At eight in the morning, I’m woken by the coughing of what sounds like a motor boat’s engine and the thumping of a subwoofer. These two sounds, singing a strange duet, circumnavigate, fading and growing in volume. After the third revolution, I throw on some shorts and open my front door. Jimmy’s sons are driving a tractor around the block, dressed in blackface, towing a trailer that blasts dance music. The trailer is decorated with olive branches and goat skulls, and a few other village boys - in black face and grass skirts - dance amongst the speakers, drinking vodka from the bottle. When the youngest son notices me, he motions me onto the trailer.

“It’s eight in the morning,” I shout to him.

He shrugs. “It is Apokria!” he shouts back, motioning again.

It is Apokria. What the fuck. I climb on back of the trailer, take a swill of vodka, and make two revolutions around the block. They smear my face with black make up, hand me a wig. The old women are already out in their chairs. They wave, and clap. It’s a clear, windy day.

~

One year ago today my bus pulled into Granada. I hadn’t seen Susanna in four months. It was a hot day. The lemon trees were in full blossom, and their ambrosia seemed to fill the whole city. I stepped off the bus into the sultry Andalusian heat. Susanna wore a sun dress, her chest pink with sun, her forehead damp. She broke into sobs when she saw me, fell onto a knee. I smiled, felt something that had gone out of me come rushing back - an ineffable thing, nameless, a silence that could, perhaps, for a moment, fill the abyss. Something entirely unexpected, a grace. That’s the only word for it, I think. A grace that surprises you with its presence, and then surprises you again when it vanishes. A grace only measured by its vanishing.

I knelt down, traced a finger behind her ear - how strange it was to miss someone’s ears - and kissed her on the forehead. Then I put my arms around her, and the two of us knelt for a moment, foreheads together, crying. That was one year ago. I had no idea. I could not have imagined. But here I am. Here I am. And I have no idea.

~

Shortly after noon most of the village gathers in the amphitheater beneath the old church. A stage built from old crates and plywood sags uncertainly in the middle. Jimmy’s sons and their friends are the emcees. They’re still dressed like African warriors, and they fuss with a computer and sound system. Loose wires splay everywhere, scattered like a den of snakes. To the right of the makeshift stage are a few long charcoal grills, filled with smoking soulvaki; old oil drums are filled to the brim with ice and cans of beer.

Almost everyone is in costume, and most of them are offensive costumes. There are sultans and suicide bombers. There are many variations of African, none of them flattering. Most of the kids are dressed more innocently: cowboys and militia men for the boys; leopards and vampires and princesses for the girls.

Alan and I have come in costume, too. Alan’s dressed as an Indian queen, replete with sarong and dot on the forehead. I’m wearing a homemade Santa costume.

We all sit beneath the church in the clear light of afternoon and watch while the kids race in sacks and balance eggs on spoons. We cheer when they finish, laugh when they wipe out. Everyone drinks beer and gorges on soulvaki. Yiorgo and Mona are here, dressed as pirates. Jimmy and his wife work the grills. My neighbor sits with her friends, wearing a rather salacious gypsy costume and pink bowler hat. She waves to me, slightly, quickly, so no one but me notices.

After the egg race the sketches start. They’re irreverent, sprawling numbers featuring the young men of the village in drag. The crowd laughs uproariously as they dance the Macarena, as they take turns seducing a man dressed as an Islamic sultan. People emerge riding donkeys, or dancing atop broken down junkers salvaged just for today; they will be burned later tonight, I‘m told.

I can understand almost none of it, of course. So I watch the crowed, the bemused smiles of parents and grandparents, the laughter of lovers and friends. It’s windy, and the women in the crowd fight to keep their hair presentable. At the back of the theater, a grandfather stands with his granddaughter on his shoulders.

