be honest. And if I did, they’d be much prettier than Roberto.”

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. Roberto was an asshole, my apologies, and he cared a great deal about his image. He wanted to be famous. He only wanted my next book because he hated David and wanted the pleasure of stealing me from him. He would have gotten tired of me. My poetry doesn’t sell, and it won’t. But I’d like for those who need my poetry 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, which I accepted, 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 home. I usually have to leave before dawn, before the heat.”

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.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh,” he said, “after it had already fallen from grace. A lot of my friends died when we were young. One of them died when his parents threw a big labor day barbecue on their back deck. It was on the third floor, and stood on these tall stilts that always reminded me of giraffe legs. It collapsed during the party, and my friend was crushed. Another friend was hit by a bus. One of my cousins got a Staph infection in his heart and died during surgery.”

He chewed idly on another olive.

“I remember my grandfather and his friends telling stories about how the city had once been. About the great maws of flame that would turn the rivers into great conduits of fire during the night. About the immense barges of iron ore. About the smog that wrapped the city like a cloak. About the heat of the foundries and the perpetual noise. I felt like I’d missed out on a mythical kingdom of enormous proportions.”

On the way back to town, we stopped at 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 cistern, bubbling sweetly. He sat down on an 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.

“That scar,” he said, looking away from me. “Which one?” I asked. “This one,” he said, running a finger above his left eye brow. I mimicked him. “I fell off a trampoline. I was seven, I think.” “And what about this one?” He reached up and traced a finger along my collarbone, following a scar that ended with the hollow at the base of my neck. “I fell off my bike and broke my collarbone,” I said. “So you’re clumsy, then,” he said, and I suppressed a smile. “And these?” He took my wrist in his hand. He ran his fingers like a gentle wind over the soft, pale skin on my arm’s inside. I shivered, suddenly overwhelmed with cold and shame. “Childish melodrama,” I said, blushing. The room’s fractal light ebbed and rucked as thin clouds swam across the sun‘s unblinking gaze.

“Why did you start writing?” I asked.

He lifted the moist fabric of my shirt and kissed the sharp bone of my pelvis. I tried not to shudder again. 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 Dad 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 out of the hills. Occasionally, my footing would falter and I would stumble into him like a drunk. He moved with a steady preoccupation, like his mind was constantly thinking about a place very far off.

The town was contracting for the evening. 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 youth: 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 remembered hiding within that scent waiting for the long summer dusk to finally descend.

We found a café 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. “Roberto had read the manuscript and was going to make a decision when he returned from Brazil.”

“How do you know the author is actually a serial killer?”

“I’ve written him letters.”

This surprised him; for the first time all day, his body seemed clumsy and childish. His wine glass fluttered in his hand, and nearly fell. His hands wavered over his plate, then settled in his lap, then re-emerged, two small birds briefly stunned.

“What have you written him about?”

“Questions, mostly. To verify that he really is who he says he is. He killed blues musicians in Mississippi, a few in Louisiana. All of them women.”

“Why?”

“His father left his mother for a blues pianist and then his mother killed herself. Do you want to know how he killed them?”

He thought about this. “No,” he finally said. “I mean, I’d like to. But don’t tell me. It’s better I don’t know.”

“He liked it when they begged, he said.”

“In his letters.”

“Yes.” I finished my wine and poured beer into the crimson-stained glass.

“Is it any good? His novel?”

“Possibly.”

He smiled and leaned forward. There was a candle flickering on the table. “That would be a 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.

“You’d be pressured 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 personally 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.

“You would have to ask yourself, then, how do we measure a life. How much is art worth. Does enduring art redeem all that violence?”

“I hope it’s not a good book,” I said.

“I hope it’s brilliant.”

“You haven’t written him letters.”

“No. No, I haven’t.”

We studied one another for a very long while. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but one charged through with something implacable; an ancient yearning for completeness in an impossibly fractured world. His eyes were serene, like a creek during the sweltering, low-water days of August.

“What is your poetry about?”

He poured me a glass of wine and started in on another cigarette.

