Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “Because the desert is expanding and the water tables are dropping and it’s getting harder to grow food. So there’s this mad dash to wall oneself off in Fortress America. Not coincidentally in the air-conditioned exurban housing developments you and your dad sell.”

  “Ha ha!” he cried, and the waitress looked up from her check pad. He jabbed the table for emphasis. “They’re here ’cause they heard about the handouts. No one ever kicks you off. Get one baby born here, and you’re set. You’re American now, even if you can’t speak the language, don’t know the history, don’t have any common cause with your fellow countrymen. You can still cash your check.”

  “What do you propose then, Jonah? If the barbarians are at the gate like you say?”

  “There’s stuff going down right now. Tonight, I’m talking.” He all but glanced around to see who might be listening. Still only two bored waitresses and an old man at the counter waiting on his pie. “I’m not saying I got anything to do with it, but I might have given a few people a few bucks to grease the wheels.”

  “You’re making no sense.”

  “Oh, but I am.” He rolled his swollen, purple-filling eyes and ticked the next steps off on his fingers with a happy cadence. “These guys, they get their package tonight. Then in a few weeks they can go teach the parasites a lesson. Then you and me, we get to South Bass Island. My family’s got a house there.”

  “You mentioned that.” She tried to ask what he’d meant by the rest, but again he talked over her.

  “And there are others. Phil Shackley, he owns the largest propane supplier in the Midwest. Kathleen Harden—she and her sons own about a million Subway franchises in the state. Jerry Mortzheimer, he’s got a huge chain of earth-moving equipment. We’re arming the island, bringing in resources. Guns, ammunition, food, medical supplies, water systems. We been talking about it ever since oh-eight. Now we have a place, when everything starts going to shit, we get to South Bass Island. Let everyone else out here eat each other when they run out of food stamps. And all the talent and business will escape, and then they’ll be begging us, begging us for help, begging us for . . .”

  He trailed off. Some fatigue seemed to overcome him during that speech, and he slowly lowered his head to the table. He gathered his hands as a pillow under his skull the way they had in high school classes. His eyes slipped shut. The two napkins jutted from each nostril like little crumpled flags. She forgave him his ravings because she knew how they likely helped: focus your rage, your disappointment, your sorrow onto anything else. Allow the troubled, complex world to collapse into identifiable points of easily rendered resentment. Cling to a satisfying fire and use it to hold one’s demons at bay.

  * * *

  After Lisa left in June 2004, Stacey kept trying to recall clues. The problem was that she’d been so wrapped up in this enigma named Lisa Han—especially the last months when they were really and fiercely “together”—that she may have been semi-blind as to what was going on with her.

  That’s what happens when you’re taking a risk, savoring the thrill of sin, writhing in the backseat of her mom’s old Pontiac Sunfire, their shirts pulled off, Lisa’s dangling from an arm, her eyes grinding shut in concentration, tongue snaking out to glaze her plump lower lip. All the places their old boyfriends took them to get their pants off. Never the Brew because that’s where the rest of the high school would be. Lisa would clamp a hand over Stacey’s mouth, but her high, muffled cries would pierce that veil. All day, every day—any amount of time that surrounded those fleeting encounters—panic lived like a hot stone in her gut.

  Just before Christmas break 2003, they’d skipped the dance after a basketball game and hit Wendy’s with the plan to drive around and pig out. She asked Lisa if they could talk about what was happening, and the conversation did not go well.

  “I always assumed I was bi,” said Lisa, chocolate eyes studying the road. “Never thought I would’ve done anything about it. But c’mon, I wasn’t best friends with Kaylyn all that time for her insights on the human condition.”

  “Did you guys ever . . . ?”

  “I wish,” she scoffed. “Settled for my second choice.”

  From the driver’s seat, Stacey threw a fry at her. “Shut up.”

  She picked it off her boob where the grease had stuck it and popped it into her mouth.

  “Look, no offense, but who the fuck fucking cares or gives a fuck?” she said. “We’re having fun. We’ll keep it between us. No one’ll know, and no big deal. I don’t see what there is to worry about.”

