A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  20

  When he woke up early the next morning, his body yearned for its routine, and he let it take over. His Tuesday was not unlike most of his Tuesdays—he taught two classes, held his office hours, ate at the dining hall twice, and returned to his apartment in the evening to grade papers. He appreciated his life in a new light, the light that surrounded a man who had had a gun pointed at him, who had had a bullet slice the air very near his head.

  He called his sister, intending to tell her that it turned out he might actually be able to help with some money and then get off the phone before she was able to collect herself enough to ask questions.

  When she picked up, she assumed he was calling about their father. “I tried calling you like five times.”

  “Ah, shit, yes, I guess I assumed everything was okay, I’m sorry, I’ve been—”

  “He showed up yesterday, but he won’t tell me where he’s been. Didn’t even have a story. Just said that he didn’t want to talk about it and to please not press him.”

  “Well—yeah, that is weird.”

  “I never would have thought that Dad was capable of all this deceit.”

  “That’s not deceit. Just secrecy. But I know what you mean.”

  “Well, whatever it is I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. But I think we just need to let him process in whatever way he can.”

  “All right, well, look, I’ve got to go. Kids need dinner.”

  They were off the phone before Oscar could mention the money. He would have to call back and try again tomorrow. He would call his father, as well.

  For now, he had no idea what to do with the actual cash Dawn had given him. Was it safe to deposit it in his bank account? Until he had time to figure this out, he went to his room and put the envelope in his sock drawer. After a moment’s thought, he took it back out and placed it instead in the lowest drawer, with his pants.

  * * *

  In the stillness of his apartment, his thoughts returned to St. Germaine. He had realized that rather than trying to forget about him, he wanted to find him. There was an image that his mind assembled and presented to him, although he kept pushing it away: Oscar standing, holding a wrench in some dusty Mexican landscape, while St. Germaine cowered in front of him, begging for mercy. But, he reminded himself, I would never actually want to hurt him. He only wanted to ask the man a few questions, questions that he couldn’t recall at the moment but which would surely occur to him eventually.

  When he sat down at his computer, he saw that he had another email from the department chair’s administrative assistant, responding to the longer one that he had not yet brought himself to read:

  Please confirm receipt of the below email. Thank you.

  He was steeling himself to finally read it, when, as he looked at the screen, a new email popped up from St. Germaine. It read only:

  Oscar, I can only reiterate how sorry I am for your loss. However, please do not contact me again.

  Oscar immediately composed a long response, but when he read it back to himself, the words seemed like those of someone who was mentally unwell, which scared him. Instead, he deleted what he had written and copied in a link to purchase the free will anthology text that he taught in his class, and hit Send.

  Afterward, he gathered what alcohol could still be found in the apartment and drank himself to sleep.

  The next day, Oscar taught his two classes and then went to his office to hold his office hours as usual. He told himself that afterward, he would read the email from the department chair’s assistant and then take the elevator to the chair’s office and explain how he had had to miss a few more classes than he had expected in order to deal with his mother’s death but that everything had now returned to normal and that he was looking forward to regaining focus on the work of teaching that he loved so much and that if perhaps a certain unsavory rumor had made its way to his attention, he would be more than happy to discuss its falsity.

  His office hours were well attended, and he spent forty minutes going over a summary of Kant’s aesthetics with a trio of energetic sophomores. After that, he met with a senior who wanted to inquire about a graduate school recommendation letter, which Oscar happily agreed to provide. On her way out, she held the door open for someone, and Ramos walked in.

  A moment of dissonance pixilated Oscar’s thoughts as a figure from his recent fever dream invaded his actual life in physical form, scratching his crotch, looking at Oscar’s diplomas on the wall, the walking embodiment of bad news.

  “It’s crazy how they just let anyone walk around this campus, right?” Ramos said, sitting down in one of the two Windsor chairs in front of Oscar’s desk. Instead of all white, today he wore all black—black jeans, black T-shirt, black sneakers, black baseball cap.

  Oscar said the first thing that entered his mind. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “This may surprise you,” Ramos said with a slow lilt to indicate that he wasn’t answering the question, “but I never applied to college. I thought it was more prudent to enter the workforce.”

  “I feel compelled to ask you again—why are you here.”

  Something about the way Ramos slouched affectedly in his chair made it hard for Oscar to believe that he ever allowed himself to be intimidated by this kid. Now he was simply annoyed.

  “Although, do you think it’s too late for me to apply? I saw a flyer out there—how much does it cost per year here?”

  “Do you reside in-state? Not that bad. Twelve K a year or something like that.”

  “State of intoxication. State of confusion. Oh by the way, I had the car window fixed. You owe me two hundred bucks.”

  “I am literally begging you to announce your purpose for being here.”

  “All right, shit, fine, man, I thought we were cool...” Ramos said, digging his phone out from his pocket. He thumbed opened an image. “One of my guys took this and sent it to me. You recognize?” He slid the phone across the desk.

  Oscar looked at the image on the screen and a sheet of icy panic unfurled from his neck down to his fingertips.

