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{Editor's note: In keeping with online convention, words that would be italicized in a print medium--names of magazines, works of art, etc., as well as words that are emphasized--appear within asterisks.}



"Jubilee"

By Jack Dann


*The coming of the jubilee is usually sensed by one or another of a few people  who have the gift of seeing the signs in the sea and air. When the signs appear, they go down to the shore and wait. If the feeling has been authentic, flounders and crabs begin to gather in holes in ankle-deep bottom, and eels soon turn up where no eels were before. When the eels come, word quickly spreads inland, and people begin to move down to the beach . . .*
--Archie Carr, "A Celebration of Eden"


I found myself in a dilapidated hotel in Athens's ancient Turkish quarter where prices were inflated, the gawking German and American tourists were fleeced without even an obligatory smile, and the air was so polluted that I was already sniffing and coughing as if I had a cold.

I had been here before with Sandra, who loved this converted nineteenth-century mansion. She loved Athens, loved its noise and food and antiquity, and imagined she could see the ghosts of ancient Greeks like Socrates and Pericles walking the streets as we ate squid and yogurt and oily pastitsio in an outdoor restaurant that overlooked the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis.

Now I was back. I had even requested our old room. But the room was all I had, for now I had no business, no home, no life. My books were in numbered boxes that lined the walls of a storage shed in upstate New York, as if mutely guarding the few pieces of furniture, prints, and cherished objects that I had taken from my old house.

And Sandra was now with someone else. . . .

I unpacked my flight bag, took a shower, and then went out on my little balcony to look at the Saturday night tourists teeming below. The balcony was filthy, layered with dirt, and I wouldn't sit down on the white, sticky plastic chairs; below, the narrow back streets were littered with garbage. I could hear the background hum of the city, sense its jittery buzz, as if Greece was a nervous sleeper and Athens its choking, yearning, flash-flickering dream.

How I hated this garbage-strewn place; and yet here I was, drawn back, as if I could find solace in happy memories, in the twisting, vendor-infested streets; in the tavernas and hotels, or away in the hill country of factories and olive groves, and the cruel upthrusted islands overwhelmed by the sea.

But instead of happy memories, bad thoughts invaded my mind.

I could not help but think of Sandra with her new lover in our bed, and I knew that I had to get out of my room, into open streets, into crowds. I had to keep moving. The plane ride from New York to LA and then to Paris and finally Athens had been its own hell. I could not bear to be alone, yet here I was in this ancient, alien place where I knew only the hotel manager, Aristides, who liked to get drunk with the European and American guests and then make surreptitious passes at their wives.

I smiled as I passed him at the bottom of the stairs.

"*Kalispera,* Mister Blackford," he said, promising to stay past his shift if I would only have an Ouzo with him.

"Perhaps later," I replied, and he grinned, as if he knew everything, as perhaps he did, for he did not ask about Sandra. But just as I was about to step into the hot, crowded street, I turned on impulse and walked back to his little desk.

"Ari," I said in a low voice, "could you find me a woman?"

The manager gave me a sly, condescending look, as if he had forgotten himself, and then said, "This cannot be done, Mister Blackford, not here, this is not that kind of hotel. Did you not see me have to kick that poor woman out of the bar earlier. She wanted a room for two thousand drachmas."

An English family came down the stairs, everyone saying hello to Ari, who smiled at them benevolently and waved to the children.

I felt my face become hot, for surely they had heard Ari talking.

"But you have been a good friend to me," he said before they were even through the doorway. "You have drank into the night with me." Then, in a low, conspiratorial voice, he said, "I will do what I can to help you. I know someone who might know someone. But it will be expensive. . . ."

Suddenly I just wanted to get out of this narrow, dirty, paneled lobby. It was difficult to breathe. The heat and the steamy walls were pressing in on me. I had humiliated myself, and the very idea of being with a woman gave me claustrophobia.

But what was I afraid of?

Being hurt again?

And then I realized that I felt guilty, as if I was cheating on Sandra.

But *she* had cheated on me.

"Perhaps 50,000 drachmas."

I turned toward the glass doors, as if Ari's whisper was a shout, exposing me. I was too embarrassed to look at him directly, but as I left, I saw his reflection in the dark, smeary glass: his merry, pudgy face and thin mustache.

And as I walked down Nikis Avenue, pushing past the tourists looking for dinner or looking in shop windows at reproductions of ancient vases and plates and pots and statues, or looking at fake icons slathered with silver and gold, I noticed that something was amiss: the streets were quiet.

Oh, the tourists were chattering and scuffing and pointing, but the shop owners weren't standing outside their stores, selling their wares; and the maitre d's weren't pushing and corralling the Americans and Germans and Japanese into their courtyards.

What was going on? It wasn't a religious holiday.

As I wandered through the bricked, narrow streets of the Plaka--the Acropolis a well lit, floating mirage on the hill above--I realized how alien this place felt without Sandra. It was like being in a familiar wood on a summer night and wondering why the cicadas were quiet.

And as I edged out of the tourist area, out of the center of the ancient Plaka, Athens became dead quiet.

Which was . . . impossible.

                                   #

After his wife Nedra died, Peter Lindsay began to dream of water deep and green and bright, as if lit from its depths by klieg lights as bright as the noon sun. He had the same dream every night. He did not dream of Nedra, bless her sweet, gentle soul; he did not dream of his past, of his youth, or of missed opportunities; but just as Hemingway's old man dreamed every night of his lions, so did Peter Lindsay dream of the ocean. An ocean that was as alive as the lions, that breathed and sighed and whispered, whispered the answers to all the questions.

The ocean contained all the creatures.

All the creatures. . . .

Although several months passed before he realized it, he had stopped painting. He still awakened at dawn, made coffee, played loud jazz on his ancient stereo, and spent the hours in the studio behind his dilapidated house, working in oils or watercolors; but he worked a little less every day, and slept a little more, until he could smell the tang of the ocean, feel it buoying him, carrying him away from the lurching, frantic darkness of sleep into emerald light. Pulling him.

When he was awake, he felt tired. Drugged.

When he slept, he heard voices like static mixed with the rushing of the sea. And as he grew weaker, dying a little more as he drifted further away, he began to differentiate voices. The sea was sound and speech.

It was white and sharp as pain.

Hospital white.

There he could finally fall back into grief, into life, which was green, glaucous green, and as large and bright and purple shadowed as the creeping, encroaching rainforest. But that was just another dream, like that of the ocean, as large as the ocean: a sea of living foliated green. . . .

                                   #

I didn't venture out of the Plaka, nor did I stop in any of the tavernas or ouzeria. They certainly weren't empty, for I passed a courtyard full of German tourists, who seemed to be having a grand time eating and drinking; and indeed the tourists seemed somehow more real than anything or anyone else around me. Perhaps it was an effect of the light, for they seemed like characters on a stage, clear and defined, while everything else was drowned in shadow.

As I left the German tourists behind, the streets became muffled once again.

I said hello to a passerby, just to hear the sharpness of a voice, even if my own; and I anticipated the delicious, plosive retort of "*kalispera.*" But there was no response, for I was as shadowy and evanescent as the gray-haired fellow who walked silently by me.

When I passed the ruins of the Agora, which had once been the hub of ancient Athens, I realized that I had gotten turned around. All the narrow, winding, crisscrossing streets in the old quarter looked alike. I was surprised to find hundreds of people pressing against a high mesh fence that enclosed the ruins of the Agora, which were barely illuminated by surrounding street lamps. Yet the crowd was unnaturally quiet. It was made up mostly of women dressed in traditional black with shawls pulled over their heads; the men seemed to be kneeling.

They were all praying.

I had, of course, been here before; it was a tourist attraction, a great, fenced-in archaeological garbage heap, with piles of stone scattered everywhere. Here was where Socrates lectured any citizen who would listen, here was where Saint Paul proselytized for a new millennium.

What could these people be looking at?

What could they be praying to?

I made my way to the chain-link fence and shouldered my way between two women, who were fingering their rosaries and praying as if their very lives depended on every word and motion. And I realized that I could hear a thousand beads clicking around me, as if a thousand roulette wheels were spinning.

I stared hard into the Agora.

All the ancient stones were still there--the altars and stoa and piles tagged for restoration--but what had been sandy ground was now covered with a gnarly carpet of grass and vine, its thick tangle was everywhere, and in the dim light it looked so dark as to be purple. Vines were curled around the piles of cut stones, connecting them like sail shrouds, and directly before me, the vines and shoots and what looked like the trunks and limbs of olive trees had taken a definite architectural shape: three columns separated by arches. And in the arches were masses that looked like bells.

A church made of trunk and vine.

                                   #

Peter Lindsay was back home. Had he been gone a day, a week . . . a month? He still felt disoriented, as if he had just awakened in the wrong house; but indeed this was his house, the familiar one-story 1890's Victorian gingerbread nestled between the million-dollar duplexes that had just been built within the last year. He stared out his kitchen window that overlooked the street as if he were alone, while his friend Stephen, who had just brought him home from the hospital, was puttering by the sink, making tea.

