Johnny Ruin

by Dan Dalton

  We’re seventeen and eighteen, at a gig. An Emo band we both love. It’s already packed. I take point, Pete falls in behind, hands on my shoulders. I’m the biggest person there. I wade through the crowd, brushing everyone aside until we’re at the front. Pete does the apologies. Sorry about him. Sorry. Nothing I can do. We stand side-by-side at the front rail for the rest of the gig, belting every line.

  I’m dragging my feet, shuffling. A woman pushes past. I recognise her hair, long, brown. My ex-wife. I call after her, coughing, but she doesn’t turn round. The last time we spoke she slapped me, told me to fuck off. When people ask why we broke up, I say we didn’t make each other happy. What I don’t say is that I made her miserable. What I don’t say is there was overlap.

  I try to avoid fights. I tell people it’s because I’m worried I’ll really hurt someone. When I used to fight with my brother, the rage was out of control. I couldn’t stop punching. I didn’t want to. Like I was made for violence. Now I worry I’ll kill someone. Or that I’ll want to.

  What I’m really worried about is that if someone fought back, I’d lose.

  Ash falls from the sky like snow. Black smoke billows in the breeze. Crops still blaze. I catch a glimpse of Sophia in the smog, she’s with someone, he has his arm around her. I try to get closer but bodies block my path. My heart is racing. I feel sick. The woman I love and the man she left me for. My body rejects the image. I rush to the barrier, kneel, hurl bile into the blackness below. Finally I spit, stumble away. As I steady myself, the earth starts shaking beneath us, shifting, cracking. The landscape splits apart, all around us the chasms and fissures of a fractured mind.

  When it stops, I’m lying on the deck. I can’t see Jon. The road remains mostly unscathed, a four-lane salvation passing through the ruin. What a freeway does is it insulates you from reality. Stick to the road, and you can traverse a whole continent without seeing any of it.

  Sample tweet: The best defence is a good fence. Buy JoeSeal.

  When she left, when books didn’t work, I quit my job, looked for other ways to fix myself. I tried yoga. I tried jogging. Ate through all my savings. I self-diagnosed my way through the DSM V. I took anti-depressants, crashed off them. I borrowed money from my parents. Maxed out my credit card. I took blue pills, had boring sex with boring people. I masturbated generously. I asked myself: What would Patrick Swayze do. Eventually I found drugs.

  I started by microdosing LSD. You take amounts so small you don’t hallucinate. But you do notice a change in perception. It’s a little like trading in your old cathode-ray TV for a 4K flat screen. The image is suddenly richer, sharper. Everything is in HD. Time slows slightly. Light takes on a different quality. It dances on the edge of your vision, fluttering, twinkling.

  The road is thick with bodies now, panicked by smoke, by tremors. I’m falling back. I try to speed up but my feet are indifferent, unruly. Someone throws a shoulder. I almost trip over one of those wheeled cases people always drag behind them. A hand on my arm steadies me. Easy there, he says. I’ve got you. My dad. He braces my weight, picks up the pace. I’ve got you.

  I’m ten, walking home with my dad and brother. We’ve been to the football. Dad doesn’t so much walk as march. We have to jog to keep up. Our pleas to slow a little go unanswered. He hates crowds, so he walks quickly. It’s his superpower. That and packing the dishwasher.

  Later, when I’m older, a head taller than him, I’ll still struggle to keep up.

  With my arm around his shoulder we weave through the crowd. Dad navigates stubborn bodies with elbows, threats. Not that he’s violent. Scrappy maybe. Never found a fight he backed away from. Especially not when it involves his kids. I once watched him knock out a guy for calling my brother a dickhead. He’s mostly silent. This is the closest we’ve come to a hug in years. Have you thought about what this will do to your mother, he says.

  I’m twenty-nine, telling Mum I have clinical depression, the kind that doesn’t go away. She starts crying, asks if it was her fault. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault, I say. These things just happen.

  I’m thirty-one and my mum is asking me if I’ve ever thought about killing myself. I say no.

  I tell Dad I’m okay to walk by myself for a bit. By the time I finish the sentence, he’s gone.

