“I’ve been distracted lately,” I respond, which is the truth. Poverty tends to drown out the latest international horror, and, from the distance of Manhattan, one faraway explosion becomes confused with all the others.
“Last month, on Patmos. Bomb blew up in a café. Killed tourists there. French and two Americans. No one has taken responsibility, not even the radical Islamists who take credit for everything. But it is hard time in Greece now. Today is our Great Depression. So there was bomb.” He utters this cause-and-effect relationship lightly, his voice a spray of chimes, but I realize he’s simply practicing his English.
“Does that happen often? Bombs on islands?”
“No, never. Never before. But we have never been so poor before. Never so desperate because of the sanctions, the”—he lifts his hands from the wheel to strangle his neck—“austerity measures. And now with this new deal we make it’s only getting worse. I pay more tax to drive this taxi than I make waiting all day for a fare.” He pats the vinyl dash, as if to reassure the vehicle he won’t abandon it. “We never should have joined the rest of Europe. No work, people angry, angry at government, angry at the West. Now is the time of bombs. ‘Kill the foreigners.’ ‘Kill Europe.’ It is written on every wall.” He ducks his head, as if physically struck with a thought. “Problem is all we have is tourism. Maybe not for long. You want to buy an island, soon the government will sell it to you. They will even sell you the people on it. Sell whatever they can. Even the police in Greece are for sale. So bomb blows up on island, kill the foreigners, make you remember Greece has teeth.”
He studies me in the rearview mirror, gauging the fear on my face. He doesn’t know I’ve already lived in dangerous countries. I glance out the window where men are lined up on the sidewalk with their backs to the street, each one pressing his nose tightly against a wall. At first I think they’re peeing, like men at a urinal, and then I think they’re about to be shot. Panama comes back, men at a wall arranged for rapid machine-gun fire—in Panama killing is a chore that everyone wants to finish as quickly as possible, the killers and the killed. Ever since Panama, I can’t take my place at a urinal without thinking of executions. But the wall is a window, changing light, and I see the flickers of a soccer match. The men raise their arms when a goal is scored.
“Don’t worry,” the driver says. “No one wants to blow up the Irish.”
It’s my red hair. For my entire life, I’ve been renouncing citizenship to a country I’ve never visited. I picture Charlie’s hair, the brown, stringy anywhere-ness of it.
“I’m an American,” I tell him. The driver looks in the rearview mirror and makes a turn into the port.
“You stay at a hotel? A cousin of mine has a small—”
“I’m staying with a friend.”
Docks stretch into darkness. Mobs collect around enormous, cake-tiered ships. The driver blasts the horn and waves wanderers out of the road. He points to a huge, blue-striped craft that is already releasing returning passengers.
“Twenty-four euro,” he says. I pay him the money he wants in the currency he hates and press my bag under my arm.
Food vendors ring chrome bells. Men and women are spilling in all directions, pressing, pulling, oblivious to the American concept of personal space. Only the bright colors of bags and windbreakers stand out in the night. A group of hippie backpackers sits in a circle, singing Jesus hymns and holding hands. I’m knocked off balance by the straw satchel of a heavyset woman pushing her mother in a wheelchair. The taxi driver has implanted the fear of a bomb in my head, and now I’m stuck with it in the midst of this human congestion. I see bombs in backpacks, in cake boxes, in the dirty cooler of the Tunisian grandfather selling bottles of water, a bomb strapped to the chest of a handsome woman reading a romance novel. Bomb, I mouth, as if saying it will stop it from happening, as if bombs like surprise birthday parties are foiled by mere expectation. A boy in an olive sweatshirt shoots his arm out in front of me, men’s and women’s counterfeit watches buckled from wrist to elbow. He looks up and rubs his thumb against his finger. After the smile that must be the oldest human gesture, two fingers rubbing for lucre. He and I wear the same brand of sneakers. I don’t know why this detail captures my attention, but it does, our unsimilar lives overlapping only in our allegiance to a leather swoosh. An older man in a brown turban, maybe his father, barks at him in a clipped dialect that must mean, try harder, get the sale. I can’t control the urge to clutch my pocket to make sure my wallet hasn’t been stolen. It’s a confusing motion, the thing I’m protecting the very sign of acquiescence. The boy smiles hopefully, a henhouse of raw white teeth. “Here you go,” I say in defeat and give him ten euros without asking for a watch.
