He hops toward me, smiling, almost clueless of his own beauty, almost because his abdominal muscles are too sculpted to be unintentional.
“You missed the boat,” I tell him. He clasps my arm for balance as he unfastens the shoes.
“I wasn’t on it.” He nods toward two towels weighted in their corners by rocks. Two towels are encouraging.
“Is Rasym with you? I need to talk to him.”
“Not yet. He should be here soon. What time is it?” He bends over to pick up his iPad, the feather of his ass crack blazing a chapped red. I’m amazed he wasn’t worried about someone stealing the device during his swim, but I remember what Louise said about the billionaire Kromers of Kraków. Adrian can afford losses. “He’ll be here any second. Why don’t you lie down with me? Take his towel. It’s too cold for him to go in now.” Adrian flips onto his back, burrows against the towel to make a comfortable crater, and hooks his arm behind his head. Blue veins cable from his fuzzy armpit. His smile isn’t flirtatious, it’s loving and careless and calm.
As I lean sideways on the adjoining towel, I experience the gratifying sense of being in the company of a person who has nothing to do with Charlie—no motive, no loss, no grief, no gain. Adrian is a holiday from the last few days of trouble, a purely uninvolved party floating in his own escape hatch. I’m jealous of him, the sun soaking into him, the water cresting at his feet, the unfailing agreement of smooth body and mind. He doesn’t even care who’s watching him. A naked man has the advantage of honesty: there are no pockets to empty. The police would ask a naked man to dress so they could search his pockets for secrets.
“How do you do it?” I ask, 2 percent sarcastic, 98 percent serious.
“Do what?”
“Be so happy all the time.”
“It’s beautiful here, so hospitable and warm.” I honestly think he means Earth. “How can you not be happy?”
“It just seems like you have it all figured out.”
“I try not to figure it out. All I do is try to put myself in its path. I’m alive.”
I’m alive, I mouth silently. A jet ski whisks around the giant boulder, a fun machine shaped like the head of a killer whale. After a few minutes of listening to the tides play across the rocks, I ask him where Rasym is.
“A group of refugees washed ashore last night,” he tells me. Even an escalating humanitarian crisis is spoken of with an unflagging smile. Nothing will destroy Adrian’s happiness. “Rasym is handing out head scarves for the women and copies of the Quran for the men. He had a shipment sent here, and he’s befriended a few of the commissioners dealing with the migrants for the UN. I offered to help, but he says my presence might confuse them. He wants to make them feel at home.”
Yes, a gay blond Adonis would disrupt the dispersal of piety. Adrian passing out Qurans might be a disquieting introduction to the West—promising and threatening far more than they’ll find.
“Are you religious?” I ask him.
“Perfectly faithless,” he says, examining a mosquito bite on his elbow. His buttonhole of a navel shrinks to a slit. “On my long morning swims I get close to something. The goats on that tiny, vacant island. I believe in them.” His smile amplifies. “I should say faithful. Faithful to what’s here.”
“Is it strange for you that Rasym is so religious? I saw him praying that day we went out on the boat.”
“You mean in terms of us being together and Rasym being Muslim.” Adrian rolls onto his side and uses his bicep as a pillow. “You’re intent on us having a serious conversation, aren’t you?”
“I’m just curious,” I say, blushing.
“Yes, it has its challenges. Not so much for me but for him. When I first met Rasym a few years ago in London, he was much more devout. Or, rather, devout in the traditional way. I shouldn’t tell you this,” he says, laughing in preparation. “Rasym would kill me. He’s sworn me never to bring it up. But he was in a writing program in London. He wanted to be a fiction writer, and his teachers kept encouraging the students to get under the reader’s skin. Go for the throat. So Rasym did as he was instructed. I read the story later. An American businessman boards a plane and is seated next to a Muslim guy wearing a tunic and turban. The businessman is very nervous and afraid. He’s filled with prejudices. But eventually the two get to talking and they realize how much they have in common. Rasym wrote the scene very tenderly. They share photos of their wives and children, they laugh about politicians and argue about sports. They bond. They see each other for once as fellow humans, and the businessman is so moved by his change of heart that he invites his seatmate to dinner at his home. It is very touching.”
