He must have asked what happened. He was sure the nasty business was his fault.
“Can’t say, Bill. Don’t know all the details.” Then Marty, who was the quintessential man of few words, said something that chilled him even through his haze. “From the sound of it, though, it’ll be the next thing in this town that keeps me up at night.”
When he came to again, he was in the Brinklans’ house, his arm slung over Marty’s thick shoulders. Marty carried him to—where else—Rick’s old room.
“Where’s Jill?” he thought he said.
“She doesn’t live here anymore,” said Marty.
Rick’s room had been stripped bare. Posters and trophies and the flag and torn out pinups from Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues were all gone. The walls spackled and painted blue. The guest bed overflowing with pointless throw pillows. He collapsed into them.
“I’ve gotta get out to Stillwater. If you gotta throw up there’s a trash can by the bed. We’ll get you some breakfast in the morning.”
Bill tried to open his mouth and say it: What he’d admitted to Dan Eaton earlier that night. What he’d wanted to say ever since he’d understood his own hapless, coward’s heart.
Instead, Marty’s mouth moved just below his wounded eyes.
“You and Rick both had this idea. That if you can’t save all of mankind, you’ve completely failed. I know he forgives you, Bill. Even if you’ll never believe it, he forgives you.”
But maybe Marty Brinklan did not say that. As soon as the silence returned, it only felt like another hallucination, and on the last few words Marty’s mouth opened into a portal where he could see ancient battlegrounds and sharpened bayonets. Marty left Bill there to listen to the sound of the car turning over and backing down the driveway. He closed his eyes and met his visions.
He dreamt of how his and every other story would end in shame. He pictured Earth after the profiteers had finished carving up every last shard. The planet would go dark, and every animal would devour itself or fall, pale and listless, into a black acid sea. The oceans would boil away, and eventually this rock of humble miracles would go silent. Spend the rest of time adrift in its slot of space, the land gray and ashen like a crater, and nothing would notice or remember what had gone on here. It was as inevitable as the next drink he would take. He thought of all that he’d lost and tried to summon his friends—their faces, their voices, their holy souls entombed in his despair. He could wish that the dead only waited patiently off stage, their makeup still on, longing for salvation when they’d take their bows. He could let his memories be the noose from which he’d swing at dusk.
Or.
Or he could climb out of this abyss. As he slipped into sleep, he told himself there was no going back to the slowly drowning swamps of the Mississippi Delta. There was a thousand dollars still in his glove compartment, a thousand more in his back pocket, and another quest, another vision, lying in wait. Even after all this, there was always a reason to stand again. To summon the courage to live and to be alive. To rage against the faceless entropy, the savage logic of accumulation that would return them all to exile, that aimed to strip them bare of everything, every place, and every person they’d ever loved. To find hope in defiance, in the subterranean fire, and to always and forever endure the Truth and struggle to extinction.
He stumbled on in his dreams, mourning the rivers and fields of his homeland. He saw it burning in blue fire, and he prayed for the strength to defend it, to fight for it, to bring it back alive.
STACEY MOORE AND A THEORY OF ECOLOGY, LITERATURE, AND LOVE ACROSS DEEP TIME
ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME to deliver an overdue letter and meet the woman she’d feared and hated her entire adult life, Stacey Moore stopped to scoop her hand into the ground and tear away a handful of dirt. Five miles outside town, well before the sign that welcomes you into the city limits—weathered, aging, yet still admonishing that here lies America’s heart—she had to pull to the side of the road, her bladder begging for release.
Her nerves rising alongside that internal pee ache as she neared New Canaan, she realized she wasn’t going to make it. No matter how old you get, a swollen bladder always takes you back to childhood, especially if you grew up with older brothers and everyone rolled their eyes when you were the one who instigated bathroom stops on road trips. She always held it just so her dad wouldn’t give her that skeptical glance in the rearview mirror, but her brothers, Patrick and Matt, were like fucking genetically advanced camels the way they could store water.
Trooping into the woods with dusk rapidly drawing down and only the faintest blue-gray light lingering, the world a fading Chinese lantern, she got situated with her back against the tree—the key to peeing outside, her mom once explained. The very process still elicited memories of campfires, her mother’s s’mores, and the fecund scent of summer nights in Mohican State Park. As a little girl, maybe six or seven years old, Stacey squatted beside her and watched. “Afterward you gotta kinda wiggle your butt around,” she said, demonstrating with a little “Twist and Shout” dance. Attempting to imitate, young Stacey promptly fell on her butt into her own pee, and her mom laughed like she was having a seizure.
Now Stacey was an expert, having peed in locales as diverse as the Brazilian Amazon and Croatian alleys, none of which had anything on this deeply satisfying gush of kidney-processed coffee and Diet Pepsi, as delightful and relieving as snapping one’s neck in that chiropractic way that releases half a dozen kinks at once. Alone in this bedraggled piece of the county except for the thunderous buzz of the crickets and the careful winking of the fireflies, she allowed herself an audible, pleasured moan, then a little laugh at the borderline-sexual severity of that moan.
Finishing, she wiggled her butt around, per Mom’s instructions, and pulled her underwear back on. Around the deep-blue flower print, the white of her dress glowed, and she remembered Lisa pulling it off the rack in a Columbus thrift store many years ago. “I think your ass will look like a million bucks in this dress, Miracle. For fifteen bucks, math-wise, that’s substantial savings.” That she’d worn it tonight was a coincidence.
The night roared with those Ohio crickets, their hopes, jokes, disagreements, and bullshitting all wrapped up in a crackling symphony. And now that she was home (or at least the place she could never stop thinking of as home), all the errant memories began to spring forward, unbidden, clamoring for attention. Whac-A-Mole ghosts. Which is why she stopped before she reached her Jeep, pulled haphazardly to the berm of the road. She reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt. Mr. Masoncup had lectured his earth science class not to call it that, like it was a slur. Soil, he’d implored, and she’d replied with something like Looks like dirt, Mase. That typical manner of hers. The character she’d played in high schooclass="underline" witty, coy, knowing anyone would forgive her teasing because she’d been demarcated as beautiful by the patriarchy (that’s a joke, but not really). Teasing people, she learned, endears them to you while also keeping them off-balance. It was a social lesson she mastered early.
Lisa Han was in that same earth science class junior year. They’d both written papers on dirt. Lisa sat two rows ahead and one over due to a randomized seating chart (a real bugfuck lottery for Mr. Masoncup to pull on the first day), and Stacey would catch her looking sometimes. She’d have to avert her eyes because chances were she’d been staring at Lisa.
That was the year everything changed. The year she changed. She used to think it was mostly about Lisa, but maybe she’d never given enough credit to that earth science class. She squeezed the fistful. Cool and wet, born from the explosions of stars and coalesced into life, it took the shape of her palm. 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? Feel it the way you’d feel a lover, give it the reverence you’d give to a body. She held a solar system of mycelia gnashing away at plant matter, returning it to the cycle, renewing. “What’s more important?” Masoncup asked them. “Humans or dirt?” And the answer was that it wasn’t even close—even as Ohio’s monoculture farms massacred the soil, a veritable mycelia genocide, and then pumped in nitrogen fertilizers to keep it alive, zombielike.