Greek Revival: Chapter 2

II.

The second time Ari saw the guy, it was almost a month later, and they were lingering at the back of the crowd in the park, pulling their collar up against the wind and humming the words to a song they only half-knew.

As it had been the last time they’d seen him, the day was unusually cold. It was Juneteenth, and they’d come late to the celebration in the park because they’d had to dig through their closet to find their favorite jacket (long, grey, waterproof, full of pockets) to protect against the weather. Although it had been bright and sunny that morning, the atmosphere had cooled over a dozen degrees throughout the course of the day and, by the time the Juneteenth event came around in the evening, the wind had picked up and the temperature began with a five instead of the usual seven or eight. Although they’d only been a few minutes late, the event had started right on time, and as Ari had approached the park, a man with a penetrating baritone voice was singing the last few notes of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ They went around the park the long way until the sidewalk deposited them just inside the fence, at the back of the crowd so they wouldn’t disturb anybody’s view.

They listened to the Poole town historian retell the lives of a formerly enslaved family who escaped to Poole and started a successful tannery and to the owner of the local rec center as he read his favorite poem. They watched the owners of the grocery store up the street struggle against the wind to set up a tent and a few hundred plates of red velvet cake.

As the crowd was singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ the final song of the ceremony, Ari saw someone striding across the park, making a beeline for the cake tent despite the fact that the song hadn’t ended yet. The tent was halfway between him and them, and as he reached for a piece of red velvet cake, Ari saw his sunglasses flash, saw the largeness and squareness of his hands as they wrapped around the paper plate and the plastic fork.

His outfit was worse this time. The last had been ill-fitting and overwhelmingly brown, but at least it had been cohesive. But today he was wearing a bright royal blue sweatshirt with no logos or markings that Ari could make out, not even that of the athletic company that must have made it. His white linen shorts were a little too short for him, not enough to be inappropriate but certainly enough to be suggestive. A bright teal cigarette box – Panda cigarettes, Ari knew now – poked out of one of his pockets. He wore scuffed brown loafers with tall socks that almost reached his knees, printed with pine trees that encircled the cuffs. He had the same sunglasses as he had worn in Turner’s, although again there was no sunshine, but he was missing his hat. As Ari had suspected, his hair was in fact bleached. It was growing out significantly at the roots, a deep chestnut brown that matched his stubble. It would have looked a whole lot nicer on him, they thought, than the blond did. Strangest of all, the guy was wearing a gleaming pearl necklace which just peeked out over the collar of his sweatshirt. With the distance between them, Ari couldn’t tell whether the pearls were real or costume jewelry, and they weren’t sure which would make the outfit weirder.

They pulled their phone out of their back pocket and began jotting notes in the same document they’d created a month ago at Turner’s. One set of notes about a stranger was weird, they reasoned, but two could almost be an anthropological project. Two was weird in a scientific way, and Ari had always held the deep, unquestioning respect for science of someone with no understanding of the scientific method.

When Ari looked up from their phone, the guy was staring directly at them.

Of course, with the sunglasses, they couldn’t know for sure that the two of them were making eye contact, but Ari felt his gaze grasping at them, burning them, and they were sure he knew exactly what they were doing.

Endeavoring to appear casual and, they were certain, failing spectacularly, Ari pretended to dial a number and put their phone up to their ear. “Hey! Yeah, the Juneteenth thing just finished up,” they said to their notes app. “Are we still on for dinner?”

They ambled out of the park, keeping the guy at the edge of their vision the whole time. He ate his cake and didn’t talk to anyone and kept watching Ari.

A car sped through the crosswalk just as Ari was beginning to cross, and they jumped back, startled. Once they made it across the street, they risked a direct look back at the crowd. The guy was gone. There were several other people, Ari noticed for the first time, wearing clothes the same color as his sweatshirt. Older men in royal blue raincoats, babies in royal blue onesies, a woman in a royal blue headdress. But no guy.

Ari kept the phone up to their ear, carrying on a fake conversation throughout the entire eight-minute walk back to their apartment, just in case. Just in case of what, they weren’t sure.

