Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  When Bethany finally let them retire they put a rented tape, Casablanca, in the built-in VCR of Lisa’s little cube TV. This had been a point of contention after it came up that Stacey had never seen it.

  “Are you fucking kidding me, bitch?”

  “So it was never on my radar, Han. Why, you gonna cry about it?”

  Nodding furiously. “Yes, I might. If we watch it, I might.”

  “Naw. You won’t. You don’t cry. You’re not capable.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know what it is about that movie, but it, like, guts me every time.”

  “It’s in black and white!”

  “Your soul is a cake full of shit.”

  Stacey cracked up and felt a surge of an emotion she wasn’t mature enough to identify.

  As the movie began, she showed her Jonah Hansen’s bottle. A red label named for a Russian peninsula. Lisa’s mouth curled up in a wry smile. “Thank you, Jonah.”

  Beneath all Lisa’s posters of bad-boy musicians—she’d gone to great lengths to frame Nelly’s shirtless bod in white Christmas lights—they added the vodka to mugs of Sprite in drips and drabs and watched Casablanca. Stacey didn’t care much for old movies. Something about the way they’re staged, all the action and dialogue stilted and lacking verisimilitude. But Bogart and Bergman in that movie. Jesus. And sure enough, when the film began to wrap up, when the Nazis were closing in and Rick forces Renault at gunpoint to help Ilsa get away, she glanced over at Lisa and saw her biting the sleeve of her sweatshirt, cheeks shiny with tears. Then Lisa’s hand moved under the blanket. Stacey’s heart beat at her ribs so hard she thought Lisa might be able to hear it. Lisa’s fingers laced into hers and held on for the rest of the movie, her thumb occasionally rubbing the knuckle.

  By the time the movie was over, Stacey was drunk and not thinking about anything. She leaned over and kissed Lisa gently on the cheek. She gave her time to flinch, but she didn’t. She tried it again on Lisa’s mouth. Then her tongue, thick and wet and delicious, pressed against Stacey’s. For once, Lisa didn’t have a snarky comment.

  Soon they were necking like the uncertain teenagers they were, unsure of what to do with their hands, how to transition further. She didn’t think of anything while they did it. No shame, no questions, no worry, no fear, just the eager work of her lips, slivers of silk buds for her tongue and mouth to explore, pleasant in the way a man’s lips just cannot be. It was strange, but Stacey could not recall the necking as viscerally as holding Lisa’s hand as the movie ended. Nothing—not sex, not drugs, not waking on a train to the sight of dawn breaking over the Carpathian Mountains—nothing had ever been as exciting as watching the last part of Casablanca while she held Lisa’s hand under that blanket. She could still remember the way their palms sweated together, feel the ghost of that moisture—and how it would cloud everything for the coming year and all the ones beyond.

  * * *

  The poet waitress got Jonah situated with a thick stack of napkins, a glass of water, and a baggie of ice. He worked two of the napkins up his nostrils and went about cleaning his face off with water. Because she felt bad about these free-of-charge services, she ordered another Diet Coke with no intention of drinking it. She had a makeup mirror in her bag that Jonah used to clean the worst of the dried blood from his face, but some of it clung to the black of his stubble and each hair got a murderous crimson shading around the follicle that he couldn’t scrub out.

  “Can I ask what happened?”

  He made a scoffing noise in his throat. “Fucker sucker punched me in the bar.”

  “A fight, huh.”

  “No, like a faggot punched me when I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Why?” He rolled his eyes but said nothing, as though the answer was obvious.

  “You know who I saw there?” he said. “Dan Eaton and Bill Ashcraft. Tonight’s like a class reunion or something.”

  And she blinked at this hum of concurrence.

  “What’s Ashcraft doing back? Which bar?” Just hearing Bill’s name, let alone that their ships had cruised so close on this night, awoke in her all the old resentments even though he’d had Lisa before she even knew that was who she wanted.

