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  First Man

  Copyright © 2014 AVA MARTELL

  All rights reserved.

  THIS BOOK IS A WORK OF FICTION. ALL CHARACTERS ARE PRODUCTS OF THE AUTHOR'S IMAGINATION AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO YOUR ACTUAL LIFE IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

  Ava Martell

  [email protected]

  This book is dedicated to my friends, readers and fellow authors who helped bring my dream to life. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support!

  Ava

  There is no sensation quite like sand slipping through your fingers. Boulders, millennia old, worn down into a thousand thousand grains, sliding through your hands like water, like dust. Every grain has a story, trod upon by goat herders and spice traders, scholars and priests.

  I don’t remember a time before the sand. Years after I left Cairo, I tried to reclaim the peace in beaches. Months on Santorini and Mykonos gave me nothing. I hid from the world behind the white domes of the church of Panagia Episkopi. I watched the daughters of fishermen with their eyes of driftwood and seaweed, laughing on the shores of Mykonos, feeding the famous pelican of Alefkantra, and I felt nothing but a longing for the blistering winds and the grit that never left my mouth.

  There were two women, and neither of them were meant to be mine. Actaeon was torn to shreds for trespassing on a goddess. I didn’t fare much better.

  They say time heals all wounds. It doesn’t. Some wounds can poison your blood and leave behind nothing but the memory of a man. That’s all I really am, a memory. I found myself in her arms, and when she was gone, I had nowhere else to look. I spent years losing myself in a thousand books, a hundred cities. I walked until my feet bled. I wanted to forgot my own name, but theirs never faded from my lips.

  Most people have plans for their lives whether they realize it consciously or not. Everyone has things about their future that they accept as constants. Marriage, family, stable job. We just seem to expect them to fall into place around us. I know I didn’t expect my life to turn into what it has.

  I’ve had more second chances than most. I’ve started over a dozen times, telling myself that this time will be different. This time I’ll be a person. I’ll settle down and stop running across the world. I’ll stop the endless searching and I’ll stop hearing the endless tap tap tap of the typewriter that follows me in my sleep.

  I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though.

  I was born in England to a man lost in the past and a woman lost in him. My father was a scholar and an archeologist, sifting through the sands of the ruins of the world’s great civilizations to free a shard of pottery. My earliest memories were at dig sites, watching from the sidelines as my father meticulously brushed dust away from the object with a reverence any zealot would understand.

  Finally unearthed, he would begin his narrative for my benefit, spinning tales of Etruscans and Greeks, Spartans and Romans, whatever long dead civilization we were immersed in. The tales of heroes and battles enchanted my young mind. I learned of Hector and Achilles at his knee, staring in rapt attention at my father as he kept me occupied and kept my clumsy toddler fingers away from the priceless artifacts.

  Somewhere in the background of those early days was my mother, golden-haired and with a fading smile stretched across her lips. As each year slipped away and I went from toddling across the sands to studying the books in my father’s collections, the smile grew fainter and fainter until it finally disappeared, taking her with it.

  There was no argument, no adulterous affair. My home was not broken in that sense of the word. It seemed almost fitting, when I look back all these years later. The dissolution of my parent’s love was just as it had been with a hundred long dead civilizations. Instead of an eruption, their love simply crumbled slowly, brick by brick. Neither of them even noticed as the shifting sands buried it.

  She simply walked away.

  I never saw her again.

  Looking back, I barely registered her absence. I was my father’s son, and I had followed his footsteps out into the desert from the first moment I could stand. In the months after she left, my father’s pace grew frantic. We travelled constantly, and my father’s colleagues had long since stopped mentioning that “the boy should be in school.”

  My father hired a tutor everywhere we stayed longer than a week, usually eagerly over-educated graduate students more than happy to drill me on calculus or botany or whichever subject my father thought I should be learning that month.

  I was thirteen when my mother left, that awkward age where your teenaged mind convinces yourself that you’re an adult, and I had never known a life with a stable address. My father called us English, but I’d never spent more than a few weeks at a time in that grey, rainy country.

  Something had changed, and I didn’t need life experience to know it. My father, a man who had spent days unearthing a mosaic with a miniscule paintbrush, lost the ability to sit still. We’d flit from one site to another, never pausing, and in the background there was always the tap tap tap of the typewriter.

  He never let me see the endless words that filled those pages. He never seemed to sleep in those last months, fueled by black coffee and the never pausing frenetic energy of a man trying to cram a lifetime’s worth of knowledge into a few scant months.

  I knew. We never talked about it. Never discussed what I was to do if he became to ill to continue on our quest, but I knew. I was young but I was far from blind. My father generally treated me more as a colleague than a son, so this sudden urge to protect me surprised us both. He wanted the illusion, and that was the only thing I had to give him.

  His sudden awareness of his mortality was written in every stroke of his pen and the endless tapping of typewriter keys.

  Let me die here, they whispered.

  The disease granted both of us a reprieve in the end. He did not fall into a coma. There was no frantic trip to the Cairo Hospital or months of convalescence. He simply slipped away during the night. I knew what had made my father the man he was had departed before I even opened my eyes that morning.