The guards signal the acceptance of passengers, and I’m swept forward in the tide up the metal ramp. I check my cabin number. Single occupancy, one bed, berth 805. I need to stick to my new austerity measures; general steerage was half the rate. It’s a small, beige, plastic-molded room with no window, and I’m asleep on the bare mattress before the ferry pulls out of the harbor.
I WAKE TO the groan of the ship. In a windowless room nothing tells the time. Did I miss the stop at Patmos, headed now for Kos or Rhodes? I check my cell phone. 6:09 A.M. We don’t reach the island until eight. My cheek pinned to the pillow, I feel the slightest sense of movement, so faint I have to go completely still to find it—a lurch of riding on water, not just back and forth but side to side. It’s like the teetering of a plane without the impending fear of a crash. I suppose we could always sink.
I get up, brush my teeth, swallow down an aspirin, and change into shorts and a button-down. I use wet fingers to straighten my hair, forging a part like an underused forest trail. Do I look the same as I used to? I haven’t seen Charlie in five years, and I haven’t spent a solid block of time with him since college. In the spring of our senior year of high school, university catalogs littered the hallways like autumn leaves—fall being the preferred seasonal motif of those brick and cable-knit tableaus that practically guaranteed not jobs nor intellectual whetting but a lifetime of nostalgia and days made only to be played back later as a highlight reel of youth. Charlie and I clamped our hands around the same catalog for a small liberal-arts college in Western Massachusetts, intent on leaving everything in the city except each other behind. Charlie managed five semesters before dropping out, and I helped him pack up his dorm room—his plan for his next steps then as disagreeable to outside interference as a wildfire. We met a few times after that in New York, teaming up for long lunches when he was in town visiting his family, and he’d tell me vaguely that he’d put down roots in Cyprus, dating one woman after cheating on another. Charlie was still at the age where cheating seemed more an emblem of a dazzling personal life rather than a moral failing. He gave, as he always did, the conflicting impression of maturity and irresponsibility beneath an out-of-season tan. At the end of our last lunch he looked at me sympathetically, as if he could see something in me that was falling apart—a crack I myself couldn’t locate. “Ian, you just tell me when you’re ready to quit volunteering and escape this shithole. The only redeeming quality left in a New Yorker is their ability not to take up space. That’s nothing to brag about. I think this might be my last visit home.” I told him I didn’t mind the shithole. “Anyway, I might try a job in Panama City.” His voice turned serious without sounding impressed. “You know, I’m always here if you need me. I wouldn’t offer that to anyone but you. Just say the word.” At the time, I figured he was lonely in Cyprus and that helping me was a convenient way of fixing what he had lost. But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. We were only twenty-four.
I leave the top three buttons of my shirt undone to suggest the relaxed demeanor of a Mediterranean houseguest capable of slack days in the sun. I don’t know what Charlie does these days for a job, but I don’t want to look like the last five years have bulldozed me under. I put my Dopp kit in my suitcase, where the $9,000 in cash is Ziplocked in a plastic bag;
each thin, green stack counting to one thousand is bound in a yellow bank band. I could have withdrawn more from the Bledsoe family account, the in-case-of-emergencies reserve that I had prided myself on never touching. But any larger amount would have been a red flag at customs. And I can’t imagine Lily will notice the loss of anything as low as four figures.
I carry my bag out of the cabin and follow the lava-orange carpeting toward the escalators. In the past six hours, the ship has transformed into a state resembling a floating refugee camp. Only the huddled passengers aren’t Middle Eastern migrants who have been pouring into Greece all summer on the news, but ticketed vacationers without the luxury of cabins. Every inch of floor has been claimed by unconscious bodies wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags. Whole families cluster in a stairwell under a makeshift tent of beach towels. Old women hug their purses, using their shoes for pillows. Scuba gear and grocery bags mark tense perimeters, and walls have been built out of suitcases to shield sleepers from the overhead lights. I have to jump sideways to cleave a path. The hallway is balmy with sleep, the moist warmth of measured exhales. Eyes open lizard-like, study me, and close.
