White Vespa. Kevin Oderman
that comes from plenty. Benevolence. They were not counting on fish, though Yórgos had promised he’d catch some, so they could have it fresh.
The boat was small but bright, a lipstick red with turquoise detailing. The captain greeted them dourly and started the engine as they stowed their groceries and day packs. The engine sparked to life in a small cloud of blue smoke and began its rhythmic thudding, the deep bass sound of an old inboard. Yórgos untied the boat and scurried to the prow to pull up the small anchor. The boat turned sharply toward the mouth of the harbor and the captain powered up the engine enough to raise a wake. From the water, the town loomed all around them.
Yórgos and the captain looked out, where they were going, but Jim and Myles looked back.
“God this town is theatrical!” Jim exclaimed. “I still ain’t over it. It feels like we’re on stage, like the whole town is looking at us.”
“The town is, the people don’t notice,” Myles said, but he was fiddling with the Nikon on his lap, twisting on a wide-angle lens. “The houses with a view are oriented toward the water, look to us.” He glanced up, then lifted the camera and looked through the viewfinder.
“Surely someone sees us?” Jim said, and he tried waving his hat, but no hat was waved in response.
“Well, maybe, maybe not. But whether they’re looking or not, the real center of Sými town is out here, on the water. No matter where you are when you’re in town, you’re at the edge of things.”
“Eccentric?” Jim asked.
“And aren’t we?” Myles said.
“I think you more than me!”
“Aha. Well, okay, I won’t take offense. But maybe that’s why I like this place so much; everybody’s got to be eccentric, walk around the center of things.”
“Watch it, Myles, you’re starting to sound like one of my kind, a regular explainer.”
They passed the clock tower. Yórgos waved to a friend and shouted something. The water was glassy, an unstill mirror for the morning sky. The only breeze was the artificial breeze of the boat passing through quiet air, the only sound the low thud of the inboard.
“Funny,” Myles said, “but seriously, life feels marginal here. You’re always looking out over water, away.”
“Something like the empty center in those Japanese brush paintings?”
“Maybe, maybe that’s it,” Myles said, not sounding convinced.
“Or in Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, do you know it? He says even great events, the crucifixion for instance, happen, ‘Anyhow in a corner.’”
“Maybe that’s part of it, too. Or maybe the houses just conform to the shape of the land. Maybe it’s economic, money here literally came from the sea. Sponges built these houses, of all things.”
“Maybe,” Jim agreed.
“But it doesn’t matter how or why. It’s just so. The center feels like it’s in the harbor, that we walk around it.”
Jim nodded.
“But the curious thing,” Myles said, “is that we feel the center distinctly. It’s got a sensible pull. I don’t know. I just feel oriented here in a way I don’t most places.”
Myles put his camera away and grinned, shaking his head. He hadn’t taken a single picture. His wide-angle lens wasn’t wide enough. To get much of the town he’d have to wait until they were no longer centered. The staginess of the town seen from the water wasn’t something he could photograph. He thought he’d need a Cirkut camera just to begin.
When they got to the straits between Sými and the bare island of Nímos the captain looked back, hunching his shoulders in a question, pointing first through the narrow straits and then out to sea, along the shore of Nímos. Myles pointed through the slot. The water was peacock blue in the channel, bright green over the submerged shoals on either side, and clear in the shallows. They skirted the rocks, holding close to the shore of Nímos, following it on around and away from Sými. When a small cove came into view Myles pointed at it and the captain ran in close. In the shallows, Yórgos leapt into the water and held the boat while Myles and Jim clambered out with the supplies, their packs, the food, and a small grill. As soon as they had their footing, the boat backed away and headed for Yialós. Yórgos waded ashore last, carrying a small bucket with his hand line and some bait.
While Yórgos fished what he thought the likely places, Jim and Myles picked their way over the rocky outcrops, stopping occasionally to crush the island vegetation in their hands. Spices. It was surprising, very surprising, just how many of the island plants were aromatic. There were spice markets, for tourists, in town, but Myles had assumed the spices were shipped in, like the sponges now, from somewhere else, but perhaps not.
When they got back to the one small tree where they’d left their packs in the shade, they found Yórgos already had started the charcoal for the grill. There where nine little fish in Yórgos’s bucket, three each. Smiling, he said, “Mr. Myles, these are tasty ones.”
Jim pulled a snorkel and mask out of his day pack and offered it to Myles. He had his Swiss Army knife out and was poking around in Yórgos’s bucket.
“I want to be sure these things get cleaned,” Jim said.
Myles laughed. “Okay then, I’ll swim. When’s lunch?”
“Don’t push your luck.”
Myles looked at the charcoal, thinking lunch would be awhile. “I’ll be over there,” he gestured. “Just give a shout.”
Myles found a rock he could dive from; he wanted to get in quick: the water would be cold. He plunged through the surface and it was cold so he swam a few strokes underwater, to be moving while his body got used to it. When he surfaced he spit in the mask, rinsed it, and adjusted the snorkel. Then he put his head down and floated out over the submerged rocks. He was still cold, but his attention was elsewhere. His dive had carried him away from the shallows, and he paddled to where the bottom fell away quickly; he felt suspended between nothing and nothing. The warmer he got the less he moved, until he was just adrift, weightless, hanging over the peacock blue of the deep water.
He felt bemused, as he often did when he swam with a snorkel. Then he realized he was thinking about the new waitress at Two Stories, about Anne, her saying she wanted her picture taken so she could see what she looked like. He doubted he could help her with that; some things we want we don’t get. And how we look is just too mixed up with how we think about ourselves to ever come into clear focus. He glanced up. A needlefish rode just under the surface, a silver streak under the brightness of the surface itself. The surface, he thought, was very like a mirror, had that mercury shine, but unlike a mirror in that you couldn’t see yourself in it. Maybe, he thought, that made it a better mirror: no illusions. Anne, anyway, hadn’t been fooled by her mirror into thinking she knew what she looked like. That said something in her favor.
He swam down, deep, to where the water was cold and his ears hurt, then came up fast, watching the unruffled shine of the surface as it got close, pushing his head, at last, right through it.
He pulled the mask up on his forehead and looked back toward the low profile of Nímos. Squinting against his myopia, he saw Jim materialize out of the rock of the island as he strode up the rise from the other side. Then he was walking down, gesturing to Myles to let him know lunch was ready. He waited while Myles swam ashore, and they walked together back over the rise and down to where Yórgos knelt over the grill, tending the fish.
Sixteen
19 June
Anne stood by the bar. The terrace was quiet, only two tables out there with anybody at them and the folks at those two tables slow drinkers. She counted her tips, passing the piles of coins to the bartender in exchange