The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “No, but I have a boat at midnight. I guess I’ll kill time visiting the Acropolis.”

  Her hotel had a view of the Acropolis, she said, as well as a sofa in case I needed to sleep. “It’s the least I can do after your loss.” Room 411. She unlocked the door, tipped the bellboy, and in the early-afternoon curtained darkness, the AC blasting, lifted her pleated skirt and spread herself across the bed. At the time, I felt good for something, and afterward, not for much. Her fingers gouged my hips, but she stared at the door as if waiting for someone more present to enter. We were still two Americans following the standard procedure for arrival. After we finished, I crawled off of her and searched the floor for my clothes.

  “I didn’t even ask what your father died of,” she said, digging her hands underneath the pillows. It seemed less a question than a boast of her impulsiveness. I slid my pants on and went into the bathroom to wash my face. When I returned she was fast asleep, blond hair leaking from a cocoon of blankets.

  I am leaning against the railing, putting all of my weight on it. Like much of the fading hotel—a Beaux-Arts mansion littered with flypaper and velvet-flocked rooms named after deposed royalty—the railing is old and in need of a paint job. Cement dust leaks from its rivets. Even if the railing were to give, I’d fall ten feet onto a patio where a man in a red keffiyeh is clipping his toenails. Taxis shoot around the square like dice, and the dogs are fighting by the fountain. I wonder how many of them were kicked out of homes and how many were born behind the Dumpsters of Plaka. Some of the females have teats that droop like the squishy, netted bags old women carry to the markets. Behind me, tourists drift in the pool, nipple-deep, swirling their arms in exaggerated circles—Germans, Italians, Russians, a few lanky Americans with phosphorescent teeth. Every so often, by the clench of a watch or a wave of an itinerary, couples reunite to gather their belongings. The rooftop of the Grande Palace is a waiting station before taking boats to the islands. I think of Charlie in his house on Patmos with a spare bedroom and a locked door.

  “Fuck America,” a little boy screams, hurtling off a lounge chair. “Fuck going back early! You promised we could stay!” His body is a rack of jutting bones, on the breaking edge before the padding of adolescence. His mother wearily gazes up at him while rotating her bracelets.

  “Please don’t run by the pool,” she says.

  “Mister Bledsoe.” The waiter taps my shoulder. He is young, doughily handsome, and the curls of his hair are frozen with mousse. Waiters never tap customers on the shoulder in New York; there must be a policy against physical contact. I remember four days ago in my father’s bedroom, my stepmother saying, “The dying don’t like to be touched.”

  The waiter hands me back my credit card. “It doesn’t work. Maybe you forgot to call your bank?” He’s so unwilling to assume the worst I could almost kiss him. “Do you want me to charge it to your room?”

  Hotel guests are the only ones allowed up here.

  “No.” I set my drink down and reach into my pocket. I take my only other card out of my wallet, the one connected to the personal credit history of a twenty-nine-year-old man whose postcollegiate career consists of sporadic but deeply fulfilling charity work. “Try this one.” I slap the plastic into his hand and smile to hide my panic. The family card, my last link to the emergency Bledsoe reservoir, has been deactivated.

  The waiter eyes the new card suspiciously. I no longer want to kiss him. I wonder if the dogs bother him when he leaves the hotel at night. I wonder if he lives with his parents. Below us, two officers enter the square toting high-power water rifles. The dogs must know their run is over because they scatter across the bleached cement.

  “Which room are you staying in?” he asks me.

  “Room four-eleven,” I say. “With my girlfriend. She’s asleep downstairs.” I picture Amy or Annabel waking to a hefty tab, yelling acronyms at the concierge, demanding Singapore service. My underwear must still be tangled somewhere in her bedsheets. “I’ll have another.” I grab my suitcase and follow him to the bar.

  It is cool in the shade of alcohol and awnings. For a second, the stain of the sun lingers on my eyes, purple circles that slowly evaporate. Very few guests settle around the counter. The waiter swipes the card, and that beautiful atonal sound of scrolling receipt paper issues from the machine.

  Just get me to Patmos, I think.

