The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

Louise pulls her phone from her pocket and motions for me and Charlie to stand for a photograph. Her phone clicks like an old camera.

  “Cute. I’ll post it.”

  Sonny smacks her thigh by the door. “Fucking mosquitoes,” she roars. “We need those special candles, Lamb. Hay bastante espinas del paraiso.” I’m impressed by her Spanish. Her worldliness seems like a recent acquisition.

  Espinas del paraiso. Thorns of paradise.

  LOUISE’S YELLOW BIKE spins us through the hills. She guns the motor, and we’re dipping and lifting, flying through pink farmland that rushes by us like blurred graffiti, the sea spread out on our right. My hands are hooked on her waist, where I can feel each contraction of her spine. My lips are near her ear, and only the whipping of her short dark hair keeps me from resting my chin against her shoulder. It is eight o’clock, not yet sunset, but the trees cast long shadows across the scrub, and sheep spring from the shade, jumping through the cooling air. I’m drunk.

  “Shouldn’t we be wearing helmets,” I yell so she can hear.

  “You should be, yes,” she says. “But I didn’t bring mine.”

  Louise doesn’t believe in brakes. I can’t tell if she’s speeding around the lurching turns to impress me or because she wants to end this vehicular spooning session as soon as possible.

  “Maybe we should slow down,” I advise.

  “You know the cause of most accidents,” she shouts. “Lack of confidence.” My drunkenness prompts me to take everything she says personally, and I try and fail to apply that rule to our former love life. But it does give me an excuse to twist my arm around her stomach, hugging tightly. For this second, and maybe only for this second, I love Charlie for bringing Louise back into my life. I press my cheek against her shoulder and stare out at the island, where a few remote houses in the hills begin to bead with light. It is humanly impossible not to be infatuated with someone driving you on a motorbike.

  “You know, when I was a kid I had a vision I’d die at the age of thirty in a car accident,” she says. “For years, I was convinced of it.”

  “Then you should slow down,” I call.

  “Don’t worry. In the vision, I died in a really nice car.”

  I’m not sure how to respond. When a hill reduces our momentum, I switch subjects.

  “It’s so beautiful here.”

  “Isn’t it?” Louise replies. “So much simpler than Italy. Like nature hasn’t overdecorated. The colors are honest, know what I mean?”

  Yes, I do. And I can feel her breathing under the thin membrane of her leather jacket.

  The motorbike trembles over cobblestones in a silent square, and soon we’re on concrete again, swooping down. A harbor slides up against a rocky beach, and outdoor tavernas streak across the opposite side of the road where waiters bend over tables to light the candles. We’re faster than their matches. Louise shakes her shoulders to amputate my jaw from her back. “You’re crushing me,” she says. She zooms through the village of Kampos and turns left, hurtling us into the darkening interior, like we’re racing nightfall. Eventually, she eases up on the engine.

  “You and Sonny,” I say. “You’ve become good friends.”

  “Yes. She’s smart. And I’m not just saying that because I’m staying here on their dime. Why? Does that surprise you?”

  “You don’t seem very much alike.” Louise doesn’t speak for a minute. Because I can’t see her expression, I worry I’ve offended her. “I just mean you’ve always been so together.”

  “Believe it or not, I’m capable of friendship with a person who’s not exactly like me,” she retorts. “Sonny’s very kind if you give her a chance. Do you get the impression she’s happy?”

  One source of pride in me is that, even drunk, my loyalty holds. I play on the side of my friend.

  “Yeah, she seems happy. She and Charlie are a good match. Why wouldn’t she be?”

  “No reason.”

  We steer off the concrete, onto gravel, winding along a thin channel between rock walls. Sheep begin to dissolve in the darkness. Louise throttles the motor to tackle an almost vertical hill, and I’m pitched back, clinging on to her, trying to save myself from falling off. After a minute of cats and wall and a cypress tree whose roots have split through the cement, we float onto a horizontal driveway, the engine reeking of burned gas. Louise finally uses her brake, gliding us under a deck. I hop off and she parks, punching the kickstand with her heel.

  The two cabins, or really two distinct sections joined in the center, stand on stilts. We take the stone staircase, and Louise nods to the gray door on the left with a key in its lock.

  “That’s your cabin,” she says. “I wondered who was taking the good view.”