  “Not sure. They came into the Lincoln. We had some beers. Guessed about The Murder That Never Was. Why are you back in town? Seeing your bro? Moving back to good ole New Cane?”

  “Just passing through,” she said. “I haven’t been back in a while.”

  “Not fucking much’s changed.” His spittle leapt across the table on the f-bomb, some of it hitting her face in that chilled shrapnel way. She hadn’t realized until that moment how drunk he was. His eyes lolled about in their sockets like the orbs were stumbling away from each other. His speech wasn’t slurred, but it had that sharp certainty that the best angry drunks get right before they black out.

  “Do you want to report him? The guy who did this, I mean?”

  “Wouldn’t give the motherfucker the satisfaction. He’s a Brokamp, a food stamper, so jail’s probably where he wants to be. Get-rich-quick scheme of the lazy.”

  “You should put the ice on your left eye,” she said. “That’s the one that’s going to swell.” He examined his face in the mirror, a face that when they were young had looked sharp and dashing, a strong, sturdy nose and a tough, resolute chin with a perfect dimple in the center. What kids fondly called a “butt chin.” Now the face was well on its way to middle age with soft bloat growing around the jowls. When you reach your late twenties, you notice your peers beginning to go one way or the other. Some retain their youth effortlessly, others begin to take on time like water gushing into a breach in the hull.

  He snapped the compact mirror closed and handed it back. “Remember we used to come here every weekend.” He removed the napkins from his nostrils, pointed into dual thimbles of wet blood, and stuffed two fresh corners up each. “Time does fly.”

  It now occurred to her that Jonah, hanging around New Canaan all these years, woven into the fabric of the town the way he was, might have heard about Lisa coming back. The waitress returned with Stacey’s second Diet Coke of the night. As she walked away, Stacey opened her mouth to ask him if he knew or had heard anything about Lisa, but he spoke right over her.

  “I got a helicopter.” The comment was sufficiently weird that her jaw closed. “Been doing real well. Making deals. Land development. And our house in Lake Erie. On South Bass Island. You and me can go there tonight. It’s less than a half-hour flight.”

  How careful she was not to laugh in his face, the baseless confidence of his youth suddenly clownish.

  “Wow, that does sound tempting.”

  “You can’t be all lesbo.” He grinned. “You got needs like any other woman.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  His mouth melted into a bemused smile. He ran each index finger along a sideburn, tracing the frame of his red-tinted beard all the way to his chin. She thought she could see the imprint of a skull on his cheekbone, almost like a stamp of two dark eye sockets gazing out from his cheek.

  “Your brother know ’bout you?” he asked. “Wouldn’t imagine Pat would take too kindly to your activities if he knew.”

  “He knows,” she said coolly.

  He sucked coffee through a straw. His eyes seemed to have grown more bloodshot, turbid as red smog. She took a small bit of pleasure thinking of how raging his hangover—coupled with a busted nose and two black eyes—would be tomorrow. “At’s good. My folks tell me he’s gonna be the new Pastor Jack when good ole Jack finally punches his ticket.”

  So strange after all this time, after all this steel grafted to her spine, how that old fear was still so immediate. Here she sat in Vicky’s having flashbacks to high school, her stomach sinking like she was a teenager again, and Bethany had again caught her red-handed and her family had again learned the truth.

  * * *

  If she counted Ben Harrington as the first person to really sow doubt within her, then she had to credit L
isa for the next step.

  The heady first days of any new relationship always have that new-toy excitement about them, yet with Lisa that glorious feeling of new thingness was amplified by the secrecy, the misbehavior necessary to follow through. On Halloween, only a few weeks after Casablanca, they were in Stacey’s room, preparing their costumes. Only now did they understand the potential upside of what they were doing: their parents would never think twice if they disappeared for hours behind a closed door.

  They were changing, and Stacey had her bra off, her hands involuntarily crossing in an X over her chest. She didn’t even realize until Lisa pointed it out.

