Ohio

by Stephen Markley

A ceremony for a fallen soldier was an opportunity to decorate and reinvent the town as its residents wished it to be.

They’d fought as brothers to earn the enormous plaque that still graced the glass display case at the entrance of the high school, yet few of them had the skill or the grades to make it to the next level. Eighteen years old and no more Friday nights under stadium lights, pep rallies, bonfires, or freshman girlfriends. No more dances, forum shows, homecomings, or raucous trips to Vicky’s Diner, slinging fries at each other across the booths.

Thinking about this cage he lived in, this prison where it felt like he’d spend the entirety of his life, cradle to grave, measuring the distance between his most modest hopes and all the cheap regret he actually ended up living. You passed your time in the cage, he figured, by clinging pointlessly and desperately to an endless series of unfinished sorrows.

It’s hard to say where any of this ends or how it ever began, because what you eventually learn is that there is no such thing as linear. There is only this wild, fucked-up flamethrower of a collective dream in which we were all born and traveled and died.

Then, after dropping Eaton off at the Eastern Star Retirement Home to chase his own two-toned demons, the goddamned truck ran out of gas.

He released the wheel and sighed. Neither Bill nor his truck had ever been to Kansas.

It was okay. This crazy rat of a day would just have to steam a little longer in its shithouse.

Though they’d been teenage enemies of a sort, he also felt the fraternity: once handsome, marbled, small-town athletes who couldn’t understand why they hadn’t conquered the world.

Before he could follow the thought, he turned and barfed into the grass, which he knew would sober him up quick and be a true bummer in the near- to mid-term.

After walking maybe half a mile down the road, he realized that while remembering the picture, he’d left the keys in the ignition and a thousand dollars in the glove compartment. He didn’t bother going back.

Love was a marketing strategy, but every ad campaign lost its zest in the end.

For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars.

He had time to kill—02:18:24—and the liquor store, coincidentally, lay right in his path.

He wasn’t a smoker, but there was nothing like a cigarette when you were drunk (which basically made him a smoker).

He entered MacMillan’s office with the rage of the righteous. He was ready to shout. To threaten. To take a stand. He pictured a Supreme Court case. He pictured the New York Times editorializing on the courageous determination of this humble kid from Middle America. He pictured an Oscar-winning biopic.

If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loved you, will be the ones to collect the debt.

“You don’t know a thing about what you want.” Her eyes evaded his. “None of us do.”

As we all know, the way memory works is that the sweep of your life gets explicated by a handful of specific moments, and these totems then stand as narrative. You must invent the ligature that binds the rest.

Obviously he fell right out of the lawn chair where he’d passed out.

“Christ,” said Bill. “My liver.” “Is that a yes?” asked Harrington. “Well, it ain’t a fucking no. You can sleep when you’re dead, Ashcraft.”

Sure, he’d left some stuff out, but he figured narrators were always conveniently forgetting essential shit.

She held the gray brick like she was contemplating Yorick’s skull.

And because it meant she’d spend a drink’s worth of time with him, he accepted.

one fixed behind the only decoration, which was a tacky ten-cent painting of Jesus, hands in supplication, eyes fixed Fatherward because he suddenly understood he wouldn’t be carrying on the family name.

He knew how you could grow resentment for a person over time, water it, care for it so that every word exchanged in every interaction—every glance even—could be loaded with this enmity.

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.

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?

Janet had become an English professor mostly to indulge the huge pop culture nerd hiding beneath her work on Faulkner.

The real reason I want my doctrate right here LMAO

Stacey doled out to herself this strategic reserve of Lisa’s favorite texts in careful drips, never reading two in a row. They were Stacey’s reward to herself, her way of connecting back to this person without admitting that that’s what she wanted. Almost all of them had Lisa’s dog-ears and margin notes. Jaunty, clever quips, occasionally filthy, always charming: A huge smiley face at a perverted scene in Lolita. A sarcastic “Thumbs-up, bro!” at a bit of misogyny from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A “Jesus I’m wet” next to a scene in Wuthering Heights.

The "Wuthering Heights" quip is kinda funn y not gonna lie. I adore the book but she nailed it with that side quip.

“We are all travelers, Stacey. The only difference is how much baggage we choose to burden ourselves with.”

She’d let New Canaan take up such gargantuan psychic space that sometimes she forgot it was just a place, and life carried on here as it did anywhere else.

When a boy makes up his mind about you there is no challenge too trivial for him to peacock.

So real

That’s how teenagedness works: everyone lives in a bubble of their own terrifying insecurities oblivious to the possibility that so does everyone else.

Beyond that, she was a fire starter. Smart and sassy with a graphic, volcanic mouth, and the first person Stacey ever met who was just unapologetically herself.

That’s how the social taxonomy of small-town high school works. You can know of a person for years without actually knowing her.

“I’m not saying there’s no way, no how not a God, but the way they tell it to you? Like there’s this omniscient dude watching us CIA-style and—you know—doling out rewards and punishments based on obscure, occasionally incoherent moral programs . . . Pretty dumb if you think about it.”

“Jesus, please don’t strike my car,” Rick said to the roof. “Just because my sinning friend is in it. Wait till he’s outside to get him.”

It was surely a lousy way to organize her friendships, but she seemed incapable of adaptation.

even though Lisa’s constant carping had taught her to view Bethany as an odious old troll out to ruin all their fun, Stacey watched and thought about how mother and daughter looked, for once, at peace and in love.

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.

Where does a girl who’s lost her religion go to find meaning? What replaces the hole that faith, cast off, leaves behind?

No eighteen-year-old is equipped to understand how love can inspire so much shame, so much self-loathing.

“No way. Inspirational music teachers, issues of queerness and race—we’re writing our own really condescending movie right now.” He laughed and cracked his glass into hers.

Kroger (epicenter of New Canaan stop-and-chat time sucks).

He talked crap behind Bill’s back while cheering him on during basketball season, but that was the whole school, and teenagers tend to do whatever it takes to reach a perfect equilibrium of noticed but not noticed.

Dying was something he thought of every day, while at the same time keeping it buried in the heart.

Your worries are simpler as a kid.

“One pitcher,” he told Bill. “Five,” he said, hopping out of the truck. “Two.” “Fine. Seven pitchers, and that’s it.”

“We lack a whole lot of imagination about violence. We want to chalk it up to ‘psychos,’ whatever that means. It’s a notion that feels safe. It’s comforting. But shit like My Lai or Auschwitz or Gnadenhutten—that’s not aberrant. It happens because of what we all have in common. How frail we are. We’re insecure, we’re greedy, we want a promotion at work, we’re afraid of the guy in charge—that’s the stupid, mundane bullshit that makes people do terrible things to each other.”

“Should we go after him?” Dan asked. Beaufort gave him a puzzled look. “Then we gotta listen to him.”