So Shelly (24 page)

Something simultaneously the product of man’s collective primordial unconscious and of Gordon’s own peculiar lakeside upbringing activated in his soul and reoriented the
gyroscope that had been spun off-kilter in the headiness of the last five days’ romantic reverie. The wave, which had begun its run that afternoon at the beach and had swept him headlong into the middle of a radical insurrection in a nation of no relation to his own, had finally broke. Gordon sat on the bus, dripping wet in the excitement of radicalism, and realized he had to make a choice: clamber out at the next stop, dry off, and return to his insulated American skin, or stay on board with his new comrades and ride the next wave of this nascent revolution.

A tone sounded through the speakers in the ceiling of the bus. The driver announced the stop. A cluster of exiting riders gathered at the middle double doors.

Gordon didn’t move.

Zoe made eye contact with him and flashed a knowing smile.

The bus reentered the bedlam that is Athens’s traffic anti-pattern.

With the reassuring understanding, which he didn’t share with his new friends, that the extent of his involvement would be limited by the length of his summer vacation, he determined that the cause was exciting enough and worthy of his participation, even to the preclusion of his intention to visit the exotic Greek isles and inevitably make the conquest of their women.

For the four weeks he had remaining in his stay, he would commit himself to the Struggle and hopefully bed its dark-eyed Athena of the black spangled bikini.

*    *    *

It was easy for Gordon to bribe Hobhouse to provide the necessary corroborating cover for Ms. Martin and Catherine, and to post an occasional blog entry, and Gordon himself phoned home sporadically to describe the places he had supposedly visited—usually with a Fodor’s travel guide spread open on his lap to provide the text and imagery with which he filled his descriptions. Catherine’s suspicions were once aroused when her credit card statements revealed several large cash advances. In typical fashion, he berated her for the violation of his privacy and threatened to cut her off financially and filially should she continue to interfere in his personal life, and, as usual, she cowered, shriveled, and looked the other way.

By August, Gordon had abandoned Hobhouse and the hotel for a tiny unfurnished two-bedroom apartment above a fish market, an apartment he shared with the ever coming and going members of the Struggle, whose standard mode of serial occupancy was to change residences frequently, take only short-term leases, and always pay ahead in cash. If such arrangements couldn’t be found, in the summer, they slept on beaches or in parks; in winter, they slept in student hostels or metro stations or, occasionally, one of their own family homes.

Gordon learned that Zoe and Rony were legitimate second-generation revolutionaries. However, except for the occasional genuinely oppressed token foot soldier, who seemed more inspired to revolution by the room, board, and hookah that the Struggle provided than by revolutionary zeal, they all were young and from middle- to upper-class backgrounds. Gordon easily identified those of aristocratic
roots by the nurtured, spongy softness beneath their hard manufactured shells. They were tough talkers; he knew the type well. He’d encountered dozens of them at the Rood.

Gordon told Shelly that by then he had figured out that Zoe and Rony had pegged him as one of these disposable idealists who was ripe for manipulation. Their plan (which totally worked, by the way) all along had been to lure him with Zoe’s and anarchy’s sexiness, to seduce him further with the romantic life of Che Guevara, to test his commitment and pull him in deeper with the addictive thrill of deviance (knocking off the grocery), and, finally, like the others, to drain him of his money in support of the cause. But by then, he told Shelly, he didn’t care.

As early as the bus ride to Pireas, Gordon consciously chose to play along. Why not? He had the time. He had the money, spawned from the biannual royalty checks for sales of
Manfred
and
Manfred
-related merchandise. He thought the cause legitimate, and he sincerely relished the role of rebel.

The plan was simple. Once the police wagon cleared the sidewalk and the gate closed behind the wagon, Rony would punch the gas pedal and pull directly into its path. The sudden acceleration would be Gordon’s cue to throw open the side door of their van. Zoe and George were to fire directly into the cab at the driver and the officer riding shotgun. After opening the door, Gordon’s job was to spray the front of the vehicle with gunfire, with the intention of blowing its tires, disabling its engine, and rendering it useless to pursue
its attackers. By the time the police in the rear of the wagon exited, or reinforcements arrived, the Struggle members would have already driven the van to a nearby parking lot, where a stolen Land Rover would be waiting for their ditch and switch. DNA testing and modern forensics made it imperative not to leave any trace of evidence behind; therefore, they would need to change clothes in the Rover and carry their guns with them until they could be safely dismantled and disposed of. They had an email prepared to be sent to various media sources boasting responsibility for the ambush on behalf of the Struggle. It was, obviously, vital to keep their individual identities anonymous.

