Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  Stacey chuckled, a tired, exhausted sound. “Bill. My dissertation was eco-crit. It was about literature. What the fuck are you talking about? I came here to ask for your help. In finding Kay. And then finding Lisa.”

  He gathered himself, simultaneously shook his head and licked his lips. “I need you to trust me. I need you to forget we met. And I need you to understand—I swear to you—that I know nothing about Kaylyn, about Lisa, about any of this.”

  “And you won’t help me.”

  “I’m not in a position to.”

  “What are you hiding, you smug fuck?”

  He stared at her very hard. “Not what you think I am.”

  She gritted her teeth, opened her mouth to scream at him, and then closed it.

  He reached into his back pocket and removed his wallet. From a photo sleeve, he removed a cocktail napkin folded into quarters. She recognized the handwriting, even after all this time.

  There’s no such thing as the devil or I would’ve sold my soul for the fight

  Nothing left now darling but you & me & this last lonesome night

  “Found it the last time I went home. B-list Harrington lyrics from when we ate mushrooms once. I also have one of Rick’s medals. His dad gave it to me. I was going to drive it to Washington and pin it to the face of whoever was running the Pentagon at the time, but . . .”

  He took the napkin back, folded it tenderly, and returned it to his wallet. Maybe he just couldn’t stomach it, the possibility that yet more evil had befallen someone he cared about long ago. But the world had changed, and he had to adapt. There might have been a time in his life when his love for Lisa still endured, when he would have followed Stacey and her bizarre theory to the ends of the earth. That time had passed. He’d lost his picture of all of them at homecoming the night he’d returned to New Canaan. He woke in Rick’s old bedroom, his pockets empty except for the cash. Her face—all their faces—were gone.

  “My one friend went to Iraq and took a sniper’s bullet to the head,” he said, already knowing this explanation would be inadequate. “Another died in an apartment fire junked out of his mind. And maybe someone I loved once really was murdered, but . . . I have these dreams—well—they’re more than dreams. I wake up from them and it literally takes me a few minutes to understand that they’re not real, they just linger that long. In them, I see the world that’s coming. The future we’re being banished to. I wake up from them and I’m soaked in sweat and shaking, and I never get back to sleep because I feel like I just went walking in another time and place.”

  In the morning he’d leave his hotel room and trade a backpack with a Saran-wrapped brick of cash for a USB drive packed with the secrets of seemingly invincible institutions. Then he’d vanish down the highway and across the plains. Stacey would return to her new apartment in St. Louis on the Central West End and slide her notebook back into the deep recesses of her desk’s junk drawer where Maddy was unlikely to snoop. It would not linger there long.

  “We lose people, Stacey,” he said carefully. “And it’s never fair, and it’s never right, and there’s always something missing about it. Something unexplained.”

  Bill stopped speaking so abruptly his jaw clicked shut. Together, in that moment, they remembered Lisa, her raw mouth and giant laugh, and they glanced around because they both felt it. Like she’d been eavesdropping from another booth.

  * * *

  On a cloudless summer night at the edge of a creaking metal dock on Jericho Lake, Lisa Han tried to stare straight up at the glowing fringe of the Milky Way, at the dusting of jeweled stars drawing from one corner of the horizon to the other. She fixed her eyes there so she wouldn’t have to watch what Todd Beaufort was doing to her with the knife. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of screaming, of revealing fear. Kaylyn, pleading from a safe distance, had all but assured they were too far to be heard anyway. Lisa gritted her teeth in agony, in defiance, and tried telling herself how little this would matter—not to those distant worlds, not really.

  Todd’s sweat dripped into her eye, and she remembered flirting with Bill Ashcraft in her freshman year math class. How his sweet-boy grin bloomed whenever she teased him. How overjoyed she was when he asked if she wanted to go to the movies that first time. This melted into her childhood when her mom moved them to New Canaan, and Lisa spent all her time at the public library scouring the children’s books while her mom used the computers to search for a job. It was where she met Kaylyn and Hailey, two impossibly cute, impossibly friendly girls whose class she’d join in the fall. To them Lisa was this crazy, fierce goddess dropped out of the sky who knew exactly how babies were made and could describe it in gory, gut-bustingly funny detail. And a few months later, she would befriend this kid Danny across the street, a cute, dorky ginger who looked like he’d been chosen for a trip to the moon when she let him have her copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. “You’re like my kid brother,” she explained to him once. “I’m older than you!” he objected. “You’re like my cute little baby brother who I’m going to stuff in a locker with a bag of dog food and not let you out until you eat the whole thing.” And then she sucked the entire length of her index finger and jammed it in his ear until he shrieked.

  Todd drove the knife into her until it stopped hurting, until her whole body went numb and cold and indifferent, and then, instead of screaming, she laughed in his face. She was thinking of Stacey’s funny little church-chick manner, this air of rosy, Christian, good-golly-Miss-Molly-ain’t-that-swell!-ness about her, and what a total gutter whore she was once you got in her pants. Lisa laughed because she was thinking of how hilarious it had been to tease Stacey about this dichotomy, to turn around out of the blue in their senior year English class and whisper, “Stop thinking about these titties, you scag.” It was just too easy to crack her ass up. So while she was being stabbed to death, Lisa had to laugh because it was so funny how in love she was. How weird. Who the fuck would’ve seen that coming? Her defiant chortling carried a mist of spittle and blood straight up into Todd Beaufort’s panicked mouth.

