“Man, this stuff is strong,” he gasps. He extends the joint in my direction. I wave it off, and he continues the offer of impairment one by one. Sonny considers a drag but shakes her head. Adrian takes another puff and the coughing returns.
“I hope you didn’t buy that off the hippies,” Charlie warns Rasym.
“Would I?” he counters. “Helios gave it to me.” I can feel Rasym’s eyes on me and I turn away, to a bank of hotel balconies high above street level, where a man and a woman lean over a railing, both topless, neither touching. Far below them, near the hotel entrance, a guy has his back to the crowds, a stream of liquid running past his sneakers. I watch until he yanks up his fly, waiting for Rasym to stop staring at me. I don’t want him asking about my job qualifications. It’s too late, I’ve already been hired instead of you, I resist yelling.
“Whoa,” Adrian whimpers, anchoring his hand on the table. His lips shrink with the threat of a vanquished smile and his white hair is slicked upward with sweat.
Louise tries again to reignite the conversation, asking Rasym about nearby islands. Charlie’s cousin, more accommodating than I expect, ticks off two or three, before the Hungarian from dinner last night slides against our table. He’s dressed in a white suit, a chubby dandy, the light of his cell phone giving the cast of embalmer’s fluid to his face. A red wine stain decorates his lapel like a boutonnière.
“Charlie,” he warbles. “You must check out this new app I invested in.” Bence rotates the screen in front of Charlie’s eyes. “It’s the cool new thing. You take a picture of yourself and it turns you into whatever you want to be—a horse, a boat, a fur coat, a sexy rabbit. Anything! It’s going to make me a fortune. The kids are eating it up! Too cool!” His excitement is embarrassing. Too cool! He pats Charlie’s shoulder. “I got your message. I’m sorry I was out. What luck to find you down here.”
Rasym darts his head to the side, watching Bence with wary concentration.
“I didn’t call you,” Charlie replies.
“But my housekeeper, she took a message about last night. She said—”
“I didn’t call you,” he repeats furiously.
“Okay.” Bence releases his hand. “I got a call from someone. If you didn’t, I expect you will. We have a lot to discuss. I won’t wait forever.”
“Bence,” Miles interjects. “The Greek government.” But Charlie shoots him a look and his resolve fades. “Never mind.”
“Thieves,” Bence gripes. “You don’t take money from the hardworking people of Europe and then cry about not being able to pay it back. Does anyone actually think they’ll pay it back? All this talk of Greek pride. If you are gifted ninety-five billion, you don’t get to have your pride. Though if they do get booted from the Eurozone, even better for business, yes, Charlie? Makes it easier to run a company without all the European bureaucracy tangling you up. Call me, I mean it.”
Charlie shakes his head as Bence lurches away. “I didn’t call that asshole.”
Adrian is chanting softly next to me, a man possessed with a message from another dimension. But I slowly realize he’s singing along to the music playing from the speakers, a speedy techno poem about love and last chances. His face is serene, lost in the lyrics of the song like it’s the only rope connecting his mind to earth. It’s music crawling into him, building a home. I remember that feeling from as far back as my First Communion, dressed in a blue suit and waiting amid a sea of unfamiliar children in the Holy Redeemer vestibule to march up the aisle. The pews of the church rippled with parental anticipation, the whole incense-heavy edginess of a ritual about to descend. Somewhere in that melee, my mother and father were together, perhaps the last time they were ever together, because a young family friend named Lily was already pregnant. In the nervousness of the church, the only thing I had to hold on to was the organ calling from the altar and the familiar lyrics of love and salvation, and I sang those verses with all my heart before my foot stepped over the doorplate and onto the flame-polished stone: “And he will raise you up on eagle’s wings.” Intoxication chooses strange memories to freight with importance, but I am convinced all music for me has been about trying to get back to that moment where a song touched so fast and deep I felt admitted to a stateless place, an open arm of sound. “Last chance for love,” Adrian croons, his watery eyes swollen with Skala’s colored lights, “I’m falling through your heart.” I wish we could all sing with him, wiring into each other, wiping the bad taste of the evening away.
