A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

“Sorry Dad, I can’t hear you—Dad! I’m gonna call you back in a little bit.” He hung up.

  The ATV was only a few hundred yards away now. He could hear its engine.

  For the first time, he thought about guns. Didn’t guns usually make appearances in scenes like this? A thousand movie scenes played before him. Would this guy have a gun on him? Should Oscar pretend like he had a gun? He saw the opening scene from No Country for Old Men in his mind, gut-shot narcos dying of thirst in the desert, a desert that hadn’t looked too dissimilar from the one in which Oscar currently stood and in fact might not have been too far away.

  That kind of thinking doesn’t help anything, Oscar told himself. Either he was about to get shot or he wasn’t. Too late now.

  A minute later the man brought the ATV to rest in front of the Range Rover and dismounted. Instead of removing the helmet, he only flipped up the polarized visor. Blue eyes set in brown skin.

  “A nice day for driving,” the man said, his accented voice muffled in the padding of the helmet.

  “You’re the guy,” Oscar said, because here he was, finally: the guy.

  The man swung a backpack off his shoulders and handed it to Oscar. He flipped his visor down again, turned, and threw one leg back over the ATV.

  Oscar couldn’t stop himself.

  “Wait,” he said.

  The man swiveled back around on the seat of the bike, both hands still on the handles.

  “So...that’s it?” Oscar said.

  The man looked him over. Oscar saw himself in the reflection of the visor. “What else would there be?” he said, and gunned the throttle, taking off back across the desert in the direction from which he had come, back into the plume that hadn’t even had time to settle, leaving Oscar standing there, dumbfounded.

  He snapped back to life when he realized that he was now, officially, doing something exquisitely, almost unfathomably illegal. His head was a din of alarm bells. The pack, an olive green military-surplus thing, was heavy in his hands, seemingly filled to capacity. He knew he should probably check its contents but he couldn’t bring himself to open the zipper. Instead he opened the empty trunk of the car, dug under the floor mat, and found the wheelwell for the spare tire. He nestled the pack, as gently as possible, into the space in the middle of the tire, and replaced the mat.

  When he pulled out, the tires squealed.

  * * *

  By the time he made it back to the small town, his adrenaline was thrumming so bad that he began to feel like he might lose control of the car; his hands shook severely. He pulled over and gingerly lit a cigarette with quivering fingers. He tried to tell his body that physically speaking, everything was fine, that there was no need for a fight-or-flight response, but it refused to listen.

  He got out of the car and did some stretches and jumping jacks to try to get some blood flowing and smooth out his nerves. From the run-down convenience store across the street he bought water and a pack of gum, and while he stood at the counter he realized that he might be on camera. He paid cash.

  When he came back out, a woman in shorts and a Lakers jersey stood by the car. It was unclear where she had come from.

  “Nice car, guy,” she said.

  Oscar got back behind the wheel without saying a word.

  * * *

  Going north, now carrying the package, Oscar’s mind began to spin out different negative scenarios at a rate that astounded even him, until it gave up on specifics and began to simply broadcast a blanket of white-noise distress. Oscar tried on different mantras in an attempt to calm himself down and found that the most effective was something that returned to him from one of the St. Germaine tapes: There is no such thing as a decision. There is no such thing as a decision.

  He felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, but he didn’t reach for it. After thirty seconds, it vibrated again. The third time, he violated his promise to himself that he would not take his eyes off the road and fished it out of his pocket to look at the screen to see who was calling—his sister. A text from her popped up while he was looking at it.

  Can you pick up? It’s about Dad.

  Oscar pulled into the parking lot of a Burger King and called her back. She picked up immediately.

  “Hi, Oscar.”

  “This is not a very good time.”

  “I can’t find Dad. His car is gone and I haven’t seen him in two days.”

  “Two days?”

  “Well, maybe more like a day and a half. But this is very unlike him. I’m worried. Where would he go? He’s got nowhere to go.”

  “He probably just went—yeah, actually, you’re right. Did you check with the Andersons?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Okay. Well, it’s early to be too concerned just yet. Keep calling around, maybe try his Knights friends, see if they know anything? I’m dealing with something that requires a lot of attention right now but I will call you back soon.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to keep this terrible feeling at bay for now. Take care of yourself, please.”

  “I will.”

  He hung up and pulled back onto the road.

  * * *

  It was another hour before his brain alerted him to phenomena worth noting in his rearview mirror. Something about the way that the sun glinted off the grill of a car behind him by about half a mile reminded him of a way that he might have seen and failed to record the same glinting many miles and several exits earlier.

  In another ten minutes, it was still there. For a while a truck came between them, but then it took an exit and the car, which Oscar thought he could now discern was black, remained, although it had dropped behind another quarter mile. Oscar decreased his speed by ten miles per hour to see if the car would gain on him, but it maintained the same distance.

