Among the Ruins Chapter1, Part 3

We lapsed into the same sort of stale conversation that was so common after she left us. It always happened. We need lots more alcohol to get back into that perfect state of communion with each other. But when she was here it was so easy, so natural, so beautiful even.

            He had started talking about something superfluous and I looked at him a little deeper. There was something about him that I hadn’t noticed earlier in the evening. There was something he was worrying about, something he was twisting about in his mind the way he was twisting his glass of wine in his hands. The rosy sheen had gone from his face and been replaced with a dull pallor that made me wonder when he last ate something or slept properly. He looked exhausted and his usually dirty clothes were even messier and more creased than normal.

            I interrupted him in mid sentence and he gave me a look of gratitude and a vague smile. I refilled his wine glass and sat back and waited for him to begin telling me what was causing him to worry.

            He cleared his throat and began forming the words soundlessly, as if he were trying them out in his head to feel the shape of them before he spoke them.

            “I think we should kill Seth,” he said finally. 

            I sat in silence for a few seconds too stunned to think of a response.

            “That is absolutely out of the question.”

            “Oh, fuck you.” He stood up and began pacing across my tiny room. “I know what you're going to say,” he said, pointing at me and gesturing wildly. “You're going to say that we shouldn't be so hasty and that we should sit him down, talk to him and sort this out, but it's gone beyond that. We're in too deep and this rabbit-hole has only so much space. We can't have him on this journey with us. We need to kill him.” He sat down on the end of the bed and leaned towards me, spilling red wine on my bed. “I feel like he's always there, hovering over my shoulder, watching everything I do and just waiting to drop the guillotine and cut my fucking head off.” He drained the wine and reached over and picked up the bottle. “It's different for you. You're not as involved as we are.”

            I sat up and grabbed the bottle of wine from him. “I'm not as involved as you guys are? What the hell are you talking about? How am I not involved?”

            “Calm down. Easy, take it easy. You're not as involved with Seth as we are. You don't register with him. He doesn't think you're sleeping with his girlfriend. He's convinced himself that you weren't really a part of what happened.”

            “Why the hell does he think that?”

            Luke shrugged.

            “Well, you aren't the only one connected with this decision. What do you think Evelyn will say? Do you really think she'll want to kill Seth?”

            He stood up and threw his wine glass against the wall. “You don't understand. You have no idea what is happening.”

            “Please enlighten me.”

            “The fact is that he knows what happened. My money and Evelyn's body will be enough to keep him from going to the police for the time being, but how long can that last? How long can we have a broken arrow until everything starts falling apart? The white whale can only be kept at bay for so long before somebody slips up and we become a hastily tacked on epilogue to a fairly maudlin tale. Viktor was a fucking bunny rabbit compared with him.” He was shouting now, occasionally rising into a screech as he became more and more agitated.

            “Seth won’t go to the police now. He wasn't involved at the beginning but now he stands to lose a hell of a lot more then we do. He may have not been there when it happened but he withheld information from the police about a murder. That type of scandal could ruin him. We just need to be patient and calm.”

            He spun around and grabbed me by the throat. “You are an idiot.” He forced me back against the wall and onto the desk where the shattered remnants of his wine glass lay. I felt shards cutting into my palms and the damp from the wine soaked into my trousers. He was surprisingly strong and I couldn't resist him. I tried to push back but he was impenetrable like stone. His hands tightened around my throat and stars exploded in my eyes as everything began to fade into black. Then his hands released their grip and I felt his lips press against mine. As I tried vainly to draw a breath I felt his tongue search out my mouth. I tried to kiss him back but I still couldn't breath and I began to cough. He pulled himself back and released me. “I'm sick of your patience and calm,” he said through a reluctant smile. “Things don’t always work out the way you want.”

            I collapsed onto my bed and tried to get my breath back. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with another wine glass. He filled it and then mine and sat next to me.

            “Do you know, this Argentine wine,” I said to him as he gave me mine, “this Argentine wine reminds me of a love affair I once had. Ended horribly. She cheated on me and I had my heart broken.”

            “Yes, it does that. Tastes of melancholy and romance. Being heart broken is unforgivable. It means you care about someone more then you care about yourself and that's no way to live.”

            “It tastes like the train ride home,” I said between sips.

            “It tastes like the end of an affair,” he said in response.

            “It tastes like a unicorn.”

            “No. No, it tastes like the last unicorn.”

            We began to laugh and then the conversation began to drift. Seth and our dilemma were forgotten, as were the kiss, the broken wine glass and my abandoned dinner in the kitchen. We sat and spoke about meaningless things for several hours before we noticed that the sun had risen and a new day begun. Then he got up and without a word of goodbye went home. Everything important had been said in the night and no words of farewell were needed.

            This has become my pre-eminent memory of him. That conversation and the night that followed contained a little bit of everything he was. It was almost my relationship with him in miniature. Everything that occurred between us could be found in that night in embryo.

            But I also remember it because of what his desperate actions and confused speech had been trying to say to me. What Luke had been trying to tell me was that life never works out the way you want. There’s always some little detail that needs fixing before you can have that happily ever after everyone craves. There will always be a Seth who needs killing, or another glass of wine that needs to be drunk. That's what the kiss was about as well. It wasn't about love, or lust or anything. He had me in his grasp and he wanted that magical kiss that ends the fairy tale and restores order. But that kiss at the end of the fairytale is never going to be the magical kiss you think it is. And he knew that.

             I guess seeing life as a fairytale is damaging. You expect there to be a beginning, middle and some sort of logical conclusion. As much as I wish it could be otherwise, life is not a fairytale, and I am not a prince.

            I once believed I would write a thousand different stories about love and beauty and an endless quest for truth like Proust, but now it seems I only have one story in me to tell; This story. A short, painful, broken story that isn't about love, or beauty or truth, but about the two people who tried to kill me and the people we killed.

            I first realized I was going to be a writer when I was recovering at my mothers’ house. I started writing everything down at my mothers’ insistence as a way to recover from my injuries and perhaps gain some closure. She thought it would be cathartic; I thought it would be pointless. It was all still too real and the bullet wounds too fresh for me to wade through my memories about it. Needless to say, as I was recuperating in my bed the images came to me and I had to write them down or be drowned in them.

            My mother didn’t understand. She couldn’t. She had only loved one man, my father, and the worst thing he ever did was love us so much that he had to leave us. If he had stayed around and tormented us with his presence and his addiction, then maybe she would have understood. She only knew a love that pained us through its absence; the love between me, Luke and Evelyn hurt us and everyone around us by its presence.

            But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start further back, when I was younger, less vain, more open and still believed in the redeeming powers of love and fate.