The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “Sir,” I hear her say in a loud voice. “Can you put that creature back in the water? You’re watching it die.”

  The young Italian couple exchange uncomfortable looks. Finally the Italian woman manages a response.

  “Little girl, it is not your business. Go back to your towel.”

  “Do you like watching it die?” Duck didn’t seem to mind when Christos cracked open the urchins on the yacht.

  The Italian woman struggles to answer. “Do you not eat fish?”

  “These starfish are endangered. Are you planning on eating it?”

  There is no chance for the Italians to win this showdown, no ethical plank they can hold besides the superiority of their age. It is an unfair match. To stand their ground is to appear as jerks in this temporary sun community; to acquiesce and return the starfish to the sea is to show their moral inferiority to a seven-year-old in strawberry bikini bottoms. A certain finesse is required that the afternoon heat has drained from them.

  “When you’re an adult . . .” The Italian woman begins to lecture. Sonny watches without interrupting. I hadn’t noticed before that the default lock of her mouth is a slanted sneer, the kind culled from dark, atonal music collections or adolescent years hanging out in basements with boys. It’s a pubescent expression of anger and powerlessness that, on her, seems powerful and persuasive. It breaks the streamlined beauty of her face like a bullet hole in a store window.

  “I love Duck’s balls,” she whispers. “I don’t know where she gets it. She’s starting to ask the big questions. Yesterday she asked me how many planets there are in outer space. And I felt like an idiot because I couldn’t tell her. I know Pluto’s been demoted, but haven’t they found a bunch of others in nearby solar systems? What are we up to now? And what the hell’s a dwarf planet? The things we learned in school, they’re not accurate anymore.”

  I think of the outer space Duck is learning, complicated with so many planets, more crowded and democratic than ours was with its nine foam-core balls rotating on a rusty stand in science class. Sonny’s right. It seems impossible that we ever believed, hand on heart, in such an infantile idea of space.

  Louise wakes, startled, as if pulling out of a nightmare, but she’s quickly reassured by the lap of waves. Pebbles have made red indentions the shape of upward arrows on her thighs. She nudges me with her hip.

  “Doesn’t it feel strange to be here?” she asks, stretching her arms. Her back muscles dip and clench. “Too lucky, like we’ve cheated the terms?”

  “A little bit. Is this enough of a reason not to go back to Georgetown?”

  “Maybe,” she says, resting her cheek on her knuckles. “Almost.”

  “But you will go back, won’t you?” I have a fantasy of Louise staying on with me in Europe, the two of us building new, purposeful lives and reading everything but Miller to each other at night in bed. “I mean, you’ve already put in a year.”

  “It’s not the seminary, Ian,” she says tiredly. “I didn’t have a calling. I could skip out with what I’ve studied and be satisfied. But don’t you think we’re getting too old to be wanderers? All this lightness for too long”—she grabs at the sunlight like it’s a curtain she can gather in her fist—“and you just disappear, floating away in it.” She squints up at me, hunting for my eyes. Her face glows, her chin dented with its mole and dimples, and an invitation I haven’t found before offers itself in the steadiness of her eyes.

  Duck returns, climbing across her mother’s knees. Louise rakes her toes through the pebbles at the end of her towel.

  “It’s weird that Charlie’s the one who has his life together,” Louise says. “I wouldn’t have predicted that back in college.” She stares out at the water. “What about you? What’s going to be your next step?” I worry Louise has Googled my name and has come to realize the corner I’m in. And like dominoes, one worry knocks against the next, setting a constellation in motion: my father in his casket, a church gone black, and his eldest son baking faraway on a beach towel in paradise. I fix the bloodstained bandage on my foot, buying time in order to change the subject.

  “If you do go back to law school, what will be your specialty? I think you’d be a terrific prosecutor.”

  Louise rolls over. She presses her hands against her chest, patiently exhausted by my mentions of life back in the States.

  “God, no. Not that. Civil liberties. Environmental law. Nothing criminal.”

  “Do environmental,” Sonny encourages. “Duck would love that.” As if Duck is Louise’s mother in Kentucky and should be considered before making any major career decisions.

  “Oh, good,” she says, laughing. “Who would Duck like for me to marry?”

