Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (29 page)

But I do. I am inured. I still sob and drink madly when they're in the thick of it, but in the between times, when they miss me but not too much, as its building, there is some relief.

I share the park with another homeless man. He hunts crull, using complex traps like the man I'd seen before, the ex-marine. We watch each other warily across the fake grass of this shitty park, and I wonder if he is the same man. Hours I spend wondering this, as though the answer will solve something for me, as though the answer will help.

He eyes me back. Perhaps he wonders if I am the same Ritry Goligh who once looked at him out of my apartment window in the slums, graysmith to skulk 47. But this is not skulk 47. It is skulk 12, after the tsunami came.

I saw Carrolla once, I think. I was roaming this skulk's back-alleys scrounging for liquor to steal, like some sickly ghast, and I saw him. He was noisy, happy, walking with a woman on his arm and talking loudly about his restaurant.

It had to be Carrolla, didn't it? Wasn't he planning a bar? I wondered if he remembered me fondly. Did he ever think of our days together?

Night, and I've spent another day staring into space, waiting for the wounds in my mind to heal. I feel less and less every day, like I've forgotten something I ought to know, like my mind is hiving off into constituent parts. Perhaps I'm forgetting who I am, or perhaps this is madness.

I don't know.

The marine across the way has been roasting crull for an hour. The newsprint he rolls it up in smells like burning hair. Sea weed paper, I assume. He's wearing rags like me. I wonder if a skirmisher suit would fit him anymore, how he might look holding a QC cannon as he attacks a subglacic base under the ice.

He waves. Perhaps he has liquor. I roll to my feet and trudge across the park. The barrels underfoot list and bob. Everything is falling apart. Soon there'll be a lake here, and soon there'll be a tsunami, and we'll all be wiped clean.

Napoleon, I think. Napoleon on Elba.

I grunt as I draw near. By firelight he looks filthy, his face grimed with muck. He hawks and spits.

"It never gets easier," he says. His voice sounds like sandpaper on chalkboard, deep and abrading, mottled with phlegm. Probably tubercular.

These are our first words, after a year, but the meaning is clear. I know him, as he knows me. We are the same in some way.

He hands me a jar of clear liquid and I take it eagerly, knock back a heavy swig. It is acetonic, perhaps some kind of medical cleaner. It strips the feeling from my tongue and throat, blooms heat in my stomach. Every bit of it helps to dispel the cold, if only for a little while.

They miss me, I feel. They think I'm coming back.

"Thanks," I manage, shuffling close to his fire. It's cool now, perhaps it's winter. I barely notice anymore.

He shrugs. "Finish it. Stole it from the graysmith."

I laugh. I look again at the jar and recognize it. It's got a CSF label. For a moment I'm back with Heclan, Ferrilly and Tigrates on the subglacic, distilling in secret and slowly drawing close to Ven.

I finish it. Gulping it down, the fumes burn up my nose, making my eyes water. When I'm done I sway.

"Sit," he says. I sit.

He pulls a chunk of crull apart, hands the wing to me. It is greasy and brown, spotted in places with feather stubs. I realize I am famished, how long since I last ate? I tear into the meat, swallowing it in gulping chunks, juices running down my chin.

"I knew it was you," the man says.

I look at him, and see that he is indeed the same man. I nod. I wonder how he survived, or if I've somehow slipped back in time to that old park on 47, and just across the way is another me, in another life, behind a kind of glass I can never break.

Memory. I'm always looking in, from the outside.

We eat, and he produces another jar of fermented CSF. We sip at it, and the world swirls pleasantly. As ever, I begin to forget. Leaning back to watch the stars, I wonder who I really am, which Ritry Goligh I am. Am I the boy who Lagged his parents, or the marine who lost his crew, or the man who told Don Zachary what to do and lived, or the man who lost it all?

Am I Napoleon himself?

"Come on," the ex-marine says. His face is lined and haggard, but there's something like brotherhood in his eyes. He's pointing to his hut, hidden amidst the poles and floating trees, built out of blue-tarp like a tent. "Let me show you."

I don't care. If he wants to fuck me, let him try. I'll kill him, and that'll be a kind of forgetting too.

