A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  Matadamas laid the gun down on his knee so he could use both hands to open the bag.

  Oscar found it funny that now, so many years later, he had the vocabulary to describe the feeling of the memory to himself; it was tinged with a sense of dawning, unexpressed calamity. Just how much trouble was he in? Was his mother about to turn the corner in the Seville, her eyes red with tears, begging the forgiveness of her only son from out the window before the car had even stopped? Or had she maybe taken to her bed with one of her episodes, and was his father working late, so that Oscar’s absence wouldn’t even be noted for hours? Would he have to walk? Could he make it home before the coming of the full dark that lands on Indiana like a closing cellar door? These were the only possibilities he could imagine, just these few, and yet the world was so, so full of them. They surrounded him, waiting to be born. How he had gotten home that day, he could no longer remember.

  Oscar lunged and grabbed for the gun with two hands.

  Matadamas got a hand on it before Oscar could pull it away and the cab filled with light for an instant and Oscar was deafened by a popping sound that he felt do something to the air around his face. The window to his left exploded outward and glass tinkled down around his shoulders.

  When he next realized what was happening, he saw that he was holding the gun, and even pointing it at Matadamas’s belly. His ears rang painfully.

  “Keys,” he said.

  Matadamas seemed more perplexed than surprised. “Well, this I do not believe.”

  “Keys!” Oscar screamed, gesturing with the gun as if it was a leash attached to a dog that he wouldn’t be able to control much longer.

  “Just relax—you’re shaking. Relax your finger or it will go off,” Matadamas said and took the keys from his jacket pocket and placed them on the dashboard. A light flicked on in a room of the motel.

  “Now, out.”

  “Oh my God,” Matadamas said, eyes wide in rage, reaching slowly for the door handle. “You’re already dead.”

  “I’m acting out of fear, which is dangerous for us both. I think I should probably shoot you but I’m going to let you get out of the car.”

  Matadamas opened the door, and after one look into Oscar’s eyes that seemed for an instant almost intrigued before darkening, he dropped down and sprinted out over the boundary of the parking lot and into the night. Oscar grabbed the keys, fumbled them into the ignition, and was back on the highway in thirty seconds. One mile later, going in the opposite direction on the other side of the median, a police cruiser hauled ass, sirens blaring.

  “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck,” Oscar repeated to himself over and over, out loud. The gun lay pointed barrel-down in the cupholder. He couldn’t bring himself to touch it or even move it out of view. He used his left elbow to knock out onto the road the little gems of glass that still clung to the window. Eventually, he picked up the gun with two fingers like it was something contaminated and jammed it underneath the driver’s seat as deeply as he could reach without taking his eyes off the road.

  The sky lightened and then suddenly there was the sun although he had not seen it rise. The rest of the drive home passed without incident.

  18

  “Whoa,” Dawn said when she opened the door.

  “I haven’t really slept,” Oscar said. He had avoided his reflection and so he didn’t know what he looked like, but he had never felt so bleary and exhausted in his entire life. He dragged his spirit behind him on the ground like a tangled parachute. The bag was slung over his shoulder. It was sometime in the afternoon.

  “Is that it, right there?” Dawn said to him, looking at the bag. “Wow. Come in.”

  There was no one else inside. He put the bag down on the kitchen counter. Dawn locked the front door behind him and closed the blinds that covered the sliding glass door that led to the back steps. Slowly, she opened the bag and removed its contents, stacking the four bricks on top of one another, like bulging reams of printer paper.

  “Holy moly,” she said. She was wearing a bathrobe over jogging shorts and a university T-shirt.

  “You should have told me it was going to be this much,” Oscar said.

  “You would have never gone.” Dawn still looked at the stack of bricks, her eyes tinged with reverence. She hefted one of the bricks like a chicken at the grocery store, feeling its weight.

  “You must have been worried,” he said.

  “About you or the...this?” she said.

  “I was talking about that,” he said, pointing. “But now I maybe think that you were worried about me, too.”

  “I think you underestimate yourself. I was never worried.”

  “Hey. Guess fucking what. There was a gun pointed at me. It went off actually. This is the first thing I should have mentioned. Your window is broken.”

  “Wait, really? That’s okay about the window. A gun?”

  “There were probably three of them, actually. There were three guys. Just like I told you.”

  “Do they know where to find us?”

  “Maybe? I have no idea.” He reached into his pocket and tossed the tracking device, without its battery, onto the counter.

  Dawn set down the brick. “What the hell is that?”

  “I guess you thought I was hallucinating or something.”

  A change came over Dawn’s face. “This could be an issue for sure,” she said.

  Oscar noticed for the first time their closeness. Dawn’s eyes found his and then moved away.

  “What is your deal?” Oscar said.

  “What?”

  “Admit that you were worried about me.”

  “Fine! All right. Jeez.”

  “All right what?” Oscar asked.