  “Easy,” Sonny answers. “Assuming she still believes in marriage, which I doubt she does, that would be Miles.” Louise and Miles exchange looks as if they’ve been incorrectly identified as members of the same crime syndicate.

  The Italian man strolls silently toward the water, his head bent away from us. He returns the starfish to the sea. A victory for innocence.

  I see Charlie descending a path from the hills. In his hand he holds a pastry from a small taverna nestled high above the rocks, its peach awning flapping in the breeze. It’s deep in the afternoon, and now that I’m onshore my appetite has returned. I borrow Miles’s flip-flops and cross the beach toward Charlie. Alone, holding his pastry but not eating it, Charlie has worry scored across his face. Trickles of sweat leak from his armpits. He’s wrapped his T-shirt around his head, fashioned like a turban on a desert scavenger. As he watches the boats at sea, some anchoring near Domitian, his tongue worries the chip in his tooth. He’s so lost in thought he doesn’t notice my approach.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  He shakes himself into the present and bites into the pastry.

  “Nothing,” he says, chewing. “Just work. It looks like a vacation, but it’s the busiest time of the season for me. I probably should have stayed behind.”

  Since we’re finally alone, I consider making the case about my finances. I don’t want to add to his troubles, but how many days of sailing will pass before Charlie takes my silence for contentment, like I’ve traveled all the way here just to spend a few relaxing days with him?

  “Do you want to go for a walk?” I ask. “We could talk about—”

  “Your situation,” he concludes. “I haven’t forgotten. Tomorrow.” Realizing it sounds like a dodge, he touches my arm. “Noon. Down at my port. We can play chess like old times.”

  Men on the two newly moored yachts are arguing and pointing at the water. One flails his arms in the melodramatic fashion that only Europeans manage convincingly.

  “Amateurs,” Charlie jeers. “Their anchors are tangled. One threw his line too far out.” He nods up the hill toward the taverna. “Charge what you want. I have a tab. I’m going to swim back to the boat to make some calls. I have to check in on my captains. Busy day running paradise.”

  I hike the trail that Rasym and Adrian took. The goat bells ring louder in the hills, but the goats are still invisible. The dirt trail snakes through the scrub, dips, and rambles as if intent on taking its time. Ahead, near a stretch of concrete, a bush shakes. I think I might be intruding upon Rasym and his boyfriend having sex. But as I round the trail, I find Adrian a few feet away, doing knuckle push-ups on the ground. At first I only see the arches of Rasym’s feet. But then his body lifts to his knees and he chants in lilting Arabic. He swoops down again, his head striking against the mat. The mark on his forehead isn’t ashes or dirt, but a bruise from tapping it in prayer. His head points toward Mecca, his back prone and his hands placed flat by his ears. The beach sways far below, and the late afternoon light strips the water of its depth. The darkened yachts look like flies crawling on raw, blue meat. Rasym hums his verses in obedience. I rush by him, not wanting to interrupt—interrupting prayer seems worse than interrupting sex; it’s even more vulnerable and exposed. I honestly didn’t know it was possible
to be a practicing Muslim and openly have a boyfriend. But maybe Rasym has found a balance in the two virtues religion offers: safety and fear.

  The taverna is empty except for a few Spaniards on the porch smoking a joint, and inside there is the cold humming of antique refrigeration. I order a phyllo and take a more direct path down to the beach. From a low bluff I notice Sonny sprinting along the shoreline. I follow her jagged course. She reaches Duck, standing by a clump of motorbikes and talking to a heavyset man in a straw fedora. Sonny scoops up her daughter’s hand and leads her away. When I reach our towels, Sonny is gathering up our belongings. Duck slumps on the pebbles, her arms crossed.

  “Did you see who she was talking to?” Sonny wheezes. “That’s the pedophile.”

  It takes me a few seconds to locate him. Most of the beachgoers are also packing up their camps. He sits on a foldout stool under the shade of a boulder, molding the brim of his hat. He has a round child’s face, although he must be in his fifties, with rash-red legs and brown leather sandals.

  “When I ran up, Duck was chatting away about her friends in school.” Sonny turns to her daughter. “Never talk to that man, do you hear me?”

  “I thought he only liked boys,” Louise says.

  “Thanks.” Sonny grunts. “That makes me feel much better.”