  It would be innocuous to anyone else, but how could he forget the grill of the black pickup truck, after he had watched it in his rearview chasing him across the desert?

  “What is this? Where was it taken?” Oscar said, a rush of energy now warming a spot in his chest that the panic had frozen.

  “I told you. One of my guys. Said he thought this truck was casing his shit two days in a row. Took this picture. Guy sped off.” Ramos examined Oscar’s face, which had gone white. “You look like you recognize.”

  “That’s the truck. That was the guy. The fucking guy. Three guys. Were there three guys or just one guy?”

  “My guy said it was just the one guy. What’s his deal?”

  “I think he was very disappointed that he didn’t get to murder me.” Oscar’s hands were on his face.

  “So what you’re saying is we might actually be dealing with some shit here, then,” said Ramos.

  “Uh, yes. When was this taken?”

  “This morning. You had words with this dude?”

  “He’s serious business, Ramos.”

  “You sayin’ I ain’t serious? I can handle my shit.”

  “How long have you even been doing this?”

  “All I’ve ever been doing is this.”

  “I’ll take that to mean, like, a year and a half.”

  “Stop playing, man. I came here for your opinion. How do you think we should proceed?”

  Oscar looked up from his palms. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  * * *

  He called Dawn as soon as Ramos left. “You’re smart but you pick bad business partners.”

  “Ramos found you?”

  “I need you to at least trick me into thinking that you understand the da
nger we are in.”

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “So you do think that’s the guy? What’d you say his name was—Matadamas...?”

  “It is him.”

  “Let’s say it is. What do you think he wants?”

  “You mean, besides the small mountain of cocaine? I think he thinks we have unfinished business or something. That we’re connected. I don’t know. It’s weird.”

  “I’ll be honest, some of these guys are real killers.”

  “If the things he told me were true, then I’d say that he definitely qualifies.”

  “This is not the kind of thing I ever really wanted to encounter.”

  “You’re in the drug trade, Dawn.”

  “You are, too, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Do you have the car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where can you meet me?”

  He had almost made it out of the room before he ran back to the desktop computer and clicked on the email from the chair’s assistant before he could stop himself.

  YOUR IMMEDIATE RESPONSE REQUESTED

  As you will no doubt recall, last year’s annual philosophy department barbecue was, although a fun afternoon overall, not without issue. A failure of some department members to RSVP in a timely manner meant that the insufficient number of hotdogs that had been purchased were quickly depleted, and a lack of clarity regarding who was contributing what resulted in the appearance of five containers of potato salad and none of macaroni salad...

  It went on and on like this. Oscar grabbed his bag and sprinted out of the room.

  * * *

  She was waiting for him behind the wheel of the Range Rover in back of the department building.

  “You don’t have a license, right?” he said after getting in.

  “Unfortunately I have to tell you that that was a lie.”

  They drove immediately off campus, hardly speaking. There were still some grains of shattered safety glass in the floor mat. Twenty minutes away, finally feeling somewhat safer, they pulled into a parking lot of a large sporting goods store.

  “My money, it’s just sitting in my drawer at home,” he said. “Do you think it’s safe?”

  “I mean, no. It’s probably the money that he wants, right? Why else would he follow you this far?” Dawn said. “He must know you wouldn’t just hold on to the product.”

  “I have no idea,” Oscar said. “Wait. That’s not true. I think he wants to kill me.”

  Dawn’s eyebrows furrowed, her mouth pursed. “That’s such a weird thing to hear someone say.”

  “It’s weird to say.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too.”

  “It’s reasonable.”

  “I’ve got to be honest about something,” Dawn said. “And I know it’s extremely inconvenient and doesn’t reflect well on me or my psyche, but I am suddenly turned on in a very strange way.”

  They shared a communicative look. Oscar thought, I know less and less about this person.

  “Damn it,” Oscar said and exhaled. Then they both took the same moment to confirm that it was sufficiently dark out and that there were no cars nearby and simultaneously unbuckled their seat belts. The car was spacious enough that when she climbed onto his lap, her legs folded with her ankles over his knees, her hair just barely brushed the roof. She kissed him with both hands on his neck, at the base of his jaw, as if she was trying to draw his face deeper into hers.

  Belts, buttons, zippers.

  “Oh my God,” Oscar said, as her hand wrapped around him. She made a sound that meant the same thing.

  Oscar tilted his neck a few degrees downward to gain some space to speak. “No, wait, I can’t believe that I forgot, there’s something I need to show you.”

  “Can it wait?” Dawn said.

  Oscar leaned over, plunged his hand under the driver’s side seat, and pulled out the nickel-plated .38. It was shinier than he remembered. In his hand it radiated malice, like it wanted to scream.

  Dawn looked at it. A moment passed. “Are we going to die or what?”

  “Eventually, yeah.”

  “That is some undergraduate bullshit,” Dawn said and reached down next to the seat to find the lever that reclined the seat, and suddenly, with a jolt, like the slamming of a door, they were down.

  * * *

  One hour later they sat across from each other in a booth at a Denny’s. Dawn ordered a double stack of pancakes and Oscar ordered a veggie burger. The gun was in the chest pocket of his jacket. Every few minutes, he touched it to make sure it was still there.

