The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “Well, Charlie’s pretty private.”

  “There’s nothing pretty about privacy amongst close friends,” he rattles. “My motto is live, live as much as you can, and have the decency to tell others about it.”

  “Prince Phillip, could you—” But his attention is broken by a little boy with girlish features running by on clopping flip-flops.

  “William,” Phillip exclaims. “Aren’t you supposed to be spending the day with my grandson?”

  “I stopped by, but he wasn’t there.”

  “They’ve all gone to the beach. You must have been late.”

  The boy shrugs. “Tell him I’ll come by later. Before dinner.”

  “Very well,” he says in dismissal and turns to me as the sound of the boy’s galloping flip-flops fade. “That’s evidently all I’m good for anymore. Arranging playdates. Relaying messages between children. William’s a Von Blücher.” When that fact doesn’t prod recognition, he elaborates. “His great-great-great-grandfather defeated Napoleon. They live most of the year in Gstaad now for the obvious reasons. Well, it’s still a fine place.” Phillip winks at me and brandishes his open, ruby-streaked hand. His thin knuckles are pocked with red spots that fizzle like a firecracker to the blackened embers of his wrist. He seems to enjoy the classification of family and country, tracking rises and defeats by resort towns. But there’s also a warm, mischievous flirtation in the old prince’s manner that undercuts his devotion to the tired titles of Europe. Charlie called him a mystic, and he stops, Sphinx-still, his handsome, hawkish nose tilted up like a sundial, to read the lines on my face.

  “Are you unwell, Ian? If you don’t mind my saying, you don’t look like a man on vacation.”

  “I’m sorry, Prince Phillip.” I’m not sure why I’m apologizing any more than whether I’m allowed to drop the royal designation. He doesn’t correct me on either account. “I just saw a horrible motorbike accident. Two dead bodies by Petra Beach.”

  “Oooh.” He groans. “Those bikes are a fast form of suicide. You must be careful. We only have one doctor on this island, and notice I didn’t say a decent doctor. Last summer, a lovely neighbor of mine was bitten by a viper. By the time the doctor determined it was serious enough that she needed to be flown to Leros, she was dead. I believe it was her death that prompted his diagnosis of the bite as serious.” He waves his hand again, like a conductor who has the power to release the music but not the authority to change the program. “You must be very careful.”

  “I wear my helmet.”

  “I wish we could afford better facilities, but with the economy the way it is and the sad wildfire of immigrants pouring over the islands this summer, we simply have to make do. The Greek Crisis is a permanent condition. Like Swiss Punctuality or American—.” He drawls off from completing the comparison, perhaps because he’s speaking to an American.

  “Don’t you have some influence as a member of the royal family?”

  “My dear,” he gasps, “I don’t have an ounce of Greek blood in my veins. I’m French by ancestry. And worse, Catholic. That doesn’t get me very far in local politics among the holy robes of our monastery. They hate the Catholics. Better a turban than a tiara is an expression they like to use. And it bears. They take their orders directly from Constantinople. Don’t believe the maps. Patmos is very much a territory of the Middle East. And if you weren’t born on Patmos, you’re a foreign invader no matter how much land you own.” This too is concluded with a wave of his ruby ring, and he giggles sweetly, clasping my shoulder. “Give Charlie my love, will you? And tell that girlfriend of his to come for a visit.”

  “Actually, I was hoping you could show me where Charlie’s house is. I’m—”

  “Lost,” he intuits, nodding at his skills of prediction. “I’m also good at directions. We do our part, we fossils.” He locks his hands behind his back, and I follow him up the slanting road. Three ducking turns, and still the empty restaurants and taped posters for pottery exhibitions are unfamiliar guideposts.

  “You’ve known the Konstantinous long?” I ask him.

  “Why, yes, for half a century, perhaps more. I met Charlie’s grandfather when he first bought on the island. And, of course, his father. All good men, tough men, as Cypriots tend to be. Stefan is my godson, an honor, don’t misunderstand, but I’ve always felt more of a kinship with Charlie. He has that flint in the eye and gold kingdoms under his eyelids, that ease in the world that his poor brother never quite mastered. Maybe Stefan didn’t have the option. He was recruited since he could wobble to take over the family business. And by all accounts he has. Dubai, I think it is. Or does he live in Doha now? He occasionally sends a Christmas card.”