“Adrian, drink some water,” Sonny says, handing over a bottle. I reach for it to pass along and accidentally knock over the vodka bottle on the table.
“Ian,” Charlie yells, saving the bottle, only to find it empty. He looks at me with fury, his lips snarled. I didn’t expect his hostility to be aimed at me. “When did you start drinking so much? You didn’t tell me you had a problem.”
“I’m just nervous—” I choke.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Miles cries. He slaps his palms on his armrests. At first I assume he means Charlie’s temper, but he’s leering out at the sidewalk in the direction Bence went. What he can’t take, apparently, is policed silence. “That man is an idiot. Why would being evicted from the European Union help a business? Doesn’t he understand that vacationers aren’t going to want to spend two weeks drifting around an unstable country? When did the facts stop mattering?”
“I thought you were going to be quiet,” Charlie growls.
Miles exhales in irritation. “I’m allowed to speak my mind, Charles. I don’t appreciate—”
“Then what about the facts on you?” Charlie says almost warmly. “Why don’t you tell us about your time in London. I’ve asked a few friends.”
Miles gawks at him, spooked, as if it never occurred to him that reputations could travel across borders, less worn than the men who run from them. I know that frightening math problem adding up on Miles’s face; it’s the look of the world catching up.
“How much do you owe back there? You can be honest with us.”
“Stop,” Sonny shouts so forcefully she attracts stares from neighboring tables. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it right now.” Miles places his hand on her leg to settle her. But that simple motion finally sends Charlie spiraling on the course he seems to have been hunting for all along.
“Sonny, if you don’t tell him to stop fondling you, I will.” Sonny and Miles both peer down at his hand as if it has inadvertently slipped inside her shorts.
“I haven’t—”
“At least have the decency to admit what you are. A parasite. A little bug that feeds on the blood of others. It’s okay. You’ve been that way since you were a kid. Just say it. I’m a little parasite. Say, I keep groping Sonny in hope that she’ll feel sorry enough for me—”
“He doesn’t grope me,” Sonny says. “He’s my friend. You’re the one acting—”
“Charlie,” I whisper, trying to pull him out of whatever kamikaze mission he’s attempting merely to put two days’ distance between him and his house. “Maybe we should take a walk along the water.”
He ignores me, keeping his sights on Miles. “I guess we should all be thankful you haven’t stolen from us yet.” Charlie slaps me on the shoulder, his first gesture of friendship all night. “Ian, you can be objective. You’re the most honest person I know. Would you trust Miles for a minute alone with your wallet? Think carefully. From what I hear, it’s quite a risk.”
Miles gets to his feet, whatever last ounce of pride pulsing into his fists. He steps menacingly around the table and stops in front of Charlie, glaring down. His teeth are pressed over the bitter, white onion of his lip, and a quiver runs through the muscles of his cheeks. There is an age one reaches where the possibility of a fistfight seems as improbable as fame or an advanced degree in medicine. Miles stands hesitantly, clearly astonished to find that the age limit has been extended.
Charlie smiles up at him. But I can see the tears unmistakably now, the sopped swolle
n pouches under his eyes, as if Charlie is the one who’s hurt, as if he’s sacrificing the best part of him to give Miles an opportunity to defend himself.
“Don’t hit him!” Sonny yells. She nearly topples the table, and Louise springs up to steady her. “Miles, don’t. He isn’t worth it.”
Rasym moves to catch Miles’s arm but is blocked by the cordon of chairs. Just as Miles seems to have gotten a stranglehold on his anger, Charlie looks up at him. The condescending smile is waxed across his face. “You can’t hurt anyone, can you?” he whispers. “Even when you try.”
It takes a certain courage to punch a crying man. And in the second before the blow, a breeze runs through the port, carrying napkins from neighboring tables and sand from distant islands. The breeze is so soft I think it might even pacify Miles, but it doesn’t. As the candles snuff, Charlie gets what he came for: a second black eye to match the first.
