Scorpionfish Read online

  Excavating these remnants of the past, I felt neither nostalgia nor a particular connection. I felt newly empty. But when I tried to pinpoint the source of this haunting emptiness it was not clear. Grief had become a part of me, like another layer of skin. But I think, now, I was grieving both the things that had happened and the things that would come.

  One of the last boxes I opened held a collection of dolls dressed in intricate, traditional Greek costume. When I was a child these dolls had sat on my dresser, and at night I thought I saw their arms moving, their legs ready to march. They frightened me. Once I had taken several of them on a boat ride with my parents’ friends. My parents, for all their love of the sea, were uneasy on boats, and my mother had been preoccupied with my falling overboard until she became too nauseated to worry. When no one was looking, I reached into my backpack and removed the dolls, which I’d fitted with parachutes made of my father’s embroidered handkerchiefs noosed around their necks. One by one, I began to hurl them into the water. I must have thrown four of them out before my father noticed what I was doing and stopped me. After, the two of us watched them bobbing in the water, his embroidered handkerchiefs floating atop them, or spread out behind their heads. Still, these dolls seemed to be a common gift, continuing to accumulate over the years. There were at least a dozen of them lying haphazardly in the box. I returned them to the closet. It was too hard to discard something with a face.

  2

  The Captain

  My mother was Greek American, and though that might mean my mother tongue is English, I was born in Athens and feel and dream in Greek idiom. But I’m not a man of geography. I don’t attach myself to places. I’m more comfortable with the placeless universality of the sea, its altered progression of time.

  Even though it’s been years, I miss those long passages across the Pacific: the contained isolation, the morning rising up from the water like the opening of a shade, the creeping dread at the first sliver of land, like coming down from a high. How different the world looked from a point at sea. The sight of a harbor no longer stirs the same emptiness, but the sea no longer gives me that same unbridled joy. Everything seems dampened, my emotions less extreme, settling somewhere deep and less accessible. The true marker of middle age.

  Katerina, my wife, has been working for the EU in Brussels since September, and the twins, because of my schedule at sea, have gone with her. At least, that was the reason we gave them for the arrangement. Nikos and Ifigenia, nine, don’t know I’m no longer working. Katerina and I are separated, but we struggle with exactly what that means. We do not not enjoy each other’s presence. There were times when we were younger that I raced home to see her, when the separations felt unbearable. Sometimes she’d even wait at the port. For me, these past years, it was not so difficult to be apart, but I imagine for her it sometimes was.

  Not long after the move to Brussels last fall, Katerina’s sister lost her job and had moved with her daughter into our home in Kifissia. We’d temporarily offered them the place. I was happy to live in the center of Athens anyway, in the apartment I’ve been in and out of my entire adult life. I’ve never liked the suburbs. And being in Kifissia—each time I say it, I hear my father’s scorn, so bourgeois—felt as distant as being shipwrecked. We could have lived in Piraeus, or Glyfada, or Neo Faliro: somewhere near the port. But Katerina wanted to be near the kids’ school.

  So even after Katerina’s sister moved out, having found work in Thessaloniki, I decided to stay in the Athens apartment. But now Katerina and the kids were coming home for the weekend—she’d promised the twins they wouldn’t miss their best friend’s birthday party—and I needed to be there, in the old house in Kifissia, as I was each time they returned.

  Despite not being attached to places, I’ve grown fond of this Athens apartment. But those days there, waiting for Katerina and the kids to arrive, put me in a bizarre sort of limbo. I couldn’t focus on any one task. I wandered the rooms, stood on the back balcony that looked out over the courtyard or the one in front, over the street, which curved up toward Lykavittos. The restlessness was overwhelming. The worst days for me, around transitions, are the days before. The waiting.

  Walking eased that anguish a little, allowed me to move my body along with my racing mind. I walked through neighborhoods I’d rarely visited, into Kaisariani, its own village, really, with a history dating back to the Asia Minor refugees. I strolled the wide pedestrian walkway that wound around the Acropolis, watched the puppeteers and musicians, older tourists holding hands, American college students in tiny clothing. I walked through Psyrri, where the vibrancy of the crowded, lively cafés seemed to beat inside me along with my heart.

