Johnny Ruin Page 8

  Later, rationale took over. Maybe a weird-looking fog was just fog. Maybe stars raining from the sky were just bits of dust and rock. Maybe a break-up was just a break-up.

  That thing you read about men being chronically dehydrated.

  We summit a slight crest in the road. The kind of crest that would make your stomach capsize if you took it by car. It capsizes anyway. I see her hair first. A finite golden braid. She’s under the hood of a Cadillac convertible, shouting. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  She sees me, falls silent. My feet are stuck. My words too. I’m sweating. She drops the hood, stands, hands on hips. Synapses fire. Nerves flash and smoulder like spent matches. Surprise, outrage, lust, anger, joy. A hundred wires tangled in my chest like headphones in a coat pocket.

  It’s no accident that the heart is halfway between the dick and brain.

  He says: Now you’ve done it.

  I say: What the fuck is your problem.

  He says: I can’t help you if you won’t help you.

  In 1979, NASA’s Skylab fell out of orbit and plummeted to Earth, scattering debris across Western Australia, burning bits of metal flaring in the sky like fireworks. Luckily, no property was hit and no one injured, though one district fined NASA $500 for littering. They never paid.

  The setting sun behind us gives everything a glow. Golden hour. Jon and I walk towards her. She wipes her hands on a T-shirt that used to be white, glares at me, her expression salt and citrus.

  They say that white isn’t a colour at all, that it’s all the colours at once. Maybe love is like that. Not one emotion, but all of them.

  Coincidence is a cliché.

  But this isn’t a coincidence.

  What the fuck are you on about.

  You wanted her to be here, he says.

  I’m not gonna miss your cryptic bullshit.

  He grins at me. Hooper drives the boat, chief.

  We’re close enough to speak now. What the fuck. She’s pissed. She blames me for engine trouble. For not letting her go. It’s not that I’m not listening, but as she started her speech I was accosted by a handsome golden retriever. I pat his ribs, let him lick my hands, stop him jumping up. Bad for the hips. You and me are fighting, buddy.

  Sophia is waiting for me to acknowledge her. I do. I’ve been on a river cruise, I say. How the hell would I know about your goddamn engine. She mutters something I don’t hear. Jon is writing in the dirt on the back windscreen of an abandoned car: This too shall come out in the wash.

  I say: Stop being such a cheese toastie.

  She says: Stop being such a cunt.

  Motorbikes. The hum and wail of two-stroke engines drifts from background to foreground, revs cracking in the air. Overpowered lawnmowers. I was too busy listening to the bass line in my chest. Missed the drop. Can’t see them yet. There must be dozens. A gang, a pack. I ask Jon if this is bad. It isn’t good, he says. Sophia is back in the driver’s seat turning the key, pumping the gas. Come on, come on, come on.

  Over the crest I see a face that isn’t. Paul. He holds his hand up to wave. A greeting, a taunt. I don’t know. Then them. Mistakes. Accidents. Hints and allegations. Grey clouds loom above. Riders on the storm, cloaked in black. An army. Then their leader, the Many-Faced Man. He waves too. This wave is meant as a taunt. One that says, We’re coming.

  Who is that, Sophia says.

  You don’t know.

  Should I.

  The road between us is shrinking. I tell Sophia to try the engine. She shouts back. It doesn’t work. I reach over, grab the keys, twist them in the ignition. The engine turns over. You’re fucking kidding, she says. I get in back, call Fisher. Jon is fifty yards away. He hops into the cab of an abandoned gas tanker, the kind that tends to be lying around in these situations. The engine fires for him first try. He swings the steering wheel, shouts at us through the window. Go, go, go.

  There is a highway in my mind littered with cars. Sophia weaves between them, pedal floored. In the back seat, Fisher rests his chin on my thigh. It’s okay, boy, I say. Behind us, Jon is having the time of his life. He dances the tanker over the road, grinning like ol’ Jack Burton, clipping cars, crushing others. In his wake a dozen memories knocked from their bikes.

