Sundeep served to start their first game.
Oscar was nowhere near as talented at squash as Sundeep, but he loved the sport, how it asked for grace but would settle for fury. Through what he considered to be sheer willpower, he was able to win about a quarter of their games, or a third if he was particularly dialed in, which was enough of a chance to keep things interesting.
Sundeep’s control of the ball was pure artistry; with an imperceptible flick of his wrist he could place it anywhere he pleased, in either a graceful arc that seemed almost to touch the ceiling or in a laser-beam line a centimeter from the sidewall. Oscar was a flat-footed brute by comparison, but every now and then he could line one up and blast it back into the corner with enough power to catch Sundeep out of rhythm.
They played for an hour and a half, the only conversation between them the occasional bellowed expletive that echoed through the empty courts.
Afterward, Oscar was completely soaked with sweat. He wrung his shirt out into a trash bin. Sundeep was only damp. Oscar had won five games out of eleven, which he was pleased with. In immediate retrospect, he appreciated that the exercise and competition had effectively obliterated his consciousness for a time and that he had spent the last little while apart from the concerns that now threatened to return.
“I’m slipping,” Sundeep said.
“I should tell you something,” Oscar said, still huffing for breath. “My mother died yesterday.”
Sundeep stopped untying his shoe and stood up. “Dude...are you serious?”
Oscar explained the circumstances.
“Holy shit. I am so sorry. Just yesterday?”
“Yeah. It’s very weird. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry. It’s not weird. Not at all. Strange, yes, maybe. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. My dad is at my place. That’s actually why I needed your car. Oh—can I please have it for one more day?”
“Of course. He’s there right now? Shouldn’t you go back?”
“You’re right. I...yes.”
“You should go back, I think. In these times it’s important to be with family.”
“Definitely. Just needed to clear my head.”
“Yeah. Well, listen—if there’s anything I can do.”
“Thank you.”
“What was her name, so I can pray for her?”
“Delia.”
* * *
Oscar took a long, scalding shower and then lay down on a bench in the locker room with a towel over his eyes. Endorphins still hummed pleasure into his muscles, but his mind had re-sharpened, and his thoughts once again cast themselves further into the future than the next few moments.
Through a vent, from some adjacent reality, he heard the pleasant sounds of the swim team hitting the pool, splashes and whistles and echoes.
He liked to consider and declare himself an enemy of cliché, but he found himself entirely constricted by it now. She’s gone! he kept thinking. Totally gone. And isn’t that just so incredibly strange and sad. He tried to come up with a more sophisticated way to express what he was feeling and could not.
Not only was she gone, but her impression of him that she had carried with her and refined since their first sublimely traumatic moment of his birth was gone, as well. This special appreciation of him had drifted off like a tendril of smoke into a dark night. It inhered nowhere. He felt diminished in a way that he knew would last forever.
But I suppose this is the way it goes, he thought. You have a certain number of lights on inside you, lit when you’re young, and little by little other people wink them out when they leave, and then when it’s your time to go, if you’re lucky, it feels perfectly appropriate.
This was a dark, shitty, and dumb thought, he knew, but hey, why not—a certain quantity of self-pity seemed fair. He was too young for this loss, after all, by at least ten or fifteen years.
* * *
When he walked through the door of his apartment an hour later with a pathetically small and poorly considered bag of groceries, his father sat in one of the two living room chairs. It seemed as if perhaps he hadn’t left the room.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Oscar, will you come sit down? You were right, actually. There is something we should talk about.”
3
“We had planned on your mother explaining this to you and now I’m not sure I know where to begin.” Lee had his fingers interlaced and he looked down at the floor. Oscar sat down. “I suppose it’s a long story but I don’t think that I could maintain the thread from start to finish so let me just tell you here first that the money is gone.”
“Wait. What money?” Oscar said. “Whose money?”
Before his retirement, Lee had owned a small business, started by his father, that sold and serviced dental supplies. Oscar’s mother had taught public school for her entire career. There had been a few lean Christmases here and there, but they had always provided Oscar and his sister with a life that most would consider middle class, at least. To the best of Oscar’s knowledge, his parents had made sound investments and rarely splurged. Their one major expenditure of the last decade had been the “home gym” they built in Oscar’s room when he moved out, which consisted of a treadmill and a Nautilus weight machine that after six months saw almost zero use.
“Have you ever heard of Paul St. Germaine?” Lee said. “He’s a philosopher just like you.”
“Dad, what are you talking about? Did something happen to your money?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This is not easy for me. Paul St. Germaine is a—well, I’m not sure what. A speaker type of guy. A thinker.”
Oscar’s imagination took over and immediately constructed a thousand terrible scenarios based on this foundation, a grand edifice of disaster with many halls yet to be explored. He gestured impatiently for his father to continue.