  “Yeah, besides Romans 1:26, Leviticus 18:22, I guess nothing.”

  Lisa glanced at her, trying to gauge how serious she was, which was very. This was 2003, when the issue of gay marriage was everywhere, and every time it came up on a talk show or in the news, Stacey could feel herself growing hot, could feel the pit of fire Tina had spent their childhoods describing, and she’d make any excuse to leave the room. For as long as she could remember, Pastor Jack had served up at least semiannual sermons on the topic, and now, as it gained steam in the media, so did he. Homosexuality is an abomination. That’s not my word. That’s the Bible’s word. That’s God’s word. That doesn’t mean we can’t have compassion for those who stray from a righteous path. That doesn’t mean we’re not all guilty of sin in a multitude of ways. But that is the word of God, and it’s our duty to abide by that in our lives. We treat sinners with compassion always, but we can never turn a blind eye to sin. It wasn’t like Stacey hadn’t seen her mom nodding along in agreement with Pastor Jack, head ticking up and back in metronome rhythm while Stacey watched her from the corner of her eye. To this day, if she smelled the odor of her church, this scent of dusty library books mixed with citrus incense, a shameful heat would rise in her face.

  She tried to articulate this to Lisa, who wouldn’t have it.

  “You need to get that stuff out of your head, dude. It’s making you nuts. Take a break from feeling guilty over things you probably don’t even believe in.”

  Stacey shot her a furious look. “I do believe.”

  Patrick had just been ordained as a part-time youth minister. During the party in the basement, he had thanked her: My little sister, Stacey. One of the reasons I’m so excited about this. Your dedication and love for this church and for Jesus Christ has been a source of inspiration for me. It’s been one of the great blessings of my life to watch you grow up and see what an amazing woman you’re about to become.

  Lisa now met her gaze, and Stacey said something she hoped would hurt her. “I’m not you. I just don’t think I’m like that way.”

  She hadn’t even been able to say it. I’m not like that way. What a repressed dyke way to phrase your denial, to stay as far away from the actual word as possible.

  Lisa threw up her hands, grin spreading. “So then stop going down on me, Miracle.”

  Even though she was driving, bombing along Stillwater Road in the pure, driven dark, Stacey wanted to reach over and smack her. It was the first time she’d ever felt that way about someone (though it would not be the last; Patrick and his wife would elicit that regularly). There was so much dismissiveness veined through Lisa’s blithe attitude, but it sounded false, a whistle through the graveyard. Lisa couldn’t stop fingering her locket, this dumb, cheap piece of jewelry in which she kept photos of various teen idols as a joke (the current half-ironic recipient was a singer from the group B2K, who’d replaced Aaron Carter). Her thumb and index finger worried it even as she tried to make a gag of this. Of them. She wanted to feel like she had control of this situation, and ridiculing Stacey’s fear gave her that.

  “Would you feel that way if your family found out?” Stacey asked. “Should I tell your mom?”

  “Don’t threaten me, bitch.”

  “Don’t act like you’re so above this then,” Stacey snapped. At this, Lisa dropped the locket to her chest. Her eyes actually popped open a little, her whole posture subtly recoiling. “Don’t treat me like I’m
a joke to you.”

  Neither of them said anything for a while after that. Finally, Lisa slipped her hand over Stacey’s, fingers skimming over the skin of her thin wrists. She said, “Only one verse I care about. What Paul said about the other Romans, baby. I loved you at your darkest.”

  They were both quiet for a while. Stillwater was the best road in the whole county—long stretches with no streetlights or homes or light pollution of any kind. The moon reflected off the thin sheet of snow covering the cornfields. Eventually, Stacey circled back into town. Stacey wondered if this conversation had been a bad idea, if she had spoiled what they had by letting Lisa see how afraid she was. Then, less than a mile from her house, as they passed the public library, Lisa pointed to it and said, “The first time I blew Ashcraft was on the roof there.”

  That surprised Stacey into laughter. “Gross.”

  “Really I’d have a hard time thinking of somewhere in this town I didn’t blow him.”

  “Shut up, Han.”