  Still they come. I’ve made enemies of my own memories. Refugees of others. Perhaps they’re ones that don’t fit the narrative any more. Perhaps I keep changing the narrative. It’s hard to keep the story straight when you don’t know what you’re doing.

  A bridge. Jon is singing to himself. One of his. He gives me the thumbs up and throws the steering wheel to the right and then all the way to the left. The trailer jackknifes, swinging out to the side as he hits the bridge. The whole thing tips over and skids towards us, screeching, sparks flying. It comes to a rest halfway across, blocking the entire road.

  Sophia slams on the brakes. The cab opens, Jon hops down. The sound of splashing liquid, the smell of petrol. He takes a match he’s been chewing, lights it on the sole of his boot, tosses it to the floor. Flame crosses the road behind him and engulfs the tanker.

  He jumps in the passenger seat and looks at Sophia. Whenever you’re ready. The wail of tyres, the smell of sweat. Behind us, the kind of explosion you might expect from a fully laden gas tanker taking out a bridge. Should slow them down, Jon says. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

  Jon says: Nice moves, hot shot.

  She says: Not so bad yourself.

  Jon says: It was all his idea.

  The bonfire is a dot in the distance by the time the sun sets. Fireflies dance in the corn fields. Black clouds roll in from the edge of the sky. The air is charged with storm static. We stop to close the roof. Golden hour is over, replaced by the twilight haze of dusk.

  Hours are always doing that to you, ending.

  I was never allowed to ride motorbikes. One of my uncles died in a motorbike accident. My other uncle messed up his knees and hips coming off one. My dad rode motorbikes. But my brother and I couldn’t. One of those dad rules. I rode motorbikes so you don’t have to. I wouldn’t get on one now, is the thing. Far too dangerous. My father’s fear is my fear.

  She kept saying I didn’t know her, not really. Maybe I didn’t. All I knew was what she told me. What she let me see. We’re all fictions.

  Sophia’s deal is she wants to be liked. She shows you things that make you like her. Her fear is showing you anything that might persuade you otherwise.

  On the side of the road we pass a woman walking, her back to us. Her hair is long, straight, dark. She’s strolling under the lights on the hard shoulder. As we pass, I turn to see her face, only when I look she’s walking in the opposite direction, her back to me. I never saw her turn around.

  Friend of yours, Jon says.

  Kind of, I say. That was my ex-wife.

  The road east rolls unrelenting through fields, national parks. The hours tick over with the miles. It’s late when I realise I’ve lost time, lying prostrate on the back seat. I passed out at some point, fatigued, fevered. I sit in a half sleep, reality shifting like the slides in a View-Master.

  The storm has drawn closer and the clouds, like vast lanterns, are strobing red. I’m sweating, even though it’s night, even though it’s still twenty-two degrees. Jon is driving now. He turns to look at me. You doing okay. I mumble something about being fine. The truth of it is I don’t know if I am.

  Sophia stirs, asks if we’re there yet. We can be, Jon says. Just let us know where you wanna get out. I kick the back of his seat. She reaches out to hand me something. My notebook. You left this on the train. I thank her, smell it for some reason, breathe in the sweet scent of worn paper. Her voice now. Is she based on me. I nod, then realise she’s not looking at me. You’re a part of her, I say. She’s quiet a moment. You might not realise it yet, she says. But it’s her story.

  In our bubble, fear consumed me. I was scared I’d lose her. After she left, I was scared I’d made it happen. That I’d willed it somehow. Fear is as fear does. When you�
�ve only got one thing and you lose that thing, you lose everything. Life is consequences.

  When it finally came, the end, it was a cul-de-sac disguised as a mews. I realised too late. There was no redirect, no recourse. After months of watching something implode in excruciating slow motion, I was very suddenly bereft, without consolation.

  A thing I tell people is that Sophia was single when we met at the gig that night.

  A thing I don’t say is that there may have been some overlap with her ex.

