A Dry Bramble Is Most Unyielding
He might have stayed in that apartment for the rest of his short life, except for the fire. Just days after losing her, he found himself outside in the middle of the night looking up at the building as it burned. How had the fire begun? He could not, or would not, remember. The only clue was that he felt no emotion as he swung his pack over his shoulder and turned to walk down the street. There were no sirens, no shouts of alarm.
Before he started university, Arpa’s father took him to Mount Athos, to live with the monks for a summer, in what must have been an attempt to put Lent before Fat Tuesday. But the young man needed no encouragement toward the contemplative life. During his stay, he wrote of his new community in his journal:
The wilderness accepts pilgrims of all kinds. Some are driven there, some are led. Others flee comfort and then preach from the simplicity of the desert, inviting travelers to look into the face of the ascetic, to mine the poverty there for understanding.
At the time, he could not see that there are also those who escape because they can no longer bear to look into another’s eyes, or risk being seen themselves – they seek the simplicity of death without understanding. The arrival of the elder pilgrim Arpaxos into the wilderness (he was of this last category) came at the end of a journey marked by humiliation, and inauspicious signs.
He traveled as far as he could by car, looking for a place to finish out his days away from the madness, grief, and complications of the city. However, as he quickly discovered, trouble just manifested differently in the rural places. When enough doors had been slammed in his face, or swung open to some horror, and when enough guns or other improvised weapons had appeared in windows, he gave up on hope and hospitality. He tried fending for himself, stealing food to survive. But the shame was too much and his skills not enough: in each village, he was marked within a day, might have been killed if he hadn’t kept moving. When it was clear that he’d become a stranger to all, he headed southwest on a single-lane road, resolved to leave it all behind.
A day south of Gytheio, he lay down in the back of an old derelict truck and rested his head on a bundle of canvas. The dome of sky above him resonated with a deepening indigo that seemed to contain within it all the energy of the cosmos, both the light and the dark, together. It was unseasonably warm, and he’d just begun to read by a small lamp, when he became aware of a flash of light from above. A star was glowing extra bright, and green, and moving. He watched with growing unease: he knew what a falling star looked like. This one was too slow, and it wasn’t immediately clear whether it was descending or rising. For more than a minute, it seemed, the thing burned hot, then dimmer, then bright flecks of orange and yellow broke off. The profound discomfort he felt at this moment recalled childhood terrors ... the mountain storm that blasted roof tiles off the family’s summer cabin, and made his mother scream; his sister’s cruel taunt of tearing back his covers and grabbing at him when he was asleep. Even the heavens, the eternal dome, could not be trusted to provide covering, or comfort, in these days.
Soon, he realized that what he was seeing was the end of some great work of humankind. He understood. Space-faring nations, having recently lost the will to project their curiosity, hopes, and hubris into the void, were leaving such works – satellites, and deep-space telescopes, and floating research stations – unsupported. Many had begun to fail, and some were falling to earth. At least that was the story. Arpaxos was not alone in speculating that these things were being brought down, that what had been happening with increasing frequency was the rocket scientist’s version of throwing a brick through a window after an earthquake – belligerent, disconsolate hooliganism, which apparently lurks inside us all. There had been several reports of these ambiguous re-entries in the last year, but this was the first he had seen. He marveled at it, briefly, then felt a little sick. As the trail of light faded, a supersonic crack and rumble punctuated the rending of our delicate planetary veil.
What he could not have known is that those space platforms that remained under the control of caretakers not yet given in to nihilistic vandalism were being turned off. Not neglected, not abandoned to entropy, but powered down on purpose as a potential liability at the boundary of a defenseless planet and it’s shrinking and increasingly vulnerable population. Before we ever had a chance to discover our place in the heavenly neighborhood, we were turning off the lights and drawing the blinds.
Moments like this were the very thing he would have stayed up late to watch with his father when he was a boy. And his father would have spoken some cold and comforting words, explaining how this monumental destruction made sense in the grand scheme of human effort and progress. As a student at the Polytechnic, Arpa would have marked the moment with a poem about how the fiery conclusion of such a venture highlights the pride and folly of men, the poet calling our attention back to the earth, to the plane of our rightful existence, to each other. He would not have shared the poem with his colleagues at university, nor would he have shared it with his father. But he would have found the act of writing comforting in the face of such waste.
Tonight, he just felt incomplete, and he wasn’t sure which he longed for more: the complacent confidence of his father or the romantic arrogance of his youth. Since neither of these perspectives was available to him on this day, and since he had no one to share the experience with, he forced himself to regard the moment as meaningless in the grand scheme, only a fallen leaf signaling autumn and colder days to come. To regard the event as mundane – even pretty – helped him feel less sad.