CHAPTER 7
This is the darkest place,” Louise says stumbling. After hours of bleached morning sun, the cave is a blindfold, and we take tiny possum steps waiting for our eyes to adjust. The end of the world is nothing if not dark. Yellow, ropey flickers beat faintly on candles staked in dishes of sand. A tall, robed monk with a gray beard mutely stands watch amid the tight threads of smoke. His knuckles are as brassy as the sconces that hang around him in the fold beyond the entryway. His face pulses with the flames. The walls start to define themselves, billows of steel wool, and as we creep forward two wood benches bisect the widest region of the cave. A tourist sits with her head bent in prayer, and her companion, glowing with sweat, covertly eats grapes as brown as pennies out of a plastic bag. According to Louise’s guidebook, the granite ceiling contains “a triple crack, which is said to be caused by the voice of God.” But the low, brooding ceiling has a zillion cracks running and looping across it. We pause in front of an icon of a man lecturing his dwarfed assistant and an altarpiece of Jesus sitting amidst a gnat-like cloud of angels. A parallelogram of sharp white light punctures the darkness in the corner, a small window framing the Aegean like a hole drilled into a skull. The eastern half of the cave, the windowed half, is more spacious and chapel-like with its meticulous stonework, terrazzo floors, and spidery candelabras. I’m guessing John was exiled to the western lizard crevice. Saints must suffer, that seems to be the only rule. Louise moves toward a drape of red fabric smoothed along a shelf of rock. She holds her hand over it as if to pick up divine vibrations.
Most tourist attractions come stocked with pro forma associations: Venice, derelict romance; the Empire State Building, ruthless conquest. But in the Cave of the Apocalypse, I’m stuck for an appropriate response. It just feels heavy, sunken, an empty bomb shelter left over from someone else’s war. The two-euro entrance fee seems entirely reasonable for the birthplace of mass annihilation.
Louise, however, is not stuck. “The darkest place,” she repeats solemnly. The lull of Kentucky rolls through her voice like moonshine vapors, but the cave doesn’t echo it. It swallows voices. “On all of Earth. Think what nightmares came from here, the plagues and demons and reels of destruction, everything we still think of as the end of the world. You can almost hear the beat of the horsemen’s gallop.”
“I think that’s water dripping from the spigot outside.”
She pulls her nightstand Bible from her book bag, a tattered white airport tag from CDG to ATH still taped around the strap. She thumbs to the end. Her eyes are better at handling the gloom than mine. “And after that he must be loosed a little season.” She quotes softly, the saliva of her lips shining in the shadows. “Frightening, isn’t it? Must be. Must be loosed.” I never stopped to ask Louise if she’s religious. It seems to belong to the great antique trash heap of get-to-know-you questions. For a moment, I picture Louise as a little girl jumping on a trampoline in her backyard, trying to get airborne, to break from gravity and into the chambers of a rain-clenched sky, while inside her Kentucky house is a rickety kitchen table covered with loaded revolvers.
Louise touches her palm to my chest. I flex my pectoral muscles. For a reason I didn’t quite understand, we slept last night in our separate beds. “I expected more visitors,” she says.
“It’s strange to visit a place dedicated to something that has yet to happen. And I guess it isn’t exactly uplifting as far as pilgrimages go. Six-six-six. The beast with seven heads. The whore of Babylon. Maybe John should have collected cats.” I can sense rather than see Louise’s eyes straining to grasp my meaning.
“Huh?”
“Like Hemingway’s house in Key West. It’s just a writing room, isn’t it? There’s probably a gas leak in here, because honestly from what I remember, it’s pretty much the recipe of a bad acid trip. It’s like peering into a mirror smeared in feces. No matter what you look like, it can’t be that bad.”
Louise wanders off to a corner. I get the feeling I’ve disappointed her, not taken Armageddon seriously, and when I follow behind her I aim for gravity. We’re again at the icon of John, a sword pointing from the sky toward the back of his head, as if he’s reciting a list of hostage-negotiation requests.
