Everything Beautiful Began After Part 27

You stopped outside a restaurant Rebecca once took you to.

Through the window you noticed the main seating area seemed to be shut down. Chairs were stacked upon the tables. Tools and debris lay on fabric sheets in corners where you and Rebecca once sat on straw chairs and talked late into the night. She liked to smoke your cigarettes. There were dumpsters along her street then, and dogs sleeping under them. Stray cats balanced at the edges of bins left open. They stepped carefully, without sound.

The man inside, next to the revolving meat, eyed you with suspicion. You entered and asked for a souvlaka. He tilted his head and took a pita from the stack. He turned his body to the meat and carved a few pieces. Then he wrapped the meat with french fries and yogurt in the pita and handed it to you in a paper cone.

You asked if you could sit down. He nodded in the Greek way that means no.

You hesitated.

"Look," he said, pointing with his knife to the mountain of boxes, old computers, and plastic containers that littered the place where you once were in love.

You ate standing up beside the door. People pushed past you. The sandwich was sweet and barely warm. Each mouthful was a painful effort. After, you bought cigarettes from a kiosk and walked back to her apartment. You smoked one after another on the steps, even though you hadn't smoked for two years. You lay down and cried noiselessly into your hand.

It was dark when your eyes opened. You had been asleep. Someone was poking you. Two policemen. One with a truncheon said something. The other laughed. He then asked you in English what you were doing.

"I was asleep," you said.

"Do you live here?" the one without the truncheon said, using it to point at the balconies.

"I did once."

They exchanged a few words and then listened to something on their radios. They seemed less interested in you now.

The one without the truncheon took out a pad of paper. "Do you have an apartment or hotel here in Athens?"

You nodded.

"Do you have any identification papers?"

"At my hotel."

"Then let's go."

They picked you up and led you off to a small blue police car. They put you in the backseat and then got into the front. They both lit cigarettes and talked quickly in a Greek you didn't understand.

The one with the truncheon was driving. The other one looked at you in his mirror.

"There's someone you wanted to see?"

"Yes," you said. The cigarettes made you feel sick.

They were both looking at you, suddenly unsure of how to proceed.

"Who?" the driver said. His contempt had changed to genuine curiosity.

"A girl who lived there."

"Wasn't she home?"

"She doesn't live there anymore."

They nodded.

"I just miss her, is all."

"Greek girls are hard to love," the driver said, "especially for foreigners."

One of them offered you a cigarette. You smoked it and felt worse.

When you got to the hotel, they told you to get out.

"What about my identification papers?"

"Forget it."

You locked your hotel room door and shed your clothes. Then you sat naked in the bathtub. You turned on the taps, but they spat only lukewarm water. Then the water turned cold. A rash of spots appeared on your legs and stomach.

You reached up and turned everything off. Then you sat in a few inches of cold water, s.h.i.+vering. The strip lighting brought out red veins in your face. Your hands were dark from the sun. There was dirt under your nails. You wanted to get out but couldn't move.

Then a steady feeling that your stomach was rising into your throat. Your hands shook. A blazing hotness. You rose from the freezing water but slipped and fell hard on the marble tiles. Then you vomited with a long wretched growl.

The floor was covered. Your arms were covered.

The smell was like a bitter fire. You vomited again. You felt pieces in your nose. Your throat was burning.

Your body was rejecting the city that conceived you.

Your life now would be in how you wished to imagine it.

The past must be created as something new.

END OF BOOK TWO.

Alone, most strangely, I live on.

-Rupert Brooke

BOOK THREE.

Chapter Forty-Six.

When you awake, you know that you have to leave but don't know where to go.

Eighteen hours have pa.s.sed, and you're tired of being asleep.

You've almost run out of money and you have no one to ask for help.

You sit up in bed. You drink all the water from the minibar and then eat the almonds and the pistachios, throwing the sh.e.l.ls into an empty gla.s.s. You can smell vomit.

You look at your briefcase and your dusty suit on the floor. Then you realize that the worst has already happened.

