Arctic Wash
The Blue Box: Part I of several, sequential parts
Suddenly my glass of Mythos seems — inadequate. I slide it away and to the right, my eyes shifting around in search of the bartender. I don’t even remember if there ever was a bartender.
“Hello?” My voice echoes once before evaporating into the humid air. What is it with this place, I think to myself as I rise from my seat to check behind the wall of half-empty bottles in front of me. Emptiness. I reach into my pocket for my phone while checking the balcony, which is deserted. There’s a text from an unknown number waiting patiently in the notification tray.
[ Take a 1-hr flight to Turkey, my friend. The Aegean is the only thing between you + a righteous shawarma sandwich fresh off the pit, just outside the palace grounds. ]
I manage a frown while squinting my eyes at the message, as if this combination of facial muscle gestures will help me determine who sent it. Hmm. I find myself behind the bar counter running the index and middle fingers of my right hand over the shelf with the whiskeys.
< Palace? >
There’s a bit of hesitation as my left thumb hovers over the send button. I’m in the mood for something new — something local that I’ve never drunk before — and my attention soon finds a distracting cooler underneath the countertop at the other end of the bar. I hit send and walk over to the mysterious box.
It’s sunset now. The sky turns a deeper shade of orange than I’m used to, although I can’t see it from where I stand inside the pub (I watched the sun dip behind the windmills yesterday while looking for my hotel; I was convinced I was staring at a painting of Mykonos instead of standing there witnessing it firsthand…) I hear the chatter of local fisherman straddling up the main alley by the front door and I catch a brief glimpse of them with their nets slung over their broad shoulders.
After waiting for their voices to disappear into the alley, I turn my gaze back to the cooler.
[ Palace = the Blue Mosque. Skip checking in + tell your driver to take you straight to the Sultanahmet from Atatürk. Once you’re there, snap the obligatory photo — then follow your nose. ]
Whoever this is, he or she is sounding a lot like the narrator from Aladdin. Back to the box. It’s a white cooler that’s obviously been painted over with blue paint; the thing has a fair amount of scratches on it revealing the original color underneath. And of course they’d use blue paint over a white box. Mykonos law. I lift the lid open and begin digging into the ice with my hands as if I’d just found the ‘X’ on a treasure map.
I have no idea what I’m going to find but I excitedly scoop faster and deeper until my fingertips start to go numb from the cold. Maybe there’s a severed human limb waiting for me beneath all this ice. Maybe I should stop while I’m ahead and finish my beer and be on my way. Maybe I should stop being such a little girl and get to the bottom of this.
Sometimes I wonder how often suspense/thriller movie scenarios actually happen in real life. The secret agent rooftop shootout. The supercar chase scene begot by laundered money and angry Feds. The runaway thief with a stolen diamond-encrusted Grecian cooler…
There’s about 2 inches of ice-cold water in the bottommost layer of the ice box. I swirl my desensitized hand in the arctic wash, blindly searching for a bottle. Any bottle. At this point I’ll take a bottled water.
Nothing.
Then — the top of my fingernail scrapes against a jagged object protruding from the floor of the cooler. It feels sort of rigid, like the scale of a dragon if dragons were real. My eyebrow twitches. Have I found something? I pinch the dragon scale tightly between my thumb and my index finger and begin to wiggle it free, unaware that it’s tearing through my skin because I can’t feel any pain in my entire hand.
A few more tugs — left, right, left again — and the object dislodges from its tomb, floating up between the ice cubes before sinking down and resting at the container’s base. My heart starts racing and I wonder if this is my spy movie moment. Clasping the shard, I urgently pull my arm out of the cooler water (which slowly swirls red with blood… ah that’s right, I had cut my finger only thirty seconds ago) and wipe it dry with a rag left lying on the bar counter.
Holding it up to the fading daylight, I realize exactly what I’ve hoisted from its sleepy depths: a perfectly insignificant piece of plastic.
A chocolate dusk befalls Mykonos as the last of the evening’s fishermen filter through the shadowy corridors winding into town. I’ve finished my mug of room temperature lager and am now amusedly contemplating whether to keep my newfound plastic dragon’s scale or hurl the damned thing into the Aegean Sea.
Time to leave this lonely excuse for a pub.
After rinsing the glass, I count a few euros out of my wallet and search the bar counter for something to tuck them under. My eyes dart across the room, inevitably locking — again — onto the cooler. Shit, I totally forgot to drain the bloody ice water from earlier. I anchor the money to the countertop using an ornate, clay shot glass from the liquor shelf and then lift the ice box to the rear patio.
The adjacent alleyway back here gradually declines to the shore — which goes for most of the alleys I’ve come across in this town, actually — making them a non-issue during heavy rains… and perfect for dumping blood-tainted iced cooler water into the street. For a split-second I imagine myself discarding incriminating evidence of a dark and murderous transgression.
As I tilt the box sideways to empty its contents, the plastic lid slides clumsily between my forearms and into gravity’s ballet. I try to catch it with the cooler, effectively drenching the bottom half of my shirt in a pinkish rinse. Just perfect.
The ill-fated cover lands face up on the corridor ground, echoing through the empty passageway like the fading bark of a stray dog. It’s at this precise moment that I see it, duct-taped to the underside of the lid:
a key.
