One.

I am getting used to the silences of my village.

There is the silence of silk, which arrives just after dusk; or, sometimes, it is the silence of brawling cats.

There is the silence of the rooster (for silence, as anyone knows, is always deeper when buttressed by awful commotion, the way most things in life (love, happiness, beauty) are measured most accurately by absence).

There is the silence of the old women’s conversations, and the sun.

These are three I’ve discovered so far. I am open to finding more.

~

My name is Nathan Olsen. I am twenty-eight years old. Ten weeks ago, I was engaged to be married. Now, I am not.

~

The village of Malona is nestled in a mountain valley, about two miles from the Mediterranean. The road into town carves through orange groves and olive groves. From the main highway, Malona is a smattering of white washed homes, their roofs augmented by satellite dishes and water heaters. The olive and orange trees form a verdant carpet around the white village.

“Don’t let it fool you,” Alan, my landlord, told me as we descended into town. “There’s an old aphorism I’m fond off. Everything in Greece looks beautiful from twenty feet away.” He smiled goofily at me then, his almost oversized teeth stained the deep beige of a longtime smoke. Alan’s in his early fifties, English, was once a chef.

“What do you do now?” I asked.

“Mostly fiddle around on my computer. Sometimes, I get hired to cater a dinner, or a wedding in the village. Call me an early retiree.”

Alan lives across the street from me with his parents, Mick and Lisa. I see Mick sitting in their courtyard sometimes, smoking cigarettes, or fiddling with old clocks; he was a mechanic, once. The cigarettes have taken his teeth, one by one. Lisa’s short, buxom, with wide blue eyes. Whenever I stop over to see Alan, she sends me on my way with a cup of tea, or a slice of pie. They bicker constantly. Mick’s hearing is going, so it’s not uncommon for Lisa to mutter about him, softly, quiet enough that he can’t hear.

~

My second night here a gypsy arrives at my door, bearing fruit.

“Hello?” she blurts out, “hello, American, are you here?”

I step out.

“I have gifts for you,” she says. Her face is creased like an overripe orange. She has small, dark eyes, a deeply hunched gait, a plethora of jewelry. Her arms are full of oranges. She hands them to be, one by one, as if building a wall of them in my crossed arms. She smiles and grips my hand, then moves down the alley with her cart, bearing more offerings.

“This is what the harvest is like,” Alan tells me. “You can’t go anywhere without accumulating oranges. You go for smokes, come home with a bag of oranges. Go out to the taverna, come home with two bags of oranges. What are we to do with them?” he asks.

I make juice; that’s what I do with them.

~

The house I am renting from Alan was once an olive press. It is long and narrow, with a loft bed in the middle and an iron cast stove inside the front door for warmth. The ceilings are high, and the beams exposed. There is a patio, and an old bread oven has been converted into a grill. Stray cats slink about this patio; they crawl onto my lap sometimes when I sit in the morning sun and drink coffee.

The first time I leave home alone, to buy a loaf of bread, Alan gives me a piece of chalk. I leave marks, little talismans, on the facades of homes, on broken stone fences. And then like Hansel and Gretel, I trace my way home.

~

Alan takes me for dinner at Jimmy’s, the taverna in our village. It’s across the street from the post office. During the day, the village’s old men crowd into the post office and play backgammon. Trucks and lorries grunt and belch by, stopping to hawk their wares. If you sit long enough, I’m told, you’ll find just about anything you could want: wedding gowns, produce, televisions and cell phones, shoes, live chickens, tobacco, kitchen appliances, alcohol. The mail arrives, too, sometimes. When it does, the church bell rings, and a small mob forms in the street, and the postman calls out the names of those who’ve received letters or packages.

We sit outside; there are tables set in the street. It’s a warm, placid night. Jimmy comes out to shake hands with Alan. He’s short, muscular, sports a wisp of a beard and wears an apron. Alan orders us two ouzos, a few pork and cheese plates. He rolls up a cigarette. He smiles, looks me over.

“You know,” he says, “most people who’ve arrived for a holiday look a bit more cheerful.”

“It’s good to be here. It’s a working holiday.”

“Yes, you said you’re a writer, in your email.”

“I am.”

“So, what are you writing?”

“A book. A novel.”

“About?”

“Mexico.”

He laughs, passes me his pouch of tobacco.

“I see you looking at it,” he says. “Go ahead, roll one up.”

I roll a cigarette while Alan watches the inside of the taverna. It’s a long, plain room with a few black and white photographs of Jimmy’s family on the walls. There’s a cast iron stove in the middle of the room. The kitchen is open, and Jimmy and his wife, Maria, work the grill. His mother, a hunched, prune-faced woman, sits over a trash can and slowly, deliberately peels lemons and pits olives.

“So you come to Greece to write about Mexico.”

“I needed a place to escape to.”

“Most people don’t come here in the winter. Most tourists at least. It’s quiet this time of year. There’s nothing here. Nothing’s open. It’s very boring.”

“Well, I like quiet.”

We eat and share stories. He tells me about growing up in England, and playing low level professional football. He speaks passionately about the game, the way most men talk about the first women they loved. He doesn’t look like much of an athlete. He’s short and knobby, with a prodigious belly. While he talks, I find myself thinking about basketball. I grew up on a dead end street in Indiana. When I was eight, my father and I built a basketball hoop at the end of the street, painted a court. I’d spend hours out there, shooting baskets with my brother, who is two years younger than me. I think it was Updike who wrote that there are only two things more divine than sex: a perfect golf shot, or a perfect basketball shot.

“There’s something about the flow of a beautiful football game,” Alan says, “when everyone feeds off each other, when a team has been playing together for years. Now? That doesn’t happen. Guys are mercenaries. There’s too much money involved. You get the wrong people playing the game because of the money. Guys don’t know each other inside and out, they can’t feel, in their muscles, where a teammate is going to be. There were games, and they were rare, where I tell you, mate, all eleven of us were like one body out there. It was poetry, like poetry. And we couldn’t have put it into words, or explained why it happened or didn’t happen.”

Alan orders another round of ouzos. We eat slowly: feta drizzled with honey; pork belly pan fried with peppers and onions; octopus grilled with lemon; warm pita and hummus. Soon, our table is overflowing with half-eaten plates, a carafe of wine, empty bottles of ouzo.

“See, I could never understand football,” I say. “I appreciate the beauty. But I don’t feel it, you know? I didn’t grow up with it. It’s not in my DNA. Basketball, though. Basketball moves me, Alan. You can put me in a gym with a ball, and I wouldn’t leave for six hours. A beautiful basketball shot - now that I can feel. There’s almost a music to it, those rare few that you know are going in the second they leave your hand. It’s like you can actually, physically feel the ball going through the net.”

Alan smiles, rubs his bald pate. He’s sweating from the ouzo and the food. Inside, there are shouts. I turn, and a table of middle aged men are standing and yelling at one another. One of them is still sitting, the oldest of the bunch. He’s a gigantic, porcine fellow. He’s at the head of the table, holding a cane and breathing from an oxygen tank, wearing a garish Hawaiian shirt and wrap around sunglasses.

“Greek men are basically a throwback to the stone age,” he says, shaking his head. “The one sitting down you should meet. We call him El Presidente. During the summer, he holds court down in Haraki. There’s a bar down there, Mike’s. And El Presidente sits out front, shirtless and fat and smelling like a stuck pig, but there are tourists that come just to see him, just to drink with him and talk with him and smoke cigars with him. He lets people sleep on his floor, no questions asked. Backpackers have stayed with him for weeks on end.”

We end up drinking until after midnight. We stumble home through the quiet, wending alleyways. The lanes are inconsistently narrow. Their middles are furrowed from the winter rain falls. The place is a labyrinth. Certain streets end without warning; others dart and dive around lemon trees.

At my front door, Alan puts his hands on my shoulders and looks at me. I’m slightly taller than him, which is rare, because I’m not taller than most men.

“I have two important bits of news,” he says, slurring the words. I bend at the knees, laughing. He steadies himself on my shoulders. “This is serious,” he says.

“Ok.”

“The first is that your father emailed me. He’s worried about you. So now that I’ve spoken to your dad, I’m responsible for you. I can’t let you get manhandled by Greek women, or leave you drunk somewhere.”

“I appreciate that. What’s the second thing?”

“Huh?”

“The second bit of important news you had for me.”

“Oh, it’s not important. Fuck it, right?”

“You sure?”

He pats me twice on the shoulders, wobbles like a weather vane.

“Good night, new friend,” he says. “Good night.”

