Everything Beautiful Began After

by Simon Van Booy

  There were quite a few people out, mostly going somewhere carrying things. Nobody was wandering in a daze anymore. A new day had begun and brought purpose. The majority of Athenians had been evacuated, but parts of the city still burned.

  George said the car was gone, so you carried Rebecca’s body through the streets, setting it down every few hundred yards to rest. George’s shoulder was bleeding badly. Then a truck full of soldiers pulled over and asked if you wanted help.

  “Piraeus,” George said.

  “Not hospital?” the blond driver said in English.

  “No, Piraeus, please take us to Piraeus,” George said.

  The driver said something to someone in the passenger seat and then said okay.

  “That’s where her people are,” George said to the driver, who then understood immediately that you had a body wrapped in the canvas. He honked and several soldiers climbed down from the back and helped load Rebecca into the back. Some of the soldiers were speaking Turkish.

  The soldiers were about your age. They looked at the body and then at you. As you neared the port, one of them took the crucifix and black beads from around his neck and offered them to you.

  “I don’t believe in God,” you said blankly.

  “He’ll catch you in his net,” the soldier said and slipped the crucifix and beads into the canvas with Rebecca’s body.

  You explained to the soldiers that you were going to Piraeus in order to get her to Aegina. You told them you were taking her to the place where she had been happiest.

  They seemed to understand.

  The truck stopped only once to pry a female corpse from a car crushed by a wall. It happened moments before you arrived. The man who implored the truck to stop was her husband. He had been buying something at one of the few kiosks that was open. He saw it collapse. The soldiers lay the body of his wife on the street. Bits of glass had stuck in her face and they glinted in the morning sun.

  By the time you reached Piraeus, the canvas was starting to smell. The soldier who offered the crucifix helped lower the body to the street, and then several soldiers found a boatman who was standing on the deck of his small ship watching everything quietly. George stayed with the body.

  You begged the boatman in broken Greek to take you to Aegina. He shook his head that he wouldn’t. The soldiers eyed him with quiet intensity. He looked past you at the body and the army truck in the square. “Sorry,” he said in English.

  Then one of the soldiers pulled out his revolver but without raising it above his waist. The boat captain shrugged calmly and went into his cabin. A minute later the engine started and the soldiers helped carry the canvas on deck.

  The engine was very loud and the boat shuddered as black smoke surged from the rear engines.

  Within ten minutes, you were way offshore. There were no other boats and the sea was quiet. The soldiers watched from the harbor wall. When they had lessened to a smudge of green in the distance you heard the snapping of rifle fire.

  The captain stayed in his cabin, emerging only once to hand George a bottle of some Greek liquor. George gave you the bottle first and then gulped half the contents.

  On reaching the port at Aegina you both realized you had been asleep.

  It was evening.

  There were hundreds of people at the harbor, as if waiting for your boat. You didn’t know what they were doing and were afraid for some reason that they would attack you. After docking, you realized they were praying for people on the mainland.

  People rushed over as the captain attached the lines, but were immediately disappointed when they saw only three men. They shouted at you for news. George yelled at them in Greek. You don’t know what he said, but they repeated it to one another and then went back to praying.

  A couple of teenage boys helped you carry the body of Rebecca from the deck and onto the harbor. They must not have known what it was because when her hair fell out through a tear in the canvas one of them dropped the end he was carrying and ran off.

  You and George carried the body away from the harbor to a bench in the square. Men were shouting at the fisherman who had brought you.

  You don’t know what time it was, but the boat must have taken several hours.

  George went to find water and came back with a car. You didn’t ask where he got it.

  Rebecca’s body wouldn’t fit lying down in the back seat, so you had to sit her up. After drinking as much as you could from a bucket George had filled at a fountain, you drove through the town and then thumped up the mountain in third gear. Halfway there, you almost collided with a moped that came hurtling toward you at an intense speed.

  When you reached the cliff, George didn’t hesitate in steering off the road onto the scrubland.

  He drove slowly until the land was too uneven for the axles.

  When you got out of the car it was dusk and everything was quiet. A cool wind was blowing in off the sea.

  Rebecca’s body seemed to lighten as you neared the edge of the cliff.

  You swung it a few times for momentum and then let go at the same time.

  When you got back to the car, George just stood there in a daze. He asked if you would drive. You couldn’t find the headlights and so drove down the mountain in darkness.

  It took all night to get from Aegina into the city again. By the time you had penetrated Athens at dawn, confusion had turned to uncertainty. Soldiers stood on every corner with machine guns, smoking cigarettes and reassuring the elderly. George’s apartment was shaken, but remained standing. Most of his neighbors had left the city for country homes. You both slept for a few hours in his bed. Then you woke up and decided to go back to your apartment. George wanted to come, but you left while he was in the bathroom.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  You no longer wanted to live.