“Does he accept?”
“The Muslim man says he couldn’t possibly. It’s no trouble. I want you to meet my family and we can all break bread and they can see you as I do, another member of the world. That kind of thing. No, no, that will never happen, but thank you. Finally the Muslim man says, it’s been great talking to you. He gets up from his seat, slits the throat of the flight attendant, and hijacks the plane. Right before it crashes, the businessman yells through the cockpit door, I thought we were friends. The voice replies, we are friends and I’ll think of you as one for as long as I live. But please return to your seat. I must finish my duty. The end.”
My smile isn’t so much an expression of satisfaction as a face that doesn’t know what to do with itself. “What did his teachers think?”
“He was basically expelled from the program,” Adrian replies. “I think they suspected him of being a budding terrorist. Yes, it’s a horrible story. But they were asking for the brutal truth, and he gave it to them. I guess what they really wanted was brutal compassion, a truly fictional version of the world.” For the first time, Adrian’s mouth contracts. The sun moves the shadow of a tree across his forehead. “I shouldn’t have told you that story. It makes Rasym sound like something he’s not. But it answers your question. I met Rasym the week he was kicked out. He was struggling with his faith. You pray, you follow the dictates and the rituals, but there are only so many times you can watch innocent gay boys hanged or thrown off rooftops in the name of Islam and not begin to question the version of god you’re serving—especially if you happen to be gay yourself. Aren’t they too young to be damned?”
“How old does one have to be?”
“The point is, Rasym had to learn to be Rasym, which is Muslim but also his own self. He finally found a more accepting route, his own route, not the kind his mother subscribes to. She’s become quite fundamentalist on her side of Nicosia, the Turkish side.”
“And his father is Charlie’s uncle, the Greek side.”
Adrian nods, his smile reappearing, first a testing fire and then a full explosion of teeth. “They married young. Apparently, it was a scandal for such a prominent family. It’s still very much the Berlin Wall in Nicosia, east versus west. Or north versus south for them. They call it the Green Line. I think he held on to that fundamentalist approach as a way of holding on to his mother after she moved back to the statelet in the north. Now she won’t talk to him. It’s sad. She feels he’s aligned himself with the infidels of the West. Like she didn’t once choose who she loved.”
“At least Rasym has you.”
“Between you and me, I think homosexuality has saved many a man. It turns them good if they let it.” Adrian flips onto his back and peers over at me. The shadow falls into the space between us. “Do you like boys, Ian?”
I shake my head. “I mean, I experimented in college like everyone does.” Adrian doesn’t seem disappointed by the news, as if a gay version of myself wouldn’t have been a temptation.
“I wondered,” Adrian says, “if maybe you and Charlie, when you were younger, because he was so excited for you to arrive—”
“It wasn’t like that.” The idea of Charlie being excited for my arrival hits me in the gut.
“Rasym is very fond of Charlie. Admires him. Out of all the Konstantinous, it’s Charlie he loves most.�
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“Rasym’s father is also in the family business, isn’t he?”
“Not so much anymore. Charlie’s father sidelined him years ago. He still gets a cut of the profits. I’m sure they’re all worried what will happen when Stefan takes control. Be nice to Stefan if you ever meet him, Rasym always tells me. And I guess I will soon, since he’s on the island.” How does Adrian know that Stefan is here? But, of course, Rasym is probably Stefan’s trustworthy source—the one who informed him about what the charter company isn’t. I’m about to ask Adrian about it when he begins to laugh. “But you and I, we have gotten too serious. We’re on a beach, man!”
“Sorry.”
“It happens as soon as money comes up. It sucks the life out.”
I drop onto my back and pinch the edge of the towel.
“Do you like living in Nicosia?”