How could Nedra be dead? Peter asked himself. It seemed a cruel trick, for nothing else had changed: The neighbor's yard across the street was afire with red and gold flowers; their white cement house, which was as old as his own, reminded him of a mosque; and he thought that he might have been in Tunisia or Morocco instead of Melbourne, Australia. His little street was quiet, but for the occasional car. If he listened, though, he could hear the heavy traffic on Punt Road, the street behind the house, a reminder that he lived near the center of a city of three million people. He had lost part of his back yard 10 years ago when they widened Punt Road to turn it into an avenue, and he had gotten used to the constant background noise: the dull roar of engines, the plashing of tires, and the sudden horns and sirens. He had learned to paint to the new rhythm of traffic; he thought of it as the rushing of blood in his arteries. Not even double glazed windows could keep it out.

But now, as he looked at quiet Affleck Street, with its new extrusions of townhouses, he *felt* Nedra's absence. And every knickknack on the windowsill, every lithograph and woodcut on the kitchen wall, even the old stains on the floor seemed . . . haunted. The room grew thick with the ghosts of the past; and Peter remembered, remembered living in Ithaca, New York, remembered meeting Nedra at an outdoor art show in Atlantic City where he was exhibiting his paintings and graphics. She was tall and blonde and freckled and sunburnt, and she had long fingers and chewed half-moon fingernails. She had bought Peter's woodcut of a fern, a miniature, and he followed her here, to her house, 9,000 miles away from home.

That was 20 years ago.

Peter gazed at the woodcut of the fern on the kitchen wall; Nedra had insisted on hanging it in the kitchen because that was the heart of the house. He stood up and removed it from the wall. But the smooth frame slipped out of his hands, and glass and wood broke on the hardwood floor.

"I'll clean up the glass," Stephen said, gently leading Peter back to the kitchen table and a cup of tea. Stephen was in his early 50s, an accountant with a black beard, high forehead, and frizzy graying hair tied into a ponytail. He was dressed in jeans and a faded workshirt, the same clothes he would wear to his office.

"Leave it," Peter said. "I'll get it later. What you can do is take me for a drive."

Stephen looked surprised. "If you need groceries, I can pick them up while you settle back in."

Peter pulled on his beard--an old habit as obsessive as children twisting their hair when daydreaming. Nedra called it "woolgathering." His beard was white and long and considerably thicker than his hair. "I want to go out to the rainforest." He forced a grin. "The trams won't take me that far."

"You haven't even unpacked your bags. How about I take you tomorrow?"

"You've already taken time off today."

"To get you settled in," Stephen said.

"And I appreciate that, and all the other trouble you've gone to for me."

"It was no trouble," Stephen said emphatically. "I told you, I'm happy to be able to pay back a little for all the time and help and good advice you've given me over the years."

"Well, then take me for a drive."

"Peter, you just got out of the hospital."

"And I'm damned well fucking determined not to go back. So humor me. I miss Nedra so much that I can't catch my breath. I miss her especially now that I'm back . . . home. But I'm not going to curl into a ball; I'm going to paint like never before. That's what she would have wanted. I'm going to paint for her. You just fucking watch me."

"Well, you're certainly sounding like your old self."

"Come on, we'll do male-bonding, and I'll tell you what it was like in the loony bin." Peter was fond of Stephen, who had been buying his paintings for years. Stephen used to say that he had the money, but Peter had the answers. Peter had made good friends in this country; they had all given him what support they could. But Nedra had always been the strong one. Hadn't she consoled him while she fought the cancer that was metastasizing into her kidneys, liver, and lung? Hadn't she finally kicked him and the nurses out of her room so she could get on with the business of dying? "It's a job I've got to do by myself," she had told him.

"You weren't in the loony bin," Stephen insisted. "You were in the respiratory wing because your lung collapsed. You were exhausted, and after what you went through, who wouldn't be?" After a beat, he asked, "Don't you remember?"

"Yes, of course I remember," Peter said. "Now take me for a ride in your expensive Jaguar."

"Why the rainforest?"

"Because I want to paint it. I need to refresh my eyes; I haven't been in the bush for years."

He didn't tell Stephen that he had dreamed of the rainforest after his operation, when he was coming out of the anesthesia. He had also dreamed of the ocean, dreamed of huge floating creatures that were themselves dreaming. . . .

                                   #

*Are you the creature dreaming, as the reef spawns, as the coral discharges its egg and sperm into the watery light of the full moon? The sea is black glass, its calm surface hiding the hot agitation in its depths. Gill-dreams of new life, ancient life, breaking the surface, changing everything; as you wait in the rolling darkness.

Are you the sea or the creature? The alien or the indigene? The answer or the conundrum?

Are you the messiah at the end of time turned serene nightmare or just a great seawall of star-spotted dorsal skin, a highway of lateral ridges and electromagnetic sensory pores? Are you the beast at the end of the world? Even now the sea changes, and reefs grow not by slow accretion but in whole stands. Sea change in the crystal waters of the South Pacific, in the once dead, fished-out Mediterranean now pregnant with skate and shark and ray, now aglow in red and yellow profusions of coral.

From without or within--from the stars or the watery bowels of the earth--do you dream as the great Parisian avenues of Melbourne become canals for gondoliers and Athens turns into Atlantis*?

                                   #

"*Pos i-ste,* Mister Blackford?" Ari asked as I stepped into the lobby, which was empty, as was the adjoining combination bar and breakfast room.

"I'm very well, thank you," I said, impatient to get back to my room. "Ari--"

"No, no, Mister Blackford, it's all taken care of." Ari flung his hands up, and I stepped back reflexively. He laughed at that. "And everything has been done with great discretion."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. I've changed my mind."

"No, it's too late. It's all settled."

"Ari, I'll take care of any embarrassment this might cause you. How much to take care of it?"

He would not look at me directly and stared into his guest record book. "I will not see this person again tonight."

"Doesn't he have a phone?"

He shrugged. "It's not possible."

"All right, Ari. Good night."

But as I turned to leave he said, "I will tell the girl when she comes . . . if I am here. If it's too late, then--" He shrugged.

"Thanks, I'd appreciate that very much."

Perhaps my voice was surly and he thought he'd surely lose his tip of 5,000 drachs at the end of my stay, for he asked, "Would you like some Ouzo? It's on the house."

"Not tonight, Ari, perhaps tomorrow." But before I left him, I asked, "Is today some sort of religious holiday?"

"No, I don't think so. It may be some minor fast day, that I wouldn't know." He grinned at me, as if we were both involved in a conspiracy against the Greek Orthodox Church. Yet he wore a silver crucifix and a saint's medallion around his neck . . . just in case. "Did you find people going to church?"

"No, but I walked down to the Agora--"

"Aha. . . ."

"What's going on there?" I asked.

"Did you look in?"

"Yes," I said, somehow feeling defensive.

"And what did you see when you looked in?" He suddenly looked quite interested.

"It was too dark to make anything out," I said, lying.

He nodded, as if confirming something to himself.

"Well?" I asked.

"It's a miracle. That's what I've been told. But only for us."

"What do you mean?"

"For Christians."

"How do you know *I'm* not a Christian?"

"Because I know you are Jewish." He smiled, but seemed distracted.

"Tell me about this miracle at the Agora?" I asked, probing, but he only shrugged. "Have you been there?"

"I think I will go tonight."

"You must have heard *something* about it," I insisted.

"It's a miracle, that's all I know."

"I didn't see anything about it on the English language channel. Is there anything in the papers?"

Ari shrugged. "It would not be in them or on the television."

"Why not?"

"Because it is a real miracle." He nodded again and said, "I will go tonight."

"Is that why the streets are so quiet?" I was humoring him, yet even as I said it, I realized I wanted to know the answer.

"I will go tonight," Ari said, ignoring my question; and as I climbed the stairs to my room, I could hear the faint clicking and clacking of his worry beads as he dropped the amber stones, one atop the other, down to the knot at the end of their silver thread.

Or perhaps it was a rosary.

                                   #

They drove with the top down because it was after 3:00 p.m. and the UV radiation was in the safe zone, or so said the radio announcer on the FOX station. Peter enjoyed the warm flat feel of sunlight on his face and the wind whipping his long white hair about, enjoyed the hot smell of February's summer, and the clear sharp air that was so transparent he could see the veins in leaves 50 feet away. This was certainly not Italy, or New York State with its heavy, water-vapor atmosphere that blunted the edges of things, that veiled the world. Here was clarity; and Peter inhaled it all as if he had just been given a reprieve from death. This was Nedra's gift to him, even as the poignancy of her loss clotted like thick phlegm in the back of his throat.

He would stay in the moment. For this moment and the next he would not think of what had been lost: he felt 25, and he was going to paint his ass off; he was going to find the colors that were in the inside of things, not just what could be only seen with the eyes. Synesthesia. He had felt the colors before, when he had first started painting, when he had been so swept up in the very act of putting brush and color to canvas that he forgot all analytical skill. Then he could hear a music that was like a differentiated thunder: musical tones of the rainbow. He closed his eyes and imagined that he was flying, flying just feet away from the macadam in Stephen's waxed leather and wood scented XJ40 Daimler Jaguar, swept into a bright cone of greenness ahead; and he could see the colors shifting as if in a kaleidoscope, each shade melding into another like emotion itself: absinthe, green apple, aquamarine, beryl, bice, and bottle green; chrysoidine and chrysolite and chrysoprase, corbeau and cobalt green, green exploding, evaporating, melting like metal into milori and mitis and moss, into peas and patina and terre-verte, into serpentine and shamrock and sea-water fronds reaching toward him, cool and wet and undulating jade, a rainforest of green, choking, inhaling, fertilizing everything, overwhelming everything that was.