  For the first time in nearly a year, the keyboard was still.

  In the days that followed, as I was shuffled around by the well meaning but socially stunted scholars my father worked with, I comforted myself with those pages. I sifted through the boxes with the same reverence my father used in a dig. I uncovered hundreds of pages, each sentence meticulously researched. The Funerary Rites of Nomadic Desert Tribes, Medical Practices of 3rd Century BCE Greece, forty-two pages about grafitti on the Coluseeum. It was as though he had spent year trying to outrun the disease that was slowly killing him. In the end, it caught him, and I was left with nothing more than a few boxes of scattered documents and journals.

  I was shipped back to England, to grey skies and rain and boarding school. The professors didn’t know what to make of me back in those days. I was far from being the only quiet boy content to bury my nose in a book, but I was the only one who steadfastly refused to stay locked up in the dormitories and the classrooms.

  I’d use any spare moment as an excuse to slip away from the crowds and din of my classmates. England was a far cry from the arid lands I’d spent my childhood exploring, but in the forest surrounding our school I found a crumbling stone wall. In actuality, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years old, if that, but I let myself imagine it had been constructed a thousand years ago, Celtic tribesmen stacking the stones to protect themselves from the Roman invaders.

  I whiled away many afternoons sitting on the damp ground by that wall. The stretch of days seemed endless at first. I kept my grades high and kept to myself, and somehow in between those rain-soaked days I grew up.

  When I had stepped through those heavy oak doors as a grief-stricken, culture-shocked boy,
I wanted nothing more than to count down the days of my sentence in those dreary halls. Instead, as I grew up, I found myself caught in the same trappings of academia that had ensnared my father.

  I studied endlessly and set myself towards finishing as many of my father’s papers as I was able. I even succeeded in getting a few published back in those days. They were heavy, scholarly journals that no one outside of academia would have heard of, let alone read.

  I looked up from those pages and I was an adult, packing the last four years of my life into a trunk and traveling to another stately marble hall in the same grey country, my adolescent desires of disappearing back into the sands forgotten, at least for a time.

  It could have ended there. I could have done my four years in Oxford, collected a few graduate degrees, and ended up with a comfortable professorship. I could have looked fondly back at my youth wandering the world beside my father. I might have married a sensible British woman, an academic of course, perhaps a literature professor. I’d live out my days in a quiet house with a garden and tell my children stories of when their father ran around the pyramids as a boy.

  That’s how it could have ended.

  Instead, the wanderlust returned. Like an itch I could never quite reach, it gnawed at my senses. I shoved it into the back of my mind, locking it up like I was hiding a dirty secret in a cupboard. For four years of university and two years of graduate study, I turned myself into someone that sand-covered boy wouldn’t have recognized. With a first–class degree in my hand, I stared down at the potential 50 years of sameness, and something within me snapped.

  I packed up my flat, shoving six years of post boarding school life into storage and stowing the few things that mattered into the worn suitcases that had once followed my father across the globe.

  And I wandered. I was 23 years old and I had no ties beyond a handful of friends back in England. I retraced the steps of my past, visiting the historic sites and tourist traps. I lost myself in women, staring into green eyes, brown eyes, blue eyes.

  Above all, I let myself get lost in the world. On the streets of Cairo or the bazaars of Istanbul, I was just another nameless traveller, another face blending into the crowd. Bit by bit, the pieces of that small boy watching his father unearth fragments of history crumbled.

  I wasn’t lost in the world. I was simply lost, but like any traveller navigating a new place, I didn’t notice that I had lost my path until all the familiar landmarks had disappeared from my site. By that point, there was nowhere left to go but forward.

  PART ONE

  NEW WORLD

  “Where to this time, mate?” Edwin Pamphilos’ melodic accent, a strange mixture of British and Greek, echoed in my ear with the tinny quality transcontinental connections always had.

  “America. Atlanta,” I replied. After what felt like a lifetime of crossing every ancient land I could buy a plane ticket to, I was going somewhere truly foreign to me.

  “You finally ran out of Old World, so you had to start on the New, eh?”

  “It was time for-”

  “-Another bloody change. I’ve heard it every few months for the last four years.”

  Four years. In the course of history, four years was an eyeblink, but emperors had risen to power and fallen from favor in less time. Four years of nonstop travel had been enough to replace the wide-eyed traveller in me with a sharp-tongued cynic. I was bored with the world at the ripe old age of 27, and I hated that fact about myself.

  I heard rustling over the line and imagined Edwin rifling through the mounds of ungraded essays, photocopies, and assorted educational trappings that covered his desk. I had chided him for his messiness at Oxford. A decade later, I had become him, at least in one respect.

  “I take it from your lack of comment, the Ovid conference went well?” I said, segueing my friend into a more comfortable topic.

  When Edwin continued, I could hear the glee in his voice. “As if a conference about the Old Man could be anything but! Harrison had a lovely little paper on Ovid in the 1990s, and of course your contribution was very well received. Banquet of the Senses, indeed. No wonder all the women in field seem to think you’re some ruddy rock star.”