  From the entryway, the village of Kampos and the shell-shaped harbor glitter far below. The air is chillier in the hills, and somewhere in the dim braid of olive and oleander trees, goat bells clang forlornly, as if by a hand that has given up expecting anyone to answer. The western sun pulls its reds from the dirt.

  We both enter through our separate doors and immediately catch sight of each other in the narrow frame that connects our rooms. The interior is spare, with bleached pine floors and a low, made bed. My suitcase sits at the foot of the bed, still zipped. Nothing medieval impedes upon the Lucite folding chairs and the smell of cleaning products and freshly split wood. A stone patio with an outdoor kitchen juts from my bedroom beyond the sliding glass, where Christos has stacked fruit in a bowl. I walk to the nightstand and turn on the lamp. When the bulb brightens the shade, I notice that it’s dented and paisley, hanging over a cerulean, dragon-patterned base. Sonny’s smuggled hotel plunder. A green onyx ashtray sits beside it.

  Just to be sure, I open my suitcase and pull out the plastic bag of cash. I inspect the stacks in the light to make sure they’re all accounted for. Paper money always looks so frail with its morose, coiffed patriarchs staring out in eternal disappointment. It’s an expression I’d seen on my father, one that says, Does it have to be this way? I can’t think of anything less current than hard currency, irreplaceable, tactile, as single-minded as missionaries, capable of getting lost. Panama runs on the American dollar, and long before my time there, in the months leading up to the U.S. invasion, the government couldn’t refresh its worn-out notes with new ones from the American Reserve. I heard stories of Panamanians carrying around their ripped, crumbling bills in plastic sheaths, like photos of dead relatives protected from careless fingers.

  “Ian?” Louise calls from her room. I quickly pull the drawer of the nightstand open, where a Bible and a Henry Miller novel lie inside. I shove the bag in the drawer and slam it shut. Louise stops in the doorway, observing established borders. Her jacket is off and her arms are crossed. She’s undone the top two buttons of her blouse. The outline of a white bra gleams in the valley of her shirt. She watches me by the drawer, or me and the drawer, or just me.

  “There’s a Bible in there,” she says. “I guess Charlie wants us brushing up on our Revelation.”

  “We should read a chapter each morning. A furnace of fire with our coffee. A weeping and gnashing of teeth before we rub sunscreen on our backs.”

  “That’s from Matthew,” she says drolly.

  “I didn’t know you were such a biblical expert.”

  “Well, I am from Kentucky.” Her foot taps the wood, and she stares down at it, as if watching her own impatience. “You must be tired.”

  “I’m pretty exhausted, yeah.”

  “When you’re up for it, I’d like to hear more about Central America, what you were doing down there.”

  “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  “I’m interested. The things you must have seen.” I pray she doesn’t Google me. Plug “Ian Bledsoe” and “Panama” into a search engine and nothing pleasant emerges.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I tell her, stepping toward the doorway.

  “Do you remember the vultures in Mississippi? How they’d sit on the fence posts, just
waiting for their chance with us.” Louise has several memories to choose from, and she selects the most cheerful one, our volunteer expedition hundreds of miles from the college quad or the Stearns Hall computer room. Death by birds is preferable to our breakup.

  “I think the cars saved us. What did they eat before roadkill was invented?”

  She nods distantly. “I’ve thought about you from time to time. Wondering what became of you. Funny that we’re here.”

  “Charlie.” I groan. “He makes the world small. Is that a good thing?”

  Louise steps forward, as if to kiss my cheek, but she thinks better of it. “Sometimes it’s a good thing. I’ll wake you for that coffee.” She turns and slowly returns to her room, shutting her door behind her.

  I close mine and bolt the slide lock. I wait for a minute to hear if she bolts hers too, but the thud doesn’t come. We never lied to each other, Louise and I. Never deceived or struck deep or regretted. There wasn’t time to. Just the skirting of painful differences. But for once I’m glad for the fast end of an old heartbreak. It makes the future less spoiled. I consider unbolting my door, in case Louise gets lonely in her cabin. But one night doesn’t matter. I strip off my clothes and climb into bed. What matters is we’ve begun.

  CHAPTER 3

  I’m on vacation.

