This he did not even consider. “You don’t understand,” he said.
“Oscar, please,” Dawn said. Her voice cracked. “Please don’t leave me. Let’s go home. Please don’t leave me.” But the car was already moving.
She ran after Oscar as he pulled out, begging him to stop, until the car picked up enough speed to separate, and then she dropped to her knees in the dust kicked up by the tires. Oscar watched in his rearview mirror for a moment too long, and almost ran into a tree before he righted the wheel.
* * *
On the road out of the property, he saw Amani returning from a sunrise jog and slowed next to her and lowered the window. She was sweaty and confused to see only him in the car. He took all of the bills from his wallet, which he noticed were stained and damp with blood, and passed them to her.
“I’m sorry, thank you for saving my life. I’ve got to take this bathrobe.”
26
He drove in silence, hardly noticing his surroundings, consumed with hate, hunched over his burning wounds. His phone chimed with incoming calls and texts but he didn’t look to see who they were from before he allowed the battery to die. Sometime in the early afternoon, standing at a gas pump in his bloody boots, bathrobe and swim trunks, he saw an advertisement for the Nevada state lottery and realized he had crossed state lines.
He stood there, baking in the heat of the tarmac, holding the pump in his right hand, his left clutched over his stomach, and made eye contact with a man in a Prius who looked at him with amusement or confusion. He cinched the robe tighter to cover the bandages.
Out into a new desert. Towering red and orange rock formations rose up on either side of the road. Oscar was aware that they were beautiful but he could not stop thinking about what was soon to happen. His pain increased. Slowly, in his suffering, it seemed to Oscar as if the true state of things was being shown to him, a door that had always been closed to him now unlocked, everything as bad as he had always feared and yet nothing to fear.
His mother’s life, his father’s—they had come and gone. They had done their best with what they had been given and tried to love as best they could and for a time, a long time even, that had been enough, but in the end there was no escape. And now Oscar’s life, as well. He felt almost honored, clothed in something like immortality, to be the bearer of such a great secret.
He turned off the AC, opened the windows. The car’s dashboard told him that it was 103 degrees outside. The heat rushed in and he began to sweat. As he drove, he recalled images from the past—his father teaching him how to ride a bicycle in the parking lot of the high school, his mother helping him move into his freshman dorm. Things like this. More than once he was sure that he had just been asleep the moment before, but his hands were steady and kept the car on the road. Eventually he began to hallucinate.
The edges of the road dripped laterally into the desert, which pulsed and undulated in the heat. For a moment, he saw a figure sitting on the hood of the car. He drove over a soda can in the road, and he heard it scream in pain, a piercing, awful sound that reverberated in his head, and he screamed along with it. The sun set.
27
Just after 9:00 p.m., he coasted out of the desert into a small, moneyed residential community that sprang up suddenly like a natural outcropping of precious ore. He wove the gracefully curled streets and regarded the three-story houses with tasteful statuary and perfect green lawns in defiance of the climate. The GPS informed him that he was one hundred yards from his destination.
He parked on the other side of the street, a few houses down. The house he was looking at was pleasant and still. Lights were on in the first-floor windows, through which Oscar could see a chandelier and the corner of a bookcase.
Parked in front of the house, right at the curb just as if it belonged there, was his father’s car.
Oscar sat there for thirty minutes, frozen in place, terrified. Voices spoke to him, which he knew weren’t real, in a string of curses and slurs.
Finally he found himself to be moving. He slowly opened the door and stepped down into the darkness. The heat of the day was still held in the ground.
He looked down at fresh blood seeping through his bandages and frowned. He stared at the blooming spots and willed them to go away and, as he watched, they did exactly that, shrinking until they disappeared. That’s better, he thought. He had not eaten or drank all day.
The house had no wall or gate. He walked across the front yard on a stone path that led between the house and garage, around back through an arch trellis near the kitchen window, past the humming central air unit to the backyard, saw a sliding glass patio door, felt that it was unlocked, slid it open, and stepped inside.
The air conditioning felt amazing on his face. He sensed a stir of life coming from deeper within the house.
There was still the chance for him to turn around and leave, to call the police. A small voice, Dawn’s voice, told him that that would be the smart thing to do.
But he had come all this way.
Four more steps and he was standing in the halogen light of the kitchen face-to-face with an older man who exclaimed, “Sweet lord Jesus,” and dropped a glass of water onto the linoleum floor and recoiled against the wall as the glass shattered. The man was in fact Oscar’s father. He made a kind of croaking sound.
“Oscar—it’s you.”
Oscar saw the old .308 propped up against the gleaming stovetop.
“Oh, I’ve done something terrible,” Lee said.
Temporarily, Oscar could not speak.
Lee walked around to the living room and Oscar followed. Plush furniture was arranged around hardwood tables. Landscapes and still lifes hung on the wall.
In the middle of the room, on a huge bearskin rug, a white-haired man in plaid pajamas was duct-taped to a kitchen chair. He had a dish towel in his mouth, also duct-taped. His eyes, wet with terror, darted between the two of them.