~

Armed with chalk, I walk through the whole village. You wouldn’t think it’s possible to become disoriented in a place of eight hundred people. It is. Old women sit in the street in lawn chairs. Their sentences are quick and clipped. They eye me warily. Fences of faded green, the ironwork oxidizing. Lemon trees grow wild in empty lots. The homes are mostly stone, painted white. About a third of them are abandoned. Their wooden doors have rotted, and their gutted insides are exposed, like some shameful childhood memory opened to the world. The angles of the homes are hard, sharp, pleasingly rigid. A garage is painted baby blue, but it’s been eroded by the sun. Which comes in flits, sneaking out from the winter cumulous that are like the autumn cumulous back home.

There was a day like this at the end of September. My fiance, Susanna had called me. “Come over for lunch,” she said. I drove over with my windows down. Autumn in Philadelphia is like a benediction, the miserable thickness of summer finally dissipating, breaking. Susanna sat beneath the giant oak tree in her front yard, reading. She looked up while I parked. As I stepped out of my car, she stood up and stretched like a lean, languid cat. Then, unexpectedly, she took off across her front yard, breaking into a barefoot sprint. She leapt into my arms and tackled me, laughing.

Where does that kind of joy come from? And how does it end? Is there a threshold that we can find, or see, beyond which it changes, or lapses? Could I pinpoint a moment when it began to atrophy? It was the beginning of autumn. We lay in the grass, kissing, the first dead leaves of the season pirouetting down around us.

I sit down beneath a lemon tree outside the village church. I wish I could show this to her. The draught of weak sun, the white homes drenched in it. This sky so much like that Philadelphia sky. I don’t feel older or separate from that day. I sometimes feel like if I were to close my eyes, I might open them and be back in her yard. That my presence here is a mistake, a stitch carved from a dream. I have to remind myself that this is my life now, and that I witness it alone.

~

My possessions are this:

One backpack. Inside it are:

A pair of jeans and a pair of khakis; four t-shirts; a hooded sweatshirt; three sweaters; two button down shirts; four pairs of underwear and four pairs of socks; one pair of running shorts; one pair of running shoes; toiletries (the basics, plus an extra pair of glasses); ‘Monolithos,’ by Jack Gilbert, ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ by Virginia Woolf, ‘Children of Men,’ by P.D. James, ‘Blood Meridian,’ by Cormac McCarthy; a letter from Susanna that I haven’t read; a painting Susanna did of Gettysburg in the fall; a letter from my younger brother; one pair of Susanna’s underwear (green and white striped) that I had packed from our late August trip to South Carolina, and that I forgot to remove, and that I have buried at the very bottom of my bag but can’t bring myself to discard.

One knapsack with a broken strap. Inside it are:

‘The Savage Detectives,’ by Roberto Bolaño, ‘2666,’ also by Bolaño, ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ by Fyodor Dostoevksy, ‘Swann’s Way,’ by Marcel Proust, ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History,’ by Mircea Eliade, and ‘Moby-Dick,’ by Herman Melville; assorted pens that I‘ve stolen from various banks and hotels.

I regret, deeply, Susanna’s pair of underwear, and that I haven’t brought more poetry.

~

Wind chimes serenade me from somewhere. Philadelphia, I think. My parent’s street sings like this during the spring. The wind here, in mornings, is monolithic. It blows away the rains and the thunder that rattle the depths of the night, the lightning that creeps like a thief over the mountains.

~

On the southern edge of town is a shallow, rocky river. Across this river is Malona’s sister village, Masari. They are, for all purposes, identical: a few tavernas, white washed homes, lots overgrown with milkweed and wild hibiscus, orange groves and olive trees whose gnarled trunks are redolent of prehistoric sea beasts.

At the crux of the Masari’s two main roads, and in the shadow of the village’s church, is Petro’s cafe. Alan and I go there one night to watch English football. It’s a small place: a bar, a few tables, and a brick fire pit at the room’s front. Three televisions dangle from the ceiling. A table of Greek men converse by the fire. They’re roasting potatoes, and sparrows on a spit.

“Sparrows?” I ask.

“Ay, sure,” Alan says. “Rhodians will eat anything. There was a bad famine here after the war. You survived by eating what you could. Sparrows, rodents. Anything.”

He introduces me to Petro, a lissome, epicene man with a tuft of grey hair, and gentle slate eyes. He shakes my hand limply, bows his head. We order cheap lager beer. It comes served with small plates of cauliflower drizzled in vinegar, or olives and salami. Across the café, the men messily tear into their sparrows. The bodies are charred completely, and the men break the birds’ frail ribs, suck the meat right off.

“If you ask for one, I’m sure they’d give you one,” Alan observes.

“No, I’m ok.”

“Do you know what I like? I like that,” he motions towards the sparrows. “I like that it survives here. Because most places, it doesn’t. England?” He flails one of his pudgy hands dismissively. “England’s a fucking cesspool. All the local pubs closing down. All the farmer’s markets being run out by Tesco’s. There’s one culture in England. There’s one culture in the states.”

“That’s not true.”

“No?”

“Maybe there’s one dominant culture. Maybe it’s like a big wave, moving ashore. But it hasn’t yet broken. Not completely.”

“In England it has.”

“The States has places. New Orleans. Go south of New Orleans. I drove south of New Orleans with a friend, down to a little blues bar. We bought thirty pounds of shrimp from the back of a pickup truck, the bed just writhing with shrimp. We went dancing with some girls at this blues bar where an old guy played piano until four in the morning. Creole women with hairy arm pits that smelled like they hadn‘t bathed in a week.”

Alan laughs at this, sits his beer, hails Petro.

“There’s pockets,” I say. “And there are still villages in the states, too. I grew up in some of them.”

“Yes, but for how long are there pockets?”

I shrug.

“Ay, it’s the same here. You don’t see the kids coming into the cafes, do you? It’s the youth, brought up on ease, on convenience. That’s how it was in England. The kids.”

“You sound like a bitter old man.”

“A group of skinheads closed down my local back in Beaston. A good pub. Skinheads started showing up. We had a big Indian population, always have. And I played cricket with a lot of ‘em. We’d go into our local after a match, shoot pool, have some pints. But these skinheads started showing up, getting into scrums with the Indian guys on our team.” He shakes his head.

Instead of Petro, a woman saunters over to our table with two bottles of beer and a plate of olives. She has curly, charcoal hair, and she looks me over with pursed lips. Her face reminds me of weathered stone, all smoothed lines and soft glints. Her chin is weak, but she has lovely, jocund eyes. Her hips are at the level of my eyes; they’re delightfully wide.

“Ah, Sabina,” Alan exclaims, jaunting out of his chair.

“Alan,” she croons, smiling thinly and extending her neck over the table so they can kiss on both cheeks. “How are you dear?”

“Lovely, lovely. Have you met my friend, Nathan?”

She simpers down at me. “You’re the American?”

“Yes, apparently.”

“Well, we’ve gotten along fine without any of you all this time.”

She sets down her beer, gives me her hand, presses her cheek against mine. “Welcome,” she says curtly.

“Thank you.”

The table of Greeks bellow something in Sabina’s direction. She barks something back, then breaks into a broad, insouciant smile and flicks her hair at them. They clap, laughter cascades in her direction.

“Petro’s wife,” Alan whispers beneath the laughter.

“Ah,” I say. “Too bad. A shame.”

Alan lifts an eye brow, shakes his head.

“Americans,” he mutters. “Manifest destiny, indeed.”


~

We drive home through the olive groves. It’s windy, and the trees shiver like ballerinas in the wind. We catch them for a stunned moment in our headlights, and then they lapse into moonlight. I roll my window down, stick my hand out. Alan drifts into the other lane, then drifts towards the shoulder.

“So there’s no good way to bring this up,” he shouts over the wind.

“Yea?”

“I’m gay, mate.”

“What?”

“I like fucking men,” he shouts.

I laugh, hysterically.

He brings the car to a stop in the middle of the road. It’s after three in the morning.

“Well?” he asks.

“Why the fuck would I care?”

“I don’t know. You’re a young, strapping guy. Some men get threatened, or think I’m trying to pick them up.”

“I don’t give a shit, Alan. You can try to pick me up. I just won‘t fuck you.”

