Opioid, Indiana Read online

  He corralled his armies and they devised a plan. For an entire week, they would wake each morning and start a war with a new nation. If they completed a war in a single day, the Earthlings would know that everything could be compartmentalized and organized thusly.

  There was so much death, my word.

  Tues’s armies were proficient and skilled, and their opponents were caught entirely off guard. The armies would commit their acts of aggression, and lay into the resting nations, slaying many before the warfare was even realized.

  Still, after a week of fighting, Tues’s army had yet to topple a nation in a single day.

  “It just takes more time than that,” Tues said.

  Remote was discouraged. “We must devise another way,” I said.

  Tues took a great puff of his pipe, and he blew smoke in the shape of regular smoke, and all the elders watched it to see what it might become.

  “That was just smoke,” one of the Earthlings said.

  “I noticed,” said Tues, “that my men fought better than they ever had, on these one-day campaigns. Because they thought they would only be fighting one-day wars. In a sense,” Tues said, “they were. In another sense, we’ve been fighting for seven straight days. And all of those wars shared a common goal. The goal of determining how quickly a conflict could be resolved. Those are probably all parts of the same conflict.”

  Remote liked this kind of talking. Remote likes speeches that are really just thoughts thought out loud.

  “You think it’s best to tell people wars will only last a day?” I asked.

  “I think it’s best to tell people all things will only last a day. That every night should be the end of something, and every morning should be the start of something else, even if it isn’t entirely true.”

  Remote loved this idea, and for his help in this matter, I named the second day of the week Tuesday after Tues, and I also decided that we would call language that says one thing but means another “blowing smoke” on account of Tues and his pipe and his magical smoking.

  It was about eleven before I finally got going. I loafed around and watched TV. I played hacky sack in the living room and ate a half-dozen eggs. I like making omelettes. My mom showed me how to make them before she died.

  And I made one of them for Peggy once, and she said that some restaurants used omelettes as job applications. Like, if you wanted to be a cook at a good place, the chef would watch you make an omelette and if you did it well, you got the job.

  “I could go up to McDonald’s and make them an omelette and get hired on?” I said to her.

  We were sitting in the kitchen and Uncle Joe was on the sofa in the adjacent room, and he was wasted on something, and he kept humming a tune that sounded like Japanese music.

  “Not McDonald’s, you fucking idiot.” Peggy smiled at me. “McDonald’s. No, a real restaurant.”

  “Like which one?”

  “Hell, I don’t even know if we’ve got one in Opioid, Indiana.”

  This was around the time I got fired from the grocery store, and money was tight, I guess, because no one was working.

  Peggy lit a cigarette. “Someone around here needs a fucking job.” She blew smoke at Uncle Joe. “He’s too important to follow schedules.”

  Here’s how making an omelette works. First, you crack three or four eggs into a bowl. It depends on the size of your pan. You have to crack the perfect amount, and it kind of takes trial and error to figure out what’s best. Then you set your pan on the stove and turn it to medium-high. The best pans are new nonstick. The second-best pans are cast-iron skillets. The third-best pans are old nonstick. If you don’t have one of those three pans, you can’t make a good omelette.

  While the pan is heating, you scramble the eggs. You use a fork. Some people use whisks, but that is overkill. The trick is you have to scramble the hell out of the eggs. I mean, you scramble them until they’re scrambled and then you scramble them some more. They’ve got to be totally mixed up. Sometimes, if you don’t do it long enough, you can tell what part of the eggs were whites and what part of the eggs were yolks, but when you’re making an omelette, it has to be an absolute mystery.

  I like using butter for omelettes. Some people use oil. Whatever you use, you have to use a lot of it.

  Once I stayed in a hotel with my old guardian, and there was a breakfast buffet and there was a chef there in a white jacket who was cooking omelettes to order.