In the end it was to him one more sign of the failure of the human experiment. He knew there would be no going back to the way it was. Considering his circumstances, he wasn’t sure what he was going toward either. Looking down the dirt track that lead to the next village gave him a familiar feeling of dread; the thought of returning the way he came was worse. When he woke the next day, Arpaxos left the road, and left all comfort behind.
He wanted to go someplace with a guarantee of solitude, and there was no place more lonely to him than the Mani Peninsula. It was on childhood visits here that Arpa had learned about his father’s almost pathological preference for escape and isolation, which Mani satisfied perfectly, even if, in recent years, young entrepreneurs were returning from abroad to renovate (and monetize) the family estates. The occasional medieval castle turned bed-and-breakfast did little to challenge the overall impression that outside the walls, there were few comforts to be had.
Mani remained the most forbidding part of Greece, the great middle finger of the Morea, pointed straight to Hades, complete with a cave at the southern tip understood by the ancients to be an entrance to the underworld. The fiercely independent Maniots were usually the last of the Greeks to bend the knee in the face of any attack or occupation (and even then, it was always with a dagger behind their back). Not only the men deserved credit for this reputation: in response to a sneak attack off the Bay of Messinia, the women of Mani were said to have fought off the Ottomans with garden tools, while the men were engaged elsewhere. In subsequent times of ‘peace’, quarreling families shot at one another between towers in the villages one day, and packed into one of a thousand tiny churches on the next. The fire-lit feudalism – and weird juxtapositions – of the Middle Ages lasted well-into the modern era in this place. If the last of us are doomed to die alone, Arpa thought, I want to be somewhere already acquainted with loneliness and desperation, a place that will not take offense at my own.
But before he would find his way to the sun-bleached, wind-sharpened wastes of the Deep Mani, he had to cross the mountains that ran along the peninsula, from Taygetos in the north, where a morbid legend said that ancient Spartans climbed to abandon their weak, and Sangias in the south, where he figured someone such as himself might have a better chance of survival. To avoid the highways, he’d have to travel south along the east coast, and spend most of a day walking in roadless places while looking for a passage to the west. At least, he noted as he crossed this last barrier, he wouldn’t be alone – the hills were home to a sizable population of goats, who wandered among the pale green vegetation covering much of the east- and south-facing slopes. Arpaxos was hopeful that he’d be able to sleep in the shade of the bushes and pick his way through the scrub when it wasn’t so hot. He remembered too late that goats devour pretty much whatever is in front of them, and if you are traveling among bushes of the kind that goats refuse to eat, then maybe you don’t want anything to do with these bushes either. When he stumbled out of the mountains three days after his escape from Gytheio, he looked as though he had been whipped with barbed wire, and his will was nearly broken. Terrible thorns had been his shelter, and he shared refuge in the heat of the day with great yellow spiders and the sound of hidden cicadas, whose rasping call was like being subjected to electro-shock therapy for hours at a time, only without the benefit of relief from emotional distress.
When he finally left the mountain behind, he took shelter in the courtyard of the church Agnosto Onoma, which in the late afternoon hid in the shade of one of the region’s many towers – this one had it’s black-clad watch-woman, who eyed him with honed suspicion from a seat in a high window. She lifted a hand in greeting; the other hand stayed on a shotgun in her lap. Looking up at her, Arpa honestly wondered if she had any idea what was happening outside of her fortress; she gave the impression that she had not approved of external events for decades and might have greeted news of the apocalypse with a dismissive shrug. He made what he imagined would be his last attempt at a friendly greeting, simply so that he could rest for a few minutes without fearing for his life.
Sitting in the empty square, where the dirty plastered walls were slowly being decomposed by the roots of old pine trees, he gritted his teeth against the wind. Arpaxos hated the sound of wind blowing through pines. As a boy, he’d spent his summers in Filothei, where plane trees gently swayed in the warm Athenian breeze, their leaves filtering the blazing sunlight like delicate green shadow dancers. Pines were nothing like that. Pine needles didn’t dance: they were fixed in their contempt for the wind, or maybe out of spite for their more liberal cousins. When the wind passed through pines, it was like a vital spirit passing through the fingers of a creature long-dead, fingers that could not embrace the living any more. Or would not.
Arpa squirmed in the corner of the square, his own spirit unsuited to the challenge of the journey, yet the hard wind drove him ever southward. And his encounter with the pines of Mani was a cold brush with ancient shades, whose ghostly needles dragged against his insides, mocking his belief that he himself was still solid.
