Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  “How’d y’all meet?” I asked.

  “Me and Joe? At a bar. I was there with some girlfriends and there was boxing on a TV, and we were play fighting with each other and Joe came up and said, ‘I bet you ain’t ever hit anything.’ But I told him I’d been in loads of fights.

  “‘Let’s see then,’ he told me.

  “‘See what?’

  “‘What you got.’

  “‘You want me to hit you?’

  “‘I want you to try.’”

  “You hit him?” I said. “That’s how y’all met?”

  “Nah, I didn’t hit him,” Peggy said. “I knocked his ass out. Two hits.”

  “You hitting him, him hitting the floor?”

  “Nope. I hit him twice and he fell over. He came to a few minutes later, bought me a drink, and then he took me home.”

  Peggy only watched as I pushed my uncle from the car and lugged him across a snow-heavy field into a wooded area, and propped him inside an antique outhouse that was ramshackle and teetering. It smelled like mushrooms and old leaves, and I perched him on a board with a poop hole cut into it, and the hole disappeared into darkness.

  I came out of the outhouse spent and panting, and I looked at Peggy. “Why couldn’t you help?”

  Peggy stood still, flakes of snow caught in her hair. “I can’t touch him like that.”

  We propped a stone in front of the outhouse door to make sure nothing would open it, and we stepped back and considered the tiny wooden structure he rested in, not much larger than a coffin would be, and Peggy’s shoulders shook, and she brought her hands to her face, and my whole body felt hot.

  “I ain’t thought about it yet,” she said. Her voice sounded bubbly. Like how it does when your throat hurts because you’re about to cry. But she lowered her hands and tears weren’t streaming from her eyes like I figured. “I mean, I knew he’d always end this way. He was sweet but he was a fuck-up. I think he got that from his dad. I never met your grandfather. But I heard stories. Your uncle thought he made the clouds.”

  “Yeah, I heard that one too.”

  Peggy’s eyes found my eyes. “What was that with your hand?”

  “Remote,” I said. “My mom taught it to me. It was stories.”

  “Stories?”

  “How things happened I guess. I don’t know. It’s lame.”

  “Tell me some of them someday?”

  “Yeah, someday.”

  Peggy and I stood there in the silence for a long time. The moon seemed like a muted jewel above us.

  There were no shadows. There were no sounds except our feet in the snow. I don’t know how long we stayed there in that winter night, but when the day started to gray with morning, Peggy led me to the car and we drove away.

  “That will work, right?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Where we put him.”

  The dead cornfields streaked by, covered in patches of graying snow.

  “Of course it will,” said Peggy. “I can always figure things out.”

  Other Days

  On March 14, we walked out of school and stood for seventeen minutes in the cold to sort of pay tribute to the kids who died in the Florida shooting. At least, some kids did. I mean, lots of them walked outside, but not everyone knew entirely why.

  I think I did it the right way. I don’t know exactly how I feel about guns. I don’t think they should all be illegal, but I think when people die it’s good to pay respect to them, and that can look a bunch of different ways. We didn’t know those kids, but we knew they were kids, and so during second period, a bunch of us stood up and walked quietly down the halls.

  It’s amazing to me how many different types of people we have in the school, but how in so many ways we’re all the same. It’s hard to really explain that with words, but I know when I was standing outside, I was standing outside with people I wouldn’t have done much with.

  Like, if most of those kids had invited me to go to their houses and play video games, I would’ve said no. But I was protesting or observing or memorializing with them, and maybe that’s the way it works. If you go to war, I guess you’re fighting alongside a ton of people you’d rather not be with. If you get a job, even, it might be with people you’d otherwise not be around.

  I mean, I still have the job at Broth, even as I write this, and I haven’t hung out with anyone from work unless you want to count the conspiracy-theory waiter. And really, by hang out I mean he’s given me a few rides home.

  He’s even asked me about my uncle. “You still haven’t seen him?”

  “No. Haven’t talked to him or anything,” I said. “Maybe Peggy has, though.”

  “I got a theory . . .” said the waiter.

  “I bet you do,” I told him. It had to do with aliens.

  Chef and I talk a bunch at work, and maybe I’d hang out with her, but she wouldn’t want to hang out with me. But she teaches me about food, and she gives me books to read.

  A few days ago, she asked if I wanted to train to do garde-manger, which is a fancy word for salad bitch, but I was like, “I want to be a dishwasher a little while longer.”

  “Why?”

  I was in my soggy apron and there were stacks of greasy dishes to run through, and my back was aching from being hunched over at the sinks, like I’d gotten an injection of poison right above my ass. “I’m good at it,” I told her. “It feels good to be good at something.”

  “It feels good to be good at something, Chef,” Chef said.

  With Peggy—if it weren’t for my uncle, she wouldn’t be my aunt. She wouldn’t be my friend. She wouldn’t know me. But the other day, when I got home from work, she said, “You’re looking older.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was kind of picking at my hands, because washing dishes just makes them fall apart, and there’s always like bits of skin flaking off my fingers.