“We saw him first on the TV. He had a show on there that was all about the human mind and how to unlock its potential. It was your mother who started watching first, actually. She was going through some of her harder times then, and she liked what he had to say. There was only one show, an infomercial I suppose is what you’d call it, which was an hour long, but at the end a number comes up and you can send away for tapes.”
“Tapes?”
“DVDs. So we ordered the DVDs and—”
“Wait. Dad. How bad is this?”
“Well, I’m trying to tell you.”
“Dad.”
There was a pause. Lee didn’t look up. “Bad is not the word I would choose.”
“How bad?”
“I’ve decided to look at it as a new beginning.”
“I don’t understand,” Oscar said.
“Well, will you let me tell you?”
Oscar acquiesced with silence and tried to quiet his clattering mind. Lee picked up an empty mug that was on the table, looked at it, set it back down. He did not look at Oscar when he resumed speaking.
“We get the tapes in the mail, there’s a whole bunch of boxes, and your mother just falls right into them. I mean, it only took her four or five days to watch them all. She wanted me to watch with her, naturally, but as you know I don’t go in much for that kind of stuff. But I do notice that she starts to seem different. Happier. She was getting up in the morning without hitting the snooze.
“And then when she’d watched all the tapes—in fact I think she watched them all twice, maybe three times—she comes to me and tells me about these get-togethers that Mr. St. Germaine has, I guess you’d call them seminars or retreats, where you can go and meet other people who like him and like what he has to say on his tapes, and you all stay together in one big hotel, and he gives more lectures about your brain and how to control it.”
Oscar rubbed his face with both hands.
“Dad...you do
know what this sounds like, right?”
“Yes, yes, but no, it’s not like that. He’s a very smart man. I can’t much follow a lot of what he talks about, but it’s obvious he’s a smart man.”
“Does this story end with you writing a check to a cult leader?”
“Don’t say that,” Lee snapped. “It’s not a cult. Really, it’s not. And I know that’s what someone would say if it was, but no.”
“But you did?”
“Well, so, I figured since your mother responded so positively, we could afford to take out a bit of our savings and go to Hawaii to one of these retreats.”
“Without telling me.”
“You only would have tried to stop us. But Oscar, if you had been in the house and seen the state your mother was in when it was getting really bad—she wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t come to the phone. For a long time, she wouldn’t leave the house at all, and then there would be weeks where she would go to church twice a day. I begged her to see a doctor, anyone, but she refused. One night, she told me that she had thought about...” His voice caught. “That it was nearly too much for her to bear. It killed me, how powerless I was to help. And then suddenly, to see her change when she found Paul, it was incredible, like a miracle. A rebirth. You would have spent the money, too.”
“I wish you had told us it was getting that bad.”
“What would I have said? You’re here at school. You would only worry.”
“I had a right to know.”
“She was a private woman.”
Oscar seethed and said nothing.
“Point being, she showed so much improvement after the first time we went—”
“You went more than once? How many times?”
“Will you let me speak? She showed so much improvement that we decided to go again.”
The conversation began to wind around itself, taking on the repetitive rhythm that can only occur in arguments between family members. It was ten more minutes before Lee got to the point, which was that, in addition to the cost of flights and expenses, there was a kind of retreat-within-the-retreat, available only to “students” with a certain level of experience, that this St. Germaine offered to those he deemed worthy. There was an additional fee for this admission, which was twenty thousand dollars. Lee had paid for his wife to attend four times.
“Twenty thousand!” Oscar nearly choked.
“Do you want me to say I feel like a fool? Well I won’t, because I don’t. That money bought your mother...” here his voice wavered and he collected himself “...bought your mother, the woman I loved more than life itself for forty-three years, a little peace, when she couldn’t get it anywhere else.”
They breathed through the first long silence since Lee had asked Oscar to sit, which indicated that something had occurred and concluded. They both slumped, not looking at each other. Oscar thought for a moment and then spoke, as the venom began to seep inward from the wound.
“Dad, so...you’re broke. That’s what this talk is.”
“Please don’t talk down to me about this.”
“How can you tell me this so calmly? Are you not...mad at this guy?”
“He helped your mother. Quite a bit. It may have been costly but your mother’s last days were her happiest. I don’t care about myself as much.”
“And Mom thought this was an okay thing to do, too? To say nothing about what Gracie and I stood to inherit—what about the rest of your lives?”
“Oscar, I loved the woman. She was in pain. I don’t think we did the wrong thing. We wanted to come and tell you about how much improvement there had been in her life and tell you about St. Germaine—a totally different conversation from the one we’re having now. I am informing you, not apologizing to you.”