The sketches ramble and roam. Evil foils emerge from out of nowhere; obese men gyrate in bikinis. We laugh, we pat each other on the back, we drink and we eat. We come together in the sun and watch our neighbors and friends and family. I try to listen but the language is beyond me. A little boy in a cowboy costume tramps around in front of the stage, stomping his feet to the beat of the music.

The girl is still on her grandfather’s shoulders. The cemetery where El Presidente‘s grave settles is behind them.

The whole scene is too much for me at some point; my instinct, my inveterate need, to be alone overwhelms me. I sneak down the alley and walk past the grills and the beer and behind the stage and down the nearly empty streets of the village. I meander without real purpose, following the streets where the sun still reaches. Occasionally music will drift above me on the wind, or laughter. A few of the oldest women in the village haven’t gone to the festival, and they sit talking, looking satisfied with the solitude and the quiet.

“Kalispera,” they wish me.

“Kalispera.”

I know that this sorrow and melancholy won’t last. There will be the discoveries of new women, the nights when the conversation flows like clear water and when I think that, yes, just having one of these nights should be enough for a whole lifetime. But they aren’t enough, of course. They’re enough for the time, but they change and transfigure; relationships turn sour, love fails. Moments have future lives, are constantly altered and revised. Everyone of us needs at least a small promise of new beauty to survive a day in this world, I think.

This loneliness can’t possibly be permanent, can it?

When I return to the amphitheater, Alan is standing by the beer, talking with Sabina. Four men in fat suits are on the sagging stage, sitting around swilling wine. Sabina smiles when she sees me, and, when I don’t break into tears, it seems a minor miracle.

“Oh, there you are, mate,” Alan says. “Look who I found.”

Sabina gives me her hand. I hold it lightly. The warmth in it destroys me.

“How are you, Nathan?”

I force a smile.

“It’s Apokria. I’m good. And how are you?”

“Good days and bad days.”

I finally let go of her hand. We all turn to the stage.

“That one is El Presidente,” Alan says to me, pointing to one of them. He rants and raves in Greek, gesticulating wildly, standing up and flipping over the table. I can’t help laughing myself, though with reservation. I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s Sabina.

“Don’t worry about laughing at the dead,” she says. “They won’t mind.”

I smile.

“Don’t you know how stories work, Nathan? Here, no one is ever dead. They live in Apokria, in the stories the men tell over Metaxa and ouzo.”

Sabina, unexpectedly, takes my hand. “We’re going to miss you,” she says. “We’ve come to enjoy seeing you, how hard you try to be one of us. We like you here. I hope you‘ll visit again.”

El Presidente’s doppelganger waddles off the stage. I must admit that the kid’s a good impressionist - he nails El Presidente’s gait. He turns and launches into another tirade. The crowd roars with laughter, grimaces with sadness. A few of the old men pull out handkerchiefs. On stage, the other three kids can’t help it, and they keel over laughing. El Presidente waddles about, kicks over one of their motorbikes. We roar, we cry, we take our neighbor beneath our arm and rollick, and the shadow of the failing day slowly crawls across us.

~

Later in the evening we pile into a banquet hall above Jimmy’s. It’s a huge, cavernous room that looks as if it hasn’t been used in a decade. Long, folding tables fill the room, and a dance floor has been built in the center. Bags of peanuts and cans of beer cover the tables. A traditional Greek band sets up by the dance floor.