  Standing on your balcony, you felt your heart had already stopped, and each soft thud in the dark, each faint push between your thumb and neck, was only the ghost of your heart and its memory of something beautiful.

  You imagined the ensuing moments if you jumped off:

  The square beneath would be remembered as the place where a foreigner died. Local children would grow up wondering who you were.

  Shouting. A single scream. A body has fallen from the sky. A tapping of shoes. People running toward you. Faces flash at windows. Doors swing open. Old women hold children back.

  By the time you found Rebecca it was too late. You will feel useless for the rest of your life. Your hands will always remember what they couldn’t do.

  An old man turns you over.

  He kneels and puts his head to your chest.

  You see your hands spread open, palms down. The rhetoric of descent.

  Your hands were tiny once. Easily cupped on cold mornings by your mother and father. Swinging between them: one, two, three, jump!

  You see the scuffed tips of your Clarks, a lighter blue. Your pockets glued together by sweets. The sound of your name meant something to eat or something to see.

  And you rose, you rose—anchored by your parents’ hands, the sun above you smashed and dazzling.

  Once all hands seemed bigger than yours.

  Hands everywhere.

  Now there are hands on you again. Hands you will never know, but that will remember you in the way they touch the living.

  Your hands are motionless on the cobbles below your balcony.

  Those same hands once held against a father’s bristly cheek on Saturday morning—one Saturday long ago.

  A single day fallen from the deck of days past.

  “Wake up, Dad,” you say. “We’re going fishing.”

  The curtains so white.

  The deep brown glass of his morning eyes.

  “My little Henry,” he mumbles.

  The sadness in his eyes is not only for his other son. You blame yourselves, but never each other.

  It is cold. The hard blue of dawn.

  You remember him tapping the ground with
a branch.

  Then worms everywhere.

  You hold some in your hands, laughing.

  It’s drizzling, but you’re warm from breakfast. You hold out a worm to your father in wonder. The worms think the tapping is rain. They can’t help it. They can’t help but rise to the light. It’s an instinct beyond their control. Something draws their ascent into another world.

  You feel the wet grass for more.

  Your father kneels and places his hands upon yours. He holds them fast against the earth.

  “Don’t ever forget this moment,” he says.

  It takes a while for the car to warm up. The engine revving by itself. The morning air thick with diesel.

  Crows stare from trees.

  A light, uneven rain.

  The gearstick is tall and vibrates when not held.

  Worms in a silver bucket on the backseat.

  They lie on top of one another and move with the silence of snow.

  The body is a disguise.

  You lifted Rebecca in your arms, but felt the weight of a stranger.

  You wondered if she took the memory of who she was. Is it possible for love to go on if not attached to memory?

  Is it possible that, after death, she feels your absence without remembering who you are? You imagine her memories folded up and packed into a suitcase that’s forgotten on the platform.

  People stand around your body. A Greek boy watches from his window.

  Finally he understands why his baby brother resists sleep.

  Like all children, the boy becomes a part of what he sees. And that night the boy sneaks into his brother’s room and holds his tiny hand. He has found someone in the darkness and will never let go.

  The old man you imagined turning you over just stands around.

  He is shaking.

  His hat has fallen off and sits upright on the ground. If you were alive, you would pick it up for him.

  You are like her now but will never know.

  The dead do not breathe.

  They cannot see or hear or move or speak.

  They feel nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  On the streets there is still rubble from the earthquake. The broken glass has been swept up, but hundreds of tents still fill the parks of Athens. People are too afraid to go home in case it happens again. In your living room there is a large crack that runs the length of the wall—neatly dividing your life before and your life after.

  George is somewhere in the city. He keeps coming over. Sometimes you let him in. He sits down and you drink hot tea at the table without saying anything. Sometimes you walk around the block. You talk about what happened. And he knows the truth about your brother, but not the pregnancy.

  You need him desperately, but don’t want to see him.

  You make chamomile tea before bed. It’s evening. Streetlights come on by themselves.

  You close the door to the balcony. The noise outside pushes softly against the windows but barely enters.

  You boil water.

  The strip of kitchen light was always too bright. Cooking feels like some clinical procedure when you don’t wish to live. Utensils glint menacingly. A faint buzzing from the lights. The table has drawers too small to keep anything in.

  The kitchen floor is unswept. Gossamer sleeves of fallen garlic lie undisturbed where the linoleum meets the cupboard. Rebecca once sat at the table drinking tea with both hands. You shared baklava from the same dish. You remember that first night. The thick cream. Taking your cigarette. The long walk home. A missing book. Unceasing heat. Her body stretching out under you like a map of your life to come.

  You wait for her to burst in at any moment.

  You’ve learned since her death that everything you are afraid of will never happen. It’s the events you cannot conceive of that happen.

  But at night you forget everything.

  Then you wake up and begin again.

  You raise your hands against the glowing stove. The friendliness of steam. The water bubbles with quick pops. You suspend your hands above for comfort.

