Johnny Ruin

by Dan Dalton

  If you really want to fuck someone up, love them as hard as you can.

  The rain is relentless, and the rungs of the ladder are slippery when wet. A mist has descended over the city, and visibility is down to a few feet. I can’t see Sophia, but I can hear Jon: Is it still a fire escape if there’s no fire, or is it just an escape.

  I top out, climb on to the tarred felt. A thick fog caps the building. I shout into the storm but the wind picks up, batters me with rain. I’m leaning forward just to stay upright. The fog only seems to get thicker. Jon finds me, grabs my shoulder. And for your next trick, he says. I’m not sure it’s a trick, but the mist parts in front of us to reveal a train carriage sitting on a second set of tracks.

  Wait long enough for a train and it doesn’t come, maybe you’re by the wrong damn tracks.

  The last time I saw her she was across the room at a party, wearing a dress she’d bought out shopping with me. I drank three glasses of champagne, went over to speak to her. By the time I got there my words had slid back down my throat. I managed only a nod before her attentions were stolen away by someone who’d never loved her. That was two weeks ago.

  The last time I thought of her, I’d woken to a hard-on and a memory of her straddling my face, her hips rocking as my tongue made her come. In the waste land of my bed I could practically taste her. The moment I came I knew I’d fucked up. I’d been sober for thirty days.

  As Jon and I approach, the train doors slide open. Sophia stands in the doorway. Tear it down, she says. She nods at the cityscape behind us, towers of glass rising high into the night, a red neon constellation sprawling miles in every direction. On the adjacent building, a video billboard eighty feet high shows Sophia leaning into the camera, naked, writhing, her lips mouthing three words over and over. I don’t need to hear it to know what she’s saying. It’s written on a vintage sign on the opposite roof, letters two storeys tall and lit with neon bulbs: I’m gonna come.

  Tear it down, she says. Or you’re not getting on this train. I walk to the next door. Sophia beats me there. Tear it down. I try again, she runs to stop me. I try to barge past. She places her palms on my chest, pushes with enough force to stop me. No. Jon’s hand on my shoulder now. You’re better than this, he says. I can’t look him in the eye. This is all I have left, I say. Sophia steps forward, takes my hand. She leans right in, whispers in my ear. Tear it down.

  When I was seven a girl in the schoolyard dropped her knickers, let the boys see her downstairs bits. We recoiled in horror, ran away laughing. Six years later in high school, we were all begging to get in her knickers. She had absolutely no interest.

  I’m twenty-two, fucking a one-night stand. I tell her I love how wet she is. Well, she says, you would be too if you were walking round with an open cavity into your body.

  I close my eyes, clench my fists. The wind rips at my rain-soaked shirt. Jon and Sophia stand back. Around me lights flicker then explode, cascading sparks falling like fireworks. The scaffolding behind the giant letters buckles as bulbs pop like electric balloons. The sign groans, tips forward, stripping its bolts, falling over the edge to the city below. In an adjacent building, glass windows start to shatter, steel beams melt like butter, entire floors blow out, collapse. I open my eyes and watch the city crumble. Like the forest before it. Like the cars on the highway. I crash the memory. Destroy it. Tear it down. Jon moves towards the train, Come on.

  From the dark a hand reaches out, grabs my ankle. I look down to see a man without a face, a flat red pulp where the face is meant to be. Paul. He reaches out to grab my other leg and I stumble, fall back. He crawls up my body, peers down at me. I try to push him off, but there’s no strength in my arms. My fingers press into the raw flesh of his unface. The stump of his tongue darts around as he speaks. Remember those birds we picked up at the karaoke.

  His blood drips into my mouth. I spit it out, thick, ferric. Jon is trying to pull him off me. Yours was all right, he says. Mine though, fanny like a wizard’s sleeve. He coughs a blood-choked laugh as Jon pulls me clear. The roof is shaking violently. We run for the train, squeeze through the closing doors. I turn to see Paul’s faceless body reaching out into the dark as the roof collapses beneath him. From the window I watch as the city falls.

