The Names

13

Shutters down, laundry hanging in a dead calm on the terraces and rooftops. There's an aura of formal accord in the stillness that falls over certain cities at fixed times of the day and week. Everyone has agreed to disappear. The city is reduced to surfaces, planes of light and shade. To the lone figure, walking these streets, the silence has the well-plotted force of something commonly willed. It is a strict observance, the wishing of a spell upon things.This is more or less what I was thinking when the argument started. A man and woman in a basement room, shouting at each other. I crossed the street and walked through a fence-gap into the pine woods, where I sat on a bench like an old man musing. The shouting grew intense, voices overlapping. It was the only sound on this weekend afternoon except for taxis down by the Hilton, cornering in early summer pain. Now the balcony doors along the street slowly opened. The woman's voice reached a bitter shriek. The neighbors began to appear on their balconies, looking down toward the sunken windows. The man was in a raucous fury, the woman spoke at runaway speed. Several people were out there, then several more, people in pajamas, in nightdresses, in robes and shorts, children grimacing in the light. All listened to the voices below, listened carefully at first, trying to catch the drift. In their dishevelment they were oddly meticulous figures, attentive, bodies held in equilibrium as they tried to comprehend, to be reasonable and fair. Then a man in striped shorts cried out a command for quiet. A bald old man in blue pajamas cried out the same plaintive word. From all the occupied balconies, voices cried out for quiet, quiet, a brief and powerful surge. In a short time the argument subsided, dropped off to a muttered exchange, and people withdrew to their rooms, fastening the louvered doors behind them.I was happy to be back. There was dinner with Ann, there were five new pages from Tap's nonfiction novel to read. The desk in my office was full of neat stacks of paper that I looked forward to marking up and restacking, and pink and coral roses climbed the full height of a six-story building a few blocks away. But later in the day, when I thought about the walk I'd taken, it wasn't the abandoned streets I recalled, the centuries-old slumber, or the antic look of the undergarments those roused people wore. It was the two voices, that man and woman in plain rage, battling.British Columbia. I knew two things about Victoria. It was "English" and it was "rainy." I had no idea what kind of house they lived in, what the street looked like, how they went about their daily routine. Did he walk to school or ride a bus? Was it a school bus or a city bus? What color was the bus? These things carried a haunting importance. These were the things my own father used to ask me all the time about my own small crossings of the world. His catechism of minims and incidentals. Now I saw what he was getting at. He wanted a detailed picture in which to place the small figure, the lone figure. The only safety is in details. Here we have a certainty or two, the petty facts of time and weather that connect people across a distance. He used to ask me about the lighting in the classroom, the amount of time we took for recess, which children were assigned to close the cloakroom doors, gripping the indentations to slide the panels shut. These were formal questions, addressed to me in clusters. I had to give him names, numbers, colors, whatever I could collect of particular things. These helped him see me as real.I had no usable details of my son's comings and goings, nothing clear, nothing intact. I had trouble seeing them, seeing Kathryn taking walks across the city. In the single year we'd spent on South Hero, in the Champlain Islands, we'd walked through a deep and empty winter, walked through blowing drifts and across the lake's stunned surface (men in fishing shanties after perch and smelt). How she'd loved it, nature at the cutting edge, alert and pure. I could not have known how pure that winter would one day seem to me, bright with detail, as though set aside for future use. We had our landscape of meditation and rough love, working it out, good days and bad. I could see the place clearly, see them in it, down to the weave of their Shetland sweaters. What I needed was a sense of the present, their living days, the things around them. They'd removed themselves from my experience of real places.Who were they when I wasn't there? What were the secrets they were keeping? I knew them in the simplest way, the accumulation, the natural gathering of hours. Is it a personal limitation or a theory of the universe that makes me want to say this is everything? This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them. Certainly this is what I wanted from Kathryn and Tap, the seeping love of small talk and family chat. I wanted them to tell me how they'd spent their day.Ann, that evening, leaned against the balustrade on her terrace, facing in toward the door, where I stood with a drink. It was still light, too early to go to dinner, and she was telling me that Charles had just become involved in a major project in the Gulf. He would be part of a team responsible for the safety system in a gas liquefaction plant on Das Island, due to be operational by the end of the year. He had recited a stream of data over the phone. Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas per day, yearly tonnage of butane, propane, sulphur. He was excited, the Arabs were excited. The Japanese, who had already contracted for most of the processed gas, were also excited. The safety apparatus was an engineering marvel and Charles could hardly wait to get started."When does it happen?”"He's back here day after tomorrow. A week later he flies to Abu Dhabi and pitches up on his island.”"Summer in the Gulf.”"It's a wonderful piece of luck. We're both a little stunned by it. He needs to get immersed in something like this, something brand new.”"Complex systems, endless connections.”"These bring him peace, I think. Peace and rest. He wants to talk to you incidentally. Instructed me to make sure James didn't leave town. Bind and gag him if necessary, he said.”"I look forward to seeing the old bastard. It's been a while.”"We're going to Mycenae while he's here. It's that time again. The goat-bells and wild poppies. He loves to sit on top of the palace ruins after everyone has left. The wind makes a ghostly sound, sweeping between those hills. Mycenae is his place, as Delphi is mine. Blood and steel. This is what he says about it. Massive rocks, blood cries, something old that he claims to recognize but can't seem to define for me.”I reread Tap's pages that night. They were full of small incidents, moments of discovery, things the young hero sees and wonders about. But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. I found these mangled words exhilarating. He'd made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.There's a grizzled old man, a sodbuster he is called in the text, who injures his leg in a drunken fall. The support he uses to get around with is one we've all seen. It includes a crosspiece to fit under the armpit and it is usually made of wood-the wood of a white-barked tree in this case. It is called a burch cruch.This term had a superseding rightness as it appeared on the page. It found the spoken poetry in those words, the rough form lost through usage. His other misrenderings were wilder, freedom-seeking, and seemed to contain curious perceptions about the words themselves, second and deeper meanings, original meanings. It pleased me to believe he was not wholly innocent of these mistakes. I thought he sensed the errors but let them stand, out of exuberance and sly wonder and the inarticulate wish to delight me.

Charles Maitland sat alone in the dark hush of the bar at the Grande Bretagne, a midafternoon lull. He looked up when he saw me enter. A smile broke across his face, some kind of tigerish gleam in his eye."You wily bastard, James. Sit, sit.”"What are you drinking? I want something long and cool.”"Long and cool, is it? What a crafty piece of work.”"What are you talking about?”The bartender wasn't at the bar. I heard him talking to a waiter in a back room somewhere."I always thought George Rowser was a fool. I'm the bloody fool, aren't I?”"Why are you a fool, Charlie?”"Come on, come on.”"I don't know what you're getting at.”"You don't know, you don't know. In a pig's eye, Axton. You bastard, I never even suspected. I never imagined. You were damned good. I don't mind telling you I'm impressed, even a bit envious, you know. It's been a year, has it, since we've been making the rounds together? And you never slipped. You never gave me reason to wonder.”The waiter came out. Charles ordered me a drink and then simply looked at me, examining as if in retrospect, wondering what he might have missed that could have given him a clue. A clue to what? I pressed him to explain."I appreciate your stance," he said. "It's the only professional stance. But the channel's no longer current, is it? You're relaxing with a friend.”"What channel?”"Come on, come on.”He was glowing with admiration and delight, pink with it, shaking a match at the end of his cigarette. I decided to wait him out. I talked about his job in the Gulf, congratulated him, asked for details. When I was halfway through my drink, he approached the subject again, fearful of being deprived of it."Funny how I happened to see the report. I don't keep up the way I used to. I used to read every bloody word in those digests and surveys.”"What did it say exactly?”He smiled. "Only that the Northeast Group, an American firm selling political risk insurance, has maintained a connection with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since its inception. Diplomatic sources et cetera.”I found it necessary to gaze across the room, to do some retrospective thinking of my own. I was aware that I'd narrowed my eyes, looking into the half light, like an illustration of someone studying an object or development. Two men entered speaking French."Of course you were aware in advance of this unraveling. You knew it was blown,”"Rowser knew.”"You learned it from him, did you?”"He's very deft for someone who sweats and twitches," I said. "Where exactly did you see the report?”Smiling, playing the game. "Has it appeared in more than one place? I doubt it. Too soon for that. The Middle East Security Survey. I used to read it all the time. Fallen off in recent years. But I still subscribe. Saw the current issue, as it happens, while I was in the Gulf. Just out. The minister of petroleum's personal copy.”"Is that what he's called-the minister of petroleum?”"The minister of petroleum and mineral resources.”"Nice.”"You were damned good, James. All this time engaged in a back-channel dialogue with CIA. I never thought George Rowser was capable of this. I must tell him someday I misjudged him.”"How was it put?”"The way they usually put things. You know as well as I.Better no doubt. 