A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  Dawn crossed her arms over her chest, snuggled in against herself.

  “That’s a perfectly good memory,” Oscar said.

  “Sometimes I think, why couldn’t I have held on to something more substantive? Like her comforting me after I hurt myself, tucking me into bed, or something like that. I try and try so hard to come up with something and I just keep coming back to that damn fish stick.”

  “I don’t think I’ve had a fish stick in twenty-five years,” Oscar said.

  Dawn laughed.

  “Do you think you’ll meet her again someday?” Oscar said.

  “My mother?”

  Oscar nodded.

  “That’s a sideways way of asking me about God?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You mean meet her in like a heaven type of deal?”

  “Wherever.”

  “You’ve been thinking that about your own mom, huh?”

  “Every day.”

  “I think about it. I think I’ll see her again, yeah. Seems the less strange of the two options, honestly. Otherwise, what? She has a brutally hard, short, and unfair life and that’s it? We never get to talk about it together, me and her, about what went wrong?” Dawn moved her napkin so that its edge was in line with the edge of the table. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of saying what I’m trying to say.”

  “I think I get it.”

  “I just really feel like there’s got to be something going on here.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “Would you say that philosophy profs are a godless bunch, in general?”

  “It varies. But yes.”

  “And what about yourself?”

  “With me it’s day-to-day.”

  “How about today?”

  “Today I can barely believe what I’ve got in my pocket,” Oscar said, and the girl came with the check.

  * * *

  They decided that it was too dangerous to go back and that they needed to stay away from campus while they figured out what to do. They drove twenty miles farther away and found a motel that had a room with a little kitchen area and a decent-sized bed. At the front desk Dawn turned her body away from the clerk and peeled off three twenties from a tightly rolled wad that she had in the duffel bag she had brought from her apartment. Oscar looked into the bag and saw more rolls of cash, and some clothes that looked like they might have been wrapped around something.

  In the room, Oscar sat on the edge of the bed and laughed at what a connoisseur of these places he was becoming. This one seemed fairly nice.

  Dawn sat down next to him on the bed. “I guess I owe you an apology about all this,” she said.

  “You know, at one point I thought you might be deliberately trying to ruin my life for fun.”

  “No. Never that. I promise I have always been pure of heart.”

  “You blackmailed me and threatened me with violence.”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “I’m kidding, I know what you mean.”

  * * *

  Dawn left to go across the street to a convenience store and buy necessities. After she was gone, Oscar felt strange and figured out after a moment that it was because he was apart from her. When she came back, carrying a plastic bag with a loaf of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly, he was surprised by how quickly the feeling was relieved.

  “You always keep expenses this low?” Oscar asked, gesturing toward the store-brand jelly that she took out of the bag and placed on the counter.

  “I told you, I’m saving for grad school.”

  Oscar disrobed and climbed into the shower and turned the water as hot as he could handle. He positioned his face under the showerhead and stayed like that for a while, the scalding water pounding on his face and lidded eyeballs, which hurt a little.

  The door to the bathroom opened. Dawn said, “I’m coming in,” and a moment later she was in the shower with him, so quickly he didn’t have time to object.

  “Turn the heat down please,” she said.

  Her head came up to the height of his heart.

  “There’s not much room in here,” Oscar said, uncomfortable.

  Their voices echoed slightly in the small space and were affected by the water.

  “Oh shut up,” she said as she unwrapped the bar of soap. She saw that he was standing a few inches farther away from her than necessary and drew him to her by his hand. “You big baby,” she said and rubbed his chest with soap.

  He took her by the shoulders and turned them both around so she could get her hair wet. They washed each other, and then he held her for a while, and she draped one arm over his shoulder and the other around his back as if they were slow dancing but they weren’t really moving at all. After a minute or two he felt her grip tighten and she began to sob, a few times, sharp and deep. He could feel her rib cage move jerkily against his. In another moment she was quiet again.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Oscar thought he heard something from out in the room but then decided he hadn’t. “We locked the door, right?” he said.

  * * *

  When he came out of the bathroom after brushing his teeth, Dawn was lying facedown on the bed with one towel around her body and another around her head. She had Oscar’s laptop open in front of her.

  “No password?” she said.

  “Hey, come on,” Oscar said, but didn’t move to close it. Then he saw what she was watching: there was Paul St. Germaine, sitting in his chair, next to his plant, holding his dry-erase marker.

  “This guy is a trip,” she said.

  “Please stop that,” he said.

  “Have you watched this whole thing? There’s like—” she looked at the list of files “—twenty hours of video here.”

  “Not all of it. But it’s all bullshit. Every word. Please—”

  “Just let me watch for a minute.”

