Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “Great night,” said Harrington, sipping coffee. “Exactly what I was looking for.”

  On Bill’s stomach, his friends had drawn two arrows pointing to his crotch. One said, LADIES, I CAN’T MAKE IT GROW while the other read, INSERT INTO ASS END OF DONKEY.

  “Oh you guys are hilarious,” said Bill. “Some real grade-A wits.”

  “We had a lot of trouble deciding what to write,” Rick agreed. He stretched his arms over his head, exposing the pale sockets of his armpits and the mad-scientist hairs that had first sprouted in sixth grade, when the two of them had stolen a shopping cart from Kroger’s, pushed it all the way back to the high school, and then, in order to impress some girls, rode it off a small cliff—really more like an abutment—into the Cattawa River. “So we compromised, but I agree it might not be our best work.” He tossed Bill a digital camera sitting on the counter. “But at least we got it documented.”

  He only needed to flip through the first few to get the idea.

  “Okay, but you gotta delete this one,” he said, showing them the image where Rick and Harrington both had their testicles hovering obscenely close to his face.

  Rick shot him a terrified eyebrow. “You kidding? I’m deleting all of ’em. My dad would fucking send me to boot camp if he knew we were drinking in his house. Speaking of—y’all are coming over tonight and helping me clean this place top to bottom.”

  Bill toggled through a few more photos. He cracked up again. “All right, this one’s pretty funny.” Harrington and Rick both wore suits and ties. They had draped his naked, dead-limbed arms over their shoulders. Both of them grinned like they were posing for a wedding picture while Bill’s head lolled back with his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

  “That one was a lot of work,” agreed Harrington, flipping a page of the newspaper.

  He now noticed the word Bullfrog scrawled across Harrington’s back like a tattoo.

  “Yeah, I passed out second,” he admitted.

  “Here.” Rick handed him a plate. “Hearty breakfast for a hearty boy.”

  The scent was simultaneously nauseating and intoxicating. He tried to force down scrambled eggs while taking in the view through the Brinklans’ kitchen window. Because they were like seventh-generation New Canaan, the Brinklans had worked their lineage into one of the county’s finer bucolic perches, a high grassy hill that descended into forest, beyond which their town carpeted both sides of the Cattawa River, looking nineteenth-century quaint, like the tuba solos were always on the verge of bursting forth during a Fourth of July parade. He’d loved waking up to this view since his childhood when Jill Brinklan would make them cinnamon rolls and Marty would sip coffee through his walrus mustache and mostly say nothing.

  Rick broke his revelry by thwapping a small item below the fold of the newspaper. It was an AP story: Rumsfeld Confident Major Operations in Iraq Finished.

  “See? Don’t you owe me an ice cream cone or something?”

  He tried not to take the bait. “We will see, pal.”

  Rick hoovered down a strip of bacon in a bite, hairy legs spread. “One thing you at least gotta admit is that with technology now they can really strike targets with precision. This was one of the most humane wars ever waged.”

  Bill belched eggs, whiskey, and Bud Light. Tried to meet him halfway.

  “Okay, right, sure, this wasn’t Vietnam or whatever, but you know they’re talking like seven or eight thousand civilians killed in the initial attack? That’s not counting like tens of thousands of Iraqi Army deaths—are we really talking about this?”

  “Yeah, summer’s for hangovers and jerking off,” agreed Harrington.

  Rick grinned to show this was all friendly. No more bitter arguments over T-shirts and bumper stickers. His small, squinty eyes only made his smile maddeningly big and bright. He had a single Himalayan-sized zit on his temple, of which Bill could see the crags, blood vessels, escarpments, and other skin-tectonic features. With his head now shaved into a stiff flattop, the sides of his skull milky and gruesome, he looked his part. Like he’d stepped out of central casting for Hillbilly Ohioan. Part of Rick’s appeal had always been that he knew this and played into the stereotype in a self-effacing, often hilarious way. It wasn’t until the last couple of years that the caricature had blended with his real thinking, which kept leading them to confrontation over just about anything: war, politics, Todd Beaufort’s sexual deviancy. “That’s war, man. You sit around in your safe little town your whole life, and of course it seems totally ridiculous that you’d have to fight for that safety. Then three thousand people get killed in the attacks—”

  “Rawr! And for like the billionth time, dude, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. I don’t know how many different ways to say it at this point. Like should I tattoo it on your arm Memento style?”

