Stephen Markley - Ohio

Later that afternoon a cop cruised by, and they all madly hid their alcohol. Jonah took a group down to his boat, and Stacey’s top came off in the water, so they all got a glimpse. Lisa hooted and clapped and shouted, “Leave it off , Moore!”

Bill lay beside his girlfriend in the sun, giddily, meltingly drunk. Normally in those days, he felt up to his nostrils in guilt, desire, and self-disgust—disgust with oneself being a thing as cherished and protected as any bit of ego or pleasure. But not that day at Jericho. It was the last time he could really remember when they were all just young, arguments lacking permanence, sins missing any real vital evil. He had lovers, yes, but he loved them. He was hurting his friends, sure, but they were still childhood brothers. With all that had passed between him and Rick, the friendship felt constantly volatile in his hands, like unstable explosive. Yet even with Kaylyn standing there in the water, looking as gorgeous and iridescent as a dragonfly, he felt a surge of love and regret unlike anything he’d experienced before. Because they were just kids, and that day they drank and they danced and they laughed at the sky-blue heavens, and it really felt like anything could be fixed and anything could be forgiven.

He had no idea how long he sat there. His gaze drifted from the stars to the city lights to the fireflies winging their Morse code. He listened to the crickets on their motorcycles, revving engines. He marveled at the beauty of It, how he could see everything about the universe down to the molecular level or up to the cosmic—the broken streetlights, the scratchy gravel of the roof beneath his fingertips, the empty spray paint can clutched by a cornice, the nuclear fuel of distant stars.

At some point, he remembered Dakota sitting beside him, fingers dug deep into his dreads, staring into space, eyes glassy. It looked like he’d buried his hands in a pit of earthworms now writhing over his fingers.

“Jesus Christ,” said Bill, getting to his feet. He jumped in place for a moment, reaching higher and higher with each release of his toes. He glanced down, and the roof looked impossibly far away. He could suspend in the air for superheroic seconds. “Wow,” he said. “Wow, wow, wow.”

Dakota still hadn’t moved, but now Bill found himself with an appetite for the night.

“Fuck that cop.” He continued jumping. “Is the liquor store still open? Let’s go back to the liquor store.”

Dakota slowly rose to his feet, surveying every possible direction. “Yeah, man.”

“Motha fuck the police!”

He skipped over to the edge of the roof, haphazardly swung his legs over the side, grabbed the pipe with both hands and swung down onto the dumpster. Barely pausing, he leapt to the asphalt, knees bending to absorb the shock.

“I get It,” he said as Dakota followed him less gracefully. “I totally get It. Even though I’m intellectually aware It’s just the methamphetamine releasing an excess of dopamine to my central nervous system, you can’t quantify a feeling like this in terms of dopamine and nervous systems, you know? Jesus-fucked-up-Christ, It’s like taking a shot of Jedi.”

“Good shit, right,” said Dakota, still distant, eyes like glazed donuts.

They walked back across the parking lot with Bill bouncing every few steps. When The Thing appeared overhead, some happy, bopping music issuing from speakers in its guts, he wasn’t even mildly surprised.

“Wowzers.”

The Thing was a never-ending python-amoeba of circus lights and seductive tunes, of venerated faces pushing up through the slime of its skin and a vacuum hose appropriating the dead and setting them up on marble pedestals jutting from its back. Slithering through the sky, The Thing bulged a muscle and barbed appendages caught souls on their sticky tips like insects. Robotic arms lowered with mechanized whizzing, tipped with hypodermic needles injecting stronger and stronger barbiturates into the masses, while oozing jelly limbs slithered into every other corner of the American night, places so dark and lonely, even the echoes fled.

He looked in all directions. “I think I’m going to go do some cartwheels on the football field. How’s that sound? Is that weird?”

“Nah, man,” said Dakota. “You do you.”

Bill took off sprinting for the fence, arms pumping, lungs as powerful as blimps. He ran beneath the watchful gaze of this Leviathan, this opaque creature that knew only control and hunger, that no person not under the helpful influence of three different types of narcotics could even see because to look at it was to miss it. Turn your eyes in its direction and it evanesced back to vapor. It watched Bill curiously, thirty-seven million microscope eyes crawling the surface of the naked country.

He snatched the chain link, scrambled to the top, and vaulted over. He hit the ground, rolled, collecting grass stains on his elbows, and sprung back up in a dead sprint toward the field. He crossed the black polyurethane surface and then his sneakers were crunching over the dry grass. He tipped his body, lowered his hands, and flung his legs back in a flailing cartwheel. He was a particle accelerator crashing protons and neutrons together. He could see the electrons slipping between realities, taste the quantum ghosts. This ended with him sprawled on his ass. The sky spun, and The Thing vanished back to stars and carbon. How rad. He did snow angels in the dust. He laughed and laughed.

“History’s all the same story, man—the consolidation of capital and political control.”

They were walking back along New Canaan Avenue, beneath the broken streetlights and past the dark park, the threat of the cops obliterated in a fog of dopamine. For a moment, a cigarette butt glowed orange in the distance, a bright coal in the space beneath the picnic shelter. Inhaled back to life. It held for a moment, glimmering as the exhaled smoke curled, warping the air. Then it went dark as if it had never existed. Bill was talking very fast and neither he nor Dakota noticed.

“But it ain’t just the military, man…” He went on to haphazardly describe: corporate media, real estate covenants, the medical-industrial complex, reality television, student loans, pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, industrial agriculture and factory farming, coal, oil, and gas interests, consumerized sex, the carceral state, neoliberal trade agreements, advertising, auto title loans, social media, narcotizing political messaging, and corporate data collection. “Any way to make a buck from people’s misery, man, they’re there.”

Always something of a borderline Timon, for Bill, perhaps smoking crystal methamphetamine wasn’t the best prescription after a long, sleepless, drug-addled, alcohol-soaked day because even as his mouth and tongue and lips masticated this feverish disquisition on U.S. foreign, social, and economic policy, a dark purple cloud began to creep into him, somewhere between the visible spectrum and his kaleidoscopic intellectual preoccupations.

Dakota had yet to say anything since they’d left the football field. He walked beside Bill with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his ratty jeans, the denim swishing noisily as he ambled along, his eyes with a bulging-orb quality. Like he was staring at a scene happening in another dimension.

The cloud descended and Bill’s voice was divorced from what transpired in his head. The purple cloud had a notion. It swept down on top of him like smoke billowing from fallen towers. The possibility that all his work and all his travels and all his passion was just farce. His way to engineer the world to make sense. His way of coping at four a.m. on a West Texas highway. His heart thundered, and he dreamt the Truth, but each discovery was as slippery as a fish in the hand, and every time he tried to catch one, it would simply wriggle its tail and be free. His chest felt tight. He was having trouble catching his breath.