  “Dawn, that man is a demon. His allure cost my mother everything she had and she died under the spell of a lie. His goal is to separate the viewer as far from reality as possible. I hate him with my gut. My bones.”

  “From what I’ve heard of your mother, she doesn’t sound overly credulous.”

  “Maybe not, but she was looking for some kind of something and he was more than happy to provide it.”

  “You don’t think that maybe that might have been a good thing? Even if it was bullshit? If it made life easier for her?”

  A change came over Oscar’s face and his nostrils flared.

  “Okay, okay, relax,” she said.

  “Bullshit a good thing?” he said, his voice wavering and rising. “It’s supposed to be about truth. How is that not clear to you? Aren’t you in my class? Truth is what I’ve dedicated my whole fucking life to. Ninety-nine percent of everything is bullshit and it takes a lifetime of hard work to find even just a tiny little fraction of that leftover one percent that means anything at all, and all I want to do is figure out one thing that’s real before I die, and this guy is everything that stands in the way of that. He killed my mom with his lie, somehow, I’m sure of it, and when she died, she didn’t even think that her life was hers.”

  “You say your ‘whole fucking life’ like you’re not just twenty-nine.”

  “You don’t believe me? You want to watch? Okay, let’s watch.”

  He leaned over to hit Play just as Dawn drew her finger across the track pad and the cursor landed on top of the last file in the list. Session 15.

  * * *

  The sound came up, and then the production card, but there was no title. The letters of Samsara faded out and behind them Paul St. Germaine sat in his chair. The plant was gone. The whiteboard was gone. He sat hunched over, elbows on his knees, fingers tented near his lips. He appeared to be thinking. Nothing
happened for fifteen seconds. Oscar thought that maybe the image was frozen but he looked closer and saw St. Germaine’s shoulders move along with his breath just slightly. Oscar thought he heard someone offscreen cough. St. Germaine’s eyes came up to meet the camera. He spoke.

  “So. Our time together is almost over. I hope it’s meant as much to you as it has to me.

  “There’s not much left to cover. We’ve seen the problem, and although it’s a big one, we’ve seen how easy it is to overcome, when you’re thinking clearly. And we’ve practiced some exercises that we can do whenever we’re feeling unsteady at the wheel of our ship, exercises to remind us that there may be a ship but there is in fact no wheel. And we’ve seen how so many of our hurts come from fighting it, from damning ourselves for that in which we had no part. So what could be left for us to do?

  “Let’s just talk for a minute. Parting is hard, and I don’t want to say goodbye just yet.”

  His eyes glistened. He leaned forward.

  “You’re right to feel that life is bad. It’s very bad. It’s lonely and painful and will end poorly no matter what. Every moment that we spend in comfort, not tearing each other to shreds over the merest resource, is a miracle of human industry and ingenuity that has taken thousands of years to bring to even this rough level of imperfection. This can be nice, these baubles of civility and society that we’ve built for ourselves, but at its core life is nothing more than a sick, distasteful joke without a punchline. The only thing that’s worse than life is existence at all—so many endless light-years of emotionless universe, titanic swathes of violence both hot and cold bending through it in such scope that to truly fathom it would be to go insane. And think, in all that uncaring space, there is only one infinitesimally small location in which you might find something like what we would call love, and that’s in your head, although it might feel like your heart, and no one will ever know about it except for you, and then you will die.

  “But, I beg you!” St. Germaine held out his hands in front of him. “I’ve said this before and I’ll repeat myself—there is no need for despair. You’re on the carnival ride. Lift your hands with me, up off of the bar. We must not avert our eyes. Join me and look upon things as they are!”

  He collected himself. Took a pause.

  “What more beautiful truth could there be than ‘nothing matters’? What could be more freeing?

  “Maybe things didn’t work out for you like you’d planned. Well, it doesn’t matter. Maybe you’ve accomplished everything you’ve ever set out to do and are surrounded by material comfort and the love of your family. Well, that doesn’t matter either. All are equal in the light of nothing matters. Maybe you’ve become one of those specters of ruin that the rest of us can scarcely even consider as real—well, the best piece of news is for you, and that is, that it doesn’t matter.

  “Maybe we’ll all meet up in some heaven. In fact I hope we do! But it won’t matter there either. It will go on and on and on not mattering. Crawl out of the cave and find yourself in another larger cave.”

  Dawn paused the video.

  “This is a little upsetting,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s all like this?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I could see why this would piss you off.”

  “The man has perverted my field and swayed my mother under his perversion.”

  “I’m sorry. I think I get it now.”