  As he drove, two narratives existed in parallel in Oscar’s head: one in which he was being followed and one in which he wasn’t. As strongly as he was able to argue with himself for the latter, the idea of the former was immediately the more vivid and compelling of the two possibilities, full of details about what would happen next. He applied slightly more pressure to the gas pedal and fled into the increasing traffic.

  The road had grown back into a proper highway now, and when he got off around noon to fill up the tank again at a large filling station, he first stopped and positioned the car so that he could watch the exit ramp. No black vehicle followed him off. And he didn’t see anything that looked familiar while he took his time to walk around the tarmac and glimpse around the dumpsters to the far side of the Arby’s.

  You are being ridiculous, he told himself. Keep it together. You’re almost done.

  But then, back on the road twenty minutes later, he could swear he saw the car in the rearview again, only now he could tell that it wasn’t a car but a pickup truck. It approached closer than it had been before, to no more than two hundred yards behind him. Oscar could make out three men sitting across the front.

  Oscar experienced a new and unnamable terror. He felt some kind of clear, perfect perception, although perceiving nothing in particular. It was like looking through a powerful telescope at nothing but empty night sky with no stars, knowing that you are looking but knowing that you are looking at nothing. He told himself that this feeling was not doom.

  He studied the men in the rearview for a moment. He could barely make out their three figures, just dots really, but he felt as if he was making eye contact with the one in the middle. Something clicked inside of him, and his paralyzing fear turned into a more useful form of a similar energy. He looked up to assess the traffic in front of him, said, “Fuck this,” and hammered the accelerator.

  The car took off like a rocket sled down the left lane.

  Driving like he never had before in his life, Oscar wove through the handful of cars in his way and then got back in the left lane with a good straight s
tretch in front of him and opened it up. He watched the speedometer climb shockingly fast, eighty, ninety, and then one hundred. He had never driven one hundred before in his life. One hundred and one! Jesus Christ! It now felt not like he was driving a car, but like falling straight down, approaching terminal velocity.

  Everything in the rearview fell away. His brain turned on rarely used centers of operation as it struggled to compete with the new pace of input. Oscar maintained this speed for a full five minutes, the cars in front of him bailing out of the left lane as they saw him hurtling closer to them. The engine was loving it, barely exerting itself, just hitting its stride.

  “Yeah!” Oscar screamed at the smaller sedans as he passed. “Beat it!”

  You should probably slow down.

  The external world smeared into a blur and then began to fall away completely, beginning at the periphery as Oscar’s field of focus narrowed into a smaller and smaller area ahead of him. The faster he went, the farther out in front of the car he had to cast his eye to gather information, assessing other cars and their positions and speeds when they were seemingly a mile away, and then bang, he passed them, and they ceased to exist. This was fun.

  And then, at the exact instant that Oscar realized that this might not be the best idea even if he was being pursued, something worth noticing appeared in his rearview again. Red and blue lights.

  Oscar’s first thought was a mechanical one: Well, that makes sense. Then the rest flooded in: everything was already over, and it had hardly begun. I guess this’ll be it then, he thought. I made my play and it was looking okay for a minute there but now it’s about to be over. There was more than a small amount of relief in the idea.

  The cop had closed the distance with impressive speed and was on his tail before he could even move his foot from the accelerator to the brake. For one brief moment Oscar was struck with the simplicity of the notion that cops were not actually in physical control of your vehicle and that it was up to you to pull over when they asked you nicely with their lights, and that some people didn’t. His speed climbed from 101 to 102.

  Then his sinking rationality sent up a flare and he slowed down, which seemed to take around five miles, and pulled onto the shoulder, coming to rest like a meteor digging through steppe turf.

  He laid his forehead against the top of the wheel and began the process of making peace with his new life in prison. He searched the glovebox for registration and found none. Bad start.

  Oscar rolled down his window and waited.

  In his rearview, the cop had his door open before his car had come to a stop. He marched toward Oscar’s car furiously, shaking his head back and forth.

  How would he explain that the car wasn’t his? What would happen when they ran the plates? It had never been discussed. One of the edifices that Oscar had constructed to prop up this whole operation, namely that Dawn knew what she was doing, crumbled entirely.

  And then, in the space of that two seconds when the cop was still approaching the car, about as slow as walking, the black truck passed on his right. Its three riders all had their heads turned toward him, looking. Time slowed down enough for Oscar to see the fray on the front of the vaquero hat worn by the one in the middle. It seemed as if he had enough time to make eye contact with all three of them, and then they were gone.

  Back to his left, the officer was in his window.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You’re just gonna blast past me like that? Make me run you down?” the cop said. He was in his thirties, skinny, face red partly due to complexion and partly to the anger that radiated off him in a brutish aura.

  “Good morning, officer,” Oscar said, and then by way of apology, “I...didn’t see you.”

  “No, I suppose that you did not. But you see me now. License and registration.”

  “Here’s my license. I...can’t find the registration.”

  The officer smiled toothily, hand on hip, incensed and incredulous. He hadn’t yet taken the license. “Well, where is it?”

