The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  I’m sweating, my hands wet with perspiration, because we’re so close to Charlie’s dock and the fact that he hasn’t responded to any of my texts hits me with terrible implication. I feel the heavy, clothy press of panic on my chest, and it takes enormous effort in those first few seconds to climb off my bike and sprint toward the body. I’m convinced it’s Charlie in the grass. Every millisecond, as I’m kicking through the dust relearning how to run, I’m praying it isn’t him, but I’m already bracing myself, already an hour in the future hearing Sonny’s screams, a mouth like a window that will never shut, and the silence of my own mouth gone dry. The older officer whips around as I thread into the high grass, scything weeds. His plastic-covered hands lift out to catch me as he commands in gibberish, “Rombaducke laf oxi.” I pivot, push him aside by the shoulder, my jaw already hurting from its lock, and find the corpse splayed out in front of me.

  A pair of hunter-green army shorts, a torn red T-shirt with an indecipherable insignia twisted across punctured ribs, a torn, meaty ear like an upturned bell toward the sky. The skin of the body is batiked in purples and greens, a bloated suitcase left out in the rain. Thick streams of blood cover the neck and jaw, not red but cellophane-clear in the sun glare. Dirt or flies are embedded in the shine. I take a careful step, straining to catch the face, just one rapid glance before reeling back, as if I can steal the identity and not the expression. A blond beard sprouts around a hollow of mouth. A gold hoop is clamped to the septum amid the rubble of smashed bone. My first relief is who it isn’t: not Charlie. It’s one of the Christian hippies, the ripped, red shirt once reading ANTI-BETHLEHEM. The side of his skull is dented into the earth, the one visible eye a flat, gray deposit. The expression, what’s left of one, communicates shock: like a snapshot frozen at the moment of death saying whoa, my turn already? Not far from him lies the body of a woman, curled in the dirt. Long, blood-matted hair covers her face, and her bare leg is weighted down by the steel crumple of a motorbike. Shards of plastic and mirror are sprinkled across her orange T-shirt. Then the smell hits me, not harsh decomposing rot, but a faint off odor like cold cuts past their expiration date. I shut my breathing off to stop the smell from reaching me.

  “You must get back,” the older officer yells. “Off, back, away.” The worry recedes, and the nausea of seeing two dead bodies fills its place. I no longer want to see, and with Charlie alive, breathing, still among us, I can’t understand why I’m standing amid bodies and bike wreckage in an open field. Louise rises on tiptoes across the road, holding her stomach. “Do you know them?” the officer asks.

  “No,” I say, stepping back, the yellow tape caught around my shins. “I think they might be hippies from that camp not far from here.” I relay this information so impassively, like a hypnotist’s induction, I’m not certain he understands a word I’m speaking. “What happened?”

  He shrugs. “That girl over there find them. Maybe driving bike they go off edge.” He points upward, toward the sharp descent from a series of lower outlying hill cliffs. The placement of the bodies in this gulley seems a supernatural distance away from the drop. “Or maybe they hit by a car, run off the road when it is still dark. Vacationers very reckless on motosikletes. We get a few deaths from them every summer.” He nods to our own bikes like they’re complicit animals, local carnivores who prey on tourists. He’s already pinning the blame on the dead.

  The careening singsong of a European ambulance breaks the quiet, and, light-headed, I snap the tape from my legs and stagger across the road to Louise. She looks far more fragile in her shorts and tank top than she did two minutes ago. I want to put my arms around her and do what only the living can do: stand still and breathe and touch another person.

  “What is it?” she demands, gripping my shoulder.

  “Two hippies on a bike. They’re dead.” I lean against my seat, waiting for the face to dissolve from my mind and the spoiled smell to leave my nose. “Maybe an accident. They’re bloody.”

  Louise grimaces as if she’s fighting her own urge to vomit. “An accident. Why did you race over?” she asks. “I thought you’d lost your mind.”

  I can’t tell her I feared it was Charlie. We were supposed to be texting only a few minutes ago. “I was worried it might be someone we knew,” is all I manage.