  “Utter nonsense. And he took our money.”

  “I get it. I get it.”

  * * *

  Dawn made them both peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and poured potato chips onto paper plates and they ate sitting next to each other on stools in the kitchenette. They did not speak but their knees remained in contact and occasionally they would reach out and lightly clutch each other’s free hand.

  * * *

  Later they removed the comforter from the bed and lay down together, doing so in the absence of spontaneity for the first time. Somewhere, they had acquired an element of physical caution, stuck to them like burrs, and they approached each other carefully, as if they might burn their hands on each other’s bodies. They coupled slowly at first and then faster than they ever had, calling out each other’s names in dire whisper-yells, bedframe clanging. Afterward they lay together at odd angles breathing heavily, legs intertwined.

  Some minutes later there was a flash of light at the edge of the curtains. Then another. Oscar put one hand on the floor so that he could reach the window from the bed and drew them back. Above the sodium lights by the parking lot and the line of road beyond, a silent lightning storm towered in the night sky, illuminating the hidden clouds in blinks and arcs, a roiling and layered vault of light, miles high. He lay back down with Dawn and they watched through the large window as it grew over the desert, coming toward them.

  “I’ll remember this moment for the rest of my life,” Oscar said.

  “Which one?”

  “This one.”

  “What about this one?”

  “This one, too. And this one. And this one.”

  Dawn smiled, which he didn’t see because he was still looking out the window, and touched him in the small of his back.

  They said nothing for a long time, watching, and then they were asleep.

  * * *

  Oscar’s eyes opened. Dawn lay against him, asleep, her hand on his chest. It was still night. He shouldn’t be awake. Something external had woken him up, but he didn’t know what it was.

  Then he heard a knock on the door and realized that it wasn’t the first. He willed himself into believing that the knock had not existed and began to fall back asleep, but then it happened again. Three short, quick raps.

  He sat up in bed, and Dawn’s eyes opened and she started to say, “Wha—” but he covered her mouth with his hand.

  “Probably just housekeeping,” he mouthed to her, in the hopes that the words would make it true.

  The gun was resting on top of the Gideon’s Bible in the drawer next to the bed. He picked it up from the middle, around the cylinder, keeping his finger far away from the trigger.

  As he crept slowly on the outsides of his feet toward the door, he felt entirely naked, and then remembered that he in fact was. He felt a draft on his ass.

  He placed his free hand on the doorframe and leaned in to look through the peephole like a man extending his neck comfortably onto a chopping block.

  In the external world, fish-eye distorted, stood Ramos.

  “Motherfuck...” Oscar whispered.

  Dawn looked at him from the bed inquisitively.

  “It’s Ramos,” Oscar said. “Where are my pants?”

  * * *

  The first thing Oscar said to him when he opened the door was “how did you find this place?”

  Ramos pointed to Dawn, who had quickly gotten dressed and sat in a chair by the window. “Hey, I know you’re my boss or whatever but you can’t just go and steal my car. And don’t either of you ever look at your phones? I know you got nowhere to go. I been driving around all night to all the motels. Found it on my sixth try.”

  “I’d say it’s maybe thirty percent your car,” Dawn said.

  “How did you know we were in this room?” Oscar said.

  Ramos gestured toward the open blinds as if Oscar was an idiot.

  “Well, you found us,” Oscar said. “So what can we do for you?”

  “Man, I just wanna know what’s up. Nobody’s answering their phones,” he said, gesturing to Dawn. “If some hard-ass narcos are running around out there looking for us, I’m not trying to take that shit on by myself.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. They’re not looking for us, they’re looking for me,” Oscar said. “You’ve endangered yourself by coming here.”

  Ramos shrugged. “It’s barely night. It’s a
lmost morning. Lemme sit down a minute. You got some water here?”

  Oscar filled a plastic cup with water from the tap and handed it to Ramos. He drank it in one gulp and handed it back to Oscar as if to ask him to fill it again but Oscar tossed it in the trash bin.

  “So what’s the deal?” Ramos said.

  Oscar was struck by the idea that there was something different about Ramos—his eyes a bit more sunken and dark-circled, maybe. His foot tapped. His hands remained plunged into his jean pockets.

  Oscar had a thought, pushed the thought away, and then brought it back. At the toe of Ramos’s white sneaker, there was something that could have been blood.

  He looked at Ramos again, who was rubbing his forehead, covering his eyes.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Could I have some more water please?” As Oscar was looking at him, Ramos glanced once toward the door, then at him, then at Dawn. There was sweat on his face.

  Oscar understood the truth but could not yet move, as if it might pass him over if he remained perfectly still.