He dug in his pockets for the cigarettes and lighter. The pack was squashed, but he bent one cigarette back into shape. The lighter, however, had apparently vanished. He went into the store and bought another one and lit up as he walked back outside. He was starting to understand the appeal.
This was still navigable, he told himself back in the car, his hands finally beginning to slow their shaking. There was still a safe path out of here. The men who he thought were following him probably weren’t. Maybe the cops had the license plate number of the car, that wasn’t even directly connected to him, but maybe they didn’t, and they only had him for speeding anyway. No reason to scramble the helicopters.
Still, though, being surrounded by various forms of oblivion on all sides was threatening to crack him up. He had been a criminal for all of four hours and was already coming apart. How were there people that did this regularly?
He tried to think like one of them, both to get into the mindset and to remind himself that, despite what it currently looked like, he in fact was not: I am a criminal. I do what I want and get away with it. I make large amounts of money quickly and with comparatively small amounts of expended effort. I am a predator. I spare no thought for the safety or well-being of strangers. I am a bad man and I am fine with that. I think of little beyond ways to effect my own personal gain.
This was enough to at least get him to turn the key in the ignition.
“Okay, be smart,” he said. “Be smart.”
Thinking now only of himself, he realized that Dawn, in her desire to get her hands on the bag that was currently wedged into the wheelwell, might have been incorrect in her advice to get back ASAP. He felt that he needed to stay off the highway for a little while, partially to regain his composure and partially to let some of the hypothetical heat on the part of the police, who might or might not be looking for him, dissipate, if in fact that was really something that happened, if the concept of heat was a real concept at all.
Driving again, he continued roughly northward along backroads for another thirty minutes, with his eyes held on the rearview mirror as much as through the windshield. His body felt battered by his nerves—his neck seized in pain from the tension and he had trouble turning his head. When he no longer felt sun on his skin, he realized suddenly that he was in a forest of great natural beauty, with redwoods towering over the winding road on either side.
He came out of these woods and pulled into an empty scenic overlook situated above an enormous lake. He stepped out of the car and tried to massage his neck. “Please,” he said to his body. “Come on.” He sat on the guardrail and smoked another cigarette and watched a boat describe a white V of wake into the lake far below him, the lowering sun carpeting the water in gold. Well, this is nice, he allowed himself to think, until another car pulled onto the gravel and he nearly fell over backward.
* * *
Walking briskly back to the car with his head lowered, he received a text from Sundeep:
Dude, squash?
To which he replied:
Can’t, busy
He continued north, stopping to replot his course every time that the GPS insisted he get back on the highway. Eventually he zoomed the map out to check the distance back to the university and figured that at this pace, driving on backroads under the speed limit, his heart might give out under stress before he ever made it home.
So when it got dark, he merged back on the highway, stayed in the right lane, and maintained his non-suspicious speed. He dropped the mantra of criminality that had been running in his head nonstop since he had seized on it and even allowed himself to listen to NPR, but the dulcet tones of the news program did nothing to soothe him, as they usually did.
He had been operating at such a high gear all day that around 8:00 p.m. he felt as if he had been awake for forty-eight hours rather than sixteen. He nodded off twice behind the wheel, one time swerving severely into the shoulder, before he admitted to himself that he would not be sleeping in his own bed that night and that he was going to have to get that figured out.
He stopped at the next roadside motel, a national chain. He would close his eyes for two, maybe three hours, and then get back on the road. In the little main office, he was given a card to fill out, which had spaces for all kinds of info, including his license plate number.
“Oh, jeez, I can never remember this,” Oscar said, overacting for the girl behind the counter. “Let me go back out and check.”
With his body beginning to crash, he got back in the car and immediately back on the highway and drove another twenty-five miles until he saw from the road another, even shittier looking place called The Villa. A room was half the price and they didn’t ask him a single thing.
* * *
Back in another motel room, again on the second floor, again overlooking a parking lot that was like something Hopper might have painted on a day that he was feeling particularly depressed, again sitting on a bed that had been both witness and accomplice to who knows how many decades of various horrors, sexual and otherwise. From a room adjacent in an indeterminate direction it sounded as if someone was giving someone else a buzz cut in the bathroom. Now that he was sitting on the bed, going to sleep seemed absurd.
On the floor by the door were two bags, one that belonged to him and one that didn’t. He knew that he was going to have to open the latter one, to lay his eyes on whatever mysteries waited inside, to make sure he wasn’t just smuggling sawdust. Maybe a bunch of plastic snakes on springs would burst forth, and he would call Dawn and she would laugh and laugh. We got you so good! she would say. You sounded so scared!
But instead he opened the other bag, the one that belonged to him, and pulled out his laptop.
He wanted to send St. Germaine the email that he had now fully drafted in his head, but here there was not even the option to pay for Wi-Fi. In fact, he thought, groups of students could take a tour of this room to get a sense of what it was like to be alive in 1992; the insectile convexity of the television screen, the bulk of the yellowed-plastic phone, the insane teal pattern of the carpet. Why didn’t I bring a book with me?
