Johnny Ruin

by Dan Dalton

  Fifteen

  Illinois / Jealousy

  I’m an hour into a ten-day walk when the lights go out. It’s a walk I’ll be nine days dead by the time I finish. A walk I’ll suffer in darkness. Colourful spots dance in front of my eyes, leading the way. After twenty minutes I realise I’m just walking with my eyes closed.

  The weather situation is this: the rain has stopped. It’s still day three. I think. It should be mid-morning but it’s hard to tell in the dark. I can’t see any clouds. There’s nothing blocking the sun. It just isn’t there. The thing with night is the sun’s still shining, it just isn’t shining on you.

  My feet slap the road. Underfoot the sound turns hollow. A bridge. I don’t know what it spans. The hole is either too deep to see, or the water too black. I find a stick and drop it over one side, shuffling to the other to watch it float past. It never does. No splash, no river, no stick.

  There is a whale in the ocean that sings at a different frequency to other whales. He swims, follows the currents, sings, but he never gets an answer. The others can’t hear him. Researchers first heard him in the eighties. They’ve no idea how old he is, how long he’s been out there, alone.

  The bridge is made of wood. Old oak, framed by zig-zagging struts on either side, a metal guard rail running at waist height, the deck wide enough for two lanes of traffic. There aren’t any cars right now. It creaks. Talking to me. Maybe trying to talk to other bridges. Maybe it creaks at the wrong frequency. Maybe the other bridges can’t hear it.

  I’m ten, being dumped for the first time. I spend the entire lunch break walking around the playground, asking her, Why. Over and over. Why. I get the same answer every time. Why. She says she doesn’t know. Why. She tells me to leave her alone. Why. I don’t understand.

  I’m twelve and my second girlfriend is dumping me. It’s a week after Valentine’s Day. She gives me back the card I got her, in its envelope. She screwed it up, spat in it. I run home in tears.

  That thing your therapist said about repeating the same set of mistakes over and over.

  The wind carries whispers, wails. I can’t do this with you here. Jon and Sophia must be sixty miles away. Maybe a hundred, knowing Jon. They’re out there together. Laughing, flirting. I can’t do this with them. But, feet failing me, I’m not sure I can do it without them either.

  Just because I’m imagining all of this doesn’t make it any less real.

  After she left I spent weeks lying foetal, sobbing. Haunted by the echo of questions I couldn’t quiet. It was the why of it all I couldn’t deal with; Why. Why now. Why not me. I didn’t have answers, so I fashioned some. Despairing, desperate, the answers I formed were worse than any she could give. I fixed on a truth that began to demolish the past, to destroy all that was good.

  The truth I conjured was this: If she cheated with me, she must have cheated on me.

  My Chuck Taylors squeak, squelch. Waterlogged socks, cold feet. Chucks almost always have holes. You’ve barely bought a pair before they wear through and your feet are soaking wet. Both of the T-shirts I’m wearing are still damp. I’m getting a rash walking in wet jeans. I lean out over the rail and am hit flush in the face by a draught of hot air. I stick my hand out, let the hot air support its weight, my arm snaking along the upstream current.

  Never let vanity get in the way of a good idea. I remove both my shirts and hang them over the edge, letting the rising heat dry them. I walk along, shirtless, arm outstretched, fabric flapping in the breeze. I look at my body. It’s less impressive when not decorated with her lips, but hardly unsightly. It’s lived in, is all. A body with stories. A narrative told in scar tissue. In tattoos and topography. Once my shirts dry, I pull them back on, strip to my boxers, hang my jeans and socks and shoes over the edge. A head full of hot air is a terrible thing to waste.

  It’s a funny thing, black. By definition both a colour and an absence of colour.

  Maybe depression is the same. Not a feeling at all, but an absence of any.