  Not far behind the sobbing girl, a woman lingers, late-fortyish, plump, wearing the floral-patterned shirt and shorts of a weekend gardener, gingerroot veins protruding from her thick calves, and her neck slung with hemp ropes. Three wristwatches are strapped to her right arm. Her round face looks too vulnerable for Mediterranean sunlight, the kind of pale skin accustomed to snowfall and calamitous winters behind storm windows. She watches the officers and us with surprising tranquility, as if she isn’t experiencing but recalling this horrible incident from some easier future, calibrating and studying it. Her calmness unnerves me, and I’m briefly thankful when her lips contort in pain. But it’s the beginning of a coughing fit. She balls her hand against her mouth. The ambulance roars over the bend and pulls to a stop, adding a belated sense of emergency, as if there has been hope of resuscitation all along, just lost on the winding Patmian roads.

  “We should leave,” I say to Louise. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Those bodies—” But the images are still too clear in my mind to fit words onto them; they reach the boundary in the brain where language ends and all that’s left is the orange whirl of broken syllables, a linguistic charnel house. Other bikers round the hill and pause to take in the activity. The young officer lifts a natty brown scarf from the grass and a sharp instrument that looks like a wooden spike. His two seniors in command step over to examine the discovery. I get the feeling that the island police force was trained by American crime shows on the virtues of appearing overly inquisitive to any random debris found near a body.

  “Carrie, come along.” The coughing woman takes the hand of the crying girl and tries to lead her away.

  “But Dalia and Mikael,” the tattooed girl murmurs. The New Jersey of her voice takes me back to the two trespassers on Charlie’s dock. She was one of them, and the other with the gold nose ring now lies dead in the grass.

  Louise looks over at me, her eyes shrunken. “I’m not up for the beach anymore.”

  “Me neither. I wish we had gone another way.”

  “I think I’ll just go back and lie down. This must happen all the time.” Louise swears, squeezing her neck.

  “That’s what the officer said.”

  “It’s dangerous how they just rent these bikes to anyone.”

  “Promise me you’ll wear your helmet from now on,” I yell as I collect mine from the seat compartment.

  “Are you coming back with me or not?” Louise asks.

  “I told Charlie I’d visit Sonny. I’ll see you at home.”

  We drive cautiously away from the scene, taking the hill in low gear, overly obedient to each stop sign. Gone is the thoughtless rhythm of speed. As I wave good-bye to Louise and make the turn toward Chora, my brain hones in on details I wish it could forget—not the plastic gloves or the delicatessen odor or the nose piercing on the smashed, astonished face. I remember Charlie at his dock not twenty-four hours ago, screaming a threat to two hippies about not making it out in one piece.

  At the top of the hill, I check my phone. Nothing. I try calling and after six aquatic rings a voice breaks through the electronic ocean.

  This is Charlie. You know what to do. Leave a message.

  CHAPTER 8

  When my grandfather died in 2006, my father, half-sister, half-brother, and I flew to Michigan for the funeral. We watched a meteor shower rain sideways through the night over the parking lot of the airport Marriott, and the next day, we watched the casket lower into Muskegon Holy Catholic Cemetery beside my grandmother’s grave. After that, to all of our surprise, there was very little of my grandfather to dispense with.

  What did remain barely filled a few swept rooms of his white Sears Roebuck farmhouse. Most of h
is clothes had already been folded into grocery bags labeled for pickup by St. Vincent de Paul. The inventory of his kitchen cutlery consisted of one fork, two spoons, a butter knife, and a can opener. The refrigerator was bare, the shelves glowing antiseptic white like mopped hallways in a hospital, and his other appliances were stowed with their power cords cobra-ed around their bases. Post-it notes on his television, radio, and electrical panel (“turn on water heater ten minutes after pump”) gave insightful instruction to anyone who cared to operate them. When we phoned the gas company to cancel service, we discovered that my grandfather had already terminated his contract—his propane tank had been filled in the spring and he told the technician to discontinue the annual visit. Every bill was paid, every signature witnessed, and belatedly (one day after the requiem mass) Lex found a list of funeral songs for which he’d always had a special fondness stuck in the front flap of his address book. When we opened the barn, I half expected the original boxes of the 1934 kit house to be stored inside, waiting for the dismantled parts to be returned to the manufacturer.

