He stops, the last frayed end of the hawser rasping through the machine and tumbling away into the oily water of the harbour.
Cosmatos listens to the quiet that follows, looks around. There are some quite startled people in his street: a woman gathering lavender flowers from her garden and a young couple spooning on a bench, a man walking two dogs. A vagabond with a flute on the street corner.
‘Come in,’ Cosmatos says. ‘Fuck you, fuck off, go to hell. But come in. Because they would neither of them forgive me if I turned you away.’
I step through the door and I’m not prepared for the air inside. It hasn’t changed. The whole place smells exactly the way it always did and now I remember that he did the cooking, that he smoked a pipe with tobacco from some upmarket shop in London, that it was his pomade that lingered in the hall because his study was on the ground floor. The Old Girl and Stella shared a work room in the attic because they loved the views and because they could throw one another insoluble problems and little jokes. I had a spot – just a recliner, no desk – in the corner, and was considered the most privileged of men.
They are still here. I know they are. I look through to the dining room. Perhaps they are having a late lunch. The same table, dark wood. The same deep green curtains, the same dark walls. The same bowl in the middle, with fruit. A decanter. But only one place laid, and that is his. He sits with their absence, and perhaps that makes him more sad, or less.
I hold on to the frame of the door and make a noise, and behind me I hear its echo, a gulp of sound like a lonely cat.
Cosmatos is crying, too.
‘Damn you,’ he whispers. ‘Damn you completely, you little shit. I never cry. I come in here every day, a hundred times, and I never cry. I never see them and I never turn around expecting them to be there, and then you’re here for one second and all I can think is that they will be right back and it will all be some stupid misunderstanding. They are not dead. They just got on the wrong train. What do you – what can you possibly – want?’
But my name is not Smith. It is not Jones or Berg or Müller. I am not northern, not calm or cool, and talking is not what I do when I am moved. I am Kyriakos. I am Constantine Kyriakos and I may not give a shit about football or the Church or ships or the Acropolis but I am Greek. I have already embraced him, halfway lifted him like the bundle of twigs that he is, and I have buried my face in his shoulder and I am crying, too. We are men, and this is how we grieve. I feel his tears on my neck, and I do not know which of us is shaking harder – we are both shuddering and wheezing – and then like an earthquake the moment ends quite simply, and we are just two fellows who have never seen eye to eye in a hug we’ll never acknowledge again. A heartbeat later, even the embrace is gone.
‘What do you want?’ Cosmatos repeats.
‘Help,’ I tell him, because catharsis leads, however unwisely, to honesty.
*
He makes coffee. I was hoping for tea.
‘Sit.’
We sit, together, and not in the haunted dining room but in the little kitchen with its stark fluorescent strips and the ugly table with the yellow plastic top. Cosmatos pours ouzo into his coffee, which explains why he doesn’t care that it’s cheap, half sawdust. I let him do the same for me. Liquorice and sketos. It’s not bad. Actually, it’s very bad: really revolting.
‘So, what?’ Cosmatos says.
I do not say that I have gone mad, or that my PTSD is feeding my mathematical synaesthesia and making me practically psychic. I do not propose that my shark is real, that I have married it or vowed myself to it. I tell him what I remember and what I have seen and I do not distinguish between what is possible and what is not. He is an expert in these things. He will draw me back to the land.
Except that he doesn’t. He just sits there, and every so often I catch the scent of his exhalate and know that I am tasting tiny parts of the skin of his mouth.
‘Your watch,’ he murmurs.
‘Yes.’
‘It was gold?’
‘Platinum.’ I shrug.
He laughs. ‘Of course.’
‘Does that make a difference?’
‘Everything makes a difference. Your mathematics tells you that. The butterfly stamps his foot, there is a storm in Mississippi. The birth of a child in Tunis changes the weighting of the world, shifts it minutely in its orbit, and over time the difference is enough to move the planet out of the path of a comet. Or into it. So it is with you. What did you give up to your shark?’