  I didn’t come to Patmos for a holiday, but morning brings it on. Dawn erupts, and night shrinks to the scratchy blotches of trees, the trees holding the darkness the longest. The sun blasts out of the sea, and the water beats against the pebbled shore. The whole island spreads out horizontal, a dazzle of land undulating and dripping with spidery dew. I can see the yellow dirt trails and gray roads running down our hillside, already rippling with the day’s first beachgoers. The buildings of Kampos are amnesia white, and colored boats rock sleepily in the harbor. It is impossible not to be on vacation here. You are on vacation the way citizens in a bomb-fogged, mortar-scorched city are at war. A place claims you whether it has your consent or not.

  My sleep was heavy. Despite Sonny’s warning, I didn’t dream at all. I put on my only pair of swim trunks, black and boxy for American legs thicker than mine. I feel oxygenated, alive, as if the fear and worry of the past is weather in a different hemisphere. Soon, with luck, the memory of Manhattan will shrink to a little rat-run garbage pile on the other side of the planet. At this point, the only living beings waiting for me at home are the brittle ferns lining the kitchen sill of my Harlem walk-up—almost beggar brown by now, a sad two feet from the faucet.

  I slide open the glass door, carrying my phone toward the outdoor kitchen under a pergola strewn in vines. A breeze pours over the deck, trembling the wet tablecloth under the fruit bowl. I check my messages, promising myself I’ll only do so once a day. Today is my father’s funeral at Holy Redeemer, which I’m not sure increases or decreases the likelihood of family members reaching out. There is only a text from my mother, not even a typed note, just a link to Edward Bledsoe’s obituary in the New York Times and an emoji of a yellow crying ball. They were married for eleven years, had a son, and her response to his death is a weeping cartoon circle. I don’t dare click on the Times obituary; I don’t want to read it again for fear they’ve expanded upon my mention as “also.” My phone comes equipped with an inventory of emojis and I choose one at random: a beaming police strobe. After I press SEND, I regret the selection. I should have chosen the greedy octopus.

  I find coffee in the freezer and fill the metal espresso pot. I rinse a peach and eat it as I wait for the pot to boil. All of these simple activities feel enhanced, hypnotic, in the rising light. I can already feel how time moves in Greece—there’s so much of it, floating and fading along the shadow-cracked hills. Words like now or soon could span decades.

  “Meditating?” Rounding the cabins, Louise hops the wall onto my deck. I wonder if she tried the connecting door and found it bolted, an unintentional rebuff after she breeched the doorway effortlessly last night. She wears a blue one-piece swimsuit and gray, high-waisted shorts. Her hair is wet from the shower, stringing down her narrow forehead. Swirls of white cream lather her shoulders, and violet smudges of blood vessels line the skin around her eyes. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No, I was thinking about houseplants.”

  “Depressing,” she grunts.

  “Where exactly are you living these days?”

  “D.C.,” she says, helping herself to a peach. “I’m in law school at Georgetown. I know what you’re thinking: law school is for those unimaginative souls who’ve run out of options. You’re right. I saw age thirty up ahead on the turnpike, so I panicked and applied. I swear I could be a hairdresser right now if a local beauty college sent me a pamphlet on the right week. I was supposed to intern this summer with a D.A., but instead I ransacked the last of my savings to drift around Europe. I figure everyone should get to do that once. I also figure I’ll be so poor by the end of my trip I’ll have no choice but to go back. Attendance by lack of means. Or, just maybe, I’ll find some reason not to.”

  She bites sloppily all the way to the pit. I want to be her reason not to, perhaps less than I did last night, but at least I want to be an option. There are two kinds of longing, the spiteful morning erections that search for any target of release and the one drawn from a specific source, a specific body in a blue one-piece that catches stray peach juice because its wearer is gumming the fruit like it contains a chunk of gold. It’s 9:00 A.M., and I’m suffering dual longings. I turn to readjust my swimsuit and am struck for the millionth time in my adult life by a hard-won fact: so many desires require the involvement of another participant. I stretch my leg within easy engagement of Louise’s hand.

  Louise reaches for a mug from the counter, blows into it to clear the dust, and, before I can stop her, grabs the coffeepot on the stove.

  “Oww,” she cries, releasing the metal handle. I open the freezer to get her ice.

  “Not ice. Is there any butter in the fridge?”

  I scan the groceries. “Goat cheese?”