They start playing around nine, and at first, only a few of the village elders get up and perform stodgy, methodical dances. The rest of us sit shyly, still sober, slowly shedding layers of costume as our collective heat fills the room. The windows, musty with the years, condense. Empty beer cans begin piling in the center of tables, beneath chairs. Children, re-energized, start dancing with their grandparents, roaming the middle of the circle, flitting beneath clasped hands, between legs. The noise grows towards a kind of cacophony. I step outside. Jimmy’s sons have parked their float in the middle of the street. They’re burning scrap wood in an oil drum. Their float is decorated with the skulls and bones of dead goats. They pull me up with them, and we dance for a bit, swilling more vodka. Down below, in the street, a dance starts. A few of the village girls are in the middle, dancing, and the boys gather round, holding hands, circumnavigating. Those on the outside clap and sing. I join the circle. Each boy takes a term breaking his place in the circle, swiveling to the middle, dancing with each girl. My neighbor, the gypsy, is one of the girls. Occasionally, as we both whirl in opposite directions, like the gears of two separate clocks, she’ll find my eyes and smile. The dance grows in ferocity, tempo. Soon, those clapping can barely keep pace. It’s my turn in the center. I take a few hesitant steps, then my neighbor takes me by the arm. We pirouette, I spin her, she spins me. She moves beautifully, admirably. I’m mostly letting her lead. She casts her head back and laughs. For a second the clapping reaches me. Mostly it’s a whir, faces and the flames, our bodies moving against the outer circle. I take my dances with the other girls, some of them as young as twelve, a few closer to my age. One of the younger girls takes my hand and kisses it. I laugh, kiss her on the cheek. Soon I’m back in the outer circle, watching while other boys take their turns.

The circles converge, and before I know what’s happening, we’re moving towards the stairs, towards the hall. We burst into the room. A few old women dance quietly with their granddaughters. They make space for us, we join hands with them. We perform a dance that everyone but me seems to know by heart. It’s a complicated number - three steps to one side, a stutter step towards the middle, a pause during which the arms are raised, a stutter step backwards, and then do it over again. With practice, I’m still the worst one here, but not so bad that I’m threatening to ruin things. The old woman whose hand I’m holding occasionally pats me on the shoulder, whispers encouragements in Greek. My neighbor smiles surreptitiously, tries not to laugh. I’m laughing myself, I realize at some point, laughing hysterically, my face burning with pleasure, my heart throbbing with exhaustion.

The dance finally ends. I find a table with Alan, his parents, Yiorgo and Mona. Many of the boys stay on the dance floor. More people are getting up from their tables now, the alcohol is taking hold. I notice that Petro and Sabina are across the room, sitting with friends. Petro’s dressed in a chicken costume, and Sabina’s dressed halfheartedly as a cowgirl, wearing just a straw hat with pigtails. The band’s numbers become livelier, their tempos faster. The elders are ceding their place on the dance floor, most of them shunting off to their tables. A few stray children still flirt on the periphery of the floor, performing their simulacrums of adulthood. A princess sits Indian style, hands thrown in the lap of her frilled dress. A pirate with his fake sword keeps trying to goad her into dancing.

Alan hands me a beer, Yiorgo forces me to take a shot of Souma. I watch the dancers, I listen to the band. The temperature ratchets up incrementally. I lose my Santa jacket. The band’s lead singer loosens his tie. Discarded clothing litters the room. The younger children have curled up on their father’s jackets, or their mother’s purses, sleeping in that miraculous way small kids can, no matter the noise level. I remember similar nights, dances like this in Wisconsin, or Pulaski, when I’d wake up briefly in my father’s arms while he carried me to our car.

It strikes me, now, that what this gathering reminds me of is those places, those earlier villages of my youth. I’m reminded of those dances in Pulaski and Shawano, those late nights in barns and old armories where I danced with my cousins and Midwestern girls whose faces I’ve forgotten, where my parents drank and laughed, maybe in awe of the smallness of their lives, maybe stifled by it, maybe wanting to cry because of the beauty of it, the melancholic beauty of the finite world in its most forgotten corners. There’s such little difference between here and there. Dairy farmers or orange farmers, polka or Greek music. The musty windows dappled in evaporated sweat. The old men with their ties undone, their flaccid necks exposed, their wives out there with their stockings rolled up and their shoes kicked off, spinning their granddaughters on their toes like dradles. The youngest kids asleep beneath tables and in corners. The adolescents playing at adulthood, trying out their powers, pairing off and slipping into bathrooms or out back doors. And the rest of us dance, or we drink, and we try to hold onto what a gathering like this say,s and what it means, in case it’s the last time one of these happens, or the last time we’re here for one of them. The old men, especially, watch the younger girls whorl and glide, watch with bedazzled eyes. They are their daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters, their cousins and third cousins. Men who’ve spent their whole lives in these mountains, on these hills, on boats plying these waters. They remember the famine. They remember the war. They’ve seen the developments creep down the coast, heard the German and the English being spoken on their streets during the sordid summer months. Their sons have gone to Athens, or Rhodes, or New York. Some have returned, and some are lost to them. A whole life passes like this, in cafes or on the sunny streets, with cigarettes and coffee, with laughter. This is a life I recognize because it is the life my father has been running from and running from for all of his days.