  Finally, she remembered being eight years old and waking to find her mom curled up in the bathtub. There was no water in it. Fully clothed, she hugged her knees, sobbing. So Lisa went to the kitchen and figured out how to make blueberry pancakes. A half hour and a couple of failed prototype pancakes later, she brought them on a tray to the tub. Bethany wiped her eyes and studied the breakfast like a foreign currency. “How did you make these?” she asked.

  “Mom, I can, like, read directions.” She unrolled some toilet paper and set knife, fork, and this makeshift napkin on the tray. “Also, you know, most directions are at like a fifth-grade reading level? And I’m already at an eighth-grade level or at least sixth. Does it make you feel better?”

  Bethany gasped, sucked back tears, nodded furiously. “Yeah, babe, it makes me feel better. So much better. You’re a tough little girl.”

  “Uh duh, I know.” And Lisa sat on the closed toilet to stuff a syrupy, blueberry-packed forkful into her own mouth. “I’m a freaking samurai, Mom.”

  How much she still had planned. How eager she was to get started. All the people she would have touched, all the hearts she would have broken. She’d wanted to get strange tattoos and pierce the tops of her ears, her tongue, her nipples; wear garish makeup and collect odd gypsy clothes; travel like a wind-borne petal, fight through the muddy crowds of psychedelic bacchanals; write a deranged novel where a woman’s periods come to life each month to follow her ghostlike, quipping about dating life and making Marxist critiques of assorted makeup products. She’d wanted to learn to play the guitar like Ben Harrington and take all her wholesome smut poetry and set it to music, to buy a camera and stalk the globe taking pictures of twisted scenes she found beautiful and then render the beautiful vistas with menace, danger, and gore. She wanted to steal unpredictable books from public libraries in Omaha and hostels in Florence and the shelves of her one-night stands, slipping her lovers’ most b
eloved, dog-eared copies into her bag and vanishing without leaving a phone number. She’d wanted to leap over vast chasms and coax others to follow, find herself and her companions all run out of food, matches, maps, water, and opinions so that they’d have to fashion fire from a glasses lens and arguments from half-remembered philosophies. She’d wanted to lead revolutions with barbaric compassion, face down all immutable phenomena, and charge over the shadowlands between the unknown and the unknowable.

  On the dock, before Todd Beaufort, sweaty and weeping, finished the deed that would follow him till his death, before he sank her into the depths of that man-made lake, down to the flooded ghost town at the bottom where she drifted into the wreckage of a drugstore on a forgotten Main Street, she understood, vividly, that the most astonishing gift of consciousness was also our tragedy, our cliché, our great curse: Love’s absolute refusal to ever surrender.

  And then she was on her way.

  Whether you face it abruptly or following a long drift into senescence, there’s that eternal moment the prophets all gossip about: when you see the whole span of yourself, how astonishing and alive you were. However, as Lisa discovered, this eternity feels like nothing at all compared to the length and depth of the Night that comes after. When you cruise by fallen stars and far-flung quasars, forests of staggering pines and winter snows, granite mountains and impenetrable clouds, cooling lava, black oceans and the rivers that feed them, singing caterpillars and screaming bats, the lonely moan of a whale, endless prairies wrung with wind, purple skies and silver rain, the soil of your strange realm. Even the Night has an end, though, beyond which there is only the void, the abyss. It’s the kind of darkness you knew before you feared it. It’s the kind of darkness so inky, oily perfect that even as you stretch your pupils to pull light in, it only grows deeper, and all you can feel is the pressure of cold air on your eyeballs. Oblivion is viewing all of time backward and forward, your voice locked forever in all that dust and collapse and depthless sorrow. But what you can never know, what you could never have believed or hoped to believe on the long and staggering journey home, is that this abyss is holy all the same. You understand even the void is impermanent, that nothingness is unstable and bound, practically galloping, toward new creation on foreign shores.

  * * *

  Stacey and Bill left the bar and stepped into the night. The rain had stopped. A cool, wet sheen covered the pavements, the cars, the sewer grates, and an internal heat leached steam into the air, white specters rising into the ether. Before they could go their separate ways, Bill took Stacey’s arm and pulled her into an embrace.

  “You have no idea how much I miss all of them,” he said. “How sorry I am for everything.”

  “I know,” she whispered.

  She would carry with her what Bill said next.

  “Keep searching, Moore.” He pulled away so he could look her in the eye. “Fight like hell. It’s the only thing I’ve ever truly believed. Always, always, always fight like hell.”

