“Ramos isn’t even my real name,” Ramos said. “Ramos is just some motherfucker I heard about once.”
Ramos leaned forward on his knees and looked at Oscar intently for the first time. He seemed to come alive in an instant, rush forward toward the brink of something. “And please look me in the eyes so I can tell you that I’m an underprivileged young man with a kid to feed, I’ve got all kinds of issues going on, and if you fuck this shit up for me, I will fucking hurt a dude.”
Oscar tried to appear unaffected as his nervous system fired in alarm.
“Ramos!” Dawn said. “Come on. None of that. That’s not cool. We talked about this.” Dawn turned to Oscar. “I’m sorry. He apologizes. That’s totally not in keeping with the spirit of partnership that I expect us to close on here.”
Dawn shot a sustained look at Ramos until he sat back again in his seat.
“I apologize,” Ramos said.
Now that the threat of physical harm was out on the table, things seemed oddly defused, rather than escalated.
“You know,” Oscar said, “the school might already know about us. I got an email from my department chair. I didn’t read the whole thing.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you about that. Wasn’t me.”
Oscar looked at Ramos, who was lighting up another cigarette. “They let you smoke in rentals like this?”
“Haven’t checked.”
Oscar found himself laughing. It turned out that total abandon had a very distinct edge of comedy to it. “You haven’t even explained what it is you want me to do.”
Dawn smiled. “Finally you ask.”
She reached under the coffee table and produced a map that had been printed from the internet.
“Couldn’t be simpler,” she said, handing it over. “Here’s where you’d be going. You can do it in ten hours each way if you don’t hit traffic.”
Oscar looked at the map. The red destination pin jutted out of somewhere south of San Diego.
“Mexico,” Oscar said.
“No. Just close. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere but a GPS will get you there no problem. There, you’ll be given a package.”
“What kind of package?”
“Nothing crazy. Backpack-sized.”
“I mean, what of?”
“Oscar.” She looked at him as if he was a child. “Illegal drugs.”
Oscar tried to keep his face from twitching. Throughout everything that he had been going through, he had remained more or less confident in his vision of himself as manfully stoic and resolute. But this threatened to break him.
“I don’t want to say the words ‘why me,’” Oscar said, “but—I can’t do this. I could never do this. You must know that. This is like, a joke. Why would you even bring this to me?”
Dawn’s face reversed polarity yet again. Any malice that he thought he might have detected was gone.
“It will be more clear to you when I hand you a fat manila envelope stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. You’re in trouble, Oscar, but I know what you need. You should consider me your angel.”
Oscar felt that much of what he had thought he had known about the world and his life had been finally cut away from him after a period of sawing that started with his mother’s death and that now he was drifting away on a small chunk of it toward something else. One set of truths receded and a new one came into focus.
He dropped his head into his palm and kneaded it, laughed, and then moaned. “Come on. I mean, Jesus. Can’t you see I’m coming apart here? And this is what you do to me?”
Dawn put her hand on Oscar’s back, rubbed it.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Oscar. But we need to move soon. Give it some thought.”
14
While biking home, Oscar assessed the situation. In his head, he heard the voice of St. Germaine telling him that it was already determined. But even if the invisible future already existed immutably, he ran through different scenarios in his head, trying to find points where he might salvage even a semblance of control.
Like it or not, he told himself, he was in this thing now, and the only way out, went something he had heard once, was through. It felt good to hug this thought for an instant, but then he realized that it didn’t really mean anything.
Of course, it went without saying that he would never be capable of doing something like this. He had essentially never committed a crime in his life. Once in his youth, he had shoplifted some baseball cards from a local drugstore out of some urge to prove that he was cool, but of his own volition he returned the next day in tears to confess his sin to the proprietor and offer him a handful of sweaty quarters. The very idea of breaking the law was abhorrent to him, cut against everything he believed about society and civilization and how one should act within it. To say nothing of his respect for (or if you’d prefer, fear of) authority, which was equally immense. He had never even been ticketed for a moving violation.
And even setting moral considerations aside! He would, on a purely practical level, be terrible for what she was asking. His nerves were jangly. His stomach rebelled under stress. He was not great at improvisation. He scrounged for more reasons: he...was very busy with schoolwork.
Eventually his thoughts returned to the money.
Oscar had always envied those who seemed to understand something about where money could be found, the direction of will that was required to generate it. It was something that Oscar had long ago decided he would never be able to grasp, and so had done his best to prune his desire for money completely. Although he knew that there were other ways to make money (there simply had to be!), he wasn’t able to name any just right at this moment.
Thirty thousand dollars.
He hated thinking about money. He had never had more than $2,800 in his accounts at any one point of his life. That was after his college graduation, when several gift checks hit at once. But then of course he had jumped immediately into grad school and made the acquaintance of his new life companion, $73,000 dollars of debt, of which he had so far been able to pay back $2,000.