  “We call this an action station,” the chef told me. And the way he made omelettes was he cooked everything that was in my omelette and then he added the eggs. But to me that’s just a kind of scrambled eggs. Egg mush. Jumbled up.

  I think the best omelettes are just eggs with maybe cheese in it but that’s it, because that’s how Mom taught me to make them, and she told me it was the color and the shape that determined if they were really good. There was supposed to be no color from the cooking, no brown. The eggs were supposed to be pale yellow when cooked, and the omelettes were supposed to be shaped like footballs.

  I never cooked the eggs when Mom was alive. Not really. I’d crack the eggs and scramble the eggs, and I’d pour the eggs into the pan, but Mom always did the cooking part.

  It works like this: you pour the eggs and they should hiss slightly when they land. They should sound like the letter S when you whisper the word sweetie. Not like the letter S when you say the word STOP. Then you use a spatula to move the eggs constantly until they set up enough from the heat and the moving to leave them be.

  This is kinda gross, but it’s like playing with a booger. I mean, sometimes you pick your nose and what comes out is a fully formed, flickable booger, and you can just flip your finger and the thing will fly away. But sometimes you pick your nose and a strand of goo comes out, and no matter how much you flip your finger it just stays clung to you. So, what do you do? You move the thing between your fingers—right, between the pads of your thumb and your pointer—until it’s like cooked enough that it becomes its own thing. It no longer just sticks to you.

  I can’t remember if that’s how Mom told me to think of it, or if I just realized that later on. But once all the eggs are the consistency of a flickable booger, you pick up the pan and tap the bottom of it a few times on the burner so the skin of the omelette settles down on the pan. Then you count to eight. After that, you fold it by a third. Like you would a letter for an envelope. Then you count to ten. Then you slide the egg onto a plate, folding it the rest of the way as it falls.

  The first omelette I made that Tuesday morning I didn’t do very good, so I made another one that was perfect, and I even said, “Look, Mom, I’m a breakfast chef,” when the thing slid onto the plate.

  And then I thought: maybe I should be a cook. I mean, when that sheet went around and I filled it out and said that I wanted to be either Autistic Ross or the Bicycling Confederate, it was a joke, but the joke was really on me, because I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. When you’re an orphan, you don’t really have goals—or at least no one is there to give them to you. Everything anyone suggests to you seems so logical it’s demeaning. I wanna be a dreamer, dammit. I wanna look off at sunshine and think up fantasy jobs to do for myself. All the counselors and guardians are like, “You like puzzles, be an electrician. You like art, paint houses.” I don’t know what my father wanted me to be and I don’t think my mom really wanted me to be a cook. She just wanted to teach me how to make eggs. She didn’t work until my dad died, and even then she was in and out of jobs. Dad was a truck driver but I doubt he would’ve wanted me to do that. Especially after he got killed driving.

  Mom and I used to have this map on the refrigerator that we would use to follow his route. We would mark where he was on a dry-erase board that had a picture of America on it. We even had a special marker. It’s one of those memories that seem like dreams. That have parts of memories in them that couldn’t be
. Because I remember, one time, we were marking his route on the map, and then my mom looked at me and said, “Guess who’s home?” and then she opened up the refrigerator and my father crawled out of it.

  But there’s no way that happened.

  And don’t get me wrong. I figured the skills my mother gave me wouldn’t be worth a sock full of dicks if I lurked up to some restaurant and smiled into the kitchen asking to talk to the chef. In my experience you had to fill out an application and then talk to a manager, and then talk to another manager and then maybe do a quiz. I knew some kids who cooked up at McDonald’s, but what they did didn’t sound like cooking to me at all. It sounded like putting stuff places.

  But Mom never told me what she thought I should be. And one day Dad didn’t come back from his route. The dry-erase America just clung to the refrigerator with a mark on it that started out where we lived and ended in the last spot we talked to him before he ran off the road.

  After that Mom didn’t really talk to me when she made eggs. And she would stare off at nothing when we ate breakfast. And she would shuffle me to the car to take me to school. And she would barely say anything to me when she picked me up.

