The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “What need? Everyone today speaks English if they can afford the sea.”

  Petros seems uncertain whether I will indeed be an excellent fit. He impatiently grinds his shoe in the dirt, as if I’m infringing upon his appointment.

  “All right, Ian. Unpack your suitcase.” Charlie eyes my bike. “I’m glad Helios felt well enough today to perform a few duties.” He makes a screwdriver out of his finger and loosens the bolt of his temple. “Christos will be proud.”

  Charlie and Petros head into the office. I return to my bike. Before I swing my leg over the leather seat, I find I’m holding five-hundred euros in cash in one hand and, in the other by accident, the black hand-carved queen. It’s substantially more than I had an hour ago.

  I trade my work cap for my helmet and straddle the motor. I am all light, a man with a job, finally retired from the losing sport of philanthropy—a man who was so close to stop that it is almost unbearable now to be flying at high speeds along the kerosene blue, my whole heart pounding against the day. I am cutting fast through the dust and sun. To my new home on the island. And to Louise.

  CHAPTER 6

  I wait for her on the other side of the bolted door. Some decisions are akin to jumping from the top of a waterfall. No one will care if you don’t do it, you can easily walk away. Who could blame you for not surrendering to the drop? But you’ll know. And the fear is not to discover one day that the world has no meaning, but that, in fact, it does. Every decision counted. Against your better judgment, all of it mattered, the steps and choices, the pauses and delays. That’s the real fear: an answerable life.

  Or so it seems to me as the sun sets and I wait for her. The roosters grow agitated, staking one last claim to the land that is shrinking into invisibility in the dark. The sky bruises, and shadows pull at the bed and chairs. Even though while I was out a cleaning woman has come to scour the bathroom, change the sheets, and place two pink hibiscus flowers on the pillows, the money is still hidden in the nightstand.

  The high beam of her bike sparkles up the drive. She climbs the steps and turns the latch on her cabin door. I hear the rush of feet, a bag dropped on the bed, and the hissing spray of the faucet in the bathroom. I place my ear against the door and catch her voice but can’t make out the words through the running tap. Perhaps she’s singing to herself. I wait until she stops. The alchemy of the purpling sky and the cool breeze flowing through the open patio door and the newfound confidence of a solid future has conspired to make every second significant, a now-or-never excitement of unbolting the door and finding Louise alone on the other side.

  The toilet flushes twice—I ignore this detail, romance requires it. Her footsteps pound on the floorboards and an unidentifiable snapping of fabric traffics through the wood. “I’ve got to go,” she says out loud. No more time. I clasp the bolt and dislodge it. I push, and the door swings wide.

  Louise screams in terror, her head rotating like a police siren, and as in my dream, she has her bathing suit halfway down around her waist. Her forearm shoots to cover her chest, and her cell phone tumbles to the floor.

  “God, Ian,” she shouts. “What the fuck?” She glares at me.

  “I, I, I—” No conclusion follows, except the most mundane. “I’ve just unpacked my suitcase.”

  “You scared me for that?” But a smile is softening the frightened edges of her lips. She picks up her phone and inspects the screen. “Well, it’s not broken. I hope my brother hung up before he heard me scream.”

  “Sorry.” I reach for the doorknob. “I wanted to share the good news.”

  “I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to hear that you’ve emptied your suitcase,” she says with a laugh. “And that you figured out how to unbolt the door.”

  “Not that.” I laugh too. “I’m staying. Charlie’s offered me a job at his boat company.”

  Louise flinches. Her eyebrows, bleached by sunscreen, dip, and her upper lip briefly contorts. She must realize the pessimism of this reaction because she instantly fixes her expression into a neutral lock.

  “Really? I’m surprised.”

  “Why? I need a job. It’s the reason I came here.”

  She tosses her phone on the bed. “No, I just . . . I don’t know. I thought you were interested in doing more meaningful work, work that benefited others. That’s what you always said you wanted, even back in school. It suits you.” Dreams suit people. An astronaut suits most children.

  “I was interested in that,” I say. “But I need the money. And maybe it’s time I grew up.”