Sabina looks at ease. The tenseness I expected, maybe even hoped for, is absent. She and her husband sit at a large table full of friends, faces I recognize from the café. She laughs earnestly; Petro lights a cigarette for her; she lets her hand linger on his. The conversation seems lively, fueled by alcohol, late night delirium. Later, Petro stands and extends a hand. She takes it. They move towards the dancers, the blur of color that reminds me of a van Gogh painting (but not Renoir; Renoir is too bright, too elegant): a café at night, the fullness of the light, the brashness of the bodies. The dancers work in broad, blunt strokes. Petro says something over his shoulder and she laughs, bowing her head and flushing. I smile; I can’t help it. The circle makes space for them. This is how it works - new dancers join as they’re inspired, the circle expands and parts until it’s at the limits of the floor, and then a smaller circle forms inside of it. The people sitting clap and watch. I watch Sabina for a few moments. A hand clasps my shoulder. I lean back in my chair, crane my neck. It’s Alan, of course.

“You were not careful,” he says, sitting down, handing me a beer.

“I guess not.”

“I warned you. Greek women are a particular breed, my friend. They take what they want when they want it, and then they use you until they’re done. And then you’re gone.”

“I don’t think that’s just Greek women. I think that’s all of us.”

“Ay, maybe. I hope not, mate. But you’re probably right.” He smiles rakishly.

We toast, sit in silence, watch. I find my neighbor, the salacious gypsy. She sits with her older man. He’s around my age, I guess, taller than me, with a stern, malicious face and small eyes. She leans into him, her whole gravitational field compelled towards his body. Mostly, he’s disinterested. His gaze notices other women, rarely seeks her out. His posture doesn’t repel her, but it’s indifferent. There’s no softness to him. She talks almost non-stop, exaggerates her laughter at the few words he says. He treats her like a precocious younger sister. I think of Kafka: how is he not amazed by her?

“Come on, mate,” Alan says. “Let’s dance.”

We join in the circle, almost directly across from Sabina. Petro raises their hands in greeting. Sabina smiles benignly. We dance for an indeterminate amount of time: it might be hours, or maybe it’s only a song. I can’t tell anymore. If you told me I was ten years old and in a barn in Wisconsin, that Susanna was a fantasy I’d invented in the hours before bed or a ghost from a past life, I’d believe all of it. Someday I’ll die and this dance will probably seem like a story I read long ago, a story from which I don’t remember the plot or the characters but remember a few images. Or, it will seem like it just ended. The meat smoke, the sweat, the music and laughter will seem denser, somehow more visceral, than they do now.

Maybe it will be both.

The circle breaks now, to my right. Yianni emerges, moving slowly but with assurance. Behind him is Marina. They’re holding hands. He cradles hers the way he might a small bird - with astonishing tenderness. The circle slows to a halt. The two of them amble to the center, and they start to dance. She leads, by virtue of his faltering feet. The rest of us resume our dancing around them. She dances with a focus that verges on purity; as if the entire universe were concentrating all its energy on this very dance. As if she focuses intensely enough, she might discover a singular clarity.