  As for this apartment, it was the longest I’d spent here in years, and besides the sad-eyed woman whom I’d glimpsed in and out while the apartment was being renovated—a woman I later understood to be Mira’s mother—I’d been alone on this floor. Even before Katerina and I had agreed to separate, I spent a night here every few months, those nights I had time off between routes but didn’t want to sleep on the ship, didn’t want to go all the way back home. To come home for a day sometimes seemed too disorienting for Katerina and the kids. Or so I told myself. Katerina and I both knew that it was simply disorienting for me.

  One evening, I walked through the heart of Neapoli, where large concrete apartment blocks built during the junta transitioned to old neoclassical homes—some bright and well-kept, some in disrepair, many decorated with graffiti—and down the countless steps of Isavron, through Exarcheia, to Kallidromiou, where the breeze felt cool and airy. Here it was lively, the night pleasant, and under heat lamps people leaned in to intimate conversations, evening coffees, and drinks. I wore sweatpants and an old hooded sweatshirt, my indoor self turned outward, only my keys and phone and twenty euros zipped into my pocket.

  After wandering awhile, I climbed those steps again and reached Dexameni Square. Though it was too early in the season for the open-air cinema, the open-air café was packed: kids played on bicycles and pogo sticks, adults of all ages sat in large groups and small, drinking cocktails, eating mezedes. A couple my father’s age—late seventies—sat on the same side of a table, glasses of white wine before them, holding hands and looking out, as if it were all theirs. The man wore a dark suit with a red cravat, and the woman’s dark hair was perfectly styled, her dress navy blue with white piping, a trench coat draped over her shoulders. Their tranquil looks unsettled me, and I decided against sitting alone. Instead I kept walking until I reached one of my standby bars in Plateia Mavili, where I knew both the bartenders—a heavily tattooed bearded guy and a serious-faced young woman, whose ponytail swished back and forth as she worked. I drank a tall draft and headed home.

  The walk back to my apartment was like strolling through a tiny village after a wrong turn, or something near the beach on a less-traveled island. Take any parallel street and you’d pass immaculate residences with well-manicured gardens, yoga studios and law offices and trendy cafés. But on this route, a few chickens still hopped around, an old trailer was parked in the middle of a lot, and a fenced-in area held a mini junkyard: a few old cars, metal pipes, old furniture. There was only one actual house, and I loved it. It stood bright and cheery behind a rickety, makeshift fence, as if the concrete of the city had been built up around it, or as if I’d walked into a fairy tale. It looked recently restored: a warm, creamy yellow coat of paint, red tile roof, and a garden of bougainvillea and oleander and lemon trees. Next to it was an old shed, which had at one time needed a new coat of paint. Now, it had been painted with flowers and citrus trees, a mirror of its setting.

  At home on my balcony, I smoked a cigarette. The courtyard was eerily quiet, and the night, with only a shaving of the moon, was dark. Only the sounds of the occasional motorbike, maybe a car radio. I slept a long, blank sleep until sunrise.

  •

  The next night Mira propped her feet on the balustrade, wearing sheepskin slippers. If the light was right you
could see the shadow of a person behind the cloudy glass partition, and if we both leaned over the balustrade we could have had a conversation face-to-face. But we did not.

  I had learned a bit about Mira from Sophia: she was from Chicago. A professor of some kind. Sophia wasn’t sure. Her parents had recently died. Nefeli was her aunt. I thought of what I might say, if only in greeting. Then, the flick of a lighter, the inhale of a cigarette, the exhale of smoke. My words tumbled out before I could think. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said. I had not only broken some unspoken code of communal living, I had implied a history. But if she found it odd she did not miss a beat.

  “On and off. But I officially quit years ago, after college.”

