Opioid, Indiana

by Brian Allen Carr

  “Okay,” I said. Then to the waiter, “You got any idea where he drops off to?”

  “Not really. I mean, I can call some people,” he looked up at the clock, “but it’d be best to wait a few hours. You want my number? I doubt Peggy has it.”

  I dabbed at the sweat on my face, the heat from the kitchen just making me melt. “I guess.”

  He took a pen and a napkin from his pocket and wrote down a number that he gave me. “I used to run with your uncle more, but I quit that game. I’m too old. He knows he needs to settle down too, but knowing a thing and doing a thing are different things.”

  The waiter walked with me to the back door and told me to call or text that evening and he’d try to see what he could find out, and I stumbled back into the gray daylight and the sloppy alleyway, the sweat freezing on my skin, and I went back out to the square to see if the Bicycling Confederate was still there, and he was.

  He had parked his bike and was sitting on a bench surrounded by geese. I had built up nerve for talking to strangers, I’d figured. I mean, I’d cooked for a chef, which maybe isn’t the biggest deal in the whole world, but it was one of the most important things I’d ever done. I’d had a few folks with verified accounts retweet me on Twitter and I met a Dallas Cowboys player whose name I couldn’t remember and I’d gotten a hand job. But the omelette thing was, to me, a kind of big deal, and I guess I was living off that high a little bit, because I walked straight up to that Bicycling Confederate, touched his flag and said, “Why the fuck are you flying this?”

  You ever talked to someone who you didn’t think was medically stupid, and the split second after you say something to them you realize they might be?

  You can’t use the R-word. And I’m sure “medically stupid” isn’t the most appropriate way to say it, but y’all, that Bicycling Confederate had a syndrome or was on the spectrum, I think. And I’m sure that’s a horrible thing to say, but it also might explain a ton. He was holding a hot dog bun, tearing off bits that he flicked toward the courthouse geese, and they hissed and clucked toward him, pecking food off the ground. Their beady and vacant eyes glistened like glass.

  “What you mean?” he asked me and flicked some bread. “I’m American. I got the right to do whatever I want.” His mouth and his eyes seemed to be from two different people, like his face was cobbled together from bits of discarded faces, and there amongst the geese he seemed like some queer king of some bizarre empire.

  “Bruh, that flag is anti-American.”

  “Libtard,” he told me. “Snowflake.” He spit toward the sidewalk, but he didn’t get enough power behind it, and a trail of saliva slunk down his chin, and he wiped it away with his hot dog bun.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Lord and savior.” He tossed the spit-soaked bread at a goose who gobbled it gone.

  Around that time, my phone shook in my pants, so I grabbed it out of my pocket and checked my texts. Bennet had hit me up on someone else’s phone.

  The text came through as a number and said this:

  (317) xxx-xxxx: This bennet, they’re talking about having the teachers carry

  Me: Carry what

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Guns hahahahahahahaahh

  Me: What

  (317) xxx-xxxx: At school to save us

  Me: Id rather get shot

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Hahahahahaha

  “I got one of those things,” the Bicycling Confederate said.

  I pocketed my phone. “Sure you do.”

  Then he held his hand like this:

  And he moved his hand close to the face of a goose and said, “He don’t believe us,” and he lowered and raised his thumb as he spoke so it looked like his hand was talking.

  “What’s with your hand?” I said, because what I saw was Remote.

  “It’s a goose, you idiot.” He lifted his hand at me. “Honk, honk,” his hand said.

  My phone vibrated again:

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Who d’you think would be the worst teacher to have a gun.

  Me: I’m busy

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Then just don’t text back

  Me: What

  (317) xxx-xxxx: Just don’t text back if your busy it’s not that big a deal.

  Then the Bicycling Confederate stood up, got on his bike and screamed, “God bless America.” He made his hand like Remote one more time. “Honk, honk, honk,” he hollered, and he biked away, leaving me to stand aloof in the congregation of geese who hooted and bleated at me, I guess hoping I had bread.

  My phone vibrated again, and I expected it to be Bennet, but it was Peggy and she said this:

  Peggy: Heard anything

  Me: Nah, but i got a number

  Peggy: Number?

  Me: From a waiter guy. Texting him later.

  Peggy: I’m at the apartment

  Me: Okay

  Peggy: You?

  Me: On way home, i guess

  Peggy: TTYL

  On my walk home, I thought about what Bennet had said and about all my teachers and which one I’d least like to have a gun, but I think I came away with the idea that none of them should have guns anywhere let alone in school. I mean, can you imagine them telling you to be quiet if you knew they had a gun in their pocket. You know how awkward that would be? People are stupid as fuck.

  The teacher would be like, “Sit down and be quiet or . . .”

  “You’ll shoot me?” some student would say.

  And then the gauntlet would be thrown. I can’t think of a more heroic way of dying than having a teacher shoot you rather than you sitting down and shutting the fuck up.

  Hell, they’d have to name the hallway after you.

  Peggy was about how you’d expect her to be. She was on the couch and was in pajamas, because she said that she had to get some rest. By pajamas, I mean a kind of tank top and some boxer shorts, and maybe I need to take a little while to explain what she looked like. This is one of those weird things, because if you’re reading this, my guess is you don’t want to hear me describe Peggy the way I want to describe her.