'Diplomatic sources arriving in London from Baghdad and Amman report that security officials in the Middle East have discovered a link et cetera, et cetera.' What I'm curious to know is whether your firm is a full-fledged proprietary or simply a convenient source of information. Not that I'm asking, you understand. They've exposed only the bare outline. I know there must be much more and it must be absolutely riveting and one day I hope to hear you tell it, James.”"Drink up. We'll have another.”"I haven't told Ann. It isn't likely this kind of special information in a confidential newsletter will filter through to the public at large. Those whose business it is to know will surely know. The rest will go on as they always have. If your past is no longer a total secret, there is still your future to consider. I thought it best to tell no one, not even Ann. No doubt your plans are well advanced by now. You'll need all possible room to maneuver.”What a joke-and no one to share it with. Rowser had taken me to that Moghul tomb to tell me in a roundabout way the same thing I'd just heard from Charles. I'd failed to listen, to understand. In his own way Rowser was intent on doing me a favor. He was resigning because the news was soon to appear and he wanted me to do the same. This is the trouble with dupes. You have to save their skin in the end. Assuming they know there's something they need to be saved from.I refrained from getting drunk. Charles gave me another of his newly respectful looks as we said goodbye outside the hotel. I went back to the office and telexed my resignation. It was not easy to feel righteous about this.Mrs. Helen was at her desk, getting ready to leave for the day. She'd taken to wearing high-necked blouses or silk scarves to conceal the ridges at her throat. I told her what I'd learned. The bluebird scarf around her neck gave this news a faint poignancy. I said I was leaving the firm without delay and suggested it might be a good idea for her to do the same. Someone might soon turn up, an official of the government, a journalist, a man with a quantity of explosives.She said to me, "Pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ.”But the next day I was back in the office, drinking tea and swiveling slowly in my chair. A look at our files now and then. Maybe that's all it involved. Data for the analysts. All those finely tuned calculations of ours, the grids of virgin numbers. It seemed almost innocent, really, as I turned it in my mind. Rowser had let them see our facts and figures- figures we'd gathered openly, by and large. But I couldn't manage to extend the seeming meagerness of the crime to my own blind involvement. Those who engaged knowingly were less guilty than the people who carried out their designs. The unwitting would be left to ponder the consequences, to work out the precise distinctions involved, the edges of culpability and regret. What Rowser received in return for his benefactions I didn't know or care. Maybe he was an agency regular, maybe just an asset or higher type dupe.If America is the world's living myth, then the CIA is America's myth. All the themes are there, in tiers of silence, whole bureaucracies of silence, in conspiracies and doublings and brilliant betrayals. The agency takes on shapes and appearances, embodying whatever we need at a given time to know ourselves or unburden ourselves. It gives a classical tone to our commonly felt emotions. Drinking tea, spinning in the quiet room. I felt a dim ache, a pain that seemed to carry toward the past, disturbing a number of surfaces along the way. This mistake of mine, or whatever it was, this failure to concentrate, to occupy a serious center-it had the effect of justifying everything Kathryn had ever said about me. Every dissatisfaction, mild complaint, bitter grievance. They were all retroactively correct. It was that kind of error, unlimited in connection and extent, shining a second light on anything and everything. In the way I sometimes had of looking at things as she might look at them, I saw myself as the object of her compassion and remnant love. Yes, she'd decided to feel sorry for me, to forgive me for the current lapse if not the others. This cheered me up considerably.Sooner or later I would have to pick up the phone and undertake a delicate exchange with Ann Maitland. I called just before noon, a time she was likely to be home, Charles out walking. But there was no answer. They were in Mycenae, I realized, listening to the wind.In three or four weeks Tap would be out of school. I planned to meet him at my father's house in Ohio, then drive him back to Victoria, a journey of sufficient distance to test his predilection for riding in automobiles. There I would glimpse my wife, spend more time with Tap, decide what to do next. Some kind of higher typing, a return to the freelance life. But where would I live? What place?When the telex began to make its noise, I left the office and went walking in the National Gardens among the plantain lilies and perfect palms.