He wondered if the story of his life was going to be the story only of an intelligent coward who used a vague moral superiority to mask his inaction.
His life, that word—there were plenty of them out there just like it. What makes mine so special that I’m not allowed to maybe ruin it?
He stopped pedaling his bike and coasted to a stop; put his feet on the ground.
Honestly, fuck it. Fuck it! I’ll go. Wait—that’s absurd. I can’t go.
The very thought chilled him in a shiver. He knew nothing about any of this.
Drugs? I’m a drug dealer now? Not even a dealer. A mule. For a pretty little kingpin.
He had to be smart about this.
The real truth of it, the scariest one, the one that he felt was slowly sapping his defenses, was that, although this was ridiculous, in a dark, agitating, physical way, the idea excited him.
For the second time, he resolved never to speak to Dawn again. This time for real.
15
When he walked into his apartment that night, he sat at his table and called his father immediately. Lee picked up after four rings.
“Hey, Oscar. Little late here. Everything okay?”
“Sorry about the time. I was just—thinking about you. How are you doing?”
“Fine. Your sister was over earlier. Your voice sounds funny. Is something wrong?”
Oscar held a balled fist up against his brow. “I was calling to see how you were doing.”
“Nothing has changed, I suppose.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Well. I guess that’s not really what I mean.”
“Oscar, thank you, but I don’t need checking up on.”
“Dad, please—you can stop being like this.”
There was silence on th
e line. Oscar wondered at which of the two phones in the house Lee was speaking—either the one in the kitchen or the one on his mother’s nightstand. Oscar heard Lee sigh deeply.
“Okay. I’ll tell you. The hardest part,” Lee said, and stopped. “The hardest part is waking up. There’s an instant every morning where I forget that she’s gone. And then I turn to look at her or reach out for her, and there’s nothing, just a cold empty space in the bed, and each day it’s all I can do to keep from screaming out right there. It’s awful—it’s just so awful. I keep thinking, how can this be part of life and still so awful? How have so many people gone through this? How can this be real?”
“Yes. It’s very strange,” Oscar said. “But I do feel like she’s with me in some way. Watching over my shoulder, or from above, maybe.” Oscar didn’t feel this at all, but it seemed like a good thing to say.
Lee laughed bitterly. “I don’t. Let’s not become childish. I don’t feel anything. Anything good, I mean.”
Oscar slumped down out of his chair and lay down flat on the kitchen floor. The tiles were cold on his back. He draped the arm not holding the phone over his eyes to shield them from the overhead light.
“Okay, Dad. Thanks for telling me that.”
“Well. I think I’ll be going to bed now. I’m glad you called.”
“Good night, Dad.”
Oscar stood back up, found his laptop, found the half-full bottle of bourbon, took a double swig like a man about to have his leg amputated in a tent, and started one of the videos up at a random point in the middle as he fought down the burn.
You total bastard, Oscar thought when he saw St. Germaine leaning forward in his little chair with his little plant.
“Ask yourself,” he was saying, “when did you decide to be the person you are? What steps did you take to construct your world around you? Or did you not build it at all? What if it was forced on you? What if you were actually imprisoned there, imprisoned in yourself? If I gave you a match, would you burn your prison down?”
Oscar drank and watched more videos until the bottle was empty, slipped through time, and woke up on the floor at 5:00 a.m. While still on the floor, held there as if under a net of anxiety and disgust, he looked at his phone, and found that he had texted Dawn at two in the morning:
Can we meet?
and she had responded two minutes later:
No texting.
He stood up, took one step, and then lurched for the sink and vomited brown acid into the drain. He wiped his mouth, stumbled to the couch, and deleted the texts before passing back out.
* * *
His preprogrammed alarm woke him up in time to shower and he made it to his intro class fifteen minutes late. While he struggled through his lecture on Spinoza’s determinism, he thought he could sense his students looking at him differently, as if something was off. He could not look at Dawn, who sat in the front row and spoke up several times during discussion at length; perhaps, he felt, to bail him out. After he ended the class (ten minutes early), she waited while the other students filed out, and then came up to him.
“Late night?” she said.
Oscar said nothing.
“I should have told you that I don’t really like to text.”
“Yeah, sure, that makes sense,” he said.
She tilted her head. “So, did you want me to come over?”
“I don’t know what I wanted.”
“I think you did.”
Oscar laughed. “Please spare a thought for my internal state. I’m not even one hundred percent sure that I’m awake right now.”
“You’re awake, I promise. Look at the clock—that’s one way to tell. In dreams, numbers on the dial are all messed up, smushed to one side or shifting around.”
There was a clock on the wall by the door and they looked at it together.
“I think I probably wanted some further discussion about the...matter at hand.”
“Okay, look, how about this, I have another class I need to get to now, but can you meet me tonight? Off campus.”
