And as if to complete the memory for me, Simon finished fiddling with the iPhone he had plugged in and gave me an expectant look as he pushed the car system’s volume up. A moment later the familiar anthemic keyboard chords crashed in, the drums filled the gap, and the bass started, Prince’s “1999” rocking.

“Yes!” I said. It was happening. I had made it to Crete, and we would slide not forward in time like the song suggested, but back to that glorious week and all the promise it held. Simon read my look and nodded emphatically along to the music.

“1999!” he yelled.

Pleased, I looked out the window, seeing the increasingly rugged hills and ravines we had not so much as glimpsed on my previous trip. That had been a beach holiday, pure and simple. Days in and by the water, nights in the bar, occasional dancing, constant drinking. We had seen nothing of the surrounding countryside or the ancient Minoan sites for which the long, sprawling island was uniquely famous. In fact we barely left the resort except to eat and return to the airport. Except for the last day.

The cave.

I frowned to myself. The cave had been the exception, an excursion that we hadn’t enjoyed and that made me feel like we should never have left the beach, should never have looked up from our drinks, our toes in the sand at the water’s edge . . .

Five years later that vacation seemed both naive and kind of glorious, a last drunken farewell to our twenties, our youth. What we would do now, up here, bumbling through our thirties and as far from the ocean as Crete physically permitted, I had no idea. I shot Simon a sideways glance, looking for signs of age: crow’s feet by the eyes or a hint of silver at the temples, but I couldn’t see them. Maybe it was just me who felt older.

And as fun as it would be reliving our last visit through drinks on the beach, I had to admit that I was ready for something different this time. Whatever my job had been and would be, working at Great Deal didn’t exactly fulfill all my intellectual needs, and I found myself thinking wistfully about all the things we’d missed last time, and what it would be like to stroll the island’s ancient ruins with Marcus, talking history, mythology. Though I had been a biology major, I had also been an English minor and had considered flipping them at one point. I wasn’t especially interested in the politics that seemed to inform—or infect—everything in the classroom, but I loved story, the shape of it, the inventive audacity of stringing together characters, places, and events to make up something that felt absolutely real but existed only in the head of the writer or their readers. If I’d had any talent or willpower in the matter, I once thought, I would have been a writer: a novelist rather than a poet, though a playwright might be good too. I liked the way stories lined up behind each other like mirrors, reflecting little bits back, sometimes direct and straight on, sometimes distorted and crazy, Joyce growing out of Shakespeare, who grew out of Ovid and all those ancient tales of gods and goddesses, some of them cobbled roughly together a stone’s throw from this very spot.

Jason, Medea, and the Golden Fleece . . . stories of magic and madness, passion, and divine intervention. Most of it I’d half forgotten till a couple of days ago, when I dug out one of the textbooks that had been sitting untouched on my shelves for at least a year and found the ancient tales waiting, fresh and familiar, ancient but edged with something sharp and urgent. I reread them with a similar urgency, a hunger I could not completely explain.

This was a land of legend, of ancient myth, of story. It was the land of King Minos and the mazelike complex of tunnels beneath his palace known as the labyrinth. Inside the maze lived a terrible monster, half man, half bull—the Minotaur—to whom victims were sacrificed annually, trapped down there in the darkness of the passages where the monster hunted . . . It was great stuff, reeking of danger and heroism and strangeness. For a second I forgot Simon, humming tunelessly next to me, forgot the inevitable partying the reunion would center around, the willful, gloriously frivolous stuff we would laugh about over the next few days, and I felt those ancient stories in the air like incense, sweet and fragrant.

I have left behind my job, I thought, my ordinary, humdrum life in an American city, and I have become Medea, a woman of magic and mystery . . .

Grinning to myself again, I watched the road signs to neighboring villages as we drove. “Georgioupoli,” “Fones,” “Alikampos,” “Kryonerida.” None of them meant anything to me, and as the roads got smaller and the gaps between habitation larger, the settlements themselves shrank till they were mere clusters of ancient houses and an occasional tiny monastery. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. The last village we saw was Empresneros, and then nothing, just a slow and winding climb into the pale mountains as I tried to check my e-mail on my phone.

“Are there hotels round here? Stores? Restaurants?” I asked, hating the timidity in my voice.

“Nope,” said Simon, shooting me a wolfish grin. “Isn’t it awesome? Out in the wilds. We figured we’d done the hotel scene and were ready for something a bit more authentic, you know? This is real Greece. You may as well put your phone away. You won’t get a signal up here.”

“Right,” I said lamely. “Wow. Great.”

There were no cars on the road. No gas stations, just these endless, rubble-strewn switchbacks, the land climbing on the one side as it fell away to the ever-present sea on the other.

“Good thing it’s fall,” said Simon. “In the winter this whole area is buried in snow, and the roads all get closed. It’s why so few people live up here. The mountain range is . . . I don’t know. Forgot the Greek name, but it means white mountains, or something like that. It’s the limestone, I think.”

We had been driving through the ubiquitous olive groves, but there were fewer and fewer signs of cultivation here, and the land was heavily wooded. I think Simon picked something up in my watchful silence because, out of the blue, he remarked, “When I got the keys for the place, I asked if there were bears or wild boar we should watch out for, but apparently they don’t live here. There’s a rare Cretan wildcat and some kind of ibex, but that’s about it. Nothing to worry about.”

“Good,” I said. I’d never been outdoorsy. I doubted Simon was either, and I was as sure as I could be that Melissa was a confirmed urbanite. We might be out in the wilds, but the house—or whatever it was—would have all modern conveniences, and if Melissa came down to breakfast not dressed to the nines and made up as if she were featuring on the cover of Cosmo, I’d throw myself to the rare Cretan wildcat. Hell, I’d eat the rare Cretan wildcat.

“What?” said Simon, who had half turned and caught my grin.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just, you know . . . looking forward to seeing everyone and hanging out.”

It sounded so pathetic when put like that, deliberately so. I didn’t want him to know just how excited I really was, how delighted that I had managed to hold on to my slender connection to them. I felt the way people may once have felt in the presence of royalty, except this was better because they were my friends. I knew that was lamer still, and I privately mocked myself for being so much the devoted hanger-on. It was tiredness, I told myself, the kind of exhaustion that makes you weak and emotional. I should have slept on the plane.

Chapter Five

I lie against the wall on the bed, my knees drawn up to my chest, my back to the room. It’s a defensive posture, an animal curling, as if I’m presenting an array of spines to the world. It has the added advantage of taking the strain off my wrist since I’m now close enough to the iron ring in the wall that I can smell the rust. Unless that’s more blood. For all I know the room could be caked with the stuff.

It is still mine dark. The kind of pitch blackness I can’t recall ever experiencing before, as if my head is in a velvet bag. It is numbing. I cannot tell how long I have been awake or if I have been continuously so. In spite of my alarm, the strange amnesia weighs on me so that I feel only half-there, and I wonder if I am drifting in and out of slumber without realizing it. In the dark, when you can’t move, there is little difference between sleeping and waking. It is nightmarish either way.

You have been in darkness like this before, I think vaguely. You woke up on your side in the black, smelling of blood . . .

I run from the memory. It’s like I’m on a railroad track with the train bearing down on me. I leap aside and suddenly the train was never there, even the memory of it boiling away to nothing, so that I can’t understand why I was so spooked. What could I have forgotten that was worse than where I was now?

I have taken off my one sandal because wearing it left me feeling unbalanced, but being barefoot makes me feel naked, vulnerable.