  Out there, in the world. I’ve lost her.

  Here, she’s standing next to me.

  The rest is lust and detritus.

  Eight

  Colorado / Obsession

  Set the scene. Mountains, lakes, trees. A thousand postcards stitched together paint a vivid cinescape, their seams visible, overlapping. Above, the sky is a hundred swatches of the same blue. A panorama of Pantone cards. The carriage I’m in moves through this collage at 150 miles an hour. I know this because Jon tells me, his face pressed against the window as we traverse a viaduct that shouldn’t be here. He has a hard-on for trains.

  Outside, a small action figure falls through the air under a handkerchief parachute.

  Sophia sits opposite, silent, sullen. I can’t look at her. My shoulders hunched, breath shallow. I’m all knots. Sheepshank stomach. Half-hitch heart. I’m trying not to tremble. Jon speaks, his breath fogging the glass. Could be worse, he says. This could be really fucking awkward.

  A thing I was into for a while was the BASE Fatality List. It’s a website, a chronological record of every BASE jumper killed since 1981. It’s a list of names with a date and a paragraph about the jump, what went wrong. I read each new entry with a twisted fascination. Vicarious suicide.

  My notebook is unrolled in front of me, pen in hand, condom discarded. I scribble in the margins of a page I haven’t written yet. She looks at me across the table and asks what I’m doing. I tell her I’m writing a book. Looks like you’re avoiding writing a book. I take a breath. Tell her most writing is avoiding writing. It doesn’t sound as clever out loud. What’s it about, she says. Him. She looks at Jon. I shake my head. Ghosts, I say. She puts in her headphones. Same thing.

  What you already know about Sophia is that she sees right through you.

  I’m thirty. We’re on a train together. She pulls my hand between her legs and rocks herself to orgasm against my fingers, letting her hips roll with the carriage. She comes with a slow shudder, her body rigid, expertly turning her satisfied groan into a whole body yawn. Afterwards, she gazes quietly out of the window, kissing my hand in thanks. Nobody notices.

  Stop it, Sophia says.

  Stop what, I say.

  You know.

  My eyes drift from her hips to my notes. An unseen conductor makes an announcement over the speaker: Remember when she said they were just friends.

  That feeling someone is staring at you. I look up to see Sophia’s face locked in a mock grimace: eyes wide, nose scrunched, nostrils flared. I don’t know how long she’s been holding the pose, but I raise my hands to my face and close one eye, clicking the shutter on a camera I’m not holding. She doesn’t flinch. I pull a face with less success. She’s better at it than me. Less prone to taking herself seriously. Less worried it’ll stay that way. She humours me still. I let our eyes meet. Hers, blue glass nebulas. Mine, the Hubble before they fixed it. Compromised. Unable to focus. Danger, Will Robinson. Eject. Eject. I look away quickly, but it’s too late. I’m already lost.

  The thing about BASE jumping is it’s instinct. You stand on top of something, you want to jump off. The call of the void. The French have a phrase for that. The thing about BASE jumping is you have a parachute. It’s not suicide if you catch yourself. It’s not suicide if you’re trying to fly.

  The guy who invented BASE jumping also decided to award a sequential number to each person who completed all four BASE jumps: Building, Antennae, Span, Earth. His name was Carl Boenish. He was BASE #4. The fourth man to do all four jumps. He’s BASE Fatality #7.

  Jon is sleeping. She asks if Bogart was busy. Elvis too, I say. And Eddie Vedder would have brought his ukulele. That’s less a swipe at Eddie Vedder, more a dig at her. Sophia once spent an in
sufferable month learning the uke.

  She furrows her brow. So now you’re stuck with Rex Manning, she says. Do you even like his band.

  Jon stirs, shifts in his seat. I do, I say. I used to.

  Announcement: Remember finding her hair in your bed for months after she left.