  I’m eleven, on a family holiday. I meet a girl who’s my girlfriend for a week. When I leave we never officially break up. I spend the whole year unsure whether I had a girlfriend or not. The following summer she says we weren’t going out in the first place. This is a relief. I wasn’t ready for a girlfriend. The reason I thought she was my girlfriend is I fixed her bike.

  I’m twenty-two, on the road with Paul. In Arizona, I use Myspace to message a girl I met when I was fifteen, on holiday in France. She replies a few days later, half-bemused, half-worried. Is everything okay. I didn’t consider how weird it might be to hear from a guy you fooled around with for a week when you were fourteen. Paul laughs. Probably time to let that one go.

  One man’s romance is another man’s restraining order.

  Re-clothed, I continue. The bridge is without end. The wind asks, Why. It repeats as I walk, legs leaden, lactic. Why, why, why. The exhaust blowing from below moans, a sexually satisfied purr. Her voice. You make me feel so good. A metal cord whips against the pole. A black flag hangs at half-staff, as if the bridge is in mourning. It’s dark and hell is twenty-two degrees.

  My notebook sits rolled in my hand, frayed, stained. I use it to conduct the wind, play a drum beat against the handrail. I’m supposed to be working on a novel. Things keep getting in the way. Walls. Bridges. When I started writing it, I wanted it to be so good she’d come back. I wanted to make her fall in love with me. Words don’t work like that, especially when you don’t write them.

  The worst thing I’ve ever written was the email I sent when she broke things off. It was a considerable fuck of a mess. I misquoted her, misinterpreted things, bent facts. Changed contexts. I quoted John F. Kennedy and the film Say Anything in the same paragraph.

  What I got in return was a text message: I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.

  In November 2014, after ten years in space, the Philae lander launched from the spacecraft Rosetta and successfully landed on a comet. The first human-made craft ever to do so. He set about his tasks, taking soil samples, analysing them like a champ. But his battery began to dwindle rapidly and on 15 November he stopped communicating. Scientists feared the worst. Then in June 2015, Rosetta received a transmission. Philae had woken up. He resumed his final task: transmitting chemical data. Rosetta lost contact with him shortly after. Without enough solar energy to stay awake, he powered down and died, cold and alone, marooned in space.

  My email should have been six words long; I love you, I always will.

  Animism is the belief that inanimate objects have feelings.

  My superpower is putting my foot in it.

  I’m thirty-one and Sophia is telling me about a guy at work. He’s beautiful. Later she texts me instead of him. Oops, not for you. I get angry, kick up a fuss. Not my finest hour. She says she’s not into him. I can only hear, He’s beautiful. She says I’m being an idiot. Maybe I am.

  The thought I can’t get out of my head is, What if I’m not.

  There’s always overlap.

  I trip, tired. Tardy. Running late for my own oblivion. Where’s a sensible family minivan when you need one. I take stock. I must only be midway across. I can’t catch them. Can’t have her back. Maybe a fall will wake me up. Maybe a fall will kill me. I never did ask what happens if I die up here. I breathe in. Motor oil, defeat. Weigh my options. There’s only wind and the void.

  The choice makes itself: it’s easier to fall than to walk. I climb up on to the rail, turn inward, face the deck. I think about her lips, about the last time I kissed her. I didn’t know it’d be the last. Maybe she knew. Maybe she’d planned it, savoured it. I lean out slightly. Her voice rises on the air: It never would have lasted. I spread my arms like wings, close my eyes, fall backward.

  It’s not suicide if you’re trying to fly.

  People talk about rock bottom. Say you reach it eventually, then you can climb back up. I don’t believe in rock bottom. You can fall as long as you want. You can just keep falling.r />
  Here, now, I land flat on my back. The abyss is a hard surface sitting inches below the bridge.

  My notebook lies nearby, sitting next to the stick I dropped, both suspended on the same solid nothing, a barrier so black it appears infinite. I flip through my notes, find a line: Talk about silence. Say the happiest you’ve ever been was reading quietly with her.

