The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “Look at the hippie camp,” Louise says, pointing to the coast. On an indent of beach amid sharp boulders, several tents are staked in the pebbles, with crosses drawn on their sides. Men and women, some naked, with lean, salamander forms, are huddled together. Among the splashing waves, I can barely make out their far-off singing.

  “It reminds me of California,” Sonny says with a shiver. “Not in my time, but my grandparents’. Grandma and Grandpa Towsend were all about free love in the sixties. Funny, in their memories they never mention venereal diseases.”

  “These aren’t those kind of hippies,” Charlie says from the mast. “They’re born-agains. Or die-fasters. They’re praying for the end of the world. Be careful, Ian, the prettiest ones will come up to you and invite you down to their camp and then try to convert you onto one of the four horses.”

  Louise pushes her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to study them. The sockets of her eyes are black grottos in the sun.

  “What’s the name of their leader?” Miles asks, snapping his fingers. “The heavyset one with the cough.”

  “Vic,” Adrian says, not even tilting his head from the sun. “She was sweet. I spoke to her once in Skala. She invited me to a bonfire.”

  “Don’t go,” Rasym commands, stepping around the hatch. “Everyone knows they planted the bomb.”

  “Is that true?” Sonny asks. Her lips are ghost white from the cream. “I thought it was left-wing radicals. I didn’t think we had anything to worry about.” She glances at Charlie as she reaches over to fit a cap on Duck’s head.

  Charlie tacks hard, turning the boat away from the coast, and in the whiplashing spin, I catch a last glimpse of two nude men waving from the shore.

  “I’ll take the monks anytime over them,” Charlie hisses. “At least you know where you stand. At least they don’t smile at you hoping every second is your last.”

  “Now, Charles,” Miles interrupts. “You know from when we were kids that there’s a rich tradition on the island of—”

  “Death cults,” Charlie snaps. “And they trespass wherever they want. Can’t they pass out their Kool-Aid and be done with it?”

  “Wait”—Sonny gasps—“whose blood is that?”

  For a second, nobody moves, caught between reality and an actor’s line. But I notice congealed red spots sprinkled across the wood deck. Terry, the cat, is licking one, and, conscious that everyone is staring at him, licks faster.

  I grab my foot, and that’s when I discover the torn nail. It must have happened when I jumped from the bike. Blood fills the entire nail bed and drips over the yellow rind of toe.

  “Jesus, Ian.” Louise groans.

  “I didn’t even realize. I must have stubbed it.” I decide not to mention the religious maniac with the trimmed beard running me off the road like God’s crusader. Half the group already seems fervently on the side of the monks.

  “I’ll find a bandage,” Sonny says. She eyes Duck, who stands on the stern, tossing nectarine peels into the water. “Sweetie, be careful.”

  “I got her.” Miles jumps into action, holding his long hands around the little girl like she’s a prize vase in danger of toppling.

  Thank you, she mouths to him, and, out loud to Charlie, “Try to control the turns, okay? It would be great if everyone survives the day.”

  Sonny returns from the galley with a first-aid kit and insists on doing the bandaging job herself. She dabs the wound with a cotton ball. I’m impressed by her nursing skills, infused with a mother’s firm handling of cuts, as if she’s accustomed to uncooperative feet. Louise avoids my toe entirely until the Band-Aid is in place. In her defense, blood looks more gruesome in direct sunlight.

  “Is there a hospital on the island?” I ask.

  “Yeah, but not a good one,” Sonny answers. “If you need more than stitches, it takes hours to get to a decent facility in Leros or Kos.”

  “So what happens if you get seriously injured?”

  “Oh, that’s easy.” Sonny squeezes my foot. “You make sure you don’t.”

  Christos drops the sails and gestures toward a speck of rocky island off the coast, mint green and sac-cloth brown, with steep jagged cliffs pitched up at its peak like ram’s horns. A tiny unadorned chapel sits halfway up the mountainside.

  “Goat Island,” he says in his cardboard English. “My family”—he touches his chest and points—“our island. We raise goats.”

  “Christos’s family island,” Charlie clarifies. “But the goats are gone now, aren’t they?”