‘I told you.’
‘Idiot. Not the watch – the meaning of the watch. Does it carry you from one place to another at great speed and in comfort? No, that is an automobile. The meaning of the watch is not travel. Can you wield it in battle? Can you eat it? Can you fuck it? No, no, no! A watch does not entail these things. It is a watch – a complex technological device for … the measurement of time. Time! And this one had a platinum case, implying wealth and status. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘You live in a world of signs as well as things. In that world, Actaeon fed his lust by gazing upon the goddess Artemis as she bathed; she fed her hounds upon his flesh. Desire and hunger: one body merges with another. The father of Acteon was Aristaeus, likewise a lecher, who as a young man in a passion chased Eurydice through the woods, where she was bitten by a serpent and died. From the mouth: death. Her lover, Orpheus, went down into the underworld to retrieve her, perhaps the most celebrated catabasis of legend. He sang so sweetly to the god of the dead that he was permitted to bring her back – from the mouth: life. And yet he could not control his love, and looked upon her face too soon, so that she was torn away again. Thereafter he imposed control upon himself. He abjured physical love, and was himself by reason thereof torn and devoured by the affronted Ciconian women, worshippers of Dionysus, the serpent god – again, the serpent – who was slain by Titans as a baby and born again when his still-beating heart was planted in the body of the woman Semele. Those Ciconians who took into themselves the meat of Orpheus were like Semele got with child, and from their loins came monsters such as Cetus. From death by way of that deep and female interior mystery of creation, once more: life. Cetus the dragon plagued Ethiopia and met his end in combat with Perseus. The dead monster became the island of Thera, where after many years the ragged skull of Actaeon was brought. That same Actaeon! We return to the beginning. And from Acteon’s open mouth – as from the severed head of Orpheus, which sang sweetly as it floated down the river on the tide of his life’s blood – arose a swarm of bees whose honey was a panacea against all but mortal wounds, and whose venom was unmatched in its lethality. Do you understand? The wheel turns and the road goes on and on. The mouth is the gate of life and death. We desire it, are devoured by it, emerge from it. Gods do not die, they are transformed. They are sundered, reforged, slain, reborn, eaten and regurgitated. The debts of our legends are never cancelled, because the seed of their renewal is contained in each payment.
‘And so we come to you. You gave time and fortune in exchange for your life. Into the mouth of the god, you offered those things. Now time and fortune are returned to you in a new form, but in the next instant there will be a price, and beyond the price another payment. What is devoured is birthed. You will grow wealthy, and you will fall, and rise, and fall as many times as the story requires. You will be ripped into pieces and reborn. Congratulations! You have become the mirror of the world. It is the fate of Greece itself, in these coming days.’
Seamlessly, from myths to politics. I try to stay on target.
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ I really don’t. You don’t talk about the state of the nation with Cosmatos any more than you discuss football with one of those assholes who has his team’s colours tattooed on his shoulder.
‘What is wrong with Greece?’ Bristling Cosmatos, ready to fight me.
‘We’re broke,’ I tell him, knowing that’s not what he meant. ‘We let the Americans sell us some very bad pigs in some ve
ry large pokes, and we spent two and a half billion euros on a network of Internet-capable public toilets because someone’s brother-in-law built them. Whatever. Some of it was our fault, a lot of it wasn’t. We’re a little bit unwilling to pay taxes and to be honest we’ve been living on non-existent money since ’94, but that makes us no different than the rest of Europe except that when the music stopped we not only did not have a chair, we were in the corner playing doctor with the pretty one from science class. When Portugal falls over on its arse, we’ll be last year’s news.’
‘No,’ Cosmatos says. ‘No. That is the shit we are made to eat. It is not the truth, and you know it – banker.’