  And then one day she didn’t wake me up. I sat up in my bed and the house was quiet and I called to her. But I didn’t hear anything, and there was a stiffness to her not hollering back for me. Like every part of that house was listening along with me for a voice that wouldn’t come, and like every part of that house was disappointed or worried. Like when you open a present at Christmas and it’s not what you wanted. That still. The ceiling fan was paralyzed where it hung above me. The light seemed like plastic. I dragged out of bed and went down the hallway to her room. Her lights and fan were on. She was covered with blankets. I crawled on her bed, but when I touched her she didn’t feel right.

  I finished eating my second omelette and decided to catch a shower. I had big plans. I was either gonna find a real restaurant, my uncle, or the Bicycling Confederate. I figured I’d let the universe decide for me, because I can never find the thing I’m looking for. I always find the thing I was looking for last.

  Let me explain.

  Let’s say I lose my hat. And I’m looking all over the apartment but can’t find it. I mean, I’ve looked in the bathroom and my room. And my uncle’s bathroom and his room. And my closet. And his closet. And the kitchen. And even in the freezer—because sometimes you just do weird shit. And on the back of the sofa. On top of the TV. On the tables. On the desks. In the nooks and in the corners.

  If I finally say “fuck it,” and just decide to go out without a hat on, I’ll somehow realize I can’t find my phone.

  This happens to me all the time. I can’t remember where anything is. It gets to be where I cuss at myself and want to die, because I can’t believe how forgetful one person can be. I mean, is this the best God can do? This creation that I am of his? That’s what I always wonder. Is this just how it works? You think you need all these things you have, but where the fuck are they?

  Now, I can go out without my hat, sure. But I can’t leave without my phone. Who can? What do you even do? You can’t text people to meet up. You can’t look up shit on the internet. If you need directions you gotta ask some milky-eyed stranger and they either never know the way or have like crazy landmarks they want you to look for. Old trees. Orange station wagons. At the burnt-down condominium hang a left. If you get to the spotted hooting owl with two left wings you’ve gone too far.

  So, I start looking everywhere for my phone. All the usual places. In the bathroom and my room. And my uncle’s bathroom and his room. And my closet. And his closet. And the kitchen. And even in the freezer. And on the back of the sofa. On top of the TV. On the tables. On the desks. In the nooks and in the corners.

  Then: bam!

  I find my fucking hat.

  That’s how it always works for me, so I figured if I went out and looked for a real restaurant maybe my uncle would turn up.

  But you know what happened?

  I walked a block toward downtown, and the damn Bicycling Confederate was swerving down the road, his flag flap, flapping like a motherfucking ceremony was going on somewhere. Like this cat had been sent home years ago when the Civil War ended and he’d just been taking his sweet time getting there.

  Did they have bicycles then? I was out of data and couldn’t check or risk an ass-kicking when my uncle finally turned up.

  And I’ll be honest, when I saw the Bicycling Confederate it did me a number, because I’d sort of put him on the back burner of my brain. Back with the widowed socks and old condom wrappers. I’d never had sex, but I’d tried on scads of condoms. And I didn’t know how to approach him. He was a few hundred yards up from me, I guess. At least a football field. But his flag was unmistakable, and his gait—well if he’d been walking it would’ve been his gait—was for certain. Like spotting a goose flying from the ground. Long-ass neck and wings going flippity. This crazy struggler with his wrists rested on the handlebars and his slow back and forth, side to side. How he never got hit by cars was one of the miracles of the universe.

  I thought: How the hell do you follow a bicyclist on foot? He was slow, but he wasn’t walking slow. And I’m in shape, but I’m not in long-distance-running shape.

  He was up on Main Street and I feel like if I’m going to tell you any more of this story I have to explain to you what Opioid, Indiana, is like and how it’s shaped and who the hell lives here.