I walk down the stopped escalator, where the ferry mutates into a bleak casino of shiny surfaces and garish bulb lights. A bearded barman in a tuxedo jacket makes drinks for sloe-eyed insomniacs, and elderly Norwegian tourists, wearing surgical masks and the red T-shirts of their future cruise ship, sit on stools playing the slot machines. A police siren on the top of each machine threatens to wake the ship, but no one seems to win. I follow the hallway toward the outdoor deck, passing rooms of rowed seats glazed in television light. The plastic odor of nuked meat issues from the cafeteria.
Through the water-slick windows, the night is bluing with morning, black burlap wearing to indigo. Right by the deck door emblazoned with warnings about falling overboard, a man sleeps crouching. His elbows are anchored on his knees, and a purple nylon jacket covers most of his head. As I stare down at him, I see the gristle of his scalp and the nub of his finger holding the jacket over his face. I wonder if he still has the Russian woman’s wallet in his possession and if I should alert the authorities about a thief onboard. But he already looks so broken I leave him be. I open the door to the deck, where the air is soft with the sea. A few smokers watch the first pinks dilute the sky, the gallop of yellow, and, not long after, the orange gas star fanning out on the horizon. Two young hippies stand at the bow, humming, with their gold crosses lit by the sun; the girl’s blond hair runs to her waist, strands lifting like streamers in the wind. We are sailing right toward the eye, and everything in me gives to the simple religion of a sunrise.
Some take pictures; others call home. By the time the island appears, a faint black groove jutting from the water like the pinched, coiled body of a crocodile, the announcement has come over the speakers. First in Greek and then in English: Please prepare for disembarkation on the island of Patmos. Passengers are asked to proceed to the marked exits. The ship’s horn wails, alarms bleat, and we are spinning around in the harbor, under a churn of gulls and morning bells. The island is white with houses, filling the valleys like snow. I feel ready, lucky, as if already the future has been sworn to me. I am not as good as I was, but maybe I can be better. The ferry readies for its mass exodus, which follows the natural order of pushing and cursing and using children as battering rams. I text Charlie. I’M HERE. HOW DO I FIND YOU?
He writes back. JUST LOOK.
CHAPTER 2
I’ve never known the specifics of Charlie’s family’s wealth. Like pools or country houses or fathers with healthy, poorly hidden porn collections, money was just a condition that some kids had and others didn’t. That’s not to say I didn’t realize early on that the Konstantinou fortune trumped my own—that I was a votive candle set beside a bonfire. Their residence was a labyrinthine, low-ceilinged duplex on the forty-eighth floor of Fifth Avenue and West Fifty-ninth Street, its brown-tinted windows glazing all of Manhattan with a high-desert varnish. The front rooms were rearranged and redecorated with the same seasonal restlessness as their corner view of Central Park: flocked wallpaper gave way to raw muslin; oily Regency chairs lost favor to skeletal Italian minimalism. The only permanent décor was a collection of tiny silver-framed pictures of skinny children and overfed dogs.
Charlie’s family had staff—real staff, housekeepers and au pairs and drivers and a Portuguese chef who, for reasons unclear, insisted on buying meat at a certain kosher butcher (Saturday was their night to eat out, and the chef’s night to chain-smoke on the balcony). Orders were relayed in subtle, inscrutable eye movements. During my visits, there was always someone dressed in unobtrusive black to provide drinks or snacks or movie times or alibis for Charlie’s older brother, Stefan, who was more a constant point of conversation than an actual presence in the house. Meanwhile, my mother and I, living post-divorce in a garden apartment on Riverside Drive, had a pudgy Peruvian cleaner who would come for three hours every Tuesday, begrudgingly paid for by my father. When I phoned Charlie there was very little chance he’d be the one to answer; it was the rare kind of New York home that took five minutes of waiting on the other end for him to be tracked down. When he called me, I was right on the line 90 percent of the time, turning “hello?” into a life-or-death question.
