Stephen Markley - Ohio

He turned his head and vomited a laundry-detergent capful of his guts but barely missed a syllable.

“The reckoning is coming too, man.” He wiped bile from his lips. “I’ll tell you something. I see the future sometimes. I don’t mean I can see it all, but I have dreams where I see it. Dreams of buildings falling down and people spilling out of the cities. Already ninety percent of large fucking fish in the oceans have been exterminated. Yeah, you heard about that? Tropical forests will be gone in our lifetime. Phosphorous will peak, and there goes your fucking fertilizer. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is toast. There goes your coastal cities the world over. Refugee flows like no one’s ever imagined. Get ready for your helping of all the chaos and murder and sodomy you can handle. And the shit that the Powers will do to hold on? It’ll make the tyrants of the twentieth century look like Disney characters.”

“Shit,” said Dakota, bending over. “A quarter.” He pinched it up.

There were worse things in the purple cloud, though. Terrible shit he probably kept so deep that to let it out might overwhelm. Like inside of him was a passion and a darkness, and he could never tell the difference between the two. He only knew they were intertwined, tangled together like a snake with a head at each end.

They cut through the alley behind a storage facility, and everything was crushed plastic soda bottles, beer cans, broken glass, and loser lotto tickets. Alley detritus speaking of the empires swaying back and forth in the breeze, precarious. Bill had always believed he and Rick would figure it out. When he came back home. And this thought led him to all the petty evils to which he’d borne witness. The dismembered hands he’d seen in Sonora, nailed to the doors of a church. The children he’d visited with in Hanoi, orphaned and limbless thanks to American ordinance still lying around the countryside. The wetlands of the Gulf eroding to oblivion. And it was all part of the same human sickness that filled him with such ancient exhaustion, that made him want to puke up his soul.

He didn’t know how long he’d been lost in his own head. He looked around, trying to remember where he was. His hands were sticky with whiskey.

Stair step . When you came down minutely from a high, Harrington had called it a “stair step.” He felt how his breath connected to the thud of his heart inside its rib prison. Ventricles and muscles made for such a delicate slaveholder. One broken piece, and you sacrificed your entire consciousness? Seemed like a shoddy system.

“You’re a real weird motherfucker, Ashcraft.” Dakota rummaged around in his pocket. “I mean, you need to, like, chill out and take yoga classes or some shit.”

He exhaled a memory of the New Mexico desert, hot and red as Mars, where he went to work after getting fired from the campaign in ’08. He’d been seeing another teacher out there. Their stipends hadn’t allowed them much fun, but in lieu of dinner and a movie they used to fuck a lot in the shower of their dorms. She’d had wonderful bundles of black hair. On their way back from a visit to Durango they’d come across a spectacular drunk-driving wreck burning like a pyre in the night. This flaming car throwing light over the sweeping grasslands and distant mesas—how awful and awesome. He and this girl watched it for a long time. Now he couldn’t remember her name.

“Dude, you home?” Dakota snapped his fingers in front of Bill’s face. They stood in spilled garbage bags, fast-food wrappers, a pile of wire coat hangers, and five empty forties lined neatly in a row. “C’mon, man, let’s pop a squat over the river.”

They crossed the street to the bridge, home to the train tracks where no trains ran anymore. Dakota took a seat with his legs dangling over the side. Bill joined him. The Cattawa flowed on in near silence.

“So I gotta ask,” said Dakota. “Whatcha got strapped to your back?”

The meth was doing something to Bill’s brain, joining up with the expiring veins of LSD and getting up to devious shit. He could feel the worming quality of a greasy electrician’s fingers rewiring circuitry.

“Long story.”

“Saw it when you were doing cartwheels.” Dakota reached behind him in a practiced motion anyone would recognize from the movies. He set the gun in his lap. The way the grip of unexpected fear feels on the skin: like on a warm day when a cloud suddenly blocks out the sun. “Maybe I need to get that story.”

Bill had seen the future before, but he’d never seen his own death. That it could be something as stupid as this made him want to sob.

“ ’Cause it’s drugs?” he asked, the words dumb and taffy in his mouth.

“We kinda got a situation worked out in the county where we don’t like new business.”

All moisture fled from his throat. He said, “Anarcho-capitalism.”

“Don’t know nothing about that. What I know is we can’t control the sale of anhydrous ammonia, but we can control some things.”

The water of the Cattawa looked good. Maybe better to slip off the bridge. Feel gravity carry his every molecule into the water. Bill dared a hard look at the gun. It had severe angles and weight, like a shrunken anvil. He hallucinated the crimson flash of a discharging bullet, the heat of the hammer on hot steel. Dakota had worms writhing on his scalp again. His pores opened up into enormous caverns gushing with toxic black juice.

“Look, man, it’s my livelihood.” Dakota’s voice had yet to waver from its stoned calm. Now he took the pistol and pressed the barrel to the top of Bill’s skull. The bullet would burrow straight down through his throat. “You gotta understand, all the shit going on round here—it makes people paranoid and violent. Just tell me if you’re moving product.”

The gun pressed a dream into him, a dream of the last time he and Rick spoke. The night bulged. The darkness swelled and collapsed like the beat of a heart.

“Honestly,” said Bill, as carefully as if trying to speak around a capsule of cyanide held in his cheek. “I don’t know what it is. It’s a favor for a friend.”

“Lemme tell you something, Ashcraft.” Dakota took the gun away from his skull. His trigger finger looked so utterly calm and reasonable. “This ain’t the same place we grew up. People are expecting a certain level of discipline. You think this is fun and fucking games? I can assure you it ain’t. I wasn’t fucking around about Jericho Lake—that’s what some of these dudes wanna start doing. I want you to answer honest: This a onetime thing?”

Bill felt out words with his tongue. “For sure, man. Seriously.”

Dakota finally set the gun on his lap and sighed, as if bored with the whole affair. “Got the feeling you’re the kinda dude people are always giving passes. This one’s mine.”

Sounds returned: the river below gargling like a throat. In the distance, a soft wind stirred the drought-fried corn cowering in its husks. His relief felt gastric, intestinal, as if the old children’s myth had come true and he’d swallowed a seed that grew tendrils through the juicy soil of his belly.

“My senior year, woulda been your junior…” Dakota replaced the gun in the back of his jeans, and Bill felt the anguish of relief. He still didn’t dare twitch, let alone stand and try to leave. “I thought I might kill some people at school.”

Bill waited and when he didn’t say more, asked, “How do you mean?”

“Those kids who did Columbine, Klebold and Harris? I, like, read about ’em. Studied ’em. Dreamed about ’em. I just thought, how cool would it be to be remembered like that? You know, no one would remember anybody from New Canaan, Ohio, ever again except me. It would be a Me day. So I brought a gun to school. My mom’s. And I was planning on walking into the cafeteria and just start mowing fuckers down. I didn’t know if I could break Klebold and Harris’s record, but I thought I could come close.”