The tourist was screaming, “Κill me so I suffer no more” in the middle of the agora.
Morning was early; the poor souls in the nearby flats woke from the flashing lights, the noise. The tourist, early forties with a goatee, had a stake that seemed to come out his shoulder, while others were emptying buckets of blood on the ancient columns around him.
“Won’t one of you shoot me?” he begged while paparazzi drones were live-streaming the scene and a young woman was tossing coal to the flames.
“Get ready for the fire, Mr. Hendrick,” she said, chewing gum. “The Ottomans will roast you alive.”
In the cafeteria up the hill and opposite the scene, an old couple slammed their backgammon pieces on the wooden board between sips of bitter Greek coffee.
“Fucking pain tourists,” said the grandpa.
“This is no simple tourist,” said the grandma. “He’s an American. He’s going for level three of the Ottoman Impaling Experience—look, they’re going to roast him alive.”
The old man grumbled in gibberish, and they played without another word.
The smoke, the heat, his own sweat invaded Hendrick’s nostrils. Trapped in his headset, his mind lost in another life of a rebel hero impaled and roasted like a lamb by the Ottomans. The prop stake fell off as his body shook, but he was so immersed he didn’t notice. Maria, his assistant, made sure the flames didn’t actually touch his skin and pushed him away when he got too close. When the level was complete and all pain stopped, Alexander Hendrick took off his headset. Droid officers of the fire brigade gave him a cold shower while others cleaned the fake blood from the columns. A local bureaucrat with a satisfied grin under his enormous moustache stamped a page on Hendrick’s passport and handed it to his assistant.
“Two experiences to go, Mr. Hendrick,” Maria said with joy. “You’ll be officially more Greek than most of us by the end of the week.”
“Thanks.” Hendrick tried to smile. “I mean, efharisto.”
“Very good, kalo, kalo!”
• • •
Hendrick’s body kept sweating for the rest of the day, his brain storing the pain as if the experience never ended. In the distance, an explosion drew the attention of the droids. The locals were again allowed to walk freely in the agora, and Hendrick lost his assistant in the crowd. He trusted Maria and had her curate his experiences on this trip. She had followed his work for years and offered him a package based on experiences he’d had before. She’d been through a lot too; her mother had killed herself after Maria went abroad for her studies, and her father had disappeared. Because of this, he had personally chosen her as his trauma curator.
One hour left until his therapy call, and Hendrick ought to hurry back to his hotel.
His eyes unable to focus on any real world stimuli, he regretted not calling a cab. Athens came alive with the bang of metal from cheap android repair shops and homeless kids singing old lyrics of roofless houses and wasted youth. What had they experienced, what could they possibly know, he thought, of pain? The ruins of old tavernas and the occasional neoclassical building blended with the ancient columns, giving a sense of a city that had died twice.
If not two hundred times.
A taxi driver introduced himself as Zeus, tried to pick him up. Hendrick wouldn’t get in the cab, and before it flew away, Zeus spit on his forehead. That or it was raining.
He turned to see Zeus’s cab disappear into a grey cloud—or maybe it had transformed into one, those people were all about the spectacle; their economy had relied on trauma tourism for decades since the Europeans forbade them from growing their own fruits and vegetables and the central bank sold most of their islands in auctions.
Fucking Zeus, man! If only he’d taken a picture of his licence plate, Hendrick would have reported him. The noisy neighbourhood grew hostile at every turn. Where once were balconies for grannies to sit on plastic chairs and observe passers-by, now neon signs covered entire sides of buildings:
LIVE LIKE A LOCAL IN GREECE—OUR MYTH, YOUR TRAUMA!
NAZI OCCUPATION VIRTUAL ADVENTURE!
ATHENS 3.0—BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE PAN-EUROPEAN BANK!
On the front of an abandoned theatre—now a refuge for scapegoats and broken robots—Hendrick could see his face on a bright poster, cosplaying as an American orphan during the Great Depression. He had spent three million dollars from his own pocket on a week of curated starvation and humiliation experiences designed by the most notorious oppression experts of the West. No one made him do it—the production budget only covered foreign traumas anyway—but a sense of obligation, of perfectionism, left him no choice.
A girl recognised his face. “Are you the actor, Mr. Hendrick?”
She had come out of nowhere. Eyes glowing.