Two days later I saw Ann at the street market near my building, the Friday market. She was hefting a melon, turning it, poking with her thumb."You have to press right here, at the underside. This man is angry with me. He likes to do the pressing himself. Listen to him mutter. I am touching his tiny plump early-season melon.”She handed him the fruit, which he placed on one of the weighing pans of an antique balance. There was a beggar with a Panasonic, playing loud music. We walked slowly down the middle of the street, between the stalls, the men shouting out prices."I've been wondering something. This is awkward.”"What have you been wondering?”"Andreas. Have you seen him?”"I thought you understood it was over.”"There's something I would like to have explained to him.”"Can't you do it yourself?”"This is silly. I don't know how to get in touch with him. I can't find him in the phone book.”"Do you have a phone book? Lucky fellow.”"I went down to the Hilton. There's a phone book at the Hilton.”"I don't know, James. Maybe the phone isn't in his name. I'm sure I can remember the number if you'd like to have it.”"You're annoyed.”"You want to talk to Andreas. Why shouldn't you? But isn't he in London?”"I was hoping you could tell me where he is.”"I thought you understood.”"People are always saying things are over.”"But they're not to be believed. Is that it?”"Where does he live? Where was he living in Athens when you were seeing him?”"Can't you contact him through his firm? That's the obvious solution. Call London, call Bremen.”"Where was he living?”"Not far from the airport. Terrible place. Two concrete slabs on four concrete stilts. A street that disappears into scrub below Hymettus. In summer it's bleached white. Dust hangs in the air. Two inches of dust on the furniture and floors. I tried once to ask him why he lived there. He went into a Greek male frenzy. Not for me to inquire, plainly.”"It wouldn't matter to Andreas where he lived. I don't think he notices things like that.”"No, I don't think he does. What do you know that you're not telling me?”The peddler of lottery tickets stood at the end of the street, between the flower sellers and the vendors of clay pots, calling the same urgent word over and over. A summons to buy, to act, to live. The risk was small, the price was low. Times wouldn't always be this good.Today, today.I called the number many times over a two-day period. Four of those times I got an old man whose number contained six digits, or one less than I was dialing. It was the right number as far as it went but it didn't go far enough. It needed a nine on the end. The other times there was only line noise, a frozen hum.I didn't want to be the victim of a misunderstanding.I took a taxi to the address Ann had given me. I climbed an exterior staircase to the second floor of the building, looked through the dusty windows. Abandoned. On the first floor a woman with a small child in her arms listened to my fragmentary questions about the man who used to live upstairs. When I was finished, she gave me the classic look, the raised brows, tutting lips. Who knows, who cares?So I sat on my terrace, watching the light change, hearing remotely the ram's horn lament of the day's fourth and final rush hour. I had no plans. I would not be leaving the country for three weeks. I wanted to get up early, run in the woods, study my Greek (now that I had the time), sleep through the empty afternoons, fade into the spaces. I would avoid people, stop drinking, write letters to old friends. These were not plans but only private forms, outlines for a human figure. I would sit and watch.Was it clear to him that any data passed on to the CIA, to their Foreign Assessment Center, to the Iraq or Turkey or Pakistan desk, was not related in any way to affairs in Greece? Did he understand that we were simply based here and did not gather local information? Of course he understood. The questions had to take a different form. Who was he? How far would he go to make his point? What was his point?A silence seemed to fall. I watched a glow appear behind the mountain, a shower of light, brick orange, climbing. Then the topmost arc of the moon showed over the ridge-line. It rose in degrees, fully illuminated, a calculus-driven model of pure ascent. Soon it was free of the mountain's dark mass, beginning to vault toward the west, to silver and glint, a cold object now, away from the earth-blood, the earth-burn, but beautiful, hard, bright.The phone rang twice, then stopped.