They shut the door behind them, hung up their fake phone call, locked both locks, and sank into a sitting position beside the coatrack, back against their front door. After a moment, a deep breath, and the realization that they’d just hung up a fake phone call, Ari stood and took off their shoes. They placed them delicately in the bedroom closet – toes pointed the same way as all the other pairs – shut the closet door with a neat click, and fluffed their pillow and straightened the bedspread on the way out. They felt their heart rate beginning to slow. Just a bit.

Ari’s apartment was tiny, taking up half the top floor of an old farmhouse: a shoebox bedroom; a kitchen-slash-dining-slash-living room with a two-person table they’d gotten at a yard sale and a green brocade loveseat (from the same yard sale) leaning against the wall; and a bathroom where the toilet practically touched the orange plastic shower curtain. All the rentals around Poole were absurdly expensive, and Ari frequently grumbled that they could have gotten a studio in Brooklyn for the same price they were paying to live in Poole, New Hampshire. Being as Poole was a college town conveniently situated between the Connecticut River and the White Mountains, anything that could be a vacation rental already was a vacation rental, leaving the mediocre and downright unlivable apartments to be price-hiked into infinity for people who wanted to stay all year round. Ari’s small, expensive apartment was also impeccably well-maintained. Their bookshelves were sorted by color (and alphabetized by last name within color groupings), their counters and sinks were all gleaming clean, the food in their fridge was sorted into Tupperwares labeled with dates and estimations of freshness, and their bed was made with hospital corners.

At the moment, it was too clean. Ari swept a frantic eye around the small space, searching for something to tidy up.

“So he knows I’m taking notes about him,” they said aloud to the empty apartment as they gave it another pass. “That’s fine. That makes me the weirdo, but maybe now he can take notes about me and I can ignore him, since I’m the weirdo now. But I’ll also probably never see him again. So it’s fine. Right? Yeah, it’s fine.”

Finding no mess, Ari grimaced and went to their fridge. They pulled out a Tupperware from two nights ago – leftover adobo made from their mother’s recipe, or as close as they could get to their mother’s recipe on thirty dollars’ worth of groceries. Their guy sighting had led them to miss out on the free red velvet cake, and Ari was starving.

The fridge door wouldn’t close.

Ari gave it a few test shoves, but it wouldn’t budge, stuck halfway open with cold air escaping. Ari’s brow furrowed, and they reached around the other side of the fridge, against the wall, to feel along the hinges for anything stuck there, peering over the top of the door as they did so. They felt nothing wedged in there, but after a few seconds something must have dislodged, they figured, because there was a soft clatter inside the fridge and the door swung shut.

Ari dumped their adobo into a bowl, stuck it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink, rooting around for disinfecting wipes. They’d used the counter for the Tupperware. That counted as needing cleaning.

With their head still buried beneath the sink pipes, Ari heard a soft click from the living room. They startled, almost hitting their head, and pulled themself up to a standing position in time to see the living room absolutely undisturbed, spotlessly clean, as it had been when they’d left it about ninety seconds ago.

Oh man, he’s really got me paranoid, hasn’t he?

Partway through wiping down the counters, Ari realized. Turner’s was a short drive up Route 5 from their apartment. The park was a few minutes’ walk. And something Greg had said at work – the Panda cigarettes. Only sold at Nanjing Marketplace, just a few short blocks away from Ari’s door. Why else would he be everywhere Ari was unless –

“He lives in my neighborhood,” they said aloud.

The microwave began to beep insistently.

***

The third time Ari saw the guy, he was brandishing a knife at them in the alley between Nanjing Marketplace and the Poole County Veterans Memorial Theater. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Ari had gone to the marketplace in part to buy some wonton wrappers so they could make wonton soup for lunch for the rest of the week and, in part, when they thought about it, to see if they might run into the guy buying his Panda cigarettes.

And they did, in fact, run into him.

The knife was almost cartoonish, with a fat blade about a foot long and a thick black handle. The tip was slightly curved and must have been sharpened recently, judging by its perfect point; Ari could tell because it was only inches from their face. They held their hands up and tried to lean all their weight back on their heels, putting their nose as far from the point of the knife as possible.