And Peter came awake with a jolt and looked around. They had driven out of Central Melbourne on the Maroondah Highway and were now in the northern suburbs, the Dandenongs. Green dreams had dissolved into miles of gray strip malls: chockablock McDonalds, Coles, Hungry Jacks; carparks, department stores, computer stores; industrial parks and auction barns. This could easily be Hempstead, Long Island or Paramus, New Jersey. But Stephen was heavy-footed, and they roared down the highway at around 140 kilometers an hour; other cars seemed to be standing still. Soon they were in the Upper Yarrah Valley, driving past gray-barked gum trees and sheep and cattle grazing in dull yellow fields, and through the bush, a thick canopy of trees shading the road. In the distance were ancient mountains, blue-tinged from air heavy with eucalyptus. Nearer were yellowish hills; small copses of trees stood upon their swells like toy soldiers. Farm country. Bush. Miles without sight of habitation. Green and gold country. God's country.

The road narrowed, turned from two-laned macadam to dirt. Stephen turned off the road. A sign nailed to a tree read TALL TREES, and Stephen parked the green Jag, now gray with dust, on the shoulder. This was temperate rainforest, cool and autumnal; the narrow-boled gum trees rose into the gray light above, and giant ferns shivered in the woody air like shields held by warriors waiting to march into battle.

Peter had not told Stephen of his dreams, or how it had been in the hospital; in fact, neither man had spoken very much during the trip. Each seemed to be isolated, and Peter was certain that Stephen wished himself anywhere else but here in this green and brown nowhere of mountain ash so tall that one had to bend backward to see their tops. Yet Peter didn't care. That thought itself jolted him. Well, he'd make it up to Stephen. He would give him a painting, or perhaps one of the pastels he intended on working on here.

Stephen followed him along the worn path into the forest; they had not gone more than a few hundred feet when they encountered fallen trees and brush over the path. Looking for the right place to sketch, Peter pushed through on his own.

"Is it going to bother you, me hanging around while you paint?" Stephen asked. "I could just as well go back to the car."

"It won't bother me at all," Peter said. "I'll just make some quick sketches, and then we can get out of here." But why would anyone want to leave this place? he asked himself. This was bliss. The place seemed to have a depth of color and space Peter couldn't find in the city; and he started working, his hand moving as if of its own volition, sketching in rough outlines, then the soft, dry smearing of pastel, the cool chalky feel of it on the fingers, clean and sure; and he gazed into the distance, as if the forest were his sketchbook, and he sensed the luminous order of this place in the trees that appeared like the columns of some natural heliotropic temple. But his reverie was broken when Stephen said he was going back to the car.

"What time is it?" Peter asked.

"Well, old son, you've been painting for over two hours." Stephen smiled, as if he was pleased. "I'm going to take a whiz and sit in the air con. It's gotten fucking humid out here. Take your time. My shrink will be more than pleased that I've been forced to just hang out and enjoy nature . . . and take a piss in the forest."

"Okay, I'm done," Peter said, lying. "Give me a minute, and I'll have all this stuff put away."

"No you *won't,*" Stephen insisted. "Do I really have to have company when I pee? Take your time. I really am enjoying it out here. But all this fresh air makes me feel sleepy." Then he gazed out into the forest as if Peter wasn't there. It was as if he was transfixed, or was somehow dreaming with his eyes open.

"Steve, are you okay?" Peter asked.

"I was just thinking about something. I'll see you in a while." And with that he walked away.

"Steve, what were you thinking about?"

Stephen stopped, turned around, and looked past his friend. He blinked, as if he were looking into the sun.

"The trees were just playing tricks on my eyes."

"What kind of tricks?"

But Stephen disappeared, leaving Peter to look into the forest, where Stephen had been staring.

The light changed, as if clouds had passed across the sun. The trees and ferns seemed to form an arbor . . . no, not an arbor, that wasn't it. The trunks and limbs of the trees had taken a definite architectural shape: three columns separated by arches. And in the arches were masses that looked like bells. A church.

Peter looked away, relaxing his eyes, then stared again. But the illusion wouldn't be shaken.

He set his pastel kit and sketchbook on the ground and walked toward the phantom church, looking away from it, then into it, as if to shake away its substance; but the illusion of bells and arches was broken only when he was almost upon the spot. He looked past what had been woody arches and stepping through them, felt warmth. It was as if the atmosphere had suddenly changed, becoming hot and humid. Even the odors were different: pungent, overpowering, as if everything was ripe and rotting, both flesh and vegetable. And as the light shifted, this new place became tangible, palpable, and he knew what had happened. He, or this place, had slipped backward, the past was somehow intermingling with the present, hot with cold, temperate with tropical. The forest was here, too, but this was the lush forest of tropical Queensland a thousand miles to the north. It was so thick that the sun could barely shine through its roof of leaf and branch and grasping fern. The trees were straight-stemmed, narrow-boled, and encrusted with lichens and clusters of brilliant flowers and fruits. The hues and complexities were those of a Breughel painting, dark and deep and mysterious. Peter could smell the damp greenness. The pointed drip-tip leaves were huge, as were the ferns that seemed to be caught in some millennium-long motion, in mid stride across the world; and lianas and epiphytes hung from the high tree limbs, twisted and tangled around branch and stem, winding along the forest floor like snakes, connecting the canopy, pulling the steaming, hot barked fingers into a great fist, growing, growing.

Peter was drenched with sweat.

*Turn around, get out of here*, he told himself, swallowing hard, as if panic could be dissolved in saliva. But where had he come in? There were no arches, no church, no path back to the safety of the familiar. He whispered to himself, a nonsensical droning, a barely audible pleading; and he was electrified with fear, for he imagined that this place was made up of eyes, eyes watching him from every direction, every angle; and then he talked out loud to himself, as he might to a frightened child, that this was a dream, that there was nothing to be afraid of.

But this was not the dream. The dream had been. . . .

Of rainforest, yes, here, this.

But it was ocean, the recurring dream had been of ocean and the great dreaming creatures that would dwarf ships yet resemble them, ships of flesh, with pores for eyes . . . eyes, Dresden blue eyes watching, dreaming.

He heard something move, something snap, but it was his own foot stepping upon dead branch and vine. He froze, as if some ancient, racial memory had taken over, the response of prey, trapped, to become the background, as if what is still cannot be seen. For he could feel the weight of distant vision, not the feral, hot-eyed, mammalian glare. And as he looked at the large leaves hanging before him, leaves tipped crimson and splotched with blue, blue the color of ancient, alien eyes, he saw them, saw them watching him, as if he were looking into mirrors; and the eyes gazed at him from years and infinities away. Peter felt caught; and he could sense the presence of the creatures from his dreams, the smooth behemoths swimming in the black alien depths of the sea; creatures dreaming and swimming, one the same as the other, dreaming him, dreaming him inside green dreams of root and vine and frond, chlorophyll dreams dreamed out of the blue; and he could sense their thoughts, or some part of a vast machinery of thought, so large and so slow as to almost thicken into substance.

But he could not reach into their depths, only dream the surface: green sea turning blue. The ocean, mother mystery, pulling at him with green rainforest fingers, the world slipping back into dreamtime, pulling him back.

Leaf eyes staring, Peter crashed through them, running to hide, to escape, an aging Adam in a malevolent unblinking Eden.

Sick with fear, he fled in the direction he had come: back to the familiar. Yet even as he did, a distant voice, the tinny voice of his consciousness, said, "*You can't go back.*" Tubers caught at his feet, his legs. He pressed himself past the thin-boled trees being strangled by parasite roots, past glistening ferns spotted with crimson and turquoise, as if all pigments had been dreamed into this green reality.

And then he was free.

He stopped, tried to catch his breath, and found himself standing on his pastels, crushing the cylindrical, colored pieces into the soft loamy dirt. The air was dry and cool. Only he was drenched and sweating. He looked for the arching church, and, indeed, when he began to calm down, he could see its natural columns and arches once again. They seemed so much closer in the softer light of the late afternoon.

Welcoming the dreamtime.

                                   #

Although it was a warm night, I closed the windows and the balcony shutters. October was usually a cooler month, the last gasp of the tourist season, but the weather hadn't changed. Who knows, perhaps it wouldn't. Aristides had turned off the air conditioning on September 30 and wouldn't turn it on again if the temperature rose to 100 degrees. I didn't care. It was quiet, the world was shut out, I was safe. I thought of Sandra sleeping with her lover in our bed, but my face didn't get hot and my digestive juices didn't start eating my stomach.

Throughout the last few weeks, I had tried to locate the pain, that region of loss and loneliness, and discovered it was in the pit of my stomach. I felt as if I was constantly hungry, yet the thought of food made me queasy. Although I usually slept with my fist pressed against my chest, as if to prevent the aching and burning from expanding, tonight I lay on my back and stared at the stained ceiling.

I had been happy to move out of the house, to split all our assets, get an amicable divorce, and start life fresh. The children were grown and in college. They were old enough to understand, and I would support them and pay for their education. But the pain didn't start until I found out that Sandra had been having an affair.

For years. For fucking years.

Still, no reaction. No change in my breathing. No constriction. No claustrophobia. I reached for the fraying lamp cord that hung between the bed and night table and pushed the plastic switch. The room was so dark as to appear flat. Perhaps tonight I would sleep. I hadn't slept more than five hours at a time for the last month.