  My father took palpable pride in the man’s foresight to dwindle down the baggage of his estate. “So considerate, your grandpa, so like him, not to be a burden. He wanted to go as easily as he came. Did you ever once hear him complain about his years serving in Korea? He barely mentioned it, even when I was little. It just was, no whining. I hope you’ll always think of him this way. Simple, clean.” There was no denying that he had gone easily. Clean. Really, all that was needed was a realty sign in the front yard, and the entire Bledsoe foothold in Muskegon County would disappear like a few uncharacteristically mild days in a long and sweltering summer. Lex, Ross, and I, however, found the whole thing creepy. Clearly our rheumy-eyed, semimute grandfather had made a hobby out of his death preparations, and if he hadn’t been felled by a heart attack in the meat aisle of IGA, we might have suspected suicide. It proved difficult to mourn a relative who had drawn such scrupulous plans for his own nonexistence, and deprived of grief in our weeklong visit, we devolved into greedy grandchildren. The three of us, or really me versus my half-siblings, fought like rival heirs over the smallest, cheapest, Post-it-less artifacts: a cracked softbound Bible; a collection of pewter tie clips; a pane of stained glass that might actually have just been a shoddy hardware-store patch job. We ran through the rooms in a frenzied game of hide-and-seek, except ours was find and keep.

  Ross got the tie clips. Lex received two oak rush chairs that my grandmother had hand-braided. And I was directed toward the attic to claim the inheritance my father felt I deserved. “That’s the real prize, anyway. You love history.”

  “Do I?”

  “Well, more than your sister and brother.”

  The triangular attic doubled as a rodent hospice; amid piles of bright-blue poison pellets, the brown mice that hadn’t yet succumbed were flinching and twisting in their final death throes. In the corner sat a cardboard Schlitz Beer box filled with newspapers and magazines. It rattled with mouse poop as I carried it down the ladder.

  The box contained a century of headlines, and as I dealt them out one by one across the kitchen table, I realized my grandparents had spent their entire lives collecting souvenirs of the worst atrocities to beat a path to their front porch in the morning. Wars, famines, assassinations, blimp disasters, epidemics, celebrity suicides, mass graves, bombs dropped here, hostages taken there, sieges, explosions, congressional witch hunts, threats of nuclear annihilation, and shockingly for two devout Michigan Republicans, a seemingly endless obsession with Newsweek’s and the Muskegon Star’s coverage of Waco and AIDS. The box of horrors was pure and unmitigated. As I neared the bottom I hoped to unearth one solitary piece of good news—PEACE! or WAR OVER or Man on Moon or even “President Gerald Ford welcomes granddaughter.” There lay only pink insulation balls that the mice had pilfered for winter nests.

  Ross wore three tie clips along the placket of his button-down. Lex relaxed into the instability of her antique chair. I tossed the newspapers and magazines back in the box. “I don’t want any of it,” I groused.

  “You might be able to eBay the Kennedy stuff,” Lex said maliciously. “Ten, maybe fifteen dollars.”

  “Ha, ha, fuckface.”

  It wasn’t about me being the slighted grandchild. Or, at least, not only that. The bizarre contents of the box ate away at my impression of my grandparents as preternaturally kind and oversweetened lemonade drinkers who sent mildewed, perfectly timed birthday cards and hugged at different ages on their doorstep in every snapshot we had of them. The fact that my grandfather didn’t throw away this particular box when even the family photo albums were missing and presumed discarded only confirmed the sinister double life that began to superimpose itself onto my memory of them. I pictured my grandfather hurrying in with the morning newspaper, stomping his boots of snow on the mat. “Look, Jean! A famine in Ethiopia!” or “The Challenger exploded in midair!”; my grandmother advancing from the kitchen, steering around the walnut sideboard, her blue-veined hands clenched in mirth: “Quick, you fool! Add it to the box!”

  Of course, it could have been that he simply didn’t have the heart to go through those clippings one last time.