  Listen, I’m a seventeen-year-old young man. I am a dick with a white boy attached to it. I’m serious. I’ve measured my penis when erect quite a few times, and on average it’s average, and it drags me around half the time making me act like an asshole.

  I get that this is viewed as a cop-out. That guys blame shit on their dicks or their hormones or how society raised them. And maybe it isn’t just my dick. But it’s my dick and the energy my dick has, and that energy is like a language that speaks to the rest of me in emotions, and those emotions are hard to say shut the fuck up to sometimes. And it’s not always a creepy thing. It’s just like peer pressure from inside you.

  And so I was there in the room with Peggy. She’s like maybe five foot four. And she has a tattoo on her right shoulder blade that says:

  how time can move

  both fast and slow

  amazes me

  And she has mild, fascinating eyes. And her shoulders are smooth. And her body is well made. And basically whenever I’m around her I just want to look at her. And look at her. And look at her. I don’t know.

  “Get some rest,” I said.

  “I need someone to listen for my phone.”

  “I’ll listen for it.”

  “But don’t go playing on it.”

  “I won’t.”

  Peggy wrapped herself up in a blanket on the sofa, and I went to my room and wondered about the Bicycling Confederate and Remote being on his hand. I know it wasn’t Remote to him, but I still didn’t want Remote on his hand. Remote was my mother’s. Remote didn’t belong to some racist Hoosier on a bicycle.

  I got up and rummaged the kitchen for some dinner because I knew it didn’t matter how the Bicycling Confederate held his hand, and I thought maybe I was just hangry
, but nothing I ate seemed to take my hate away. So, I brooded around a bit before going back to bed.

  Wednesday

  On Wednesday I woke up worried. I’d had weird dreams that I can’t do justice to describing with words.

  I was trapped in these patterns that kept changing. I don’t know if the patterns were like tunnels or mazes, or if they were more metaphorical than that. I mean, I saw them. And I saw me. But I don’t know if I was inside patterns or if they were inside me or if it was somehow simultaneously a bit of both, but I kept seeing the patterns change as if I was trapped in a GIF, and each time I was about to figure out the logic behind the pattern the frame changed, and I’d go blind to the organization again, and my mind would sputter and hiccup, and then settle in as I learned the new formations, but then the pattern would morph again, and I never got free.

  I sat up from sleeping, and I was sweaty like maybe I had the flu. My mouth tasted like burnt carpet smells, and for about a minute I was lost—like I’d woken in the wrong body. The only other time I’d ever felt like that in Indiana was the first time I got blackout drunk, and I remember coming to in the weight room of some apartment complex, and there was a woman on a treadmill pretending not to notice me. I’d felt that a few times back in Texas. At least once at the group home and once at my father’s father’s and at my last guardian’s.

  This was different though, because I knew I should’ve known where I was. I mean, I knew all the stuff I saw in my room was mine, but I was fuzzy on how it came to be in its current location. My posters seemed to be on someone else’s walls.

  Then I settled into remembering, but I started worrying about my uncle.

  I remembered I hadn’t texted the waiter from the day before, so I found my phone and hit him up.

  Waiting for texts can take forever, but I was still out of data, so I just turned on my flashlight and talked to Remote.

  “Your week’s been weird,” he said.

  “And it’s not over,” I told him. “Any clues as to what I should do?”

  “I’m your hand, you idiot.”

  “Yeah but . . .”

  “Anything Remote knows, you already know.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. My face is your fingers and your voice is my voice.”

  “But what about the other Remote? On the Bicycling Confederate’s hand? Do you get to know what he knows too?”

  “The only thing I know,” said Remote, “is how Wednesday got its name.”

  Remote realized that the days established by the Graph of Kal the Ender could be used to solve problems. People could take each unit of time established by the graph and spend those moments to focus on society’s flaws.

  But some of society’s flaws could not be remedied with logic.

  Insanity was one of those flaws.

  Amongst all the insane Earthlings, one stood out as most astoundingly different. His name was Wed.

  He would pull people’s hair for no reason, and everything he drank he drank from a spoon as though eating soup, and he never decorated his home in observance of the seasons, and he didn’t live in a regular house. He lived in a tree. He barely ever wore clothes. His hair was a tangled knot of dirt and twigs.

  The only thing he was good at was catching things. He could catch rabbits and he could catch bears and if your children were sick, he could come and catch their colds or catch their pneumonia and he would take the sickness away with him to his tree and he would set the sickness free in his branches so his tree was always losing its leaves and getting better and growing them back again.

  Earthlings discussed him with me often.

  “Wed is a real problem, man,” they said. “Sure he catches all the fevers, but I’m always finding him naked in my yard eating water out of my well with a spoon. Something must be done.”

  At that time, little was known about the sun. We knew of the moon because of Mun and his infinite beard and we knew Kal the Ender was up there repeatedly killing him, but the sun was a great mystery, because no one could ever catch up to it to ask it questions. All we knew about it was it burned your skin if you stayed out in it too long.

