Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “It seems like you think you have no choices, Kay, but you really only have one. You get clean.”

  Kaylyn held her mouth in her hand. She’d never wanted to kill herself before, but she thought about it then. She definitely had enough junk left to OD. She could hike out to the Brew or Jericho Lake and put it straight into the pit of her elbow.

  “I’ll drive you right now,” said Hailey. “I know a treatment place in Columbus. I’ll help pay for it and you can stay there as long as you need. That’s your only option. Then we can talk about what you want to do about the baby. Who knows, maybe that little gal will save you. Maybe she’ll give you a reason to make up for everything.”

  Kaylyn wept harder. When Hailey guessed at the sex, she saw, vividly, what a daughter of hers might look like.

  “There’s no way I’ll make it,” she said. “There’s absolutely, one hundred percent no way.”

  Hailey pulled her into her arms, rested her chin on Kaylyn’s head. Her friend’s body was warm and soft, a mother’s body. “Of course you will.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Kaylyn demanded, wanting to strangle her. “I’ve never done anything for you. I’ve never been anything but a fucking monster to anyone.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Hailey. “You had the only Teddy Ruxpin on Rainrock Road, and you let me play with him all the time.”

  She didn’t find this funny.

  “I can’t take back what I did. Not now. I’ve lost myself.”

  Hailey pulled back, looked at her with a severity, but also a kind of demented humor, a Look at where we find ourselves in this grand cosmic joke sort of face. She took Kaylyn’s gaunt cheeks in warm, moist hands. “It’s never too late to start over. You and I know that.”

  “Why?” Kaylyn pleaded. “Why do you keep helping me?”

  “Jesus Christ, Kay.” She pushed a handful of greasy blond off her forehead. The ruddy bulbs of her cheeks gleamed brightly, filling with embarrassment. “Because I’ve loved you too long. We do anything for the people we love. That’s what I’ve learned from you.”

  She woke the next morning in the large house of the Volunteers of America of Greater Ohio sicker than she’d ever been in her life. Vomiting and diarrhea like her insides were unspooling out of her. Her bones and muscles ached so maddeningly that she wanted to scratch her skin open and rip the whole infrastructure out. She itched everywhere. Her vagina felt like an open sore and she wanted to burn it shut. She thrashed in the sheets. She thought she could feel the baby eating her from the inside and dreamt of cutting it out of her stomach. She wanted to stab the nurse when she came by with water, and she puked it all over the floor instead of the toilet just to be spiteful.

  And yet.

  The morning after that, in the midst of a host of pains so unfathomable she thought they might drive her to permanent madness, she got out of bed and went to the window. The sun was rising. Alum Creek to the east, and the green expanse of the Franklin Park Conservatory to the south. There was a song playing in her head. From Ben Harrington’s second album. This pretty, sad girl, lost for so long even the devil had gone and forgotten her name. She watched the clouds pass over the sun and spears of light pierce through their gossamer veil. The song played and played in her head until she went to the toilet to be sick again.

  * * *

  Bill could hear only the ticking clock in the kitchen and the sound of his own breath.

  “You don’t have to be alone with this,” he said, putting his arm around her. “Whatever it is. I can help you.” As he pulled her into his embrace, he wasn’t sure if the pulse was his or hers or the baby’s.

  “You don’t understand,” she said again. “I’ve done awful things to people I cared about, people who were my friends, who I was supposed to love. I look back sometimes, and I can’t believe the person I was. Who I am.”

  Kaylyn shimmered before his eyes, and there was something always out of his reach, something more to her than the mourning Ohio beauty, more than an unexpected sexual audacity discovered in her grandma’s house in Dover, more than the girl he’d tried to drink away in a dozen countries on a thousand nights. He’d go to the underworld, he’d stand on the bitter rock, he’d eat the sticky bodies of the vilest subterranean insects, and still he wouldn’t have her. Hades abducted Persephone and made her queen, but the motherfucker was the enemy of all life, all gods, all men. How to pull apart a story like hers? He felt in her things he’d never seen, processes of cunning none of them had ever understood, and the way she looked at him, her eyes now black pits with dark tongues lapping in the depths, he wondered if he should fear her. That was her power. That he’d never really know. And even when the waters rose at the end of civilization, he still wouldn’t.