  “I try to quit,” I said, though I had stopped trying a few years ago. The couple who lived on the other side of the courtyard arrived home and began cooking, as they always did. Below them, someone made a video call in French, which happened every other night at eight. The neighborhood took on a new life in the evenings.

  I asked if all was okay with the apartment, the heater.

  She didn’t speak at first, but her feet shifted. “I somehow lost the key to the building,” she finally said.

  There are three things you need to know about Greek apartment buildings, I told her. First, there’s strong disagreement about whether to lock the front door, with the key, from the inside. So you also need a key to get out, after midnight. She said that sounded dangerous. I told her I’d be right back and I returned with my extra key, handing it across the balcony, and we met eyes for a moment, smiled. She thanked me and told me she’d make a copy. In the darkness her eyes seemed luminous and gray, as if in black-and-white film, and it took me a moment to focus on the rest of her, the contours of her body underneath a loose, dark sweater, a thin gold bracelet around her wrist and several woven from thread. Her dark hair was messy, wavy around her face.

  It suddenly felt strange to be looking at her, so I retreated, sat back down in my chair. “Also, there’s a fight over the elevator. The people on the first floor don’t want to pay for it. The people on the second floor claim they don’t use it. Finally, the question of how to heat the building, the most fraught of all.”

  She laughed. “Good to know.” Her phone rang and she excused herself for a moment. “Hi, Dimitra,” I heard her say as she disappeared inside. She returned moments later, telling me about a boy who was living with her friends Dimitra and Fady and their daughter, Leila. She mentioned a refugee squat nearby, in an old abandoned school, and asked me if I knew of it.

  I told her I did not.

  A silence hung in the space between us. I see now she must have misinterpreted my reticence, maybe took me to be a nationalist, xenophobic fascist. “You reminded me of something, of the time when I was still working, and the reasons now I’m not.” My opportunity had come, and I could tell from the quiet that she was waiting for me to continue. But my words felt blocked.

  “I understand,” she said, finally. Though how could she. I excused myself and said goodnight.

  •

  The next morning, I picked up Katerina and the kids at the airport. The twins piled into the back seat as if I’d come for them after only a few days’ absence, talking and planning for the birthday party that weekend. Katerina recounted the busy few weeks she’d had, something related to an upcoming funding deadline. As we turned onto our street, one of the more modest of the neighborhood, everything seemed larger and more open than I remembered. The trees seemed greener, the air crisper.

  Between the car and the front door, Katerina and the twins were stopped by an eager neighbor. I steered around them, set the suitcases down, and took out my keys. When I opened the front door my chest tightened. The year had rewound—before I lost my job, before living full-time in the Athens apartment—but instead of feeling familiarity, I felt as though I’d stepped into another reality, another version of my life. As Rimbaud famously wrote: I is someone else.

  The kids raced to their rooms to charge their devices, back to the house they knew as theirs. Katerina walked in, set the groceries we’d stopped for on the counter. I began to unpack them, as was our custom, and she asked if I was still planning to accompany them to the island over the summer, when she’d take a couple of weeks off. She reminded me that as far as the kids knew, we were only separated because of work. I think Katerina and I often told ourselves the same untruth. There’s a comfort in those things that remain unexpressed.

  I reassured her that I planned to come to the island, and Katerina disappeared into the bedroom to take a nap. Ifigenia came out as I was finishing up with the groceries and sat on one of the barstools in the kitchen, playing some internet game I did not understand, complaining about her brother. She wanted sympathy and some lemonade. With their mother, they helped themselves, but when I was around they asked me for things. Can I have some milk will you make me some cereal can you order souvlaki.

  There was a new refrigerator, sleek and chrome and tall, and I stood in front of it as though it were a portal. The old refrigerator had been fine. Not particularly old, even, just basic. There was also a new espresso machine, the kind that used not coffee but little pods, which didn’t seem to me like coffee at all. All that pod-waste, drifting in the sea.