She had the kind of fair skin that seemed to admit light, almost to provide a passage for light. Maybe it was her guileless manner that heightened the impression of such open texture-that and her stillness, the way she collected whatever was in the air, gathered objectively, our conversation, our world complaints. I remember how she turned her head once, moving into a patch of sun, her left ear going incandescent, the edge and outer whorls, light penetrating finely, and how I thought this moment was the one that would come back to me when I wanted to think of Lindsay years from now, the haze that rimmed her downy lobe.I told her I'd be seeing Tap soon. We climbed the street named after Plutarch, slowly, bending to the effort. The sky above Lycabettus resembled an island sky today, saturated with color, blue deeps and soundings. This island sense was enhanced by the whitewashed chapel at the top of the hill, the tending presence, not so much surrounded by the sky as adhering to it, belonging to it."Will you be seeing Kathryn too?”"If she's not living in a hole somewhere up the coast.”"Does she write to you?”"Occasionally. Usually in a rush of some kind. The last lines are always scrawled. Even in Tap's letters I don't feel her presence. Shouldn't there be a feeling of her presence behind them? It occurred to me just recently that she doesn't read his letters anymore. In a way his letters told me more about things, essential things, than hers did. We exchanged some sense of ourselves through him. A mysterious sense, an intuition. But I don't feel her presence anymore. It's another connection closed down.”"You don't feel her presence but you still love her.”"I make too much of love. This is because I've never been massively seized by it. It was never an obsessive thing for me, an obsessive tracking of someone or something. You can break clear of obsessions. Or they just dissolve. But this happened slowly. It grew around me. It covered everything, it became everything. I'll tell you what the shock is. To live apart is the shock, the seizure. This is what I register daily and obsessively.”"In novels lately the only real love, the only unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.”We both laughed. We wondered if this was a sign of some modern collapse. Love deflected, love that could not work when it was given to a man or a woman. Things had to work. Only small children and animals in the wild could provide the conditions in which a person's love might find a means to perfect itself, might not be thwarted, dismissed, defeated. Love was turning mystical, we thought."When are you two going to have children?”"We're our own children.”She smiled in the private way she had, the slowly deepening way, amused perhaps to have hit upon a truth. She'd only meant to make a small joke but had found something in the sentence that made her want to think about it."Seriously. You ought to have children.”"We will. We want to.”"When does he get back?”"Tomorrow afternoon.”"Where is he?”"It's written down somewhere. Cities, hotels, airlines, flight numbers, times of arrival and departure.”We walked under the locust trees, fifty yards away from the place where the street becomes stepped, climbing in four or five levels toward the pale crags."This is the conversation we were supposed to have on Rhodes," I said."When he went swimming?”"He left us on the beach. There was a deep pause. We were meant to talk importantly about things.”"I couldn't think of anything. Could you?”"No.”"That was the one day it didn't rain," she said."When we all squeezed together on my balcony, passing David's flask.”"Oh that plummy sunset.”We decided we'd walked far enough. There was a small narrow shop, a grocery store that offered little more than yogurt, butter, pyramid cartons of processed German milk. Two chairs and a small metal table stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us."You ought to make the visit a permanent one," she said. "Stay there, see what happens.”"It rains.”"Not that we don't want you back.”"She purposely chose a rainy place.”"How big the world is. They keep telling us it's getting smaller all the time. But it's not, is it? Whatever we learn about it makes it bigger. Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It's all a complication. It's one big tangled thing." She began to laugh. "Modern communications don't shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm." I didn't know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. "No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.”I sat there and watched her laugh. She wore the same jade dress she'd gone swimming in, that summer night by the sea.