  “And you think Charlie will make you an adult?” Her voice is thick with disappointment. I’ve forgotten Louise’s skill at radiating judgment—or is that a demonstrable lack of skill, an inability to prune back the hostile flowers to encourage sweeter ones to grow in their place? Her lips are pierced to a dot just above the mole on her chin. I usually admire her unchecked responses—it must come from boundless fields of confidence, unbuyable real estate, immune to foreclosure—but not right now. I want to ask her what she’s done to help the universe in the last eight years. I want to remind her that she’s staying rent-free in this cabin out of Charlie’s generosity. “It seems to me you’re different than he is,” she says, rubbing her toe across the fading light on the floor, as if trying to wipe out a wine stain. “There is still so much you could do besides indulging the rich, making money off of fun. I don’t see you happy doing that.”

  “You might not know this about me, but it’s not exactly easy for me to get a job these days.” Of course she knows. Her cell phone is connected to the Internet and lies within reach on her bed. Even Duck could assess my occupational prospects given a few seconds alone with that device: my life has been rated on the Internet and I’ve received one star. “Charlie is doing me a favor by taking me on. I’m lucky. Things have been dark for a while. It’s about time some good came my way.”

  “You really believe that’s how it works?” she asks harshly. “Bad and good always balance each other out?”

  “I’m broke,” I snap. “I have no money. This isn’t about what I’d like.”

  “I’m broke too,” she replies, not resentfully but as if it were an ordinary observation, almost proud in its acceptance. “Always have been. Maybe I’m just used to it. I find it freeing in a way. Sometimes I think it’s only the beggars who can be the choosers. You aren’t always consulting the oracle of your lifestyle.”

  “All right,” I say peevishly. I begin to close the door, but a flicker in Louise’s eyes stops me.

  “Wait,” she says. “I’m sorry. Congratulations. Truly. What do I know? I care about you, that’s all.”

  I so badly wish for the courage of three minutes ago. But it takes all of my strength to stand still and not shut the door. I don’t need more courage, as it turns out. Louise has her own reserve. She drops her arm from her chest, her small breasts bobbing as she steps across the purple wood. Her white skin glows with what little light is left to the day. I let go of the doorknob, and she kisses me, pushing me backward. Kissing, arms yanking, we stumble together from her room to mine and fall against the bed. We hold each other tightly, as if to pull away for even a second might prompt reconsideration. But I don’t see beyond this wanting. And like some dream of fighting the murderer of one’s own blanket, even a swimsuit pulled halfway down proves difficult to remove with finesse.

  THE SEX HAS left its marks. I’m used to this condition—my skin like a drop cloth recording each spill and grapple. It is the curse or boon of being so fair that the imprint of Louise’s mouth lingers on my collarbone, her bony knees are embossed on my thighs, and her palm prints are etched on my rib cage as if I were a window she was frantically trying to open. Each follicle of chest hair is blushing.

  “Sorry. Am I really that violent?” she asks with the sheet wrapped around her waist. At some point in our skirmish, Louise paused to turn on the bedside lamp—why, I didn’t ask. Its paisley shade bathes our bodies in a yellow-green corona. Her breasts
expand and contract with each breath. Her skin, varnished by a childhood under a brown Kentucky sun, holds no trace of the man who, until two minutes ago, was on top of her.

  “You’re very violent,” I reply, although that wasn’t quite the case. I lean in and kiss her, her top lip fatter than her bottom one, wet slivers of hair stuck against her cheeks.

  Louise Wheeler and I had sex exactly six times when we dated in college. Was it as amazing then as it was just now? I can recall the dorm room, the foam-wafer mattress, the vintage Pink Floyd poster and the avuncular postcard of James Baldwin attached with blue putty to the cinder block wall beside her bed. But I can’t summon whether or not it was satisfying—perhaps because at twenty simply being in the vicinity of a willing vagina was deep satisfaction in itself. Were we good then? Did I make an impact? Pure erasure, a personal history reduced to statistics—six times!—but failing to register the early tremors or the quiet aftermath. Maybe it’s because at that age, sex is more like assisted orgasm.