  On the other side of the bar, a skinny, twitching man chats up an older Russian woman. He looks familiar, the way anyone young and amphetamine-eyed looks vaguely familiar in proximity to a bar. “I’m a traveling vigilante,” I hear him say without a hint of sarcasm. The Russian laughs, her burned breasts and chandelier earrings shaking like a minor earthquake.

  She holds up her phone. “Let me take picture,” she says. “First vigilante on vacation.”

  He presses his hand over the phone to block the lens.

  The guy is so sweaty I can make out the pattern of his chest hair underneath his shirt. A scar runs from the corner of his mouth, and his head is shaved to disguise the twin islets that remain of his hairline. He looks like a gigolo in his last year on the circuit, his flirtation cut with a baffled desperation. His index finger is just a nub, like the end of a pool cue steadying for a shot. He might be my age, he has my accent, but his face is so beaten I can’t imagine how the guard in the lobby let him up here without asking to see his room key. He catches me staring, so I turn to the view of the Acropolis. When I look back, he’s still watching me, wincing. He snatches his wallet from the counter and stalks off toward the elevator. The Russian woman is too busy gazing into the aurora borealis of her phone.

  The waiter pours my second drink. The gin will help the panic. It has already painted the flowers in the planters a softer shade of pink. But I have to be careful from here on with my spending. I only have what’s left in my bank account and the small stack of cash, hidden in my suitcase, that I managed to siphon before the reservoir went dry. I once spent a winter after college helping single mothers in the Bronx set up bank accounts. “Five dollars. Let’s start your future of financial solvency with five dollars. Surely you can spare that much.”

  The Russian woman pats the counter, as if she’s feeling for weak spots in the wood. She jumps from her stool and kneels on the ground. As I sign my name on the receipt, she begins to wail about missing money, her wallet stolen. “Asshole vigilante. It had my boat ticket. Waiter, fast, call down! Don’t let him leave the hotel!”

  I take my drink to the railing, trying to remain uninvolved. It’s my new tactic, distancing myself from the problems of others. It feels surprisingly liberating, cordoning off worry to the limits of myself.

  How do you feel sorry for a rich kid? This was my father’s favorite joke when I was little. I’d be midmission in a video game or at the dining room table conjugating French verbs on one of the weekends he was mandated to watch me. He’d ask it like a dare, and, without missing a beat, he’d supply his unfunny punch line. You don’t.

  But I have a better answer.

  You make him not rich. I have fallen out of money. It’s like falling out of love. Only with money, it’s not you that walks away, you’re still here, it’s the money that goes elsewhere, finds a new home, forgets. It’s my fault—not that it matters; you can’t talk your way back into money like you can with love, calling it up in the middle of the night, pleading for a second chance. I try to picture Charlie on his yacht in Patmos, a black-oak sixty-footer agitating waves, the free food and sun and the hours of sleep ahead. But I am sweating and the dogs are gone and the Acropolis is so blurry I wouldn’t mind it torn down, and all I can think of is my call to Charlie four days ago, the first time I had spoken to him in years.

  “I need to ask a favor. It’s urgent.”

  “Hi, Ian. I’m fine. Can’t complain. You missed my birthday by a month.”

  “I’m serious. And it’s more of a proposal than a favor.”

  “How about asking nicely? How about putting some sweetness in
that New York whine of yours?” The phone fell from his ear and after a short scuffle, he was back. “How’s volunteer life? How many starving kids did you save from the death camps today?”

  “I’m in hot water. I need your help. You always told me I could ask. Well, I’m asking now.”

  “Hot water?” He paused. I could hear the static in the distance between our voices. “I’m in Greece. The water’s freezing. I have an idea. Why don’t you come?”