  “Hardly.”

  Edwin snorted. “If you’d actually come to one of these conferences more often than once a decade, they might realize you’re - What was it you said to that hot little graduate student that was fawning all over you at the last time you graced Corpus Christi with your presence? ‘I’m just a guy.’”

  “Keep your hands off those coeds or I might be forced to give Elene a call,” I said.

  I could feel Edwin’s shudder two thousand miles away. “Don’t even joke about that, Adam! You know how Greek women are. . . and Italian women, and Spanish women, and now American women.”

  “Edwin, I have to go. I’ll give you a call later.”

  He sighed, and when he spoke again, he couldn’t keep the “disapproving older brother” tone from his voice. “Be sure that ‘later’ doesn’t end up being six months from now when you decide to move to Morocco or something. Be well, Adam.”

  “And you.”

  Atlanta was young.

  After growing accustomed to cites over a millennia old, a city less than two and a half centuries old was a welcome change. The Antebellum houses that had escaped Sherman’s wrath, along with the scores of replicas, captivated me almost as much as the temples of Greece and Rome had. I wandered through the historic district of Peachtree Heights and was shocked to find myself marveling at the architecture, having in the past fallen to the pretensions of my profession. Neoclassical wasn’t quite such an insult after all.

  Unable to resist the comedic value of the Classics department of the University of Georgia existing on their Athens campus, I set off for the school. Like it or not, I was an academic and my first days in any city began with a visit to the local university. Stadium sized lecture halls made slipping into a few classes unnoticed relatively simple. Whatever the topic, I found immeasurable comfort in these academic orations.

  Typical of American academia, Park Hall was a stately brick building. Thick pillars stood like sentinels around the heavy wooden doors. Inside, it smelled like every other academic building, old wood and the vaguely citrus scent of floor polish. Tucked in the free space in the English building, the Classics department seemed to almost be an afterthought. Not many people still seemed interested in losing themselves in dusty relics anymore. Pity.

  “Are you looking for the Predecessors of the Parthenon lecture?”

  I turned quickly to see a slender blonde in a pale green slip dress looking at me inquisitively.

  “Yes,” I said quickly, my interest piqued. “Yes, I am, but I’m a bit lost.”

  She smiled warmly. I had heard rumors of Southern gentility, but it was surprising to see how unexaggerated they were. “Follow me,” she said. “I’m a bit early, but I wanted a good seat. These guest lectures always fill up fast.” She lead me into a large room with stadium seating, already half-filled with students, professors, and anyone with enough interest in classical architecture to give up a Thursday night.

  She walked up to a cluster of professors and, in a matter of seconds, was engaged in an animated conversation with several of them. Sensing that she had all but forgotten about my presence, I took a seat near the front.

  She hadn’t been joking about the popularity of the lecture. The hall filled quickly. The speaker was Manolis Korres, an expert of Greek architecture. I’d seen him speak several times before, and I found my attention wandering to the woman in the green dress. The house lights lowered as large images of the Parthenon appeared on the overhead screen. The dim light obscured her features, and I wondered if her eyes were blue or green like her dress. She watched the lecture with rapt interest, barely blinking.

  To be young. . . I doubted if she was even 23. She had the look of an enthusiastic grad student, the knowledge hungry students that lingered after the lectures, hoping a five minute c
hat with the professor would unravel the reasons why they were spending their lives in the dust of parchment and marble.

  Once upon a time, I was her. Ten years ago, I wanted nothing more than to understand the secrets of the past, to bury myself in the sand and ashes of the ruins. I didn’t want to hide back then. I wanted to know. It had taken far too many years before I realized that however magnificent the Valley of the Kings was, it was still a city of the dead.

  I squinted as the house lights suddenly blinded me, and I applauded along with the crowd. She was smiling.

  To be young.

  It was over a week later when I saw her again. I had rented a studio apartment downtown, and while unpacking the meager amount of boxes I had had shipped from Barcelona, I realized that my pots and pans were still hanging about the stove in my old apartment off Carrer Del Taulat. Despite my nomadic lifestyle, I was not a man who subsisted on takeout curry and leftover Chinese.

  Nothing quite illuminated any society as accurately as a trip to its version of the mall. Rome and Cairo had open air markets and bazaars and Atlanta had Perimeter Mall, and I needed cookware.

  Tuesday afternoon, and the mall was relatively empty. I skirted a pack of truant teenage girls and slipped into the kitchen goods store. As I passed a shelf of baguette pans in search of a few simple skillets, I saw her. She stood next to a display of electric mixers, her face buried in a French dessert cookbook and entirely oblivious to her surroundings. Clad in a pair of faded jeans and a red tank top, she looked even younger than she had at the lecture. I turned away, feeling strangely like an intruder.

  “Can I help you?” she asked raising her eyes from the full page illustration of a chocolate mousse cake.

  They were grey.

  I smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, but I didn’t think I should waste this opportunity again. You disappeared after the lecture before I had a chance to take you to dinner.”