  “It’s true. My mom was always trying to get us to stay at our house so she could keep an eye on us, so last year during the Oscars, we watched it with her and Bob, and they’re both so old they fell asleep before they even announced Best Actor. Bill and I went around the corner from the living room to the kitchen, and I sucked him off on the kitchen island.”

  “Oh that’s disgusting! C’mon, Lisa.”

  Lisa had her window cracked, her fingertips holding the outside of the door. The night came in on the wind and black threads of hair blew across her eyes. “What, you never gave Harrington head? Poor guy.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “So? You didn’t like it?”

  “I didn’t not like it. I don’t know. I could take it or leave it. It was just a thing I’d do as long as we had a fair trade-off.”

  “Oh, well I love it. Turns me on.” She shuddered dramatically, eyes fluttering. “I think I have a clitoris in the back of my throat.”

  Stacey brayed laughter. “Oh my God, where do you even come from?”

  “What? That’s Linda Lovelace. Deep Throat.”

  “Huh?”

  “The porn star. It’s actually really sad. She wrote this memoir about how her husband beat her and like had her gang-raped and forced her into prostitution and pornography. Really terrible.”

  Returning her eyes to the road, Stacey said, “You’re a really strange chick, chick.” They were quiet again for a moment. “So wait, if you love giving head so much, do you miss it? Am I just totally not satisfying a need of yours? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yeah. Well.” She smiled, a cute little tick of her lips. “Luckily I have a clitoris on my clitoris too.”

  When Matt was a sophomore, Stacey still in eighth grade, there’d been a kid whom everyone suspected of being gay. Stacey couldn’t remember his name, but she did remember hearing that someone beat the windshield of his car into spiderwebs of fractured glass. None of this was ever far from her mind that year, but the shame could never win out over the taste of Lisa. Her orgasm was never in the small, tight noises she made as Stacey teased her with her tongue—it was always in the silence, this moment when Lisa’s breath caught and her nails dug into Stacey’s skull, and reality felt impossibly taut, a wire stretched to the breaking point. Humming from the finger that plucked it.

  * * *

  She left Jonah with his head on the table. Passing the waitress—of the ample rear end, not the elderly poet—she told her to maybe call Jonah’s dad. “He might have a concussion.”

  She wondered if she’d wandered into Vicky’s not to meet Bethany Kline and marvel at how difficult it was to hold on to hate. Maybe Vicky’s, from which she’d yet to escape that night, was a kind of supra-reality, an illusory space where so many of the spokes of her life crossed, her own Tel’aran’rhiod imbued with nostalgia, time, and interconnection.

  She touched the envelope sticking out of her purse, but she had a new destination, and she would put off this final, horrible errand just a bit longer. If anyone knew Lisa as well as she did—that is, if anyone knew her at all—it was Bill Ashcraft. The thought of Lisa coming home and contacting him but not her was enough to send an old splinter of jealousy cruising through her vein like a sliver of bone on its way to the heart. Which was exactly why she needed to see him. Or maybe “confront” was the word. She checked her phone, but she no longer had Ashcraft’s number. Other than the errant Facebook Like, they hadn’t spoken in years. The Lincoln bar wasn’t far from Vicky’s, and she left her car in the square to walk.

  She headed south through downtown, and the route brought her within view of the old steel plant, closed since the eighties when Fountain Steel decided it was cheaper to make tubular products elsewhere. Why the town had never gotten around to tearing down that ugly industrial boil, she never understood. It was like they left it alone hoping that someday whatever mechanized processes lay inside would simply start back up of their own accord. The plant and the abandoned middle school had been located precariously close to each other, possibly because some city planner wanted kids to get a good hard look at the best opportunity their town had to offer. Generations of students breathed the air from those stacks, while the plant’s CO2 drifted lazily into the atmosphere.

  Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind? Until her conversation with Hilde, Stacey had had no conception of how deep and aching this chasm inside herself was. Before that strange confluence of Hilde and Gaia she’d never really considered herself as part of any ecological system, and this came to astonish her later. How people walk through their lives nearly in a coma, unaware of the physical substrate that surrounds them. She considered the nights camping in Mohican with her family, Matt and Patrick getting yelled at for wrestling too close to the fire or throwing each other’s s’mores in the dirt, and later the hiking and camping she would do in Croatia, Lithuania, and Switzerland; Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil. The natural world existed for her, as it did for most of the Global North, only as another theme park, a Disneyland. One of the luxuries of modernity was never having to consider how the asphalt from a parking lot could crush soil, disrupt a delicate system, banish a pocket of insects, birds, or small mammals to ruin. Or that this parking lot was merely a microcosm of something far larger and darker: a war on the living biosphere. People call it the Anthropocene, but a much better word for it is the Necrocene—a human-induced geologic age in which profit flows from exploitation and extinction with vast capital accumulation powering yet further devastation in a terminal cycle.

  Back in the late 2000s while traveling through Europe, Stacey began to consider the implications of what she’d discovered since casting off her religious delusions. What humanity was doing to the biosphere at the moment—its obsession with the impact of a neutron on uranium or carbon-based fuels or fishing vessels that ripped scars into the ocean floor or its husbandry of every creature down to the honeybee—this fascination, this plunder, it could not last long. This dawning realization floated on the margins of literature. From Eggers’s What Is the What to Adichie’s Americanah to Collins’s Hunger Games, modern authors had internalized it even if they weren’t writing directly about it: the profound catastrophe the planet was undergoing.

  She wanted badly to write about this. How humanity had created this overflow of prodigious breeders, masters, killers, and artists. How its narcissism could produce deities, literature, destruction, and dogma. How it nevertheless occasionally conjured fierce, unfathomably deep love. It made Lisa even more beloved in her mind and memory, raised her to the level of a prophet. What kind of seventeen-year-old picks up Gaia? Or for that matter reads about simulation theory or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? Stacey hadn’t caught up to Lisa intellectually until she was in her midtwenties, at which point she could only jealously marvel at her long lost friend. She’d known Lisa was more creative, aware, and curious than the next seven hundred people at the
ir school combined, but it wasn’t until many years later that the hidden depths of her friend’s interior life came to shock her. There were only a handful of Lisa’s margin notes in Gaia, but one of them stood out. In his epilogue, Lovelock asks the reader to consider the human sense of beauty, “those complex feelings of pleasure, recognition, and fulfillment, of wonder, excitement, and yearning, which fill us when we see, feel, smell, or hear whatever heightens our self-awareness and at the same time deepens our perception of the true nature of things.” Beside this, Lisa had written, simply, the same quote she’d stuck on her locker and tacked above her desk back home: I Loved You At Your Darkest.

  As the steel plant receded from view, and she took a shortcut down an alley, Stacey considered for the thousandth time that her preoccupations as a writer, a thinker, a consciousness, were simply a nebulous extension of Lisa Han’s.

  Steam hissed from a manhole cover, electric lines hung like jungle vines, and the Lincoln’s dingy plastic sign came into view. Someone who agreed with Jonah had slapped a WRONG WAY sticker with the Obama logo on the stop sign at the end of the sweaty alley. Emerging onto the street, she saw a man standing hunched over the passenger window of an idling car. He too was familiar.

  * * *

  During their senior year together, she and Lisa grew so close that their other friendships ceased to exist. Lisa in particular had come to truly loathe her Elmwood friends, although that started back in sophomore year when Hailey Kowalczyk began dating Curt Moretti, the quarterback, and a friend of Stacey’s brother Matt. He was a tall, truly stupid kid with a scimitar nose, hoop earrings, and one of those awful haircuts where the sides are shaved and his dark blond sat on the top of his skull like an oversized yarmulke.

  Lisa tried to elucidate the falling-out for her once while they sat on a picnic table out by the softball field. It was the first unseasonably warm day of 2004. Casablanca, Halloween, Hell House, Thanksgiving, and Christmas break had all come and gone. Graduation loomed. Stacey had made the melancholy choice of Wittenberg University in Springfield. Lisa was still deciding between three or four schools. They could feel the road about to fork, and at first she thought this was what was bothering Lisa, but that turned out to be wrong.