Ramos spat blood into the dust, fell back from his squatting position to sit in a heap against the wall.
Matadamas approached Ramos and extended the gleaming gun to his forehead like a blessing. Ramos closed his eyes and twitched. He made a small sound.
“This guy?” Matadamas said. “This guy right here? He’s the one for whom you give a shit?”
Matadamas cocked the hammer back.
Oscar’s heart, he was quite sure, stopped. After more than one instant of time perceivable to him, he realized that he was simply awaiting his next heartbeat as he regarded the image before him in complete stillness, two figures against a backdrop of brick, the man with the gun and the man on his knees both arranged in roughly triangular positions in ways that seemed almost intentionally composed, their physical relation to each other also arranged along similar aesthetic principles. Their faces, too, seemed to capture some kind of larger entirety, in the relation between the focused malevolence of one and abject terror in the other. A closed system. What he saw was beautiful, although that wasn’t the right word.
Matadamas smiled again, said something in Spanish to the other men, and eased the hammer of the revolver gently back down with his thumb.
Wait, Oscar thought. Had Ramos just been executed and had his brain spared him the image of it for his sanity’s sake, replacing it with what he was seeing now?
“I am rushing things,” Matadamas said. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, as if in frustration. “Oscar,” Matadamas asked, “what I want to know is, how is it exactly that you think things work?”
“I know only that I have very little idea,” Oscar said.
“Let me tell you about the world. That feeling you have, that you are the center of things? It means nothing, as you are about to see. It is completely illusory. This is not a story. You are not a character. I’m about to shoot your friend in the nose just to prove a point, the point that there is no point, and then I’m going to start chopping off your fingers until you tell me exactly what I want to know, and then I’m going to kill you as well, and that’ll be the end of it, you understand? You won’t even get to find out how it ends, because you’ll be dead. You thought you could walk a straight line through chaos by walking it straight at me. Well, sorry, Charlie, no cigar.”
None of the other men said a single word. Matadamas strode three more paces toward Oscar. Oscar tried not to let his right hand, which hung at his side, move toward the gun at the back of his waistband.
“You are not a protagonist. I am. Do you know why? Because I’m blessed with the gift of violence, and if you go for that gun, you know as well as I that you’ll never get it out of your pants. I am at home in these things. This is my air. You, I can see, are suffocating.”
“Matadamas, I think you talk too much.”
“You are funny, though, Oscar, I’ll give you that.”
Matadamas looked over Oscar’s shoulder and saw Dawn in the car some forty yards off. He waved at her, fluttering his fingers up near his head. It seemed to Oscar that she had crept closer since he had gotten out.
Oscar said, “Here is what I propose.” He awaited his own words. He opened his mouth again to speak.
Against the wall, Ramos sprang up, pushed his feet against the brick, and shoulder butted Matadamas in the small of his back. His revolver clattered to the ground, spun momentarily like a coin on a countertop. “Run!” he yelled.
Oscar stayed pinned to the spot. Either because to expose his back didn’t seem like the right play or out of fear paralysis, he wouldn’t have been able to say.
Ramos kicked at Matadamas, who easily sidestepped it, even as he was leaning over to pick up his gun, and Ramos fell backward on his ass.
As Oscar stood and watched, the narcos erupted in laughter, chuckling at first, then quickly building until they were clutching their stomachs, cackling, kicking at Ramos as he tried to regain his feet.
With the suddenness of a thunderclap, the wall a foot above their heads exploded into dust. The narcos hit the ground as Ramos scrambled to right himself. Oscar looked behind him—Dawn was standing on the running board leaning out from behind the driver’s side door, a glinty object in her hand.
Matadamas raised his gun and this time the ground in front of him jumped up into shards. Oscar looked back again and saw that Dawn was reloading the rifle. Oscar began to move.
Ramos had scrambled, still not fully righted, a few steps closer to Oscar, and Oscar grabbed the zip tie that bound his hands behind his back and pulled him to his feet and the two men turned toward the car and ran.
The narcos were army-crawling into the lee of their car, except for Matadamas, who had advanced and dropped down to one knee and drew down on Dawn not slowly but with the practiced fluidity of someone who knows how to hit a target. Oscar punched him in the jaw and sent him sprawling.
A slice of air a few feet above his head was alive with bullets—Dawn was missing high to cover them.
When they made it to the car, Ramos dove across the back seat through the door that Dawn had opened. Oscar jumped behind the wheel as Dawn walked around in front of the hood, rifle still level, going to work on their cars now with a fresh magazine, putting a few rounds into the engine block of the truck and then blowing out two windows and one of the tires.
Dawn stood by the passenger door and fired until the gun clicked and then jumped in. Oscar turned the car around so sharply that he felt two of the wheels lift off the ground and had them pointed around back toward the road at the other end of the tarmac and floored it.
Oscar’s ears rang with white noise loud as a scream. There was a conversation being held in the car, human voices, but nothing registered with him. It wasn’t until the car was back on the road that his cognitive capacity returned to the point that he felt as if he could speak.
