The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  Adrian steadies his hands on his boyfriend’s shoulders. “We’re going to Nicosia as men, and let them be children if they don’t want to meet me. What does it matter if they accept you abstractly, if they aren’t willing to see my face? You have to decide.”

  I give them their privacy and step onto the balcony. A motorcycle gang of ants is crossing the stucco, and maroon bees suck the centers of wilted flowers. Birds whistle below in the garden. Sonny isn’t staring out at the view. Her focus is on her thumbs, pressed against the table, as if committing their prints to ink.

  “How are you holding up?” I say.

  “Am I losing my mind or finally regaining it?” she asks. “Why do I feel so lucid? Why?” She motions for me to take the chair across from her. “I suppose it was inevitable. He was so sick.”

  “No matter how inevitable, it’s always a surprise.”

  She nods, adjusting her elbows on the table and sliding her hand through her hair.

  “I want to thank you for your advice yesterday. My former manager hooked me up with a lawyer. You were right. It was smart to talk to her.”

  “What did the lawyer say?”

  Sonny lets out a feeble laugh. “She was so excited when I explained my situation you’d have thought God cold-called her. As soon as I mentioned the name Konstantinou, she nearly crashed the car she was driving. She says even if the marriage isn’t official, it’s enough of a threat that they’ll throw money at me to shut me up. Imagine the payday now that Mr. K is dead.” It’s as if Sonny is purposely beefing up her role as gold digger. I sense she’s using me as a dry run for all of the invectives she’ll be bombarded with if she proceeds with her claim. But the muscles of her jaw stiffen, and she looks up at me with the burden of someone who wins at a heavy price. I’m not sure whether to offer her my congratulations or condolences.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “If I had more dignity I’d just walk away. If I had an ounce of self-respect, I’d take Duck and go back to California and never ask for a dime from them. It would prove I loved him if I didn’t take a cent.”

  “I’m not judging you. It isn’t an easy world.” But that response sounds too pat, so I apply a dose of naïve hope. “There’s still a chance Charlie could be found. Maybe he did take a boat out and is lost at sea. It happens.”

  Sonny drops her shoulders. She searches the blue above us.

  “Please don’t be Miles,” she says. “I don’t need the comfort of insanity. No, there are only two possibilities. Either Charlie is dead, or he purposely disappeared because he didn’t want to get caught. In either case, he’s not coming back.” She’s handling reality rather well. The late afternoon shadows are encroaching on our small islet of sun. We’ll sit here until the shadows cover us. “If he’s alive and did run, I forgive him. I’ve been thinking all day about what kind of person I am. Not was, even up to a week ago, but am now. I can take what I need and still love him. I can be greedy for Duck and sincere when it comes to him. You’re right. The world isn’t easy and it will call me whatever it wants to, and even the good names won’t be right.” She breathes heavily. “Unless you’re a woman, you can’t understand the number of names you get called in one lifetime. But I’m done believing in any of them. I’m too old to be tricked into dignity.”

  She leans her head against her shoulder, as if needing physical contact with her own body. Tears blur her eyes. “I’m not doing this only for me.”

  “I know you’re not.”

  Somewhere in Chora, a steeple bell begins to ring. I count the clangs to determine the time, but it rolls past twelve and other bells join it.

  “You’ll keep in touch, won’t you?” she asks. “When you go. Even if Charlie vanishes forever, it’d be nice to hear from you once in a while. Check in, will you? Tell me you’re doing well. You can still lie to me.”

  “I hope I won’t have to lie,” I say with a smile. “And I bet Charlie would be glad that you got some of his family’s money. Maybe that’s what he meant that night in Skala about always making sure you’re safe.”

  “You’ve always been good at covering for him,” she says, patting the table. “Like that chess piece. Charlie didn’t put the queen in my bag. You did.”

  I don’t confirm or deny it. I dig my fingers in my pocket and fish out the gaudy earring I’ve been carrying around to return to its owner. I push it across the table. Sonny smirks when she realizes what it is.