  In your imagination, you see other fires from long ago. Deep glowing coals. The sound of rushing air. The house of your childhood in Wales.

  Your mother polishing shoes for school in the morning. The gentle, quick-scratching of the shoe brush above the television. The chirp of plates being dried and stacked in the kitchen by your silent father.

  You remember things—but the details are not of your choosing.

  It’s cloudy. Washing on the line nods weakly, unsure. Everything is too large for your hands—even night seems longer, darker, unmanageable.

  You surface from the depths of memory to eat lunch, to have a bath, to walk around some ancient ruin that can never be rebuilt. The future lies on the other side of what’s past. We go back to move forward.

  But going back is like returning to a house where everyone moved out long ago; for the only life that dwells within memory is the shallow breath of your misplaced desire.

  Athens is still warm, but the evenings are very cold. You feel the cold in the core of your body. Hot baths work for only an hour or so. You take them in the afternoon when the light is pretty.

  People hurry home through dusk without stopping.

  Lights go on in kitchens by early afternoon, and doorways of hanging beads, where bodies once lingered, are now simply doors, with square frosted windows and handles worn with turning.

  Televisions have been carried in from balconies—extension cords folded away. And the stray dogs that lay in the shade of orange trees at the roadside are no longer part of the evening landscape. Without anyone noticing, they have carried their old bodies elsewhere.

  You have a radio, a couch, a bed, a small desk, and a washing machine in the bathroom that doesn’t work—all of which were in the apartment when Rebecca was alive.

  Your desk has a black marble top. It was the first thing you moved when you entered the apartment. You set it beside a window. The desk is so polished that it reflects everything. Birds swim through the table as you work.

  Summer has ended and the square below your balcony is empty.

  Once full of footsteps, people talking, and people sitting down alone to watch the others—the gaping square is an open mouth with nothing to say.

  It’s where you want to kill yourself.

  It’s where you plan to, but never will.

  Occasionally a dog wanders up to the fountain, looks around for a moment, and then turns away without barking.

  Newspapers blow across the cobbles like small sails.

  Everything you do is a secret because nobody sees or knows.

  You remember being a child again.

  Shouting: “Look, look, look at me! Look. Look at me.”

  In bed you listen for the noises that once comforted you, but hear only a stream of inaudible names from a distant tide of traffic.

  You like to sit on your balcony and look at cars as they line up at lights. They are all different colors. Sometimes a driver is smoking, or talking to his wife, or simply staring out at nothing.

  Sometimes you carry out a bowl of coffee in both hands and sit very quietly. Sitting there makes you feel good. Your lips see themselves approaching in the reflection of the coffee. You find steam beautiful.

  You remember the steam from your father’s coffee. The cup rests on a small table with folding legs in the middle of the fishing boat.

  A light mist unfurling across the pond like a spell. The hollow clap of the boat bobbing. The unscrewing of a thermos. The smell of pond water.

  Sometimes you see birds from your balcony. They pass without flapping their wings.

  You imagine what it would be like to simply drift through the air with no effort.

  You go to bed.

  The days are broken by light.

  Most nights you lie in one position. By contrast, your sleeping mind cannot dwell on one thing for too long. Your sleeping mind, like a ghost, drifts from place to place,
from person to person.

  In the morning, you wake to see what has washed up on the tide of dreams.

  You stay in bed.

  The morning is very white.

  Someone in the square is talking on a cell phone. Sometimes people wait there for things.

  You feel the world going on without you. And soon you become starkly aware that in the great history of life, you mean absolutely nothing.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  In the weeks that followed, you spent long spells at the kitchen table in your underpants and socks thinking. Rebecca and your child lay at the bottom of the sea, a world within a world, existence without existing.

  Professor Peterson came to check on you. He wanted you back at work, but you had no interest. George kept coming by, too. He wondered if her family knew, and if you should somehow find the sister. But you pushed them away.

  You went out once a week to the market, but didn’t linger there as you once did. Rebecca liked to pick out oranges with the leaves still on and then arrange them in a terra-cotta bowl beside the bed.

  “What about all the little insects in the leaves?” you said, the first time she set the heavy bowl on the bedside table.

  She peered admiringly at the bowl of fruit. “What about them?”

  About six weeks after the earthquake, you opened your eyes in the middle of the night and realized something was very wrong with you.

  It was still dark.

  You managed to sit up. It was difficult to breathe and your hands were shaking. You reached for your notebook but couldn’t write anything.

  Then you realized that you couldn’t move your legs.

  You looked around the room, at the pattern of weak streetlight chalked upon the wall and the outline of your things in the darkness.

  Your life was nothing more than a quick sketch and you a character not fully brought to life by the artist.

  Then you must have fallen asleep because the next time you opened your eyes, you had fallen out of bed. You were sweating, but at the same time felt very cold. You remember being able to see a few stars from where you lay.