Beyond Wonderland

by Paul Jump

It was when we arrived out of breath, soaked with sweat, at the bus stop only to see the back end of the number 73 disappearing into the intense heat haze that we really began to lose our tempers.

“Oh, fucking hell!” cried Eleni, above the chinking of the bottles in her bag as she dropped it into the gutter in frustration.

“It seems only fair to question whether Odysseus would ever have made it back to Ithaca if he’d had to rely on the MBTA,” I murmured, waving my hand with furious vigour in front of my face to dispel the cloud of diesel that still lingered in the heavy, lifeless air.

“It went two minutes early!” exclaimed Eleni, her nostrils flaring with indignation as she glared at her watch. “When did you ever hear of a bus being early in Boston?”

“The worst thing is that the driver must have been able to see the train arriving in the station and deliberately ignored it.”

I squinted back towards the subway station marooned in the midst of a vast expanse of shimmering concrete which must have been replete with commuters’ cars during the week but which, on this sleepy Sunday in the dog days of the New England summer, was almost completely bare.

“It’s just ridiculous,” resumed Eleni, confirming the perfect visibility of the blue and white train which had conveyed us – if conveyed is not too grand a word for such an achingly slow, sweaty, overcrowded journey - from Government Center. “How can the richest country in the world have such a fucking joke of a public transport system? Even Greece does better than this!”

“Maybe there’s another one soon,” I suggested, raising my voice above the mounting din of the jumbo jet that was looming bigger and unnervingly bigger in the brilliant blue sky above our heads, its wheels already lowered for its landing at Logan Airport, just six subway stops back towards Boston.

Alas, however, from what I could make out through the Pollackesque chaos of knife scratches and cigarette burns inflicted by bored passengers on the timetable’s plastic screen, there was nothing scheduled to arrive for a whole hour.

“We’ve got to get out of this country or I’m going to become a suicide bomber,” hissed Eleni, scowling like Nemesis herself in the direction of the omnipresent skyscrapers of the financial district, looming strangely purple in the hazy distance

“Well, at least it has warmed up a bit since we were last here,” I remarked, sinking down onto the kerb after a pause, ignoring what I excused as her typically Mediterranean intemperance. “Can you imagine waiting here for an hour in January?”

Eleni’s glare clouded over somewhat as she cast her mind back to those dark, bitter weeks before she had received her first paycheque from Harvard Medical School, whose offer of a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship had prompted us to make the enormously irksome, scarcely relished move across the Atlantic. God, what a hard time that had been! We had even resorted to stealing from our local supermarket, partly out of sheer indignation at Corporate America, whose realtors, hardware stores and utility companies had unexpectedly wiped out our entire savings in one manic three-day period, but mostly out of sheer necessity. Even the single dollar it cost to travel to this northern tip of the blue subway line had seemed a significant expense back then - but it just hadn’t born thinking about the be shut up all day in our tiny apartment, still cluttered with half-emptied boxes and half-finished furniture, while the winter sun shone so crisply. After all, such a fine day was rare enough even in the summer in Oxford, at whose preposterous university, still proudly marooned in the era of Lewis Carroll, I had met Eleni four years previously. Besides, how could a couple of bewildered Alices in this surreal new England possibly resist an planning their first excursion to a station intriguingly called Wonderland?

“It’s hard to believe this is the same placed, isn’t it?” I continued, peering at the ramshackle old fairground beyond the car park, which had turned out to be the distinctly underwhelming source of that name. “Having such distinct seasons is like moving to a different country every three months. Don’t you think?”

“Fuck moving to a new country every three months,” asserted Eleni, with an ardent shake of the head. “I’d rather just live permanently in Zakynthos. And fuck waiting in this desolate shit hole for another hour. I demand the beach now!”

She kicked the kerb with her sandaled foot, crying out at the inevitable consequences for her unprotected toe. I chortled at the time-honoured slapstick of her performance, but God knew I shared her frustration with the situation. Forgetting to set our alarm the previous night, we hadn’t even woken up until around midday. Then it had taken us almost an hour and a half to complete the two subway journeys necessary to get to this point. And now, after missing the three o’clock bus, it seemed that we wouldn’t reach our destination until some time after four: over four hours late.

“Well, there’s the beach over there,” I suggested, gesturing half-heartedly at the concrete wall beyond the main road that hid the ocean from view. “We could wait there, I suppose…”

“No way!” declared Eleni, vehemently. “It’s disgusting! You saw it last time.”