“Dad—is this...?”
“Yes, of course. Where are your clothes? You’re bleeding.”
“What were you planning on doing?”
Lee ran a hand through his hair and looked around. He had the expression of a man who had just woken up to discover the bed he was lying in was on fire. “I... I just wanted to talk to him. I don’t think I was ever really going to hurt him.”
The man with the towel in his mouth made a muffled sound.
“How did you find this place?” Oscar said. The edges of this scene were drawing in on him a bit and he had to push them back into place.
“I found the address in a notebook of your mother’s. I don’t know how or why she had it. That was one of the things I wanted to ask him. I only just got here a little while ago. We shouldn’t stay.”
Oscar looked around, bewildered. There were framed photos on the mantel, a large grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs. He looked at the man in the chair again, who seemed to shake somewhat.
“Dad—what have you done?” Oscar had heard the phrase a million times but never used it.
“I haven’t done anything,” Lee said. “Not really.”
“Well!” Oscar said, holding his palms up in disbelief. “What happened?”
“What’s happened to you?” Lee said, pointing toward the bandages.
“I need this whole thing to slow down,” Oscar said and went and sat on the couch facing the man in the chair. When he sat, he felt something heavy move in the pocket of the robe and he reached in to find Matadamas’s revolver. Hmm. He didn’t remember that.
“He wasn’t making any sense,” Lee said. “So I had to do this. I only hit him a single time.”
“You haven’t spoken at all?”
“Not properly.”
Lee came over and sat next to him on the couch. They both stopped and looked at the man in the chair.
Oscar put his hand on the tape that covered the man’s
mouth.
“Hi, we’re the Boatwrights,” he said. “You must be Paul St. Germaine. Please don’t scream.”
He ripped off the tape.
Paul spat out the towel and gasped for air. “Please,” he said. “I can’t feel my feet.”
“Delia Boatwright,” Oscar said. “Do you really remember her or were you lying?”
“What? Delia...” St. Germaine said, eyes blank. “I’m trying...”
“She believed in you,” Lee said.
“I’ve watched your tapes,” Oscar said.
“Ah...yes, Delia, of course. But please, my feet...”
Lee got down on one knee and loosened the tape around Paul’s ankles. Relief washed over his face. He took a breath. “Delia—a very smart woman. Please, whatever you want, you can have it. I’ll take you around. There’s much of value.”
This man was almost completely unrecognizable from the person Oscar had seen on his laptop screen. He was frail and diminished, the effects of his age no longer dignifying.
“My father had come here to kill you. I’ve considered stopping him.”
“I’m embarrassed to say that he’s right,” Lee said and stood up and turned away as a way of hiding his face. “I’m sorry for striking you earlier.”
St. Germaine looked Oscar up and down. “Young man, I don’t know what happened to you but you appear to be bleeding. Let me get you some bandages.”
Lee had moved to the mantel and picked up a framed black-and-white photograph of a couple on their wedding day in what looked like the early ’50s.
“Where is your wife?” Lee said.
“To my great sadness, Samantha died seven years and, let’s see, eight months ago.”
“My Delia died just recently.”
“Your son had informed me. I’m very sorry for your loss,” St. Germaine said. “There’s nothing harder.”
“Yes.”
“She was wonderful. Kind and funny.”
“Don’t talk about her,” Lee said.
“And this is why you’ve come here to kill me?” St. Germaine said.
“Something like that.”
“You consider me responsible.”
“I know that it’s not exactly fair,” Lee said.
St. Germaine craned his neck to look around, exhaled. His hands were bound at his side but he made a thoughtful gesture with his mouth, a pursing of the lips in consideration.
“Well, I’m—let’s see, how old?—I just turned eighty-four. That’s more time than most get, and it’s been a better life than I’ve deserved. My body is completing its failure regardless. That rifle, though—it’s a large caliber? I’ll admit that I’m afraid of pain.”
“I’m no longer sure about it at all,” Lee said.
“Forget about that for a minute,” Oscar said. “Everyone shut up for just one minute.”
They did. In the silence, the grandfather clock ticked. In a flash, Oscar understood now—oh, right, I’ve died. I was shot in the stomach and I died, which makes perfect sense, and all of this is something else entirely. So I might as well proceed.
“I want to ask you some questions,” Oscar said and then experienced a wave of physical pain so intense that he almost fell forward onto the floor. He shook his head to try to clear it.
“I want to ask you,” Oscar said after he regained himself, “I want to look on your face and ask you—you do believe what you say?”
Lee said, “I think I need to step away. I feel absolutely terrible about this,” and left the room.
“I believe every word of every idea to which I’ve ever attached my name,” St. Germaine said.
“There is no idea. It’s nihilism. Ignorance.”
“Oscar,” St. Germaine said, “I’m worried that perhaps you’ve missed the point. Say, would you like some food?”
For an instant, Oscar thought he saw a face in the lines of the drapes and almost screamed, but then it was gone.