Watching Marina, I can see her life in Sabina’s. I can see the long, monotonous years of frustration. But I can also see the minor joys, those luminous seconds or hours where the sacrifices don’t seem like sacrifices at all, and when this small village seems like more than enough for one life. The children in bed. The stranger who comes to town. The thousands of forgotten meals with the husband. The long, steady days, and the brief, immaculate ruptures.

A few people from the circle, including Petro, join Marina and Yianni. They from a smaller circle in our middle, moving counter to us, a ponderous reverence to their movements, as if each step were drawn out and emphasized, as if it might be the last step any of them take.

What I cannot see here is my own life. These are not my people. This is not my place. This is not my home. My presence here is aberrant, perhaps even parasitic. There are parts of me here, of course. But it is me through them, and with time, these parts will be washed away, eroded like glass by the sea. And although I feel that there are pieces of them in me, too, that they have opened me so fully, and given me so much, it is still somehow not real. It is all expectation, and perception. And it will end.

But maybe this is all we have: expectation and perception. We search for places that feel like home, and then we find them, and we feel trapped. And then we lose them, and we tell stories because it’s the only tool we have in this world, the only way we can control a single thing about our lives. But sometimes, I think, meaning is out there. What is it? I don’t know. But there are rapacious afternoons spent in bed with a new woman; a daughter dances precisely with her father. Except the story can’t end there. The afternoons becomes memories. The father is committed to the asylum and drugged until one day he dies alone. The daughter marries a man she does not love. Her life vanishes within the narrow, wending roads of a village.

All we are left with are the things we have perceived and remembered and searched for and tried to make sense of. I guess I want to say that words fail. But you already know this. Words fail. Yet we search for them, and we search for each other, and we search and search. And what do we find?

When I was a boy, I would lie in bed and try to imagine the universe without me. Was there only blackness, or would I assume the consciousness of an entirely different person? Those seemed the two options, and it was an idea I tried very hard to understand. It wasn’t re-incarnation; I’d retain none of my former qualities, and would be, completely, this new person. But maybe, in moments, it would be as if a seam opened, and I’d be dimly aware of the person I’d once been - could perhaps intuit a shadow of a memory, maybe the melody of a song. Maybe there would be the shape of a word a lover once spoke to me.

It was a ludicrous, childish idea - a way to avoid the totality of death. But I would lie in bed for hours, and devote all my energy into trying to glimpse an image or sound from that other life. I feel close to glimpsing something now. Like this dance is happening in one of those seams. Or, conversely, I feel that if I were to concentrate, to let go of my physical attachments, I might discover a few notes of music, or hear a word whispered, a word that might explain how I’ve come to this place, how I’ve lost so much. A word that might unify that boy in bed with this man. I close my eyes. The music rolls like a dulcet river. Alan’s hand sweats into mine. I want to say it’s there, that word, or at the very least its shadow is there, or its absence, which would suggest that maybe, somewhere, the word itself can be found. I open my eyes. Sabina’s looking at me. She smiles in a way I can’t comprehend. Alan squeezes my hand and I bump gently into him. The music has stopped. I’m still here.

~

I sit on the fire steps and smoke a cigarette. The stars are very clear. The music comes down to me, muffled, distorted. There is laughter, too. I smile; it seems the appropriate response.

Someone deposits a hat on my head. I take it off. It’s Marina’s bowler hat.

“Hey,” she says, sitting two steps behind me.

“Hey there.”

“Mind if I have one?”

I pass her my cigarettes, my lighter. Her legs recline beside me.

“That man you fawn all over,” I say.

“Mm?”

“You deserve better than that.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Nothing,” I say. “You’re right. I know nothing about it, or anything. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I see the way he is with you. That’s all. You deserve better.”

“He’s not a bad guy. He says he hates it here and wants to move to Rhodes, maybe even Athens. Open up a business there.”

“He doesn’t love you.”

“Not yet. He says I’m too young. He says when I‘m older, we could be happy.”