He laughs at this, slaps the steering wheel. I step out of the car, into the tremulous wind. He’s parked askew, so his headlights spill into the groves. There are stray rocks everywhere, like gravestones; they come tumbling down from the mountains like bowling balls. The last time I saw Susanna, we took a trip to Gettysburg. We’d been apart for two months. I was leaving in three days. So we drove to Gettysburg. We spent the day wandering the battlefields. There were stones and boulders - like these stones in the olive grove - everywhere. I imagined the bodies of soldiers amongst them. Why are we drawn to such places? Susanna asked me. Why is it we commemorate death and battle with such curiosity? There was snow on the ground. I’d stood atop a stone fence and looked out over the fallow hills, the distant ridge line of barren trees. Susanna had trudged across the field, and she stood out amongst the snow, stark as a sentinel, alone, dark haired. “I’m sorry I don’t love you the way you love me,” she shouted back to me. “I’m sorry.”

“Have you been in love Alan?” I ask. He’s stepped out of the car and is smoking beside me.

“Ooh, yes. Yes, very much so.”

“Did you get a good amount of time together?”

“We did. We had a beautiful amount of time together.”

“What happened?”

“Well, he wasn’t out. And I understood that. His parents were very conservative. So we had to go around on the sly, which was fine and exciting. I tried to understand. Slowly he seemed to be opening up. But then his parents caught onto things. He had a girlfriend at the time, a girl he was with for cover. I was O.K. with it, because I knew how hard it was for him. But when his parents found out they made him a deal. They would buy him a house. What more can you want financially? No mortgage, to have your home paid for? That’s all you want. But the condition was he had to marry the girl. And he did! The fucker actually did it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah, well. We do such awful things to each other. But there have been others, too. A young man at school. And we were right on that razor edge of things, you know? That threshold before anything happens, which I think is the best place to be, really, in so many ways, when the tension has built and built, but hasn’t yet tipped over…”

“I know what you mean.”

“Ah, yes, well we’re sitting on the grass one beautiful spring day, the two of us by the river. On the cusp of this beautiful razor edge. And he turns to me and he says, ‘Alan, I have to tell you. I’m married with a child.’”

“Oh no.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m sorry again.”

“What can you say? I’ve had bad luck, I suppose.”

“Me, too, I guess.”

“So that’s why you’re here.”

I smile, take the cigarette from his hands. We’re looking into the nothingness of the fields.

“Yes.”

“Then let her go. You youngsters, you get so attached. Time goes so quickly. Before you know it, you’ll be mourning someone new. And then you’ll be my age. You don’t know what will happen in the future. Those connections, they last. They endure. Let her live her life. Let her go. And maybe you come back together someday. And if you don’t, by then, you’ll be grateful for what you had.”

“It’s not that simple. I didn’t handle myself well at then. It’s complicated nowadays.”

“Ooh sure it is. You just let go, really. That’s all there is to it.”

“We’re standing in the middle of the road, you know.”

“It’s Greece. It’s winter. We’ll be ok.”

~

I ride my bike out to the edge of town, where there’s a quarry. Past the quarry the river can be forded. It’s shallow and clear, cold this time of year. I roll my pants up and wade through the water, taking my time on the smooth stones. I ride into the mountains. When the grade becomes too steep, I abandon my bike at the side of the road. There’s nothing up here; the road eventually leads to the monastery. It wends and carves its way up the mountain, like a rope gone flaccid, before disappearing into the rugged gorges and ridges. The flora up here is mostly small scrub plants, the occasional azalea. A few, stark olive trees guard the road like ancient sentinels. From time to time, a stray bird will rustle free from one of the bushes, gliding out over the valleys below.

The villages spill on both sides of the river like dirty milk. The riverbed itself is like a great tree, its roots terminating in the Mediterranean. When I climb high enough, the only sound is the wind, the clanging of a goat’s bell somewhere above me, invisible. I sit down in the road and roll a cigarette. I try to take in the panorama, the sea swelling far off, the mountains across from me, their flanks tapestries of flora and sun and cloud shadow, the little villages nestled between the thatch work of the olive groves.

I start to cry, deep, primal sobs. There’s no one within miles, no one to hear. My legs fail me; I keel over in the road and drop my cigarette and fall onto my hands. I wonder how it is we survive a single moment amidst such beauty and such loss. I know that with time this sorrow will abate. I know that with time my heart will moderate again, and I’ll forget myself in writing, or walking. That I will go hours without remembering, and then days, and then so long that when I do remember it’s a surprise. But I’m not sure I want that, right now. I’m not sure I want to come out of this depth - three years of

joy, these last months of devastation. I forget what it’s like to live moderately; I’m not sure I can handle it again.

But then this loneliness. It seems manageable for a second or two, maybe even beautiful. But the prospect of those seconds, aligned ahead of me like an infinite army, brings me to my knees again. How will I manage them?

Then, down below, a gunshot explodes somewhere in the valley and it resounds, lone and plangent, amongst the hills. Then the dogs start going like mad, and the roosters join in, and the birds - the doves and starlings and pigeons - all take to the air at once, moving like cirrus clouds. And then the deepest silence possible, much deeper than before, takes hold of the villages of the valley.

　

　

Two.

The season of the drunken goats comes in the weeks after the orange harvest. By then, any oranges unpicked turn overripe, bloat with fermentation, and burst. They fall to the ground, leaking like deliquescent corpses. Then, the goats that wander these mountains and valleys like peasants have their way with them. They drink and feast, drunk on the abundance. These weeks are dangerous for travelers: the inebriated goats are liable to stumble into the road at any moment, like young children set loose, their survival instincts not yet honed. Every so often you see a car with dented fender, or broken mirrors. The driver slows, pokes his head out the window.

“The season of drunken goats,” he says, shaking his head.

Such are the hazards of life here.

~

There is a video I keep watching on my computer. A famous performance artist is in a large museum space. Black hair, senescent and grey flecked; a vibrant rose red dress. People wait hours to sit across from her, to gaze into her eyes. Why? Because we, as a species, like myths. Especially myths about artists. The poet who spurns easy pleasure to live ascetically on an island. The artist who spends a lifetime not attaching herself to anything, convening honestly with the sorrow of loss and death. The artist who, through continually opening herself to absence, transfigures that pain into provender for the rest of us.

But this video is not about us, the faceless, rapacious horde. It’s about the artist and a man. He is an old lover from the 1970’s, when both of them were painfully young and painfully beautiful. They lived in a van then, were precipitously in love. But that flame soon devoured itself. They both decided that a torrid, beautiful affair deserved a spectacle of an ending. So they went to opposite ends of China’s Great Wall, and they walked. When they eventually met, they embraced, and then turned around, and vowed never to meet again.

But now that man is here, in the museum. The years have exacted their toll. His lean face is gouged and gaunt; his lanky body is stooped. He’s here, like everyone, to see her, the artist. The video camera is waiting. It zooms in on her, her bowed head. She hasn’t seen him waiting in line. She lifts her eyes, and the smile that breaks her breaks me, too. It’s a helpless, impulsive fracturing of her stoic, faintly Middle Eastern face. The tears come soon after. They stare into each other’s eyes. They have one minute. Maybe they remember their bodies as they once were. Or they remember stars along some mountain road in Tuscany. Or a cigarette they shared. Or maybe they remember making pancakes for twenty people crammed into a flat in Jerusalem.

I think about the long walk they took on the Great Wall - the loneliness, the terrible anticipation. To move towards an intimate body for the last time. To be so alone, to have no choice but to walk. And I think about the moments after that final embrace, as they begin the walk back. Did they turn and watch, waiting for that last glimpse of the other? We don’t like to think about what comes after a narrative ends - after the last embrace, after the reunion. I think about the final scene of ‘The Graduate,’ the two lovers alone in the shadow of their euphoria. We don’t like to imagine the mundanity that follows the catharsis.

The old lovers’ time is up. They reach out to each other. She wipes her tears, he touches his heart. I hope they shared a memory in that minute, that their minds traversed the same lost terrain.

I watch this video over and over. The lift of her eyes, the smile, the tears. What strength they had! To let go of each other with such astonishing grace. I let go by calling Susanna drunkenly from Athens. I ranted and raved: about her selfishness, about her lack of work ethic, about her foolishness. I called her an ungrateful cunt. She, for her part, deleted me from facebook, removed all our photographs.

Perhaps, if we’d loved each other three decades ago, before the tentacles of technology, we’d have lost each other with the same grace as the artists. And perhaps, if the artists loved today, they might have lost each other with less grace.

She wipes her tears, he pats his heart.

Then she stares into the lapidary blue-green eyes of a twenty-something from Brooklyn who has been tweeting her progress in line. He takes a piss, hops a cab to his hotel. He looks in the mirror and asks if that one moment was worth all those years apart. He tries to weigh that one luminous moment against all those lost, mundane years they could have had. Those years no one would watch a film about on the internet.