  Christos chopsticks his giant fingers at his eye, an inch of space between them. “Few now. They are stolen.”

  “I saw two yesterday,” Adrian testifies, propping himself on his elbows. “When I swam over.” The island is a mile or two from Patmos, a marathon swim even for someone as fit as Adrian. “Their hair hasn’t been shaved.”

  “Your family should mark them,” I volunteer. “A tag on the ear.”

  Charlie snorts, grabbing onto Christos’s shoulder. “Did you hear that?” He mimes a puncture to the ear. “Ian, you know what the local thieves would do? They’d cut the ear off before they carried them off. It would be an island of goat ears. Greek law: it’s yours until you can’t prove it is.”

  “Well, a missing ear is an identifying marker too. What about informing the police?”

  Now Charlie and Christos both laugh, one mouth full of white teeth, the other a cave of black throat.

  Christos drops anchor. The vibration of the chain’s unspooling motor causes the glasses on the table to jitter. The captain grabs a plastic bucket, tugs off his shirt, and, without a preamble, dives off the side of the yacht.

  “Christos goes deep because he isn’t afraid,” Charlie says, “of the enormity of the water. I can’t stand tourists who swim with one hand latched onto the side of the boat. You’ve come this far, let go.”

  Louise slips out of her shorts.

  “Are you coming?”

  “Maybe in a minute,” I tell her.

  Soon everyone except for Miles and me dives off the boat, as naturally as if they’ve been trained from the diving boards and docks of their youth. Even Duck, taking fledgling steps to the edge, manages an upside-down launch.

  “You don’t swim?” Miles asks, resting his head on the cushions.

  “No, I do. It’s just . . .” I feel dizzy, and the pain in my foot, once identified, has started to sting. Blood has already leaked into the bandage. I can’t remember the last time I was on a boat, and the bobbing motion combined with the glare off the water reminds me of the sickness of watching television too long on a hot afternoon—the nauseating claustrophobia of unreal colors and sounds.

  “Sonny tells me you were living in Panama?” Miles prompts. I don’t respond. “My family had some dealings with a Dutch shipping company that has its headquarters there. My father has a thing for the Panama Canal. The eighth wonder, and, for him, the only improvement Americans ever made on the world.” I smile wanly and perform an examination of Goat Island. Nothing moves there, not even the trees. “What were you doing in Panama?” he finally asks.

  “Helping out,” I say vaguely. Making mistakes, I think. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. I climb down the ladder into the galley, steadying myself on the lacquered wood walls. In the gentle quiet below, the boat’s pitching is less severe. A chrome dining area with an entertainment system leads into a square bedroom. A king-size mattress takes up most of the space. The bedroom is littered with Charlie’s personal items: books and coins and DVDs and old chess trophies, much like the décor of his dorm room in college, as if the moving boxes were shipped directly from Massachusetts to Domitian. I pass back into the main room, where the cat leaps onto the kitchen table. Above the table hangs a framed photo of Charlie and his father in Venice. They smile amid the gray feathers and puddles of Piazza San Marco. I haven’t seen Mr. K in nearly a decade. The seal in him has turned walrus, and he grins proudly and sickly from a wheelchair. There’s an oxyg
en tank hooked to his side and a mask in his lap. It won’t be too long now before Charlie also loses his father, with one less species listed under the Konstantinou genus. But unlike me, Charlie will bury him alongside his family.

  I hobble into the bathroom on my injured foot. When I finish, I wait a few more minutes down below, toying with chess pieces that roll on a cut-wood, opal-inlaid table across from the galley’s radio equipment. By the time I return, everyone is toweling off on deck. Sonny is wringing Duck’s hair out, and Louise is rinsing off on the stern with a shower nozzle attached to a rubber hose. I can see her nipples through the blue bathing suit.

  Charles winks at me as he lights a cigarette. “It takes a day or two to get used to her.” At first I think he means Louise. “After a week, you’ll be steering Domitian.” After a week. By then, will I still be drifting through an accidental vacation or will Charlie have given me keys to a brand-new life?

