A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  He walked one lap around the car, opened the door and jumped in. New car smell engulfed him.

  On the gleaming wood-panel dash was a yellow Post-it:

  The GPS is already programmed. XOXO

  Oscar pulled off the note and crumpled it up. He remembered a joke he had heard once: How do you fuck an elephant? You just climb on up there and start fucking.

  He put the key in the ignition and the car came to life in two stages, implying a turbocharger. He felt the engine thrum powerfully, beg to get moving. If he was going to do this, which it appeared that he was, he’d better not do it halfway. “You’re fine,” he said out loud to himself. “It’s cool. This is cool.” He put on his black sunglasses, even though it was still barely light outside, and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He was almost convinced.

  He tried to converse with his interior monologue but found it to be basically an unending scream.

  The soothing voice of the British woman in the GPS got him onto the highway headed south. The sun was up now, reflecting low off the hood and warming Oscar’s arms and chest. He realized that his current level of nervousness would fry him out if he were to drive like this for ten hours, so he took deep breaths and tried to let his mind wander. He fiddled with the radio, found NPR, and returned his hands to the wheel. He listened to three minutes of a piece about people who had been forced to sell their homes and live in converted vans before he caught himself and quickly flipped to a rock station: T. Rex. He rolled down the windows and draped his left arm over the door panel. It was hot out and getting hotter. He turned up the music.

  The car was a beast. It was hard to believe that something so large could be so quick, but he zipped around trucks with ease and caught himself creeping over eighty more than once, which startled him. The last thing he needed right now was to be pulled over, although he supposed it would be an even bigger issue on the way back. He set the cruise control to three miles per hour below the speed limit.

  In this way, he passed the first hour, burning off the adrenaline. It took about that long for him to realize that if something terrible was going to happen, it probably wouldn’t happen today, so he might as well relax.

  Oscar couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a long car trip. It had been so easy to remain cloistered at the university that he had never seen any reason to deal with the hassles and costs of owning a car, even in California, but now he began to think twice about that decision. He had forgotten how meditative the act of driving could be, under the right conditions. He thought that it probably had something to do with the fact that such an easy and simple-seeming action (find a lane, maintain a speed, stay within the lines) was so effective at hiding a truth that should have been obvious: that he was in direct control of an enormous hunk of metal that could end his life and the lives of others with a simple jerk of the wheel.

  Around eleven o’clock his lack of breakfast caught up with him and he pulled into a truck stop. He bought black coffee and two tamales from under a heat lamp, paid the Mexican girl behind the counter who couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old, and sat in a booth facing the parking lot to eat. Before he left, he went back to the counter and paid for a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. He had smoked maybe ten cigarettes in his life and had never enjoyed them, but they might make a good prop for the character he was playing.

  Back on the road he lit one up and decided that he was right. He coughed at first but found that the nicotine both steadied and enlivened him. He laughed when he thought of Dawn being annoyed that he had smoked inside her car. Was this even her car?

  “Screw you, anyway,” he said out loud, and smiled.

  * * *

  The sun rose to its peak and then began to fall and still Oscar was going south, the red line on the GPS that separated him from his destination steadily shortening. The palette of the scenery outside his window changed from greens to brown, vegetation to sand and sagebrush.

  There was not a single instant that he didn’t feel a burning, physically uncomfortable urge to turn around immediately. It was only to his own amazement that he had, as of yet, not.

  When the GPS indicated that he was two hours from the location where it was supposed to happen, he began to come out of his trance. Soon he would again have to exit the car and make the minor decisions that constituted moving through the world.

  He began to keep his eyes open for a motel when he was sixty miles out from the point. He passed up a Motel 6 in favor of some place called the Circled Wagons Inn. The parking lot was one-quarter filled with trailer-less trucks and dusty SUVs. He parked, went into the office, and paid the smoking woman at the desk twenty-six dollars cash for the night.

  Oscar brought his bag into the room, which was on the second level facing the empty pool, and sat on the bed. Not so bad, he thought.

  On the other side of the road he could see a chain steakhouse with the outline of the state of Texas and the words Open Late! in neon. He locked his door, walked across the parking lot, darted across the road through traffic, and entered.

  There were only a handful of customers inside, and when the hostess led him to a table, he asked if he could have the big corner booth, which he had always preferred since childhood—something about having a solid wall behind him.

  “Well, hey, it’s fine with me,” she said. “Haven’t had a party of eight in forever.”

  He sat alone at the booth under a wall covered with cattle skulls and wagon wheels and fake Indian war clubs. When the waitress came (were there any males in this town?) he ordered the largest steak they had, adding, “I know you guys aren’t allowed to serve it very rare, but what if I said pretty please?”

  She smiled and said she’d see if she could pull some strings.

  As he waited for his steak, he drank two beers and listened to the piped-in mariachi music. The slab of meat came out flanked by a baked potato and crispy onions. It swam in its own blood. He ate every bite.

