But Rami warmed to me, and we sat together on that same bench where my mother had smoked her cigarette. He showed me some more of his drawings, which were becoming more and more sophisticated: kids with black-and-blue hair, long streets lined with citrus trees, and the empty, blocked-out squares for the rest of his story.
Everything felt either rigidly compartmentalized or limitless.
•
What happened after the vandalism was that a young collective of artists, instead of cleaning up the graffiti and repairing the puncture wounds in the megaphones, had stenciled them with blue scorpions skittering into and out of the holes. When I walked to the small square where many of them assembled, near the squat, I found Leila there, her eyebrows dyed blue. She, too, was growing, her face moving from a child’s to a young woman’s, an angularity to her features she didn’t have just a few months ago.
She asked if I’d spoken with Rami. I said of course I had. “Why?”
She looked at me, as if deciding what to say. “No reason,” she said.
I asked if she’d seen Nefeli, and she shook her head.
The museum curator hadn’t seen her either, and Nefeli, after those interviews, had refused to communicate any instructions regarding the installation. Her laconic, spare e-mails said the same thing she’d said originally: it was public space, it belonged to everyone and no one, that she’d had no right to it, that those vandals, and now the artists, had every bit of right that she did. It kept her narrative moving. Meanwhile, some of the local residents were complaining, wanting it cleaned up, didn’t like all those kids hanging around. For all she knew, Nefeli said, they had been the culprits.
I went by Nefeli’s apartment. She didn’t answer the bell, but when another resident left I walked in like I belonged there. I was, after all, good at that. I knocked on her door, called to her gently, but there was nothing. Her neighbor heard me knocking and offered that several days before she’d seen her leaving with a duffel bag, her easel, her camera around her neck. Her mail was piled up in the foyer.
Fady and Dimitra hadn’t seen her either. One night, Dimitra and I got drunk on my balcony, and she leaned in and asked, “Do you think Nefeli vandalized her own work?”
The possibility had not crossed my mind. “She likes attention,” I said. “But not this much.” Still, her comments stayed with me a long time. I understood something I don’t think I had before: that Nefeli and her art were the same thing. That the same kinetic energy that went into her work could destroy her: she both created and absorbed it. Not a collection of selves but a composite I. Whole.
Nefeli’s show continued to run, and the vandalism gave it even more publicity. It was all over the art magazines, the culture pages. Dutch tourists were always being interviewed outside the museum. The screen displayed those scurrying scorpions and the young artists dressed in black, some still with blue eyebrows, streaks in their hair, juxtaposed with footage of protests in Syntagma, from the tent city that was there several years before. I couldn’t free myself of the notion that Nefeli had somehow merged into her work. Time was folding in on itself. I took a photo of the screen and then of the installation outside.
That night I dreamt of those blue scorpions, vivid, graphic, scurrying, and I woke up hot, sweat pooling on my lower back, behind my neck. I drank a glass of water and washed my face, ran a cool washcloth over my skin. From the balcony I stared down on the courtyard. The moon was bright. In the distance the low bass beats from a club still sounded, a group of female voices laughed, a woman told a story she found so funny that she gasped to get the words out.
“Are you there,” I asked, to no one.
Back inside, I moved closer to Nefeli’s painting and in the near darkness noticed something blue next to the figure of a woman, on the floor. I stared at it a long time, and its outlines seemed to sharpen. I had never paid attention to it before, but now in the dark I was sure it was a scorpion. In the corner, near the balcony door, my mother slept upright in my reading chair, her glasses resting on her chest.
When I woke up I returned to the painting. The blue was just a splash of color. Nothing more.
When I’d moved into this apartment it had felt nearly blank. I knew I had lived here and I had remembered certain moments: the way the window in the kitchen looked into another person’s kitchen in the next building, the sound of the elevator, the wash of light in the living room in the morning, the violent spin of the washing machine, the echo of voices in the stairwell. But there had been something collapsed about it. The longer I stayed the longer I felt the web of interconnections filling it back with breath: me, my parents, the Captain, Nefeli, Haroula, Rami, Leila, Dimitra, Fady.
When I went down to check my mail—something I did religiously in Chicago but often would forget for days in Athens, as if I were somehow unreachable—I found a letter addressed to the