You clean up the vomit in the bathroom. Then you shower. Your nose has formed neat scabs on the inside.

You shave with the plastic razor and for some reason start thinking about some museum that George talked about when he came to visit you in hospital. It was a museum of wonder, he said, a museum of lost things, a museum that wasn't planned, but built slowly from the discovery of beautiful pieces recovered from the sea.

You want to see it. Then you will decide what to do with your life.

You imagine the faces of the fishermen as they free a piece of marble from the nets.

You slip from the hotel into bright light. Athens has changed again.

The streets, once cracked and sinister, are now swept with warmth. You can feel it settling on your arms and face.

A sense of poise.

Tourists are smiling at you.

Vendors call gaily from their stalls, and you begin to understand, with a sense of relief, that overnight you have become a visitor.

Athens is embracing you for the first time, like a kind, rich woman who has failed to recognize her own child from the broken days of her youth.

You take the metro from Monastiraki; this time you are going in the opposite direction. It's quicker than you remember, and cleaner.

The station at Piraeus has a roof now. The platform is swept. A uniformed railway employee answers questions and asks people with luggage where they are going. Tourists will remember Athens as a place where people were helpful.

You alight, stepping over the gap between the platform and the train. A stray dog wanders in to greet you.

You walk out from the station into the main square. It's very busy. North African men are selling pocketbooks on the street. The pocketbooks sit on a bedsheet, their handles wrapped in plastic.

You buy a coffee and some heavy cake from a cafe. As you eat, a woman in black comes by with a cup, but you look away. She sighs loudly and walks off. You remember George. He'll be frantic, but this is something you must do alone.

You ask two old men on a bench where the museum is. They don't speak English and just nod their heads. Then you ask in broken Greek and get the same response.

A woman on the church steps doesn't know either. She's typing something on her phone but doesn't know where the letters are. Her finger circles the keypad as though she is casting a spell.

A man on an upside-down bucket is selling small tubes of glue from a folding table. On the table are things glued together.

He doesn't know where the museum is but asks if anything you have is broken.

"Everything," you say in Greek. He puts a tube of glue in your hands. You hold out a few coins, but he pushes them away.

You wander through a bustling market. Enormous fish laid out on ice. Some have twisted bodies. Smaller fish are being scooped into cones of paper.

Then you see animals hanging over bright red spotlights behind gla.s.s cases, their entrails unfolded for inspection.

Greek men shout at you to come over. A very short man sings as you pa.s.s. You turn toward his voice, and he takes your hand and leads you to his fish. He has very small feet.

You stand and look at his fish lined up on the ice. He smiles and smiles until you point to a small fish and say, "Okay."

He wraps it up for you and then, winking, throws in a baby octopus. You pay and ask him where the museum is.

He's never heard of it, but the fish come from his brother.

You keep walking, deeper and deeper into the chaos of the Athenian port. You ask a dozen people-even taxi drivers-how to get to the museum, but no one has ever heard of a museum for lost things.

You turn to walk back the way you came, still carrying a meal you can't eat. But you no longer recognize the streets you came down. You stand still, while everything around you is moving.

You sit in the shade at the edge of a park; a handsome man with sungla.s.ses suddenly appears. He asks gently in Greek if you're lost. He has perfect fingernails and smooth hands. He is about to get on a large BMW motorcycle that's parked next to your bench. His suit is a deep gray and his graying hair combed perfectly to one side.

You explain that you're looking for the museum of lost things.

"The museum of Piraeus?"

You nod weakly.

"Turn around," he says.

Behind you is a small sign with an arrow pointing to a long white building. It says MUSEUM in Greek.

Then he gets on his motorcycle. You watch him drive away-wis.h.i.+ng he had stayed. You think of George. He doesn't even know you're here. He's somewhere in Sicily, drinking coffee on his balcony, in love again, sweeping up the dust that blows around the city.

Chapter Forty-Seven.

A smoking woman with long nails asks if you want to leave your bag at the desk. When you say no, she asks what's in it.

"One small fish and an octopus."

She looks at you strangely.