If only I could stop thinking about Sandra, about the past, I could sleep. I thought of the sea, of warm, long curlers on a shelf of virgin white sand. I visualized a place where the sea and sky were one and the same, and realized it was Lefkada, an island where Sandra and I had been happy. But the whisper of the sea soothed me, spoke to me with distinct voices, caressed me, then turned into a roaring crashing pounding and . . .

I woke up, gasping for breath.

Someone was knocking at the door.

I bumped my eyeglasses off the night table as I tried to find the light switch, and then I realized who it must be. No, I wouldn't turn on the light. I would wait until she left. But she was insistent. She would knock, then wait. I imagined I could hear her breathing outside the door, and I thought of swimming, of mermaids, of sea sounds, I remembered my dream of Lefkada; and feeling my way to the door, I let the whore in. For company, out of curiosity, I don't know. Perhaps it was loneliness. She had awakened me from a dream I wished wouldn't end, and I was . . . frightened now to be alone in the clammy darkness.

She was tiny, barely five feet tall, with very long, very thick black hair. She could have been Sandra, and for an instant I caught my breath; but in the dark, at midnight, any woman with a petite build and dark hair would have jagged my imagination. She closed the door behind her, but said nothing, nor did she reach for me in the flat darkness.

As I was reluctant to turn on a light, I said, "*Si-gno-mi,*" and felt my way across the room to the windows. I pulled open the shutters, letting in moonlight and city light, but when I looked down at the street, I saw dark water streaming and rippling between the old office buildings and apartment houses. It was as if the sea had broken through a great dam to fill the dusty, dirty streets of the city with clear fast-flowing water, white water sweeping silently as oil leaking over ancient cobblestones and steps. It wasn't water, of course, simply an effect of light and mist and humidity. Yet I couldn't help but feel that I was looking into reality, into someone else's dream of the future; and as I stood there looking into Athens's watery light, I felt the prostitute's arms slide around my naked waist, felt her flesh press against my back; in that instant, I found a relief from private pain. I felt a new security, a poignant longing for the ocean, for green islands and blue sea, for what might lie in its shimmering depths.

And as we made our clutching way back to the bed, as we tore at each other, as if ecstasy was a pain that could be only momentarily endured, I imagined I could hear the voices of the sea, as if I had lifted a conch shell to my ear.

The voices whispered, and in that instant of gasping pain I felt completely alone.

As if only I could swim.

                                   #

Stephen had taken the Jag.

Perhaps he had gone for help. Perhaps he thought Peter was lost or hurt. Or, perhaps, he had followed Peter into the bush, into the rainforest, and panicked.

Peter waited two hours and then walked out to the main highway, which was choked with cars, as if this was a public holiday. He walked along the road's shoulder until he came to the source of the jam: a head-on collision between a Volvo and a small Russian-made car. Glass had shattered across the road, and the bodies of the cars were twisted one into the other, like shiny, chitinous burrowing beasts. Slowly, cars were making their way around the accident, over the glass-strewn road shoulder. Peter crossed the road and peered inside the Volvo and the Russian car. Although the seats and smashed windshields were stained with blood, the cars were empty. The ambulance must have already come and gone, Peter thought. Surely wreckers would have towed away the cars, and road crews would have swept away the debris. But where were the police?

On either side of the road, the bush looked thicker and darker. Peter remembered walking through the scrim of one reality into another, from bush into deep, tropical rainforest; and although he *knew* it was real, it felt like a dream. Just as he knew that Nedra was dead, that she would not be waiting for him when he returned home. The bush--the thick knot of trees and climbers that deepened into green darkness, into a greener darkness than should have been ordinarily possible--seemed somehow impersonally malevolent.

Peter could feel the bush, the forest, the dreaming weight of it. He hurried, wanting only to escape it, for he imagined that it was staring hard at him, trying to possess him. Perhaps he should have stayed in the hospital.

Perhaps. . . .

No! And he stepped into the road, extending his thumb for a ride, forcing those drivers who would pass him to steer around him.

A woman driving a small, but very new and polished Japanese car picked him up. She was overweight, pretty with a ruddy, freckled complexion and brownish-red hair, which was heavily sprayed; and she looked to be in her late 30s. She seemed nervous. "I usually don't pick up hitchhikers." She brushed her fingers back and forth over the cellular phone handset cradled between the seats as if she was dusting it.

"Well, I haven't hitchhiked since I was a kid," Peter said, trying to calm her. "A friend gave me a ride out here and then left me stranded. I'm a bit worried about him. For a second, when I saw those cars wrapped around each other, I thought it might have been him. But, thank God, it wasn't." Peter waited for her to take the bait and talk about the accident.

"You have an American accent," she said, looking slightly less tense, as if being an American was credential enough.

"Well, I've lived here for 20 years." After a beat, Peter said, "My wife just died."

"I'm sorry," she said distractedly as she stopped and waited to turn onto the macadam road. Traffic was heavy.

"Where are you from?" Peter asked.

She accelerated onto the highway; the little car certainly had zip. "Melbourne."

Peter waited for her to continue, but she drove on in silence, an uncomfortable silence. "I thought that accident back where you picked me up was very odd."

Still no response.

Peter shrugged and leaned away from her, against the window. He would not try to force conversation with her. It was enough that she had given him a ride. Why had she? he asked himself.

"Why do you think the accident was odd?" she asked. She seemed tense again. "An ambulance must have taken the people in the cars to the hospital. They just haven't cleaned up yet."

"I would expect police to be directing traffic," Peter said, "and cordoning the area."

"Police are too busy."

"Doing what?"

She shrugged. "There have been a lot of drownings."

"Drownings?"

"I called my sister while I was tangled up in traffic, waiting for the accident to sort itself out. She lives in St. Kilda, a few blocks from the beach, and she told me that she had never seen so many police around there. Seems people have just been walking into the water and drowning."

"I'll bet it was a shark attack," Peter said. "We've had problems before. And people panic and think they see all sorts of things." He felt a chill even as he said it. How could he tell anyone what *he* had seen?

"No," she insisted. "My sister told me just what I told you."

"But that wouldn't affect the police out here," Peter said.

"Something's going on here, just like in St. Kilda. I tried calling the police emergency number, to make sure the accident back where I picked you up was properly reported and because traffic had completely stopped--and that wasn't exactly a four-lane freeway back there."

"What happened when you called?" Peter asked.

"I couldn't get through. The line was constantly engaged." She rubbed the corner of her mouth with her index finger, correcting her lipstick. Peter suspected it was a nervous habit.

"Did you try again?"

She handed the phone to Peter, who dialed 000.

The line was busy.

                                   #

When I woke up, it was still dark; yet I could see faint grayness through the balcony door windows. I sat up on the side of the bed, completely awake. Jet lag. There was a rustling behind me; and I found myself looking at my reflection in black window glass, for the prostitute had turned on the lamp on the bed table. But I could not see her in the glass. Well, vampires have no reflection, I thought sourly. Yet I did not feel soiled. And as *she* had insisted on using a prophylactic, I thought my chances were quite good that I hadn't been infected.

"I'm sorry I woke you up," I said, not yet turning around. I really didn't know what she looked like: my only glimpse of her was in the dimly lit hallway and when she turned on the bathroom light, which was on the wall outside. For the first few breathless moments I had pretended that she was Sandra, and I felt the edges of a familiar emptiness; but she didn't feel or taste like Sandra, and I discovered that I didn't want Sandra; I just wanted to be blind in the sweat-scented darkness.

"You will tell me that I look like your wife, no?" she asked, coming around the bed to stand in front of me. I was shocked, I must admit, for there was a resemblance. But Sandra, always a girl-child, had become brittle and too polished; this woman would soften and fade with the years. I could see lines around her eyes; she was certainly in her late 30s, and her body was more voluptuous than Sandra's. She turned around and pulled her hair away from her neck. "Zip me up, please."

When I had pulled the loop of thread over a tiny hook that neatly closed the top of her dress, she turned around. "Well, do I look like her?"

"No," I said, easing away from her.

"Ari thought I did." She looked out the balcony into the gray light and smiled. "But many men think I look like women they love. I think there are many women with dark hair and faces like mine."

"How much do I owe you?"

"Whatever you agreed with Ari."

I gave her 50,000 drachmas, which she counted. She smiled and said, "You did not cheat me. Good bye." With that she closed the door.

"Wait." I dashed to the door and opened it.

"Yes?"

"Where are you going?"

"To church."

"May I come with you?" I asked.

She studied me and said, "Yes, but only if you promise not to ask me stupid questions."

"Such as why you're going to church at dawn?"

"Or why such a nice girl would fuck you for money."

                                   #

"Do you need to drive this fast?" Peter asked. They were in the suburbs, driving through the bright afternoon tunnel of strip malls and fast-food chains; and Mary-Ellen--she had finally told him her name--was tailgating and weaving erratically through the traffic.

"I want to make sure my sister's all right."

"But you just talked to her."

"When I tried to call her again, she didn't answer the phone."

"Then what's the rush?" Peter asked. "We can try her again now, and if she doesn't answer, we'll try her again later. She probably just stepped out."

Mary-Ellen rubbed the corner of her mouth.

"Why are you so anxious? Peter asked.

"Just a feeling."

"Feeling?" Peter became uncomfortable. He would have preferred small talk, for he sensed she was going to draw him to her, entangle him. He thought of Stephen. Perhaps it was time to call him; he would certainly be home by now.