  * * *

  Back in his room, Oscar got his laptop out of his bag to finally read the email that had been in the back of his mind all day, and then discovered that he would have to go back down to the lobby if he wanted to pay for internet access. Instead, he opened up the file with the downloaded St. Germaine sessions and clicked on one at random that he hadn’t watched yet, session seven. He jumped to about five minutes in.

  On the screen, St. Germaine stood before a large blackboard on which nothing had yet been written. His hands were clasped and resting on the slight paunch of his stomach. He was speaking directly into the camera.

  “...you see, there’s coded information inside of me that, for some reason that no one has yet been able to determine, wants desperately to continue to exist. In order for it to continue to exist, at least for another eighty years or so, it needs to encode itself within a new human vessel. In order to produce a new human vessel, it needs me to achieve a certain physical state of affairs with a member of the opposite sex. The code’s urge to survive is so strong, and its dominance over me so complete, that it’s able to convince me that the best members of the opposite sex for me to achieve this state of affairs with are those with certain deposits of flesh around certain areas of their body, certain qualities of the bones in their face, even certain aromatic chemicals present in their breath. Of course, this was all before I met my wife.”

  He laughed before continuing.

  “The point is that even though I’m able to see this very plainly, to see how beholden I am to this code and its will, I am not able to free myself from it, or even release myself from the delusion. The sight of an attractive female still elicits a certain pang in my chest, a certain primordial acknowledgement, a certain directive that demands to be immediately addressed. This is not a thought I have, but a feeling. And there’s nothing I can do about it.

  “Consider now that this is not merely some outside thing that we occasionally
deal with. Nor does it only pertain to sex. It’s stitched into the fabric of our very reality, this will that is not ours.

  “Make no mistake: We are slaves to this code.”

  * * *

  “Oh, enough,” Oscar said into the stillness of the room. Reenergized now, he put his boots back on and went back down to the night clerk and paid $6.99 cash for the Wi-Fi code, which the clerk wrote on a Post-it note and slid across the desk to him along with his penny of change. The code was INTERNET.

  Back upstairs he read the email standing with the laptop in his hand like the skull of Yorick.

  Dear Oscar,

  First allow me to say how surprised I was to see your message. My granddaughter set this account up for me some years ago, and it was only by happenstance that I recently checked it. Generally speaking, I tend to prefer my privacy, but in this case I’m happy you were able to find me, even if the tidings you bore were ill ones.

  I’m so terribly sorry to hear about your mother. Unfortunately, it’s very important to me and my current students that I maintain strict confidentiality regarding the things that we discuss, even in death. I hope you understand, although I suspect that you may not. I will say, however, that Delia was a bright and loving person, and I will cherish her memory.

  To answer your question, it’s true that I have no formal degrees. So if, as you say, my premises don’t lead to my conclusion, I must plead the ignorance of the blissfully unrigorous. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that you and I are hardly in the same field. I am not doing philosophy. I am simply helping people. “Seminars” then, as you’ve called them, is surely the wrong word—how about sermons?

  Yours in sympathy,

  Paul

  Oscar considered an impulse to smash the laptop against the wall, and then tossed it onto the bed with disdain. Already composing a response in his head, he undressed and took a long shower, then got into bed, tried to think of nothing, and thought instead of his mother. Would she be disgusted with this or would she understand? It was a ridiculous question, with an obvious answer.

  Oh Jesus, what am I doing here? He had, in the days immediately after her death, comforted himself with the idea that she was in heaven, where she could look down on him from time to time and smile in pride, but now he raced to remind himself that he did not truly believe in that kind of afterlife, could not believe in it no matter how much he would love to, and that his mother was not watching him, could not see what he was doing.

  But he wasn’t prepared to lose her in that way just yet. So he convinced himself that a properly perfect heaven would wield some discretion with regard to the earthly deeds that its inhabitants were able to view, and that she could hypothetically be there, enjoying all of its rewards, and still be blind to this situation specifically. Thank God.

  * * *

  When he awoke, the digital clock read 4:12. He reached over and switched off the alarm, which he had set for 4:30. He swung himself instantly out of bed and went to the window. The carpet was somehow cold. Outside in the parking lot, bathed in the light of the sodium lamps, a man leaned in toward the open driver’s side window of an old Pontiac, yelling at the driver in a stage whisper, clearly upset but still considerate of those who were sleeping.

  “She can have whatever she wants, but the bird stays with me,” he was saying. “And you can call her right now and tell her I said that. She can even keep the cage. But the bird is mine!” The odd little scene was somehow charged with significance.

  This will be a full day, Oscar thought.

  As he got dressed (the same jeans and shirt as yesterday, new underwear and socks), Oscar found himself talking to his mother, which he supposed one would have to call a prayer, his lips moving very slightly and soundlessly as he thought the words.

  Mom, I’m in a bad way here. This situation is not ideal and I’m sure you’re not very proud of this but you see how I’m trying to do the best I can with what I’ve been dealt. I’m very scared, though. If you could just maybe ride along with me today, I think that would be a great help. Thanks, Mom.