“Who the fuck are you?” the guy demanded, hoarse-voiced, hand trembling. “Tell me right fucking now or I’ll use this thing.”

“I – my name is Ari Tan.” College icebreaker activities sprang unbidden to Ari’s mind. And I use they/them pronouns. I’m a Classics major, and I’m either from Palayan or Providence, depending on when you start counting. A fun fact about me is that –

“Who do you work for?” the guy growled. “Don’t test my patience.”

“What?”

“Your boss!”

“Um – Teddy Chisholm.”

The guy’s face went blank, his scowl fading into confusion. “Who?”

“He owns Full English Bakery. Across the river in Vermont.”

Now the guy cocked his head to one side. His hand shook a bit less, and Ari wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. The guy lifted his other hand and scratched his head, which Ari was just now noticing was uncovered. The blond in his hair had been replenished, so only the slightest traces of his brown roots were visible.

“Teddy Chisholm. Full English Bakery,” the guy repeated slowly. “What the hell does he want with me?”

“Um. Nothing, as far as I know?”

“Don’t fuck with me –”

“I’m not!” Ari insisted, and they flinched at once at the tone of their own voice. Too harsh. Back it up. “Sorry, I don’t want to escalate this situation. I just genuinely don’t know what the eff you’re talking about and I’m afraid of getting stabbed.”

“I won’t stab you if you tell me what I want to know.”

“But I don’t think I know what you want to know. Which is why I’m afraid you’ll stab me.”

The guy seemed to puzzle this over for a moment. Ari saw, up close, that he looked younger than he did at a distance, or even out of the corner of their eye at Turner’s. More than young, though, he seemed exhausted. The stubble around his mouth seemed to drag his whole face down. His hands had begun shaking again, and he leaned heavily on one leg as if the other might give out under him at any moment. His sunglasses had started to slip down his nose, so Ari could see a pair of bushy brown eyebrows just above the top of their frames. They were furrowed in concentration now.

“Why have you been following me?” the guy asked. “You’ve gotta know that one.”

“I haven’t,” Ari replied.

The knife moved closer. Ari took an instinctive step back and raised their hands higher into the air. “Really, I haven’t,” they repeated. “I just think we both live around here. I mean, I was already at Turner’s when you came in, and it’s not that weird for two people who live in the same town to go to the park for a public event.”

“I don’t know if I believe you.”

“I hope you do, because it’s the truth.”

“If you’re not following me, then what the fuck were you doing taking notes about me at the bookstore? And the park?”

Okay, so I was even more obvious about that than I thought I was being.

“I’m… a writer?” Ari said lamely. It sounded like an even worse excuse aloud than it did in their head.

“Are you?”

“Yeah, I am. I swear. I’m supposed to be working on my grad school applications right now, but it’s the most soul-sucking thing in the world, so sometimes while I’m thinking about it I get distracted by people-watching. You were a person in my vicinity when that happened. It’s nothing to do with you personally, I promise. Just wrong place, wrong time.”

Am I babbling? I’m babbling. The guy with the giant knife in my face definitely doesn’t care about my grad school applications.

The knife lowered a fraction of an inch. “What are you applying to grad school for?”

Oh. Scratch that, I guess. “Um, ancient Mediterranean studies programs. Classical studies, Ancient Greek, stuff like that.”

The knife lowered another several inches. He was holding it with less purpose now, angling the tip casually towards Ari’s solar plexus. They noticed, for the first time since he’d sprung out at them from behind Nanjing’s dumpsters, how much they were sweating. Even on the off chance that they didn’t come out of this interaction bloodied, they would still have some truly awful armpit stains to wash out of their button-down.

“Really?” the guy said, a reedy note of eagerness creeping into his voice. He sounded like Ari had just offered him a piece of free red velvet cake. Maybe even the entire cake.

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Can you read Ancient Greek?”

“I… yeah, I can, but –”

“Are you good at it?”

Ari could feel their jaw hanging open in disbelief. What kind of person held someone at knifepoint in alleys to interrogate them about their proficiency in dead languages?