"We're very close," Mary-Ellen said. "We're six years apart, but we always know when something's wrong. Would you come with me to check on her? I'll take you to your home right after."

Peter remembered a woman who had picked him up when he was hitchhiking. That was 40 years ago. Once the car was in motion, she had told him that she was afraid to drive alone because something had just gone wrong with the brakes.

"Well?" asked Mary-Ellen. "Will you go with me?"

Peter agreed, then asked to make a call. Stephen wasn't home; neither was Mary-Ellen's sister; and as she drove through Melbourne's streets, between the 1970s reflecting glass monoliths and past the turn-of-the-century iron lacework facades and ever-present gardens, he told her what he had seen in the rainforest. He glanced at her as he talked, but her face was neutral, and he was unable to tell what she thought from her expression. Yet it was easier to talk to this stranger than it would have been to tell Stephen. He could have told Nedra, may she rest in peace; surely he could have told her. She would have believed him.

*Rest in peace. . . .*

So now he could admit that she was dead; her death was penetrating him slowly and deeply, like the bitter cold winter nights in Ithaca, New York. And as he talked, as he remembered what he had seen, as he visualized the rainforest, he imagined that he could look right into its arches, into its green darkness, as if he was looking into dark glass. The faint reflections were the stuff of dreams and thought, the diaphanous shapes of possibility. A thousand epiphanies, a thousand transformations.

                                   #

We walked quickly along the dead labyrinthine streets, for she seemed to be in a hurry. When I asked, she told me that her name was Georgia; I didn't argue, or try to find out her real name. It was still dark, but there was a bit of gray in the sky, prefiguring dawn. All was shadow and emptiness. An occasional car sped by, dangerously fast, taking up most of the street; but the city was asleep; and all these narrow cobbled streets, the walls of windowed flats and storefronts, the paper devils and rusted cans--even the cars--seemed somehow insubstantial, dream projections of the millions of sleepers in the millions of apartments and houses and hotel rooms that formed a hive capped by the Acropolis, which was uncharacteristically dark. The klieg lights must have been turned off at the first glimpse of morning.

When we came to the church, I took a start.

"What is the matter?" she asked, breaking the silence.

"That is the shape of the trees and stones I saw in the Agora." It was a small Byzantine church, square, with a terra-cotta roofed dome on pendentives; in the arches of the pendentives hung three large bells. "Have you been to the Agora?" I asked.

She looked at me quizzically. "I didn't think Americans believed in miracles."

"Do *you*?"

"I believe what I see," and Georgia headed into the church, as if she was afraid to remain outside, or simply impatient. I followed her in, past a woman dressed in black seated behind a high counter; she stared ahead, as if blind. Past the wooden offering box. The interior, from floor to ceiling, was covered with paintings, frescoes, mosaics, and icons. The figures seemed to move in the flickering candlelight; I felt claustrophobic, even though the main room was large and high-ceilinged, for I could feel the weight of the years in this place. A thousand years of art and devotion. The prayers of the dead filled the space like millions of invisible feathers. They were the shadows, the jittery guttering of votive candles, dim reflections on silver and gold. Every wall and ceiling was covered with painted figures: On the upper walls was the celestial hierarchy dominated by a gold haloed Christ--a shadow Pantocrantor waiting for the first strong rays of morning light to proclaim his majesty; the Virgin Mary stood in the eastern apse, half hidden in darkness, as if she were naked and shy; and as I gazed upon her, I knew where the old Greek gods were hiding, for she was Hera, and, perhaps, Aphrodite thinly disguised. I moved from room to room, and the ancient figures in the paintings and gold- and silver-encased icons seemed to shift, to watch me as I passed. I looked at a painting of a saint riding a chariot pulled by sea horses. The water was a flat, faded blue, yet as I looked it deepened, and Saint Poseidon receded, the gold scaling of his halo lightened by gray light streaming in like water from cisterns that were small, high windows. And I could smell the sea; for just that instant it swelled and rippled, as if the painted image had been elevated to hallucination. Details emerged, like figures from a fog, revealing a long shoal descending into the sea. Men and women and children were stepping naked into the water to meet finned angels and cherubim. A Hieronymus Bosch caricature of heaven.

I heard hurried footsteps behind me.

I called to Georgia, looked for her in the main chapel, and caught up with her outside. The courtyard was filling with people. Despite the size of the crowd, no one spoke.

"Why did you leave without telling me?" I asked.

"I'm going home," she said, as if that answered my question.

I reached for her arm, and she clasped my hand, pressing it hard. Then she pulled away, as if in revulsion.

"Come back to the hotel with me."

"Why?"

Because I didn't want to walk through the streets alone. Because I was anxious, uneasy, frightened by shadows . . . and miracles. Because I couldn't face going back to my room alone. Because she looked like Sandra. Because she wasn't. Or perhaps it was just humiliation. I couldn't just fuck a whore; I had to have a relationship with her, turn a trick into more than money.

I could not answer.

We walked along the edge of the Plaka, skirting the commercial section: the upscale fashion and textile stores, carpet and glitzy jewelry shops. The city had suddenly come frantically alive with people. It was as if they appeared with the light, explosions of them; and in the humid, polluted morning--the sun a wavery smear in the east--the world roared and stank. Everything was noise and touch and motion: Car horns blared, children howled and laughed and chased each other while adults spoke at the top of their lungs and drove their cars and motorcycles and motorbikes as if Jesus himself was directing traffic. It was as if everyone needed to get close to everyone else, to breathe each other's flatulent air, to drive in each other's space, to push, shove, and step over and beside each other; and then we were in the market. Smells of cheese and fish and the musty tang of meat.

Athens had awakened from its night stupor.

Vendors shouted to one another in the flea market. Businessmen crowded into the central metro stop. A heavy woman with enormous arms and unkempt hair thumped the hood of a car. A motorcyclist drove along the crowded sidewalk straight at us. The roar of machines and people was transformed into a droning, continuous streamer of sound, an exhalation that promised to end but didn't; and I remembered my mother measuring the length of the cicada's buzzing to predict how hot the day would be.

She led me down a narrow street filled with huckster tables selling kitsch: blue stone evil eyes glued onto the handles of miniature brooms, decaled icons of saints, plastic worry beads. She held my hand tightly, so we would not become separated.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Home. . . ."

The commotion of the street was swallowed, as if we had walked a great distance from the market . . . from the city. I looked down the narrow street into the green and brown darkness of liana, into the leaves and roots and vines and acid-smelling humus of forest. Rainforest. I felt dizzy, for it was like looking down from a height into its thick green canopy. Below this layer of branch and leaf would be tomblike silence punctuated by shafts of light; and the boles of trees distorted and disguised by parasitic tubers would create imaginary rooms and corridors, naves and chapels and altars of humus. I watched people walking down the street ahead of us, tentatively stepping over broken blocks of concrete pushed upward by brush and root and tuber to enter the green shade of forest. I felt warm, as if the trees and shoots and vines ahead were radiating heat . . . and something else: I felt myself yearning for the green shade.

I walked toward the forest, imagining that Georgia was with me; I felt numbed, intoxicated, and I could hear voices whispering. And, impossibly, as I gazed into this welcoming cave of green, I thought of the sea. I moved closer to hear better, for the rushing shushing-ticking-breathing whispers would not quite resolve into words, yet I was certain that's what they were. Green words, cool as the sea, cool as memory; and I heard my wife Sandra speaking to me, as if she were the mother and I was the child; and I remembered the luminous, night-lit green lawns of a resort in the Catskills. I was six or seven and the grass and trees seemed to glow with their own light . . . and extend forever in all directions. I could not remember seeing the klieg lights that surely illuminated the grounds.

Just so did the forest at the end of the street seem to glow, as if lit by memory. There, before me, was safe haven. And I could hear the forest and everything in it. Yet even as the tubers broke through cement before me, cracking like branches in a New England ice storm, even as the forest approached me like a green god aswirl in leaves, trunk-tall as the eucalyptus, so tall that the canopy of pale trees blocked out the sun, even then and there, in the blood warm shadows did I look into the heart of the sea.

For there I saw the creatures dreaming. . . .

Home. . . .

                                   #

*Fish creature, do you wait in the sea dreaming forests? Or do you wait in the forests dreaming the sea? Do you have moments or eons to dream the world, this one or your own, while you float in the seas, large as Dorian islands--Skorpios or Madouri or even tree-carpeted Meganissi? Is this theater or architecture? Are you here or there?

Yes, you dream.

We can hear you and see you and feel you.

But are these your dreams or our own. . . ?*

                                   #

They could not get anywhere near the beach. St. Kilda Road, a grand eight-lane thoroughfare lined with palms, had almost no traffic; yet once they turned west into St. Kilda proper, they found the roads impassable: cars blocked every street, every alleyway. It was as if the Mercedes, Holden Jackaroo Vans, Falcons, Russian Neva Four-by-Fours, and Lasers had been simply abandoned, some with their engines still running.

"I think we should get out of here," Peter said.

"We're almost there," Mary-Ellen insisted. "We can go up and around and take Jackson Street to the beach." She backed the car into a driveway and turned around; but she was boxed in, for a 1967 cherry red, mint-condition Chevy Impala convertible was blocking the road.

"I'll see what I can do to get it moved," Peter said. "Whoever owns the damn thing must've just parked it there this minute." Mary-Ellen nodded her head impatiently, as if she had something more important to think about.