I lean back on the stairs, rest my head and peer back at her so that she’s framed by the cataract of stars.

“I loved a girl once, a girl who reminds me very much of you. I told her she was too young. Do you know what I think now?”

“What?”

“I think when beauty comes, you usually get one shot at it. And maybe it means you’re going to pay a price for it later, in anger, or pain. Maybe it comes when you aren’t ready. But if you try to put it off for later, it will escape you. When beauty offers itself to you, you accept it, no questions asked.”

“So did you? With that girl?”

“No. But I have with other ones. And I’ve paid for it, too.”

She carelessly runs a hand across my brow, through my hair. I close my eyes. We’re both very drunk.

“I want you to fuck me, American. I‘ve decided that.”

I laugh at this.

“I prayed that you would stay and that I would lose my virginity to you.”

“Well, that was a silly thing to pray for.”

“I guess so.” She’s still stroking my brow; it feels better than I can possibly express. I close my eyes. She runs her fingers around my cheek, into my mouth. I suck on them, bite them.

“So will you fuck me?”

“No,” I say, opening my eyes, looking at her. She looks so sad and imploring, as if I’ve wounded her. “No.”

“But what about beauty offering itself to you?”

I shrug. “I suppose we are who we are. That doesn’t change. I’d like to, for what it’s worth.”

She kisses me on the forehead.

“Walk me home then?”

~

We walk home, and she takes my arm somewhere along the way. The moon is gibbous, shrouded by a few strands of cloud. The streets are quiet. We take a long, meandering path through the uneven, narrow alleyways. I’ll miss the roads here, the sudden protuberance of a house, the sudden narrowing or widening, the secret courtyards that open like gasps, the lemon trees falling over rusted gates. The hard angles of the homes set against the uncertain, winding streets.

She rests her head on my shoulder, twines her fingers with mine.

We go up to my roof. The stars are still out, though the moon is falling into the horizon, and the sea is glazed with the white of dawn. While she rolls a cigarette I go downstairs and get a heavy blanket. I come up and stand for a long time at the railing, the blanket over my shoulder, looking out over the minor lights of the village, the mist coming off the groves, the mountains looming stoically like slumbering beasts.

I wrap the blanket around her shoulders, pull my chair close to her so that she can lie her head on my shoulder. She pulls me under the blanket with her.

“Are you going to go home after this?” she asks.

“No. I’m not.”

“Then where?”

“Istanbul, I think.”

“And what will you do there?”

“I don’t know. Try to find work. Try to write.”

“Why don’t you just go home?”

I smile into the top of her head.

“Because it’s a strange place and I need to be escape it for a long time. Maybe forever.”

“What about your brother and your nephew?”

She takes my hand beneath the blanket. I squeeze it.

“I think they’ll be ok. I hope.”

“Will you be lonely in Istanbul?”

“Of course. I’ll be lonely everywhere.”

“Can I write you letters and tell you about my life? I‘ll miss talking to you.”

I laugh. “Of course. But you’ll get bored with it eventually. And someday you’ll forget about me. And that’s ok, too.”

“Well, right now I don’t think I’ll forget about you,” she says.

“Can we be quiet for a bit, kid? I’d like to be quiet if that’s ok with you.”

“Of course,” she says, but I know I’ve wounded her slightly. I touch her on the chin, kiss her very briefly on the lips. And then we sit there, listening to the other breathe. I want to give her advice, but I’m so tired. I want to tell her to give more of herself before it's too late. Someday, for most of us, it is too late. Give more of yourself while you are young, while you have an abundance to give. Do not squander it uselessly. Burn it up on love, burn it up on beauty, burn it up on the provender of life, not the cheap and venal. She doesn’t need me to tell her this. She knows, I think. Some things in life you just know. The church bells begin their resounding; this sends the birds scurrying and singing. The sun rises out of the sea. She’s fallen asleep.