  EVERY SUDDEN DEATH is a murder. The incidents surrounding each last breath are analyzed exhaustively for a person to blame. How much morphine did the night nurse add to the IV drip? Was the walk light still white before the taxi rounded the corner? What was the final call on the phone found near the open window? Even a presumably natural death holds the opportunity for a finger to point. My father died in bed at his home in the West Village. Edward Bledsoe, senior vice president of Kitterin Inc., international baby-food manufacturer, twice married, age sixty-seven. I am “also” according to his obituary. “He also had one son from a previous marriage.” Lily, my stepmother, was downstairs in the kitchen, lecturing the nurse in her operatic Spanish. I sat by his bed in one of the Amish rockers that Lily spent her free time collecting from antique stores, under one of the modernist prints she wrangled poker-like at night from online art auctions. I hadn’t seen my father since the two strokes stalled his face six days earlier. “He’s going,” Lily had warned me. “At least it feels that way. The doctors say there’s a chance he’ll pull through. Try not to upset him, okay?” His eyes still worked, flinched, and as I peered down, I got the feeling I had cornered an injured animal, a creature that had no choice but to relent. His gray mouth gaped, and his white hair was combed back in a style that was never his. It must have been the nurse’s preference.

  “Hi, Dad. How are you feeling? I thought I’d keep you company.”

  There was only one photo of me in the many framed above his bed—where younger, happier Bledsoes celebrated birthdays and graduations like the repeating pattern of wallpaper. In the photo, I am a toddler in Central Park, tumbling in his lap like a Labrador, while his eyes are fixed on a great concern beyond the red autumn trees and the pond of miniature sailboats. It was the same pond that Charlie and I used to visit after school as teenagers, stoned beyond the ability to tie our shoelaces or wonked out on some of Charlie’s mom’s funny pills. We were engaged in the great postadolescent pastime of trying to obliterate our innocence as brutally as we could, torching every last place in our minds that it might hide. We’d sit on the benches by Kerbs Boathouse watching the armada of white, spinning sails, our jaws slack, our eyes as glassy as oyster meat, and my head rattling with liquid-fire revelations I wasn’t sure I had only imagined or had spoken out loud. “Did I just tell you about terrorists putting piranhas in the pond to devour children?” I’d ask him worryingly, each forgotten second betraying the stability of the current one. Charlie would look over, as if trying to assess how to save a drowning man without getting wet. A round of Destroyers would have lent my brain a focus, but Charlie and I were past that age. Charlie was already deep in his street years, a platinum cap on his left canine, Cyprus by way of Compton, a sudden expert of subways. But Charlie always brought along his velvet bag of chess pieces, and we’d play on the stone tables next to the sleeping homeless as night fell.

  I sat and my father lay there, in the silence of minutes and the birds in the backyard birches. The town house was about as accommodating to me as a shotgun in a mouth—no room but to get to the point.

  “I couldn’t get ahold of Mom,” I said to fill the quiet. “She’s been traveling in Bangladesh. Did she tell you she’s thinking of opening an orphanage in Delhi?” It was a futile question. They never spoke. My mother had been living in India for the past seven years, surviving like a new age maharaja on the meager residue of her divorce settlement. We communicated once a month by Skype, and her damp, midwestern face in the midst of a yellow monsoon diluted my memories of her midtown studio with its bone-dry static that would terrorize me every time I touched a doorknob. “I’m sure she sends her love.”

  His brown eyes fled to their corners. He could still control his breathing, and air shot spastically out of his nose, as if trying to expel her from his mind.

  “Lily says you’re going to be fine,” I assured him. “The doctors expect a full recovery.”

  After more silence, I told him the truth of my situation: I had been let go as operations manager of a nonprofit that prided itself on taking in anyone, no matter how deranged or needle tracked or urine scented; my rent was overdue on my Harlem walk-up; I had few friends left in the city to count on. Maybe I told him all this because I was sure he couldn’t respond.

  “I’m dangerously low on funds,” I said.

  You never know who will help you, but you can often predict who won’t. My father’s working hand spread out on the mattress. His eyes shut. He hated me. He always had. But he especially hated me when, upon his insistence, I took a low-level desk job at the Panama City branch of Kitterin Baby Food Inc. and promptly abandoned it to help out in the gang-ridden, red-zone quarters. “You’ll find equality is a young man’s game,” he had said to me on my first visit back, the last pulse of restraint before his lips creased. “And when your father’s business relies on the stability of the current Panamanian administration, going in and tampering with that stability, no matter how corrupt, is not a cause for gratitude.” He treated my efforts in Panama as an extended vacation, days that didn’t add up, and in terms of mere addition he might have been correct. Perhaps he knew one day I’d wash up on the shores of his sickbed asking for a handout.

