Waking the Moon

loud in the abrupt silence. “He believes he has found Atlantis.”

Magda put her pen down and rubbed her throbbing temples. “Oh, please—”

Christos Eugenides shot her an angry glance. “This is all quite true, Miss Kurtz. The site is thousands of years old and I assure you more spectacular than anything you have ever seen. It is a more important archaeological find than Pompeii or Tutankhamen’s grave.”

He paused, his gaze lingering upon her neck, then added in a very low voice, “You are aware, I am quite certain, that the Minoan culture is at the very heart of worship of the great goddess. Perhaps the most ancient culture of the Mediterranean. And we know next to nothing about it at all.”

At the word goddess Magda’s mouth grew dry. “Of—of course,” she said, and gulped the rest of her tsipoura. The raw liquor scorched the back of her throat. “Yes, of course—and this Marinatos will see me? I can catch a plane to Santorini?”

Christos Eugenides shook his head. “I do not know if he will see you or not. You will have to find someone with a boat. It may be difficult; Spyridon is not a popular man right now. His political views are considered reactionary and dangerous.”

“Can you give me the name of someone with a boat?”

He turned and walked to the edge of the patio. “I can give you nothing, Miss Kurtz. I am quite sorry.” But as he stepped down onto the sidewalk he hesitated, then said, “Santorini—that is not the correct name. In Greek it is called Thera.”

He walked quickly toward the corner, his last words hanging in the sullen air before the wind and dust swallowed them.

Thera: Fear.

She had not gone to the island. Instead she returned to her room in the cheap pensione she’d found in Monastiraki, the old Turkish quarter near the site of the ancient Agora. There she finished another bottle of tsipoura and tried vainly to find some English-language news on the ancient radio. She knew she shouldn’t be drinking. She felt sick and frightened and exhausted, ready to give up this entire crazy quest to learn something about her stolen artifact. She wished she could leave tonight, but she’d booked a return flight for two days hence and couldn’t afford to change it.

“Ahhh, hell.”

With a groan she collapsed onto the mattress, flattening a pile of books and papers. The sheets were damp and reeked of bug spray. Her notes looked as disheveled and forlorn as Magda herself. She reached for the tsipoura.

“Hair of the dogma,” she said, frowning. The bottle was empty. She couldn’t remember finishing it. “Well, enough already.”

She dropped the bottle onto the cracked cement floor. With a satisfying crash it shattered. “Goddamn waste of time,” Magda swore.

From the room next door came the endless percussive thud of music. The same song, the same tape played over and over until she could feel it in her spine as she writhed on her foul-smelling bed, trying vainly to sleep. Her neighbor wailed along with it, his voice hoarse and giddy.

She lives, no fear, doubtless in everything
She knows
Through time, unchecked, the sureness of
Her grows
She leaves Herself inside you when
She goes.
She lives in a time of her own.

“Goddammit!” she yelled, but the noise drowned her words. “Turn it DOWN!”

Drumbeats and a fadeout; then the song began again. Magda rubbed her temples and moaned.

“Oh, Peter, please.”

She’d run into him when she had arrived two days earlier, a young hippie taking a year off from Swarthmore. A sweet kid, actually, stoned every time she saw him, his head bobbing to music real or imagined, it didn’t seem to matter. But she just couldn’t stand it anymore.

You have always heard Her speaking
She’s been always in your ear
Her voice sounds a tone within you
Listen to the words you hear
Her time has no past or future
She lives everything She sees
Her time doesn’t stand outside Her
It’s in every breath She breathes.

Magda stumbled into the hallway, its stained white walls pocked with dead silverfish and faded blue handprints, talismans against ker, the spirits of the dead. From a small recessed window came the muted noise of traffic. When Magda pounded her neighbor’s door, the cheap wood paneling felt frail enough to break.

“Peter!”

Abruptly the door swung inward. Music and smoke poured into the hallway, the smells of sweat and burning wax. And there was her neighbor, blinking sleepily and holding a cotton kimono closed at his chest.

“Peter,” she repeated, striving to be heard above the din. “Look, could you turn it down a little? I—I’m not feeling well.”

He stared at her curiously, then backed into the room. She could glimpse a small tape player atop a heap of dashiki shirts and frayed jeans. In one corner a tiny old-fashioned oscillating fan turned listlessly back and forth, back and forth. He’d dragged his mattress onto the floor and covered it with an Indian print batiked in lurid shades of purple and orange. When he reached the mattress he stopped, kicking it idly with a dirty bare foot. He made no move to turn down the music.

“Peter?”

He was young, nineteen or twenty. Young enough that even after days, maybe weeks, without shaving he had only the faintest gold stubble on his chin. Thin but broad-shouldered, with long unwashed blond hair spilling down the back of his kimono. Where his robe hung open she could see his chest, hairless and tanned, and the smooth slope to the top of his narrow hips, the jutting edge of his hipbone and a flash of white where the sun hadn’t touched him. He nodded and cocked his head.

“Hey, Magda,” he said in a thick honeyed drawl. “How you doing?” His brow furrowed. “Um, maybe you better come in.”

She took a step after him, stopped as the warm wind from the fan tickled her legs.

No wonder he was staring: she’d stormed out barely dressed. Her jeans were still on the floor where she’d flung them after she’d returned from her unhappy meeting with Eugenides. She was wearing nothing but her blouse and white cotton underwear.

“Oh, shit.” She clutched foolishly at her collar and started to leave, but Peter was already at the door, peering outside before closing it with exaggerated courtliness.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, then, miracle of miracles, crossed to the tape player and turned it down. Without looking back he tossed her a dashiki shirt. “You want to get high?”

High? With no way to get to Thera, no hope of learning more about the lunula, only fifty-three dollars (American) in her pocket and no credit left on her American Express card?