~

I want you to understand about the loneliness. I want to tell you about it in a way that isn’t maudlin or self pitying - although it is often both of those. There are times it literally cuts my knees from beneath me. There are times when I am running up the mountain outside Malona - I run at dusk, or I run by moonlight, or I run in the dark if there is no moon - and I will reach its crest and I will look down at the lights of our little hamlet, look out to the Mediterranean and its sheath of moon dance, and I’ll keel over in the middle of the road and I’ll pray. I don’t believe there’s anything out there to hear me, but the loneliness is there and I can’t bear it. Or, sometimes, instead of praying, I’ll let our a primal scream and down in the valley the dogs will reply in echoes.

What it feels like, if I am being honest, is a wound. It’s as if someone extracted an internal organ while I was sleeping - maybe a kidney, or a lung - only I’m too stunned, upon waking, to locate where I’ve been wounded, what has been taken. This loneliness is a minor injury, of course. It’s one most of us have incurred; with time, like a grave, it will fill in, and the earth above it will settle, leaving only a slight depression where, once, there was a deep gouge. Maybe, even wildflowers will grow.

But this minor wound portends, or intimates, the major wound that is, ultimately, the condition of existence: to be mortal. It is knowing that you will die, inevitably, and being terrified of that, but also wanting to die, right now, to get it over with, to escape the impossible fear of waiting and not knowing. And how is that wound filled? Time, which truly does heal all minor wounds, only deepens that one. With what substance can we possibly fill that mortal wound?

~

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I will. When the loneliness of Susanna, and of my displacement, is at its deepest, I don’t go for a walk in the mountains. I don’t open one of the immense novels that are gathering dust in my knapsack. I don’t write. I get on my computer and I chat with my friends in their offices in D.C. or New York or Philly. I read articles about baseball or about television shows or about the top twenty popular misconceptions about what college is really like. I subsume myself under the cultural pabulum. And in moments, it allows me to forget myself. I could be in my old apartment. I could be sitting in my parent’s den, or Susanna’s bedroom. This is the wonder of all this technology: it obliterates place. It creates a permanent present where desire is continually and repeatedly sated and piqued, all at once. If you have a computer, now, you can always lose yourself.

I feel this desire, this yearning to be lost, even when I’m out - when I’m hiking in the mountains, or drinking a coffee at Jimmy’s, or talking with Alan. It’s like a subsonic current, an anxiousness coursing down my nerves.

~

I ride my bike to Masari.

I stop at Petro’s for a coffee. He isn’t in today, but Sabina is there. I try speaking to her in Greek, but she stops me.

“American, please. Don’t waste your time. It’s cute, but don’t.”

I smile. I’m sitting outside, beneath a big plane tree. She rolls her eyes at my smile. I roll a cigarette and take out a book of poems. I’ve been reading the same book because it’s the only poetry I have with me and because my mind is too frazzled to handle Dostoevsky or Woolf or Melville. It is ‘Monolithos’ by Jack Gilbert.

Sabina brings out my coffee, a few warm pitas, half a lemon, and a dish of hummus.

“Monolithos,” she says. “You’re reading about Monolithos?”

“Yes, sort of. They’re poems. By an American. Who lived much of his life on islands in Greece.”
She smiles at me the way a mother might at a sad, wayward child.

I think about Jack Gilbert and how he died in a nursing home in California having lost his mind, his lapidary mind. He spent his life on islands and in villages. And in the end he was failed by his mind. The great lion institutionalized. His wife wasn’t there when he died. They’d been living apart for thirty years. Her flight from New York was cancelled and they couldn’t get her on another one. When I read about this in November I went out the field behind my house and I sat down and I cried and I looked at the stars. I didn’t know I would be here in November. I didn’t know here existed. Susanna still called me every night and told me she loved me in November. November seems very long ago.

After my pita and hummus, Sabina brings me out a piece of cheesecake.

“A gift of the house,” she says, and as she walks away, she glances over her shoulder and half smiles at me, holding my eyes for, perhaps, a half second longer than I expect her to.

~

It’s dusk. The mountains surrounding the village are gilded. The thin stratus clouds that come off the sea are burnished pink and lilac. A few starlings and doves chase each other through the gloam. Old women wash out their patios, and suds cascade down the middle of the alleyways. The old men have crowded into Jimmy’s and the post office; their games of backgammon grow rowdy and contentious.

Where are the children? I can hear them playing video games. I can see them crowded around their computers. The church bells call out. A woman steps onto her porch. She’s hunched, with an aquiline face and sunken eyes. She mutters a prayer to herself, swings incense back and forth, blesses her space.

~

Across the street there is a girl. She’s perched on that fine threshold before beauty completely takes her. In six months, I think, she‘ll walk outside and men will be unable to look away from her. But for now, she can move about surreptitiously. I see her, sometimes, while I have my morning coffee and cigarette. Every morning, shortly before dawn, she goes out to her front porch, barefoot, and she paces back and forth, swinging a small, bejeweled thurible. Incense smoke wisps out of the crucible, its ambrosia filling our little alleyway. She takes three steps one direction, eyes closed, lips murmuring, gives the thurible a minor flick of her wrist, turns on her heels, strides three paces the other direction, and repeats the same flick.

The first time I witness her, it strikes me as a bit humorous, this nearly-beautiful girl going through the same processions as the old women I encounter on my morning walks. But the more I see her, the more I feel as if I’m encroaching upon something sacred. She’s so entirely closed during her prayers that she doesn’t notice, or acknowledge, my presence.

One morning I decide to wait for her to finish. She processes, intones, spills her sweetness into the dawn. When she’s done - she stands very still, lips whispering - I step into the street. She notices this, and observes me with a furtive glance. I wait for her to say her prayer.

“Hey. Malate anglika?” I ask.

She shrugs. Her hair is dark, but she keeps it neatly braided and thrown over her left shoulder.

“Do you pray like this everyone morning?”

A minor smile graces her face; she dips her hair, takes the braid in her hand.

“I’m sorry I watch you. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“It’s ok,” she says. Robert Hass, in a poem of his, describes a lover’s hair as like a clear cold river.

We stand there, me in the street, her barefoot.

“What do you do?” she asks. “And why are you here?”

I smile up at her.

“I’m a writer.”

“So?”

“So I tell stories. I create things. Fictions.”

“Why?”

It’s my turn to shrug.

“That’s a funny thing to do,” she says. “You came all the way here to tell stories?”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think?”

I look her over, narrowing my eyes in false concentration. She subconsciously juts

out her hip, tosses back her head. Her face is still soft and undefined, hasn’t yet gained the firm lines of adulthood. Her eyes are very dark.

“Fifteen,” I guess.

She smiles, brushes her hair back, looks down. A lovely, laconic lilt of her head.

“Good guess?”

“Maybe.”

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“What’s yours.”

“Nathan.”

“I’ve never met anyone named Nathan before,” she says. Then, reflexively, she smiles. Her sense of composure astonishes me. There is a serenity in her movements, her emotional control, that brings to mind the word ‘old soul.’

“It’s a Midwestern name.”

“The Midwest? Like Iowa?”

I laugh. “Yes.”

“There’s a church in Iowa I’d like to visit. It’s made of corn husks.”

I remember driving through Iowa once as a boy: the corn wimpling under wind, the grand ruined houses built along rivers, the rivers diminished by summer’s heat to trickles of mud, the occasional oasis of poplar trees or oak trees that reminded me of Bedouin caravans crossing the plains.

“Why do you pray like this?”

“Because it makes me feel good. Because it’s quiet and lonely and it helps me to focus on important things.”

“I like that.”

“I need to go to school,” she says. “It was nice t meet you Nathan.”

“Ok.”

She makes a half turn, then looks back over her shoulder. “I’m Marina,” she says.

“Marina. That’s a beautiful name.”

She shakes her head and disappears inside. I still come out in the mornings to watch her. Mostly, she pretends I’m not there. But sometimes, when she stops to turn, I’ll see her crack her eyes open, glance in my direction and, ever so surreptitiously, smile.
~

I’m eating a pita with chicken at Petro’s. Sabina’s behind the bar.

“American,” comes a towering voice. I look up. El Presidente is perched on a stool at the bar, pointing his cane in my direction. With his other hand, he motions me to come sit beside him. I take the stool, and he places a giant hand on my back. He doesn’t look very good. His wrists are bloated and bruised; he has about three chins, and his eyes are jaundiced.

