Lies That Bind Us(7)
“No ‘Rock Lobster’?” I asked, grinning.
“What?”
“The B-52s song,” I said. “‘Rock Lobster.’ Melissa was always singing it, and . . .”
He was still smiling, but his face looked blank. Then his brow furrowed and the smile widened.
“Right!” he exclaimed. “‘Rock Lobster.’ Yeah. I’d totally forgotten that.”
I grinned, pleased by his remembering, feeling once again that shared glow, and wondering how anyone could forget the way she had been. The way we had been.
Well, I thought. We would rebuild it all, down to the last bass riff and ridiculous vocal trill . . .
And as if to complete the memory for me, Simon finished fiddling with the iPhone he had plugged in and gave me an expectant look as he pushed the car system’s volume up. A moment later the familiar anthemic keyboard chords crashed in, the drums filled the gap, and the bass started, Prince’s “1999” rocking.
“Yes!” I said. It was happening. I had made it to Crete, and we would slide not forward in time like the song suggested, but back to that glorious week and all the promise it held. Simon read my look and nodded emphatically along to the music.
“1999!” he yelled.
Pleased, I looked out the window, seeing the increasingly rugged hills and ravines we had not so much as glimpsed on my previous trip. That had been a beach holiday, pure and simple. Days in and by the water, nights in the bar, occasional dancing, constant drinking. We had seen nothing of the surrounding countryside or the ancient Minoan sites for which the long, sprawling island was uniquely famous. In fact we barely left the resort except to eat and return to the airport. Except for the last day.
The cave.
I frowned to myself. The cave had been the exception, an excursion that we hadn’t enjoyed and that made me feel like we should never have left the beach, should never have looked up from our drinks, our toes in the sand at the water’s edge . . .
Five years later that vacation seemed both naive and kind of glorious, a last drunken farewell to our twenties, our youth. What we would do now, up here, bumbling through our thirties and as far from the ocean as Crete physically permitted, I had no idea. I shot Simon a sideways glance, looking for signs of age: crow’s feet by the eyes or a hint of silver at the temples, but I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was just me who felt older.
And as fun as it would be reliving our last visit through drinks on the beach, I had to admit that I was ready for something different this time. Whatever my job had been and would be, working at Great Deal didn’t exactly fulfill all my intellectual needs, and I found myself thinking wistfully about all the things we’d missed last time, and what it would be like to stroll the island’s ancient ruins with Marcus, talking history, mythology. Though I had been a biology major, I had also been an English minor and had considered flipping them at one point. I wasn’t especially interested in the politics that seemed to inform—or infect—everything in the classroom, but I loved story, the shape of it, the inventive audacity of stringing together characters, places, and events to make up something that felt absolutely real but existed only in the head of the writer or their readers. If I’d had any talent or willpower in the matter, I once thought, I would have been a writer: a novelist rather than a poet, though a playwright might be good too. I liked the way stories lined up behind each other like mirrors, reflecting little bits back, sometimes direct and straight on, sometimes distorted and crazy, Joyce growing out of Shakespeare, who grew out of Ovid and all those ancient tales of gods and goddesses, some of them cobbled roughly together a stone’s throw from this very spot.
Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece . . . stories of magic and madness, passion, and divine intervention. Most of it I’d half forgotten till a couple of days ago, when I dug out one of the textbooks that had been sitting untouched on my shelves for at least a year and found the ancient tales waiting, fresh and familiar, ancient but edged with something sharp and urgent. I reread them with a similar urgency, a hunger I could not completely explain.
This was a land of legend, of ancient myth, of story. It was the land of King Minos and the mazelike complex of tunnels beneath his palace known as the labyrinth. Inside the maze lived a terrible monster, half man, half bull—the Minotaur—to whom victims were sacrificed annually, trapped down there in the darkness of the passages where the monster hunted . . . It was great stuff, reeking of danger and heroism and strangeness. For a second I forgot Simon, humming tunelessly next to me, forgot the inevitable partying the reunion would center around, the willful, gloriously frivolous stuff we would laugh about over the next few days, and I felt those ancient stories in the air like incense, sweet and fragrant.
I have left behind my job, I thought, my ordinary, humdrum life in an American city, and I have become Medea, a woman of magic and mystery . . .
Grinning to myself again, I watched the road signs to neighboring villages as we drove. “Georgioupoli,” “Fones,” “Alikampos,” “Kryonerida.” None of them meant anything to me, and as the roads got smaller and the gaps between habitation larger, the settlements themselves shrank till they were mere clusters of ancient houses and an occasional tiny monastery. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The last village we saw was Empresneros, and then nothing, just a slow and winding climb into the pale mountains as I tried to check my e-mail on my phone.