Chapter 7
Neighbour’s Report #2
I never believed all the rumours of course.
Tina and Vangelis were the perfect couple. Perfect parents.
It’s why I came from the big city you know, to live out here. With people like that. We are actually neighbours around here, with the full meaning of the word. Back at Athens, Kallithea, were I used to live we didn’t even know who our neighbours were. After a couple of years and random encounters you got to know the faces eventually, but not like here.
I got greeted to an impromptu gathering the day I moved in. I met everyone, and I mean everyone. They were all like, meet my uncle the fireman, and my cousin the tailor, and my son-in-law the baker, and my godson Yanni who is lazy and still lives with his mom. And you have to eat this, and taste this, and drink my red whine, it’s the best in Northern Greece!
It was culture shock for me.
The wine helped.
Working for a corporation is soul-sucking. Quitting that job is like getting your soul back.
I remember getting anxious for things that seem ridiculous now. Is he going to misinterpret my email? Are the quarter’s goals met? Are we ready for the annual review? Is the share up or down?
My doctor said I was going to die two years ago. They got me scans, they took litres of blood, they did tests and more tests. I must have seen about eleven different heart doctors, four of them abroad. All paid for by Hephaistos of course. I was too important to them.
I mean, we were building everything. I used to joke that I put the heavy in “Heavy Industries.” Cars, ships, planes, buildings, cranes, dams, generators, pipes, we made anything. CAD was my thing. Designing stuff in 3D, so they could get fabricated. Simulate stresses, swap out materials, projected corrosion, wear and tear, steganopoiisis. They made me project manager, and kept telling me to delegate, but I just liked making stuff. I didn’t want to pore over stats and spreadsheets all day. I wanted to research, design, test, optimise, send it for manufacture and then kick the damn thing to see if it was tough enough.
I was on a strict diet, a good workout schedule. It didn’t matter, my heart was failing.
I was on a routine business trip, when I saw a cardiologist’s sign. It wasn’t one of those fancy doctors. He was old. His doctor’s office was pathetic. He didn’t care, he was close to pension. Or death.
I’m not sure why I knocked. I was sick of doctors at that point, and I’d been across the Atlantic to meet the best ones. What did this guy have to tell me that the others didn’t?
I knocked. He greeted me. I told him about my case, showed him my test results and gammagraphy (I always hate that word. The Greek one is more awesome. Sparkography. Sparkagraphy? Anyway, sparks and photographs).
He put on his glasses and read it for a while. I was huffing and puffing, already regretting my impulse decision to visit a random country doctor.
Then he asked me what I did for a living (Manufacture). Where I lived (Crowded Apartment Building), how my life was (Shit). If I had children (No time).
Was I happy?
Was I?
(No).
He “prescribed” me to go live in the countryside and drink a single glass of red wine every day.
I laughed, paid and got out.
When the quarter ended and had two mild heart attacks at the age of 32, I quit my job and came here.
It’s ironic really. I quit Hephaistos and became a blacksmith.
Now I build or fix people’s fences, rooftops, tractors. Granted, they end up able to withstand a hurricane or made from metasteel when a single wooden beam would suffice, but I can’t help myself. Half of them have no idea what I do and how I make them, but they are always grateful. Seeing people’s smiles first-hand when you fix something for them is the best feeling in the world.
So no, I don’t believe the gossip. I know these people. The psychologist is trained to see illnesses, much like a surveyor is trained to see cracks. He was wrong this time. The girl was not abused. She was intelligent, studied hard and with an interest in science. Her parents are average people, but they loved her. They would have mended their marriage eventually if Emma didn’t die that soon. Now it’s beyond repair.
Yes, I noticed the girl’s experiments. Someone gossipped about it though, then I noticed. She had cuts in her arms all the time, yes. With colourful band-aids on them. The parents kept saying she was clumsy with her microscope kit they bought her. All those sharp edges.
They were initially happy of course for their little girl’s interest in biology. What parent wouldn’t be? It’s a perpetual cliche in Greek households, everyone wants their kid to become a doctor or a lawyer.
Well, they sure aren’t happy now.
Chapter 8
I was sitting like a slump at a bench on Ktel station. It’s the intercity bus service that gets you to other parts of Greece. It’s generally dirty, noisy, but it gets you there.
I was waiting for my night express. Thessaloniki is the second-largest city in the country, so the transit is frequent. The bus-station is busy all day, and retains its business up to the night hours. It’s what you would imagine a third-world airport to look like. Then replace planes with buses. People carrying luggage, chickens in cages, all nationalities coming and going, greeting their loved ones, announcements in Greek and repeated in murdered English. A banner ad right across my line of sight was proudly showing a computer error message. Nobody cared to fix it.
To my right I could see the line of taxi drivers waiting for a fare. Men talking, looking around to hook up a client. Yellow cars, pimped up with electronics and antennas. GPS equipment, old-style CB radio, a couple or three of app-based taxi services. In-car Wifi.