Hendrick checked for paparazzi drones before pushing her away. The last thing he wanted was to bring attention to himself when his team was nowhere in sight. What if that girl had tried to touch his face, infecting him with some skin disease, or taken the passport that he had tried so hard to fill with official stamps of generations of trauma and oppression from around the world? He should have left it with his assistant.
“This is my pain, not yours!” the girl shouted. Her thick accent, curly dark hair, something about her felt familiar. As if he knew her in another life.
Hendrick picked up the pace, his body drenched in sweat. He was about to call his assistant to take him back—where had she disappeared—when his psychoanalyst rang, his troubled face popping out of the smart watch.
“This is not the time,” said Hendrick, looking behind his back.
“Sounds like the perfect time!” said the doctor, delighted. “Are you alone? First time in a while I catch you off guard like this—usually you’re withdrawn, safe, uninterested in your emotions or those of people around you—how are you feeling right now, tell me!”
He could swear that girl was somehow following him. Another taxi flew past him, missing his head by an inch or two. Fucking Greek drivers, every single stereotype he had registered in his stereotype app was proving up to date.
“You’ve been through what, the impaling experience?” the doctor continued. “I had another client who didn’t survive that, you know? His butt was itching the next day, and a week later he choked to death in his sleep. Can you imagine? The psychosomatic implications … Oh, and psychosomatic is a Greek word, it comes from …”
“This is really the worst moment,” Hendrick said. It felt like something was blocking the air coming out his throat and he had to spit. “I think I’m being followed by angry locals.”
“Remember we have a strategy for dealing with these emotions,” said the therapist and took out a controller. “Should I order a drone strike?”
Voices came from the graffiti on the walls. From the heaps of rubbish in the square. A road drowned in broken cars. And, in the distance, the echo of backgammon pieces hitting a wooden board, signalling a doomsday on repeat. Now, above his head, a military drone, with the logo of the Pan-European Bank and several stars on its forehead, guarding him against all evil.
He kept moving. His sleeve now covering the watch, the therapist’s radical comments were barely coherent. “If only you’d get immersed … in your own traumas for a change!” The shadows on the wall were now persecuted by the drone’s light. His personal Apollo. Soon, his crew spotted him and formed around him a shield of flesh and metal against the great unknown. The voices went silent, and if he was being followed before, his companions had scared the strangers away.
“You’re no longer vulnerable,” said the therapist. “I’m going to terminate the call.”
“Wait!”
By then he was already at the hotel. Waltzed under its golden arches, through a corridor of video installations and posters—including a poster from his latest Hollywood film, where he had cosplayed as a victim of war—and squeezed into the crowded elevator.
The memory of that stake filled him with dread. The pressure. Old horrors mixed with the new traumas manufactured for his new movie role; he pushed onwards, almost collapsing before reaching his room.
Maria waited for him there and warned him to avoid analysing the pain between the experiences. Time between the sessions was for resting, for disassociating. He took the smart watch off. Everyone deserved some peace.
Rest and with it, lethe were an Insta-sleep pill away. Maria brought him one from the minibar and put him to bed.
• • •
The next day he fought alongside Leonidas and died by Persian spear through the chest right after his coffee and before brunch. In the simulation, he wondered why these Spartans didn’t look like they were depicted in films. He thought he even spotted a woman among the warriors, and maybe some teenagers, all staring at him. But it was hard to tell, and everyone was covered in dirt and blood within seconds.
Maria took him to the café on the hill, insisting the local sweets would enrich his experience. The old couple from before were sitting at the table next to them, and the woman offered koulourakia.
“You like?” she said warmly.
“Malakes tourists,” her husband groaned.
Hendrick—still tense from the immersive war experience—threw the table with the koulourakia upside down.
“What is wrong with you, old man! Don’t you know who I am?” he shouted. “I have suffered, you have not! I have experienced being impaled, tortured, I have died for your country—twice this week—and you’ve done what? You’re enjoying your retirement, your comfortable life, your koulourakia and your spinach pies—and, I imagine, your house for which you don’t have to pay rent, did you get it from your father, or perhaps your wife’s family?—and surely you spend your summers enjoying frappé by the sea, and complaining about young people and tourists. Where is your own personal experience of oppression?”
“Well … my father grew up poor and …”
“You didn’t!”
“My grandmother was shot by the …” The old man seemed close to having a stroke. His face turned red, but so did Hendrick’s, who started coughing. The women were in distress. Maria stood between the old man and Hendrick.