  “If you hadn’t passed out first, you could’ve written it on me in Sharpie.”

  “Guys,” said Harrington, setting the paper down. “Dad says cut it out. No one—I mean no one—not me, not the girls, not anyone—wants to hear you idiots debate this another second.”

  Across the room, Harrington’s funky ringtone bleated out of his cell. He went to answer.

  “Maybe Iraqy-raq had nothing to do with it, and maybe they did.” Rick turned back to Bill, still smiling. “But this is bigger than any one country, man. It’s civilizational. It’s two different ways of seeing the world, and sometimes you’ve got to show strength. Hit back with all you got, so they know what you’re about.”

  The hot pit of fury this put in Bill’s head. It was a black hole with a gravitational force that pulled every last atom into its dense, infinite sphere. He refused to take the bait, Lisa’s voice in his head. She thought he and Rick were engaged in macho, horn-locking, dick-comparing bullshit. She said he had to chill out when Rick goaded him. Not turn every petty issue into the Lincoln-Douglas debates. She was the one person he considered possibly smarter than him, so he’d lately been trying to listen to her. As Harrington wandered to the back porch to take the call, Bill let go of the conversation in his own particular way.

  “Tell you what,” he said to Rick, “I’ll admit bombing Iraq to submission was easier than I predicted if every time you bring up 9/11, you have to suck my cock.”

  Rick arched an eyebrow. “Now does that mean to completion each time? Or like one up and down gulp per September Eleventh observation?”

  “Hey,” said Harrington, poking his head back in, holding the phone to his bare chest. “The girls want to go to the beach today.”

  “Jericho?” asked Rick.

  “Booze?” asked Bill.

  “Stacey says Lisa and Kaylyn can hit the liquor store on their way.”

  “Plus, we still got a thirty rack of Coors,” said Rick through an Oh shit, this could hurt face.

  “Christ,” said Bill. “My liver.”

  “Is that a yes?” asked Harrington.

  “Well, it ain’t a fucking no. You can sleep when you’re dead, Ashcraft.”

  They spent that hot summer day of 2003 at Jericho Lake. The chain of calls early Saturday morning tumbled through the ranks, and half the high school showed up. They pooled pilfered booze. Hailey Kowalczyk brought armfuls of wood, and she and Dan Eaton built a fire pit on the beach for later that night. Stacey teased both Dan and Rick that the sun was invented in a time before boys with such reflective skin. Jonah Hansen turned up twirling the keys to his dad’s boat, docked a half-mile’s walk down the shore. Ron Kruger and Eric “Whitey” Frye arrived with patched-up black inner tubes and five bottles of Zima. Tina Ross came, and in her swimsuit you could see all the weight she’d lost, her bones looking as fragile as those of a featherless bird. Tony Wozniak and Mike Yoon brought a football, cornhole boards, and beanbags. They backed Yoon’s Explorer to the edge of the parking lot and blasted 93.7 FM, pop music from Columbus.

  Bill watched Rick and Kaylyn standing in waist-high water. Rick’s Stars and Stripes claw marks glared at him. Kaylyn skimmed her
fingers across the surface, and when she turned he saw the tramp stamp on her lower back. He’d always hated tattoos, but Kaylyn’s made him especially disgusted—a blue butterfly with symmetrical curlicues spreading across the once-perfect crest of her ass. She wore a lime-green bathing suit and held a hand over her brow to block the sun, squinting. Rick’s lower lip puffed out from dip, he took her by the hips, his eyes hidden behind Oakleys. Bill thought Kaylyn’s gaze flitted to him, but she might have just been turning away from the sun.

  Later that afternoon a cop cruised by, and they all madly hid their alcohol. Jonah took a group down to his boat, and Stacey’s top came off in the water, so they all got a glimpse. Lisa hooted and clapped and shouted, “Leave it off, Moore!”

