Why I Killed My Best Friend (19 page)

The young woman, of course, was Anna. When she came back to Greece for what would turn out to be our final summer together, Aristomenis had already taken things a step further: tired, disappointed by the utter stupidity of society, he had begun to overturn some of Wright's theories. A positive is the sum of two negatives. So if form and function are one, then function can also destroy form, which can in turn destroy the original function. Architecture as the destruction of the system that nourished it.

He started to take on big projects, office buildings, in an attempt to solve that awful equation: how can you influence people's lives through form, materials, function? How do you mobilize workers whose lives are a senseless cycle of daily needs, daily exploitation and tedium? How do you fight a rotten system that transforms creativity into mere labor? One way is to reverse function and use: you give a bank the form of an ancient temple. You build a sky-scraper whose windows don't open, thus creating the illusion of a world that both belongs and doesn't belong to the worker. You design an enormous, open-plan office that's also a cell of sorts: no walls anywhere, yet the very openness of that space comes to oppress the people who work there. They can't pick their nose or eat garlic or make a personal phone call without the person at the next desk knowing. Life becomes harsh, unbearable. It takes on an outward sheen of luxury that only heightens the sadness, the lack of freedom. People cease to think. The rage within them builds.

Rage—now there's a word that must have charmed Anna back then, when her inner world was a battlefield of unbridled rage and contradictions. They ran into one another at some reception, Aristomenis talked to her about Stamatis, about situationism and his
theory of what he had started to call inorganic architecture. His method of exploiting the system captivated Anna from the start. I can imagine what happened next. They joined forces, joined their lives.

“How does she seem to you?” he asks, downshifting smoothly. We're almost at my place now. We pull up at the corner of Ippocratous Street and he turns on his right blinker. The downward slope of Kallidromiou always brings an inner warmth.

“She seems fine. Happy, I mean.”

“It's a fragile happiness,” Aristomenis says, combing his eyebrows again. “I feel more secure when I know she has people around. I'm so glad she has you now.”

You're just like Stamatis, aren't you? You want me to look after her.

“She doesn't take care of herself. Have you heard that cough? She's always running a fever, and gets sick at the drop of a hat,” he says.

Then she shouldn't smoke so much. What am I, her nurse? I'm tired of dealing with Anna's problems. “Spring can be tricky,” I say. “It's so easy to catch cold when the weather changes.”

Aristomenis shuts off the engine and looks at me with big, sad eyes. “I'm worried it might be something more than just spring. I'm worried she might be self-destructing.”

Everyone's always worried about Anna. Something about her still shouts,
Look out, merde! I'm not like other people!

“Look out!” Kayo shouts in the darkness. He's lying on the sofa and I almost sit down on him. I don't turn on the light. I take off my shoes the way Anna did, trying to toss them onto the rug with a similar flair. I light a cigarette.

“What's wrong with you? You're smoking now?”

“I saw Anna and her husband today.”

Kayo, me, and the glowing tip of my cigarette. A silent agreement: he doesn't ask any questions, just waits for me to start.

“They have a nice house.”

“I had no doubt.”

“And they've planned a bourgeois revolution.”

“I wouldn't put anything past Anna. What's he like?”

“Strange, smart. Sort of paranoid.”

I tell him the whole story, more or less.

“Just don't get sucked in again,” Kayo says.

“I don't have time for any of that. I've wasted too many years of my life that way.”

“So what exactly are you doing?”

“I'm curious, that's all.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he says in English. Usually Kayo and I speak French to one another. Like all French people, he sounds funny when he speaks in English.

“Where is the cat, anyhow?”

“She had another freak-out. She scratched me on the arm.”

I turn on the light. There's a long line of dried blood on his arm. I bring cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom.

“I don't understand. We've had our heads bashed in by the police more times than I can count and you still can't take care of a wound?”

“I was waiting for you to come home,” he says.

All things considered, it seems sort of unlikely that he'll actually move out. I lean my head on his shoulder, rest my palm on the scratch on his arm, and the loneliness fades.

I'm wearing jeans and sneakers so I can move quickly. My shoulder bag is stuffed with bright green wigs, goggles and confetti. Kayo has the proclamations. Irini and the group with the yellow wigs
will be waiting for us on the platform in Syntagma. The plan is to have three in each car, so there are enough of us to fill the whole train. Music right away so that people don't get scared. We don't have instruments, we'll just hand out whistles. We also brought rain sticks, which in a pinch can serve as batons to fight the police. The Bears will give the rhythm with lids from pots and pans. At Syntagma we'll all head toward the exit, to meet Kosmas and the Reds. From there we'll see how things go.

Kayo winks at me as he steps into his car, with two of Irini and Kosmas's classmates. I board my car, too, with two kids from
Exit
. As soon as the doors close, we pass out our proclamations and whistles. With our goggles and wigs on, suddenly we're the Greens. Kind of ironic, if you consider that green is the color of the socialist party, and I used to be in love with a PASOK youth organizer.

The first few seconds are crucial. There are always more young people out in the afternoon, but that's no guarantee of success. Things could go either way. “Are you a theater troupe?” asks one woman who looks like Aunt Amalia toward the end of her life. The lining of her coat is torn, like Amalia's was. “It's not theater,” I reply, gently squeezing her wrist, “it's life!”

“The metro is ours!” the kids shout. “It belongs to us all. Athens belongs to us! Say no to a dry life!”

It was Kayo's idea, he's crazy about rain. Dry life on the one hand, rain sticks on the other. “A cataclysm of joy,” is what he called it. The idea for the wigs came to us in a kind of free association from that—it seemed important to have color involved, since people always associate anarchists with black.

