The Outsider Ch. 27

The conversation dragged on a few more minutes, but finally Colleen hung up. Mike set down his cell phone and looked at Ruthie as she sat quietly on the spare bed. She looked blankly ahead, her eyes not focused on anything in particular. He sat down next to her. He did not touch her or try to take her hand. He just joined her in blankly staring ahead and told her about the phone conversation. When she didn't respond, he decided to change the subject.

"You know...today...when I got back...you were acting really weird...like you were freaked out about something."

"I had a good reason to be freaked out."

"And that reason was...?"

"My counselor, you know, Dr. Hartman...she...uh...kinda told me something. I mean...they always say it's best if you know everything about yourself...and I'm wondering now if that's really true. Maybe you're not supposed to know. Anyhow, she told me...she kinda..."

Ruthie stopped, totally regretting what she had just said. However, it was too late to take it back. She didn't know how to continue. Finally she grabbed the stack of articles she had wanted to hide only minutes before and shoved them in Mike's face. He took the papers and skimmed through them. Ruthie fidgeted and finally interrupted his reading:

"Sucks knowing this, doesn't it?"

Mike shrugged his shoulders:

"Doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything. Now you know a couple of new psychology words, but what difference does it make?"

"I dunno. It doesn't bother you that Hartman's saying that I'm a fucking mental freak?"

"No. And I don't think that's what she's saying. It says right here..." he pointed at one of the paragraphs "...that it's fairly common. And just looking at all these articles; they don't even have it pinned down. I mean...here it gives a different name: 'Asperger's syndrome'. This article's saying non-verbal communication disorder is the same as 'Asperger's syndrome' and over here it's saying it is not. Typical science...these writers don't know themselves what they're talking about."

Ruthie didn't respond, so Mike continued:

And even if you are fucked up, so what? Who isn't fucked up? Me? Your roommates? Your cousins? Our parents? The potheads downtown? The drunks running around campus? Your church? My church? Who isn't fucked up in some way or another? You're a lot less fucked up than most people I know."

Ruthie hugged Mike. For a long time the couple sat on the bed, with Ruthie in Mike's arms. Mike's words did calm her down a bit, but she knew that there was so much that she had not told him. The urge to smash her defective brain on the rocks and then float away in the ocean had retreated for a moment, but she knew it would return.

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Ruthie stayed the night with Mike. She knew that Jen would be leaving first thing the next day, but decided not to depress herself by saying goodbye. Later in the morning she would return to her room and only her stuff would remain; that Jen would have already left and that would be the end of her. Ruthie could not have explained herself why she did not want to say goodbye to Jen, but she didn't. Better to spend the night with the one person who did care about her than to worry about someone who didn't, and would be out of her life within a few hours anyway.

Her mood had improved enough that she approached her boyfriend about making love. She rubbed lubricant into her vagina and on Mike's penis and massaged him until he was hard. Then she laid back and waited for him to finish.

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Ruthie was one of the last of the students to vacate her dorm. During the final two days she was in her room, she was the only student remaining on her floor. She reveled in having not only a room, but an entire floor to herself. Of course, she took advantage of her solitude by being totally naked anytime she was on the fifth floor. On her very last afternoon in the building, she went out on the roof and relaxed in the warm May sunshine.

Ruthie had a serious issue hanging over her once the semester ended: where she was going to live. Salinas no longer was an option. There was no way she could afford to live anywhere in the Santa Cruz area by herself and with that fucking non-verbal communication disorder bullshit messing up her brain, her chance of finding a compatible roommate was zero. She realized that, unless she relented and went to Nebraska, she faced the prospect of being homeless.

Ruthie was still on the roof of her dorm, lying on a towel and doing stretching exercises, when Mike came up looking for her. He had a big surprise for her: announcing that he was about to sign a lease for an apartment and asking her if she wanted to have a look at it.

Ruthie was stunned. An apartment? At first her instincts told her to not go with Mike, because she really did not want to live with him. However, she knew that she had no other choice if she wanted to stay in California. She resented being forced to rely on him, but at least the problem of where she was going to live over the next year was resolved. She nodded, picked up her towel, and went to her room to put on her favorite skimpy dress.

