Burn them, he says. Go out and burn them. Don’t throw them in the recycling. In a hundred years if the world still exists people will know everything about us and how we live now. Have you ever thought about that? How in a hundred years there won’t be any such thing as the past. Who am I kidding, a hundred. It’ll happen way faster. Sure. Time will be an endless present. Ever thought about that? Even our trash will still be around. That’s why we have to destroy whatever we can while we can. Memory without gaps isn’t memory. It’s death. Go out and burn them. Just don’t get any ash on the clothes out there. My back hurts from bending over the bathtub. Mind those clothes, you hear?
And then he leaves.
I pour another tsikoudia and drink it standing up in front of the window. Then I take a swig straight from the bottle.
I wonder if I should take my father to see a doctor.
I wonder what my mother did when she read that letter from Atlantic City.
I wonder if she closed her eyes and cried or if she forgot or if she kept on hoping. If that dress ever came if she wore it if she went to church. Whatever became of that dress, I wonder.
Outside the whole world is letting loose. The windowpanes are shuddering, the wind whistles through whatever crack it can find. My mother’s clothes are whirling on the line like captive ghosts struggling to escape.
I wonder if that memento ever arrived.
If those two dollars ever came from America, if my mother ever bought that pencil.
People Are Streinz
SEVEN MONTHS without a single dream. Seven whole months. The twenty-first of May was the last time I had a dream. I remember because it was also the last time it rained around here. And I remember because it was Lena’s name day and I said it was a good sign that it rained and I finally had a dream for the first time in a long time. But I haven’t since then. And it hasn’t rained again, either. No rain and no dreams. Dead silence.
Dreams and rain. Who knows. Maybe they go together these days.
Lena doesn’t care about the rain. She doesn’t care that it’s almost Christmas and it’s still twenty degrees outside. She doesn’t care that everyone’s walking around in short-sleeved shirts and outside the birds are singing like it’s April. She doesn’t care about dreams, either.
I don’t dream, she says. I’m better off without dreams. What good did dreams ever do me? I just have the same one all the time, that I’m falling off a cliff and there’s no one to catch me. Why sit there worrying about stupid dreams. You’ve got plenty else to worry about. Yesterday they called again from the appliance place and asked about our payments. We’re three months behind and this and that is going to happen if they take us to court. Did you hear? To court. Can you believe it? The guy had this tone of voice like he was talking to I don’t know who. I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole. To have him humiliate me like that, and there was nothing I could say. And if we have to go to court they’ll make us pay the lawyers’ fees, too. Are you listening? Why don’t you worry about that for a change. About stuff like that. Not dreams and rain.
She’s holding a strip of orange peel and slicing it into pieces with a knife. She’s already cut it into a thousand tiny slivers but she won’t stop won’t give up. She slices it into tiny pieces and then smaller ones and even smaller than that. A thousand slivers. And she’s still at it.
Watch it, I say. The last thing we need is for you to lose a finger.
The twenty-first of December. Saturday afternoon. Four days until Christmas. Out the kitchen window I can see colored lights blinking on and off on the balconies and in the windows and yards of nearby apartments and houses. Red green yellow blue. Stars and garlands and Saint Vassilises and sleighs pulled by reindeer. An incredible number of lights. Like you’re in an endless casino and all the houses are slot machines. Cement, poverty, and colored lights — Bangladesh meets Las Vegas. Kids are riding their bikes in the street and women are watering flowerpots full of bushy plants. I see men in shorts grilling meat and drinking beer on the rooftops of apartment buildings. I see a bird circling in the air around a birdcage and the bird inside flaps its wings too but in a surprised kind of way. The sky is completely clear, the air as dry as the mouth of a person who’s very scared. Just a few days before Christmas but nothing looks like Christmas. Except for the lights. It’s as if Christmas came and went and now it’s spring but for some crazy reason everyone forgot to take down their decorations.
A few days before Christmas and something in the air around me is burning like a slow fuse. I wonder. I wonder when the fuse will burn down to the end and when the explosion will come and what will happen after that.
The other day I caught myself standing in front of a shop that sells hunting gear looking at the knives and switchblades in the window. Then I went in and bought a Buck knife, one of those American knives with a blade twenty centimeters long. It’s no joke it’s the real thing it can do some serious damage the heft of it in your hand makes your mind go dark. I carry it in my boot just in case, as they say. I didn’t tell Lena about it. But at night when I can’t sleep my mind wanders to things like that. Fuses and explosions and guns and knives. And I wonder what the hell is happening and where it’s all heading. It scares me.
And then there’s Lena dicing orange peel at the kitchen table. Slicing it silently with a knife in an utterly silent house. A silence like you wouldn’t believe, like what they say about the silence before an earthquake. And I think about how if there’s an earthquake maybe the weather will change, maybe it’ll rain and get cold and maybe even snow. If there’s an earthquake big enough to shake the whole world maybe something will change. And it scares me to be thinking those kinds of thoughts. What kind of life can you live without anything good, I say to myself.
What kind of life can you live when you’re waiting for something bad to save you from something bad.
• • •
There’s half a bottle of wine left from yesterday. I fill a glass with feigned indifference, as if it were water, and Lena looks at me and starts to say something but I beat her to it.
Monday, I say. On Monday when I get my Christmas bonus I’ll pay off the rest of what we owe at Kotsovolos. Okay?
Fine, she says. That’s great. I can stop worrying.
She grabs another piece of orange peel and starts to slice it with the knife. Her fingers are yellow.
Do you maybe, just maybe, have some idea of how much we owe? she asks me. Take a piece of paper and start writing. Two months of building fees is two hundred euros. The car insurance expired on the fifteenth. That’s another two hundred.
Rent. Kotsovolos. A hundred and forty to the electric company. The fucking credit cards from the fucking bank of fucking Cyprus. I have two cavities that need filling. By the time I’m forty I’ll have no teeth at all. Who knows how much the dentist will cost. Why aren’t you writing? You should be writing. And if you add it all up you’ll see that to make ends meet we need the Christmas bonus and the Easter bonus and the bonuses for next Christmas and next Easter too. Write it. Write it down.
I grab the knife from her hands and throw it in the sink. She looks at me as if I were a stain on a white shirt and then opens the drawer and takes out another knife and goes back to cutting the peel right where she left off. Her fingers are yellow and trembling.
Lena, I say.
Write, she says.
• • •
I look out the window. The sky. There’s a strange color in the sky again this evening. A gray like the underside of a piece of cardboard. Endless gray. No sun no moon no stars. Neither day nor night.