“You’ve been in my village two weeks, and you haven’t said hello to me. I see you here, I see you at Jimmy’s. And yet not one word to El Presidente. Why is this?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

He claps me on the back, and then takes my hand in his, squeezing it so hard that I can feel my fingers cracking.

“I am El Presidente. You know me?”

“I’ve heard stories.

He smiles a ruined smile. Most of his teeth have fallen out.

“And do you have a name, or should I just call you American?”

“I’m Nathan.”

He nods affirmatively, and orders me a shot of Souma. I catch Sabina out the corner of me eye; she can’t suppress a slender smile. She pours us two large glasses of Souma, splashes it with water and lemon.

“Do you like women?” El Presidente asks. “What do I ask? Look at you, a young American like yourself. Of course you like women! What are your opinions on Greek women? How do they rate?”

“Well, I haven’t been well acquainted with Greek women yet. But they’re very beautiful. They seem to age very well. Many beautiful older women here.”

El Presidente cackles at this.

“Greek women are shit! Pure shit! Except Sabina. Sabina, darling, you’re the lost love of my life. Why couldn’t I have met you when I was younger, before you met your beautiful husband? Could you have possibly loved a man like me, a pig, an ugly pig with a big heart and a bigger cock?” She laughs, extends a hand, and he takes it, planting a sloppy kiss on her palm.

“I’ve been married three times, to three beautiful women,” El Presidente continues. “And none of them were Greek! One, my first wife, was Italian.” He kisses his fingers, makes an exaggerated gesture of delight. “A beautiful woman with tits to die for. Tits out to here,” he says, extending his hands from his own fulsome chest. “Tits bigger than mine!” He cackles again. “And a great cook. Me and my Italian were very happy. But love, it can be funny, right, American? It can vanish, like a bird. Oops, where did it go? It is a mystery. I spent many years sad over my Italian. And then I met my Turkish wife. Most Greeks will tell you the Turks, the Turks are shit. The Turks are beautiful! My Turkish wife, she was my love. My ultimate love. No tits, but an ass! The ass of a Goddess on my Turk. We went everywhere together. Turkey and Greece and Croatia and Egypt even. We slept on the street, in bad hotels. It didn’t matter if we were together. But again, love, it is cruel and also sweet. But in the end, it is almost always cruel. Or, it is cruel until death, that ultimate end, and then all love, even painful love, is nothing but sweet. And again, after I lost my wife to the world, I spent many years sad. Not that there weren’t women in those years. There were many, of course. Beautiful women. But none of them were my Turk. I was trying to find her in other women. American, let me tell you. Do not waste years on sadness. Do not waste beautiful women being sad. Because time heals all wounds, but why waste the time waiting? So many women I wish I could have again, so many women wasted waiting for my Turk. And then! And then American, I met my English wife. This was a love for conversation. A love of drink and food. But mostly conversation. And her cunt, American! Her cunt tasted like clean water. The best cunt I’ve ever tasted.”

Sabina pours herself a glass of Souma. She hasn’t stopped smiling since El Presidente started talking. I wonder how many times she’s heard this.

“But sadly, my English wife, my English wife who I could talk to for hours and whose cunt I could lick for days, she was taken from me too soon.” He bows his head, his jaw coming to rest on his jowls. He’s still wearing his wrap around sunglasses. It’s nine at night. I bow my head, too, but I’m not sure how long this moment of silence is supposed to last. “My friends, they tell me, ‘El Presidente, you are too old, too fat. Your heart, it is bad. You have had two strokes. You need to turn to God. You need to stop drinking. I say, what is God if not alcohol and food and women? I have lived as God would want me to. By eating and drinking and fucking as much as I could! What God would want me to live any other way?” He raises his glass, finally. “American, drink with me. To fucking and to food and to alcohol.”

We toast. Sabina tips her glass in our direction.

“Tell me, American, are there women in your life?”

“A few,” I say.

“Good. Good! What I wouldn’t give to be your age again, to fuck my way through Europe. I think my cock would probably fall off from overuse.”

Sabina chides him gently in Greek. Again he takes her hand, and plants a slovenly kiss. El Presidente gathers himself, brings a bloated hand to his gargantuan heart. “I’m glad we had this talk, American. I want you to come visit me. Do you know where my caravan is parked?”

“I do. Down on Haraki bay.”

“Yes, right where the river meets the sea. I wake up every morning and I piss in the sea. They’ve tried to get me to leave for twelve years, the motherfuckers. Come and visit me. My door is open to my friends. And everyone here with a good heart is my friend. So please, come visit me, American.”

Later, Sabina helps El Presidente trundle outside, to his scooter; it’s been specially modified to support his oxygen tank. He and I were the last two people in the bar. Sabina shuts the door and turns off the lights.

“Ok,” she says. “Time for you to go.”

“I have to pay.”

She saunters behind the bar, leans forward on her elbows.

“Would you like a shot with me before you go?” she asks.

“Sure.”

She goes to her supply.

“What do you drink?”

“Whiskey.”

She glances over her shoulder. The dim light deepens her eyes. They’re almost predatory. She pours two half glasses of whiskey.

“To your continued health on your travels,” she says. “Yammas.”

We touch glasses. She downs hers in one gulp; it takes me a few. She takes the glasses in one hand and deposits them in the sink. I’m watching her; she wears these knee high boots that I can’t look away from. She runs water into the sink, glances back and lifts her eye brows.

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“It’s getting late, Nathan. Get some sleep. You look like you could use it.”

~

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~

You would think that an island has room for only one ecosystem; you would be wrong. Somewhere west of Lindos - Lindos, that picture perfect town nestled on a saddle between two mountains, its white homes that tumble like a waterfall of snow towards the sea - the olive trees and hard pan of the mountains gives way to conifers and acacia, to gently rumpled fields of tall grass and wild wheat. This side of the island is cooler and rainy than our side. This change is dictated by the wind, that old magician. Alan and I drive down a dirt road between acacias and small oaks that are turning themselves whitely in the wind, that soft photosynthesis that is their from of breathing. I remember the long meridians of northern Wisconsin. The roads that climb and tumble over the ancient glacial hills. I remember my great-grandfather’s white Norwegian church, its lone, simple steeple. I remember his grave in the graveyard that is surrounded by fields of corn. And I remember how those fields undulate in the wind.

All of this is to say, I feel strangely at home.

We drive along the coast to Monolithos. It is a lone turret of stone that rises from the sea floor. It is possible to reach Monolithos by a narrow causeway of stone that connects it to the mainland. The stairs are treacherous, marble worn smooth and slick from centuries of passage. There are no railings, and every year a few poorly supervised children tumble off this great rock.

At its summit there was once a fortress. It guarded this side of the island from the Turkish fleets. Now, the fortress walls have crumbled, and will only crumble further. The monastery built within its confines is dilapidated; its frescoes are faded and almost illegible. Alan and I stand in front of the monastery, on the precipice of this great cornice of rock. The Aegean spills out beneath us, impeccably azure until it meets the stony, imposing Turkish coast.

“Had you seen this on the internet?” Alan asks me.

“No,” I say. “I had no idea this existed.”

He smiles, pleased that his island’s best secret had been kept from me until now.

Hawthorne, in his travel sketches, wrote about his first trip to Niagara. He spent three days lolling about the falls, witnessing it from all angles, listening to it from near and from far. He wrote about the wonder with which the first Indians must have come upon Niagara - their befuddlement at the growing roar emerging from the forest; their bewilderment and awe when that great cataract was first unveiled beyond the hardwoods. I think of the first travelers to this island, the Minoans, perhaps, or maybe some earlier band of Arabic nomads. I imagine their wonder at first seeing this promontory of rock. I think that I can almost reach out to them and say: I feel the same thing. It is that ineffable something that binds us ineluctably to the past and future: that which is beautiful, that which is stunning, that which feels impossibly true.

And maybe it is disappearing. Maybe that wonder has been commoditized and co-opted by agents of commerce. But I’d like to report that it’s still out there, still looming, still waiting to surprise you with its scale. You already know this, of course, and don’t need me to tell you. But maybe I needed to witness it for myself. Maybe I’d forgotten and you’ve all been the ones reminding me: just wait, and it will surprise you again. Be patient. Open your eyes.

“There is a church I visited in Kiev,” Alan tells me while I’m looking out from the rock. “A medieval church. And its frescoes are perfectly preserved. I went there with Vlad, when he and I spent our summer together, our lovely enthralling summer.” I don’t think he can see me smile about this. “We were so infatuated with each other that we would have literally eaten each other’s shit, you know? That kind of passion.”

“I know the kind.”

“Good. I was worried you didn’t.”