Oscar realized for the first time how colossally stupid it was for him to even bring his laptop, just so that he could read an email. But then again, the bitter anger he felt when he saw St. Germaine on the screen had sustained him well and clarified his focus. That’s why he had been watching them slowly: he didn’t want to build up a tolerance. Plus, he recalled, Dawn had told him not to think, and he was good at following directions.
He keyed up one of the PSG videos and clicked the progress bar past the intro and left it paused, St. Germaine frozen on the screen leaning forward, with his mouth halfway open and his eyes mid-blink, looking palsied or possessed.
Oscar had at first thought that to watch all of the tapes would be to implicitly grant St. Germaine a legitimacy that Oscar had quickly decided he didn’t deserve. There was no reason to try to develop an understanding of the entire system when it was clear that St. Germaine didn’t seem to put too much thinking behind it himself. But Oscar could admit to himself now that he was beginning to understand. The man was a charlatan and a thief, an abuser of the weak, and his “work,” if it could even be called that, was based on nothing that could ever be accused of being a properly presented fact.
But still, there was something there. Perhaps it was merely the allure of showmanship, or the respect demanded of true conviction. Once, while Oscar was riding the L during a visit to Chicago, a raving preacher dressed in tatters stepped onto the train and began a nonsense sermon. Oscar could sense the other riders turning away and trying to block the man out, but Oscar listened to every word, secretly fascinated, as he explained the causes of the coming apocalypse, which had something to do with a stuffed elephant that he carried under his arm. Oscar thought that if he listened closely enough, he could sketch the outlines of the underlying logic and find some common rea
lity with this man. In fact, it seemed terribly important. The man had tears in his eyes—he was trying to save their lives. And nobody cared to see if he was telling any truth.
Maybe the real reason Oscar hadn’t watched all of the tapes was out of fear that they might start to make sense.
He hit Play. St. Germaine resumed the point that he had been making.
“You are an animal. Please understand this.”
Oscar hit Pause.
He got the bag that wasn’t his and sat with it on the bed like nervous prom dates. It certainly had heft.
He unzipped the large main compartment and saw what was inside.
Here in his hands was the proof that everything was exactly as it seemed. The bag of drugs was nothing other than a bag of drugs. This had all been real.
Dawn had refused to tell him the specifics of what he would be picking up beyond allowing that it was a fair quantity of illegal but not particularly immoral or physically ruinous drugs, which he assumed meant cocaine, but he never imagined that it could possibly be this much. Inside the bag were four large, soft brick shapes, each about the size of a ream of printer paper, wrapped in duct tape. He didn’t have to be a DEA agent to know they would weigh exactly one kilo each.
In this moment, Oscar doubted not only the spasm of bad decisions that had led him to this horrible ordeal, but also every decision he had ever made in his life: the decision to leave home, the decision to eschew the pursuit of money over all else, the decision to try to be truly smart, the endless hours he had spent in pursuit of perception.
He tried to return to his “I am a criminal” mantra to stem the rising tide of panic in his chest, but saw immediately that he would not be able to suppress it. He was seized with a single instinct, which was to get as much space as possible between himself and the contents of this bag.
A thought intruded, elbowing through the urge: You can flush it. And then you need to flush it. Flush it and tell Dawn you lost it, or sold it, or it was stolen, or to do her worst and go fuck herself but that she had chosen the wrong man for the job and he would rather take his chances with professional disgrace and financial ruin than bear this thing for another mile. Hell, flush it and go tell the cops yourself, see if her safeguards are as strong as she thinks.
Confident that he was finally thinking clearly, and forcing to the periphery of his thoughts the threats of physical violence and the promise of monetary salvation for his family, he dragged the bag into the tiny bathroom and sat down on the floor at the foot of the toilet. He knew that this was a bad idea, but it was nested under so many other bad ideas that he wasn’t even sure what that meant at this point. All he could think about was how good it would feel to be safe again.
He didn’t have a knife, so he produced his key ring and found the sharpest one, the small key to his book locker in the school library. He began to saw away at the middle of the duct tape of one of the bricks until a small hole developed. As the bag flexed, it exhaled tiny puffs of white powder, which landed on Oscar’s hands and immediately made him feel filthy.
Finally, he held the brick over the water of the bowl and thrust the key so that he could begin a lateral disemboweling cut. Some of the powder wafted out, like from a pitcher’s rosin bag.
The key clicked against something hard buried in the brick’s middle.
Hmm?
He brought the brick bag to his lap and poked around a bit more and confirmed that there was indeed something inside that was not powder. He worked the hole that he had made until it was about an inch long and he could get his fingers inside.
What he pulled out was another smaller ziplock bag that contained within it some kind of small electronic device.
Intrigued now, Oscar set the brick down on top of the other three and brought the device to the small desk and turned on the lamp. It was a little bit larger than one inch square, made of gray plastic, with a small battery compartment and something that looked almost like—an antenna.