Peter got out of the car and for a beat he stood still, like an animal testing the air for sound or smell. There was not a soul around; the street was quiet, except for the thrumming of Mary-Ellen's car . . . and the empty Chevy, idling loudly in a throaty purr. Peter felt a shiver of fear snake up his back, for something had shifted, just as it had in the rainforest; but it wasn't the eerie quiet or the lack of people on the streets. It was a pervading--and sickening--sense of . . . permanence and immanence. The atmosphere itself seemed to be different, and there was a whiff of ozone in the air, as if prefiguring a storm. The light was hard and brilliant, seemingly reflecting off every surface to hurt the eyes; yet it cast shadows sharp as compass lines; and it was humid, as humid as in the rainforest; and Peter felt as if he was falling. He hadn't felt that since he had first come to Australia to be with Nedra. He remembered how everything had seemed slightly off center in those first few months, and how often he had felt the urge to cry. As he did now. As if everything precious had suddenly been lost to the past, or to this bright and hollow future.

He called out to the owner of the Chevy, but no one answered; there was hardly an echo in the empty street. He waited--the polished hood radiated heat like hot tarmac--then got into the convertible and parked it facing away from Mary-Ellen's car. But in that time, in the few seconds that his back was turned to Mary-Ellen, she had disappeared. Unlike the Chevy's owner, she had turned off the ignition and locked the doors--as if to keep Peter out. Peter shouted her name and ran down the street. He had a clear view ahead, but she was nowhere to be seen. Obviously she had cut across to another street; most likely she knew the area. Peter was certain that she would be heading toward the water. He stopped, out of breath and sweating. He could just go back, take the Chevy and try to drive the fuck out of here, perhaps drive through some invisible scrim back into reality; but just now, in the quiet of the streets, he remembered with the force and clarity of hallucination his days and nights in the hospital. He smelled the sharp limy tang of the ocean again, the ocean that had filled his recurrent dreams. And now that human and mechanical noise was stilled, he could hear the ocean, could hear its whispers as it breathed and sighed; and he remembered dreaming of the creatures.

*The ocean contained all the creatures. . . .*

Once again, here was the dream.

He was standing in it, listening to it; and he felt himself being pulled toward the sea. "Nedra, help me," he whispered, pleading, or praying; and somehow it seemed as if he had suddenly awakened, pushing his way out of the dream; and indeed he must have jolted himself awake, for now he could hear a faint roaring in the distance. Was it a crowd by the beach? Or traffic? Or the sea itself?

He hurried through the silent, empty streets toward the sound. He passed the entrance to Luna Park, a bright yellow cement face with a gaping red-lipped mouth; he passed the Palace Theater and the children's castle with its blue and red and green towers; he walked through terraced neighborhoods of chockablock terra-cotta roofed houses; until he came to a palm-lined esplanade where he could look down to the beach.

It was as crowded as a hot Saturday. People were milling about the narrow shelf of sand like fleas, and Peter imagined that he was watching a pitched battle, for it seemed as if those closest to the water were being pushed into it, their space on the wet sand immediately possessed by the next rank of citizen soldiers. And the crowd was screaming . . . no that's wrong, Peter thought. They're calling out to the sea.

To the creatures in the sea. . . .

And Peter looked beyond the thronging crowds, out to the water, beyond, to the other side of the harbor, across to Port Philip Bay where shipbuilding cranes were silhouetted against a flat, blue, cloudless sky. He looked into the water, scanning it like words on paper. Its inky shoals of dead vegetable matter were purple, bleeding into bands of turquoise and a region of pale blue that could have been mistaken for the sky itself. There he saw the creature, at first mistaking it for an island. He imagined he could hear it, as if it were the sea itself, imagined that what he had thought was the roaring-calling-shouting of the crowd was but an echo of the island creature, a public clarion, a megaphone screaming what everyone yearned to hear.

Destiny revealed.

And Peter, standing away from the massed tumult, away from the eye of the action, away from the crowding thoughts of those below, saw the death and transformation of thousands of ordinary people as peripheral, for he, too, saw and heard the creature.

Saw it through its eyes. Curved expanses of flesh smooth as glass and harder than diamonds; indeed, the creature was transparent, but that was a psychological, not a physiological state. Or perhaps both were the same. Peter saw it as a vague, distant, elliptical shape, but that was overlaid with the image he saw in his mind's eye--the image directed toward him like coherent light by the creature: its grayish-pink gill slits shivered, and its vertical tail moved slowly from side to side, and Peter recognized the creature as the enemy. Sharklike, larger than even a whale shark, the largest creature on earth, it stalked him with infinite patience. It drew him down to the beach, bathing him in the radiance of its musing; and Peter could feel an ancient phylogenic urge to return to the sea, back to the watery womb from which he had been torn.

And so did he walk to the beach, to the crowds, to the sea. He yearned, like the crowds milling around him, to swim and breathe as the creature. The slow, comforting, clock-ticking thoughts of the creature turned the sea and all its dark depths into a bath. The cold water that would cleanse and transform.

The creature's sea thoughts. . . .

The sea. . . .

Rolling, thrusting white fingers into dark, damp sand, repeating, demanding, controlling. . . .

Still Peter found it in himself to resist.

"*No!*" he screamed, as the crowd pushed, carrying him with them to the sea that was thick with spawning krill and boiling with eels and rays and yabbies and coral reef fish that had never been seen in these waters. Peter's shout seemed deafening, even among the rustling of thousands of people, for it was as if speech had been swallowed by the sea, as if everyone was already under water, already swimming, darting forward, swirling around each other to form a roiling mass. Food for the sea. For the fishes in the sea.

He saw the faces of those around him emptied out by the beast that was an island in the sea. He smelled the bloated corpses, which were strewn all over the wet sand and stepped over without notice, as if they were stones or plastic litter. He smelled the sea, thick with organic perfumes, and then he was in it. The crowd pushed him, carried him, crawled over him, stepped on him, in their common rush to get to deep water.

He could gain no purchase on the sandbar.

He choked and gagged and inhaled water.

He would breathe or drown, dream or die, for like the others he was being pulled into the submerged eye of the shark, into the pale blue of dreams, into sky and sea and transformation. And so he dreamed, as if the cold, living water were itself the stuff of dreams, a conduit of thought that connected Peter to the great shark, the mind and motor of the sea.

But it wasn't either or, it wasn't dream or die; it was breathe or drown, but not as the creature and the sea demanded. He breathed, he inhaled, but not the sea. He pushed and kicked himself to the surface and gasped for air. He fought to stay on the surface, and he swam and treaded water and walked out of the sea onto the corpse-strewn beach. He was alone with the dead, but the shark's dream still clung to him like his sodden clothes. He resisted, yet could not quite walk away from the beach. He felt empty, as he had when Nedra died; and as if the creature and the sea held all his yearnings, he could not completely leave it. Neither would he succumb to its lure. So he made his way to the timber pier, as if the Victorian kiosk at its end was some sort of halfway house. Here he would be safe. Here he could watch and try to understand, marooned on this narrow strip that was neither earth nor sea.

Beyond the kiosk was a curving rock breakwater, usually occupied by penguins and sea birds. But not today. Peter leaned over the railing: Thousands of people were now swimming underwater without coming up for air. Some still wore their clothes, but most were naked; and Peter glimpsed the new, raw slashes in their necks--gill slits. Reflexively he felt his own neck, felt the raised spots that ached and burned, but his flesh had not opened, for he had resisted. He watched the swimmers; their legs and feet had already fused together--a grotesque renunciation of earth and air and sky.

Flesh transformed by a thought.

Peter gazed, transfixed, into the water at the finned and gilled men and women and children; he could see the vague shapes of corpses in the shallows below, those who could not or would not be transformed. Their arms waved, as they danced with eels and crabs in the undertow. Below, by the pylons of the pier, a woman rose to the surface, gasping for air, flailing her arms above the water. She looked like Mary-Ellen, but he could not be sure; and then she slid downward into the gray-green water, into the purpling depths.

He could still the creature's thoughts beating against him like curlers on a beach. . . .

"It's been happening like this all day."

Startled, Peter turned to find a balding man in a black suit. He spoke with an American accent, and his shoulders were hunched, as if he found being tall an embarrassment. He wore black thick-framed plastic glasses and had uneven teeth that were so white they might have been caps. His full mustache exaggerated his thin face, which was an expanse of forehead, gaunt cheeks, and a cleft chin.

"You've been here all day?" Peter asked.

"Most of it. They come down to the beach and walk into the sea." The man turned his head slightly, indicating that he meant those who were now swimming. "But they don't stay long." He stepped beside Peter and leaned against the rail. "See?"

Peter looked down. Indeed, the swimmers were gone, as were the corpses. As if they had never been.

"They come in waves. You came in with the last of them. You were the straggler, that's why you didn't find anyone on the streets."

"How did you get here?" Peter asked, suddenly frightened, sensing something deadly and dangerous and close.

The man chuckled. "Same way you did. It's jubilee. Soon *you'll* be down there."

"Who are you?" Peter asked, looking up quickly; but there was no one there.

Had been no one there. . . .

Only the creature swimming toward him, sending its waves to beat upon the beach like tendrils of thought, sending itself like Christ to the man who would not listen.