“I, uh, I mean – I like to think I am,” they said. “I did my thesis on ancient Dionysian mystery cults and I did a lot of translation for that.”

“Jesus, fuck, thank goodness,” the guy said. His deep sigh of relief seemed to draw his body taut, and he stood taller and shook less as the air left his lungs. “I couldn’t just go down to the college and ask around. Not safe, you know. But if you really have no fucking clue what I’m talking about –”

“And I don’t.”

“Then this is perfect. Oh, fuck, thank God, you are exactly what I need. We shouldn’t talk here, though, it’s not safe, they’ve been following me for weeks and now that they’ve seen us together they’ll be following you too, if they’re not already. They have some way of making themselves invisible, and I think it has something to do with those weird iron rings they all wear. But if I could just read the damn things they’re using, whatever they are, if it’s the rings or if they’ve got some sort of, I don’t know, fucking, old-ass magic spellbook, or, like, clay tablets or something? Whatever they’re using, if I knew what it said, I’d be able to undo it, which is where you come in – what did you say your name was?”

Ari glanced down at the knife. “Um.”

“Oh! Shit, yeah, right, of course. Don’t wanna talk to the guy with the knife. I wouldn’t have stabbed you, honest. I don’t even eat meat.”

The guy began to make a show of setting the knife on the ground behind him, but Ari didn’t stick around to see how that show ended. As soon as neither his gaze nor his knife was pointed at them, Ari took off running.

“Hey!” they heard the guy yell out behind them. “Wait!”

With the guy’s footsteps pounding a few seconds behind them, Ari sprinted down the alley, turned the corner, dashed down another, smaller alley that they used as a shortcut sometimes, and launched themself through the back door of the large brick mixed-use building that held their favorite stationery store. They flattened themself against the wall between the door and the nearest window so they couldn’t be seen from outside. The guy’s footsteps had faded, and though Ari waited against the wall for several minutes, they didn’t hear him outside, and they didn’t hear or see anybody else come into the building. In those several minutes, their heart rate refused to decline, but at least it seemed that they had lost him.

They tiptoed their way through the grey carpeted halls of the building until they reached the glass door of the stationery store. The door was rigged to play a snippet of a different classical piece every time someone walked in. Ari received the first few seconds of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Great. Reassuring.

“Hi, welcome! Can I help you with anything today or are you just brows–”

The lady behind the counter cut herself off mid-sentence when she glanced up and saw Ari’s face. “Are you alright?” she said. “Did something happen?”

Ari swallowed. “There was just – a guy. In the alley. Following me. Can I hang out here for a while to make sure he’s gone?”

The lady’s eyebrows knitted and she nodded, jerking her chin several times in quick succession. “Oh, my God, of course. What did he look like? Should I call the cops?”

Ari felt themself bristle. The last time they’d called the cops, they’d still been at school. An out-of-town partygoer – pale, freckly skin, a mess of red hair, and breath carrying enough vodka that Ari felt drunk after smelling it – had broken into Ari’s student apartment and refused to leave. When the police showed up, they wouldn’t do anything about the intruder until Ari could prove they were leasing the apartment, because until then, the cops ‘wouldn’t be able to trust either party.’ Ari had to dig up their lease from among their files as one officer followed them around while the other helped himself to their good seltzer. In the end, even the lease hadn’t been enough for them, and Ari had had to call their landlord before the cops finally escorted the intruder away.

And even besides the track record of the Poole P.D., Ari felt their chest pinch when they thought of trying to get the guy arrested. He needed help, and a lot of it, but Ari didn’t suspect he’d be able to find that help in the county jail. He was obviously suffering some kind of break with reality if he was running around mugging people for their Greek translation abilities. Not even Ancient Greek programs were that committed to finding students. And, as crazy as it might have made them – almost as crazy as him, probably – when Ari reflected on the situation, they believed that he wouldn’t really have stabbed them. Regardless of whether or not he ate meat.

Ari forced themself to drop their shoulders, which had tensed around their ears without them noticing. They said, “No, no cops, that’s okay. Thank you. I just want to make sure he’s gone, that’s all.”