The rhythm works its magic. We shake our rain sticks and impromptu sambas break out all over the train. From neighboring cars, the Bears accompany us with spoons and pot lids. The sound is deafening, pleasantly primitive. We keep passing out whistles. A few girls in office attire start laughing; the mood is contagious. A
window breaks somewhere nearby and a woman cries, “My God!” but her voice is drowned out by rhythmic clapping from the rest of the crowd.

Most people are on our side, I can now say with certainty. Of course some are pale with fear, mouths hanging open. I never understood why people freak out when a window breaks. As if it were the most precious, irreplaceable thing.

The train doors don't open at the next station. The people waiting on the platform stare at us through the windows as if we were aliens. “We're for
real!
We're for
real!
” shout the kids in the next car, and the new slogan makes its way from car to car until the whole train is shuddering with the noise. A few terrified older passengers are reading the proclamation. The train is moving now, and doesn't stop at the next station, either. It's clear: they're bringing us straight to our destination, the last stop, just a little bit faster. By now the platforms in the stations we're passing through are completely empty. At the fifth station we bypass there are policemen lining the platform. We open the windows and douse them in confetti.

One woman pounds on the windows with her fists, gesticulating at the policemen in despair. “Don't expect them to do anything,” I say to her. “We're not doing anything wrong. Here, read this!” I hand her Irini's text about the homeless. My favorite part is this:
A girl was walking absentmindedly through Syntagma Square, probably headed home after work, loaded down with grocery bags. She almost walked straight into a group of homeless people. She jumped back with an expression of disgust on her face. Our greatest fear is absolute poverty. Today people with no jobs and no homes are suddenly appearing in front of us: they're not hidden anymore, they're not ghosts, and they're not creatures out of our worst nightmares. They're real people. And since they continue to exist, they can free us from our greatest fear: that we'll cease to exist if we ever lose our jobs. The state actively contributes to the creation of that
illusion. It hides the homeless, pushes them away, considers them a miasma. Restaurant owners chase beggars away, just as people used to chase away lepers. Let the homeless sleep in the metro. Or else give them a home
.

The woman is tugging at my sleeve, waving the proclamation in my face. She's trying to tell me something, but I can't hear her over the din.

“What?” I ask, cocking an ear.

“What I said, love—I don't know how to read.”

She speaks with an accent. Ten to one she's Albanian.

I'm gliding along on a magic carpet. The crowd is pushing me. Even if I refused to walk, all these elbows and hands would get me to the escalator somehow. The whistles are blasting, teenagers are jumping up and down in place as if it were a concert. It must be nice, but I can't tell, can't judge. I'm gripping the woman's hand, the same hand that just now tugged at my sleeve. I can hardly breathe.

“Where are we going, love?”

Maybe it's the word she uses:
love
. Her difficulty pronouncing the “l.” The simplicity of the phrase, “I don't know how to read.” It's getting harder and harder for me to breathe. The stairs quiver before me. People's faces, too. The sound of the whistles is distorted now, almost demonic in my ears. I feel hemmed in, claustrophobic. I have to take care of this woman and then get out of here. But where will I go?

Anna, the Albanian's face still haunts me. I see it behind the reflective guards the riot police wear over their eyes. I see it in the bathroom sink when I'm washing my face. On the proclamations we write about equality and justice. In pots of boiling water. Even in the toilet bowl. I flush twice, three times to make it disappear. How did Camus put it in our charter?
Direct Action means having the passion necessary to embody your emotions, to dramatize your political
thought
. Well, I've embodied my emotions completely: I'm trembling all over. My heart doesn't fit in its usual place. There's no one here to bring me back to myself. Only this woman, a stranger. She reaches into her purse to take something out and cuts her hand on a slip of paper; a drop of blood springs from her fingertip. That's all it takes. I faint.

“What happened?” asks a girl with bright green eyes and a yellow wig. A giant cricket. She shakes me, undoes the top button of my shirt. It's all over, she's going to eat me.

“Maria, can you hear me?” She slaps my face once, twice. “Can you hear me? Maria? It's Irini!”

I'm falling into Daphne's drawing. Running across brown fields, plashing through mud, headed for the cave. My feet sink deeper and deeper into the mud. I can't breathe at all. I'm not a witch, not even an apprentice witch. I'm swimming in slow motion through a bog, my head the only part of me that's above water, and I can barely keep it up. I'm beginning to understand: my head is the mouth of the cave. My body isn't just numb, it's made of stone.

The cave is me.

Six

I keep having this recurring nightmare: university qualification exams, essay question. Topic:
In our contemporary era, interpersonal relationships are complex. Evaluate the importance of true friendship in this context
. Everyone else has turned in their papers; the room is empty except for me, still sitting before a blank page. My left arm is completely paralyzed, as if it were back in the cast from the third grade. I attempt to scribble something with my right hand. Kyria Fotaki, our literature teacher, is standing over me, looking at her watch. “Your time is up, Papamavrou.” She's right, it is.

Ever since Anna left for the École des Beaux Arts in Paris I kill entire days watching television—sitcoms, MTV, commercials. I don't read, don't draw, barely leave the house. I just smoke and change channels manically, leaving nail-marks on the plastic buttons of the remote control. I scarf down chips and chocolate bars, get fat, start to resemble my mother. I'm hoping not to enter the next phase, when you give yourself over to God's care, cross yourself all the time and hang incense over your bed. Deep down, I actually do believe that someone, something, will come to my rescue.

And once again, that someone is Andreas Papandreou. He comes into the apartment, grabs me by the hair and gives me the push
I need to reenter the world. By all rights I should have joined PASOK out of gratitude for that alone.