“What the hell was that?” he finally said.
“This is an M4 variant,” Dawn said as she detached the stock from the receiver and stowed both components in her duffel.
“How long has that been there?”
“What the fuck?” Ramos said from the back seat, sitting up. He had brought his legs up and around the zip tie and now his bound hands lay in his lap.
“My possession of that,” she pointed, “represents a sizable percentage of my entire illegal activity. And yes I was lying about never shooting a gun before. But that’s my last lie.”
Oscar started to say something, but a feeling of peace descended on him suddenly, and he returned his eyes to the road. Interesting—the road rose up higher and higher in his sight, blocking the horizon and then going past the top edge of the windshield in his field of vision until it looked as if he might be directing the car into a full vertical loop. Along with this new feeling came a sensation of warmth, of descending into some large fuzzy body of substance in a slow-motion belly flop.
“Oscar—” Dawn said, looking at him.
What? Oscar heard in his head but not in his ears.
His right hand came up holding a bit of the lower edge of the front of his shirt. He noticed that there was a hole in it.
He heard Dawn cry out.
Oscar saw the blood that had pooled in his lap and on the floor by the pedals.
This is a big problem, Oscar thought as the warmth moved over him. Huge even, and I’m going to deal with it immediately just as soon as I wake up. Then he nodded off backward as the car ran off the road.
23
When Oscar awoke he was in the passenger seat. The car was moving through a forest with trees so tall they blocked the sunlight and created a feeling of evening. Paul St. Germaine was driving.
“Paul?” Oscar said, and he turned his head toward him.
“Oscar!” he said. “Gosh—you need to understand that I’m so, so sorry about all this. This has all been a huge misunderstanding.”
Oscar looked to th
e back seat. Ramos sat stock still in a rictus, eyes straight ahead, his hands on his knees.
Oscar looked back at Paul, who kept both hands on the wheel but directed his gaze at Oscar. His face was kind, his hair only slightly thinning.
“Is this real?” Oscar said.
“That depends on what you mean by real, of course,” St. Germaine said, in his avuncular voice.
Oscar felt bathed in the most intense emotion. He brought his hand to his face and found that tears were streaming down it. The road wound through the trees. He craned his neck to the base of the window to try to see the sky but found that he could not.
He turned around to look in the back seat. Ramos was gone. In his place sat Oscar’s mother. She wore a knitted shawl over a red flannel, the same outfit she was wearing in a photo that had always stood on the mantel over the fireplace in their home.
“Oh, Mom, oh my God, Mom. Mom, I can’t believe it’s you.”
His mother tilted her head and reached out to touch his shoulder and made a small look and sound that Oscar remembered as pure love.
“Bunny,” she said, “My sweet baby boy. This was all such a bad idea!”
It felt as if all of Oscar’s body was weeping, some essence of himself emanating from everywhere at once, hitting the air.
“I know, Mom. I don’t know what I was thinking. I miss you so much. Why did you have to leave?”
“Oh, Oscar, I really, really didn’t want to. But everything’s going to be fine, bunny.” She was sitting next to him now, cradling his head, speaking in a comforting whisper.
“What’s happening to me, Mom?”
“You’re dying, sweetheart. You got shot in the stomach. It’s very bad.”
“I’m so scared.”
“It’s okay to be scared. This is all very new and strange.”
“So you’re not real?”
“No, dear heart, I’m not real. But I still love you very, very much.”
“It’s so unfair.”
“I know. I know.”
“I don’t think you’re dying,” St. Germaine said.
“He can be more optimistic than you’d think at first,” she said.
Out the windshield Oscar could see the road beginning to darken, the wood becoming deeper and thicker as they proceeded, the branches moving in and down.
“There’s supposed to be a white light,” Oscar said.
“I know that that’s something you hear about sometimes, bunny, but that can be explained via the function of panicking neurons.”
“I know that. That’s my thought. That’s from my brain.”
Oscar put his face in his hands, wiped away tears, but they continued in a torrent, wetting his cheeks entirely.
“You did this,” he said to Paul. “You did all of this.”
“We both know that’s not true,” he said and piloted the car to a stop.
“Bunny,” his mother said, “this is as far as we can go. You’ve got to go on alone now.”
“No! Please. I don’t want to.”
“Shh,” his mother said. “It can’t be so bad. Billions of people have done it. Your own mother has done it. Everybody’s done it.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
“I sure hope so,” she said.
And then Oscar was alone, standing at the side of the road which was now a dirt path, leading deeper into the forest. He turned around to look back from where they had come, but blocking the path was a flat wall of a poorly textured low-resolution image of trees, something out of an old video game. He turned back around. There was no sound of anything other than the rustling of the vegetation. The wind began to rise, the branches bending under the gusts. He walked.
After a time, he saw that his father was walking alongside him.
“You know, you just missed Mom,” Oscar said to him. “She was back there.”
“I love that woman enormously,” his father said. “When she died it just about took the life out of me.”