  “The car’s not mine.”

  “Not yours.”

  “My friend’s.”

  “Your friend okay with you driving his shiny new car damn near the goddamn speed of sound?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Where you headed so fast?”

  “I’m late for work.”

  “Oh yeah. And what line of work might that be?”

  “I’m a professor of philosophy.”

  “I coulda sworn I thought you said ‘work.’”

  “It’s a lot of grading. You’d be surprised.”

  “I didn’t know they paid Range Rover money for that.”

  “Yeah, it’s a friend’s.”

  “You mentioned that. Well, ponder this for a second, Aristotle—you got anything in this nice fast car that I should know about?” He peered into the car, the front and then the back. “In fact, why don’t you just go on ahead and step out of the vehicle, please?”

  Here it was, the curtain rising on Oscar’s fumbling production of deceit, his last act as a free man.

  His mouth opened to produce a lie before his brain had fully formed it.

  Some piece of communication gear chirped on the officer’s shoulder and emitted an indecipherably urgent message in the voice of the dispatcher.

  The cop didn’t respond immediately but instead looked directly at Oscar, weighing his dislike for him and the desire to charge him with as much as possible against the urgency of this new development. The dispatcher squawked again; this time Oscar thought he heard the term “all units.”

  Still looking at Oscar, the cop pressed a button and acknowledged the call.

  “You stay right here, you understand me? Someone else is coming for you. You don’t go anywhere,” he said as he turned and ran back across the dusty shoulder to his squad car.

  “I’m not sure about the legality of that,” Oscar said, but the cop had already slammed his door and peeled out hard into traffic with his lights and siren blaring.

  Oscar sat there, looking forward, breathing heavily. What had just happened?

  From where he was sitting, he could see the sign for the next exit. On the GPS it looked to be about an eighth of a mile away.

  He looked at the keys and wondered for a moment why the officer hadn’t just taken them, and then turned them in the ignition.

  * * *

  As soon as he had pulled off the highway and driven down backroads for fifteen minutes he pulled to the side of the road near an empty field and called Dawn.

  She picked up. “Your cell phone? Don’t you watch movies? Go find a pay phone.”

  She hung up.

  He drove on and found a pay phone outside of a convenience store in a strip mall a few miles away. He got out of the car, blipped it locked with the key fob, took a step away, and then turned and locked it again, double-checking.

  He was surprised to hear a dial tone when he lifted the receiver to his ear. Looking through the plate glass into the store, he accidentally made eye contact with the cashier. Oscar turned his face away from him as he dug into his pants pockets for a quarter, dropped it into the slot, and dialed, reading the number that she had texted him off his cell.

  “It’s me,” Oscar said.

  “Sorry, I’m not one hundred percent sure it’s a real thing, the cell phone thing, but it’s better to play it safe.”

  “I almost just got arrested.”

  “Wait, what? Did you meet the guy? Do you have it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that part was okay. Are people following me?”

  “Following you? Who?”

  “I mean, do you think there’s any reason why people would be following me?”

  “No. I mean, shit, no, definitely no.”

  Oscar heard her muffle the receiver with her hand and whisper something to someone else in
the room.

  “I might be losing it a little bit,” Oscar said.

  “You’re spooked.”

  “There were these three men, in a truck, and they were behind me for a while, and then when I sped up they were still there—”

  “Is that it?”

  “It’s hard to explain. But I really think they were tailing me.” Now that he was off the road, he wasn’t so sure. It was hard to recapture the claustrophobic clarity of that moment.

  “Listen to yourself. So people in a truck were behind you on the highway? Uh-oh, better freak out. You’re being paranoid, which I don’t blame you for, all things considered. But you’re fine. Just get back here. Did you say you were almost arrested?”

  “I came this fucking close, I swear.”

  “What happened?”

  “Deus ex machina. Won’t happen again.”

  “You need to relax. I can hear you breathing.”

  There was a silence. Oscar took three deep breaths, something his mother taught him to do when he was upset as a child.

  “Mexicans?” Dawn asked, betraying a note of real concern.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I guess.”

  “Well, it’s not really saying much anyway.”

  “I’m still okay, right?” he said. “This is all still okay?”

  “Everything is fine. You’re overthinking it. Stop being a pussy. You haven’t even crossed any borders. Just maybe stay off the highway for a little while until your head clears. Think of your family and hurry up and get back here. I’m hanging up now. Keep driving.” She hung up.

  Oscar turned around and sat down right on the curb. He felt like crying. The event was still too recent for him to fully comprehend how close he had come to being big-time arrested.

  He felt like he was drowning. The air he breathed seemed not to be properly working on his lungs.

  He tried to think about the money, about how it would feel when he cut his father a check and told his sister that he could help her out for a few months, if she needed it, while she figured out what she was going to do. But he found no motivating images. His imagination, as Sundeep would say, lacked any real robustness.