  “I found it on Domitian. It’s the earring from—”

  “I remember.” She picks it up.

  “Charlie got back to his yacht, that much is clear. So he really could be anywhere now.” She doesn’t bite. She’s not interested in false faith.

  “So ugly,” she moans. “Charlie always had great taste, except when it came to jewelry.” I suppose talking about him in the past tense is a sign of acceptance. “I figured it got lost when Miles punched him.” She clips the earring onto her shirt like Charlie did and lets it dangle over her heart. On her tan uniform, it does look like a war medal. “Can you imagine if Charlie did return looking like a shipwreck victim and discovered that the only person who kept hope alive for him was Miles. He’d be so pissed. Charlie hated him even when they were kids playing together. I guess you never know who your real friends are.”

  That sentence sends a chill through my skull. I clasp the table and let go.

  “Are you still taking Duck to Nicosia in the fall?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Who knows? For once, I’m not thinking that far ahead. This weekend is the festival for the Assumption of Mary. They float an icon of her in the sea by Kampos and set these little paper boats on fire. It’s beautiful. I want Duck to see it.” She laces her hands behind her head and gazes out at the southern tip of the island. The monster star is turning the dirt fields red and the sea a glass-blown yellow. “You know, I don’t think I ever experienced real happiness until Greece,” she says. “Back home it was never direct happiness. I always needed someone else’s confirmation that I was in a good place. But here it just is. Pure. Like it doesn’t even care if it’s remembered.” She stares at the sky with wonder. “I’m twenty-seven, Ian. And I have the weirdest feeling I’m going to live to be a hundred.”

  I turn to the horizon, where the future always looks less crowded.

  THE SCALY, PISTACHIO door across from the taxi stand creaks open when I tap my knuckles on it. Pop music blasts from far upstairs, and the rooms on the main floor are sheeted and empty. I climb the crooked staircase, following the synthesizer bass line and the screaming-girl lyrics. I pass through a tiny oval door that’s cut into a larger one. Inside, the garret apartment lies in shambles. A ceramic vase is shattered on a table. An entire bottle’s worth of red wine stains an embroidered sofa. A modest impressionistic painting of a port on fire has been revived by a slash through its canvas. The Beijing fuerdai weren’t such respectable renters after all. The knob on the stereo is missing, so I pull the plug to kill the music. I take a narrow spiral staircase up to the roof, turning in six circles to reach the sky.

  Miles stands barefoot on the tarry, whitewashed rooftop with his arms outstretched. The dense brown slab of the monastery looms above him, and bells from every church and shrine are pealing from all directions. The fuzzy laughter of tourists reverberates from far below. He must have heard me climbing the steps, but he keeps his back to me. He’s swaying and his arms are soaring, as if drifting on some invisible current.

  I should have figured it out as soon as I realized Charlie and Vic were only pretending to be enemies. If a method proves effective, it tends to be exploited repeatedly. And Charlie never had much of an imagination; even at Destroyers, he always resorted to the same nearest-window strategy. I knew that Charlie staged the fight with Miles that night in Skala, but I didn’t know that Miles was in on the act. Who would suspect him of cleaning up his enemy’s mess?

  “He was supposed to be back by now,” Miles whimpers, wrapping his arms around his sides. “He has
to come back.” An empty bottle lies by his foot.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Otherwise you won’t get your money. You must owe a lot in London to have taken care of Stefan for him. Did Charlie promise you a cut of his inheritance?” Miles spins around, but it isn’t fear that grips his face. He’s somewhere far beyond that. I almost feel sorry for him. He murdered for no reason. Mr. K died before there would have been time for Stefan to tell him the truth.

  “We played games as kids,” Miles slurs. “On summers here as children. Charles always wanted to play the same game he made up. It’s too hard to explain the rules. It was about running away from murderers.” I’m not surprised that Charlie took Destroyers as his own invention, any more than Sonny was when he took their song as his own discovery. It’s ours, so it’s his. Even if Charlie hated Miles, Destroyers must have forged a lasting bond between them. “He wasn’t very good at it. He always found the worst corner, and I’d have to invent a last-minute escape. Keys or windows where they shouldn’t be. A hole in the wall.”