“Okay, if you’re sure. What did he look like?”

“Um, he was wearing sunglasses, so it was kind of hard to tell. Wavy blond hair. Taller than me. Bigger, too. He was… weird.”

“That sounds so creepy, oh my god. Men are the worst. You stay here as long as you like, okay?”

“Thank you.”

Ari tested every pen in the pen section. Rollerballs, gel pens, highlighters, fountain pens, fancy thin-tipped markers in pastel colors for the kinds of people who bullet journaled. Ari remembered their half-started bullet journal, buried somewhere in their desk, abandoned after they’d forgotten to write in it one day and messed up the date on the next page and had to scribble it out, completely wrecking the aesthetic. They gingerly replaced a pale pink fine-tip marker among its peers.

After another circuit of the store and a few minutes of talking themself out of buying another bullet journal – what if this is the boost I need to really get to work on my applications though? – Ari thanked the lady behind the counter, pulled out their phone, and ordered a rideshare. Or rather they ordered Pete Ticknor’s rideshare. There was only one guy who drove rideshares in Poole, and Pete had all the apps covered. Mostly only out-of-towners used his services, though, since people could walk pretty much everywhere downtown and anyone who wanted to get to the college or the hardware store or the outside world needed their own car anyway, unless they wanted to take the notoriously tardy public buses. But Ari didn’t feel too great about walking home or waiting for the bus under present conditions, so Pete it was.

His grey sedan pulled up outside the stationery store not long after. Ari waved goodbye to the lady behind the counter, got in, exchanged pleasantries with Pete, and was home a few minutes later. They tipped Pete generously on their way out and gave him the usual five-star rating, not that it mattered, considering he was the only game in town. But still.

Ari climbed the stairs. Unlocked both locks.

The coatrack wasn’t right.

Ari stared at the coatrack.

It was their coatrack, definitely. Shabby, secondhand, wiped clean by dozens of lemon-scented disinfecting wipes since its arrival at Ari’s apartment. But something about it wasn’t right. Ari ran a hand over it. There was a small nick in the wood on one of its arms, but Ari couldn’t say whether it was new or whether it had always been there and they hadn’t noticed because they weren’t in the habit of feeling up their coatrack. They bent down to examine the feet.

Beneath each of the coatrack’s three feet was a tiny half-moon of discoloration on the wooden floor. The rack had been moved about three quarters of an inch to the left.

Resting in the coatrack’s shadow, so dull that it blended in with everything around it, was an iron ring.

“What the eff,” Ari said aloud, pulling the ring from beneath the rack. They didn’t move it back, in case it was some sort of evidence. Well, it was evidence that their coatrack had been moved about three quarters of an inch to the left, obviously, but in case that fact was evidence of something else. Something bigger. Something worse.

Ari flipped on the lights and held the ring a few inches in front of their nose to examine it properly. The iron was rough, pockmarked and beginning to rust, although the inside had been ground smooth, probably so that it didn’t give its wearer a bad case of tetanus. The outside of the ring was crudely engraved, although the state of the iron made the engraving almost impossible to read. Ari brought it closer to their face. They made out a few letters – a capital E, a capital I.

A capital omega.

Ari squinted at the ring. Yes, it was definitely an omega. No English character looked anything like an upside-down horseshoe. And the thing they’d thought was an E was actually a capital sigma. There was a phi, too, a bulbous circle with a line stuck straight through the middle, piercing it vertically. Like a knife.

Operating on instincts they’d learned in an epigraphy workshop that primarily took place in the college’s graveyard, Ari brought the ring to their desk and pulled out a scrap of paper – it wasn’t tracing paper, but it would have to do – and a pencil. They laid the paper over the surface of the ring and began rubbing the pencil across it. They rotated the paper around the ring until they’d captured the whole engraving. They checked the inside, too, but it seemed smooth and unmarked. They read the inscription aloud.

“Oa-ei-aps… oa-is… ly-siph-tha?”

