Christos Ikonomou - Something Will Happen, You'll See

Or a cracked reinforcing bar, to say it in my language.

• • •

He didn’t die right away. He died on Good Saturday in the intensive care unit of a state-run hospital in Nikaia. Everything inside of him was burnt, the doctors said. The skin had come loose from the bottom of his feet and they looked like shoes with no soles. During those two days they let Yiannis in to see him three or four times and each time he had to put on a mask and gloves and plastic booties over his shoes — a new, warm pair of boots, with solid soles that hadn’t yet been worn down — and each time he stood by the side of the bed he saw Petros’s arm or foot suddenly flail, two or three or four times in a row, and Yiannis’s eyes would fill with tears and to steel his nerves he would repeat words to himself from some old prayers that he had mostly forgotten. But that flailing wasn’t the work of god. It was just the current shaking Petros’s body — that’s how much current was still in his body.

At night to keep himself from falling asleep he did arithmetic on cigarette packs. He divided 24,000 by Petros’s age to see how many volts there had been for each year of his friend’s life. He multiplied Petros’s age by 365 and divided that into 24,000 to figure out the volts per day. Then he calculated the hours and the minutes and the seconds. That’s how he spent his nights.

And when he got tired of numbers he wrote other things.

Caution! Keep away from the patient! He’s a shocker!

What’s black and red and jumps in bed? Petros!

You have a body like an electric eel vai vai vai vai vai dance the tsifteteli.

Hahahahaha, Yiannis wrote on his cigarette packs.

Hahahahaha.

• • •

Do something, he told the doctors. I don’t have money now but I’ll get some. I swear to you, I’ll get some. If you could just save him. We’ve been together since we were kids. You know how it is. You’ve got friends you’ve known since you were kids, don’t you? Please, I’m begging you. Do something.

• • •

He found a thick black marker and kneeled on the rug and wondered what he should write on the cardboard. He wanted to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once. Or maybe it should be some plain, dry slogan, the kind of thing a political party might say about workplace fatalities, about people who die on the job. Or maybe something like the things they write on the gravestones of people who die in vain, or too young. Something about god and the soul and angels and the afterlife.

He wondered if he should write something not about Petros but about Yiannis.

I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.

The other day on TV they were talking about some guy in America or Canada who got fired and two days later went back to the factory with a load of rifles and pistols and mowed down anyone who got in his way then blew his own brains out and on the t-shirt he was wearing those words were written in big black letters, that exact phrase.

I’m filled with an incredible emptiness.

What an insane thing to say.

• • •

In the bathroom he got his hair wet and slicked it back and carefully covered the shiny spot on the top of his head and put on his hat. It was a light hat of soft black leather but when he put it on and looked in the mirror he felt as if he were wearing a helmet.

He went back into the living room and picked the placard up off the rug and looked at the cardboard which still had nothing written on it and twirled the broomstick in his hand and then put the cap back on the marker and set it down on the coffee table and looked at the walls around him and with his free hand grabbed his hat and pulled it down low over his forehead like a man leaving a place forever, never to return, and –

Enough, he said and went out into the street.

• • •

The clouds had grown bigger and were casting long shadows over the city and from up there on the hill the city lay spread before Yiannis’s eyes like a dirty wrinkled blanket. He headed towards Neapoli walking in the street next to the sidewalk with the placard on his shoulder and as he walked he looked at the ashen sky and remembered a documentary he’d seen a while back on TV about some rich English or Irish guy — he never really figured out where the guy was from, it was late and he was dozing on the sofa — who’d had an asteroid or something named after him. They showed the guy saying how proud and happy he was about that, about them giving his name to an asteroid — I like thinking that even when I die, he said, my name will keep orbiting the universe for years, even centuries. And Yiannis walked with the placard on his shoulder looking at the sky and thinking how strange it would be for them to name an asteroid Petros, if instead of that foreign guy it had been Petros, if it were the name Petros that would orbit for whole centuries through the universe, an asteroid, a small lonesome planet.

What’s wrong with you, he said to himself. You know that could never happen.

Who would give a steelworker’s name to a planet or an asteroid or even a meteorite.

Then he remembered what he’d said to the doctors. Please, do something, save him, please. Do something. What a fool he’d made of himself. Instead of grabbing those assholes by the scruffs of their necks and pummeling them, instead of turning the whole place upside down, he’d sat there and cried and pleaded and scribbled on packs of cigarettes. And the jerks had made a fool of him, too. We’re doing everything we can. It’s a challenge for us just to keep your friend alive, they told him. Sure. A real challenge. Then again why would they show you any respect. Money. That was the real issue. Money. They didn’t think you could come up with the cash. If you’d waved it in their faces they would have done something. They would have found some way to save him. You should have given them twenty-four thousand euros. One for each volt. Twenty-four thousand, sure, you don’t even have twenty-four in your pocket. Worthless fool. Lying coward.

It was unfair, though.

He thought how unfair it was that the only words he had found to say to the doctors seemed to have come straight out of some series on TV. Then it occurred to him that now that he’d started to talk the way people talk on TV he might start to think like them too and that thought terrified him, it froze his heart — and then he stood up tall and gripped the broomstick in his hand and walked faster and consoled himself with the thought that no one on any TV series would ever do what he was doing today.

Then again he couldn’t be sure. Because it’s a proven fact that people on TV have great imaginations.

• • •

He walked down Attaleia to Papadiamantis turned right walked past Philippou and when he got to the corner of Papadiamantis and Palamas he stopped. The entrance to the building site was blocked by a chain-link fence. He looked at the wires hanging overhead and wondered which one had killed Petros, which was the wire with the twenty-four thousand volts. Then he stood with his back to the entrance and held the placard in the air with both arms. He stood between sacks of cement and barrels of lime between stacked crates and steel and piles of bricks. Across from him was a row of apartment buildings that stretched from one corner of the street to the other, an unbreachable rampart. He knew that the contractor, Petros’s boss, lived in one of those buildings, and he held his placard up high so it would show. The street was deserted, there wasn’t a soul on any of the balconies. He held the placard high and waited. Someone would come for sure. Someone would notice him, someone from the neighborhood would come down the street and stop and ask him what was going on why he was standing there holding a broomstick with that piece of cardboard on it and Yiannis would explain to him and the other guy would say yes, he’d heard about the man who’d been electrocuted the other day but he didn’t know he had died and he would shake his head and tell Yiannis to take courage what can you do in this life what can you say that’s how life is and the hardest part is for those who are left behind and he would ask how old Yiannis’s friend had been and if he’d had a wife and kids and siblings and if his mother and father were still alive — and in a half-hour at most the whole neighborhood would have heard that a guy with a hat and a sign was standing in front of the building site and people would come out onto their balconies to see and would speculate and gossip, what kind of weirdo is he maybe a thief or a pederast waiting to swipe some kid? Go inside and call the police.