Apollo, god of the sun, the golden charioteer with his bow . . .
I took another of Chad’s long, steadying breaths and stared out the window at the craggy slopes with their clusters of dust-colored olive trees, ramshackle farm buildings, and bleached, crumbling churches. It was beautiful. I needed to get over my stupid, halting inadequacies and enjoy what I’d come here for.
“You heading straight back to Charlotte after our little get-together?” asked Simon, idly watching as an ancient man in worn and faded clothes, which might once have looked quite formal and must have been insanely hot, shooed his goats to the side of the road.
“I think so,” I said. “I had wondered about going to Turkey, but I have to fly again for work soon, so we’ll see.”
I wasn’t sure why I said it. It just came out. His suave composure, the luxurious car . . . I couldn’t help myself.
“Where to?”
“What?” I asked, already back pedaling.
“Where will you be flying for work?”
“Vegas,” I said. “One of our head offices is there. Not really my kind of place but . . .”
“You have got to be able to have fun in Vegas!” Simon exclaimed. “Something for everyone there, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Gets kind of old after a while, though.”
“I guess it could,” he said. “Where do you usually stay?”
“Oh, various places,” I said airily. “Work takes care of the arrangements.”
“Close to one of the casinos?”
“Always,” I said with a theatrical eye roll, as if nothing could be more tiresome.
“Which one?”
“What? Oh, what’s it called . . . the one with the pyramid.”
“Luxor,” said Simon.
“Right. Of course. Forget my head if it wasn’t attached.”
“The sky beam is something, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, anxious now. “Really is.”
“They say you can see it hundreds of miles away.”
“I bet that’s true,” I said. “So tell me about the place we’re staying here. You made it sound quite mysterious.”
He turned and gave me a look, as if he knew I was changing the subject, but I couldn’t read his face to be sure, so the half smile that hinted at something private might have been about what we were just discussing or what he knew was coming.
“Oh, I don’t want to steal Melissa’s thunder,” he said. “Wait and see.” For a long, taut moment we rode in silence, and then he started fumbling with the radio controls, scrolling through station after station of tinny Europop and sighing. Last time we were here, there had been a beachside DJ at the hotel, a buff local guy in shades and a do-rag who spent his breaks windsurfing and looking cool for the girls. He had thought Melissa was the greatest thing since . . . well, whatever the Greek equivalent of sliced bread was. It was as if she were an icon, a walking, talking model of everything his American surf-suave pose was supposed to be. She was the thing itself. Simon had rolled with it all, used to his wife getting this kind of attention, befriending the guy with a nod and a knowing grin that showed he didn’t feel threatened. From that point on the DJ had been sure to play whatever she asked for, even hunting down the tracks he didn’t have just so he could blare them for her. She had been on an alternative eighties kick, so my memories of Crete had a soundtrack by Depeche Mode, Tears for Fears, and the B-52s.
“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.