At the same time, one part of my mind was preoccupied with the practicalities, of which there were bound to be many, and of which I knew I was not the correct executor. I would need to tell someone—although not these officers, within the domain of the law I was still his wife and there was something shameful about airing the confused state of our marriage to these strangers, in this moment—that I was in a false position, not exactly an impostor but nonetheless operating under false pretenses. In short, I would need to tell Isabella. About the separation, the true state of affairs between her son and me. And then it would fall to her, the funeral arrangements, the transportation of the body, whatever else needed to be arranged.
The police car pulled into the station, a single-story concrete building, there were dogs outside but they were chained, intimidating animals, it was easy to imagine them lunging and snapping at the end of their leashes. As the car slowed, I saw the officers turn to look at me. I averted my gaze, I felt myself to be playing the part of the grieving widow—a sensation that, had I genuinely been a grieving widow, I never would have felt, there was a small but definite wedge pushing between the person I was and the person I was purporting to be.
One of the officers ran to open the car door for me. I stepped out, the sky was overcast again and I wondered if it would rain. The officers motioned for me to follow them into the station, a building so small that I wondered where they could be keeping the body, whether there was enough room for a morgue. I followed the officers inside, in their extreme politesse they were behaving as if I were an oversized ship being steered into a narrow port, waving their hands like air traffic controllers. They wore a general expression of anxiety and would be relieved when I was no longer their responsibility, when I was finally taken off their hands.
Inside, the station was near empty, there were a couple posters on the wall—I couldn’t decipher their message, they were written in Greek and the images themselves were opaque. The overhead lights blinked irregularly. I was hurried through the waiting area, there were two rows of plastic chairs with seats that had warped over time, all empty, although it couldn’t be that the area was without incident, the fires alone must have generated so many cases (missing persons, unidentified bodies, grieving parties). I was shown into a small office, a man stood up to greet me, although there was not very much in the way of an introduction, he merely rose to his feet and indicated that I should sit down.
I sat down. He also returned to his seat and began flipping through various files, as if he were simultaneously very busy and also a little bored by the situation, in a way it was understandable. He must have had a great many responsibilities, and although the matters that brought the public into his office were necessarily of great individual concern, to him it was just another day’s work, he couldn’t be expected to live his life at a pitch of continual crisis, day after day, it was his job to remain calm, rational, he couldn’t give way to his emotions.
Indeed, the entire atmosphere in the station was overwhelmingly sterile, nothing like what you might expect from watching police procedural shows on television, which are populated with colorful characters and extreme human dramas, there was nothing of the sort on display here. Eventually, the officer looked up at me and asked to see my passport, which luckily I had thought to bring, neither of the two officers had told me to bring identification of any kind. As I handed the passport to the officer I said, I didn’t take his name when we married, I kept my own.
He nodded, perhaps this information wasn’t relevant. He rose and said, holding the passport in one hand, that he would be back in a moment. I sat in the chair, I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket, I was reminded again that I had not called Isabella, that Isabella did not yet know that Christopher was dead. The reality of his death was everywhere around me, here in this room, and yet Isabella knew nothing of it, however material this new reality, it was not yet consistent, not yet pervasive. It had been a little more than an hour since the police had come for me. The officer returned, carrying both my passport and a laptop, which he opened and placed before me.
Here is your passport, he said. I thanked him, he pushed the laptop a couple inches away and sat down on the edge of the desk, he said that he would be showing me a number of photographs on the computer—he waved a hand in the direction of the laptop—from which I would identify the body. I understood this to mean that I would look at photographs of the body before proceeding to the body itself—as though the images were a form of preparation, the way a nurse practitioner swipes your arm with an alcohol swab before an injection, a ritual that only exacerbates your dread.