  “You need to go now,” she said.

  Panic feasted as she led him back through her house. At her front door, he clutched the meat of her bicep. He pulled her into him once more, gripped the bones in her back and felt all of this like he was being buried alive.

  She kept her hand on the doorknob. He scrolled through their ancient conversations, searching for an explanation and got nowhere except the memory of her clutching a towel to her skinny, small-breasted body when she emerged from the summer water of Jericho Lake. He couldn’t bring himself to believe all this longing he’d carried was just a well-stretched scam by a cruel, ignorant pill junkie.

  “I’m sorry.” He let go of her, sucked in a needed breath.

  She smirked, wiped tears from her eyes. “What an un-Ashcraftian way to depart.”

  “Maybe a good-bye kiss? Or a good-bye blow job?”

  She laughed and wiped a few tears away as she popped the door open, the lamplight spilling over the concrete steps.

  “That’s more like it.” She kissed him somewhere on the fringe between mouth and cheek.

  She closed the door behind him, and Bill hurried into the night. The whole world felt like a sleight of hand. Their lives: all part of some larger parlor trick, an expert misdirection, and here they were, reeling, grasping. He needed the comfort of the liquor store again and aimed in that direction.

  He’d gone only five blocks before he understood how exhausted he was, how strung out and ready to collapse onto the crummy red brick. As he neared the square, he heard a low rumble in the distance. The rumble grew until the sound familiarized: helicopter blades thudding dully at the air as they kept their cargo aloft. The red lights of the chopper cruised up from the south. He stopped in the middle of the street and watched it. It was too low, nearly skimming the tops of New Canaan’s tallest three-story brick edifices, tilting back and forth with uncertain piloting. The nose dipped, as if for a moment it would dive kamikaze straight into the guts of this rank neighborhood, and then it achieved more lift, adding clearance. This close, the blades positively thundered. It passed overhead, weaving chaotically, and Bill got a look at its black belly, tinted blood red by anti-collision lights looking like wet, blinking eyes. Pointed due north, it sped toward its destination, as if drunk and desperate, as if fleeing. Like the angel, the chopper vanished into the same inter-dimensional chute of ashes and blue light.

  He heard sirens in the distance, and not just one vehicle. It sounded like a response to a three-alarm fire, and he remembered they would still be looking for him. If they found him, they would lift up his shirt and see the flesh outline of the package and know what he’d done—whatever that was. He did the only thing he could think of, what all children eventually revert to. He cut over to the Dunkin’ Donuts and dialed collect the only adult he could trust. He said, “Hi. It’s Bill. I could use some help.”

  Then he sat down on the curb and let darkness close around him.

  When he came to, strong hands were hauling him up, guiding him into the backseat of a car. “If you’re gonna be sick it’s gotta be back here.”

  He fell into the cushions of the backseat. A car that still had that old man, Barcalounger scent: fake leather and stale, sneaked cigarettes. Through
the slits of his eyelids, he watched Marty Brinklan walk around the front and get in the driver’s seat. He looked almost the same, a big unkempt cap of stiff white hair that never receded and the mustache, now more handlebar than walrus. Bill was too far gone to note if he looked any older, any paunchier, any grimmer, but these all seemed reasonable. He still had a busted boxer’s nose, as crooked and malformed as a knot in a tree. He’d broken it four times, most recently when he and Rick were kids and an angry woman beamed him with a flowerpot to the face during a domestic disturbance call. Rick’s mom had to wear earplugs for the snoring. Bill tried to apologize to Marty, but he wasn’t sure of the words he was saying.

  “I get it. It was either me or a night sleeping it off in county.” Marty’s baritone had a sandpaper rasp. Bill tried saying something else but an unseen palm held the lids of his eyes. He felt the centrifugal pull of each turn, the rumble of the road. It vibrated inside his teeth.

