I didn’t drive back to the port that night, opting to stay in the guesthouse. As I crept through the gate, down the stairs, I couldn’t help but peek in Nefeli’s window, which was wide open, the light on. But she wasn’t there. The bed wasn’t made, a tangle of sheets. I glanced around the courtyard, expecting her to come up behind me.
When I got back to the guesthouse, I went to the small bottom drawer of the bureau, the one where I always left my things. A few T-shirts, underwear, a few notebooks, and a plastic baggie full of makeup and pens. For a moment, I hesitated. Like Schrödinger’s cat, they were both there and not there until the moment I opened the drawer. I tried to remember the firsts: the first time I’d slept here, the first time I came to think of this space as my own, the first time I learned Nefeli was sick. I could barely recall a moment. I could barely recall chronology. I could barely recall what was mine.
I’ve always slept soundly on the island, but Nefeli’s earlier scorn had unhinged me, as had being back in this place without Aris. I drifted in and out of awakenings, strange dreams, and paralyzed wakefulness. Finally, I was overcome with the desire to be outside.
Three o’clock in the morning, midweek, and the village was quiet, so quiet I felt exposed, half expecting faces to emerge from the shadows, or figures to hold lanterns to my face. I focused on objects: doorknobs, the shadowy center of a tree trunk, an alcove, or a plant beneath a door.
Strolling through those narrow streets at that hour, I experienced the same eerie sensation I’d felt sleepwalking through my own house as a child, unable to recognize it. I had to ask myself a few times if I was indeed asleep.
When I reached Thanassis’s, I relaxed at the familiarity, though now that it was closed, empty, the huge plane tree seemed different, the restaurant spacious, cavernous. I walked right up the three steps and sat at a table, as if expecting to be served.
My mother sat at the bar with my father and several other friends, and Thanassis was behind it. A carafe of raki in front of them, a haze of cigarette smoke. I didn’t recognize all of them. One of them was Traianos, a friend I’d loved, who died the night of my thirtieth birthday in a horrible, senseless accident. A woman with long, straight black hair, her back to me, swayed her hips, and when she turned for a moment it looked like Nefeli, but it was not. There was no sadness in their faces. They were laughing, singing, drinking. For a brief second my mother caught my eye and she smiled—something warm and playful—but then she turned back to her friends. Somehow I understood this might be her last drink.
The chairs had been placed on the tables. I sat down at my usual space, in the corner, where the seats lined the walls, a long booth along the side of the restaurant, facing the open canyon. I took one chair down and propped my feet atop it. From there I could see the tiny cemetery lit up, the lights from other villages, all the way down to the lights that lit the port, still bustling and alive at this hour. I felt sleepy, my body suddenly heavy. I wasn’t ready to go back to bed, but I felt as though I could sleep right there.
Moonlight drenched the taverna. The village was so still I felt hypervisible, as if I were walking through the deserted terrain of one of Rami’s video games. I took a photo of the landscape in front of me: a physical correspondence to remember this numbness. The lights from a few clusters of houses lit up the side of the mountain. If I leaned over the edge of the half wall—up to my chest—I’d fall down into the ravine, into the valley. I felt safe there, though, on this side of the void.
Then I felt a strange surge of joy despite the circumstances, and, for the first time in my life, inexplicably free.
That’s when I glanced to the entrance and saw a tall figure there, glowing in the moonlight. I jumped, felt a strange pull behind my belly button, a tingle near the top of my spine. Half fear, half arousal. A man. A light-gray T-shirt and matching sweatpants, like a track star from 1985. Gray running shoes whose bottoms lit up like fireflies. The glint of his glasses. A familiar, pleasant feeling.
The Captain. He looked to the bar, then back to me. I wondered what he saw there, what tableau of loss.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. He spoke in Greek. “You startled me, in fact.”
He shifted on his feet, as if ready to break into a run. I became aware that he’d been in my thoughts. I felt a wash of relief—someone else, alive and walking around at this hour. Let alone this someone else.
“I was walking and saw you.”
You as in me? Or you as in a person. I still couldn’t tell if he recognized me. I realized I had not yet spoken and that my silence was probably unsettling. “Do you want to join me?” My voice sounded different: thick and deep. I gestured around the taverna to the seat in front of me, as if it were the middle of the afternoon. For a moment he didn’t move. Didn’t laugh, or even smile. Was he sleepwalking? My mother used to sleepwalk and it always frightened me: she would suddenly be standing in my doorway, laughing, and say something crazy, like, Oh, you! You’re a paper finger! You’ve come for the furniture train, wait for the celery, do you need an umbrella or a bookcase?
I was hesitant. You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker. Why? Heart attack? But then he sidled over, as if we were in a crowded bar and had met eyes across the room.
“It would be nice to have something to drink,” he said.
Neither of us said anything for a moment. It was not awkwardness.
“Insomnia?” I asked.
He nodded. “A dangerous place to sleepwalk,” he said, looking past me, over the cliff.
He walked across the dark restaurant to behind the now-empty bar, and then he disappeared into the kitchen, which apparently was not even locked. He came back with a beer and two small tumblers. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The owner is a friend. I’ve been coming here since I was a child.”
I slid my feet off the chair but he sat down next to me—not too close—on the bench; there was something both pal-ish and warm about the gesture. He leaned back and crossed his ankle over his knee. He wore white ankle running socks with a blue stripe at the top. Endearing. His physicality, the everydayness of it. He offered me a cigarette.
“Oh why not.” He lit it for me. “Always quitting.”
“I remember.”
“Your father?” I asked, after a moment.
“He’s fine. Holed up on the hill, in Nefeli’s cottage this whole time. Obsessed with his bees. Something both selfless and self-centered. Careful tending, with no response, no acknowledgment. Honey. In his old age, this sort of careful, repetitive task, wrapped up in solitude, suits him.”
“Okay,” he added. “The truth is, he’s losing his mind.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He sighed and looked as though he were ready to divulge some painful secret. We had not been in the habit of talking these last weeks; we had forgotten our rhythms, and anyway, we were not used to the other’s physical presence.
I tried to store his face in my memory then. His hair was graying slightly at the temples and otherwise was nearly blond from the sun. High cheekbones. Behind his glasses, eyes like a big cat. His nose was sunburned; I could tell by the light of the moon. Otherwise, there was a heaviness to the space, a density to his presence, our joint presence here that was somehow pitched at an angle to everything else.