Gordon later told Shelly that he waited all day for Zoe and Rony to chicken out or simply to change their minds, or for some circumstance to arise and cause an abortion of the mission, but they didn’t and none did. He crouched in that van with his hand on the cool metal of the latch. What at first had seemed romantic had turned real and scary.

To steel himself against his rising anxiety as he waited for his cue, Gordon repeated the mantra, “The future is past. The future is past.” It helped if he put what had yet to happen in the clear and calm of retrospect. It would allow him to perform his scripted role, free from the hesitations of conscience and choice-making. “The future is past. The future is past.…”

As if second-guessing themselves and their role in the ambush, the rear tires of the van spun in the roadside gravel beneath him—like him, searching for the necessary traction.

Gordon says he still doesn’t remember opening the van door. When the tires’ rubber finally bit into the road, the van
lurched suddenly forward and threw him backward with his hand still clutching the latch. The door flew open with or without his conscious intention, and the game was on.

Cliché or not, from that point on, it all happened for Gordon in slow motion.

Almost immediately, the Kalashnikovs in Zoe’s and George’s hands exploded with deafening reverberation inside the van. There was no hesitation in their actions. They moved with the confidence of true believers, the conviction of the converted, the faith of martyrs. Gordon watched them for what couldn’t have been more than a second or two. Each on a knee, waving their weapons in a short oscillating manner. Both of their mouths were wide open. Their lips, left exposed by the holes in their masks, appeared chimpishly pink and fleshy and were stretched wide, baring their teeth and tongues. He watched as they let loose primitive howls unheard among the rat-a-tat-a-tat of their weapons.

Still clinging to the latch with his left hand, Gordon swung his right flank around so that he was firing his gun single-handedly with indiscriminate aim in the direction of the hood and undercarriage of the police wagon.

Just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

With the tires squealing exhilarated shouts of triumphant baptism, Rony sped from the massacre.

“Don’t!” Zoe screamed at Gordon as, Orpheus-like, he stuck his head out of the still open door to look back at the hell they’d left behind. Slinging her strap-on Kalashnikov over her shoulder, she lunged and reached desperately to stop him, but it was too late.

In the fleeting glimpse Gordon stole as the van made a
hard left turn, Gordon saw the police wagon’s front fender biting into the concrete street. He saw water spilling and steam rising from the radiator that his own blasts had ruptured. And having rendered the wagon immobile, he felt the momentary flush of the pride of accomplishment rush through him.

Panning upward, peering through the jagged frame of shards of glass where the windshield of the wagon used to be, Gordon saw the top of the driver’s head with blood-matted hair slumped over the steering wheel, and the inside of the cab splattered with pinkish matter. Scanning to the left, the officer who had been riding shotgun was still strapped in by his shoulder belt but was virtually headless, except for the mushy ruins.

Then, it all went black.

There was light again as the stunned Gordon was shepherded from the van into the Land Rover, where Zoe ripped the stocking cap off over his head and began to strip him of his clothing. She was already free from her disguise. Again, she wore the black bikini top, shorts, and sandals.

“I can do it myself,” he said, coming to his senses.

“You must hurry. Get down behind the seat,” Zoe commanded him.

In the front passenger seat, he saw George crouched on the floor beneath the dashboard. To Gordon’s right, Zoe was crouching.

Gordon discarded his outer layers of clothing, which Zoe gathered and stuffed into her beach bag that already bulged from her own and George’s clothes. In his white tank top and blue and white floral board shorts, Gordon lay across the
backseat, invisible to the outside. From the streets and sidewalks, Rony appeared to be the only one inside the vehicle.