  “You do that in the locker room too. You’re afraid of your own tits, Miracle.”

  She blushed. She did not like to be naked. Did not like having anyone, even Lisa, assessing her breasts.

  “I’m not a flaunter,” she said. “Sorry I don’t parade around everywhere with my boobs out.”

  “Like this?” Lisa reached behind her back and snapped off her bra. She was gorgeous, and she knew it. Stacey was about to say something more when Lisa took a handful of her hair, turned her around, and pushed her forehead against the wall, right up against her poster of the band Creed. She kissed down Stacey’s neck, her back, and yanked her underwear down. Then she felt Lisa’s tongue tracing a route from her clit up her ass and back. She did this until Stacey had to bite her own arm to keep from screaming.

  Minutes later, she lay on her bed with her legs spread, exhausted, quaking.

  “Who’s the flaunter now, Moore? Put your pussy away.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” she breathed.

  Lisa had on an old Jaguars cheerleading outfit, and she was busy covering it in fake blood, along with a sharpened dowel rod for a stake. “Buffy, the Asian Vampire Slayer,” she called it. Stacey pulled her underwear back on and went back to assembling her costume. She had a hospital gown and a tank top under which she’d stuffed a small pillow. She smeared some of Lisa’s fake blood on the gown and went about putting on zombie makeup.

  “What a disturbing costume,” Lisa said. “Like you got an abortion so you turn into a zombie?”

  “This way I can just take the pillow out and be a regular zombie after.”

  Stacey was one of the actors for Hell House, where she would play the victim of an abortion before meeting up later in the night with Lisa and others at a party.

  “I dunno. There’s something fucked up about it. Leading kids through this showcase of ways they’re going to end up eternally damned.”

  “It’s just a haunted house,” she said. “Not a big deal.”

  Patrick and his new wife, Becky, were in charge of organizing that year. Stacey hadn’t particularly wanted to spend the first part of her night lying in stirrups, moaning for the spectators with a fake fetus in a jar bedside, but Patrick had pleaded with her to take at least one shift.

  “Do you actually believe that?” Lisa pulled her hair into one pigtail and set about snapping a hair tie around the other. “Do you believe you’re going to hell if you get an abortion or watch an R-rated movie?”

  “No, not necessarily,” she said, blushing. “It’s complicated.” Lisa rolled her eyes and decided her pigtails were uneven. She took the ties out and started again. “You’re saying you don’t believe in Hell?”

  Lisa looked at her in the mirror. “Nope. Not even a little.”

  “You have that Bible quote in your room,” she said stupidly, as if this was proof of anything.

  “Oh, I’ll put on a horse-and-pony show so I don’t have to go to war with my goddamn mother. But c’mon, Moore, this stuff is bizarre. Hell House is whack. It’s whackadoodle. Whackadoodledo.”

  “I didn’t know that’s what you really thought.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess we don’t talk about it.” She examined herself in the mirror, flipped her head around, and watched the pigtails twirl like pom-poms. “I’ll tell you what I do believe.”

  She took Stacey’s shoulders and looked her in the eye, serious as an aneurysm.

  “There is a creator. He’s just probably some pimply-assed geek masturbating while he watches us in this room.”

  Some of Stacey’s anxiety retreated. She had thought Lisa was mad at her for taking part in Hell House. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yep. I’m reading this book that says it’s all but mathematically assured that we, us, this”—she flipped up her skirt so Stacey could see the orange spanks beneath—“and all human history is taking place inside a computer simulation.”

  “Yeah, I saw that movie with Keanu Reeves.”

  “This room, New Canaan, Ohio, Earth, Creed . . .” She smacked the poster. “This is all taking place inside a simulated model, which you gotta admit is even weirder than thinking there’s a magic man in the sky watching your boner.”

  Stacey laughed, a deep rat-a-tat staccato.

  “It’s simple enough when you think about it. This book lays it out: Computational power has increased rapidly since its introduction, so rapidly that it’s clear mankind is just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”

  “Moore’s Law!” she cried.