“Ruined landscapes,” he said. “Libraries at the end of the world, holding all that’s left of civilization. Civilizations buried beneath the filth of their progeny. Bodies prematurely ruined. Images, mostly, disconnected from each other. I don’t have much use for form or structure. People admire form but they don’t
remember it. They remember an image.”

“I think form is pleasing at a very pure level. We want closure in our art because we’re denied it in our lives.”

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 of a whore from a 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 Greek 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 that he wanted to write about the environmental devastation of the Aral Sea. The Soviets completely destroyed it. 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 was big on the environment and social justice. So he went over there to investigate how people were adapting. He 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. Living in New York, like every other young writer. I finally convinced an ex-girlfriend to lend me enough money to hire a private eye from Moscow. He sent me a report a month later, from Semeyinsk. It 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. It was this dingy little slab that was more like a bomb shelter than a hotel. Then 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 because 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. Those first few days, they treated me with total disdain. I felt like I’d walked into a room where everyone had been mocking me. So I sat alone and tried to read. I’d 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, reading all his stuff, that I’d never be half the writer he was. And I wanted terribly to be able tell him that. More than I‘d ever wanted anything in my life.”

He smiled the bittersweet smile of an old man remembering a lost love, and hailed the waiter for another beer.

“When I was younger, Dad always let me proofread his stories. I don’t remember when that stopped, and I don’t remember why it did, but after it did, I was so wounded that I just stopped reading his stuff altogether.”

He drank half his beer in one gulp. Though the night had grown somewhat
cold, his forehead was rumpled with sweat.

“Dad was a very meticulous writer. Very academic. After I finished all 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 had receded, 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. When I did sleep, they haunted my dreams. 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 more absolute than anything I‘ve ever experienced. 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 one night 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 crude map of the village. An arrow led to a building on its edge. 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. The crowd was equally depressing. Withered old men and young, wide eyed boys. I had nothing to do but join them, and wait. Every few minutes, a scantily clad girl would emerge from behind 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.”

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 then. 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 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 Susanna, I should tell you. She had a name. I waited for Susanna. 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, but only 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 Susanna, 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. Susanna 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, its 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 shaking. I walked very slowly. I kept waiting for the stench of a decay to hit me. 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 Susanna were watching me, and Susanna 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 in there, it was so hot. 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 horror. 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 was torn between wanting the day to dawn, to relieve me of the terror I felt, and wanting night to stay forever, so I could reach one of the fires. Eventually, dawn painted the horizon. 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 Susanna. More than once, I thought that I must be stuck in a nightmare, or that I had already died. I was so full of despair. Despair about my situation, but also despair about my writing, which would never be good enough. And longing for my father. Melancholy for all the people I loved in someway and had lost, sorrow for the lives we must live, lives of petty, meaningless jobs and inevitable, random death that can rear its maw at any moment. Death that was on the verge of consuming me into an infinite silence. Mercifully, the second night arrived, and I was saved by motion. I began to move again, and felt hope. One of the fires seemed to be getting closer. I started to run towards it. 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 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. The Bedouins 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. They 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 by the time I finally came across some, I‘d decided to stay.”

“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.”

We sat in the still, quiet night and listened to nothing; to the deep silence of the stars and the sea.

Outside of my hotel, he turned to me. He put his hands on my hips and pushed me against the gate. The force of it stunned me. 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.

But I couldn’t sleep. I read the serial killer’s novel on my flight to New York. It was mostly impenetrable: a labyrinth of misfits and grotesqueries, mangrove swamps and decrepit blues bars situated at the edge of the known world. I thought that maybe I dreamed the entire book, dreamed all the letters, dreamed my entire life. 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. It made my publishing house, which was very small, instantly famous.

The pressure to release the author’s name was immense. It was solely mine to bear; none of my employee’s knew the author’s identity. 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 can stay. The Greece I love is on the verge on non-existence. I send you 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. There is a long, stream of conscious poem that I find particularly moving. I keep returning to it, year after lonely year. It’s titled ‘The Night Café by the Water.’

For a while, the poet was in Athens, and then Paris. The last I heard, he was in Constance, in the southwest 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 the publishing industry 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 awaken them to the world’s beauty. Most of them ask if I’ll pass their letters along to the author. And I would, but he was executed, by lethal injection, on October 17, 1999.