  Now, in Texas all the history is drenched in war. They always say there’s been “six flags over Texas.” There’s a theme park in Texas named after the slogan. First there was Spain and then there was France and then there was Mexico and then there was the Republic of Texas. Then the United States. Then the Confederacy. Then the United States again. So, it’s really seven but I guess we either don’t count the Confederacy or pretend we’re not really part of the United States. And I’m sure you could find millions of motherfuckers to gladly take up either stance on the matter.

  Most of those transitions involved bloody battles. The most famous of these was the Alamo in San Antonio, which I went to on my first ever vacation. We walked around the mission and I stuck my fingers in a bunch of bullet holes, and Mom and Dad were still alive then, and they stuck their fingers in bullet holes too. But anytime you drive anywhere in Texas you see signs marking skirmishes and ambushes and battles galore. It’s probably all a bit exaggerated, but that is the Texas way.

  In Indiana, they never fought over shit. I learned that in school. Indiana history is the history of home building. Crop rotations. Outstanding winters. Their legends are of regular people—men who were strong enough to lift a wheelbarrow one-handed, women who could bake swell sugar cream pies. There’s some basketball players. Horse racers. Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes.

  To be remembered in Texas you have to die in a coonskin cap after murdering a half thousand men single-handed. You have to become a president or be Beyoncé or Wes Anderson. Or Willie Nelson. Or the rapper Scarface.

  There’s a highway in Indianapolis named after a musician called Babyface, and all his most famous songs were performed by other people.

  That’s Indiana, though. Hoosiers are some behind-the-scenes motherfuckers.

  Even Larry Bird, who is their most famous athlete, is most famous for being white. He’s an American man. Famous for being white. He is Indiana.

  Opioid is a good enough place, but if you called it rinky-dink, you wouldn’t be a liar. There’s a courthouse downtown that they decorate for the seasons. There’s a cemetery everyone jogs through, and everybody feels safe there, like the corpses might come out and have a picnic and cheer you on. There’s a college. There’s a river. There’s a hotel with a bar in it. In the evenings, if you stand still in the road, you can hear old men whistling Cole Porter songs. That dude was from Indiana. His childhood home was turned into a meth lab.

  So, the
Bicycling Confederate was down Main toward the courthouse, and I watched him pedal up that direction, and I decided I could lollygag a bit, and that I could most likely perch up on the courthouse lawn and maybe watch the dude ride around the square.

  I wasn’t trying to draw attention to myself. I figured if I sprinted to him he might see me coming and get nervous and race away, or a cop would see me running and get suspicious and want to talk. My shirt was tucked in, and I didn’t have a hat on, but you can only go so far before you look like a kid. You ever seen a grown man sprinting in regular clothes on an afternoon for no reason? It’s a bad look. Seems like they’re on drugs.

  Also, if I broke a sweat, there was no way I could get a job making omelettes if I found a real restaurant. I didn’t have realistic expectations of landing any real work that day, but if I had pit stains on a 30-degree Tuesday, and I showed up when I was supposed to be at school, I sure as shit wasn’t going to get hired.

  In Texas, you come to understand the size of an acre. Maybe it’s lots of places. But in Texas, people are always saying how many acres a thing is, and the courthouse in Opioid, Indiana, sits on like 2.6 acres, if I had to guess, and around it there is a square with businesses that face toward the courthouse at the center. It’s like an old-fashioned town. From back when people wanted to see other people. I wonder what towns will look like in the future. Towns that get designed after the internet. Tunnels with phone chargers everywhere, I bet.

  Now, if you go out of town a mile, you’re in cornfields, and so I wonder what Opioid was like in the 1800s. It must’ve seemed like it had sprung out of the crops. Like the citizens of the place had gotten lost in a corn maze and just decided to build. They didn’t know that if you’re in a labyrinth, if you put your hand on the right wall and never let go, and just move forward forever, you’ll eventually get free.