We laugh.

“Well he took me to this church one afternoon after we’d been making love in his apartment. And he told me the story of it. Apparently, everyone had forgotten about these frescoes, or thought that they’d faded. But what had actually happened was that, over the years, layers of plaster had been applied over the frescoes. And during the war, when the Nazis were retreating and destroying everything, they’d wired the church to blow. But something had gone wrong with the explosives, and all they did was blast off about three feet of plaster, and this revealed the extraordinary frescoes that had been hidden for centuries.”

“Really?”

“True story.”

“So we only know about this beauty because of the Nazis?”

“Yes.”

I turn and he’s sitting on a decrepit portion of fortress wall, smoking. We carefully descend from the fortress. Soon, we’re back on solid ground. I take one last look at the great rock. I remember Gilbert. “Monolithos,” he wrote, “means single stone. And it gave our home its name.”

　

　

　

Three.

Hey bro, it’s your brother in Philadelphia. Your in Greece, which is pretty crazy, because were all the way over here still. I guess its pretty cool, you being over there on your own and everything. Plus, its winter here, so you must be happy to not be here where its cold and gray all the time. Dad’s doing his usual winter depression thing where he snaps about every little thing. I think he misses you to. He doesn’t have anyone to play basketball with since i’m so busy with work and Luke and wedding stuff. I’m sending pics of Luke, so you should look at them, because there cute pics. In the first one he’s dressed as a baseball player and in the second one hes just wearing that dorky hat that dad gave him for christmas. Work sucks still. But I need the insurance for Luke and the money for the wedding, which is prob going to be October maybe September sometime. I dont know what mom tells you but i started tapering my methadone doses which has been pretty hard I’ll be honest. Some times I really want things I shouldnt want. But I’m telling my therapist about it and im staying strong cuz I have to for Luke right? Hes talking in a lot of sentences now not just single words. He says your name sometimes because I think he misses you. We all miss you, but I understand why you had to go even if we all wish you were here to be with Luke. He’s young tho so he probably wont remember this anyway. As long as you come home before too long ok?

~

I ride my bike out of town, past the old orthodox church where on New Year’s Eve, at midnight, the young men in the village race to the top of the belfry, all of them drunk and armed with shotguns; the winner gets to fire the ceremonial first shot of the new year. This actually happens, I am told. No one has died yet, which seems a minor miracle.

I pedal through the orange groves, where parades of goats meander and bleat. Their shit pockmarks the road, and I do my best to swerve through it. The sun is full today, towering, a force with which to be reckoned - white and expansive. I remember a line about Camus, about the sun of Algeria being one of the main characters of ‘The Stranger.’

I take the road down to Haraki. The hillsides around the coast are littered with the shells of villas and developments started and abandoned. They lurk like the skeletons of dinosaurs. They remind me of the seaside village in Spain where Susanna and I spent a night fucking and eating seafood and drinking wine. I wish I could stop thinking about her. I wish the memories would vanish or recede. I wish I could break from them, could experience this sun and these hills and this ride without the tendrils of loss tugging at my legs, my arms, my internal organs.

When I went through my last serious break up, at the age of twenty-one, I spent a great deal of the months after it wallowing in self pity. In the intervening years - between this one and that one - I’ve looked back at the pain I felt, and I’ve been somewhat ashamed of it. There are people who endure real tragedies, after all. But during those years, most of my close friends - male and female - have endured their own break ups, and they’ve responded with similar levels of sorrow, and disbelief. They’ve thrashed about just as violently as me.

The end of relationship is its own kind of mortality (it did not surprise me when I read a study that showed people have any easier time recovering from the death of a loved one than from a divorce). What has come before - the shared moments of pleasure and joy - is nullified, in a sense. It’s altered, and cannot be recovered in its previous form. And it’s inevitable, in that period of alteration, before time allows us to adapt and accept that what was once beautiful is now painful, that we ask ourselves: at what cost do we pursue the purity of beauty? But then, of course, we eventually emerge from that pain. We eventually see things with a newness of spirit.

The key is to remember this newness when mired in this period of alteration and sorrow: that simulacrum of death. I remember the winter of my twenty-first year, after that first break up. It was spent amongst the ruins of North Philadelphia with two equally

morose women. Both of them were losing lovers, too. They were both dark haired and introspective, a photographer and a filmmaker. I’d gone to bed with both of them when I was slightly younger. But that winter, we were all so melancholy that sex seemed unthinkable. Instead, we whittled away the brief, grey days talking in small, dim apartments - rooms where books grew like skyscrapers, and where cigarettes filled ash trays like dead leaves - or wandering the cold abandoned streets. We spent the late, lonely hours at diners where the other patrons were drag queens and thespians, or at Chinese joints that were filled with young gangsters and stoned jazz musicians. We ate greasy omelets and hash browns smothered in ketchup; steamed vegetables and cashew chicken in garlic sauce. We smoked endless cigarettes. We talked about giving up on love, about living ascetically, about devoting ourselves to art instead. We analyzed and re-analyzed encounters with our exes. We were, generally, insufferable. We must have made dreadful company for anyone outside our heart broken circle: I imagine we were about as much fun as rotten fish.

Those long days of wandering and bemoaning now strike me as some of the richest, most deeply felt, of my life. I often wish that I could experience them again, and better appreciate the depth of pain, the gothic grandeur of the city’s gutted churches and boarded homes, the dingy charm of its seediest establishments. But there is a kind of myopic self pity to just-ended love that attenuates our senses. And even now that I am aware of this myopia, I still find myself missing whole conversations because I’m replaying a letter from Susanna, or a conversation we once had, or a memory. But I’m trying very hard to remember to expand my aperture, to keep it wide and engaged. Because some day, I will not be on this island anymore. Someday, I hope, there will be a new woman, and I will be in the midst of love’s specific beauty again. Someday I will be sitting in an office or in a kitchen and I will think: what I wouldn’t give to be heartbroken in Greece again.

~

El Presidente’s caravan is situated, like he said, at the mouth of the river. It’s parked on a slight rise, overlooking the sea. It’s painted sky blue, and he’s glued hundreds of sea shells to its façade. Its tires are deflated, and rusted from the brine. Scrawled above the door, in looping, messy handwriting, are the words ‘Casa Presidente.’ I knock once, firmly, and he answers, shirtless. His stolid torso is impressively hirsute. He laughs with delight, and dangles an arm around my shoulder.

“American,” he bellows, “you actually came to see me. I thought maybe you were too much of a pussy!”

“No, I’m here.”

He disappears inside, rummaging around amongst the interior of the caravan. I poke my head in. It’s drab, strewn with clothes and dishes and bottles of beer, reeks of sweat and alcohol and the underside of unwashed testicles. I quickly poke my head back out. Soon El Presidente stumbles out, dragging his oxygen canister and two lawn chairs. “Here, here,” he says, “give me a hand over here.” We set the chairs outside his caravan. The beach in front of us is chalky shale. It’s littered with garbage, old clothing, shattered televisions.

“These motherfuckers,” El Presidente says, settling into his chair, “are trying to take this away from me. These motherfuckers come down every month and tell me that they will take my pension from me, that they will take my life from me. I worked for that pension! You know why they do it, huh?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Because they hate me being here. Because they think I’m a black mark on the beach. All this land here is an old army base. Barracks and mess halls. And these motherfuckers have been trying for years to make a resort, for fancy fuck Germans and English and Americans. So they can come here and lock themselves up and not have to see anyone else. And I say fuck that, this is my country and my land and I want to live here, so I parked here. Do you know how long I’ve been here?”

“No.”

“Twelve years, American! Twelve years ago, when my English wife died, bless her heart and may she and her delicious cunt be resting in peace, I said, ‘What now?’ I was too old for another love affair, my heart was too old, and I am too fat, and even if my cock still throbs like lightning, my heart, I knew, was done with love, forever done with love. There was no empty space left for a new love. It was already too full. So, what then? I said, ‘I want to wake up and piss in the sea.’ And I love Haraki. It is my home. My friends are here. So I parked here. Twelve years ago. And a week after I parked a government official from Rhodes who knows nothing about me or Haraki or villages, drove up and told me I had to leave. So I told him to fuck off!” He laughs and chokes on himself; he cranks the oxygen. “Two weeks later the same official comes back, this time with even bigger official, from Athens, a man who knows even less about my village and my friends and me! And he tells me to leave because I make the land ugly to developers. I laughed at him and said, ‘Everyone here is my friend. They come to see me, to talk. You do not understand this place. So go the fuck away before I shoot you.’” His eyes bulge with satisfaction. “What do you think of that, American?” He grabs his nuts. “But now they have finally realized how to fuck me! With money. With my pension. If they bleed me dry, what will I do then? These motherfuckers have finally figured out how to drive El Presidente away. Because they are afraid of me, afraid of the villagers ruining their progress, ruining their dreams of making Greece no longer Greek, they will take away our lives.”