  “Said your parents are gone?” Marty asked him.

  Bill wasn’t sure how he responded.

  “I’ll take you to the house. You can pass out there. I gotta go back out, though. We got a call. Nasty business out on Stillwater Road.” He sniffed allergies into the back of his throat. From childhood, Bill knew what would come next. Marty cracked the window and sent a loogie shooting off the tip of his tongue. Through the window he could only see dark veins of purple swimming by, and in that purple a mask with bottomless eyeholes that watched him as they drove.

  He must have asked what happened. He was sure the nasty business was his fault.

  “Can’t say, Bill. Don’t know all the details.” Then Marty, who was the quintessential man of few words, said something that chilled him even through his haze. “From the sound of it, though, it’ll be the next thing in this town that keeps me up at night.”

  When he came to again, he was in the Brinklans’ house, his arm slung over Marty’s thick shoulders. Marty carried him to—where else—Rick’s old room.

  “Where’s Jill?” he thought he said.

  “She doesn’t live here anymore,” said Marty.

  Rick’s room had been stripped bare. Posters and trophies and the flag and torn out pinups from Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues were all gone. The walls spackled and painted blue. The guest bed overflowing with pointless throw pillows. He collapsed into them.

  “I’ve gotta get out to Stillwater. If you gotta throw up there’s a trash can by the bed. We’ll get you some breakfast in the morning.”

  Bill tried to open his mouth and say it: What he’d admitted to Dan Eaton earlier that night. What he’d wanted to say ever since he’d understood his own hapless, coward’s heart.

  Instead, Marty’s mouth moved just below his wounded eyes.

  “You and Rick both had this idea. That if you can’t save all of mankind, you’ve completely failed. I know he forgives you, Bill. Even if you’ll never believe it, he forgives you.”

  But maybe Marty Brinklan did not say that. As soon as the silence returned, it only felt like another hallucination, and on the last few words Marty’s mouth opened into a portal where he could see ancient battlegrounds and sharpened bayonets. Marty left Bill there to listen to the sound of the car turning over and backing down the driveway. He closed his eyes and met his visions.

  He dreamt of how his and every other story would end in shame. He pictured Earth after the profiteers had finished carving up every last shard. The planet would go dark, and every animal would devour itself or fall, pale and listless, into a black acid sea. The oceans would boil away, and eventually this rock of humble miracles would go silent. Spend the rest of time adrift in its slot of space, the land gray and ashen like a crater, and nothing would notice or remember what had gone on here. It was as inevitable as the next drink he would take. He thought of all that he’d lost and tried to summon his friends—their faces, their voices, their holy souls entombed in his despair. He could wish that the dead only waited patiently off stage, their makeup still on, longing for salvation when they’d take their bows. He could let his memories be the noose from which he’d swing at dusk.

  Or.

  Or he could climb out of this abyss. As he slipped into sleep, he told himself there was no going back to the slowly drowning swamps of the Mississippi Delta. There was a thousand dollars still in his glove compartment, a thousand more in his back pocket, and another quest, another vision, lying in wait. Even after all this, there was always a reason to stand again. To summon the courage to live and to be alive. To rage against the faceless entropy, the savage logic of accumulation that would return them all to exile, that aimed to strip them bare of everything, every place, and every person they’d ever loved. To find hope in defiance, in the subterranean fire, and to always and forever endure the Truth and struggle to extinction.

  He stumbled on in his dreams, mourning the rivers and fields of his homeland. He saw it burning in blue fire, and he prayed for the strength to defend it, to fight for it, to bring it back alive.

  STACEY MOORE AND A THEORY OF ECOLOGY, LITERATURE, AND LOVE ACROSS DEEP TIME

  ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME to deliver an overdue letter and meet the woman she’d feared and hated her entire adult life, Stacey Moore stopped to scoop her hand into the ground and tear away a handful of dirt. Five miles outside town, well before the sign that welcomes you into the city limits—weathered, aging, yet still admonishing that here lies America’s heart—she had to pull to the side of the road, her bladder begging for release.