  Louise lowers her head and kisses my shoulder, purposefully without suction so as not to leave more evidence. We wrap our hands together and watch the night blow in from the patio under the slow radar of the ceiling fan. The impossible thread count of Charlie’s guest sheets makes me feel like I’ve been sleeping on recycled climbing nets my entire life.

  “We have to be down at Skala at ten,” I say happily. I could say anything happily right now. Give me a page from the Book of Revelation and I’ll make it sound like a thank-you note.

  “Do we have to?” Louise whispers, pushing her palm against the hinge of my wrist. “I’d rather stay up here away from everyone.”

  I would too, but Charlie specifically asked that I come and I can’t disappoint him. “I promised. We’ll go for an hour.”

  “Every night is an obligation. You almost forget it’s a vacation.” She sighs. “I guess it isn’t a vacation for you anymore.”

  “I have a few days until—” I stop myself from naming the reason; no one is supposed to know that Charlie is leaving the island. “He’s letting me get settled.”

  “Very nice of him.” Louise releases her grip and grabs the Henry Miller off the nightstand. She flips through it and stops on the underlined passages. “How is it?” she asks. “I saw you reading it on the beach.”

  “I found it in the room. Was anyone staying here before I showed up?”

  She shakes her head. “No, it was empty. I asked Charlie if I could unbolt the door and have the whole place to myself, but he said he was saving it. I guess he thought you might be irritated if you found me camped out in your space. After all, we might not have hit it off again. Like car accidents, what’s the chance you’re going to hit the same person twice?” She runs her nail along the underlined sentences and gives up, tossing it away. “Do you remember my freshman roommate, Becky Holbrook? I took a class on Romantic poetry my second semester just so I could save money by borrowing her used textbooks. I’ll never forget, Becky had underlined all of the verses on love and made little notes in the margins, ‘yes, this is just what it feels like, love like a roaring river.’” Louise rolls over and shoves her face into the pillow, the muscles of her back cramping with silent laughter. She slaps the pillow to create an airhole for her mouth. “At that point Becky Holbrook had never had a boyfriend. Not a single date, not a kiss. A true virgin, if you can believe it. And it took every ounce of compassion not to shake her awake on her top bunk at night and say, ‘Becky, I can’t sleep. I have to tell you something. It’s urgent and it’s eating me up inside. Love is nothing like a roaring river. You need to know that. Good night.’” Louise whisks my hair back tenderly, curling stray strands around my ear.

  I want to argue in defense of Becky Holbrook. The roaring river is much closer to what I feel right now than my usual default impression of love, which is something approximating a balloon drifting up in the night, battered by pockets of turbulence, with no hand far below in the city reaching up belatedly to retrieve it. Eventually deflated, it will return to Earth to suffocate an endangered ibis. Enough love in New York could wipe out an entire species.

  Louise climbs off the mattress and gathers her swimsuit from the floor. Her thin hips jerk from side to side, as if she’s slaloming a mountain. “My leg fell asleep,” she says, reaching for the support of the door.

  “So what do you think love is like, if rivers are out?”

  I expect an answer along the lines of “short-range ballistic missiles” or “benignly swallowing razor blades.” Or maybe it’s “Argentina” or “soft rugs.” I don’t know what Louise is capable of, but I want some verification of the heat spreading in my chest and the cold knot twisting below it. She doesn’t answer, or at least I don’t take her next words as one.

  “Do me a favor,” she says as she turns. She covers her breasts with her swimsuit. The rest of her remains so delectably exposed. The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles. “Let’s not tell Charlie and Sonny about us. Let’s leave them out of it. You know how this kind of thing can become a telenovela for everyone else.”

  I nod. “At least tell me what happened to Becky Holbrook.”

  Louise stops in the doorway. “Married. Three kids. She owns her own import glass business and has a huge house in Marin County. Happy as a fly in a dirty kitchen by all accounts. It’s a good thing I never woke her up.”