  “You know about the gun laws in California?” Dawn said.

  “They don’t exactly smile on drug trafficking either.”

  “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

  “I’m from Indiana.”

  “Oh, and that’s like a war zone or something?”

  “It’s kind of just nowhere. But there are guns.”

  “You feel like you could point that thing at someone and shoot them?”

  “Little ones like this are fairly inaccurate.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m not going to shoot anybody,” Oscar said.

  “I think that to even consider that as a possibility might be overrating your ability at these kinds of things,” Dawn said.

  Oscar considered. She was probably right.

  He ate two bites of his veggie burger and then signaled to the waitress and asked her for a cheeseburger.

  “Coulda sworn you said veggie,” the woman said.

  “No, yeah, I did. Just a change of heart.”

  “Okay but are you gonna pay for both, because I’ll get in trouble.”

  “I will.”

  The girl left.

  Oscar still didn’t have a plan but he had slowly come around to the idea of having a plan. The idea of getting cops involved, they agreed, was too fraught to even consider, especially given that the only crimes they had evidence of were their own. Which meant that, for now, there were really only two courses of action from which everything else would ramify: stay or go.

  “What does that even mean, ‘go’?” she said.

  “Just for a few days.”

  “Like at a motel, I guess, or what?”

  Oscar opened his mouth to ask her if she had any family nearby she could stay with, but the words caught when he realized he probably should have asked her about this kind of stuff long ago. He didn’t even know where she was from.

  “Where are you from?” Oscar said.

  “Las Vegas.”

  “I’ve never known anybody from Vegas.”

  “For most people it’s not a place you’re from but a place you end up in.”

  “Is that a song lyric?”

  “Probably.”

  Oscar hesitated with what he was trying to say next, and Dawn said, “Now would probably be a good time to ask me about my family, while you’re at it.”

  Oscar smiled a little, looked down. “What’s the story with your family?”

  Dawn slipped her feet out of her sandals and drew her legs up under her on the booth. She was small enough that she still fit under the table, even sitting on her ankles. “It’s pretty dark, man.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay. My dad killed my mom and then himself when I was seven.”

  Oscar had had his veggie burger halfway to his mouth to take a bite and now instead of eating it he was just holding it up, looking at it, some weird thing he had found in his hand.

  “Jeez, ah, crap,” Oscar said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “That’s so horrible.”

  “It made the news. You
’ll get a few hits when you Google it. He found her with another man and went basically insane with a shotgun. Shot the dog, even. I was at school at the time. I was lucky I wasn’t close by, obviously.”

  “Dawn, I... I don’t know how to react.”

  “It’s okay. He was a piece of shit, if you can’t guess. My mother, though, I loved. I can remember loving her. Her, I miss. I’ve never gotten anyone to tell me for sure, but I’m fairly certain she was a sex worker. She was twenty-three when she died.”

  “We don’t have to keep talking about this.”

  There were very few other people in the place. At the counter, a burly man in a work jacket stirred sugar into his coffee, banging the spoon against the mug.

  “Honestly, I don’t mind it. It’s keeping my mind off of things.”

  “I’m just trying to imagine what that would be like. What happens after something like that? Where did you go?”

  “There were relatives but none the state deemed worthy of the honor. You do the foster home thing. You get moved around. I was kind of a bad kid but I kept my grades up and wrote one hell of a college admissions essay about overcoming adversity.”

  For the first time he had ever noticed, it looked like Dawn was trying to avoid his eye contact instead of the other way around.

  “Do you have many memories of them? Your parents?”

  Dawn folded up a corner of her napkin. Above and behind her, a fluorescent light that illuminated the menu above the counter flickered briefly, and then died forever.

  “Whenever I think of my mom, I have this one memory—it’s weird, the things that we remember. I’m sitting at this little kitchen table that we had, tucked into a nook under a bay window. We had one of those plastic kiddie pools set up outside, the kind where you just like dangle the garden hose for a while to fill it up, and I remember the way that the light reflected off the water onto the wall in front of me in the kitchen, dancing around. It was summer. The sun was up but it was dinnertime. I’ve got this plate of fish sticks in front of me, five or six of them in a neat little row, and I go for one of them and somehow it ends up on the floor. And I remember sitting there looking down at this fried brown fish stick lying on the white linoleum floor tile, which I can still see perfectly in my head, and thinking, this is very bad, we’ve got ourselves a real problem here, because that fish stick is down there and I’m all the way up here. I might have been in a high chair—is it possible to have memories of being in a high chair? Maybe I started to cry. And then my mom, who was talking on the phone—I remember that because she’d do this thing where she’d coil the cord around her whole arm, without stopping her conversation—she just comes over and leans down and picks the fish stick up and examines it for a second to make sure it didn’t pick up anything from the floor and puts it back on my plate and goes back to whatever she was doing. And I remember I thought, well, that right there is my very own mom, and felt all kinds of warm emotions of positivity that I guess we don’t have great words for.”