  “Miles, did you lure Stefan up to the house by promising him information on the charter company, or did Stefan reach out to you on his own?”

  “Charles said he’d only be in Bodrum for a few days,” he cries. “People don’t just disappear. Where is he? The refugees, more each hour, so many of them, endless gobs of flesh, but no Charles.” He loses his balance and lifts his arms to steady himself.

  “You shouldn’t have included the photo of Charlie and Stefan with the suicide note.”

  “This is an island of refugees. Are you aware of that? Have you bothered to learn the history of this place? No history for an American, right? Only beaches. In 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, a horde of refugees took shelter here.”

  “I saw Charlie stash that photo in the Bible on his bookshelf. There’s no way Stefan would have known where it was.”

  “More refugees with the conquest of Rhodes by the Turks in 1522.” Miles wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “And again, in 1669, when Crete fell. I won’t even bore you with the Venetians. Greece is a very young country.”

  “Charlie must have told you where to find the photo. You put it back in the Bible today when you were talking to Sonny. You’re too thorough of a cleaner.”

  “And now London is falling. London falling,” he sings. “My vespers, yeah? When I was little, we used to come to this house every Easter as well. It’s the prettiest time of year. The youngest monk always plays Judas. If you can play Judas, you can play anyone.” He stumbles forward as if to hug me, but the momentum of his first few steps peters out. He looks down at his feet. “We had horses in the country back home. I knew each one so well I could recognize them by their smell. We’d have to put them down too. It was out of principle. If you ride them and feed them, you have to be able to end their suffering. You see, that’s how he and I are different. The first time I held the rifle, I was nervous. And I asked my father, where do I shoot her?” He laughs and brings his finger to his temple. “The head, of course. These are my stories, Ian, and they can’t be taken or touched. I have so many I want to tell you. We had horses and a rare-book room and a greenhouse for herbs and two Alfa Romeos that never did run and bright, long meadows and the devil wasn’t there.”

  “Miles,” I whisper, trying to pull him out of his spell. “Why don’t I take you down to your bed?”

  His shaggy eyes fix on me, and I see red dents in his bottom lip from where he’s bitten into it. Where he is, there is no backward.

  “It was all for what? For time? To keep in a name? My god, what difference did it make? All I did and no point to it.” I’m not sure if he means the murder or his life. Too many memories are sloshing through his brain. I grab for his wrist, but he dodges my arm and marches with quick, deliberate steps toward the ledge.

  “Miles,” I yell. “Come here. Closer. Come close.”

  “Remember our toast?” he asks. “You’re Catholic, aren’t you? Can you ask for forgiveness in advance? I was given everything but a purpose. When you have everything I guess you don’t need one. All you can do is watch the loss. Come back in the spring. Blue anemones bloom up the hill. I lost my virginity there to a Greek girl. It was like paradise.” He steps over the edge, a millisecond of swirling white shirt and tan skin, and then nothing, and then the screams in front of the monastery.

  Miles never learned to swim. It wouldn’t have saved him. He couldn’t fly.

  CHAPTER 18

  He sits cross-legged by the wheel of my bike. His jeans are caked in dirt. His lips are dotted with sores. The diamond stud is missing from his ear. A fresh, short-sleeve ANTI-BETHLEHEM shirt reveals long, sinewy arms with bite-like scabs running down their pale undersides. He’s staring out at the view of Skala at dusk, and even the yowling ambulance that pulls to a halt by the taxi stand doesn’t distract him. At first, I don’t recognize him as anyone other than a nationless stray of Vic’s camp, a postraid orphan reduced to sleeping far away from the policed beaches. But as I fit my key into the seat compartment to collect my helmet, he lifts his head. It’s Helios’s sickly eyes that catch mine. He winces out a smile, as if the air is a wall he keeps hitting his head against.