  Bill lay beside his girlfriend in the sun, giddily, meltingly drunk. Normally in those days, he felt up to his nostrils in guilt, desire, and self-disgust—disgust with oneself being a thing as cherished and protected as any bit of ego or pleasure. But not that day at Jericho. It was the last time he could really remember when they were all just young, arguments lacking permanence, sins missing any real vital evil. He had lovers, yes, but he loved them. He was hurting his friends, sure, but they were still childhood brothers. With all that had passed between him and Rick, the friendship felt constantly volatile in his hands, like unstable explosive. Yet even with Kaylyn standing there in the water, looking as gorgeous and iridescent as a dragonfly, he felt a surge of love and regret unlike anything he’d experienced before. Because they were just kids, and that day they drank and they danced and they laughed at the sky-blue heavens, and it really felt like anything could be fixed and anything could be forgiven.

  * * *

  He had no idea how long he sat there. His gaze drifted from the stars to the city lights to the fireflies winging their Morse code. He listened to the crickets on their motorcycles, revving engines. He marveled at the beauty of It, how he could see everything about the universe down to the molecular level or up to the cosmic—the broken streetlights, the scratchy gravel of the roof beneath his fingertips, the empty spray paint can clutched by a cornice, the nuclear fuel of distant stars.

  At some point, he remembered Dakota sitting beside him, fingers dug deep into his dreads, staring into space, eyes glassy. It looked like he’d buried his hands in a pit of earthworms now writhing over his fingers.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Bill, getting to his feet. He jumped in place for a moment, reaching higher and higher with each release of his toes. He glanced down, and the roof looked impossibly far away. He could suspend in the air for superheroic seconds. “Wow,” he said. “Wow, wow, wow.”

  Dakota still hadn’t moved, but now Bill found himself with an appetite for the night.

  “Fuck that cop.” He continued jumping. “Is the liquor store still open? Let’s go back to the liquor store.”

  Dakota slowly rose to his feet, surveying every possible direction. “Yeah, man.”

  “Mothafuck the police!”

  He skipped over to the edge of the roof, haphazardly swung his legs over the side, grabbed the pipe with both hands and swung down onto the dumpster. Barely pausing, he leapt to the asphalt, knees bending to absorb the shock.

  “I get It,” he said as Dakota followed him less gracefully. “I totally get It. Even though I’m intellectually aware It’s just the methamphetamine releasing an excess of dopamine to my central nervous system, you can’t quantify a feeling like this in terms of dopamine and nervous systems, you know? Jesus-fucked-up-Christ, It’s like taking a shot of Jedi.”

  “Good shit, right,” said Dakota, still distant, eyes like glazed donuts.

  They walked back across the parking lot with Bill bouncing every few steps. When The Thing appeared overhead, some happy, bopping music issuing from speakers in its guts, he wasn’t even mildly surprised.

  “Wowzers.”

  The Thing was a never-ending python-amoeba of circus lights and seductive tunes, of venerated faces pushing up through the slime of its skin and a vacuum hose appropriating the dead and setting them up on marble pedestals jutting from its back. Slithering through the sky, The Thing bulged a muscle and barbed appendages caught souls on their sticky tips like insects. Robotic arms lowered with mechanized whizzing, tipped with hypodermic needles injecting stronger and stronger barbiturates into the masses, while oozing jelly limbs slithered into every other corner of the American night, places so dark and lonely, even the echoes fled.

  He looked in all directions. “I think I’m going to go do some cartwheels on the football field. How’s that sound? Is that weird?”

  “Nah, man,” said Dakota. “You do you.”

  Bill took off sprinting for the fence, arms pumping, lungs as powerful as blimps. He ran beneath the watchful gaze of this Leviathan, this opaque creature that knew only control and hunger, that no person not under the helpful influence of three different types of narcotics could even see because to look at it was to miss it. Turn your eyes in its direction and it evanesced back to vapor. It watched Bill curiously, thirty-seven million microscope eyes crawling the surface of the naked country.