  “Lemme see,” she said to me, and she looked at my hand. “Come sit on the couch.”

  Her purse was with her, and she had some lotion in it that she took out, and she took my hand, and put a squirt of lotion into one of my palms, and then she sort of rubbed it in, and it was two things.

  It was one of the kindest and most generous things she’d ever done for me.

  It was hawt as hell, man. It was like she was giving all my fingers handjobs.

  During the walkout when I was standing outside with my classmates, Bennet came up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “We can memorialize him too, if you want?”

  “Sure,” I said, but that’s the only other time my uncle has come up between us.

  Then Bennet said, “Give me your phone,” and he took a picture of us standing in front of the walkout crowd and tweeted it with the caption: Strugglers.

  Maybe he was being ironic?

  I still haven’t heard from Erika. I text her from time to time, but I get nothing back, and who knows? Maybe she’s seen it and doesn’t want to respond, or maybe she doesn’t have a phone anymore, or maybe she moved back to Michigan and got to hang out with her old friend Hannah again. The one she’d met in Michigan when she was younger. The white one who was nice to her the way Erika was nice to me.

  Who’s to say?

  There are a few more things I have to tell you about.

  There was another philosopher in my book named Plato, and he had this metaphor about shadows. Basically he said that we were all just watching shadows on walls. That all of life wasn’t really happening. That it was just, like, pretending to happen. It’s like life’s a movie. And the job of all the people in the audience watching the screen is to realize that they’re watching a screen. And they have to climb their way out of the theater and stumble with shocked eyes into the real light of existence. And after that they need to go back and rescue everyone else left inside.

  But
maybe it’s best to let sleeping people sleep.

  Right now I’m about to go to bed, but before I do, I want Remote to tell you how Sunday got its name, because I think it was the last story my mom ever told me:

  In the time before the shadows, I realized that my only true accomplishment in life was naming the days, and I only had one day left to name so I became sad. I would spend long hours brooding, knowing that once the final task was complete, I would feel empty.

  My friends noticed my sadness, and they sent me to Wed to see if he could catch my sickness and set it free in his tree. But once I was in front of him, Wed said my sadness could not be removed without destroying what Remote was. “What you need is a purpose,” he told me.

  “I had one once,” I said. “To name the days.”

  “Find a new purpose,” Wed said. “You can have more than one.”

  Remote then looked at Wed’s arrow. How it aimed at the sun.

  “What about that?” I asked Wed.

  “About what?”

  “The sun,” I said. “We still know almost nothing about it.”

  “That’s not true,” Wed said. “We always know where it will be.”

  Then I realized what I had to do. I climbed the highest mountain on Earth, and I called out to Mun, and I told him I needed a favor.

  The next day, I got all of my friends together. Tues was there and Jupiter and Frida and Satur and we stood in front of Wed, whose sunburned penis looked miserable and ashy.

  “This is my plan,” I told them. And I explained how Mun would use his infinite beard to hoist me into space and to send me to the sun so that I could study it and find out what it was.

  “But even if you make it,” said Tues, “how will we know what you come to find out? How will you ever return?”

  “I will find a way,” I told them. “I will send a signal.”

  Weeks later, Wed stood naked holding his arrow. And he felt a weird sensation. He couldn’t say exactly what, but something had changed. He scanned the world with his eyes, to see if he could catch what had shifted.

  Then he realized, something was watching him from the ground. It was shaped just like Wed, and it seemed to grow from out of his feet, and it stretched across the Earth away from the sun.

  He waved at it, and it waved back. He danced, and it did too. He lifted his free hand into the sky. And he held his hand a way he’d never held it before, and when he did, Remote appeared on the ground in front of him, because I was sending him my message.

  “He made it!” Wed hollered. “He made it all the way!”

  That is how Sunday got its name.

  And Wed stood there in the sunshine. And he felt it shining on.

  Of course, it can be hard to zonk out.

  I see the Bicycling Confederate sometimes riding around town. Every now and then I’ll hold up Remote at him, and he’ll holler “honk, honk” at me like I’m making a goose.

  Autistic Ross stops me when I see him. The first time he did, I held up Remote at him, and he said, “That’s the farmer.”

  “Farmer?”

  “Have you ever played Rock, Paper, Scissors?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think it should be different,” he said. “I think it should be Farmer, Garlic, Vampire.”

  Winter was fading, and the streets were slick with snowmelt. “I don’t understand.”

  “Farmer beats garlic,” he told me, holding up his hand like Remote. “Garlic beats vampire,” he said, holding up his hand like a rock. “But vampire beats farmer.” He held his hand like scissors except his fingers pointed toward the ground.

  Then we played a few games. Right there on the streets of Opioid, Indiana, for all the passersby to see.

  You can play it too. But be warned it’s addicting. You play it once, you’ll play it forever. Teach it to others. They’ll appreciate it and get addicted too. I only ask that when you do, be sure to tell everyone you learned it in Opioid, Indiana.

  For book club discussion questions on

  Brian Allen Carr’s Opioid, Indiana,

  please visit bit.ly/opioidindianadiscussionquestions