  “All right I was worried about you! What an asshole.”

  Oscar pulled her to him and kissed her. It was long enough that he had enough time to think, Well! Look what’s happening now. And then he pulled away.

  “I swear to Christ you almost got me killed,” he said.

  “But you’re fine. We will deal with it. And now we’re rich.”

  This time she kissed him.

  Physical memories returned to him: the way her body responded to his. The way her energy unspooled around him and recoiled just when he thought he could interpret it.

  Her bathrobe was discarded on the kitchen floor, next to one of his boots, the other in the hall leading to her bedroom near his Piggly Wiggly shirt. Her room was dark, bed unmade, window fan running, blinds already drawn.

  They coupled quickly, as if to sneak the act by one another. At one point, with her on top of him, Oscar had the sudden thought, I should be dead! and he was afforded a moment to perceive how much he preferred the current arrangement of things. He even obtained some distance from the essentially empty descriptors that he used at all times to regard himself: professor, son, brother, moral actor, not a genius academic but a diligent journeyman, unwealthy, still largely screwed. For a moment he fell away from, or was lifted out of, these ideas, into a space where some unstrippable part of himself could exist unalloyed.

  Afterward they both were silent. Oscar lay down next to her, too tired to feel awkward or out of place. He had entered a new realm of fatigue, something that felt like a good kind of death, a complete emptying rather than a burdening. The last thought he had before he fell asleep was that if the person he thought he was differed considerably from the person that he actually was, he would never know it. When he closed his eyes, he saw road.

  * * *

  When he awoke, the clock on Dawn’s nightstand said 2:15 p.m.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Dawn was still next to him. She opened her eyes.

  “Did you have class today?” he said.

  “Did you?” she said.

  He laughed. “How are your grades?”

  �
��Great.”

  “That’s good.”

  She moved an arm and a leg against him and he responded by stretching toward her, and no feeling of wrongness or impropriety was introduced by this moment of something like tenderness, so they lay like that and breathed.

  “You snore so loud,” she said.

  “I’ve been told that.”

  “I left you here and then went and worked on a paper and came back four hours later and you hadn’t moved an inch. I let you sleep.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was a silence and Oscar took a moment to regard himself from the outside and noted how worried the current state of affairs would have made him even a week ago. But what was one more bad decision?

  After another minute she said, “Out there on the road, did you stop to think about the morality of this stuff? Coke, I mean. Facilitating its consumption specifically.”

  “I tried not to.”

  “It’s something I’ve struggled with. But it’s just coke. Who am I to deny the rich kids their coke?”

  “That’s not very universalizable, is it?”

  “We’re not in class.”

  “We’re certainly not.”

  Oscar had tried cocaine exactly once, while visiting a friend as an undergrad. He had spent a few hours feeling like a once-in-a-generation genius, a capital-G Great Man destined to change the course of Western Thought, and had in fact left a party to sit on a bench under a streetlamp and scribble thoughts furiously in his little notebook. But when he went through his notes the next morning, he found them to be execrable where they were even coherent, and he became disgusted and ashamed with the psychotropic ruse that had been played on him, a feeling that lingered all day like the offensively weird taste in the back of his throat.

  They were silent again and Oscar wondered if maybe he might as well just drift back to sleep but then she spoke again.

  “Is it weird if I tell you I’m proud of you?”

  “A little, yeah. I still feel pretty disgusting.”

  “Okay. I won’t say it. Oh! I guess I owe you some money,” she said.

  “I get it just like that, huh?”

  “I’m excited to give it to you.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “A man deserves the sweat of his brow.”

  Oscar sat up and leaned back against the headboard and rubbed his eyes.

  Dawn said, “Although I must admit that I find it odd that you’re still here.”

  “I can barely move,” Oscar said, and it was true. He felt wrung out, his body come to collect the ruinous interest on all the adrenaline it had fronted him.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I’ll make breakfast.”

  * * *

  They were sitting at her black marble kitchen island and eating perfectly cooked omelets and drinking coffee from a large French press when Ramos knocked once and entered through the front door, wearing all white from his sneakers to his baseball cap. He did a double take when he saw Oscar.

  “Don’t say anything,” Dawn said to Ramos when she saw the way he looked at them together in their states of undress. “I mean, about this. You’re allowed to speak.”

  Ramos walked over and placed his hands on the countertop. “So, nice job, I guess,” he said to Oscar.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Oscar.

  “Is this it here?” Ramos said, gesturing at the bag.

  “Open it,” Dawn said.

  Ramos hefted the bag onto the marble and unzipped it. He pursed his lips and nodded at the bricks within, a sign of respect. He raised a hand toward it and looked at Dawn as if to say, may I?

  “Go ahead. It’s killer.”

  Oscar hadn’t seen her sample it. She must have done so when he was asleep.

  Ramos wiggled his pinky finger into the hole that Oscar had made with the key and extracted it with a pile the size of a large pea on his nail.