Oscar continued, “Wait—what I’m trying to say is—are you a good man? Do you think you’re a good man? Is that even something one should be concerned with being?”
Something like a smile crossed St. Germaine’s face. “I hope—I believe—that the people who encounter my work and connect with it often have their lives improved in a way that I think you would probably want to call ‘good.’”
“My mother—you cheated her. You sold her a lie. She died in ignorance and in debt to you.”
Paul snapped his head and restrained torso toward Oscar. The chair budged half an inch. “When Delia came to me, she was in constant misery. She still sought the love of God and could not bear the lack of it. She spoke of killing herself—I’m sorry if this news is a surprise to you. I freed her from that.”
“Well, you fucking overcharged. And your bullshit is not the love of God.”
“I never want anyone to spend more than they can afford. And furthermore, what was my lie?” St. Germaine asked of Oscar.
“That this life is escapable.”
St. Germaine smiled. “I wish we had met under more pleasant circumstances, Oscar. I feel as if we would have gotten on quite well. Of course life is escapable. What could be easier?”
“You misunderstand me,” Oscar said.
They sat apart from each other in silence for ten seconds. St. Germaine’s eyes lit up. “You know,” he said, “of course. That’s right. I remember you now.”
Oscar looked up.
“Delia mentioned you in our first interview in Hawaii. She was scared that the thing that plagued her lived on in you, as well.”
The grandfather clock struck the hour and began to chime. Oscar clutched his stomach.
“You should know that she loved you very much. In fact, her worry over you was hurting her. I taught her that your life was beyond her control, just as her own life was. To release her from this weight, I had to convince her to sever the connection she felt with you.”
As Oscar took a breath and opened his mouth to speak, a rifle report cracked from somewhere behind the house. The echo was lost over the desert.
Oscar bolted up. The room tilted and then righted. He dug the pistol out of his pocket and aimed it at St. Germaine.
“It’s okay,” St. Germaine said.
The gun shook in Oscar’s hands. He didn’t want to go see what had happened outside. Oscar lowered the gun and moved down the short hallway to where he could see the patio door, standing fully ajar, a rectangle of blackness filled with night. He took one step toward it and stopped. All was still.
“Please,” St. Germaine said from behind him, “sit.”
Oscar went back to where he was sitting previously and cradled his head in his hands, still holding the gun.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” St. Germaine said.
“That’s not true,” Oscar moaned. “That’s just not true.”
“Shhh,” St. Germaine said. “It doesn’t have to hurt like this.”
Oscar stood up, walked over to the chair, and placed the muzzle of the gun between St. Germaine’s eyes, which the man had tilted up to him, and breathed deeply before speaking. “Whether or not I’m going to pull this trigger—that’s already been determined?” He knew this was an overly simple way to state it.
Paul closed his eyes and smiled like a man hearing a beloved piece of music from a passing car. “Either way, as you see,” he said, “it’s out of my hands.”
To his great shock and disgust, Oscar felt his finger pull the trigger.
The gun clicked.
“Oh my God,” he said.
“Hah!” St. Germaine exclaimed.
From some distance that didn’t seem very far away, they heard the sound of sirens.
“I think it would be best if you stayed put,” St. Germaine said. “They’ll be able to get you patched up.”<
br />
Suddenly, Oscar could sense a vague outline of the full foolishness of what he had done. In a thrall of panic, he knocked the kitchen chair with Paul in it on its side. The air left St. Germaine when he hit the carpet.
Oscar lurched toward the patio door. The hallway seemed as if it had repositioned itself diagonally, on its corner, and he kept one arm on the wall to counteract this rotation. Behind him, Paul flopped around on the floor trying to right himself.
At the threshold of the door, Oscar stopped, terrified about what he’d find on the other side.
But when he stepped through into the air, with a feeling like falling, there was nothing of note on the other side. Just a large outdoor table under a trellis, surrounded by empty chairs.
“Dad?” he said quietly, and then again, more loudly. “Dad?”
The sirens were closer now.
He felt around in the pockets of the robe for the keys to the car and found nothing.
Although to leave out the front of Paul’s house would have meant to step into the suburbs, leaving out the back was stepping directly into the desert. Oscar scrabbled over some tastefully arranged stones and a chaise lounge and then a larger boulder that marked the end of the property and looked out to find sheer nothingness. Pure, flat night, with nothing on the horizon and no moon to light the way. His father must be out there.
He looked back at the house, which was now several hundred yards in the distance, although that couldn’t be right, he couldn’t have covered that much ground already. He thought he could make out someone standing in the rectangle of light that was the open sliding door, yelling something.
Oscar walked deeper into the night. It was cold now, and he pulled the bloody robe tighter. The next time he turned around, he realized the ground had sloped downward and he could no longer see the house at all.
He had expected that his pain would eventually begin to subside but it was getting worse and spreading. He moaned like an animal. Bile rose in his throat.
An unencumbered wind was rising, and as he stumbled over the hard ground he realized fully how bad this was. Fear spiked inside him. And then it fell away.
A Philosophy of Ruin Page 19