And here we go. Say it out loud. Acknowledge it. When you pretend it’s something else, you give ground. Since the death of his wife, Cosmatos has become a very sophisticated, very highbrow fascist. It’s one of the reasons we don’t see each other very much: I can’t stand it. It’s like looking at a man cutting his face with a knife. The Old Girl would have been furious with him. Cosmatos! For God’s sake. Take up with some floozy. Really – find a young, foolish PhD in anthropology who thinks frequent contact with your penis will teach her about religious ecstasy and the cult of the twice-born. Flaunt her at parties and outrage our family. Ideally a Dutch woman who speaks frankly about fellatio. That is a perfectly respectable folly for an old, childless man whose wife is dead. But this … not this. It is beneath you.
Indeed, it’s a bully’s faith and it doesn’t suit him, but it was always there. It’s a fault in the code, or some sort of odd psychological balancing: the only thing in his life to which he does not apply the power of cultural analysis that is his. Instead he erects remarkable edifices around it, balances and protects it with baroque constructions and conspiracies and blinds himself to the subtext. Cosmatos the revolutionary, plotting the rise of the new Sparta from the towers of the academe.
After the Old Girl died it became all of him, or all of the small part of him that is not the overlapping Jungian disciplines of alchemy, poetry, theology and branding. I know better than to argue. Years ago he was filled with a kind of weird lucidity about it, about the need for Greece to believe itself unique, to create a perception of Greekness that was arranged around eudaemonia. ‘We must be heroes! We must believe that we are great so that great choices are ordinary to us – we must all act as if we are observed and infused by pagan angels!’ But now that elixir has been diluted with a more obvious sort of grime, a common-or-garden racism. Everyone has an idiot relative who’ll tell you across the dinner table that ‘the blacks’ don’t really understand civilisation and aren’t suited to it, or that ‘the Jews’ control the media and that’s why only some dishrag newspaper or flashing GIF website knows the real story. Consciousness, I once read in a book, is a complexly convoluted loop of information that can observe itself. What does it say about a person, then, if they cannot manage the trick? When Cosmatos is like this, is he a person, or a piece of stupid stone, walking and talking like a man?
He shakes his head. ‘No, Constantine. No. These are symptoms. They are not what is wrong, they are what happens because of it. Greece is not broke, it is broken. The streets are full of spongers and the halls of power are full of cheats. Africans, Gypsies, Croatians. Bank of America, the Germans, the Chinese. Rapists of a nation as much as of women and boys! In one way or another it is the same. They set up shop, they create a problem, and then the only solution is to give them more money to make it go away! They are here to speculate, to grow rich through this crisis they have created and settled upon us. They will take everything we have that they covet, and we will be left behind when they begin to take off again. It is not migration, it is swarming. Oh, don’t roll your eyes at me! You break bread with them all the time!’ Jaw jutting, inviting me to swing at him across the awful coffee. I swallow some instead. It’s still awful, but it tastes better than Cosmatos’s patriotic shit.
This is what death has done to him. What kind of stupid, I wonder, does my grief make me?
Cosmatos is full of portentous anger. ‘The whole of European society is constructed on a failed model of being! A hash of lies and ignorance! Those bastards in Brussels and Berlin, saving their banks and making us carry their trash! Oh, yes, for them it is easy to say the law is what is written, and the text of an international treaty is absolute and to maintain as we suffer that that is virtue. So what if a nation burns and a people starve? So what if the poorest of Europe must play host to the wretched of Africa? That is the so-precious law we must follow. It is a Judaeo-Christian perception filtered through a German mindset and it is fundamentally foreign to our understanding. It is out of date anyway! Nothing is written in stone in a digital century, and we understand that. It is our time once more, Constantine. The true Greek life is poetic, not arithmetical – which is why you are forever so at war with yourself. We will learn to live symbolically, at one with our gods. You, too, will have to learn.’
So, filleting: finance bad, group poetry sessions good; Jews bad, Greeks good; law bad, gods and symbols good. In other words, a sack of shit. I’m angry with myself for coming. I knew we’d end up here and I gave him an audience because I was weak. Nostalgic. I came looking for kindly ghosts and found this narrow old man. ‘This is crap. Yes – yes, it is crap, Cosmatos – yes. But what I want – do not interrupt me please, I have listened nicely to your crap even though you know I hate it – what I want to know is how does any of this crap connect to my shark?’
