Free Hotel Living by Ioannis Pappos

the last person to see him alive. I honked, I yelled . . .” She waved her fork at Erik. “He kept running. I had to chase his freezing ass down the street.”
    â€œSorry, I don’t run in a team.” Erik laughed.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that?” I said.
    â€œI don’t need one more class in my life. I’m not like you,” Erik said, satisfied.
    I wasn’t following, but I could tell he smelled blood.
    â€œLet’s see,” he said, and looked at the ceiling. “Stanford class of ’98? EBS ’03? Command ’03? Bay Area Sailing Team I-don’t-know-when . . . What’s next? Friends of the High Line, class of 2004?”
    Was I accused of being a zealous immigrant? Today’s version of the never-ending American story? A successful Melissa? Fine. I was an educated immigrant. He knew that, he acknowledged that, so why couldn’t education be our bond? Our stick between Melissa and corporate? If we had anything in common, we were both into reconciling reality with ideas. We spiced things up—like the smell from the kitchen, which was getting stronger by the minute. The Pakistani music louder; the same song had been playing for half an hour, pounding my head after my absurdly long week, flight, andlack of sleep in Erik’s sarcophagus of a bedroom. “Isn’t that how you grow up in this country?” I countered, feeling the swollen glands in my neck.
    â€œI didn’t choose this country.”
    â€œYou came back,” I said.
    â€œTo do my share.”
    â€œOf what? Declassification?”
    â€œYes.” Erik laughed. “Whatever it takes.”
    â€œAnd you picked the right hood?” I pressed.
    He pushed his plate toward Melissa, who was already eating his chicken bites, and motioned to the waiter for more beers. “I picked the only hood where we can preserve without penalizing the classless,” Erik said.
    â€œSo preservation is to blame now?” I smiled.
    His manner changed. “ I’m the journalist, amigo. I didn’t say that. I said urban preservation criminalizes poverty. That’s how we preserve in this country. We push the poor out of the city.”
    â€œThree more beers! Now!” Melissa yelled, eating with her hands.
    I looked at her dirty nails and mustache. Cabs were parked and double-parked on both sides of Ninth Avenue. What if Alkis or Paul walked in at that moment?
    â€œThat’s the way to do it,” Erik said to Melissa, and I wondered if—correction, when —Erik would pick up a New York accent.

FOUR
    T WO WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ERIK told me he was going to Hawaii for the holidays to cover an eco-event and kayak with his brother. He didn’t ask me anything about my holiday plans, which were nonexistent.
    â€œYour name is at the airport in Athens,” my sister told me that same week.
    If I traveled back to Greece, the army could force me to enlist for a minimum of eighteen months. I’d lose both my job and my American green card. So, once again, my sister and I talked about our never-materializing plan: that I would buy the whole family a trip somewhere in Europe. My father’s work, my sister’s kids, my mother’s health and fear of flying: the trip was always postponed for one reason or another. By 2003 I hadn’t seen my family for three years, a period long enough that I could pick up on the pity on colleagues’ faces when I had to respond to their query on how long had it been since I’d visited Greece.
    â€œYou’re choosing comfort and privilege over family,” Paul told me at a conference in downtown Chicago whenI dodged his question about when my next trip to Trikeri would happen.
    I was not proud, but I didn’t doubt that my choices were right, necessary. “Even globalization has its limits,” I retaliated. “You know better, Paul. You just came back from”—pretending to