She keeps her shoulders back as she walks home. She can feel the bruises forming on her lower back, her arms, her ribs. Jimi has left a cheap cardboard For Rent sign leaning against the porch. There’s a Post-it note stuck to the front: Just kidding. Don’t forget my rent. xoxo. Pilot tears the sign into four pieces and stuffs them in the recycling bag next to the front door.
The door is propped open with a skateboard and a fan is blowing the scent of weed out onto the street. Inside they’ve got the music playing loud — someone else must have gotten paid today because she can hear the beer bottles clinking together over the sound of the stereo. No one hears her come in and walk into her little bedroom at the side of the house.
Pilot texts Charlotte to say she’s still alive, and Jimi to tell him she’s got his money. Then she texts Rob to set up another date. Outside in the living room the music changes to a song that she likes. Pilot walks toward the noise, debating how many rounds she will let them talk her into.
The One Who Walks with a Limp
by Nick Mamatas
Greektown
Papou’s apartment was on West Broadway in Kitsilano, or at least the door was. Step inside, like Manolis did most every afternoon to check in on his grandparents, and the place was Greece. White walls and fake marble floors, ANT1 news on the TV featuring politicians shouting at one another at jet-engine volume, the smells of rigani and lemon and oil wafting out of the kitchen. Instead of books on the shelves, cheap but well-dusted statuettes — The Discobolus and the headless but winged Nike of Samothrace, next to an old bottle of ouzo in the shape of a white-skirted soldier. And Papou, stationed at the head of the table in the living room, a pair of Greek-language newspapers from Toronto and Montreal spread out in front of him. Manolis bent over and kissed the old man on both cheeks.
“Did you get the money?” Papou asked.
“Sure, Papou, sure I did. Five hundred. I’ll give it to Yiayia later,” Manolis said. He actually only had a hundred dollars for Yiayia, from his job as a personal trainer. That would keep the lights on. Papou would worry if he thought Manolis wasn’t rich, so the boy lied frequently. In the old days, nobody would dare have lied to Papou, especially not about money.
Once, Papou had been the man, and West Broadway had been Greektown. If you owned a restaurant and wanted your windows intact and the soft drink truck to deliver on time, you gave Papou a few dollars and everything would be all right. It wasn’t just a racket, either. Papou once punched a Hell’s Angel so hard the man started convulsing at Papou’s feet, and it was just for saying something dirty to Rhodanthi Kostoulas, who wasn’t even a favorite waitress of Papou’s. And he kept the Chinese gangs, all the ξένοι gangs, off the block too. Ξένοι, the Greeks called everyone else, as if Greeks weren’t foreigners in Canada.
But now there was no more Greektown. Kits was Yuppietown, and there were more vegetarian restaurants than souvlaki joints. Manolis had tried, years ago, as a big and muscular sixteen-year-old, to collect, but at his very first stop the staff just laughed at him. The restaurant was going to be shut down the following week, and the building torn down and replaced with a new condominium complex in six months. Ευχαριστώ, μαλάκας! Some protection!
Yiayia came out into the living room and called Manolis to set the table and bring out the food. There was a knock on the door and Papou shuffled over to answer it — it was his old friend Stelyo, who had a truck and a bread route. Other people trickled in — cousins Nikki and Popi, Vasso and the baby, even Rhodanthi. She came with her face all painted, and had even plucked the hairs on the mole atop her lip, Manolis noticed. She’d always had a crush on Papou, that one.
In the old days, Papou’s apartment had been busy like this every night. Three chickens, or a leg of lamb. Guests brought pastries and wine. It had been a long time; Manolis remembered when Stelyo had brown hair, and Popi was thin, when Mikey and Greek Mikey were both in the closet but not the same one. They all still loved Manolis’s grandfather, but not enough to come around regularly now that the old man was powerless. Nobody but Manolis lived anywhere near West Broadway anymore. They all passed the baby around — her name was Georgia, after Papou — giggling and tickling her chin, making ritual spitting noises to keep away vaskania, the evil eye. Can’t admire or love anything too much if you’re a Greek, or it’ll be taken away. That was the lesson the Turks had taught the family in the nineteenth century, and the German occupiers in the twentieth.
Papou spoke in Greek, which Manolis mostly understood, but Papou was talking about people Manolis didn’t know, and places he had never been. Manolis had baby Georgia on his lap, and that occupied him. He’d held all sorts of babies, but never one for so long, and never one without the constant direction and critique of three or four of his aunts.
Stelyo leaned over and said, “Eh, you know how to work this?” He had in his hand an iPod Touch. Vintage 2008. “My boy Vangelis put my old rebetiko records on it, but it’s all Chinese to me.”
“Sure, it’s like a phone. It’s easy.”
“No,” Stelyo said. “It’s not.” He shook his head.
“Like a smartphone. You press the screen. No real buttons.”
Manolis found the list of songs and chose, randomly, “Ένας μάγκας στο Βοτανικό.” “A Manga in Votaniko.” A manga — one of those swaggering men who affected limps and wore thick mustaches and pointy shoes, who patronized the hashish dens of Athens. Hustlers and ne’er-do-wells. Papou had told Manolis all about the manges, hinted that he had been one of them. “They’re like pimps without whores,” he’d told an eight-year-old Manolis, “though sometimes their girlfriends are whores,” and somehow that conversation had ended with Yiayia slapping Manolis for letting his grandfather’s words into his young ears.
The iPod had an internal speaker, and the volume was loud enough for mostly deaf Stelyo to enjoy, but it sent the baby crying, and the family yelling. Then Papou slammed his palm against the table and stood up. He wasn’t angry though. He snatched the baby from Manolis’s lap and shuffled away from the table, his legs finding some old rhythm. Papou started to dance the zeibekiko, his free arm outstretched, fingers snapping, his knees bending like he was a man forty years younger. The women began clapping along to the rhythm of the song. Greek Mikey flung a five-dollar bill at Papou’s feet, and the old man bent low and swung to snatch it. Georgia howled, and finally Vasso clambered to her feet and rescued the baby. Papou staggered like a sailor on deck, like a happy drunk, and winked when everyone grew afraid, but then his face turned ashen and he took to one knee. Yiayia got to him first, her meaty hands on his thin shoulders.
“Tέλειωσα,” Papou said. I am finished.
Yiayia snorted and helped him to his feet. The table cheered.
“Bravo!” Stelyo exclaimed, and like a criminal he snatched the iPod Touch out of Manolis’s hand and shoved it back in his pocket.
“Enough playing,” Yiayia said. When she spoke, people really listened. Imagine a classically trained contralto dedicated to telling people to be quiet and clean their plates. “George has something important to say.”
Papou hadn’t had anything important to say in a long while. He read the papers, he walked around the block, he even learned to use Skype and talked to the relatives he wasn’t feuding with back in Greece twice a year, on Christmas and Easter. But his world got smaller as Greektown did, and he’d had little to say since Manolis was a kid.