The words, if they were words, were unfamiliar to Ari, which was unusual for them. They had taken every Greek class the college offered, a few of them twice when the readings changed from year to year. They’d participated in every optional classical studies workshop and lecture they could get their hands on. They kept their Greek fresh during summer and winter breaks by translating their favorite poems from English into Greek and back, and when they ran out of favorite English poems, they moved onto their favorites in Spanish (easier than English to put into Greek) and Tagalog (much, much harder – none of the verb aspects matched up). After their first few Greek classes, Ari all but forgot what it felt like not to recognize a Greek word, not even able to reach into its heart and locate a root or a part of speech. Ancient Greek was often like a forest, with dense thickets of sharp, harsh sounds and clusters of participles and a dark, impenetrable canopy of verb tenses and particles. It was impossible to force one’s way through it. No amount of bushwhacking would beat the language back into neat, straight roads. But to someone familiar with the language, Greek opened up its trails, its pathways, its scenic routes and its stark, plain clearings. Ari wasn’t used to feeling lost within the language, but as far as they knew, these weren’t even words.

Their dictionaries – two physical books plus an online tool for looking up Greek words – agreed. None of the pieces of the ring’s engraving yielded any results, and Ari’s attempts to decline, conjugate, and parse the words were just as unsuccessful. Someone had gone to the trouble of engraving an iron ring with what amounted to a random collection of Greek letters.

And then they had left it in Ari’s apartment. Under a coatrack that they had moved ever so slightly to the left.

Ari slammed their dictionary shut and began a frantic search of the rest of the apartment. They examined everything, lifting up the grates on the stove, feeling under the cushions of the loveseat, whipping the shower curtain aside with half an expectation of finding a slasher-movie murderer behind it. Nothing else was different. Not a single other piece of furniture had been touched, as far as they could tell. Nothing moved, nothing altered. Just the coatrack and the ring.

Maybe I actually should call the cops. Being mugged by an aspiring classicist and then finding a ring covered in random Greek letters in my apartment doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

But what am I going to tell them? Officers, I had a genuinely dangerous experience earlier today that necessitated police intervention. I didn’t call you then because I think you’re a bunch of bigoted jerks. I would, however, like to report that my coatrack is slightly askew and I have a new ring that I don’t remember owning. What’s that, you say? Well, yes, I did study Greek in college, and yes, there is Greek on this ring, and yes, I have been under a lot of stress lately, and that thing that happened to me earlier that I didn’t call you about was pretty scary, now that you mention it. Well, gosh, when you put it like that I guess I really can’t be sure there’s anything wrong. I guess I’m just hysterical. How brave and right you are for pointing that out. Thanks so much for coming by, officers. Toodle-oo.

So no cops. Ari collapsed on the loveseat and ran their fingers over the ring. They could feel the roughly engraved iron catching at their fingertips. They switched to rubbing the inside of the ring, running through nightmare scenarios. Obviously someone had broken in. But the doors had been locked, the windows shut, no sign of forced entry. Obviously Ari was just crazy. But they felt no different than they had this morning, and they hadn’t moved the coatrack. Obviously something inexplicable was going on. But everything was explicable somehow – wasn’t that what science was? Ari wondered if they should find a scientist.

Absently, they slipped the ring onto their index finger, still twirling it around as they thought.

The smell of lilies, heavy and cloying, filled Ari’s nose. They sniffled, felt like a sneeze was coming, and they squeezed their eyes shut. But instead of a sneeze, they saw – how did they see? Their eyes were closed, they knew their eyes were closed, but – they saw a man standing in front of them. He had a neat beard and wore a flowing white garment, halfway between robe and dress, and carried a tall stick with a snake wrapped around it. The snake stuck out its tongue at them and lunged, unwrapping itself from the stick as it flung itself towards them.

As quickly as if they had, in fact, sneezed, Ari’s eyes popped open, and the smell and the man and the snake were all gone, and they were alone again on a crappy loveseat in a tiny apartment that no longer felt like home.

Ari wrenched the ring off their finger and put it on the loveseat beside them, staring at it as if it were another snake that might attack.

Wait. Didn’t the guy say something about people wearing iron rings?

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.