They walked together side by side in silence.
“It’s getting cold,” his father said.
“I don’t feel it,” Oscar said.
“I’m concerned about that,” his father said and pointed to Oscar’s stomach. There was a large, clean, unbloody hole in his belly, a foot wide, like he was a doughnut. They could see right through to the other side.
“This is some kind of illusion,” Oscar said. “Although it does hurt pretty bad.”
His father shook his head. “Oscar, there’s so much we wish we could tell you. Sadly, it’s not allowed.”
“Dad, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s so sad,” his father said and was gone.
Oscar continued. The path got more and more narrow and overgrown until he had to fight through low branches at the level of his face. Still, he felt the need to keep going.
Eventually he had to push through full vegetation, knifing into thick boughs with his hands to drive his body through the scratching branches, driven by an unknown purpose.
He did this for a long time—hours, days. At certain points, he screamed, cried, wailed, was nearly overcome with frustration and despair, but continued on. Coming from everywhere, booming and full of echo, he listened to recitations of certain memories. Some were significant, but most were not—he heard his father give him the little speech that he gave when he handed over the keys to Oscar’s first car, and then he heard an old classmate of his say something about the library’s weekend hours, and he heard his own voice respond—was this an actual conversation he had had? He heard people that he understood to be his grandparents fighting bitterly over something trivial. He heard Dawn’s voice over the sound of bowling pins: Don’t think. Decide.
Then specific words fell away and people he had forgotten about for years spoke directly to him in tongues. He didn’t understand their language but he received the basic point they were trying desperately to transmit—that this world is a veil and the veil is on fire.
Then, in an instant, he emerged into a clearing. It was bright—sun shone down through the cover in slanted columns and landed on fallen, moss-covered trees. The wind was still. From somewhere nearby he could hear some kind of babbling water—a pleasant little stream. In the middle of the clearing, emerging from the ground, was a pedestal of gleaming white marble with a Corinthian capital. A small object rested on top of it. He picked his way toward it through the scrub.
Sitting on the pedestal was a solitary fish stick.
Oscar knew without touching or smelling it that it was a fish stick and not a mozzarella stick or something similar. It seemed immensely powerful, radiating benevolence, just sitting there, four inches long, fried golden brown. The fish stick understood that you hurt, and it felt the same hurt. It was just as confused as you. It wanted the best for you. It wanted you to know that it was almost funny how awful this all was. It wept for you. It reached out for you.
Oscar reached out for it.
The fish stick said, “Oh shit.”
24
“Oh shit, I think he’s waking up.”
“Bleeeeyahhh,” Oscar said as he tried to sit up.
“Don’t sit up,” Dawn said.
It felt like gauze was drawn slowly away from Oscar’s eyes. It was extremely unpleasant.
“What—what—” Oscar said.
Dawn put a hand on his forehead. “I know, I know, but relax.”
Oscar looked around and found himself stretched out on an overstuffed couch in a narrow, sparse living room. For a moment he thought it was a train car.
Ramos was standing at the door of the trailer, calling to someone outside.
The overhead light hurt Oscar’s eyes terribly. “Is there water?” he said. His mouth was so dry that it felt pointy at the edges, like it contained a mouth-sized pin
econe.
Dawn told Ramos to get some water and in a moment a glass was presented to him. Oscar raised his hand and watched it shake. Dawn, who was sitting in a folding plastic chair next to him, grabbed his arm to steady it.
He took a sip, Dawn took it away before he could have another, and he looked down at himself. His chest was bare, and his stomach was wrapped in a foot-wide band of clean white bandage. Running out of his arm was an IV line that connected to a bag of clear fluid that was duct-taped to the wall a few feet above him. On his legs were orange shorts that might have been swim trunks.
“We had to throw out your jeans, man,” Ramos said. “Fucking nasty.”
The screen door opened and a woman of about forty walked in, wiping her hands on a rag that she tucked into the back pocket of her cutoffs. “Are you in much pain?” she said. She had black curly hair tied in a knot behind her head.
“Please tell me where this is,” Oscar said.
“Amani is a doctor,” Dawn said.
“What your friend means is that I used to be a nurse.”
“Not currently?”
“Not since my honorable discharge, honey. But I did two tours in Anbar Province. So I know gunshots.”
“I got shot?” Oscar said.
“Yes,” Dawn said.
“Wow,” he said.
“Again,” Amani said, “how much pain?”
Oscar tried to move his body and screamed and clutched himself. It hurt so bad he nearly passed back out. Dawn stroked his hair.
“Okay, yeah, no, that’s expected,” Amani said.
“How long was I gone?” Oscar said, breathing slowly now as he recovered from the pain.
“A long time,” Dawn said. “All night.”
“You won’t remember, but you were in and out,” Amani said.
“Couldn’t have gone to a real hospital?” Oscar asked Dawn, adding, “No offense,” to Amani.
“It was discussed,” Dawn said.
“Amani was closer,” Ramos said.
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 17