Oh.
Oscar jumped, fumbled for the lamp switch, couldn’t find it, and ripped the cord out of the wall. Then he dove across the bed to turn out the overhead and frantically lowered the blinds. He double-checked that he had locked the dead bolt and fed the nut on the feeble little brass chain into its slot.
In the dark, taking care to make no noise, he went back to the desk and examined the device by the light of his shitty cell phone, which, he noted, was at 20 percent power.
Now that he was looking at things on their face, he did not attempt to convince himself that this thing was anything other than a tracking device of some sort.
It was indeed quite possible, he told himself, that I am being followed. Actually, he was just going to go ahead and mark that one down as a definite. It was quite possible that he had been followed to this place. It was quite possible that his hypothetical followers were watching this room currently.
He went to the window and raised the level of the blinds to one millimeter above the sill so that he could kneel on the floor and look out at the parking lot. All seemed still. Passing light from the highway was visible over a small embankment on the other side of the lot, where arc lights illuminated a sad menagerie of cars that stood in contrast to his expensive, overdesigned SUV.
Although he was able to look at his situation truthfully, he was not yet prepared to decide on a course of action, and so he stayed like this, on his knees, forehead pressed against the fabric of the blinds, for some time. After what felt like an hour but was probably more like ten minutes, he found that he was praying.
Dear God, dear Mom, Uncle Steven who died in a helicopter in Vietnam, please help me, please help me, please help me...
His eyes closed.
After another indeterminate amount of time, something either without or within him caused them to open. Then, as he watched, a black pickup truck, the black pickup truck, pulled into the lot and parked. Its lights shut off.
Oscar noted with some degree of happiness that he did not feel particularly scared, perhaps because his capacity for fear had been pushed past a certain threshold beyond which further increases failed to register. Or, better stated, he was scared, he was fucking terrified, but he wasn’t paralyzed.
He crawled on his knees (for some reason this felt safer than standing, even though the blinds were closed), and grabbed the device and lay down with it on the floor next to the bed. From outside he thought he heard car doors shut.
He propped his phone up on its side and in the anemic light of its screen fumbled with the battery door on the strange device. He slid it open with his thumb and detached the D battery from the wire clip.
Back at the window peering through the slit in the blinds, he could make out three slim figures, dark with shadow, conferring by the hood of the truck. One of them held something in his hand that glowed, either a phone or something with a screen, and he gestured with it toward the building, sweeping it from end to end. The figure in the middle, the tallest one who wore the hat that Oscar had noticed earlier on the road, shook his head, and then said something to the third, and then turned back to the first and prodded him in the chest with his finger.
As Oscar watched them, they seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. As they began to move toward the building, they were swept for an instant in the headlights of a turning car and he could see their clothes—jeans, boots—but not their faces. They passed down out of Oscar’s vision into the row of doors on the first floor.
Oscar couldn’t think. Tried his limbs and couldn’t move. He felt sweat form on the back of his legs.
A minute later, by looking sideways out of the extreme edge of the window, he could see an arm appear at the top of the stairs at the end of the second floor’s outdoor hallway. A veined hand and forearm below a rolled-up white sleeve—that’s all the angle would allow him to see. The hand extended a finger and pointed down the hall.
&nb
sp; Oscar lowered the blinds completely and lay down on his stomach on the opposite side of the bed from the door. He could hear footsteps approaching slowly from down the hall, but he did not hear the men say anything to each other. He felt his heartbeat against the floor like hammer blows and had the momentary terror that it could be heard out in the hall and would give him away like a scent.
The sound of their footsteps passed from the left of the door and moved down to the next room to the right, stopped there, and then returned two rooms back to the left. The sounds of softly spoken Spanish followed. Oscar couldn’t pick out any words.
They were now standing directly outside his door. He could hear six feet and the weight they carried.
He felt their presence like a fire, sucking the oxygen out of the room through the crack under the door. Peripheral sounds died away. The whirr of the fan, the tiny hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzz of the ice machine outside were all muted as the world seemed to pause for an inhalation in the moment before the window would shatter or the door would come flying in off its hinges.
There was a tiny knock at the door.
It was so quiet that Oscar had trouble believing what he’d heard. Perhaps it was just a creaking of a floorboard. He focused on the feel of the carpet against his face, tried to burrow down into it as if it were soft black sand, clung to it like a vertical rock face. Outside, he heard three voices’ worth of harsh whispers.
Then he heard the footsteps recede down the hall toward the stairs.
When Oscar worked up the nerve to open his eyes, peel himself from the floor, and crack the blind again, either a minute or an hour later, the truck was gone.
He slumped down with his back against the door. His heart was more whirring than beating. He tried to take a few deep breaths.
He picked up the receiver of the room’s phone and dialed Dawn. It rang four times and went to her voice mail. He hung up and texted her from his cell:
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 11