  “Might want to go easy,” Dawn said.

  “Yeah?”

  Dawn nodded.

  He returned some of the pea to the bag and lifted half the original amount to his nose, covered one nostril with his free hand, and snorted.

  “Well, hey,” he said, eyes wide, looking at the corners of the room one after the other. “Hey hey hey. I’m getting the picture.”

  He regarded the satchel with new awe. “This’ll straighten people out,” he said.

  “Not without your help, fair Ramos,” Dawn said.

  “Aye aye, capitán,” Ramos said. He zipped up the satchel and slung it to his back. He gave Oscar a collegial shove in the shoulder. “Look at you, Mr. Drug Runner over here!” he said, and then left out the front door.

  In fifteen seconds he came back inside. “What the fuck happened to the window?”

  Oscar had the coffee mug halfway to his lips. “An unimaginably vast system of causality lashed out and passed through it,” he said.

  “It got shot,” Dawn said. “Other parties became involved. Everything’s fine. But be careful.”

  * * *

  After he was gone, Oscar turned to Dawn. “Would you really have had him hurt me?”

  “A girl shouldn’t tell all of her secrets. Hey, speaking of that, stay right there. This is the fun part.” Dawn dropped down off her kitchen stool and disappeared somewhere around the corner. In a minute she was back, carrying a manila envelope. She dropped it down in front of Oscar. “That’s not all of it, obviously.”

  Oscar looked at the envelope and then blankly across the room.

  “Well, come on,” she said.

  He picked up the envelope, pinched the sides so that the opening went ovoid, and looked down into it, keeping it at arm’s length. An inch-thick wad of green lay at the bottom.

  “That’s five thousand dollars,” Dawn said. “You ever seen that much in one place?”

  Oscar took out the bills, held together with a rubber band. Compared to the briefcases of money that you see in movies, it was frankly unimpressive. But fifty one-hundred dollar bills was fifty one-hundred dollar bills. And more than that, they were real. And they were his. And no, he had never seen so much cash in one place.

  He tried to feel exultant but couldn’t quite muster it, which Dawn saw on his face.

  “I know,” she said. “We’re good people—this doesn’t feel very good at first. Try to think of the problems this can solve. Think of your family.”

  Something occurred to Oscar. “Where am I going to tell them I got this?” He was still staring into the envelope.

  “Maybe you can say that you had another paper published.”

  “Ha!” Oscar laughed. “Hahaha!” But then he realized that Dawn wasn’t kidding, and furthermore that she was right, that his family would believe whatever he told them.

  “When do I get the rest?” he said.

  “Very soon. First the cash must flow.”

  Oscar remembered something else. “Can I actually borrow your computer for a minute? I need to send an email.”

  He took her laptop back into her room, logged in to his email account, and opened a response to St. Germaine’s last email.

  Hi, Paul,

  Your whole thing is basically just determinism, which is a term that you might want to ask your granddaughter to show you how to Google. There’s been quite a lot written on the subject, and you’ll you probably find some of it rather interesting. The matter of free will is not nearly as simple as you lead your “students” to believe—you’re at least a few decades behind and I’d hate for you to embarrass yourself further. If you live in northern California, I’d even be happy to let you audit my class. Where do you live by the way? Your last email neglected to mention.

  More importantly, there’s one other issue that I wanted to touch upon, and that’s that I’m given to understand that my father is under the impression that h
e owes you some type of monetary debt related to the bullshit you fed my mother. Surely we can agree, in recognition of how much you have already taken from my family, that this debt died with her?

  Yours in compatibilism (which is another term you should look up),

  Oscar

  19

  Oscar parted with Dawn and walked back to his apartment the long way, avoiding the heart of campus. Now that his mind was free to explore the implications of his actions, he didn’t feel particularly great about supplying the student body with drugs that could, he considered now somehow for the first time, potentially kill them. The envelope full of cash was tucked into the front of his pants.

  Walking was so slow. He missed the Range Rover already.

  And God—how had he not thought of this, not even once, this was practically his job for God’s sake—how much violence was represented by the mountain of coke for which he had just found a market? How much misery of an economically vulnerable people, deaths in crossfire, revenge killings, chainsaw beheadings?

  He walked through the door of his apartment and fell into his bed without taking off his boots.

  This was supposed to be a relief, a victory, to be back home safe with the whole thing over, but the one thing just led to more things and he still felt like shit and he still missed his mother and this wasn’t really his home. And how much money was five thousand dollars, really? Even forty?

  He pulled the covers over his body and then up over his head and tried to go to sleep even though it was only 4:00 p.m. and he wasn’t tired. He clutched the envelope of money to his chest. This impulse is bad, he told himself, you know what this is. This is like trying to die. But the pull was too strong, and soon he was asleep, dreaming of lizards crawling up out of Roman ruins that were frozen in a sea of ice.