I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it.I never wore the clothes. The shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person, a walker in the woods.The ground cover was starting to pale in the dryness and heat. I listened to myself breathe, finding a narrative cadence in the sound, a commentary on my progress. I had to break stride crossing gulleys and then push and surge to make it up the inclines. These changes in rhythm were part of my unhappiness. I had to duck under the branches of smaller trees.It was 7:00 a.m. I was on one of the higher trails, near the paved road that curves up to the outdoor theater. Two shots sounded down below. I slowed down but kept moving, my arms still crooked at my waist. I thought I would go to the end of the path, ease into a turn, jog back the other way on the same path, walk down to the street and go home for toast and coffee. A third shot sounded. I dropped my hands to my sides, walking along the path now, looking down through the well-spaced pines. Light fell with particular softness, an amber haze in the trees.I saw dust rising at the end of a long draw down near the path that runs above the street. I was waiting for some mechanism to take control, to tell me what to do. A man came out of the scattered dust, scrambling uphill, trying to run right up the middle of the shallow draw, slipping on the rocks and debris washed down into it or dumped there, newspapers, garbage. I backed away, keeping my eyes on him, backed slowly toward a set of steps that led up to a scenic lookout just off the road. I didn't want to take my eyes off him. The moment I turned he would see me, I thought.He had a pistol in his right hand, gripping it not at the stock but around the trigger-guard and barrel, like something he might throw. I crouched at the base of the steps. He came up over the rise, breathing hard, a medium-sized man, barely twenty, in rolled-up jeans and sandals. When he saw me I stood straight up, I shot up, and then went motionless, fists clenched. He looked at me as though he wanted to ask directions. He leaned away from me, distracted, holding the gun out from his hip, arm bent. Then he ran to the right, hurrying through the brush at the edge of the paved road. I could hear the scratching sound his pants made in contact with the spiny foliage. Then I heard him breathing, running downhill, following the road as it dips around to the north and reaches street level.I went to the edge of the slope. There was a clear line of sight between the lowest branches and the floor of the woods. I saw someone move, a figure close to the ground. I felt a ringing pain at my elbow. I must have banged it on something.I went down the slope, moving from tree to tree, using the trees for whatever cover they provided and to check my rate of descent. I wanted to be conscientious. I felt an unspecified sense of duty. There was a right and wrong to all this and it involved the details of actions and perceptions. The tree bark was rough and furrowed, scaly to the touch.It was David Keller. He tried to raise himself to a sitting position. His back was covered with dust, the shirt, the neck and head. Pine needles clung to the shirt. He was breathing heavily. The sound of men breathing, the human noise, men running in the streets.I spoke his name and moved slowly into his field of vision, edging around, careful not to startle him. He was sitting several yards from the path, among a half dozen fairly large stones, and he was using one of them as a hand grip, arranging himself less painfully. A rust fungus spotted the stones. At first I thought it was blood. The blood was spreading over his left shoulder, dripping down on his wrist and thigh."Two of them," he said."I saw one.”"Where were you?”"Running. Up there.”"Are you all right?”"He ran out the other way.”"Did you get a look at him?”"He wore sandals," I said."They waited too long. They wanted me point-blank. They were trying to be disciplined, I think. They held off, they waited. But I saw him, I saw the gun and I fucking ran right at him. I went right at him. Surprised the hell out of both of us. I went as fast as I could. I just went, I was angry, I was in a rage. I just saw the gun and charged. I think he fired once. That was the one that hit me. I was just about on top of him by the time he squeezed it off. Then the other one steps out and fires. I'm all over the first one, his gun is trapped somewhere under us. The other one was up there about fifteen feet, right by those trees. He fires one more. The first one wriggles out and takes off running. He leaped the ditch and went right off that wall. Lost his gun. It's in the ditch, I think.”Telling it made him breathe harder. He kept licking his lips and then took sweat from the back of his hand, putting the hand to his mouth. Blood dripped on the shiny red trunks."How bad is it?”"Stiff, stiff. Hurts like hell. Is someone coming?" I saw several men standing against the wall of the building across the street, looking up at us. Above them, all up and down the street, there were people on the balconies, in robes and pajamas, watching quietly."I've been expecting this," he said. "The only question was which country, how they'd go about it. It could have been worse, boy. Better believe it.”