  She shakes her hand, making a fist. “I’ll be fine.”

  My phone beeps with a message. It’s my mother. I DON’T UNDERSTAND??

  “Is that Charlie?” Louise uses a towel to muffle the handle. She pours out two coffees. “He texted me an hour ago. We’re all meeting at his dock at ten.” She adds milk without asking how I take mine and deposits one of the mugs in front of me on the terra-cotta counter.

  I could get used to this, to us, shirking our obligations back home, drinking coffee together in our bathing suits. I watch as Louise sips hers, her lips puckered on the rim, her eyes in the direction of the sea like some fish-eating bird scanning her hunting grounds. She looks over at me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” I become uncomfortably aware that I’m only wearing shorts. I go inside and grab a black T-shirt, slipping it over my head as I step back out.

  “Have you been on Charlie’s boat before?” I ask.

  “Twice,” she replies. “It was my first time on a yacht. I knew Charlie was rich, but I didn’t realize the extent of it. Did you?” She waves her hand. “Of course you did. You two grew up together, thick as thieves.”

  “I’m not rich. Not like that.”

  She smiles. “You make it sound like a character flaw.”

  We lean against the counter, staring out at the view for what feels like an hour. It’s probably been three minutes. My eyes slip from the sea to her mouth, studying the crash of her upper teeth. I try to remember what it was like to kiss her.

  “He’s like a boy with a new telescope on that boat,” she says. “Do you sail?”

  “I took some lessons on the Hudson River when I was a kid. But nothing like Charlie. Those were cheap little skiffs that were allowed to flip over. You didn’t flip over because you didn’t want to swim in the Hudson.”

  “Miles can’t swim.” Louise deserts her coffee halfway through. “The British guy we were talking about yesterday. How does someone
have a house here and spend days out on boats, but has never learned to swim?” She glances at me, and in the same harsh monotone that doesn’t just level her sentences but also strings stray thoughts together in a deceptive progression, says, “Be careful today. You’ll burn.”

  We return to our cabins to collect our gear. I open the drawer to the nightstand and try to find a better hiding place for the money. The room is uncooperatively bare. I examine the cabinet under the bathroom sink, but it’s filled with cleaning supplies, suggesting the presence of a maid who comes when guests are out. I decide to leave the money in the drawer, stuffing it inside a sweater, and take the Henry Miller novel in case we end up marooned on a beach. I shove my feet into my sneakers and bolt the glass door and window shutters. When I step outside, Louise is already on the driveway, walking her motorbike across it.

  “You don’t have to lock up,” she calls as I slip my key into the hole. “This isn’t New York. No one can find this place—thieves, friends, tax collectors.” I lock it and put the key in my pocket.

  “Are we riding together?” I ask.

  She points to a second bike under the deck. “They’re faster with one person on them. There’s a helmet in your seat.” I make the slick, stupid decision not to put it on.

  The hill is hellish. Total unidirectional hell. If I had gotten my bearings on a flat surface, I might have cleared it smoothly. But I’m braking and skidding, learning the strength of the throttle as I descend at a sharp, winding slant. In the low, diagonal fields, sheep crowd the shadow of a tree, creating a perfect wool reflection of the sapling. Thirty eyes dully watch me halt and rev and nearly crash into their pasture. My shirt is soaked with sweat by the time I reach the end of the gravel path, where Louise lingers on the cement. She spots me and races on.

  We play an embarrassing relay: Louise speeding away, stopping for me to catch up, speeding away again, like fast prey taunting its hapless hunter. “I think you have the better bike,” I yell, an excuse neither of us believes.

  She’s out of sight along the zigzagging hills beyond Kampos and the silent square. Her absence lets me practice, gun hard, brake easy, shift my weight on the seat to guide through the turns, full-metal fury on the straight slices of blacktop. The wind snaps softly around my body, as if locating new erogenous zones along my legs and sides. I can taste the wild oregano pouring from the fields; it tastes like Saturdays in childhood or lost favorite love songs. What is this sensation, this lightness and sure-footedness, this race of the heart over the sea? It’s as close as I’ve been since a teenager to feeling young, raw-egg young, wide awake in careless hours, this newness of a place that I could gather in my arms and still wouldn’t have enough. Pleasure is back, unsnapped from its cage.