  When my brother was born, Dad planted a tree in our garden. He planted a second when I was born, fifteen feet from the first. The trees grew as we did, always fifteen feet apart. We used them as goal posts. Sometimes a branch would reach too far across the gap, and Dad would cut it back. A few months ago, he had to cut one of the trees down. It was rotten, diseased. He never said which.

  My brother isn’t a fighter. But he worked out a way to hurt me. Words. He and Paul would taunt me. Small things that stung all the same. They’d tell me I was adopted, that I had no friends. That I was a virgin. The thing about words is that they don’t land straight away, the way a punch does. Bruises heal in a day or two. Words linger like unexploded bombs.

  I’m not a fighter. Not any more, at least. Unless you count the night I was out with Sophia and punched the guy from her work in his stupid beautiful face.

  A thing I used to wonder was what would happen if I punched someone hard enough in the back of the head that my fist broke through their skull, mashed their brains into a pink pulp.

  The crowd close ranks as I walk, try to stop me passing. They conspire to ferry and funnel, to kettle, to keep me in place. I overtake an old colleague, a man who spent his life padding around at half pace, ambling, no concept of the space he occupies. The kind of person who is just gratuitously in the way. Even from the other side of a room.

  Like an average work-day commute, I oscillate from bemusement to fury, fists balled, shoulders hunched, throwing a fuck’s sake at every opportunity. Clock’s ticking. I don’t have time for this. It’s only when I’ve been fighting through them for an hour, maybe more, that I think to look up.

  In the distance, a liquid skyline ripples in the breeze. It moves in the air the way a mirage might, shimmering, flickering. A towering cityscape rising from the east coast of my mind. New York. The end. I tumble to the floor on the shoulder of the road, spent. Too exhausted to continue.

  The problem with LSD is it’s hard to get hold of. Ketamine is easier. So I switched to that.

  The sound of hooves on tarmac. A voice. Jon. Howdy, pilgrim, he says. Need a ride. I turn to see him mounted atop a horse I recognise: Lightning, my trusty steed. It’s a long story. Found him grazing on a patch of grass a mile or so back, scared shitless by the quake, poor guy. He ruffles Lightning’s mane. We soon calmed you down, though, didn’t we. Jon Bon Jovi, horse whisperer.

  It’s not that long a story. Lightning is a 16-hand dark bay. The reason he exists is drunken fantasies Paul and I had about riding into battle, smiting enemies. That was a long time ago. It’s a good decade since I last shouted, Lightning, ma trusty steed! in faux Scots brogue.

  Memories are good like that, casually grazing in the pastures till you need them.

  Jon pulls me up behind him. He kicks, clicks his tongue. Lightning moseys down the road. I grab Jon’s waist. Butch and Sundance ride again. Only in this case, for the first time.

  Clip clop. Clip clop.

  Eighteen

  New Jersey / Violence, Part II

  The tunnel yawns, stretches under the river. The one between here and the end. I didn’t make it this far last time. I flew out of Newark. Paul’s body was on the same flight. Most of him, at least. His face was in a gutter, pressure washed from the highway he died on.

  Water runs the road surface slick. Black tarmac ripples, shimmers under fluorescent bulbs. The walls are ceramic tile, glossy. Everything is tinted blue. A tunnel directed by Michael Mann. Jon’s at home on horseback. Me, less so. Lightning ambles with a lilting gait. I’m not leaning back. You should always lean back when riding a horse down a slope.

  Graffiti scrawled in black marker on the tile: This is not not an exit.


  Jon hums something by Morricone. I gnaw a plaster on my finger. The webbed fabric frayed where I’ve picked at it. I bite loose threads, spit them out. The plaster is there because I bit my nail down to the pulp, chewed till I tasted blood, thick and ferric. I have done myself a violence.

  My brother and I used to fight, the way most brothers do. Problem was he wouldn’t hit me back. I’d hit him, and keep hitting him. I feel bad about it now. I write him texts sometimes. To say sorry. For the times my eyes rolled red with rage. For the times he’d ask if that was all I had and I’d hit him till my fists were sore. I never send them.