  He moved to the sink and dry heaved a few times, gagging, eyes watering, but nothing came up. He brushed his teeth staring at his own eyes in the mirror, a human male, age twenty-nine, height five foot eleven, weight one seventy-five, straight teeth, okay vision, slight stubble, in the year of our Lord two thousand and nine, standing right here in this weird sad place for the first and only time.

  He spat, rinsed.

  He still had three hours before what was supposed to happen but sleep was out of the question and there was nothing left to be done in the room, so he grabbed his bag and went to turn in the key card to the front office. The bearded man in his sixties behind the counter said they don’t really ask for the keycards back but okay.

  He drove to the gas station on the corner. As the pump fed the tank, he leaned against the hood and watched the sky lighten in the west and thought about how strange it was that he would ever have to die.

  Stop it. He caught himself. This is not the time for thoughts like that. But he was beset with the feeling that everything, including both his personal environment and the universe in general, was so utterly ridiculous, a needless contrivance that would have been laughable if it wasn’t so underpinned by misery and pain. A line of Schopenhauer returned to him, one that he had committed to memory as an undergraduate: “Does it not look as if existence were an error the consequences of which gradually grow more and more manifest?” Once, he had found it funny.

  He pulled into the first non-chain diner that he found, trimmed in chrome and neon, and sat in a booth by the window and ate a stack of pancakes, two fried eggs on buttered toast, and a side of bacon. He couldn’t believe how much he had been eating. He told himself he would compensate with a light lunch.

  Back on the road, riding as if in a trance. The sun rose.

  Forty-five miles from the destination, still blindly following the GPS, he got off the highway and soon found himself in some semblance of a town that showed only the slightest signs of habitation. There were a few houses, half–blown-down shacks behind chain-link fences, most with the parted-out, rusted husk of a vehicle dead on the lawn of sand. They seemed more like caves, features of the landscape that might provide some shelter, rather than man-made additions to it. The only human he saw was a pudgy child sitting on a concrete foundation slab tossing Skittles to a dog on a chain.

  Oscar drove through the center of this town and came out on the other side into an empty expanse of sagebrush that stretched on for miles, over which three lines of sawtooth mountains interlocked in the distance. He drove on this two-lane road for fifteen minutes, encountering nothing except a few trucks.

  His adrenal glands were back into overdrive now, and he pulled onto the shoulder to urinate. The desert soaked up his water and in a few moments the ground at his feet was completely dry again.

  It was eerily quiet out here. He could see the headlights of an approaching truck so far in the distance that they barely seemed to be moving at all. From the hard ground he dug out a fist-sized rock and threw it as far as he could into the brush. The dusty impact was clearly audible from twenty yards away.

  * * *

  This road turned into one that was smaller and less well paved. He drove through an open cattle gate and yet another road, smaller still, and Oscar couldn’t tell if he was on private property now or not. Ahead, after a few more minutes, he saw what Dawn told him he would find: a tiny abandoned truck stop that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the early fifties, before the interstate siphoned off all the traffic. He pulled into the parking lot under a red-lettered sign that read simply FOOD.

  On one side of him, off about thirty yards, was the empty road. On the other side was an uninterrupted expanse of brush that dipped down toward the horizon. A great pall of dust, lit in the angled morning sun, hung over a brown sliver in the distance that Os
car realized after a moment must have been the country of Mexico.

  It was 7:30, half an hour early. He shut off the engine and got out.

  The little truck stop was boarded up, but half of the boards were missing. The interior was covered with indecipherable graffiti and broken glass. A line of swiveled diner stools still stood in the filthy shade, but the counter that was once in front of them had been taken away. Instead of going inside, Oscar sat down on a stone bench by the derelict gas pumps. A lizard scurried out from under his boots.

  Sitting on the bench, he felt an unexpected stillness. He received some amorphous ideas about the absurdity of circumstance but was unable to pin anything down. He settled on: Things could be so many different ways, but this is the way that they are.

  In a few minutes, off across the brush in the distance, there was some kind of disturbance, which he soon decided was a plume of dust. He watched it draw closer. It was hard to tell how far away it was: one mile? Five? He went back into the car and dug out the pack of cigarettes from the day before and lit one.

  Oscar noticed that his hands, although they weren’t quite shaking, were doing something weird, responding to something like coldness that moved in waves out from his center.

  After a minute, a dot appeared at the base of the plume of dust. Slowly, it resolved into a helmeted man on an ATV, hauling ass, up on two feet like an equestrian to brace himself against the bumps in the ground. Oscar finished the cigarette and ground out the butt under his heel.

  His phone rang, which startled him, and he looked at the incoming number: his father. Shit, he thought, and answered it.

  “Dad, hi, it’s actually a pretty bad time, what’s up?”

  It was a bad connection—he heard only several garbled consonants of his father’s voice. He looked at the phone’s display—just one bar of reception.