“What are you going to do?”

He flicks his wrist. “The way of things here is who you know. And I know everyone. I have friends everywhere. I go to the tax office, and everyone comes out to give me hugs. Everyone wants to go out for drinks. I go to the tax office, with my friends, and they will deal with Athens. They will find the holes for me. I trust my friends.” He looks out at the sea. It’s a windless, warm day. The Mediterranean is tri-hued, incandescent. It comes gently ashore. A lone fisherman is on the beach, his rods wedged amongst the rocks. He sits and smokes and waits.

“I’ve talked so much about myself, and I know nothing about you, American. Tell me, please, about you.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, we are friends. I want to know everything.”

I study the fisherman, the empty beach. The ruins of Haraki castle rise above the beach, a half mile distant.

“I guess I grew up in Indiana and Wisconsin. Do you know where they are?”

“I think. The Middle West, yes?”

“Yes. The Middle West. I grew up in the Middle West. I moved to Philadelphia. I have friends there, but now they’ve moved and have real jobs. And I’ve been working some bad jobs for the last few years, hoping that I could save enough money to leave.”

“This ‘bad job.’ What do you mean? What job is bad?”

“Well, it was bad because of where I grew up, I guess. Because all my friends had jobs that paid more money, that were more important. They’re teachers, businessmen, computer guys. I planted flowers and delivered pizza.”

“My English wife always talked about bad jobs. I said, no, no. There are no bad jobs. A job? It is a job, and that’s all.”

“I like that,” I say. “That’s good.”

“You haven’t told me very much, American. I still can’t say I know you. All I know is you grew up in the Middle West and worked so-called bad jobs.”

I laugh.

“Try again,” he says.

“I grew up in the Middle West.” The lone fisherman stands up and, to my surprise, wades into the surf, still wearing his pants. He walks out to about waist deep and just stands there, gazing out over the infinite azure. “I grew up with storytellers. My whole family has always been storytellers, starting with my grandmother. She would read me books and tell me stories when I was a boy visiting her.”

“Stories about what?”

“About our ancestors. They were Norwegian, and they were farmers. About our dog saving the world. About God, and about me and my brother meeting God. She was a good story teller. I think, if she had been born later, maybe, she could have been a writer. A professional writer. But that wasn’t the way of things back then, so she became a teacher instead. My father is a storyteller, too. He’s also a pastor. But I remember trips as a kid, driving in our big old van, and we would pass the hours by telling family stories. Each of us - my dad, my mom, my younger brother and sister - would play a character in a story. Or we would read Bible verses and talk about them. So I grew up telling stories in the Middle West. There’s a lot of empty land there, in the Middle West. And a lot of villages that remind me of this place. But mostly there’s land. Distance means something there. You‘re very isolated, because of all that space. And because of that there were many small communities, and community life was important, because it was all you had when faced with all that space. The people that lived around you, the restaurants and churches, the sports teams and county fairs. That sort of thing.”

El Preisdente’s eyes are closed and I cannot tell if he’s listening intently or dozing.

“What else? I lived in Philadelphia. I moved there when I was fourteen. It was different, of course. There’s not the space out east that there is in the Midwest. Everything is close together, everything blurs. Space means less. Distance means less. I guess it was probably strange for me, but I couldn’t say how it was. And now, I guess, it’s home. Although not anymore. But it was home, for a long time. Has that ever happened to you? Where a place that was once home suddenly feels like it’s become a part of your past, but you‘re still living there? I can’t explain it any better than that. It’s like all of a sudden you hit a brick wall, you know? Like you can’t go any further. That’s what happened in Philadelphia. So I left. But now I don’t know if I can go back, ever or when.” We sit in silence. The fisherman has waded back to shore, and he’s taken off his pants and is now sitting on the shale in just his underwear. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe he’s insane. El Presidente is wheezing heavily beside me.

“And are you a storyteller, American, like your grandmother and your father before you?” he asks, his eyes still closed.

“I hope so. I’d like to be. But I don’t know.”

~

At the market in Masari, Sabina’s purveying tomatoes. Picking them up, bringing them to her nose, squeezing them for firmness, checking for soft spots. I see her, but I don’t say hello. I walk home alone along the river road. The susurrus of the plane trees, their shimmying shadows, their trunks of blue and green and brown that, from up close, resemble impressionist paintings. Of what?

~

Two days of rain and thunder. I spend them on my computer. Mostly, I log onto my sister’s facebook account and check Susanna’s profile. How preposterous, I think. Of course no one is going to broadcast pain or loss on facebook. She puts up a functional façade: a poem about the moon; a note from a friend about yoga; a petition to keep open a school in Camden, New Jersey. Ah, yes, the activism of my generation. Sign this, sign that. We can’t be bothered to show up, but we’ll all sign something. I probably check it every few hours. Nothing changes. I check again. I update my profile photo to one of me standing on Monolithos. Alan took it. Why this need to see and be seen? Why this need for everyone to know that I’m here, that the place is beautiful, that I am doing-just-fine, thank you? How much of our daily life is refracted through this aperture, is crafted for maximum effect - maximum appearance of happiness, maximum vulnerability, maximum honesty? I have a friend who has posted a photograph of himself and his baby nephew. The child is sitting on his lap, holding onto his arms. ‘It’ll get chicks wet,’ he tells me. ‘Seriously, panties will drop.’ I like to think I am above such posturing. But it’s raining outside. I should write my brother back. I post something on his wall instead: about how I miss him, and how I miss Luke, and how he should give Luke a kiss for me. Susanna is still friends with him, I know. Hopefully she’ll see it.

~

While I’m drinking coffee during one of the rainy days, Jimmy’s youngest son approaches me. He’s lanky; his body hasn’t filled in with muscle yet. But his face is mature, with a strong jaw and high cheeks and the remnants of a beard. He is, I’ve been told, the goal keeper on the village football team. It’s something of a tragic position: the last three local boys to be keeper have devolved into alcoholism.

“Have you been to New York?” he asks me.

“Yes, I have. I lived in Philadelphia. Do you know it?”

He shakes his head. I smile; of course he doesn’t know it. I muster a small amount of indignation for every citizen of Philadelphia.

“Well, it’s about an hour and a half from New York. So I’ve been to New York a lot.”

“What’s it like?” he asks.

“It’s big. It’s very big. Um, it can be overwhelming. And it’s very noisy. And it’s very crowded all the time. I never felt like I was alone in New York. But there’s a lot of good there, too. There’s a lot of great music. And there’s a lot of good sports, and good food. There’s so many different neighborhoods. You could explore New York forever, and by the time you finally saw the whole city, you’d have to start all over, because every neighborhood would have already changed so much. Does that make sense?”

He nods. “So you like it?”

“Yeah, sure. I don’t think I’d live there. It’s too big for me. But I like visiting.”

“I have a cousin there. I’m going to go live with him when I turn eighteen. He lives in the Bronx. Have you ever been there?”

“I have. A friend of mine taught there. I like the Bronx. It’s a cool place.”

“The Yankees, right?”

I laugh. “Yes, the Yankees.

“Well, my cousin’s a DJ, and he said he’s going to teach me when I come visit.”

“Very cool,” I said. “I’ll look you up if I ever visit New York again.”

He smiles, slaps me on the shoulder in a strangely filial way, like a younger brother who’s trying to fit in would.

“Well, cool talking to you,” he says, giving me an exaggerated thumbs up and then going back to the kitchen.