"It's OK," he says. "I know."

On my knees, moving in a blur, I stagger through the bushes to his home. I kneel before the opening, and he pulls the sheet-wall aside.

There is a lamp glowing inside, illuminating a small cave-like space that looks like a shrine. It dizzies me. The canvas walls are covered in old photographs, taped and tacked into place. There are bits of faded yellow paper with child-like drawings on them, crayon outlines delineating a house, a tree, a mother and father, and two girls.

In the photographs I see his two daughters, his wife. He is dressed as a marine, standing by her side in their wedding clothes in front of some Calico church. They are happy and smiling. I look around the shrine and see them everywhere, covering every bit of blue tarp so the blue is just lines between the memories like mortar. Scattered around the floor are numerous items, a small and singed teddy bear, a pack of toy marines, child's clothes.

It is a ruin, a tangle of bonds so hot I can feel it buoying me up, and every one pointing at the man standing behind me. Tears well into my eyes, for the first time in a year not for my own suffering, but the suffering of another.

I turn and see him standing there, tears in his eyes too.

"It gets better," he says. He points at the shrine. "It helps."

I nod, rub the tears away.  

"Thank you," I say, and lurch to my feet. "Thank you."

Staggering away, I feel some part of me change. The part that has been shearing off for months, the part that kept itself secret when my first adoptive parents dived me without stop and hid behind a wall made of my own mind, begins to plan.

And I know what I have to do. For the first time in a year, some clarity presents itself. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but I know what I have to do.

I go at once. Drunk and stinking, dressed only in rags, I cross the wall into Calico. People stare at me, as I ride the Wall line to the Reach. They step away, turn up their noses, and I do not blame them. I need this. A man in a suit with a briefcase uses it to drive me out of the way. When I turn, he uses the bag to hit me in the face.

My nose breaks. That's OK.

Mr. Ruins feels me coming. I feel it, and I sense the Lag tightening around my family's throats. It's a risk, but the only thing I can do. 

Nobody stops me, as I walk into my old building. I ride the elevator in silence, halfway between terror and elation. I might see them again. I might get them all killed.

The door is ajar, and I walk in. It is my old home. Loralena is standing in the middle of the room, with Mem and Art either side of her. They have grown so much. When they see me the hope in their eyes peaks, then sinks. They sag, and the light goes out of them, Lagged.

Mr. Ruins emerges from the kitchen. "I told you never to come here, Ritry," he says.

"I just need," I begin, but I am so drunk and my nose so broken I can't speak well.

"You are disgusting," he says. "What is it? Here, let me."

He leaps the bonds between us, into my mind. I have a little strength now, but not nearly enough. The power he's raised from Lagging them, from feeding off me even now, makes me useless to resist.

He reads the marine's tent-shrine, and grins his big white grin.

"You want mementoes," he says. "Well, of course, Ritry. Of course. Take a seat."

I take a seat right there, in the doorway, on the floor.

"Very good," he says. "Now hold there one moment, will you?"

I sit, and look at my wife. She is pale, there are fresh worry lines on her face, but she is my Loralena still. I love her so much it hurts. Mem and Art gaze at me without seeing, and I want to reach out and tell them everything will be alright, but how can I say that when he is here even now? How can I promise anything?

He comes back with a sheaf of black plastic garbage bags and a stack of photograph albums. I recognize them, one from our wedding, one of the kids growing up, one of us in Candyland. "Yes, this is a good idea," he says. "I should have thought of this myself. It will only make it keener."

He shakes open the black bag and holds it open, then starts peeling photographs out of the album. He looks at each one for a moment, holds it out to me, then tears it to pieces and drops it into the bag.

"Something for you to do," he says.

It takes hours. He goes through all the albums painstakingly, and when he's done with that he collects Mem's old rooster teddy, and cuts that to chunks with a pair of kitchen scissors. He unloops the cotton stuffing within and makes a show of spooling it into the bag, like intestines. He adds clothes which he cuts to ribbons, ornaments which he smashes, some plates, cups, cutlery, anything he can think of.

Every one hurts. Every one is what I need.

At the end, there are four full bags. He knots the top of each, and tosses them to me. They land on the floor before me with a crunch and scrape.