I assumed this question registered on the less serious side of the scale, but Adrian pushes himself onto his elbows. “Oh, I don’t live with Rasym. I’m mostly between Kraków and London. He comes to visit me for a week each month, but otherwise we’re on our own. You steal a person from their old life when you find them. We just steal each other a little less. I like to be stolen more than Rasym does.”
“Did you ever meet Miles in London?”
“Never,” he mutters, turning his eyes to the sea, watching its crests through the sun-bleached valley of his thighs and pubic hair. “That fancy circle he’s so obsessed with was never my thing. I guess it’s no longer his thing either, now that he can’t afford it. Or rather, their thing is no longer a broke Miles. Poor guy. I heard he’s had to sell his apartment to pay his debts. No, I’m the opposite. I went to London when I was twenty to escape. I wanted more by wanting less. Does that make any sense?”
Amid the echoing laughter of the hippies and the blackening waves in the late afternoon heat, Adrian recounts his first years in London, traveling there by train from Poland, refusing his parents’ money, not out of any grudge against it, but in the self-interest of surviving on his own. He slept in parks, then in apartment shares, taking small, lurid side jobs—nude house cleaning, go-go dancing in bars—never reaching the point of full-fledged hustling but passing over all of its contingent steps. He tells me about trips to Amsterdam and Stockholm, hitchhiking and getting by on a diet of vending machines or the refrigerators of one-night stands. Many of his friends were actual prostitutes, and he never divulged the vaults of money open to him back in Kraków. Adrian paints that period a bit too much like a fairy tale, prince to pauper without any of its scars. I get the impression that his time hunkered on park benches and gyrating for tips, the prodigal son of the man who privatized Poland, was a far shorter stint than he’s letting on. It’s hardly his fault: early experiences grow larger than the days that hold them, while entire stable years drift away in a blink.
“I had to stop when Fakt, a Polish newspaper, found out about me. For my family, I had to pretend to be the spoiled son. Everyone was more comfortable with that.”
He tells me that he still lives humbly in London, not as humbly, but his friends are mostly the ones he met on the streets and in the bars. He grabs his iPad and shows me a few photos: gay men, coarser in eye and skin than Adrian, faces haunted but stronger for having survived the ricochets of their youth. Adrian smiles at them in the tender way people used to look at photographs, not as vectors of competition but as reminders of distant ports. After scouring several albums my interest begins to wane. Adrian seems to sense my boredom.
“Do you want to see your friend, Louise?” he asks. “I found her Instagram account. It was locked, but she accepted me as a friend.” He clicks on an icon and pulls up louisealtheawheeler (Althea is Louise’s middle name? Her parents must have been Dead Heads before they were Born Agains).
I flick through her shots of Patmos—sunsets, beaches, a plate of fried octopus, a view of the monastery from the handlebars of her bike. None of the photos she took of Charlie and me are uploaded. No sign of all the likes that first picture of us on the balcony accrued. Two outlaws who escaped into paradise. I continue flicking, tracking her movements back to Paris (a shot of her and Sonny in front of the glass pyramid at the Louvre), London, Copenhagen, Berlin. Eight weeks back, she’s in Lexington, Kentucky, her arms wrapped around a tall, bearded guy in a cowboy shirt, the caption below an emoji of a swollen heart. Before I can search the inventory of her life any further, Adrian yanks the tablet away and aims it at the hippies. They’re lighting a small fire on the beach with sword grass and the ripped-out pages of a book. He clicks a few shots.
I am still eight weeks back in Lexington, mentally unplucking Louise’s arms from the bearded guy’s neck. Jealousy is the presiding emotion of the Internet—it feeds on the banquet of soft filters and precision-fit moments that never expire. Who is he? I imagine asking Louise in the cabins tonight, the question a torpedo locking on its target. And I imagine an answer that dispels the entire scene: You idiot, it’s my drug-addicted brother, Luke. How dare you accuse me? Seven days. That’s all I promised. And she’d be right.