  She looks at the loudspeaker, then at me, unimpressed. I try a dozen words, choke on each. I need some air, she says, standing. I ask if she’s coming back. She frowns. Do I have a choice.

  I say: Don’t leave.

  She says: Say it like you mean it.

  The first name on the BASE Fatality List is William Harmon. He died 11 April 1981, jumping from an antenna in Virginia. There’s no picture. I like to think he had a moustache, went by Bill.

  Sophia is leading. We walk through carriages from different trains: Amtrak, the Tube, Virgin East Coast. I realise my T-shirt is stained with Paul’s viscera. I’m a walking Turin shroud of my dead friend. I pull a random bag from the luggage rack and take out a T-shirt, sliding it on over the one I’m already wearing. I don’t want to take my shirt off in front of her. Not now.

  We pass through a buffet car, tables stacked tall with bagels and pizza and hummus and cheese and chocolate. A feast of foods I binge on. I grab a coffee. The first sip burns my tongue. Fuck’s sake. She looks at me like I’m a little slow, tells me I can make it any temperature I want. I blow over it. But if it were the right temperature, I say, what would I have to complain about.

  A few carriages later I hear her say, You fetishise sadness.

  The carriage we’re in is a library, the walls lined with books I own. Have you even read these, she says. I look at the titles. Some of them, I say. She throws me a copy of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things. Her favourite book. I never finished it. Not enough, she says.

  We arrive at a bar car, all glower and walnut veneer. It’s full of women I’ve dated, talking among themselves, drinking G&Ts. Sophia takes one from a waiter. Happy hour, she says. None of them pay me any attention. It smells like perfume. Like gin and regret.

  You dated all these women, she says.

  Some of them. Some I’ve never met.

  Then why are they here, she says.

  I fall in love a dozen times a day.

  That isn’t real love, she says.

  It’s the possibility of love, I say.

  Possibilities don’t love you back.

  I pause a moment. You did, I say.

  In our bubble, I wake to the slow curve of her shoulder, pale, unsheathed. I trace lines between her moles with the tips of my fingers. Barely touching. She whimpers, rolls her body as I stroke softly, as I hold her halfway between sleep and dream.

  In our bubble, she’s snoring like a trooper.

  Next to me at the bar is a woman I dated long distance. I’d spend all my time saving money to see her. It was fine except when I was with her, when she seemed to resent my presence. Sometimes the best relationships are the ones you imagine.

  Sophia points at a woman I had an intense affair with in my early twenties. What about her, she says. I tell her to guess. Your persistence put her off. She takes another by the shoulders. You fell for her quickly, then you realised she’s a loud eater. She runs to another. You hated each other, but the sex was incredible. I smile. Two out of three ain’t bad. I don’t tell her which two.

  She isn’t done yet. She runs over to another.

  And this one, she says. She’s gorgeous.

  Simple, I say. She didn’t like books.

  And this one. Why did you stop.

  Do you want me to be honest.

  Brutally, she says. Always.

  She wasn’t you, I say.

  In our bubble, we made up terrible insults for each other. Nonsensical stuff. Uninsults. You’re such an ice-cream sandwich, she says. I gasp in mock outrage. Bloody cagoule, I say.

  In our bubble, where time found a tempo just for us, there was nothing I loved more than looking over the top of my book to watch her reading hers, waiting for her to feel my gaze. A silent game played until she found a sentence she didn’t mind pausing on. The smile I’d get in return, warm enough to linger even now. It’s the smile I still see when I close my eyes.

  Announcement: Remember when she broke up with you by text.