“Please don’t shout at him,” said the old woman, then turned to her husband. “The young man is right, darling. Our ancestors have suffered, even our parents, but we haven’t. No, we’ve lived a good life. How else can we access their stories? I recognised Mr. Hendrick, remember, you also loved him in that Spartacus movie. He doesn’t have to suffer, but he does it for us. He may not even be himself now, you know, maybe he’s possessed by a character from his simulations—I’ve heard about it happening before. These things are intense, darling. Please apologise to him.”
The old lady was afraid. Someone had called the police droids; they were taller and more intimidating than the fire brigade ones. Programmed to protect the tourists before the locals. “Everything okay, Mr. Hendrick?” one of them said. Maria helped the old lady gather the koulourakia from the floor. Hendrick got up and looked down on her.
“What is your problem?” Maria told him. “This woman reminds me of my mother. She’s only been kind to us. Why are you like this?”
Hendrick tried to calm himself, recalled the breathing exercise that his therapist had taught him. These people didn’t matter to him. He’d had his Spartan experience. He had felt his body pierced by that spear. No actual wound, but the pain was real. Now when he’d shut his eyes, he’d feel the blood dripping down his groin and his thighs. Nothing else mattered.
One experience to go.
• • •
That weekend Maria drove him to the bridge of Corinth, where he’d spend several hours in an old woman’s suicide simulation based on the Greek crisis of 2012. Must have been four or five economic crises ago. He’d first starve his body in real life, then proceed to experience a series of losses—his character’s daughter leaving her to study in another country, then her husband cheating, then hostile, loud men confiscating her house so the bank could auction it later. A chemical injection escalated feelings of depression and despair. He looked down from the bridge and, with all his being, wished for release by drowning or, perhaps better, breaking his head during the fall.
“Corinth is where my mother was last sighted,” Maria said. “The scenario you’re going through is based on my family’s story, I’ve designed it. It’s more … authentic that way. That’s what people like you look for, right? The authentic.”
Hendrick smiled. This was exactly it, why he had selected her. Curators like her would use their own memories, their own lives. She’d been with him every day of his stay, to share her pain, and help him carry it. The Academy Award nomination seemed inevitable with her help. He trusted her with his feelings even more than his therapist at this point.
“When I say jump,” Maria whispered. “Obviously you don’t actually jump, but it will feel like it. You know, it’s possible that my own mother jumped from this bridge, too. We’re similar, I bet that if you saw her you’d recognise her. She had dark curly hair, like I used to, and the same light brown eyes.” Maria put her hands on Hendrick’s shoulder, as they had planned. It gave him a sense of security, in the midst of all the curated despair, to know that even if the emotions he was programmed to go through actually led him to jump, his assistant would hold him. But then Maria smiled also. And pushed him off the bridge.
“Go make us proud,” she said.
As Hendrick fell in the water—virtually and physically—he saw a woman falling next to him. She looked like Maria, but slightly older, with dark curly hair and a cheap summer dress. She had thick arched eyebrows and a melancholic smile. Her eyes were dry from earlier tears and, for a moment, they both froze in the air, staring at each other.
“This is my pain, not yours,” a voice said in his head. The woman’s lips hadn’t moved. “If you want my pain, let us swap. Mine for yours. Deal?”
Moments later, he was drowning. He could feel two hands holding him down.
• • •
Later that day, as he passed that café on the hill, the old Greek couple smiled—even the grumpier one.
“Representation matters,” said the wife, who had been an activist in her youth. “What a blessing to be represented by such talented stars of the cinema. Not by lousy Athenians but by someone who has actually experienced the trauma, the pain, of being Greek.”
The husband nodded apologetically.
When the movie was released, the Greek Academy of Film awarded Alexander Hendrick—they spelled his name Alexandros without checking with anyone first—an award for Greek actor of the year. It hadn’t gone to a native-born for a decade or so; not that the place of origin matters.
In his acceptance speech, he thanked Maria first of all. “The traumas I have acquired in my travels are more valuable than anything else on this earth, be it fame, or luxury, or even this award. I have thus decided to quit acting, and move to Athens with this wonderful woman to start a new life. I love you, Maria.”
From among the shocked, silent audience, Maria quietly mouthed words of gratitude.
“I love you too, mother.”
• • •