Why I Killed My Best Friend (8 page)

Irini is nineteen, Kosmas twenty; they're both students in the Department of Mass Media. They're tall and skinny and have a healthy glow on their cheeks, though they're sworn vegetarians. Irini has a small mouth with full lips and teeth even whiter than Kayo's. Kosmas is like a happy alien. Now that he's cut his hair short, you can't help but admire his beautiful ears. The two of them aren't sleeping together yet, or with anyone else for that matter, and so they shriek and chase one another around the table. They dish out the potato salad, open a bottle of red wine, and wait for us to take a bite before they dig in.

“That's what I call respect for the aged,” Kayo says. He'll be turning forty this year. Like all narcissists, he's got issues with his age.

Irini gives him a mournful look. She's probably a little bit in love with him; I certainly was at her age. When you're nineteen you fall for people like Kayo. All it tends to get you are some wrinkles around your eyes and a deep well of hopelessness in your gaze.

“Do you want to say grace today, old man?” she asks.

“I'm still sleeping,” Kayo growls.

“Okay, then I will,” Irini says. She clears her throat. Her eyelashes quiver in the light of the candles we always set out on the kitchen table. “We're not afraid of ruins. We're the ones who will inherit the earth. So they can go ahead and destroy their world before they walk off the stage set of history. We carry a new world in our hearts.” Some of the words she uses hover midway between sentiment and sentimentality. The word “heart,” for instance. Irini knows how to pronounce it properly, to give it meaning. At her
age, if Anna and I ever said “heart” we surely would have burst out laughing.

She's less emotional in the texts she writes for
Exit
, though they come from the heart, too. In an article about the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, Irini dreamed of a society comprised of citizen groups that would take the place of multinational corporations in an attempt to
restore social desire in a world that revolves self-complacently around egos and profit margins. People want to reap without first cultivating the earth. They want rain without lightning, the ocean without the murmuring of its waves
.

Is that how Anna would speak if she were a teenager today? There's certainly no way she would end her text with an exclamation of this sort:
People say cities provide freedom of choice. Freedom means
doing
what you want, not
having
what you want. Today's cities are dominated by the logic of advertising. Our biggest source of anxiety isn't whether or not we'll have complete access to the sole object of our desire, but how we can consume lover after lover. Society makes sure to give you the distressing impression that, in choosing one person, you lose all others, as if people were coats to choose from, old or new
.

The coat Irini wears is a shiny, silvery old leather jacket, torn and covered with ink stains. Kosmas has a kind of retro air, too: he always has on a red scarf; you'd think it was attached to his neck, like the gold necklace in Gwendolyn's story. He's as jittery as a marionette, hands and feet in constant motion. He might leap out of his chair unexpectedly, for instance, and shout, “Why
can't
we sell the idea of revolution the same way they sell shoes? Why
can't
we make revolution irresistible, like a really stylish winter coat? Don't you want to bet that if we did, all those spoiled rich kids I went to school with would be falling all over themselves to get a revolution of their own?” Kosmas went to high school at the American College of Greece. He must've been one of those kids
plagued by inner dilemmas: I may be rich, but I feel poor. It's more or less how I felt as the daughter of an oil company executive.

Kosmas and Irini are the digital brains of
Exit
, and of our activities more generally. They're the best hackers I've ever met. They can bring the Ministry of Finance to its knees in half an hour, though if you saw them waiting for the bus you'd think they were just two college kids like all the rest, headed to class with textbooks under their arms, whose biggest worry is whether they might get a pimple on their chin.

“Okay, we need to put our heads together here.” I pull my glasses down to the tip of my nose, mostly because I know they get a kick out of my schoolmarm routine. “Speaking of ruins, Irini, we might want to think about the Attic Highway—we haven't done anything on that front.”

“The Attic Highway can wait. We've got over a month for that. What we really need to talk about is the metro.” Irini blinks her eyes a few times, and I can't help but admire her perfectly arched eyebrows, her jet-black lashes, which tremble so suggestively. Then again, perhaps it's just a matter of age. I see in Irini what Diana once saw in me: possibilities.

“What's wrong, Maria? Are you daydreaming?” It bothers Irini if my mind wanders even for a minute. Kids of her generation always want things to operate according to schedule: now it's time to space out, now it's time to work.

“I met the daughter of a childhood friend of mine this afternoon. I guess I'm feeling a little nostalgic . . .”

Anna-Maria leaps up into my lap. Cats can tell when humans have become cats, too, when they've slipped into a furry pouch of regression. She sinks her claws into my sweater; a single prick and I'm back to my normal self. I clap to get everyone's attention.

“Okay, people, let's get to work! Who has the final text for the metro?”

Irini clears her throat. It's her day. There are times when certain people shine, take the lead, while others would rather just disappear into their chairs, like me right now. Irini starts to read: “
They presented it to us immaculate, marble, smelling of disinfectant, like an airport bathroom. Cold white fluorescent lighting. Private security guards. The Athens Metro is a moving walkway that transports us home after hours of low-paying, back-breaking work. It feels like the inside of a bank, exudes an air of industriousness and order. Music and food are prohibited. Human activity of any sort is avoided. In Europe people at least make themselves at home in their metro, they sing, they sleep in its warmth—after all, no European government cares enough to actually solve the problem of homelessness. We take it a step further: we hide our homeless, we kick them out of the station at Omonia. They mar the Europeanized image of prosperity we're hoping might attract the business of multinational corporations. Sweep the dirt under the rug! Was the new metro designed for people so exhausted they've become zombies? Is this the new Athens we're so proud of? This imitation of Brussels? Say no to this asphyxiating state ‘security'! Say no to the Olympic spirit being promoted by multinational corporations! Say no to the paternalistic aesthetic regulation of our city's working class! Bring your guitars and your sandwiches. Come help us give the Athens Metro the color and life we all deserve
.”