“I read it over last night in bed,” Louise says. “And, when it really gets nasty, I was surprised by how good it felt.” She sounds like she’s describing porn, and maybe that’s what it is for the faithful, a faucet of release. “This part about Babylon on fire.” She turns a page. “He gets so specific, like an auction catalog at Sotheby’s. The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble. He mentions pearls like ten more times. He really hated pearls. But he overdoes it to the point that he sort of revels in each item he’s destroying, like a shameful connoisseur.”
“You know what I hate? Lapdogs on private jets. I wish he’d predicted that.”
I finally succeed in making Louise laugh. She checks that the monk isn’t monitoring us.
“Funny, I was making my own list last night. Diamond-encrusted cell phones. Monogrammed designer champagne holders. Orange Lamborghinis. A cafeteria table of stuck-up eighth-grade girls.”
“Burn it. Burn it all. You’re right, it feels good.”
“Black-oak yachts with indentured servants on board.”
It’s a dig at Charlie, more transparent to me, perhaps, than it is to her, because Louise keeps grinning at our joke. I feign a closer examination of the altarpiece. After the scene last night in Skala, Charlie deserves some blowback. All morning I’ve been trying to rescue the kind, loving Charlie from the memory of him mowing down each of us with insults. Even if it had been his method of escaping to Bodrum for a few days undetected, he overperformed it, each attack too pointed and precise. Maybe Louise can afford to hate him, but I can’t. I need Charlie, my employer, the generous friend. I hold on to his words at the dock: “more than brothers.” I believe it because I’ve tested it, and it held.
The monk grabs a fistful of fresh candles from a hidden cache and beckons me over to take one. He nods to a brass box for coins by the dishes, and I slip a euro in the slot, a prayer jukebox. As I light the candle and wedge it in the sand, I ransack my head for a suitable prayer. Duck has peace on Earth covered, and asking for Louise to stay feels too petty and self-serving. No end, I think. Or, no, a quick end for everyone, with no warning first. Maybe a minute of warning. Actually thirty seconds. Ten. Cancel that. I pray for the refugees, for everyone running, that they make it safely from their homes and never return.
Louise pulls out her phone to snap a picture, but the monk lobs a warning to her in Greek while forming a stop sign with his hand in the universal no photographs gesture.
We take another lap around the cave, but all we find are more alcoves of leaden rock, cold and swept of dust. There isn’t even a hole leading to a deeper cavern. Vital information seems to be missing, a reason or a clue. Finally, Louise and I step o
utside and blend into the sunlight. The dry air and sizzled hillside scrub feel like a homecoming. It’s all still here, the gaudy, blue world.
“Do you know how it ends?” Louise asks, waving the Bible as we climb the stairs toward the exit.
“Yeah, it’s Apocalyptic literature. It only ends one way.”
“It ends with a wedding,” she says, stuffing the book into her bag. “The bride waits for the groom at the altar. And he shows.” She rubs her thumb across my upper lip. “You had a sweat mustache.” I reach for her backpack and make my own adjustment, tearing the airport tag from the strap. I don’t like the reminder of her being in transit. She balks, as if she might have been saving it, the way, as kids, we’d keep ski-lift passes on our coat zippers, letting the sticky paper fossils hang as emblems of heroic Christmas vacations careening down mountains in Aspen or Klosters-Serneus.
“Sorry. Did you want that?”
“No,” she says, reddening. “Let’s just go.”
Passing through a gravel courtyard and the front gates with its warped white arch, we reach the blacktop. A sagging figure in scratchy brown burlap sits on a square of cardboard in the roadside weeds. Wedged in his fist is a waxy paper Coca-Cola cup, change filling enough to cover its base and make a plaintive rattle—likely, the coins are his own contribution to encourage the custom of giving. He looks like a rain-damaged watercolor of an old man, burns and rashes bubbling along his bloated arms and outstretched leg. It takes me a minute to realize his other leg is missing, just a pant strip balled against his upper thigh. There’s no indication of how he managed to end up here in the half hour we were in the cave. He shakes his cup into a melody. I know that spare-change rhythm so well from New York I could sing along to it—help, help the homeless, help, help the homeless.
The Destroyers Page 20