  This time the ruby-streaked hand doesn’t wave but reaches into his shirt pocket to extract a cigarette. The old prince is as jittery as a Brooklyn cement truck with its round mixer constantly rotating—he’s always engaged in small, restless actions for fear of hardening. Phillip tears a few centimeters off the tip before he lights it. “I bought the wrong kind at duty-free, the long ones I can’t stomach. But we must be frugal. We take what we are given.” Phillip is the kind of smoker who doesn’t inhale. He holds the cigarette like a stick of incense, swirling it in front of us as we pass a tiny taverna with its refrigerator motors purring through the lifeless noon. A young man stands in the doorway, his shirt open and his sweaty collarbone glistening through the soapy gray light. Phillip studies him, smirks, and passes on.

  “For the record, I didn’t approve of that nonsense of Charlie’s father cutting him off.” The news stalls me for a second and I take double steps to catch up. “What’s the boy to do when he’s never been raised to have a real profession. I told his father that. You have the money. Let Charlie be. He can’t survive on some arbitrary skinflint allowance. He’s beautifully wild. I think their time in America has had the deleterious effect of confusing moneymakers for strong characters. It’s a lost art, the art of living, of taking small pleasures. I’ll be honest and risk sounding like every other ancient crank drinking at the mahogany bar of nostalgia. They don’t make people like they used to. Interesting people. People like destinations. People who are entertaining instead of entertained. One day there may be a wildlife sanctuary for the last remaining characters. I thought that might be New York. Sonny assured me on our first meeting that I was hopelessly out of touch.”

  Phillip shakes his head at a world of new humans forged without the vestigial appendages of personalities and puffs on the white filter like a senior citizen sipping soup.

  “Charlie’s father demanded he get a job.” I avoid the tone of a question.

  “What choice did he have anyway? I doubt Stefan would have welcomed him into the business with open arms. Once his mother was too sick to defend him, it was find a career or come home. Well, Charlie did, didn’t he? He’s done splendidly with his charter company. Perhaps I was wrong and his father was correct. Bon.”

  “Have you been on one of Charlie’s yachts?”

  “Oh, dear, no. I’m too social to isolate myself on yachts for days on end. But I see Charlie’s boats coming and going from that dock he rents. I can see it from my hilltop garden. It’s a booming business, and I told his father so. When Charlie started it a few years back, I thought the idea was atrocious. No chance of making money on such a minor operation. On lugging tourists from island to island for a few hot months each year. On dressing up youths from nearby islands as captains. And you know Charlie’s excitement over a new idea tends to be as lasting as his patience. But he proved himself and continues to, and slowly his father’s clench on the family coffers loosens. I imagine he helps fund him now. Hoping for a child’s success is constructive. Demanding it is altogether different.” Phillip flashes his smile at me, then curtails it as if it has dawned on him that I haven’t offered a single decent story to add to his collection plate. “You are close to Charlie, aren’t you? I haven’t been spilling secrets to a stranger?”

  “Very close,” I say reass
uringly. “In fact, I’m joining the Konstantinou Charters team, so we may get to have that lunch soon.”

  “A lunch! What a lovely idea,” he sings, as if the offer were mine. “You must promise to bring Sonny. I fear she’ll be gone one day.”

  Phillip’s fear echoes Charlie’s, and yet nothing about Sonny seems to suggest she’s on the verge of packing her bags. “Why would she? You don’t think she likes Patmos?”

  “It’s not about liking,” he rasps. “But do you see marriage in Charlie’s future? I don’t. And honestly why would there be? It’s so much nicer to be free. Although I’ve often thought maybe it was all those bad marriages that created the pressure cooker of interesting souls.” Phillips lifts his shoulders at the mystery of it all. “What do I know? When you get to be my age you learn that youth is not a torch you pass on to the next generations. Youth is a state from which you are dethroned.”

