When he finished with that, he squeezed a long line of glue onto the cardboard then pressed the broomstick into the glue and counted to seventy. He cut four lengths of red string, twenty centimeters each, made eight holes in the cardboard, to the left and right of the broomstick, passed the string through the holes and tied it around the broomstick to strengthen the whole contraption. He looked at his makeshift placard and lit a cigarette. He smoked it down to the filter and each time he inhaled he could feel the smoke chafing his throat — he must have smoked an entire carton over the past four days. He waited a little while then held the stick up high and waved it around to see if the cardboard would hold. It was shoddy work. But with things as they were it was the best he could do. With things as they were he couldn’t wait.
He lit another cigarette and lay down on the carpet with his knees bent in the air. He heard the churchbells start to ring and thought how crazy it was to eat the body of Christ and drink the blood of Christ and as he smoked he looked out at the day that refused to be anything but black that refused to sweeten even a drop.
• • •
On the Thursday before Easter Petros Frangos, his best and only friend, had been killed at a building site on Papadiamantis Street, a stone’s throw from the old cemetery in Nikaia. He was electrocuted. He wasn’t actually killed there because he didn’t die right away. He died two days later, on Good Saturday, in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital. He was an experienced steelworker, knew his trade, one of the last Greeks in that line of work. And on that day, Good Thursday, the contractor had pressured Petros to stay late and work into the evening — what with Easter and all the state holidays they were falling behind on the job. Petros said fine but it wasn’t fine. He was in a hurry to finish up because that evening they were supposed to leave for Yiannis’s village. They were going to spend Easter together up in the mountains of Epirus. You’re going to take me with you this time, he’d told Yiannis. There’s no way I’m staying down here for another Easter. I want to try it out, he’d said, to see what it’s like because I can’t stay here much longer, man. Things here are getting rough, everyone’s losing it, these days people scare me. You tell me the only thing that makes life worth living is giving yourself to others. But what happens if no one wants to take? What if you don’t find anyone to give yourself to? I’m telling you, the future is in the mountains — that’s the kind of crazy stuff he’d been saying to Yiannis.
Give us the mountains, he said, even if we have to eat stones.
Like what Kolokotronis said during the revolution. Give us Greece even if we have to eat stones.
And then as he was carrying steel reinforcing bars that night one of them brushed up against a high-voltage wire and twenty-four thousand volts shot through Petros and shook his body and tossed him down on the dusty cement as if he were already dead or something that was never alive to begin with.
Not even water, he’d told Yiannis. In two years we won’t even have water to drink. They said it on the news. That’s why I keep telling you, we have to head for the mountains. I can’t stand it here any longer. I’m sick of always being caught unawares. In this city every new day and every new person is another kick in the teeth.
Or a cracked reinforcing bar, to say it in my language.
• • •
He didn’t die right away. He died on Good Saturday in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital in Nikaia. Everything inside of him was burnt, the doctors said. The skin had come loose from the bottom of his feet and they looked like shoes with no soles. During those two days they let Yiannis in to see him three or four times and each time he had to put on a mask and gloves and plastic booties over his shoes — a new, warm pair of boots, with solid soles that hadn’t yet been worn down — and each time he stood by the side of the bed he saw Petros’s arm or foot suddenly flail, two or three or four times in a row, and Yiannis’s eyes would fill with tears and to steel his nerves he would repeat words to himself from some old prayers that he had mostly forgotten. But that flailing wasn’t the work of god. It was just the current shaking Petros’s body — that’s how much current was still in his body.
At night to keep himself from falling asleep he did arithmetic on cigarette packs. He divided 24,000 by Petros’s age to see how many volts there had been for each year of his friend’s life. He multiplied Petros’s age by 365 and divided that into 24,000 to figure out the volts per day. Then he calculated the hours and the minutes and the seconds. That’s how he spent his nights.
And when he got tired of numbers he wrote other things.
Caution! Keep away from the patient! He’s a shocker!
What’s black and red and jumps in bed? Petros!
You have a body like an electric eel vai vai vai vai vai dance the tsifteteli.
Hahahahaha, Yiannis wrote on his cigarette packs.
Hahahahaha.
• • •
Do something, he told the doctors. I don’t have money now but I’ll get some. I swear to you, I’ll get some. If you could just save him. We’ve been together since we were kids. You know how it is. You’ve got friends you’ve known since you were kids, don’t you? Please, I’m begging you. Do something.
• • •
He found a thick black marker and kneeled on the rug and wondered what he should write on the cardboard. He wanted to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once. Or maybe it should be some plain, dry slogan, the kind of thing a political party might say about workplace fatalities, about people who die on the job. Or maybe something like the things they write on the gravestones of people who die in vain, or too young. Something about god and the soul and angels and the afterlife.
He wondered if he should write something not about Petros but about Yiannis.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
The other day on TV they were talking about some guy in America or Canada who got fired and two days later went back to the factory with a load of rifles and pistols and mowed down anyone who got in his way then blew his own brains out and on the t-shirt he was wearing those words were written in big black letters, that exact phrase.
I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.
What an insane thing to say.
• • •
In the bathroom he got his hair wet and slicked it back and carefully covered the shiny spot on the top of his head and put on his hat. It was a light hat of soft black leather but when he put it on and looked in the mirror he felt as if he were wearing a helmet.
He went back into the living room and picked the placard up off the rug and looked at the cardboard which still had nothing written on it and twirled the broomstick in his hand and then put the cap back on the marker and set it down on the coffee table and looked at the walls around him and with his free hand grabbed his hat and pulled it down low over his forehead like a man leaving a place forever, never to return, and –
Enough, he said and went out into the street.
• • •
The clouds had grown bigger and were casting long shadows over the city and from up there on the hill the city lay spread before Yiannis’s eyes like a dirty wrinkled blanket. He headed towards Neapoli walking in the street next to the sidewalk with the placard on his shoulder and as he walked he looked at the ashen sky and remembered a documentary he’d seen a while back on TV about some rich English or Irish guy — he never really figured out where the guy was from, it was late and he was dozing on the sofa — who’d had an asteroid or something named after him. They showed the guy saying how proud and happy he was about that, about them giving his name to an asteroid — I like thinking that even when I die, he said, my name will keep orbiting the universe for years, even centuries. And Yiannis walked with the placard on his shoulder looking at the sky and thinking how strange it would be for them to name an asteroid Petros, if instead of that foreign guy it had been Petros, if it were the name Petros that would orbit for whole centuries through the universe, an asteroid, a small lonesome planet.