  LUNCH IS FRESH urchin, gathered by Christos from the sea and sliced in half with a switchblade on deck. The spiky black stars look like the orbs held by the saints in Charlie’s icon paintings. I pick at the slimy brown meat without commitment. I’m thankful when Christos switches to the motor to guide us smoothly toward the coast, a bright blue wake trailing behind us. We anchor again thirty feet out from a quiet, crescent beach on the north side of the island. Rasym and Adrian jump into the water first, holding a pile of towels above their heads as they wade toward shore. Christos unstraps the tender from the boat with irritated effort. If Miles could swim, he wouldn’t have to use it, and if his son were here, it wouldn’t be his job.

  “I can stay on board,” Miles says apologetically. “I don’t mind. He doesn’t have to go to all the trouble.”

  “It’s fine,” Sonny replies. “And now we can bring supplies with us.” She tosses three water bottles in the inflated dinghy and I place my novel in there too, wrapped in a towel. Sonny guides her daughter by the hand down the ladder. Charlie dives from the bow, reemerging to position Duck on his shoulders so she can ride him to shore. I pull off my shirt and stare down at the soft turquoise. There are two kinds of swimmers, those who jump headfirst without even testing the water, and those who linger at the edge, steeling themselves for the cold jolt, pep-talking themselves into free fall. I’ve always been the latter, but I believe it’s misplaced to call it cowardice. There’s a thrill to the waiting and slow-building resolve, a body beating back its instinct to remain on solid ground. It’s the pleasure of reticence, of the brain sweating, of the notion that actions have prices, which the fast, careless divers know nothing about. Eventually though—mainly because Miles is staking his claim to my attention, darting toward me from across the deck (wait, is he going to push me in?)—I jump.

  The water is sharp at the surface and instantly giving underneath, the entire blind hug of it. I take my time, paddling in the stillness, opening my eyes, sinking under to the soundtrack of my own breath. I watch Sonny on the beach, marking a spot with the spread of a towel. Charlie was right. Two beefy Greek men, their stomachs industrial mixing bowls over impressively scant swim trunks, stand a few feet from her, leering with predatory intention. She ignores them, and it’s only Duck falling against her, whining like an air horn, that eventually clears them from the vicinity.

  I climb onto the brown-pebbled beach, the undersides of my feet throbbing with each step on the coarse stones. Louise pats a black towel that has already been opened next to her.

  “You need to buy water booties,” she says, holding her humor on her lips. “You can get them in Skala, along with your very own Anti-Bethlehem T-shirt.”

  “Anti-Bethlehem?”

  “It’s the hot Patmos shirt of the summer. You know, Revelation Island, Anti-Bethlehem, the birthplace of the end of the world. There are also Anti-Bethlehem bibs and beer mugs. Get your Christmas presents early.”

  Charlie is buttering Sonny’s back with lotion. Rasym and Adrian are floating in the shallows, their chins catching the wave crests.

  “Now do you miss New York?” Sonny asks me.

  “Not for a minute,” I say.

  “Neither does Charlie.”

  Charlie picks up a pebble and launches it into the water.

  “If the world is a bomb, New York is its fuse,” he says gruffly. “That’s where all the bad things start. Not here.” Louise wrinkles her nose, as if finding his metaphor a touch too pat.

  The sun dries my body in minutes, and for a while all I can do is watch the water’s surface, brown and purple like peacock feathers. The tide spreads across the pebbles and pulls back out, each time with a skeeeeth like the sound of a rake driven over concrete. All day and night for millennia, for light-years, there has been this sound, this skeeeeth-ing, and maybe it will be the last sound too, the world’s last sound, one final skeeeeth before it’s all blown like cartwheels into space.

  A few minutes later, the tender cuts through the waves, Miles crouched at the prow with his button-down wrapped around his neck, and Christos in back, directing the motor. Miles’s chest hair is long and crinkled, and his doughy nipples poke periscopically from his chest. His chin is raised proudly against the wind, like Christopher Columbus centuries too late for colonization or even a good spot on the beach. He steps into the water and gathers the supplies we’ve stowed. Charlie greets his arrival by springing up and running into the sea. He takes large, lunar steps before he disappears under the carpet of blue.

  Miles drops my book between my legs and sits down beside Sonny in Charlie’s perch.