  Her nerves rising alongside that internal pee ache as she neared New Canaan, she realized she wasn’t going to make it. No matter how old you get, a swollen bladder always takes you back to childhood, especially if you grew up with older brothers and everyone rolled their eyes when you were the one who instigated bathroom stops on road trips. She always held it just so her dad wouldn’t give her that skeptical glance in the rearview mirror, but her brothers, Patrick and Matt, were like fucking genetically advanced camels the way they could store water.

  Trooping into the woods with dusk rapidly drawing down and only the faintest blue-gray light lingering, the world a fading Chinese lantern, she got situated with her back against the tree—the key to peeing outside, her mom once explained. The very process still elicited memories of campfires, her mother’s s’mores, and the fecund scent of summer nights in Mohican State Park. As a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, Stacey squatted beside her and watched. “Afterward you gotta kinda wiggle your butt around,” she said, demonstrating with a little “Twist and Shout” dance. Attempting to imitate, young Stacey promptly fell on her butt into her own pee, and her mom laughed like she was having a seizure.

  Now Stacey was an expert, having peed in locales as diverse as the Brazilian Amazon and Croatian alleys, none of which had anything on this deeply satisfying gush of kidney-processed coffee and Diet Pepsi, as delightful and relieving as snapping one’s neck in that chiropractic way that releases half a dozen kinks at once. Alone in this bedraggled piece of the county except for the thunderous buzz of the crickets and the careful winking of the fireflies, she allowed herself an audible, pleasured moan, then a little laugh at the borderline-sexual severity of that moan.

  Finishing, she wiggled her butt around, per Mom’s instructions, and pulled her underwear back on. Around the deep-blue flower print, the white of her dress glowed, and she remembered Lisa pulling it off the rack in a Columbus thrift store many years ago. “I think your ass will look like a million bucks in this dress, Miracle. For fifteen bucks, math-wise, that’s substantial savings.” That she’d worn it tonight was a coincidence.

  The night roared with those Ohio crickets, their hopes, jokes, disagreements, and bullshitting all wrapped up in a crackling symphony. And now that she was home (or at least the place she could never stop thinking of as home), all the errant memories began to spring forward, unbidden, clamoring for attention. Whac-A-Mole ghosts. Which is why she stopped before she reached her Jeep, pulled haphazardly to the berm of th
e road. She reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt. Mr. Masoncup had lectured his earth science class not to call it that, like it was a slur. Soil, he’d implored, and she’d replied with something like Looks like dirt, Mase. That typical manner of hers. The character she’d played in high school: witty, coy, knowing anyone would forgive her teasing because she’d been demarcated as beautiful by the patriarchy (that’s a joke, but not really). Teasing people, she learned, endears them to you while also keeping them off-balance. It was a social lesson she mastered early.

  Lisa Han was in that same earth science class junior year. They’d both written papers on dirt. Lisa sat two rows ahead and one over due to a randomized seating chart (a real bugfuck lottery for Mr. Masoncup to pull on the first day), and Stacey would catch her looking sometimes. She’d have to avert her eyes because chances were she’d been staring at Lisa.

  That was the year everything changed. The year she changed. She used to think it was mostly about Lisa, but maybe she’d never given enough credit to that earth science class. She squeezed the fistful. Cool and wet, born from the explosions of stars and coalesced into life, it took the shape of her palm. When you’re a child you think nothing of touching dirt, but as an adult, how often do you pick it up and feel it this way? Feel it the way you’d feel a lover, give it the reverence you’d give to a body. She held a solar system of mycelia gnashing away at plant matter, returning it to the cycle, renewing. “What’s more important?” Masoncup asked them. “Humans or dirt?” And the answer was that it wasn’t even close—even as Ohio’s monoculture farms massacred the soil, a veritable mycelia genocide, and then pumped in nitrogen fertilizers to keep it alive, zombielike.

  Maybe it was dirt that had started her down the road to losing her faith.