  I stayed in the kitchen and read at the counter. Eventually, the twins must have fallen asleep as well because the house settled into quiet. The stillness of midday. I considered going outside for a cigarette. Katerina had always asked that we smoke outdoors, and the habit remained. After all these years I have come to prefer it. I like the ritual of stepping out of my space and into another, my balcony an urban observation deck. Even on the ship I smoked in the open air, never in my cabin, never enclosed.

  But I decided to skip the cigarette and wandered down to the den, which was on the bottom floor and opened up to a small garden. I sat at the desk and opened the drawers, rifling through my things. I don’t know what I was looking for. The domestic always made me restless, as if I were waiting for something to happen. After I was asked to leave the ship, I cleared out my cabin. One box was filled with little papers I had tacked up everywhere. Katerina found the notecards and Post-its and threw them away. I was enraged and went out to the dumpster in my bathrobe, trying to salvage them. “It was garbage!” Katerina said. She followed me outside. “Scraps of paper. There was nothing there.” But there had been angst on her face.

  It was odd, for Katerina had long ago stopped trying to clean out my things. There were things I gave up in marriage but there were things that I would not, and these artifacts now, more than ever, stood as a marker of my former self. Proof that he’d existed.

  A few days after that, I had found several boxes wrapped on the bed. Katerina followed me into the room and smiled, told me to open them. “Happy birthday,” she said, almost shyly.

  The first had held two athletic shirts, the kind that wicked away sweat, and a pair of basketball shorts. The second, a pair of expensive jeans she’d seen me glance at in an overpriced boutique. The third, though, held a leather-bound journal and a gorgeous pen. “I won’t mistake this as garbage,” she said, and I hugged her close.

  •

  We had carbonara, my favorite, for dinner. And perhaps because of the travel, the children grew tired soon after and went to sleep early. Katerina and I watched television together on the couch, a quiet closeness I’d forgotten I’d loved, until she announced she was exhausted and going to bed.

  “I should call my father,” I said. Katerina nodded. My father always expected me to come to him. I should call, I should visit, I should make the effort. It had been this way since I went back to the States for university. He was used to people coming to him: for political favors, for homage, for conversation and advice, like a mob boss.

  I let the phone ring and ring, but no one answered. Finally I hung up, not wanting to wake him if he was already asleep. I would call in the morning.

  I listened to Katerina in the bathroom getting re
ady, heard the water as she washed her face, brushed her teeth. I imagined her taking out her contacts, pulling her hair back. All the small rituals I knew so well. I waited until I heard the light click off before I went in myself.

  But I paused in the doorway of our bedroom. I felt hesitant to get into the bed we’d shared for so many years.

  “What is it?” Katerina asked, sensing me.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Should I sleep here?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. She was already under the covers.

  I met Katerina when I was in my late thirties, and we married in my early forties, so there had been many women before her, mostly a series of relationships from which I always ended up fleeing. After we had the twins, I transitioned from sailing routes in the Pacific to ones in Europe, and while the change was difficult, the rhythm of my life on the Aegean was soothing in its own right. The inky-blue sea, the white froth of waves, the black dome of the nighttime sky opening each morning to each familiar port: small houses dotting the arid hillsides, scrubby patches of bright flowers, bleating goats. The landscape of my youth.

  Though I switched to those shorter routes for my marriage, my family, Katerina would still argue that I’d missed the twins’ most important years. And it’s true; when I’d return home my kids eyed me bashfully, with interest—an intriguing, benevolent guest in their home. After being at sea, the skies in Kifissia had always seemed low, and the different schedule of my days as the twins grew—take them here, pick up some milk, help with the homework—though busy, felt featureless.

  To Katerina I’ve been mostly faithful. Though I would never have thought this way as a younger man, now I think what so often drives people to infidelity is not sex but space. And because I was so often at sea I had space. Sometimes at sea I nearly forgot my other life, could almost not imagine it. What kind of man does this, forgets about his wife and children? I suppose I was that sort of man. My problem, one of them, was that I did not operate with the consciousness of a married person. I don’t mean I went out at night like a wild bachelor, but I moved through space without thinking of the other person, without a deep awareness of that person at all times.