  My father took enough notice of my disenchantment to inform me that I was never happy and wouldn’t be and it was just like me to see the worst in every gift. I tried to explain that it was technically impossible not to see the worst—that’s all that was in there, the absolute worst—but he was too busy working up a deal to sell the house and land to the farmer next door. The neighbor would absorb the forty acres, demo the residence, and keep the barn for storage. On the last day, driven mad by our own loud arguing in the quiet, polite weather of Michigan, we collected in the rental car as if it were a Manhattan life raft. If anyone wondered where the newspapers and magazines went, they didn’t ask. I had returned them to the attic to await the mice and demolition crews.

  As we were about to drive away, my father rolled down the window and sat silently for a few minutes, staring at the maples bickering with late-summer birds and the un-curtained hollows of the house.

  “Good-bye, Dad. Thank you. Rest easy,” he said before putting the car in reverse. Then he beamed over at me. “I sold it for two hundred K. That’s an appreciate value of one hundred and eighty thousand in seventy years. Your grandpa would have been shocked out of his socks!”

  AT FIRST I’M temporarily lost. Then, after twenty minutes of climbing sharp, lopsided steps and slewing down stone ramps and along passageways hemmed between endless retina-scorching, whitewashed walls, I’m officially lost. I can’t locate Charlie’s house. Halfway down an alley. A red door with a brass doll-hand knocker. The trouble is, doll-hand knockers and red doors and dark, leaky alleys multiply like clowns in a fun house, and every new, untried path spirals me through cat-puddled corners and grated windows and acute angles of stairs that lead through low claustrophobic archways. I’m hurrying at a jogger’s pace, as if speed can extinguish the memory of the roadside accident with its blood and limbs and yellow tape. Aproned Greek women watering cacti watch me with feline disinterest and scurry into their homes before chancing a showdown with the incurably adrift. Six attempts and I’m once again at the entrance to Chora with its view of Skala and languid line of gift shops peddling painted rocks and maximalist confections of copper and amethyst.

  Follow a wall through a maze and you will eventually reach the exit. But is there a rule for finding your way in? I should have asked Charlie to draw me a map. I should have asked Charlie a lot of things.

  I enter the nearest gift shop and ask the elderly woman at the counter if she can point me in the direction of “Charlie Konstantinou’s house.”

  She rubs the flecks of hair on her lips. “Char-lee Kon-stan-teen-o?”

  “Yes. It’s his father’s house. His grandfather’s. Konstantinou. Konstantinou.”

  She ponders the name, which I thought I had been pronouncing correctly my entire life but clearly my American ac
cent is molesting it.

  “His grandfather’s house. Old house. Shipping house. Wealthy house.”

  “Oh,” she roars hopefully. “You want take picture. Aga Khan house?”

  “No, not Khan, not Iranian. Konstantinou. Cypriot.”

  She smiles and repeats, “Khan.”

  “Konstantinou.”

  She points out the iron-barred window at a jewelry store. “Across street, ask.” I know it’s simply her method of dispatching the idiot tourist onto the next shopkeeper. It hits me, the square that leads right into Charlie’s alley.

  “Can you tell me where the Plateia is?”

  “Which?”

  “Nighttime. Party. Big crowds.” I flutter my fingers to indicate fun or champagne bubbles or fast, fleeting hordes.

  “Too early,” she says, tapping her watch. But she guides me to the doorway and signals up the road. Then her hand fins and swims in eight different directions like a demented water snake. I’m about to admit defeat when I catch a familiar figure walking by the jewelry store, a short, white-haired man with an untroubled smile, his thumb toying the ruby ring on his middle finger. I quickly thank the woman and step into the glassy sunlight.

  “Prince Phillip,” I call. The old man spins around, and his smile increases in intensity but not in size. “I’m Charlie’s friend. I met you the morning I arrived.”

  “Of course, yes.” He leans forward expectantly for the reception of a kiss on each cheek. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “You never had it. Ian. Charlie and I went to school together in New York.”

  “Oh, then you must be the custodian of all his juicy secrets. I’ll bribe you with lunch sometime and you’ll have to confess them to me. I do miss the wilds of New York. What a time my wife and I had there in the 1980s, the energy and commotion. Charlie will never discuss New York, but I know he has plenty of good stories up his sleeve. Why must I be acquainted with the only under-sharer of this young generation?”