                                   #

I woke up exhausted in the darkness of my hotel room. I had been having fever dreams; and for an instant, as I hung between the borders of sleep and wakefulness, I was in the rainforest. I could smell its rich vapors--the flowering lianas, the gagging fish-rot of a river that twisted and disappeared, tree mushrooms blooming and decaying, dampness cloying, enveloping, misting my skin until I could not bear my sweat-soaked clothes. I wanted to leave them behind, throw them away . . . as Georgia did.

I bolted fully awake.

Georgia. . . .

I sat up on the bed, shivering in a cold sweat, and pulled off my soaking undershirt. I turned on the light on the night table, but the room seemed to grow huge, and I quickly switched off the lamp. Blazing white afterimages receded to gray, and as my heart slowed, I remembered. . . .

I remembered walking into the green mirage at the end of the narrow street in the Plaka flea market. Georgia walked with me--walked across the broken street that was being crushed, overwhelmed, by root and leaf and fern--walked with me into the rainforest. The dim rooms and rows and phantasms created by the great-boled trees were but manifestations of yearning itself, and so we were drawn, pulled, sucked into the silent, sweating shade, into the soft, life-giving sunlight of immanence radiated by fronds and boles and tubers, by the jeweled insects and scurrying beasts, by vipers slipping through grotto blue river water, by salamanders glittering along the banks. Monkeys hung shining on branches, prey for eagles that were, in turn, like reflected sunlight on the water below them. Clouds of parrots, glowing, flew overhead, tiny stars in a living, moving constellation; and Georgia beside me, sweating and pulling me along, overtaking the others, who moved slowly, as if in a trance. She led me through alleys and streets and avenues created by trees and vines that seemed to reach upward forever, along the leaf-mulched floor of the forest, toward a narrow gap ahead . . . a blue eye unblinking . . . a hole, a tear in the silent living creature that was the rainforest. It grew as we pressed toward it. There were no human tracks here, just those of jaguar, ocelot, and panther; and not a sound could be heard, except for the crunching of twigs and leaves beneath our feet. Even the cicadas were silenced. And I remember that my heart was beating quickly, not from fear but anticipation.

And the eye grew larger, revealing itself as sky, as sea the color of sky, as if one were merely the reflection of the other. There, as rainforest ended--a living, breathing, green wall--we padded along soft sandy beach toward the sea, toward the creatures as large as islands that were waiting, willing, dreaming. Dreaming the forest and the sea, dreaming us.

Georgia let go of my hand and ran ahead toward the sea, toward the creatures. I watched her strip off her dress and fall into the sea, as if into a mirror. I could feel her joy, hear the creatures that were coaxing me to follow. They whispered like thought itself, as if they were the memories of ancient conversations. Georgia did not turn back; overcome with bliss, she left me without a glance, and I . . . I ran back through the forest, which now seemed suddenly dark and dead and dangerous. I ran back to the street, to the crowds milling in the market, back to the hotel, here. . . .

I closed my eyes, trying to clear my head of memories, then got up and walked across the room to the balcony. I threw open the doors, expecting a rush of air and noise. It was quiet, silent, and the air was heavy with musk and perfume, the damp, sweet smells of rainforests, of jungle. The familiar acrid smell of Athens's pollution had disappeared. The city had stopped. Yet below me, in the street, I saw water purling once again over cobblestones and steps, lapping against cement rails, perrons, and brick walls. But this time my eyes weren't being tricked by light and mist and humidity. Water was indeed streaming through the lamp-lit streets. What I had glimpsed from the balcony earlier, as Georgia had closed her arms around me for 50,000 drachmas, had now coalesced into reality.

Were the creatures in the sea dreaming this into being? Was this my own private dream of coursing water and death? Or was it some watery manifestation of Athens's collective yearning? I could only watch and listen, expecting to hear voices in the breeze, in the water below, for, of course, I was dreaming.

I had to be dreaming.

Only in a dream could reality twist and change like this. Only in a dream could I look on, unafraid; and, as if I had given myself the suggestion, I felt a vertiginous longing and emptiness. Georgia, why hadn't I followed you? Why did I turn and run? I clung to a tiny core in myself that rejected the security, the empty warmth, the longing for transformation. I wanted the world back, the world we had made, the failed, imperfect, human world. I thought of Sandra and reached inside myself, searching for familiar pain . . . the pain I had tried to run away from, the pain that could not be undone with a wink and a nod; but it was lost, buried, hidden. Stolen. Sandra was a name, a familiar smell, a recollection; and I knew as I watched the water purling below, that even if I could wake up and find the fear that had saved me from the beast, it would, eventually, draw me back to the sea, to itself.

I listened. Silent Athens. The city lights looked hazy, haloed, blinking like stars obscured by clouds. I needed to see people, needed to hear conversation, for I could not help but feel that everything had just died, that Athens  itself had died, and that I was alone, marooned. No use to pick up the phone as a test and call for Ari. The phone had never worked. And what if I went downstairs? Would the lobby be flooded? How deep the water. . . ? *Wake up!* I struck the desk with my fist, hard, and felt the pain radiate up my arm.

I was awake.

I dressed, went downstairs, and found Ari. He was sitting in the lobby behind his desk, which was perched on a ledge joined to the staircase. He wore an open shirt that looked soiled and wrinkled; he had undoubtedly slept in it. His face was flushed, and his hair was disheveled, revealing his bald spot, usually carefully covered with long strands of pomaded hair. He held a glass, probably Ouzo, in both hands.

"Greetings, Mister Blackford. *Kali-ni-hta.* Would you like a drink? On the house." He smiled hopefully. "Come, we will go into the bar. I have scotch if you do not wish Ouzo. It is only you and me left in the hotel and--" He gestured toward the door, at the water running along the street.

I nodded and walked down the few steps into the lobby foyer. The door was closed, but as it was mostly glass, I had a clear view of the street. The stream, although shallow, was filled with fish sliding under the oily water like shadows. I could see cod, bass, whitebait, mullet, and eels. There were small silvery fish in profusion, swirling, reflecting schools of them swimming below bobbing, plastic bottles and bits of paper.

"The water here is not deep," Ari said, as if the stream seething with fish was a perfectly natural phenomenon. "It has not yet come over the front steps to the hotel. However, in some streets you need a boat. I have seen it. Like Venice, is it not?"

"Like Venice," I said, glad to be following Ari into the combination bar and breakfast room.

"But we have time," Ari insisted. "This is as good a place to be as any. Did you not see the fish swimming in the street? You would not be hungry here. Would you like me to cook you a fish? I would not charge you. After all, it is from God, is it not?"

I declined his offer, and we sat down at a table. Ari brought glasses, a bottle of scotch, and a bottle of Ouzo. "Where are the other guests?"

He laughed sourly, then took a large swallow of Ouzo. It was transparent in his glass, which meant he had not bothered to add the traditional splash of water, which would have turned the liquor cloudy. "They all left to swim with the fish."

"What do you mean?" I asked, although I knew . . . I knew.

"You won't see them here, of course, for the water is so, uh . . . undeep." He looked to me for the correct word.

"Shallow."

"Ah, yes, shallow," Ari said. "Only good for small fishes. But go to Syntagmatos Street. You can stand on higher ground and see everyone under the water. They are now fish, no longer men. Fish. . . . But here it is almost dry. You are safe here, Mister Blackford."

"Why are *you* here, Ari?" I asked.

He sighed. "I am waiting for God to take me. But perhaps he does not want me. I think that is so."

"Why don't you go to your family?"

"You cannot drive anywhere now. The streets that are not underwater are filled with cars, all empty. Or covered with jungle. There is jungle, too, Mister Blackford, here, in Athens. Remember the miracle in the Agora? That you told me you did not see? There was a church there. I, too, couldn't see it, but many did. It's big now. A cathedral." He crossed himself. "I looked, but I couldn't see it."

"What did you see?" I asked.

"Jungle, all the way up the hill to the Acropolis, too. Big trees--and birds and animals and flowers--such as have never been seen in Greece."

"Then you've seen the . . . miracle."

"No, it is not the same, Mister Blackford. For you, I could understand, you're a Jew. So--I mean no disrespect, Mister Blackford--it could be understood why you would not see the church, or the cathedral. But I am a Christian. But a bad one. So, you see. Here we are." He tried to refill my glass, but I stopped him."

"So there are others like us," I said, but it was a question.

Ari shrugged. Probably . . . some. But everyone is in the water or in the jungle. So quickly, no?" He laughed, as if he had just thought of a joke.

I stood up to leave.

"Maybe it will change, Mister Blackford," he said. "Maybe it will go back to the way it was before . . . before God. Maybe everyone will come back."

"Maybe they will."

"Maybe we are here to take care of everything in the meantime." Again he laughed, sourly. Then he said, a touch of desperation in his voice, "Stay here. It's good as any place."

"I'll have a look around. Perhaps I'll come back."

As I stood up to leave, he said, "None of the others came back. . . ."

                                   #

Peter Lindsay retraced his steps, walked back past Luna Park, past the Palace Theater and the pastel painted children's castle, walked down the neatly kept streets of terra-cotta roofed houses, working his way through the seemingly endless traffic jam of empty cars . . . cars that had been parked on the streets and sidewalks and lawns. He walked quickly, and his footsteps echoed like shots, for he was alone here, completely and absolutely alone. It was as if the sea and sky had swallowed everything alive, yet Peter could still feel a presence.

As if the man on the pier were right behind him, stalking him. A ghost.