  “How very 1950s Englishman of him,” Miles ventures. “Come to Greece, corrupt the boys. I thought those types had all moved on to Thailand.”

  Sonny gives him a caustic look. She grabs his button-down and bundles it around Duck’s shoulders. “Put this on, sweetie.” A network of grooves appears between Sonny’s eyes when she’s upset. “If he talks to her again, I’ll get Charlie to pay a visit.”

  “I could talk to him.” Miles speaks so unthreateningly it cancels out the suggestion.

  Sonny waves her arm toward Domitian, trying to signal to Christos or Charlie to pick us up in the tender.

  “We still have a few hours until dinner,” she grumbles. “Ian, you’ll have to borrow something of Charlie’s to wear tonight.”

  “I can lend him a change of clothes,” Miles offers. He seems ready to throw his body in front of Sonny’s feet at the first opportunity.

  “Ian, your shoulders.” Louise shakes her head. I press my fingers along the burnt skin. My body is a combat zone of island injuries. If I keep going at this rate, I’ll be on a helicopter to the hospital in Kos by the weekend.

  “Come to think of it, I can’t take a cab home,” Miles says. “I left my wallet onboard.”

  Charlie stands on the bow of the black yacht, his cell phone stuck to his ear; in his other hand he holds a bottle of liquor. What’s left of the sun finds the bottle and fills it with gold. His body is a black calligraphic I against the blue. We’re all waving now, as if desperate for rescue. The distance between each of us on the shore is negligible, but between us and Charlie fraught and far. The beckoning is contagious, all of us trying to catch Charlie’s attention, Miles hopping, Sonny and Louise making X’s with their arms, me whistling with two fingers in my mouth, each in our own way needing him. We were all different people before we arrived on this island, which I suppose is why we’re here.

  “He doesn’t see us,” Louise says, dropping her arms.

  “He’ll see us.” Sonny’s certain voice breaks. “Well, maybe—”

  But he does. And in the convoluted logic of boats and shorelines, when we get back onboard we relax into it like it’s home.

  THE NIGHT BEGINS as most nights never do: with a group hug. It was only meant as a demonstration, but we are huddled together in Charlie’s sitting room, our arms around each other and our breath humid on each other’s necks. Charlie, Sonny, Louise, and I, four fingers, and when Duck runs over and clamps onto her mother, the thumb. All evening I’ve felt like I’ve been floating, the sea still in my legs, and it is only this tight clutch that fixes me to Earth. I want to stay here, holding and held.

  “It doesn’t get any better than this,” Charlie whispers. “It really doesn’t.”

  Duck refused to hug Sonny good night, because the hug signaled bed. Christos’s wife, Therese, a bony, gray-haired woman who speaks far better English than her husband, urged her toward her mother, but Duck stood firm. Withholding love meant staying up later. Sonny, in a red silk dress with a thin gold chain tight around her throat, kept her arms held out for her daughter to fill.

  “I don’t want to hug you,” Duck whined.

  “You’re crazy not to,” Charlie said, climbing the steps in a green polo and plaid shorts. “If you don’t, I’m taking your place.” He swooped his arms around Sonny, pawing her back. “Man, this feels good. Louise, get in here.”

  Louise had borrowed one of Sonny’s linen dresses, and it hung stiffly on her body like a sheet draped over a piano. She walked over and entered the embrace.

  I didn’t wait to be invited. Charlie instantly gripped my shoulder, and Louise held my waist. Duck, stomping jealously, broke from Therese and added her weight.

  It is just a demonstration, but we all stay here longer than we need to, a beating unit, temples pressing, complete. I agree with Charlie. It doesn’t get any better, not younger or sweeter or surer. It is Duck who breaks away first, because for her this feeling isn’t as rare.

  “Say your prayers,” Sonny orders.

  Charlie looks like he’s been ambushed. “Prayers?” He shakes his head diabolically. “You mean shopping lists?”

  “What do you pray for?” Louise asks Duck as Therese reaches to confiscate her. Therese’s teeth are worse than her husband’s, grime-black and urine-yellow like February snow piles in New York.

  Duck considers for a minute. “Peace on Earth?”

  “Oh, my god, I love you,” Sonny says, clapping her hands. “See, Lamb, you’re always underestimating the Towsend women. A present for you tomorrow, Duckie. You pray hard for peace on Earth, and I will too, and eventually we’ll convince him.”

