In the breaks between protests we come home, take hot footbaths, look for work. This year I found the school, Kayo is doing some underwear modeling. At night he prints T-shirts with old situationist slogans: In a society that has abolished any kind of adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society. In the morning I find him curled up with Anna-Maria in my parents’ old bedroom, a Kodachrome icon of the Virgin Mary that my mother left to protect me hanging on the wall above him. Kayo adores it. It’s a bad habit he picked up in New York: he’s always coming home with the cheapest, kitschiest junk. A mismatched family of characters, childish yet lurid, occupies his bedside table: a pink plastic Hello Kitty, a music box topped by a fake ballerina with gold pointe shoes, a plastic camera that squirts water, one of those flowers that bobs up and down on its stem when there’s music playing, a Statue of Liberty made of hot pink foam.
I sleep in my childhood room. There’s nothing angelic or little-girlish about it. “It’s an absolute mess in here,” Kayo mutters when he’s in a bad mood. But I like it that way. Amid the newspaper clippings, posters, books, packs of anti-capitalist stickers, I’m somehow able to find myself. “Lose yourself, you mean,” he says. To keep myself from hitting him I psychologize his own mania for cleanliness: he’s biracial, the son of a white woman who washed him incessantly when he was a kid, and ironed a new shirt for him every day so that none of the other kids could say he smelled bad. Kayo smells wonderful, in fact, even when he’s in a funk. I’m the one who always seems to need a shower.
“Where’d you see her?” he asks, tossing the sheet aside. He sleeps naked, but the sight has long since ceased to affect me. These days I just give him a cool once-over, as if he were soft porn on TV. Or an underwear ad.
“I haven’t seen her. Yet.” The thought of us meeting in person makes me shudder—the thought that she might come in to ask how Daphne is doing in class, or how I ended up there, an art teacher at a private school. She’s presumably living a more noteworthy life than mine, doing more important things.
“Will you just tell me what happened?”
I tell him about Daphne.
“A miniature Anna? My lord, what a nightmare!” Kayo is one of the few men Anna never managed to charm. After all, he was always even more beautiful, more daring than she. Kayo stretches and yawns beneath the icon of the Virgin, a faded woman with a halo looking down on him from above, smiling a restrained smile. The way the icon artist painted her, she always seems to know more than we do.
A short while later, Irini and Kosmas show up with a Tupperware of warm potato salad. They hug us tightly, just like every night, as if we haven’t seen one another in ages. It’s nice: their young bodies give us a forgotten energy, a brief dose of electroshock that I otherwise only experience at protests. It must be how Kayo feels on those rare occasions when he approaches young men in bars.
Irini is nineteen, Kosmas twenty; they’re both students in the Department of Mass Media. They’re tall and skinny and have a healthy glow on their cheeks, though they’re sworn vegetarians. Irini has a small mouth with full lips and teeth even whiter than Kayo’s. Kosmas is like a happy alien. Now that he’s cut his hair short, you can’t help but admire his beautiful ears. The two of them aren’t sleeping together yet, or with anyone else for that matter, and so they shriek and chase one another around the table. They dish out the potato salad, open a bottle of red wine, and wait for us to take a bite before they dig in.
“That’s what I call respect for the aged,” Kayo says. He’ll be turning forty this year. Like all narcissists, he’s got issues with his age.
Irini gives him a mournful look. She’s probably a little bit in love with him; I certainly was at her age. When you’re nineteen you fall for people like Kayo. All it tends to get you are some wrinkles around your eyes and a deep well of hopelessness in your gaze.
“Do you want to say grace today, old man?” she asks.
“I’m still sleeping,” Kayo growls.
“Okay, then I will,” Irini says. She clears her throat. Her eyelashes quiver in the light of the candles we always set out on the kitchen table. “We’re not afraid of ruins. We’re the ones who will inherit the earth. So they can go ahead and destroy their world before they walk off the stage set of history. We carry a new world in our hearts.” Some of the words she uses hover midway between sentiment and sentimentality. The word “heart,” for instance. Irini knows how to pronounce it properly, to give it meaning. At her age, if Anna and I ever said “heart” we surely would have burst out laughing.
She’s less emotional in the texts she writes for Exit, though they come from the heart, too. In an article about the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, Irini dreamed of a society comprised of citizen groups that would take the place of multinational corporations in an attempt to restore social desire in a world that revolves self-complacently around egos and profit margins. People want to reap without first cultivating the earth. They want rain without lightning, the ocean without the murmuring of its waves.
Is that how Anna would speak if she were a teenager today? There’s certainly no way she would end her text with an exclamation of this sort: People say cities provide freedom of choice. Freedom means doing what you want, not having what you want. Today’s cities are dominated by the logic of advertising. Our biggest source of anxiety isn’t whether or not we’ll have complete access to the sole object of our desire, but how we can consume lover after lover. Society makes sure to give you the distressing impression that, in choosing one person, you lose all others, as if people were coats to choose from, old or new.
The coat Irini wears is a shiny, silvery old leather jacket, torn and covered with ink stains. Kosmas has a kind of retro air, too: he always has on a red scarf; you’d think it was attached to his neck, like the gold necklace in Gwendolyn’s story. He’s as jittery as a marionette, hands and feet in constant motion. He might leap out of his chair unexpectedly, for instance, and shout, “Why can’t we sell the idea of revolution the same way they sell shoes? Why can’t we make revolution irresistible, like a really stylish winter coat? Don’t you want to bet that if we did, all those spoiled rich kids I went to school with would be falling all over themselves to get a revolution of their own?” Kosmas went to high school at the American College of Greece. He must’ve been one of those kids plagued by inner dilemmas: I may be rich, but I feel poor. It’s more or less how I felt as the daughter of an oil company executive.
Kosmas and Irini are the digital brains of Exit, and of our activities more generally. They’re the best hackers I’ve ever met. They can bring the Ministry of Finance to its knees in half an hour, though if you saw them waiting for the bus you’d think they were just two college kids like all the rest, headed to class with textbooks under their arms, whose biggest worry is whether they might get a pimple on their chin.
“Okay, we need to put our heads together here.” I pull my glasses down to the tip of my nose, mostly because I know they get a kick out of my schoolmarm routine. “Speaking of ruins, Irini, we might want to think about the Attic Highway—we haven’t done anything on that front.”
“The Attic Highway can wait. We’ve got over a month for that. What we really need to talk about is the metro.” Irini blinks her eyes a few times, and I can’t help but admire her perfectly arched eyebrows, her jet-black lashes, which tremble so suggestively. Then again, perhaps it’s just a matter of age. I see in Irini what Diana once saw in me: possibilities.
“What’s wrong, Maria? Are you daydreaming?” It bothers Irini if my mind wanders even for a minute. Kids of her generation always want things to operate according to schedule: now it’s time to space out, now it’s time to work.
“I met the daughter of a childhood friend of mine this afternoon. I guess I’m feeling a little nostalgic . . .”
Anna-Maria leaps up into my lap. Cats can tell when humans have become cats, too, when they’ve slipped into a furry pouch of regression. She sinks her claws into my sweater; a single prick and I’m back to