And, sure enough, I recalled very clearly that it had been the assortment of condoms, tampons and plastic bottles littering the snow-flecked sand, as much as the lacerating force-7 sweeping unobstructed down the coast from the Canadian tundra, that had driven us back into the station before the train that had brought us had even begun its return journey.

“But do you really think the beach will be that much better at Pete’s?” I asked, sceptically. “He can’t live that far out of town, surely.”

Pete Mulligan was a senior postdoctoral fellow in the lab on the opposite side of the corridor from Eleni’s, whose frequent boasts of living in a house right next to the beach had prompted a popular clamour for him to host a barbecue: a clamour to which he had happily bowed.

“He said the water is very clean where he lives,” shrugged Eleni.

“Well, he would tell you that, wouldn’t he? He’s probably been masturbating for weeks over the prospect of seeing you in a wet bikini!”

This, after all, was the man who, just a few weeks previously, had approached Eleni one lunchtime as she had lain on the quadrangle lawn in her summer dress and called her a shameless siren for thus tempting men with her legs. Then, when she had protested that she was merely trying to make the most of the sunshine, he had asserted that, in America, any woman who didn’t wear a wedding ring was a temptress. Of course, he had known perfectly well that she was married to me, but he had evidently mistaken her scorn of jewellery for a lack of conjugal commitment.

“Don’t be disgusting,” chided Eleni, though serious censure was conspicuous by its absence from her tone.

“You know he has, Eleni. You said yourself that he only talks to your cleavage.”

“No, I said he only talks to Blanca’s cleavage,” she corrected, with a sly grin. “He prefers my legs. He told Blanca the other week that she has the best tits on the third floor, but that I have the best legs…”

“Did he really say that?” I asked, laughing with relished incredulity.

“Apparently. Doug was there too - although Ulrike says he once told her that she has the best legs in the whole medical school…”

“That was before he met you, of course,”

“I’m not sure…”

“Of course it was!”

I leaned forward and gave her nearest thigh a reassuring squeeze, reciprocating her giggle as she leapt away before I could reach up any higher. After all, it was very hard to take Pete’s lewd comments wholly seriously when they were dished out so indiscriminately.

Indeed, by all accounts there was scarcely a single European female to whom he had not made some suggestive comment or other. He was apparently labouring under the blissful delusion that Europe was a continent of free lovers, for whose inhabitants sexual encounters were as casual and as common as cups of coffee. And the source of this delusion, it seemed, was the existence of topless beaches, by which it was probably fair to say that he was obsessed: it had taken less than five minutes from our initial introduction at a previous lab barbecue for him to begin interrogating me, “man to man”, about what I had seen on the beaches of Zakynthos, and he had repeated his questions several times since.

Not that I had resented his doing so. On the contrary, there was something distinctly refreshing – as well as amusing – about the frankness with which he thus displayed his preoccupations. After all, God knew that your average Harvard postdoc, regardless of their continent of origin, tended to hold their cards very close to their chest (academia, after all, is hardly the most attractive of career options for those of an expansive temperament). Yet Pete, by contrast, let it all hang out. He freely admitted to having a subscription to the topless news channel, as well as to frequenting topless bars in Lynn. Nor was he even shy about divulging his plans for an excursion to the nudist beach which apparently lurked behind some particularly well-endowed dunes just beyond the Canadian border.

Moreover, it was not as if I entertained the slightest fear that Eleni might surrender to his advances. For the truth was that Pete Mulligan was exactly the kind of unsophisticated, unselfconscious, unenlightened “man out of focus” for whose production she – in common with the rest of the Europeans – condemned American culture. She decried the “spray cheesy” AOR he played on the stereo in his lab, the slack jeans that hung off his backside “as if he had shat himself” and his endless collection of freebie “geek chic” T-shirts, bearing the logos of academic conferences he had attended or pharmaceutical products he had ordered. But it was the pot belly, sustained by an alleged average daily intake of four litres of Coca-Cola – swigged from giant plastic bottles between experiments - which really set the tongues surreptitiously wagging whenever it was seen to protrude from beneath a machine-shrunken hem.

And then there was the hair. Mulligan bore far too close a resemblance to mullet for Pete to avoid becoming known to all and sundry as Pete the Mullet. Reaching halfway down his back, it was the proud recipient of regular perms at his local hairdresser, as well as even more frequent bleaching in his own bathroom, with peroxide purloined from his lab stocks (a cost-cutting measure with, he claimed, saved him $20 a month). He also admitted to giving his thick moustache the same treatment, although rumours still lingered that it was all the acid in the Coke that really did it.