"Now get out," says Ruins. "And if you ever come back again, well." He strolls back and lays his palm on the side of Loralena's face. "You know."

I pick up the bags and I leave.

It takes a month. I set up in Candyland, atop the old wooden rollercoaster. There's a platform there where Loralena and I sat, on the night I think Art was conceived.

I build the tower out of mortar dust I grind from the park's old buildings mixed with water from the sea, to make a sticky paste. I grind the broken and torn fragments of memory into the paste, then slather it onto a frame of wood and nails I salvage from the rollercoaster's support struts. It is papier mache, one of the games I used to play with Art and Mem, building impossible figures from our imaginations.

The tower rises, rickety and creaking and filled with the memories of my life. When the regular pain comes from Mr. Ruins, I focus it through this. The tower becomes a totem, amplifying the pain, rewarding him more. I suffer for it, am left gasping and sick since now I no longer drink, but there is a plan somewhere, even if I do not know what it is.

The tower rises, a story high, two stories, and I fill out the walls with wattle and daub, building it from four bags of shredded mementos. At the top I fashion something like a periscope, jutting through the wooden ceiling. It is a haphazard affair, made of wooden planks with shards of broken mirror I found in the funhouse and toilets. I peer up into it, on the listing floor of my conning tower, and peer out.

I see the cities spreading away like layers in the mind.

I scour the beaches around Candyland for days, until I find a piece of wood suitable to serve for a wheel. It was once the top seal of a capstan, I think. I affix it at the head of my trembling tower atop the tallest wooden rollercoaster, and look out over the world I have left behind.

The power of memories wells up around me, not only my own but Lorelan's, Art's, and Mem's. Their trails dart everywhere, the bonds hot and tight in this space, where so much of them now is interred.

There is only one thing left to do.

In Calico, it is easy to find Mei-An. Imbued with the power of the bonds behind me, I see her trail with ease.

I call her from a public node, and she comes to meet me in a coffee shop in the shadow of the wall. We sit in red plastic bucket seats and I look at this girl, this woman who is like a ghost from my past, and wonder about all the ways my life could have gone. What if I'd run with Mei-An then, and we fled the skulks together?

Perhaps I would never have met Mr. Ruins. Perhaps none of this would have happened, and I'd have different children in a different family, a different life.

But no. Ruins would have found me. He was hunting me all along, and the tsunami wall would have made no difference to him.

I think all this as I look into Mei-An's big Asiatic eyes. She is as beautiful now as she once was cute. She has grown into her face, and into her languages. She has made a proud and powerful woman of the skulk-touring child she once was. In the background I can feel Mr. Ruins' curiosity, as he watches me, us, and his confidence that there is nothing I can do. He is listening with me as I ask for the things I need.

"I saved you," I tell her, at the end. "Zachary would have come for you and never stopped. You owe me this, at least."

"I know," she says. She rests a hand on mine. Surely she can see what has become of me. I wasn't much then, when she knew me, but I am nothing now. She could so easily say no, but she doesn't. "I wish you'd answered my message. I was trying to warn you."

I smile. She thinks perhaps that it is Zachary that brought me to this low ebb. Perhaps she thinks me his slave, doing his bidding all these years. She never knew Mr. Ruins. So I smile for her, to show that it is not so bad as that. Of course it is worse, but that is not her doing. "It's all in the past," I say.

Mr. Ruins watches as I wait, as she leaves then comes back like a child sent out on a treasure hunt, bringing me good clothes, a node, and enough money to pay for a hotel. These things are trifles for her, but impossible for me to attain on my own. I have no identity in this world anymore, no name to register my own node or book a room, no money to pay for good clothes.

I thank her, and she starts to cry. Perhaps she suspects even as Mr. Ruins does, that this is some kind of last hurrah for me. That I am going to my death.

Perhaps. I kiss her hand, taste the scent of her unique skin I last tasted in another life, and say goodbye. First I go to a hotel, and wash, cleaning out the grime of a year. In the steamy heat of the shower I cut my own hair and shave my straggly beard, watching all that filth puddle and swirl down the plughole. I've done this before, one life shedding away for another. This is nothing new.