* * *
She suggested that they meet somewhere she thought he wouldn’t be worried about being seen together—the bar of a blue-collar bowling alley a dozen miles from campus. He borrowed Sundeep’s car. She was waiting for him on a barstool when he got there.
They ordered Coors Lights that came in frosted glasses and a basket of fries to split.
“Okay, look,” Dawn said, over the clatter of flying pins and ’80s rock. “I know you think that this is like the biggest deal in the world, to do something like this, to dip a toe in this world. I thought so, too, at the start. But I want you to realize just how common this is, just how many people are doing it. Every time you see something on the news, with cops lining up bricks on the curb outside a box truck? That is like a lightning strike, compared to everything that gets through. No, not like a lightning strike, because lightning is random—this is even less likely because you can change your odds by being smart. Those people on the news were stupid—I can point out a big mistake in almost every case. You are smart. I am smart. We have everything worked out. I promise you that this will be fine.”
“The money is—it’s incredible.”
“Yes, it is. And I hope you trust that I’ve been honest with you and that I will give you all that you’ve been promised.”
“I do, actually. Ha, how stupid is that.” Oscar took a long drink from his glass.
“I am happy with the profit that I’ll be clearing. I have no reservations about giving you what you are owed for this. This is not a rare thing, like I said, but we do need you. Your white maleness is extremely valuable. It will protect you as it always has. I bet you’ve never been pulled over on the highway once in your life.”
She was right.
“You won’t have problems recouping that cash when I get—if I got it here?”
“No.”
“How—?”
“Listen, Oscar, for reasons that I’m sure will make sense to you, I want to keep you sequestered from the big picture here as much as possible, okay? Also, that reminds me, I want you to promise—no Google.”
“What?”
“You know how when you have a weird pain that you can’t explain so you get on the internet and the next thing you know you’ve convinced yourself that you have several types of cancer and have begun to consider your own funeral arrangements? That applies here—don’t Google the law, don’t Google how other people have done it, don’t even Google the route. It can only hurt you. It will drain your nerve and nerve is the only thing you need for this. I know it’s asking a lot but I think it would be best if you trusted me.”
Behind them, someone bowled a strike and bellowed, “Hell yeah!”
“When would I have to go?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
His heart rate spiked. “And what if I didn’t?”
“Wheels are in motion. We are now counting on you. This is a one-time offer. If you bail, which you won’t because you can’t, but if you did I’d have to scramble to find someone else.”
Oscar finished his beer.
“I need you to decide right now,” Dawn said. “Don’t think. Decide.”
Oscar thought of his father, suffering alone in his house, heat turned down as low as possible to save money, sorting through the basement for anything that could be sold. He thought of the .308 propped up in the corner of his father’s broom closet. He thought of his sister, his imagination taking over now, crying silently over the bed of her youngest son. He thought of his mother, hurting so bad that she saw fit to hand over her last dollar to a stranger, or worse yet, she knew it was wrong but would do anything to make the pain stop. All of this horror seemed like it was about 40 percent related to money. And how much of it could thirty thousand even alleviate?
He saw his father’s
broken face, the way he looked at the grave of his wife. He saw his sister holding her son’s hand, weeping for more than he realized. He saw his student loan statement. Suddenly his heart was filled with an inexplicable, terrible longing.
“Okay,” Oscar said, and exhaled. “Okay okay okay okay okay.”
PART II
16
Oscar woke early. He had thought that he might not have been able to sleep, but he had one of the most restful nights of his life, with entirely untranslatable dreams about red and yellow spheres of light dancing around columns of rock in an underwater cave. The memory of these dreams immediately began to slip away from him, like running ink.
Outside the sky was a very dark blue. His body pulsed in rolling waves that he felt down to his fingertips. He dressed in his favorite clothes, to fortify his spirit: jeans nearly worn out in the thighs but still strong at the seams, Piggly Wiggly T-shirt, brown leather jacket starting to crack at the elbows. He pulled on his boots like armored greaves. He was too nervous to eat but he took his time brewing coffee and sat in a kitchen chair by the window watching the sun slowly suggest itself.
He checked his email one more time, since he wouldn’t be able to check it from his flip phone. At the top of the screen sat an email from [email protected]. His blood paused in his veins.
His cursor moved to click it but then he remembered what Dawn had said about maintaining his will. Now is not the time, he told himself. But he jammed the laptop into his backpack so he could read it later, along with the email from the philosophy department. Out the front window, he saw that the car was parked on the street just like Dawn said it would be; a recent-model silver Range Rover with sport trim and a large, aggressive-looking deer guard set out in front of the grill. He imagined the almost tender image of her and Ramos coming by to drop it off in the middle of the night, wordless, communicating with flicks of the eyes. The keys were waiting for him in his mailbox.
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 8