Havoc

by Christopher Bollen

I am eighty-one years old,

I’ve discovered that it isn’t so much the eyes of strangers you miss in old age as the pleasure in your own eyes at the sight of yourself.

It’s been six years since Peter’s death, and the sadness of that loss tends to spring on me a half hour after waking, right as I rotate the shower handle and unwrap a fresh bar of hotel soap. Grief has no sense of theater; it nestles itself into the most ordinary corners of the day.

For fifty-four years we didn’t just finish each other’s sentences; we could start them.

I have been a guest at eighteen hotels, and the Royal Karnak is the only one I’ve ever considered my home. My plan is to stay forever.

Once the compulsion becomes too strong inside me, there’s no taming it—I wish for my own sake that I could.

What do I do? I liberate people who don’t know they’re stuck. I help them to press the eject switch. That’s one definition. Another? I sow chaos. I clean house. I change people’s lives for the better, whether they see it that way or not. Only once did my actions end for the worse. But I don’t like to think about the murder.

I had a daughter once, my dear Julia, the pride of my and Peter’s lives, an intelligent, shy, beautiful girl who was taken from us too soon.

In the United States, we would say “moved out of a house and into a new one.” Houses don’t move, houses stay fixed, increasing in value while the unvalued humans who inhabit them come and go like seasons. But right in that dark shrine to a dead queen, my heart sang with Shelley’s notion that houses travel with us, that they aren’t merely comprised of cladding, brick, and plumbing but are defined by the individuals inside them and the marrow of their years there, and that the soul of a house journeys with us when we move.

This poor woman, marooned with these people she calls her own.

I learned later that the boys have one stipulation: never the same guy twice. I could have done wonders with that tiny loophole, but I no longer felt the urge to test their bond. Ben and Zachary belong together. They don’t need to be saved.

No one wins Seif’s favor, let alone on the first day of their arrival. But this little boy has somehow

“I keep my distance from that sort. I don’t want to get mixed up with him.” Added up, these warnings do hint at a criminal element.

As I glance over at him, I notice him staring at me with a horrified expression, as if he has finally seen it, the wrongness—has realized something terrible about me that I won’t be able to explain away.

As a rule, I try to avoid the subject of my whereabouts before I checked into the Royal Karnak, who I was, what happened at those places.

saw you check in this morning!” I exclaim. “With your little boy! Is his father here too?” For a second my question hangs sourly in the air. I realize how old-fashioned I sound, making such an outmoded assumption about families, a loyalist to the nuclear that blew up a long time ago.

Way to assume

As we gaze at each other in silence, I sense an understanding growing on his face, the sparkle of a kindred soul, misunderstood, mischievous, a touch too lonely, but someone preternaturally wise to the difficulties of an imperfect world.

The Sun, It Shines for All—and

Guess how many times Julia visited her father in the ICU? Once. That was all. She said it was too painful for her. A grown adult. Too painful for her to visit her father, the man who’d spoiled her at every turn.

Going back and now I get why she wouldn't visit him. Poor Julia

I wasn’t trying to escape my grief by booking a red-eye ticket out of Chicago five years ago. Not exactly. Nor was I lured solely by the glamorous nostalgia that the five-star European hotels promised on their websites. I left (or came, as I like to think of it) because of the plain fact that I missed being seen.

That’s what I missed: being recognized as a physical entity that takes up space.

Perhaps that photo is now being used as a dart board, a shooting target, or the image on a Wanted poster.

Clever boy, I think. I like Otto for his refusal to be stowed in a soulless cabinet of steel and reclaimed wood. His tantrum has brought us all together, washing up on this same safe shore.

feels like a second chance to be part of a family, or at least to exist in close proximity to one.

Lady your obsession with this family is getting creepy

“I lost my daughter too,” I blurt before I can stop myself. I don’t like to discuss Julia, it fills me with too much heartache. “She was just a few years older than you when she passed. An adult with a whole life ahead of her. This was back in Wisconsin. None of us saw it coming.”

At my age, injuries appear out of nowhere, like dangerous men on the sides of highways, trying to convince you to stop for them.

He knows. He saw the tail of the scarf in my pocket yesterday as I left Carissa’s room. He’s put the puzzle pieces together. Clever boy.

I know in my heart that Otto and I are destined to be friends.

“Is Otto sad not to see his father?” Tess snorts. “The better question might be, is Alain sad not to see his son?”

There are moments when I’ve felt scared for my safety around him, and then he’ll be perfectly loving and sweet the next moment.”

We all need to escape our lives every so often. To recognize the cage we’ve found ourselves in, the bars around us that we’ve accepted as normal because they’ve risen up so slowly and imperceptibly over the years. That’s how life betrays you, day by day, when you aren’t paying attention.”

often I left those museums with a mild depression that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the trip. A hollow formed inside me, right under my heart. What are we? So little when all the accounting is done.

I hadn’t seen Egypt, which cured me of this dismal appraisal of our collective brilliance.

I’m startled by the coldness in his face. In the dim green light, I can’t make out his mismatched eyes, but his expression contains a palpable anger, a throb that, if I didn’t know better, nears violence.

I feel so close to Otto right now, like I’m his protector, spreading my own arms to shield him.

Lady you're lowkey creepy ngl

“I’m going to tell.” His homely face shrivels, his front teeth as crooked as old shutters, the light gone from his glasses, leaving only a flickering of his pupils underneath the lenses.

“We have a bad room at the hotel,” he blurts. “It’s small, and it shakes all the time from the elevator. You said in the van that you have lots of money. I won’t say anything if you get us a nicer room with a game system. It can’t cost much for someone as old as you.”

Not her being blackmailed by an 8 year-old

“She hit me . . .” I hear him say. “For no reason. She hurt my ear, Mom!” “Otto,” I plead. “That’s not—” “I want to go,” he sobs. “She scares me. Please. She’s not a nice woman.” The wheels of my brain are turning too slowly for me to make sense of his manipulation.

The small and frail can be conquered—that is an American fact.

I don’t want Otto making a fuss and raising suspicions about me. Even unverified, such claims could open the door to the darker secrets in my past.

But it’s the threat of the last line in his note that stops me. I also want some things for Mom. The demands won’t cease.

Otto has clearly said something amusing because Seif’s shoulders are quaking in laughter. I’ve never seen Seif smile, let alone laugh. The fact that the boy has managed to endear himself to the only hotel employee impervious to my charm is nothing short of a provocation, a little Otto flag planted on my turf.

These guests and their problems, they are not your burden. You must let them make their choices and live their lives. We can serve as a sympathetic ear. We can help in small ways when asked. But we can’t fix the things that don’t work inside them. We are but temporary friends.”

Listen to this wise advice

dawns on me that Americans are the least at home of any people in the world, never quite able to settle into their surroundings, a part of them always off somewhere better or worse in their heads.

Suddenly, out of nowhere—Forgive me, Peter—a wave of desire races through me.

Lmao

Right now, I wouldn’t mind the gigolo’s slim, muscular body on top of me for a half hour, our lips and hips kissing, his penis sliding in and out of me. Will I ever know that feeling of pleasure again?

Ew TMI grandma *cringes*

“You bold floozy,” Zachary exclaims as he rotates onto his stomach. “I didn’t count on you as my main competition.”

Lol y'all need to stop

“Set.” The god of havoc, of disorder, of foreigners and storms.

disappointment can be a gift, absence, loss, humiliation—that’s a gift you never stop opening.

There’s barely a muscle or joint inside me that isn’t sponsored by some multisyllabic wonder drug.