I could just hop in and get home. The scam was already done, I had the cash on me. I could sit at home for a few days and then go back to work pretending I learnt a lot from our investigation. No one would really care. And regarding the little girl, well… What’s done is done.
I sipped the remains of my cold coffee.
I had already spent all day back at home, then I’d come here to get the overnight express. I would have a five hour drive, and then wait till morning for the regional bus to Kilkis. Then, find a hotel, freshen up, go straight to work cause you are on billable time. It would be tiresome.
I sighed.
I wanted to do this, I wanted to work, to be a CDI guy, whatever that was. Dunno if its exciting or whatever, it was a way to contribute. Not doing anything was the worst thing in the world. And now I had a job that would entail trips to the country and I’d try to cheat myself out of that? No way.
A honk startled me from my phase-out. There were other honks as well, but this one seemed to address me specifically.
Zoe had come up to the bus parking space and honking me. Two bus drivers and a guy that seemed to work there was yelling at her.
“Hey, you can’t be in here! It’s for bus and cargo only,” a man said.
She rolled down the window and flipped a cigarette butt to the floor. “I’m picking up bipedal cargo, be out in a sec.”
“Oh OK, quick as you can,” the man said and resumed his duties.
She wasn’t allowed to drive in here of course. It is accessible, and vans come in here all the time but civilian cars need to go to a side-road and pick up people from there. I couldn’t contain a smile.
She gestured at me as if I was a monkey.
I didn’t move a muscle. “How did you know you’d find me here?”
She shrugged. “The overnight bus is cheaper. I knew you’d wait all day.”
“What changed your mind?”
She lit up another cigarette as if it was a fuse. “Poly, just refund that damn ticket and hop on.”
Chapter 9
Uncle’s Report
Christos Foinos
I really don’t know what to say. I have no idea what happened. Emma was always a shy kid you know, not talking much, not messing around. She even liked hanging around us grown-ups, she listene
d to our conversations and kept quiet. It was always an issue with my sister, “watch your language,” “don’t swear,” “mind what you say,” I always had to be careful around the house cause Emma was sticking around.
Yes, she seemed to be on top of that microscope every waking hour from the moment she got it. I remembered something about onion layers, that they were thin enough to see by default, so we found an onion together and played with the microscope. She was delighted to see the cells so clearly.
It was the last time she hugged me.
I missed the next family event due to my work, I had to be out of town. My sister called me and we spoke for hours. She was upset, she felt something was happening to little Emma. She said they took away the microscope, that she was hurting herself all the time. She was studying her blood, that’s what she told her.
My sister dragged her right away to a pedopsychiatrist, who did nothing to help the situation. I admit I urged her to send her there, it was only logical. I mean, the kid was basically cutting herself.
The doctor made a mess of the situation. He kept insisting to talk to the kid alone, he was apparently convinced that she was abused and wanted to “help her relieve the burden.”
The burden was finally relieved when the kid told us grownups what we wanted to hear, and accused her father of touching her inappropriately.
I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t believe it. I told Tina that it couldn’t be true, that those doctors kept seeing things that weren’t there but she was terrified. I told her to do nothing until I came back, but I had one last meeting to go to so I was a day late. By the time I came back from Athens my sister’s marriage was ruined.
Chapter 10
The road was mostly open. It was late, 3 a.m. I had cracked open a window despite the chillness of the night air. Having a chain-smoker in the car was not easy. I had curled a bit in my seat to doze off. The radio was blasting loud teen-angry music.
“If you wanna pee or something tell me, don’t be shy. It’s a long way ahead, I’m driving slow.”
“Nai, why not? Let’s stop at the next freeway station.”
I dozed off. Zoe poked me. I looked around and it was bright. The station’s lights acted like a siren to all the sleepy/hungry/freezing drivers.
The toiled was exactly like I expected it to be. Three words: not clean enough.
We sat at the cafeteria and bought something to snack on.
“Do I smell patsa?” I asked and curled my nose.
“Nai, its on the special menu. That trucker guy who is staring at my boobs took a nice big bowl,” Zoe said, not really minding her volume.
Patsa is… I’m not sure what it is. I do know that it’s traditional food, it contains meat, or entrails, and it smells awful. Like, seep in your pores awful. Common folk love it. People use to go eat some after a night’s drinking. I guess it is supposed to make you feel better or something, but I think you just vomit the whole thing out.
“So, have you ever been to Kilkis?” I asked, trying to occupy my mind with something else.
“Ohi, have you?”
“Ohi. Thessaloniki yes, many times. I think there’s not really much to see in Kilkis.”
“We’ll see. It’s a small town, rural. It’s a hot zone for rabies, we’ve had reported incidents in red fox vectors all around the area.”
“I see,” trying to look interested. I was tired. “So, what are we gonna do once we get there?”