  “You can still be young at heart, right?”

  Phillip winks at me. “Let’s have that lunch soon. I’ll be gone in a week. A friend in Vienna has a ghost I must visit.”

  “To exorcize?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dare. I simply keep them company. It’s horribly lonely on both sides.” We cross through a tunnel and into the Plateia, the cracks between its rutted stone caulked with cigarette butts and wrappers. Phillip snuffs out his smoke on the wall and gently folds it in a tissue, which he places in his shirt pocket. “Hoo hoo. You’re that way,” he says, pointing toward the alley, then shuffles across a shaft of sunlight and is swallowed in the narrow passage on the opposite side of the square.

  I push on down the alley, stopping at the red door and taking the flaccid doll hand in mine. I assume the hand is meant as a greeting, but it looks more like the appendage of a consumptive Victorian hanging from the side of a bed. I bang it three times against its brass ball. Inside, footsteps advance across the wood, a lock fumbles, and the door swings wide. Sonny stares out at me, her hair pulled back tightly, her plucked eyebrows arched, and her mouth an open oval. She leans out to search the alley for another presence, her bare feet curled over the threshold. Only when she realizes it’s empty does she deflate against the door.

  “Hi, Ian,” she says without bothering to mask her disappointment. “I thought it might be Charlie.”

  On the subject of disappointment, we’re evenly matched. A part of me hoped Charlie might answer the door, might have decided against Bodrum and already patched up the tear that he’d been so intent on ripping last night. After the dead hippies on the road, I’m not sure I have the strength to dangle a bunch of convincing lies Sonny’s way. I’ve come to deliver a report of Charlie bruised but fine on Domitian. But it occurs to me that I’m actually here on the chance of gleaning news about him. Come here again and I can’t promise you’ll make it out in one piece. Even far from the ambulance siren, those words won’t leave my head. Why hasn’t he responded? I wrote him again after I parked my bike—ONE OF THE HIPPIES YOU THREATENED IS DEAD—hoping the message would force an answer. There hasn’t been one.

  “Do you mind if I come in?”

  Sonny shoots a worried glance into the darkness of the house before backing up. I slip into the chilly room lit with scented candles—jasmine and lavender—to cover its perpetual smell of old rain. In the sitting room, an ironing board is erected on the scarlet carpet, and tiny, candy-colored clothes are spread across its plank.

  “Are Therese and Duck here?” I ask. I don’t want to lie in front of a child. I can handle deception among adults, but any cross-examination from a seven-year-old might break my resolve.

  “No, they’re out,” Sonny replies as she takes her place behind the ironing board. “I was just doing some chores.” She grabs the iron and makes a few cursory swipes around a pink collar. There is something slightly staged about Sonny’s middle-of-the-room domestic routine, as if she intended Charlie to catch her hard at work when he came crawling home, keeping up the slog of household activities to contrast his own irresponsibility. But I wonder if I’m being unfair to her; maybe everything Sonny does seems performed because she’s so beautiful in motion, each movement planting a seed of previously uncultivated desire. For a second, as I watch her, I want to iron too, like it’s some vital human ritual I’d never stopped to appreciate. The spell is broken when she jams the asthmatic appliance on its base and stares at me with agitation. “Why did you ask if Duck’s here? Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Because that’s what people ask when they have bad news.”

  “I don’t have bad news.” I drop onto the couch. A glass bowl filled with melted ice cubes sits on the coffee table. “I suppose you haven’t spoken to Charlie today?”

  She laughs silently as she whips the pink dress off the stand and folds it in half. “No, not since last night. Not since I left him in Skala. I waited up half the night for him to come home. No dice. It takes Charlie longer than most for his conscious to kick in.” I resist correcting conscious with conscience. “The evolution from how bad I am to how bad he is takes about as long as the life span of a mosquito.” Her balled fists are putting new wrinkles in Duck’s dress. “Still, I would have appreciated an apology. Not to Miles, but to me.”

  The promise of providing Charlie with an alibi was far easier in theory. An abstract angry Sonny was manageable; the combustible woman in front of me is an unfair fight. No throwaway excuse is going to pacify her.