“Look at them,” Adrian says jubilantly, his eyes on the hippies bent around the fire, their faces like stone lions watching it grow. “I like them. Who cares if they read the Book of Revelation? Maybe it’s their way of enjoying every minute.” He uses the screen as a tray and begins to roll a joint from a small stash in his bag. “Rasym is convinced the hippies planted that bomb last month. He thinks they celebrate destruction. To me, it looks more like they celebrate life.”
An empty chair at 11:00 A.M. at Nikos Taverna. Charlie’s chair, the one he sat in every morning. A bomb on a timer in a crowded port. What if Sonny is right that the bomb was meant for him? If something terrible did happen to Charlie that night on Domitian, if he isn’t simply hiding out until his brother leaves, could it have been a second attempt to succeed where the first one failed? All this time Charlie might have been a man with a mark on his back—a motive that goes far deeper than a fistfight in a square. I stare at the hippies perched around their afternoon campfire. Maybe they’re celebrating the vanquishing of the godless. They unbuckle the collar from the Dalmatian’s neck and toss it, laughing, in the flames.
“Go slow on that,” a voice booms above us. I look up to find Rasym peering down, black sunglasses insecting his eyes.
“I only want a few drags,” Adrian protests, lighting his badly rolled joint. Half of the paper catches fire, a miniature Hindenburg hanging from his lips. Loose white ash blows through the air.
I get to my feet. Rasym is dressed in a tan T-shirt and chinos, dirt slicked across the front. He drops a heavy zippered bag next to Adrian’s towel, the weight of it still imprinted on his crooked shoulders.
“I was hoping we could talk,” I say to him. “How about a walk down the beach?”
Rasym chews on his lips as he kicks off his shoes. After a second’s hesitation, he begins to march in the opposite direction of the hippies. I jog to catch up.
“Adrian told me what you were doing for the refugees.” This comment is met with silence. “That’s really good of you.”
“People are suffering,” he replies matter-of-factly. “It’s not like Greek islands have an endless supply of Qurans and hijabs lying around.” I think of the natty, brown head scarf found next to the hippies’ bodies in the roadside accident. All around me, stray details seem to be adding together, but, like a dream set in math class, I can’t understand the equation. “It’s going to get worse.”
“What is?”
His forehead wrinkles. “This crisis. The camps are already at their maximum capacity. Even the winter won’t stop them. This is a beginning without an end.”
We continue along the shore, Rasym swerving toward the water’s edge to sink his feet into the wet pebbles. His ankles, exposed under his pant cuffs, are reedy and swathed in long, black hairs like fluttering eyelashes.
“Charlie,” I say aloud to set the course of the conversation. This too is met with sil
ence. He’s the polar opposite of his boyfriend. Perhaps that’s what first drew them to each other, the so easily likeable challenged by aloof resistance, the hard-to-like floored by the persistence to connect. “Rasym, I’m concerned. Very concerned. Charlie’s missing.”
“I know that,” he snaps and walks more quickly. As I pick up my pace to catch him, he stops altogether, forcing me to spin around. His lips sandpaper together as he glances out at the water in the direction of Charlie’s port. In profile, the bruise on his forehead bulges.
“Do you know where he is?”
He doesn’t speak. I need Adrian to interpret his silences for me. An interpreter or some muscle to shake a straight answer out of him. Finally, hands slipping tiredly into pant pockets, he replies. “I was going to ask you the same question.”
“So we’re both in the dark. Don’t you think we should do something?”
“Like what?”
“Can’t you call your father? Charlie’s a Konstantinou, for god’s sake. Don’t they have a private army of helpers or something?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why isn’t it that simple?” I cry.
He watches me, as if determining whether I’m worth more words.
“Charlie’s made a point of being on his own here. Mind your own business has pretty much been his ethos when it comes to my side of the family. And my father has been cut off from any real power for a long time. There isn’t much he could do.” I catch bitterness in his voice, the weak branch of the Konstantinou oak rattling its inferior, sun-deprived leaves. “He would suggest we contact Stefan or his own father if he were in any condition to help. No, you know what he’d do? He’d ask me if Charlie going off like this was out of character, and what am I supposed to tell him?”
The Destroyers Page 39