Lindsay stood in the hospital corridor, watching me approach. She was bright with fear, shining. I was afraid to touch her.

A man came from the Ministry of Public Order. We sat in the kitchen drinking Nescafe. He was a middle-aged man, a chain-smoker whose brisk and commanding manner grew almost entirely out of the management of his cigarettes and lighter. I asked him if anyone had claimed responsibility for the action. This is how we referred to it. It was the action.Yes, phone calls had been made to several newspapers. A group that called itself the Autonomous People's Initiative had claimed responsibility. No one knew who they were. Considering how they'd handled the action, he said, it was yet to be decided whether or not they were to be taken seriously. The weapon found at the scene was a 9mm pistol called a CZ-75, made in Czechoslovakia.He asked me what I'd seen and heard.The next day there was another visitor, a man from the political section of the U.S. embassy. He showed me credentials and asked if I had any scotch. He'd just had a nice visit, he said, with David Keller in the hospital. We went into the living room, where I waited for him to ask about my job, my contacts with local people. Instead he asked about the Mainland Bank. I told him what little I knew. They lent money to Turkey, impressive sums. They had only a representative office in Turkey-no foreign bank had a full-fledged branch-so they approved these loans out of the Athens office. He knew all this, although he didn't say so. He had the look of a once fat child, milk-white, smooth-surfaced, wheezing. He was incomplete without the much-loved bulk, alluding to it every time he moved, a soft-footed man, lowering himself carefully into the chair, carefully crossing his legs.He asked a few questions about my trips to countries in the region. He approached the subject of the Northeast Group several times but never mentioned the name itself, never asked a direct question. I let the vague references go by, volunteered nothing, paused often. He sat with the drink in his hand, having wrapped the bottom of the glass in a paper napkin he'd found in the kitchen. It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way.

But who were they really after?This is it, this is the thing I can't resolve. I'd gone running at the same hour for six straight days. No sign of David at that hour except on the last of these days. Were they waiting for me? Did David precipitate the action by rushing the gunmen before they had a chance to realize this was not the man they wanted? Or did they simply mistake him for me? There would be a curious symmetry to such an error, a symmetry of misidentification, especially if we believe that Andreas Eliades was behind the action or somehow involved in it. It was Andreas who mistook me for David Keller the night we first met. He thought I was the banker. Did his companions think David was the risk analyst? The possibility is haunting, that there is an exact correspondence at the center of all this confusion, this formlessness of motive and plan and execution. A harmony.What is the counter-argument?There was no mix-up. David and I don't look alike, we weren't wearing similar clothes, we hadn't been following similar routines. They wanted the banker. They waited outside his building, saw him come out in running clothes, drove up to the woods and placed themselves at the end of the likeliest path.Which do you believe?I want to believe they plotted well. I don't like thinking I was the intended victim. It puts all of us at the mercy of events. It's one more thing to vex me with its elusiveness, its drift-a fading into distances of human figures and whatever is real and absolute about the light that falls around them. When the gunman turned my way, I was at that instant not only the intended victim but had clearly done something (I tried to remember what) to merit his special attention. But he didn't aim and fire. This is the point. It turned out that he didn't know who I was, what I was supposed to have done. I want to interpret this as a sign in my favor.Did you think you were going to die?A pause filled my chest, a blank fear. We stood looking at each other. I waited for the second self to emerge, the cunning unlearned self, the animal we keep in reserve for such occasions. It would impel me to move in this or that direction, strategically, flooding my body with adrenalin. But there was only this heavy pause. I was fixed to the spot. Helpless, deprived of will. Why was I standing rigid on a wooded hill, fists clenched, facing a man with a gun? The situation pressed me to recall. This was the only thing to penetrate that blank moment-an awareness I could not connect to things. The words would come later. The single word, the final item on the list.American.How do you connect things?Learn their names. After I told the man from the Ministry what I'd seen in the pine woods, I told him everything else I knew, gave him all the names. Eliades, Rowser, Hardeman, all the tenuous connections. I gave him business cards, supplied approximate dates of conversations, names of restaurants, cities, airlines. Let the investigators work up chronologies, trace routes, check the passenger manifests. Their job was public order. Let them muse on the plausibilities.What else?Nothing. I reconstructed events in such a way that I was able to omit a certain name without causing the sequence to appear incomplete. It was Ann Maitland I didn't want them to know about. She was not of a type or mind to disavow this kind of protection, it seemed to me.She and I said nothing directly to each other about the shooting. It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much. We began to look past each other, as if at meadows in the distance. Was Andreas the figure we saw? Our talks became ironic pastorales, slowly paced, with repeated attempts at tenderness.Lindsay spoke only of my coming to David's aid, which put a fine sheen on her tendency to reassure us all.The city went white with sun and dust. Charles would labor in the Gulf, installing radio links, infrared sensors. David would recover without complications, cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner, the cherished manner of people self-conscious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturized by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.