Ruthie wasn't sure what to expect from Mike's choice of apartments, but what she saw convinced her that he did understand her needs to some extent. The unit had two bedrooms, one of which would be for her. All of the windows faced away from the complex and overlooked a hill running down to the highway, which meant that no one could see in from any of the other units. The place had more privacy than most houses. Best of all, there was a balcony that was concealed by opaque panels, a place where she could sit out wearing nothing looking at the ocean, and even sunbathe during the afternoon. It was as close to a perfect place as Mike could have gotten.

Ruthie wondered if Mike expected her to split the rent, but he mentioned nothing about that. Nor did he ask her to put her name on the lease. It was very strange, what was going on, especially given the conversation he had with his sister just a few days before. Very strange indeed.

Ruthie pushed aside her doubts and accepted Mike's offer. He was giving her a real refuge, a place where she could be herself and enjoy her body, a place that she could never hope to have without him. Yes, it came with a commitment to a relationship she really did not want, but what alternative did she have? Go to Culiacan and look at her dying grandfather? Go to Lincoln and have to look after Debra's kid?

So that was it: she had just committed herself to living with her boyfriend.

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For the next couple of days, Mike took charge of setting up the new life he wanted to have with Ruthie. He rented a van and took stuff out of her dorm to the new apartment, then asked her to go with him to pick up some furniture from his father's house. When they got to the house, Ruthie was surprised how much the property had deteriorated since the last time she had seen it. Mike seemed not to notice or care. His goal was to take all the furniture out of his own bedroom and a couple of items from Colleen's room that she didn't want. He also grabbed a sofa and a coffee table from the living room.

Ruthie was surprised by Mike's brazen raiding of his parents' house for furniture, but he explained that whatever was not off the property when the bank foreclosed would either be seized and auctioned, or simply would be tossed onto the sidewalk. Mike raided the kitchen for silverware and utensils. He then went into the garage to look for tools, only to find that his father already had sold off the tools.

Ruthie looked around the desolate house, wondering about some of the nicer furniture that was missing. Mike explained that Colleen had some of it in storage, and the rest had been sold at a garage sale.

Ruthie was immensely depressed by what she was seeing. The house was rotting away, the family's belongings were scattered, and its members were going their separate ways. She understood that Mike had the best intentions with his father, but she also knew that having a couple of conversations with him was not going to change what was about to happen. It was blatantly obvious that Mr. Sinclair had lost the will to live and that the state of his house matched the state of the man's mind. He had become morose and self-destructive. Already his marriage was gone and his kids were becoming estranged from him. Ruthie suspected that was exactly what Mr. Sinclair wanted, to chase everyone out of his life before oblivion overtook him. As for Colleen, Ruthie suspected that Mike's sister simply was biding her time and wanted nothing more than to get away from her relatives.

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Mike had the van full of what he wanted by the time his father got home. When she saw him, Ruthie was shocked by how bad Mr. Sinclair looked. Mike described what he was taking and the older man indifferently shrugged his shoulders. Mike invited his father out to eat. Mr. Sinclair again shrugged his shoulders and handed his car keys to his son.

Mike had wanted to talk to Mr. Sinclair about...well, about what? Suddenly he realized why Colleen had become impatient with him, because it seemed that there was nothing the older man wanted to talk about. It was Ruthie who stepped in and managed to engage Mike's father in conversation. She got him to talk about the group Kansas and why over all the years the music had fascinated him so much. He responded that, even in the 1980's, during a time the impending decline of the US was not so evident, he had a premonition that life was going to get much worse. He ordered a whiskey, and then another. The drinks shut down his train of thought and he became quiet. Finally they took him back home and helped him into the master bedroom. Mike, not sure what else to do, took his father's car back out and filled it with gas.

Neither Mike nor Ruthie had much to say as they returned to Davenport. Ruthie quietly stared out the passenger window into the darkness. She dreaded the hours of lugging heavy furniture that awaited them as soon as they got back, but more than anything else she was thinking about how much life sucked. Her thoughts drifted to her impoverished mother, now exiled to a small cinderblock house in a crappy neighborhood in Culiacan. Without looking at her companion, she commented:

"Our lives are so fucked up. And you know what really sucks when your life is fucked up?"

"What's that?"

"You keep thinking...my life's fucked up, but at least it can't get any worse. And that's bullshit, because it always can get worse, and it does. And then you think to yourself. OK, it did get worse, but now that's it. Surely this is as bad as it'll get. But it's not. It never is. It never ends."

"Not 'till you die, at any rate."

"That's right, Mike. Not 'till you die. That's when things quit getting worse, when you're dead. Your dad's right about that."