  A rule we had is we’d never hit each other in the face.

  The only time he hit me back he broke my nose.

  Ahead, a swell of wrongs surrounds two cars in the middle of the tunnel. Faces I recognise: a girl I dumped by pretending to go to hospital for dialysis, a chap whose girlfriend I used to sext with. My stomach drops. Between the cars, I see who the Many-Faced Man is talking to. Sophia.

  Jon kicks us to a trot. Oh good, he says. For a moment there I thought we were out of trouble.

  I’m twelve, punching the wall in my room. I want to make sure my knuckles are lined up properly. I heard that you can break the bones in your hand if you punch wrong. So I practise. I hit the solid brick wall with both fists until I get it right every time. I want to be ready. I’m not sure what for.

  In our bubble, we’re out at a club. Her colleague tries to pull her away to the bathrooms with the promise of white. I ask her not to. Don’t be a downer, he says. He grins at me. I tell him his nose is bleeding. He tells me it isn’t. I punch him. It’s bleeding now, I say. The bouncers throw me out. Sophia follows, shouting. I apologise. What I don’t tell her is how good it felt.

  In tiny block letters on the tile: Some men just want to watch themselves burn.

  The crowd turns to face us, closing ranks to block my path. Lightning is anxious, snaking sideways. Jon pulls the reins. Whoa, boy. They surge forward. Jon kicks and Lightning rears on command, front legs clearing the first wave of wrongs. We push and trample our way into the mass of bodies, hands grabbing legs and feet, trying to fell us from our mount.

  I can see Sophia and the Many-Faced Man standing, centre circle. I dive into the crowd, use my shoulders, elbows to fight through. Fuck it, Jon says, leaping out backward. He crowd-surfs a moment, ever cool, before he’s pulled down into the mosh pit with the rest of us. I push my way towards Sophia, trip, tumble into three inches of rainwater. I lie at her feet, stunned. Sounds wash together. The water runs red, as if the sky is bleeding. I sit up. The crowd quiets.

  What are you doing, she says.

  We’re here to rescue you, I say.

  She sighs. I don’t need rescuing.

  That’s not what it looks like to me.

  Just stop, she says. You never listen.

  I see the missile too late, a ball of yellow flame thrown from the crowd. A petrol bomb. It misses us, smashes against the tunnel wall, exploding fire across tile.

  Lightning bolts. Wrongs scatter as he bucks and tramples. Others surge towards Jon and me. We stand back-to-back, pushing them off. Fought our way out of worse, Jon says. I raise my dukes, breathe heavy. Let me guess, I say. You always wanted to say that. I try to punch, but my arms are slow, heavy. I have no strength, like my limbs aren’t my own, like this is all a bad dream.

  Jon says: Get angry.

  I say: I don’t know how.

  I’m eleven. I fight every day. At home. At school. Any slight sent my way, I’ll fly off the handle, throw fists, feet. At lunch I wrestle enemies to the ground. It doesn’t matter if I lose. What matters is the fight. Later, when I’m bigger, stronger, my anger will start to scare me. I’ll decide to stop fighting before I hurt someone. I’ll stop punching walls, stop rising to bait. I’ll learn to walk away. But for now I’m a bag of burning rage, barely contained behind bruised skin.

  As we fight, the Many-Faced Man climbs into his car. Sophia slides into the passenger seat, avoids my eye. Then I see Fisher, tail wagging in the back seat. They’re helping each other. My ex, my bully. She’s going to leave. And she’s going to take him with her. He steps on the gas.

  Sophia’s car sits empty. I make a break for it. Jon pulls me back. Don’t, he says. I spin, swing at him, clip the side of his head. His hat tumbles off. He’s got my dog. As I turn to run the air ignites in front of me, a wall of flame and glass floors us both with a terrible roar.

  We interrupt this broadcast. A high-pitched tone rings out. The picture is all static. My shoulder screams, so does my hip. My palms burn. I can’t breathe, can’t remember how. Finally, I cough, gasp in a lungful of air. I look up to see the car reduced to a roaring furnace of twisted metal.