  Thirteen

  Iowa / Anger, Part II

  Lightning dances on the horizon. The storm must be hundred miles wide, a curtain of fire rippling staccato across the skyline. Bolts fire at random. Purples, blues, flashes of white flame, like the hypnotic charge of a plasma lamp. I reach back and tap Sophia on the leg, pointing at the horizon in answer to the inevitable, What. She rests her chin on the side of the car. We stay like that a while, watching the show in silence. The next time I look back I see she’s fallen asleep again. Fisher is nestled into my legs, shaking. It’s okay, buddy, I say, stroking the top of his head, keeping my eyes fixed on the faraway storm, thankful the thunder isn’t closer.

  The plains are made of a thousand fields, dust and dirt and grass and corn. Northern English moors, Australian outback, apple pie prairie, battered badland. Buildings are sporadic. The orange flame and black smog of a distant refinery. The occasional gas station. Petrol cathedrals. Only thing more abundant over here than churches. We pass one Paul and I found in Nebraska that had a counter papered with printed-out Internet jokes. There’s one pulled from the road I grew up on, old mechanical pumps with flip clock displays that haven’t spat fuel in years. Back beyond the occasional rest stop, the storm simmers on the edge of visible. Waiting. Coiled. Wind buffets the side of the car. The part of my mind we’re passing through is anger.

  Nothing much grows here.

  That fighter pilot I read about, ejected at 50,000 feet into a storm cloud, spent forty minutes trapped inside, rising on updrafts, falling, rising again, covered in ice, bleeding from his eyes, his ears, until the storm let him go. You can fall for ever if the wind wants you to.

  Jon checks she’s sleeping. So what, you’re friends now.

  We’re not not friends, I say. But we’re not enemies.

  I couldn’t do it, not after all she’s done to you.

  What are you talking about, I say.

  She tore you apart, he says.

  And I did the same.

  It’s a clever plan, he says. Have her break down, ride to the rescue. I tell him to shut up. He fiddles with the radio, half-listens to a few stations, switches it off again. This way she needs you, right. I start to tell him I didn’t plan this. That I’m going to let her go. But I stop myself.

  And what if I need her, I say.

  He shrugs. Then we’ve got a lot further to go.

  My superpower is selective vision. I can see what I want to from a hundred paces.

  Jon is tense, terse. We’re clashing, slipping like a worn clutch plate. Knocking heads. It’s been a long couple of days. Tempers burning up on re-entry. Spend enough time with anyone you get sick of them. Spend enough time with yourself it just might kill you.

  I’m twenty-two, ducking under a punch. Paul’s fist connects above my right ear. A scuff. I don’t know how the argument started, but I got out of the car. He wanted me to get back in. Took a swing at me when I refused. We never much talked through our fights, never apologised for words or fists. Just waited till it was forgotten. A week later he was dead.

  Time slips. Musical chairs. I’m in back. Sophia drives. The storm is on top of us. The wind makes the car swerve to keep a straight line. From the front seat I hear untruths and half quotes. The storm bathes them both in red light. Portraits in a dark room, lit only in flashes. Then a pitch in the frame rate. Their motion stuttered, animated. They skip and rewind and flicker. Fragments, figments. Everything is red. Lynch-like. I can’t trust my eyes. I shut them tight and listen.

  She says: He knows what I’m going to do.

  She says: And yet he lets me do it.

  He says: He lies to himself.

  He says: That’s his superpower.

  She says: What scares him more.

  She says: That I won’t leave, or that I will.

  Thunder now. What the thunder said was the thunder barked. The thunder laughed. Who’s to say I can trust my ears. When I open my eyes it looks like they’re holding hands.

  I’m thirty-one, waiting to hear from her. It’s late. I’m in bed. She’s out somewhere. I stay awake, staring at my phone. I have to masturbate three times to fall asleep. When she calls, she’s drunk in a cab. She apologises for not texting. I love you, she says. Her voice is soothing, sedative. Sometimes when you’re too scared to sleep you just need to be read a story.