We were all spoiled kids, no question. Whatever dim connection Buckland Academy maintained to its Protestant roots reminded us that we were all born with unfair advantage. Some of us were just more spoiled. I knew even at age nine that Charlie’s money was the kind generated from larger reserves than baby food. It was a strange pocket of America in which I was raised: children whose ancestors reached the shores of this country already loaded. The Bledsoes are a Michigan breed, devoutly modest and thrifty, proud of owning their own snow shovels. My family goes back several midwestern generations, but we are first-generation millionaires, and my father despised ostentation wherever he encountered it (especially in his son). He was a New Yorker by trade and not by social observance. The Konstantinous, on the other hand, seemed to revel in their fortune: trips to Biarritz or St. Barts or Greece or Palm Beach were treated as migratory necessities rather than as vacations, something one couldn’t not do, and there was always a new cause or artist or wetland they were subsidizing with the giddy thrill of an illicit romance. I grew up alongside Charlie’s wealth, I made a second home in it, and, as with anything introduced so young, I never really questioned its source. Both of our fathers were “businessmen focused on the global economy,” which was similar to calling them “sharpshooters”—a designation that didn’t lend itself to particulars.
Over the years, though, I did learn certain crucial details. Mrs. K was a quiet, stout woman with deep wrinkles running from her eyes like two palm trees blowing in separate directions. She had the curious habit of cracking open little half-and-half creamer containers in her kitchen and knocking them back like whiskey shots. “For calcium,” she’d say. She was kind and eloquent and had a tic of rotating the clasp of her earring, and she treated me with the sincere appreciation a mother bestows on a friend who might be a positive influence. “Now how is your mother?” she’d drawl in concern, without ever remembering that her name was Helen. Mr. K, at least fifteen years older than his wife, was bald and brown. He had the round, boneless face of a seal, and he sat cross-legged on the sofa, his pant cuff pulled up to reveal the spot where an argyle sock met his hairless leg. He laughed with his shoulders and asked a scatter of questions, which I rarely understood because of his thick Greek-Cypriot accent. Charlie would quickly intercede. “No, Dad, Ian isn’t doing lacrosse this year either. I told you, we’re committed to after-school chess club.” Occasionally, though, words and sentences did leap out with clarity, and the Konstantinous enjoyed talking about their homeland over dinners of expensive kosher lamb needlessly slaughtered according to Jewish decree. This is the story I managed to piece together: Mr. K and his father had built a construction empire in Cyprus in the late 1960s. When the 1970
s oil crisis cut American businesses off from the Middle East, Konstantinou Engineering took full advantage, becoming the region’s premiere construction company, partially due to its ties with the West. I also learned that after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the family abandoned Nicosia for London and then New York. In the 1980s, Mr. and Mrs. K briefly moved back to have their two sons, Stefan and Charalambos, before resettling permanently in New York.
“But what does your dad build in the Middle East?” I’d ask Charlie. He’d shrug. “Things that need building.” “But what’s their specialty?” Charlie had been taught to be oblique, and he’d dutifully change the subject. He remained oblique even when, once in high school, protesters besieged the lobby of their apartment building, accusing Mr. K of traitorous oil deals and the mistreatment of Burmese laborers. Mr. K could be found forty-eight flights up, cross-legged on the sofa, an argyle sock snug against his calf, and his shoulders shaking in mirth. “Dehors eastos raskhish anix?” “No, Dad, Ian can’t stay for dinner.”
There were threats made and suspicious packages destroyed without ever being opened. For a month, Charlie was assigned two bodyguards to shadow him, a cause of bewilderment even in the halls of Buckland (where the sons of disgraced dictators included their familiarity with the political process as campaign planks during student-council elections). I found Charlie sitting on one of the benches in the school locker room, nude and slumped, wiping his face with a towel. The bodyguards were lingering somewhere out of sight, the whole subterranean room as steamy as a prep kitchen in a Chinese restaurant. I couldn’t tell if he was crying or just taking a minute to compose himself. But he looked up at me just then, his brown eyes defiant, his naked body so vulnerable and strong. He said in a slow voice worn-out by its own rehearsal, “What’s so bad about us really? Is it because we’re successful? We built the highways in the Middle East.”
The Destroyers Page 4