  “Precisely. He says it’s clear that at some point computing power will be so enormous that we’ll be able to run simulations of anything, including the creation of a whole universe of conscious beings. But why run just one simulation? Why not run millions, Stace? And within these simulations, many of the beings we are simulating will at some point develop the ability to run their own simulations. The odds that we are the original biological entities who will create the very first simulation are small. Nearly impossible, actually. The odds that we are among the billions of simulations simulated by other simulators, merely the creation of other computer simulations, are extremely high.”

  “You’re such a weird geek.”

  “Not that it makes any difference in how we live our lives,” she promised. “We still have to treat people well, try to get laid, and we still gotta save the fucking whales, dude.”

  And yet later that night, lying in the fake stirrups, acting the role of forsaken abortion victim, who’d died of complications on the operating table, Lisa’s bizarre story stayed with her, and she wondered why this theory was any less plausible than an outcome like eternal torture. It was the last time she ever let Patrick talk her into being a part of Hell House.

  * * *

  “Seriously, though, you should come back here and be with me,” said Jonah, head weaving playfully. “Get down like we shoulda got down after homecoming. I’d make you happy.”

  “Would you now.”

  She guided her straw through the hole in the cylindrical ice and swizzled. An old man in a Navy ball cap began a coughing fit, his throat wet and horrid. He was horridly skinny and had a gruesome tattoo on his arm, a clown with a murderous smile. The man’s skin was so brown and weathered, the image looked dehydrated, head-shrunken.

  “Women need men, men need women,” said Jonah. “That’s as old as the Bible. And with me you get the added benefit of protection.”

  “Protection?” She was winding him up on purpose, but there was a freak-show quality from which she couldn’t look away. Come see the geek. Come see the sword swallower. Come see the drunk proto-misogynist.

  “This country’s going between the rock and the hard place, proverbially speaking. We’re about ten years away from fucking meltdown, mark my words. We got so much debt, we’re drowning. And as soon as those bills come due, who you think they’re gonna make pay? Not the parasites. Not the food stampers. It’ll be the people actually making this country run. That’s who the government will ask to bail them out. Then what happens?”

  Her playfulness dissipated at this political millenarianism, and now she wished she hadn’t asked.

  “What happens is we got a narcotic in this country. We got welfare dependency so much so that it’s—it’s a narcotic. Now half the country’s a drug addict and there’s more and more starting to get in line for their hand
out. What happens is as soon as the balance tips . . .” He held his arm in a diagonal slash and then, like a teeter-totter, dropped it abruptly. “All those people just start voting more and more for themselves. That’s what these whole Obama years have been about. That black man just gave his people what they voted for him for. And what part of the population is growing? It’s not the white half, I’ll tell you that. It’s the drug addict part. And it doesn’t matter if you get Obama out. If you impeach him or whatever. They’re just going to vote themselves another Obama the next election because now there’s more of them than there are of us.”

  “And the teeming hordes just get what they want, huh.”

  “What they think they want,” he corrected. “But then all the businessmen who make this country run, who create all the jobs and the wealth, you think they’re going to stick around? They’ll take their factories and businesses to other countries or they’ll go out of business all together. Just close up shop. It’s already happening. Who do you think makes this country run?”

  She pointed to their waitress, waiting for the Navy man to make up his mind about pie. “Her?”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. Why do you think the country’s getting browner, huh? Why do you think all the Mexicans and Guatemalans and Haitians . . .” He began ticking them off on his fingers, his voice gaining righteousness. “. . . Indians, Cambodians, Nigerians, Kenyans, Angolans, Iraqis, Afghans, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Chinese—whatever—why do you think they all want to come here?”

  She would have been impressed if Jonah had been able to name that many nationalities sober. She couldn’t help but troll him back, all thoughts of asking him about Lisa vanished in the heat of this abrupt and unhinged political argument.