  “I’ll take a cab back to Chora,” he says. “I don’t want Christos to bother again.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t let me teach you,” Sonny says. “I taught Duck.”

  “Pride,” he answers honestly as he twists open a water bottle. “But maybe with your coaching I could try. When I attended Ludgrove I had an uncle who drowned off Borneo, so I was released from swimming instruction.”

  “That seems like a reason to keep you enrolled,” Louise counters. Miles laughs, rubbing his chin. He’s not such a bad sport.

  Time passes. The heat thickens. An Italian couple argues under their umbrella in a sleepy seesaw rhythm. A fat man smokes nearby while playing Sudoku in a metal folding chair, squares of burned flesh swelling through the metal’s weave. Goat bells ring in the hills around the beach. Extended thoughts prove impossible, snatches of concern at most, more their feeling than their source. In the shadow of an olive tree, an older European couple, nudists, crouch with their legs splayed, offering full genital exposure, every labial fold and uncircumcised droop on display. Their nudity is so frank it doesn’t read as sexual, as if arousal must find its establishing rhythm in a small degree of shame.

  I lie on my towel watching Miles playing a shell game with Duck using actual shells. He moves the three shells around an open magazine, and she studies their crisscrossing intently. “Now which one is the beetle under?” he asks her.

  She points to the middle one, the most obvious or the most-clever-for-being-so-obvious choice. Miles turns them all over. There is no beetle. Duck’s horrified face approximates the moment she will first learn of the hydrogen bomb.

  Miles opens his fist to reveal a crawling black beetle.

  “Remember,” he advises. “Before you pick, always ask to see the dealer’s hands.” She nods attentively. “Sometimes the shell hides the hand.” I often find childhood lessons are the ones most in need of relearning.

  Adrian and Rasym climb barefoot with a mat into the scrub hills above the beach. I wonder if they’re going to mess around in the bushes. I try to begin on Henry Miller, a book called The Colossus of Maroussi, as Louise dozes next to me, but around the tight black type is an inch of white border, and beyond that border the blue sky and sea, and my eyes slip across sentences into the far margins to find Charlie and Sonny kissing in the water. A few months before the war broke out I decided to take a long—Sonny leaning back in Charlie’s arms, swaying her brown torso in the current. My eye str
uggles back to catch the next cliff edge—vacation. I give up a few cliff jumps later and flip lethargically through the pages. I assumed the book was new, bought randomly by Charlie’s interior decorator as cerebral décor, but someone’s initials are penned on the first page. G.F. A few sentences are underlined midway through the novel: Who are you, what are you now in drugged silence. . . . Are you you? If I should bash your skull in now would all be lost . . . will there come out with the blood a single tangible clue? The heat gums my brain. This G.F. had more patience for Miller’s disquisitions than I do. It’s defeating not to connect to passages a previous reader has taken the trouble to mark, like coming across a postcard of buildings long torn down. Sonny climbs dripping out of the water, adjusting her bikini top. The fat, smoking man ignores his numbers game.

  “How’s the reading?” she asks, worming herself down on her towel.

  “Nonabsorbent,” I reply. “I found it in the cabin. A G.F. got to it first.”

  Sonny shrugs. “Here’s a confession. I always check that the characters in a novel are older than I am. Ideally they’re a minimum of five years older. Otherwise, I have trouble taking their mistakes seriously.”

  “Was that true for the roles you played?”

  “No.” She laughs. “Five years younger and deeply tortured was the ideal. I meant it when I said Charlie saved me from the psych ward of Hollywood. It’s like my body was broken and he set every bone back into place.”

  “Have I seen any of your movies?”

  “Probably,” she says defensively. “Or maybe not. Who cares? I’ll never go back. I’m so done with it.” I wonder how much she was done with it and how much it was done with her. “I always tell Duck, she can be anything she wants except famous.”

  Duck lounges next to Miles, glaring at an Italian man who emerges from the sea in a snorkel mask holding a bright red starfish in his palm. He places it on his girlfriend’s knee a few sunbathers down from us. Duck gets to her feet and storms over to them, her back rigid like the hind of a deer.