  I sat there for almost an hour with his hatred, rocking back and forth and trying to perfect the next sentence: “A small loan, an advance to me and I promise no more, just some cash, five figures, the price of one fucking sponge-colored modernist print, and I’ll leave you and Lily alone for good.” I sat and he hated and I felt sure we had both entered the terrible universe of each other’s minds.

  The doctors were wrong. He was dying. I don’t know when he began actually dying, but he did, as I sat pinned to the chair and his hand finally went still. He went right beside me, this thin body I had depended on and feared. “Dad, Dad? Please Dad?” He looked peaceful, as if he’d finally been let go of.

  “What did you do?” Lily screamed when she entered the bedroom. Those were her only words to me during an afternoon of doctors and phone calls. I retreated to the greenhouse, trying to keep out of the way, pinching the tears from my eyes. Death and money don’t mix. Death frightens money, money dwarfs death. Doctors give way to lawyers, like tired football players sent to the sidelines by over-officious referees. My two half-siblings hurried over as soon as they heard.

  Lex, the youngest, stood trembling in the greenhouse doorway. “Ian, what did you do?” she cried before darting back into the kitchen. I could hear her talking to Lily. “Why did you let him up there? Alone!” My half-brother, Ross, kept eyeing me nervously through the kitchen window, as if I were a mental patient who had accidentally wandered into their backyard. He, at least, had the courtesy to lower his voice. “It’s not right that Ian was the last one with Dad. Can you imagine what he was talking about? Mom, you should have been up there with them. Or even the nurse. What exactly are the doctors saying he died of?”

  I was the answer. Every death needs someone to blame.

  Lily finally ended her vow of silence at nine o’clock that evening. She was building a fire in the living room on a humid summer night with all the windows onto Perry Street shut. The headlights of cars flared and receded through the panes. I couldn’t shake the sense that she was trying to make her home as inhospitable as possible.

  “By the way,” she said, grasping the mantel, her back bothering her as it often did, tears in her eyes. She had her own children to worry about. “He left you nothing. Just so you know. It wasn’t my doing. That was his wish.”

  I walked out the front do
or. It was ninety degrees in the darkness. I was cold.

  ALL OF ATHENS is purring with light: the green lights of the streetlamps furry with coastal fog; the metallic fluorescents of street-level bars and falafel stands; the boats at sea scattering hurricane yellow across the glossy water. Not New York light, no overbright excess, but an oily, needling, low-to-earth current like mood lighting for quick petty crimes. At night in Athens history dies, and the city spins. Life, I’ve always thought, is felt more intensely in the dark.

  We are racing at high speed, rosaries swinging from the rearview mirror. The taxi smells like a midnight mass. The driver has a picture of the Virgin Mary taped to the underside of his sunshade, just as yesterday on my way to JFK, the driver had a postcard of Jamaica stuck to his. A small glass jar is affixed to the dashboard holding a lit stick of incense. The glass jar might be a repurposed Kitterin baby-food jar—that’s how far the shadow of a global conglomerate reaches. The four drinks I had at the hotel have left me in alcoholic limbo, thirsty for another, regretful of the fourth. I roll down the window and let the wind rinse my face. The driver licks his fingers and smothers the incense tip. The smoke flows. “What side are you on?” he asks.

  “Side?”

  “Side. Dock. Do you have your boat number?”

  I flip through my printouts to find my ferry reservation. “Blue Star,” I tell him.

  “That is ferry company. Which dock? Piraeus is very big port, very crowded this time of year.”

  There is no dock listed on my printout.

  “What island are you going to?” the driver finally asks. His bald spot is a yarmulke of sweat.

  “Patmos.”

  “Holy island,” he says. His foot eases on the gas pedal, slowing his mobile church. Tourists fight through waves of touts on the sidewalk and battle their own refractory luggage wheels. “You don’t need to worry, I don’t think, about the bomb.”

  “What bomb?”

  “You did not hear on the news?” he scolds, as if the least he can expect from a visitor is a basic awareness of current events.