People sit on the steps of the Propylaea as if in a classroom, fifty of them, listening to their guide. The faces are intent, arranged in rows on the marble heights among the common encumbrances and gear, the handbags, cameras, sun hats.Amid the scaffolding above them a workman slips the bit of a power drill into a block of dressed stone. The shank of the drill is a full meter long and produces a noise of rotating abrasions that sings among the columns and walls.The native stone is worn smooth, worn down by treading feet, lustrous and slick. An old box camera stands on a tripod with a black cloth hanging down. It is aimed at the Parthenon.We approach hypnotically, walking on the smooth stones, not watching where we step. The west facade rears before us. It would take a wrenching effort to avert our eyes from it. I'd seen the temple a hundred times from the street, never suspecting it was this big, this scarred, broken, rough. How different from the spotlighted bijou I'd seen from the car that night, coming back from Piraeus, a year ago.The marble seems to drip with honey, the pale autumnal hue produced by iron oxide in the stone. And there are stones lying about, stones everywhere as I cross around to the south colonnade -blocks, slabs, capitals, column drums. The temple is cordoned by ropes but this mingled debris is all over the ground, specked surfaces, rough to the touch, wasting in acid rain.I stop often, listening to people read to each other, listening to the guides speak German, French, Japanese, accented English. This is the peristyle, that is the architrave, those are the triglyphs.A woman pauses to fix her sandal.Beyond the retaining wall the great city spreads, ringed by mountains, heat struck, steeped in calamity. The smoke of small fires hangs on the hills, motionless, fixed there. The breathless rim, cinders falling from the sky. Paralysis. Nothing will disperse but powers of sound, rising from the traffic arcs, the jittery cars locked in concrete. Bombings will become commonplace, car bombings, firebombings of offices and department stores. A blind might will seem to shake things, to course headlong through that entire year. No one claims credit for the worst of the terror.I walk to the east face of the temple, so much space and openness, lost walls, pediments, roof, a grief for what has escaped containment. And this is what I mainly learned up there, that the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel. It wasn't aloof, rational, timeless, pure. I couldn't locate the serenity of the place, the logic and steady sense. It wasn't a relic species of dead Greece but part of the living city below it. This was a surprise. I'd thought it was a separate thing, the sacred height, intact in its Doric order. I hadn't expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the art and mathematics embodied in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice we know as our own.Old people sit among upright fragments along the north facade, old women in white socks and heavy shoes, men with lapel badges, a guard in his gray cap, smoking, carrying with him the official aura, the glaze of vacant hours. The old box camera remains untended on its tripod, the black hood lifted in a breeze. Where is the photographer, the old man in the battered gray jacket with sagging pockets, the man with the sunken face, dirt in his fingernails? I feel I know him or can invent him. It isn't necessary for him to appear, eating pistachio nuts out of a white bag. The camera is enough.People come through the gateway, people in streams and clusters, in mass assemblies. No one seems to be alone. This is a place to enter in crowds, seek company and talk. Everyone is talking. I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.