  The happiest times were the ones when we both read quietly, lying across each other like dropped matches, the sound of paper friction, pages turning, satisfied bodies shifting weight, being, breathing. Here, in the black of my mind, suspended, I feel her lie back on my chest, fingers combing flaxen hair, happy groans, stolen glances, stolen kisses. I remember every detail.

  The only trouble is I’m not sure if it happened. Not like this. Memory is mostly invention. I don’t remember what I remember. Maybe the silences weren’t happy. Maybe I made this up. I mean, I never met her parents. We never had a holiday, never invited friends round for dinner parties. We fucked and drank and made promises and maybe we were never part of the same story.

  That thing you read, that your friends might not consider you their friends.

  Other things I may have invented: our past, our present, our future.

  Fiction is the only time the loser gets to write history.

  Dazed, I climb back up to the bridge, lie foetal on the road. The deck creaks, rolls. I scroll through things she told me: You make me feel so good. He’s beautiful. It never would have lasted.

  I think she actually said, It was always going to end, but I prefer, It never would have lasted.

  I take the pen from my pocket, hold it like a child might, nib protruding from the back of my fist. I find a fresh page and start carving, scratching words into the pulp. You make me feel so good. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. My handwriting is rough, illegible. It doesn’t matter. I just want the words to exist. I keep going: He’s so beautiful. I love you, I’m gonna come. I tear out the page, push it between a crack in the deck, pull a Zippo I didn’t know I had from my pocket, flick it open, light it. The paper smokes, smoulders. Fleeting yellow flame. Then nothing. Cotton tendrils rise in wisps from the black edges of the page. I roll on to my back, defeated.

  Words don’t burn so easy.

  What annoyed me about her: she talked too loudly on buses, so other people had to listen. She had different personalities for different friends. She had a fake phone voice. She asked questions in the cinema. Every now and then she chewed with her mouth open. She’s a really good liar.

  What really annoyed me about her: I hated how attracted I was to her.

  Other words for bubble: blip, bead, blister.

  There’s an elephant at a Tokyo zoo that has spent sixty-six years living in a concrete pen. She’s known as the loneliest elephant in the world. Campaigners started a petition to get her released, but experts said she wouldn’t have survived a move. Captivity is all she knows.

  That thing you read about lonely people dying sooner.

  Through squinting eyes, shooting stars fly sideways along the road, roll past, screech to a stop. Turns out stars smell like gasoline. A door opens. Not stars, just passing headlights. Then a voice. Jon. What’s this, he says. The dark night of the goddamn soul.

  He lifts my arm, wraps it round his neck, picks me up. The car sits close by, just out of focus. It’s a minivan, the one Paul and I once took on a US road trip. Gary Busey. What are the chances. He props me in the passenger seat, pulls my legs into the car one by one, the way you would for someone without much use of his limbs. I let him buckle my seat belt. Gets bumpy, he says.

  My favourite death on the BASE Fatality List is an honourable mention. Dwain Weston was a world champion BASE jumper, but for the Go Fast Games in Colorado, 2003. Weston and his buddy Jeb Corliss planned to do a fly-by of the Royal Gorge Bridge wearing wing suits. Weston would fly over the top of the bridge. Corliss underneath. As they approached the bridge Weston was flying low, but spectators assumed he’d pull up at the last second. He didn’t. He hit a railing at 120mph, severing his leg and killing him on impact. Jeb, who flew underneath as planned, was showered with Weston’s blood, almost colliding with the body as it fell from the bridge.

  Some BASE jumpers said Weston wasn’t used to piloting the wingsuit and lost control. Others thought maybe he’d tried to aim for a two-metre gap between railings, to raise the stakes.

  They say it’s the fall that kills you. For Dwain Weston it was the bridge itself.

  It’s not suicide if it’s an accident. It’s death by misadventure.

  But you left, I say. You drove off with Sophia.

  You didn’t give me a choice, Jon says.