In all of Oscar’s life, they had never discussed Delia’s depression so openly. They had in fact almost never used the word depression, just as they hadn’t in this conversation. Throughout Oscar’s childhood, it was understood that occasionally it would be necessary for Mom to stay in her room, in her bed, for two or three or four days. During this time, she would exist in a kind of half sleep, watching soap operas on the portable black-and-white set or reading paperback novels a slow page at a time. Lee explained to Oscar and his sister that sometimes their mother got very tired and had to rest and that she wasn’t to be disturbed unless it was very important. Lee would bring in trays of food for her and bring them back out almost untouched. When enough time had passed, his mother would emerge from the darkness, scoop up the nearest child, and kiss them like she had returned from a long trip. This was simply part of the rhythm of life in the Boatwright household, a fact that Oscar had gradually grown into, which made it hardly notable.
It wasn’t until years later that he realized that his mother’s days spent behind closed blinds were so clearly a symptom of something, and that the defeated wryness of her humor and a certain melancholic suite of her mannerisms were surely vents from some deeper chamber of her being. It had taken Oscar finally thinking of his mother as a person and not just as his mother to come to this realization.
Oscar wasn’t sure if he had inherited this depression. There were certainly periods of his life in which it seemed that the largest part of himself was dedicated to dread. He often looked at sleep as an escape rather than a necessity. Of course he often felt that his intelligence and sensitivity were burdens rather than gifts. And if he did sometimes fantasize about being dead, he never thought about killing himself, at least not seriously. But when things were going well, he felt generally good. So what if things were rarely going that well? Where does brain chemistry give way to logic?
“Oscar, I’ll be honest. I’m scared to be alone. I need my son. I’ve been in this room all morning, thinking, what do I do now? I realize now that I may never have told you this plainly, it’s such a simple thing. But I loved her so, so, so much.”
Oscar dropped back down into the chair and let his air leave him in an exhausted sigh. What did he have to offer this man?
Lee continued, more talkative now than perhaps Oscar had ever seen him.
“There’s something I keep remembering, from when we were young, your mother and I. We had only been married a month or two, and I got up early to go to work, and she would stay in bed for a little while. But this one time, as I stood there in the doorway looking at her, she got out of bed and held her head to my chest, just stood there holding me, and after she got back in bed I went into the other room and dropped down on my knees, you know that’s not something I usually do, and thanked God for sending me this woman, which I really do believe that he did. It’s hard to explain to you just what I was feeling but that’s the memory that I have.”
“It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to explain to me. That’s a very nice memory. You should keep remembering that.”
“You know—there’s one more thing. I’ve been looking around at your books. I was kind of hoping you might be able to give me some ways to stay...positive,” Lee said. “You know, like some things that you’ve read. In your studies.”
“Dad, we’ve talked about this. That’s not really what philosophy is.”
* * *
That night, after Lee had gone to bed, Oscar opened his laptop and Googled Paul St. Germaine. The first link was his personal website, which was of a primitive, outdated design and featured a close-cropped headshot set against a field of stars. He didn’t look aggressively charismatic; he appeared to be in his fifties, graying hair, roundish face with slightly knobby features, and a wry smile. Below his photo, the text read “As seen on TV!” Clicking the tab marked Bio brought up only one sentence: “Pioneering thinker Paul St. Germaine has helped millions worldwide to lead happier and more productive lives through harnessing the power of their own minds.” No real credentials could be ascertained.
The site was thin on content and appeared to exist mostly as a portal t
o buy the DVDs, which had to be purchased as a full set of fifteen, for the price of one-ninety-five (plus S&H).
Thinking that his family deserved at least this much, Oscar broke one of his minor moral codes, and after clicking around a bit, was soon illegally downloading the first of the fifteen installments. While he waited for the download to complete, he combed through more of the Google search results, which contained an odd absence of criticism about St. Germaine and his programs.
Oscar mostly found message board threads (hosted on websites like BuildABetterYou.com and TheExaminedLife.com) where people discussed, in the internet patois of the over-sixty set that featured abundant capitalization and exclamation points, whether they should invest in the DVDs. One user with a dancing fluffy pink avatar wrote, PAULS PROGRAM LITERALLY SAVED MY LIFE!!!! DON’T BE A CHEAPSKATE!!!! Just below that, another user wrote, This guy is a total con artist. Depressed? Save your money and get some sun and hit the gym.
Oscar could find almost no mention of the retreats, aside from one person who started a responseless thread with the title So who will I be meeting in Hawaii?
When the download was complete, he pressed Play and leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest.
After one second he hit Pause again. He got up and walked around the living room with his hands on his hips, tried to breathe deeply, heart rate elevated. Through the window over the sink he could see a fir tree illuminated by a streetlight. He went back to the computer and hit Play again.
The first image to appear was the title card of what must have been the production company, Samsara, accompanied by a few synthesized tones. The video quality was grainy and the audio lo-fi; it appeared to have been recorded sometime in the midnineties. This then faded into gold superimposed lettering that read “Session 1: An Introduction.”
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 2