I think about New York. Specifically, I think about one night in New York with my friend who was the teacher. We’d gone to Brooklyn to see some friends of hers, drank some whiskey, taken a few pain killers. We waited nearly and hour for a subway for, wobbling alone on the platform, me pacing from one end to the other, the lights throbbing and crackling. It must have been three or four in the morning. God, I’d thought, what poetry: the graffiti on the walls, the emptiness of the tunnel on both sides, the dissonant electricity of the lights, the two of us half in the bag. My friend is tall, she was in heels, her hair is a voluptuous red. We’d never been lovers, never even hinted at being lovers. We were the only people on the train into Manhattan. We sat across from each other, on a diagonal, the car bright and white, jostling softly, singing its soprano libretto around the turns. I remember the two of us looking at the other, our bodies sprawled across the empty seats. It seemed to me that, on this train and this train only, if I got up and kissed her, it would be the most natural, logical thing I could do. So I stood up and put out a hand, which she took. She stood up, too. She towered over me, even without heels. We stood there, lurching with the train’s kinesis, and I put my hands on her jaw and then we kissed for a long while. In memory, I see us almost as a photograph, me reaching up to her, the solitary brightness of the car. Eventually, we came to our Manhattan transfer. It was in the East Village. We found a café in the basement of a brownstone. We smoked cigarettes and talked - about what, I don’t remember - and ate omelets, and it was if we’d emerged from some different realm. By the time we caught our subway uptown, the city was stirring again. We weren’t alone on the train, but we sat next to each other, and she slouched down to rest her head on my shoulder. We came above ground to the gloam of dawn, the tenements and projects rising against the murky dawn, the open maw of Yankee Stadium, regal and condemned. We’ve never talked about this night since: about the poetry of the subway platform, about the kissing on the empty train, about the café, about rising up from the earth to the monochromatic skyline.

I finish my coffee, wave to the boy at the register, and walk home through the rain.

~

“Hey,” Sabina says. “You again.”

Alan and I walk into Petro’s, collapse near the fire, shake out our coats.

“Winter here, it’s no good, Alan. Maybe our young friend thinks he made a mistake coming here.” She kisses Alan on both cheeks, takes my hand lightly, smiles and averts her eyes.

“Not at all,” I say. “It’s snowing back home.”

Sabina smiles at this, dips her head.

“Ah, what do you say, ouzo tonight?” Alan asks, clapping his hands together in excitement. “I think tonight is an ouzo night.”

Sabina joins us, and the three of us drink ouzo clouded with water. Alan regales us with tales of old and disturbed lovers: a ‘Sound of Music’ loving drag queen whose father was a mobster (“We were strictly cuddle buddies, no fucking”); Vlad the Ukranian whose family lived in a hand built stone hutch outside of Kiev, and who liked hunting rabbit and pheasant, and who also liked smuggling dope into London (“His family took me in after I drank five bottles of homemade vodka with his alcoholic uncle and could still stand”); about a six-foot-six Sri Lankan cricket bowler (“He had the beard and everything. My God he was a beautiful man. On team trips, we’d rent out these twenty-five person houses, and he and I would make breakfasts for the whole team, eggs and bacon and baked beans and toast and tomatoes and sausage. But what a beautiful man!”).

Alan, who is drinking at least two ouzos to everyone one of mine, excuses himself to use the toilet. Sabina, who has been facing Alan and the fire, pivots in her chair, plants her elbows on the table, rests her chin on her hands and glares at me.

“Why didn’t you say hello at the market the other day?”

I turn my head, try to formulate a response.

She holds up a hand. “I’m teasing. But really. Next time don’t be a creep and watch me. Come say hello.”

“Ok.”

Alan returns; the conversation devolves into mutual Greek friends I haven’t met. I feel the tendrils of anxiousness pulling at me, luring me to go home, to get on my computer, to ameliorate this sudden chasm that’s opened up beneath me, this abyss of self doubt and recrimination. The problem is, there are always triggers, moments nested inside of this one, or the next one. The fire reminds me of the stone oven in Susanna’s house. We’d sit there in winter and make fires and read poems to each other. The storm outside - the rain, the lightning - reminds me of a night at the end of last summer, when a Philadelphia thunderhead knocked out my power and woke us both up and we lay sweating in the dark and watched the lightning, the silhouettes of the trees being lashed in the wind. The conversation moves on without me, Alan somehow immune to the alcohol, Sabina occasionally, furtively, reaching out with her eyes, trying to gauge the reason for my silence, for the fact that my eyes sometimes seem like they no longer see what’s in front of them.

I’d like to be so distracted that I cease thinking.

At the end of the evening, when the storm finally starts to relent, we go to the bar to pay. Alan, again, visits the bathroom.

“What’s the matter with you?” Sabina asks.

“Nothing. I’m tired.”

She studies me with concern. I can’t help thinking that I wish I’d seen her when she was younger, that I’d met her then. But this is selfish of me. Because she’s still terribly beautiful.

“Would you like to come over for coffee?” she asks. “Thursday at noon?”

“Ok.”

“You’re sure?”

“How will I find your house?”

She finds a pen. She takes my wrist, the pen clenched between her lips, and rolls the sleeve of my shirt up. On it, she draws a map of the village, starting with the café. She marks her house with a star.

“It’s the fourth house on the right,” she says. “Roll your sleeve down before Alan comes out.”

I do. Alan emerges, tottering.

“Oh-kay,” he mutters. “Sabina, my sweetheart, kalineta.” They kiss, Alan bows.

“Kalineta,” I say, presenting my hand. She squeezes my fingers briefly.

“Kalineta,” she says. “I’ll see you two boys around.”

~

How to live meaningfully?

I am reading about the drug war in Mexico. The federal police have come across the bodies of two boys - nine and ten - who had been tied to the back of a car like dogs. Their father, through no fault of their own, was a capo in the Sinaloa cartel. He’d been in the car while the driver slowly accelerated. The boys, it appears, ran for miles and miles before their young legs finally gave out and they were pulverized by rock and stone. The father, after witnessing this, was shot in the head.

After this, I read about the Oscar race. Then I read about college basketball. And all of this information passes through me like water, or sugar.

Finally I turn off my computer and I step outside. It is the hour before dusk. The sun implodes beyond the mountains in a florid flourish. The moon, nearly full, ascends out of the sea. I go for a jog. The wildflowers are just beginning to lift their noses, and a few girls are out amongst the olive groves, carrying wicker baskets and filling them with the first flowers of the season. The smell of wet grass and milkweed reminds me of Northern Wisconsin, of the crisp summer dusks spent walking home from the lake through the tall grasses. I stop for a moment to smell; there is a tremendous buzzing, a primal whirring. The wildflowers are alive with feasting bees. They go about their devouring, and the girls go about their harvesting. I run into the mountains. The night grows colder, still moist and fragrant. The village’s lights sparkle to life in the valley below me, like a small galaxy. I remember being nineteen. I was in the Shenandoah Valley with my first girlfriend. We were young, in the midst of first love. We were going to get married. We’d gone for a long hike in the woods. She wore sky blue shorts, and I liked the tan of her legs so much when contrasted with those shorts. Afterwards we drove out of the mountains, exhausted in that silly, pleasant way of young lovers feeling, prematurely, like adults. We descended towards an old mining village, a collection of sad lights in a dark valley, like a cluster of dim, dying stars. We found a burger stand, a little dive that only served burgers and fries and milkshakes. We ordered two of each. We sat amidst the sadness of the place - the water damaged wall, the frazzled lights, the faded photographs of miners and ancestors - and laughed, our legs entwined under the table. She did her hair in pig tails and looked so young, so astonishingly beautiful, that I wanted to fall out of my booth and cry tears of gratitude. We hadn’t yet wounded each other, betrayed each other, diverged. For years I couldn’t think about that day because it opened a sorrow I didn’t want to confront. Now, I think: I’d live that day infinitely, even knowing what comes after.

I come down from the mountains. I slow to a walk. The river is to my right, invisible but humming, flush with last night’s rain. I can hear the sounds of boys shouting in Greek, laughing, calling out. In the distance, coming over the olive trees, is a penumbra of light, very much like the Friday night lights back home. I move towards it. There’s a miniature turf field nestled in the grove. It’s fenced in, with two small goals at each end. The boys are playing five on five soccer. I stand against the fence and watch for a time. Jimmy’s youngest son, the one with the cousin in the Bronx, notices me, and he smiles warmly, holding up a hand. I wave back. They ebb and flow on the pitch, laughing, berating each other when they turn the ball over, clapping when one of the keepers makes an impressive save. Their bodies are fluid and lithe. They handle the ball with skill and delicacy. My body slowly cools from the run, and the wind comes off the sea, and the bees whisper steadily amongst the flowers. The boys catcall and laugh, dribble between each other. A keeper lunges to his right and steers a shot wide. One of the older boys rifles a shot from midfield, kisses it home off the cross bar, eliciting groans from the other team, hugs from his own. Jimmy’s boy looks at me, shakes his head, bites his tongue. I laugh. A few of the girls with their baskets come to sit beside me. The flowers sit in heaps between their legs, and they weave them into bouquets. Occasionally they look up, watch the boys for a few seconds, smile privately, their faces filling with warmth. The day whispers its last, the boys glide back and forth, the girls twine the flowers between their legs…