“At least one of your lab mates could have offered us a lift!” I murmured at length, glaring at a passing car in displaced resentment. “Or are the back seats of American cars only for show?”

Most of the Harvard Europeans remained remarkably loyal to public transport despite the appalling service, but the Americans were a very different story; according to a Bostonian lab mate of Eleni’s, only “losers” used the subway at the weekend.

“Maybe we could get a lift back with someone, at least,” she suggested.

“No chance: they’ll all be back home by now, watching the Red Sox game.”

“That’s true.”

“And there won’t be any food left either.”

“No…”

That seemed to be the pattern at Medical School barbecues: the Americans would arrive early with a young child or two and a plastic Stop and Shop bags full of burgers and chicken drumsticks, which they would proceed to eat while standing around the grill and chatting desultorily about television, pre-school care and their most recent out-of-town shopping trips. Then, just as they began to drift off home, the Europeans would start to arrive with brown paper bags full of alcohol and pockets bulging with CDs, to which the Mediterraneans would spend evening dancing while those from the North Sea rim looked on drinking beer, arguing about football and agreeing what a global calamity the election of George W Bush had been.

“So what do you want to do for the next hour?” I asked, surprised to see an all-but-empty rollercoaster train executing an all-but-silent loop the loop; we had assumed in January that the whole place was derelict. “The fair seems to be open…”

“Fuck that!” declared Eleni, fixing her eyes on a large brown and white car as it emerged from the heat haze. “Let’s get this taxi.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, uncertainly, still not quite having regained my sense of financial security despite the healthy dual income we now enjoyed. “It might be expensive: we don’t know how far it is.”

“I don’t care,” replied Eleni, thrusting her hand out with all the gusto of a punch. “I’m not spending a whole hour in this fucking dump.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I agreed, reluctantly, rising to my feet. “We are very late…”

At first it looked as if the taxi wasn’t going to stop but, at the last minute, it suddenly lurched into the lay-by that constituted the bus stop. Instinctively, I leaned down to snatch Eleni’s bag from its prone position in the gutter, but a superior reflex of self-preservation threw me back again as the car closed in on my skull in a Hollywood screech of brakes.

“Why don’t you put that in the trunk?” said Eleni, glancing impassively at the green canvas rucksack lying less than half an inch from the taxi’s near back wheel. After all, erratic and inattentive though they almost invariably were by British standards, Bostonian taxi drivers were paragons of consistency and discipline compared to the kind of kamikaze dodgem racers with whom Eleni had got used to sharing the roads while learning to drive in Athens as an undergraduate.

“Boot!” I corrected, waving my hand vigorously in front of my face, as much to dissipate the rush of adrenalin that the near miss had evoked as to dispel the cloud of dust it had kicked up. “It’s a car, not a fucking elephant!”

“It’s not a fucking shoe either,” she retorted, opening the rear door. “Just pass the bag to me. I need to get the address out of it anyway.”

She sat down with a little shriek as I leaned down and picked up the bag; it was only when I sat down beside her and the black, sun-heated black leather came into contact with my bare legs that I realized that shriek had not, after all, been one of exasperation at my habit of chiding her for every Americanism that slipped into her vocabulary. Indeed, I was obliged to call on all my English reserve so as not to echo her reaction at twice the volume.

Stretching her skirt down between the backs of her thighs and the seat, she reached into the front pocket of her bag and removed the white post-it note on which Pete had written his address. She leant forward and passed it to the driver – a seriously overweight Hispanic sporting a good three days of stubble and huge sweat-stains in the armpits of his shirt - who grunted something we took to indicate that he knew where it was, then proceeded to screw the paper into a ball, toss it out of the open window and drive off in much the same whiplash-threatening fashion as that in which he had come to a halt.

“Well, however hot it might feel, at least we needn’t fear being incinerated today,” I murmured, peering fearfully out of the back window at the startlingly close owner of the horn which had angrily greeted us as we joined the main road.

“What are you talking about?” asked Eleni, even she looking a little nervous as the driver simply leaned forward nonchalantly and turned up the radio. “You get burned even when it’s cloudy.”

“I mean that Phaeton is evidently too busy driving his taxi today to concern himself with his father’s chariot.”