  “What if,” I said, “we ask Wed to catch the sun for us? To ask it questions. To figure it out. He’ll spend so much time naked in its rays it’ll teach him a lesson, and he’ll get dressed to avoid its burning him.”

  The Earthlings pondered this idea. On the one hand, they saw the logic in it and wanted Wed to wear clothes, but on the other hand, they worried. What if Wed could catch it? It was so danged hot. What if he was able to bring it home with him to his tree? Would we all catch fire?

  Tues was there, and he offered this observation. “I have, when bored, fired several arrows at the sun, but I have yet to hit it. I doubt Wed is as fast as my arrows, but we could invite Wed to try to catch one before it falls. If he can, we rethink the endeavor. If he can’t we offer him the task.” Tues blew a great plume of smoke that shaped itself into Wed running and running and running after an arrow. “At the very least, he’ll be gone from us forever.”

  So, Wed was invited to race an arrow.

  Tues shot the fastest arrow he had, from the strongest bow he owned, and Wed darted out naked after it and disappeared into the distance.

  The crowd that amassed to watch the race waited patiently for Wed to return from the distant horizon that he raced after.

  He returned hours later with the arrow in his hand. “I caught it,” he said.

  The crowd was astonished, but Tues said, “As it flew?”

  “The arrow never once rested,” said Wed. “I can catch anything.”

  Tues noticed dirt in the feathers of the arrow, and he said, “Then we have another more difficult task for you.”

  “Just a moment,” Remote said, because I was worried about the sun’s heat.

  But Tues took the arrow from Wed’s hand and showed me the dirt. “It’s okay,” Tues said. “He can handle it.”

  “Oh,” Remote approved. “If you say so.” I looked out at the Earthlings. “I have faith in Tues.”

  “What’s the task?” Wed asked.

  “We want you,” said Remote, “to catch the sun for us. If you think you can?”

  Wed rubbed his head. “Do I get to keep the arrow?”

  Tues handed it to him. “Why not?”

  Taking the arrow from Tues, Wed turned the projectile, extended it in his hand and pointed it at the sun. “I’ve caught it,” Wed said. “It will not move.” He stood there sweaty, his naked body heaving and the arrow held above him.

  The crowd gasped in shock.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  Wed looked at the arrow. He looked at the sun. He looked back at Remote. “If you don’t believe me just watch.”

  We did. We watched on and on. And, as we waited, the sun moved. So, too, did the arrow.

  “Wed,” said Tues. “The sun is moving and you are moving with it.”

  “No,” said Wed. “I am being completely still. The direction of the arrow and the placement of the sun are unchanged.”

  At sunset, Tues challenged him again. “The sun is getting smaller,” Tues said. “The horizon is eating it.”

  “It is doing no such thing. Watch on.”

  Tues sent for coffee. The Earthlings went home. Only insane people and Remote and warriors could endure such madness. Tues and I watched in the night as the arrow Wed held was finally lowered to the ground and aimed at his own feet. “Clearly you see now that the arrow is pointing at the Earth.”

  “It is pointing at the sun,” Wed said. “The Earth is merely in its way.”

  At daybreak, Wed’s arrow pointed to the exact spot at the exact moment where the sun crept into the sky.

  “Alas,” said Remote. “You have caught it! It hasn’t moved from the arrow’s line.”

 
; I made to relieve Wed of the arrow, to spell him from his task, to allow him to take his naked leave.

  “Are you crazy?” said Wed. “It might escape if I lower the arrow.”

  For the rest of Remote’s life, Wed stood there proudly nude, with his arrow pointed at the sun. In that way, Earthlings learned of time and watches, and we decided to name the middle of the work week after Wed, because he stayed centered on the sun.

  When Remote showed him how the word Wedsday was spelled, he grew appalled. “It’s too plain,” he said. “It needs something strange in the middle.”

  Remote added the letters NE to stand for Wed’s never-ending task. WedNEsday.

  I got a text back from the waiter that said he hadn’t heard a peep, and I got out of bed and went to find Peggy. I wanted to see what she knew, but she wasn’t around. And there wasn’t a note. So, I sent her a text and took a shower.

  I hadn’t bathed for a while, and I wondered if maybe that was why my dreams were so weird. Like maybe dirt traps in bad energy. I always feel like, when I haven’t bathed for a while, I get a kind of second skin of filth, and I considered to what extent that filmy layer might act like a sealant that keeps in negative thoughts.

  Every time you ever see a picture of a killer on TV, they always look filthy, and maybe there’s a kind of connection between being dirty and being violent, but of course my data was still gone, and I had no way of looking up anything.

  I was having to make more decisions than usual, but they weren’t decisions that affected anything, they were just kind of decisions about what to think. Like, I was in the shower shampooing my hair, and I had to come to terms with the idea that being dirty MIGHT have an impact on your likelihood of committing violent crimes, and just there being the two options made it certain that I had to decide which of the options was more likely to be true. I couldn’t fact-check my own thoughts on my phone. I couldn’t run anything by the internet. I had to just decide which thing was more likely ACCORDING TO ME.