  And they were gone, these infinitesimal creatures, walking the surface of time, trying and failing to articulate the dreams of ages, born and wandering across the lonesome heavens.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I can’t be the first author to believe he’s mostly clueless, who understands his real skill in life has been to pull into his orbit a vast array of tireless mentors and fearless fellow travelers who, like an antigravitational force, have kept the walls of his wormhole from caving in time after time. But I have to keep this hulking paragraph narrowed down to those specific to this book, who offered counsel, consolation, and compassion during the four years of its gestation. (Rest assured, I’ve kept a list of grudges, rivalries, bitter recriminations, and plans for petty revenge in a separate Word doc.) First, there is the vast panoply of tornadic personalities, gutsy genius, and shameless alcoholism that is Iowa. Some very smart writers read and reacted to early portions of this book, including Fatima Mirza, Tim Taranto, Anna Bruno, Willa Richards, Noel Carver, Jennie Lin, Anna Parker, Jed Cohen, Harry Stecopoulos, and Katelyn Williams. Three of my great friends, Jamel Brinkley, Charlotte Crowe, and Patrick Connelly, read early drafts and offered important guidance on the way forward. Ethan Canin is about as generous, headstrong, and brilliant a teacher and writer as you’ll find walking the earth. He read this novel in an embryonic stage and his encouragement allowed me to navigate the confusing choices and subtle anarchies that were to come. Sam Chang, Nimo Johnson, Charlie D’Ambrosio, and Karen Russell have my blind allegiance forever. I’d drive all night to bail any of you out of jail. Deb, Connie, and Jan—you three outrageously and transparently collect thank-yous in the acknowledgments pages of contemporary novels, and here’s one more. Drew Emerson, Jon Erwin, and Kevin Hanson provided me with deep insight into military life and the incommunicable nature of deployment, of being at war in the twenty-first century, but also with unexpected and enduring friendships, for which I’m far more grateful. Delaney Nolan never read a word of this book, but she inadvertently helped me think through the nature of loss, of wanting something of yourself back that has departed, one night when we broke into a backyard tree house on Maple Street to smoke a joint and hide from an insane thunderstorm. Susan Golomb threw elbows, broke noses, and dislocated shoulders to get this book sold. I owe her forever. They say editors don’t edit anymore, but then what the hell was Cary Goldstein doing? This book took a quantum leap when Cary got involved. And even after I thought I’d Beautiful Minded this thing to asymptotic perfection, Jonathan Evans supervised Dominick Montalto as he scoured it with a staggering attention to detail (I’ll never forgive myself for misremembering the Cavs’ 2007 playoff run). Steven Bauer continues to ride herd and remains the most important mentor I met as a wandering youth. As for my weird nuclear cell, Laurie, Bob, Lucinda, and Hannah, thank you for your DNA, your support, and your general tolerance of my irreducible rascality. However, the greatest debt of gratitude I owe is to Karen Parkman, a stunning human, a brave mind, a soulful witch, who read my future, who helped me to cross the finish line, who laughed and cried at all the bizarre stories of my wild home. Finally, I have to acknowledge the friends and peers who, as I worked, were never far from my mind: Nick Savoia, Sarah Pressler, Dustin Whitford, Ben Laymon, Tim Barnes, Brent Jones, Carl Culbertson, Josh McCoy, Nate Smith, and Chris O’Hara. Over the years, in different ways, you all have followed me, haunted me, and made me wonder how things might have been different.

  A Simon & Schuster Reading Group Guide

  Ohio

  Stephen Markley

  This reading group guide for Ohio includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Stephen Markley. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Since the turn of the century, a generation has come of age knowing only war, recession, political gridlock, racial hostility, and a simmering fear of environmental calamity. In the country’s forgotten pockets, where industry long ago fled, where foreclosures, Walmarts, and opiates riddle the land, death rates for rural whites have skyrocketed, fueled by suicide, addiction and a rampant sense of marginalization and disillusionment. This is the world the characters in Stephen Markley’s brilliant debut novel, Ohio, inherit. This is New Canaan.

  On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets, lost loves. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to New Orleans, and now back to “The Cane” with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting the mother of her former lover; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinn
er date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax.

  At once a murder mystery and a social critique, Ohio ingeniously captures the fractured zeitgeist of a nation through the viewfinder of an embattled Midwestern town and offers a prescient vision for America at the dawn of a turbulent new age.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. Discuss your first impressions of New Canaan in the prelude. How are these impressions reinforced—or changed—throughout the course of the novel?

  2. Consider the structure of the novel—how imperative do you feel it is to the reading experience?

  3. “In them, I see the world that’s coming. The world we’re being banished to” (477). In what ways might the novel’s events feel microcosmic to current events and politics?

  4. Consider Bill Ashcraft’s “T-shirt incident” which unites many of the novel’s central characters. How does this incident echo throughout the novel? How does it define Bill? Also, discuss the incident from the other characters’ points of view.

  5. “In the last decade, everyone had learned to be a truth masseuse” (106). Discuss the novel in the frame of “post-truth.” Are the narrators reliable? Consider the different angles and perspectives in which we view the characters and their stories. How do these alternating views affect your overall perception of the characters?

  6. Ohio is a novel fraught with power dynamics between its characters. How do they differ between the men and the women?