  In our bubble she’s trying to make a hollandaise. It’s not going well. I’m a full-time grouch, but her bad moods creep up, all stealthy, unpredictable. This is usually how it starts, with her being frustrated she can’t do something. On cue, she throws the saucepan in the sink, storms out in a tear-filled fury, insists she’s never cooking again. I have different tactics for this. Today I try to make her laugh. When she comes back in, I’m holding a candlelight vigil for the hollandaise. I read a poem I wrote. Sometimes levity works. Those times she’ll laugh, lighten up. This time, well. Let’s just say I’m yet to find a better opponent in a game of let’s not talk for four days.

  Another tactic was to play Dashboard Confessional at full volume.

  A thing I wonder: what came first, the Emo or the agony.

  I sit up in my seat and Jon hands me his hip flask. Drink deep, he says. I sip cheap turps through clenched teeth. You know when someone dies and the body evacuates its bowels, I say. Jon nods. Death shits. I hand him back the flask. That’s the kind of shit I feel like.

  Tell me, she says. What have you taken.

  Dunno, I say. Don’t remember it all.

  Jon speaks for me. He’s on ket.

  Ketamine, she says. Really.

  Really. Whole heap of it.

  But… but he doesn’t—

  He does. He did.

  A meteorite flares above us. Burns bright, fades out, skips across the highway. The road ripples like water in its wake. I tell them about the hallucinogen. About the sleeping pills. The whiskey, Jon says. He knows what I know. You took all that, she says. She asks why, even though she knows what I know. So I’d miss you. I shake my head. So I wouldn’t miss you any more.

  Drugs never scared Sophia. She’d do white from time to time. At gigs. She’d arrive back from the bathroom, pupils like black holes, buzzing. She’d want to fool around. Not sure if it was the white or the thrill of doing it. But it upset me. I was too jealous, too insecure.

  It’s always guys that have white. Guys who carry just to be interesting. They’d offer. She’d go. I’d shake my head. Not for me. I was anxious, scared. Scared of being like them. Scared that white would make me more fun, more interesting. That she’d like me more if I did it.

  I’m twenty-seven, being told I’m no fun. You’re no fun, my wife says. We never have fun. Later I’ll realise the depression was to blame. The way it flattened me. Made me too serious. But her words do damage. You’re no fun. They hit me out of nowhere, a rock leaving ripples.

  A thing I’m afraid of is being boring.

  You could have called me, Sophia says. If it was that bad. I tell her it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. How hard is it to ask if I’m okay, I say. A year, and you never asked. Not once. She looks hurt. Don’t confuse me not asking with me not giving a shit. What I say next is, Whatever, because that’s the worst thing you can say in an argument.

  In 1978, a Russian surveillance satellite, Kosmos 954, crashed in northern Canada. Its nuclear core spread radioactive material over hundreds of miles. Only 0.1 per cent of the waste was ever recovered. It was meant to stay in orbit for a lifetime. It lasted four months
.

  Fisher whines, needs to stretch his legs. I’m about to tell them to pull over when Jon pipes up. Fisher could use a run, he says. We pull into a rest stop that looks like any in America. Parking bays, and picnic benches bolted into the floor. People will steal the fuck out of unsecured seating. I climb from the car. The air full of static and tension. I’ll get us a table, Sophia says. She smiles at Jon as she goes and I realise she’s glowing, but it’s not for me.

  What was that.

  We’re getting along.

  You’re getting along, I say.

  Come on, he says. Don’t be that guy.

  Probably a little late for that at this point.

  Is it a problem if I get along with your dog, too.

  I’m thirty-one, feeling pretty low. I give her a choice. If you do it; I do it. She’s excited now. Animated. This will be so fun. It is fun. She cuts lines and we stay in the cubicle, fuck each other’s brains out. It feels so good. And it was so easy. That scares me more than anything.