  He snatched the chain link, scrambled to the top, and vaulted over. He hit the ground, rolled, collecting grass stains on his elbows, and sprung back up in a dead sprint toward the field. He crossed the black polyurethane surface and then his sneakers were crunching over the dry grass. He tipped his body, lowered his hands, and flung his legs back in a flailing cartwheel. He was a particle accelerator crashing protons and neutrons together. He could see the electrons slipping between realities, taste the quantum ghosts. This ended with him sprawled on his ass. The sky spun, and The Thing vanished back to stars and carbon. How rad. He did snow angels in the dust. He laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  “History’s all the same story, man—the consolidation of capital and political control.”

  They were walking back along New Canaan Avenue, beneath the broken streetlights and past the dark park, the threat of the cops obliterated in a fog of dopamine. For a moment, a cigarette butt glowed orange in the distance, a bright coal in the space beneath the picnic shelter. Inhaled back to life. It held for a moment, glimmering as the exhaled smoke curled, warping the air. Then it went dark as if it had never existed. Bill was talking very fast and neither he nor Dakota noticed.

  “But it ain’t just the military, man . . .” He went on to haphazardly describe: corporate media, real estate covenants, the medical-industrial complex, reality television, student loans, pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, industrial agriculture and factory farming, coal, oil, and gas interests, consumerized sex, the carceral state, neoliberal trade agreements, advertising, auto title loans, social media, narcotizing political messaging, and corporate data collection. “Any way to make a buck from people’s misery, man, they’re there.”

  Always something of a borderline Timon, for Bill, perhaps smoking crystal methamphetamine wasn’t the best prescription after a long, sleepless, drug-addled, alcohol-soaked day because even as his mouth and tongue and lips masticated this feverish disquisition on U.S. foreign, social, and economic policy, a dark purple cloud began to creep into him, somewhere between the visible spectrum and his kaleidoscopic intellectual preoccupations.

  Dakota had yet to say anything since they’d left the football field. He walked beside Bill with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his ratty jeans, the denim swishing noisily as he ambled along, his eyes with a bulging-orb quality. Like he was staring at a scene happening in another dimension.

  The cloud descended and Bill’s voice was divorced from what transpired in his head. The purple cloud had a notion. It swept down on top of him like smoke billowing from fallen towers. The possibility that all his work and all his travels and all his passion was just farce. His way to engineer the world to make sense. His way of coping at four a.m. on a West Texas highway. His heart thundered, and he dreamt the Truth, but each discovery was as slippery as a fish in the hand, and every time he tried to catch
one, it would simply wriggle its tail and be free. His chest felt tight. He was having trouble catching his breath.

  He turned his head and vomited a laundry-detergent capful of his guts but barely missed a syllable.

  “The reckoning is coming too, man.” He wiped bile from his lips. “I’ll tell you something. I see the future sometimes. I don’t mean I can see it all, but I have dreams where I see it. Dreams of buildings falling down and people spilling out of the cities. Already ninety percent of large fucking fish in the oceans have been exterminated. Yeah, you heard about that? Tropical forests will be gone in our lifetime. Phosphorous will peak, and there goes your fucking fertilizer. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is toast. There goes your coastal cities the world over. Refugee flows like no one’s ever imagined. Get ready for your helping of all the chaos and murder and sodomy you can handle. And the shit that the Powers will do to hold on? It’ll make the tyrants of the twentieth century look like Disney characters.”

  “Shit,” said Dakota, bending over. “A quarter.” He pinched it up.

  There were worse things in the purple cloud, though. Terrible shit he probably kept so deep that to let it out might overwhelm. Like inside of him was a passion and a darkness, and he could never tell the difference between the two. He only knew they were intertwined, tangled together like a snake with a head at each end.

  They cut through the alley behind a storage facility, and everything was crushed plastic soda bottles, beer cans, broken glass, and loser lotto tickets. Alley detritus speaking of the empires swaying back and forth in the breeze, precarious. Bill had always believed he and Rick would figure it out. When he came back home. And this thought led him to all the petty evils to which he’d borne witness. The dismembered hands he’d seen in Sonora, nailed to the doors of a church. The children he’d visited with in Hanoi, orphaned and limbless thanks to American ordinance still lying around the countryside. The wetlands of the Gulf eroding to oblivion. And it was all part of the same human sickness that filled him with such ancient exhaustion, that made him want to puke up his soul.