  A woman I was sleeping with recently steps in front of me. You ghosted me, she says. I tell her that isn’t true. It probably is. You just stopped texting, she says. She’s attractive. I like that Sophia is here to see her. She’s also drunk, spilling her gin as she speaks. Who’s this. She struggles to focus. I introduce Sophia, then I pause. They both look at me. Are you fucking kidding me, she says. She introduced herself to Sophia. It’s Laura. Laura, I say. The reason I stopped texting is we broke up. I was pretty explicit. I’m uncomfortable but I don’t know how to end this. I already ended it. You wanna know where guys like you end up, Laura says. She knocks back the last of her gin, holding up a finger to indicate a pause. Alone, I say. She takes another sip of her drink, forgetting she finished it. You’re such a dick. We watch her leave. Sophia turns to me. What, I say. She raises her glass in a cheers. You can really dish it out, she says. Shame you can’t take it.

  Give your character a flaw. A compulsion. Something they can’t help. Something that gets them in trouble. Jon wants to be needed. Sophia wants to be liked. Me, I want to be adored.

  Come on, she says. She takes my hand, leads me into the next carriage, her hips swaying with the train. I start to ask something, stumble over the words. What scares you more, she says, that my sexual appetite extends beyond you, or that you’re having this conversation with yourself.

  We sit on a bench seat in the next carriage, looking through a panoramic window at the mountains of my memory. There is music playing, a Springsteen cover. We sit side by side, staring straight ahead. The peaks rise and fall as we pass, like they’re tuned to the wavelength of the song. But the beat is off. I watch them, trying to figure out what doesn’t fit. Then it clicks. I feel it in my ribs. Then higher, in my throat. It’s my heartbeat. I’m on fire.

  Why did you do it, she says. My heart can’t help falling over itself, the beats it skips leave gaps between mountains. I ask her why she never texted to ask how I was. Is it because I moved on, she says. My heart makes the mountains climb, tumble ever quicker. I ask how hard it is to text. Were you punishing yourself, or me. More silence. Do you ever miss me, I say. A bull horn blows in the distance. It’s been a year, she says. I talk to my feet. And what’s one year out of fifty, sixty. She lifts my chin up. I can’t be here any more. We rally silence back and forth until I fumble my return. I tell her I’m not ready for her to go. Shouldn’t I get to choose when to leave, she says. She’s still sitting down. We’re both bad at goodbyes. The song hasn’t finished.

  She says: I need to see a man about a dog.

  In our bubble, we didn’t have a song. We had dozens. Hundreds. A song for every mood, every memory. Songs we sang while drunk. Songs we played in the time between sex and sleep. Songs we sent each other in the middle of the night because, You really need to hear this.

  In our bubble, a thing we did is make each other playlists. It wasn’t about the songs as much as it was the titles. Our playlists had names like 4am Post-Whiskey Drinking Pre-Hangover Bed-Bound Blues. Minstrels For Menstruals. Emo Brunch. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Punk.

  You could come with me, she says. Help me leave. The song finishes. I can feel her eyes on me. But you’re my memory, I say. Don’t I get to decide when you go. The speakers play a looping static, the sound you get when a side ends. You haven’t changed, she says. You know, I tried. I wanted to give you a chance to do the right thing. I shouldn’t have bothered. She leaves. I let her.

  The mountains outside flatline as the carriage door closes.

  An announcement says she never loved me.

  Liar, I say. No one is listening.

  Nine

  Colorado / Obsession, Part II

  The sway of the carriage
is hypnotic, metronomic. The click of the wheels on the track claps steady against the hum of the engine, a diesel electric boombox burrowing deep into the mountain. An occasional low grumble suggests the train is not a morning person either.

  Jon is still snoozing. I sit down opposite, place a mostly cold cup of train coffee in front of him. He opens one eye. Howdy, pilgrim, he says, and then, you shouldn’t have. He takes his flask out, tops up the coffee with whatever paint thinner he last filled it with.

  She gone, he says. I nod and tell him she just needed time to think. For the best, he says. We got a broken boy to fix, and we’re two days down. He takes a sip of hooch coffee. Is there anything else I need to know, I say. He thinks about it a moment, counts on his fingers. Let’s see, New York, the end. Yadda Yadda. He looks up. Oh, the key. We’ll need that. I ask what key. He shrugs. It’s your head, champ. You’ll figure it out.