She stacked the packets of cigarettes that she just bought in front of her like making a castle. She liked the soft-package ones for some reason. “We’ll interview the family, write everything down. Copy the doctor’s report. Inform the doctor about the rabies infection algorithm, we’ll leave some brochures and instructions on the rabies shot. I think those guys have been informed already by Mr. Epiktitos, but we’ll check. And we will educate the civilians in the immediate area about rabies signs in animals, prevention, we’ll post up a couple of posters in the city hall, things like that.”
I stared at her for a second. She actually did know what to do, to my amazement. Her whole demeanour had me believing that Zoe had never actually done a CDI’s job. “Sounds like a plan.” I processed her words a bit more. “Hey, don’t tell me we’re gonna do shots to people?”
She pushed her little castle of nicotine with her finger and brought it crumbling down. “Ohi, of course not. Vaccines are done at the hospital. We just educate people, doctors and civilians. Generate reports. Keeping the bureaucracy monster fed. Sometimes I think we just work in order to have something to show for at our next budget review. An endless cycle.”
She began making her castle again.
Chapter 11
Reconstruction of Macro Photography used by the victim
Video Transcript
ZV: You are messing this up!
PN: Stop shaking the table, this is delicate work.
ZV: You’re dripping some water on your phone. How hard can it be?
PN: Stop shaking the table! I can’t stabilise my hands.
ZV: Just throw it on the lens.
PN: It needs to be a round drop, held by surface tension.
ZV: What does this blogger know, he can’t even spell. He wrote “how dose it work.”
PN: He might not be a native English speaker. The instructions are good enough.
ZV: Stupid article. Isn’t there another?
PN: Stop shaking the table!
ZV: All right! Jeez… Touchy with our projects, aren’t we?
PN: Wait… Got it. Now it says, turn the phone over…
ZV: Now what’s your excuse.
PN: Inexperience and shaky hands. I’ll try again.
ZV: Keep the water drop on the phone lens. Don’t spill it.
PN: That’s what I’m trying to do.
ZV: Really? It seemed like you were trying to water that plant over there.
PN: Ghnn. Got it. Easy… Now gimme the blood slide.
ZV: I don’t have it ready.
PN: Come on, you took the blood slide duty, I took the water drop duty. It is a clear and equal splitting of duties.
ZV: You didn’t want to prick your finger.
PN: And I didn’t want to prick my finger.
ZV: Well, you sit still, don’t let the water drop and I’ll prick your finger.
PN: No!
ZV: Haha, men and blood. Whatever. Wait a sec.
PN: Put a tiny drop on the slide, spread it across and make it thin with the needle.
ZV: Yes Dexter…
PN: Then put the glass over it, one side first.
ZV: I know…
PN: And then…
ZV: I said I know!
PN: Bring it here where there’s more light.
ZV: Jeesh, a nine year-old can do this. Relax.
PN: OK. Yeah, its blurry. Oh, here, that’s good I guess.
ZV: Just take a bunch of pictures and we’ll sort it later.
PN: That’s not very thorough, CDI Zoe.
ZV: Come on, who cares? No-one’s gonna see this report anyway.
PN: I just wanna do a proper and thorough investigation.
ZV: Why did you have to be a historian? Couldn’t you have been a delivery guy, like all the normal people?
PN: I honestly have no clue why a deliv…
ZV: Forget it. Take pictures. Thorough ones, quick as you like.
PN: How do I turn on flash?
ZV: Here, press this.
PN: OK got it.
ZV: Nai, that’s looking good.
PN: Our reconstruction shows that the victim could indeed carry on her obsession with blood, even after her parents taking her microscope away. It is of course nowhere near the magnification of a specialised lens but we can see how she could carry on with these makeshift tools.
ZV: Seriously?
PN: The video is on.
ZV: Are you one of those guys that talk into a tape recorder all day?
PN: We are recording this!
ZV:
Moron. Here’s some more blood. Play with yourself.
PN: A quick comparison shows that the images are similar to the hundreds found in the victim’s phone memory. We can therefore conclude that this was the method she used to carry on her obsession.
ZV: -
PN: Zoe, stop that.
Chapter 12
I was at the wheel. Zoe had declared that she’d never let me drive her car at first, but when the first light of dawn coloured up the countryside, she caved.
She was dozing of at the back seat. I could never actually get cosy back there, but her smaller frame allowed her to find a relaxing angle and snore quietly.
We were nearing Thessaloniki, and I debated with myself against taking the district freeway or cut through the city and see the sights.
I decided to detour through the city as it awakened. It was actually taking us a few hours in the opposite direction, but traffic was low and I could just breeze through the main roads.
Zoe woke up and lit a cigarette before opening her eyes. “Did you miss the turn?”
“Ohi, I wanted to do a small detour.”
“Cool. Lets get mpougatsa then.”
We stopped at a place near the seaside and bought mpougatsa and chocolate milk. It makes for a delicious breakfast that cures any case of constipation you might have.
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