“Doesn't it sound a little too hippie at the end?”

“Maria, you're impossible! It's already been printed! You're always wanting to make changes!”

“What I certainly don't want, Kosmas, is for them to pass our movement off as just another wave of inveterate nostalgia. For them to dismiss it as utopian thinking and all that crap.”

“You want our generation at the demonstration? You'll have it! I guarantee you, our whole department will be there.”

“Kids whose most cherished dream is to get a job at a private television station are going to come down and occupy the metro?”

“Don't you want them to?”

“I want young people, not bearded hypocrites from the Communist Youth.”

“Don't be prejudiced, Maria!” Kayo says, draining the last of his wine.

I throw him a disparaging glance and stand up from the table. Whatever claws I once had are gone.

I use the tongs to agitate the photograph of Irini in the basin of developer. Her features are fluid, our little phantom of liberty. Her eyes are shining, her long hair is braided into Princess Leia buns on either side of her head, which is at a slight tilt, neck bare, inviting a kiss or a bite. Underneath we'll print a line from Alice Walker,
Resistance is the secret of joy
.

All the darkroom equipment, the red light, the quiet swish of the liquid in the basin do nothing to alter the way that space echoes within me. The moment I open the door I experience a visceral sense of vertigo, a fear of falling and breaking my arm, even though there's no stool anymore, and no salt, and I no longer believe in proverbs. When I slip into this room and close the door, something African comes and colonizes Exarheia Square. Something that brings me back to the days of crickets and caves and dismembered dolls. “What on earth do you do in there for hours on end?” Kayo sometimes asks. “I breathe in chemicals,” I answer. “I punish myself for being a racist.”

Now he opens the door just a smidge.

“Close the door, Kayo, are you crazy? You'll ruin the photographs!”

He steals into the room and hugs me. His body is still warm from the sheets. Doesn't he ever tire of this game of incomplete conquest? A hug, a kiss or two on the neck, then each of us to our own bed. It only exacerbates the feeling that's been bothering me since afternoon, of having suddenly been thrown back into childhood. A
six-year-old girl came and dusted off certain forgotten regions inside me: self-sacrifice, trust, admiration, disappointment, boundless love.

“Want to come and sleep in my bed tonight?”

I don't reply. Kayo goes out of the darkroom, and I follow.

“Don't you think it's time you found a place of your own?”

He's picking at the leftover potato salad, and freezes with the fork in midair. I stand on tiptoe and eat the bite off his fork.

“You really want me to leave? You're that upset?”

“You said our living together was a temporary solution. It's been three years.”

I enjoy crushing his dignity from time to time. Maybe the cold potato in my mouth is to blame. Or the memory of Antigone's fake braid. Or of Anna's high-handedness: give me Apostolos, give me your drawing, pee here, smoke this cigarette, sing whatever song I tell you to. It seems fairly obvious that I'm trying to act as Anna would, to usurp her place. You just say whatever comes into your head and everyone else takes you at your word.

“I think you should leave, Kayo. Find a place to live already. Take your life into your own hands.”

Merde. I'm a sadist.

I peek into his bedroom before leaving for school. He's cleared all the ballerinas and plastic flowers off the desk. His suitcase is out in plain sight. Is he staging his departure to make me feel bad? I grab my coat from the rack in the hall and run down the stairs. I'm afraid that if I stop for even a second at the mirror by the front door, I'll remember how I used to primp and preen in that exact same spot fifteen years ago, trying to be whatever it was I thought Kayo wanted. I wore men's suits and cut my hair short, shaved the nape of my neck. I lived on an apple a day.

These days the bones in my wrists still protrude, but at least my arms are the arms of a normal person, not a ghost. I've gained ten
kilos since my Paris days. My hair is shoulder-length now, and I use a ballpoint pen to put it up in a bun, the way Anna did during the last phase of our friendship. The only thing Kayo still likes about my looks is the way I dress. I still shop at vintage stores—sometimes for elbow-length gloves, sometimes for men's suits. The gloves are straight out of
My Fair Lady
, but the suits are proof of his lingering influence. If I can survive without Kayo the way I survived without Anna, then I'll be truly free.

I take the metro to school. I scan the platforms for potential escape routes, passages that aren't being monitored. There are cameras everywhere. And our plan hangs by a thread: there's no central committee controlling things, just whatever collective telepathy steers us to a certain place, to this electrified now. I've got copies of our proclamation tied up in a tube and tucked into my scarf. I bend down as if to brush something off my shoe and shove the tube under the seat. Right before I get off at my stop, I slice the string with a knife and the proclamations roll all over the floor, a torrent of colored paper. I guess I did learn something after all, flying on magic carpets and playing Little Wizard.

“My mom says you should call her.”

Daphne hands me a business card with both cell and land lines, of which there are four: home, work, a number in Paris, another that must be a summer house on some island. The card is warm from the girl's sweaty palm; it practically breathes.

“Thank you, Daphne. Now go and draw with the other kids.”

“What should I draw?”

“Whatever you like.”

She plops down on her stomach and sticks her tongue out at Natasha, who, terrified, quickly draws a rainbow at the top of her page, over the family she's been drawing, as if to protect her creation. Daphne turns her back on Natasha, hides her paper with one
hand so the other girl can't see, and starts to draw, speaking all the while in a sing-song: “Look at the lightning, colored rain, the little kid cries, waaa, waaa . . .”

She's starting to pique my interest.

“Come on, little kid in the cave, pick a big leaf from the tree so you don't get wet, hmmm, hmmm . . .”