  A face that isn’t appears behind me. Paul. She’s not worth the trouble, mate, he says, sinew and muscle straining to show emotions they can’t translate without skin. He lithpth a little, but that’s to be expected for a man without lips. But you were with him, I say. That other me. He waves it off. I’d rather be here, he says. You’re a bit of a cunt, but less of a cunt than he is.

  I think he winks at me, but without eyelids it’s hard to say for certain.

  Jon starts the engine. The timbre under the wheels changes as we leave the deck and hit solid road. Thought I’d never get off that bridge, I say. Was walking for hours. He and Paul laugh, hard and hearty. You’re kidding, right, Jon says. Damn thing’s fifty feet across.

  The next sound I hear is my own delirious laughter.

  The wind: I can’t do this with you here.

  On the dash, an E.T. bobblehead doll nods at us, keeping time with the sway of the chassis. He was our mascot, back then. We picked him up at a Walmart in Pennsylvania. It made sense, the three of us being alien tourists in a foreign land. He was also a good reminder to phone home.

  Jon is quiet. He’s not even drumming. I ask if he’s mad at me. A minute slips by, words hang unanswered. You push, he says. All the time. And you wonder why people leave. It gets tiring, champ. He leans close, whispers. And just between us, having me go on without you made zero sense, narratively speaking. Terrible choice. He smiles now. Butch ain’t shit without Sundance.

  In another life, Jon would have made a hell of an editor.

  That thing you read about the blackest material ever created, a kind of carbon that absorbs 99.9 per cent of light. It’s so black the human eye can’t comprehend it. You can be looking at a surface less than a millimetre thick and think you’re staring into a bottomless abyss.

  In back, Paul is digging through a box of cassette tapes. Can I ask you something, I say. What do you live for when you’ve got nothing left. He’s quiet a moment, pensive. Tyres thud over asphalt cracks. Dunno, he says. Think maybe you’re asking the wrong person.

  When you’re busy remembering the worst about somebody, it’s easy to forget why you were friends in the first place. I ask him why he’s here, after what I did. Globs of viscera drip syrup-like from his open wound of a face. You find monsters where you look for them.

  If he had skin he’d probably be grinning.

  Sixteen

  Indiana / Jealousy

  Jon drives. Paul plays deejay. I’m in back. It’s day four. When I’m not sleeping, billboards littered along the blacktop sell me a life I’ll never have. Some of the posters show me, a future me, smiling; Sophia drunk. We pose in carefully curated holiday photos. In some we have kids. She does, at least. I watch as my picture fades in each. Overlapped by other men, other lives.

  If we were on our road trip we’d be somewhere in Illinois. A road sign points to Chicago. On our trip we barely drove through, we were tired, fed up of sightseeing. Said we’d see it next time, Paul says. Lots we never got to do. He fumbles with a cassette, pushes it into a slot that shouldn’t be in the dash. Arcade Fire. A nice surprise. Paul never had the best taste in music. He lost his virginity in the back of his dad’s Transit van to ‘Senza Una Donna’ by Paul Young.

  Some people find my taste in music depressing. My ex-wife did. Sophia listened to
the first mixtape I made her over and over. It’s beautiful and sad, she said. Like all the best things.

  That thing you read about sad music actually making people happier. Something to do with letting you process your sadness, instead of ignoring it. Happy music is a form of denial.

  The mixtape for this would be: How to kill friends and effluence people.

  I sleep well in cars. The vibrations always send me off soundly. Here, now, I pass in and out. Exhausted, fatigued, car tired. In front, Paul and Jon banter like old friends. Maybe they are. I close my eyes to the sound of a song about waking up.

  The next time I open my eyes, I move to stretch out, roll my neck, only to jump at a body next to mine. Sophia. She’s on her phone, texting. She’s glowing, but not for me. From the front, Paul and Jon are talking, don’t notice I’m awake. Don’t notice that Sophia is here. Maybe she isn’t. She laughs and plays with her hair and I hate how much I wish she were here.