I want to say I don’t know why I came here, but I do. I came here to hide, and this lecture is the price, and I came here to be with Stella, and Stella’s price cannot be paid.
‘Hah! Crap is exactly the point! You have a shark in your head that eats corporations and shits money. You know what that means?’
‘Self-evidently, you evil old prick, I do not, or I wouldn’t be asking.’ Too tired of him now to pretend.
But he doesn’t take offence. He’s on a roll now, because all this somehow makes him happy. He laughs. ‘It means revolution! The overturning of things, the approach of apocatastasis. A return to the beginning. You have contracted a god, Constantine. It does not matter if you think it is a brain lesion or a space alien or whatever you are telling yourself. When you do the bidding of your god, your enemies fall and you rise. That is the only law for you now. You are becoming what we will all be, in the new Greece. Soon you will not even notice that you do the bidding of your mistress. If you go against her, you will be devoured.’
‘Symbolically.’
He leans forward, wafting sketos. ‘Yes. Symbolically. You are used to a world in which symbols are intangible things like the aristocratic titles of exiled princes, even if symbols and rumours are the governing currencies of your trade. But in the new Greece, symbols will be the actual truth. If you are devoured by your shark, your physical body will be torn apart, and the pieces will be swallowed. Watching from the Judaeo-Christian model, one might see a man cut up your body and feed it over the side of a boat. Or one might see a crowd of people each tear a piece from the corpse with their mouths. But that watcher would be wrong. He would be seeing what is not there, the ghost of an irrelevant way of being in the world. A way that is lifeless and foreign, like a fat burned-out German automobile with grass growing through the shell, in a field full of thoroughbred horses. The truth would be that a god ate you, because you were unfaithful.’
I realise that Cosmatos is entirely off his head.
I say: ‘In the new Greece.’
‘The Greece that is coming, Constantine, will be the whole world: Greece, from Athens to Magadan, Thessaloníki to Cape Town, Corfu to Darwin and Guam. Not tomorrow, not next year. Now. Greece shall be torn no longer.’
When Megalos said that, I thought it was original, but it must be a new asshole catchphrase.
Cosmatos gets to his feet and extends his hand. ‘Come. I know people who can help you.’
He actually means to take me somewhere. These people he’s talking about rig
ht now are not generalised people, the spectral silent majority who agree with him and always have. These are specific people. Hell no.
‘I’ve got somewhere to be,’ I tell him. Unspoken: anywhere but here, with you.
He scowls, puffs out his cheeks. ‘Fine, then. Do whatever the fuck you like.’
He shows me to the door.
We don’t hug.
*
Four days later it happens again: the telltale trail of 4s. Harrison’s monitor is gone for ever, thank God, and the gas it emitted when it died was apparently toxic so he can’t have another one. Sadly there are still emulators, clever bits of programming which take expensive hardware and make it behave like something cheap and old. You can get a stock ticker for your iPad which does it, and for some reason the bug has caught me, I’ve started using it. I still have all my other stuff going on, I’ve just got my tablet resting on a little stand and the cool green numbers drifting by like something from that Keanu movie.
The 4s go up and down the stock list, then up, then down halfway to one price where they seem to hover and consider. And then they disappear. A decent company apparently in good health.
I pick up the phone to a flunky. ‘Dump Couper-Seidel,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Dump it. I’ve lost faith. Do it now.’
He does. ‘Jesus, Constantine, that was expensive.’
I think about it. Couper-Seidel has three competitors. ‘Get me as much as you can of Juarez Industrial Copper and Ardhew Metallic.’ I don’t like the third one. It’s wobbly. ‘Who holds Couper’s debt?’ Everyone has debt. Everyone is leveraged somehow. He tells me. I short them.