  “I know he’s sorry. In fact—” A patter of gravel rises from the balcony, and I lean back on the couch to glance out the overbright window. A leg straddles the ledge as if the man it belongs to is considering a jump. It’s three flights down into thorn branches, if the shrine doesn’t break his fall along the way. Sonny looks at me almost humorously as she marches toward the balcony door.

  “You can come in. It’s not Charlie.”

  Miles appears in the doorway, his head bent timidly and his graying, wavy bangs covering one eye. Black and silver stubble rinses his chin. He tests a smile on me, unsure where my loyalties lie. I have no choice but to copy it.

  “Hello,” he says, holding his right hand in front of him like it’s a toy he picked up and isn’t sure where to stow. “Is the coast clear?”

  “If it were any clearer, you could see Africa.” Sonny studies me again. “Miles just dropped by.”

  “To apologize for last night,” he quickly adds. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Sonny spins around. “What came over you?” Her feet keep rotating until she lands back on me. “Charlie’s the one who needs to apologize. Tell him, Ian. Tell him he did nothing wrong.”

  “We all said things we didn’t mean,” Miles whispers. It’s a generous assessment. I can’t recall anyone else who said one nasty word all evening—not even Rasym. But it was Miles who brought the confrontation to a physical end. He slides around me and dips his right hand into the bowl of ice cubes. Bruises on two of his knuckles are yellowing to purple.

  “I’m okay,” he insists. “I swear I’ve never punched someone before. Not even in school. I’ve known Charles since we were both boys spending summers on this island, and we never once fought, let alone a punch.” The memory of the blow seems to be contained in the bowl because he keeps his eyes fixed on it. “I’m really sorry. I feel, I feel—”

  Sonny doesn’t appear that interested in how Miles is feeling. She takes the opportunity of his bowl-centric distraction to roll her eyes and blow a clogged breath.

  “You shouldn’t have punched him,” she snaps. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t deserve it. Miles, it’s fine. I forgive you. And I’m sure Charlie will too. We all had too much to drink. No one stays in their corner with that much alcohol.” Miles must have been apologizing the entire time it took the ice cubes to melt. And what at first might have seemed a welcome consolation to Sonny is now clearly undermining her assessment of whom she regards as the real victim. I wonder if Miles mentioned Charlie’s accusations last night, if he
tried to explain them away or confessed. Miles lifts his hand from the bowl and wipes the excess water on his leg.

  “I’ll apologize to him myself. If you don’t clear these misunderstandings up right away, they only grow bigger.”

  “I’d give it a day or two,” Sonny advises. “And maybe it would be best if you aren’t here when he gets back. After all—”

  Miles nods and stands. “I’ll make it up to you,” he swears, reaching his unbruised hand for her shoulder with the hesitancy of someone who’s been reprimanded for touching. “I’ll fix it.”

  “There’s nothing to fix.” She presses her hand kindly over his. Miles’s last smile is a sincere one. Having secured one friend, he seeks another.

  “Ian, if you ever want to have a coffee. I know you’re a permanent member of the group now, and since Patmos is a second home, I’d hate for you to think the worst of me.”

  “Sure.”

  He raises both hands in good-bye and sees himself out. When the door shuts, Sonny races to lock it.

  “I never thought he’d leave,” she wheezes. “My god. It’s like everyone just assumes I have all the free time in the world.”

  “Do you think he really would have jumped if I had been Charlie?”

  “If you had been Charlie.” She smirks. “Depends on how angry you looked. Stupid of Miles to show up so soon. People say Americans are socially inept, but it’s the Europeans who have zero sense of space. They crowd you with their anxiety. He would have stayed for dinner to tell me seventeen more times how bad he felt.”

  “He does seem sorry.”

  “Sorry.” She sneers. “If I hear that word one more time today.” But sorry is all I have to offer her. Sonny collapses into the medieval chair, toying her fingers along the armrest’s pegs, her toes gripping the edge of the coffee table. Her tank top exposes the egg-white side of a breast.