The configuration of their bodies placed Gordon’s glassy eyes in direct line with the steely gray of Zoe’s, but she looked through him, not at him. Gordon’s thoughts wallowed in the horrific events of the just past. Hers remained Lady Macbeth–like, focused on present exigencies and future necessities. Her performance in the previous five minutes had “unsexed” her in Gordon’s eyes. Her behavior hadn’t been so much manly as reptilian, cold-blooded, and cruel. He could no longer remember what he had found so alluring in her. The thought of making love to her became repulsive.

The plan was to dump the vehicle, then scatter and independently make their ways to the beach at Glyfada (where Gordon had first encountered Zoe). There, they’d reunite, stake out a spot, build a fire like many other beachgoers, and spend the remainder of the night burning their clothing and dismantling and dumping their weapons in the ocean.

Gordon never made it to Glyfada, nor did he ever see the others again.

Hobhouse was sound asleep in his room at the InterContinental, butt-naked and napping with arms and legs outstretched like a prone Leonardo da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man
.

“Christ, Hobby. You’ve put on fifteen pounds.”

“Twenty-five,” Hobhouse said, wiping the sleep from his eyes, cobwebs from his brain, and vestiges of cream sauce from his lips. “You don’t look so hot yourself.”

Gordon had lost weight in the nearly four weeks they’d
been apart. His hair had grown unruly, and he hadn’t shaved since the night on which he’d met Zoe and Rony in the café.

“We’ve got to go,” Gordon said.

“Go? Go where?”

“Home.”

“We are home.”

“I mean home, home.” Gordon began to gather articles of Hobhouse’s clothing from the floor and to form a pile on the foot of the bed.

“What? What about—”

“What about nothing,” Gordon said. “We’re going home. I’ve already booked us on a red-eye to Kennedy. Now get your fat ass moving.”

“But …,” Hobhouse began, but abruptly ended his protest. The dream was over.

It was Shelly who received Gordon’s call from New York asking to be picked up at the Detroit Metro Airport, where his connecting flight would be landing that afternoon.

When he emerged from behind the tinted glass of the automatic sliding doors to baggage claim, he was met by Shelly and Claire, who was already five months pregnant but only beginning to show. He shot Shelly a “What the fuck?” look as she came around the rear driver’s side of her father’s Suburban, but she adroitly dodged the shoot-to-kill stare, ran to him, and hugged him, full of appreciation that he had asked her to meet him. Shelly rose onto her tiptoes and threw her arms around his neck, which he’d shaved during his New York layover.

Shelly whispered, “She wanted to come,” as if that explanation would suffice to ease his consternation. Somehow, it did.

“So Shelly,” thought Gordon, “to bring along Claire.” Unlike most people, Shelly didn’t love religiously, in a worshipful and covetous way, demanding exclusivity. She was willing, even eager, to share all whom she loved, believing love not to be a finite pie with only so many slices to go around but infinite and endless manna from the universe. She believed that love generated itself forever anew, and expanded in ever-widening circles unless, as is typically the case, it was impeded by the petty jealousies and the small-mindedness of the majority, who have been brainwashed by parents and churches and governments, competing for their slices of allegiance and affection.

Holding Shelly by the elbows at arm’s length, Gordon looked her up and down and drank in the satisfying taste of the familiar. Her skin, golden brown, as if she’d spent every second of summer vacation out of doors, set off the snow-whiteness of her teeth inside the first genuine smile Gordon had seen in a long time. A smile for which he was sure his return was only partly responsible. She had summer secrets to tell that would explain her rejuvenation from the mysterious gloom of the previous winter and spring. He wanted to hear them, but not until he had unburdened himself of his own sinful summer tales.

Speeding south and then east on Midwestern interstates, and with his own special flair for poetic license, Gordon regaled the girls with stories of his European adventures, at
least right up to the final day. That he’d save for Shelly alone, to barter it for her secrets.

They wanted to hear it all: the book signings, the famous places he’d seen, the people he’d met. He told them of his reenactment of Leander’s swim, the beaches and beauties, the Grecian nightlife, the shrine of Poseidon, the Macri sisters, and he told them of the anarchist friends he had made and with whom he’d stayed for a while in Pireas. Claire was oblivious to the Peloponnesian War, so, much less was she aware or interested in the civil unrest occurring in modern-day Athens. But with Shelly’s years of experience reading Gordon’s body language and decoding the inflections in his voice, she communicated with knowing eyes her understanding that there was more to the story to be shared later.