Running (Thorndike Press Large Print Reviewers' Choice)

Running



Jasper died a week before I returned to Athens, so I never saw him again. They carried him out and down and he died in England, or maybe on the plane. There were witnesses in the lobby. There was a story in the newspaper. There was, the drunk boy said without raising his eyes to meet mine, proof.

Out on the street, a hot breeze moved the suffocating air around and kicked up grit from the gutter. I stood for a time by the door of the bar waiting to feel something, then walked in the direction of Monastiraki.

When I met Jasper in the spring of 1988, I still had fifty dollars, which was fifty dollars more than I had now. He wore a faded black T-shirt and dark pin-striped cutoffs that looked like they’d once been the trousers of a school uniform. His lank, oily blond hair was shaved in the back, hung in his face, and he was sweating.

“I need to make some money right away,” I told him.

Jasper nodded, lit a cigarette.

“There’s quite a lot of ways to do that here,” he said, his voice smooth and kind, his pale green eyes trained on my remaining possessions.

We recognized one another. I wasn’t a tourist. He’d get nothing for bringing me back to the hotel.

We stood in the aisle, away from the seated passengers, with our arms hanging out the window, the bright hot sun burning down and a breeze born from the speed of the train blowing in upon our faces. Outside, terraced slopes of silver-leaved olive trees dotted the rocky yellow landscape, and piles of plastic bottles lay strewn by the edge of the track. He told me about a punk show he’d seen in London where a guy set his cock on fire using aerosol hairspray, and about a journal Alexander Pushkin kept that had been published after being banned for one hundred years.

“I’ve been rewriting the want ads in dactylic hexameter,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because it’s funny. Because it makes them more beautiful,” he said. “Obviously.” Jasper described the city planning of Athens and the ruin that was London and the prospects of getting work in the olive groves of Artimeda. I wasn’t used to people talking so much.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“The States,” I said.

“Originally,” he said. “I mean where are you from originally?”

“The United States.”

He shrugged as if I hadn’t understood the question. “Athens is okay,” Jasper said. “But you can’t sleep out and you can’t sleep in the underground. The idea is to get to the islands. You know, make enough money in the city or picking fruit somewhere. Or,” he said, “by better, quicker means.”

His breath had the sweet medicinal bite of licorice and a cool flammable underlay. His eyes were a calm marbled green; skin so tender it looked like he might not yet shave; dimples beside a pair of fine, full lips. Jasper’s was the kind of elegant placid face you saw in old portraits. His posture straight, his shoulders wide. It was only after half an hour of standing beside him that I noticed his left arm was in a cast.

As we got closer to Athens, ragged, hungry-looking boys holding leaflets jostled onto the train, crowding the aisles, leaning on the arms of seats, talking to people about the islands or the Plaka or Mount Olympus. Saying they’d bring you to a nice place to stay; they’d take you to the ruins, to the port, to the bluest waters waiting just one more town away.

“None of it,” Jasper said, his eyes gone flat and dark as we approached the station, “is true.”

* * *

Back then I also had a small bag. Carried my last pack of Camels and a lighter, my passport, newly exchanged blue drachma notes with statues of gods printed on them. I had a pair of cutoffs, a T-shirt, a pencil, some soap. I had a wool sweater, ammonium nitrate, electrical tape. I was flush with riches even after a year of sleeping out in train stations, church doorways, and parks. I had good boot laces. I had fire.

Now I was sufficiently pared down to the essentials. The sweater was unnecessary; the extra T-shirt had become a towel.

I’d come back to Athens after three months away picking olives, wandering the streets in Istanbul, and living in a border village that was a tight, rocky knot of land claimed alternately by Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. I’d come back against every rational instinct for self-preservation I’d ever known.

We had lived together, Jasper and Milo, and me at a four-dollar-a-night hotel on Diligianni Street across from Larissis train station and a sick sliver of scrub grass littered with condoms and empty bottles that people called a park. Sometimes when Declan was between jobs he would stay there too.

The city was like a beacon. And it drew us from wherever we’d been left. For me, the outskirts of a smoke jumpers’ base in a cold mountain town, for Jasper and Milo the London suburbs and rain-soaked council housing of Manchester. We were looking for nothing and had found it in Athens: Demeter’s lips white as stone, Apollo’s yellow mantle sun washed, sanded, windblown to granite. The barren, blighted street outside our room in the low white ruin of the red-light district smelled like burning oil and a sooty haze hung in the middle distance. The hotel had no sign, but everyone called it Olympos.

I first arrived in Greece by boat the year before, and didn’t have money for meals. I had been hungry on that trip from Brindisi in a way I’d never experienced before. The heat, the vast, wind-filled open ocean, dark water shining like mercury beneath the sun; bright blue sky and wind, salt and sweat drying against your skin. I’d had a deck-class ticket and drifted along near the dining room’s outdoor tables waiting for people to leave before they finished their meals. Then I’d slip in quickly for their leftovers. People think they need things. Money or respect or clean sheets. But they don’t. You can wash your hair and brush your teeth with hand soap. You can sleep outside. You can eat whatever’s there.

Once you’re in a warm place, you can live for years and years and years on one five-dollar bill to the next. Five dollars is a reasonable amount of money to come across in the course of a day.

Jasper and Milo knew this before I did; good at surviving week to week, sipping sweetly from bottles of ouzo and Metaxa, reeling arm in arm before the Parthenon or the big television at Drinks Time. They were runners. We were all runners.

I tried to imagine it now, to feel their presence again amid the concrete and noise, to hear Jasper’s footsteps on the slick granite sidewalk. There was no money left to buy a train ticket or a deck-class. I’d been robbed in Tarlabasi and the last of the money we had made together was gone. I could stay or hitchhike but I was weighted down, tied, tired.

The dementing arid heat of day was high and powerful and I could feel the sweat crawling across my scalp. Compact cars sped by on the dirty thoroughfare. I turned up Karolou Street and walked on the shadowed side along a block of empty buildings and shuttered cafés to get some reprieve from the sun’s glare and the roar of the highway.

I stopped at a kiosk to ask for a cup of water and when the man inside handed it to me his fingers grazed mine for a second and I had to look away.