  Sonny’s response goes unheard. The girl is already hurtling down the stairs, chasing a frenzy of cartoon beeps that must be the ring on her cell phone. Duck has more important calls to take.

  I’ve borrowed a pair of pants from Charlie as well as a white suit coat. I wear my T-shirt and swim trunks underneath, which prevents the need for a belt. Charlie’s scent lingers in the silk coat lining, his familiar tang of lavender and metal. As we walk to dinner I find myself opening the coat to catch stray whiffs. Our voices echo down the stone corridor. The moonlight and the yellow shine from lit windows turn the walls soft.

  Our dinner reservation is really a section at one of two never-ending tables that bisect the cobblestones like an equal sign. We’re in the Plateia, not far from Charlie’s house, but in a matter of steps, isolation is replaced by the loud pulse of late-night revelers. White Christmas lights flare out from the restaurant, the strands netting over our heads, and music blasts from the open windows. The tablecloths indicate previous consumption, stained with red wine and Brailled with salt. Miles is already seated. We’re nestled in among other diners, some who know Charlie and Sonny, others who introduce themselves. Their names are hyphenated and foreign and loaded with consonants, like the rattling of silver dish sets. White pants, fresh makeup, ochre bodies fashionably starved, clove cigarettes that oversweeten the air, mouths in motion, left open between bouts of laughter. The drinks come swiftly, with a snap of the fingers, but the food order is forgotten. Sonny is in her element, her foot tapping to the pace of her conversation. Most often, we are beneficiaries of someone else’s misfortune. “Lost all of his money. His money, his wife, his art. Haven’t seen him since.”

  I’m three vodkas in and back at sea, adrift. I’m also comatose from my sunburn, and the salt on my skin feels as leaden as an X-ray vest in a dental office. Louise picks at a basket of bread and eyes me pleadingly as the bald man seated next to her prattles on about politics. It was interesting for the first ten minutes. He introduced himself as the French diplomat but speaks perfect American. Whether he�
�s an American diplomat to France or a French diplomat to somewhere else is never resolved. “What we’re witnessing in the Middle East is the death of the nation state,” he tells her. “It was an invention, and a clever one until it broke. The opposite is happening here in Greece with the European Union. The invention of an empire is failing right before our eyes.”

  His wife, an interior designer, explains that she only does houses she “feels.”

  Charlie sits across from Sonny, one minute smiling and listening, the next deep diving into the Mariana Trench of his thoughts. Charlie’s attention span has always been short, and he’s never learned to let his expression fly on autopilot. His eyes are candles snuffed.

  “People think rococo was created for the French aristocracy, but it was actually a rejection of Versailles,” Sonny lectures. “It was a more democratic aesthetic. Its tastelessness was its wit.”

  “A note scrawled on a torn take-out menu!” Miles erupts, nearly knocking over a bottle of wine. “That’s my uncle’s most prized possession. He lived upstairs from his flat in the seventies. ‘Your music is too loud and is vibrating my ceiling.’ Signed David Bowie.”

  A branzino finally arrives, but no one has silverware. The fish lies across the table, glimmering green and untouched, with the bulging eyes and drawn mouth of a bout of seasickness.

  At a certain hour, the older diners disappear, and younger, drunker vacationers take their places. The corners are padded with ice buckets and leaning bodies. Portable credit-card machines zoom through the crowd like drones. My most successful eye contact is with the branzino. If the twentieth century had taken a different exit ramp, these eternal summer revelers would be the first in line to be shot. It’s amazing that they haven’t been, unreal that decadence won and the celebrations can still be heard far out at sea. At midnight, the restaurant turns on its outdoor lights to a roar of appreciation, the entire square overlit as tables are quickly dismantled. I brace my hands on the edge of our table, afraid it will be ripped from us. I suppose if I were less jet-lagged or hadn’t already decided on Louise, I might try my luck. I’ve always had better success in countries that don’t speak my language, and more than a few socialites browse nervously, as if searching for someone worth the duration of their drinks. But in our tans, on vacation, under the glare of stadium wattage, individuality blurs like cantaloupe in a blender. A mutually agreed upon hysteria fills the emptiness, identities only reclaimed when it’s time to pay the tab.