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A Novel
by Hari Kunzru
Book Reviewed by:
Excerpt
Blue Ruin
I swung my legs out of bed and stood up carefully. I felt light-headed and hungry, though better than before. I decided to go and scavenge through the bags of groceries in the car, but when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I found a tote bag filled with supplies and a note from Alice saying I'd been asleep when she came and she hadn't wanted to wake me. There were some cut sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, bottled water, painkillers, toilet paper, a toothbrush, hand sanitizer, fresh masks. I held the bag as if it were a bomb. It had been a long time since anyone had made me a care package.
One corner of the barn had been partitioned with plasterboard, and I opened a door to find a basic but functional bathroom with a shower stall wedged next to the toilet. I went to the car to see if I had any fresh clothes. An hour later I was washed, dressed and shaved, feeling cleaner than I had in days, but so tired that I had to go back upstairs to lie down. Almost at once I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, the light was failing and the trees were vague black shapes outside the window. I shut them again and woke into another bluish-white morning that smelled of earth and leaf mulch and wood exhaling the moisture of the night.
I sat upright. I felt shaky, empty and insubstantial, but my head wasn't throbbing and my vision was clear. The little cot above the barn was the first proper bed I'd had since the day Augusto drove me out of the house in Jackson Heights. Sleeping in a car, you're always anxious about a tap on the windscreen, a flashlight, a hand trying the door handle. Though I'd been traveling for years, and I'd often slept in strange or unfriendly places, I'd been feeling very vulnerable. With a good night's sleep came a flood of emotions that I found hard to master. I breathed deeply, fighting back tears.
In the car, tucked into the glove box, was a skinny roll of twenty-dollar bills. I'd calculated that I would need to work for another six weeks before I had enough saved for a security deposit. I was thinking about trying Long Island, maybe getting summer work in one of the tourist towns. I was too weak to work construction or landscaping, or any of the other heavy jobs I'd done in the past, and my recurrent bouts of fever and faintness were forcing me towards a question that I'd always known I'd have to answer sooner or later, about what I'd do when I could no longer physically sustain my way of living.
First I needed to get a room, somewhere to stay, then I could think about the rest. Experimentally, I stood up and made my way gingerly downstairs, two feet on each step like a little child. I took another shower, giving thanks for each second of hot water. Since I wasn't sure when I'd next be able to do better than a public bathroom, I wanted to remember the sensation, the jet hitting my neck and shoulders, sluicing the back of my head. I opened the trunk of the car and dressed, wishing I'd thought to wash some clothes; they could have dried overnight. I rummaged in the bags of groceries for breakfast. Some of the food would have to be thrown away. There was a whole chicken, pieces of salmon, milk, all of it slightly warm. I tore chunks off a loaf of bread and smeared it with runny butter, using a plastic knife from a stash of cutlery and paper plates that I'd swiped from a supermarket salad bar. I wondered what I should do with the rest of it. Most was usable, but company policy was to throw away anything that was returned to the store, regardless of the reason. There were giant dumpsters full of perfectly good groceries, padlocked so that no one would take anything. Maybe if I texted the help desk and volunteered to pay for the losses out of my wages, I'd be able to keep the job.
When I went to make the call, I found my battery was dead. I hunted for the charger and took it upstairs to an outlet, knowing that when I switched it on, I'd probably find it full of angry messages. So I left it and went downstairs and very cautiously opened the barn door, just a crack, staying behind it so I was out of sight. I sat with my shoulder against the door, breathing in the air and listening to the woods, increasingly aware of what wasn't there, the absence of the high white sound of the city, the screaming at the margins of perception composed of air conditioners and power cables and buzzing fluorescents and the stress of too many people packed into a tight space.
Excerpted from Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru. Copyright © 2024 by Hari Kunzru. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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