The thirst of concrete

Three weeks ago right around when I started work a heat wave rolled through Athens boiling away the city’s last reservoir of sanity. From the windows of the air-conditioned office of the Athens News the city looked depleted, its colors dehydrated into sepia tones, the mess of water heaters and satellite dishes atop the buildings like glinting globs of mercury at any moment ready to slosh down into the streets.

Down below on those streets, it felt like everyone had lost patience with everyone else—we all wanted out, and wanted out now. The heat clawed at everything that’s raw about downtown—the swarms of taxis irritable like agitated ants, the swirls of strange characters around Omonia (Harmony) square jittery and stenched, their bizarre, mirage-like appearances lended reality and weight—everything screaming, bus wheels smacking the pavement and trolley lines cracking like dry lightning the trolleys themselves like bugs their antennae bent back from heat while they scuttled to the curbs for shade. The air thicker carrying sound like water. Masses of crossing faces bewildered by the heat, their voices like cats fighting on the street.

Even the air conditioners were sweating, their perspiration dripping on the streets or condensing on the ceilings. Going from inside to outside gave me a headache, like my brain and body were pulling inside themselves trying to find a wisp of cool still preserved within. Going back in felt like a lie—you could almost see the fumes of the evaporating, smoggy city rising among the buildings like pillars of mud from a civilization long destroyed.

Greek flags hung limp on their poles like they’d been beaten, runny like eggs bruised blue like flesh. People sat on the steps of department stores catching the escaping cold that rolled along the floor and out into the street, the light of their cigarettes meek, the color appearing cool. The mountains around the city seemed to recede leaving but outlines like cardboard cutouts, the real mountains snuck away leaving their doubles to fool the city. The few scrappy trees on their slopes sucked back into the rocks like frightened eels into coral, parched, the city whole city parched.

Electricity demand in Athens roughly doubles during the summer months. Greece is also one of the least efficient and most thirsty users of water in Europe. Most of the forests around Athens have been burned or logged into non-existence, and Mt. Parnitha, the last major greenery in sight of the city, was burned last year and with it the forest that helped cool the city. It was a big story when many meteorologists predicted that the mountain’s destruction would suffocate Athens. It may not need to; everyone is already holding their breath.

All this combined with the Greeks’ notoriously poor environmental sense (though it’s become better and the media more alarmist) makes me wonder about the future of the city. Sometimes Athens does become only the biggest village in Greece, not just because of its character, but for how precarious it feels in times like these. It never seems so more likely that it will melt or die of thirst and sheer exhaustion, frantic and seizing as it heats with no way to throw off come night the fire of day. It drinks and drinks, and never is it sated.

It cooled for a few days, then burned again but there are days of clear light not so heavy like a hammer pounding nails of light in our eyes. There are days I don’t wake sweating. They are few; the sky turns silver with heat-maddened dust. I wake expecting fires. They burn and circle the city, the smoke awake before us still wreathing the city, the concrete morning, like a snake around its prey. The black clouds flee high into the sky by day, slowly unfurling from flames somewhere lost but finding their way to our gates.