  Jon rolls over, sloshes for purchase in the puddle. I stand, slowly, help him to his feet. He groans, Fuck, picks up his hat, tips out the water. I’m sorry, I say. He grabs my shoulder, coughs up a good half a lung. Well, he says. You know what they say. Never beat your heroes.

  The crowd closes in. Another bomb lands nearby, filling the tunnel with fire, smoke. It’s a full-scale riot. I cover my mouth. Bottles smash against tile. Where there’s smoke there’s a sprinkler, only the water spraying from the spigots is red, thick. It covers us like syrup.

  A man moves towards us, face obscured, waving a pipe. He points it at me, shouts something I can’t hear. You can stop this, Jon says. The man raises the bat, swings, misses. You can stop this.

  I take a deep breath, picture the tunnel. All fire and blood. I’ve got this. I exhale slowly, see her smiling over the top of a book, snug in one of my T-shirts. The screaming stops. Silence now, save for the trickle of water from the sprinklers. I open my eyes. Wrongs gone, riot over.

  A month after the bubble burst she arranged to collect her things. I didn’t have much. Some toiletries, a couple of books. I could have met her somewhere, but I didn’t. I made her come to me. I don’t know what I hoped. A kiss. A fuck. It wasn’t that kind of goodbye. It was awkward. She was tense, stilted. She said a few words. Words that hurt. Took her things, turned around, left. I thought it was disinterest. Dislike. I realised later what it was. Fear. She was afraid of me.

  I’ve never hurt her, never would. That wasn’t the point. Men like me hurt women all the time. I’d made her come to my flat. Closed the door behind her. Looked at her with lust and longing. I’ve spent years making myself strong. Lifting weights, punching walls. There’s a rage inside me. She’s seen it. I’m dangerous, whether I intend to be or not. To her, that day, I was a threat.

  In marker on the tile: One man’s romance is another’s restraining order.

  Red rear lights disappear into tunnel black. Sophia is gone. Jon squints, stares into an empty flask. Well, pilgrim, he says. Guess we’re finishing this thing on foot.

  I say: Why does she keep leaving.

  He says: Why do you keep asking her to stay.

  That thing Epstein said: Insanity is playing the same record over and over and expecting to hear a different song.

  The sound is unmistakable. We’re not five paces before we hear it. The bulbs in the section of tunnel ahead are out. Everything is shadow, confusion. Clip. Clop. Then from the dark, we see him. I shout: Lightning, ma trusty steed. He trots over, blows at us, butts me with his head. I ruffle his mane. Jon rubs his nose, whispers: Why do you say his name like that. Is he Scottish.

  Jon’s arms hang round my waist as we stroll through the tunnel, a distant light growing brighter. We’re both leaning forward, the way you should when walking a horse uphill. What aren’t I getting, Jon. He grins. The list is long and distinguished, he says. My mouth curves into a smile.

  I’m twelve, convinced someone will arrive in my town looking for a kid that’s the best at something, rollerblading, or climbing trees or something, and I’d be that kid and they’d take me off on some grand adventure to save the world, just like in the films I loved. No one ever came.

  I’m thirty-two, tired, bored. I just wa
nt to sleep. I take the rest of the Ketamine I’ve been microdosing. The room starts to drift into the distance, like I’m looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I’m that kind of tired where I can’t sleep, so I drop a sleeping pill. When that doesn’t work, I take another. Then a couple more. Wash them down with whiskey. Finally, eyelids heavy, I drift off.

  I have done myself a violence.

  Nineteen

  New York / Lies

  The skyline isn’t liquid at all. The buildings here crumble, collapse. Waterfalls of concrete cascade to the ground. From a distance, what shimmered is up close: a city falling apart. And it’s beautiful. The scale of it. The way sunlight falls down side streets. The way the moon hangs in the sky, like it has shrugged off the night. It’s mid-morning on day five. This is the end.

  This isn’t the end, Jon says. He tells me to pull up. We should probably go incognito. We take plastic sunglasses from a market stall set up on the sidewalk. His are in the shape of stars, mine are hearts. He gives me the thumbs up. There, he says. They’ll never see us coming.