Phaethon was a reckless young man who, one day, manipulated his father, Apollo, into letting him drive the chariot of the sun. However, Phaethon’s inexperience, and consequent inability to control the horses, threatened to consume the Earth in flames until Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt. Not that Eleni was remotely interested in her country’s ancient mythology – as the silence with which she responded to my explanation attested. Indeed, it is fair to say that she had actually come to resent my frequent, irresistible allusions to it, on account of her immortal suspicion that, as a Classicist, I was only interested in her because I associated her with Eleni of Troy. On one occasion when she had drunkenly voiced that suspicion, I had replied that any man would be interested in a woman who evoked comparisons with the most beautiful female who ever lived - and that any woman other than her would be flattered by such a comparison. However, that had failed to placate her. She said any man who was so enslaved to received, hackneyed notions of beauty that he started a war over the woman who best embodied them was a fool and a criminal.

A sign flashed past us reading: Lynn 15.

“Lynn? Isn’t that where Pete’s topless bar it?” I asked, my forehead banging against the window glass as the taxi juddered through one of the numerous potholes which, much to our initial surprise, littered the road surfaces in this land of the automobile.

“I think so,” she nodded, with a faint smile.

“So much for him wanting to live out here to recreate his beachside Californian childhood!”

“He says he also likes it because it’s cheap. Apparently he pays half of what we do - although God knows why he needs such a cheap house: he earns more than I do and it’s not as if he has kids or a car. He never even goes on holiday, apparently: he doesn’t even have a passport.”

“He must have an extremely serious pornography habit,”

“I don’t want to know,” she frowned, peering at a roadside banner in Spanish, the numerous grammatical failings and English corruptions of which would doubtless have been pointed out to us, with a mixture of amusement and dismay, had any of the Harvard Iberian contingent been with us.

“How old is Pete?” I asked, eventually.

“Late thirties.”

“And yet he’s still a post doc?”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t he have been a group leader by now? Or isn’t he up to it?”

“No. He’s very clever. Apparently he knows more than his boss about many things.”

“So why doesn’t he apply?”

“That’s a good question. Maybe he doesn’t want the responsibility… It’s shit around here, isn’t it?”

I put my finger to my lip urgently. After all, it was highly likely that our driver – who already seemed hell-bent on killing us - lived somewhere in the vicinity, and we couldn’t entirely rely on his incomprehension of English spoken with a Greco-British accent. But once I was sure he wasn’t watching us in his overtaking mirror, I did see fit to nod. For despite the preponderance of the kind of colourful weatherboarding which I still found distinctly exotic and picturesque, the area was undeniably shabby and desolate: the kind of anonymous, blue-collar hinterland your average SUV-driving Brookline resident would rush through as quickly as possible on their way up to the fashionable beaches further up the coast, without a thought for the poor bastards who were obliged to call it home.

Then again, what would our driver’s family back in Mexico have said had they know that he was, at that moment, driving a taxi with $30 on the meter? $30! Such a sum would have been beyond their wildest dreams. Indeed, it was close to going beyond my worst nightmare too. God, what a preposterous undertaking this was! To hell with conscience! Why hadn’t we just taken the commuter rail to that king of misnamed towns, Manchester-by-the-Sea? For once, I wouldn’t even have resented paying the dollar ‘walk on’ fee for the admittedly lovely beach which the local council had the – to our Old World sensibilities - outrageous gall to charge. After all, it wasn’t as if we would have been missed: Pete had apparently invited practically everyone on his floor of the Medical School: at least thirty people, not counting respective spouses and children. No, we wouldn’t have been missed at all…

Eventually, after another $5 had been accounted for, we turned off the highway onto a long street of small, mostly whitewashed, weather-boarded houses, each fourth one of which was indicated by a telegraph pole on the footpath in front of it, leaning at a unique angle to the vertical such that the cables zigzagged their way into the distance like the spiders’ silk-ways that had used to glimmer every morning, dripping with dew, on our little lawn in Oxford.

The taxi finally pulled up at the tall, possibly man-made sand dunes that blocked off the end of the street. Withdrawing the entire $40 contents of my wallet, I passed it all forward and wincingly told the driver to keep the change (even if he hadn’t been so big and, apparently, unhinged, we had learned never to dream of withholding a generous “gratuity” from an American taxi driver after more than one had taken us to task over our doing during Black January, when we had been forced to use taxis to bring home the furniture we needed). Then I followed Eleni out, slammed the door behind me and took her hand in mine as the car executed a hasty three-point turn and then diminished into the distance.

“Welcome to Ithaca,” I muttered, as the sound of the engine was superseded by the chirping of the crickets