But Peter sensed a change as he approached St. Kilda Road. The air seemed to clear, to become lighter and dryer, as if humidity and its accompanying whiff of ozone were the messengers of dreams. He saw someone walking, walking ahead, threading his way through parked cars, pausing here and there, as if to decide which one to take. Here was another human being, someone who could walk and breathe and swing his arms. Peter called out to the figure. The man stopped, turned to look at him, then disappeared down another street; and for one terrible instant, Peter imagined that it was the same man he had seen on the pier: another phantasm, a creation of the sea.

But suddenly he heard traffic, the plashing of tires, a distant white noise that made him homesick for his own home just miles from here, homesick for his own familiar things. He wanted to shave and wash his face with his own towel. He wanted to make a cup of tea, listen to the traffic on Punt Road, look at his collection of prints and paintings that covered his walls, assure himself that there still was a familiar world of small comforts.

As he approached the last of the cars left in the road, he saw a green Jaguar convertible. The top was down, the keys in the ignition. He checked the glove compartment, found the registration papers. Thank God it wasn't Stephen's. He'd call when he got home. If he could get home.

Without a qualm, he drove the Jaguar down the empty street, turned onto St. Kilda, and after a few long, palm-lined blocks, found himself in traffic . . . cars stopping at intersections, people dressed in business clothes walking by on sidewalks, business as usual. Nothing had changed here; and he drove west home. Couples jogged along elm-shaded lanes, an old man fed popcorn to the pigeons, high-school students in red and white uniforms played cricket.

Peter parked the car in front of his house and noticed that in his rush to leave with Stephen he had left the mesh metal gate open. He closed it, stood in his yard for a moment, taking in the familiarity of it all: his rose bushes, small compost pile, the trees that he refused to trim or cut down, although they scratched against his roof and windows in the slightest wind. He looked at Nedra's earthen pots of busy lizzie and flowering cherry. He could almost feel her presence here; and he felt the tears come, along with the curious thunder sound that he always heard inside his head when he cried. He remembered hearing that sound when he was a child, and now he was 63 and still hearing it. *Nedra, I miss you so.* I'll call Stephen, he told himself, opening the door, feeling better at being in surroundings he could control; but as he stepped in the house, he felt a profound exhaustion. He would sleep all of this away, as if it had never happened.

But first he would make himself a cup of tea.

                                   #

*You whisper to them, you embrace them. Even as they call your name, you devour them. You draw them down. Into the depths where the stars burn.

Reefs of them.

Dreaming.*

                                   #

I made my way down Nikkis Street through water that was well above my ankles and hoped I could get back to the Agora. The eels and schools of shiny small fish gave me wide berth, but I could feel crayfish being crushed underfoot. It was easy to get lost in this maze of narrow, winding streets, which were already turning into canals. Indeed, Athens was turning into Venice, an empty Venice. There was not another soul on the street, and I imagined that this watery city was a machine, a great neon clockwork automatically ticking away. That it was empty was but a minor detail. The lights in the shops were on. The street lamps were bright. Except for the fish swimming through the dark water that streamed down the street, everything seemed dead. I could not hear the creatures of the sea that had whispered to me in my dreams . . . or their dreams. I was deaf, isolated, as if I were being punished for not following Georgia into the sea.

The water receded as I made my way back to the Agora, which was dry. The streets had been broken by roots. Slabs of concrete had buckled, there were hills of ancient cobblestones, and, of course, the great trees. I could not tell where the high chain-link fence had stood, which had enclosed the ancient temple stones . . . which had enclosed the church I had seen, the mirage formed from the impossibilities of root and vine and leaf. Perhaps the fence still stood, buried in the tangled, humid, woody darkness ahead. Yet street lamps blazed in the humid air, as if the creatures of this new world had left them on so they could see their handiwork. A child walked out of an alley toward the rainforest, which was claiming everything west of Athinas Street. I called to him, ran after him, but he disappeared into the shadow tangle of the Agora like a cherub passing into heaven.

I stopped before the upheavals of stone and cement. I could hear them cracking and breaking, and I could hear the groaning of wood and vine as they reached upward, grasping tendrils, connecting and thickening and melding into every other leafy limb and torso. Giving birth in that connection to the silent beasts and reptiles, to the birds and insects wriggling in the soil and forming clouds in the spore-infected air.

And as I stared into the rainforest, into the darkness, for it looked to me like a well, a pit, I began to make out the outlines of Ari's cathedral, and as I stared at it, so did it seem to gain substance, and the forest began to fluoresce, as if covered with the microscopic phosphorescent organisms that set beaches and water aglow on summer nights, fluoresced into the organic flowing lines of a Gothic cathedral . . . into flying buttresses supporting flowering vaults--living, growing scaffolding--into naves, defined by thin boles and fronds, into spires and pinnacles, towers and gables and galleries and arches, all reaching like a hundred towers integrated into one shifting, knotted structure. Here were Reims and Sainte-Chapelle and St. Maclou combined.

If I entered, I might be lost. But what else was there to do? Wait for God with Ari and drown? Wait for the creatures to speak? Wait for dreams while getting drunk on Ouzo?

But the simple truth was that I wanted to go.

I wanted to feel once again the warm, green security. In fact, I yearned for the intoxicating, numbing bliss, for the whisperings and soft corridors of dream, for secret conversations profoundly sensed and heard in the susurration and ululation of leaf and sea; and I yearned to see Georgia, whom I imagined as a long, lithe mermaid, a naiad transformed, rather than one of Ari's grotesque "fish."

I entered the vined cathedral, walked through naves and chapels and transepts of glowing vines, palms, and dead spinifex. I walked along a dark trail, confined by a great vine forest on either side of me that was like two receding walls; although it was the dark of night, a suffusing glow of trees and fronds extended away from me in all directions. But I was being led along a dead path, a pavement of bones and shells and spongy dirt that was the residue of rot. I heard no voices, no whispers of comfort, and I felt the isolation and despair of the damned. I had turned away from the warmth and succoring light, and now it was being withheld, even now while I walked in the belly of the beast, as I followed the way I had taken with Georgia. Around me, everything had crystallized into silence, and I imagined that if I tapped any of the twisted tree limbs or huge veined fronds that glittered as I passed, I would send a reverberation through this tangled, twisted beast, would set this glacier of forms ashiver. And it would shatter around me, the branches becoming spears of beryl and jade and emerald. But there was no life here as there had been before, no animals padding, no birds or insects made out of light. No sound but my feet crunching upon dead matter.

I came to a river, which was as glassy as winter ice. Mushrooms scattered along its banks looked like frosted jewels or colored baubles. I had seen this river before, with Georgia. We had passed it. Now it glowed like the quiet water in Capri's Blue Grotto, and there led my path. To the creatures in the sea? To Georgia?

I looked for a blue parting in the forest, looked for the sea that would glow even in the night, for the sea that had accepted Georgia; and then, suddenly, I understood. I was still inside the cathedral, which now began to pulse with life, as if needing only recognition. The river was glass, part of the *ars de geometria* that curved overhead; and the translucent trees were but large mullions that separated enormous stained glass windows. As I looked through the forest turned to glass--to ice that radiated heat and light--I could see the blue of sky and sea through the branches and fronds and vines.

And I walked out of the forest into sunlight, into eternal day. Before me was a long shoal descending into a faded blue sea, and ahead were familiar figures, the same ones that I had gazed upon when Georgia had taken me to her church. Here were the images and icons I had seen on the walls come to life: the finned angels standing in the shallows, watching, and the naked supplicants--the men and women and children--waiting on the beach. Here was Georgia--her hair long and wet, her skin pale as porcelain--welcoming me, giving me another chance.

I knew this place. I had been here before.

This was the island of Lefkada, near the fabled palace of the old wanderer Odysseus. I could see the smaller islands of Madouri, Skorpios, and dark Meganisi in the hazy blue distance. But there were also other islands floating like mirages in the clear calm water, islands I had never seen before, islands as smooth as stone . . . or glass.

I called out to Georgia.

I called to her as I walked into the sea that was viscous, heavy as oil.

I called to her as the islands--glass smooth creatures--moved toward me, swallowing oceans and pumping them back through gill slits high as cathedrals.

I called to her. . . .

                                   #

Peter turned on the electric kettle, dropped a tea bag in his mug, and then looked out the kitchen window, expecting to see the neighbor's white cement house, red and gold flowers, cars parked on both sides of the street.

But there was no house, no street.

There was water. Ocean. Perpendicular cliffs and gorges and great waves crashing, attacking, grinding and wearing down rock walls to create huge castles and spires and towers: detached cliffs rising from the sea, from the reefs.

From his kitchen window, Peter looked out at the cliffs and rock stacks and ocean. Looked out at the creature in the sea, a creature larger than any of the rock stacks. A creature transparent as glass. A heat distortion in the water. An aberration of light curving into the smooth shape of a whale shark. Waiting.

The rocks looked purple in the sunset. The red sky filled with twisted braids of yellow clouds; and the ocean was undulating, expanding and contracting, as if it were breathing, as if it contained all the dark depths of space . . . a void without stars, the ultimate darkness.

Peter turned away from the window. The light on the electric kettle blinked on, indicating that the water was hot. He walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, where Stephen had left the suitcases, and into the studio, which smelled of oil and varnish and turpentine and the reassuring sweet musk of memory. He pulled the drawstring of the pleated linen window blinds and prayed for a view of the neighbor's yellow townhouse.

But he found only the sea.