  “Ian,” he says limply, as if it sapped all of his strength to remember my name and there isn’t much left over to utter it. “Hey.”

  I squat down, and he flinches. He reeks of smoke and armpits.

  “Your parents are looking for you,” I say softly. “They could do with seeing you now. Charlie’s dad died. Do you want me to give you a ride to their house?”

  He shakes his head. “No. No way. Charlie back?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  He raises his arm and lets it drop hopelessly onto his lap. “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew this was your bike.”

  “Where can I take you?”

  His tongue greases his lips. “Take me someplace better.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Camp gone,” he mutters. “I need to borrow from you, dude. Just a little. Please. Anything. I’ll do anything.” His skittish eyes move to the space between my legs, either to my crotch or my pockets.

  I stand up to fish out a bill.

  “Helios, you’ve got to take care of yourself.” I try to make the advice sound dude-like, free of parental lecturing. “I really wish you’d consider going home. Your parents are worried. They haven’t seen you in days. What about talking to Vesna?”

  “Stop!” He moans and flings his hand flipper-like against his cheek. “No! Just give me. Please, Ian, just give!”

  I fold the fifty-euro bill twice and extend it toward him. He gawks up at it as if it’s a meaningless piece of scrap paper.

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  I’m growing aggravated by the zombie-ed out son of Charlie’s boat captain. The men in the ambulance have already raced toward the scene of a fall, and the dark atmosphere is thick with emergency. I don’t want to be in Chora any longer.

  “It’s money,” I reply, shaking it. “Take it. It’s what you want. You don’t have to do anything for it. And you don’t have to pay me back.”

  Helios lets out a gutting cry and tips onto his hip. “I don’t need money,” he yells. “There’s nowhere on the island now to use it. I can’t buy it anymore with the camp closed. Give me what you have! You’ve got to have some left! Give!”

  “Helios, I’m sorry, but—”

  He rolls into a crouch, and his entire face curdles with the effort of standing. He breaks into a staggered run, hopping over a wall, and is lost in the maze of painted stone.

  The lamps of Chora blink on, paling the lights of the ambulance. It’s cocktail hour at the Apocalypse.

  NIGHT HAS FALLEN by the time I approach Grikos. Mid-August traffic has intensified along the winding roads. Rental cars thrash around corners like dying fish. Even sleepy Grikos glitters with the romance of candles and glassware. I park my bike and walk along the port. Families gather on the back decks of their yachts, eating and d
rinking and cheering each other on at games, like tailgaters in the world’s most expensive parking lot. I turn onto the concrete dock where Domitian is tied, its sails down, its black-oak hull swaying against the buoys. Hazy yellow light bleeds from the portal windows. Someone’s home.

  A breeze lifts off the water, and I wait for it to die before jumping on deck. The wood floor has been freshly mopped and waxed after Sonny’s morning excursion. I climb down the rungs of the ladder. The galley is empty, but the track lighting is turned high and speakers play a late Beethoven string quartet at low volume. I take a seat at the opal chessboard and set the pieces in place. Charlie was always white. Now I am. The ashtray lies upside down on the kitchen drying rack.

  Christos steps from the bathroom with a caddy of cleaning supplies. Grease is smeared on the front of his shirt, and his gold St. Christopher medallion is tangled around his collar. He pauses when he spots me and grunts in acknowledgment before stowing the caddy under the sink. His eyes are bloodshot. Why do people read palms when they should read faces? I can read his. He’s had a brutal day with the news of Mr. K’s death. He’s spent his life as a faithful servant for the Konstantinous. I wonder if Rasym’s side of the family will bother to keep him on.

  “I close boat now,” he tells me as he stacks glasses in the cupboard.

  “I’m just waiting to see someone.”

  “No more boat. No more . . .” For a second, he glances at me with fleeting hope but doesn’t find what he’s looking for. Instead he grips the counter, as if Domitian is riding treacherous waves.

  “How about a game?” I ask. He shakes his head. “Charlie and I played a lot as kids. I’m sure you two did too. Come on. Just one game.”