  THE POPULATION OF Skala spikes in the night like a murder rate. A whirlpool of motion that becomes more frenetic the closer we get to it. Metal-green faces shine above tooth-white shirts and peasant blouses. Cowboy boots are scuffed, studded, or inlaid with travertine and quartz. Tattoos pulse on waxed forearms or surface faintly through shawls of shoulder hair: an Italian flag; a happy face inside a pentagram; Gandhi leaning on a pot leaf. Tassels. Fringe. And the night is thick with gold chains, entire racetracks around necks and wrists. An oxidized cistern in the center of the village is a discard site for plastic cups. Children jump, one, two, three, invisible hopscotch. Outdoor flat screens in crowded bars play the same manic footage of fashion shows; agitated models march down planks draped in furs and capes. I can’t decide if this obsessive runway broadcasting is meant to encourage or mock its audience. Paris fashion week. London. Tokyo. Milan. Seasons out of order.

  The traffic is so extreme it’s safe. Minicoupes clog the road, honking and blinking their headlights. Motorbikes fare a bit better, weaving through the pedestrians and rendering handholding a semilethal proposition. I extend my hand for Louise to take, but she ignores it as we cross the street. There are more bodies in Skala than beds on the island, but the arctic ice shelf of a ten-tiered cruise ship is docked in the harbor, and skiffs are running relay to cargo cabin-fevered vacationers. Everyone is hurrying, as if in search of some near-capacity trophy spot in the village and they haven’t yet realized this is it. Jewelry shops and T-shirt stalls corral a small percentage of the foot market. Every so often a cheer ascends over the pop music, like a group rounding the top of a Ferris wheel, but it’s merely a cluster of Germans or Italians toasting over metal ice buckets.

  “Don’t say it,” Louise warns.

  “Don’t say what?”

  “What you’re thinking.” She smiles at me. “It’s not a nice word.”

  “What word is that?”

  “You know what word,” she says.

  And I do know, or at least I can guess. Eurotrash. Except it doesn’t look particularly Euro anymore. It could be Bogotá, Santa Cruz, Seoul, Moscow, Gaborone. The provincial sorting of trash seems like an outdated concept. It’s just human flotsam washing up on August nights along the shores of another Greek island. I test out new words in my mind: Humantrash. Caucasiangarbage. Globalcapitalistrefuse. The language doesn’t need more insults.

  A shoulder slams into Louise, pitching her back, but is gone before we discover the assailant. “I
told you we should have stayed home,” she says.

  Passing the closed police station, we come upon a young woman struggling to stand. Her knees below a tight floral skirt buckle and she falls back on the cobblestones with a visible bounce. Between her legs, as if she has given birth to it, is a pile of wheat-colored vomit. Her head is orbiting around, but she makes another noble attempt, the leather straps on her cork wedges straining against her toes, her feet bowed inward like a wobbly foal, her elbows slashing drunkenly for balance or to keep bystanders from interceding. I instantly become patriotic. I pray she isn’t American, that we’ve boycotted this one-woman Olympic tournament against alcohol and gravity, an event we so often win. Each tectonic layer of her hair is a different ideation of blond.

  “Don’t fucking touch me,” she cries, mercifully British, to no one in particular. She drops back to earth, narrowly missing the vomit. Finally a friend races over with a bottle of water. I grab Louise’s arm, and we wind through the crowds. She looks back to make sure the woman is safe.

  “When I waited tables at a bar in Lexington, I was the one who had to deal with the drunk women,” Louise says. “Which always meant fending off men. I swear, everything about women’s fashion is designed to hurt their chances—the high heels, the short skirts. I used to give them corkscrews to carry as a weapon before placing them in cabs. Civilization is a nice dream, isn’t it?”

  We finally locate Charlie and the rest of the group sitting at one of the quieter tavernas. Its outdoor chairs aren’t metal but guava-green canvas and its drinks lack the tropical ornaments of cherries and orange slices. Ice is administered by elderly waiters via trembling silver tongs. Still the stainless steel table is a disk of whirling lights and a hidden speaker system plays propulsive techno tracks, just at a slightly less ear-splitting volume.

  Charlie is wearing the same T-shirt and shorts from earlier; the gaudy earring is still clipped at his heart. He’s slumped in his seat, downing the last of his drink and helping himself to the vodka bottle on the table. Sonny sits across from him next to Miles, who has his hair pulled back in a topknot. His pink oxford is buttoned prudishly to his neck.